Discussion by Kalteis and Frankson, photo by Detectives Beyond Borders

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper, Porto, Portugal, 2011)

Dietrich Kalteis, a novelist whose debut I reviewed earlier this year, also has a penchant for verbal mano-a-mano and an eye for atmospheric scenes, and he has chosen to illustrate some of the former with some of the latter. His newish Off the Cuff site pits Kalteis and fellow author Martin J. Frankson in a series of discussions that include the kinds of questions I like to ask and, in its current edition, some thoughts on crime-novel titles that I suspect you will enjoy reading. And now Kalteis, whose Facebook feed regularly includes stunning photography, plans to illustrate his posts with my noirish photos. The current Off the Cuff discussion unfolds under a photo I shot in Porto in 2011 (above/right). So feast your eyes and feed your head.

And read what I had to say about Kalteis' Ride the Lightning: 

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I read Dietrich Kalteis' debut novel, Ride The Lightning, as an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed. But trust me: The book is pretty good.

What I like best is that it sustains a breakneck pace without sacrificing character to action, or action to character. Kalteis made me care about his cast of lowlifes, screw-ups, and marginals without stopping the action too often for endearing moments of humanity or self-conscious wit. What these characters show of themselves, they show in the act of doing what they do. 

What they do is grow, develop, and sell drugs; rip each other off; try to stop each other from growing, developing, and selling drugs; and seek revenge. Even the worst of the main characters is good enough at what he does that he earns a reader's respect. He gets kicked around and beaten up and gets his leg caught in an animal trap, all of which he deserves, and his very resilience is admirable. I also like Kalteis' understated nude-beach scenes.

This novel, appropriately for a book under consideration at Detectives Beyond Borders, crosses the U.S.-Canada border, from Seattle to Vancouver, where most of the action happens. So Karl, the bounty hunter who loses his job and has to shift from the U.S. to Canada, muses that he expects less violence as compensation for his reduced income. (Karl states this in a more entertaining fashion, but this was an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed.)

I also like characters' references to Medicine Hat, Alberta, as "the Hat," as well as the mostly downmarket setting, not so much because I got to go slumming, but as a reminder that peaceful, low-key Canada has its lowlifes, too. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More old stuff from Portugal

Roman mosaics under Banco Comercial Portuguesa in Lisbon. This video offers a tour, with some glimpses of the city above.

Retired monks, Igreja de São João Evangelista, Évora.

And finally, just because I liked seeing orange trees in December:

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

How the new imperils the ancient in Portugal

(Almendres cromlech; photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Stonehenge is the Xerox of Neolithic monuments; guides to and promoters of every other such monument compare theirs to Stonehenge, usually to note that theirs is thousands of years older.

The Almendres cromlech, a group of ninety-five standing stones outside Évora, is about 7,000 years old, predating Stonehenge by 2,000 years, our guide told us this morning, and he's no Portuguese chauvinist. In fact, he said, Portugal does a bad job of protecting the ancient monuments in which the country's southwest is so rich and of educating the public about the monuments.

The three we saw today [the cromlech, its accompanying menhir (left), and the Great Dolmen of Zambujeiro] lack the most basic facilities. There are no visitors' centers, no explanatory plaques, no trash cans or bathrooms. No postcard sellers, no bookstores, nothing to let visitors know they are in the company of anything but what locals, ignorant of the monuments' origins, traditionally called "castles of the Moors."

The dolmen (right), in fact, a high-end burial chamber from late in the Neolithic age, about 2,000 years younger than the cromlech, has been stripped of the earth that covered it, subjected to a series of half-arsed recovery efforts, and left in such danger of collapse that it looks like a row of dominoes about to tumble, or like a mouth full of horribly misfit teeth.

Back to Stonehenge. The British, our guide said, are the models for archaeological preservation and education. In Portugal, he said, appeals to history fall on deaf ears that hang off the head of mercenary politicians, and some of the most important monuments are in private hands, which bars UNESCO from stepping in and declaring the area a World Heritage Site.

Portugal's rich landowners are greedy and uneducated, he said, and the local people, loath to give up their traditional ways of life, resist the idea of rebuilding their local economies around tourism. So, in the end, I'd say I learned at least as much about contemporary Portugal as I did about its Neolithic predecessors.

The guide was an eloquent spokesman for public archaeology, and that's the cause to which he and the group of which he is part devote themselves. The group is called Ebora Megalithica, and I hope you'll join me in reading up on the group and, above all, on the wonderful landscape and history it seeks to protect.

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' thoughts on some Bronze Age monuments.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Saudades do America

(Landscape with aqueduct and
laundry; Évora, Portugal)

I chose classic American crime fiction to read on this European trip, and:

• After reading Double Indemnity, Fast One, and, on this trip, Seven Slayers for the second time, I still maintain that the best American crime writer named Cain was Paul.

• The 1945/46 movie version of The Big Sleep may have brought together the most impressive collection of talent ever assembled for a movie. Possibly Hollywood's greatest director (Howard Hawks) giving orders to possibly Hollywood's greatest star (Humphrey Bogart) and a perfect supporting cast. A Nobel Prize winner (William Faulkner) and a talented novelist/screenwriter (Leigh Brackett) sharing writing credit,  It's a hell of a movie. And Raymond Chandler's novel is still better.

• Don't get me started on the radio script of The Thin Man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Adventures in the alphabet

(Roman temple in Évora, Portugal)

A guide to Roman excavations in Lisbon pointed out the 'ood supports that underlie many of the city's buildings. A hotel keeper in Porto told me 'i-fi was available in the room, and she wasn't talking about stereo.

Then it occurred to me what an odd sound the consonantal W is. It's so common in English, but what other languages have it? Arabic, maybe, though a guide on my trip to Tunisia was sparked to tell a story about the habits of his countrymen by an 'ooman he saw crossing the street in front of our tour bus.

***

If the letter W is a closed book to speakers of Portuguese, X may puzzle visitors to Portugal. It's pronounced sh in Portuguese, so the bar Maria Caxuxa in Lisbon is pronounced, delightfully, "Maria Ca-SHOO-sha."

Got that? X=sh. With that in mind, what do you think puxe means?

Wrong. It means pull.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A storm for all ports

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

The skies opened last night while I was having a late nectar and water at a local restaurant and watching soccer with the locals, the first bad weather I'd had since I arrived in Portugal. Too bad; I'd been enjoying this business of eating outdoors in late November.

Since I'm in the city that gave port wine its name, this evening I visited the Vinologia wine bar for a port tasting: €10 for a glass each of three varieties, plus a morsel of dried fruit with each and the best chocolate I have ever tasted.

At the first sip of aged tawny, fruit trees spouted in the middle of my hard palate, and by the second, the trees had snaked their way around my tongue, and cheerful farmers were harvesting the fruit on a hot summer day. By the evening's fourth glass, a warmth that started below my sternum had spread to my shoulders, for some reason, and all was right with the world.

Read more about port and its history here. And, just so you don't think everything in Portugal is old, here's Rem Koolhaas's Casa de Musica.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Big art in Portugal

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

I like art that looks like richly drawn cartoons, whether it's from the late Roman period, the twentieth century, or so fresh that the paint looks barely dry. I like it whether it turns up in a train station, in a museum, or on the street.

Here are an azulejo in Porto's São Bento station (left) of a Portuguese king about to kick some butt, and a third- or fourth-century mosaic (above right) of Hercules in a domestic spat in Lisbon (Painters have it easy. Sculptors and mosaicists deserve extra props for portraying facial expressions in stone and glass.)

In Porto, someone put some empty wall space to good use in the old Ribeira section (yet another UNESCO World Heritage site).

What's good about this art? It's narrative and decorate at the same time. It's colorful, it's easy to read (Look at the postures and facial expressions), and it will make you smile even if the figures in the artwork don't share your amusement.

Long live big art!
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Nuts about nata

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Ever wonder what happened to all those riches explorers brought back from the New World?

Some of it went to build the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, or Hieronymite Monastery, in Lisbon's Belém parish, put up by Manuel I with a kick-start from gold Vasco da Gama brought back from his first voyage. The vast complex is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a landmark in the Manueline, or Late Gothic Ongapotchket, style.

Belém is also famous for pastéis (singular, pastel) de nata, warm custard tarts sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. If these tarts had been around in Vasco da Gama's time, he might never have left home.

***

(The most famous ruler
born in Libya before
Moammar Ghadaffi)

The ex-monastery's ex-church is also home to Portugal's National Archaeology Museum, a treasure house of finds from the Paleolithic period right up through the Roman period. Northern Portugal is especially rich in the former (as are Spain and southwestern France.)

Finally, since I can't let a day pass without your daily dose of hand-painted tiles, here's a bit of commuter azuleijo from Lisbon's Rossio metro station.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Azulejo, or tiles to go before I sleep

These are all azulejo, or hand-painted, tin-glazed tilework, and the Portuguese have been making the stuff for five hundred years.

(Photos by your
 humble blogkeeper)

Today it's everywhere: on the exteriors of the humblest houses and the grandest pubic and private buildings, in museums and metro stations and souvenir shops. Azulejos are applied art, they're decorative art, and contemporary artists have turned them into fine art. There's even a National Museum of Azulejo in Lisbon, and it's very much worth a visit. No need to look for azulejos if you visit Portugal; they'll find you.

Azul is the Portuguese word for blue, and when I first heard of azulejos, I thought of Delft blue tiles, and I figured the Portuguese must have learned the art from the Dutch.

Nope. it transpires that azulejo is from the Arabic al-zuleijah, which means tilework. The Portuguese learned the art from the Moors, though they eventually did produce examples in the Dutch style.

And now, goodnight.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A visit to the world's oldest bookstore

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

It's called Livraria Bertrand, it's on the Rua Garrett in Lisbon, and it was founded in 1732.

It's now the flagship store of a chain, and the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed its original home, but Bertrand has been operating at its current location in the Chiado neighborhood since 1773.

The staff is helpful, the selection looked good, and books in translation are available at more affordable prices than I've seen in other cities. I bought an English translation of O Crime do Padre Amaro by the nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós, but Bertrand has not stayed in business for 279 years by shunning the latest trends (above right).

The shop came in especially handy because I've discovered that taking a Kindle on vacation sucks. The difficulty of flipping back and forth in a Kindleized guidebook is a nuisance, but the real drawback is the alienating experience. You're sipping a coffee at a miradoura on a gorgeous November day, surrounded by locals, visitors, attractive, scholarly middle-aged women (OK, there was only one), and you're pecking away at a goddamn machine? A Kindle is better than a book on paper the same way a waterfront warehouse is better than the Parthenon: It holds more stuff.

On my way from Bertrand, I saw a bookbinder at work in a storefront shop and, with his kind permission, I took a picture of him. A scene like this  makes me want to reenact the first verse of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," throwing my Kindle from a rooftop instead of a watch to cast my vote for eternity outside of time. Except, as happened to the best minds of Ginsberg's generation, Kindles would probably rain on my head for the next decade.

Finally, here's an example of an architectural style I'll call Stripped-Down Gothic thanks to the 1755 earthquake.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Visigoths: Breaking the silence

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Completed a triple play this evening of getting lost in the medieval quarters of Seville, Tunis and now Lisbon. Lisbon's was the least worrying because of the city's physical situation: Just head downhill til the water laps gently around your ankles, then turn right.

And now, just because I have maintained this blog for more than five years without ever mentioning the Visigoths, here's Lisbon's old city wall, part of which they built.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Olha, que coisas mais lindas!: Gorgeous Portuguese crime-fiction covers

(Courtesy of
Luís Miguel Queirós)

I head for Portugal on vacation this week and, as usual when I travel, I'll try to find out a bit about the local crime-fiction scene.

My first search turned up a colorful blog post from Cullen Gallagher, a fellow Noircon attendee who is not from Portugal but who did post some eye-catching covers of American, English, and other European crime novels translated into Portuguese. The covers are courtesy of an acquaintance of Cullen's who also supplies background about their creator and publication history.

One of the covers illustrates this post. See the rest over at Cullen's Pulp Serenade.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011