Cracker

Joan and I finished watching the first episode of season 2 of Cracker last night. This is an 1990s BBC series featuring a fat, alcoholic psychiatrist who captures criminals by way of superior insight into human nature. Anyway, now we're sick of Cracker and took the other seasons off our Netflix queue. We just don't like the Cracker, and in general it fails the way a lot of mysteries fail, and it is all too tiresome. There are two hurdles to writing mystery stories and bad mysteries like Cracker fall flat over them every time.

First, there is a Claudia problem. This problem is named for a co-worker who came up to my desk once to talk about some horrific atrocity in the news. She said that she just couldn't understand why anyone would shoot 22 children at a grade school. And of course she couldn't. In fact, very few people hear a news story like that and say 'Boy, I know just how that guy felt'. If that's your reaction, you are an unusual person. Before you do anything else, and I mean anything else, you should consider becoming a bad mystery writer, because for some reason bad mystery writers always want to explain why the criminal did whatever he did, and your insight would be a valuable advantage. And they don't want to explain just ordinary acts of social violation, like snagging a six pack of beer when the clerk isn't looking. No, bad mystery writers always want to include unbelievable acts of mayhem in their tales, and then somehow make normal people understand why these things happen. Bad mystery writers devote hugely too much time to this. Half of this Cracker episode was devoted to long painful scenes with the criminal's ex-wife, mysterious references to the Hillsborough disaster (which I still don't understand as a motivation even after looking up the Hillsborough disaster), ruminations on the criminal's hard time with his father's death, and closeups of the criminal's pathetic anxiety and bad teeth, motivations in themselves. Well, he snapped. He just did. It would have been a lot quicker to tell us that up front and forget about the ex-wife, the father, and the soccer disaster, because those aren't really very convincing. I can't imagine what would be.

There's another major problem with bad mysteries, but I'll write it up some other time.

Mining novels

This is a great story by John Markoff in the NY Times. I'm not a lawyer though, or I'm sure I'd see it differently. Legal discovery has been automated, and the sophistication of the software is mind-boggling. The sweetest part is the Enron Corpus, a public database of Enron email and documents seized by the government during the criminal proceedings, which has proven invaluable to researchers trying to understand corporate language and social networks. Future Enrons will be plagued and prosecuted, not by lawyers, because there won't be any, but by software developed with the Enron Corpus.

A novel could be written with this data-mining software. There must be a million stories in the Enron Corpus. Obviously plenty of slimy, criminal tales, but also romance, misunderstandings, jokes, lies. Happy families, miserable ones, duck hunting, moving children to college, crazy drives across country to look up people who died years ago. No more writing novels - we'd just start our software and make coffee. It's 100% accurate, while humans are barely more accurate than flipping a coin.

The Illusionist

We watched Silvain Chomet's The Illusionist this weekend. It was full of beautiful, precise pictures. The landscapes of Edinburgh and the hinterlands up the loch were gorgeous, with the detail and precision of scientific illustrations. They made me think of the Colorado landscape drawings of William Henry Holmes.

I don't know what the end of the movie means, but I love not having everything spelled out. It takes a lot of guts to leave key parts of the story up to your viewers or readers. Try to imagine a mainstream Hollywood movie showing a character looking at a snapshot, but not showing us the snapshot. They would never trust us to come to our own conclusions.

Eagles

It's been eagley this last week. We saw a juvenile bald eagle in the trees by the apartment ponds. It was being shouted at by a hundred crows, who were careful to keep their distance. Crows will dive at an owl, but apparently not at an eagle. It may not even have been aware of them. I thought it was looking very closely at the mallard and ring-neck ducks below. Its head and tail weren't white, but there seemed to be white below the brown feathers on its head. When it turned its head, white showed through. Later it flew over us, making for the river. Then yesterday we saw a pair, very high up, turning closely together. At intervals, one would plunge at the other feet first. The other would elegantly curve away. There was some uncertainty about identification, but not with the final bird we saw, at the wetlands, with a very bright white head and tail.

Goose

I'm not sure if I haven't been writing because of the frazzling effects of the holidays, or the lazy mood I got into over the two weeks off from work. If I had to pick just one excuse? Lazy mood. I haven't made beer in weeks either, but that's because I'm out of vessels. If I made more beer now, it would just pour out on the ground.

I did finally go paddling on the river yesterday though - again, like everything else, it's been weeks. What have I been doing over all these weeks? Reading, listening to music, riding Amtrak, running with the dog in the morning. Anyway, yesterday it was pouring down and I got pretty wet, but it isn't particularly cold, especially if you're paddling hard, and it was fun. The strangest thing I saw was an apparently dead swan, flat at the edge of the water with its neck stretched out along the ground. By the time I got the boat turned around and worked my way back up to it, it was miraculously alive and waddling away. Looked more like a domestic goose from the back.

Bread

About that bread - it's the Jim Lahey no-knead bread that Mark Bittman wrote up in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It's the greatest thing ever, of course, especially since I lost the recipe. You don't need the sheet music to whistle 'Summertime' either. This bread is chewy with a great crisp crust, and the longer you let it sit before baking, the more sour it gets.

Here's the recipe in my head - possibly, probably different from the original. Mix flour, salt, and yeast, then warm water - half as much water as flour by volume. Make sure it's evenly wet, but don't worry much after that, then cover it somehow - I have a bowl with a snap-on plastic lid that is pretty airtight. You could just wrap it in plastic, but somehow you need to keep it from drying out over the next 12 hours or so. Let it sit overnight, then preheat the oven and a heavy casserole with a lid to 450 degrees. Flop the dough out and knead - no, sorry, don't knead it - roll it about a little and get it kind of round, then drop it into the hot casserole. You can rub the top with olive oil if you want. You can sprinkle it with salt. You can sprinkle it with rosemary. Cook it with the lid on for half an hour, then with the lid off for another fifteen minutes. Make everybody wait while it cools for 15 or 20 minutes on a rack - luxuriate in the power of making everybody wait. I wouldn't advise sticking too closely to this recipe - certainly not after you've made it once - it's more fun to figure out just how hard it is to screw it up. Don't let it cool too long.

Radio

Here's a good thing not to do again. I was listening to NPR Saturday morning and got angry during a segment where Scott Simon interviewed Judd Gregg, Republican US senator. The senator, a clever and determined liar, made a number of statements that Simon let pass without comment. I don't know why I was so much angrier at Simon than the senator - I think because the job of a GOP senator is to lie, which Gregg was doing perfectly well. Simon's job is to ask questions, which he was not doing so well. My opinion only.

Anyway, I found myself yelling at the radio, and then a bit later writing an email to NPR with the subject line "Tell Scott Simon to pull his head out of his ass". It was quite personal. I had a great time writing it, clicked Send and then took the dog for a walk in this frosty weather we've been having lately. Glorious walk! When I got home and checked my email, maybe an hour and a half or two hours later, there was a reply from Scott Simon.

It sure wasn't a form letter. He replied to my substantive points, alluded to my insults in that way people do when they receive a rabid attack from a stranger, and ended by making me feel about three inches tall. So I have decided not to do that again. I think and read a lot about politics, and while I don't want to renounce my citizenship or stop voting or anything, I know it would be better for my mental equilibrium if I cut back on the blind rage aspect of it. Another thing that I think would be good for the old brain and soul is to avoid insulting people I don't know - maybe even people I do know.

On the plus side - I made a great loaf of bread last night.