OK, OK, OK: I've got more than a few quibbles with the six movies featuring Marvel Comics characters that led up to the box office record-breaking colossus that is Marvel's The Avengers (particularly the 2003 Hulk, directed by Ang Lee and starring Eric Bana as Dr. Bruce Banner, and Iron Man 2) -- quibbles which essentially boil down to (a) a lack of respect for the personalities of the characters and (b) an absurd urge to present said super-fellas as quite a bit less super than they are in the comics -- but, just as with the Borg, resistance is futile: The Avengers (can we just dispense with the "Marvel's" part of the title?) is, IMHO, the best Marvel-related movie featuring super-powered characters, period. (I'll still give the nod to The Incredibles for being the best superhero movie; although, I gotta admit, it's a close call.)

How much did I enjoy The Avengers? Well, two pieces of evidence tell the tale:

1. For the first time ever, I am seriously contemplating watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from start to finish. Previously, my longest exposure to Joss Whedon's oeuvre was the first two or three episodes of the late -- and apparently unlamented -- Dollhouse; I am now interested in seeing more of his work, particularly in light of his rep for giving the best lines and action sequences to his female characters. Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow ain't the Natasha Romanova that I know and love, but she ain't chopped liver either.
   
   
2. Despite my burning, raging, and manfully-throbbing desire to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus -- the sort-of prequel to the very first Alien movie (which Scott also directed) that opens in the U.S. on 8 June, and which has been promoted by a series of "the future is now" video clips on the Web -- I didn't think of the FREAKIN' AWESOME! trailer for it that played before The Avengers once the movie started. Well, after ten or fifteen minutes into the movie, anyway.
   

I also didn't think of the forthcoming (U.S. release date: 3 August) The Bourne Legacy movie starring Jeremy Renner, who played a very-different-from-the-comics Clint Barton/Hawkeye in The Avengers, even though I quite liked the first three Bourne movies and loved, loved, LOVED Renner in The Hurt Locker.

That's how much I feel for this movie, to paraphrase a cheesy song from the late 1970s by Ambrosia.

I've gotta see it again before it leaves the theatres. Maybe I'll take my youngest.

From Monday, 7 May through Saturday, 12 May, I read Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (NY: Pantheon Books [a division of Random House], 1969; English translation by Joan Tate; originally published in 1966 in Swedish as Mannen som gick upp i rök by P.A. Norstedt & Söner, Stockholm; 1st U.S. ed. [May 1969]; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 69-15536; 183 pps.); I checked this out via inter-library loan. This is the second of the ten Martin Beck mysteries/police procedurals collectively known as The Story of a Crime; I read the first book in the series, Roseanna, back in March, also courtesy of inter-library loan.


The work of a common law Marxist couple, The Story of a Crime is a series of police procedurals that take "a scalpel" to "the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type"; happily enough, the social critique is more implied in the first few books, so they can be read as straightforward mysteries. That said, Sjöwall and Wahlöö's critique is pretty implicit, and it would take a fairly inattentive reader to elide entirely over it.

First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police is ganked off of his late summer holiday in the Swedish archipelago by the Foreign Office, who want him to investigate the disappearance of a celebrity journalist named Alf Matsson; Matsson, whose brief is covering entertainment and sport figures, was last seen in Budapest, but the weekly tabloid that he works for has a long history of attacking the Swedish government: the F.O. suits want to resolve Matsson's disappearance before his paper publishes still further attacks against them. Beck's boss, Hammar, tells him that the Third Section (Counter-Espionage) investigated Matsson three months previously, but found nothing of interest (pps. 20-2; Chapter 4). It is Beck's dissatisfaction with his domestic situation -- he has long since fallen out of love with his wife, and feels no particular attachment to his teenaged children, a boy and a girl -- as much as his curiosity and his vague sense of being flattered that the Foreign Office specifically requested his services that prompts him to accept the assignment. (His salary is paid by the Foreign Office while he conducts their investigation.)

It is to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's credit that such a vague case -- which the F.O. wants conducted on the Q.T., to forestall other journalists from trumpeting the news and embarrassing the government -- proves to be as interesting as it does: the snarky references to James Bond movies (which would've been at about their peak of popularity in 1965-66), first by Beck's boss (p. 21), are meant to cast ridicule on the thinking and motivations of the Foreign Office hacks, who admit to being concerned that "'we might have another Wallenberg affair on our hands'" (p. 20; Chapter 3), referencing the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg from the Siege of Budapest in 1945, and his reported death in the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1947. While Beck is sent behind the Iron Curtain on his investigation, it's ironic that, "of all the capitals in the world, Budapest had the lowest crime rate" (p. 36; Chapter 7); sounding the theme of the brotherhood of man and that there is more that unites us than divides us, Beck eventually finds an agreeable comrade in Major Vilmos Szluka of the Budapest police, who observes, "'Being a policeman...is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse'" (p. 101; Chapter 17). (Keeping with the "fact" of the relative orderliness of Hungarian society, Szluka remarks, "'They have as many murders in New York in a week as we have in the whole country in a year'"; pps. 102-03.)

There are some interesting bits of trivia salted throughout the narrative: a hard-drinking Swedish journalist complains that beer is no longer served in moustache cups (p. 32; Chapter 6); Beck overhears two Swedish women in Budapest grousing about the quality -- or lack of -- toilet paper in foreign countries, sounding rather like stereotypical British tourists (p. 91; Chapter 15); there is information about the customs and passport controls of various European countries, particularly as related to travel between the West and the Soviet bloc; the fact that Hungarian coins in the 1960s at least were made of aluminium (p. 130; Chapter 22); and there's a hint of the divide in Swedish society between the urban north and rural (or, at minimum, provincial) south, when Beck, returning from Budapest, takes a taxi from Linhamn to Malmö, and thinks that the driver's "southern Swedish dialect...sounded...almost as incomprehensible as Hungarian" (p. 133; Chapter 22). (This divide was also alluded to in Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallender mystery, Faceless Killers.) But the things that most appealed to me about The Man Who Went Up in Smoke are its low-key, straightforward style; the lack of melodrama; the understated dialogue between Beck and his associates (and their everyday sarcasm: Beck, et al, don't talk like moonlighting stand-up comedians); the realistic portrayal of a would-be femme fatale (as in Roseanna, Sjöwall and Wahlöö show that it matters more how a woman acts than how a woman looks); and, most of all, the way that Beck's inner drift and dissatisfaction with his own life is implied through his actions. Indeed, the ending reverberates with a soul-crushing ennui that holds its own with anything in the work of John Cheever, Raymond Carver -- or, presumably, Richard Yates. I really hope that the series doesn't sink under the weight of the authors' political doctrine, as B. Traven's Jungle series ultimately did.

From Monday, 4 April through Thursday, 19 April, I read Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Roman Dusk (NY: Tor Books [Tom Doherty Associates, LLC], 2008 [copyright 2006 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro]; ISBN: 978-0-7653-1393-5; 352 pps.); this is yet another installment in her series of novels about the millennia-old, "compelling" vampire Count Saint-Germain (the 19th book in order of publication; the second book chronologically).


( I hold intimacy to be the highest expression of life one person may share with another. )

The May 2012 issue of Harper's (Vol. 324, No. 1944) has an especially infuriating "Annotation"; this is the regular two-paged feature wherein a rotating list of writers take a document and expound upon it, prizing out the backstory and nuance that might otherwise escape the attention of the casual reader.

The current issue's "Annotation" is titled "Unreconstructed: The federal government builds a shrine to its archenemy" by Daniel Brook, and glosses a brochure advertising the U.S. government's rebuilding of the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library, housed in the home-in-exile of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, called Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi; Hurricane Katrina put paid to the library (as well as "the mansion and other buildings on the property"; p. 40) in 2005, a mere seven years after the library opened.

Brook notes that "even the name of the library is meant to provoke," given that it "is not among the thirteen official presidential libraries supervised by the National Archives and Records Administration" and that it won't "house Davis's papers, the largest collection of which is at Rice University, in Houston" (p. 41). But it's this tidbit that really takes the biscuit:

"Beauvoir is overseen by the Mississippi division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a century-old organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers. Over the past decade, the group's national leadership has moved far to the right, promoting activist 'heritage defense' and purging moderate 'headstone polishers.' The Mississippi division, which successfully lobbied the state for the production of a Beauvoir commemorative license plate, has also proposed one dedicated to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the slave trader and Confederate cavalryman who became a founding member and early Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan."

-- p. 41

Brook also notes that Davis's "1,500-page memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" contains "an implicit defense of the postbellum Klan terrorism that disenfranchised the freedmen" (p. 40).

The takeaway then, Dear Reader, is that the United States federal government is financing the reconstruction of a monument to a man who approved of a terrorist organization that originally targeted blacks -- recently freed slaves -- but later expanded its brief to other ethnic and religious groups; and that it is very likely that the Mississippi state government will authorize a license plate honoring another man who helped found and then led said terrorist organization.

What a shining example of one's federal and state tax dollars at work.

Something that I forgot to mention in my review of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited that really bugged me: Waugh's repeated description of Julia Flyte, the eventual inamorata of the narrator, Charles Ryder, as "spidery-limbed" -- and Waugh's expectation that this denoted her attractiveness and desirability.

Now, I realize that, in the context of the post-World War I, "Bright Young Things" (in the UK) / flapper or "Roaring Twenties" (in the U.S.) era, where the beau ideal of feminine pulchritude was a boyish figure and shortish hair, a slim, somewhat flat-chested body was indeed thought to be the bee's knees. (I wish I could remember where I read that the whole boyish look for women came about from women trying to capture the attention of men who'd been in the trenches for two years or more and had become more accustomed to homosexual liaisons than encounters with women [and I would suspect that this was probably truer in England than it was in the U.S., simply because U.S. troops weren't in the meat-grinder nearly as long as England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Turkey, or even Russia were]; my best guess is that it was either in C.A. Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix, 2nd Edition, or George Chauncey, Jr.'s essay "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," collected in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Volume 1.)

However, I was left utterly unattracted -- indeed, nearly repulsed -- by such descriptions as this, in Chapter Seven of Book I:

"She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not reduce her to type."

--p. 179

Later, in Chapter One of Book II, Ryder refers to her as "that lovely, spidery child of nineteen" (p. 238) and as having lost, ten years after he first met her in 1923, "that fashionable, spidery look" (p. 239).

*Pause*

Uh, sorry; but when I read Julia described as being "spidery-limbed" and as a "lovely, spidery child of nineteen," I was not charmed by a wistful vision of a loved one's appearance upon first encounter; no, instead I thought of this*:



"Spidery-limbed." BRRRRRR


*The clip is from the anime Wicked City (1987; original title Yōjū Toshi; based on the first of the Wicked City novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi), not the 1992 live-action Hong Kong remake of same.

Yesterday was the last day before her vacation of someone who works in my division; she's flying back to the Philippines to visit family.

Her supervisor, a woman who's really old enough to know better, asked her why she wanted to go back to the jungle. The Pinoy's family doesn't come from a jungle any more than we here in metro Detroit do. (Well, maybe in the Guns N' Roses sense; but in the Mowgli / Rima / Tarzan / Bomba / Ka-Zar / Sheena sense? Not so much.)

One of her co-workers, someone whom she used to be casual buddies with, asked what "her people" did for recreation in the Philippines if they didn't have tv.

This co-worker got a cold shoulder; the supervisor got a nearly-snarled, "Why don't you look it up on Wikipedia?" in response to her query.

Damn. Forget the Tea Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, etc.: the real major political party in the U.S. is the Know Nothing Party.

I mean, ignorance must be bliss, 'cause there are so effin' many people who practice it. Sheeeeesh.

From Monday, 5 March to Wednesday, 4 April, I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945 [portions of the novel were previously published in abbreviated form in Town and Country]; 351 pps.); this is the original version, not the revised edition published in 1959, owing to Waugh's subsequent embarrassed distaste for the novel. The copy that I have includes a three-paged insert containing Christopher Morley's review of Brideshead Revisited, reprinted from the December 1945 Book-of-the-Month Club news, that was designed "to be pasted, if desired, to the flyleaf of the book." The jacket illustration is by Lester M. Peterson; if you remove the jacket, you will see a rather fraught, symbolic illustration engraved on the front cover.


( Spoilery spoilers ahead )

The missus went to Walmart last night to pick up some incidentals for Easter; among the items that she purchased were some sweet potatoes.

The cashier didn't know what they were, and rang them up as limes, which means that the missus was charged considerably less than she otherwise would've been, given that Walmart's limes were dirt-cheap (no pun intended).

*Pause*

I'm pretty sure that, since Walmart is headquartered in Arkansas, mistaking sweet potatoes for limes is cause for automatic termination. Not to mention failing the third grade.

O_o

The missus recently purchased an Amazon KindleFire on eBay. She has offered its occasional use to me, should I wish to check out a library book or purchase reading material on/for it. (Indeed, she let me read a free article by David Peace -- author of the Red Riding Quartet, The Damned Utd, and the Tokyo Trilogy [Tokyo Year Zero, Occupied City and Tokyo Regained] -- on it shortly after it arrived.)

After checking out the website of faustfatale and reading the first chapter of her latest opus, available for Amazon's Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook, I approached the missus about her offer:

ME: I'm thinking about buying a book for the Kindle; it's only $2.99.

HER: Okay....

ME: But I'm concerned that you won't let me buy it when you find out what the title is.

HER: Oh..?

ME: Yeah. It's Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick -- Double-D Double Cross.

HER: [glares at me silently]

ME: [glumly, after enduring several seconds of her withering stare] That's what I was afraid of.

From Monday, 19 March through Friday, 23 March (23 skidoo!), I read Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Roseanna (NY: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard [Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.]; 1993 [English translation by Lois Roth; Roseanna originally published by P.A. Norstedt & Soners Forlag, Stockholm, in 1965; English translation copyright 1967 by Random House, Inc.]; 212 pps.; ISBN: 0-679-74598-X), thanks to an inter-library loan.


Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a (common-law) wife and husband team who wrote the ten volume series of mysteries featuring a somewhat depressed police detective named Martin Beck; the series is collectively titled The Story of a Crime, and the fourth book, The Laughing Policeman, was made into an eponymous Hollywood movie in 1973 starring Walther Matthau as Beck's stand-in, Sgt. Jake Martin. (The setting was also changed from Stockholm to San Francisco.) Both Sjöwall and Wahlöö were Marxists, whose intention was "to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.'" Apparently, over the course of the series, Beck "serve[d] as the barometer of a changing atmosphere, reflecting shifts in the political, economic, social climate [of Sweden];" however, Roseanna is a straightforward police procedural (as are, purportedly, the second and third novels, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony).

The body of a naked brunette woman is discovered by workers dredging the Göta ("Gotha") Canal at the Borenshult lock; the investigation of her death is assigned to First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police. At this point, Beck is in his mid-thirties and in something of a middle-aged slump, both in his career ("Martin Beck wasn't chief of the Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties"; p. 10) and his marriage (he married his wife after a summer romance and an unexpected pregnancy; "One year after the birth of their daughter, there wasn't much left of the happy and lively girl he had fallen in love with and their marriage had slipped into a fairly dull routine"; p. 11). Nonetheless, the case of the mystery girl slowly galvanizes him, at least partially, from his mid-life drift; Beck and his team eventually learn, thanks to a lucky break, that the murdered woman was named Roseanna McGraw, a librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska (amusingly, for American readers, none of the Swedish cops have a very good idea as to exactly where Nebraska, never mind Lincoln, are). Roseanna was in her late twenties and was something of a free spirit, especially sexually, particularly for the time of the events of the novel (1964 or, at latest, 1965) and where she lived. Beck and his team receive some help by correspondence from a Detective Lieutenant with the unlikely name of Elmer Kafka ("Be vewy, vewy quiet: I'm hunting cockwoaches! HUH-HUH-HUH-HUH!"), but, even so, they're faced with the unenviable task of winnowing a field of nearly a hundred suspects scattered over half the globe, given that Roseanna was likely murdered on and dumped from one of the tourist boats that ply the Götha Canal and Lake Vättern.

Roseanna is a surprisingly engaging mystery; there are no spectacular set-pieces here, but there is a skilled presentation of believable police work spaced over the course of several months, with just enough acerbic humor to give the reader the idea that Beck and his colleagues are neither justice-loving automatons nor moonlighting comedians. There are hints of darker elements to some of the policemen's personalities (as, for example, the implied racism of the eidetic and buttoned-up Fredrik Melander, who remarks that they should look for two South African tourists "'with tom-tom drums'" and is incredulous that Turks should visit the Göta Canal [p. 56]; one wonders at anyone thinking that Afrikaners or Anglo-Africans communicated by "tom-toms," or at a supposedly absurdly well-informed detective not knowing of the Gastarbeiter agreement that West Germany had with Turkey from 1961, thanks largely to U.S. pressure on West Germany), but nothing so great as to be indicative of criminal behavior. There is a suggestion of the cultural gap between inhabitants of southern and northern Sweden (a doctor from southern Sweden is described as speaking "calmly, evenly and methodically"; p. 139) that is apparently the mirror image of that found in England (vis. the "northern monkeys / southern fairies" divide in the 1998 British heist movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, co-written and directed by Madonna's second ex-husband, Guy Ritchie), as well as a quietly alarming aside about the regularity of murder in Göteborg ("There was the traditional new year's murder in Gothenburg which was solved within twenty-four hours"; p. 175). There is a confusing reference to "Harrison's Law" in the transcript of an interview that Lt. Kafka conducted with one of Roseanna's ex-lovers (in response to Kafka's query, "Did she have any particular habits [in bed]?," the man asks, "Harrison's Law isn't valid in Nebraska, is it?" [p. 76]; the only thing that I can think of is the Harrison Act of 1914, which was the first law in the United States against the distribution and use of opiates and cocaine, but that doesn't seem relevant or accurate here).

Happily enough, I found Roseanna more agreeable than Henning Mankell's first mystery featuring Kurt Wallender, Faceless Killers; I'm more likely to read subsequent volumes in The Story of a Crime (probably via inter-library loan) than I am to read many subsequent entries in the Wallender series.