Going Viral
I was sad to see that Tom Watson didn’t survive the playoff round of the British Open, but good for him anyway. He held the lead and the world’s attention through four very solid days of golf. The poor guy who won probably felt a little unappreciated–someone opined that his wife, child and agent were probably the only people on the planet rooting for him to win. I don’t watch much golf, but I watched the last hour of regulation play on Sunday. I didn’t think my heart would stand another four holes of do-or-die situations.
When I was a kid, I used to wonder if my team would have lost if I hadn’t turned on the television. It was a theme I recognized when I saw it later in Agatha Christie’s novel Destination Unknown (aka Toward Zero), a corollary of the Butterfly Effect. So I’m sorry, Tom, if my turning on the television caused a confluence of events that led to you losing yesterday.
My Storytellers Unplugged essay Apparently I Write Like a Girl generated a lot of buzz over the weekend. It received more direct feedback than anything else I’ve written for that market, and was also picked up by several other bloggers. Not exactly viral, but as close as I’ve come to it. Not suprisingly, much of the feedback came from female writers who had been the objects of gender bias during their careers. However, some other male writers told stories about how they had been discriminated against, and the reports also extended to sexual-orientation bias and any other slant you might imagine. If you follow the link, you can read the dozens of interesting responses to the piece. Nick Mamatas wrote about it on his LiveJournal, which also led to some interesting discussions, as did FairyHedgehog. Mystery writers and readers at rec.arts.mystery provided some good feedback, too. If there was a common theme to be found, it was that people thanked me for sticking to my guns, which I appreciated.
There was also an interesting quote from Dorothy L. Sayers. A man once asked me—it is true that it was at the end of a very good dinner, and the compliment conveyed may have been due to that circumstance—how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a larged, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I shouldn’t have expected a woman [meaning me] to have been able to make it so convincing.’ I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
We watched the movie Band’s Visit this weekend. Members of the Alexandria (Egypt) Police Band are in Israel by invitation to play at the Arab Cultural Center in a small town. Unfortunately, they misinterpret the name of their location and they end up in an even smaller Israeli town that has no Arab Cultural Center, no Arabs and, they say, no culture. It’s the classic fish-out-of-water story as these two groups try to figure out how to cope with each other until things get sorted. In a stereotypical movie, the band would have played for the townfolk and crossed cultural divides through music. That doesn’t happen here, but there is a sort of entente. The band members are farmed out to a few people in the community for the night, and they have some small-scale adventures, establish some limited lines of communication, but the awkwardness of all that history and hostility remains. In fact, there are a lot of awkward silences in this movie. I’m sure there are things that we missed because we weren’t familiar with the individual customs of the two factions–did it mean something to the General to see the Israeli woman’s bare foot with its painted toenails, for example?
We also went to the Alley Theatre for a production of Sherlock Holmes and the Crucifer of Blood, which is based primarily on The Sign of the Four, but with material extracted from all over the canon. A good play with fine staging and very strong performances. Suffered a bit from a dearth of suspects. Once the obvious were eliminated, there wasn’t but a single character left, so it was fairly easy to put together what the surprise at the end was going to be, but that was okay. We don’t get into town to see plays more than once or twice a year, so it was a nice change of pace.
Yesterday we went to the museum of fine arts, intending to follow up with supper at a restaurant that played an important part in our early relationship, only to discover that it wasn’t there any more. The web page was still live when I checked into its hours before we went into the city, but the place is now an antiques store or some such. So we have annointed another restaurant as its surrogate for future dinners.
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