The Mystery Engine

This week, I've been reading my first Agatha Christie novel: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I've read a few mystery novels before, and I've never really liked them. I either guess the murderer way too early, which leaves me bored and impatient, or I'm completely lost and confused and I just want the author to tell me who did it already.

But Christie is different. Despite the shortness of her novels, her characters are astonishingly complex and surprising and funny, and she colors them richly with just a few deft strokes of very British humor. She also doesn't write straight up "whodunnits," as far as I can tell. What propels the reader through the book isn't solving the mystery, it's figuring out what each character is hiding--it's discovering what each person wants, who each person really is, and what he or she believes that they must hide from the world. It makes for fascinating reading.

I suspect that writers of bad mystery novels tend to think the wrong way about the mystery genre: people don't really care about crime or culpability. Instead, I think that we all care unfailingly about people, the complexities of the human mind and human motivations. As in all literature, people and their personalities, our neighbors and their passions and secrets, are the engines of mystery novels, not the mystery itself.

Nerd Girls

Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo

Annie Potts from Ghostbusters

Tavi Gevinson, author of The Style Rookie, a fashion blog

Me, newly shorn and be-spectacled

Six Things Worth Knowing About Me

1. I'm the kind of person who has to carry a Band-Aid in my backpack at all times. I used to carry Neosporin, too. If placed in the right habitat, I'm almost comically prone to cuts and scrapes and bruises.
2. I kind of love bad weather. I hate getting cold or wet like anyone else, but there's something I enjoy about a semi-catastrophic weather forecast. Snow? Tornadoes? Big windy electrical storms? Exciting! I think it comes from all those tornado drills and warnings in elementary school. We'd all get to hang around in the basement where the kilns and art projects were kept. We were safe-ish and bored and we got to goof off for an hour or two. When bad weather is imminent, the world seems to sing with gleeful possibility: I always know that true disaster is unlikely but that I'm pretty much guaranteed an hour or so of a break from my regular day.
3. When I was little, I used to run everywhere. I think it's a sign that, deep down, I'm pretty much excited about everything.
4. I really, really, really dislike fake laughter, especially the kind that ineffectually masks anger or displeasure or nervousness.
5. When I was younger, I never thought I would like getting socks for Christmas; having a sparklingly clean kitchen; NPR; or drinking boring old caffeine-free, sugarless herbal tea. Sometimes I wonder what else I'll come to enjoy as I get older. Watching the six o' clock news? Cooked spinach? Sweaters with ribbons and spangles on them? The sky's the limit!
6. I've never particularly wanted my life to be like a TV show or a movie (though I really wouldn't pass up meeting a time traveling adventurer in a snazzy suit, if given the opportunity), but I wouldn't mind life being a little bit more like a novel: it would show more unity, have clearer themes, and have most of the duller parts lopped out.
   

Enamored

I'm having one of those days where all I want to do is lay on my couch and read about a zillion books and do a little writing. Maybe I'm just growing weary of daleks daleks daleks all day long, but it's come upon me suddenly, the hunger for words. It happens. I've added five or six books to my Goodreads To Read shelf in the past few days. I want to read lots and lots of sci-fi and steampunk and cyberpunk and go back to my gloriously nerdy roots. I'm hungry not for high literature or for sentimental feeling or for postmodern ambiguity but for thinking. I want ideas, big, chewy, crunchy ideas with lots of vitamins and fiber and nutrition and maybe some sprinkles on top.

Anyway. You get the idea. It's lunch time, obviously. Here are some other things I'm enamored with:

• My new iPod Nano, which my lovely parents bought me for my birthday because they are awesome and because they love me
• Putting together lots of new playlists for my new iPod Nano after the gym tonight
• Laurell K. Hamilton's Meredith Gentry series. I mean, the woman can make faeries (faeries?! are you kidding me?) into fantastically creative and compelling mystery novels for adults. She is obviously some kind of genius.
• 70 degree days in November, warm breezes, cool skies, the chilled and rainy days to come.
• My birthday tomorrow. I plan on getting a massage, buying a bottle of red wine, ordering Indian take-out, and settling in for the night with a good book, which sounds like pretty much the best idea I've ever had.
• This brief essay by Lera Auerbach on The Best American Poetry blog. 
• This fantastically textured, moody, profoundly beautiful poem by Claudia Burbank on the same blog.

Enjoy, folks, and have a happy Monday.
---------------

Geranium

Thank you for the dead geranium, red
memory of a short-stemmed city.
For nickel shows, tea rooms, the rotten-egg
mill-smell that crept between the fretted sheets.
For elms that divided our limbs with dusk,
and twisted things in ash trays, girls lit with gin,
long trains moaning, the night in a plum.
Thanks, too, for captured Kaiser helmets stowed in attics,
the Alligator Man and Monkey Woman at the circus,
and rented clarinets, and dented trombones,
ladies in a savage dance, hair bound high.
Thanks, perhaps, for noon, the dark bird’s love call,
being born on ice, out of wolf, wolf.
For the stately progress of capped men
towards a gray chowder, something shaken by the gills.
And all that we devoured, and all that didn’t drown.
--Claudia Burbank

Halloween & Doctor Who

Halloween was a little disappointing this year. It used to be my favorite holiday, but as a grownup, I've gotten a little tired of dressing up for what usually turns out to be a disappointing, bar-fueled debacle. I used to love Halloween because it's about imagination and playfulness and not taking life too seriously. It's about dressing up and taking a chance on being somebody else for a night, and it's about laughing at death and all the other scary things that go bump in the night. I mean, it's a holiday centered around candy--candy, people! It's obviously awesome.

Or, if you live in a college town like I do, it's a holiday about getting schwasted, wearing stripper heels and a miniskirt, and yelling outside my bedroom window until 3:00 a.m.

Ugh. Obviously, I've become that cranky old lady who wishes all those damn kids would just put some clothes on and go to bed already.

Anyway. I went out with a few friends this year. It was a nice time, but I wish I'd had enough time to come up with a costume. Going out as just myself in a bar full of witches and Chilean miners and Anchorman characters was really a drag. But next year, I already know what I'm going to be:

"Party time, excellent, whoooo!" I wonder if I can find a Flowbee to carry around with me . . .

In other news, a friend recommended that I start watching Doctor Who now that I'm done with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm completely addicted now. 

If you don't know Doctor Who, it's a British sci-fi show that's been on BBC since the 1960s. It's about the Doctor (a time-traveling alien "bloke" with a penchant for saving the world) and his travels with whatever lady "companion" he picks up off the London streets. The show's premise (the bored Doctor explores the universe for fun and do-goodery) provides the show's writers with ample opportunity to combine wildly imaginative story lines with strange British slang ("wotcher!") and silly British humor.

Of course, Doctor Who is sometimes serious and dramatic and philosophical . . .

but usually it's just plain silly.

He fights goofy-looking aliens . . .

 

and old fashioned robots . . .

and even Satan when necessary . . .

 How could it not be the best thing ever?