Tales From a Train: The Judy Bobalik Dia Sin Pantalones

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper_

My second day on the Southwest Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles began with words no leisure traveller wants to hear: "LAST CALL FOR BREAKFAST!" So I high-tailed it to the dining car wearing nothing but a pair of lounge pants (just a fancy word for pajamas or long underwear), a T-shirt, my gray sweater, and my brown Rockports, and I stayed that way the entire day, except for a brief stop in Raton, New Mexico, when I put on pants to brave the high-desert snow. Just try that on a plane.

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The multi-headed sculpture above lives at the Art Institute of Chicago and depicts Karttikeya, the principal Hindu god of war.  Its 12th-century sculptor, and the tradition in which he or she worked, must have had some clear-headed ideas about the effects of war if they depicted its god as able to see in all directions.

These dancing beauties from the Khmer period in Cambodia (c. 10th century), on the other hand, are apt to encourage more cheerful thoughts.

And finally, just because this would not be a Detectives Beyond Borders travel post without a photo of buildings or trees, here's a photo, also from Chicago, of buildings and trees.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Tales From a Train: Introduction

It was quiet as the train pulled into Dodge City—too quiet, because we weren't in Dodge City at all.

I'd hoped to be awake when we passed through Dodge, just so I could say I was there, and my watch told me we had another twenty-five minutes to go.  Then I realized I had reset my watch from Central to Mountain time before retiring for the evening, so Dodge was already thirty-five minutes in the past.

It was quiet as the train pulled out of Dodge City ...

*

Somewhere in New Mexico (Photos
by your humble blogkeeper)

The train ride from Chicago was leisurely, pleasant, companionable, and entertaining in a way only travel by a method other than flying can be.  In the coming days, I hope to bring you tales of technologically advanced Amish, a convention devoted to gourds, and an old guy named Shaky Ray who has an elevator in his closet and who just can't stop performing surgery.

Fullerton, Calif.

In the meantime, the Southwest Chief got me to L.A. an hour ahead of schedule. When was the last time a plane did that?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Chicago, city of poles

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Totem on left: (teeth chattering): "Oh, dear! The museum closes at 3 today for a women's board meeting. Should we tell him?"

Totem on right (smiling sardonically): "The early closing is right there on the Web site. Let the idiot read more carefully next time. And the schmuck calls himself an editor."

========

OK, so all I got to see of the Field Museum this afternoon was the Stanley Field Hall, thanks to that early closing. But what I saw was impressive, including not just my two polish friends, but also Sue (John McFetridge will like this one.)

And Chicago's architecture is so rich that any excursion downtown is like a walk through a museum, so this was still a hell of a day.

This is what Rome must have been like when Raphael was sneaking into the Sistine Chapel to look at Michelangelo's still-in-progress ceiling frescoes and crib ideas for his own work in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura.

What other city has ever produced such a feast for the eyes? What combination of genius, imagination, and money made it happen? And why in Chicago?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The greatest intersection in the world: 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago

The excellent 57th Street Books.
on, er, 57th Street

The University of Chicago gave the world the atomic bomb and Milton Friedman. Its peacefully isolated campus in Hyde Park also contains what must be one of the world's most aesthetically elevating intersections, that of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, whose northeast corner is home to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and whose southwest corner houses the Museum of the Oriental Institute.

Robie House, 1908-1910, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright was one of the twentieth century's great architects, maybe the greatest, and the Oriental Institute houses one of the world's best collections of Near and Middle Eastern antiquities. And it doesn't just show the treasures, it excavated many of them.  On top of all this dizzying cultural wealth at 58th and Woodlawn, you can get a terrific pizza just two blocks away. What intersection in what city can match all this?

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper, who will now get some sleep because he has museums to visit tomorrow.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detail from the decoration at the palace
 of Sargon II of Assyria

Hand-wringing Mesopotamian priest.

Crime fiction at the Art Institute of Chicago, plus a question for readers

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942.
Oil on canvas, 84.1 x 152.4 cm, 33.125 x 60 in Art Institute of Chicago

"Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.

"He looked at the drunk's back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in-down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself-and spoke to the bar kid.

"`Seen a lady in here, buddy? ...'"

— Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Statue of the God Horus as a Falcon,
Egypt, Ptolemaic period (335-30 BC),
Art Institute of Chicago

"`Well, what did he say?' she asked with half-playful petulance.

"`He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.'"

— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

*** 

I saw the art; I thought of the writing. But the purest piece of crime fiction here at the Art Institute of Chicago tells a story by itself, no outside writing needed.

The artist: Goya. The paintings: Friar Pedro and El Maragato. The series of six small pictures gives us Friar Pedro (a Gerry Kells or Tough Dick Donahue for his time) foiling, disarming, and shooting the bandit El Margato. The bandit threatens the friar, the friar wrestles the bandit, clubs him with a gun, shoots him, and ties him up.

Friar Pedro Offers Shoes to El Maragato and Prepares
to Push Aside His Gun, Francisco José de Goya
y Lucientes. 1806, Oil on panel, 11.5 x 15.75 in.
(29.2 x 38.5 cm) Art Institute of Chicago

And you know the stock hard-boiled scene where the hero contemplates and analyzes his chances of distracting then jumping the bad guy so he can take away his gun? A thousand crime writers have written the scene in this century and the last one. Goya painted it in 1806.

What works of art have made you think: Wow, that's a crime story!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

Busted, Part II

Remember last week's post about my bus trip from Boston, a journey extended from eight hours to ten by highway tie-ups that pushed my arrival smack into the middle of Philadelphia's evening rush hour? You know, the post that began "Remind me never to travel by bus again"?

That was a longish trip; what could possibly happen on a short hop, like the one from Philadelphia to New York? I pondered the question Thursday as my bus sat in a spreading red pool of engine coolant on the shoulder of Route 90 in Pennsauken, New Jersey, waiting for a tow truck, a replacement bus, and an ambulance for the cardiac patient/passenger who had begun feeling faint during the delay.

The new bus arrived, the heart patient was all right, and I found Derry's own Desmond Doherty, for whose debut novel, Valberg, I inverted a few commas and made sure no dashes were used where hyphens were called for, browsing patiently in the Mysterious Bookshop in Lower Manhattan when I arrived, barely half an hour late for our meeting.

The day's haul included books by John Lawton, J. Robert Janes, and "Owen Fitzstephen," and some good Derry stories over lunch from Doherty, a lawyer with business on both sides of the Atlantic who made the brave decision not to make his debut novel the story of a lawyer with business on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book is a serial killer/police procedural/story of its city that does, however, incorporate some of Doherty's own professional experiences, including a heart-rending bit of backstory. I'll look forward to discussing the novel's sequels with Doherty, only I'm traveling to our next meeting by plane.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

It's not the heat, it's the banality

Don't take me

Remind me never to travel by bus again. Guy in front of me is the sort who says “discourse” and “ostensibly.” Guy to my right snores, probably almost as loudly I do.

Retrieving a package from under one’s seat requires contortions. We’ve just got through our second highway traffic jam only to wind up in our third. This should delay us long enough to arrive in Philadelphia smack in the middle of the evening rush hour.

On a bus, I can experience the physical discomfort of modern air travel and (Woman in front of me just said: “The amount of people.”) the inconvenience of road travel all in one loud, cramped, knuckle-cracking, banality-spouting, hairy armed, sharp-elbowed package.

The “amount of people” woman just said that she used to take Amtrak all the time, and “I don't know if it was accident or suicide, but someone jumped onto the tracks every time.” Discourse Boy sounds like he went to film school. So take the train. But be aware that Amtrak appears to have “rationalized” its pricing, the way airlines do, so book well in advance, or you may be forced to pay big bucks.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders looks at the Mediterranean

Photo by your humble blogkeeper

And here's that link in handy, one-click form: http://tinyurl.com/cuzmt77

Look out, Cleveland

I'm busy selecting my Bouchercon wardrobe, so posting may be light, erratic, or both for a few days. At left is Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, part of my research for my first trip to this year's Bouchercon city.

I also know a bit about Cleveland through the crime writer Les Roberts, a former Chicagoan and Californian who writes mysteries about a Slovenian American P.I. named Milan Jacovich and has become so favorite a Cleveland son that he's one of this year's Bouchercon guests of honor. I read one of the novels years ago, before Detectives Beyond Borders, and I found Jacovich a highly engaging regular-guy protagonist.

Once I get to Cleveland, I'll moderate a Bouchercon panel called "Murder is Everywhere" with authors Timothy Hallinan, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Cara Black, Jeffrey Siger, and Stanley Trollip (Michael Stanley) on Saturday, from 10:15-11:05 a.m. (Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.)

I'll also head for the West Side Market and the Cleveland Museum of Art, though I'll miss the Harvey Pekar statue dedication. And I'll look for some good kielbasa, because it's there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Getting closer to Schwartz's

(A Montreal landmark still worth visiting
even though it's now owned, in part, by
Celine Dion's husband.)

When I was growing up, Schwartz's seemed miles away physically and sociologically, and its famous smoked meat was a bit spicy for my taste. Ours was more a Chalet Bar-B-Q family.

But as I've explored my native Montreal by bicycle on recent trips, I've been amazed at how close Boulevard St. Laurent (you'll know the street if you've read Mordecai Richler) is to downtown.  And I've grown to love smoked meat, medium.

Boulevard St. Laurent, home of Schwartz's, is often referred to locally as "The Main," and one sign of its importance to Montreal culture is that, even though public signs are by law supposed to be French-only here, banners and billboards tout "Le Main."  In addition to the smoked meat, it was a pleasure to talk about Philadelphia with the countermen and to say things like "Your brother is ... ? Well I know somebody who ... Why don't you give me a card?" I felt less like an interloper and more like I'd been sitting at the counter making deals for fifty years.

And it was nice to hear that amiable verbal swagger of Anglophone Montrealers speaking and conducting business in French, proud, I imagine, that they can function in multiple languages, when so many people I run into seem questionably able to function in one.

Today, back to Philly.

***

As much as I like trains, at unpredictable intervals this trip back from Montreal was a good advertisement for the relaxed comfort of modern air travel. America needs to catch up with twentieth-century Europe and give passenger rail sufficient track to avoid congestion and enough track that it owns, so it does not have to surrender right of way to freight and other trains. And why did the WiFi connection work in the café car but not from my seat?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Love et leadership à Montréal

(Mary Pickford: Canada's sweetheart)

Bilingual stop signs used to get painted over in Montreal, so I was pleasantly surprised today to read the following on an anti-bullying poster in the city's Alexis Nihon Plaza:

"Avec ses programmes d'arts médiatiques et de leadership, LOVE: Vivre sans violence donne à nos jeunes..." (Emphasis mine)

I wonder how such tacit recognition of the vitality of Quebec French would go over with zealous linguistic and cultural purists. And, assuming that the dominant English-language influence on Quebec French is likelier these days to be American than British, what does it say about American and Quebecois culture that love and leadership are two of the words that have crossed the linguistic boundary?

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Montreal's McCord Museum of Canadian History offers a special exhibition on Toronto-born Mary Pickford and her role in creating the modern idea of celebrity. Pickford was a pioneer in her field, an Oscar winner, and an entrepreneur (she co-founded United Artists). She was like Madonna, but with talent. And just think: She came from la terre de mes aïeux!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What I did on my late-summer vacation

1. Got word that I'll moderate a panel at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland next month. (I'll provide details when organizers post the program.) The convention's opening ceremony happens at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which could dovetail nicely with my Project Noir Songs event at Noircon 2012 the following month.
2. Read a crime novel that comes up with a simple, creative, even daring strategy for coping with information dumps.
3. Wrote and sent off the second of my two small contributions to what looks like an exciting project involving Scandinavian crime fiction.
4. Heard a youthful member of my entourage declare: "I'm too young for juvie," then muse about his chances of getting into a good university.
5. Surveyed the grim, unsmiling photographs of Boston Celtics basketball and Boston Bruins hockey players at Boston Garden TD Banknorth Garden and wondered what ever happened to the old-fashioned idea that sports were supposed to be fun.
6. Also in Boston, saw the most flagrantly, blatantly disingenuous ad since that cigarette that declared "They're Not for Everybody. (But Then, They Don't Try to Be.)" That the ad featured a player who had since been traded in a salary dump by the underachieving Red Sox made its faux solemnity all the more delicious.
7. Realized yet again the near-infinite number of ways in which trains are better than planes. Enjoyed the infiltration of New Age health babble in the train's café car, where the menu listed Tylenol, Dramamine, and Advil under the heading "Wellness."
8. Started a book that misuses commas and misplaces quotation marks so frequently that I feel waves of gratitude for the rare puntuation mark used the right way.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Don't run government like a business

I'd left an important travel document at home on my just-completed trip, but a quick phone call from airport security personnel in Zurich to immigration officials in New York cleared matters up and had me checked in within ten minutes. Once again, a much-maligned U.S. government agency had provided service vastly superior to what private companies offer. And that's not to mention the exceptional help I received from the Internal Revenue Service the one time my dealings with it went beyond routine filing of a tax return.

What would have happened had the two agencies followed the popular injunction that they run their operations like a business? Zurich would have been kept on hold for hours listening to recorded messages about how important your business is to us. If it got through to a live person at all (unlikely, given the hour on the East Coast at the time), that person would have been a call-center robot rigidly trained not to deviate from prescribed order in answering or asking questions. Eventually he or she would have made it down the list to my problem, which would have been solved, but in hours rather than minutes.

Years ago, when run-government-like-a-business was the byword of the day, a wise commentator pointed out that a business has the right and even the duty to shed unprofitable divisions, but government can't just halt services to customers who don't bring in the desired cash — i.e., unprofitable citizens — or at least could not until recently.

Think about this the next time someone says private enterprise is better than government at everything. If in doubt, presume that the speaker is running for office, angling for kickbacks, reciting a mantra, or all three.

***

I'm fresh back from my local pharmacy, where the druggist told me that the private insurance plan offered by my private employer will no longer let me pick up my prescriptions. Instead, I am now forced, against my will, to get my prescriptions via mail order.

Where is this freedom of choice I stand to lose if the federal government assumes responsibility for health insurance?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Down the Danube

I've taken a break from crime to read Danube, Claudio Magris' thrilling meditation on history, literature, time, national and personal identity, and just about everything else worth meditating upon.

Nothing much in it puts me in mind of crime fiction, as books outside the genre sometimes do.  But the following might interest people who think about or read ultra-violent crime fiction. It also sneers at a vogue word in arts criticism in a way you might enjoy:

"The rhetoric of transgression presents crime, maybe on account of the unhappiness which is assumed to accompany it, as carrying its own redemption, without the need for any further catharsis. Violence thereby appears as one and the same as redemption, and gives the impression of installing some kind of innocence among the psychic drives. The mystique of transgression, a word invested with edifying claptrap, deludes itself in exalting evil for evil’s sake, in contempt of all morality."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Peace to Tunisia!

(Photo of Roman ruins at Dougga, Tunisia, by your humble blogkeeper)

Back in 2006 I visited Tunisia and wrote about it in one of my earliest posts.

A commenter on that post replied that

"In Algeria, they used to say: When Algeria is a man (a warrior), Tunisia is a woman (peaceful) ... "

I hope that pacific reputation survives the country's current political upheaval.

My adventures in Tunisia included a retired English archaeology professor breaking into a show tune from Oklahoma to help explain rivalries between herders and farmers in Punic and pre-Punic times.

An Eid Mubarak! (Blessed Eid!) uttered at the conclusion of any transaction went a long way toward generating good will, earning me smiles, at least one slap on the back, and accurate directions from a shopkeeper who led me out of his store and into the street so he could be sure of steering me right. And I saw a henna-haired woman in a sleeveless top, as slender and graceful as a cypress in the Mediterranean breeze, loading her shopping cart with booze in the liquor section of a supermarket in Tunis.

Peace and good wishes to the sane, hospitable nation of Tunisia!

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Back to crime — tomorrow, maybe

I was going to get back to crime fiction today, but I keep coming across wise and striking observations from The Way of the World. Here are two more.

The first is that nothing remains of true Islam "now that fanaticism has re-emerged." Predictable stuff today, or at least up until recently, but Bouvier wrote those words in 1953. And this:

"Alexander, a recent coloniser, brought Aristotle to the barbarians; thus the widespread mania for believing that the Graeco-Romans invented the world; and thus the contempt — in secondary education — for things Eastern (just a bit of Egypt, Luxor and the pyramids, so that children can learn to draw shadows). The Graeco-Romans themselves — see Herodotus, or the Cyropaedia — were not so chauvinistic. They greatly respected Iran, to which they owed much: astrology, the horse, the postal system, many gods, a few good manners, and no doubt also that carpe diem of which the Iranians are such past masters."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Life on the road

My current reading is not crime, but it shares a striking sentiment with one of the great espionage adventure novels.

The current book is Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World; the classic adventure tale is John Buchan's Greenmantle, about which I wrote here.

Buchan's Richard Hannay, exhausted when he reaches Constantinople, finds the city

"a mighty disappointment. ... I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere. It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb — wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children."

Later, cleaned up and rescued, Hannay sees the city differently and draws a lesson from this:

"What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty ... A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. I felt a free man once more, and could use my eyes."

Bouvier is brought to similar reflections by bouts of dysentery in Macedonia:

"With sweating foreheads, we'd rush to the Turkish-style toilets and resign ourselves to staying there, despite hammering on the door, because dysentery grants only brief respites.

"When I found myself in this low situation, the town would get me down. It was very sudden; it was enough to have a lowering sky and few drops of rain for the streets to be transformed into quagmires ... Everything in it that was misshapen, nauseating and deceptive would emerge with ightmarish clarity. ... In my mind I poured acid over the street, cauterizing it. ...

"When I got over that, I would see through the window, in the evening sunshine, the white houses still steaming from the downpour, the mountain chain spread out beneath a washed sky and the army of tobacco plants, which surrounded the town with their reassuring sturdy leaves. Once again I would find myself in a solid world, at the heart of a gilded lion. The town had revived. I could dream."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Way of the World

I take a brief break from crime with this post, with a tip of the hat to the crime writer who directed me toward its subject.

The subject is Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World, and I'm reading it slowly. That's just as well; though the book is a journal, a factual account of the author's trip from Switzerland to the Khyber Pass in 1953, it is full of images redolent of poetry and mystery — a song about a soldier "who, on returning from the war requested a pancake to be kneaded until it was `as white as this man's shirt.'"

or

"We set up the machine and looked up to meet a hundred pairs of magnificent eyes; the whole tribe was on tiptoes around us."

I can read those lines and feel I've read an entire story. What lines make you feel that way?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

That's Baron de Montesquieu to yuieu

I found a nice prediction in the Persian Letters, Montesquieu's epistolary narrative/satire of a Persian who journeys to the exotic land of France.

Usbek, having stopped in Smyrna, writes to his friend of the corruption and decadence of the Ottoman Empire: "There you have it, my dear Rustan, a correct idea of this empire, which will be the scene of some conqueror's triumphs in less than 200 years." (Italics mine, not Montesquieu's.)

The Persian Letters appeared in 1721; the letter quoted above is dated 1711 in the book. Historians date the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to 1908, and the empire fell in 1922. Montesquieu had a keen mind or perhaps good intelligence (or "intel," as today's jargon-worshiping newspapers would have it).

Later, bound for Marseilles and urgently eyeing Paris, Usbek writes to another friend that "Travelers always seek out the big cities, as they are a country common to all foreigners." As yesterday, so today, except for those travelers who always forgo the big cities to seek out the all-inclusive resorts.

(Read the Persian Letters free here. The Ottoman prediction is in Letter 19, the observation about cities in Letter 23.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Flight dreck

Another bit from my current crime reading, Selçuk Altun's Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, dovetails nicely with a non-crime post I had planned to make. Here's Altun:

"The stewardess of the `business class' section was presenting the flight security precautions with the usual repulsive mimicry."

Here's me:

"A train journey begins with a thrilling lurch into motion. A plane journey begins with the slightly nauseating whiff of filtered, pressurized air.

"You squeeze past your rowmates' knees to get up. You squeeze past their knees to get back. (Just don't drop anything, because good luck squeezing down between rows to pick it up.) You contemplate the condensation between the windows. You choose from a wide range of entertainment options. You enjoy the easy-going conversational genuineness of the crew ..."

Coming soon: More from Selçuk Altun, plus my theory about why flight crews, so rigidly cheerful in the air, can be so obnoxious once they land.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009