Mount TBR #8

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Sheiks and Adders – Michael Innes

Sir John Appleby starred as the hero police detective in the mysteries of Michael Innes. Author Innes, a college professor, wrote erudite droll mysteries for discerning readers who may have felt a little embarrassed to be caught reading a mystery. In the early Appleby stories of the 1930s, Innes worked with vogue elements of whodunit tradition (locked rooms, elaborate engines of death, dotty characters) but added many modernist flourishes and writerly stunts. The later ones, written in the 1980s, if you can believe it, featured less literary, lighter frolics that amuse and soothe middle-aged fans.

In fact, this odd little entertainment conjures not much mystery. Our retired Sir John feels rather bored gardening and one can’t read all day. So he finds himself easily coaxed by a fetching young person to attend a fête at the improbably named Drool Court. The costume party, organized to raise funds for charity, is to be outside, on the estate of the fetching YP’s father Richard Chitfield. The rich father has warned off his daughter's boyfriend from wearing a sheik costume. Nonplussed Sir John observes various male guests dressed up like the Saudi royal males.

He stumbles onto the fact that the fake-sheiks camouflage a genuine sheik who is having a hush-hush meeting with Chitfield.

The requirement of camouflage implies the possibility of fire from terrorists and enemies. Appleby, a protector of the Queen’s peace, takes on the mission to help the real sheik out of his jam. The climax explains the punny title, a take-off on the game Snakes and Ladders (sheik and snake rhyme, by the way; sheik doesn’t rhyme with sneak). Innes fires off not only punny in-jokes but also lets loose literary allusions by the score. Pat yourself on the back when you recognize them, don’t fret over what you know are allusions but can’t approximate the source.

Highly recommended for readers looking for a short, donnish novel.

Back to the Classics #8

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

American Humor: A Study of the National Character – Constance Rourke

Constance Rourke died in late March 1941, at only 56 years old, when she slipped and fell off the icy porch of her Grand Rapids, Michigan, house. With her untimely death, our country lost a pioneering scholar of American folk traditions, popular entertainment, and social history. She not only gathered information, often for the first time, but also analyzed it with a sharp yet sympathetic attitude.

She was among the scholars of the time who were concerned about the rise of fascism and communism between the wars so she wrote popularized history in order to remind the American people of who they are and the ideals they had better be ready to defend.

This ambitious book was published in 1931. It divides folkways of entertainment into a number of curious topics: the Yankee peddler and backwoodsman as American types; the minstrel show; trouping performers and strollers; and religious cultists as entertainers giving drudges respite. She shrewdly examines forgotten comic writers like Petroleum V. Nasby (Lincoln’s favorite funny man) and classic American writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Howells and Henry James. She persuasively juxtaposes Lincoln as a major literary figure and one whose storytelling prowess is in the American tradition of tall tales and joke-telling.

Rourke is apparently little read and little cited these days in American Studies, though her work was seminal for years after her decease. One problem for us post-moderns is that she doesn’t know anything about anthropology or ethnology. Although her recognition of Lincoln as a literary figure is discerning and prescient, sometimes the literary criticism feels labored, stretched. Hawthorne as a teller of folk tales seems weak. Ditto with Moby Dick an outgrowth of joke books of the day because of its risible Biblical names and puns. Still, for readers into the history of pop culture, this book might be worth reading.

Powder House Day

Powder House Day commemorates the events of April 22, 1775, when Captain Benedict Arnold and his foot brigade demanded the keys to New Haven's city powder house, so that they might arm themselves and head down to Massachusetts to join the bloody fray of the American Revolution. 

The Minutemen and Their World – Robert A. Gross

In 1977, this book won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, given for histories about the Americas. From the viewpoint of social history, Robert A. Gross (UConn) analyzes the effects of the American Revolution on Concord, Massachusetts. Gross makes clear how the coercive acts of Parliament in 1774 exacerbated pre-existing social and economic problems.

Before the coercive acts, Concordians paid little attention to the outside world. They had faith in their local government, which was run by local potentates who owned roughly twice as much land as ordinary people. When the Crown replaced the locally-elected town council with a Crown-appointed institution, their politics changed quickly from loyalists to “rabble in arms.” Feeding this radicalism, however, were district loyalties and religious differences, a legacy of the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

The farmers, artisans, and other people of Concord knew that their community was in trouble. People had large numbers of kids so population pressure on the land made it impossible for fathers to pass land and livings down to sons and dowries to their daughters. Unable to make a living, sons could not marry and were encouraged by their parents to start farms in New Hampshire and Vermont. This loosened traditional ties and patriarchal control that bound people all the way back to the Puritans.

The best thing about this book is that if focusses on ordinary women, blacks, artisans, spinsters, the poor, and the substantial citizens. People formed and supported militias, through terrible economic hardship by the war’s end, not because they wanted a revolution, but because they wanted to struggle against social forces and preserve a world that offered opportunity, a world they feared was vanishing.  It is a perfect illustration of the quotation by Sicilian author Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

French title: La Disparation d'Odile

Published: 1971

Englished: 1972, Lyn Moir

The Disappearance of Odile - Georges Simenon

The only points that date this short novel are a couple of references to hippies. Otherwise, this is a timeless story about an eighteen-year-old girl who, unable to identify the next step and feeling totally misunderstood, decides to leave Lausanne, Switzerland for the city lights of Paris. A letter left to her older brother Bob clearly indicates that Odile is thinking of taking her own life.

With the consent of and travelling money from his father, Bob cuts his college classes and goes immediately to Paris, because he is very worried. He knows little more about Odile beyond his sense that she mistakenly feels that after feeling a little friendship and a little intimacy, she is ready to leave this world forever. Since the age of 15, she has had fraught friendships and affairs that have been not good for her. What really alarms him is that before she vanished, she took her father's revolver and sleeping pills from the family medicine chest.

Bob’s peregrinations in Paris take him to clubs in the Saint Michel district. Simenon captures details. The hippie hangouts smell like cigarette smoke. The neurotic characters seem blurry because they themselves are not sure of their emotions. Simenon flashbacks to Odile and Bob’s distant parents. The father, a best-selling author of popular history, is cocooned in reading, thinking, and writing. His mother plays bridge and knocks back scotch. Neither have time to show affection or interest in their two kids. Bob could handle this indifferent treatment, Odile could not. Simenon writes in his usual restrained way as he describes a dim, out of focus emotional milieu.

Lausanne, at least in the late Sixties, sounds like a place where there is little to do for either the young or old. Switzerland sounds like a place best-suited for outdoorsy extroverts who have lots of money for equipment for hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, winter camping, etc.

Mount TBR #7

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst – Jeffery Toobin

In early 1974, I was a high school senior cracking wise all the time to hide my uneasiness about going to college in the fall. I was a simple kid that wanted two things: not to flunk out of State and a girlfriend.

So with these clear-cut but crucial goals alternating in my mind, I didn’t have mental space to devote to the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst on February 4, 1974. Keep in mind in those far off days of pre-cable TV and pre-24 hour news, our country felt huge. Since replaced by Florida as LaLa Land, wacky California and its dizzy denizens felt very far away. And, self-involved and self-regarding as I was, I was off to a university better known for partying than political activity.

Anyway, in this book, Toobin reminds us what a dark period the Seventies really were. Despite my two burning concerns, in the main people were nervous about gas prices and the energy crisis, disgusted over Watergate and politics, and stressed about disappearing factory jobs due to foreign competition and higher oil prices. The fact that a rich young woman could be snatched out of her apartment and then seemingly turned into a bank-robbing criminal was yet another example of things going to hell in a hurry.

This kidnapping gripped the imagination of the general public, stoked by the intense media scrutiny that lasted for eighteen months. Toobin underlines the curious fact that the first world-wide feed of live news with the minicam was the May 17, 1974 shootout between the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and the LAPD. 

The SLA members always told Patricia Hearst that they posed no danger to her but she was in fact in danger of being attacked and killed by the police in a raid. This was one of the very few points on which they were correct. The LAPD did not hold back even when they assumed that Patricia Hearst was in the house as they poured 5000 rounds into it (while receiving about 3000 in return) and set it afire as an unintended effect of using tear gas.

Lesson learned: Don’t do what the government doesn’t like, kids. A cell or the grave ain’t a good choice.

About 40 years ago there was a raft of books about the kidnapping, such as Belcher and West’s Patty/Tania. But Toobin thought since no book had been written in about 30 years, it was time for a re-evaluation. This is worth reading because Toobin provides more details that Belcher and West, as employees of Hearst’s father, were too discreet to include. Also, Patty/Tania, rushed into print as quickly as January 1975, did not cover the year in which Patricia Hearst and Harrises were on the run or their trials.

Toobin, a writer for The New Yorker, writes clear prose in a readable style. He captures but does not belabor how strategically and tactically inept the militia group was or how infantile their politics were. He has a reliable eye for the good story and spins crackerjack tales about characters such as Tom Mathews, the high school student kidnapped by the Harrises and Hearst on the day of the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods. Young Tom got a see The New Centurions at drive-in with them and they let him go so he could be in time for a baseball game he had to play the next day.

Thomas Jefferson's Birthday

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson – Joseph J. Ellis

Writing for the popular audience, Joseph J. Ellis presents information in longish essays. This book features five monographs that focus on Jefferson in his different roles: continental congressman, minister to France, political consultant based at Monticello in the mid-1790s, first-term as president, and finally a retired guy in the evening of his life.  Not a Jefferson partisan, Ellis examines the Jeffersonian cast of mind and character and has tough things to say. Sally Hemings was out of the scope of this book.

Studying Jefferson in his own time, in his own context, we see that he really was an ideologue. That is he was a believer in “an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes, a systematic way of going wrong with confidence,” to quote John Adams. Jefferson bemused Adams for thinking that just because he (Jefferson) could imagine ideals he could make those ideals existent in the real world.

From his young adulthood, Jefferson had a deep-rooted hostility to concentrations of political power. In the Declaration of Independence, he criticized the King and monarchy. Later, he castigated Hamilton and the Federalists for conspiring to build “tyrannical” federal power. In our present political culture, the deep suspicion of central power especially from faraway places comes right from Jefferson’s visceral distrust.

However, Jefferson’s high Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals did not extend to what we moderns understand as democracy. He believed in property qualifications to vote and he thought ordinary people should not hold national office. Ellis asserts that Jefferson was a founder of not democracy, but American liberalism in the sense of an 18^th century liberal’s belief in individual freedom, unimpeded by government.

Ellis also emphasizes the fact that Jefferson had an amazing way of framing ideas. He was not a democrat but he discovered the kind of rhetoric that would work in a democratic society. Before the revolution, writing was targeted to a narrow audience of the educated elite, but taking a page from Tom Paine, Jefferson discovered the elements of rhetoric that would appeal to The People. It had to be simple. For instance, issues of colonial dependence and independence were complex but in the Declaration Jefferson he cast the debate in either/or terms, between enslavement to British tyranny or freedom. Jefferson also found that language had to be ambiguous and allusive, meaning anything to any reader. For example, extremists on the left and right can warm their hands with the fire of “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ...” Ellis calls Jefferson our master of illusion, a master of our will to believe, because of his elusive use of evaporative language.

The problem with this book is the Ellis generally leaves alone Jefferson as tough politician and canny administrator. Jefferson, I think, for all his high-minded ideology and lofty ideals, had few illusions about how the world worked. He made serious contributions as secretary of state, as behind the scenes political consultant and boss man, and as president leading up to the War of 1812. Jefferson had to balance his principles (limited federal power) with real world goals (acquire territory, remove foreign presence, etc.) in order to accomplish big things like the Louisiana Purchase.

European RC #5

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

The Hard Sell – William Haggard

This short 1965 thriller is set mainly in Vittorio, Italy, which I think is supposed to be Naples, the city of litter and Duh Mob. Haggard’s series hero, Colonel Charles Russell, works in British military intelligence, in an obscure office that undertakes delicate jobs that defy easy classification. Russell is asked by a childhood friend informally to visit his company’s plant in Vittorio in order to investigate a series of slow-downs and accidents. Alone the incidents could be explained by happenstance, but the series says something is fishy. After Russell arrives in Italy, the perp ups the ante with sabotage and an attack on the owner’s son.

Haggard, a firm believer in national traits, characterizes Southern Italians as lovers of intrigue, mindful of face and reputation and status, ridden by unsavory family connections, prone to outbreaks of temper, romantic, loud, chaotic, violent. The villain in this novel is a Swede and thus prone to ups and downs. When he’s up, a formidable adversary, but when down, unstable and unpredictable.

As the hero, Russell transcends stereotypes. He is a rare bird: Anglo-Irish but Catholic, not stubborn or inflexible. He is ever on guard lest his emotions and feelings cloud his cool, logical judgement. At about sixty, Russell does not engage in James Bond-like action scenes or love affairs. Instead, he fishes and plays golf.  He flirts with a forty-something courtesan - in a combination of schoolboy classical Greek and rough dialect learned during the war; could anything be cooler than speaking a foreign language fluently but imperfectly?

Russell works with not only the local police commissioner, but the local communist agitator. A conservative of the old school, Haggard has his series hero take communists as the hard right – in short, communists are serious, purposeful, resolute, resourceful and in touch with ordinary people and their troubles, just like men of the right. Contrasting the dark days of the present with the golden age of the past, Russell thinks that the Europe worthy of the name “committed suicide” when he was nine – i.e. in August 1914.  

Like most old-timey conservatives, Russell loathes demagogues and mobocracy, abhors socialism, and shits on democratic socialism (remember what Stalin did to democratic socialists -  see The Case of Comrade Tulayev). Russell will fight a worthy adversary or work with him, depending on circumstances. Russell is too practical and results-oriented to fuss over moral judgments. Russell believes in moral principles since without them people are slaves to passion and irrationality. But Russell does not expect – much less demand – moral judgement to help him in a world dominated by evil, flux, chance, repute, money, power, and other fleeting, ephemeral rubbish.

The  Hard Sell is an intricate novel that capture the usual real-world situations of people assuming they are making cogent decisions based on correct assumptions, but in fact their premises are wrong. Anybody who has worked in an office know assumptions are often fatal, valuable as they are. The Hard Sell is still worth reading though it lacks the sheen of threat and ruthlessness of earlier novels such as The High Wire, The Antagonists, The Arena, or The Unquiet Sleep.

Mount TBR #6

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Patty/Tania – Jerry Belcher and Don West

On February 4, 1974, the United States experienced its first political kidnapping. The radical left group Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst from her apartment near the UC Berkeley campus.

In those far-off pre-information superhighway days, this fantastical crime garnered as much media attention as our society could muster: three major TV networks, local daily newspapers, and radio broadcasting. The hyper-competitive paperback book publishers churned out “instant books” – books written and published very quickly to exploit burning reader interest in topics of the day. Pyramid Books hustled this instant book into print in January 1975, while Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst were still on the run.

Readers can easily imagine what half-baked junk many instant books were back then. However, Belcher and West give us a fast-moving narrative of the case. The outstanding point is that the two reporters provide wide-ranging background on the major players and their experiences. For example, they reproduce in full a pathetic autobiographical letter Donald DeFreeze, head of the SLA, wrote to a judge. Pathetic either way, that is, whether it is the pitiable truth or a cynical attempt to stir the sympathy of a judge.

Belcher and West give a wealth of interesting detail on the fringe characters to whom the media paid no attention. I had no idea that the prisons were such hotbeds of political activity and discussion in the late Sixties. Various programs had college students visit inmates for educational purposes and consciousness-raising rap sessions. But these meetings sometimes turned into political agitation and radicalization on both sides.

After the draft stopped vacuuming up college students, the anti-war movement lost a lot of steam and so did other far left activist groups. And by the early 1970s political activism on the left had curdled into angry, disappointed, desperate youth striking out in various ways. The authors discuss how the SLA recruited members from a defunct Maoist revolutionary group called the Venceremos ("We will win") who broke off from other radical groups because those groups were too restrained for them. The SLA claimed responsibility for the cold-blooded killing of Oakland School Board Director Marcus Foster, an African-American who was doing great work under trying circumstances. For this senseless stupid act, they were roundly condemned by other leftist groups.

As an added attraction, the appendix includes texts of the Symbionese Liberation Army tapes and communiques. Such primary documents -  with unreadable content, incoherent organization, harsh invective, and strutting tone - capture the utter poverty of imagination, education, or theory of the self-styled revolutionary militia.  

Both writers were veteran newspaper reporters so they were careful with facts and documentation. Their writing is brisk, readable, and not as flat and grey as much journalistic writing was back then. They had to be cautious about objectivity and not sensationalizing the case, because they worked for the San Francisco Examiner, edited by the victim’s father Randolph “Randy” Hearst. To Hearst’s credit, one gets the feeling that he did not interfere with coverage by his paper or investigations for this book project. But, as we would expect, Belcher and West don’t mention Hearst’s fondness for red wine nor do they discuss the strain the kidnapping  put on the Hearsts' marriage. 

Be aware that, as journalists usually do, Belcher and West break down when they try to take the bird’s eye view. For instance, the discussion of the influence on excessive TV watching on the anti-social behavior of the white, middle-class, baby boomers is singularly unpersuasive.

Our present-day image is that the Sixties were the time of turbulence, the Seventies of mellow. In fact, in only 18 months in 1971 and 1972 the United States saw in excess of 2,500 domestic bombings, according to FBI statistics. Besides the violence, the Seventies were a time when people retreated into bitter privacy and staying afloat. People felt nervous and disgusted over gas prices and blows to the auto industry, economic woes in what now is called the Rust Belt, fears about crime like serial killings and mass murders related with drugs, and the breaking of confidence and trust due to lies about the Vietnam war and the Watergate political crisis that forced Nixon’s resignation. Things hippie went mainstream in the Seventies – getting high, casual clothes, bright colors, crafts like macramé, just you and me simple and free, have you never been mellow – but the left politics of the hippies went into disrepute because of cults like the SLA and hundreds of mad bombings

Such is the oddity of life that we can be in the middle of commotion and upheaval but have little sense of the hurly-burliness of it all. In this book, Belcher and West didn’t seem to realize what crazy times the 1970s were, a cluelessness which appealed to me mightily. Because looking back I didn’t know the Seventies were that nutty either - in 1974 I was just a wiseass high school senior and naïve college freshman. I wanted only two things: not to flunk out of State and a girlfriend.

Back to the Classics #7

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Peter Pan – James Barrie

The title character is all boy in that he’s all I’s: impatient, impulsive, ignorant, intrepid, and imperious. In short, a guy that would grow up to become a great quarterback, but a terrible boss. But our title character is not going to be anybody like Tom Brady or Our Stable Genius, because he’s determined never to grow up. He tempts three middle-class kids from their happy home with promises of teaching them to fly and having adventures with redskins, pirates, wild animals, and fairies. Ho-ho-ho: who wouldn’t go?

Well, me, for one. I was the kid that kept a low profile to pursue my agenda in peace. I thought the Goldfish in The Cat in the Hat imparted good advice that those dumb kids ignored for silly kicks with that feline trouble-maker. As Bob Dylan said when I was a teenager, “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

Anyway, the problem is that Peter Pan likes constant action, not the down-time that kids – especially reading kids – want and need:

In his absence things are usually quiet on the island. The fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young…and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life.

Not only is Peter’s busy-ness creepy and domineering to lazy kids us readers used to be, but also giving us slackers spooky pause is the fact that he lives in an eternal now. Peter takes his comrades through great adventures but he never remembers what he or others did during those adventures. At the end Peter amazes and dismays Wendy with this:

She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.

“Who is Captain Hook?” he asked with interest when she spoke of the arch enemy.

“Don't you remember,” she asked, amazed, “how you killed him and saved all our lives?”

“I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly.

When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said, “Who is Tinker Bell?”

“O Peter,” she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.

“There are such a lot of them,” he said. “I expect she is no more.”

I expect he was right, for fairies don't live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them.

Wendy was pained too to find that the past year was but as yesterday to Peter; it had seemed such a long year of waiting to her. But he was exactly as fascinating as ever, and they had a lovely spring cleaning in the little house on the tree tops.

Wendy, as she grows up, realizes how different children are from older human beings. Also, the line “I forget them” chills us in light of the line in Chapter 5:

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.

I daresay Peter doesn’t remember their names either.

For adults, Barrie is impartial about the lack of mercy of children who come up with the most cutting things in the most innocent manner. On March 18 I was in Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland when I heard a four-year-old girl loudly opine, “Too much cute things in here.” “I’m with you sister, “I wanted to call out but didn’t because I hadn't better be an evil role model.

Plus, Barrie raises a question I’ve had ever since I was a kid as to why obedient personalities regard as fascinating leaders that are aggressive, impulsive, arrogant, commanding and lacking in knowledge, skill, or ability to back their bombast. I confess I don’t understand the conventional fascination for Peter perhaps because when I was a kid I wanted to be older as soon as possible so people couldn’t be telling me what to do. Being a child is being vulnerable to being ordered about and who wants to be having to follow orders all the time?

Read Peter Pan. The story moves at brisk pace, has variety of jokes from word play to stock characters like the hapless dad and ultra-talented canine, and the impressive late Victorian vocabulary that will limber up an 11-year-old for Sherlock Holmes. Keep a box of Kleenex handy for the last chapter!

April Fool’s Day

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

This strange book has been called the first travel narrative. In fact, scholars believe it to be a compilation of materials from various medieval sources. One acerbic critic said that the farthest point Mandeville reached was the nearest library.

The writer calls himself Sir John Mandeville. He claims to be a knight who traveled the Holy Land and North Africa. He confidently asserts that he advised a sultan and otherwise hobnobbed with the Great Khan. He describes bizarre creatures and weird human animal hybrids.

The reader is a dupe who looks to this short classic for genuine history or geography. The attraction of this book is the writer’s style and wit in stitching together information from various sources as a record of his own journey. With deadpan humor he implies that non-Christians aren’t half bad and that Europe may not have the market cornered in scholarship and civilization. The writer is matter-of-fact as he simultaneously tells stretchers himself and warns us against believing things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. He’s comically skeptical. He’s engaging.

His hoaxing appeals to us readers who like putting on spouses, siblings, parents and friends. I know of a kid who tied a rubber band around his tongue when he noticed that doing so made his speech sound weird. He then went to his mother, garbling, “Ma, I don’t feel so good, My head hurts.” Thinking he was having a stroke, the mother held the little prankster to her breast, saying “Oh, honey, we’ll get help. Don’t worry.” The poor woman still tells this story on the embarrassed son who has no recall of such an incident. Anyway, if you find pranks like this and tall tales amusing, you the kind of hoaxer and trickster who will like this book.

Read it an edition in modern English, such as the edition published by Penguin Classics, translated by W.R.D. Moseley.