Whodunit?

beatnicks meet the 21st century & writing hints

COMMENTS:

 

 from rick dale on Sunday, January 29, 2012

 

"Marginalia! I routinely encourage my students to create marginalia when they read, not because I do, but because it is a habit that encourages critical reading. After all, isn't a dialogue with the author what we're really after as readers?"

 

BOOKS:

  

in my last blog, i talked about the similarities between charles frazier's "nightwoods" and jack kerouac's "the dharma bums". a basic similarity that i think i did not discuss is the fact that physical and spiritual journeys are taken in both books, though you could say that about many, many novels.

  

in addition, each has a basic story line: kerouac's, written in the first person, is about the mountain climbs and friendship. in frazier's novel, luce, a woman who lives by herself, is presented with extremely disturbed twins (a boy and a girl) left by her murdered sister. she has to find a way to raise them and help to find the killer of her sister. so it actually is a whodunit.

  

i have mentioned kerouac's influence on frazier. he also influenced allen ginsberg and ken kesey as well as musicians from the beatles to bob dylan. and he invented the word 'beatnik' to describe a generational movement.

  

please scroll back to read more about the two books.

  

"the dharma bums" can be found in a penguin classic and is 187 pages.

  

"nightwoods" is published by random house and is 259 pages.

  

WRITING HINTS:

 

check your punctuation. we all make comma mistakes. it's better not to make these errors, but i'm talking about two other easily avoided over- and under-punctuation problems. i just re-wrote a short piece about l.l. cool j, a piece i hope to submit someplace or other. i took it to a writing group, incorporated some good suggestions, and showed it to a son who was visiting. he circled all of the exclamation marks. i can not believe that i had four or five exclamation marks in a four or five page story!! see! this is something i would have marked immediately in a freshman comp essay. one exclamation point is o.k. many are not. your story should carry the excitement, not the punctuation.

my other suggestion has to do with the question mark. many people ignore the interrogation point when they are making a rhetorical question. remember to include it for a direct or rhetorical question.

plese scroll back for many writing hints.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

 

Ohioana is proud to partner with the OSU Libraries Read Aloud program to present award-winning author, Gary A. Braunbeck. The Read Aloud will be held on Thursday, April 12^th from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. Room 202 (Mortarboard Centennial Suite) of the Thompson Library on the OSU Main Campus.

 

audreylavin.com http://bit.ly/OhAudrey  

whodunit? jo nesbo's 'the snowman' & other cultural events

if you have a chance, take in the flick lost bohemia by joe astor, formerly of canton oh. it's a short documentary about the community of artists who lived, some for fifty years or so, in the apartments above carnegie hall. it will probably be shown as an art film around the country and is a fascinating peek at a world i, for one, didn't know existed-- right in my own back yard, so to speak.

 

i am sorry to say that for the first time i was disappointed in a metropolitan opera movie production. we saw mozart's don juan over the weekend. the eight leads (eight leads!!) all had fantastic voices. as a concert, it would have been beyond outstanding. but it was presented as an opera and something was off with the setting. the set was a three-storied vertical that we have seen many times in the past two years. it's not trite yet, so that's not what i'm complaining about. my complaint is that the staging did not taking advantage of the three levels. but worse than that, for the most part, the director did not take advantage of the whole horizontal stage either. i understand that if the scene calls for two people 'whispering' to each other, you can't have the stage full of peasants dancing, but so many times the characters could have moved, or someone could have passed in the background instead of showing us a tight little scene. but no carping about the music; it was magnificent.

 

now i am reading jo nesbos' The Snowman. it is advertised as following in the footsteps of steig larssson. really odd. nesbo was writing first for one thing and though i am not fond of larsson's trilogy, he is the sharper, cleaner writer of the two. norway is also the background of nesbos's novel and the book does feature a number of gory crimes against women.

 

The Snowman is the seventh in a harry hole series. i have not read any of the previous books. one thing i can say in favor of the snowman is that, although it probably connects with earlier books in the series, it does stand alone.

 

harry is a typical noir detective: he has a drinking problem; he has women problems; he is both an intuitive detective and a hands-on detective. for example, for no strong reason, he decides to go to a family owned shack that had been searched by police before. what do you know? it seems that during the previous search, the police did not open the large freezer where, guess what? harry finds a body.

 

i like very smart katrine bratt who is working with harry. i also like all of the red herrings we readers follow along with him. i have to say that if i were a serial killer, i would find something quicker to leave as my calling card than a snowman. think about it, wouldn't it be easier just to steal a rose from a neighbor's rose bush and leave it near the body than to spend a half-hour or so making a snowman in your victim's yard?

 

more later when i finish the novel

 

audreylavin.com           http://bit.ly/flTthc

whodunits by thompson and bowen, canada's shaw festival, and a bit of the bawdy bard

i should not have read two period pieces one right after the other. not only are they both turn of the century, but also both girl detectives (molly of in a gilded cage owns her own detective agency while sarah of murder in little italy is technically a mid-wife who detects!), but also each one has a boyfriend in the police force. i'll try to deal with them separately.

murder in little italy by victoria thompson is #8 in her gaslight mystery series. young widow sarah brandt is a mid-wife, who also happens to come from a good family, so can mix with various classes. her career gives the author a chance to work in some slightly unusual mysteries. this one is built around a baby who arrives too early and is too healthy to be the son of the man married to his mother. sarah delivers the baby and finds the mother dead the next day. the novel is historically interesting because the conflict among italian and irish immigrants is important to the plot. conveniently sarah has a boyfriend, detective sergeant frank malloy, who gives thompson a chance to work in some of the changes teddy roosevelt was then making in the n.y. police department.

career girl molly murphy marches with vassar college friends (no, she didn't go. i'm not sure it was all that easy for an irish immigrant to break into the crowd, but this one does it)  in a suffrage parade, which doesn't have anything to do with the plot except introduce us to some characters and add a touch of historical authenticity. she manages to be assigned two intertwined cases. for the most part, her new friends live in gilded cages, which molly doesn't plan to do. lucky for her as her husband to be daniel sullivan is with the police force and not a wealthy man. poisons are delivered in an interesting manner as one of molly's friend after the other becomes mysteriously sick. you'll guess from the beginning but still enjoy another easy read.

victoria thompson's murder in little italy is published by prime crime and is 291 pages.

rhys bowen's in a gilded cage is published by st. martin's paperbacks and is 260 pages plus a preview of the next novel in the series.

i've just come from spending a few days at the shaw festival at niagara-on-the-lake, which is why i haven't blogged in about a week. the festival, which was originally a summer festival, now runs through october. go if you  have a chance. we saw the doctor's dilemma by shaw, an ideal husband by oscar wilde, half an hourby barrie (it takes place in a little over half an hour), and one touch of venus,a marvelously silly story with choreography by agnes de mille, lyrics by ogden nash and perelman, and music by kurt weill. they don't make them like they used to!! all (except barrie) full of humor and, at the same time, plenty to think about.

as a final note for those who are interested in the bawdy lines of the bard, charles nicholl writes that, 'shakespeare's work is full of stealthy obscenities' and wonders what it tells us about the world's favorite writer's own sex life. he recommends shakespeare, sex and love by stanley wells to get some answers.