Limping

I stepped on a fancy Hot Wheels ambulance. It had sharp tail fins. It made a dime-sized crater in the arch of my foot.

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A few recent club transfers involving Ecuadorians:

• Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton to Milan (permanent transfer)
• Piero Hincapié from Leverkusen to Arsenal (loan with purchase option)
• Kendry Páez from Chelsea to Strasbourg (temporary loan)
• Jeremy Sarmiento, Brighton’s last remaining Ecuadorian, to Cremonese (another loan)

It was expected that Joel Ordóñez and Kevin Rodríguez would be swooped up from Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise, respectively; but they weren’t. So, they’ll have to spend another season lighting up the Belgian league.

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Ecuador’ll play in Paraguay tomorrow night. We’ve qualified for the World Cup. Paraguay is on the World Cup’s doorstep.

So, our motivation is low, Paraguay’s is high, and Paraguay is playing better than usual (if nowhere near as well as from 1996 to 2011).

And we’ve only ever lost in Asunción.

Still, I’d wager, we’ll earn our first point there. Our defense just doesn’t let in goals.

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Current mini-book: Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1956), the inspiration for the novels of Sjöwall & Wahlöö. Inspired by the show Dragnet, which every other cop procedural is indebted to, e.g. the one that goes:

In the criminal justice system

Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous

In New York City

The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies

Are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit

These are their stories

(Dun, dun)

Cop Hater is set in New York, but the place names have been changed.

Wikipedia says the first edition has 166 pp. and the revised edition has 236. I must be reading the text of the first edition. In my omnibus, the novel’s page count is 116.

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Current late-night viewing: Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), starring Canadians who haven’t crossed over to Hollywood. That, in itself, is refreshing. I’m also enjoying the lingo. Royal Canadian Mounted Police = RCMP = The Horsemen. I keep expecting a guy on horseback to show up and harangue the cops at the precinct in Downtown Vancouver, but no, it’s always a twerp in a suit.

Lots of autopsies are performed. The nude bits are blurred out (unlike on Britain’s Silent Witness, which uses famous guest actors to play the corpses).

Da Vinci streams, free, via various apps.

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I think the weather has started cooling for good this summer. We’re getting a nice rain tonight. The back lawn is about nine inches tall. I would’ve mowed on Saturday, but my foot had a painful gash in it.

Sjöwall & Wahlöö

In spare moments, I’ve been reading The Terrorists (1975), the last book of Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s crime series.

It begins with a scene of grotesquely comical political violence in South America.

My favorite policeman in the series, Gunvald Larsson, is on hand for the occasion. A fastidious dresser, he’s delighted to find that the banana republic he’s visiting has excellent tailors. (Apparently, tailoring is no longer practiced as a skilled craft in Sweden.) He commissions a new suit to be made for him.

This suit is, of course, ruined during the political upheaval.

A little later, in Stockholm, a young woman is brought to trial for robbing a bank. It’s proven that the “robbery” was a misunderstanding. All the young woman had done was to ask for money and to place a bag on the teller’s counter for the money to be put in. The teller had interpreted these actions as extremely threatening.

These facts are drawn out through the testimony of two other recurring characters, the bumbling patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvastmo.

Next, a famous pornographer is fatally coshed in his mistress’s house. The now very high-ranking detective Martin Beck is assigned to the case. He and a junior detective, Benny Skacke, spend a morning watching one of the pornographer’s movies, Love in the Midnight Sun.

At first, the junior detective winces uncomfortably at all the nudity. Then he yawns. The movie is very boring and unerotic.

This is clearly a lampooning of those Swedish “masterpieces” of the late 1960s, I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), which are now in the Criterion Collection. (No, I haven’t watched them.)

As I’ve read through its ten books, Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s series has reminded me of something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something with lots of recurring, cartoon-like characters and scenes of wry screwball comedy.

Now I know what it is.

It’s Tintin.

The locked room

It’s the middle of my spring break.

The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.

But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!

[Sigh.]

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I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)

Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.

Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)

The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.

It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.

February fragments

Four weeks after having sprained my ankle, I walk much better; but my ankle still hurts all day long.

Karin drives me to work each morning, what with my being injured; and when my shift ends, I walk home the scenic way, upon a riverside path that’s much less icy than my usual route.

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I’ve been trudging through Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I just finished Ghosts, the second installment. Some fifteen years ago, I read the first book, City of Glass, and vowed not to again; well, now I have. The second time was better. I suppose it was effective training to have read, in the interim, novels like Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 in which the characters stay holed up for long periods with their thoughts. But in those novels, the long, inactive waits are punctuated with tasteful elevator music and wistful sippings of Cutty Sark. In Auster’s books, the waiting turns the protagonists into bums. Anyway, my objective is to get through the third book in Auster’s trilogy, The Locked Room, so that I can then read Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Locked Room and write down the same title twice consecutively in my reading journal.

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The kitties have been chasing each other around the apartment all the last hour. Jasper trapped Ziva behind the couch for a while, but Karin coaxed him away.

Karin’s bible reading

“Genesis offers many interesting tidbits,” says Karin.

She has begun a new reading cycle, using a one-year bible (New Living Translation, 1996).

She reads to me:

“The valley was filled with tar pits. And as the army of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some slipped into the tar pits, while the rest escaped into the mountains” (Genesis 14:10).

You could place your finger onto the text at random and, more often than not, end up with some such tidbit.

Why tar pits?

Their precise spiritual significance is not clear to us. We can only speculate what this passage meant to early readers.

Or, maybe, there is no spiritual significance: the tar pits are mere literary props, included for the sake of drawing the reader into the story, in the way that certain Swedish mystery novelists mention their detectives’ every cup of coffee.

Or, maybe, the tar pits really existed at that location, some people’s slipping into them was a plain fact, and Genesis records it for that reason alone.

Karin then reads a psalm. She comments: “You know, Sweetie, King David was kind of a weird dude, weeping almost every night.”

Not so weird, I think.

Closing credits (2018)

A rainy New Year’s Eve. Still, 2018 ends with more warmth than 2017 did.

This is my 120th entry of the year. I’ve written ten entries each month.

For providing material to discuss, I again thank Karin, Jasper, and Ziva; my tutees; my blood relations; and Brianna and other in-laws.

Additionally, this year, I acknowledge:

The poets.

Boca Juniors and River Plate.

The Mormons, who, until mid-October, were very friendly to Karin & me. They must have then given up trying to convert us.

Brett Kavanaugh.

My dissertation adviser for – so far – allowing various prolongments.

The St. Joseph River for declining to flood our apartment complex.

The city of Austin.

Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö for authoring the Martin Beck mysteries.

Aimee-Ffion Edwards for acting in four of the best screenworks I viewed this year:

• Skins (a lewd TV soap opera about Bristol’s teens; not for the faint of heart);
• Detectorists (a gentle sitcom – featuring the excellent Toby Jones – about rural, amateur metal detectorists; quite suitable for the faint of heart);
• Luther (a quasi-fantastical crime show starring Idris Elba; for the great of heart); and
• Queen & Country (the long-overdue, surprisingly un-cynical, cinematic continuation of John Boorman’s Hope and Glory).

I also thank the moviemakers of 1996.

And I thank our new church, which welcomed Karin & me during a rather turbulent period. We watched over the two- and three-year-olds during many services. Starting in the spring, we also wrote, printed out, and folded each week’s bulletin. (Mercifully, that task will soon be performed by a new secretary.) The most rewarding event each week was the adults’ Sunday School class. For authoring that class’s discussion guides, I heartily thank the late John Stott.

Finally: thanks to everyone who offered money and prayers on our behalf. Please pray for me to complete my degree soon. Karin & I long to get out of this rut in which we’ve been living.

The joy of getting, pt. 2

Karin & I went to four Christmas gatherings. All were relatively painless, and some were quite nice.

As mentioned a few entries ago, I participated in the gift exchange held by Karin’s mother’s family. I’d been assigned to buy gifts for Brianna. She’d asked for clothes and toys with decorations of Hufflepuff – her Harry Potter “house” – and of Bob’s Burgers, the TV show. My selections were very well-received: especially, the Bob’s Burgers-themed Clue game, which we all played after we finished eating the Christmas meal. (Brianna was the murderer, of course.)

Brianna also had drawn my name for the exchange. She used her $50 budget to order three books for me, all of them new, though I’d submitted a much longer wish list of used books. Two of the new books arrived in time for Christmas; one is still in the mail.

The three books are:

• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (not yet arrived);
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro; and
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Due to my puny haul, and out of pity, Karin bought me the last two of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals (used).

At the gathering of Karin’s dad’s family, I was given a book called A Journal for Jordan, the heartrending true story of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq and the woman and child he left behind. This, apparently, is a “joke” gift that has been passed around between all the family members.

I also was given a t-shirt depicting Schrödinger’s cat:

The cat is a recurring topic of discussion in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which Karin’s dad’s family enjoys. I don’t watch that sitcom – it’s about nerds – but I do like cats and metaphysics (which is not the same discipline as physics). I talked to Karin’s dad’s family about this horrifying philosophical paper to show that I appreciated their gift.

The man on the roof

Karin & I rested all of yesterday while Brianna and her friends roamed the streets. We’re still sick – Karin is sicker than I am – but not so sick that we can’t go to work or that Brianna can’t go to school.

I finished reading two other novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (seven down, three to go). Afterward, I learned that in 1976, one of those novels, The Abominable Man, was cinematically adapted as Mannen på taket (The Man on the Roof). This movie is something of a classic. It’s said to have been stylistically influenced by The French Connection. And it’s got Sweden’s “signature” action sequence, in which a rifleman shoots at police helicopters from a rooftop.

Here’s a poster:

And here’s another:

The second poster shows my favorite policeman in the book series, the obnoxious Gunvald Larsson. He has a towel on his head because his scalp has been grazed by a bullet.

I’d very much like to see this movie, but I don’t know where to find a version with English subtitles.

Reading report

For the third time, I’m trying to read Rebecca. Some passages are very good. Some could have been trimmed down a bit. In general, the book emits a nice, festering scent of dread.

I was inspired to try out Rebecca again because I’d just finished a du Maurier-like James Bond novel: The Spy Who Loved Me. What a weird little book. Its narrator, a young woman, juxtaposes her sordid past with her terrifying present, in which two monstrous goons pursue her through a nightmarish landscape. Toward the end, James Bond becomes the narrator’s life-saver and lover. (I haven’t spoiled the plot, most of which can be discerned by reading the table of contents.) Bond behaves like a douchebag.

In the Bond novel, the haunted past is, for the most part, linearly recounted – not woven in along with the present terror, a technique that du Maurier skillfully employs in Rebecca. Ian Fleming should’ve written a second draft. But, apparently, he never did that with his novels. Not surprisingly, The Spy Who Loved Me was poorly received: none of the book’s plot was incorporated into the movie of that title, and Fleming made the book unavailable as a paperback for as long as he could.

These two fantastical novels have been something of a break from the realism of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals, of which I’ve read five in the last two months. I’m halfway through that series. I now have no trouble identifying the funny parts. When certain characters appear – especially the unrefined inspector Gunvald Larsson and the lazy patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant – it’s a signal that humor is forthcoming. It’s the despairing kind of humor that says, “On such pillars as these, society rests.” The Swedish welfare state is criticized for allowing the lower orders to distract themselves with drugs, drink, and sex while the upper orders squirrel away the crucial assets. It’s a criticism from the Left: it explains why the workers of the world aren’t uniting.

I am gotten the better of by the Swedes

Last night, we had quite a nice storm, with bright lightning flashes and sheets of rain. Ziva ran to the bedroom, to hide. Later, she poked her little face around the blinds and peered out at the rain. In our neighborhood, there was just a little flooding, and a small section of our street was blocked off.

Today was my last workday of the semester. I’ll be at home for one week, and then Summer Session I will commence.

Today, also, I finished reading Roseanna, the first mystery in the famous series by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – perhaps the most “procedural” crime novel I’ve ever read. No quirky investigators here. Just meticulous ones. I found it quite gripping.

Reputedly, the book also is humorous, although, to me, that aspect was rather faint. I think I knew which parts were the funny ones. Oh, well: Swedes 1, John-Paul 0.

I’ve owned the first four of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s books for many years, and now it looks as if I’ll be acquiring the other half-dozen.