Thomas Ricks knows "transition" is not verb

"Petraeus and Odierno reversed some of Casey’s directives. ... formally demoted `transitioning' to Iraqi security forces from the top American priority to number seven on their mission list. Replacing it as the number-one task was the mission of protecting the Iraqi people."

 As I take my leave of the most thrilling, important, trenchant book that I've read since The Man Without Qualities, I highlight a small but significant additional reason to treasure it: The author, Thomas E. Ricks, clearly thinks good writing important, and he is unafraid to say that others should do so as well.

The sneer in those inverted commas around the odious transitioning above made me cheer, and it's worth noting that Ricks sneered in the context of commending two generals who de-emphasized "transitioning" in their effort to salvage a sloppy, directionless U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Ricks concludes his analysis of U.S. military leadership since World War II with an  epilogue of suggestions for undoing the damage wrought by incompetent generals and the diseased culture that the Army had become. Among these is better education (as opposed to training) for generals.

"As an added benefit," Ricks suggests, "many would learn to write clearly, a skill notably lacking in many American generals in this era of PowerPoint bullet-point briefings that lack verbs and causal thinking and all too often confuse a statement of goals with a strategy for actually achieving them."

Thomas E. Ricks, you are the man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

What's your favorite non-crime crime story?

I've been banging on about The Man Without Qualities for some time now, occasionally highlighting an aspect of Robert Musil's great novel that raised some issue pertinent to crime stories.

By no means are such passages restricted to chapters about the murderer Moosbrugger, and that leads to today's question: What non-crime stories have struck an unexpected crime-related chord? What issues, characters, or incidents have made you think, "Crime writers should be writing about this"?
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Problems of a blogger with a post to write

I predicted that The Man Without Qualities would have something to say to readers of crime fiction (as this greatest of twentieth-century novels does to anyone), but, somewhat to my surprise, the passage I think likeliest to interest readers of the kind of crime fiction I write about here has nothing to do with the sex killer Moosbrugger and nothing to do with murder.

Rather, the pertinent reflections come in a chapter titled "Problems of a moralist with a letter to write," as the protagonist Ulrich and his sister contemplate a financial crime:

"It occurred  to him right at the start, for instance, that whenever he had taken a `moral' stance so far, he had always been psychologically worse off than when he was doing or thinking something that might usually be considered `immoral.' This is a common occurrence, for in situations that are in conflict with their surroundings these ideas and action develop all their energies, while in the mere doing of what is right and proper they understandably behave as if they were paying taxes."

 The same chapter disposes humorously of good/good and bad/bad people, proposing that only those in between, the good/bad and the bad/good, make "purposeful moral efforts." The disposition of the bad/bads might bring a blush to readers of crime novels whose villains dispose of their victims in especially graphic or artistic ways:

"For bad/bad people, who can so easily be blamed for everything, were even than as rare as they are today."

*

The Man Without Qualities is often cited as one of the greatest European novels of the twentieth century, and I've never read a better. As for one of its rivals, I once read that a humorous slogan once declared that "Marcel Proust is a Yenta." And, to tell the truth, the man could go on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Man Without Qualities and you, plus ill-matched book covers

"Ulrich retorted:`A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he's stupid ... in literature, talents not much above average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses.'"

Whom, authors or otherwise, does that remind you of?

"Ulrich, thinking he was the first to have realized that the man under the window was one of those sick people who through the abnormality of their sex lives attract the lively curiosity of the sexually normal..."

What scandals or crime novels does that remind you of? And how many schillings would you care to bet that Musil smiled when he wrote that passage?

 *

Odd Musil cover note: One edition of The Man Without Qualities bears reproductions of paintings by the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele — odd because the novel as well as commentaries to Musil's essays make it clear that Musil was wary at best of the Expressionists' tempestuous emotions. What covers have you thought particularly ill-matched to their books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders dissects a joke

The wait is over. It's been barely a week since I finished reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but when the book in question is quite possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a week seems long. But my copy of Volume 2 arrived today, and I shall keep you posted as appropriate. The novel's third part, with which Vol. 2 begins, is called "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," so I suspect I'll come up with a post or two to interest the crime readers of intelligence and good taste who visit Detectives Beyond Borders.

I made good use of the inter-Musils interval, reading, among other things, one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Allan Guthrie's funny, violent, touching novella Kill Clock, and a whole bunch of newer writing influenced by pulp, paperback originals, and 1970s and '80s adventure stories.

Along the way, I revisited a previous comment I'd posted about wiseass crime writers, talented authors whose good jokes occasionally obtrude on the story rather than helping it along. Such jokes sometimes seem to me the verbal equivalent of an actor mugging for the camera.

Eric Beetner has an interesting relationship to those guys. I read two of his books while waiting for TMWQ2, the novella Dig Two Graves and The Devil Doesn't Want Me, a novel. Beetner is good at creating entertaining variations on crime themes, such as the prison story and the revenge tale (you might call his takes on the former two, in Dig Two Graves, oral storytelling), the road epic, and the saga of the aging hit man and the hotshot young gun. (The latter works all the more because the young gun is such a little shit.)

I thought some of Beetner's jokes were a bit jokey in the novella, but hell, it's a novella. When he stretched out to novel length, in The Devil Doesn't Want Me, I was pleased to see an occasional rueful tone to some of the jokes, which shows me that the guy has chops and that he knows how to create a range of moods.

And the book is filled with good things: amusing byplay involving FBI agents who never get involved in the main story, and trenchant observations about the new Las Vegas and the old, among them. But a time or two, I think Beetner loved a joke too much to let go once he'd told it. Here's an example: The protagonist, Lars, a middle-aged hit man who keeps body and soul together with yoga, contemplates his superiority to the musclebound thug holding a gun on him:

"Guys like the big brute...smashing Lars' own gun hand into the tile floor cared only about the muscles. Lifting, squatting, pumping. For what? A thick neck like that can't turn to check out a great ass anymore."

That's the kind of touching, surprising, humanizing thought that Allan Guthrie is so good at. But Beetner has Lars continue the thought:

"And why did evolution put a swivel on a neck if not for that?"

That may be funny, but what does it add? What does it say that the preceding lines did not? I say Beetner should have cut the line and saved it for another book. To me that coda to the joke was a bit like being elbowed in the ribs and asked "Get it? Ya get it?" And that was all the more frustrating because the first joke was so good.

Your questions: Am I wrong? And what makes a joke function effectively as part of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Candidates without qualities

Coming soon: Volume 2

You know that American fashion of asking would-be presidents and vice presidents what they like to read? In addition to all the other shorthand with which we label parties and candidates, I now regard Democrats as the party of Walter Mosley and Daniel Woodrell, and Republicans as that of L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand, and my heart overflows with compassion for my intelligent, literate conservative friends and acquaintances.

I thought of this last night as I finished reading volume 1 of The Man Without Qualities, the high-minded business tycoon Arnheim holding forth to the title character, Ulrich, on how a modern corporation operates ("modern," in this case being just as operative today as when Robert Musil worked on the novel, from 1930 to 1942):

"Wherever you find two such forces, a person who really gives the orders and an administrative body that executes them, what automatically happens is that every possible means of increasing profit is used, whether or not it is morally or aesthetically attractive. When I say automatically, I mean just that, because the way it works is to a high degree independent of any personal factor. The person who really wields the power takes no hand in carrying out his directives, while the managers are covered by the fact that they are acting not on their own behalf but as functionaries. You will find such arrangements everywhere these days, and by no means exclusively in the world of finance. You may depend on it that our friend Tuzzi would give the signal for war with the clearest conscience in the world, even if as a man he may be incapable of shooting down a dog, and your friend Moosbrugger will be sent to his death by thousands of people because only three of them need have a hand in it personally."

It's not hard to see why any high official would shift uncomfortably in his or her seat reading that, whether a Republican from Haliburton or Bechtel, or a Democrat sending troops to war or overseeing the execution of a mentally deficient prisoner. (That is predicated on the assumption that the candidate's involvement in the execution was calculatedly and morbidly unreal.)

Here's another bit from the same chapter, this time Arnheim on the film industry:

"`Do you ever go to see a film? You should,' he said. `In its present form, cinematography may not look like much, but once the big interests get involved—the electrochemical, say, or the chromochemical concerns—you are likely to see a surging development in just a few decades, which nothing can stop. Every known means of raising and intensifying production will be brought into play, and whatever our writers and aesthetes may suppose to be their own part in it, we will be getting art based on Associated Electrical or German Dyes, Inc."

With the possible exception that Musil did not anticipate the extent to which the movie industry would itself become a big interest, I'd say there's not much to quarrel with there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

More Musil! (With a bit of Lance Armstrong and Oprah)

It's been almost a week, but I have not forgotten Robert Musil (left) and The Man Without Qualities. Today's entries have nothing to do with crime fiction, but the second, in particular, ought to strike a cultural chord:

"The Committee on Public Worship and Education reported on the progress of the definitive suggestion, tentatively announced, to erect a great Emperor of Peace and Austrian Peoples Monument near the Imperial Residence; after consultation with the Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Education, and after sounding out the leading art, engineering, and architectural associations, the Committee had found the differences such that it saw itself constrained—without prejudice to eventual future requirements and subject to the Central Executive Committee's consent—to announce a competition for the best plan for a competition with regard to such an eventual monument."

Some may find that apt commentary on public bidding for government projects; I especially liked "the definitive suggestion, tentatively announced," a reminder that a staement's meaning depends on the whims of whoever utters it. And this:

"Ulrich. who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are of course the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something `unutterable'—truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value."

Somehow that reminds me of the unsavory penchant for public confession in our culture, apt the day Lance Armstrong says he is "ready to speak candidly" (sic) to Oprah Winfrey.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Man Without Qualities visits a newspaper

After an excursion into crime fiction in the mild forms of Derek Raymond, Garbhan Downey, and Charlie Stella, I'm back with more from The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, if you prefer the original German), by my man Robert Musil.

Unlike some of the bits I've quoted from this supremely entertaining novel, these latest have nothing to do with crime fiction. One, however, does contain some telling and entertaining reflections on newspapers (and, by extension, media that did not exist when Musil worked on the novel from 1930 to 1942):

"`His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times,' he explained gravely. `Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land.'"

and

"If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with about a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out for its content of reason and reality. [ed. note: Ha!] ... The moment his return has ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little piece on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section..." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

More Charlie Stella, and a bit of stupidity is turned to good account

I was told I could expect my copy of The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2 to arrive this morning, but when I arrived at the store around 5 p.m., I was told the day's delivery had not yet arrived.

I enjoyed the succession of grimaces and furrowed brows from the store employee who looked up my order even though I was sure all the facial gymnastics meant no good news. Sure enough, she told me the book would now arrive Friday. Then, while I was browsing elsewhere in the store, another employee walked over to tell me that my order had never gone in after all and would now take about a week.

"No thanks," I said, similarly declining her offer for help with anything else. I'd been helped quite enough already, I told her.

But all was for the best, since it transpires that the e-book edition of The Man Without Qualities I'd read included just half of the novel's first volume. So I walked to another store and bought Volume I, and I now have fifty-one chapters and 390 pages to read before I need Volume 2, and by that time the order-challenged folks at the first store may able to come up with a copy.


I took my new purchase to hot dog restaurant, intending to have a bite and some coffee while I typed this post. The two workers in the place said yes, it was a WiFi hot spot, but they did not know the password. Was my chain being yanked, or are the folks who run the place really that lackadaisical and incompetent?

*

I've spent part of the rest of the day reading Mafiya, sixth of Charlie Stella's eight novels. It's a bit different from the other seven through its first hundred pages, with less humor and characters more savage and vicious. But the same multiple viewpoints he uses in the other books — Stella loves to show men and women at work, out, and at home, doing what they do in their daily lives — here make the vicious Russian gangsters even more chilling.

As much as I enjoyed Stella's first five novels, Books Six through Eight — Mafiya, Johnny Porno, and Rough Riders — are my favorites. Stella gets better and better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

All arts aspire to the condition of Musil

I'll end 2012 by finishing Volume 1 of The Man Without Qualities and begin 2013 by awaiting Volume 2, due at my local independent bookstore Wednesday. My latest collection of favorite excerpts from Robert Musil's twentieth-century classic will concentrate on violence, ethics, morality, psychic balance, and other matters of especial interest to crime-fiction readers:

 “But how, Diotima wondered, can humanity provide itself even with roast chicken without violence?"

*

“Moosbrugger’s experience and conviction was that one could not pick any one thing out all by itself, because each one hangs together with the next one." [Moosbrugger is a murderer.]

*

“And yet such examples of lying ‘between’ are provided by every moral maxim, for instance by the well-known and simple one: thou shalt not kill. One can see at the first glance that it is neither a verity nor a subjective statement. We know that in many respects we keep to it strictly; in other respects certain very numerous but precisely defined exceptions are admitted. But in a very large number of cases of a third kind, as for instance in the imagination, in our desires, in the drama, or in the enjoyment of newspaper reports, we roam in a quite unregulated manner between abhorrence and allurement."

*

“Man’s feeling towards this maxim is a mixture of blockheaded obedience (including the ‘healthy nature’ that refuses even to think of such a thing, but, if just slightly deranged by alcohol or passion, instantly does it) and thoughtless splashing in a wave of possibilities."

*

“But I’m just trying to show you that people like that, who lose their balance so easily, are extremely unpleasant. Impartiality is an attitude one can only really adopt towards them when it’s someone else who is taking the beating. Then, I grant you, they bring out the very tenderest feelings in us, then they’re the victims of a social system, or of fate. You must admit nobody can be blamed for his faults if one looks at them through his own eyes. For him, at the worst they’re mistakes or bad qualities that don’t make the person as a whole any the less good. And of course he’s perfectly right.'"

*

“All the same, the result was that crime, love and melancholy had fused in her to form one circuit of ideas, one that was highly dangerous."

I'm not the only one who thinks this great Austrian writer has something to say to crime fiction readers and writers. Here's a comment David Whish-Wilson posted on one of my previous Musil posts:

Re Musil and crime (and more broadly, the human condition), I chose this quote of his to open my first novel:

"And with one foot beyond the frontier I declare myself incapable of going further. For one step beyond the point where we have halted - and we should move out of the realm of stupidity, which is even still full of variety, and into the realm of wisdom, territory that is bleak and in general shunned..."

Happy New Year!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Authors as anthropomorphic animals, plus more Musil

And now back to crime fiction, The Left Bank Gang. Well, it's a comic book. And it brings Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce together in Paris—as anthropomorphic animals who plan a bank heist. And the four, joined by Gertrude Stein and Zelda Fitzgerald in supporting roles, are cartoonists rather than writers. That allows dialogue like:

"Did you see the piece by Stein in `This Quarter'?"

"Naw, I can't stand her comics."

 "They are unreadable."

"I kind of like them."

"They're shit."

The book, by the one-named Norwegian cartoonist Jason, is like Woody Allen's "A Twenties Memory," only flatter, more matter of fact, and just is a funny in its poking fun at our fascination with the Lost Generation.

But you didn't think you were through with Robert Musil, did you? Here are a few more gems from The Man Without Qualities:

"Now, as it happened, Ulrich was not accustomed to regard the State as anything but a hotel in which one was entitled to civility and service, and he objected to the tone in which he had been addressed."

 *

 “Such a composer cannot be either a conspirator or a politician. If he were, his genius for light music would be unthinkable. And nothing irrational happens in the history of the world.”

 *

"Understanding reality is exclusively a matter for the historico-political thinker. For him the present time follows the battle of Mohács or of Lietzen as the entrée follows the soup."

 *

"It was perhaps not only Count Leinsdorf’s feelings that were given wings by a certain vague metaphorical quality that lessened the sense of reality. For there is an elevating and magnifying power in vagueness."

*

 “I give you my solemn word,” Ulrich replied gravely, “that neither I nor anyone else knows what ‘the true’ is. But I can assure you it is on the point of realisation.”

And, most contemporary-seeming in 2012 from this book written between 1930 and 1942:

“`Tell me, what do you understand by ‘true patriotism’, ‘true progress’ and ‘true Austria’?”

"Startled out of his mood and yet still in the spirit of it, Ulrich answered in the style in which he had always carried on conversation with Fischel: `The P.I.C.'

“`The P.I.C.?' Director Fischel repeated the letters in all innocence, this time not thinking that it was a joke, for although such abbreviations were then not yet as numerous as today, they were familiar from cartels and trusts, and they were very confidence-inspiring." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012