Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

olitics, Shrek email and a quick Finding Nemo review, and then the promised review of Patricia Cornwall's Portrait of a Killer Jack the Ripper book.

The big news of the last few days is the terrorist bombings in Spain.  These were followed just a couple of days later by a national election, in which the ruling party, PP, conservatives who supported the Iraq War against the vast popular sentiment, were swept out of office by PSOE, a leftist party.  My initial reaction was the obvious one. "Those Spanish pussies, surrendering to terrorism!"  Not that I much support the clusterfuck of an Iraqi occupation that Bush has us stuck in, but it seemed that some terrorists hit Spain, and Spain responded by running up a white flag and hoping the bad men wouldn't hurt them again. Hoping the crocodile would eat them last, to drag out an old saying.

However as I thought about it a bit more, I realized that my initial reaction was insufficient, and that there had to be more to it than that. After all, the Spanish stereotype is pride and machismo. They're fighters, tough people, not ones to practice electoral appeasement.   And anyway, it's pretty stupid to categorize an entire nation by one stereotyped emotion or another.  They aren't all macho swaggering idiots anymore than they are voting for a party that's going to pay ransom to Al Quida so long as they're left alone.

And as I hoped it would, much more information has emerged over the last couple of days. Information that lets us put the entire series of events into better perspective, and not react with knee jerk "with us or against us" ignorance. Not that that's slowing down the warbloggers.

The gist of things seems to be that yes, the vast majority of Spanish people opposed the Iraq War, but that has little or nothing to do with their feelings about terrorism, which they are as strongly opposed to as most of the rest of the civilized world. Spain voted out the PP, the ruling conservative party, because they opposed the Iraqi War and occupation, since they didn't feel that it was doing anything to fight terrorism or make them safer.  Moreover, they were angry with the lies the PP fed them, since the PP immediately blamed the ETA (Basque Separatists) for the bombing, and kept trying to blame them for it, since the strongest support for the PP was based on their opposition to the ETA. However, as the investigation into the train bombings continued, and evidence began to mount that it was not the ETA, and was probably an outside terror front like Al Quida, the people began to grow very angry at the PP, who kept lying to them and insisting the bombings were the work of the ETA.

Here's a quote from an actual Spaniard, a woman who sums things up more clearly than I have. 

So, the PP knew that their antiterrorist policy (against ETA) was one of its main winning cards, and they didn't hesitate to blatantly manipulate the 11-M attack, suppressing information, calling people to demonstrate against ETA, knowing all the while that the Antiterrorist Information Brigade had as good as discarded ETA authorship a few hours after the attack. The antiterrorist police heads even threatened to resign at the madness of it all, and this was leaked to the opposition and the press. And all the while the state TVE showing documentaries about ETA activities right until late Saturday night, on the eve of the election, and failing to report live on Minister Acebes informing about the Al-Q line of investigation which he had been forced to acknowledge - forced by his own angered police heads and by the media which had all the information but was withholding it just long enough for the Minister to do the decent thing.

This heartless manipulation of the dead for political gain clinched it - it was the last straw, it galvanised a portion of apathetic socialist voters who would have otherwise abstained, galvanised first-time voters, and galvanised Izquierda Unida voters (which include communists) who opted for heaping their vote on the PSOE for a higher chance of defeating Aznar (IU lost 5 seats because of that). In Spain, government change has always been heralded by a higher participation of voters. In a nutshell, many Spaniards felt badly abused, and acted accordingly. So, yes, 11-M influenced the vote, but not because we are overcome by fear, or because we think that we can avert further attacks, but because we will only put up with so much lying and manipulation, and especially not when it is the dead and their families that are being heartlessly and shamelessly manipulated.

Hard not to take a lesson from that closing line, regarding Bush and the Iraqi war justifications and his new election commercials featuring actors portraying firemen in simulated WTC rubble, eh?

To segue abruptly and awkwardly to the larger issue: most of the world opposed Bush's Iraq Attack, since it was predicated on WMDs and links to Al Quida. And as some knew then and most know now, there were neither WMDs in Iraq, or links between Saddam and Al Quida.  Or course Iraq is now quite filled with Al Quida, amongst dozens of other competing anti-American factions, since the country has descended quite a ways towards anarchy since the US invaded and took out Saddam's evil and corrupt government and police force (good), while unfortunately having virtually no plans for how to replace them in a timely and efficient fashion (bad). Just such a clusterfuck was precisely why many people who vaguely supported the Iraqi invasion based on the lies Bush was telling us back then, myself included, feared it would make things worse, in the long run.  One year is far from the long run, by the way, so the jury is still out on how things have been changed for the better or worse, but things certainly could have gone better than they have, and that's mostly since the post-invasion planning was as poor as the pre-invasion military planning was good. Both were tainted by political appointees with no practical knowledge and an excess of naive "They'll greet us as liberators, with rose petals." type logic, but the military didn't let those NeoCon wet dreams dictate their entire strategy.  And unfortunately for Iraq, there was no post-invasion planning force other than the neo-con dreamers. Which is why we had the looting, burning, and destruction of important documents when Saddam's forces broke, and why the country is still largely lawless, in economic shambles, and costing the US tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of American soldier lives.

Bush supporters seem to be saying, "Since he got us into this mess, he's the best one to get us out of it." Which isn't logic I particularly embrace. If your bus driver keeps making wrong turns and stupid mistakes, at some point you vote in a new driver, eh? Furthermore, the Republican logic from the Spanish bombings and election, applied to America, seems to be, "If there's a terrorist attack on the US before the election, we need to vote for Bush to fight back since a vote for Kerry is giving in to terror.  Also, if there's not an attack before the election, it means Bush is doing a great job against terror and needs to be kept in power."

Convenient for their goals, eh? This sort of thing is why you don't let your opponent frame the debate with terms of their liking; they can make every course of action seem to favor themselves.

The Spanish people decided their government was lying to them, and taking the wrong tack on many issues, especially the war against terror, and they voted to replace them with different people with different ideas. Occupying Iraq is doing nothing to cut down on terrorism world wide, so why does a country (Spain in this case) voting against leadership who supported the war and invasion mean they're giving in to terror?

The Islamic extremists, the "terrorists" (as always, where the line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" is drawn is largely subjective) want to attack Westerners, ideally Americans. The largest result of the Iraqi invasion has been to topple the most secular dictatorship in the Arabic world, and fill Iraq with very convenient American targets. So in a sense Bush was correct with his "Bring it on." (I.E. "Kill American troops in Iraq if you think you can.") comments, in that the US forces in Iraq have drawn terrorists and their sympathizers to Iraq. However, as the Spanish train bombings demonstrate, just shooting at G.I.s in Iraq isn't enough to keep them completely occupied.  And it can't be entirely heartening to the US occupation forces in Iraq to know their own president has been busy hanging targets on their backs.

Guns and the ability to shoot back or not, they're far easier targets than anything in the US. After all, it's far easier to drive/sneak across the border in a Land Rover full of AK-47s and plastique from Iran or Jordan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Syria or Turkey than it is to smuggle bombs and personnel across the ocean into the US.

In yesterday's blog I discussed movie trailers along with the Spartan review, one of them being the relatively-disappointing Shrek 2 trailer. This elicited comment from a Hungarian reader, who mailed in with her take on things.

Hi

about Mayala not wanting to see the trailer... I did. It looks bad. I hope it's just a crappy trailer since I loved Shrek so much... but who knows?

In light of this email, and my own misgivings/lukewarm reception to the trailer, I dug up the Shrek 1 trailer.  Not on the DVD, where it would be full screen and good sound and all.  I wanted an even comparison, so I checked it out online.  You can see it here and see what you think, but I wasn't real impressed.  I'm sure I saw it before I saw Shrek in theaters, but I don't think Shrek was much on my radar in advance.  I thought it would be just another dopey kids' cartoon with a bunch of bad Disney-type songs, and only went and saw it with my dad after it had been out a month or so, and had gotten such great reviews and even better word of mouth and box office. And I really enjoyed it, and have come to like it more over time, but even if I'd seen this trailer in advance, it wouldn't have done much for me.

It's narrated, but by what sounds like an assistant sound engineer; not a good voice, and while I usually think anything would beat another of the phony Mr. Voice guys... the Shrek trailer guy doesn't.  There are a lot of good scenes from the movie, but from all through the movie, chopped together, giving away far too many good scenes in advance, and with no real narrative flow.  Worst of all, I don't get any impression of how subversive and intelligent and snarky the movie is.  It just looks like a dopey kids' movie with perhaps slightly less stupid stuff than usual.

So by that decidedly odd metric, I have to say the Shrek 2 trailer isn't that bad. It's not great, but it's certainly better than the Shrek 1 trailer, and we all know how that movie turned out. And it's at least given me some hope Shrek 2 will be better than its trailer, since Shrek 1 certainly was.

Speaking of CGI movies, I recently saw Finding Nemo for the first time, since Malaya and I finally got around to watching the DVD, about a month after we bought it used for $12 at Blockbuster. I was going to write a full review of it, to go along with all the others this week, but when thinking about it, I realized I didn't have anywhere near enough to say to fill up a decent page of discussion.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good either. I'd certainly put it below Toy Story 1 and 2, Shrek, and Monsters Inc. in the CGI movie Pantheon.  It wasn't even as good as A Bug's Life, though it was about as good as or slightly better than Ants or Ice Age. Finding Nemo looked astonishingly good, probably the best looking CGI ever (since the technology keeps advancing, and it's the most recent entry, that's not a big surprise), but the plot was uninteresting, since you never doubted for an instant that Marlin would find Nemo, and they'd live happily ever after.  Putting all of the tragedy of the sacrificing mom and eaten eggs at the start and having nothing but happiness, with a few minor setbacks, after that was a plotting mistake, IMHO.

Nemo had a lot of interesting and colorful characters, but since Nemo and his dad weren't among their ranks, I was frequently bored.  Dotty was the only sort of interesting major character (I liked all of the fish in the aquarium and the pelican, but they were all supporting actors.) but I was more often bored or annoyed by her verbal antics and memory issues than I was amused.  Mostly I watched the pretty colors and waited for Marlin to finally find Nemo, while learning when to let go of his child, and waited for Dory to get all better and live with them, and all of the other fish to escape the aquarium. And of course he did, and she did, and they did, in the end.

I'm not saying that I wanted heartbreak and failure for a conclusion, but even though I knew virtually nothing of the plot, I was never really impressed or engaged in the film. If I'd been in a theater I'd have been checking my watch, wondering how much longer I had to wait before I could see the pre-ordained ending and leave.

I liked the small stuff the best.  The three sharks on their 12-step starvation program.  The way the squid papped out some ink whenever startled.  The undersea mine field and explosion and submarine disaster. The awesome glowing toothy carnivore fish.  The civilization the aquarium fish had constructed for themselves. The screwball seagulls with their endless, Secret Cow Level-esque chorus of "Mine mine mine mine!" and the crabs trying to evade them. (I must admit I thought the seagulls were inexplicably saying "Mike.  Mike." at first, until Malaya pointed out that "Mine." made a lot more sense.  All the small stuff was great stuff.

Which made it all the more a pity that dad was so monotone "I must save my son and I'm stupidly single-minded.", Dory was so hit or miss manic, and Nemo was every determined yet vulnerable child character in an animated movie ever, since the mediocrity of the main characters and the straight line plot were what dragged it down, in my opinion.  I was really bored by the surfer/stoner dude turtle also, who got far too much screen time for is jokeless existence.

Of course the movie made a fortune and most critics loved it (188/190 on RT), but I just read the only two negative reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes (Film Threat and Zertinet), I found myself agreeing with most everything they said.  It's not bad, but it's just nothing special, and follows the same pattern and style of their earlier, superior work without quite equaling it. 

The problem with “Finding Nemo” is not in its visuals or effects. Actually, the most impressive thing about this film is the world it has managed to create and the convincing atmosphere it sustains. One must also note Thomas Newman’s beautiful score, which only adds to the mystery and majesty of this underwater world.

But while the imagery is impressive and the father-son story touching, there is something artificial about “Nemo.” It is a difficult issue to put my finger on, but it is always there and always apparent.

The problems start with the voicing. Brooks, as Marlin, brings a constant manic energy to the part that is rendered ineffective by the film’s end. DeGeneres has several funny lines, but she also fails at achieving anything remotely memorable.

The movie unfolds as almost all cartoon films now unfurl: Hero meets up with wacky sidekick, encounters strange creatures during the mission, and ends up revealing to the audience a universal truth about human emotions. Now, granted, every film ever made could be summarized with such a broad umbrella, but after “Toy Story” and “Shrek,” a film like “Nemo” must do more to stand out from the pack.

And finally, there is a lack of emotional growth present in the other children’s films listed here. True, Nemo learns some self esteem on his mission. As Marlin swims about the ocean, he realizes that Nemo deserves more freedom. These lessons, however, occur instantly and transparently. Never once did I believe that I was seeing true growth – simply the flip of a page in a wooden script.

None of this is to say that “Nemo” is a bad film. For families, it will be wonderful and several moments surprised me with their subtlety and humor. I am only attempting to isolate why I left this film with a shrug, while I left “Shrek” wanting to dance.

A great film, whether it is a children’s fable or a wartime epic, should not require excuses.

That about sums it up for me. But hey, at least there weren't any ridiculous musical numbers.  And as always, YMMV. If anyone really loved it, feel free to let me know why.  I won't ridicule you or anything, I'm just curious to hear from someone who thought it was as good or better than the other excellent CGI movies we've had in recent years, and why.

I've had the book since it was first released, but hadn't read it until just a couple of weeks ago, in late January 2004. The book was a gift that I received for Christmas in 2002, over a year ago, from a website coworker.  I hadn't asked for it, but the friend who sent it to me lives in the UK, and knows of my serial killer interest, so it was a good choice for a gift.  I was interested in it, but never seemed to get around to reading it until I was prompted by events that transpired during the endless wait to eat at Claim Jumper on Valentine's Day.  While we waited 3 hours for a table, Malaya and I spent about an hour and a half browsing a discount book outlet, and to fill the time I read a chapter or two out of about a dozen novels.  One that I selected, basically at random, was a non-fiction book by an ex-FBI pathologist and criminal profiler.  And in one chapter of his book, he discussed Jack the Ripper, and his work in creating a criminal profile of the man as part of a UK TV special.  He didn't come to any definite conclusions, but out of the few choices, he favored Kosminski, a Polish Jew who lived in the Whitechapel area.

Spurred on by reading that short account of the issue, I started on Cornwall's book the next day, and read through it in a couple of days.  It's a fast read, as I said.  She's not a brilliant writer, by any means, but she's entirely competent in writing non-fiction, and has some flair for fiction. She puts it to good use in Portrait, since the recreations and descriptions of the various murders are by far the best part, since she can write them basically as fiction. Fiction based on real events. The background information about the victims, including their generally miserable lives, their life stories, the social situation and setting of the times, information about the Whitechapel area, the police at the time, society in general, and the actual technique of the killings and how they were discovered and investigated are all fascinating.

Cornwall is less skilled at putting together a coherent and chronological book, but I think most of that was due to her writing it for a general audience, and editing it to keep interest throughout.  The best chapters are the five that feature long, detailed descriptions of the victims, their final day on earth, the crime itself, and the immediate aftermath and pathetic, utterly hopeless police investigations into the Ripper crimes.  Spaced around these she's got tons of psychoanalysis and profiling of her anointed Ripper suspect, reports of her own investigation into the issue, new discoveries, and far more on the technical details of police procedure, both back then and now.

The book isn't written like a non-fiction book meant solely to advance her theory and build to a conclusion.  It does that, but it's also meant to be popularly accessible and interesting, so she spaces out the juicy stuff to keep from having too many pages of dry procedural facts in a row, and jumps around a lot, in how she relates her own investigation, how she talks about past Ripper study, and also the chronology of the olden times and the bloody crimes.  It's written as though either 1) she put it all down without any editing or proofreading at all, throwing things in in any order as she thought of them while writing, or 2) carefully edited into that form, in order to be interesting to the layman and varied in tone and content. It's like one of those perfectly artful, messy hairstyles that Meg Ryan used to wear in every movie. Where you can't tell she spent two hours to get it perfectly "just rolled out of bed" or if they really did just roll out of bed.

I think Cornwall's case could be presented more coherently and lucidly and it would be more persuasive. But it would make the overall book less enjoyable a read, especially for the general audience. She obviously balanced it how she thought best, and what the best seller crowd likes is not going to be what the hardcore Ripperologist wants. Not that they were likely to greet her conclusions with much enthusiasm anyway, no matter how she presented them, given her pedigree and financial advantage.  And when she called her book Case Closed, seemingly dismissing and denigrating the years of work the Ripperologists had put in, that was probably the end of it, in terms of winning over the geek Ripper crowd. More on that issue later.

Another thing she did very well was to discuss the police at the time.  Who they were, who was in charge, what their jobs were (basically walking around the dark blocks of the slum areas to keep some semblance of order; solving crimes was not exactly a top priority, even if they'd had any ability to do so in anything other than the most obvious of cases), what tools they had available, and so on.  Cornwall frequently lists the myriad of errors they made in their investigation (it's a good thing they didn't arrest anyone as the Ripper, since they'd certainly have gotten the wrong man) though she's not entirely unsympathetic.  As she says, the Ripper was a criminal a century before his time; killing quickly and anonymously, selecting strangers who had no ties to him, and leaving virtually no evidence behind. Today he'd be caught in a week, with the ability to take fingerprints off of dead bodies, gather DNA samples, fingerprint and analyze letters he mailed, and so on. But in the late 1800s, before such police procedures existed, he was untouchable.

Since the presentation is pretty sound, aside from some editing and presentation choices that clearly favored popular readership over scholarship, valid criticism of the book must them focus on Cornwall's methods and conclusions, rather than her presentation. And while I think a lot/most of the critics are fueled by jealousy and bitterness and indignation, that doesn't mean what they have to say is necessarily wrong.

Some good, if rather brief discussion of Cornwall's man, the famous painter Walter Sickert, and a good sampling of the general critical reaction to her book can be found in an updated chapter on the Crime Library discussion of Jack the Ripper. A quote:

Retired police officer Stewart Evans, now a crime historian and author of four Ripper books, dismissed Ms. Cornwell's theory as "nonsense, devoid of any evidence whatsoever." The British newspaper {The Guardian} reported on December 8, 2001 that:

“The American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell was accused of ‘monstrous stupidity’ for ripping up a canvas to prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Even in the context of the crackpot conspiracy theories, elaborate frauds and career-destroying obsessions that London's most grisly whodunnit has spawned, Cornwell's investigation is extreme. Not only did she have one canvas cut up in the vain hope of finding a clue to link Sickert to the murder and mutilation of five prostitutes, she spent £2m buying up 31 more of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing desk.

My impression, based on reactions like this one and those by some of the negative reviewers on Amazon.com, is that they're geeks who are pissed off at Miss America coming to ruin their party. They've been kicking around the same old tired evidence for decades, getting nowhere with it in their incestuous little circle jerks of self-appointed Ripper experts, everyone up on his own soap box, shouting out his pet theory to no avail. And here comes Mrs. Bestseller with her personal fortune and heavy emphasis on criminal profiling and psychology and deduction, and rather than finding nothing new and bowing to their superior experience, she dared to come up with numerous daring new analyses, found new evidence, and forcefully made a strong claim to have solved the mystery no one else could. Basically, she came into their comic book shop, bought all the best Magic cards, beat them, took their best cards, and laughed while she did it.

It's like Bill Gates storming into some local computer club and showing off his state of the art, prototype Pentium 11 housed in a tower of solid platinum, while all the other geeks are trying to wring an extra 2 FPS from their lovingly-detailed, bargain-purchased, home-assembled computers.  The geeks are either going to line up in worship, or withdraw with much muttering and resentment.  And resentment seems to be the prime reaction, judging by quotes like the one above.  Look at the guy quoted above; he's written not one, not two, but four books on the Ripper. He's probably spent 15 years on the subject. And here comes Cornwall, does work he could never even imagine doing, and she writes a huge bestseller afterwards, spreading her opinion more widely with one book than every other Ripperologist put together, and making her entire investment stake back in royalties.  If I were him, I'd be pissed too.

Stewart Evans does have one Ripper book that's still in print and available from Amazon.com, and I'm sure it's sold a ton of copies, given that there is one whole reader review. Of course just because they're all clearly jealous of Cornwall's resources, fame, and reading audience doesn't mean they're wrong and she's right. But it doesn't mean they're right and she's wrong either.

Curious about the general reader response, I checked Portrait out on Amazon.com, for the reader reviews.  Did anyone comment on it? Oh yes. There are currently 459 Amazon reader reviews yielding a 2.5/5 star rating, and most of the critiques are negative, and quite nit picky. Since the vast majority of books on Amazon have at least 3.5 or 4 stars, a 2.5 is very low, and when you consider that her book is entertaining and a good read on the Ripper subject, you know there's a lot of bitterness and strong disagreement going into those 0 and 1 star reviews.

As for Cornwall's conclusions, her evidence is largely psychological in nature.  According to her, and she's got endless quotes and letter/painting analyses to back it up, Sickert was quite a sick puppy. Apparently mutilated as a child by several traumatic operations to correct a fistula on his penis, he grew up with very fucked up parents, had suspicious episodes of violence in his youth, and just basically fits into the modern "how to raise a serial killer" profile almost perfectly. Since that's the sort of thing Cornwall writes, I think she saw this info, started to fixate on Sickert, and then convinced herself that he was the guy, based on the profile she'd constructed.  And she might be right, though there's no concrete proof, despite her extensive and expensive efforts to finding some of his DNA to test.

Sickert was in the area at the time, frequently wandered the streets late at night, hung out in very unsavory places and with nasty people, and painted dozens of very creepy paintings showing scenes quite similar to the Ripper killing scenes and victims.  He also seems very likely to be the author of numerous of the letters the Ripper (or hoaxers) sent to various London newspapers at the time, based on various signature quirks, secret initials, letter watermarks, and other such things Cornwall analyzes in great detail.

The best evidence against Sickert being the Ripper is that he was supposedly in France when several of the Ripper murders occurred, and therefore couldn't have possibly committed them. This is pointed out by numerous critics, and not addressed by Cornwall in the book at all, to my memory. I can't believe she didn't hear of this issue while doing her research, so the fact that she doesn't mention it at all troubles me.  She did point out that Sickert was in the habit of popping off to France quite often, and that one could make the trip by train and then steam across the English Channel in just a half a day or so, which might undermine the "He was in France." arguments.  How exact are the dates and times when he was known to be in France? Can anyone prove conclusively that he was in France too soon before or after one of the five credited Ripper murders to make the trip back to Whitechapel to commit it?  If so I've not seen that evidence, so I can't comment on how well it proves or disproves Cornwall's hypothesis.

Perhaps the most interesting detail of the book, something that I'd not heard much about before, is that there were dozens of other murders, similar in nature to the Ripper's, committed in London around that time. For some rather apparently arbitrary reasons, they aren't counted among the official tally. Can anyone prove Sickert's location for those?  Especially since the later ones seem to be frequently announced in advance in those supposedly-hoaxed Ripper letters that Sickert seems such a good suspect for writing.  I've not seen any of Cornwall's critics address those other crimes. She lists numerous mutilations and other blood-thirsty murders, perpetrated upon women and children, and quotes Ripper letters to the newspapers that talk about them, often before they occurred or before they were reported.  She sees this as strong evidence that far more of the Ripper letters are legitimate than the Ripperologists agree upon.

The "experts" agree say that none, or perhaps one, of the hundreds of Ripper letters are legitimately from the killer.  Cornwall says that most of them are legit, and that Sickert wrote almost all of them, continuing long after the first famous dead whores.  She's got lots of evidence that Sickert was amazingly prolific as a writer, and that he sent out dozens a week to numerous publications and newspapers. So he certainly could have written that many letters, taunting the police and the public about his past and future crimes.  But there's no proof that he did, since most of the letters are long gone. Cornwall does show that one of them uses a rather expensive paper with a watermark that matches some Sickert was known to have, but so did many other people.  And in any event, even if she could prove that Sickert wrote that Ripper letter, or even a bunch of them, wouldn't prove that he was the actual killer himself.  He was clearly a weirdo who was fascinated by the crimes, but hell, that describes me as well. He clearly got a joy out of fucking with other people, since he hated the world and considered everyone else inferior to himself. *cough* He could easily have gotten a lot of fun out of fucking with the papers with his letters, while never actually killing anyone himself.

One thing she doesn't discuss much of is why the police at the time and the public and the newspapers didn't associate more of the other murders with the Ripper.  Especially since he was clearly talking about them in his newspaper letters.  I mean the hoax Ripper letters to the papers that (according to Cornwall) told about crimes that he hadn't committed yet.

There's also a very interesting chapter near the end of the book about an inn registry that Cornwall found in some old bed and breakfast in France, one just across the Channel from England.  It's got tons of notes and cruel comments and dirty drawings in the margins, all apparently done by the same person, and there are numerous similarities between those drawings, and the words in the comments, to many of the Ripper letters.  Impersonation? Chance? Or more?  Sickert was known to spend much time at that inn, but there's no way to know if he was the author of the drawings, if he wrote the Ripper letters or just copied their style, if they were true letters, or him just sending off hoaxes to get a thrill.

In any event, I'm not enough of a Ripper expert to draw any conclusions, and I'm certainly not going to trot off and study the letters and figure out the whole chronology and investigate the other crimes to see if they really were foretold in Ripper letters, nor am I interested enough to do a whole lot more reading on the subject. But I found Cornwall's book pretty interesting, if far from completely convincing.  It's certainly good enough for me to recommend it to you guys; if only to give you some perspective on all of the carping and sniping and griping her critics are doing about it.  I love controversy and controversial material.

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