Murder in Santa Barbara

This week's SB Independent has nice short accounts of historical murders in alleged paradise.  Minor compensation for the murder of I.V. Halloween.  "The Armenian Assassin" is particularly good.

Paper 1 General Topics and Procedure

Here's the first slide on that from yesterday's lecture

and here's the procedure that we discussed

For example, five minutes ago, Keely in Colton's section mentioned that she's going to do number 2, "ripped from the headlines."  So what are you interested in, I asked?  The school shootings in Marysville, WA, she said, for example. One way to proceed, we said, is for Keely to figure out what aspect of the shooting is most interesting or compelling to her.  Maybe it's the idea that the shooter was a "very loved child" and really cared about his friends, as the linked article notes.  So is it the idea that he killed people--his friends--but didn't seem like a killer? And that even after he killed at least two of his friends he still doesn't seem like a killer?

That's one piece of the two-piece topic.  Now, what course material would help explain this interesting specific part of the "headline" piece? (Remember that specific is important.)   Are there characters that seem nice but kill anyway?  Mr. Cubitt tried to kill Abe Slaney, and he's almost a saint.  Eileen Wade? She kills, but is originally quite a nice idealistic person.  There may be clues to the Marysville situation in Chandler's analysis of Eileen Wade.  or some other character . . .

A similar process would work for 1 and 3 as well--starting with a passage (1) or issue (3) you really like, and thinking of the topic that emerges (1) or a course analogy (3).

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War Comes Home

One of our course themes--and Cause 1 of the Noir crime genre and accompanying social changes--appears literally in the title of this article, "When War Comes Home."  In it, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tells the story of a horrific random murder committed by a returned vet.  Here an apparent case of PTSD may have been caused by a physical brain injury suffered by Staff Sgt Dwight L. Smith, pictured here, and that went untreated.  It's a story worth reading in part for confirmation of some of our discussions and also for a sense of the ongoing currency of the problem.