Aurelio Zen

Bob and I have been enjoying the latest Masterpiece Mystery series starring Rufus Sewell as the Italian detective Aurelio Zen. As an American, I find it difficult to understand his British accent, especially as he tends to mumble his lines in a low husky voice. It's sexy, but I find myself translating his speech as he speaks even though we supposedly share a common tongue. It's also hard to understand the Italian accent of Caterina Murino, his romantic interest -- but I intend to overcome this obstacle as I like the series a lot.

The stories move fast with many interesting twists and turns. Their theme is corruption: everything turns on who (including Zen) is trustworthy and what the reality is behind the facade. There are layers of facade and shifting realities, which is always fun, at least in fiction. I enjoy the complexity of the plot twists and I enjoy Zen's dark sense of humor as he plays a game of wits with the forces attempting to defeat him.

Michael Dibdin wrote the original Aurelio Zen novels. I never really got into them though I enjoyed his earlier books. He was one of the rare writers of detective fiction who didn't settle immediately into a series featuring one detective. His earlier books were very different from each other in terms of setting, characters and plot. I found them strikingly original. Eventually he settled into the Aurelio Zen series, which became hugely successful. I don't know why I never followed the series since I really enjoyed Dibdin's earlier books. I think the Zen books were a bit too convoluted for me, which, paradoxically, is just what I do enjoy about the Masterpiece Mystery adaptations.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Bob and I met our friends Deb and Joan for a lazy afternoon in Dimond Park. (That name is spelled correctly, by the way. The park is called "Dimond," not "Diamond" as you might suppose.) We unfolded our lounge chairs under a shade tree to watch Woman's Will's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Woman's Will is an all-female troupe that mostly performs Shakespeare (hence the pun.) It's a small group without much money, but they've been around for a few years. They did a spirited rendition of The Dream, updating it to the seventies and substituting some Bay Area references for Elizabethan ones. They sang a lot of well-known golden oldies. Fortunately, they all had marvelous voices. The play ended with a rousing chorus of "Let the Sun Shine In."

At first it seems strange to watch women play male roles, but after a while it seems entirely natural. After all, men used to perform all the female roles back in Shakespeare's day. The troupe did a good job. They were lively and funny with a lot of horseplay though the poetry of Shakespeare's language didn't really come through. Since they're not professionally trained Shakespearian actors, I was willing to forgive them for that. Besides, they were competing with loud picnics on either side of the stage filled with screaming kids and water balloon fights.

Iridescent Wings

Bob and I drove up to Inverness to visit our friend Barbara, which is always a treat. Barbara lives in a gorgeous house at the top of a steep hill "at the end of nowhere" as one of her grandchildren put it. The house is surrounded by wooden decks that look out over a spectacular view of forest and gardens. The forests are provided by nature, the gardens by Barbara. On one side of the house, she's planted her vegetable garden and what she calls her "Latino garden," a bright array of scarlet and orange flowers. On the other side of the house, she has her more demure English garden filled with old-fashioned roses and flowers in hues of lavender, blue and white.

Surrounded by this blaze of color, Barbara herself dresses quietly, but well. "Casual elegance" is the appropriate term. When I first met her, she was a wardrobe consultant and I was a Tarot-tossing bohemian. She endeared herself to me by telling me that "Clothes are luminescent with memory, like Tarot cards." Sadly, I have no fashion sense, as most of you know. My daily uniform consists of a Tee shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate clothes. I haven't the knack for dressing well, but I admire those who do and I love costumes so I loved hearing about Barbara's latest project, which was to design the costumes for a community theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

"It's full of fairies, you know," she told us over a salad she'd picked from her garden, "But the director didn't want wings and I agreed. So I came up with the idea of feathers. I found an easy way to attach them so I put them in the fairies' hair and adorned their costumes with feathers. We had feathers everywhere. The men were dressed soberly in suits and ties as businessmen. At the end of the play, the fairies marry the businessmen so we had them fasten feathers on the men to symbolize the union. It was lots of fun, feathers flying everywhere, in their hair and on their suit lapels."

Later, when we were sitting out on the deck, she demonstrated the effect with a tuft of brightly colored feathers in her blonde-brown hair. The talk of theatrical costumes made me think of Ellen Terry's famous costume for Macbeth. John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of her in it: "a green gown shimmering with the iridescent wings of 1,000 beetles."

Les Mots

It was a hot day two days ago. Fortunately, I spent it at Christina's house doing artwork at her dining room table. It was an ideal place to work. The air conditioner hummed comfortingly on one side of us and Nina and Gigi, her two dogs, stretched out on the other side of us taking an afternoon snooze.

We worked on our art journals. She has more than one going at a time, but the one she worked on is called "Les Mots." Appropriately, it is full of cutup words and phrases that sometimes fall accidentally or not so accidentally into poems. She made a page of pictures this time, though, with cool translucent blues to sooth our overheated souls. I made a page of cool greens, which I later altered with an upside down woman kneeling on a beach.

It's soothing to work with another person, each of us sorting and pasting our images onto the page or sometimes tossing them across the table to each other. I gave her a glowing brown seashell and she gave me a deep green page that I used later as a background for the image you see above.

Horoscopes for the Dead

I got out the latest book of Billy Collins' poems from the library yesterday, Horoscopes for the Dead. Happily, it more than lived up to my expectations. He is one my favorite living poets. I liked the poem he wrote about a dead poet's poem:

Memorizing "The Sun Rising" by John Donne


Every reader likes the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth century morning.


And it's a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.


But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress's eyes,
I can feel the first one begin to fade
like sky-written letters on a windy day.


And by the time I have taken in the third,
the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now, 
a wavering line of acrid smoke.


So it's not until I leave the house
and walk three times around this hidden lake
that the poem begins to show
any interest in walking by my side.


Then, after my circling,
better than courteous dominion
of her being all the states and him all princes,


better than love's power to shrink
the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,


and better even than the compression
of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas


is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,
testing the plank of every line,
it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

According to Type

I hesitate to get into national stereotypes, but it's hard not to after you watch enough International Mystery series. The Nordic ones are by far the bloodiest. They usually feature rape, child kidnapping, sexual abuse, religious fanaticism or various violent crimes against women involving all of the above. There is often some psychological component to the criminal's make-up that explains his gruesome behavior. The plots tend to revolve around societal problems or else are based on passion and revenge. I don't know about those Norsemen. Too many long alcoholic winters, I guess, combined with their Viking heritage.

The British are into cleverness, charm and eccentricity. They've got two types of mysteries going: the quaint village murder or big city crime. In the quaint village programs, you never see anyone who isn't white. The characters bicycle around town, sing in church choirs or potter about in their gardens. The bad guys invariably turn out to be members of the upper class: ruthless aristocratic bitches with family secrets or weak-willed nobility involved in mercenary real estate deals that will ruin the rustic scene. In the big city crime stories urban grime, immigrants, political scandals and the corrupt police force abound. (Not so different from what's happening in London now, apparently).

The Germans solve their murders in teams. The plots are often about immigration problems (actually, this is a recurring plot line in all European countries) or else they're about about Neo-Nazi groups: secret societies, duelling scars, and Swaztikas. The stories are dark, but they're not as dark as the Swedish ones and there's some humor in them.

I have to judge the French by Maigret because that's the only French series I've seen, but it runs true to form in that it's a vintage brand with Maigret as the most famous detective of them all, excepting Sherlock Holmes. Set in the past, the stories are straightforward police procedurals: setting, suspects, clues and alibis all methodically in place. The characters are studies in "types"; the themes are usually adultery or greed.

Italian mysteries are more light-hearted except for the ones written by Brits or Americans about Italians, which tend to be moralistic. But the Italians themselves produce amusing, fast-paced mysteries centered on love, romance and flirtation. Since Family reigns supreme in Italy (either as a sacred institution or in its opposite form as the satanic Mafia), there is usually some sentimental reference to motherhood in the story or a scene of a happy family gathering.

A Sinking Ship

I've been working on my art journal. I've only got a few more pages to go until I'm finished. Well, more than a few, actually, but at least the end is in sight.  I like to think that my book is tastefully morbid in tone, somewhat like the art of Edward Gorey, though I'm not nearly as morbid as Gorey. But then I'm not as talented as he is, either, nor as funny. In fact, I'm not funny at all, at least not on purpose. Sigh.