Because when you are the mom of three small boys, who has time for me, myself, or I?

Certainly not you, not now. Right now, you have a six-year-old in a Tae Kwon Do uniform wiggling his top tooth loose with his tongue. You have a three-year-old in an inflatable Hulk costume making farting sounds. You have a six-month-old in a swollen diaper standing in the stroller and chewing on the straps of what was once your favorite and finest Italian silk bra. You have all of them all around you: the sole, freak female in the house, sitting on the potty, pleading, “Can I please, please, have some privacy, please?”

Your boys, these sons, think they have a right to your body morning, noon, and night. If you lock them out of the bathroom, they will panic, shriek, shrill, and cry — as if you have locked them out of your very heart. They will kick the door, thrust themselves against it, and then rattle the doorknob, yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mom!”

The writing is good and intense. Take the time to visit the link and read the whole story (free on Salon). Allen, who grew up as the daughter of Hall of Fame NFL coach George Allen, has also published a full book of her stories, Better Get Your Angel On (1989). She is more famous for her memoir Fifth Quarter (2000) of growing up with her father and brothers, one of whom became a US Senator (George) and one of whom ran the Redskins rather poorly as GM (Bruce; neither contract nor trade for Kirk Cousins).

Photo: Lucia Spisiakova. Three boys on the shore of Liptovská Mara.

Ozymandias is one of the great poems of the English language, even if Shelley was a confused, womanising wife-swapper who drove his first wife to suicide.

...on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Craig Murray, indefatigable Scots nationalist,¹ invoked Ozymandias to characterise the BLM iconoclasm: Ultimately, All Monuments are Ozymandias – Craig Murray. No great man and no great woman lives without feet of clay. We are all hypocrites and heroes of our time, more than most.

When Horatio Nelson helped to “free” the Kingdom of the Sicilies from Napoleon and restore its appalling autocratic monarchy, Neapolitan writers and intellectuals were shot and hung on Nelson’s flagship, anchored off Naples so the mob could not intervene to save them. Nelson watched some of the executions between bouts of shagging Lady Hamilton. I do not recommend toppling Nelson’s column; but I do advocate some real information about him in an education centre under the square.

Evidently the monuments to Nelson will need to come down, as the most Noble Lord Horatio Nelson, Viscount and Baron Nelson, of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in the County of Norfolk, Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Hilborough in the said County, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Vice Admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet, Commander in Chief of his Majesty’s Ships and Vessels in the Mediterranean, Duke of Bronté in the Kingdom of Sicily, Knight Grand Cross of the Sicilian Order of St Ferdinand and of Merit, Member of the Ottoman Order of the Crescent, Knight Grand Commander of the Order of St Joachim is a murderer of journalists and an agent of tyranny.

Curiously, despite Admiral Nelson’s invaluable service to the Crown, first his mistress, then his beloved daughter Horatio struggled to stay out of bankruptcy prison.

The one-time favour of dukes and kings availed her naught. Her time and her protector had passed on.

Lady Hamilton as Circe (1782) by George Romney

When will all the monuments to Shelley himself to be torn down? While we are at it, shall we tear down the monuments and cancel the university courses dedicated to the study of his brilliant wife’s masterwork, Frankenstein?

There’s an excellent film, chronicling some of the excitement of the Shelleys relationship and their relationship with Lord Byron (who had a daughter with Mary Shelley’s half-sister):

[fvplayer src=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-WGaZaojFc” splash=”https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T-WGaZaojFc/maxresdefault.jpg” caption=”Mary Shelley – Official Trailer I HD I IFC Films”]

Almost everyone in the Shelleys social circles has earned vilification. Lordy Byron in particular forcibly separated a child from its mother, Allegra, who without adequate love or care perished at five. There will be no one left to admire, no one left standing. Like a Western Taliban, we have turned upon ourselves and our culture.

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies

Happily, words endure longer, better support the blows and admonishments of crazed radicals, than bronze and stone.

Who will be left to admire? On whom should we model ourselves? Apparently no one.

While some might argue that unhappy slaves and bloodthirsty revolutionaries would be better role models – the mythical proletarian hero of the Soviets – even those hide crimes in their past. Unfortunate George Floyd apparently once-brandished a pistol at a pregnant woman and committed armed robbery. Would adulterous pro athletes or violence-glorifying, women-abasing rap stars better societal models than these imperfect men and women from our past?

Everyone is a hero somewhere. Terror and scourge of Europe, Attila the Hun is a great leader to Hungarians and the founder of that nation. His name remains one of the most popular in the land.

So no one, it is then. What sad and dreary self-loathing folk, Western Europeans and Anglophones have become. Their sole mission now to acquire and consume. With neither vision nor heroes only the sands of time await.

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1. Ironically Murray was long at the service of Her Majesty the Queen yet now he is currently being hoisted by his own petard and by his own people. Help him fight back if you will. ↩︎

2. Image of Attila the Hun at Heroes Square Budapest, Millenium Monument courtesy of Mr G’s Travels, image of Nelson over Trafalgar Square, courtesy of Colin Busby, both CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Bad Pharma, a new book by Ben Goldacre, looks into the research practices of big pharmacy. Apparently any negative information about new drugs is systematically suppressed even in the academic environment:

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug…: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin….This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

…In 2003, two [systematic reviews] were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results….

In general, the results section of an academic paper is extensive: the raw numbers are given for each outcome, and for each possible causal factor, but not just as raw figures….In Fries and Krishnan (2004), this level of detail was unnecessary. The results section is a single, simple and – I like to imagine – fairly passive-aggressive sentence:

“The results from every randomised controlled trial (45 out of 45) favoured the drug of the sponsor.”

How does this happen? How do industry-sponsored trials almost always manage to get a positive result? Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them.

Still feeling confident about your industry sponsored cell phone radiation tests?

Here’s what happens if someone speaks up about negative results:

Rosiglitazone was first marketed in 1999. In that first year, Dr John Buse from the University of North Carolina discussed an increased risk of heart problems at a pair of academic meetings. The drug’s manufacturer, GSK, made direct contact in an attempt to silence him, then moved on to his head of department. Buse felt pressured to sign various legal documents….

In 2003 the Uppsala drug monitoring group of the World Health Organisation contacted GSK about an unusually large number of spontaneous reports associating rosiglitazone with heart problems. GSK conducted two internal meta-analyses of its own data on this, in 2005 and 2006. These showed that the risk was real, but although both GSK and the FDA had these results, neither made any public statement about them, and they were not published until 2008.

During this delay, vast numbers of patients were exposed to the drug, but doctors and patients learned about this serious problem only in 2007, when cardiologist Professor Steve Nissen and colleagues published a landmark meta-analysis. This showed a 43% increase in the risk of heart problems in patients on rosiglitazone. Since people with diabetes are already at increased risk of heart problems, and the whole point of treating diabetes is to reduce this risk, that finding was big potatoes. Nissen’s findings were confirmed in later work, and in 2010 the drug was either taken off the market or restricted, all around the world.

Still feeling that independent scientists would be able to get the word out over the billions of dollars of industry sponsored research?

When the paper describing this situation was published in Jama, Lif, the Danish pharmaceutical industry association, responded by announcing, in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, that it was “both shaken and enraged about the criticism, that could not be recognised”. It demanded an investigation of the scientists, though it failed to say by whom or of what. Lif then wrote to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, accusing the Cochrane researchers of scientific misconduct…

The investigation went on for a year. Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that only Lif’s third letter, 10 months into this process, made specific allegations that could be investigated by the committee. Two months after that, the charges were dismissed. The Cochrane researchers had done nothing wrong. But before they were cleared, Lif copied the letters alleging scientific dishonesty to the hospital where four of them worked, and to the management organisation running that hospital, and sent similar letters to the Danish medical association, the ministry of health, the ministry of science and so on. Gøtzsche and his colleagues felt “intimidated and harassed” by Lif’s behaviour. Lif continued to insist that the researchers were guilty of misconduct even after the investigation was completed.

If the Romney presidential campaign were not illustration enough, some people are prepared to say and write anything for money. And that includes the pharmaceutical companies which are supposed to be looking out for our health.

Why is this article focused on cellphone radiation? We can decide to take pills or not, or accept a certain medical treatment. We have little control over cellphone radiation, just as for decades we had little control over second hand smoke.

Goldacre’s book looks fabulous, peeking behind the curtains of pharmaceutical companies practices. Well researched but popular works like Bad Pharma are essential to reforming out of control industries, like tobacco, oil or pharmacy.

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients will be released on January 3, 2013 by Faber and Faber. A pity that it won’t be out in time for Christmas. In the meantime, Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks starts down this road. In an interview in 2008, Goldacre stated that “one of the central themes of my book [Bad Science] is that there are no real differences between the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry and the $50 billion food supplement pill industry”. Goldacre has been sued several times for exposing medical shams and won damages and/or court costs up to €220,000 from the plaintiffs.

Excerpts above from Bad Pharma are from an extract published in the The Guardian.

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Brennan-Jobs writing is splendid. Her treatment of the complexities of the Ivy League and fraternities in a story about date rape is spot on. Brennan-Jobs describes eventual acceptance into the special circles of the Ivy League and how it seems like another, better world to an outsider:

One weekend that summer the four of us went to Avery’s summerhouse in New Hampshire. She drove her father’s red MG with the top down and it was just right, just how it should be, I thought, on the East Coast during college in the summer with friends. The house was small, clean and furnished beautifully, expensively. The walls were thick. Vintage quilts spilled over antique four-posters.  The house was two stories, rectangular, with a patio and a lawn in back that sloped down and ended at an inlet of the Atlantic ocean. There was no beach, just a little drop down. I didn’t understand that the water was ocean, and not lake, until we jumped in and I tasted the salt and felt the sharp cold. It had a power that a lake didn’t have, too, even though it was calm on the top. Lake water seemed thinner. I had never seen this kind of ocean before, this domesticated version of the Pacific. Later we made dinner together and ate on the patio as the sky darkened. I extrapolated, watching the ocean from the porch, sitting with my friends, eating: here with these people, even wild and violent things were calm.

I began to wonder whether I’d been wading too deeply through my life, hampered by unnecessary seriousness. Maybe life could be lived more on the surface layer, where the sheen is.

Later Brennan-Jobs reveals the friend who introduced her to these perfect circles had a dark streak and had destroyed the life of the young woman she had just met in London:

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said softly. Then she hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

I had a feeling this was about Cole. “Cole and I are just friends,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. We’re not a couple or anything.”

She began to tell me her story.

It was not, I learned, a crush at all. She had met Cole at a party at one of Harvard’s final clubs. She had a few drinks there, but didn’t remember anything after that. She woke up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, knowing that she’d had sex, missing her underwear. She went to the hospital and tested positive for the presence of Rohypnol—the “date rape drug”—in her blood.

I’d never heard of Rohypnol before. Emily said it made you cognizant, even excited or blissful, in the moment, and then you forget everything the next day. She didn’t know who had slipped the drug into her drink or who had had sex with her. Several people told her later that she and Cole had sex that night in the club in front of a group of people.

At the time, I learned, she was training to be a doctor at Harvard and had almost completed her course.  She dropped out after the incident with Cole and returned to her native London.

Here the banality of evil resonates quietly. This is what the Ivy League is about. The propriety is all surfaces, underneath which a morass of Kennedy ravishments and careless murder. The same dangers F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

In another essay about abandoning vegetarianism, Brennan-Jobs nails the paradox perfectly in describing her first baked chicken. The human body is very unhappy without meat over time. All the frustration at the murder of animals for food does not change the underlying cravings of the body for flesh.

I felt unfastened, too, roasting the chicken today, eating it at night with my boyfriend. It wasn’t my first time eating meat – but it was my first time eating meat as a meat-eater. It was moist with crispy skin and there were vegetables, too, cooked in the juices in the same pan: beautiful white beets with red veins, shallots with burnt and twisting stems, sweet potatoes – all upstaged, though, by the flavorful meat that sat between us, glistening. It collapsed the space between us, brought us closer, I think, with comfort and normality; it also collapsed time, made the vegetarian years fade.

The very word vegetarian has so many different meanings, one can never be sure what someone else means or even what one means oneself.

I grew up, left home and traveled farther and farther from California to the East Coast, then to England, then to Italy. I slipped through holes in understanding and language: in Boston one can be vegetarian and eat fish; in England a vegetarian may also eat fish, and rarely objects to the meat that flavors a dish; in Italy una vegetariana may sample everything, as the population is perplexed by the concept of meatlessness; little exceptions seem unavoidable.

I absorbed the excuses and ate. I strayed as far as I could safely stray into the universe of flesh, emboldened by anonymity, right up to the point when I would be questioned, and then stopped.  And if I was troubled by the difference between what I said I was, and what I ate, the taste of the tender, flavorful meat seemed absolution enough, as if the spiritual problem was mitigated, the animal suffering alleviated, the question of my identity (a vegetarian? who eats meat?) obfuscated by my pleasure.

I deeply sympathise with Brennan-Jobs. I loathe the idea of eating meat, consuming flesh. I wonder about the health of the activity given the tortured flesh from modern day factory farms, pumped up with fatteners and hormones. Or even the terror of transported animals forced into slaughter houses. Consuming their death throes cannot be good for us.

Most people in the West eat far too much meat. The human body needs meat about one meal every two days. I try to restrict myself to that rhythm and make fish one out of every second meal. But abolishing meat altogether creates a slow decline to weakness. I know, I’ve been vegetarian for as long as a year at a time.

It could be worse. Fijans ate other humans like we eat beef. And when one sees what Westerners have done to Fiji or to the Philippines one can hardly blame their blood thirstiness.

Brennan-Jobs essay takes us deep into the riddle of flesh eating in delicious prose. Alas, it would be wonderful if she would post more prolifically to her weblog. There are only four or five posts for the last two years.

While I am far from convinced that Steve Jobs and Apple have done any good in the world of technology in the last five years (I share Stallman’s walled garden and privacy concerns), Brennan-Jobs fine writing is enough to take the sheen off my dismay.

Ioan Holender Opernball with Desirée Treichl-Stürgkh

To my astonishment, there was not a single image of ballet in the book. Ballet premiers are relegated to a two page list in the back.

I had heard of Holender’s contempt for ballet but to just cut ballet out entirely from his commemorative goodbye album is a step too far.

While opera can be a magnificent art, most often it is tedious, filled with bombastic emotions of oversized egos.

Ballet on the other hand is the springtime, it is mortality in flight, it is delicate flutters of the soul made flesh.

The weak point in ballet is the music, which too often was primitively written for dance. Later that changed with Profkofiev and Stravinsky’s ballet scores like Romeo and Juliet, Firebird and Rites of Spring.

Holender’s Close Up was not even written by the author. He assented to five interviews about his time at Staatsoper where he answered the interviewer’s questions about his work. The lazy man’s way to writing a book.

In this case it works. Holender manages to come across as his irascible, irritable and bombastic self. The interviewer has edited the answers down to the essential so if you want to learn more about Holdender’s methods, it’s all there. He covers talent scouting, relationships with conductors when developing new talent.

I remember telling Muti about Angelika Kirschlager the first time. Muti didn’t know her and therefore didn’t want here. They all want the singers they already know. So you also have to fight with conductors and stage directors to convince them. And that is not an easy thing to do, believe me. (p. 455)

Axel Zeninger’s photos as whole are excellent. As a stage photographer it’s interesting to observe the changes in technology. In 1999, the early digital pictures have noisy shadows and are a little bit blurry due to long exposure times for instance in Don Giovanni, pp. 202-203). In 2009, the pictures are all sharp, as Nikon’s high ISO actually works and one can shoot at 1/400 second and not at 1/30 second. But you can see what a blessing high ISO digital photography is by wandering through the photos from 1993 and 1994, such as Umberto Giordano’s Fedora on pp. 84-85 or Richard Wagner’s Ring on pp. 48-49.

In addition to the photographs and Holdender’s insights, the program for each opera premier is included and reproduced at life size. Much nicer than a stack of programs in the corner of a shelf (as I have).

Closeup: 118 Premieren Wiener Staatsoper is recommended for Staatsoper, Holender and opera fans. It’s an excellent idea to have a bound and visual summary of the Holender years, especially as it’s well printed by Edition Lammerhuber. Alas there’s nothing to recommend it to amateurs of ballet. Given Mr. Holender’s contempt for ballet, I can’t say I’m sad to see him go.

As I know more and more people from the opera again (in Moscow I spent a lot of time with opera singers and a fair amount of time at the Russian operas, but not the Italians) and I live in Vienna, I might very well read it myself to see what it is I’m missing out on.

Much of the story seemed to be adaptations of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant novels. In just one example, the Mord’Sith seem a near clone of the Bloodguard but with breasts.

Which set me to asking myself whatever happened to a film version of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant Trilogies (there’s three of them)? The Thomas Convenant novels are fantasy for grown-ups dealing with issues such as acceptance and exclusion via physical metaphors like lepresy. The sex lives are also very complex, exploring the breakdown of the physical elements of love over time.

Despite some heavy hitters signing up to develop such a film, no studio signed off on it. Here are Stephen R. Donaldson’s own notes on the subject.

"Covenant" film news: it’s over. The producers who optioned "Lord Foul’s Bane" have tried everything they could think of, without success. Now their option has expired, and they have declined to renew it. Bury it now, folks, ’cause it’s dead. 1/29/07

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Possible "Lord Foul’s Bane" film: bad news. It doesn’t look good. So far, the project has been rejected by Fox, Sony, and Dreamworks. "Too dark." "Too much like LOTR." The prospective producers have decided to change their tactics. They are now hoping to get a reputable director "on board." If they succeed, this may increase the project’s credibility.

I’ll post more news when I have some. 2005

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This past week, "The Hollywood Reporter" announced that "Covenant" is coming to the big screen. This is both premature and misleading. Here are the facts to date.

The production team of Mark Gordon ("Saving Private Ryan") and Peter Winther ("Independence Day") is quite serious about wanting to make a "Covenant" film. "Revelstone Development" has a design in place and a screenwriter on board (John Orloff, "Band of Brothers"). What Gordon and Winther do *not* have is a studio (i.e. money); and without a studio little or nothing is likely to happen. Since Hollywood basically shuts down in December, Gordon and Winther plan to start approaching studios in January.

I would like to emphasize that I have no control over any aspect of this process. After all, the film rights are held by Ballantine Books, not by me. I’ve met Winther and Orloff, and I’m convinced that their respect for and excitement about "Covenant" is genuine: for that reason, I’m starting to get excited myself. And I have no doubt that Revelstone Development will consult with me from time to time, and will take whatever I have to say seriously. But I have no actual power here. Nor do I want any. In fact, I’ve refused every offer to give me any power. I love movies; I hope a "Covenant" movie (or several) will be made; I hope it will be good; and I hope it will be successful. But I’m simply not qualified, either by experience or by personality, to make the kinds of decisions–and compromises–which are essential to film-making. And I have my own work to do, work which pretty much consumes all of my creative energy. So I’m rooting hard for Revelstone Development; and if Gordon, Winther, and Orloff ever want my opinion, I’ll give it to them. But really this is all out of my hands.

More news as it develops….

P.S. I’m just guessing here; but I suspect that peculiar references to "Saturn" in "The Hollywood Reporter" are a confused conflation of "Satan" and "Sauron." I can’t think of any other explanation.

As it happens, Russell Crowe has decided NOT to take on the role of Thomas Covenant, no doubt (drum-roll, please) because he considered it too taxing. Imagine my surprise. As you may know, money people typically commit to a movie, not because they like the project, but because a "bankable" star has agreed to participate. Therefore the "Covenant" film remains purely hypothetical.

I’m amazed that the Thomas Convenant series has never been made into a motion picture considering how far near the bottom of the barrel Hollywood scraped for its Lord of the Rings lookalikes in the boom years. Or that it hasn’t been picked up for a television series.

Too sophisticated?

Ann McAffrey’s Dragon series made it to the big screen on a large scale. Even latecomer to the screen Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy made it Sci Fi channel in 2004. Surely somebody has to get around to the Thomas Covenant Chronicles eventually even if they end up simplifying and whitewashing some of the darker elements.

I’ve just finished Luke Jenning’s Breach Candy in a single sitting by noon. I woke up early and had the urge to furnish my mind with travel instead of poisoning it with the usual news and internet marketing gunk which clogs my inbox.

As the Israelis give it to the Palestinians again for no particularly good reason apart from intrinsic viciousness and selfishness – and we the Western world stand by and watch (kudos to Sarkozy for actually standing up and seeking to do the right thing just once, tomatoes to Blair for blame and bullying the victim yet again for his American masters), it’s difficult to read the news.

Anyway back to Breach Candy, it’s the story of a film producer in search of a story and love and a ballet dancer in search of herself and love, both lost in Bombay. But the book is far more than the sum of the two stories, between which Jennings jumps back and forth. It is a slightly gritty look at the world of Bombay.

Mumbai Nepean Sea Road

Of course, the view is from the top down, but that seems to be the only vantage point in Bombay from which anything is visible apart from filth and scrabbling. When our protagonists intersect with the real world in short sordid episodes it highlights the hypocrisy of the social caste system in far brighter bursts.

While credibility is stretched when the hero ends up in the arms of a fifteen year old prostitute while the heroine ends up in the arms of the Indian actress it doesn’t crack. The Lesbian affair doesn’t have a particularly genuine edge or truth to it. But it is not unusual with romantic comedies that the ending cannot match the pace.

Legendary actress Smita Patil, inspiration for the character of Jennings’s Indian actress

Another shortfall might be in differentiation of narrative voice. At first it is very difficult to tell the difference between June Webster’s voice and that of Stanley Collinson between the chapters all written in the first person in the voice of one or the other. It surprises me that both June and Stanley write and describe scenes so similarly.

Some of the most powerful stories happen in flashback, often cunningly narrated to new acquaintances in present time. How Stanley left his live-in girlfriend after seeing her in the arms of a film director. Why did he leave without a fight or without clarification?

June asks Stanley the same question. But is there any point to fighting or struggling after that point of betrayal. Still the reader wonders, was there any betrayal before Stanley just disappears. Perhaps had he put his foot down about the issue faster, what he perceived as betrayal was a harmless flirtation.

When I eventually got around there, about two o’clock, I found a note from Emilia. They’d finished shooting very late, she hadn’t got in until the early morning, where had I been, another night edit? The good news, the note went on, was that her contract had been extended, she now had a featured part, there was some location shooting, she’d had to leave early, it would probably be another late night, she would ring me, she missed me.

‘Another late night, I thought, sure. She missed me. Again, sure. The worst part was the whole thing corresponded to the edge-of-consciousness nightmares I had had ever since I met her. The only course of action open to me was to cut myself away. Cauterise. Leave no trace.’ 

If you won’t stand and fight there, when will you stand and fight?

Never is the answer. Stanley ends up starting a film about the wrong actress, as he is put off the trail by others manipulating circumstances around him.

Stanley persists on hopelessly romanticising and idealising the rest of the women, all busy leading their lives around him.

In good fiction, one is forced to examine others lives in close up for at least a few hours. Seeing others’ lives should be enough to remind us how much remains to be done within our own.

Except it’s all true. The hero of the Vienna Woods Killer is one of the most loathsome souls to ever tread this planet. Hitler and Stalin and Beria’s soul tied up in the flesh of one nasty small chap from Styria by the name of Jack Unterweger.

Jack Unterweger using his favorite cover: crime writer

One of the difficulties of the story is where to begin… Should one start at the beginning with childhood and growing up? A bit drab. Or should one start near the end to raise interest and then flashback to the end.

Leake does neither. He starts somewhere in the middle and wanders forwards and back as suits the narrative. I started reading the book in the trial chapters (about two thirds) so my way through should have been even more confusing. Strangely starting in the late part of the book and then reading the middle and then the beginning wasn’t at all disturbing. A lot of the early ground was covered quite late. I was more interested in Unterweger’s celebrity games on his release – how he played Vienna’s literary and bohemian society for fools. Those escapades were well covered.

What concerns me about a book like this is that the lead character has no redeeming characteristics. Yes, he has charm and he has moderate literary gifts (seven plays and two fictional autobiographies, most produced, some best sellers). But those gifts were only ever used for deceit or manipulation. Unterweger’s primary and primal goal in life was to have the possibility to kill young women, usually after copulating with them.

He liked the feeling of power of watching life ebb out of a woman as she begged him for a mercy never to come. There were a few survivors so we know exactly how this monster went about his business. He usually targeted prostitutes but that was more a matter of circumstance. It’s nigh impossible to get away with killing people you know (more than once at least). A serial killer who wants to kill repeatedly and not get locked away should always target strangers and there are none more vulnerable than sidewalk hookers. As Leake writes: "Street prostitutes are the only women in today’s society who will get into the car of a stranger willingly."

So after spending more than three hundred pages with a monster like Jack Unterweger, how is one better enlightened or prepared for life? As a cautionary note, Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood for the 21st century. The abstinence societies in the US should buy The Vienna Woods Killer in quantity and give it to all the girls between twelve and seventeen. They’d really think thrice about getting into a car or slipping into a restroom with a hot and bothered boy or man.

The Vienna Woods Killer could be useful to law enforcement agents as a detailed case study of how a serial killer or even serial criminal can slip between agencies and end up free to strike again. The Vienna Woods Killer could be useful as propaganda for the three strikes and you’re out crowd who believes once a criminal, always a criminal, lock ’em up and throw away the key.

Worse and less ironcially, The Vienna Woods Killer could be used as a serial killer’s handbook. This Jack Unterweger guy was pretty good at it. He managed to successfully ply his trade in five cities, three countries and two continents.

For someone who is trying to make a better world or would like to believe in the good of mankind The Vienna Woods Killer has nothing to offer except darkness and pain.

The quality of the prose cannot redeem the subject matter. If you love life and/or humankind, I would recommend you stay far away from Jack Unterweger and The Vienna Woods Killer. I hope John Leake finds a more inspiring tale on which to use his considerable talents of forensic journalism. There are any numbers of cases of liberation movements suppressed by international intervention or multinationals pillaging a community. Something like the research behind Silkwood or Julia Roberts’ lawyer character.

In my particular circumstances as a foreigner strongly tied to Vienna and its bohemian life, I found the historical prism into life in the early eighties and nineties of significant professional interest. If The Vienna Woods Killer is accurate, curiously Vienna hasn’t changed much. I don’t yet share John Leake’s contempt for the Vienna pseudointellectual glam bohemia (schikerei he calls them) but perhaps I just haven’t been in Vienna long enough.

I know enough true stories from the last couple of years which might gradually persuade me as well. There’s a guy who didn’t sign the rent contract ("my name isn’t spelled right") and then changed the locks on his landlord. Abusing the pro-tenant laws of Vienna, he paid half the official rent for three years before he was finally evicted. A good Viennese family – for what that’s worth. But that is a tale for another day…

Ohne Anna und ohne Wein
Manchmal muss Mann leben.