Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Snow-covered lion on Columbia campus

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Kind, cynical funny mystery writer Donald Westlake died on New Year’s Eve. If you don’t know the prolific Westlake or his funny goofball career criminal Dortmunder, you should fix that. Westlake was a ninja at making a huge mess of funny and surprising stuff that gets sorted out to your stunned but smiling satisfaction in his last few pages.

One of my Dortmunder favorites, Don’t Ask, starts with Dortmunder in a traffic-stuck frozen fish truck but lurches him forward into the theft (more than once) of an 800 year-old femur disputed by two angry countries.

More Westlake wonders, all of them suitable to keep you happy on airplanes, even when jostled by turbulent weather or children…

Trust Me On This

Newswoman Sara Joslyn goes to work at notorious tabloid and runs afoul of murder mystery while working on stories of century-old twins, a star’s honeymoon, and a “body in a box”; romance as a bonus with great police intervention which I’m restraining myself from describing.

Baby, Would I Lie?

Sara Joslyn again, now working for cute boss Jack at a trendy New York magazine called Trend, re-meets some of her tabloid pals in Branson country-western land and gets tangled up in an even more tricky mystery.

Humans

Begun in 1986 and/or 1990, according to its preface, this book recounts a struggle carried out by one angel and one demon against God’s plan for the end of the universe. Remarkably similar in its premise to Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990), which I also love, this book takes a different pathway, both darker and funnier, to — but of course I don’t want to spoil the ending.

I am now regretting I never wrote Westlake any fan mail — this blog post must now suffice. He was a true craftsman whose work made the world better, not least by making us laugh.

Happy New Year

Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

Pop, bam, fizz! Another New Year arrives, with fresh round of wild ideas from EDGE.org.

“What will change everything?” was John Brockman’s question this year. “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” He’s now posting responses given by more than 150 wide-angle guessers — people from actor Alan Alda to quantum teleportationist Anton Zeilinger — with Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine filing separate guesses.
“Homesteading in Hilbert space,” predicts Frank Wilczek:

…The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus’ Old New World. It is also, in a real sense, much bigger… Our fundamental equations do not live in the three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively) infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. It will take us much more than a century to homestead that New New World, even at today’s much-accelerated pace…

“Happiness,” counter-predicts Betsy Devine:

In the next five years, policy-makers around the world will embrace economic theories (e.g. those of Richard Layard) aimed at creating happiness. The Tower of Economic Babble is rubble. Long live the new, improved happiness economics! …

Here are other short samples from just a few more of the best:

“The robotic moment” says Sherry Turkle

I will see the development of robots that people will want to spend time with. Not just a little time, time in which the robots serve as amusements, but enough time and with enough interactivity that the robots will be experienced as companions, each closer to a someone than a something. I think of this as the robotic moment…

“A forebrain for the world mind” says Danny Hillis

…If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital…I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism’s own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient….

“Molecular manufacturing” says Ed Regis

…Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they’d do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they’d do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials. The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion…

“We are learning to make phenotypes” says Mark Pagel

…the thing that we think of as “us”,can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don’t suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced…

“Malthusian information famine” says Charles Seife

…There seems to be a Malthusian principle at work: information grows exponentially, but useful information grows only linearly. Noise will drown out signal. The moment that we, as a species, finally have the memory to store our every thought, etch our every experience into a digital medium, it will be hard to avoid slipping into a Borgesian nightmare where we are engulfed by our own mental refuse…

“The use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population” says Lawrence Krauss

…Having been forced to choose a single game changer, I have turned away from the fascinating scientific developments I might like to see, and will instead focus on the one game changer that I will hopefully never directly witness, but nevertheless expect will occur during my lifetime: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population…

I join Lawrence in hoping that his prediction won’t come true.

Henry James

Originally uploaded by jadc01

I’ve been spending some time in the NYPL, reading old letters written to my godmother and namesake, author/editor/suffragist/ball-of-fire Elizabeth Garver Jordan.

Quite a few of these are from Henry James (1848 - 1913), whose books could not have been more different from her cheerful fictions. I transcribed for you, dear readers, one typed example (his penmanship is appalling) from Box 3, folder 14, labeled “James, Henry 1904 - 1905.”

I break it up here to give your eye some blessed white space, but his actual letter is one long breathless paragraph. James was on a lecture tour, and she had straightened out for him some problem about his reading at a convent school. I do not know the identity of Miss E. L. Cary, though an earlier letter from James thanks Elizabeth Jordan for introducing them. And “the whilom Parker”? Your guess is as good as mine.

95 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass., March 2, 1905

Dear Miss Jordan,

Forgive my again flying to you, in gratitude, on the wings of the great Remington. [Remington is a brand of typewriter.]

Your kind activity of yesterday, culminating in your second telegram, has given me the peace that passeth understanding. Tuesday fourteenth will beautifully do; by this I shall solemnly abide, and I am now writing to Sister M. Rita to this comfortable effect. I might have wired her directly yesterday — that came over me, to my confusion, ten minutes after I had wired you; but I lost, in my anguish and shame, all presence of mind, and just instinctively clutched at you. May the peace I just spoke of have been now completely brought to you! — with my renewed liveliest thanks.

Your letter is luminosity itself, and everything, I am sure, will go merrily forward. I don’t quite imagine what all those sequestered young souls will make of my profane lucubration; but that is their own affair, and I am fortunately not afraid of their being, as who should say, shocked or scandalized.

It interests me much to hear of your pleasant impression of the whilom Parker — so pathetic a figure as he had, these last months, appeared to the mind’s eye. If I had known you were to meet him, I would have asked you to kindly mention that I would have voted for him could I have voted for anyone — instead of being, through long absence, a poor practically disfranchised creature. But even that crumb of comfort I gather he doesn’t affect you as missing.

You must show me Mrs. Spencer Trask* on the first opportunity — for my curiosity is insatiable. Let me add, for your reassurance, that I have edged away from the “Pen and Brush” quite as gracefully, I think, as I have, with a fine discrimination, sunk into the arms (as it were) of Miss E. L. Cary — for a performance in Brooklyn, on the basis of the proper equivalent, on May tenth p.m.; so you see into what excellent “form” you have got me.
Yours most truly, Henry James.

*Footnote: Katrina Trask, author and wife of “millionaire banker” Spencer Trask. They created (much later) the artist colony Yaddo. Her writing is said to fit “easily with that of other society people with high literary talent.”

Elizabeth Jordan (1865 - 1947)

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Frank is on book tour for The Lightness of Being, but oh boy — he is much better off than poor Jack London!

How do I know? I’ve been reading Elizabeth Jordan’s boxes of letters, mostly from the years she was editor of Harper’s Bazaar (1900 - 1913). One of these came from Jack London, who was sadly following his Call of the Wild on a three-month lecture tour around the US, most recently landing him in a commercial hotel in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

In her own day, people speculated that she had a romance going with Henry James*:

The story runs that when Henry James proposed marriage to Elizabeth Jordan, he wrote a letter couched in so involved and complicated a style that she could not possibly understand it. She answered it in a note so illegible that he could not possibly read it.

Not bloody likely, says Ms. Jordan’s goddaughter (me) — not least because her penmanship was much better than Henry James’s. His 30-plus letters to her over twenty-some years are breathless and surprisingly flirty, when I can read them. I did transcribe one long one, blessedly typewritten.

I wish I had transcribed a long very sad letter from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on black-bordered stationery about how much he missed his wife, who had recently died. But I ordered a photocopy, which the NYPL says they will send me about one month from now. I’ll share it with you then.

* How times change — recent speculation is that she had a romance with Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy!

Great Tew churchyard

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… though it has been slightly buried by packing, then travel, then jet lag, and now the unpacking.

It has been wonderful spending a springtime in England.

Roses, campanula, hardy geraniums, and the peaceful, sleepy cooing of pale-gray doves.

Wide meadows with elderflower and hawthorn tree borders, whose stiles Miss Elizabeth Bennet might have slipped through on her long walk through the fields to Mr. Bingley’s house.

Small village shops where Alice in Wonderland might have bought apples or candy.

And in London, I swear that I once saw Bertie Wooster coming out of a tailor’s shop, proud of but unnerved by his coat’s rather daring new color.

But now my own real life is starting up again, which is a good thing.

Tolkien’s table, Merton College

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is this the table where JRR Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings? Is it the setting he had in mind for Elrond’s conference where 4 hobbits, 2 men, and one each of wizard/elf/dwarf pledge their faith to a fellowship of the One Ring?

It may well be both of these, for it is a fine old stone table in the gardens of Merton College, one where (it is said) Tolkien would often sit outdoors writing on fine days like yesterday in the years after 1945, when he became Oxford’s Merton Professor of English language and literature.

Merton (founded in 1260 by Walter de Merton) has many lovely medieval spaces set among peaceful lawns and well-tended gardens. I would not be surprised in Tolkien’s vision of Lothlorien’s elegant retreat from a dangerous world owes something to his own experiences of life in this setting.

Caution: Wikipedia trolls at play

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is Hillary Clinton a giant shape-shifting reptile? Do ghosts use cellphones? Does Smithville, Iowa have a “quaint little library”? And how should Wikipedia reflect (or not) each of these sincere, not trolling, beliefs. (Trolls create a whole new set of wiki-problems.)

A veteran of some of the most hood-filled neighborhoods of Wikipedia, “Filll” has created a Wikipedia quiz-cum-learning-tool, the AGF Challenge Exercises. The challenges, based on real Wikipedia problems, include all three of the above. “AGF” stands for the Wikipedia policy “Assume Good Faith.”

He explains it to Durova:

When Wikipedia is criticized externally or internally over its handling of assorted situations, they are often extremely highly charged and emotional affairs, and often ongoing. This [the AGF Challenge Exercises] is a way to see a sanitized collection of problems in abbreviated and sanitized form, where critics inside and outside Wikipedia can offer their advice and suggestions.

In surprisingly-closely-related news, Harvard’s librarian Robert Darnton has a great essay in the June 12, 2008 issue of the NYRB. Most relevant bit:

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively‚ and even how to appreciate old books.

And with help from Wikipedians like Filll, we can learn our own ways to make bad bits better.

Jane Austen’s writing table

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This tiny table at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton was where she wrote the jewel-like novels that made her famous. If I ever feel like complaining about my workspace, I’ll remember hers, set in one corner of her family’s sitting room.

It won’t be in bookstores for another week but that didn’t stop two “reviewers” last week from posting low-ball reviews on Amazon. The book is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, a colorful, profane, and surprisingly frank memoir of sleazy politics.

Media mentions of Allen Raymond’s book have mostly talked up his phone-jamming, for which his RNC pals threw him under the bus. The book details many stunts more colorful. Deceptive robocalls to Democrats from “scary black men” or “actors putting on thick Spanish accents” worked wonders at keeping them home on Election Day. Swapping soft money for hard–funneling GOP dollars to leftwing splinter candidates–engineering repeat contributions from donors who had already given their legal limit–Raymond names names and shows how each trick works.

Adam Cohen in the NYT says that this book may finally force Senate action on the long-delayed Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act. I hope it will.

I got an advance copy just a few days ago in response to my longtime phone-jamming blogging, and just posted my own review on Amazon too. It would be quite a job to track GOP lowballers around the two-way web but you may find it an interesting hobby. (On Barnes and Noble: “Pitiful and poorly written,” some prescient reviewer claimed on Christmas Day.)

Probably the biggest reason that GOP insiders want you not to read this book is not the rude first-person memories of Bush, Rove, Feather, Synhorst, et al. but the way showcases in-crowd contempt for their freeper supporters — “the Jesus-loves-guns crowd” — “the knuckle-draggers, the gunnies, and the committed ideologue nuts.” “The mouth-breathers who who decide GOP primaries might allow people to steal their money and send their children to impossible wars but they’ll cut no such slack for baby-killers.”

The book’s quite a read, and it could just make politics better.

sneering squirrel

Originally uploaded by Fifi LePew

Of all the condescending and unfairly snarky non-reviews of a good book I’ve seen in the New York Times, this morning’s haute hit-piece on Gods Behaving Badly takes the let-them-eat-cake gâteau.

..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.

A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”

You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”

Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.

But then “real writers,” even when they stumble, all deserve real respect (”Nice clothes there, Emperor!”), quite unlike a mere blogger.