'Reverse Jinx?' World Series Game One — Sort of






I can't explain how I watched last year's World Series. I managed to pay attention, take notes and write not one but two live-blogs of the thing. I suppose I was distracted enough by the novelty of reacting to things via live-blogging to not collapse in a wet sack of neuroses about the games themselves. No such luck this year.

I'm genuinely sports superstitious. Even as I'm doing superstitious things, I can tell myself, "This is objectively nonsensical. There is no causal relationship between your behavior and team performance," yet I won't for a second stop whatever's occupying my attention. One time I saw my team win a late-inning playoff game while I was seated in a weird way and holding on to a magazine I'd been flipping through. I sat in that position, clutching that magazine, for the rest of the games. They won 'em all!—I developed a peculiar pain! No, seriously. I had trouble walking because I'd sat like a mutant to watch baseball. Somehow this made perfect sense at the time.

In a strangely obverse display, I once walked home from a trip to The Booze Store during the early innings of a playoff game and discovered that while I was out, the Red Sox had scored three runs. A few minutes after sitting down in front of the TV, they gave up two. I immediately left the house and walked around my neighborhood for what I later figured out was eight miles. I periodically called friends to check the score. The Sox wound up winning by nearly ten runs, but when I'd gone home in late innings and after they'd gotten a large lead, the opposing team put runners in scoring position (RISP), and I left the house again.

The ritualized pain of this behavior has been leavened in recent years by the advent of the DVR. At least you can still see the game in identical broadcast quality later if your jinx-related actions pay off. But pain or inconvenience has to be at the heart of the anti-jinx. I once tried the "Uh-oh, honey, the team won yesterday, and we had sex that morning, so we're going to have to have sex every gameday" gambit, and of course the team lost the next game. So much for fucking. The anti-jinx has to be sacrificial, because you can't preemptively reward yourself for the reward of the team winning. That's like bingeing for weight loss.

I wanted to avoid all that this year — as did, presumably, The Wife — so I decided that the best way of eliminating painful behavior was to establish a comfort precedent, something that wasn't necessarily rewarding but at least put me into a position that wasn't likely to be orthopedically punitive. Going into World Series Game One, I would be leaning back, feet up, some sunflower seeds and iced tea* at hand, laptop in front of me.
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* — I know what you're saying: "You goddamn fucking candyass, why are you not drinking beer?" Here's why: jinxes. If you are willing to buy into the sympathetic magic of your actions influencing events, you don't want to be powering down a beer when your team starts lighting up the scoreboard, because pretty soon you're basically shotgunning beers every inning to keep the good mojo. It doesn't matter how good it feels when they win if, in the morning, you can't move because you drank 10 beers in about three hours on the basis of hocus pocus.
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If something went right, great. I would have to sit comfortably and be able to fuck around online and sip tea and maybe crack at a clump of sunflower seeds for the rest of the games, just to keep the good times going. If things went wrong, I might have to lie down on the couch or something. Rough going, but I figured I could handle it.

It turned out pretty well, but of course my neurotic fretting about the early innings of the games got the better of me. There's no way to write about bad juju. Because I believe in jinxes, I couldn't write, "Player I Support on Team I Like does Thing That Is Good." I mean, if I singled it out, it would never happen again, because I was crowing about it. Right?

If this train of thought seems completely alien to you, you're not really a sports fan. I don't mean to suggest that all sports fans are so susceptible to the nonsense that I allow to control my own actions — rather that anyone who really loves sports knows how much this makes sense to some people. You may not agree with them, but you know them. They're your friends and peers. They do dumb crap like this, and you feel for them anyway, even if they ostensibly are completely stupid.

I hope this degree of thinking evinces some form of method to its madness, because it instantly explains for me why I didn't liveblog the games. I couldn't. For one thing, both Buck and McCarver were far less than their normally egregious selves, leaving little to take apart. For another, praise or criticism of how the games were played could sway events too direly. Better to distract myself, as I did. With chatlogs. Many many chatlogs.

Below are the standard bullet-point thoughts with some chats I was having, mid-game, added in blockquote format:


World Series Game One

• Not paying attention to pregame. Not paying attention to pregame. Not paying attention to pregame. Besides, everything anyone could mock about it has been done.

• I am completely fucking psyched that there's going to be a movie about South Africa starring Morgan Freeman and a dude frahhhm faaaacking Maaaaaasachussets. I'm even more psyched for the inevitable and not-at-all-racist right-wing commentary about the movie and how the crime rate in South Africa is currently horrible. Of course, this couldn't be because of anything white people did. It will be because of socialism or something else that makes for a wonderful code-phrase that actually means, "Thee blicks." I wish I could lay my bet in Kruggerands, but in this economy, I'd be lucky to get out of the red and Bick in Blick.

• I know I should probably spend time thinking about how this game is already frontloaded with militaristic pomposity and the unsubtle marriage of a sport and a celebration of jingoistic aggression, but fuck that. Let's ignore that this dude has a hook for a hand. Let's instead notice that the American military's anti-gay policy (which is already so farcical that anyone could drop 2,000 words on it without hesitation) routinely doesn't account for well-coiffed young men who sing with a voice made for New York theater. This guy is making the national anthem fabulous. Guess it's for the best he has a hook for a hand so he doesn't get the chance to jerk off two men at once anymore!

• So far Cliff Lee has been amazing. I get an email telling me to fire up my chat program. Okay. This happens:

RIG: Are you watching this "basey-ball" thing? It is quite humorous!
ME: Beisbol has been berry berry good to me.
RIG: I was watching "The 12 Sexiest Las Vegas Jobs" but I decided to give this base-ball a chance
ME: Cliff Lee struck out four of the first five batters. He's been really nice to watch.
RIG: I am not here to compliment people.

This really should have been a warning of things to come.

• New York and Philadelphia are not that far apart, a rare fact that seems to have delighted some staffers at FOX and led them to try to brand this as "The Amtrak Series" as a way of making it seem as fundamentally interlinked and marketable as the 2000 Mets/Yankees "Subway Series" or the 1989 A's/Giants "Battle of the Bay." To illustrate this, they toss up a moving graphic of the distance, which apparently is just Google Maps retouched a little bit to not immediately seem like Google Maps. But it's not working.

RIG: Are they really doing a Google Maps thing on the series?
ME: hahaha yes
RIG: "Amtrak Series," brought to you by Amtrak! Amtrak: No derailments in 50 Days.
ME: That's because it's government run, though. If we only privatized it, old tracks and under-inspected railcars would go away.
RIG: The government is bad. I have learned this through my extensive watching of TV and listening of radio. Also, some black guy is president??? NOT IN MY AMERICA!!!

That's right: the state of American discourse on 24-hour news is such that you can't even bullshit about a baseball game without immediately thinking, "Arrrghhh! Black guy!" and "SOCIALESM!!!!" The worst thing is that it immediately works. You can apply ahistorical mindless hatred to any topic and sound like you're a cash-cow pundit on the worst channel in the English-speaking world.

• Chase Utley hits a home run after a 9-pitch battle with CC Sabathia. It's amazing. I really like Chase Utley and wish I hadn't overdone it in my last Phillies-related blog and run through all the 1980s/1990s banking/investment slogans I could remember.

• Joe Buck goes to a great deal of effort to let everyone know that this is the first home run hit by an opponent at the new Yankee Stadium in the postseason this year. The last part is stupidly redundant: this is the first year the stadium has existed, so the "this year" modifier is totally unnecessary. Remember too that there have only been three postseason games played at this stadium before today, and the great significance melts away into probability, a rudimentary understanding based on chance... really, any sort of horse sense that says, "Joe Buck has a stat sheet in front of him and will cite anything from it that seems important because it gives him relief from the tremendous onus of observation put on his horrible brain."

• It's a FOX broadcast, so pretty much every aspect of it has been sponsored by somebody. We're only a few years away from the "FOX Ballshot Cam" and the "FOX Spit Chin-Drip of the Game." For now, though, we're stuck with shitty promotional bumper music from instantly disposable bands. Amazingly, did you know that one of the artists in the FOX pregame show would wind up being featured in phone ads regularly shown during commercial breaks?

ME: Yes, Switchfoot, on the Blackberry Storm! Switchfoooooooooot!
RIG: Also, Switchfoot is a gay Christian band.
ME: Yeah, but FOX has some promo deal with them this postseason.
RIG: Figures they'd get in bed with Fox. Fuck Switchfoot, man. Seriously.
ME: This one wasn't as bad. The one they were playing in the ALCS was their song where the lead singer was just singing the melody from "War Pigs" over and over.
RIG: Well that's probably better than the singer singing a Switchfoot melody over and over.
RIG: LOOK I HATE SWITCHFOOT CAN WE STOP TALKING ABOUT THEM
ME: Wow, it's like you'd prefer the shoe to be on the other foot now. To switchfoot, if you will...

• Of course it wouldn't be Yankee Stadium in the postseason without a bunch of celebrities sitting in comped seats to give you the impression that they're there every gameday. Currently shown: Alec Baldwin, someone you never see at any other time of the season. Some other celebrity whose name I didn't write down, much like the rest of the celebrity press for several years.

• Ahahahaha, and of course, there's Rudy. "America's Fuckstain." He's wearing a cap that has the traditional Yankees' NY in the middle, but he has the PD (Police Department) and FD (Fire Department) stitched on either side.

RIG: Giuliani didn't mention 9/11 in his appearance, how refreshing. [Rudy was on camera but nowhere near a mic.]
ME: ahahaha fucking Giuliani still wearing a PD FD hat
RIG: Baby steps,
RIG: I want to point out that I completed that joke like a champ
ME: I wonder if he has one of those hats for each member of the FDNY killed by his stocking WTC7 with unshielded fuel or by his vetoing funding for a better portable radio system for all firefighters that might have saved lives during 9/11... if that funding hadn't gone to his totally useless WTC7 Emergency Command Center.
RIG: Way to go political. Baseball should be pure.
ME: Now please rise for the 4th Inning Stretch of My Country T'is of Thee—
RIG: —led by Adolph Giuliani. Whoops, I meant Rudolph,
RIG: "MY COUNTRY TIS 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11"

Reminder that the FDNY's principal union did not endorse Giuliani and was sharply critical of him, but there's Rudy anyway, whoring out the memory of death because, hey, he was there when people died, so he must be awesome or something.

• I mean, I recognize that America bailed on Rudy in the primaries in 2008, but how is it not a basic talking point in any situation that Rudolph Giuliani is human fucking garbage? He ran for mayor on a platform of "BLACK PEOPLE HAVE SQUEEGEES AND INCONVENIENCE WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR CARS." He's race-baiting scum worse than any far-right avatar of whatever they think Al Sharpton is. He advocated and enforced censorship of the arts. He piggybacked on a crime reduction that began two years before he took office, then branded the crime reduction as (partially) his own under the appellation CompStat, then exported his partner-in-riding-a-wave-of-crime-reduction, the clown Bernie Kerik, to Iraq as an avatar of peacekeeping. Kerik failed tremendously and is also a corrupt asshole.

Giuliani is a bandwagoning dicklord on things he couldn't achieve himself. There isn't a single thing he's remembered for that he actually had any control over or accomplished. Levi Johnston probably has more qualifications to run for the American presidency based on the fact that he actually did the things we claim he did. That's only Bristol Palin, but that's a fuckload better than "save NY from black people and terrorism and also I wear hats."

• I'm trying really hard not to focus on the game. So much so that this happens:

RIG: That much alcohol will do that after a few generations
RIG: Look at the Kennedys.
ME: No!
RIG: JFK Jr was the best of the lot and he died because his small paws couldn't work the control stick.
ME: Just pitched into the ocean with both hands in his mouth, typewriter-gnawing like he was eating a mini corncob.
RIG: Nose twitching back and forth... He was so cute when he saluted his father's casket and then jumped up to start nibbling on his digits
ME: hahaha remember when he stole the casket and tried to dam up a nearby creek with it...
RIG: hahaha And then Uncle Teddy drove his car into it! What a card.

I can't and don't understand it either.

• Chase Utley hits his second home run of the game. I really love Chase Utley right now and start thinking of 1990s BASF ads again:

ME: AT CHASE UTLEY, WE DON'T JUST HIT THE BALL, WE HIT THE BALL FARTHER.
RIG: hahahahahahaha
RIG: "At Chase Utley, we make sure that the ball we hit is the ball that matters: yours."

As soon as Utley crosses home plate, McCarver launches into an embarrassing monologue about how Chase Utley is a "gamer." He would never have made this monologue without Utley's hitting two home runs, so the emptiness of his sudden praise is all the more evident. This is spontaneity; it's baseball ad-lib, free as it always is from definition or quantifiable meaning. Chase Utley is a gamer because he plays the game. He also plays the game right. He might be gutty about it, getting into his gut to hit a home run. Or he might be gritty, willing to dive for a ground ball and make a play. Make it right. He's all these things right now, in the McCarververse: gutty, gritty and gamery. Why? Because he hit two home runs.

If Chase Utley had hit two line drives that scored nobody, he wouldn't even register within the baseball commentariat or within McCarver's tiny frame of what baseball means. It takes literally one serendipitous stroke of the bat and 90 seconds of McCarver-brain-on-walkabout to instantly delegitimize anything anyone would say about the worth of "baseball wisdom" or baseball color commentary. It's reductive. It's stupid. It's reactively vapid bloviating. It is exactly what is wrong with American sport and observation of anything.

Tim McCarver takes less than two minutes to indict critical thinking in this country, and I despair that maybe only 10% of the audience noticed. But, hey, dingers.

• September 11th is home-team utility: the New York Yankees popularized the singing of "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch, using the traditional longer break between the top half and bottom half of the innings and the singing of "Take Me out to the Ballgame" to tack on the endlessly boring melismatic vocal stretches of warp-headed Ronan Tynan. Plenty of baseball fans who loathe the Yankees have suggested that Tynan's interminable quasi-operatic melisma helped to keep a "hot" opposing pitcher in the dugout and feeling the muscles in his arm start to crank, complain and contract.

I don't really think this was a programmatical decision, but at the same time I can't dismiss the chance that it was intentional. The Yankees are run by crazed people. Last year, it was illegal to leave your seat during Tynan's aria. The paths from the seats up to the bathrooms were literally CORDONED OFF. You had to sit and APPRECIATE Ronan Tynan and AMERICA. I wish I were making this up. People were only allowed to go to the bathroom after the Steinbrenners were sued for preventing people from going to PEE when some ugly fuck yelped an unnecessary song about YEAH—AMERICA—GOD LOVES US MORE.

Stop and think about this for a moment: an ownership group had to be sued to allow people to pee and to refrain from corralling them such as to oblige them to pay obeisance to a random guy singing about how a supernatural being had made America really awesome instead of all those other sucky countries. That actually fucking happened.

• Speaking of the Yankees' idea of the 7th Inning Stretch, there's an announcement that a woman from the (surprise!) American military named Mary Kay Messenger will be singing "God Bless America." I decide to do some dishes and come back later, and this exchange happens:

ME: OK, I'm walking away from the TV before I hear another Sloth-headed Jew-hater like Tynan sing "God Bless America" for 17 minutes
RIG: Fuck God Bless America
RIG: It's a shitty fucking song
RIG: Also; kinda want to fuck Mary Kay Messenger.
...
RIG: Gonna slow down on the drinking
ME: I fuck the Messenger
ME: And I ride and I ride
ME: Plow through the labia wide
ME: I leave her hot and quiver-thighed
ME: Fucked'r till her cervix died
RIG: Nice song
ME: I labored over it

Pretty much all my IM comments are designed to riff off Iggy Pop, and Rig is a fucking jerkoff. I was also feeding my dog when I thought of that. But do other people care that my dog starves? No, they don't. Only I have the courage and commitment to make sure dogs like my dog and the American taxpayer stay alive but also have healthcare up until it's more convenient that they be put to sleep so they shut the fuck up after they start howling or crying with pain when I could be watching SportsCenter. I'm sorry. I seem to have wandered into John Boehner's fever dream.

• Chase Utley gets called out on a bullshit pitch off the plate.

ME: Chase Utley's gentle eyes well with burning tears of resentment at his treatment.
RIG: "At Chase Utley, we know how it feels to be mistreated, and we'll make sure that you aren't."
ME: Joe Girardi has to make his way to the mound because the Damaso Marte doesn't have self-checkout.
RIG: Should have signed Chad Kroeger.
ME: lmao
RIG: God I hope hes a pitcher...
ME: Apparently he's the lead guitarist of Nickleback
ME: Somehow this makes it better
RIG: ahahaahahahhahahaa oh yeah that guy, his hair is magnificent
ME: That picture's asking you: you wanna kick The hack? Or fling The Bee? 'cause he can go either way.
RIG: It's asking: "Do you like Canadian Cock Rock?"

This is really the end of the evening's making any sense.

• I'm starting to lose control of any idea. The game is too close. I'm talking to a drunk, a Phillies fan and also a Yankees fan. I don't want to be in this bind. Everyone is angry about everything, except for the drunks. I wish I were drunk.

• My first inclination is that Yankees relief pitcher David Robertson looks so diminutive and spooked on the mound that he reminds me of a small general who failed at something during the 19th century. Only later does it occur to me that he's basically a cowardly and bonsai version of Harry Truman. Stunt him, stunt Truman somehow. And castrate him. There you go. That's Robertson.

• Cliff Lee owns. He nonchalantly basket-caught a pop-up, suavely tagged out Jorge Posada on his booty, and snatched a ball hit behind him, then flipped it to first. Cliff Lee should challenge male Phillies fans' sexuality. This was a tight, good game.

Game over.

I'm staying happily laid out on my couch. This is the way to manage superstition: recumbently.

Magdalen Nabb's Marshall Guarnaccia Novels






Don't you hate it when you discover a new author you really like, and it turns out she's dead?

I don't suppose this happens too much to people who've recently fallen in love with someone like Dickens. Even an inattentive reader is probably going to guess that he lived in the 19th century. The style is all wrong for a modern novelist, and all that attention to detail just seems a little too perfect, you know? Besides, eventually they'll stumble across an edition that mentions his bio on the back or has a foreword that fesses up that the guy died.

There are all sorts of pitfalls to modern novels, though. Unless you're someone willing to risk spoiling a book by looking up the author on Wikipedia ahead of time, you never know who you're dealing with. You might be sitting in the Barnes & Noble café cheerily chatting up a stranger about this new writer you've discovered, and they could turn to you and say, "You know that guy got arrested for being a pedophile, right?" To borrow an analogue from music, imagine how teenagers who'd just gotten into the Who felt after raving about Who's Next when someone told them Pete Townsend got arrested for Googling little girls.

The worst thing, of course, at least in terms of reader satisfaction, is finding out the author died. With Dickens, you know to pace yourself. If you race through The Pickwick Papers, nothing's going to change the fact that you now have ten books left. Sure, there's the rare chance that an author'll pull a Tupac and have a bestseller long after they've croaked — Camus' The First Man comes to mind — but after over a century you can be pretty sure that Knopf isn't going to drop Charles Dickens' R U Still Down? No matter how much you want to see more from the guy, that's it. There is no more.

After enjoying both Death in Autumn and Some Bitter Taste from author Magdalen Nabb, I decided to Wikipedia her and figure out what her deal was. Given the above, my finding out that she died in 2007 and saying, "Aw, shit," should seem pretty reasonable.

Nabb belongs in that group of genre novelists who exploit the tropes of their style of fiction so well and with such thoughtfulness about their environments to earn the appellation "stylist." Her writings didn't blaze new trails in fiction, nor did they achieve a totally unique insight into human behavior or the written word. But within her genre, she's top notch, and within fiction as a whole, her books will be remembered as pleasurably competent and often quite good. Like Alan Furst's or John le Carré's in espionage fiction, her stories set detective fiction on the same level as "literature." Her characters are real, her imagery and pacing often beautiful and always well-executed. Even if, in the terms of fiction as a whole, her work can't be considered great, she took a genre and made it universally enjoyable and accessible.

Part of that might come from "writing what you know." Nabb was born in a working-class English family, moved to Florence, Italy in the 1970s and essentially started over with life. As a foreigner in what is — tourists, students and wealthy expats aside — a relatively small city, she recognized that she would always unavoidably view Florence from the outside in. Thus she quite cleverly wrote her Florentine stories in the way she experienced the city itself, taking a native Sicilian and plugging him into a place that's just as foreign for him as it was for her.

As for the police procedural aspect, Nabb was fortunate to meet and befriend several officers of the Carabinieri shortly after moving to Florence. The star of her books, Marshal Guarnaccia, is modeled after one of these officers, as are several other characters. Once she began writing, these friends took her along as an observer of routine police work, giving her a thorough grounding in both the mundanity of their daily lives and the reactions they'd have to the unique (and uniquely horrible) events to which their jobs subjected them.

Perhaps it's the modeling at work, but Nabb rarely missteps in describing Guarnaccia's work. The paunchy and tired Sicilian wants to help people, doesn't consider himself any genius, is generally overwhelmed and bewildered by the thousands of tourists — all of whom make him wonder why they don't just stay at home — gets pushed about by the demands of wealthy expatriates and Florentine nobility, and suffers the hassles of working with ambitious prosecutors (in Italy, prosecutors are assigned to cases before arrests and can direct the scope of investigations against the wishes of the regular police and the military police, the Carabinieri). Still, because he is curious, patient and open-minded, he consistently wins through.

This works for Nabb in two ways. One, the worst part of most writing about detectives (or amateur sleuths) who are geniuses is that the authors themselves aren't. The staggering insights aren't so staggering; as a result often important clues go unmentioned until the dramatic concluding reveal, attempting to mask the fact that the mystery is "unsolvable" by making it literally so for the audience.

Two, Guarnaccia is a very recognizable, familiar and comforting character. Because the reader is not told that he's brilliantly observant, he or she can follow along feeling like a part of the narrative. We can see in him any old cop we might have met, someone who believes in the system without really being a part of it, someone who has ideals but doesn't declaim idealism. We can see the family men we are or have known — the overworked dad who's struggling to equalize the brainpower he devotes to work problems with that he devotes to remembering his kids' and wife's interests, changes and demands. There are many hacky faults to Agatha Christie, but the biggest is that Hercule Poirot is nobody any of us have ever met. Marshal Guarnaccia might as well be the guy down the street in the bathrobe and with the blotchy eyelids grabbing his paper in the morning. It just so happens that his street is in Florence.

Here, too, Nabb smartly avoids a misstep. Because Guarnaccia is Italian but not Florentine, most mistakes she might make in characterizing the city and its inhabitants can be ascribed to a narrator who is just as much a foreigner as she is. Guarnaccia was probably born sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, and for Americans this probably means nothing, but for Italians it helps to justify a fish-out-of-water character. Although the Tuscan (essentially Florentine) dialect was established as "Standard Italian" during the unification of Italy in the mid-19th century, that standardization didn't become linguistically universal until the post-war years, with the advent of greater mass communication. Though Americans from the northeast might have complained in the 1950s about how people in the south were "difficult to understand," this would have been criticism instead of legitimate complaint, a reflection on sloppy accents, not literally difficult dialects. Meanwhile, in Italy, this sort of complaint would have seemed totally reasonable: there were many speakers still monoglot in regional dialects that non-Italians who'd only studied official Tuscan Italian would not have understood.

What the reader then finds is a novel that celebrates Florence and is about Florence, yet is written by a non-Florentine about a non-Florentine. By marrying her outside-in perspective to a protagonist who has the same, Nabb immediately elides any problems she might have in terms of subtle verisimilitude. Even if she gets a small detail of Florentine life wrong, it's probably still right within the context of the books, because obviously the character himself might have missed it too. Nabb and Guarnaccia feel their way around the city and in doing so create an environment deeper than the tourists but probably nothing like a native's familiarity.

This degree of circumspection likely informs the rest of the text. Nabb came to Florence as a potter and also worked as an English teacher. So far as I can tell, she wasn't a "writer" in any official or published capacity. Yet I think that position only helped her, as she married genre to reticence about her description of people. The essence of any mystery story involves capturing the outward behavior of people while mistaking their inward motive. It's a wonderful atmosphere for the writer unsure of herself. You can write around characters, feeling their human periphery until you get at something like their multi-dimensional inner self, then exploit it once you know what's there. By all accounts, this is what Nabb did: starting out stories with crimes, characters and a few premises, then writing until a narrative took hold within the text the characters manifested.

Though I've only read a few of her books, some shortcomings emerge. For one, she falls back on reiterating the same details of and observations from her main character. It's a common detective-story trope: the paragraph or two that all fans of the series can repeat by heart, down to the quote that says, "This the detective of which we're a fan." For another, the middle section of her books often seem to involve the "mistaken and dogged investigation of the Wrong Man" phenomenon. Though what little I know of the Italian justice system tells me that this is actually pretty standard fare, it nevertheless provides a familiar middle for a detective novel. Perhaps it would work better if Guarnaccia's doubts weren't so substantive, the prosecution so hasty or the timing in the book so... well... procedural. Again, though, this might be her fictive reflection of what has legitimately happened in the Florentine justice system in the past, so perhaps the reader should just roll with it.

There are other mystery-writer sins to engage too. In two Nabb books, chosen at random, she employs the familiar plot device of two seemingly random unrelated crimes coming together at the end as connected acts. It's a good way of taking a closed-room novella mystery and making it novel length, but it's overused. It also minimizes the mystery, because readers can start inferring connections from chapter two or three, refine them by mid-book and have the ending wrapped up long before the narrative.

Nabb also sometimes exhibits the opposite (some would say the biggest) mystery sin: withholding. She presents the resolution to Some Bitter Taste via a long exposition from someone who is nearly incidentally interviewed in the investigation. While happenstance and undiscovered resources of knowledge mark a real-life investigation, structurally it seems a little bit of a let-down to meet someone who discloses decades of cover-up, a business whose aspect was never related before, family members we've never met, and a legal crusade ongoing for decades that no one would have dreamt of. It might be real in terms of what happens to cops, but in a closed-door mystery, it's lazy, and while it ties numerous threads together, it's tough to read it as anything other than the shortest way of wrapping up.

These ills pervade the mystery genre, and at this point it's either fussy or ignorant to dismiss a mystery writer for them. By buying the book — any mystery book — a reader concedes that some of these things will happen. The important distinction comes in terms of what kind of text surrounds them. What the reader will find, in this case, is a devotional love of the city of Florence and the Florentine character, one that offers a romantic familiarity in the midst of whodunit. For fans of the city, the atmosphere is enough to sustain the rest of the books.

As for the procedural elements, not all are well-prescribed and neatly executed. Some mystery fans will delight in denouements knitting dozens of different threads in a contrived "mystery" manner. Others will enjoy solutions that come by accident, by random interview, by the unpredictable serendipity of circumstance and question that's often a hallmark of real policework. What one finds depends on the novel, but all are worth a read and engender enough goodwill to try more in the series.

Rating: 4
The rating is reflective of the series as a whole. Some of the books wander a little (though never tryingly far afield), while some are exceptionally lean and well-executed. Strongly recommended for friends or family who love mysteries and who you wish read more elegant fiction. Also strongly recommended for friends or family who really love Florence but can't get back there: the exposition and background details are immediately recognizable to anyone who's spent even a few days in the city and are a great way of re-experiencing, in a more pedestrian and "native" way, things that were processed only as a tourist.

Those buying online: the books with shorter page-counts are printed with smaller text, smaller line-spacing and greater use of the space on the page. In terms of reading experience, there is not a substantial difference between a 150-page Nabb book and a 300-page Nabb book, because they should be typographically presented in such a way as to equalize the reading experience. When in doubt, go cheaper on her Guarnaccia series, taking advantage of the page count. It should still be pleasantly rewarding.

I Finished My Law & Order: SVU Fan Script!






If you've got two ears, two eyes, a heart and a passing familiarity with English like me, I assume you too must love the bounty that is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Those people care. They love law, order and rape victims. They're the thin blue line between you and all the sick, twisted perps out there. But, as they debuted their eleventh season, I realized two things. One, they must be running out of ideas. Two, I've watched enough episodes that there's no reason why I can't write my own fan script.

Well, it took a couple of weeks, but here it is. I hope you enjoy it. I really feel like I got in touch with the characters and some serious real-life issues.

WARNING: SOME OF THIS CONTENT IS OF AN ADULT NATURE AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

"Murder My Balls"

by Mobutu Sese Seko, Mr. Awesome and Dashiell K. Rigamarock

We fade in on a crime scene, with sirens wailing in the background and horns honking. It's a beautiful, spacious penthouse apartment, sparsely decorated with top-of-the-line modern furniture. Camera captures several technicians taking pictures and dusting for prints, then pans over to a man's body on a king-sized bed, naked except for the bed sheet covering him. The bed sheet is soaked with blood around the crotch. The MEDICAL EXAMINER is looking at the body, as DETECTIVES OLIVIA BENSON and ELLIOT STABLER inspect the scene. STABLER opens a wallet.

Looks like the vic was a "Doug Robb." Hey, I know that name, that's the guy from my daughter's favorite band — what'stheirname, you know... Hoobastank.

I've never seen anything like this, detectives.

What is it?

There's really no other way to put it. His testicles are just destroyed.

You mean "removed"? Kinda surprised there were any there to begin with, if it's the same guy.

No, they're still there. What's left of them. I'd put the time of death about eight hours ago, just a few minutes after... this... happened.

Whoever did this knew the vic. This is personal. And the reason is him.

Look at this, El. His cell phone. Looks like he was texting and using social networking up to... looks like eight and a half hours ago. Maybe he invited the killer over.

Someone needs to update his status to "dead."

Fadeout.

OPENING CREDITS

TITLE CARD: 16th Precinct, Special Victims Unit HQ

DET. BENSON is sitting at a computer with a large plasma-screen monitor, browsing a social-networking website with a blue color scheme. The victim's picture is displayed prominently at the top left of the screen.

What kind of sick website is this? FaceSpace? People just tell the whole world about themselves? Whatever happened to modesty?

People are putting their whole life on display without thinking twice. It's like inviting every pervert in America into your living room.

And what's this "I love lamp" thing this guy has as his personal quote? These people will do it with just about anything. Least on the street people have the decency to keep it on the down-low.

You think that's bad? Between FaceSpace and Tweeter, people will tell other people when they go to the bathroom. No need for the Big Brother surveillance state anymore. Just give people the technology to monitor themselves, and they'll use it without thinking of the consequences to their own personal security.

The vic — this nutcase — wants someone to "murder his balls."

He what?

This sick bastard likes fat people to stand on his scrotum, Cap'n!

Those "sick people" are called Flatliners, detective, and their community is growing.

A sense of horror dawns on STABLER'S face as his DAUGHTER walks in the station.

What's wrong, El?

(to DAUGHTER) Listen, your boyfriend... he doesn't want you to... stand on his balls, does he?

Well, he bought me some platform shoes...

...

He's a really sweet guy, dad. I wish you'd get to know him. I wish you'd trust me.

(hissing) He bought you platform shoes? What's his name? I wanna talk to this kid.

I don't see what the big deal is, dad. He just wants me to be taller and his balls to be shorter.

You said he wants you taller? It could be a body modification fetish. He hates his own body for being ugly, therefore now he hates all bodies considered "normative."

Kathleen, you talk about trust? I gave you that, but everything in your life has been spiraling out of control since I got you out of that ball-standing arrest.

I've got something!

What is it?

One hour before the vic was killed, he asked someone named "Kinky_Friedman420" to "punish his balls."

Kinky Friedman? Like the singer?

Different guy, but whoever he his, he has over 150 pictures of balls.

(to DAUGHTER) If this kid you're seeing wants someone to kick him around, it looks like he just found the right guy. I'm gonna deal with him and you later. But for now, you don't see him again, understand? (to BENSON) Let's go check this guy out.

COMMERCIAL

TITLE CARD: The NY Times, Times Square

BENSON and STABLER stand in the background of a large fluorescent-lit office, showing a picture of victim DOUG ROBB to a worker, who then points them to a mustachioed man sitting far in the foreground. As they approach him, BENSON says:

KINKY FRIEDMAN FOUR TWENTY?

KINKY FRIEDMAN breaks into a run, trying to make his escape through the office. STABLER chases him down and pins him to a copier.

So you're a "Flatliner," huh?

The term is, "Genitorturer," thank you.

TITLE CARD: 16th Precinct, Special Victims Unit HQ, Interrogation Room

So you admit you knew Doug Robb?

Why would I deny it? I didn't know him personally or socially, but we interacted online.

And you went over there and "punished" his balls?

It's what he asked me to do. He enjoyed having his balls punished, and I enjoy punishing balls.

Yeah, well, maybe you won't like it when we tell your friends and family what you like to do with balls?

Go ahead. I have nothing to hide.

You're proud of what you do?

You don't understand. I don't know why I hope anyone will understand anymore.

Well why don't you enlighten me?

You're so stuck in your categories and hang-ups about human sexuality that you aren't willing to open yourself to the possibilities that pain and roleplay give you. I spent years trying to deny who I am, and when I finally gave in to those desires, it's like my universe unfolded and revealed something new. Each person's universe is like Brer Rabbit's bramble. You have to drop the sword of Damocles to unfurl the bramble flag of possibility and spread out the unique quilt that is our diversity. I realized this while punishing someone's balls as I saw them take the punishment and text about it to someone else half a world away in Sri Lanka: the world is a ball because the world is flat. You can see anyone in the world from the place where I'm flattening your balls. That's just the way the ball bounces now, whether you fumble it forward for a strike or you drop it against the ropes and send it running home with a dunk. So if you want to call me a "Flatliner," you go right ahead. I know which way the world turns. It turns into a line. There are thousands like me. The flattened world means we cannot be silenced.

You disgusting bastard. You make me sick. I oughta kill you with my bare hands right in this room. Maybe I should flatten your balls, huh? Tell me, is that what you did to Doug Robb? Did you flatten his balls?

Of course. That's what he asked me to do.

Then I've got some bad news for you, buddy, because when you murdered his balls, you didn't stop there. You murdered the rest of him, too. Tom Friedman, you are under arrest for the murder of Doug Robb. You have the right to remain silent....

COMMERCIAL

TITLE CARD: 16th Precinct, Special Victims Unit HQ

Assistant District Attorney ALEXANDRA CABOT enters the room.

Well, it looks like Friedman's gonna walk because of laws.

...

What? How? We had that guy dead to rights.

He and his lawyer made a convincing case that he couldn't be held responsible for the murder because of diminished capacity.

...

What?

In addition to being invited over by the vic and doing exactly what was asked of him according to a FaceSpace PM, he claimed the vic made him drinks, and he was too crunk at the time.

Ahhh, the familiar Sippin' Dat Purp defense.

To be fair, he was pretty out of it. He started talking about Captain Cragen and complained that he was arrested by an anthropomorphic hyper-turtle.

Oceanographers have recently discovered that sea turtles can live for well over a hundred years.

Figures. I used to think I'd live forever back when I was still drinking.

This is BS. How can he just walk like that? That case was solid.

Well, for one thing, detective, he claimed that you threatened to kill him in the interrogation room, which coerced his confession. For another, he and his lawyer made a convincing case that the sex was a consensual act and a legitimate free expression of their interests.

LAWS... it's like the lawyers want to protect the killers more than the victims. Let's see laws keep your family safe at night. Let's see what happens to society when we care more about laws than human beings. Let's see the kind of justice that happens then for the victims.

This sort of thing wouldn't happen on the STREET. I'm from there.

Yeah thanks, counselor. Great victory for justice. I guess you could say the only person who lost his freedom of expression was Doug Robb, of Hoobastank, when he died in that bedroom when someone murdered his balls.

Liv, El, people have a right to free expression. That's our job as much as anything, to protect people from us — and from the criminals out there.

Well maybe Tom Friedman should have thought of that before he murdered Doug Robb's balls.

Actually, I've been doing some reading, and according to this copy of New Things That Happen Times, it appears that Genitorturophiliac Eroticism is the second-fastest growing fetish in the United States, and its attraction may result from a disorder of the hippocampus that associates pain with the same neuro-receptors that are triggered when taking ecstasy. Also—uh, sorry that's my cell phone.

Really makes you think.

Yeah, well, don't think so hard that you forget to make a clean collar this time — I'm talking to YOU here, El. Now, I want to go back and reexamine every part of this case. There's got to be a way to get this guy.

Too late. I just got a text. When processing Friedman for release at Riker's, another inmate stabbed him in the kidney with a shiv. He died before he even got to the prison infirmary.

Damn. Looks like he got away with it.

Maybe not. That was my assistant on my phone. Turns out Doug Robb of Hoobastank had taken a massive amount of Warfarin. We don't test for this in clear cases of exsanguination, but maybe we should have. It's a blood thinner. With the sort of dosage he was on, he would have bled to death pretty much instantly from any intended or incidental cut.

You mean he—?

—wanted to be killed? I'd have a hard time concluding otherwise. There's no medical reason to take that amount of blood thinner, and you can't get high off of it. When your vic reached out for someone else to come over, he wanted help. He literally wanted someone to murder him and murder his balls. Funnily enough, my assistant sent all this to me as direct messages in Tweeter.

Someone wanted their balls crushed to death and wanted to die. Makes you think.

Welcome to Mogadishu.

Fadeout.

DICK WOLF

END