Behind Closed Doors

A couple years ago the Los Angeles Times had an article in its magazine section about how more and more self-centered Angeleno types were planting un-see-through-able shrubs around their houses, presumably to facilitate nude sunbathing or front-yard drug use. And the Times writer, as best I can recall, took the position that this was a bad thing, that this would tear down the fabric of street life and make us all strangers to each other.

(I think this is the article. This is along the same lines.)

I think about that article a lot, late at night when I'm walking through the streets of Los Angeles. Mostly, it kind of bothers me.

I hate that "it's the end of the world" attitude among Los Angeles architectural critics. They have in their heads, I think, some kind of monster created by the spawn of the Utne Reader and Sunset magazine, and when the city strays from that dual image and its pitchers of mojitos on the front porch of a green communal compound in the hills, they think it's all going to hell.

It's the kind of thing that it's easy to think here. Los Angeles is a weirdo city, giving the illusion of space and sun enough for all your most benign dreams. Buy property at the right moment and before you know it you're a guerilla filmmaker with a vintage car.

But at the end of the day it's just a city, and some of us wind up in the hills in our compounds and some of us wind up in the flatlands, and we're all happy and unhappy in our various ways and while I am a firm believer in the idea that architecture and space can affect your mood I don't want to take that too far.

I also kind of feel that these people are barking up the wrong tree. If the hedges make you feel so closed off in your own neighborhood, there are always shopping centers and carparks. There's the bus if you want to look your co-residents square in the face. Who doesn't dream off a life of porches and neighborhood gossip -- but it's not always available, like so many things that we dream of.

And then, finally, last but not least, I like walking through the city streets lined with hedges. You try to peer through; it feels menacing and glamorous; you don't know what's happening back there; you never will.

Two Minute Mysteries Can Last A Lifetime

If you are going to quit smoking you need things to compulse over.

This is why I now have a book of half-filled Sudoku puzzles. More precisely, I have a book of Sudoku puzzles in which the easy-to-mild Sudoku puzzles are untouched, while the hard Sudoku puzzles are half-filled. Something I could actually do wasn't going to hold my attention; I needed something I couldn't do, and I needed to abandon it once I got bored.

Also: when I was at Borders the other day I saw in their clearance rack the Two-Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J. Sobol. It is perhaps worth noting that on that trip to Borders I also found a cigarette between the pages of the book I was looking at (Gold Diggers! Through the Ages! -- which looked pretty good). I'm not asking whether the cigarette was a message from a supernatural being.

So, two-minute mysteries. I had many, many Encyclopedia Brown books as a child -- I did not have any two-minute mysteries (featuring Dr. Haledjian). I saw them around though, in the hands of my more sophisticated peers. They feature actual death and dismemberment, as opposed to property damage. The solution is upside down at the ending; they take about a page and half.

When I was a kid, I couldn't solve any of the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. My current rate is about fifty percent. My young and impressionable mind may just have learned Donald J. Sobol's little tricks (he's particularly fond of the criminal going for, at the direction of the detective, the, say, flower when an innocent man would have gone for the flour).

The mysteries aren't logical in the way of Sudoku. For example, in The Case of The Spilled Brandy, Haledjian catches the criminal because he finds the brandy in a house he's supposedly a stranger to. It's not, I think we can agree, really a logical solution. Instead, the stories have this crossword puzzle aspect to them -- the solution's not perfect, but it's the only thing that you can use under the circumstances.

This sort of thing will leads you to decide that "greases" is an adequate synonym for "facilitates".

Which leads to an oddly appealing combination of crossword puzzle solutions and supposedly real human interactions. They're not really human interactions, of course, and they're not designed to be psychologically piercing. But the human brain, mine at least, given a set of characters, cannot help trying to move them into more plausible attitudes.

And although this is already probably too long (the Secretary was complaining about post length yesterday) there's also the dependence on a supposedly shared body of human knowledge, that, of course, is not shared at all. I don't mean the random facts ("after covering 26 miles, a runner's calves will have increased an inch or more"), but the not-quite facts. I.e. a resident of San Francisco will never, ever call the city Frisco. Still mostly true, but not really true enough to give conviction. Some of that may just be the passage of time; the copyrights in the book start in 1967. Some of it may be the need to limit the world -- two minute mysteries can only be solved in a world designed as a test chamber, where a particular act always produces a particular effect.

It all reminds me of Edmund Wilson's essay about Sherlock Holmes, in which Wilson discusses how the beauty of the Sherlock Holmes set-ups is ultimately diminished by the solutions. I feel the same about the Two Minute Mysteries. While Holmes stories started with the beauty of the exotic and strange and improbable, the set-ups of Two-Minute Mysteries have the beauty of the pseudo-familiar, the would-be-plausible, and, ultimately, the improbable.