Thursday Murder Club Book Two

 

The Man Who Died Twice: Thursday Murder Club Mystery Book Two (2021)

By Richard Osman.

Viking, 351 pages.

★★★ ½

 

 

 

The old gang–in both senses of the word–is back: Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim, Bogdan…. So too are their law enforcement allies, PC Donna DeFrietas and DCI Chris Hudson. Book Two of the Thursday Murder Club series is not as much fun as the first book, in part because learning more about the characters removes some of the intrigue that made the first book so special. In particular, we find out a lot more about Elizabeth Best and why she is often able to gain favors and access to things we would not imagine a person residing in a retirement home to acquire. We also meet her first husband Douglas Middlemas, an exasperating rogue who has also been in the spy business.

The new caper involves stolen diamonds from the home of Martin Lomax, a middleman in organized crime dirty dealings. About £20 million worth of jewels have been removed when Martin’s home is burgled, and Douglas is probably the one who stole them. In a parallel story, gentle Ibrahim is badly beaten by a group of muggers on BMX bicycles. The assault has all the earmarks of local punk Ryan Baird. The Thursday Murder Club first mobilizes to find out who put poor Ibrahim in the hospital. Elizabeth, though, can't help but think that somehow the hot diamonds and the attack on Ibrahim are linked.

Maybe, maybe not; Elizabeth is not infallible. This time around our elderly sleuths are engaged in some seriously dangerous business. Martin has Mafia connections and it’s their diamonds that are missing. If they don't show up Martin will end up a corpse, as will anyone else who gets in the way. Quite a few bodies appear in this book, but will all of them stay dead? Elizabeth and Douglas recall a past case about the man who died twice, hence the novel’s title.

There are new subplots, including the fact that Chris is having a hot affair with Donna's mother, Patrice. This is rather refreshing because Donna and Patrice are Afro-British, and Chris is White. We also meet a clueless MI5 agent named Poppy who’d rather be a poet.  But rest assured, Joyce is still keeping a quirky diary that’s a mix of British deadpan and cavalier commentary on violence. When one murder victim is shot in the noggin at close range, Joyce muses upon the experience of blowing someone’s head off: “It probably doesn't suit everyone. It wouldn't suit me... Perhaps it would suit me? You don’t know until you try, do you? I never thought I would like dark chocolate, for example.”

Book Two is darker than the first novel. A lot of things come into play, including knitted friendship bracelets, delicious revenge against Ibrahim’s attacker, Elizabeth’s inquiries into obtaining £10,000 worth of cocaine, a woman named Connie Johnson who makes Martin seem like a pussycat, a bus station locker, a suspicious parent, and a deadly game that sends Elizabeth seeking answers to cryptic clues left by Douglas. Bogdan has more to do in this novel and Ron's character is softened. Who would expect gruff old Ron to be a doting grandfather? His grandson Kendrick even manages to get in on the act.

Many readers may find that the mystery in The Man Who Died Twice is more sophisticated, others that the book is too sanguinary and not as much fun. In my estimation, Osman interjects enough humanity to temper matters. There is, for instance, an interesting take on Elizabeth's husband Stephen, who is in the grasp of dementia. Yet there are times in which he is lucid, plays chess, and helps the Thursday Murder Club make sense of the rising body count. Osman also knows when to press the comic relief button, like jokes about the receding hairline of an MI5 agent and Donna’s unsuccessful efforts to ignore the details of her mother's relationship with Chris.

Given that Book Three is due out this fall, you may rest assured that the Murder Club will remain intact. Speaking for myself, I hope that the new book will return to the good-natured tone of Book One and save the swashbuckling for James Bond.

 

Rob Weir

Rockwell Museum Exhibit on Race Powerful but Overwhelming

 

 

IMPRINTED: ILLUSTRATING RACE

Norman Rockwell Museum

Stockbridge, MA

Through October 30, 2022

 

 

 

Is it possible to make a point too well? The Norman Rockwell Museum is currently displaying a powerful exhibit titled Imprinted: Illustrating Race.  Early on we see a 2018 work from Thomas Richman Blackshear II titled A Common Thread. We see individuals of African American, Asian, and Native American heritage fronted by an exotic female figure who looks as if she might have escaped a Gustav Klimt painting. Each holds a candle, which suggests the exhibit will shed light on how race is depicted.

 

In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. More’s the pity that the issue he highlighted 78 years ago–white oppression of peoples of color–persists. Systematic racism is a major reason for this, a term that alerts that racism is so tightly woven in the fabric of American society that many people no longer “see” it, and those who do find it hard to disentangle enough threads to make it unravel.

 

 

 

Imprinted reminded me of the unexamined systematic racism of my elementary school years–like illustrations for Little Black Sambo storybooks. These were in wide circulation and were even read aloud in school. They were first written by a Scottish woman and Sambo was supposed to be South Asian, shades of British imperialism. Sambo, though, resembled a golliwog, a black rag doll that caricatured black features. Golliwog dolls and books in turn took were inspired by minstrel shows in which (mostly) white entertainers donned blackface to lampoon African Americans. Thus, white American saw Sambo as African American, as he resembled golliwogs and all-too-present blackface acts.

 

 

 

 

 

This set the tone for numerous other disrespectful ways people of color were depicted. Consider the above ad for Cream of Wheat in which a smiling black man is infantilized to the level of the white blunderbuss-toting toddler at his side. Norman Rockwell’s 1946 Dining Car captured the same man-to-child implications.

 

 

 

 

 

Smiling subservient black folks were once trademarks for products such as Uncle Ben’s rice and Aunt Jemima Pancake mix.  If you can believe it, when I was in second grade a black woman wearing a kerchief visited our school as the “real” Aunt Jemima. The entire school was ushered into a room to gawk at her. (She was most assuredly an actress handed a very bad gig!) For sheer offensiveness, though, it's hard to top British soap maker Pears. The image speaks for itself. 

 

 

 

Here's where things get complicated. The Rockwell show has over 300 images from the 19^th century to the present. To return to the Blackshears work, by trying hard to be inclusive several problems arise. The first is a drive-by issue. Themes of Orientalism, negative views of immigrants, and discrimination against other non-white peoples are given short shrift. The images educate–one including an Irishman serves notice that “whiteness” isn’t a given–but the unintentional suggestion is that discrimination against African Americans holds primacy. It is indeed an American dilemma, but it is slippery turf to imply rankings of oppression. (The Chinese, for instance, were even more reviled during the late 19^th century.)  The show would have been stronger had it not strayed upon turf it could not cover thoroughly.

 

Gary Kelley "Nina Simone"

Gregory Chrsitie "Coltrane"

Blitt's controversial "Fistbump"

 

A larger problem is that Imprinted is overwhelming. A Swiss friend with less grounding in American history expressed feeling bludgeoned before she entered the second gallery. The images are powerful, but I think less would have been more. By the time one gets to positive images of black life in gallery three, the viewer is emotionally spent. Thus, we recoil in horror before Barry Blitt’s Fistbump (2008), which shows Barack and Michelle Obama as terrorists burning an American flag in a fireplace with Osama bin Laden’s portrait hanging above the mantle. The irony is that this is a New Yorker illustration in which Blitt sought to lampoon Obama alarmists. Yet it’s understandable viewers might misunderstand after being saturated with negative depictions. Many, I’m sure, were so exhausted that they long stopped reading accompanying wall placards. (For the record, I echo those who find Blitt’s illustration problematic.)

 

Kadir Nelson

 

I also observed people rushing through the exhibit In Our Lifetime: Paintings from the Pandemic, which spotlights the heralded Kadir Nelson. Maybe this should have been the first gallery. Nelson is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work has graced postage stamps, New Yorker covers, Dreamworks projects, galleries, and museums. He offers an America that could/should be, one that includes confronting its past, but finds room for people as people. Two paintings of kids drive home the point in Rockwellian fashion. Stickball shows a determined boy who just happens to be black ready to take his best cut. If the little girl in Sweet Liberty had been white, one might call the painting mawkish. Because she is black, though, we see it for what it is: a call for America to follow its better angels.

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

The Sentence an Astonishing Novel

 

The Sentence (2022)

By Louise Erdrich

Harper, 387 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

 

Forgive repetitive use of the words haunt, ghost, and sentence in this review; they are necessary. The Sentence, a new book by Louise Erdrich, is haunting and brilliant. There are some actual ghosts in the book, or at least we think so. There are many ways to be haunted in both the normal and paranormal. Can the past be a ghost? Our imaginations? Trauma? Madness? Guilt? What about present-day upheaval and social harm?

 

The book is also about sentences. That word also has multiple meanings and implications. One can be sentenced to jail, to carry a burden, to perform unwanted roles, to atone for past sins, to bear the brunt of anger, or even endure Covid, the latter also an omnipresent haunting.

 

The protagonist of The Sentence is an Ojibwe woman named Tookie. She is what Native American call a “City Indian” who dwells in Minneapolis, a place haunted by the police murder of George Floyd. Before that happens, Tookie is involved in a harebrained scheme while thinking she was doing a solid for friends. She is talked into bringing them a body from the morgue under false pretenses. Unknown to Tookie, the corpse had drugs taped to his body. Because Tookie had been in trouble earlier in her life, a White judge sentences her to 60 years of incarceration. Luckily, the lawyer she thought was the inept successfully appeals her case and secures her release from prison. The bad news is that she’s haunted by the time she spent in solitary confinement. Tookie maintained her sanity in prison by reading. This, of course, involves different kinds of sentences: printed words upon the pages of books.

 

When we next meet Tookie, she is married to her soulmate Pollux, the tribal cop who arrested her. He is no longer a cop, rather a gentle man who helps Tookie endure her nightmares and memories. (More hauntings.) Pollux and Tookie are also the de facto parents of the orphaned Hetta. Tookie works in a bookstore that carries mass market titles, classics, and Native-American literature. Jackie, Asema, and Penstemon are supportive colleagues, but Tookie prides herself on choosing the right books for customers, even the cranky ones. She dubs one particularly demanding customer Dissatisfaction, though actually he's an attorney whom she later befriends. The real problem customer is Flora, who dies while reading a sentence in a book and haunts the bookstore. What did she read? What does she want? Her behavior is reminiscent of pixies, naughty but not openly dangerous – until she is.

 

The Sentence is a complex book that takes us many places, not all of them pleasant. Hetta gets herself in dire straits on several levels and believes that the father of child she’s carrying has ghosted her. Ahh! Another type of haunting and this one for a reason we discover. Flora carries preexisting ghosts that prevent her from moving on. Erdrich guides us through tragic dealings between Native peoples, enslavers, and the governments of both United States and Canada. The infamous Riel rebellions of the Métis peoples and the 19^th century come into play. Before Erdrich concludes–and she cameos in her own book–she immerses us in Venn diagram overlaps where legend, life, and the afterlife collide. Have you ever heard of werewolves or rugaboos? Want more? How about Marcel Proust references? Do you know the difference between a quarter and a quatrefoil, let alone the significance of the latter?

 

You don't have to dig into myth or the 19^th century to find points of contact. As I noted earlier, Covid is an ever-present ghost. So too are the riots and protests linked to violence against non-White peoples. When Erdrich details police violence and mob chaos in Minneapolis, the craziness is reminiscent of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Erdrich writes, "The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world." Yet somehow, she makes sense of this sentence:  "Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders." Can a name haunt us? Read this astonishing book and maybe you will know. I can assure you that her sentences will haunt you.

 

Rob Weir

On the Road a So-So Version of Kerouac's Novel

 

ON THE ROAD (2012)

Directed by Walter Salles

IFC Films. 124 minutes, R (sex/nudity, language, violence, substance abuse)

★★★

 

 

 

In Friday’s blog about a museum in Lowell I mentioned Jack Kerouac, a native son. Today I look at the film adaptation of his most famous novel, the semi-autobiographical On the Road.

 

The movie certainly had an all-star cast: Amy Adams, Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Garrett Hedlund, Elisabeth Moss, Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Stewart, Tom Sturridge.... Yet it also had a troubled path to the screen and went through numerous scripts and endured directors who dropped out of the running and multiple cast changes before executive producer Francis Ford Coppola coaxed it into existence with Brazil’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) at the helm. It got mixed reviews and that’s about right. It might have fared better had Kerouac never written his thinly disguised travel novel. If you’d read it, you can’t help but see the film as a streaky copy of the formative years of the Beat movement.  

 

Kerouac wrote about how he, under the pseudonym Sal Paradise, fell under the Svengali-like spell of Dean Moriarty, a Neal Cassady avatar. They split from New York City on a drug, booze, stolen car, and sexually-charged cross-country jaunt. On the Road (the novel) came out in 1957 and is a roman à clef that chronicles the spirit of their post-World War II adventures. Kerouac used aliases in most of his novels, but most were only lightly fictionalized and are easily unmasked. In the movie, Sal is played by Sam Riley, and Hedlund is Dean. Marylou (Stewart) and Camille (Dunst) are stand-in for Moriarty’s wives LuAnn and Carolyn. Carlo Marx (Sturridge) is an Allen Ginsberg surrogate and Old Bull Lee (Mortensen) a William Burroughs incarnation. Jane (Adams) parallels Joan Vollmer Burroughs and the Dunkels (Danny Morgan and Moss) portray Al and Helen Hinkle, friends of Cassady’s.

 

On the Road is, in many ways, the tale of young people (Sal, Carlo, Marylou, Camille) coming of age after falling under the spell of powerful men and mentors of the twisted variety such as Bull Lee and Dean. Marylou/LuAnn, for instance, was just 15 when she married Moriarty/Cassady and Sal/Jack followed Dean like a starry-eyed teen, though he was actually four years older. Subplots such as Sal finding his voice as a writer and Carlo coming to grips with his sexuality are shoe-horned into the film but are not particularly well integrated. Sex, though, is depicted. It fueled the Beats, along with jazz, poetry, debates in smoke-filled cafés, and devil-take-care lifestyles. Sal was particularly shy when he met Dean and turned down offers to sleep with Marylou. Dean/Neal had no inhibitions; he was bisexual and didn’t allow anything as “square” as a wedding ring to get in the way of trysts with available women and men.

 

On the Road takes us from New York to New York via Denver, Louisiana, North Carolina, California, Mexico, and points in between. In the film, Sal becomes his own person as a field worker and in Mexico, where he breaks Dean’s hold over him. The sprawling cast of characters has time to develop on the page, but is hard to condense in a movie, a partial reason why the first version ran 137 minutes before losing 13 minutes when it went into wider distribution. Neither version can really do full justice to the tone of Kerouac’s writing, which appears only as brief voice-overs in the movie. One does wonder, though, if a stronger film would have resulted had two drop-outs stayed aboard: Russell Banks as scriptwriter and Gus Van Sant as director.

 

It does have a great soundtrack. How can you go wrong with tracks from Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Son House, Charlie Parker, and Dinah Washington? Éric Gautier’s cinematography also stands out. Nor is there anything wrong with the acting. Overall, though, the film feels like a jazz ensemble on an off night– the notes are there but not the passion.

If you’ve never read On the Road, the movie might entice you to read Kerouac. If you have done so, take a look at the film and we can compare notes.

 

Rob Weir

 

New England Quilt Museum: Fabric to Magic

 

 

THE NEW ENGLAND QUILT MUSEUM

18 Shattuck Street

Lowell, Massachusetts

(Closed Monday, Tuesday)

 

Poor Lowell. It tries hard, but fate has a habit of throwing it curves. It was Jack Kerouac’s stomping grounds, but his Lowell home is a down-on-its-heels double decker that’s still occupied. If you want to see a Kerouac “home” you have to go to Florida; Lowell got only his gravesite and a namesake canal-side park. Wang Computers brought good jobs to the city, but it folded in 1992. Next, Lowell spent a good chunk of money rehabbing LaLacheur Park for the New York-Penn Lowell Spinners franchise and drew well. Then Major League Baseball eliminated its short season affiliates.

 

Lowell still has its National Historical Park–the nation’s first urban national park–but money has been tight and Congress has been loath to honor the humble New England textile workers whose story it tells. When I visited in June, most of the NPS parking had been eliminated and the lots sold to developers. It’s now a challenge finding on-street parking, not to mention the need to pump coins into meters.

 

The Lowell National Historical Park is still very much worth visiting, but a different objective brought us the Spindle City: The New England Quilt Museum (NEQM). It’s located within the National Park Visitors Center complex and is the only museum in the Northeast devoted to quiltmakers. My wife Emily is a fine quilter in her own right and has educated me on some of the fine points of producing patchwork blankets, hangings, and coverlets. In her estimation, the NEQM takes things to a different level.

 

The NEQM is a small facility whose ground floor is largely given over to shop space. Exhibits are upstairs and confined to just a handful of galleries. The works within them change frequently, but if what we saw is any indication the NEQM is worth repeated visits.

 

 

 

The featured needlecrafter on display was Dominique Ehrmann, a French woman who certainly challenges traditional notions of quilting. Much of her work goes from 2-D to 3-D. She is at once a fabric wizard, a storyteller, and a spinner of fantasies. One piece is where quilting meets steampunk, a gigantic work that one shudders to imagine the amount of time it took to assemble. Others begin with flat surfaces but break the plane by spilling over the edges and into what we’d normally see as negative space. Cool stuff.

 

  

A few other things caught my eye. I love animals and always like to see how quilters who don’t sculpt like Erdmann does represents them on flat surfaces. Here’s a small sampling: a deer, a fox, and a wolf, the latter of which is stitched onto a Japanese-style jacket. 

 

 

  

I also quite enjoyed the textured surfaces of Marge Tucker and a shimmery strip pattern from Teresa Duryea Wong that put me in mind of what heralded Ghanaian artist El Anatsui does with gold foil he salvages from discarded liquor bottles. Wong uses material, but it creates a similar effect.

 

Marge Tucker

 

Teresa Wong

 

 

Whenever I can, I like to give a Western Mass plug. Ann Brauer of Shelburne Falls caught my eye with her vibrant reds and oranges slashed with blue, yellows, greens, and a tiny bit of white. The combo really makes the printed material stick out.

 

Ann Brauer

 

When you visit, these pieces will probably have been replaced with others, but I’m sure there will other things that captivate. Get up close to observe the stitching, the precision, and the passion that goes into each work. You simply cannot walk away and think of it as anything less than art.

 

Rob Weir

Micahel Kiel Cash: August 2022 Artist of the Month

 

 

Michael Kiel Cash

Shores of Mercy 

 

 

 

Not many singers list their inspirations as Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Rumi, Townes Van Zandt, and Walt Whitman. Michael Kiel Cash is an eclectic musician whose style is a mix of poetic imagery, original songs, and tradition. He is mainly a guitar player, but he also dabbles on a Hammond B3 organ, the lute-like Mesopotamian tanbur, and an Armenian bowed instrument called a kemenche. If all of that isn't enough, he also brings to the table a variety of musical styles ranging from country blues, soul, folk balladry, and even a choral piece: “Hymn of theHarvest” That one comes out of nowhere, but what a glorious surprise.

 

On Shores of Mercy, Cash also fronts a very fine studio band that adorns his songs with fiddle, penny whistles, bouzouki, mandolin, and numerous other instruments. You can hear a homemade live solo rendition of the title track that features a sweet little picking pattern to go with a love song, but Cash shows even more range when he slips into band mode. There is the twangy “Flood of Springtime Dreams,” a song about all the things he thinks of that drift away in the vernal wash that comes after a long winter, but check out the Cajun-meets-gravely-Jimmy Buffett vibe to the upbeat “Lyin’ with My Baby.” He is equally adroit with several acoustic blues selections. Try “Hoophead’s Country Blues” to get a sense of that persona; it’s complete with some mouth harp, of course.

 

There’s also the infectious “Muscadine Wine,” that’s infused with splashes of country, folk, gospel, and old-time music punctuated by some heavy acoustic guitar bass lines. He even gets soulful on “Heart of the Mountain” and is backed by some Motown-like singers. It’s an unusual choice for a song set far from urban streets and whose thesis is that city love will rub you raw, which is why he’s sticking to a mountain girl. Yet, somehow it works.

 

Shores of Mercy nailed me as I was listening to music on a five-mile walk and was just about to skip August for an artist/album of the month selection. There wasn’t anything wrong with other things I had queued on my device, but Cash grabbed my attention because he took chances instead of worrying about how anyone would pigeonhole him. My advice is don’t even try. Just enjoy.

 

In case you’re wondering, no, Michael Kiel Cash is not a member of the famed Carter-Cash extended clan. He was raised in New England, lives in New York City, and his parents hail from Texas and Louisiana.

 

Rob Weir

Carrie Soto is Back: In Time for the US Open

 

CARRIE SOTO IS BACK (2022)

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Ballantine Books/Random House, 384 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

1994: Thirty-six-year-old Carolina “Carrie” Soto and her father Javier are in the stands of the U.S. Open and Nicki Chan is about to tie Carrie’s lifetime record of 20 Grand Slam titles. (That’s the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open for non-tennis fans.)  Carrie is not happy.  

 

Taylor Jenkins Reid then rewinds the clock in Carrie Soto is Back. Javier, nicknamed el Jaguar, was a tennis hero in his native Argentina but a bad knee forced him to retire in 1953. He soon immigrated to Miami, where he was a hitter—a training partner akin to a boxer’s sparring opponent­—before moving to Los Angeles to become a club pro and coach. He met Alicia, a dancer, and Carrie came along a few years later. Carrie was a toddler when a car struck and killed her mother. Carrie and Javier developed such a close bond that they finish each other’s thoughts– in Spanish and in English. That’s easier when all either thinks about is tennis.

 

Reid’s 1955-65 part of the book is its weakest. If you’ve seen King Richard and change a few details—no mother, no siblings, and coffee-skinned Argentines instead of African Americans—it’s similar enough to be called derivative: a child star by age 9, a father promising his daughter she’ll be the greatest ever, jealousy from older players she defeats, and so on. By the time Carrie turns pro at 16, everyone knows not to underestimate the short, dark, stocky girl. All she needs is refinement, which comes when another temporarily supplants Javier as her coach. Soon Carrie is collecting Grand Slams as if they are playground matches against beginners.

 

Reid’s latest novel probes what it takes to become a champion and it’s more than just hitting a lot—and I mean a lot –of tennis balls. There is diet, running ten miles on sand, drills, quitting school and working with a tutor, and mental preparation. Carrie excels at all of it, but especially the latter. The press dubs Carrie “Battle Axe” and few would disagree. Carrie would rather rip the heart out of an opponent than befriend her or agree to an injury timeout. She’s # 1 and intends to stay there.

 

It doesn’t work that way. As anyone who watches sports knows, the pros are a young person’s game. Knee surgery forces Carrie to put down her racket at the wizened age of 31. Her African-American agent Gwen worked angles that left Carrie set financially for life, but “Achilles”—Javy’s nickname for his daughter—finds it impossible to sit on the sidelines and cheer for others.

 

The heart of the book is Carrie’s comeback in 1995. Her only nod to age is that she’s only interested in Grand Slam events and automatically qualifies for them. Few commentators believe she’s a threat at age 37. Consider that as great as Serena Williams is, she won her last Grand Slam at age 36.

 

Carrie’s training requires a hitter and she’s flabbergasted when her father suggests tennis vet Bowe(n) Huntley, a brief fling from her past with a reputation for a John McEnroe-like temper. If that name sounds familiar, in Reid’s Malibu Rising he was married to Nina Rivera; sleeping with Carrie led Nina to divorce Bowe. Carrie doesn’t want any part of him now, but what papa thinks is what happens.

 

Carrie’s obsession with clawing her way back is so relentless that one male broadcaster is caught calling her a “bitch” on a hot mic, an offense that would today get him canned. Nothing is as easy at 37 as it was at 27. Carrie must compete against players stronger, faster, and with different skills than she. Nicki really annoys her because she’s so bloody nice, even when telling Carrie she intends to destroy her. Each Grand Slam match is like a Hoosiers playlet. Will Carrie win? Learn anything about herself? Discover things she’s missed? Lose things she takes for granted? Take a seat at center court and find out.

 

Carrie Soto is Back is thrilling despite being predictable and self-reverential. (At another juncture a character is reading Reid’s Daisy and the Six.) This book will be on the shelves in time for the 2022 U.S. Open. It’s a perfect choice to read in between matches. My head tells me not to bet on 40-year-old Serena Williams.

 

Rob Weir