My Kitchen Floor Is A Wonder

From our recent correspondence:

I’ve just been reading a book titled The Symmetries of Things by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss.

It has really superb illustrations of the many different kinds of symmetries, as well as some designs offered as exercises.  (The exercises are always important in mathematics.  It’s never enough to say things like ‘sure, that makes sense,’ or ‘yeah, I follow you.’  You have to learn how to do it yourself or you don’t really get it, and as things move along further, you will quickly lose yourself in the dust.)

Meantime, if you’re not interested in the mathematics of the subject or the exercises, the pictures are still fascinating.

I don’t know how far I’m going to get, or how fast (how slowly, more likely), but the journey itself is enjoyable — and I will never look at a brick wall (or anything else with a pattern or symmetry: a frieze, wallpaper, sports balls, furniture,  tilings, cobblestones, etc. etc.) the same way again.  The brick wall that bounds my deck, in the simple pattern known as a ‘running bond,’ is notated as 2*22….

I just looked down at my kitchen floor this morning and, with my now symmetry-conscious eyes, I  discovered that it has a repeating pattern with no symmetries: it’s a wonder!  (In this case, “wonder” is a technical term for a repeating pattern with no mirror or rotational symmetries or rotational mappings.  Its notational symbol is, unsurprisingly, o.)

I urge both my readers to find a copy of this book and look at it.  Warning: it’s expensive, with all that glossy paper and those many, many illustrations. Worth looking at, though. So, if you wish only to browse through it, find a copy in a library or a bookstore that you can look at. Then, if you’re as fascinated as I am — and you may well be, since the book is amazingly accessible, especially in the first few chapters — you can always buy a copy for yourself. It’s worth whatever investment of time and mind you care to make.

20 Things

A lot of things have been happening lately, and I’ve wanted to tell both my readers about all of them, but I’ve been too busy, what with all these things happening…

Whenever I get into that regrettable behind-the-8-ball state of imbalance between blogging and life, I fall back to what are relatively small items to blog about.  They’re the only ones, under those circumstances, I can get my head around quickly enough to write a short piece, establish any links, and get it posted, in between everything else I’m busy with.

Herewith:

A good friend came by last night for a little supper and conversation, and he said he’d downloaded Google’s Chrome browser.

This morning, I did too and found a link to a very interesting online book written by the Google Chrome team titled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.

Whether you’re using Google Chrome or not, it’s worth a look at this book for both my readers.  Tech-oriented readers can see how a complex idea is presented simply without talking down to the audience.  Non-techies can learn a lot about the internet we deal with daily.

Enjoy!

Books With A Wider World View

From our recent correspondence:

I’ll definitely suggest Gino Segre’s Faust in Copenhagen, which is the story of how quantum physics came to be, through several key conferences and meetings in Copenhagen put together by Niels Bohr.  The younger members of the group (later major physics heavyweights) put on a skit at the end of each one to entertain (and spoof) the elders (at the time the leaders in the field) and, in the central conference described here, they base the skit on Goethe’s Faust, a play whose text was relatively well known to all the participants.

Gino Segre is a physicist himself.  He is not trying to teach physics in this book, but the history of science at a fascinating time, and he does it well.  It’s a riveting narrative, and a relatively little-known story with an international cast of characters.

I also highly recommend the collected stories of Cordwainer Smith, the book titled The Rediscovery of Man. Not only is this the complete collection of Cordwainer Smith’s stories, it has an excellent introduction to his life and his fiction. Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of the East Asian scholar and professor Paul Linebarger, an expert in and teacher of East Asian studies and related subjects to many of our leading diplomats for many years. In fact, in Barbara Tuchman‘s book Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Paul Linebarger is represented in the bibliography.  He was born in China of US parents and was a godson to Sun Yat-Sen. His family moved to France and Germany while he was still a child so that he grew up speaking several languages; his writing shows his remarkable knowledge of many languages and cultures. This is only one of the reasons I like him so much: he has such a wide view of the world and its people and their cultures.  We need a wider view of each other on this planet, I firmly believe.  And he can write superbly good stories, in a unique voice.  In addition to these stories, he has a hugely entertaining novel, Norstrilia, well worth finding and reading.  Once you read him, you will never forget him.

A quick search reveals that abebooks.com has a wide selection of copies of all the books mentioned here..  And of course a worldcat.org search may reveal copies in libraries near you, free for the borrowing.

(Some Of) The Greatest American Writing

From our recent correspondence:

Do you remember when we used to watch some of our favorite shows on TV, we’d see the end credit for Stephen J. Cannell Productions?

It showed a guy sitting at a typewriter, typing fast.  Then he’d pull the paper up out of the machine, and it would float into a big “C” in the air, and the caption would read: Stephen J. Cannell Productions.

This end credit appeared on a great many of my favorite shows over many years. To get an idea of how many hugely popular and well-written shows, and which ones, look on Cannell’s web site, here.   Wow.  The whole site is worth looking at to get a picture of Cannell’s continuing attainments. And there’s a recent interview with him in Success magazine, here. I was astonished, reading that interview, to learn he was dyslexic — like another great writer, Agatha Christie, as the article pointed out.

Somewhere in the early 90’s, I learned, the networks geared up their own production studios, rather than buying from outside studios, and thus the networks — the buyers —  put themselves into competition with the sellers like Cannell’s studio. About that time, Cannell said in the interview, he saw the writing on the wall and stopped trying to produce shows. Thus, we haven’t seen his production company end credit at all for some time.

He started as a writer, was a writer all through his career, and ended as a writer, publishing mystery/suspense books.  He had seen early on that the only way to maintain some control over how what you wrote was used was to become your own production company; when that no longer was viable he got out. But he never stopped writing.  And he never stopped teaching and helping other writers.

After his recent death, the show Castle, on which he had occasionally appeared as himself, used his end credit one more time. This time when he pulled the paper up, the caption below the picture said “Colleague. Mentor. Friend.”  This time the paper, instead of forming the letter C, floated slowly down, then out of frame completely.  As the Cannell productions fanfare music reached its end, the next card came up, saying, “We’ll Miss You, Pal.”  You can view these last end credits here.

I’ll miss him too, even though I knew him only as a viewer and a fan of his work.  He wrote and produced great shows, entertaining me and millions of other for decades. I loved that clever end credit, too.  Thank you, Castle people, for that elegant tribute.

I Can See (You) Clearly Now

As a Determined Hermit, I don’t like to travel very often or very far.  I do, however, enjoy seeing and talking with friends, whether they live close by or far away.  Snow and ice or heavy rains complicate the problem.

Ah, the wonders of modern technology!  There is such a thing nowadays as video chat, and I can use video chat over the internet to visit with friends or have business-related conferences.  A friend in Florida and I sit down, at agreed-upon times, to have a cup of coffee with each other, without either of us having to travel to do it.  Soon, she will move to the Rocky Mountains, and we will still be able to chat.  The physical location of each of us, once we are set up to use video chat with each other, doesn’t affect our ability to do so.

A nearby friend and I have lunch together monthly, barring bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances, but in between we can confer as necessary via video chat.  For us, it has always been relatively easy, as we both have Macs, and we have merely to connect using iChat and our Macs’ built-in cameras and microphones.

Friends who have PCs, especially those without built-in cameras, have more to do,  getting chat ID, internet video camera, microphone, and software set up, it seems, but once they do, video chatting becomes easy.

I find it best to set up a time in advance, using email, to make sure the person I want to chat with will be available and that the time is convenient for both, and if there’s an agenda, formal or interpersonal, it’s a good idea to let them know what it is in that email. You wouldn’t just drop in to someone’s house without calling first, would you?  As a Determined Hermit, I hope not.

Video chat has made a big difference to me so far this winter.  Today will see the second editorial conference I’ve had in two weeks with someone who works at home.  (For business offices with firewalls around their computer systems, there are commercially available videoconferencing arrangements, different from the kind of home-based video chatting I’m talking about.)

In an age when gasoline can only get more expensive and scarce, and travel pollution can only make global warming worse, you and I can stay at home and use our internet connection to visit each other.  It’s better than just a voice phone call.  Maybe nothing will replace being in the same room with someone else, but if that’s not possible, this may be the next best thing.

Collectible Noughty Publications

The ‘noughty’ of the title refers to the decade just past, but no matter what you chose to call the decade 2000-2009 – Rebecca Mead discusses its naming issues here — some books published during it became collectible quite quickly.

Richard Davies of abebooks.com presents a list of 35 titles, as cover shots plus linked titles, with fascinating facts about each one.  While I don’t buy collectible anything — I buy my books to read and re-read them — I find it fascinating to see how the other 5% lives.  Read all about it here.

Ready, Set, Unread

Beth Carswell, who works at abebooks.com, and a group of friends, voracious readers all, spent a lunchhour discussing why some books remain unread, even by voracious readers.

In addition to listing the group’s top ten reasons, nicely laid out and convincingly argued, Carswell gives a list of the top 25 books (shown by cover shot and linked title) the group came up with that, among them, remained unread.  Read all about it here.

Filled With Purpose

A friend recently lent me a book he had been using, to great and positive effect, to help him reorganize as he moved into a home office to set up and run his business.  It’s a fine book and has those tough-love principles about getting and keeping clutter out of your life, and how to go about it so it’s a permanent arrangement, not a temporary cleanup.

I don’t feel the need to worry about clutter myself, having cleared out and recycled some time ago, but as I looked at the book, I noticed something interesting: the book went through its de-cluttering guidelines room by room, dining room, master bedroom, garage, etc. While a general floor plan of my house would certainly list such rooms, I had repurposed each room (I live alone, like a good detemined hermit, which simplifies these things) into a room whose function had meaning to me and to my own life, not to some possible future inhabitants of more traditional mindset.

So: that’s not the dining room; that’s my library, the walls lined with filled bookshelves below and artworks above.  Yes, there’s a dining table with its chairs in there, a Danish style I had bought for my mother, but I don’t eat there, so it’s now my simple but elegant library table, where I spread out large reference books like the atlases or fat dictionaries, or open up several at once to compare what they say, as well as make notes or use my laptop when that’s the best way.  I’ve also hooked the low-hanging chandelier up as high as possible to get it out of the way (I’m tall).

And: previous owners converted an all-too-apparent laundry room, facing on to the living room, to a card and game room.  It had its own folding wooden doors, and they paneled the walls to match, very nice, and set up one wall filled with lovely wooden shelves.  In this room, once, card games held smoky sway most nights.  When I got the smoke stench out of the house after moving in (thanks to a tip from a friend: leave out bowls of vinegar for several days, then change them, until the smell is gone, a week or two instead of forever) I turned it into a study and office. Once it was my telecommuting headquarters, lit by skylights and filled with my computer equipment, now in recycled retirement. Again, the built-in shelves hold books, with room against the other walls for a desk and an actual library table rescued from a library remodeling, a great place for my current project, whatever it happens to be.

Also, the master bedroom is my art studio.  Yes, there’s a studio couch against one short wall, but the whole long wall on one side is all bookshelves, floor to ceiling, while the other side has my terrific iMac, printer, and other equipment that I use for my own writing, email, artwork, photos, and much more.  And near the sliding glass doors that look out to the patio sits my drafting desk, currently holding the pastels I’m using to create a portrait of my cat, Kasha.

Sure, there’s an en-suite dressing room, bath, and closet — all that has to be somewhere — but the dressing room’s two sinks are also handy for artwork cleanup and as a water source for watercolor painting and other media.  Also, my cat Sasha always has some water there — why should he have to go into the kitchen, at the other end of the house, to get fresh water?

Across the hall from the studio is what probably would be labeled by someone else the guest bedroom.  To me, it’s the music room, because the piano lives there, on the one solid wall that’s not an outer wall.  There’s also a large convertible sofa that unfolds to a queen-size bed (fairly comfortably, as these things go).  And the washer and dryer now live in an alcove off the music room, as does what I think of as McGee’s Closet, a storage area for seldom-used but sometimes wanted art and sewing resources.

Pretty much the only room that has kept its ostensible floor-plan purpose is the kitchen.  I love to cook and bake, and over the years I have lived here, I have put down a new floor, and put in new countertops.  I chose an all-but-black Zodiaq surface in a color called Abyss to complement and anchor everything.  I’ve cleaned out the kitchen drawers (more recently than I care to admit) leaving in them only kitchen tools I actively use for cooking and baking.  Shelves in the garage hold (no, not books!  I wouldn’t mistreat good books that way, and wouldn’t keep any other kind!) auxiliary kitchen storage of tools, devices and appliances I don’t use very often but do use now and then, and which I don’t want cluttering up the active areas of countertop and workspace in the kitchen.

So there you have it, my non-traditional room layout that baffles the advice about bedrooms and other standard rooms in clutter-clearing books.  As I was showing a friend around, she stopped and said to me, “You actually use all the rooms you have!”  I thought: yes, not only am I paying for them, but I like the spaces I have, so why not use them as suits me best?

The Play’s The Thing

Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes

I’ve had this book for decades and have read it many times, but not recently.  So I’m coming to it relatively fresh; while I know the basic outline of it, and am aware “whodunit,” I’m enjoying as though for the first time all the lovely layers of wonderful things, not least the author’s light hand with true erudition and wit.  It’s a lovely scary funny terrifyingly suspenseful beautifully subtle occasionally punny completely serious glorious wicked superb concotion of a novel, with an absolutely thundering nail-biter ending, one of the best ever written. It’s an elegant masterful work of fiction, not just a great mystery novel; it’s so much more than merely a “whodunit.”

The book was written in 1937, and it’s set then; the Duchess of Horton is giving one of her brilliant house parties, this time featuring the production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by some of the guests, with the rest as audience. The cast and audience are a large group of distinguished personages, from the Lord Chancellor of England (a longtime friend of the Duke and Duchess) through scholars, friends, acquaintances, and many more, all meeting for the event at the Duke’s palatial estate, Scamnum Court. The performance promises to be a distinguished one — one that is interrupted by a shot  behind a curtain… and Inspector Appleby of Scotland Yard is called in. For story, characters, wit, pace, and compelling action this novel has never been equalled, in my opinion.

What a book! Stunning, wonderful, great… truly a classic.

Michael Innes wrote many mystery novels featuring Inspector Appleby, all excellent, and all very different from each other in setting and plot — no ‘formula’ here.   Other Innes novels stand alone or follow the adventures of Charles Honeybath, portrait-painter.

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart; details of his life and work may be found

here.

Book, Baker, Kindle, Eucalyptus, Gutenberg

No, it’s not a rival to Big Bang Theory‘s Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock (thanks, Captain Randy, for alerting me to this).

It’s an article by Nicholson Baker in the August 3 2009 issue of The New Yorker titled A New Page: can the Kindle really improve on the book?

It’s an article well worth reading, not only to learn what Baker’s experience of the Kindle2 was, but what others think too, and much else about ebooks and ebook readers (whether hand-held dedicated devices, like the Kindles and the Sonys and others, or like other types of more general devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, Palm organizer and others).

Just one of Baker’s points:

There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace.

You can see videos of the Eucalyptus app in action on the web here.  Just sit and let the video play…

The Eucalyptus app draws on the volumes offered by the Gutenberg Project, which is at home here.

Note to the budget-minded (or iPod-impoverished, depending on your point of view): you can also download books directly from the Project Gutenberg site onto your desktop or laptop computer, and read them on those devices. It’s not handheld — which is what Baker’s article is about –  but it’s a free download (plus any contribution you care to make; see below) and you already have the necessary equipment if you are reading this post.

Should you find yourself interested in the Gutenberg Project, donations of volunteer time as proofreaders (details here; no special experience or training is required, just read the FAQ and register, then do as much or little as you can — a page a day, perhaps?) or of money, even a little, as you download titles, to keep the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation going.

The Foundation is a section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization which attempts to preserve literary and other intellectual works and make them available free or at the lowest possible cost to people everywhere.

So, book and ebook lovers — OK, OK, ebibliophiles, excuuuuse me — if you want to read those books as ebooks, or if you need a place to make a few more charitable donations to help out your tax picture, or just want to help the project, now you know how to do it.

A Mere Child Could See It

Picasso: a biography, by Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian is a writer and translator of far wider scope than even those who have read his superb Aubrey/Maturin series may realize.  One of his masterpieces is a biography of Picasso, the great artist of the 20th century.  Picasso and O’Brian lived near each other in the South of France, but this book is not a series of memoirs or conversations, it is an attempt to present the man and his art — a well-researched work that is never dry or dull.

In O’Brian’s introduction, he states carefully that this is neither a life of the man divorced from his art, nor an attempt at explicating the art.  O’Brian uses all his considerable skill as translator (documentation of Picassos’s life occurs in many forms and languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Freench, and even Picasso’s own somewhat fractured French in his letters and notes, drawing on documents donated to the Museo Picasso in 1970, requiring a linguist and translator like O’Brian to do them justice) to bring us Picasso, whose art and whose life are inextricably part of each other.

A single illustration will show O’Brian’s masterful handling of this complicated subject:  O’Brian supplies a discussion and several illustrative excerpts, explanations by contemporaries and anecdotes showing how analytical cubism was understood and accepted when it was new (ca. 1910).  After several paragraphs of these, very helpful in setting context, we find:

‘A more open, or a less conditioned mind goes straight to the point without these detours: Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Vollard was the object of a good deal of merriment among the dealer’s friends–”What is it meant to represent?  Which way up is it supposed to be?”–but a child, still young enough to speak imperfectly, looked at it and instantly observed, “That’s Monsieur Voyard.” ‘ — p. 170

I found it helpful (but not vital) to have available a source of illustrations of Picasso’s work. I bought the Taschen Verlag 2-vol edition which has many fine color reproductions on glossy paper, arranged chronologically.  Many of the works O’Brian discusses can be seen reproduced here. (Yes, “Monsieur Voyard” is in there, and yes, I could see the face at once.) Of course, everyone knows a reproduction doesn’t have anything like the impact of the real thing — but the ‘real thing’ is far away in a collection somewhere, often not available for viewing at all (at least by the casual visitor), and the reproductions, if as well-done as these are, can provide satisfactory reference images for the works mentioned in O’Brian’s text.

O’Brian’s books are superb — never found one less than excellent yet — and this is the best (and clearest, and most enjoyable to read) book I know for the general reader to understand Picasso, his life and art.  The position is filled.  No other candidates need apply.

Little Things

So often it’s the little things that give a determined hermit the greatest pleasure. Let me share a few:

1. The Ink Shipment. I like writing with a fountain pen and have several I’ve picked up over the years. I noticed the other day that I was getting low on ink — I like to fill the pen from the bottle — and decided to put it into background processing for a while — I wasn’t going to run out of ink the very next day, or even the one after that. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a sale catalog from Levenger’s. Levenger’s has nice inks and good colors, but they tend to be somewhat costly for my pocketbook. This time, however, between the sale catalog and a special-offer coupon, I did manage to put together an order for ink in bottles and in long cartridges that satisified my desire to use different colors now and then, and still not break the bank. Also, I’ll be able to fill my pen until the year 2030 without reordering… Levenger’s offers an ink six-pack in two different assortments and cartridges in the same sets of colors. I looked forward to the arrival of that ink so much, and when it came, I hardly knew how to act — except to open it, set it out, and fill a pen, grinning the whole time.

2. I Saw a Deer. I was driving to lunch with a friend and as I was travelling along a leafy and narrow side road I saw a deer. She was beautiful, and walking in a slow and stately manner into nearby woods. I had to struggle to keep my eyes on the road, but in the glimpses I got of her, she was still moving with great dignity and slowness, looking as though she had browsing on her mind… So beautiful! So beautiful! I felt lucky to see a deer, and lucky to live in an area where they can still survive in the wild, but close enough to housing that they can’t be hunted. There’s more than one reason to have woods between the houses and the road.

3. I Saw Lightning Bugs. At twilight, I looked out onto the small lawn at the side of my house and saw the little green lights blinking on and off against the evergreens that border it. Lightning bugs! I never wanted to catch them. They’re so nifty, just flying around, seeming to float from one spot to the other, illuminating each, and moving on… In order to see and enjoy them and let them come nearer, you have to just stand (or sit) quietly for a while. Not a bad thing in itself.

4. Circles. Yes, I like things to give me delight, especially things I get to use every day, and when I saw that circular filters were available for my Chemex, I bought some. You get to fold the circles, first in half, then in half again, then open out one side so you’ve got a cone. You have to understand what fun this is, handling something as neat as a circle in paper and folding it just so, and then actually using it to make great coffee… Great stuff all around!

5. It’s Raining. it started raining about half an hour ago, and I hope it continues. It started out moderately strong, backed off to nothing, then went to very light drops. It’s currently stopped again. Come on, you guys, we can use some more! Anyhow, we need it and the light and shade is beautiful, modulated and muted, yet still definitely daylight… Rain on…

There, I told you they were all little things, but each one gave me a huge amount of pleasure. Some of them keep on giving me a big kick, day after day. Who knew that getting a shipment of ink, folding circular filter paper, seeing a deer and some lightning bugs, and watching the rain, could all be so much fun. Just having fun… experiencing life. All of it.

Novel Software

I looked the other day for some text-related software that might help me in my efforts to think through and set out story, plot, characters, setting details, and other things along with writing the actual text of some fiction. I knew I didn’t want a word processor, and I knew I wanted more than just another low-level text editor… but what?

On Version Tracker, I found Jer’s Novel Writing Software. Great stuff! Slim and elegant, does what you want it to do, runs like a dream on Tiger.

You can type your text, and quickly make a marginal note or set a bookmark for later editing, revision, additions, reference points, or whatever. You can keep character or other notes, and general notes. A very helpful outline feature lets you see what you’ve done in concise form, with collapsible and expandable sections, and it’s created as you type. You can set up your novel’s general structure — say, Book, Part, Chapter, text block — in advance and then not worry about text formatting, just write. And you can control screen appearance and printed appearance separately and very flexibly.

And lots more; look here to find out more about it. You can download it for free to examine it, and you can buy a key for $30 if you decide to use it.

Any piece of software that comes with a document called “Please Please Read Me” and an EULA worded like this one already has significant points going for it. I hope you’ll try it to see what it can do and how it does it if you’re interested in writing fiction — or even if you just want to look at some excellent and novel software.

The Pot of Basil

I went shopping Friday morning and had fun picking out tomatoes, peppers, onions, buttermilk (for curries), tofu, and, along with the rest of my groceries, a basil plant growing in a pot. Mine has none of the grisly attributes of Isabella’s much larger plant in a very large pot; it has lots of nice slightly curly leaves, large and small, and, with reasonable care, will supply fresh basil for a good long time to come.

One decision, once I got it home, was where to put it? It fit very nicely on a small shelf over the sink, with good bright light and occasional direct sun from the skylight. Seeing it there will remind me to check to see if it’s dry enough to water. And I’m getting ready to put a note on the refrigerator of the last time I fed it… about every two weeks, it says on the little piece of paper that came with it.

I told a friend, who lives in warmer climes, and she said they have pots of it growing on their screened-in patio all year round. Mine will do fine in my kitchen; although it’s warmer there than anywhere in the house in summer, and correspondingly colder in winter, it’s still all really moderate indoor temperatures as far as plants are concerned. And my friend assures me that basil plants are hardy. Good; that’s what I like to hear.

For my first leaf-picking, I’ve got some tomatoes ripening, and plan a tomato-mozzarella salad drizzled with olive oil and topped with fresh basil leaves. Can’t wait.

Current Puns

Wouldn’t you like to hear the brilliantly funny Stephen Fry tell you all about puns? Take your wordplay where you find it, in this case in a half hour program on BBC radio 4 — excellent, and full of puns.

The title of the show is Current Puns — well, it may help US listeners to know that you can buy something from English bakeries called currant buns — but listen carefully and you’ll get it all. Great stuff!

Sharpe’s Challenge

Fans of the Sharpe Chronicles will be glad to see Sean Bean return for the first time in 8 years as Richard Sharpe. In 1817, Wellington sends Sharpe, a veteran who has already seen action in India in 1803, back to India to unravel an intrigue. Darragh O’Malley returns as Harper, and the adventure, loosely based on several of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels set in India, is back with lots of action and intrigue. The acting and production are excellent; this one was filmed on location in India. Well worth seeing. If you haven’t seen the other 14 filmed adventures, you’ll enjoy them too, adapted from Cornwell’s twenty novels about Sharpe.

The Doctor’s Case

I’ve just been rereading my copy of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came on one of my favorite Holmes stories, ‘The Doctor’s Case’ by Steven King. It’s a fine tale, blending originality with staying strictly within the limits established by the canon, it does not imitate any canonical story in terms of type of crime or method of solution (as so many uncanonical Holmes stories seem to), and it gives us glimpses into the characters of Holmes, Watson and Lestrade that are original and yet do not conflict with those we already know.

And if anyone is in doubt that Steven King is a fine author and stylist — and no, there is no horror or gruesomeness here, it’s a pure Holmes story — this story will be proof.

There are many other fine stories in the book, which is well worth reading and can bear re-reading, as the canonical (I nearly typed conanical) stories do. Besides, if you got hold of a copy, you could read ‘The Doctor’s Case.’

Picasso by Patrick O’Brian

I have literally just got done reading O’Brian’s Picasso, and I have to say I have found a great book! Not just good, fine, well-written, excellent, brilliant, bravo and adios — it’s all that; but it’s great, too. Not so many of those around. I did think as I was reading it that this made O’Brian to biography what Tuchman was to history… taking events from the records, not just hearsay or what someone else wrote, by itself; unafraid to say the plain truth, when the truth was plain; aiming at neither praise nor blame, but clearly full of liking and admiration, without any kind of truckling, worship, or excuse-making, and similarly full of profound respect for the work, the work, the work, that Picasso continued to turn out almost without interruption until almost literally the day he died, some years past 90 (he was born in 1881).

So many biographies, especially of artists, somehow miss the point, the reader feels at the end. After all the stories of love marriage children births deaths bad luck and good luck, friendships made and friendships broken, you quite often feel as though you’ve had a lot of detail without any real picture of the person — many leaves without a glimpse of the tree. That is emphatically not the case here. O’Brian is well-acquainted with research using primary documents, interviews and secondary documents, and the problems of sifting evidence and coming to what conclusions one can, and when one can’t, saying so in clear terms. Also, while O’Brian knew Picasso slightly (his own term), since O’Brian lived in the Rousillon for so many years, and Picasso spent his summers in various places in the Midi, in no way is this a buddy book or anything like it.

One of the nice things about the book is that, only as far as is justified, O’Brian lets you know as major events happened in the world, if there was or was suspected to be an influence on Picasso’s art. Picasso lived in Paris during the Occupation of WWII — he was in his sixties and the Spain that had originally issued his passport was long gone behind the Spanish Civil War, so he was effectively a stateless alien, quite an unsafe thing to be anywhere let alone in occupied territory in wartime. He didn’t truckle, a difficult position to maintain under those threatening and ugly circumstances, and many records and accounts of his life at this time provide evidence for this, not just some boastful statement after the fact. The anecdotes of what happened to him and what he did during the war as various Germans from troops sent to ‘search’ (even at times when troops had just searched and knew there was nothing to find) up to a visit from the German ambassador himself are recounted in the book, and I won’t spoil them here (but a hint: Guernica was still in his Paris studio at the time).

Hardcover copies of the original 1976 edition titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso are available occasionally, and only on the used book market, while a fine paperback edition titled simply Picasso and with a new preface by the author (the only textual difference from the original edition) was brought out some time after 1989 and itself reissued by HarperCollins in 2003.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) – dir. John Madden; Nicholas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale, Irene Papas
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the overwhelming events of World War II. It is based on the novel Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres, which is a novel of the war as it happened devastatingly on Cephalonia, told through the lives of several fictonal characters, but historically accurate in its depiction of the war and its effects.
Every movie that attempts to portray a book, or bases itself on a book, especially a long and complex book, is the result of a struggle to deal with all the complexities and events of a much longer tale than a feature-length movie can tell. This is a superb movie, reflecting key events and characters of the novel, and showing and expressing much of what is there, and deepening some aspects, changing, collapsing or deleting whole story threads in order to make a feature-length movie. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin does an excellent job of this, sifting and refining,and not losing its focus on the relationship between Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) and Corelli (Nicholas Cage), with Pelagia’s father (John Hurt), her fiance Mandras (Christian Bale), and Mandras’s mother (Irene Papas) as major supporting players. Both book and movie keep you wondering if Pelagia and Corelli will find a way to get together. Fittingly enough, given their different emphases, the movie answers one way, and the book another. Go see this fine movie.

Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle

Let me start out by saying that Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my all-time favorite marvelous terrific films, viewable over and over. And I say film, advisedly. It does not fall into any particular genre (anime, animation, fantasy), although it partakes of all of these. It belongs right up there with great feature films of all time. It’s not an accident that Miyazaki’s earlier Spirited Away won the best animated feature Oscar in its year, 2003. There is no substitute for seeing them yourself, if you haven’t, or seeing them again, if you have (they both bear re-watching very well).

I bought the original book of Howl’s Moving Castle just because I’ve approached the movie from every other possible angle, including the Studio Ghibli book on the art of the film, which contains the entire filmscript as well as the pictures.��

As one would have to do to translate a book into a feature-length movie (one film contains script/story material of roughly one short story, so a novel of necessity has to be changed, pared down, maybe characters combined or omitted, some scenes ditto, and maybe even new material put into the place of old material which has been deleted), Miyazaki has begun with characters and situations present in the novel (a wizard Howl with a moving castle, a Sophie who is changed into an old lady, the Witch of the Waste casting a spell out of jealousy, Calcifer, the hat shop, the gushing stepmother, the attractive sister Lettie) and lifted them out of the more complex novel (Sophie has two sisters in the novel, and there are many other differences and complications — including that Markl is a young man of 15 named Michael and a rival at one point with Howl for Lettie’s attentions, and Howl has a sister back in ‘our world’ — Wales, in fact — who has a family herself. Howl’s name in Wales is Howell Jenkins; and many other differences).

I note that Christian Bale (who does the English-language voice of Howl) is Welsh, although in the featurette about the English-language voiceovers, they chose him (Bale, himself a wizard of a thousand accents, gives Howl’s voice as a US voice without any regionalization) as an actor who could present an unusual character (unusual to the US — a hero without being a he-man, one who calls himself a coward during the film, although he’s actually quite brave when confronted, and says his strategy for dealing with problems is to run away) to the US audience convincingly. They picked him, they said, after seeing his success in Batman Begins — who, I note, is another widely-accepted American ‘hero’ who overcomes his fears in order to battle fiercely.

My point is: Miyazaki has transformed and streamlined the story to concentrate on Howl and Sophie, with Howl’s castle and Calcifer, and changed somewhat the role of the Witch of the Waste, and created the Madam Sulieman character out of other characters, and made the war over the missing Prince a major factor in the film, showing Howl’s character development and role as a lone struggler against the war’s depredations. If there can be said to be a Miyazaki original ‘message’ or ‘theme’ in the film, it’s the one about the pointlessness and destructiveness of war, and how the war has no real reason that justifies the war itself.�In the book as well as the film Sophie does find a way to set Calcifer free and give back Howl’s heart, and Calcifer does return afterwards because he likes them (and because it’s starting to rain).�And Sophie and Howl do get together.

But let me say this: the book is a much more lightweight confection than the film, shelved in the ‘teens’ section of the bookstore when I bought my copy, clever and inventive, but not terribly deep, nor intended to be. It’s filled with literary allusions and references that are well-handled and integrated into the plot, and also many plot twists and reversals that seem to my eye more busy than substantive, although they all have to do with and lead to the final unravelling of what’s been going on. And while Sophie has to solve the basic mystery of the Howl-Calcifer relationship in the book, too, she stumbles along there from minor calamity to minor calamity, not learning much about herself while doing so, until at the end of the book things are cleared up all at once (not without a struggle). By contrast, Miyazaki’s film has transformed the materials and characters of this book into a brilliant, moving, beautiful film with amazing depths, the work of a true genius. Beautifully crafted, beautifully produced, both visually and in terms of story and character. Amazing, astounding, incomparable.

Go see it.