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1. Martin Cruz-Smith told Diane Rehm on her NPR show that his Russian detective character in Gorky Park and other books is an anti-hero of course, because Russian. Right. Only Americans can be heroes.
2. The New York Times regional dialect quiz, based on various research projects, placed me in succession as most likely from "Fresno, Stockton, or Anchorage:" then "Fresno, Stockton, or Modesto:" and finally "Fresno, Oakland, or San Francisco." Then I was satisfied and stopped. The characteristic question? Not having heard of a word for a drive-through liquor store. The other characteristic questions were what you call a road that parallels a highway (a frontage road), and what you call a flying insect that glows (don't have my own word for it, since I've never seen one in real life: I use whatever the person uses who I'm reading or listening to).
Notice that only one question was for a word I use. The rest is for stuff that I don't. Also, the "heat map" showed me most similar to . . . most of the country. And least similar only to Minnesota and Louisiana. But the heat maps for individual words seemed to me to mostly show the Southeat and the Midwest as "most similar." Though I thought California usages largely came from whatever you call the southern midwest, at least in the neighborhood I spent the largest time in as a kid. Which was neither Fresno, nor Modesto (neither of which I even saw till I was an adult), nor Stockton (where I visited when I was too young to go outside by myself). And definitely not Anchorage.
Apparently my three years in Philadelphia have left no marks on my speech that this test could uncover.
3. I've had K living with us for almost two months. He's a friend of the kids initially, and came to me because I invited him a long time ago when he went to Bakersfield to live with his mother. Now his mother has died and he's trying to get back into the work force. It's a terrible time to do that, but he has a couple of extremely classy nibbles and he's otherwise working very hard at this jobhunting gig, and also doing some freelance editing. And doing tall-person odd jobs around the house. He's a sweet guy. All my friends want to introduce him to their daughters. But while Truffle loves him and wiggles at him and cuddles right up to him she doesn't want him to take her for walks. She wants nobody but me to take her for walks. I suspect this is because her eyes are getting a bit cloudy and she just feels more vulnerable when the person she's with is not her main one. But I don't know.
I can't remember what I've been reading lately -- mostly old Russian things on Gutenberg.
My brother-in-law, who has made his living in the past because of a fluency in Russian, somehow doesn't know the word "tvorog" (actually I don't know how to spell the Russian version in Latin letters, the Czech version is "tvaroh." Google informs me that the English word for it is "quark." Also that the Cyrillic is творог. My impression is that it is a pretty common food all over the place in Central and Eastern Europe. But he didn't know what I was talking about.
2. The New York Times regional dialect quiz, based on various research projects, placed me in succession as most likely from "Fresno, Stockton, or Anchorage:" then "Fresno, Stockton, or Modesto:" and finally "Fresno, Oakland, or San Francisco." Then I was satisfied and stopped. The characteristic question? Not having heard of a word for a drive-through liquor store. The other characteristic questions were what you call a road that parallels a highway (a frontage road), and what you call a flying insect that glows (don't have my own word for it, since I've never seen one in real life: I use whatever the person uses who I'm reading or listening to).
Notice that only one question was for a word I use. The rest is for stuff that I don't. Also, the "heat map" showed me most similar to . . . most of the country. And least similar only to Minnesota and Louisiana. But the heat maps for individual words seemed to me to mostly show the Southeat and the Midwest as "most similar." Though I thought California usages largely came from whatever you call the southern midwest, at least in the neighborhood I spent the largest time in as a kid. Which was neither Fresno, nor Modesto (neither of which I even saw till I was an adult), nor Stockton (where I visited when I was too young to go outside by myself). And definitely not Anchorage.
Apparently my three years in Philadelphia have left no marks on my speech that this test could uncover.
3. I've had K living with us for almost two months. He's a friend of the kids initially, and came to me because I invited him a long time ago when he went to Bakersfield to live with his mother. Now his mother has died and he's trying to get back into the work force. It's a terrible time to do that, but he has a couple of extremely classy nibbles and he's otherwise working very hard at this jobhunting gig, and also doing some freelance editing. And doing tall-person odd jobs around the house. He's a sweet guy. All my friends want to introduce him to their daughters. But while Truffle loves him and wiggles at him and cuddles right up to him she doesn't want him to take her for walks. She wants nobody but me to take her for walks. I suspect this is because her eyes are getting a bit cloudy and she just feels more vulnerable when the person she's with is not her main one. But I don't know.
I can't remember what I've been reading lately -- mostly old Russian things on Gutenberg.
My brother-in-law, who has made his living in the past because of a fluency in Russian, somehow doesn't know the word "tvorog" (actually I don't know how to spell the Russian version in Latin letters, the Czech version is "tvaroh." Google informs me that the English word for it is "quark." Also that the Cyrillic is творог. My impression is that it is a pretty common food all over the place in Central and Eastern Europe. But he didn't know what I was talking about.
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Martin Cruz Smith's eighth Arkady Renko novel, Tatiana (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), was inspired by the 2006 murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Like her, Tatiana Petrovna was a long-standing government irritant, and her "suicide" strikes her friends and followers as uncharacteristic. Renko agrees, believing her death is connected to a notebook covered in strange symbols that Petrovna recovered from a desolate beach near the seaport city of Kaliningrad: in the tremendous opening chapter, we witness the notebook's translator owner being killed by a psychopathic butcher who stalks the beach in a van with a smiling plastic pig on its roof.
This is 71-year-old Smith's first novel since admitting that he has been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995. (He concealed this from everyone in the publishing industry, not wishing to be branded a "Parkinson's writer" or have people like me comment on the awful salience of the bullet Renko has in his head that could kill him at any point.) Smith worked on Tatiana while having experimental deep brain stimulation therapy to arrest the decline in his linguistic aptitude, often extemporising from a stool while his wife acted as amanuensis. Its fast-paced, pared-back prose is very different from the dense realism of Gorky Park. But there's no diminution in quality or excitement – dour, sardonic Renko is always a joy to be around, and the race-against-time climax, as Renko's chess-genius ward Zhenya struggles to crack the translator's code, is expertly handled.
Love, C.