Out and Down in Paris

by Jonathan on November 28th, 2009

I’m in Paris now, trying to catch my breath and working on the next Jenner book. I’ll be here for a few days, taking photos and making notes of locations, and having a much needed visit to Alain, my barber, who’ll transform me from a bushy-bearded Charles Darwin clone to something more highly-evolved, almost metrosexual.

Alain, who bills himself as the last Master Barber in Paris, entertains me immensely – he has such a finely drawn sense of himself. The first time I went there, we talked about what I wanted, and then he did exactly what he thought best. When he’d finished, he stepped back, looked at me critically, then pronounced it “Nettement mieux!” – clearly better. And he was right.

His tiny barbershop/barbering museum on rue St. Claude, a narrow, gallery-filled side street in the Third Arrondissement, is worth a visit by anyone in need of a haircut or – his specialty – un rasage à l’ancienne – a traditional shave. You’ll need an appointment.

It’s noon on Saturday, grey skies, soft light, quiet, other than the distant toll of church bells. My apartment here is in the Marais, the part of medieval Paris left standing when Baron Haussman radically reconfigured the city in the 1800′s. It’s a lovely part of the city, narrow streets lined by beautiful old buildings – it’s particularly wonderful at night, when the tourist herds have thinned. The Marais is also the heart of Jewish Paris, with so many temples and delis and black-hatted Orthodox jews that if it weren’t for the macarons and Paris-Brests in neat rows in the patisserie windows, I’d think I was in Brooklyn.

An unexpected advantage of living in the Marais is that the place actually is quiet on the weekends – Jewish businesses here shut down by sunset on Fridays, and remain closed through Saturday. Even though this is also the heart of gay Paris, Friday and Saturday nights are blissfully tranquil. Of course, there’s a flip side to that: the shops are closed, which means a slightly longer trek when I’m feeling lazy and hungry…

And, speaking of lazy, I’m lazy today. I get the worst jetlag, and am doing the worst thing for it: it’s almost 1PM and I’m still in bed. I should be out, finding breakfast and taking photographs, but I’m happy to be warm and cozy, and to look at the grey world outside from the comfort of my bed.

To make up for that, I’m going to post a couple of photos I took on my last visit. Here’s the Place des Vosges, one of the most elegant squares in Paris, built as the Place Royale in 1605. The layout is precise and symmetric, with a bosquet of lindens framing neatly defined lawns that are punctuated with tonsured firs and fountains – Nature well and truly tamed, in the grand Enlightenment tradition. It’s very difficult to capture in a photo, since the square works best as a three-dimensional experience, the shifting perspectives as you walk past the straight lines of lindens articulating an elegant aesthetics of geometry.

Here, even the dullest streets are pretty.

Bed. Bed is good.

My Life in Blood – a gallery

by Jonathan on November 23rd, 2009

I have a long article about blood in the UK newspaper the Independent today. It’s a bit of a curious thing, hopscotching around the place, covering how I became a forensic pathologist, the Cuban white and black magic I saw in Miami, realism in crime fiction, the meaning of blood in different religions, blood spatter forensics and vampire movies.

Since I don’t know how they’ve illustrated it, I thought I’d add a few photos to support the story. I gathered these from around the internet when I first started working on them, and have lost the links – if they’re yours, please let me know so I can credit you.

I’ve tried to do it in sequence to correspond to the story. Obviously, if you’re squeamish, you probably shouldn’t look at this post. Although, really, if you’re squeamish, what are you doing on my blog?

In Israel, a ZAKA operative wipes blood after an attack:

A Durer portrait of Christ suffering:

A Cranach crucifixion – Christ’s blood anointing the faithful…

A devout Filipino being crucified on Good Friday:

Shi’a Muslims marking the Day of Ashura; others sacrifice by donating blood.

An nganga, a cauldron filled with mystically significant metal, wood and leather objects, and blood, and, here, a human skull. For practitioners of palo mayombe, the dark form of the syncretic Caribbean religion of santeria, the nganga is the ritual equivalent of an altar.

Technicians clean up an nganga discovered in New York City, ritual markings on the wall. In Miami, when we encountered santeria or brujeria (palo) artefacts, the cops would scoff at them, but most would refuse to touch them.

Oh, Shiny Metal Beast – I love you so!

by Jonathan on November 20th, 2009

I’ve had the visual elements for this lying in the post hopper for almost a year. It was going to be a post about how easily we anthropomorphize things, how we can feel pity for inanimate objects. Or, at least, how I can.

It was triggered by this rather perverse battle between a tiny robot and a big robot, or rather by how moved I was at the plight of this little manikin made of metal strips and cogs, continuing to fight the good fight while hopelessly outmatched. Click on the image for heart-breaking little-robot-on-big-robot action…

I felt similarly stricken at the loss of the Phoenix Rover, the space explorer probe, when it shut down last year with the approach of  Martian winter; after five months of glorious data collection, it would be encased in carbon dioxide ice for a year – pretty much certain death. The demise of the Rover was all the more painful because I’d been following its blogs on Gizmodo – thank God I’d not become addicted to its Twitter feed! Click on the photo below to link to its farewell message.

Finally, to bring it all home, Spike Jonze’s fantastic Ikea ad:

Ah, yes… “masterful” indeed.

by Jonathan on November 20th, 2009

I’m posting this review from an English newspaper because I loved the “masterfully”.

I’ll be using the word frequently in my internal narration of my day – “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully pouring milk on his Frosties”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully looking for his pants”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully freeing the several feet of toilet paper trailing from his shoe”,  that sort of thing.

Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully blogging despite being still 90% asleep…

-

The Right Direction

by Jonathan on November 19th, 2009

Things are going  well for A Hard Death in the UK. Yesterday, I got an excited email from my agent to let me know that the book is on the UK Bookscan Top 20 Fiction Heat Seekers list, bumping shoulders with work by some really strong authors. I’m amused to see that I actually beat out the Master, James Ellroy; I’m sure it won’t last long, but if I ever meet him, I’ll be sure to let him know.

Next Monday, I have a feature article in the Independent, a British broadsheet newspaper. It’s a peculiar piece, about my experience with blood, covering everything from how I became a forensic pathologist to my feelings about the Twilight series; we’ll see if that affects sales at all. I’ll be sure to post it here when the piece goes online.

I’ve been meaning to record a podcast, some thoughts and a brief reading from A Hard Death, but there seem to be a thousand and one things that need attention at any second – the penalty of living a disorganized life, I fear. I’ll get to it this week, or die trying. Or a reasonable facismile thereof.

And this just in…

by Jonathan on November 13th, 2009

The prize for First Review of A Hard Death goes to… The Daily Mail! Our heartiest congratulations to them, and my thanks for a great review.

I’m flattered that the critic focuses on Jenner as an emotional character (let’s face it – Jenner’s a bit of a trainwreck). I’m also intrigued that he or she cites the book’s refreshing lack of gore – violence was pretty much the only thing American critics had against Precious Blood.

I have to say that the “too violent” critique didn’t worry me. I don’t want to shock or offend, but I realized, as I was writing A Hard Death, that I write violent. Which isn’t surprising – just as breaking eggs is an unfortunate but necessary step in the omelet-making process, if you’re writing murder…

I didn’t think Precious Blood was particularly violent; rather, the violence was explicit and realistic, but never gratuitous. A Hard Death moves faster, and has a signifcantly higher body count than Precious Blood; it’s plenty violent.

It’ll be interesting to see what other critics think… In the meantime, click here to read the Mail review yourself:

A Technical Note: Airboats

by Jonathan on November 12th, 2009

British readers may be unfamiliar with airboats, which, as far as I know, don’t exist in the U.K.

The airboat is a shallow draft boat, powered by an aircraft engine and propeller in a mesh safety cage.  Because they use air movement, rather than an underwater propeller,  airboats can travel in very shallow water, and even over more solid terrain (for short distances). They’re very popular in the Everglades, which is essentially a vast, extremely shallow river hidden by marsh grass; the first time I rode in an airboat was to get to the scene of a remote airplane crash in a part of the Glades not easily reached by traditional boats.

I found this photo on a web page from the Airboat Association of Florida, a tribute to a man named John F. Schneider. Mr. Schneider was apparently devoted to airboating in the Glades; these photos make it easy to see why. Airboats skim across the surface of the water – they feel incredibly fast, in part because of the roar of the engine behind your head. If you find yourself in Florida, you owe yourself at least one airboat ride.

An anniversary…

by Jonathan on November 12th, 2009

I’ve been so busy with life and the U.K. release of A HARD DEATH that I hadn’t noticed that the anniversary of the US edition of PRECIOUS BLOOD was upon me.

By way of commemoration, here is a series of relevant images:

Altdorfer, “The Martyrdom of St. Florian” (1515)

Caravaggio, “St. Katherine” (1599) – I’m fascinated by the whole “spoked wheel” thing. In Raphael’s portrait of St. Katherine from the early 1500′s, the spoked wheel has the smooth, mall-ready finish of something from Pottery Barn. We know she was tortured with a “spoked wheel”, but what the hell is a “spoked wheel”? I don’t believe either Raphael or Caravaggio have a clearer sense of it then than we do today. Notice that the wheel is broken…

Caravaggio, “The Martyrdom of St. Andrew” (1610)

Francesco del Cossa, “St. Lucy” (1470)

I love the demure way Lucy holds her eyeballs on that little lorgnette thing…

A Big Deal in Lille

by Jonathan on November 1st, 2009

One of the fun things I did this spring/early summer was lecture at the 46th International Meeting of Francophone Legal Medicine. I was invited over by Professor Didier Gosset, the Chief Medical Examiner in Lille, in Northern France.

Didier and his team, including Professor Valéry Hedouin, and Dr. Anne Bécart, forensic odontologist, took great care of me. They put me up at the beautiful Hospice Gantois, an exquisite hotel built in the 1400′s as a hospital. The building has been renovated in an elegantly modern way (I’m a sucker for the combination of clean modern design and old spaces; one of my favourite hotels, the Wheatleigh, near Lenox, Massachusetts, where Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown did a beautiful job renovating a faux Italian palazzo in the Berkshires – I completely stole their bathroom design ideas for my loft in NYC).

My room had a view out over a small park that reminded me of the courtyard gardens in Ico, the brilliant videogame created by Fumito Ueda, about which more here; Ueda is one of the inspirations for Jun Saito, one of Jenner’s closest friends.

The conference was a fascinating glimpse into the differences – and similarities – between the way the French practice forensic pathology, and the way we do it in New York. I spoke for two hours on gunshot wounds; I lectured in French, which was fun for me and doubtless  arduous for the audience. Still, we all survived, probably because my lectures are so heavily illustrated – I showed more than 300 images.

They didn’t guillotine me afterwards, so overall I think it went fairly well. After I’d lectured, I relaxed a little – I got to catch up with old acquaintances and make new friends. We had a great dinner at l’Huitriere, a superb Art Deco Michelin-starred seafood restaurant tucked behind a traditional fish merchant’s.

It was a wonderful experience – I even got a Bronze Medal from the city of Lille for my participation. I wasn’t in Lille long enough to really get to know it, but it’s a lovely city, with handsome old rowhouses with Flemish-style red and brown brick, and an elegant city center; I’ll certainly be back. As a returning Bronze Medalist, I have no doubt that they’ll let me ride the buses and subways for free.