Susan Amper's Blog: Bookcrazie, page 2
December 24, 2021
Being the Ricardos, 2021 film
I Love Lucy has been a favorite of mine since childhood. It's a shame to see it dealt with so poorly in Aaron Sorkin's underwhelming script and poor direction. Has he never heard that you shouldn't film someone in front of a window or that you should film them with lights on. Nicole Kidman sometimes evoked Lucille Ball, but I always knew it was Nicole Kidman. Javier Barden was only fair--he can't sing or dance--so it's an earthbound Desi we see. J.K. Simmons is miscast as Fred. That role seems like it would be easy to cast--even an overcooked Nick Nolte would have been a better choice. If you are a Lucy fan, it's worth a watch but not much else.
Game On, Janet Evanovich, 2021
Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight by Janet EvanovichMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
In GAME ON Janet Evanovich's TEMPTING TWENTY-EIGHT is the latest installment in her Stephanie Plum series.
In the twenty-seven years since ONE FOR THE MONEY hit the bestseller lists, a reader might think Plum has come far. Not so. And that's o.k. There's something comforting in knowing that Stephanie remains true to her hometown of Trenton, and readers will take solace in knowing she will have encounters with her beau Joe Morelli and hottie Ranger, Lula will have fashion and food issues, at least one car will be blown up, and Grandma Mazur will try to sneak a peek in the coffin at a wake.
In this entry into the series, Stephanie is after a master cyber-criminal, Oswald Wednesday, a psychopath who leaves destruction and death in his wake. He's after some amateur hackers who have wormed into his system, and one of them, Melvin, says they thought Oswald "was a genius. We didn't know he was a homicidal maniac." And therein lies the trouble. Where to stash the hackers so Oswald doesn't kill them. At first, Stephanie has them stay with her, but realizing that will not work long term, she moves them to her parents' home, where her Mom has taken up a new hobby (other than tippling) and her father has an actual conversation at the dinner table. So things are looking up for Stephanie Plum. At story's end, Stephanie has made her first ever chocolate cake for Joe Morelli and is about to surprise him with a new giant television. We await what's in store for this motley crew of fun characters in the next installment.
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The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly, 2021
The Dark Hours by Michael ConnellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Renee Ballard still shifts at night, but due to the pandemic, she can no longer live on Venice Beach. So she is forced into an apt. for the duration.
This takes place after the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and in the midst of the pandemic. Renee finds that most of her fellow officers are apathetic as a result of cries for defunding the police. Renee, however, is on the job. She is after The Midnight Men, 2 men who rape women and take their pictures while doing so. In addition to that Ballard is called to a crime scene on New Year's Eve during which neighborhood yahoos have been shooting bullets into the sky. One seems to have killed a local mechanic. Ballard has her doubts, and she intends to prove the man was murdered. It turns out the gun was used in another unsolved homicide worked on by Harry Bosch. So Bosch and Ballard get together again. Bosch plays a very minor role here, but the ending hints that there might be a larger role for him in the future or not.
View all my reviews
Poe ho ho: Some Jolly Reads for the Holidays
When people hear the name Edgar A. Poe they usually think “dark and serious.” But most of his fiction was the opposite. To help dispel the misperception—and add cheer to your holiday season —try out these gladsome yarns.
A good introduction to Poe-as-jester is “Mystification.” It was originally titled “Von Jung, the Mystific,” then “Von Jung.” I would call it “A Portrait of the Artist as a Con Man.” The hero is Baron Ritzner Von Jung, a student at Göttingen University, who like Poe had a “lofty” forehead and stood five feet eight. He was brilliant, highly esteemed, but completely misunderstood. No one considered him even capable of a joke, but in fact he was the secret perpetrator of “the most egregious and unpardonable of all conceivable tricks, whimsicalities, and buffooneries.” He was, in sum, “one of those human anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives.”
Not only did Von Jung’s solemn demeanor hide a droll disposition, but the tricks he engineered, like so many of Poe’s, went unrecognized as tricks. The prank in “Mystification” involves a fake book, an amphigory: a work carefully written so that it sounds profound, but actually makes no sense. (If you know the key, however—in this case to omit words according to a specified pattern—an intelligible story appears (a ridiculous one, about a duel between two baboons).
The timing of the tale’s first appearance suggests that Poe was hinting at what he himself had been doing in the stories he had recently published, including “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Siope,” and “The Assignation.” Poe had meant them as satires, but their parody was so subtle that most readers took them seriously. (Many people, including some Poe scholars, still do.) Von Jung’s amphigory may also hint at the design of the tales that Poe brought out next: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “William Wilson”—works that seem grave and profound, but from certain angles appear ridiculous.
“Mystification,” like many of Poe’s tales, does not try to be funny throughout. It works more like a joke, which is only funny at the end. Poe wrote more than a dozen tales in which one character tricks another.
Then there are the tales in which it is the reader who is tricked. “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “The Premature Burial,” “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” present themselves as non-fiction, but twists at the end reveal them as jests. Most are quite straight-faced up until the very end. The exception, and to me the most amusing, is “Von Kempelen,” which drops playful clues to its jesting all along the way.
The article concerns the scientist Kempelen, who is so much in the news for his recent discovery. Poe’s gimmick is to pretend that everyone has already heard of the discovery, and the present background piece is merely attempting to satisfy the public’s thirst for new details. This conceit enables him to tease us by continually referring to—and hyping—the momentous discovery without telling us what it is.
Along the way, the story drops numerous sly references to other hoaxes. It also mocks the whiny little author, who is constantly finding fault with previously published accounts, and who wants us to know about his having met Kempelen, when he stayed for a week, about six years ago, at Earl's Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island. (Well, it’s funny the way Poe tells it.)
The jokes here are gentle, even uncertain, as in Poe’s early tongue-in-cheek parodies, “Metzengerstein,” “Siope,” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Preserving a veneer of gravity, these works offer a game of “Now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t” and at the same time “Where’s Waldo?” which sends readers hunting for the winks and jokes and pieces that don’t belong.
“How to Write a Blackwood Article,” by contrast, is laugh-out-loud funny throughout. The story features one Suky Snobbs, the very earnest corresponding secretary for a Philadelphia literary society, who is anxious to elevate the society’s writing. She travels to Scotland to seek advice from William Blackwood, publisher of Britain’s most successful literary magazine, who gleefully shares his recipe for tales “full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition.”
For modern readers the biggest laugh comes from seeing how precisely Blackwood’s advice matches what Poe himself was doing in tales like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “Pay minute attention to the sensations,” Blackwood instructs. “Hint everything—assert nothing. Have an air of erudition. Put in something about the Supernal Oneness.”
“Thou Art the Man” is a comical murder mystery—with all the ingredients of modern mysteries. The rich old Barnabas Shuttleworthy lies dead, a victim of foul play. Suspicion falls on his ne’er-do-well nephew and heir. The humor comes from the droll irony of the narrator’s commentary on the doings of Charley Goodfellow, who keeps trying to exonerate the nephew, it seems, but somehow always ends up making things worse. The mystery, while easy to solve, is clever enough, with clues that seem very much ahead of their time. This tale too ends with a trick—one which, like those in many modern mysteries, traps the culprit into revealing his guilt.
Reading Poe’s comic tales can make one wonder: How do we reconcile these romps with those dark tales of the macabre? I think we should reverse the question: How do the seemingly dark ones fit into a body of fiction that is overwhelmingly comic? And overwhelmingly devoted to hoaxing.
Susan Amper, Ph.D.
https://susanamper.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
@susanamper
A good introduction to Poe-as-jester is “Mystification.” It was originally titled “Von Jung, the Mystific,” then “Von Jung.” I would call it “A Portrait of the Artist as a Con Man.” The hero is Baron Ritzner Von Jung, a student at Göttingen University, who like Poe had a “lofty” forehead and stood five feet eight. He was brilliant, highly esteemed, but completely misunderstood. No one considered him even capable of a joke, but in fact he was the secret perpetrator of “the most egregious and unpardonable of all conceivable tricks, whimsicalities, and buffooneries.” He was, in sum, “one of those human anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives.”
Not only did Von Jung’s solemn demeanor hide a droll disposition, but the tricks he engineered, like so many of Poe’s, went unrecognized as tricks. The prank in “Mystification” involves a fake book, an amphigory: a work carefully written so that it sounds profound, but actually makes no sense. (If you know the key, however—in this case to omit words according to a specified pattern—an intelligible story appears (a ridiculous one, about a duel between two baboons).
The timing of the tale’s first appearance suggests that Poe was hinting at what he himself had been doing in the stories he had recently published, including “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Siope,” and “The Assignation.” Poe had meant them as satires, but their parody was so subtle that most readers took them seriously. (Many people, including some Poe scholars, still do.) Von Jung’s amphigory may also hint at the design of the tales that Poe brought out next: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “William Wilson”—works that seem grave and profound, but from certain angles appear ridiculous.
“Mystification,” like many of Poe’s tales, does not try to be funny throughout. It works more like a joke, which is only funny at the end. Poe wrote more than a dozen tales in which one character tricks another.
Then there are the tales in which it is the reader who is tricked. “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “The Premature Burial,” “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” present themselves as non-fiction, but twists at the end reveal them as jests. Most are quite straight-faced up until the very end. The exception, and to me the most amusing, is “Von Kempelen,” which drops playful clues to its jesting all along the way.
The article concerns the scientist Kempelen, who is so much in the news for his recent discovery. Poe’s gimmick is to pretend that everyone has already heard of the discovery, and the present background piece is merely attempting to satisfy the public’s thirst for new details. This conceit enables him to tease us by continually referring to—and hyping—the momentous discovery without telling us what it is.
Along the way, the story drops numerous sly references to other hoaxes. It also mocks the whiny little author, who is constantly finding fault with previously published accounts, and who wants us to know about his having met Kempelen, when he stayed for a week, about six years ago, at Earl's Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island. (Well, it’s funny the way Poe tells it.)
The jokes here are gentle, even uncertain, as in Poe’s early tongue-in-cheek parodies, “Metzengerstein,” “Siope,” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Preserving a veneer of gravity, these works offer a game of “Now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t” and at the same time “Where’s Waldo?” which sends readers hunting for the winks and jokes and pieces that don’t belong.
“How to Write a Blackwood Article,” by contrast, is laugh-out-loud funny throughout. The story features one Suky Snobbs, the very earnest corresponding secretary for a Philadelphia literary society, who is anxious to elevate the society’s writing. She travels to Scotland to seek advice from William Blackwood, publisher of Britain’s most successful literary magazine, who gleefully shares his recipe for tales “full of taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition.”
For modern readers the biggest laugh comes from seeing how precisely Blackwood’s advice matches what Poe himself was doing in tales like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “Pay minute attention to the sensations,” Blackwood instructs. “Hint everything—assert nothing. Have an air of erudition. Put in something about the Supernal Oneness.”
“Thou Art the Man” is a comical murder mystery—with all the ingredients of modern mysteries. The rich old Barnabas Shuttleworthy lies dead, a victim of foul play. Suspicion falls on his ne’er-do-well nephew and heir. The humor comes from the droll irony of the narrator’s commentary on the doings of Charley Goodfellow, who keeps trying to exonerate the nephew, it seems, but somehow always ends up making things worse. The mystery, while easy to solve, is clever enough, with clues that seem very much ahead of their time. This tale too ends with a trick—one which, like those in many modern mysteries, traps the culprit into revealing his guilt.
Reading Poe’s comic tales can make one wonder: How do we reconcile these romps with those dark tales of the macabre? I think we should reverse the question: How do the seemingly dark ones fit into a body of fiction that is overwhelmingly comic? And overwhelmingly devoted to hoaxing.
Susan Amper, Ph.D.
https://susanamper.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
@susanamper
Bookcrazie
I will be writing short essays about Edgar A. Poe and American Literature. In addition, I will be reviewing some of the many books I read, movies I watch, and also adding assorted thoughts on whatever
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