Writing and photos of Robert P. Baird; translating Books, incl. Spanish to English; Site Updates; Memoirs of my first small plane flight

I recommend that you explore digitalemunction, a site for the original writing, thoughts and photographs of Robert P. Baird of Chicago. A piece on the econometrics of hate crime particularly struck me as insightful, but I have barely scratched the surface.

If you like books, words, language and culture, you will enjoy looking at the site Life in Translation, which deals with translating Spanish into English and refers to many related sites, including one that details mistranslation in movies (films).

Both of these sites are now on my blogroll.

Speaking of mistranslation, I've occasionally been responding in languages other than English, including Spanish, German, and French, both here and on other sites (including detectives beyond borders and crimespace). These efforts have pretty weak outside of Spanish and the occasional word, say, of Swedish or some form of the Norwegian language that I have picked up "along the avenue" (I never asked for an explanation of the different forms of Norwegian while I was there, though I did hear some discussion of Bokmål and Nynorsk/New Norsk one dark, cold winter night in about 1980 while warming by the fire after an exhausting day of cross country skiing). Thanks for your patience with my foreign language efforts.

I have been cleaning up my site to try to make up for my lack of knowledge when I started the blog. Expert status remains elusive, but here we go: some previously invisible links are now visible (like links to two of Gary Disher's books that I really enjoyed). In addition to these technical issues, some comments have been clarified or amplified. These include the mention of Tourette Syndrome, as part of my very brief remarks on the unusual nature of Jonathan Lethem's terrific novel Motherless Brooklyn. These edits, including the continual cleanup of typographical errors, are more obvious on the RSS feed than on the native blog itself. I guess many of you know why.

I think should disclose Cara Black is now a friend due to a very kind and generous email exchange. This will not slow down my commentary on her wonderful detective stories set in Paris, or on any other of Soho Press/Soho Crime's many first-rate volumes.

The list of Labels on the right hand side of the page may be annoyingly long, but it will help you find anything on the site. As a possible aid to the blogosphere, technorati tags are being inserted throughout, rather exhaustively. I'm not how smart the technorati search engine is. If you have any thought on these matters, I'd be happy to hear them.

I have finished Jonathan Lethem's book You Don't Love Me Yet, but I'm not yet sure what to say about it. I won't rush it. So here instead is something I wrote the other day in response to Annalee Blysse asking about people's experiences with small planes (the date is accurate +/- one year):

"I took my first flight in a small plane in 1975. The pilot was a friend from high school and we were college freshmen at the time. I never really thought about it for a second, until right after take-off. Then I became distinctly aware of the fact that I was in a tin can, and not a heavy duty one, bouncing all over the place. So, I had a quick decision to make: do I panic because my buddy is taking me to my death in a flimsy piece of junk that has just launched into the sky, or do I sit back and enjoy the ride? Luckily, I was able to accomplish the latter. Panic didn't seem like a helpful or practical solution to anything. Later, we flew into Mexico for a couple of trips and slept under the wings- just imagine customs & immigration checks on a couple of kids with a plane! Just imagine not being able to raise the tower (in Spanish or English) at Guaymas, and then having a 727 pull in right behind us and almost blow us away (literally). Ah, those were the days."

Annalee recommends http://www.flork.com/ (Flork: Meet new people Webwide) for book promotion. Comments are most appreciated, as always.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

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Dr. Criminale, Malcolm Bradbury, Gary Disher; see the Autralian post below

An excerpt from Crime Down Under is found just down under this post. I have yet to write on Gary Disher and it weighs heavy on my soul, especially with an Australian mother and so many relatives there. Hence the link to a good source. I have read these two and highly recommend them: The Dragon Man and Kittyhawk Down

So now I have this HTML/javascript problem: white rectangles show at the end of each post in IE but don't show in Firefox (but other things don't show in Firefox either, like the stat counter # and some pictures). I suppose is partly an Amazon script thing (actually Google, I now believe). I wanted to start with Booksense to support local bookstores but I'm not in the mood to add more javascript at the moment.


In lieu of a proper review of Dr. Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury, I offer my response to a comment found on the blog by Elizabeth Baines and her reading group (they have quite a lot of discussions about literature; you may enjoy them as I did).

"Sorry but I think your group missed the boat. First, Eastern Europe Constantly juxtaposed inappropriate bedfellows, like the poets in prison, and the poets not in prison but who maybe once were or will be again, so this switching of tone that bothered you (and I know that inappropriate tone can bother me, too) was actually an accurate and important part of the setting. Life in Eastern Europe in those days should bother us! Second, if you read Djinn by Alain Robbe-Grillet and other books of this genre (or maybe you have, sorry), you will recognize that the lack of resolution regarding the good Doctor is exactly postmodern, not a post-modern joke. So, what Bradbury did was (attempt to) inform us all about postmodernism with the help of humor and satire, and simultaneously write a perfect postmodern novel. I don't see this as one trick at all! I see it as a brilliant fusion of the text on literary theory with (the) question of whether text exists at all and if any text can be true without having an infinite number of truths (one for each reader, because we are all authors of our own texts which happen to inhabit the covers of a single book). Or some-thing like that. Or am I confusing deconstruction / post-structuralism and postmodernism here? I sort forget (but I just looked it up- I'm cool!), but at the time I read Dr. C, maybe 10 years ago, or whenever it first came out, it was all very clear. Thanks for posting on a favorite author of mine! Tried Rates of Exchange yet? Brilliant! Jim"

Added after the fact, on 9/12/07: via direct communication, it seems that Elizabeth and I are in agreement about nearly everything.

Comments are always appreciated, favorable or otherwise.

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