Month: February 2017

Q: What’s white on top and black on the bottom?

A: Society.

Q: Why is it so hard to give bad news to the Japanese?

A: Because you have to drop the bomb twice.

Q: What did Kermit say at Jim Henderson’s Funeral?

A: Nothing

Did you find those jokes funny? Good Grief! What’s wrong with you?

Well, as it turns out, you’re not a horrible human being, you’re just intelligent, highly intelligent. Or at least that’s what a new study in Cognitive Processing has found. Intelligence plays a key role in humour and high intelligence is key in appreciating dark humour, black jokes, not suitable for people you don’t really know, kind of jokes.

So smart people are mean?

Not really. The funny thing about jokes (pun totally intended) is that the punch line creates a disconnect between what you thought was likely to be the outcome and the actual outcome. That’s why it’s so hard to guess the punch line – or should be. Jokes, that kind of make sense, or can be deduced are often considered corny. That is, the disconnect wasn’t so great. It’s not that funny.

A dark joke is not predictable, but more than that, it adds an element that should never be funny – death, abuse, doubts about our values etc. It takes a certain ability to organise, compartmentalize, and then to appreciate the disconnect in the jokes and to find it funny.

So smart people are grumpy and disillusioned? Maybe, but not necessarily.

The group with the highest ‘sick humour’ appreciation scored the highest in verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, they were also better educated, and scored lower for aggression and bad mood. The group with the lowest sick humour appreciation and comprehension scored the lowest in verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, were poorly educated, and scored higher for aggression and bad mood.

In short, if you’re easily offended by sick jokes, it’s probably because you’re aggressive by nature and not that smart.

I sincerely hope that didn’t offend you.

Are you being Gaslighted? Do you even know what it means?

If you read anything online these days, you’ll be familiar with the term ‘gaslighting’. It refers to the manipulation of one person by another, in a way that makes them doubt their sanity. It’s also been used to describe Trump’s campaign winning tactics, twisting and playing with our understanding of ‘facts’ until nothing seems quite concrete.

However, the term gaslighting comes from a play which you never read in school, and of which you probably never saw the movie either. It was the first play of a talented writer who failed to make it into our shared cultural history, and his name is Patrick Hamilton.

The play is set in 1880 in the upper middle class London home of Jack Manningham and his wife Bella. In the 1942 Broadway production Vincent Price played Manningham. You’ve heard of him, right? Manningham is a man who has purposely married Bella in order to be able to purchase a flat below the one where he murdered a rich heiress years before. He was searching for her rubies when the police arrived and fled and now, every evening he sneaks back in to resume his search. He refuses to tell Bella where he’s going (obvs) and promotes the notion that she’s mentally unstable so that, as she starts to get wind of the truth, she doubts herself. Bella begins to believe she is losing her grip on reality, because whenever he leaves, she thinks the gaslight is waning. The single truth is, the gaslight is waning, because Jack is upstairs with it on full blast as he searches for the jewels.

However, in this concept – the one single truth manages to support the untruth – that she is insane.

It takes Detective Rough’s intervention to work out the connection and uncover Jack’s actions.

So there you have it. It’s much more complicated than just Trump waving his hands around and saying the same few words over and over again. Gaslighting as a concept explains how truth can support fiction when we allow ourselves to doubt our perceptions or ignore physical reason.

A Woman of Integrity by J. David Simons

British film star, Laura Scott’s is the other side of fifty and the last film role she had was for the voice of an animated fish. She’s become financially embarrassed and doesn’t want to reduce herself further and head into a sitcom position like her friend. So when an American producer says he wants her for a play about one of her favourite stars of the silent screen, things look like they are turning around. However, she soon realises, there’s more to integrity than simply drawing a line between your heart and your art.

I never like to give plot lines away and I won’t here. It’s enough to say, this story is about two actresses, one of which intends to play the other in a play and we get to read the manuscript of the latter’s autobiography interspersed throughout the tale. It’s the manuscript she’ll get hold of later on after dealing with a little dishonesty, treachery and soul searching along the way.

I don’t think it needs pointing out that it’s a book about two women written by a man, but I do point it out because I think he did a surprisingly good job. If I’d guessed the author’s gender I would have said female because it is insightful and often explicit in a way you’d expect an Alice Munro story to be.

Laura Scott has integrity, so did Georgie Hepburn and both of them have to wrestle with maintaining it. The story is fluid and enjoyable and kept me reading. My only qualm with the story would be that I was expecting a big reveal, but I don’t feel like this was delivered. The way the two stories run parallel together gives you the impression that at some point a fusion will occur, but it doesn’t. Of course, it doesn’t, it’s a sensible British story not some piece of Hollywood Tomfoolery!

Ultimately, this story already has that tingly, BBC one, lottery funded, BAFTA winning actresses kind of feel to it. It’s very British, set in North London and you can hear Emma Thompson’s voice coming off the pages. I closed the book with a pleasant sigh. Well, that was rather nice…

Expected publication: March 16th 2017

Freight Books

Book Review: Saigon Dark by Elka Ray

UPDATE: This book is on an Amazon 99c deal Sunday 19th March and Monday 20th March. 

The premise – that a single mother (Lily) living in Vietnam decides to ‘rescue’ an abused child who wanders out in the night on the same night as her child of the same age drowns, and then deals with the consequences – doesn’t do the story justice. It’s a tale of motherly love and how it effects the most sensible, well educated and grounded of us all as an obsession and compulsion. It’s also an account of the fragility of human relationships in matters of trust and romantic love and how ‘blood’ or in this case motherly love is thicker than water.

Saigon Dark Review

I don’t do stars, but this book is an easy 5. It’s the best new fiction I’ve read this year (okay, it’s February), but it is still an excellent novel. Saigon Dark is best enjoyed if you have no idea what’s coming. So I won’t get too much into the plot. The best I can do is to compare it to some other well-known books to give an idea of the style and quality.

One such would be Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the story starts off as a romance then veers towards the supernatural before becoming a full-on psychological suspense novel. Likewise, Elka Ray’s Saigon Dark starts off as a story of a woman wishing back her ex-husband, then becomes a little spooky, turns into a tale of a woman living under the constant pressure of lies and then explodes into a classic noir romp full of secrets, blackmail, and murder. Elements of Ray’s story also had the feel of Patricia Highsmith’s, The Talented Mr. Ripley, in that occasionally, the pose becomes quick and economic, rushing through Lily’s intensely focused actions of dealing with dead bodies and the fear of being discovered. There’s also the tense but stylish management of lies and the evolution of Lily into a new person, completely at odds with her previous or professional self.

There are many themes here that will appeal to a wide range of readers. Throughout the book, a thread regarding trust is present. Lily can only trust herself, she has to compartmentalize everything she feels in order to protect herself and her children. There are also ideas of rebirth and renewal and the hope of making something better. Ultimately, there is sadness and tragedy to the story, but it is not of the soppy, anti-climatic variety, rather a more sensitive and empathic approach to noir. And all this wrapped up in a fascinating Vietnamese location and culture that reads as genuine and authentic.

There’s no way this book can be easily described – well written and fascinating subject matter is only the beginning. It could easily become a huge hit and also has all the hallmarks of a noir classic. It should be read, simple as that.

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Crime Wave Press

Elka Ray