‘Hollyweed’: Prankster alters LA’s landmark sign Reuters. And high time, too
One address, 75 firms, no employees: Inside India's domestic tax havens
In 2017, Pursue Meaning d Knowledge Sharing Instead of Happiness
How Adam Driver, Of All Unlikely Personalities, Became A Movie Star
“If you, in 2012, watched Adam Driver on Girls – an unhinged, distasteful walking id, as magnetic as he was bizarre – and said to yourself, ‘This guy is going to be the cast’s biggest star,’ you should probably start betting on horses. … Especially considering that the only thing more obvious than Driver’s gifts might be his presumed limitations – that topographic map of a face, that woodwind voice – the actor’s ascent raises the question of howexactly he became Hollywood’s go-to young actor of excellence.”
Let’s just run that again: In Illinois, if you don’t do your domestic-abuse training course every two years, you’ll lose your hairdressing license – and your livelihood.As I write in After America, in the Fifties one in 20 members of the workforce needed government permission to do his job. Now it’s one in three. The original justification for requiring a government permit to cut another person’s hair is that a salon contains potentially dangerous chemicals such as coloring products. Making the license conditional upon acing sexual-assault training courses is not just the usual Big Government expansion but the transformation of the relationship between a private business and the state:The rule was inspired by the spirit of camaraderie in hair salons, said State Senator Bill Cunningham, one of the chief sponsors of the amendment. For some women, those salons are a safe space, where they can sit among other women, drop their guard and confide about life as their hair is braided or colored, or their nails trimmed and painted….As Ann Althouse comments:So, it’s a great place for government to plant informants…Just so. Just as the Stasi turned neighbors and relatives into spies, the State of Illinois is making your stylist one.
Nordic Noir is fittingly subtitled The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film and TV. So it is pretty wide – Nordic Noir in all media. It is an interesting book for people who love Scandinavian crime fiction or who wants to get an overview of what is going on in there. I consider it a useful handbook.
It is divided into eight chapters: 1. Beginning: Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Martin Beck Series, 2. Sweden’s Trojan Horse:Kurt Wallander, 3. Lisbeth Salander’s Legacy, 4. Larsson’s Rivals, 5. The New King: Jo Nesbo and Other Norwegians, 6. Dark Nights in Iceland and Finland, 7.Darkness in Denmark, 8. The Nordic Screen: Film and TV Adaptations. In addition to an Introduction, an Epilogue (Some Names to Watch For), three Appendices: Top Twenty Nordic Noir Novels, Top Six Noir Films, and Top Six Noir TV Dramas, plus an Index.
Barry Forshaw, the author, is a British journalist working with Scandinavian crime fiction, and the book shows that. It contains a variety of types of information from a variety of sources: notes, reviews, observations, conversations with authors and translators, small stories, background information, gossip, insights from the publishing business. It is a little of this, a little of that, sort of semi-organized, loosely structured; somehow held together by the loose organizing principles visible in the list of chapters: a little chronology, a little geography basically. The result is interesting, useful and information-packed.
In the end what is expressed in Nordic Noir are the views of Barry Forshaw: both in the content and in the organization. I agree with some of them, I think others are quite odd. For instance: He spends pages on Sara Blaedel (uninteresting, largely unknown except in Scandinavia and abroad), but barely mentions Leif GW Persson– literally a pop star among crime writers in Sweden, best-selling throughout Scandinavia, several prizes. I don’t know or understand why? Maybe Forshaw has met Blaedel and likes her? Who knows?
Despite oddities, some factual errors here and there, and despite the fact that Forshaw seemingly doesn’t read in any of the Scandinavian languages but relies on secondary sources a lot, it is still quite an impressive and interesting book. Anglo readers interested in the Scandinavian Noir landscape will, I am sure, find Nordic Noir very intriguing and useful!
