Sen and sensibility: Detectives Beyond Borders schmoozes three Nobel Prize winners

In honor of Nobel Prize announcement season, I bring back this post, which I promise to update the next time I have coffee with a Nobel laureate.

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The number of Nobel laureates with whom I have exchanged pleasant words grew to three this week when I attended a lecture by Amartya Sen, who won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1998 for his work on poverty, famine, and welfare economics.

"You can't have a humane society without considerations beyond your own interests," Sen told his audience at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and if that's a surprise from an economist, consider Wikipedia's summation of the economics classic with which Sen began his lecture. That book's author

"critically examines the moral thinking of his time, and suggests that conscience arises from social relationships. His goal in writing the work was to explain the source of mankind's ability to form moral judgements, in spite of man's natural inclinations towards self-interest. [He] proposes a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior."

If you know as little as I do about the literature of economics, you may be surprised to learn that the economist in question is Adam Smith — you know, the invisible-hand, self-interest guy (The book is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Penguin Classics edition of which comes with an introduction by Sen.)

I won't bore you with statistics and numbers, because Sen didn't bore me with them. Rather, he made the simple case that social factors, ethics, and indices of social well-being and misery all have a place at the economist's table, and he did so without turning preachy or dogmatic. In short, he's the kind of professor who might have made me an economics major had we crossed paths when I was in college.

Sen moves beyond the traditional purview of economics when he talks and writes about India, where he was born in 1933. His essays in The Argumentative Indian make the case that dissent, heterodoxy, and respect for opposing viewpoints have been integral to Indian culture at least from the time of Arjuna's debate with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita and constitute a touchstone of India's present and its future. And that constitutes his rebuttal to the chauvinist, nationalist Hindutva movement in Indian politics, whose apparently organized campaign on Amazon has done so much to generate interest in Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History.

"Oh, yes! They have attacked me!" Sen said as he signed my copy of The Argumentative Indian.

"Be proud of your one-star reviews!" I replied. If the line of autograph-seekers behind me had not stretched a fair way down a hallway, we'd have high-fived.

 (My previous most personal contact with a Nobel winner came in 1986, when I sipped coffee with Dario Fo, the Italian actor/playwright, who ordered decaf because he needed sleep. He regarded his envelope of Sanka with suspicion before tearing, pouring, stirring, and sipping. Then he made a face, shook his head sadly, and said in the one language we could speak with something approaching mutual comprehension, "Détestable!"

(My third Nobel encounter was more memorable for the beautiful, philo-Semitic water polo fan in line behind me as we waited for Isaac Bashevis Singer to sign our books.  "Tell him something in Yiddish!" she said. Alas, the moment did not mark the beginning of a torrid fling.)

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Sen's dynamic view of the Sanskrit classics sent me in search of The Mahābhārata. To my delight, the opening of that ancient book suggests that it may be as glorious a celebration of storytelling as The Thousand and One Nights.  I doubt if I'll write a complete review any time soon, though. The Mahābhārata is variously said to be seven, 10, or 11 times as a long as The Iliad and The Odyssey put together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

One city, one crime novel — but which novel?

I have in the past gently chided the Free Library of Philadelphia for the high-mindedness of its "One City, One Book" choices. Why can't Philadelphia do what other cities and institutions have done and sneak a Chandler or a Hammett in there once in a while?

Hammett has long enjoyed popular and critical esteem, and his work, I was surprised to learn recently, can appeal to younger readers. Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and recent editor, told me last week: "I talk to kids about Hammett. The Maltese Falcon has helped reach some reluctant readers."  Teenagers, she said, responded especially to the novel's celebrated "Flitcraft Parable," a story of sudden, cataclysmic, arbitrary change.

Alan Glynn's novels could serve as a springboard for discussion of corporate and government infiltration into our lives. Kevin McCarthy's could meet American interest in its immigrant populations and their histories. So could Paco Ignacio Taibo II's. Same with Andrea Camilleri's, which would also tally nicely with the boom of interest in cable television food shows and diversity in dining. Want a contemporary view of China? How about Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine?

If Philadelphia wants to stay local, why not David Goodis' Black Friday? Sympathy for the downtrodden. Survival against daunting odds. Finding one's own destiny.  Black Friday is full of big themes, the sort of thing to generate big discussion and draw in even readers who have not read the novel. Or how about Hammett's Red Harvest? That book would lend itself easily and deliciously to discussion of Philadelphia's history of rotten politics.

Or what about— But that's where you come in. What crime novel or story collection would you have your city, county, province, state, or country read? And why? It's not enough that the book be good or great. It must have the potential to appeal to readers young and old, to crime fans as well as to those who normally don't touch the stuff, and to those who might need a nudge to pick up a book in the first place. How does your choice meet these criteria? How will it grab readers the way "The Flitcraft Parable" snared Julie Rivett's teenage existentialists?
 
 © Peter Rozovsky 2013

Descent into Death: A glimpse at 1950s American crime fiction

Are the 1950s the most luridly masochistic, twisted, self-obsessed, self-voyeuristic decade in American history? Based on the period's crime fiction, yep.

I've been reading a fair number of crime novels and stories from the 1950s, reissued by Wonder Publishing Group with suitably lurid covers after original publication in magazines of the time, notably Manhunt. Two highlights have been "As I Lie Dead" by Fletcher Flora and We Are All Dead by Bruno Fischer. In each, a first-person narrator relates a tale that takes him exactly where you'd expect from the title, and it's hard to imagine anything more self-involved than imagining one's own death.

Why did these authors have their characters do it? Is lurid embrace of death really more prevalent in American crime writing of the 1950s (and late 1940s) than in that of previous and succeeding periods? If so, why?  As a gross generalization, I'd say that characters in 1950s crime melodrama embraced the forbidden when doing so could still exact a tremendous toll in guilt, psychological dissolution, even death, and that this lends stories of the time their giddy, nasty kick. Shed one's inhibitions, as we've all been doing since the 1960s, and you shed the possibility of writing such stories.

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This is a fine time to ponder such questions. On Thursday I'll attend two events celebrating the Library of America's publication of David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.  The durable, handsome volume includes Dark Passage, Nightfall, The Burglar, The Moon in the Gutter, and Street of No Return, and you can meet the book's editor, Robert Polito, for a program at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The fun starts at 5:45 with a screening of The Burglar, for which Goodis wrote the script, and Polito takes the stage at 7:30. Visit the library's website for information.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The bomb

Michel Foucault yesterday, a leading American public intellectual today, but I promise crime fiction tomorrow including, possibly, a visit to the most surprising crime-fiction city you'll have heard of.

Today's subject is Garry Wills, a visitor to the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library last night to talk about his new book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.

Wills says the American presidency arrogated for itself extraordinary powers amid the Manhattan Project, then kept those powers once the emergency of World War II had passed. The results include extraordinary secrecy, disrespect for the Constitution, the undermining of Congress, "the era of undeclared war, presidential war," and the development of a massive national security apparatus not at all times zealous about the truth.

Unlike the other 300 million Americans, Wills worries about the institution of the presidency, rather than about this Democrat or that Republican, and here's where a crime fiction or thriller plot suggests itself: A president takes office and finds out from his national security apparatus about secret, perhaps dirty projects around the world. He tries to end them. What happens?

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Wills' talk was crisp and to the point, and the program finished early. Perhaps one should expect no less from the author of a much-honored book about the Gettysburg Address.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Mystery

Our lives are suffused with it, and one of life's mysteries is why, if the Free Library of Philadelphia is going to host such compelling speakers as Karen Armstrong and James Ellroy, and if it insists on ending the programs at the library's normal closing hour of 9 p.m., it does not begin the evenings earlier than 7:30.

Quite a number of audience members' questions went unasked, and mine, at least, would have been good. I'd have asked this scholar of comparative religion, this preacher of compassion, this advocate of religious practice and of the ineffable that lies behind the words we use to delineate the divine, why the scriptures of the three religions she discusses most (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) so seldom if ever acknowledge the mysteries that lie at their own heart. Why has it been left for rabbis, exegetes, sages, interpreters and scholars of later times to do so? (And why, one might add, do the oldest Indian scriptures explicitly embody mysteries in ways that Western ones do not?)

Armstrong's current initiative is the Charter of Compassion, and this reminded me of one of the unforgettable crime novels of recent years.

We now return you to our regular programming.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

James Ellroy, Part II

I don't know if anyone could justly accuse James Ellroy of humility, but he did show some candor when a member of last night's audience in Philadelphia asked if he had a favorite among movie adaptations of his novels.

L.A. Confidential was a fine movie, he said, and I believe he remarked that sometimes one gets lucky with adaptations, and sometimes one does not. But, he said, "I would never criticize an adaptation, because I took the dough."

Ellroy read from his new novel, Blood's a Rover, at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library. Perhaps because the library had recently survived a city budget crisis and the threat of closure, he stressed the formative roles that public libraries and reading had played in his life. And he repeated, amid many plugs for the new book, that "if you don't have the cash, the gelt, the dinero" to buy the novel, you can read it free at the library.

He also told the crowd that the pillars of his upbringing were the Lutheran Church and Confidential magazine, where he could read "who was a homo, a nympho, a dipso, a lesbo," and he invited "the most invasive questions" the audience could come up with.

These questions naturally concerned sex and money, and Ellroy neatly, gracefully and amusingly sidestepped them. A showman he is, and one who, at least last night, knew for every second exactly what he was up to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Cool Six Thousand

Yes, James Ellroy could have read with drums and a saxophone behind him tonight at Philadelphia's Central Library. The jazz cadences were there — great streams of words, startling verbal BLAAATS! and outrageous proclamations. Oddly enough, the only musical reference he made was to Beethoven, whom he called "my greatest teacher."

The man is capable of great hyperbole and verbal music, but I believe his invocation of the titanic Beethoven was sincere, and it was certainly quite moving. How can he, Ellroy, complain, he said, when Beethoven wrote such music while mired in poverty and imprisoned by deafness?

"What about Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice?" someone asked.

"SNORE!" replied Ellroy.

"Why did you end the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy just before Watergate?" someone else (me) asked.

"Watergate?" said Ellroy. "The biggest SNORE! since Thomas Pynchon."

In short, Ellroy gave the happiest, most buoyant, most joyously self-aggrandizing performance I can remember from an author, perhaps because of a new love whom he mentioned several times and to whom he blew a kiss as he took the stage. And yet he was capable of moments of great earnestness, as with Beethoven, or in reply to the inevitable question about his writing process. Such a question often induces groans. Here, Ellroy somberly outlined his procedure: For Blood's a Rover, his new book, a four-hundred page outline, research reports, then sitting down and making the stuff up.

Of special interest, perhaps, was his answer to the questioner who asked "Why Los Angeles" as the archetypal noir city?

"Because Raymond Chandler wrote there," he said, and because that's where the movie studios were, and that's where the great films noirs were made.

More, perhaps, to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009