Let's Fluent!

I'm still at Bouchercon in St. Louis with all but one of my MIE compatriots (boy, have we talked about you, Dan!), and that means I haven't had much chance to come up with something new.  So this is a baldfaced swipe off my other blog, written a few years back from China.

One of the nice things about wandering off the beaten path in China is that most people still don't speak English, and they don't particularly aspire to.  This spares you the "Is this a pen?" conversation you're likely to have  repeatedly in some areas of Japan, or chats in Cambodia with people who have made friends with only one English verb, "Have."  An example, from my own experience.  It's raining and slippery on the sidewalks, and the young lady in front of me takes a tumble.  I help her up and say, slowly and clearly, "Are you all right?" and she smiles and says, "Have."

In many parts of China, nobody even tries, which is probably as it should be.  I mean, do I try to speak Chinese to visitors in America?  Under these circumstances, you get creative and resort to sign language and mime, but even that will take you only so far.  An example:

Last night, I went into a restaurant, put my book on the table next to the place mat, and waited for anyone to notice I'd arrived. Ten minutes later a cheerful young lady wandered up and started chatting in Mandarin.  I put both hands in front of me, palms together, and opened them like a paperback, to indicate that I'd like a menu. She leaned across me, still chatting, picked up my book, opened it at random, put it into my hands, and wandered off again. I could practically hear her thinking, “He couldn't do that himself?”

So I went out and bought a book that purports to make me fluent in Mandarin. It's called Let's Fluent!, which should have sent up some sort of flare. But I bought it, took it home, cleared a space on my desk, and let it fall open. This was the phrase it opened to:

He prefers the cheese that comes from his father's farm.

Now, I don't know about you, but for me, no social situation springs immediately to mind in which this would be an essential phrase. Even ignoring the fact that the Chinese don't like cheese, when exactly would this come in handy?  And is there any conversation, however lively, that this phrase wouldn't stop dead?

So I kept flipping through, and came upon yet another stone-cold conversation-stopper:

The trouble with stamp collecting is that it's too time-consuming.

It is? Is that really the trouble with stamp collecting?  How about that it's more boring than growing worms?  Or that – after years of effort and expense – what you've got is a bunch of stamps?  Or that you're going to find yourself hanging around with stamp collectors?  And as with the other example, to whom would you ever say this?

My spirits were flagging – this was not the kind of witty, light-hearted banter I'd envisioned myself delivering, fluently, of course.  But then I struck gold. The next piece of repartee I opened to wasn't exactly at the level of wit that made Oscar Wilde famous, but at least I could figure out what kind of people one might say it to. Here it is (and this is a word-for-word quotation):

The topic of my paper is the structure of the crust and upper mantle in Northern China and their relation to Cenozoic tectonism. 

Fortunately I did bring some slides with me, which I hope will make things clearer.

Okay? Not really "me," I'll admit, but if I am ever called upon to address a gathering of Chinese geologists, I'll have a hell of an opening. I can hear them now, sitting up straight and grabbing pencils all over the hall. Once I'm really fluent, I'll throw in a couple of jokes about the rock cycle or maybe a pun or two on the word “mantle” that'll have them wiping tears of mirth from their thick glasses. And the slides! What possibilities the slides offer! They want rocks? I'll give them rocks. Rocks that would make other rocks roll uphill.

And when I'm finished, I'll bring us all together into a dusty group hug with the following nugget:

It's interesting that people may have different customs and traditions, but you can always find something in common among them.

Damn! To think I'd have missed all that if I'd put the book back. Come on, everybody – Let's Fluent!

BOUCHERCON HIATUS: My September 11, 2001

We’re still at Bouchercon, doing all the things that make hanging out with friends and fans worthwhile, but I’ll leave the telling of those tales to others.  After all, “What happens in St. Louis stays in St. Louis.”  Though I must admit, Dan, I'm having a really hard time not saying at least something about Ysra bringing that sheep's head into the hotel bar.

Today’s post was written at the request of a New York City-based newspaper to be part of its 9/11 10th year commemorative issue.  I was asked to talk about where I was that Tuesday morning.  Here is what I wrote. 

I like it over here by the United Nations.  Beekman Place is different from other New York City streets; it’s more like a quiet, residential private road in an elegant European city.  My walk to my office is down First Avenue overlooking the East River and alongside the gardens and flags of the UN.  It gives me a few daily moments of serenity and escape from the often out of control state of my life as a lawyer here.

I need this walk today.  The sky is so blue and clear, except for the few smoke-like clouds on the downtown horizon.  I’m up by the UN General Assembly Building when I call my friend Panos to find out how his date went last night.  He’s frantic and says he can’t talk.  He’s waiting for his mother to call him from Greece.  I ask if everything is OK.  He says she’ll be worried when she hears that his office was struck by a plane.  I must have misunderstood him.  He works in the World Trade Center.  He says his office building is burning and he has to get off the phone.

Those are not clouds on the horizon, it’s smoke.

I tell him to get out of the building.  He says it’s not necessary.  He’s okay.  His date kept him out late and he’s still at home.  He’ll go to work in the afternoon, after the fire is out.  He hangs up.

How could a plane have hit the World Trade Center on a day as clear as this one?  Something must have happened to the pilot.  I hear sirens everywhere and move a little faster toward my office.  By the time I get upstairs everyone is looking out the windows on the south side of our building.  It has an unobstructed view of the Towers.  Now they’re both burning.  I’m told a second plane hit the second Tower.  We all know what that means—even before learning about the Pentagon.  Someone tells me a plane hit Pittsburgh, my hometown.  I can’t believe what I’m hearing.  I call my daughter, she lives in Greenwich Village.  She’s frightened.  We all are.  I tell her to keep calm. My son is in Cincinnati, I’m sure he’s safe but I can’t reach him.

We’re all glued to the big screen TV in my law firm’s main conference room.  The first tower begins to fall and we turn en masse from the television to look out our windows as it crumbles to the ground before our eyes.  It’s surreal, it can’t be happening.  But it happens again.  Not a word is said while we watch the second tower fall.   We are at war.  But with whom?

My mind can’t fix on what all this means.  I focus on a rumor that there’s an imminent biological anthrax attack and race to the pharmacy for enough antibiotic for my daughter.  That’s something I can do.  Again, I think, my son is in Cincinnati.  He’s safe there.

When I moved to NYC in 1969 my first job was blocks away from the Trade Center site.  The Towers were in the midst of construction and I saw them every morning across the Brooklyn Bridge as I’d head to work.  In August 1974 I watched Philippe Petit do his high wire walk between them, and three years later glimpsed at mountain climber George Willig scale one in the wind.  Even after moving my office uptown they were always in view from my window.  They spanned my career as a lawyer in NYC.  I can’t believe they’re gone.

 

The City is in shock.  Lines of thousands of refugees from downtown are trekking up Third Avenue toward home or simply to somewhere other than where they were.  No one is talking.  The smell is everywhere, acrid and bitter.  There seems to be grey dust on the shoes of every cop and will be for days.

I stop at a restaurant halfway between my office and home.  It’s Greek and run by a friend.   It’s the only place I can think of to go.  There is no one at home and I can’t get downtown to my daughter.  She’s fine.  Panos comes in.   I try making a joke about his date from last night.  I say he should marry her, she saved his life.  It’s not that funny.

A half dozen or so young men and women of about the age I was when I started working in NYC are sitting quietly at a table along the front windows.  A cell phone rings—one of the few that must be working—and one of the women answers.  She’s a dark haired girl.  She listens, shuts her phone and starts sobbing.  She says something to the others; they hug each other and cry.

Damnit.

It’s after midnight by the time I head home.  My cell phone rings on the way.  It’s a friend from Capri in Italy.  He’s been trying to reach me all day to see if I’m okay.  I hang up and continue home.  I’m tearing.  Friendship like his is what life’s all about.  Family and friends are what matter.

A week later I drive to my farm, get in my pickup and head to Pittsburgh to visit my brother and sister-in-law.  I decide not to go back to NYC but drive south, toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  I’ve never been there before, but it just seems the place to be.  I have to drive by Washington, DC to get there.  It’s only when I see the first sign for DC that I realize I’ve made an unconscious pilgrimage past the three sites of the 9/11 massacre—NYC, Western PA, DC.

 

Duck, NC is chilly in the off-season and the ocean is wild.  I lock myself in a hotel room overlooking the sea and complete my first novel.  I’m driven to make something good come out of all of this bad.  A week later I drive back to NYC.  I’m on the Jersey Turnpike heading north and close to the City, but I can’t tell where it begins.  Its southern landmark is gone.  This world is insane.

A few years later I give up my life in NYC and move to the Aegean island of Mykonos to pursue my dream of writing mysteries exploring the heart and soul of Greece.   There is no reason to wait any longer.  Is there?

Jeff—Saturday

Bouchercon Hiatus - What Lies Beneath

Sadly, I'm not at Bouchercon eating sheep's head and drinking sloe gin. But in the spirit of the hiatus, and thankful for one week where I don't have to scrabble around on a Friday morning wondering what to write about that will be remotely interesting, I thought I'd dredge up one of my favourite posts from the vaults, from January 2010, and one of the first about those wonderful London secrets I find so fascinating. Oh and I've found a plot that features ghost stations. About which, more anon...

As I work from home, I rarely venture on to the London Underground these days, which is no bad thing because I'm mildly claustrophobic and being crammed on to a rush hour tube can cause the most sanguine passenger to panic. But earlier this week I ventured into town for a meeting. The tube lived up to its clapped-out image and my journey along the District Line was delayed by about 20 minutes thanks to a signal failure, a frequent occurrence. We were held at Sloane Square station, and not for the first time I thought it was a shame that the bar which used to be on the platform, the only one on the whole of the underground system, had long since closed. A pint might have made the delay more bearable. However, it wasn't too bad, and from where I was sat I could see one of those little curios that make living in London so special.


When the owners of the Metropolitan Railway built Sloane Square station in 1868 they had a problem: the River Westbourne, which flowed into the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park (and was originally crossed by Knight's Bridge, later Knightsbridge, home of Harrods). What did they do? Relocate the station? No, cocking a snook at nature, they built the station regardless and carried the river above the platform and encased it in a large iron pipe. It was that pipe I could see from my vantage point on the train.

Though travelling on the tube can be occasionally unpleasant, there is much I love about it. Rattling home, late at night, slightly drunk, trying not to doze off and miss your stop; the hot blast of musty air that precedes an oncoming train; people-watching on a long journey; the laconic announcements from long-suffering drivers; tourists staring bewildered at the labyrinthine maps; the underground is an integral part of London life. I'm fascinated by its history. Discovering that my local station, Ladbroke Grove, used to be called Notting Hill, but was later changed when a new station was opened and named Notting Hill Gate provided me with the first big twist of my debut novel.


I'd love to find a plot device where I can incorporate the various 'ghost' stations on the line; disused stations fallen into disrepair, of which you catch a tantalising glimpse in the murk of as your train hurtles past. Stations such as Aldwych, which is used as a film set because it's still in good condition; or Down Street, closed in 1932, used as an air-raid shelter by Winston Churchill and his war cabinet, much of which has been bricked up, though some rooms still survive and the fabulous old facade remains on view at street level in Mayfair.

However, my favourite piece of 'hidden' London Underground arcana is above ground and can be seen by anyone, though, understandably, people often walk past blissfully unaware. When the District, Circle and Hammersmith and City lines were built, architects employed a technique called 'cut and cover.' As they were near the surface, they cut a deep hole to house the track and then covered it with a tunnel. This meant having to knock down houses and cut through roads. In working class areas they went ahead without a care, turfing people out of their homes, often without paying compensation. This being Victorian London, in more affluent areas, the story was different. When the Metropolitan line was built in 1868 and ran through a prestigious terrace named Leinster Gardens, in Bayswater, the residents, in a fit of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) complained that a great gaping hole where the tube would run might ruin the look of the street. They were also worried that the steam from the trains venting off might rise above street level and that could also prove unsightly.


After much wrangling a compromise was reached to preserve the street's demeanour (and the value of the residents' property): the railway owners would knock down two houses, numbers 23 and 24, to make way for the line but keep the facade, door, railings and windows. From the street, the houses look like this (note the blacked out windows):

Convincing huh? But from the back,  you see this:

A 1930's hoaxer once sold tickets at ten guineas each for an exclusive charity ball at the address, prompting hundreds of guests to turn up in full evening dress and knock on a fake door, and heaven only knows how many pizza delivery drivers, taxi cabs and people spreading the gospel of some God or other have been sent there for a giggle.


cheers




Dan - Friday

Bouchercon Hiatus - What's in a name

Bouchercon and hiatus are two words that are pretty hard to spell for a foreigner. I hope I got them right though. I am in hotel room in Minneapolis, two hours away from boarding the plane to St Louis. The two days spent here in the Twin Cities my husband and I have used to shop and if we are taken aside in customs when returning to Iceland the customs officials are in for a big surprise. We have four suitcases full of aluminuim foil, shampoo, toothbrushes and plastic jars. We considered buying toilet paper but had no more space. But do not dispair, we are not only taking away from America we have also come bringing gift - not inscence, gold or myrrh but scourged sheeps' heads and a pate made from .... you guessed it: scourged sheeps' head. This we intend to offer to those Bouchercon guests who have always wanted to try a scourged sheep's head but never had the opportunity. These delicacies will be served by Murder is Everywhere in the venue bar, I cannot remember if it is on the Thursday or the Friday evening. This means if you will have to go to the bar both evenings I guess which is a positive thing. So enough of this, here is a post from August 2010 that I hope might interest you: 

I have just received a request from abroad asking me to provide the phonetic spelling of my name. This caused me some problems since phonetics are only mastered by linguists in Iceland as here we know how all the words sound. What probably instigated this request is my last name: Sigurðardóttir, which looks a bit easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajökull , but only by a slight margin.

Here we go by first names and last names are mostly used to discern between the Yrsas, Örnólfurs, Þórs, Freyjas and so on. Gravestones, formal letters etc. use full names but you will never see the last name placed in front of the first name as is common elsewhere. The phone book contains full names but you look under the first name. This relates to our last names not being a family name but a patronym, i.e. it says who your father is. My father is Sigurður (his first name) and I am his daughter (dóttir) so I am Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Yrsa the daughter of Sigurður. Had I been a son I would have been Sigurðarson or Sigurðsson. This way last names change with every generation, my son and my daughter are Ólafsson and Ólafsdóttir, last names which neither my husband nor I carry, nor do our parents and neither will their children. This system is pretty good in my mind as it removes the existence of fancy family names and increases the likelihood that each person makes their own dent in society based on their own worth. (I feel the need to mention that the photo accompanying this paragraph is not of my family, this particular photo opportunity has never presented itself in our case).

Women never take their husband’s last name when they get married here and never have. It would make no sense at all as although married they remain the daughter of their father and would become the son of another father altogether if they were to assume their husbands name. This coupled with the whole patronym thing, does have its downsides. When my parents moved to Texas to study in the 70s with my sister and me, they were not able to take a hotel room as they had separate last names, in addition to my sister and me having the third last name. To the receptionists at the hotels they had all the makings of a sinful couple accompanied by someone else’s children to boot. This was not considered good form in the Bible belt at the time. We ended up having more conventional passports issued for the whole family under my father's last name Þorsteinsson, and were subsequently able to travel without having to camp.

Back to the phonetics. Since I know not a single linguist I had to figure out some way to explain how my name sounded. Needless to say I drew a blank when it comes to my last name. There is a letter in it that does not exist in English: Ð, in small caps: ð and it sounds like trying to say a T when leaving the dentist’s office having had too much aanesthesia which has affected the toungue. So I focused on my first name noting that the last name is never used. Yrsa luckily does not contain any odd letters and originates from Latin, having evolved from the word Ursa meaning female bear. So I was able to use my newly acquired ad-hoc phonetic ability to say my name sounded like Ursa with an I.

This is the version explaining the meaning of my name that I like. There are other much less appealing ones that I keep trying to forget but seem unable to. To give you an idea the definition provided in the book of Icelandic names says it means: wild person, madcap, giantess, grumpy sheep. Not exactly something I want my name associated with.

I was brought up being told that the first woman to be named Yrsa was a Scandinavian queen known as “the mother of kings”. I tried looking this up to boost my self esteem and found the following on Wikipedia:

"Yrsa was a tragic heroine of Scandinavian legend. She appears in several versions relating to her husband, the Swedish king Eadgils, and/or to her father and rapist/lover/husband Halga (the younger brother of king Hroðgar who received Beowulf) and their son Hroðulf. The consensus view is that the people surrounding Yrsa are the same people as those found in Beowulf, and the common claim in Beowulf studies that Hroðulf probably was the son of Halga is taken from the Yrsa tradition. Several translators (e.g. Burton Raffel) and scholars have emended her name from a corrupt line (62) in the manuscript of Beowulf, although this is guesswork."

The brief paragraph above is at best runner up to the worst written paragraph on Wikipedia, but putting aside the incomprehensible text and connections, what threw me completely was the reference to the rapist-lover-husband. The three are really ill matched and I thought the Wikipedia people must have misunderstood the saga – maybe thinking they were written in phonetics. So I looked up the original saga where Yrsa appears, Hrólfs saga Kraka, and lo and behold the name appears very early on with an explanation of the origin of the name to boot. Only not in the way I expected or wanted, and incredibly enough seem to have been able to forget at some point.

“As time passed queen Ólöf gave birth to a child. It was a girl. Ólöf hated the child in every way. She had a dog called Yrsa and she named the female child Yrsa, after the dog. “

I stopped reading, the rapist-lover-husband hook no longer working. But, being a crime novelist I don’t like leaving readers in the dark so I can tell you what I do remember of Yrsa’s story, she was given pauper farmers for bringing up as their own never knowing that she was a princess. She ended up marrying a king but before you get your mind set on a happy ending you should know that this particular king was her father. Think female Oedipus less the eye poking out dramatics.

If you have time on your hands I suggest looking up the origin and meaning of your name. Who knows, maybe there is another name out there meaning grouchy sheep.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Bouchercon Hiatus: Reprise !st Books and How I got started

Bouchercon Hiatus:
If you're unfamiliar with what Bouchercon is, you can learn all about it by going here: http://www.bouchercon2011.com/
In case you don't know it already, the only one among us who isn't attending is Dan (We'll miss you, Dan) and we're all pretty busy with preparations and travel. We have, therefore, agreed that two posts from each of us, in succession, will be drawn from our archive.
This is from January 10 this year

1st Books How I got started



Murder in the Marais, my first book in the Aimée Leduc Investigation series, just came out in a tenth anniversary edition. I'll be getting back from the ALA midwinter Library conference in San Diego when you read this so I'm posting a blog post I wrote for Meg Waite Clayton on her Stories of How Writers Get Started (megwaiteclayton.com/1stbooks/) last year. Meg's a great fiction writer btw check out her blog and her books even though she doesn't do murder but writes wonderful literary fiction. This is what I wrote for her blog and it reasonates for me right now because writing, like life, is a journey and I can't believe in less than two months Murder in Passy, Aimée's 11th investigation will come out.

Here's the dirty, dark secret of starting my life of crime.
When I began writing I never thought I’d finish a book much less set it in Paris, even get published or write a series.
I wasn’t a doctor, a policewoman, a sketch artist or with the FBI. I was a mom, a preschool teacher and had old friends in Paris. The total sum of my qualifications apart from reading and loving mysteries.
I did grow up in a Francophile family in the SF Bay Area and attended a French Catholic school. My father was a Francophile and loved good food and wine. In the 50’s my uncle went to France and studied with the artist George Braques, so talk at our dinner table was a lot about France. Later, I lived in Europe, mostly Switzerland and France and did every kind of black market job under the European sun.
But it was the story of my friend’s mother, a hidden Jewish girl in Paris during the German Occupation, that drove me to write. I’d heard this story when I visited the Marais with my friend and just felt somehow, someway I had to write this. As I told Meg before, this led to three and a half years of writing what became Murder in the Marais.
During the process I’d discovered I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way. But I began spending more time in Paris in the mid-1990’s to develop Aimée Leduc, my PI turned computer security sleuth. I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It became important to me that my character Aimée be half-American, half-French be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, have a strong fashion sense and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life. And that she know much more about computers than I do.
But when my editor accepted the first manuscript (Marais) she asked...”Where’s Aimée going next?” I hesitated. “What do you mean?” “Well, where’s she going to discover crime next. Which part of Paris?” Long pause. “You are writing the next book aren’t you...this is a series?”
“Of course,” I lied.
“You’ve started I assume?”
“Matter of fact, the story takes up right after the Marais.” I said the first thing that came into my head while running to my computer.
“Good a continuation, her next case, the next part of her life...that man she met..what about him?”
My editor was feeding me ideas and I wasn’t going to ignore them. “Yves the journalist, yes, the relationship will go somewhere and she’s going to Belleville.”
My bright idea since I’d just stayed in that district with my friend, a single mom who’s daughter was the same age as my son. I slept on her couch, took her daughter to school, paid her gas bills and saw another side of Paris in doing so.
“Belleville...where’s that?”
Ok this was before the movie Triplets of Belleville.
“But that’s where Edith Piaf lived, she sang on the streets.”
“Fine,” my editor said.
And there I was powering up my computer, searching for my notes, napkins from the Belleville bistro, my photos and I had a goal. Aimée was going to Belleville, murder somehow would be involved, a problematic relationship with Yves, the man she got involved with in the Marais, would ensue and I was off.
And that’s how it’s been with each other book. Aimée’s got office rent to pay, a business to run, upkeep on a crumbling 17th century Ile Saint Louis townhouse flat with archaic plumbing, a bichon frise named Miles Davis to walk on the quais of the Seine and a penchant for bad boys. In part Aimée’s journey; her progression in life and investigations mirror what I discover in Paris, the society, immigration issues, in that book about Belleville corruption in the government and it’s a flow streaming into politics. We meet Aimée in November 1993 and now eleven books later (in the forthcoming Murder in Passy) it’s November 1997 - only four fictional years have passed. But the background setting she experiences are the seasons, the current scandal, Princess Diana's death in the car crash. Each book is a long snapshot of the time, Aimée's life in this era in the 90’s when people still paid in francs, smoked in the cafe's, Google was still an idea in the head of two guys at Stanford. And the Paris I rediscovered visiting often for research.
But to get the details, the stories, the insight from the ‘experts’ I needed and still need help.
Friends have friends, and their introductions in Paris open doors. In my case doors to private detectives, police, and local cafe owners. Over the years I’ve built up these connections, nourished them with bottles of wine over dinner and running possible scenarios by these experts, some of whom have become friends.
“I want you to get it right,” a retired Commissaire once told me, “if you’re writing a book set in Paris, a real city, you need to get the police system and all the details correct.” I appreciate that and the time he takes meeting with me and talking. He was in charge of the Princess Diana investigation and has provided a wealth of details.
Ok so many crime writers kill people on the page for a living but in my case it pays for my habit. Going to Paris and doing research. There’s so much I don’t know, I tell my husband, so I have to visit the archives, libraries, interview computer hackers, go in the sewers, visit the Morgue etc. he just nods. “I know.” In Paris on the cobblestones, in the metro I get a spark of a story, a detail, overhear a conversation I’d never hear otherwise. My novels aren’t set in the beret and baguette Paris, or the tourist areas, but off the beaten track, the backstreets and courtyards of quartiers not often seen. More like a sociological slice of life in the darker side of the city of light. The areas Aimée explores from the quarries underground in the Latin Quarter to her decaying elegant 17th century apartment on the Ile Saint Louis. It’s a trip to Paris without the airfare to an area you probably haven’t seen before.

Over the course of the books Aimée’s developed, I’ve gotten to know her more. It’s been an organic process, certainly not one I expected. So in beginning a book, I think back to my editors words, start with a particular part of Paris that intrigues me, of a story that could only happen there and feel driven to tell it. This district of Paris is a character. The murder, while important and propels the plot, isn’t the focus, it’s how the murder impacts Aimée and why she would investigate, the family and friends surrounding the victim, the community and this little part of Paris that's affected. A way to explore moral ambiguities and the grey areas when murder isn’t black and white.

Cara - Tuesday

Bouchercon Hiatus:Brazilian Wish Ribbons

If you're unfamiliar with what Bouchercon is, you can learn all about it by going here: http://www.bouchercon2011.com/


In case you don't know it already, the only one among us who isn't attending is Dan (We'll miss you, Dan) and we're all pretty busy with preparations and travel.


We have, therefore, agreed that two posts from each of us, in succession, will be drawn from our archive.


The one below, originally dated the 10th of February of last year, is particularly appropriate, because, during the event, I'll be handing out Brazilian Wish Ribbons to anyone who asks for one.


So, if you're reading this, and you're going there, don't forget to buttonhole me.


Because they also make terrific bookmarks.

This is me.

See that yellow string on my right wrist?

It used to be a ribbon once, a very special ribbon which Brazilians call a fita do Senhor do Bomfim.

At least ninety percent of Brazil’s population has worn one of these things at some point in their lives.

And the ones who haven’t are mostly too young to tie knots.

Here’s a (very brief) resumé of how the custom began and why we do it:

More than three million Africans were imported into Brazil as slaves.

They brought with them the Yoruba religions of Africa, which came to become inextricably mixed with Catholicism.

For more than 250 years, Salvador, in the northeastern state of Bahia, was Brazil’s Rome.

And the church of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim (Our Lord of Good Endings) became the Afro-Brazilian Vatican.

On the high altar of that church is a statue of Christ, carved many years ago in Portugal.

The length of the statue’s right arm is 47 centimeters.

Which is the length of one of these ribbons.

The ribbon bears these words: “Lembrança do Nosso Senhor do Bomfim da Bahia”

(A reminder/memory/souvenir of Our Lord of Good Endings of Bahia.)

Wearing them became a declaration of faith and, later, something more.

You’ll find them on the fence around the church.

This shot is of the same fence, taken from the opposite direction.

They come in various colors, each one identified with both a Catholic saint and an Orixa, an African deity responsible for a particular form of activity or endeavor. Mine is that of Oxum, the spirit-protector of writers and artists.

We wear them on our ankles or on our wrists.

We tie them on with three knots, one above the other.

And, as we do, we make three wishes.

Mine has been in place for about fourteen months.

I dearly wish it would fall off.

But I can’t remove it.

If I do, I run the grave risk of never having any of my wishes fulfilled.

Permanently.

But, if I hold the course, they’ll all come true.

Yeah, it seems silly doesn’t it? Being afraid to take it off?

But I could tell you stories…

On the other hand, if you're less superstitious than I am, you can always use it as a bookmark.

So, if you see me wandering around Bouchercon -- ask.

Leighton - Monday

Art Month

Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer

was sold in 2006 for $135,000,000, making it,

at the time, the most expensive painting ever to change hands.

Does that make it better than his other portait of her?

With Bouchercon just around the corner and everybody packing and stuff, Leighton suggested we choose one of our favorite earlier posts and flourish it again: sort of a "greatest hits" approach.

But I'm contrary, and anyway I'm in the middle of putting together the September edition of my monthly newsletter, and it occurred to me that the intelligent and discerning readers who hang out here might be interested in the section of the newsletter where I sort of catch up on what I've been reading.  So here it is.

Other People's (Art) Books
It's been art month.  Pretty much everything I've read has been about art, and some of them have been dillies. Here are three I particularly recommend.

Sarah Thornton brings a trained sociologist's eye to the related worlds of art and art commerce.  Over the course of a year, she spent a single day -- after weeks of preparation -- with members of the art world's dominant tribes:  an auctioneer, a dealer, a critic, a classroom in a fine-arts university, the giant art fairs at Basel and Venice, the management of the Tate Gallery, and -- oh, yes, an actual artist.  Out of these sharply observed encounters, Thornton fashions an Impressionistic overview of the global art world, which turns out to be closer to Warren Buffett than La Boheme.  A great read and a fascinating introduction to a world populated in part by folks like the nice couple from Florida who are building a private museum to house their art.

Sociopaths are often interesting, and John Drewe, the subject of this book, is more interesting than most.  Drewe, a con man to his elegantly manicured fingertips, figured out that what makes a fake painting look real is not only the forger's skill, but the picture's provenance -- the paper trail that leads back from the present day to the artist or to an almost unarguable attribution.  Drewe donated tens of thousands of pounds to the archives of the Tate, one of the world's finest, and gained entry to do research there.  His bag was searched each time he left, of course, but Drewe wasn't taking things out; he was putting things in -- items ranging from phony bills of sale to entire forged catalogs of nonexistent exhibitions.  When the provenance accompanying one of his commissioned forgeries led the researcher to the Tate archive, there the evidence was.  And dealers and buyers fell for it, in spite of the fact that Drewe's forger created his masterpieces using ordinary house paint.  A riveting book and a real eye-peeler about "expertise" in the modern world of art.

The Ghent Altarpiece is the masterpiece of Jan Van Eyck, probably the first great oil painting in history, the most influential artwork of its day, and either the last great work of the Middle Ages or the first great work of the Renaissance.

It's packed with enough symbolism to engage the rapt attention of ecclesiastics, historians, iconographers, and crackpots for ages, and it has.  It's reputed to conceal vast and powerful mysteries, if they could only be decoded.  Adolph Hitler, always a sucker for the occult, believed that it contained clues to the location of the Arma Christi, items associated with the Passion of Christ, including the Crown of Thorns.  Possession of the Arma Christi was thought to confer supernatural powers.

Fully open, the Altarpiece's twelve panels stretch more than fourteen feet in width and almost twelve in height.  It weighs, as one scholar says, about as much as two full-grown elephants.

And yet, the Ghent Altarpiece is perhaps the most-frequently stolen artwork in the world.  Even now, one of the panels, "The Just Judges," is missing, replaced by a replica painted in the 1940s.

Noah Charney's book about the Altarpiece and its many thieves is worthy of its subject, and that's saying quite a lot.

Tim -- Sundays