Posts Resume Monday, Sept 24, 2012

My mom, who is 75, wants to go up to teeny tiny town near Rapid City, to see her sister, who is 80. They live in a house in the boonies and have no internet.

I'll be back online on Monday the 24th and promise not to miss another day.

Please bear with me, your patience is appreciated!

60 is the new 40

On August 10, 2012, the Cheyenne chapter of the AARP hosted a seminar called Gray Matters - which was free and provided a free lunch - unfortunately fish and cheesecake, blech - from 4 to 6 was a reception for all travelers who had come in for the AARP National Spelling Bee to be held on the 11th.

I attended that and it was a lot of fun. The emcee introduced a few folks, we talked about words, there was a "mock" spelling bee (which only consisted of about 20 people getting up and being questioned on one word...._ and so on. And there were finger foods there - Chinese food to be precise. Don't know where they got it from or if they cooked it on site (Little America is a hotel and resort where people come to play golf among other things) but it was delish.

The spelling bee started at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am (Well...8:30 is not so ungodly but I had to get up at the ungodly hour of 6:30 to get there in time for registration, etc.) It started with 4 rounds of 25 words each - which was a Written Test.

The first 25 words were extremely easy. They asked words like "Greetings" and "Navel" and "Mince." I suppose a few might have been considered difficult... "Animus" and "Lacuna."


The second 25 words were equally easy, but I did miss MUGWUMP.


I assume they did this just to help everyone settle the nerves and get new people used to what was going on. People had trouble hearing some of the words (hey, they were all over 50 and most over 60) and the Pronouncer  would come down and tell them the word face to face and have them say it back, etc. Indeed, the Pronouncer did an excellent job.


Third round was where they started asking the difficult words.


I missed:
QUESTIONARY INERCALATE
TUATARA
SKOSH
VIRIDITY
WIMBLE

The fourth round was the real killer. I only got 12 out of 25 right. I missed:

FELICIFIC
DOVEKIE
FLYTING
NAPERY
COTYLEDONARY
WELTSCHMERRZ
OPPUGNER
AECIOSPORE
SYNCYTIAL
KNUR
IRIDIUM
TUYERE
HYOSCYAMINE

I then stayed for the Oral rounds and was joined by one of my friends from my Scrabble Club. (I think an audience could have assembled for the Written rounds, too. There were chairs there and family were in them...but I think most people only wanted to come see the Oral rounds where you actually saw the speller's faces as opposed to their backs, etc.)

Two of the people I met last night at the reception made it to the Orals. One of them it was his first trip to the Bee and he was successful his first time out. Made it through about 10 rounds. (In the Orals, you miss two words and you're out.) Another one was an elderly woman from Minnesota who also got through about 10 rounds before being knocked out.

There were three sisters and a brother who had come as a sort of family reunion. The eldest sister made it to the Oral rounds but was bounced after only two rounds. This was too bad and it was because she was a bit unlucky - she got two 6-syllable words in a row while some of the others were getting much easier ones (but still, not ones I could have spelled). But she was disqualified along with several other people in the same round, so hopefully she didn't feel too bad.

The words in the Oral Rounds were extremely difficult. Several times more difficult than the toughest words in the final round of the Written.


But, had I studied for a year, I think I could have handled them.


And it is my intention to study for a year and  get into the Orals next year.


So, why is the title of this blog entry 60 is thenew 40?


Because it is.


People are living longer. You don't want to outlive your money and more importantly you don't want to outlive your sense of enjoyment of life. And learning new things every day is enjoyment and keeps the mind active.


The AARP Spelling Bee is held every year, and it gives you an excellent reason to travel to Cheyenne and see The Cowboy State. You'll meet lots of interesting people.


You do have to study.


I studied very desultorily for about a month...combine all the time I studied and it was about 10 hours. Not nearly enough, but then, I'm a good speller so the Written Rounds were relatively easy - except for that killer last round.


Why learn words that you'll never, ever say in real life?Well, because they're interesting. And the concepts of what you'll learn, you can apply in other areas. So it's a win win.


So start planning to live a long, healthy, active, intellectual life, and do it now, however old you might be!

Inside the List

From the New York Times:  Inside the List

NAMING RIGHTS: It’s not unusual for popular novelists to use pseudonyms, whether because their given names seem too pedestrian (“John le Carré” is actually David Cornwell) or because they work in more than one genre (“J. D. Robb” is actually Nora Roberts) or because it’s just really cool to invent a secret identity or two (“Elizabeth Peters” and “Barbara Michaels” are both actually Barbara Mertz). 

But the Atlanta writer Karin Slaughter comes by her thriller-ready name honestly: it’s the one she was born with. “I was teased mercilessly as a child,” she told a Web site dedicated to mysteries a few years ago, “so I think I’ve earned the right” to the name. Slaughter’s new novel, “Criminal,” hits the hardcover fiction list at No. 4. It’s her sixth consecutive book to land there, and her 10th best seller over all. Like her last several novels, “Criminal” unites characters from two different series, and it’s earning Slaughter some enthusiastic attention. “Reading this book was like watching a great athlete having a career year,” the mystery writer Jim Grant said. Jim who? Oh, right: you probably know him better by his pseudonym, “Lee Child.” 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: For a guy with a law degree, John Grisham can be casually (and lazily) insulting to the lawyers in his novels. In “The Litigators,” at No. 6 in its second week on the trade paperback list, he refers to one character as a shark, and to various others as sleazy, unethical idiots. But he’s got nothing on Hilary Mantel, whose “Wolf Hall” is at No. 20 on the same list after 15 weeks. In that book, the Duke of Norfolk confronts King Henry’s eventual fixer, Thomas Cromwell, with one of the more scathing curses in recent literary memory: “You . . . person,” he sputters, before finding his footing. “You nobody from hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.” It’s the kind of thing you can picture (or I can picture, anyway) crocheted on a throw pillow in the chambers of the Supreme Court. 

ASSASSINATION FASCINATION: Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” written with Martin Dugard, is at No. 5 in its 41st week on the hardcover nonfiction list. It’s not the first time Dugard has shared credit for a best-selling account of an assassination: in 2009, he and James Patterson made the list with “The Murder of King Tut.”

WORTH WAITING FOR: Fifty years ago in the Book Review, on July 22, 1962, the fiction list was topped by Katherine Anne Porter’s allegory about the rise of the Nazis, “Ship of Fools.” A selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, “Ship of Fools” went on to become the best-selling novel of the year, against some pretty strong competition.

 

Too many projects, too much procrastination

Many apologies. I'll get my girdle in gear soon.

Feb 3, 2012: Dorothy Gilman, ‘Mrs. Pollifax’ Novelist, Dies at 88

From New York times:  Dorothy Gilman, ‘Mrs. Pollifax’ Novelist, Dies at 88

Dorothy Gilman, an espionage writer whose best-known heroine, Mrs. Pollifax, is very likely the only spy in literature to belong simultaneously to the Central Intelligence Agency and the local garden club, died on Thursday at her home in Rye Brook, N.Y. She was 88. 

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her family said. 

In “The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax” (1966), the first novel in what would be a 14-book series, Mrs. Gilman introduces Emily Pollifax, a 60-ish New Jersey widow bored by the compulsory round of tea and good works.

In search of adventure, she offers her services to the C.IA. — who, after all, is going to peg a suburban grandmother as a cold war secret agent? — and adventure she finds. In the course of the series, which concluded in 2000 with “Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled,” she fetches up in Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, China, Morocco, Sicily and elsewhere. 

Clever, lucky and naïvely intrepid, Mrs. Pollifax employs common sense and a little karate to rescue the kidnapped; aid the resistance (when you are a suburban lady spy, a fashionable hat is ideal for concealing forged passports); and engage in all manner of cheery deception (when doing business with a malefactor who is expecting a can of plutonium, a can of peaches makes an excellent if short-term substitute). 

Reviewers sometimes quibbled about the improbability of the novels’ basic premise. But the books proved popular with readers: in a genre in which women had long been young and sultry, Mrs. Pollifax, with her peril and petunias, made an irresistible, early feminist heroine. 

The series was the basis of two movies, the feature film “Mrs. Pollifax — Spy“ (1971), starring Rosalind Russell, and the telefilm “The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax” (1999), starring Angela Lansbury.

The Mystery Writers of America named Mrs. Gilman its 2010 Grand Master. 

Dorothy Edith Gilman was born in New Brunswick, N.J., on June 25, 1923; she decided on a writing career when she was still a child. Planning to write and illustrate books for children, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Under her married name, Dorothy Gilman Butters, she began publishing children’s books in the late 1940s. 

Mrs. Gilman’s marriage to Edgar A. Butters Jr. ended in divorce. She is survived by two sons, Christopher Butters and Jonathan Butters; and two grandchildren. 

She was also the author of several nonseries novels for adults, among them “The Clairvoyant Countess” (1975), “Incident at Badamya“ (1989) and “Kaleidoscope” (2002), and novels for young people including “Enchanted Caravan” (1949) and “The Bells of Freedom” (1963). 

By the seventh Mrs. Pollifax novel, “Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha,” published in 1985, Mrs. Gilman’s heroine has remarried. But for the most part, she is quite content to leave her husband at home for the duration of the series as she gads about the world, a paladin packing peaches.

Jan 10 2005: Charlotte MacLeod, 82; Author of 'Cozy' Mysteries, Juvenile Books

From Los Angeles Times:  Charlotte MacLeod, 82; Author of 'Cozy' Mysteries, Juvenile Books

Charlotte MacLeod, mistress of the "cozy" mystery who penned more than 30 whimsical whodunits featuring warm, witty and downright wacky amateur sleuths solving murders by quicklime, ancient spear, stinging bees and other innovative means, has died. She was 82.

MacLeod, who also wrote a dozen juvenile books, myriad short stories and a biography, died Friday at a nursing home in Lewiston, Maine. The author spent most of her life in Boston but had lived in Maine since 1985.

Known for her ladylike manner, hat, white gloves and impeccable grammar, MacLeod was a perfect match for the "cozy" genre -- something of the opposite to hard-boiled private eye mysteries. MacLeod's cozy mysteries eschewed gore, graphic violence, sex and vulgar language and reveled in a dizzy pace, outrageous characters, a little romance and a lot of laughs.

"She wrote specifically for people who did not want blood and guts, at least not a whole lot of it anyway," Alexandria Baxter, her sister and business manager who typed and proofread her manuscripts, told the Portland Press Herald in Maine. "Everybody drank tea and ate molasses cookies. It was that kind of thing."
Film critic Kathi Maio, writing in Sojourner magazine, once characterized the author and her work: "If, as I believe, mystery fiction's primary goal is to entertain, then Charlotte MacLeod is one of the most gifted mystery authors writing today."

MacLeod, who sold more than 1 million copies of her books, wrote two series under her own name, the Peter Shandy mysteries and the Sarah Kelling mysteries. She also wrote two series under the pseudonym Alisa Craig, the Madoc Rhys mysteries featuring a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, and the Grub-and-Stakers mysteries about folks in a town she called Lobelia Falls in Canada.

The author's first adult mystery protagonist, Shandy, was a horticulture hotshot professor at Balaclava Agricultural College. He was world-renowned for developing the Balaclava Buster, a rutabaga, and also infamous as Balaclava Junction's "unofficial man-about-the-trouble," solving screwball crimes in his spare time.

Kelling was a young impoverished widow of a prominent Boston family still struggling to remain on Beacon Hill by running a boarding house. She marries art theft investigator Max Bittersohn, and together they investigate crimes, often in disguise, and do good, while managing truly outrageous relatives.

MacLeod described one of those relatives, Cousin Brooks, in her 1998 book "The Balloon Man," for example, as "a trim, sprightly man only 5 1/2 feet tall, with the bright eyes of a chipmunk and the inquiring mind of an investigative reporter. A man of many talents, he was particularly authoritative on the subject of the crested grebe."

In 1994, MacLeod wrote her major nonfiction work, "Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart." Her subject, a contemporary of Britain's better-known Agatha Christie, was an early 20th century mystery writer and playwright whose autobiography had inspired MacLeod as a child.
As an aging fiction writer living in a house with three cats in rural Maine, MacLeod was often likened to Christie, and to fictional sleuth and author Jessica Fletcher portrayed by Angela Lansbury on the popular 1984-1996 television series "Murder, She Wrote."

Asked by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994 if she were the inspiration for the Fletcher character, MacLeod replied tartly, "I can't even ride a bicycle. I have eight pairs of glasses, and I'm lucky if I can find one. That's about as good as I get at solving mysteries."

MacLeod was born in Bath, New Brunswick, Canada, on Nov. 12, 1922, and moved to Boston with her family as an infant and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951.

An avid reader as a child, she soon started writing her own stories. At 10, she entered a newspaper contest and won $1 when her story was printed.

After attending the School of Practical Art, now the Art Institute of Boston, MacLeod worked as an advertising copywriter, first for Stop and Shop Supermarkets, and then the Boston advertising firm N.H. Miller & Co., retiring in 1982 as the firm's vice president.

On weekends she wrote short stories. In her 40s, she moved on to books, beginning with juveniles because as a child she felt there were never enough mysteries for girls to read.

She published her first adult mystery, "Rest You Merry" featuring Shandy in 1978 and followed the next year with the first Kelling mystery, "The Family Vault."

Highly disciplined, MacLeod began new books on a Sunday, wrote mornings beginning at 6 a.m., rewrote in the afternoons, and worked in her bathrobe to avoid the temptation of running out of the house to do errands.
In addition to churning out books, MacLeod edited two anthologies of short stories, "Mistletoe Mysteries" and "Christmas Stalkings."

She was a co-founder and past president of the American Crime Writers League and won five American Mystery awards and a Nero Wolfe award.

MacLeod, who is survived by her sister and a brother, often said she so enjoyed writing her books that she would continue even if nobody read them. "I always loved to write. I love words," she said in 1994. "I can get ecstatic over a semicolon."

 

Killing Agatha

From the Hindu:  Killing Agatha

Why every aspiring writer of detective fiction would like to go for Agatha Christie’s jugular...

Killing Agatha Christie is a popular sport with writers of detective fiction. It’s also something of a rite of passage. A public sneer at Christie is a practical necessity for the nervous beginner testing the waters. If one declares Hercule Poirot insufferable and Miss Marple certifiable, one is already midstream. The other side, the greener one, is literary fiction. The muck still sticking to the skin is detective stuff. The writer, gaining the shore, may yell her lungs out that detective fiction is literary, but nobody’s really listening until she attacks Agatha Christie. Shadow boxing with Poirot and Miss Marple just isn’t enough any more. One must go straight for the jugular, and murder Agatha Christie. 

That’s the M.O. But murder is not easy, not this one, and Christie has been, overlong, a serial murderee.

Why is she so difficult to kill? 

Let’s take a look at what her murderers have. 

Enough motives

The Motive, as Hercule Poirot sublimely remarked, is always money. Christie sells more than anyone else. (J. K. Rowling? Careful — oh-oh, disapparated already?) Wait on, there’s more — Christie dominates libraries, which takes her a notch beyond, and makes her also the most read. After the initial colic of envy, this could be a good thing for the literary writer. It proves how irredeemably vulgar Christie must be. Literary fiction, of course, can only be read by the truly literate, the sort who, horrid thought, cozies up with Edmund Wilson — today remembered for little beyond his neurotic “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945) tantrum in The New Yorker. 

Not only do her bad books sell by the million, but Agatha Christie is dead too, and that’s an injustice difficult to ignore. 

Think of it. The day your new book is out, nobody notices. On your way to work, the guy on the seat next to you misses his stop because he’s reading N or M? On the way back home he’s still reading the book and he misses his stop again. And just when did she write the darn book? 1941? 

Even his dad wasn’t born then, what’s he doing reading retro stuff when he could be normal and ask after your book? Not that you’d ever mention it, but it’s difficult to miss, title coyly peeping over the wraparound Economic Times. In a perfect world this is when he pulls the chain, stops the train, and smashes into the nearest bookstore to grab a copy. Except that the nearest bookstore has never heard of your book, but N or M? eyeballs you the moment you cross the threshold. 

These are strong currents, not to be quieted by the unguent of a good review or two. Wet work is called for, definitely. 

The Weapon — ah, no matter how they dress it up, the weapon’s always the same: Agatha Christie can’t write. Now this is a clumsy weapon to wield against a woman who wrote relentlessly for 65 years, unless you can get a bit specific. 

Which brings us to Opportunity. Things really lush up here. Almost every book offers an opportunity for attack: plot, characters, locale — they are all flawed, and my dear, have you even considered her prose?

Every murderer needs an alibi. Best not to look too closely at this one, or we might land up finding Christie characters and plots in the murderer’s own oeuvre. Even Colin Watson, after his satirical Mayhem Parva, went on to give us Miss Silver who is only Marple gone giddy on whisky and sex. 

All this worked well in the postmodern fug of mannered ennui and cynicism, but in the second decade of the third millennium, it reads so yesterday. We need to let in daylight now, and seriously examine why it is so difficult murdering Agatha Christie. 

At the end of the first page of any Christie novel, the reader is infected with a delicious sense of anticipation. Nothing has happened as yet — no corpse, no murderous thought, no simmering resentments — yet the page trills with excitement. In the voice of Dolly Bantry, the reader’s thought is “This is my murder, and I intend to enjoy it!” 

Christie intended to appetize us for murder. And how well she succeeds. We’re avid for murder before she so much as hints at the corpse around the corner. 

The trick is simple, and not easy to duplicate. Christie is not writing for the reader. She’s writing in real time, as she watches the story unfold. The excitement we feel is her own. 

If there is any skill at all to writing, it is this. A supreme lack of self-consciousness, an indifference to detail except for what moves the moment, the flow from now to next. 

I didn’t see that — did you? is the question the reader keeps asking because the scenery is flying past the window, and it’s all familiar, so how can we tell what we missed? 

Banal prose? Did I hear you mutter banal? When was the banal so dangerous as with Agatha Christie?

Christie limned society in shrewd spare lines (most of them spoken). The very economy of those lines gave her characters the annoying clarity of strangers glimpsed across the aisle: the little you saw or overheard compelled you to vividly imagine the rest. 

The next accusation is that Christie was prolific — and what can be produced so fast but trash? The same argument is levelled at two other successful hacks whose anniversaries were recently celebrated — P. G. Wodehouse and Charles Dickens. There’s a paradox here, one generally overlooked. People wrote more, and much faster before computers. In fact, the messier the implements, the faster they wrote. Shakespeare wrote faster than Scott who wrote faster than Dickens who wrote faster than P.G. Wodehouse who ran neck-to-neck with Christie most of the time. 

So if Christie pulled off six impossible books before breakfast, how did she do it? She doesn’t tell. Her Autobiography, published posthumously in 1977, is her most accomplished work of fiction. It is completely opaque. 

The real story

Try reading a Christie novel without its detective. The book does not collapse. The story still moves. You realise then that the game in which you were earlier caught up, with its clues and red herrings and breathless denouement is merely impasto, an overlay on the real story, the one you’re left with when you close the book. Murder is merely a colour that makes one narrative emerge, but there are other stories in flux — like that other dystopia we call life. 

This is why Christie’s books are addictive. We recognise the dystopia because it locates familiar irrationalities, discrepancies, anarchies, misfits, and we’re asking all the time what if this means murder? The cannibalistic sadist, the tragic necrophiliac, even the cellar with its layers of bodies, seem puerile next to Christie’s respectable murderers. For her solid tax-paying men and women, murder’s merely another domestic chore. 

Time we saw this really, bcause when paraphilias are passé and axe murderers put to grass, there’s still the misfit, the discrepancy, the odd detail that nags, and we do need to find out what it means. And that is why it is impossible to murder Agatha Christie.