Detectives: The Anti-Hero?

It strikes me somewhere after the 300th time I've read the synopsis for an upcoming detective novel, that almost every one of the blurbs starts off by describing our main protagonist as retiring or withdrawing from the line of duty.

Off they go to some remote, seaside or rural area to get away from it all, to relax, to leave the stress and horror of their jobs far behind. Or, they've often been forcibly and quietly retired from duty after unorthodox or unprofessional conduct.

Of course, they have but to arrive in said rural/briny region for a body to turn up or a person to go missing, and so begins the standard detective-killer runaround until all is revealed at the end and we pat ourselves on the back for having known who it was all along.

But why is it that we should be so keen to have our heroes be unwilling ones? We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of a detective straightforwardly doing their job. When normally working, our detective is sanctioned by the institution to which they are attached - usually in some way an official representative of society engaged to solve crimes. Indeed, the detective might be said to fulfill a crucially ordering function, restoring truth to society's narrative and eliminating its threatening elements.

Why, then, do we insist on them not wanting to fulfill this function? Rather to fall into it, unwillingly, if inevitably?

One of our earlier detectives in fiction was Dickens' Mr. Bucket from Bleak House, and critics credit him with playing a reformist role that restores justice to English society in the way lawyers (like the dread Tulkinghorn) cannot. In this sense then, the detective emerges as a anti-hero figure who we trust in a position of power precisely because he does not seek it.

Of course, there must be many, notable exceptions to the phenomenon I am describing, and what's more, this popular tendency to 'anti' our heroes before they become them could merely be the result of the exigencies of a better plot. Still, I know I prefer my politicians un-power-hungry (utopian as that may seem), why not my detectives too?

Going To Stop

Last Monday was my driving test. I won't pretend I wasn't absolutely terrified of failing, because I have quite the history with not passing my driving tests, but I duly took myself down there with enough sleep and enough coffee balanced with fennel tea for calmness.


My wonderfully characterfull driving teacher took me round the test route a few times, telling me repeatedly to 'slow down' until I was going at about 15km per hour. As we reach a stop sign I begin to slow down but don't quite come to a complete stop. In slight panic, he begins to exclaim with increasing volume, "go to stop…go to stop!'


I will not dwell on my confusion at the seeming oxymoron of going to stop, nor on the actual driving test and my panic as the examiner exited the car without a word, and I was left flapping in confusion as to my status like a fish on dry land (in Israel there are laws against telling you whether you passed or not immediately after the test after an instructor was shot by a dissatisfied customer).


No, instead, I will focus on the phrase 'go to stop,' which seems to me to be a typically Israeli expression. This country is a land steeped in contradiction and paradox, of which this sentence is only one example. In practical terms, on the road, I can see this principle at work when Israelis barrel ahead at top speed heading toward a red light where they will only have to decelerate massively (no judgment I do this too).


But perhaps more suggestively we go forward with the idea of a religious-nation state only to have to stop at the limits of trying to combine synagogue and state in the modern world. We fight like mad to have a Jewish state and then find ourselves caught up in defining exactly which kind of Jews we mean. It is, perhaps, a paradox to hold on to a religious identity at all in today's world.


But I would like to think that (especially in today's world where its difficult to legitimately stand up for something) it's an admirable quality to retain one's enthusiasm and forward motion. It's no accident this country has been called 'Start-Up Nation,' and perhaps hurtling towards a red light can sometimes decrease road safety, but at least we make the effort to hurtle towards something at all.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

In the midst of updating favorite book covers on my website, I stumbled across a great site called bookcoverarchive.com. Browsing through their collection of incredible covers made me wish repeatedly that I'd read (at least some of) these books. Every cover was a perfect balance of visual pleasure, narrative cleverness and just enough of an edge of sophistication. Basically - almost exactly what I'd want in a book.

Here are a few of my favorites



























And then my personal top pick - grabbing that spot for its cruel relevance and perfect irony...




The problem was, the more the magic of the covers worked on me and the more I longed to read these books, the more I worried about my judgement. Surely we all know not to judge a book by its cover?

Except that actually, it's the only way we do. Marketing books and visiting book stores on a daily basis has, for the first time, put me on the front line of how books get bought, and unfortunately it's not my fabulously written copy or my persuasive presence that sells a book - it's the work of the graphic designer in the studio who may or may not have even read it.

This seems a little crazy, and feel free to disagree, but I can't help feeling that in the age of Facebook profiles and digital cameras we can't really be surprised that the first and last lines of defense are appearances.

[all covers are the copyright of their respective publishers]

Real Vintage Words This Time

Today saw the acquisition of about 60 second-hand English books. My mother and I paid a visit to the ESRA (English Speaking Residents Association) bookshop to do battle with groaning shelves and frayed pages.

Our final selection saw Plato thrown together with John Le Carre, and Defoe's Moll Flanders getting intimate with Holly Golightly and Nabokov's Lolita - keeping good company one and all.



Other pairings were perhaps more appropriate, like a Penn University Press book on The Poetics of Imperialism and Conrad's Lord Jim, or an unencountered Proust novel with R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.






Still, all this heavy literary name-dropping aside, the best thing about this visit was the chance to get my hands on about 10 old Everyman editions of the classics. Some seemed quite random (I won't say completely random because who knows where the holes in my literary historical knowledge might lie), but the main point wasn't to read the books, but to own them.

In my post-kindle (or two) world, the relation between buying books and reading them has changed completely. On Kindle, I will buy on impulse, (it's only '1-Click' after all), virtually fork out the 4.99 GBP and promptly forget all about the book if I don't need to read it for work or for class. It exists on my e-reader and assumedly backed-up somewhere in Amazon's labyrinthine archives, but as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist in my possession at all - nothing more, really, than an item on my debit card bill.

But real books - on dead trees? Now there's something I'd like to own. Not read, necessarily, but just own. Looking ahead into the e-future of everything, I can't help but think (like most people) that reading an actual book may eventually disappear. But the physical book itself will not. Instead, e-book reading will bring about an increase in the value of a book, as they turn into possessions people want to own for the sake of having them.



Maybe this is awfully sad, the book divorced from its world-building, escapist capabilities, or it's function as a commentary on real life, but looking at my shelf of new, hard-backed, gilt-edged 'possessions', I find it hard to agree.

Assimilation and Driving

How long can you live in a place before it's starts to affect your personality?

It's been over two years that I've lived in Israel and only now do I find myself morphing into an Israeli. It's not that I actively tried not to before, just that I never found myself intensely affected by the difference in culture one way or another. but how strange that I should begin to mimic exactly what irritates me the most.

Simultaneously to raging vociferously (inside my car of course, with the windows tightly shut and sound muffled) about the Israeli need to beep when the traffic light turns orange, or of driving too fast or compulsively needing to change lanes to fill any available gap and get to one's destination that much faster, I drive the exact same way. And the thought of driving any other way makes me rage even more.

Thankfully, I still believe in the sanctity of indicating, or as the Americanized Israeli's put it, 'putting on de blinkerrr', a lost skill that has nearly disappeared from the Israeli road. My parking is also faultless, though I try not to read too much into my obsessive need to stay within the lines. But I wonder how long it will be before I too decide to park on a slant, taking up two bays and sticking my vehicular rear-end into the lot, and before my 'blinkerr' turns off, once, and for all.

My Internet Diary: A story in Links

So, ironically, given the title of my blog, this posting is my response to the overload of information I'm currently encountering in my increasing use of the internet. No vintage words here..preserved in a tucked-away second-hand boutique, available only to a select few to whom has been disclosed its secret location. Instead the great leveller, the mass, and the insistently modern.

Previously merely a social networking tool and a basic research facilitator, (i.e. my internet forays confined themselves to Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia), my experience of the net has now, in a classically rapid fashion, expanded enormously.

Now, instead of researching courses to take in universities or academic institutions as a physically present human being, I consider sending my electronic money out into the ether and signing up for online courses, trusting that 'teacher-less' and without fellow students, reliant only a well-stocked 'multimedia' curriculum, I will somehow still qualify myself.

What i will call my 'internet encounters' have also exponentially increased. Instead of running away in panic to bury my head in the sand when confronted with the plethora of youtube videos and online articles and blogs posted and messaged by my friends on Facebook, I am now their avid reader and viewer. Consumer.

In true avant-garde social media style, however, as a consumer I am also implicitly a producer waiting to happen. Hence, assumedly my desire to share with the aforementioned ether the story of my day's internet activity.

Why exactly I feel anyone else would or should in fact be interested in what my personal, and daily experience of the internet is, I dont venture to explain or even examine just yet.

Instead, as a blogger with at least the spurious authority to post as much as I want about that eternal topic - myself - I will, without further ado, give you my

Internet Diary: DAY ONE.


1: I discovered a 'clothing-optional airline'. just the name is great. http://econudes.org/node/266

2: I discovered 2 new amazing websites called wordnik.com and chemistry.com, both as a result of two stellar ted talks (ted.com) I listened to. I highly recommend the personality quiz on chemistry.com. Even if you'd rather not affiliate yourself with a dating site, its definitely worth it to do the test and cheerfully ignore the welcome or unwelcome consequences of now having 'matches' spread across the globe. As for wordnik, I still havent really oriented myself there...but I fully intend to be spending more time on the site, so I will update as and when.


3: During a frantic search, desperately trying to find some music to listen to on Youtube whilst packing, I typed in 'best movie soundtracks' or something similar, and ended up stumbling across some real gems I haven't actually got in my score collection (now numbering around 700 and running out of things I want and dont have). One of these was the 'stoic prison theme' from the Shawshank Redemption (Thomas Newman can always be relied upon to make emotivally powerful though dangerously repetitive themes.) This one, however, is pretty good, and doesnt just let you relax through it. Like the movie, it keeps you riveted and involved, so that you have no choice but to suffer throgh the difficult parts and thrill to the exhilarating ones..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vq9dFO0vc

4: In another chance encounter, I came across a mislabelled but fabulous track of the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi on youtube, which i will now have to exert myself to find on iTunes listening to the 30second preview of each likely song until I come to the right one. But until then, who wouldnt want to hear this -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2K7D-uMH2g&feature=related

5: Also, as mentioned above, I found this online copyediting course which I want to take with mediabistro.com, who are also sending me insane amounts of newsletters and blogs and stuff on the latest media and PR news, which I have, apparently, signed up for. One of these concerns itself exclusively with E-Books, which will in 10 years time be called simply 'books' as E-mail gradually proceeded through to email, and eventually graduated up to almost replacing 'mail'.

6: Another of the Ted Talks i listened to was on Metaphor - excellent and well-worth a revisit. it was short, clever, metaphorical of course, and did a good job of making this seemingly arcane literary--grammatical category of language into something highly relevant - even indispensable - to a successful society.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html


Ok, I think that's probably enough for my first day. I feel I might need some assimilative sleep time to process all this new knowledge...just in case the blogging and sharing hasn't worked..