The total lateral load that is able to be resisted by the frame is calculated from the column's flexural strength where a plastic hinge forms at the top and bottom of the columnThis sentence makes perfect sense to me, so it's not a basic failure to communicate - there must be a violation of some sublimated technicality.
The thing I notice about English Literary Criticism (tm) is that there is a straightforward correlation assumed by almost all authors that the smarter a thought is, the longer the sentence explaining it should be. This is usually achieved by sub-clauses clarifying or expanding each point as it's made. This usually has the effect of obscuring the idea rather than illuminating it. Or to put it another way...
The thing I notice about English Literary Criticism, in comparison to engineering technical writing discussed above, is that a straightforward correlation is assumed by authors between how intelligent and insightful an idea is and the number of subclauses which should be strung together into a single sentence in the explanation of that idea and this naturally results in sentences of considerable length and complexity which require greater effort to untangle than when broken into their component parts.
While I've been sick these past few days I've been watching movies and TV, and yesterday I decided to watch an episode of The Wire. It's actually almost better the second time around, there's a lot of little detail I missed the first time. I've been finding myself gripped by the drama and putting on each new episode without delay.
I have recommended this show to a lot of people, and re-watching it, I think i'm going out to find more people to recommend it to.
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#1 - The Bugle
Jon Oliver (of the Daily Show) and Andy Zaltman (described on his own wikipedia entry as a "comedian" quotation marks inclusive!) take a satiric read on the news. It has the same basic formula as The Daily Show, but with fewer graphics and more puns. I am never behind on The Bugle, it is the best thing I'm listening to.
#2 - Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Review
Ranting and films! This show has good coverage of films as they come out in the UK, and generally fun/light interviews with stars. It's quite entertaining and occasionally illuminating.
#3 - Thinking Allowed
Each week ex-professor Laurie Taylor reads two sociological books or articles, and gets the authors and some sociologist pundits to discuss the content and the context. It's fascinating stuff which covers a massive range of different topics.
#4 - Front Row Daily
A BBC cultural round-up show with various hosts and guests. This is not universally interesting, but it makes up for the odd dud segment with its breadth of coverage. Movies, theatre, art, music - they segue through them all. The main problem with this is... it's daily, and I am therefore always falling further behind.
#5 - The Film Program
Rather than provide broad coverage, this BBC production headed by Francine Stock generally picks one or two films each week that are especially interesting and really looks at them in some depth. They also tend to run shorter serials of interesting features, delving into the history of mechanics of cinema to find things which otherwise might pass you by.
#6 - In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg is not a particularly good presenter, he's a bit abrupt and doesn't seem to be an expert himself: just enough research notes to just fail at faking it. However, he manages to find some fascinating academics each week to talk about subjects that are always more interesting than I thought they would be.
#7 - Moyers and Company
This show is somewhere between journalism and a polemic for the middle classes. Each week he interviews one or two people at great length and depth about the various social problems confronting the USA. He's insightful and interesting, and his guests always put a different perspective on the situation over there. It's a really great show - but man, the world is depressing, so I tend to only listen to this when I feel like my fragile worldview of humanity's basic goodness can take a little knocking.
#8 - NPR Books Podcast
Collating the various book-related activities on US National Public Radio. This is usually interesting, but just not as interesting as most of the other stuff I listen to.
#9 - Forum: A World of Ideas
If In Our Time makes some pretty dull subjects interesting, the Forum somehow manages to take extremely interesting and topical topics and take enough shine off them that if you're not bored, you do yet feel like you should be far more interested and challenged than you are. Nevertheless, the topics they touch on are worthy enough for an occasional listen.
There are also a handful of PodCasts I used to listen to, but which are finished, so I cherry-pick the occasional re-run and think are worth sharing. In no particular order.
Robin & Jose's Utter Shambles
Two comedians (or a comedian and a comedienne if you like) sit down with someone interesting and talk rubbish for 40 minutes. It's extremely entertaining, one of the funniest things out there. It won't improve your life though, just your day.
A History of the world in 100 objects
This is hands-down the most informative and smartest podcast that I've listened to. The curator of the British Museum takes 100 objects and explains the history that created them and the history they created. This show brings history to life and gives it an immediate interest.
Shakespeare's Restless World
A show by the same guy about Shakespeare, and again, this is a must-hear!
I am also trialling a couple of PodCasts, but only one is looking likely to make the cut
Stuff You Missed in History Class
Basically what it says on the tin. I've only listened to a handful of episodes, but so far it's at least moderately entertaining and informative.
The problem with approaching pulps as a literary genre is that the main unifying trait of the pulps is not stylistic - it's one of production. Pulps were written by the cheapest authors and printed on the cheapest paper, and the intent was simply to mass produce literary output for such a nominal price that it could be consumed in vast quantities. It's arguably the early 20th century equivalent of "fic".
Over time, I think that Pulps have come to more and more be seen in the context of the genre whose origin has few other deep roots - the super hero. Conceived largely as adventurers in adventure stories, the likes of The Shadow and Doc Savage nevertheless established character templates which would define the heroes who followed; it's hard not to see Batman as the Shadow writ large.
I reference the Shadow and Batman because they are, in addition to being masked vigilantes, both detectives of the first order, in fact, they were constructed originally and primarily as detectives. The Shadow came after The Continental Op & Race Williams, the original hardboiled detectives, and he clearly imitates and amplifies their positive crime-fighting traits, while even further isolating the detective from ordinary civil society.
What this gives us is another prism to look at Hammett's detectives - instead of whether they are as logical as Poirot or observant as Holmes, are they as driven as The Shadow? What are the common story elements between the proto-supers, and their patently mortal kin, like the Continental Op? There is, no doubt, a certain strand of extreme violence which is common to both, and which has its mirror in early Hollywood gangster flicks. There is a certain contained neatness to the stories, and a certain flair for dramatic situations far beyond the simple poisoning of a rich old lady.
Where they diverge the most is, I think, in their representational techniques. Hammett's Op is hard-headed and pragmatic, constantly espousing the virtues of legwork and dogged investigation, declaiming flashy leaps of logic or dramatics at all points: he is the Occam's razor of detectives. The Shadow however revels in the convolutions thrown his way, and never discounts an adventure as too fantastic. The content may not be worlds apart when you look closely and structurally, but the attitude is.
Crime films face the fundamental challenge that the genre is based on telling rather than showing, while the medium of film is very much about showing. I'm reading a Ngaio Marsh at the moment where around 3/4 of the printed words are witness interviews and speculation between the detective and sidekick on who did what and why. It's not inherently visual: it works just as well without the pictures. Where the films have an advantage is that what images there are can be shown extremely quickly. A couple of seconds of footage can replace thousands of words of description.
Robert Altman clearly realizes that he needs to really show us something, but I get the sense that he's not entirely sure what that should be. He wastes the first 10 minutes of the film showing us a sequence where Marlowe tries to feed his cat but has to go and buy a different brand of cat food.
This slice of life must be intended to show us a human being living his life, and it's the kind of thing the younger Coppola manages to make mesmerizing in Lost In Translation; but the focus here is not tight at all. There's something loose and unfocused about the cinematography and scant dialogue which makes the scene as boring as it sounds. This kind of framing seems to be establishing the film more as a character study of Marlowe than what we might be expecting in terms of a detective story, but there are few other occasions where the camera lingers so on Marlowe, and there was plenty of occasion for it to do so.
This baggy and aimless direction permeates the entirety of the film; there isn't a single scene which crackles with tension or feels dramatic or revealing. It amiably ambles on, occasionally hinting at a more serious and more interesting movie, occasionally straying into the grey area of absurdity. In this, it is not entirely unlike the book, which is similarly lethargic and indulgent.
However, it is significantly better in one respect from the book, and to explain why I need to have a brief digression with my old drinking pal, Baudrilliard.
Baudrilliard operated in the field of semiotics; in particular he was interested in where a semiotic system begins to break down so that signs ultimately point to nothing - only to themselves. The basic business of a detective writer is to manipulate the signs they use to misdirect you - it's never the obvious suspect. As the options for misdirection get better and better explored, detective authors created a second-order semiotic system - it's always the person you'd least suspect.
Chandler's early work understood the danger of both first-order and second-order referents, and instead of working to manipulate a system of signs, as Christie did, he attempted to write Literature (tm) in which crime occurs: Meaning (tm) would take care of itself. But by the time The Long Goodbye rolls around, 20 years into his career, the magic seems to have faded somewhat and instead we're left with a Conventional (tm) murder mystery tangled into a lengthy exposition on a life that doesn't really have any other meaning than the banally obvious: he's lost in a system of his own custom signs. Harsh perhaps, but for me this is what makes Hammett and early Chandler so interesting - it feels like a window onto something real. Chandler's relapse into the whodunit does not inspire.
The correction that the film makes is to untangle the misdirections: everything is what it seems. The question transforms from "whodunit" into the altogether more interesting: what do you do about it. From the navel-gazing philosopher-cum-dick, Marlowe is back onto the mean streets, navigating his own life instead of untangling someone else's. And in that light, the attempts to humanize Marlowe and break the mould of the thriller begin to look less like lazy direction and more like a plan to tell the real story.
That real story is told exclusively in the last 5 minutes of the film, the rest of the action forming the necessary exposition for you to understand what's happening and theorize about why. And that,
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steve_hix was me getting back to you.I'm something like half way through Chandler's works and handily and he provides his own criteria for thinking about his work; an essay called The Simple Art of Murder. He makes a number of very good points in the essay about the differences between Hammett and Christie's followers, especially Dorothy Sayers. Points which have stuck in my mind and interested me enough to spend a year of my life pursuing and exploring. The principle claim he makes though, is that Hammett's murders commit murders for real motives using the means at hand, rather than the over-elaborate and almost motiveless killings which fill the formal detective novel.
I'm not entirely sure that's any more true of Hammett than Chandler than Christie. Sayers is on my list of things to read in the near future and I'll let you know when I get there. The point is that crime is a fact of life and a factor in life, it's integral rather than aberrant. In Christie, the solution of the crime is the return to normality, in Hammett, crime is normality. Well, his debut, The Big Sleep lives up to this ideal - and perhaps the success of the film is that it picked up Bogart's Sam Spade and called him Philip Marlowe, a wise-cracking PI just at home with his clients as the criminals that plague them: when there's even a difference.
Well, 14 years later Marlowe isn't the man he was. When Sternwood hired him, he cost $50/day plus expenses; when the Wades try to hire him he's too proud to take a dime - he's financially worse off after a novel of investigating than at the start. The Sternwoods were a job to Marlowe, the Wades seem somehow an entirely personal matter of honour. When Eddie Mars has Marlowe trussed up, he plainly explains to Vivian how they'll gruesomely kill him, never backing down, never compromising. Marlowe used to pound the streets of the city, delve into criminal enterprises, but by this book he's pottering around the exclusive suburbs of the super-rich, solving their very specialist and convoluted problems. The murders may not require the curare that he so disdained in his essay, but they're every bit as elaborate and constructed as anything in Christie's mechanical mind.
The Long Goodbye isn't bad, but it's soft all the way through. Marlowe has moved from the mean streets and into the country manor.
I'm watching the 1973 film adaptation as I type this. It's not great.
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I'm basically a die-hard lefty; I'm for high taxes, big social safety net, for free and luxurious public services, for the heavy regulation of banking, and thus the certain destruction of freedom and happiness. So I'm deeply suspicious of Romney as the republican candidate; despite his mild record he's basically a stooge for the evil empire.
What's perturbing is the growing suspicion I feel about Obama. I watched several interviews with him when he was first elected Senator, and I thought he seemed like a decent and honest guy with a pretty good idea about how to fix things. This was before we really knew how bad it was. And his rhetoric is still good, but I just can't help but wonder why he seemed unable to achieve anything in his purported agenda in the first couple of years of his term when he controlled both the House and the Senate. The obvious answer is: he didn't want to.
I've read a lot of theories both ways on Obama. His defenders talk about his long game, about the fractious nature of the Democratic caucus compared to the regimented Republican caucus, about his efforts to foster statesmanship... but I keep circling back to that first couple of years, where with a clear mandate and deep support he really didn't seem to seize the day. Posts like this one seem tricky to directly refute on any point in detail, but more importantly, it feels like the truth. I don't doubt that Obama's in a tough bind, in a system absolutely overwhelmingly stacked against hope or change, whichever you believe he's doing... but I do wonder.
Of course, the cynic/realist in me does rather feel like both major US parties are rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The great hope must surely be the Occupy movement, which has made some surprisingly detailed and constructive plans to front themselves as a major third-party, though it seems extremely doubtful they'll be in any way able to contest the Presidential election unless Bill Gates or the Queen decides to front them a couple-billion dollars on the off chance it could save the "free world".
Final point of interest - one of the major themes coming through strongly for me in Hammett and Chandler is a profound scepticism of the political system in the US and the sustainability of its production/consumption habits. 80 years ago those guys felt the US was on the brink and it's still here... which is a little reassuring, unless you believe their basic commentary on life which is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
tog42 lent me the complete Highlander TV series a little while ago, and I've been chipping away at it for a while now. I've been trying to justify this to myself on some kind of high-handed intellectual grounds - it's art, it's good, it's meaningful, etc etc. It's not that easy, not as easy as it is perhaps with shows like Buffy: The Wampire Slayer or Babylon 5, where care has been taken on a holistic or conceptual level to create an artistic piece as well as an entertainment. No, as far as my discerning eyes and brain can fathom, Highlander: The Series functions on more-or-less the same basic yet ruthlessly efficient premise-enactment of most modern television. What is that premise? Well, see, there are these guys who live until someone cuts their head off in ritual combat; eventually there can apparently be only one of them left, which does rather imply conflict is a necessity. The first season works out fairly much exactly like this - each week an immortal shows up, runs afoul of our hero one way or another, and gets invariably his head chopped off.
Accompanying the formulaic plot is a rigidly adhered to flashback structure, trying to place the immortal in a longer-term context, trying to make the world feel less coincidental - effectively trying to stretch the timeline of the episode over centuries.
This combines to set up a situation where you have a highly constrained story structure, but where the content of that story is completely free: it is virtually a procedural drama with a central Iconic Hero (to borrow Robin Laws' terminology). This is inherently uninteresting, in much the same way as any other procedural drama, and just like those others, the creators try to create interest in the incidentals. Do we like the characters? Do we find their relationships interesting? Are we intrigued by the variations proposed?
In a crime procedural, the main tools of variation are the details of the murder. As crime dramas wend their way through season after season, the arrangement of the motive, means and opportunity become ever more labyrinthine. Highlander has a far larger set of incidental variables to play with, including all of human history and every configuration of lifestyle. Over the course of the show you can see the creative team patiently sifting through the variations and looking for different points of interest.
There are a few places where the show verges on the interesting. For my money, perhaps showing my bias, the most interest incidental material are two of the three substantial love stories running through the show. The first love interest is our hero's long-term partner, informed about "The Game" - she was used exactly how you'd expect, to create drama through endangerment.
However, his second entanglement is with another mortal, and here we see a wider range of behaviours. They are convincingly attracted to each other, but the relationship is uneasy because of his secret life and because I think both of them appear to being a dominant half of a partnership. Their courtship is therefore more interesting than the usual TV romance, and I was particularly pleased when despite the obvious appeal of them as a couple, the creative decision was for it not to proceed. Most of the time when TV writers pull this gambit, it's a last-minute almost deus ex machina which destroys the fledgling romance, but I was persuaded that within the limits of TV, this was just an incompatible match.
The third romance is between two immortals, and the multi-centenary nature of the romance offered some interesting possibilities in terms of how a relationship could work. In the end, this has been somewhat under-done, but was nevertheless, slightly interesting.
The second thing which I found a little interesting was the gradual formation of an almost coherent mythology and sense of historical scale - the flashbacks eventually begin to coalesce into a broad-ranging but connected long-term history of the character. The pay-off for the duration of the show is that by the later seasons, the structurally-demanded flashback sequences explaining the context for the action actually come from previous episodes of the show itself. The so-called "Butterfly Effect" implied by the early flashback sequences begins to manifest itself within the show you've actually been watching.
Once that sense of a legacy and history becomes established, the basically episodic nature of the show becomes submerged, because you can almost begin to believe that over a long enough view, there is a coherent narrative of a life being portrayed.
Unfortunately, to reach these points of interest takes the show far too long, and the individual episodes are not really as dramatic or intense as I'd like. I've found myself watching them at 2* speed or faster looking to cherry-pick scenes of interest and hunting for the ongoing story threads. Enjoying the potential, essentially, more than the actual show.
Given that potential, I'd love to see this show remade under the guidance of a JMS or Joss Whedon - I think that show could be really excellent.
Murder From The East is fantastic in the old sense of the word: it's just too much to hold even an iota of credibility, and Race Williams makes James Bond look positively sensible and restrained. The plot is straightforward: Race is propelled from one dramatic action sequence to another with healthy dollops of posturing and exposition to make it seem like there's more to it than a simplistic violence-wish-fantasy. After a completely arbitrary length of strung-together sequences, a climactic final.
I think it's fair to say that in Daly we have the real genesis of the modern action genre. It has all the hallmarks, all the trademarked situations, the one-dimensional everything. It reads like the novelisation of an 80s Schwarzenegger movie because it is the template and gensis of a whole echelon of trashy violence-worship. On some level, that must surely make him vastly more important and influential than Hammett; but not more interesting.
In Dirty Secrets, Ben Seth Ezra talks about the trio of definitive hard-boiled authors, Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, so embarking as I am on a serious study of Hammett, I thought it'd be sensible to check out the dark horse, Macdonald. I've used Dirty Secrets to untangle Chandler before, and I thought it'd be interesting to have a casual look at doing that for The Blue Hammer.
DS talks about three kinds of scenes: investigation scenes (where the detective finds stuff out), violence scenes (where someone takes a poke at him to spur the action or delay us pausing to think) and reflection scenes (where the detective sifts through his notes and finds the will to carry on). Marlowe routinely experiences all of these things, and to a lesser extent so does the Continental Op. Lew Archer... only investigates. Mike Hammer might spend his entire time kicking in doors or teeth, and hence become a satire, but Lew Archer dials down the hard-boiled elements to the point where you wonder whether he's really a different kind of detective from any modern investigative detective. At best, he's the soft-boiled detective.
The plot construction is similarly deviant from the hard-boiled rubric. Hammett's stories are fundamentally about simple people creeping deeper into complex situations and problems. The explanation is never really too complex, and never really has too many moving parts. Chandler tends to be more comfortable with complexity and with opacity. Macdonald succumbs to the kind of meticulously intricate material that Christie and her ilk revelled in, with all the usual trappings of doubled identities and long-lost relations and skeletons in the closets. I gave up trying to properly solve the puzzle when I realized that the completely straightforward semiotic arrangements that mean the butler is your first suspect were applicable and bingo: puzzle solved at the 2/3 point of the novel.
Ellroy is similarly guilty of absurd complexity even in his best works. White Jazz hinges on an absolutely stunning array of historical interrelated perversions and uncovered deviances. He not only gets away with it, but manages to make it all compelling, by playing it to the hilt and never flinching from any horrific implication, all the while somehow still making us empathise with his completely broken characters. Macdonald's material is just a bit too tame, and a bit too ordinary to similarly gut-puinching.
All in all, forgettable.
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