Blue Hotel finalist in Ngaios

Blue Hotel is on the shortlist for Best Novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards. The paperback can be ordered online here.

The Ngaio Marsh Awards official press release follows:

2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists plunge readers into page-turning tales about who we are

From heart-wrenching tales of families torn apart by disappearance or deportation to examinations of historic crimes, swindles, and injustices to page-whirring novels about former cops and former convicts, the finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards offer a diverse array of storytelling excellence

“When we first launched New Zealand’s own annual prizes for crime, mystery, and thriller writing in 2010, we modelled our Ngaio Marsh Awards on the Hammett Prize in North America, which celebrates literary excellence in crime writing,” says Ngaio Marsh Awards founder Craig Sisterson. “The Ngaios have never been solely about detective fiction; instead highlighting and celebrating outstanding Kiwi storytellers whose tales, fictional and factual, explore the investigation of crime or the impact or effects of crime on people and society.”

The 2023 Ngaios finalists announced today across three categories, like many previous years, says Sisterson, underline that original ethos. This year’s finalists range across an array of styles, settings, and stories, exploring important topics from radical empathy and redemption in one of the world’s most notorious psychiatric facilities to familial grief, dealing with dementia, mass surveillance, and the ongoing impact of colonisation and the Dawn Raids.

“The consistent thread throughout this diverse array of Kiwi books is quality storytelling that struck a chord with our international judging panels of crime writing experts from several countries,” says Sisterson. “As the likes of Val McDermid have said, if you want to better understand a place, read its crime fiction. Crime writing is a broad church nowadays, including but going far beyond the traditional puzzling mysteries of Dames Ngaio and Agatha Christie, and can deliver insights about society and humanity alongside rollicking reads. Many of our finalists showcase something about who we are, as people and a nation.”

The finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction, a biennial prize previously won by filmmaker Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) for IN DARK PLACES, a book about the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora, by Kelly Dennett for THE SHORT LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF JANE FURLONG, and most recently by Martin van Beynen for BLACK HANDS: INSIDE THE BAIN FAMILY MURDERS, are:

• A NEW DAWN by Emeli Sione (Mila’s Books)
• THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Dr Gwen Adshead & Eileen Horne (Faber)
• DOWNFALL: THE DESTRUCTION OF CHARLES MACKAY by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press)
• THE FIX by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman Books)
• MISSING PERSONS by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)

Each of this year’s non-fiction finalists delivered compelling stories that immersed readers in a variety of subject matters, from historical figures and crimes to deeply personal stories.

“There were some stellar non-fiction reads this year,” said the international judging panel of Scottish journalist and true crime writer turned novelist Douglas Skelton, Auckland lawyer Darise Bennington, and Ngaios founder Craig Sisterson. “From well-researched and fascinating dissections of historic events to deeply informed and personal tales, to disturbing yet engrossing accounts of the humanity behind shocking acts, we have terrific finalists.”

The finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel are:

• ONE HEART ONE SPADE by Alistair Luke
• TOO FAR FROM ANTIBES by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
• BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
• SURVEILLANCE by Riley Chance (CopyPress Books)
• THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
• PAPER CAGE by Tom Baragwanath (Text Publishing)

“There is no shortage of fresh ideas in New Zealand crime fiction, nor in breadth of style, with this year's entrants running from chilling thrillers to the cosier end of the spectrum,” says British journalist and book reviewer Louise Fairbairn, the Chair of an international judging panel for the Best First Novel category that also included South African writer Sonja van der Westhuizen, British reviewer and longtime CWA Daggers judge Ayo Onatade, and Australian podcaster and author Dani Vee. “Those debuts that particularly caught our attention were unafraid to explore difficult real-life issues and embed themselves in an authentic New Zealand of rough edges and grey areas, rather than glossy make-believe.”

Lastly, the finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel are:

• EXIT .45 by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
• BLUE HOTEL by Chad Taylor (Brio Books)
• REMEMBER ME by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
• THE DOCTOR’S WIFE by Fiona Sussman (Bateman Books)
• BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
• BLOOD MATTERS by Renée (The Cuba Press)
• THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)

“It’s a very strong group of finalists to emerge from a dazzlingly varied longlist,” says Sisterson. “This year’s entrants gave our international judging panels lots to chew over, and plenty of books judges enjoyed and loved didn’t become finalists. ‘Yeahnoir’, our local spin on some of the world’s most popular storytelling forms, is certainly in fine health.”

The winners of the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards will be announced at a special event held in association with WORD Christchurch in Spring, details and date to be confirmed soon.

For more information on any or all of our 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists, or the Ngaios in general, please contact founder Craig Sisterson.

It is not dying

Shirley Halperin: Are you worried about artists making a living in the near future?

Trent Reznor: Absolutely I am.

Jimmy Iovine: We all should be.

Reznor: I've dedicated my whole life to this craft, which, for a variety of reasons, is one that people feel we don't need to pay for anymore. And I went through a period of pointing fingers and being the grumpy, old, get-off-my-lawn guy. But then you realize, let's adapt and figure out how to make this better instead of just complain about it.

-- Eddy Cue, Robert Kondrk, Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine interviewed by Shirley Halperin of Billboard magazine, June 14 2016

Falling man

"The work gets slower, that's for sure. This latest book took me nearly four years to write and it's not even 300 pages. It's not a burden, it's just day-to-day. But at some point I realised I'd been sitting there for four years. Why isn't it a bigger book?"

-- Don DeLillo interviewed by Xan Brooks for The Guardian

Quitting

Remember blogging? In the early days of the World Wide Web an Internet user's knowing gaze fell on Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox) and Bookslut (Jessa Crispin). Cox left Wonkette in 2006, after which it wasn't fun; now Crispin has shuttered Bookslut, leaving us with less fun again. Boris Kachka at NYMag.com asked Crispin why she's leaving and her answer shows why we will miss her:

BK: You’re not a fan of the industry.

JC: Part of the reason why I disengaged from it is I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature.

Earlier at NYMag.com, Casey Johnston declared social media unwell:

It's an established fact of social media services that, once they reach enough size that the potential audience for a post becomes nebulous, people shy from posting on them, because they can't predict what reaction they'll get. This — called "context collapse" — is why we've seen group messaging services boom as broader social media ones have flattened; in your Slack or HipChat or GroupMe, you know how your friends or family will react to a link you post. On an open and unfiltered social media feed, the outcome of posting to a public is far too unpredictable.

In 2014 Prince told Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone why he had stopping releasing albums:

Prince famously liberated himself from his record deal with Warner Bros. in 1996, and it apparently took him years to realize that his freedom extended to not releasing music. "I write more than I record now, and I also play live a lot more than I record," he says. "I used to record something every day. I always tease that I have to go to studio rehab.

"I'm a very in-the-moment person," he continues. "I do what feels good in the moment. ... I'm not on a schedule, and I don't have any sort of contractual ties. I don't know in history if there's been any musicians that have been self-sufficient like that, not beholden. I have giant bills, large payrolls, so I do have to do tours. ... But there's no need to record anymore." He makes a direct connection between fasting, celibacy and his abstention from recording. "After four days, you don't want food anymore. ... It's like this thing that says, 'Feed me, feed me.' When it realizes it's not going to get fed, it goes away. ... It's the same with music. I had to see what it's like to stop making albums. And then you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, I don't feel the need to do that anymore.'"

Before the morning comes, the story's told

JESSE PEARSON: I've heard a lot of writers say that sometimes novels take on a life of their own, and I've heard other writers say that that's just bullshit and that doesn't happen and you're always in control.

PETE DEXTER: It's not bullshit. I don't ever feel like I'm in control.

JP: I love that thought, but I'm trying to understand how it works.

PD: It's like you're writing and you get to a place or an event and you sit back and think about who the guy is and how he reacts to it. You don't know what that reaction is going to be until you actually think about the guy, put yourself in the guy, and then think about the circumstance. And then you see, and the choice he makes there leads to all his other choices. In that way, it's kind of like life. Now, the opposite of this is these guys who plot their books in the beginning. I couldn't write a book like that. It would bore me to death. This is a problem in screenwriting too.

JP: That's been made into this weird algebraic thing, where it's like, "Three minutes in, this has to happen. Twenty-seven minutes in, this has to happen."

PD: You get 12 guys around a table, eight of whom are afraid that they're losing their jobs, and they're looking at a script and they start doing what you're talking about. "There's got to be more x, y, or z here." They want to plug all these things in even though they don't fit, and that's why you see so many movies that look like other movies.

JP: Right.

PD: Because eight guys are worried about losing their jobs. But I've got no idea how you'd maintain any kind of spontaneity, even within the personalities of the characters, if you had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time. If it's any kind of a story at all, it grows as you write it. The characters grow in ways that I can't possibly anticipate at the beginning of things. As well as I know the story of my stepdad and me, if you'd asked me four years ago, before this book really got going, what it would be about and I had to guess, I promise you that three-fourths of the stuff I guessed would be wrong.

JP: So you have to let the narrative guide you as you write it.

PD: If you can anticipate to the end in any way beyond, you know, the feeling, then I think you're kind of cheating yourself as a writer. Things happen that ought to be allowed to happen.

JP: It also seems more courageous and maybe pure to write like that.

PD: To me, it's more economical. When you follow the story, as opposed to leading it, you're less likely to make huge mistakes. You used a good word when you said "pure" because, if you follow the story, the things that you write will be purely of the story and of the characters. Even if today you look at yesterday's work and can't use it, there are still going to be things in there—if you followed the rules—that are useful to you.

-- Pete Dexter interviewed by Jesse Pearson for Vice, 2009

Trance state

"Once I'm writing a novel, it's like laying a few bricks every day to build a house until the house is done. I write early in the morning. I work from seven or eight until one o'clock in the afternoon. I just add to it. In general, I don't know where I'm going with it. I like to have a process of discovery, so it's kind of a mystery to me where it goes, but I know the characters well ... When I'm involved in a novel, it's really like being in a trance for the several months that it takes. I'm preoccupied. But the great thing, Todd, is that there are no rules. That's something I always liked about being a writer. However you get it done, you get it done."

 -- Barry Gifford interviewed by Todd Summar, 2015

Easy movement

"Mennonites ... believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It's that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss."

-- The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber (The Penguin Press, 2014)

Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

Girl In A Band's opening chapter detailing Kim Gordon's breakup with Thurston Moore has been chewed over by an online audience that might not normally discuss a woman in terms of her relationship but the memoir in total is judicious and single-minded: a personal narrative of laterally-mobile ambition signposted with appearances by the fashionable and infamous. The author presents herself as a ‏60s art school child who jumped almost directly to the New York 80s gallery scene, bypassing disco and rock. As per the title she has much to say about gender but it's Gordon's adult quality that sets her apart from her morose peers: even while professing fears of inadequacy the narrative focus is intelligent and self-possessed. The chapters on her favourite Sonic Youth tracks make a fine 20 minutes on YouTube and her memories of New York are a paean to an urban culture now priced out of existence.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2015

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Murakami's The Strange Library appears designed for younger readers but few of them would recognise a library as it's depicted: borrowing cards, inked date stamps, stacks of books teetering over the door. The book is designed by Suzanne Dean, whose credit is tucked at the foot of the credits. An endpaper note explains that many of the illustrations have been sourced from The London Library and visually the enterprise has the charm of an English storybook but the story, translated by Ted Goossen, is less attractive. A boy researching the Ottoman Empire becomes imprisoned by a extremely threatening old man; his fellow inmates are a girl who speaks with her hands, and a sheep man – a recurring Murakami character who appears in Dance Dance Dance. The combination of inventive design and lurching narrative renders the experience either more frustrating or engaging, depending on your tastes. The final effect is subversive: looks like a children's book, freaks you out.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2014

Ghosts

The Haunted Life by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics, 192pp) is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac's work and his father's correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the accompanying material shines a light on it.

As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge (later dropped) and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War Two, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.

"Someday, we'll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California," says his friend, 19 year old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.

The Haunted Life is a young man's story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.

Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters' thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than "say" the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off:

"Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river's moist gust of breeze... The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings."

Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It's the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.

Sunday Star Times, 13.04.2014 Pic: Kerouac in 1943 c/- Wikipedia

The Wanderers

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 per cent in the 1970s to 50 per cent in the 1990s, probably because we measure ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation...

At the onset of the the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons -- as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society. But nowadays we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one's gifts with the world.

-- Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Penguin, 2012)

(Pic: Gustav Courbet)

He could have married Anne with the blue silk blouse

Charles Q. Choi on the science of déjà vu:

The researchers found déjà vu most often occurred when new scenes were very similar to previously experienced scenes in terms of their spatial layout but not similar enough that people consciously recognized the resemblance.

"One reason for the jarring sense that accompanies déjà vu may be the contrast between the sense of newness and the simultaneous sense of oldness — something unfamiliar should not also feel familiar... A situation that resembles one in memory may be a particularly good candidate for producing that simultaneous recognition of newness alongside a sense of familiarity."

Chris Lee on how David Bowie is not here and yet still is:

"He has consciously dropped out of sight," says Paul Trynka, author of David Bowie: Starman, considered the definitive biography of the singer. "For someone so consistently vain and self-obsessed, the heart attack—the realization of his mortality—came as a massive psychological blow. But he's someone who has always had a real understanding of how to manipulate the media and saw the dramatic potential of a disappearance in a very Hollywood way. It became a kind of Houdini disappearing act. The fact that it's gone unstated makes it even more mysterious."

Also from Scientific American; why paper won't go away either:

"Your iPad will go blank on you," Barrett said. "But 'Huckleberry Finn' will never go blank on you. Even if you store it in a wet basement and it gets really badly molded, you can dry it out and it'll still be there."

(Pic: Lana Del Ray in Cannes; John Sargent's Madame X)

Do your thing

In a sure-to-be-discussed-everywhere article Kim Wright asks why so many literary writers are shifting to genre:

The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground and the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there does seem to be a definite trend of literary/mainstream writers turning to romance, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and YA.

The evidence may not be empirical but this does seem to be a trend. If it is I would answer the question by saying that literary authors were always writing in a genre in the first place. John Birmingham and I stumbled towards saying this at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2003:

"Big L" literature, as they describe it [says John Birmingham] no longer connects to the real world. It's left to "small L" literature writers, the journalists, crime writers and drug scribes, to get their fingers dirty and get the meaty stories out there." 

"I really love literature, you need it like you need vegetables," said Taylor. "But it's become this timid thing."

Strolling around a big bookstore (because I find less in them to stop and read, let alone buy) this timidity becomes apparent. From subject to tone to style to title and packaging, "literature" follows as many rules as "romance" or "historical."

David Mamet spotted the "trend" in 2000:

For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carré, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian. 

Each year, of course, found the press discovering some writer whose style, provenance and choice of theme it found endearing. These usually trig, slim tomes shared a wistful and self-commendatory confusion at the multiplicity of life and stank of Art. But the genre writers wrote without sentimentality; their prose was concise and perceptive; in it the reader sees the life of which they wrote, rather than the writer's "technique."

O'Brian wrote the Master and Commander novels, of which Our Mr Reynolds was a great fan. He was always pressing them on me. I didn't like them so much but we found common ground in Le Carré – the early ones, at least.

Maybe lit's still good. There's crap in the genre shelves as well. The Clean said it best: Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten.

Bedside reading

La vérité est là

Season five of Maupassant is my favourite.

When I was down you just stood there grinning

Major book chains are closing up. Meanwhile in France (pictured) where the selling price is fixed by publishers, book stores are still open for business. Note also that retailers lease fewer than four floors, don't serve coffee or sell CDs and DVDs. So Amazon has won... at least until governments (= consultants) decide the postal service isn't financially justifiable.

A London publisher told me about the Christmas when Amazon UK demanded that they cut their prices. The publisher refused, so Amazon switched off the 'Buy' buttons on all their titles. The publisher refused to back down and Amazon caved – eventually. Stories like that make me like bookstores even if they are a chain.

I'll remember Borders in Auckland for stocking my novels (ta Chris B) and wish the staff well. If the Civic premises are going to vacated, now is the time for a DKD revival.

Also on the theme of change The National Enquirer has been staking out Steve Jobs. I don't want to know and I'm not going to link to it but I do want to point out that the last time a reporter pulled this kind of stunt the Tooth Fairy bit his lips off.

A diary of crossed lines

Donald Rumsfeld has a memoir out. Early reviews say it dodges the questions and shunts responsibility until the very end, so in that respect it sounds true to the politician. Writes Lyric Winik:

Yet detractors and supporters alike say that on a personal level Don Rumsfeld is warm, funny, and generous. He is not a petty gossip, like Henry Kissinger.

Is anyone a petty gossip like Henry Kissinger? From The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:

Nixon was often on the phone with Kissinger for fifteen minutes or longer. The President was repetitive, sometimes taking minutes to come to a point.. Kissinger occasionally came out of his office after such calls. 'Who was taking that?' he would ask. One of the four women stationed in the small outer office would raise her hand. 'Wasn't that the worst thing you ever heard in your life?' Kissinger would ask. [p. 191]

... Kissinger seemed singularly obsessed with his own prestige and image. If he had long list of telephone messages, he would often call back Nancy Maginnes first, then Governor Rockefeller, then movie stars and celebrities and then the President... He assigned his aides the distasteful job of heading off negative stories and lodging complaints about those that made it into print. The job was especially difficult because the offending stories were often true; Kissinger himself was, at times, the unwitting source. He let information slip as he courted Washington's most influential journalists. [pp. 193-194]

If you have some long afternoons to kill I (once more) recommend Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (Public Affairs, 804pp). The day I lugged that puppy out of the bookstore was the day I admitted my obsession. Now offline, here's an original Muse Lounge entry on Rumsfeld, fighting and so on:

Hitting others

Boxing doesn't seem real anymore. The fighters are real and their punches break bones but the bouts that Don King books and is paid for are so strategic and limited that the outcome surprises nobody except for the chumps who place their bets. For newcomers to the sport, Don is the guy with a Bride of Frankenstein hair-do grinning at the camera and waving the little American flags like a puppeteer trying to cheer up a sick child.

Sunday's middleweight title bout between French challenger Morrade Hakkar and American incumbent Bernard Hopkins was promoted as a Rocky III-style metaphor for national tensions during the current Iraqi conflict. Hakkar literally skipped and ran around the ring for the entire first round until the veangeful champion closed in and whupped him. And so the crowds did cheer.

But the better metaphor, grimly, was to be found in the bout New Zealanders were watching before that, when our own David Tua went up for the second time against Hasim Rahman. If hanging off the other guy like a woozy lover and sandbagging him to an unsatisfying draw is boxing, Rahman is a world beater. Tua was less frustrated by his opponent's long arms than he was by Lennox Lewis's. Clearly exhausted from throwing big blows, he still produced surprising volleys late in the game to try and break Rahman's saggy dominance, but never quite succeeded.

The two great learning moments came in round six, when Tua connected a humdinger and Rahman looked goosed (Tua was still too tired to close) and in the last round when Rahman raised his arms and declared himself the winner about 15 seconds before the final bell. You don't do that to boys from South Auckland, and Tua lashed out at Rahman like he was going to kill him. Really and properly.

As a casual observer I haven't seen that sort of blood anger in Tua before; the last time it surfaced in a Don King bout, it was in Mike Tyson. A pissed-off and disrespected Tua is a truly shit-scary prospect: how long will he be allowed to remain the nice guy? For his career's sake, not long, Don King must be hoping; but personally I hope Tua stays the patently good-natured fellow he seems to be.

Likewise the war, which we all hoped would be savagely rapid but also do kind of nice things for people, whether they be shoeless Iraqi conscripts or Dick Cheney's pals at cocktail hour. Now however, about ten days in, matters are taking more familiar shape, and the war of liberation has become a fight more or less like the others we have known, read about or watched: a slow slog compromised by surprising nastiness, with a predetermined but unsatisfying result looming, and a guy everyone pays but nobody likes waving the flag.

And once again - the boxing metaphor stretched to nanofilament width here - the fools are the ones watching and laying their bets. Viewers are not happy to find out what those great looking weapons really get up to, and they are shocked to see that women and children are dying. I'm cynical about these reactions insofar as the reverse implication is that young or middle-aged men dying is somehow by the by. Practically nobody signs up to die. (Even some of the 9/11 hijackers didn't know suicide was part of the deal.)

Now we're in the thick of a recognisably war-shaped war the press can get down to the fundamentals of who's shot what, and apportioning blame. The Iraq conflict is a self-declared battle of technology: not a proving ground, but a living, killing strategy based on new ideas like unmanned drones and software that anticipates the food, fuel and ordnance needs of a sprawling, highly ambulatory fighting force.

It is a mantra of battle to never advance beyond your supply lines. Logistics are as dangerous as the other guy, as Custer and Rommel both found out. Rather than ignoring the supply-line maxim, the strategy for fighting in Iraq is actually based on refuting it, calling as it does on 150,000 troops (less than half used to mop up the shell-shocked enemy in Kuwait) to move very, very quickly around the Iraqis, isolate them and pick them off during or after the entry into Baghdad.

Although the theory is now associated with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it's been around a while. It's been called things like "21st century" and "modern" warfare, and seems, broadly, to be a logical response to the popular history of Vietnam where a superior but traditional armed force was successfully resisted by more mobile guerrilla-style fighters.

Whether or not it works is in the future tense. But we are already hearing an echo of Vietnam in Washington. The media are tut-tutting and spokespersons are clearing their throats in order to speak up about what the strategy ought to have been. There's a sense that Rumsfeld is being set up, and you can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

In a recent (March 30) CNN-broadcast press conference Rumsfeld defended the strategy and attacked the press for the way they were reporting the war. Around the same time there was an announcement that the U.S. would be sending an additional 100,000 troops to Iraq.

Insisting on confidence, attacking the press, and escalation: it's a one-two-three combination. Although Rumsfeld's situation is different, the mood of the fight reminds me of Robert McNamara, another moderniser of military strategy later hung out to dry.

-- Muse Lounge, Mar 31, 2003

I am not a number

A fan as I am of exploitation cinema the buck stops when it exploits writers. Collider has done a good job of covering the I Am Number Four movie but the skinny comes from New York Magazine's piece on James Frey's young adult fiction factory which originated the work. The terms being offered the writers who work on these pieces are odious. Writes one potiential participant:

The Authors Guild got back to me with serious concerns over the contract... I later spoke to Conrad Rippy, a veteran publishing attorney, who explained that the contract given to me wasn't a book-packaging contract; it was "a collaboration agreement without there being any collaboration." He said he had never seen a contract like this in his sixteen years of negotiation. "It's an agreement that says, 'You're going to write for me. I'm going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don't have to use you. In exchange for this, I'm going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can't verify—there's no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses." He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—"although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250."

Read the article - it's all in the fine print. I was cautious about criticising Frey for the Million Little Pieces fiasco because it wasn't clear whether he volunteered to lie about the book's veracity or was coerced into doing it - and also, the man's so far away from me in space and income that I couldn't really bring myself to care. But I've revised my opinion: James Frey is a gold-plated prick. If you boycott one movie this year, make it I Am Number Four.

For international readers

Departure Lounge in the English language section of a bookstore in Florence.

The secret life of bookmarks

A bonus of buying secondhand books is finding the previous owner's markings in the text and folded corners as bookmarks. Or in this case, a postcard memory of the Hotel Bauer Grunwald, with no name or date. When I first read it I thought it said "Remember choix outside!", as in "choice" but I think it says "chox" as in chocolates. First glance was better.