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Blog Headline of the Week
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Every man is his own hell.
H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
It’s been too long since I’ve had a post in this admittedly infrequent series. So as kind of transition from the legal oddities that have been appearing each Friday, I thought it appropriate to talk about one of my favorite movies about lawyers — My Cousin Vinny.
 Now My Cousin Vinny may not wow a lot of people. While Marisa Tomeia won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film and it gets an 86 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, it receives only a 75 percent rating from “top critics.” But when it comes to lawyers, the film is a hit. In fact, it finished third on the ABA Journal‘s 2008 list of the 25 Greatest Legal Movies.
Distilled to its essence, two college students are charged with murdering a clerk at a “Sac-O-Suds” convenience store in rural Alabama. Thinking the police are talking to them about shoplifting a can of tuna, they inadvertently confess. Bill (Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid fame) has a cousin, Vincent “Vinny” Gambini, who graduated from the Brooklyn Academy of Law, a correspondence school, six years earlier. Thing is, Vinny, played by Joe Pesci in inimitable Pesci style, just passed the New York bar six weeks ago after six tries. Still, he travels to Alabama with his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito (Tomei), to represent them. Their personalities and dress not only make them stand out, it puts Vinny at odds with the trial judge, the last role played by Fred Gwynne, best known as TV’s Herman Munster.
Why is the film such as hit with lawyers? Because the comedic farce lets Vinny do and say things any lawyer who’s been in the courtroom would love — or has wanted — to do or say. Hs response to the prosecution’s opening statement? “Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you.” Clearly, the most concise and brilliant opening statement in legal history. Or there’s the following colloquy, the last line of which is sotto voce:
Judge: I don’t like your attitude.
Vinny: So what else is new?
Judge: I’m holding you in contempt of court.
Vinny [to Bill]: Now there’s a fucking surprise.
Vinny struggles throughout with procedure and finding attire that matches his style and the judge’s rules. The trial itself is a wonderful farce and Vinny’s cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses is excellent, including destroying one witness’ testimony by referring to “magic grits.” Yet there’s plenty of other humor outside the courtroom, much of which stems from Vinny’s Brooklyn tough guy tone.
For example, when he first meets Bill’s friend, Stan, in their prison cell, there is a deftly scripted misunderstanding about prison rape. Scenes with Vinny and J.T., a local yokel who loses $200 to Lisa in a game of pool, are classic. In their first encounter, a “negotiation” ensues when J.T. tells Vinny he will only get the money “over my dead body.” “You like to renegotiate as you go along, don’t you?, ” Vinny says. “Well here’s my counter-offer: do I have to kill you? What if I were just to kick the ever lovin’ shit out of you?”
Whether inside the courtroom or out, Vinny’s and Lisa’s take on the law and life give My Cousin Vinny a unique style and flavor. And perhaps because of how it satirizes the trial process, it is one of the few films I can watch over and over and laugh out loud each time.
Vinny (to J.T.): Okay, let’s see if we agree on the terms. The choice now is: I get my ass kicked, or, option B: I kick your ass, and collect the $200. I’m goin’ with option B, kicking your ass and collectin’ two-hundred dollars.
My Cousin Vinny
Seven years ago today the first post appeared on this blog. Since then, nearly 1,850 have been added (counting a handful of repeats). While a number of SD blogs have come and gone over those years, this one keeps stumbling and bumbling along, moving far away from its original political tone.
There will be close to 250 book reviews on this site by year end. If I were ambitious, I would create an index or directory but that sounds like the type of project best suited for a cold winter day (if it ever becomes a project).
I’ve only been using Google Analytics for a couple years (since about mid-January 2007) and the conversion from politics to books started about two years before that. As a result, it isn’t a completely accurate gauge. Since 2007, though, the single most popular post is my 2008 review of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. It’s accounted for 5.7 percent of all pageviews during that time, a figure I find quite surprising. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt that someone — not me — added it it as a link on Petterson’s Wikipedia entry.)
Almost as surprising is that there’s a post from this year in the top 10 for pageviews: my February review of Tommy James’ Me, the Mob, and the Music ranks ninth. As would be expected, it is the most popular post this year (2.5 percent of all pageviews), although the Out Stealing Horses review is close behind.
So happy birthday to my personal diversion and outlet.
Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.
Joshua Porter, bokardo.com, April 19, 2007
When I first saw something about Bowker releasing a new research report “on who buys books and why,” I was thinking about a post on how I fit — or didn’t fit — the mold. But then a particular statistic grabbed me:
32% of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less than $35,000 annual [sic] and 20% of those sales were for children’s books.
It’s very refreshing to see that, even in a recession-plagued economy, those who may be struggling still are wiling to purchase books for themselves and their children. Given that the Census Bureau indicates the median household income of every state in 2008 exceeded that $35,000 figure, it is gratifying to see that one-third of books are being purchased by those who fall below the median.
This doesn’t mean I’m no longer going to support libraries and organizations that get books into the hands of children. Likewise, no one would suggest a family skip mortgage, rent or utility payments to buy books. But I think this shows people understand just how important books are in the overall scheme of things.
The book is an endless supply of nourishment.
Victor Nell, “The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure,”
Reading Research Quarterly (Winter 1988)
Scandinavian crime fiction is the hot new wave, a new niche of bestsellers combining mystery, thrillers and, occasionally, social themes and history. Despite the buzz around fiction from Northern Europe, Red April, the first book by Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo to be translated into English, can stand its own in any comparison.
 Red April is built around Peru’s deadly internal warfare of the late 20th Century. Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar has voluntarily transferred from a post in Lima, the nation’s capital, to his childhood home of Ayacucho, the capital of a political region of the same name in the Andes Mountains. The Ayacucho Region was not only where the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist revolutionary organization, committed what it called its first “act of war” against the Peruvian government, it was one of the areas of the country hardest hit by the brutal tactics of both the terrorist and counter-terrorist forces.
The story takes place between March 9 and May 3, 2000, some seven and a half years after the Shining Path’s leader was captured and the organization fell into decline. Chacaltana, a well-intentioned yet odd and naive functionary, is called upon to investigate a severely burned body found in a hayloft. Even though the local police captain declines to perform his agency’s part of the investigation, Chacaltana comes to believe that death has the markings of a terrorist act. This causes problems with the region’s political hierarchy because, as the local Army commander tells Chacaltana, “in this country there is no terrorism, by orders from the top.” Shortly thereafter, though, the commander assigns Chacaltana to be an election judge in a remote area of the region, an experience that leaves him convinced the Shining Path is still active and terrorizing peasants and villagers.
As additional gruesome murders occur, the prosecutor quickly realizes the victims are individuals he has interviewed as part of his investigations. “It’s . . . it’s as if I were signing their death sentences when I leave them,” he says. We follow Chacaltana’s investigation and realizations amidst the many churches and passions of the religious celebrations for which the city of Ayacucho is famous. Is he on the track of a serial killer or confronting a resurgent Shining Path? The book also provides a twist on what American readers have come to call the police procedural. Chacaltana assiduously attempts to follow established procedures, none of which are helpful in this case and in which he meets varying assistance and obstruction from the police captain, the Army commander and a local judge.
Translated by Edith Grossman, Roncagliolo’s writing, pacing and plot make Red April a book that is difficult to put down (I read it in less than 24 hours). At the same time, Chacaltana is a unique protagonist. While he struggles with his own demons, including visiting with his death mother each day in his home, he also helps mediate some of the gruesomeness of the story. His short investigative reports, once of which opens the book, and his attention to them are not only character-incisive, are memorable. Not only do they stand in sharp contrast to notes the killer(s) seem to make after each murder, they reflect both his desire to follow bureaucratic procedures and his own touch of ineptitude. Thus, he reports that the 1,576 residents of a village can’t remember where the individual who found the burned body was because they were as drunk as he during a three-day festival. He also reports that the man was said to be in the hayloft because he was with a married woman, “endowed, according to witnesses, with sizable haunches and a lively carnal appetite.”
In the end, though, Red April is political thriller and commentary as murder mystery. It takes the elements of crime fiction, including the police procedural, and uses them to provide a view of how innocents were caught between the brutality of both the Shining Path and the counterinsurgency. Roncagliolo lends it all an air of authenticity by not only describing tactics used by both sides but taking some of the dialogue from actual contemporary documents. While enjoying the book, readers will feel fortunate that it is not an authenticity derived from their own national history.
If you kill with homemade bombs it’s called terrorism, and if you kill with machine guns and hunger it’s called defense.
Santiago Roncagliolo, Red April
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Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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