The ideology behind ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005).

Yes, I read the book; and I saw the 2011 movie starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

Despite the name, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is mostly the story of a polyamorous middle-age journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who tracks down Nazis with the occasional help of Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous young lady with the dragon tattoo.

Blomkvist is a stand-in for the novel’s author. Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) was a left-of-center Swedish journalist. Larsson flirted with the radical leftist movements of the 1960s at a very young age. He declared himself a Marxist at the age of 14.

To his credit, Larsson later disavowed outright Marxism. He longed, though, to wage a righteous battle against European Nazism. Never mind that most authentic European Nazis were in nursing homes and graveyards by the time he reached full adulthood.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suggests a preoccupation with rightwing conspiracies. Not that there’s much of a risk in Larsson’s native land. Sweden, on the contrary, is one of the most “woke” countries on earth. The Swedes pioneered the use of the self-consciously “gender neutral” pronoun half a decade before such absurdities reached the English-speaking world.

There are also the cartoonish, over-the-top depictions of misogyny in the book and the movie. The original title of the novel was, Män som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”).

Was Larsson kidding? No, he wasn’t. Even in Sweden, though, there was enough common sense in commercial publishing to avoid saddling a book with an ideological title like that.

If you read the book and/or watched the movie, you’ll find that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is fantasy fulfillment for its author. Mikael Blomkvist saves Lisbeth Sanders from the bad guys. He doesn’t really want to sleep with his much younger heroine. (According to the book, Blomkvist has always preferred middle-age women to “young girls” in their twenties.) But the twenty-something Salander comes on to him. So how can he say no?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even though I saw it for what it was: fantasy fulfillment for a politically left-leaning journalist who had entered midlife crisis territory.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not a bad novel, despite it’s flaws. By all means read and enjoy it. Just don’t take it literally; and realize that the book’s author, Stieg Larsson, had multiple axes to grind when he sat down at the keyboard.

-ET

**View THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO on Amazon (quick link)**

9/11+22

Twenty-two years have passed now, since the concerted terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

As I’ve remarked in recent years on this date, I’m acutely aware that for the younger generation of adults, 9/11 is not memory, but history.

My grandparents and Pearl Harbor

While the date retains its significance for those of us who are old enough to remember it, I’m realistic about such matters. And hey, I was young once, too.

My grandparents often spoke of Pearl Harbor as if December 7, 1941 were yesterday. For me, though, Pearl Harbor was a historical event that took place 27 years before I was born. It simply didn’t carry the same weight for me.

It’s therefore okay if you’re in the under-thirty crowd, and find that talk of 9/11 doesn’t pack the same emotional wallop for you that it does for many older adults. I’m not here to lecture you on that.

The past makes the present

You should, however, learn about 9/11, just as I learned about Pearl Harbor and World War II. I learned about Pearl Harbor and World War II not because those events were immediately relevant to me, but because understanding those events helped me to better understand the world in which I was growing up, in the 1970s and 1980s. World War II, after all, shaped the “postwar” world. Hence the name.

And the same applies to you, coming of age in the post-9/11 world. You need to know about 9/11 not just for commemoration and respect, but also for understanding the somewhat messed-up country in which you are coming of age.

(And just for the record: I don’t envy you on that one.)

9/11 and the beginning of the culture wars

9/11 began a chain reaction that transformed the United States from a relatively optimistic and united country in the 1980s and 1990s, to a far more cynical, distrustful place riven by partisan divisions.

Here’s a very short explanation: In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans were initially united. Our nation had just been attacked, after all, and the 9/11 terrorists attacked all of us. The September 11th bombers didn’t care if you were a Democrat or a Republican. If you were an American (or, indeed, anyone who didn’t subscribe to their particular interpretation of Islam), they were willing to take your life in order to make a point.

After the attacks, though, we couldn’t agree on what should be done in response.

Should the US return to its mostly Western, mostly Christian roots, in a defensive posture? Or should it more assertively embrace multiculturalism and diversity?

Should we ban the Quran? Or teach it in schools (so that Americans will better understand Islam)?

Should we withdraw from the Middle East? Or remove bellicose dictators from countries like Iraq by force?

Questions like this are at the heart of what we now call the “culture wars”. Although we don’t argue very much about Islam nowadays, we are preoccupied with a similar raft of questions. For example:

Should we focus on what unites us as Americans? Or should we dwell on racial injustices of the past?

Should we accept the “heteronormativity” of human societies within a context of tolerance for all? Or should we take extraordinary steps to promote alternative interpretations of sexuality and gender?

Believe it or not, such questions were less prominent in 1993 or 1983. While these matters may have occupied the occasional university classroom debate, the vast majority of Americans would have looked at you cross-eyed if you’d posed such questions.

9/11 focused a quarter of the population on both real and imagined grievances (the “woke”), and a quarter of the population on both real and imagined external threats (the MAGA crowd).

The rest of us remained in the middle. But guess what? 9/11 also turned the term “centrist”—once something that most people aspired to be—into a pejorative. And now we have a culture in which almost anything can become a source of controversy or outrage. No one is listening to the centrists anymore.

9/11 weaved suspicion and fear into the fabric of daily life. I remember taking commercial flights in the 1990s with nothing more than a boarding pass and a quick show of my passport. No one was going to body-search you before you boarded a plane.

Until 9/11, that was.

America was not an “innocent” country before 9/11/2001. (Our innocence had ended in the 1960s.) But it was a country that was much more at ease with itself, and with its fellow citizens.

Everything changed on 9/11/2001, and mostly not for the better. That’s why you need to learn about 9/11, even if you are too young to actually remember it.

-ET

Reflections on the life (and passing) of Steve Harwell

Steve Harwell, the lead singer of the 1990s band Smash Mouth, passed away earlier this week.

I will confess that I was a lukewarm fan, not because I disliked Harwell or his music, but because of my age. By the time Smash Mouth broke out, I was already in my late twenties. I had largely moved on from that phase of life in which one feels compelled to keep up with the latest in youth music.

Nevertheless, the news of Harwell’s passing has led me to explore some of Smash Mouth’s material retroactively. I recall hearing “Walkin’ On The Sun” in the late 1990s, but I never paid much attention to it. I just watched the video on YouTube, and I keep rewatching it. It’s downright addictive.

Smash Mouth’s music typifies the youth music of the 1990s. Whereas 1970s music was (often unnecessarily) heavy, and 1980s music was bombastic and preening, 1990s pop music was usually just fun.

That’s a fairly accurate description of “Walkin’ on the Sun”. There’s no discernible sociopolitical message here, not even any adolescent angst. Just tongue-in-cheek exuberance.

That was what the 1990s were all about. In those years before 9/11, the war in Iraq, and pointless culture wars at home, American culture was mostly optimistic and mostly enjoyable. I miss the 1990s, back when “woke” simply meant “alert and awake”.

Steve Harwell was arguably a perfect lead singer for that era. If you watch him in the aforementioned video, he isn’t going out of his way to be moody, sexy, or confrontational. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, like a Robert Plant or a Mick Jagger. Harwell is just having fun. And he makes you want to have fun, too.

Although Smash Mouth is remembered most fondly by Millennials (who were in their youthful salad days in the late 1990s), Steve Harwell, born in 1967, was a GenXer.

Nothing particularly odd about that. It is the preceding generation that typically creates the bulk of youth cultural artifacts for the current generation. In the 1980s, Gen Xers watched the teen movies of Baby Boomer John Hughes, and listened to rock musicians who were almost exclusively Baby Boomers.

Harwell’s life was much too short. And while there is doubtless a lesson in his passing about the pitfalls of alcohol, we’ve seen and heard similar stories before. Back to my era: Gen Xers recall the 1980 deaths of AC/DC singer Bon Scott and Led Zepellin drummer John Bonham. Both of these musicians’ lives were cut short that year because of alcohaol.

I’m sorry Steve Harwell is gone, but I’m glad I discovered his music, albeit belatedly.

Steve Harwell, 56, RIP.

-ET

Shaven armpits, manscaping, and the hairy question of beauty

Paris Jackson, the only daughter of the late Michael Jackson, recently posted an Instagram video in commemoration of her father’s birthday. She received some negative remarks about her armpit hair.

Based on the photos I’ve seen, Miss Jackson’s armpits are unshaven but trimmed, not what I would call overgrown or hirsute, by any stretch.

But this raises a question. How does untrimmed body hair affect beauty and sex appeal? Body hair—on both men and women—seems to go in and out of fashion. National and cultural factors also seem to exert an influence.

I am naturally hairy, for better or worse. I had chest hair when I was still in junior high. I also have hair on my arms, legs, and back.

I was born too late to capitalize on all this excess bodily carpet. In the 1970s, chest hair was associated with male sex appeal and masculine virility. Burt Reynolds and a handful of other hairy male celebrities drove this trend.

By the time I reached full adulthood in the 1990s, however, things were going the other way. This was the dawning era of the manscaped metrosexual.

Then both men and women began trimming and shaving their pubic hair. I won’t go too far down that line of inquiry, so as to keep this post safe for work. But the larger message here was that body hair was out of fashion.

I was late in picking up on this, as I am on so many things. One day, a friend flippantly asked me if I planned to show up at a summertime social event in a tank top with my “back hair hanging out”. (This person is not a friend anymore, but that’s another story for another time.)

I might have replied that in 1976, my ample body hair would have been considered the height of sexy. But this conversation took place well into the twenty-first century.

I have since succumbed to the manscaping trend. I now keep my back hair in check with a battery-operated device called a Mangroomer. I have become accustomed to having less body hair than I once did, and I’ll pull out the Mangroomer when I start feeling a little shaggy back there.

As far as women’s armpit hair goes: I suppose I’m a prisoner of my early biases. In my formative years, women religiously shaved their armpits but never shaved their privates. Once again, my inclinations and preferences are the exact opposite of twenty-first-century trends.

-ET

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.

Marlene Dietrich
JFK

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

**View SEX WITH PRESIDENTS on Amazon**

Flexible hygiene standards and the GenX childhood

Suburban parents nowadays worry obsessively about their kids catching something. Some parents even carry around little packages of sanitary wipes, so that they can sterilize surfaces in advance of their progeny. As if an American kid is going to catch Ebola at a birthday party.

This obsession with a germ-free childhood is a recent invention. GenXers grew up in an environment in which germ theory was understood, but not always given much consideration.

It was not uncommon in the 1970s to see kids passing around and drinking from the same bottle of soda. Maybe someone wiped the mouth of the bottle clean before they handed it to you…but probably not. Nor could you easily object. To express too much fastidiousness about the casual exchange of bodily fluids would have been regarded as fussy, especially among boys.

The childhood tradition of becoming “blood brothers” was mostly obsolete by the 1970s, but it happened. In that era before AIDS, no one worried about mixing blood, either.

We were sometimes told to “wash our hands”, but that carried its own dangers. School restrooms were unhygienic by today’s standards. They were often equipped with creaky cloth towel cabinets, in which the same towel roll was recycled again and again. (Twenty-first-century versions of the cloth roll towel cabinet are reasonably sanitary, I am told. But the ones you would typically find in a public school restroom in 1978? Not so much.)

Was this lax approach to juvenile hygiene a good thing, or a bad thing? Arguably the proof is in the pudding. The majority of us made it to adulthood without expiring from any communicable diseases. I am now in my mid-50s, and I rarely get a cold. So I suppose there is something to be said for naturally acquired immunity. 

-ET

Gordon Lightfoot (1938 – 2023), his music, and me

When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, my dad used to sing this song from the radio. The refrain went:

“Sundown, you’d better take care

If I find you’ve been creepin’ round my back stair.”

This was Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song, “Sundown”, of course. In the year the song climbed the charts, 1974, I was but six years old. I therefore didn’t grasp its meaning. But the song still brings back memories of that time.

And now that I’m old enough to understand “Sundown”, I find it an unusual take on the familiar romantic love triangle: that of the cuckolded male.

Fast-forward to 1986. My high school English teacher, wanting to demonstrate how stories could be told in poems and song lyrics, played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for us on one of the AV department’s record players. Yet another of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs.

I immediately connected with this song, even though I was unaware of the historical reference behind it. My teacher told our class about the November 1975 shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. That gave the song even more weight. It was a work of imagination and art…but also something real.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released in 1976, to commemorate the shipwreck of the previous year. It remains one of my favorite songs from a musical era that I was too young to appreciate as it was taking place.

Last November marked the 47th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This got me thinking about the song, and about Gordon Lightfoot. According to Google, Lightfoot was still touring in his eighties.

But all tours, and all lives, must come to an end. Gordon Lightfoot passed away on May 1, of natural causes.

While Lightfoot and his music were a little before my time, I always appreciated his work. There are few songs quite as haunting and memorable as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. And whenever I hear “Sundown”, I always hear my dad singing along with the radio in the mid-1970s.

A brilliant musician, and an artistic life well-lived. Gordon Lightfoot, 84, RIP.

-ET

**View Gordon Lightfoot’s music (CDs and vinyl) on Amazon**

 

When Jerry Springer spoke at my high school

Former politician and talk show host Jerry Springer has died.

Most people know Springer for his gonzo talk show work on national television. Decades before that, he was a well-known figure in Cincinnati politics and local broadcasting.

Springer spoke at my Cincinnati-area high school in 1985. At this time, the biggest skeleton in Springer’s closet was a 1974 scandal in which Springer, then a Cincinnati City Council member, paid a sex worker with a personal check. Springer resigned from city council in a certain degree of disgrace.

Several of my male classmates couldn’t resist calling out, “Where’s the check”? while Springer was speaking at our school in 1985. Springer, a good sport, laughed off their taunts and moved on.

Jerry Springer was never one to be impeded by other people’s opinions of him. I recognized that in 1985.

After the Jerry Springer talk show debuted in 1991, I tuned in a few times. In all honesty, the show was never for me. But I didn’t watch much network television of any kind during the early 1990s. I was too busy, and my life too disjointed.

I’ll always remember the local, Cincinnati version of Jerry Springer, anyway. The speaker at my high school who wasn’t about to be deterred by an embarrassing incident from his past, or others’ ungracious insistence on calling attention to it.

Perhaps there is a lesson for all of us here. One can go far, despite being hampered by very human flaws and a less than perfect track record. The trick is to shrug off the crowd’s disdain, and keep moving forward.

Jerry Springer, 79, R.I.P.

A visit to historic Madison, Indiana

Today I scratched another town off my Indiana bucket list: Madison, located in the southernmost portion of the Hoosier State, along the Ohio River in Jefferson County.

Madison is located less than two hours from the east side of Cincinnati, so the drive was not arduous. I went with my dad, who is a native Hoosier from southern Indiana. He had many anecdotes about how much the area had changed since the 1960s. Since I was not born until 1968 myself, I will have to take his word for it.

The charm of Madison, though, is that much of the town’s original 19th century architecture has been preserved. Throughout Madison’s central historic district, you’ll find baroque Victorian mansions and narrow brick row houses that will make you think you’ve just dropped back into the 1800s.

The firehouse was built before the Civil War.

And speaking of the Civil War, there is a Civil War monument near the courthouse that includes a cannonball that was fired into Vicksburg, Mississippi by Union troops in 1863.

While there are many of the usual chain restaurants in the strip outside (and above) the town, Madison residents seem to be doing their best to preserve and patronize locally own businesses.

I didn’t see a Starbucks, but I did see an independently owned coffee shop with a healthy crowd inside, for example. I also saw an independently owned shoe store on Main Street, as well as a musical instruments store. Amazon hasn’t killed all independent retail, it seems.

Overall, Madison is a pleasant enough town, but I’m not sure if I could live there. It’s at least an hour’s drive from any of the surrounding major cities (Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis). I’m a product of urban sprawl, I suppose, and I’m rather dependent on the amenities that such sprawl provides. There was not much urban sprawl in Madison.

Once again, though, a nice place place to visit. As always, I hope you enjoy the photos.

-ET

And finally, if you’re in the mood to read some fiction set in Indiana, I’ll take this opportunity to point you toward my crime novel, VENETIAN SPRINGS, and my historical supernatural fiction series, THE ROCKLAND HORROR. Both of these stories are set in (slightly altered) versions of southern Indiana.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The period between the two world wars was the golden age of the pulp fiction magazines. This was a time before television, or (of course) the Internet. Entertainment options were limited. (Heck, they barely had radio in those days.) Many people therefore turned to magazines that specialized in quickly written and fast-paced stories of romance, western adventure, crime, science fiction, or horror.

What happened to pulp fiction? The pulp magazines weren’t the victims of television, as is commonly thought. They were the casualties, rather, of the cheaply printed paperback. Modern paperback books were first introduced in 1935, but they really caught on during and shortly after World War II. The paperback completely changed the publishing and bookselling landscape, much as Amazon would about sixty years later.

Some of the original pulp content is still with us, of course. Horror fans who adore H.P. Lovecraft may not know that favorites like “At the Mountains of Madness”, “Dagon” —and most other Lovecraft stories—were originally published in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine founded in 1922. (Note: Weird Tales technically still exists, though its format has undergone some modifications; the magazine has a site on the Internet.)

I’ve read and reread Lovecraft’s oeuvre  as much as I care to. So when I was recently in a mood to do some reading off the beaten path, I decided to indulge in a bit of vintage pulp crime fiction.

Or actually, quite a lot of vintage pulp crime fiction. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps contains forty-seven stories and two complete novels. Writers represented in this collection include well-known names like Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). There are also plenty of stories by writers who are long forgotten.

Why read pulp fiction? Well, you probably already watch pulp television.

I’m a longtime fan of pulp TV, in fact. During the 1980s, I regularly tuned in to action television shows like The A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the original MacGyver. These shows were all escapist television, with plots that roared out of the gate like a 1981 DeLorean or a 1987 Toyota Supra.

My favorite was The A-Team. An episode of The A-Team kept you on the edge of your seat. Each episode ended with a blazing gunfight, in which no one was usually killed or seriously injured. The A-Team made absolutely no attempt to provide any sort of messaging on social, political, or philosophical issues. The other aforementioned 80s-era pulp TV shows were done in a similar vein.

Most of these shows did not age well. For nostalgia’s sake, I recently tuned in to a few old episodes of The A-Team and the original MacGyver. In the MacGyver episode, the eponymous hero found himself in the Soviet Union, where everyone conveniently spoke English. The Russians even spoke English with each other. I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this. Life is too short.

The same might be said of the stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. You can detect the literary and storytelling skills at work; but you can also tell that you’re reading fiction produced in a different era, when expectations were very different. My 1980s pulp TV shows did not have to compete with Netflix. The writers whose work is collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps did not have to compete with Michael Connelly or Lee Child.

The stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps are interesting as artifacts of the pulp era, in the same way that a Ford Model T is an interesting artifact of automobile technology in the 1920s. But as entertainment for present-day audiences? Keep in mind that some of these stories are more than eighty years old. You had might as well ask me if I would like to use a Model T for my daily commuting needs.

I suspect that this massive tome (more than one thousand pages in print) is so massive for a reason. The editors knew that the phrase “your mileage may vary” would be very applicable here.

What about their usefulness for writers? Those of us who write fiction are always thinking of a story in market analysis terms, after all. 

I wouldn’t recommend that any twenty-first century writer try to imitate the style of these stories, exactly. At least a quarter of these tales contain plot holes that you could drive a Model T through; and almost all of them contain hackneyed dialogue. (“He’s on the square!” “The place looked swell.”)

And oh, the eyebrows that will be raised among the finger-wagging social justice crowd. While these stories aren’t intentionally sexist, they are the product of a different time, when ideas about men and women were different. They overflow with gendered terminology that would make any writer the target of an online pitchfork mob today (“honey,” “doll”, “sugar”, “dame”, etc.).

The female characters in these crime stories are mostly props. But then, so are most of the men. These stories are all about plot, plot, plot.

And that is where this book may be instructive for writers who have found themselves too immersed in navel-gazing literary fiction. The writer who suspects he is spending too much time on flowery descriptions and internal monologue may learn something valuable here: how to get to the point, or to the plot. The pulp-era writers were certainly good at that, despite their other shortcomings.

-ET

**View ‘The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age–The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s’ on Amazon**

 

Unoriginal place names in Indiana

A few more pics from my recent trip to Columbus, Indiana.

Once again, I enjoyed my time in this city to the south of Indianapolis, and I like Indiana in general.

My only problem with the Hoosier State is that Indiana is absolutely unoriginal when it comes to place names.

Columbus, to cite the most pertinent example, is the name of the state capital of neighboring Ohio.

Other geographic plagiarisms in Indiana include Milan, Versailles, Nashville, and Edinburgh.

There is even a Cincinnati, Indiana. For those of you not from the Midwest, Cincinnati is a city in Ohio, on the Ohio-Indiana border.

-ET

While almost slipping into the Flatrock

I made a trip to Columbus, Indiana last week. Columbus is a nice town to the south of Indianapolis.

Indiana is seldom exciting, but it’s a friendly place with some captivating scenery (by Midwestern standards, at least). And there is some very nice scenery, indeed, in Columbus.

Below is the Robert N. Stewart Bridge, on 2nd street. I took the photo below from the bank of the Flatrock River.

And here’s a view of the Flatrock River itself, facing away from the bridge.

I almost slipped on the concrete boat ramp while taking these shots, which would have placed me in the Flatrock River, and not just beside it. So I hope you enjoy the photos.

-ET

The Bengals’ defeat, and those curious expressions of fan loyalty

As some of you may know, the Cincinnati Bengals lost the AFC championship game to the Kansas City Chiefs last night.

This morning, my personal Facebook feed, heavy with Cincinnati residents, was filled with professions of fan loyalty, like the one above: “Still my Bengals.”

Others were professing their “fan loyalty” in more abstract terms. Some declared that they would stick with the Bengals no matter what.

And here is one of the places where I can’t connect with the rabid spectator sports fan: this concept of team loyalty.

If you find spectator sports enthralling, that’s one thing. The fact that I don’t find them particularly entertaining is a mere matter of preference.

Similarly, we all enjoy different television shows and movies, different kinds of music. I don’t happen to be a fan of country music. This doesn’t leave me shaking my head at the preferences of country music fans.

But then, most country music fans aren’t making public declarations of fan loyalty when their favorite artist fails to win a CMA award. Only spectator sports fans do things like that.

A professional sports team—the Cincinnati Bengals, the Kansas City Chiefs, whatever—is a corporation that sells an entertainment product. No different from Sony Pictures or Netflix. Fans of entertainment companies are more accurately called consumers.

If you enjoy an entertainment company’s product, so be it. But it’s important to remember where you stand, in the big scheme of things, before getting too invested in this fan loyalty concept.

Take Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati Bengals’ 26-year-old quarterback. Joe Burrow has a 4-year contract worth over $36 million. And—of course—a beautiful girlfriend with a widely subscribed Instagram account. Rich young celebrity athletes with beautiful girlfriends are nothing new, of course.

More power to Joe Burrow. I’m sure he’s talented and that he’s worked hard. But it’s somewhat self-deluding—if not foolish—to think that this man needs your expressions of loyalty after he loses a game.

And he certainly isn’t reading your Facebook feed.

But of course, these public expressions of fan loyalty aren’t really about the team. Otherwise, they would be sent to the team, instead of directed toward one’s friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. (Consider the sports team flags on your neighbor’s pickup truck. Who are those intended for?)

These expressions of fan loyalty seem to be more about the need for group affiliation, than any genuine devotion to unknowing, millionaire celebrity athletes. And this need (among some people, at least) goes all the way back to the Byzantine Empire. In Byzantine times, different factions of chariot racing fans actually evolved into the equivalent of paramilitary organizations. All based around spectator sports.

While I can somewhat understand this impulse—especially in light of its historical roots—I just don’t get it, at a visceral level. Why? What’s the point?

But hey, that’s just me.

If you’re an ardent Bengals fan, my condolences on last nights defeat. But Joe Burrow, I’m quite sure, will be just fine without my sympathy, let alone my expressions of fan loyalty.

-ET

Challenger disaster +37 years

I was a senior in high school on January 28, 1986. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger occurred that day at 11:39 a.m., EST.

The explosion took place just 73 seconds into the shuttle’s flight, and killed all seven crew members. Among the dead was Christa McAuliffe, a Massachusetts teacher who had been a guest astronaut.

That year I had a part-time job in my school’s cafeteria. I was operating a soda machine in the lunch line when the students began filing in, talking about what had happened. This was one of those national tragedies that was announced in classrooms, rather like the assassination of JFK, when my parents were in high school.

The Reagan Administration had been hoping to revive interest in the U.S. space program, as well as to inject some life into math and science education. (Even then, there were concerns that American students were falling behind their global counterparts in math and science.) The presence of teacher Christa McAuliffe on the mission was a key part of that effort. McAuliffe’s inclusion would have been a good idea, perhaps, if not for what happened.

I’m not going to exaggerate, and say that the Challenger disaster depressed me for a month, or anything like that. I was sorry for the loss of life, of course. But in 1986 I was a self-absorbed teenager, and this was a faraway event.

The disaster did have a sobering effect on me, though. At my present age (I’ll let you do the math), I am acutely aware that life is fragile, and that bad things happen to good people. I wasn’t as aware of this in 1986.

The Challenger crash dominated the news for weeks afterward. A case can be made that Christa McAullife received a lion’s share of the media attention. This was probably inevitable, given that she was a civilian volunteer and a teacher. McAuliffe was about the same age as my mother, I remember noting.

The investigations and Congressional hearings surrounding the disaster lasted for several years. In 2004, President George W. Bush conferred posthumous Congressional Space Medals of Honor on all the Challenger crew members. 

On the night of the disaster, President Reagan delivered this televised speech to the country. One of his more moving oratory moments, in my opinion.

A sad moment for the country, and one that I still remember, almost four decades later.

-ET

A right (and wrong) reader for every book

I’m slogging my way through Holiday in Death, by J.D. Robb. I purchased the audiobook for this title at a steep discount on Chirp.

I now know that J.D. Robb is a pen name for Nora Roberts. I wish I had known this in advance, as Nora Roberts has never pleased me in the past.

View it on Amazon

I know: blasphemy to some of you. Nora Roberts is, after all, a bestselling author who has delighted millions of readers over the years. I don’t dispute that.

But she’s also a writer of various flavors of romance, and every book she writes tends to be at least one-half romance novel.

Holiday in Death is no exception. It’s ostensibly a police procedural set in the near future (2058). Like other Nora Roberts titles, the premise of this one intrigued me, but I was underwhelmed by the execution.

Why? Maybe it’s because I’m a heterosexual male. I can only read so many paragraphs about the “beauty” of a male character before I gag, or at least grow bored, and start wanting to skip ahead. But female romance readers eat those details up.

Holiday in Death, sure enough, has all the characteristics of a romance novel. There is more sex than shooting, and the female detectives in the book spend as much time checking out hot guys as they do investigating the serial murderer who is the villain of the story.

The novel’s protagonist is NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas. She’s tough and snarky, and I’m fine with that. But far too much space is devoted to her storybook relationship with her unlikely husband, the Irishman named Roarke.

And here we descend into full-blown romance novel territory. Like most romance novel male characters, Roarke is less a human male than a personification of female fantasy. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and (of course) he’s a self-made business mogul.

Roarke is tanned and well-muscled. (Despite being married and running a business empire, he still finds time to spend hours each day in the gym, one supposes.) And—of course, once again—he has long, Fabio-like hair. (Male pattern baldness does not exist in the universe of women’s romance fiction.)

Holiday in Death presently has a 4.7-star average on Amazon, with 3,885 ratings. Most of Roberts’ books have high ratings. Nora Roberts is not only a bestseller, but a multi-decade bestseller. Her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was published in 1981, more than forty years ago. I was barely in junior high then.

My intention here is not to knock Nora Roberts (once again, Nora Roberts is doing just fine.) My objective, rather, is to illustrate a point that many reader-reviewers (and many review-hungry indie writers) often overlook: a reader can simply be a mismatch for a basically good book.

Holiday in Death is a good match for many readers (most of whom are devotees of romance fiction, one imagines). Otherwise, it would not have so many 5-star reviews.

But Holiday in Death is a bad match for a mystery/police procedural reader who is a fan of Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, and John Sandford.

The book is probably a bad match for any heterosexual male. I was definitely ready to quit when I heard the paragraph about how the gorgeous, long-haired Roarke “emptied himself” into Eve Dallas at the climax of some acrobatic lovemaking. Sorry, but I don’t need to read about other dudes ejaculating. And if I did want that much detail about the sex act, I’d go to Pornhub.

For reader-reviewers, the lesson here is: don’t pan a book simply because it doesn’t match your tastes. (I won’t be rating or reviewing Holiday in Death on Amazon or Goodreads, as this is such a clear case of book-reader mismatch.)

For authors, the lesson is: don’t market your book to everyone. Your book is almost certainly not for everyone. Few books, after all, are for everyone. Not even books written by the esteemed Nora Roberts.

-ET

**View Nora Roberts’s novels on Amazon**