Reports of Heavy Metals in Protein Powders: What You Need to Know

  (crossposted on Facebook)

A recent Consumer Reports article raised concerns about heavy metal contamination in protein supplements. It got picked up by the New York Times, and now I’m seeing it all over the internet — a few people have even sent it to me directly.

I read the original report and wanted to share a little context that I think was missing.

1. Yes, heavy metals are in protein powders — especially plant-based ones.

Plants naturally absorb minerals from the soil — the good (like calcium), and the not-so-good (like lead or cadmium). So when you extract and concentrate protein from peas, rice, or hemp, you also concentrate those minerals.

A serving of plant-based protean powder can have up to 10x the metal concentration of the whole plant it came from. That doesn’t mean it’s unsafe, but it’s something to be aware of — especially since many people use these powders daily.

And serving size matters. The worst offenders in the report were high-calorie mass gainers — products meant for elite bodybuilders during bulking phases. One serving can pack 1,500+ calories, which means more of everything — including metals.

2. “No safe level of lead” — technically true, but not the whole story.

There’s no nutritional requirement for lead, so regulators don’t set a “safe” intake level. But that doesn’t mean any trace = dangerous. Tiny amounts are found in many healthy plant foods — even leafy greens and grains.

No one credible is saying “stop eating plants.”

That said, we should be stricter about where plants used for protein powders are grown. If you're going to concentrate a plant’s protein, you’re also concentrating its heavy metals. Standards for plant protein products should reflect that — and until they do, it might be smart to avoid them.

3. So… should you ditch protein powders?

If you can meet your protein needs through whole foods — which most people can — then yes. That’s ideal.

But there are situations where supplements can help:

• People on long-term calorie-restricted diets

• Athletes trying to cut fat without losing muscle

• Older adults who need more protein but eat less overall

In these cases, a protein supplement can be useful — if chosen carefully and used in moderation.

4. Choosing proteins to add to your diet:

High-protein, low-calorie whole foods — like non-fat cottage cheese, plain Greek yogurt, egg whites, or lean meats
Whey or casein protein powder from a reputable brand (if food alone isn’t enough)

Simple products with few additives — unflavored is ideal, but chocolate is a common compromise
Avoid mass gainers — they're extremely high in calories (often 1,000–1,500 per serving) and typically rank highest in contaminants
Avoid protein bars and fortified snacks — these are often junk food with protein powder added, and on calorie-restricted diets the last thing you need is junk food

5. Special case: dieting & older adults

If you’re losing weight, protein is even more important. Without enough, you could lose up to 30% of your weight loss as muscle — which isn’t good for strength, metabolism, or long-term health.

But with enough protein and resistance training, you can keep that number closer to 5–10%.

The problem? You’re eating fewer calories… but need more protein. That’s where a supplement — just one or two servings a day — might really help.

6. What about vegans?

Most vegans can meet their protein needs through whole foods, just like omnivores. But if you're in one of the higher-need groups above, and you're falling short, it gets trickier.

If you need a vegan protein powder, look for one with third-party testing — like NSF Certified for Sport, which screens for contaminants and banned substances.

If you can’t find one you trust, you might want to adjust your training goals or consider slowing your weight loss. A registered dietitian can help you sort that out.

7. Final Takeaways

• Most people don’t need protein supplements. Don’t take protein supplements unless you have specific reason to do so, like weight loss.

• Most people overestimate their protein needs — and underestimate their fiber needs

• If you do supplement, keep to simple non-proprietary supplements like plain whey or casein, limiting servings to 1-2/day. None of that proprietary pixie dust is proven to work anyway, and the more complicated a product is the more sources of risk.

• Avoid “mass gainers” unless you’re a competitive bodybuilder

• Be cautious with plant-based powders unless they’re well tested

• If you’re worried, contact the company and ask to see their testing data

• Inform your primary care physician of any supplements you are taking, including protein, because what is safe and effective for most people isn't necessarily right for you.

I’ve been following this story for some time now; metals in protein supplements are a real concern. But if you follow these guidelines, there is no need for alarm.

I've decided to try to lose weight -- a nearly impossible-to-lose amount of weight. And I've decided to be public and brutally honest about it.

Me at about 305 lb.

How I Got Here

I'm just a quarter inch under six feet tall, and when I reached my current height around age 20 I weighed 165 pounds, which is right smack in the middle of the mythical "ideal weight" charts.  If you were draw a line between that point and the 283 pounds I weighed on my last birthday, it would be equivalent of adding about the weight of a nickel (5 grams) every day.  If you've ever tried weighing yourself daily, you'll know that the readings often go up or down by hundred times that amount on successive days.

Of course the process wasn't quite as linear as that.  There were periods where I plateaued, others (usually after some kind of injury) where I suddenly put on five pounds or so that stayed on. But the point is that the underlying trend is tiny on day to day basis. So tiny as to be imperceptible. And it's very difficult to monitor a trend that that's too small to see, and if you can't monitor it it's nearly impossible to control it.

And in fact there wasn't much objective reason for me to try hard to control it. My blood pressure was generally OK to good.  My cholesterol was OK -- low LDL and sky high HDL.  The only red flag was the distribution of the fat I was putting on.  My limbs are quite lean; nearly all of the fat I put on is belly fat. That's important because the fat that accumulates around your organs, the so-called "visceral fat", has been implicated in a number of inflammation-related diseases including diabetes and dementia.  But aside from the location of the fat I was putting on I could have been the poster boy for "Health at Every Size."   Until December 27 of last year. 

Diabetes

I was driving home from Christmas dinner at my sister's house when suddenly my hands stopped working; it wasn't a cramp exactly but my fingers would not ungrasp the wheel.  The following day I went to the emergency room where I had a random blood glucose reading of 349 -- normal would be 100-120. They gave me a shot of insulin and immediately I felt better than I had in years.  Which is interesting because it shows how feeling "OK" isn't necessarily something you should put much stock in. "OK" can be what "lousy" feels like after you've got used to it.

Diabetes runs in my family so the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes was no surprise.  I went home with a prescription for metformin, a drug which prevents high blood sugar by inhibiting the body's conversion of stuff it has lying around (like lactic acid) into glucose.  Metformin is the mildest diabetic medication there is, and it's unique in that it cannot cause low blood sugar.  As long as you can manage your diabetes on metformin, you don't have to take onerous daily precautions to avoid dangerously low blood sugar.

This was an opportunity for me; despite my large size I've always been active.  Even being in my 50s and weighing nearly three hundred pounds I can get on a bike and ride thirty miles, or hike for four or five hours over rugged terrain.  My doctor says I'm "robust" for my age.  So I set out to manage my diabetes with an aggressive regime of exercise, and initially it paid off.   One of the most useful yardsticks for how well you're managing your diabetes is called "Hemoglobin A1C"; it's a measure of the cumulative effect of high blood sugar over the past several months.  When I visited the doctor in mid January I weighed 281 pounds (about 30 pounds under my maximum body weight ever) and had a super-high A1C of 10.5.  When I followed up three months later I still weighed 283 pounds, but my A1C at 5.8 was just a hair above normal.

I'd also joined the Y and found I could easily burn about a thousand calories an hour on an elliptical machine, but the real foundation of my diabetes control strategy was simply walking.  Whenever I walked for two hours or longer my blood sugar levels would drop back into the normal range -- low 100s or even under 100 -- and stay there for the rest of the day.  

Setback my Exercise Regime

Although it required a high level of commitment, it looked like I'd come up with an effective long-term strategy for managing my diabetes. Then I slipped on the ice crossing the street on one of my walks and injured my knee. 

That actually happened in February, a month and a half before my excellent April checkup. Despite hurting my knee I continued to burn 3000-4000 extra calories a week, but over the course of April my knee deteriorated fast. By the start of March walking more than a few steps had become painful and I could only walk with a cane. I had essentially become almost entirely sedentary.

This turned out to be almost like an experiment. I had super-high A1C (10.5) in January. In April after three months of intensive exercise my A1C was practically normal (5.8).  Then after three months mostly sedentary my A1C crept into the moderately high range (6.5). Surprisingly I'd also lost about seven pounds. Of course some of that could be muscle, but my experience in this period suggests what may be the problem with the idea of losing weight by exercising.  When I stopped exercising a lot of my appetite went away.  A big sandwich that a few months ago I'd have snarfed down without even tasting now looks like way too much for me to tackle now.

Why I've Decided to Lose Weight

Thanks to a combination of steroid injections and and physical therapy I can now walk for about 45 minutes before my knee starts sending warning signals.  And despite the inactivity imposed on me by my knee injury, my A1C remains well within the therapeutic target range for diabetic patients.  So being forced to be sedentary isn't exactly a health crisis.  The problem is that my knee limits many of the activities I enjoy.  I can't hike, or bike for very long and I can't kneel to paddle my canoe. Even if my knee get better, the writing is on the wall: my orthopedist tells me I have arthritis in both knees, and from the increased strain I'm feeling in my "good" knee I can tell I don't have a lot use left in either knee. At least not at the levels of stress they've been getting. And I've been having other inflammation-related health problems which are almost certainly related to central obesity (i.e., visceral fat).

I've decided that the only way I can continue to enjoy the things I used to enjoy is to lose weight.  A lot of weight.  Around least fifty pounds I'd say, although half-again that would be even better. The problem is that losing this much weight is statistically improbable, and keeping it off for more than a few months is nearly unheard of.  And, although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, there is no scientific evidence that diet and exercise can achieve sustainable weight loss. But I'm going to give it try anyway.

Right from the outset it's a virtual certainty that I'm going to fail.  I have certain advantages that most people attempting this don't have, but realistically my chances of success are something like 5-10%. But that's OK. One of the things I learned in my professional life is not to be afraid of failure. The real problems with failure are taking to long to acknowledge it, stubbornly refusing to learn from it, and being so afraid you get too timid to take risks.  And after all, what am I risking here? A couple of years of effort surely.  A chance that I might come out of this a little bit heavier.  

On the other hand even if I fail I may get a window of opportunity in which I can strengthen my knees and extend the time I can enjoy strenuous physical activity by several years.  One of the keys to being a "successful failure" is finding something useful you can take out of a project that doesn't meet its goals.

Why I'm Sharing This

I've also decided to be very public and open about this.  Normally I keep this sort of thing to myself because I'm an introvert. That doesn't mean I'm shy or socially awkward, it means I don't particularly enjoy being the center of attention.  But weight management is something a lot of people struggle with; it makes people feel like failures.  I, on the other hand, am not afraid of failure.  In this case not even a tiny bit. I don't think it'll mean I'm a bad or contemptible person.  

So although it's contrary to my usual inclination, I'm going to share my personal successes and failures. I intend to take one almighty hell of a whack at this thing, and if I fail I'll move on and take whatever useful I can from it.  I also intend to be brutally honest about what it's like to attempt this, in the hope that other people who are trying (and perhaps failing) can take some comfort in my experiences.

WBR: A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)

I thought I'd say a few things about David Linday's seminal 1920 sci fi/fantasy novel, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. This is a novel which immensely influential for many important 20th Century writers and critics. J.R.R. Tolkien was an admirer, and C.S. Lewis was clearly deeply influenced by it. Even literary critic Harold Bloom fell under its spell; his one attempt at writing his own novel was a sequel called A FLIGHT TO LUCIFER.

Here are the opening 13 lines (note -- A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is in the public domain):

On a March evening, at eight o'clock, Backhouse, the medium—a fast-rising star in the psychic world—was ushered into the study at Prolands, the Hampstead residence of Montague Faull. The room was illuminated only by the light of a blazing fire. The host, eying him with indolent curiosity, got up, and the usual conventional greetings were exchanged. Having indicated an easy chair before the fire to his guest, the South American merchant sank back again into his own. The electric light was switched on. Faull's prominent, clear-cut features, metallic-looking skin, and general air of bored impassiveness, did not seem greatly to impress the medium, who was accustomed to regard men from a special angle. Backhouse, on the contrary, was a novelty to the merchant. As he tranquilly studied him through half closed lids and the smoke of a cigar, he wondered how this little, thickset person with the pointed beard contrived to remain so fresh and sane in appearance, in view of the morbid nature of his occupation.

This opening gives an almost entirely misleading impression about what is to come. It sounds like the start of countless Victorian and Edwardian adventure stories, but this is nothing of the sort. Faull and Backhouse along with a number of other nicely-drawn characters from the first chapter simply disappear. The novel moves on to the enigmatic gentlemen Maskull and Nightspore, and then for the bulk of the novel just Maskull alone.

Looking at a manuscript opening like this I'd immediately pull out my red pen. It's inefficient to introduce the readers to characters in the opening when those characters are going to immediately disappear, especially "point of view" characters. And generally you want to let readers know the kind of story they're in for -- at least in genre fiction, where you generally take the reader by the hand and show him he's come to the right place. And there are other things you expect from a science fiction adventure too: a dramatic structure with a readily identifiable beginning middle and end; a protagonist with motivations and problems who deals with a series of rising complications and ultimately resolves them.

What you get in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is none of these things. It is not dramatic, it is epic, episodic and nightmarish. It's a long and difficult slog because so much of what carries you through a conventional, dramatically structured novel just isn't there. Chief among these are characterization and motivation. Maskull has no real reason to visit Arcturus other than a vague interest; once he gets there he goes from place to place, not because he has any reason to, but more in that he has no compelling reason NOT to. Maskull reminds me of Mersault in Albert Camus' THE STRANGER, who also does appalling things for no particular reason.

It's almost as if Lindsay sat down to write a commercial 19th C adventure yarn and ended up writing an avant garde novel. It's possible; first novels do have a way of getting away from their authors. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS anticipates much of later 20th Century literature. Practically the entire Existentialist lexicon could be indexed to this book; it's chock full of absurdity, despair and rudderless anxiety. Even Maskull's confusing inconsistency could be put down to lack of what Existentialists call "authenticity". 

Sound like fun? Well, at the time the word of mouth must have been disastrously bad: it sold fewer than 600 of its original print run, and I'd bet the very few of the original purchasers made it all the way through. But if you don't give up, the balance between frustration and fascination gradually tips toward fascination. A mere decade after it's publication it took C.S. Lewis three years to locate a copy; but even though in his correspondence he's clearly aware of ARCTURUS's limitations, its impact upon Lewis's own fiction is almost hard to overstate.

Now a lot of fans of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS have written various keys to its enigmatic meanings, but the point of these writer's book reports isn't to discuss meaning, or even literary value; it's to look at lessons we can draw about *method*. But I don't think there's a lot of lessons to draw about method from this particular book. Its language is competently composed, but frankly I think that this book's virtues as a work of imagination are somewhat exaggerated by its admirers. Take the following:

The floor itself was like a magician's garden. Densely interwoven trees, shrubs, and parasitical climbers fought everywhere for possession of it. The forms were strange and grotesque, and each one seemed different; the colours of leaf, flower, sexual organs, and stem were equally peculiar—all the different combinations of the five primary colours of Tormance seemed to be represented, and the result, for Maskull was a sort of eye chaos.

At first this passage seems impressive, but if you really examine it you find it's only just that -- seemingly impressive. The "densely interwoven trees" etc. are fine as far as they go, but then Lindsay punts on the description. In so many words he's essentially telling us that the what Maskull is seeing is indescribable. I suppose a little of this is inevitable when describing an alien landscape, but I find that when this kind of handwaving is incessant it quickly becomes annoying.

This is not to say that the work lacks imagnation -- far from it. Imagination runs riot on every page, but mainly in the realm of ideas rather than sensation. In the chapter quoted above Lindsay gives us a character of a third gender:

He found himself incapable of grasping at first why the bodily peculiarities of this being should strike him as springing from sex, and not from race, and yet there was no doubt about the fact itself. Body, face, and eyes were absolutely neither male nor female, but something quite different. Just as one can distinguish a man from a woman at the first glance by some indefinable difference of expression and atmospheres altogether apart from the contour of the figure, so the stranger was separated in appearance from both.

See? It's the old handwaving trick again. You can't call this "unimaginative", but it strikes me as undisciplined; not fleshed-out as it could be.

So how did this clumsy and difficult text become the most influential underground speculative fiction novel ever? Where does the fascination come from? I think it's the experience of being in the hands of a totally uncompromising author.

Some bad writers like to think of themselves as uncompromising; they hide the fact they don't know how to engage readers by pretending they're not interested in catering to the unwashed masses. That's just craven, self-righteous posturing. But Lindsay is a different animal. He is sincerely obsessed with debunking anything you might believe lends your existence meaning or significance. This pig-headed skepticism, chapter after chapter, begins to take on the color of integrity. 

Which brings me to what I think is the lesson of this novel: the difference between the things that produce accessibility and the things that produce power in writing. 

I think we can lump much of what makes a piece of writing widely accessible under the heading of "technique". Imagine a writer of crude fan-fiction. At first what he writes is only interesting to fans of the franchise. As he gets better at prose style, plotting , structure and characterization, more people who can read his fan-fic without scorn. Eventually many can read his work with actual enjoyment.  His work becomes more accessible to the general reader, albeit starting from the opposite end of the spectrum that inaccessible highbrow literature does.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS may be the most inaccessible published novel I've ever read. And although this opinion will offend fans of the novel, I think it's because the novel is crude. Which is not to say it's stupid or unimaginative. It's just that it's prose style is at best serviceable, and it lacks things like structure, plotting, and characterization that help readers through a long story.

On the other hands A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is immensely powerful. That's because the writer has something to say to practically every human being. Whether you're an ethical egoist, an altruist, a sensualist or a legalist, David Lindsay wants you to know you're just wrong, wrong, wrong. Even even if you insist on disagreeing with him, at least you have the pleasure of seeing him shoot holes in the opinions of other people you disagree with.

So power in writing, I think, comes from having something to say that's meaningful to readers -- at least some of them. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is a book for perhaps one in a million readers, but I believe it will always find those readers.

Should *you* read A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS? I'd say its practical value to a science fiction author is debatable; but I definitely think it is a must-read for fantasy and even more so horror writers. That's not a guarantee you'll enjoy it, but it's worth studying the way Lindsay imbues the landscape and its inhabitants with immanent meaning (albeit only to debunk that meaning).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA

Title: A Voyage to Arcturus

Author: David Lindsay

Published: 1920

Pubisher: Methuen & Co. Ltd., London UK

Edition Reviewed: ISBN 978-1480258426

Word Count: 93,000

Writer's Book Report: John Scalzi's FUZZY NATION

ONE LINE SUMMARY REVIEW: *Fuzzy Nation* is a "reboot" of a classic 1962 sci-fi novel which competently re-engineers the story to modern standards of technology, storytelling, and political correctness but which falls short of the original's charm and emotional impact.

DETAILS:
I've never read anything before by John Scalzi, but given that he is the object of the Rabid Puppies hatred and Sad Puppies deep ambivalence, I thought I'd check out *Fuzzy Nation*, his "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's classic *Little Fuzzy*.

Why reboot a classic sci-fi novel? Well there's the commonplace problem of technology outstripping sci-fi for starters, particularly the original's lack of personal digital information and communication gadgets. In the original Jack Holloway consults books on microfilm, develops movies in a darkroom, and can't reach characters by videophone because they're away from their houses. This is all very anachronistic to a generation that grew up with databases, cell phones and personal computers.

There's also the issue of contemporary tastes in politics. The planet Zarathustra in the original was clearly based on South Africa of the early 20th Century. The names of some of the animals even sound slightly Dutch-ish (e.g. "Veldbeest"). The outcome of the original novel's dispute over the "sapience" of the Fuzzy species seems incomprehensible to modern political sensibilities. If the Fuzzies turn out to be people who were living on Zarathustra before humans came, most modern readers would assume that this means humans need to clear off the planet. But in the implicit politics of H. Beam Piper's universe humans can still run things and exploit the mineral and biological wealth of the planet, they just have to work *around* the natives, while they *run the natives' affairs for them*.

This is the politics of paternalism; of "white man's burden". That might not seem strange at all to a reader in the early 60s who had grown up on Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, but to a modern reader that attitude is almost inexplicable. So while "politics" may be a dirty word, it's not unreasonable to tweak the unexamined imperialist and paternalistic assumptions of the original in order to reach modern audiences.

So far so good, but the place where this re-imagining falls short is re-tooling the story for modern tastes in storytelling. The original novel's Jack Holloway was a larger-than-life archetype of frontier self-sufficiency, an upright and elderly but still-sharp prospector and sometime gun-slinger. The new Jack Holloway is a young and crooked lawyer eking out a living prospecting after being disbarred and alienating just about everyone he meets. Why re-imagine Holloway this way? Because conventional wisdom is that flawed and somewhat unlikable characters are more interesting. While this is fine as well as it goes, it's a bit simplistic because what really matters is what you do with the character.

Scalzi hits another writing-workshop bullet point by giving his picaresque Holloway greater agency in the plot outcome than Piper's Holloway has. In the original Jack Holloway plays a key role in initiating the events of the novel, but by the story's third act he is largely sidelined and the main action is resolved by deus ex machina -- a major no-no according to polite canons of literary taste.

So in outline form Scalzi's story looks like a major upgrade to the H. Beam Piper version. But fleshed out, it doesn't quite measure up to the classic. Why? Because while Scalzi is a fine writer, he's just not as good here as H. Beam Piper is. A story like this takes a tremendous amount of exposition; in Piper's version this imbues the setting with a kind of Golden Age wonder but in Scalzi's version it simply weighs down the narration and dialog.

What's more while Scalzi's version is unquestionably more competently plotted, there's a lot more to care about in Piper's version. Piper stocks his story with memorable and vivid characters where Scalzi's supporting cast is sufficient to move the story forward but forgettable. Piper's version is, underneath the charm, a serious sci-fi attempt to address the question of where "human" rights come from. In Scalzi's version this is merely a plot point.

And H. Beam Piper's version scores over the Scalzi version in this one respect: character arc. The classic H. Beam Piper protagonist is a self-sufficient, rugged individualist, but in many ways *Little Fuzzy* subverts this archetype. *Little Fuzzy* was conceived at a time Piper had moved to Paris, where he missed his friends and his marriage began to fall apart. *Little Fuzzy* is really about the the tension between self-sufficiency and loneliness.

So it misses the point the reconstruct *Little Fuzzy* to give Jack Holloway more agency in the fate of the Fuzzies, because it's not really about the Fuzzies. It's about a lonely old man who adopts a family and through them develops new friendships. That arc is what gives the *Little Fuzzy* its powerful emotional impact. Scalzi's Holloway starts out the story as as secretive, manipulative schemer and ends as a successful, secret, manipulative schemer. It's sufficiently entertaining, but not particularly moving.

*Fuzzy Nation* is a cute and entertaining book that is utterly inoffensive to standards of literary taste or politics -- standards that I generally endorse. There's nothing wrong with a book being adequate and inoffensive, but that's not what greatness is about. A great story is timeless. It's been over fifty years since the publication of *Little Fuzzy*, and despite being dated in several respects it still stands up. Will people still be reading *Fuzzy Nation* in 2070? I doubt it. They'll be reading *Little Fuzzy*.

A Fish Story

I finished a hot and strenuous garden project for my wife today, so I decided to reward myself by taking a late afternoon fishing trip.

I've recently noticed a pond on the map a few miles from my house. It's not well known because it is almost completely surrounded by private property; but there is small bit of water frontage on a busy road with a few parking spots. So I put the canoe on the cartop and when I arrive I'm in luck; it's a sunny Sunday afternoon, but there's only one other car there. I launch the canoe.

Since this is a just a few miles outside of Boston, I've brought my "urban fishing" tackle box, which is stocked with small "panfish" lures. City fishing isn't about catching trophy fish, it's about catching anything at all. So I tie on a tiny 1/16 oz "rooster tail" -- it basically looks like an allergy pill with a hula skirt. It also features an oval brass tag that spins around as you retrieve it. In my experience this is practically the only thing besides earthworms that catches anything in urban ponds.

I make my first cast about twenty-five feet downwind and along the shoreline, retrieving past the edge of a bank of weeds visible from the surface. I immediately get a strike. At first I don't believe it; having a fish strike on your very first cast of the day is  a once-in-a-blue moon event. But sure enough I reel in a pumpkinseed -- a kind of sunfish. That's no surprise; practically the only thing you get in these urban ponds is sunfish (bluegills and pumpkinseeds), yellow perch, and very rarely a smallmouth bass. The surprise is this is the biggest pumpkinseed I've ever caught. It's longer than my hand (why would I bring a tape measure here?), so it's over eight inches long. That makes it close to trophy weight. but it's late Sunday and I'd have to find an official weigh station that was open. Anyway I'm doing catch and release so I throw him back.

By the time I finish dealing with the pumpkinseed the wind has blown me to the north shore of the lake. I make my second cast and immediately get another strike, and this guy puts up one heck of a fight. I'm fishing with 4 lb test monofilament, so I have to set the reel's drag very, very low. It takes me a long time to land him. He's a juvenile largemouth, only eight or nine inches long, but spunky. Now I'm starting to think I should have brought the big lures -- this little guy is exactly the size the tiny rooster tail lure is meant to attract.

Now obviously I don't continue to get a strike on every cast, but every place I go in the 100 acre lake I catch fish. Mostly tons of black crappie. Some of them are quite big for crappies; a pound to a pound and a quarter I'd say. And all over the place I'm pulling one yellow perch out of the water after another. They're all on the small side, about 4-5", I think because they all get eaten while they're still minnows.

Before coming here I'd picked out a very fishy looking spot on the map. It was a place where a brook emptied into a bay which in turn opened by a narrow neck onto the main body of the pond. A spot like that is perfect for a predator to hang out and wait for dinner to pass by. But I don't even bother going there, and when I tell you why you'll think I'm crazy.

You see I love fishing, but I hate catching fish.

I like the setting -- out on the water where it's quiet. I like the time, usually in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is low, the sky bright and the breeze light. But most of all I like the process. I rig up my line, study the terrain, decide on a spot where I imagine a hungry fish may be lurking. Then I pick a target beyond that. I become the target. Plop! The satisfaction of a perfect cast.

Now I am the lure pretending to be something else. Help! I am a wounded minnow. Please don't dart out of the weeds and swallow me. Help! I'm a cicada who has dropped out of the tree onto the water. Please don't come to the surface and gobble me up.

And it's not that a perfect day fishing doesn't at some point involve catching something. Ideally I catch just enough to maintain the pretense that I'm not out here wasting my time. One fish is a good day. Two fish is a great day. But three fish is just another good day. Four fish and it's time to go home and cut my losses.

I just don't like the killing part. So I catch and release, killing only the fish I can't unhook cleanly. When I catch a fish that won't survive I immediately kill it and bleed it. But that's my least favorite part of fishing. Even catch and release can get fiddly when it doesn't go well. None of this catching business is as simple and satisfying as the fishing is.

So I find myself in the canoe becoming increasingly apathetic. Oh, something's nibbling on the lure. I'll just keep reeling in. If it wants the bloody thing let it do the work. Then I find myself casting and thinking, "God I hope nothing strikes." When I hear myself thinking that, I decide it's time to head home. I won't say this was a bad day; like they say a bad day fishing beats a good day working. But there was too much catching for my taste.

And now this pond has now ruined all the other ones around my house. Next time I spend a day not catching anything, it won't be because catching fish is hard, it'll be because I deliberately went somewhere I wouldn't catch anything. The pretense of purpose will be gone.

So I'll come back to this pond, but rigged for big fish. Very big fish. That will be perfect. I'll know the fish are there, but I'm just not catching them today. But someday I might.  In fact I think I'll go to the bait and tackle store tomorrow and see if they have a lure that looks like a puppy who's fallen into the water. I imagine working the lure: Help! I am a golden retriever pup who has fallen out of the boat.

Movie Review of THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

I saw the second HOBBIT movie last night and on the way out I heard a man tell his companion, "That's got to be the worst movie I've ever seen!" Now I think he must be reacting to the fact that this movie is only one third of the story, and ends abruptly on a somewhat awkward cliffhanger. THE HOBBIT 2 is certainly is well-made movie with an excellent cast (Martin Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch AND Stephen Fry), and absolutely top-drawer production values. It is brisk paced and unencumbered by exposition, the bane of many fantasy stories.

The place where it falls down is in the writing.

There's a reason that writers struggle with exposition. Exposition does so many important things in a novel. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but occasionally a caption helps you understand what you're looking at.

One of the advantages of film is that if actors are good we see many things intuitively without the need for elaborate exposition. As with the LotR movie THE HOBBIT 2 takes advantage of an excellent cast to bring minor characters to life. Unfortunately the one character the movie fails is Bilbo, and this is entirely the fault of the writers. They've reduced him to almost a secondary character.

THE HOBBIT is a deceptively simple book. Despite its literarily disreputable fantasy genre, THE HOBBIT is a finely crafted novel about Bilbo's personal journey from being a parochial prig to becoming a wise hero. Tolkien plays him off the secondary characters with considerable dexterity, but this sophistication is lost in a movie that's all about impressive but silly action set pieces.

Take Bilbo's interaction with Cumberbatch's motion-captured Smaug. The writers get Smaug's character right, and the movements and presence of the dragon are awe-inspiring. Yet somehow this scene falls short. In the book the threat of the dragon isn't merely physical. Smaug *tempts* Bilbo. That gives the book scene a whiff of horror which is missing from the movie, and this is entirely the fault of the writers, who don't seem to care much about what's going through Bilbo's mind.

The most controversial element in this film is the addition of the non-canonical chracter Tauriel. She is in the movie to provide a corner for a love triangle with Legolas and Kili, of all people. This didn't bother me. Tolkien had a deeply romantic streak in him that didn't make it into print in his lifetime. He was a man with his own personal mythology, and central to that mythology is the love story of the mortal Beren and the elf-maid Luthien. The love of a mortal for elven-kind is one of those crypto-catholic motifs that lurk in the background of Tolkien's works; it's all about the love between the flesh and spirit. The non-canonical scenes between Tauriel and Kili might well be the most Tolkienian aspect of this movie.

The weak leg of the triangle is Legolas, who as conceived of by the writers is little more than a pretty killing machine. There is at once too much of Legolas in this movie, and at the same time not enough. A movie *about* the adventures of Legolas is an intriguing idea. A movie *almost* about Legolas is not.

I think Christopher Orr from The Atlantic nailed this movie in his review when he called it a work of fan-fiction. But I don't take the position that fan fiction is somehow contemptible. Tolkien created a new mythology. For a mythology to live other people must embroider it, even add to it. Orr has it precisely backward. The problem with the movie's addition to Tolkien's canon isn't that this they are fan-fiction, but that they are commerical fan fiction. Tolkien's cultural promise won't be fulfilled until his work is in the public domain, if that ever happens.

THE HOBBIT 2 is not a bad movie, but the writers don't have enough confidence in Bilbo to let him carry the story. THE HOBBIT doesn't get much respect from LORD OF THE RINGS fans, and it is evident in their treatment of the source material that the writers don't love THE HOBBIT the way they adore LORD OF THE RINGS. They're less interested in telling the story of THE HOBBIT than they are extending LORD OF THE RINGS.

That's too bad, because THE HOBBIT is a very good novel in its own right and deserves the same loving treatment.

Writer's Book Report: TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis

Anyone who has seen either the 1969 John Wayne or the 2010 Coen Brothers' movie adaptation knows the essentials of TRUE GRIT's plot. 14 year-old Mattie Ross's father visits Fort Smith Arkansas for some horse trading, and is shot there by Tom Chaney, one of his hired men. Mattie herself goes to Fort Smith to collect the body and settle her father's accounts. For Mattie, this involves hiring Rooster Cogburn, a drunken, trigger-happy US Marshall as a bounty hunter. She wants him to cross over into Indian Territory, track Chaney down and bring him to justice. And to Cogburn's surprise and irritation, headstrong Mattie follows him into Indian Territory "to see the deed done" herself.

Here are the first thirteen or so lines of the novel:

---

PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen year-old girl could leave home and go off in wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces he carried in his trouser band.

Here is what happened. We had clear title to 480 acres of good bottom land on the south bank of the Arkansas river not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas. Tom Chaney was a tenant but working for hire, not shares. He turned up one day hungry and riding a gray horse that had a filthy blanket on its back and a rope halter instead of a bridle.

---

Right away we see one of the defining strengths of this book: its observant, eccentric, forceful narrator. Many have noted that the book is narrated by a fourteen year-old girl, but I believe this is incorrect. The narrator is over forty years old and referring back to events in her youth. She has a lot in common with her younger self though.

Portis gets right to work on establishing the narrator's voice. Notice "do not" and "did not". One of the remarkable things about this book is the near total lack of contractions. This is one of Mattie's quirks, and it even bleeds over into her recollection of dialog -- a subtle touch I thought. Mattie is judgmental. Right in the first sentence she is telling us her low opinion of the public's ability to see the truth.

Mattie's also a sharp observer, but in a particular sort of way. She tells a story like she's testifying in a civil trial, obstinately slipping her opinions into the hard narrative facts. Yet Mattie doesn't tell us how she felt about her father being murdered -- her actions will make that clear enough. She does tell us her father was "robbed" and goes on to inventory the items stolen: his life, his horse, $150 "cash money" and two California gold pieces. This after he had been kind to Chaney, given him a home which, admittedly, was an old cotton house but "had a good roof". Note also the inflated way she lists the items in the inventory, using conjunctions rather than commas.

This is quite a skillful approach to characterization. Portis doesn't milk the situation for bathos; we're already inclined to sympathize with a 14 year-old girl whose father has been murdered. Instead, he takes the cover of our sympathy to paint a girl who is not entirely likable. Mattie is a bloodthirsty, bible-thumping pill -- a pious girl, yes, but one whose Christianity makes up for what it lacks in forgiveness and cheek-turning with a double-helping of retribution and sharp dealing.

One of the best ways to paint a character is to present him early on with a choice. Portis does this by having the sheriff offer Mattie a choice of who the "best" US Marshall would be. William Waters is the best tracker, a half-Comanche with an uncanny ability to "cut for sign". Rooster Cogburn is the meanest, a pitiless, fearless man who drinks too much. But the best in the sheriff's opinion is L.T. Quinn, a fair-minded man who never plants evidence, and is a lay preacher to boot. "Where can I find this Rooster?" is Mattie's deadpan response.

This bloody-mindedness is the secret of her appeal. She knows what she wants and how she intends to get it. Mattie steps into the story and takes charge, and from the moment she gets on the train to Fort Smith she is a force to be reckoned with. I wish more authors would learn that lesson. Too many manuscripts try to gain our sympathy for the protagonist by having bad things happen to him in the first chapter. Then they follow with the obvious, logical reaction: the protagonist feels bad, sometimes for pages on end. I don't like to overgeneralize, so if you can make that work, more power to you, but don't ignore the other possibility, of having the protagonist take forceful action. The combination of misfortune and competent reaction more readily produces sympathy than misfortune with passive suffering.

One more thing to take note of here is subtle dialect that slips into Mattie's highly "correct" narration. Her father is "shot down" and robbed of "cash money". Later we'll see lots of use of regional dialect both in dialog's grammar (excepting contractions) and in words (skim milk is "bluejohn").

Another interesting thing Portis does is with backstory. There's almost no backstory in the opening -- unless you count Mattie's recounting of her father's death, which she did not witness and therefore tells us about rather than shows. Portis presents the characters to us and puts them to work fully made. Then, when Rooster and Mattie are deep in Indian territory, we get a surprising detour into Rooster's backstory.

Rooster's background is unsavory. During the Civil War he was one of Quantrill's Raiders , a vigilante group which perpetrated atrocities against Union-sympathizing civilians. After the war he robbed a US army payroll. Later he robs a high interest bank in Nevada, which ironically leads to him being hired as a US Marshall. Rooster sees distinctions in his behavior which justify it. The high interest bank is practically a criminal itself -- it should be a criminal, therefore robbing it isn't robbing an honest citizen. The army payroll? Well, that's Yankee money.

One thing that must be said is that it's a lot easier to get through backstory introduced late. We're already committed to the story, and presumably interested in where the characters came from. But still, it slows down the story, and we don't need it to follow the action, so why put it in? I think this is a case of Portis spending attention span to achieve something else. Tom Chaney is a depraved man who kills for no good reason. Ned Pepper, the outlaw Chaney throws in with, kills when it is to his advantage. Rooster Cogburn kills when it is to his advantage and he doesn't consider the victim respectable. Mattie is out to kill for revenge, although she calls it "justice".

Portis places each of these characters along a continuum, and each is marked by violence -- literally so. Chaney has a powder burn on his face. Ned has a mutilated lip from being shot in the face. Rooster has a dead eye. Mattie will, by and by, receive her own mark of violence. After he climactic confrontation, she is attacked by a snake (note the allusion in a Bible reference-laced novel) in a pit (entrance to the underworld?). It's sly and deft bit of symbolism that you're free to ignore if you want to take the story as a simple adventure. It manages this is a relatively short manuscript length, I estimate about 70K words.

I think what makes this story such a favorite of writers is how it works on more than one level; as a straightforward adventure, as a ironic, even cynical satire, and as a mythic story of retribution and loss of innocence (which the hard-headed young Mattie shows flashes of). That's how two movies can be made from such a short book that are so different from each other, yet both are unusually true to the book.  The '69 preserves more of the book's scenes but gives the story a more upbeat ending.  The Coen brothers version adds some macabre scenes, streamlines others, but restores Portis' ironic and bittersweet ending.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

TITLE:  True Grit
AUTHOR: Charles Portis
PUBLICATION DATE: 1968
EDITION REVIEWED: Kindle Ebook, ISBN:1408814005, Aug 28, 2007 Overlook Press