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.