Anna Politkovskaya: 'A Small Corner of HELL: Dispatches from CHECHNYA' (2003)

Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of HELL: Dispatches from CHECHNYA, translated by Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky, with an introduction by Georgi Derluguian. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Prerss, 2003).

I've carried this book around for more than a decade and finally took the plunge. I knew it was going to be grim, made grimmer by the fact that Anna Politkovskaya, the book's astute author who had borne persistent witness to the Chechnyan wars, was shot (four times) and killed in a Moscow elevator on Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday -- October 7, 2006.  

Because of Anna's work, and the work of others, the devastation wrought in Chechnya is known; as are its atrocities. In reading A Small Corner of Hell, in trying to promote it, I catch the glimpse of an understanding from Anna's words: "Our fate was to look for people who were similar to us in the world, who knew something about life that most people would never experience. Perhaps we would like to share this secret with them, but they didn't want to know and didn't care." (HELL, page 200).

The bottom line: A Small Corner of Hell looks at war mostly from the perspective of people trapped inside it, poor people, civilians, Chechnyans and Russians, ground down and pulverized in dire situations from which they cannot escape. 

This is journalism at its best, literature really, a mix of memoir, chronicle, dream and nightmare. Knowing now that the author of year 2003 will be gunned down in year 2006, too, adds another layer of immediacy and poignancy to each page. 

Putin treats journalists as "enemies of the people;" given this charge, it's not surprising that many have been killed inside Russia since he came to power in 2000. Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) is one of more than thirty so eliminated. 

Hence also the chill from Donald Trump's adoration of Putin, and Trump's labeling of American journalists "the enemy of the people." See, for example, David Jackson, "Trump again calls media 'enemy of the people.'  USA Today, February 24, 2017. Link here.

Once you lose freedom of speech and the fair rule of law, you're in constant danger of death and destruction, without much recourse. 

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

Monique Truong's 'The Book of Salt:' Take Two

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003, 2004): a few pinches more.

“’I left Vietnam when I was twenty-two,’” said the man whose eyes were again back on the Seine. ‘I haven’t been back since.’ His voice trailed off, his words taking a quiet leap into the water below" (pages 91-92).  

Exile. Hasn't been back since. Because he can't, because of the danger or expense, or because he chooses not to? Questions for all exiles, expatriates, refugees and immigrants. In this case, the scene is from a bridge over the River Seine in Paris. 

“'He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world'” (page 99). Sounds like a good idea to me.

“Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways. Weak is another way of putting it” (page 125). 

“She is French, after all. Madame is a snob but not a prude” (page 132). 

“They promised her the words to an opera and the history of everyone who has ever lived” (page 181). 

“. . . the first thing Miss Toklas asked me was whether I had a recipe for gazpacho.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you learn it in Spain?’

‘No.’

‘Then it is best to forget it.’

‘Oh'" (page 211). 

Today's Rune: Signals.

Monique Truong's 'The Book of Salt:' Take One

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003, 2004) takes her readers into the 1920s and 1930s milieu of French Indochina (Indochine française) and France through the eyes of a gay Vietnamese cook working in three spheres: the Governor-General's house, on board ocean-crossing ships, and in the service of two Americans-in-France -- Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A novel that is both absorbing and consciousness-raising, The Book of Salt delivers.

Truong writes in vivid detail of both food and social relationships. We see Binh's family system (particularly his place in relation to his father, mother, and brother Minh), Binh's friendships with fellow travelers, and his arc of time working for the intense and fussy Stein and Toklas.  

Several characters tell stories, usually short ones, throughout the novel, with Binh commenting upon their style and manner. "That, for Bão, was of course the whole point of telling the basket weaver’s story. No matter who else may be present, Bão was the hero in all of his stories" (page 56). Don't we all know storytellers who put themselves in the starring role as hero?

Binh enjoyed, as a kid, his mother's creativity in storytelling; her tales rarely remained the same over time:  “While my mother’s hands followed a set routine, her stories never did. They were free to roam, to consider alternative routes, to invent their own ways home, especially in the retelling" (page 81). And: "For my mother and me, the story of Father Augustine was like any other, a thing to be repeated and retold. A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word" (page 165). The Book of Salt is such a gift. 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life' (2003): Take II

A wee bit more from Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Ben Franklin (1705/1706-1790) was a thinker and doer, a writer, a printer, a satirist, a promoter of books, a lover of libraries and postal services and lightning rods. He was fueled by a lifelong "gift of curiosity." He enjoyed solitude as well as social networking. At all ages and in all the places he traveled, he kept engaged with the world around him. He believed in making things better in pragmatic ways, whether postal delivery or air quality in fledgling cities.

Benjamin Franklin also had enemies. "He was on the side of religious tolerance rather than evangelical faith" (page 477); he was both viscerally and rationally opposed to the dogmas of the Puritans and strongly against fanatical poltroons in general. The likes of a Ted Cruz would have disgusted him, but also inspired his biting satire.

Isaacson quotes John Adams' reflections on Mr. Franklin later in life (in 1815): 

"He had a vast imagination . . . He had wit at will . . . He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. . ." (pages 477-478)

Franklin's Reception at the Court of France, 1778. Anton Hohenstein.

If you think of Ben Franklin, what's the first or second or third thing that pops into your mind?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life' (2003): Take I

Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Most if not all people reading these words will have heard at least something about Benjamin Franklin. What Isaacson provides is a coherent overview of Franklin's entire life. 

Ben (1705/1706-1790) was quite a character. Mix a little of Thomas Edison with Voltaire, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, Donald Trump, Gore Vidal and Neil deGrasse Tyson and presto -- one might catch a glimpse of the nine lives of Ben Franklin. Seriously, he was that multifaceted, quite capable of thriving in the year 2016.

Of Franklin, Isaacson notes: "there was joy in his antic 
curiosity. . ." He was not "motivated merely by his quest for the practical . . . In general, he would begin a scientific inquiry driven by pure intellectual curiosity and then seek a practical application for it" (pages 129-130). 

Of Franklin's many social connections: "Franklin only occasionally forged intimate bonds with his male friends, who tended to be either intellectual companions or jovial club colleagues. But he relished being with women, and he formed deep and lasting friendships with many. For him, such relationships were not a sport or trifling amusement, despite how they might appear, but a pleasure to be savored and respected" (page 165). 

Politically, Ben Franklin was most often a pragmatist and a centrist: "Though a populist in many ways, he was wary of the rabble. His outlook, as usual, was from the perspective of a new middle class: distrustful of [both] the unwashed mob and the entrenched elites" (page 212).

Franklin provides an endless font of stories and ideas, many of them very relevant to the 21st century. 

To be continued.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Andrew Dalby's 'Bacchus: A Biography' (2003)

While still slowly going through a hefty book on Mary and her many manifestations, I finished two nifty books by Andrew Dalby, one on Venus / Aphrodite here and here, and one on Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus: Bacchus: A Biography (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004). There's intertwining of content in all three. An important shared element is wine.  

Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus has a rich life story throughout the Mediterranean regions that is depicted widely in art and text. Dalby shows how the Macedonians took this mythology with them through the Middle East and all the way to India, breathing new wine into old wineskin, as it were. 

The origins of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus proceed backward from the present through artists, poets, philosophers, dramatists and various other types of writers, through the Romans and Greeks to at least 3200 years ago -- probably further back than that. 

What is the origin of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus? As Dalby succinctly puts it: "You can try to find the original story, but there is no original story." (Bacchus: A Biography, p. 146). That's daunting, haunting, mysterious -- and cool. 

The mythology of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus was well-known to early Christians, and to observant later Christians, too.  One of the more interesting connections is through "The Marriage of Cana" in the Bible (Book of John 2: lines 1-11). This scene is discussed in the Mary book, too, because Mary inspires the action. When the wedding party runs out of wine, Mary makes note of it, and Jesus performs the miracle of turning water into wine.

Which makes me wonder how some later Christian sects could ever justify their rejection of wine or any other spirits in their formal gatherings or even at home. Jesus didn't turn wine into water, he turned water into wine. But these eccentric sects reject drinking completely. For instance, the Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints); Methodists (traditionally); Southern Baptists; "Dunkers" (at least the Dunker from Maryland I once knew); Seventh-day Adventists (Ben Carson is a member, and Mitt Romney is a Mormon); certain Evangelicals; and so on. 

Islam is against wine and spirits in principle, although Sufis and various artist and mystic types have demonstrated different interpretations that allow and celebrate it. 

Finally, Jains and Sikhs shun wine and all spirits. 

Personally, I can't become too excited about any religion or sect that shuns wine or its alternatives, nor would I want to join them -- any of them.  

And so, back to Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus: a salute, with wine, is in the offing. 

Today's Rune: Joy.      

Milwaukee, Minnesota (2003)

If you approach Allan Mindel's Milwaukee, Minnesota (2003) as part archetypal fairy tale, part darkly comic modern "heartland" story, you can relax into it without qualm. Definitely this is true: twelve years since its release and three viewings down the pike, I continue to enjoy it -- a small independent film that holds up well. 

Besides the handful of actors (all with something to recommend in their performances), there are striking visual contrasts (as in the image above) within the purview of Bernd Heinl, director of photography, and for the ears, there's a cool wintry soundtrack by Michael Convertino and Robert Muzingo (even a little backwards-looping music). 

Milwaukee, Minnesota centers around Albert (last name Burroughs, no less, played by Tory Garity, whose mother is no less than Jane Fonda), a savant of some kind, wildly successful at winning ice fishing contests while living with his control-freak mother. 

Who, you may ask, is Albert's father? There's a little mystery for you right off the bat. 

Why, suddenly, does Jerry James, a roving incarnation of evil (banality and all) -- arriving from Chicago as if escaped from a parallel Coen brothers' universe, convincingly played by Randy Quaid -- roll into town?  

Why on earth is the movie called Milwaukee, Minnesota, and who is Mr. McNally (played aptly by Bruce Dern) -- as in the publisher of maps?

Why is Gary (Josh Brolin) wearing modified women's undergarments? What exactly is Gary's connection to "the Lady" (played by Holly Woodlawn, as in "Holly came from Miami F-L-A / Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.")?

What about grifter Tuey (Alison Folland) and her hypochondriac brother Stan (Hank Harris)?  Hint: how Tuey and Albert respond to one another is a key element in the film.

Milwaukee, Minnesota, in its overall feel, reminds me of Wim Wenders' 1977 film Der Amerikanische Freund / The American Friend (that one starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz). And at certain times, Troy Garity's Albert strongly resembles Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock, protagonist in The Graduate (1967). In addition to a certain physical resemblance, Hoffman was ten years older than his character was supposed to be at the time of filming, and both actors were about thirty years old when playing their respective roles -- in both cases they are memorable and a little off-kilter.
  
Today's Rune: Harvest.

Whatever Subject

I'm happy, pleased and proud to have fulfilled another long-standing goal in my life's quest: reading the complete essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), a beautiful set, 1045 pages in Frame's translation, very rooted in Montaigne's times but also in classical Greco-Roman antiquity, a double bonus.

Montaigne has a very contemporary feel. One can easily imagine having a conversation with him in the 21st century; nor would he be surprised by much today even though more than 400 years have passed since he completed his life's work. Montaigne is the epitome of humanity in our most thoughtful and self-reflective moments.

"Any topic is equally fertile for me . . . Let me begin with whatever subject I please, for all subjects are linked with one another."  

-- Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York, London, Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Everyman's Library 259. Pages 810-811.  

My philosophy exactly, the primary rationale behind "Erik's Choice."

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

The Mosaic of the Search

Truly digging the writings of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). He is like a conduit between the present and his time of some 400-500 years ago, and between his time to the classical writers of "antiquity" (notably Roman and Greek). Dig into Montaigne and you pick up a lot that is of enduring relevance.

"Put into his head an honest curiosity to inquire into all things; whatever is  unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed . . . He will inquire into the conduct, the resources, and the alliances of this prince or that. These are very pleasant to learn and very useful to know."*

*Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame (Everyman's Library 259. New York: Knopf, 2003), page 139 (from essay 26). 

Pictures from an exploration of New Orleans' French and Spanish quarter.

How to pronounce Montaigne? Here's a link.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

The Great Blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada

For those who found themselves on this date ten years ago located within any swath of North America ranging from Detroit to Toronto to Manhattan, here's an oft-evocative writing prompt: "How did you respond to the Great Blackout of 2003?"

I've already gotten more than 100 responses so far, forming a mosaic of tales tall and short, muted and loud. The folks trapped in an elevator when the power failed. The heat. The food sizzling on grills in backyards and alleyways. The mad dashes from place to place grand and small. Generators. Boozing. Car radios. Dancing in the streets. Bartering by flashlight. All of it and more! How about you? 

Of course, some folks ain't never even done heard of nothing like such a thing. But there ya go, that's the way of the world and all the people in it. Go ask them that's stuck in Cairo or Aleppo on this date today, in the year 2013. Or in the parlance of our day:

***What?***

Today's Rune: Journey.   

To Think Outside the Box, First You Need the Box

I happily read some more pages out of Twyla Tharp's inspiring marvelous wonderful beautiful nifty-fifty lovely helpful tome, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide (with Mark Reitner;* New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Taking it closely, nice.

Who is Twyla Tharp? 

Twyla Tharp is a famous artist -- choreographer, dancer and so on. She will be 72 next Monday.

Once you've heard the name Twyla Tharp -- unless it goes in one ear and out the other, or you literally cannot hear -- you remember.

Once you've seen the name Twyla Tharp -- unless it goes in one eye and out the other, or you literally cannot see or have no working memory -- you remember.

Twyla Tharp first flew across my radar screen via The Catherine Wheel (1981), but she did a gazillion projects before that and has since done a gazillion more.

Now you know a little something about Twyla Tharp if you didn't already; if it's still not clicking, check her out on Wikipedia or something. Live a little!

This is all leading up to the title of Chapter 5 in the book: Before You Can Think out of the Box, You Have to Start with a Box.

In this chapter, Twyla Tharp gives examples of her project boxes, from ideas and conception to completion and archiving. Real simple approach to production. Real good one, too. More on the practical use of boxes (or other containers) in the next "post."

Above: From Jon Ronson's pithy 2008 documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. Containers come in many colors, shapes and sizes nowadays. All aboard for funtime!    

Today's Rune: Protection. *Mark Reiter is Owner, The Reiter Agency and has co-written, edited, represented and/or written many a book.

 

Hello, My Name Is . . .

Before I get back to reading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide (2003), here's a little something she delves into: the power of names. Her real name, she observes, inspired her to do something different in life, and for that she's abundantly thankful. But, she also notes, anyone can rename themselves if they so choose, and for whatever reason. Maybe it's a symbolic religious choice, or a political one. Or maybe one feels inspired by something completely different. Maybe a person takes a shine to a moniker given by others, or decides to take up a stage name, or a pen name.

Now we're getting into all sorts of identity dimensions. 

Tharp dives deeper into the idea, but that's without me reaching for the book and quoting anything else outright.

One type of name is the one name. Off the top of my head, there are such folks as Prince, or the Artist Formerly Known as Prince; Madonna; Twiggy; Sade; the great Voltaire; Adele; Selena.

Another type combines two names, like Lady Gaga and Iggy Pop, Joey Ramone, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious.

Others take a middle name, or go with initials, keeping their gender or other variable mysterious, often to break down or outflank barriers of some kind.

What do you think? Have you toyed with your name over the years? Was there a trigger or inspiration? Do you emphasize, like or prefer part of your name? Or have you ever transformed your name entirely like Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali?

 

Today's Rune: Partnership.  

  

In the Loop

Amando Iannucci's In the Loop (2009): frenetic like Fawlty Towers, inventively invective-ridden like Deadwood -- imagine Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) playin' the Dozens. If that doesn't bring it home, maybe you've seen Wag the Dog or Wrong is Right? In the Loop has more snap. More bite. And here, we're talking about a devilishly blistering satire of the Anglo-American policy push for the Invasion of Iraq and resulting debacle, that crazy little thing called the Iraq War (2003-2011).

  



















With In the Loop, we go behind the scenes, then watch with horror as VIPs and their attendants run amok, screaming on mobile phones, bumbling from one cock-up to another while fiendishly plotting behind each other's backs. 

Besides the imagery of a blizzard of mobile phones / cellphones and tsunamis of insults, In the Loop delivers "the emotional truth" of the rush to war, sensible opposition to that rush, and -- if you stick with it all the way through -- a well-timed conclusion. The actors -- including James Gandolfini as an American general dubious of the rising chorus for war exactly because it's based on such a flimsy pretext -- are sharp, with a grand party mix of British and Americans. Welcome to the madhouse or, as Scotsman Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, pictured in the Shepard Fairey-like "poster" above) puts it rather succinctly early on, watch out for "ass-spraying mayhem."

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Biographie eines Blicks / The Impassioned Eye

Heinz Bütler’s documentary Henri Cartier-Bresson: Biographie eines Blicks / The Impassioned Eye (2003; DVD 2006) takes a non-linear look at the 20th photographer-artist, who makes several "gimlet-eyed" quips. Judging from this film, Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was still mischievous right to the end. It'd be helpful to read at least a summary of his life before watching this, I think.

My notes follow. Most of the phrases come from Cartier-Bresson himself, as translated into English in the original.  

“What patience – that’s what you need. Actually it’s impatience.”

2^nd asst. to Jean Renoir – he showed up and gave Renoir some photos, asked for a job – and Renoir gave him one

Interaction of people with their surroundings

To be a good photographer you just to have live, then life will give you pictures . . .

You have to take pictures because it fills you with life . . .

That’s photography – you have to seize the moment . . . that’s the joy of taking pictures

People in settings

Music and outings, roaming, ever roaming

Simple observation – look

Another photographer says: “a single instant can reveal all the ambiguity of the visible"

Isabelle Huppert – a great photo has a musical feel to
it . . . it’s a little like theatre, in fact . . . I think he’s telling us about himself when he’s telling us about the world

Mexico, China, India, Harlem, Mississippi, civil rights

Arthur Miller: America is a place of extremes

There’s a natural geometry in what we see . . . You feel, you see, the surprised eye responds

Do you see the pigs? They’re interested in everything . . .

Isabelle: He was everywhere

Henri:  eye, mind and heart had to be aligned

Patterns – geometry is the foundation

On Calder: I liked him a lot . . . you couldn’t understand a word he was saying . . .

Isabelle: a moment of truth

Henri: Portraits are the most difficult. Everything is fleeting . . . (example of brief flashing smile on Coco Chanel’s face before she went hard as nails again)

Take care of your [camera] eye

Truman Capote

This moment that comes out of movement

Get close enough to feel something but [remain] detached enough not to get too involved

There’s no law – no rule

Reading Rimbaud as POW during WW2, perennially escaped prisoner in his psyche (and he did finally escape)

Someone notes: he had an innate feeling for politics and international events

Miller: fundamentally a tragic vision

You never know what you’re getting into

Drawing, other art forms into his 90s

Looks at a painting in a museum – he asks, what can you do after this? Get good and drunk

Martine Franck (1938-2012) – her legs attracted his camera eye, among other things

Surrealists, interaction over the years

Memory is so strange. Proust had a lot to say about that

Everything lives on . . .

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Luis Buñuel: Mon dernier soupir

Thorougly enjoying Luis Buñuel's Mon dernier soupir (1982) / My Last Sigh (1983). The version I'm now reading is the University of Minnesota Press edition, Abigail Israel translation, 2003. "Jean-Claude Carrière . . . An attentive listener and scrupulous recorder during our many long coversations . . . helped me write this book" -- from the preliminaries. 

Buñuel (1900-1983) comes at things from an interesting perspective. He was born in a Spanish village that retained Medieval rhythms for many centuries. He experienced that lifestyle, followed by the bulk and tumult of the 20th century, starting with the Great War of 1914-1918, proceeding through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Cold War. He was a boy at the dawn of the cinema and eventually became a master at making movies right into the 1970s, stopping just long enough for this "last sigh" of a memoir. The things he saw and the changes he lived through must have been astonishing -- luckily he goes into some of them here.  

Another thing that becomes clearer from Buñuel's description is how much the Spanish Civil War seems remarkably like the Greek Civil War and the Russian Revolutions and Civil War, how like the Mexican Revolution, the Irish Civil War and also how like today's Syrian Civil War. People like to divide and fight. We're digital people with analog dreams. Buñuel gets at this also in La mort en ce jardin / Death in the Garden (1956) and Jean-Luc Godard does it in Les Carabiniers / The Carabineers (1963). Beyond the artists, though, as George Santayana put it, "Only the dead have seen the end of war" (1922).  

Today's Rune: Protection.    

Código 46

There may have been something in the air or the water or the ether or the Zeitgeist just around 2003 and 2004. Whatever the case may have been, a cluster of movies came out in that time bubble and all seem to overlap in this way: they are pensive, offbeat and a little eerie and they all contain elements of beauty. Here are four for the ages:

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003)

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 (2003)

Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 (2004)

Each of these films has a science fiction feel -- but they are also in the here and now, the near past and the near future. They have an international, cosmopolitan edge. And they collectively remind me of something Luis Buñuel's wrote via My Last Sigh (translated by Abigail Israel; University of Minnesota Press, 2003): "You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. . ."   Indeed, that's a motivation for maintaining "Erik's Choice" and "Speak, Memory: Time Regained," tending to memories individual and collective -- dreams, history, imagination.

Today's Rune: Flow.

Zoë Heller: The Believers

Zoë Heller understands people exceedingly well. It's almost eerie how she can see the world from various points of view, with telling detail. In The Believers (2008), the plot revolves around the immediate family of Joel Litvinoff, a high-powered civil rights lawyer mostly at the point where things go awry: Audrey (his English wife), daughters Rosa and Karla, adopted son Lenny, and Joel's mother Hannah. There are others. The main backdrop is post-9/11 New York City, on the verge of the Iraq War.    

As in What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal (2003), Zoë Heller masterfully delves into her characters and milieu. Everything works in tandem as sentences become paragraphs, paragraphs become chapters and chapters become a novel. Heller can set the scene in a single sentence. Here's a married couple on an important day: "When Karla woke at six, Mike was already up and creeping about the room in his underpants." (p. 316). Here's another one: "Audrey looked around, wondering how long Jean was going to talk about nature." (p. 273). Another thing to note about Heller is her lexicon, a compelling mix of British and American English, slang and all. I find her a complete joy to read.

Today's Rune: Wholeness.