Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #22

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic in Translation. Eva Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1951. Clearly a born hardcore reader and seeker like us, she found Taoism at an early age. As just a child, she spent time hiking and meditating in the mountains of the New Territories. For Shambhala Publications, she has translated many curious books on Taoism, Ch'i Kung, and Fengshui. She is an adept in the I Ching, something that, like the ouija board, had better not be monkeyed with by the unwary, the ignorant or the frivolous.

Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living – tr. by Eva Wong

This translation is of a collection of anecdotes in eight chapters. It dates from about 500 B.C. though there is the inevitable controversy about authorship (Who? How many?) and when it was written and compiled and edited. The Lieh-tzu is considered a one of the three Taoist classics, a distant third after the Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu.

Maybe mystics worthy of the name don’t cotton to Lieh-tzu so much because on the whole he’s so genial and understandable. Some people say that the Taoists contributed to the variety of Chinese cuisine. That is, Taoists worked with a variety of ingredients for foods and potions that would extend life to hundreds of years. Lieh-tzu, however, is skeptical about transcending natural laws regulating human longevity. Lieh-tzu, not having immotality or methods to achieve it, says:

That which has life must by the law of its being come to an end; and the end can no more be avoided than the living creature can help having been born. So that he who hopes to perpetuate his life or to shut out death is deceived in his calculations.

However, there is a certain amount of really difficult material – the kind of not parsimonious cosmology that has exasperated Doubting Thomases for centuries, especially in chapter 1. But I figure Taoism is an orientation, not a religion, so we can skim what makes our brain bleed when we think about it and latch onto what is clear and practical for us if we want to.

For instance, do we really need more clarity than this story, which is as widely-known in Chinese culture as The Tortoise and the Hare is in ours? I paraphrase:

An old man in the kingdom of Ch'i was ruminating that the sky was going to fall and earth was going to crack open and swallow him. He was so afraid of dying that he couldn’t sleep or eat. A friend, fearing for his sanity, consolingly explained to him: "Heaven is only so much vapor. If stars or planets fall to the ground, they can’t crush us anyway. The earth is an accumulation of grains and dirt. Walking on the earth isn’t going to make it sink or cause fissures. Don’t worry so damn much." With this both men were tranquil.

Chang-tu-tze heard of it, and said: "The clouds and mists, the winds and rains - who can say that they will never break up or be damaged and destroyed? Heaven and earth are impermanent. He who frets over its possible disintegration probably isn’t completely crazy, but is just worried about something that may happen in the distant future, or something that is highly unlikely to happen at all.”

When this was communicated to Lieh-tze, he laughed, saying “It’s nonsense even think about whether heaven or earth can or cannot be destroyed.  Whether they will perish or not is something we don’t know. If heaven and earth will not perish, that’s great because we can live our lives without worry. However if they will perish that is something we can’t do much about so why worry about it? While we live we can’t know what it’s like to be dead and likewise when we’re dead we won’t know what it is like to be alive. Therefore, why let the question of whether heaven and earth will perish or whether there’s a heaven or hell, occupy our minds?

Lieh-tzu calls to mind Epictetus because he counsels us to not worry about what is not up to us. Don’t worry about what is out of our control:

Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing. (Enchiridion 1)

And like the notorious advice from Epictetus,

“With regard to everything that is a source of delight to you, or is useful to you, or of which you are fond, remember to keep telling yourself what kind of thing it is, starting with the most insignificant. If you’re fond of a jug, say, “This is a jug that I’m fond of,” and then, if it gets broken, you won’t be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset.” (Enchiridion, 3)

Lieh-tzu tells this bedtime story for the pandemic:

There was a man whose only son died of a sudden illness. He did not mourn for his son nor was he sad. His friends were curious about his behavior so they asked him, “Your only son is dead.   You should be heartbroken. Why do you act as if nothing happened?” The man replied, “Before my son came I had no son and I was certainly not heartbroken back then. Now I have no son. Why should I be heartbroken now?”

Pretty cold-blooded, but is it really as wild and unrealistic and demanding as that advice about turning the other cheek when somebody insults us? But if we are going to deal with whatever life still throws our way, we have to be ready and serene for discomfort, fatigue, malaise, sickness, affliction, disability, disfigurement, etc., especially if we and ours are going to live – thanks to our healthy habits and medical miracles – into our eighties and nineties.

Gulp.

'Round Midnight

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

Nothing good happens after midnight, as momma used to say.

But novelists will persist in setting their stories during the witching hour. The opening scene of this novel is set in a Denny’s, maybe the one in Ikebukuro that my wife and I took my father-in-law to in 1992 when he looked like if he ate any more rice he would pop.

Anyway, in this short novel, after midnight in Denny’s sits college sophomore Mari Asai who can’t handle being at home because the family is having a problem related to her older sister Eri. Like parents in the hikikomori situation, the parents do nothing beyond hope their daughter’s strange disorder is just a spell that will go away on its own.

To the nourishing strains of Percy Faith, Mari is approached in the restaurant by Tetsuya Takahashi, who met Mari when her older sister dragged her in to fill out a double-date. Only nineteen years old, unused to be being out at such a time, Mari is wary and unforthcoming. Takahashi is also a college student, but with the usual open vistas of time that a Japanese college student has, he plays trombone all night in the college jazz band club.

It comes out in conversation that Mari can speak Chinese fluently because she went to an experimental school. After Takahashi leaves, Kaoru, the manager of a love hotel, comes to find her and ask a favor. A client has beaten up a Chinese sex worker and disappeared. The sex worker speaks no Japanese, so Kaoru, not wanting to call the cops who would only complicate the situation, needs to talk to the woman to find out how best to proceed. Mari agrees to interpret.

Thus begins a series of chance events and random confusions that thicken the darkness of the human heart and the darkness of the world. A person can examine the darkness of their own heart and still vow to act fairly, respect people, and be brave and persistent about dispelling their own darkness. But contact with the darkness of the world - the outcomes of acting out of fear, lust, and greed -  is dangerous, leaving bitter memories in Kaoru, disfiguring marks (an employee of the love hotel) or causing the end of a promising life.

This is the first Murakami I’ve ever read – I’m not good about reading living writers. Murakami has an eye like a drone outfitted with a camera, flitting over scenes and people to describe and set an eerie mood. He mentions background music a lot, letting the mood he wants to set to be partially expressed by familiar and not so familiar tunes. His themes allude to past Japanese literature: post-war Japanese society as drab prison of unending work (The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe) and the coming together of sleep, memory, voyeurism, and mortality (The House of Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata).

Murakami’s interest is in the individual, often young, as they struggle to find out who they are and connect with other people who are also dealing with money-mad work-ridden society. Putting the needs of the group or employer before the needs of the one or friends or family leaves individuals on their own when they struggle with problems caused by sacrificing health and well-being to work or the mindless darkness of their heart. The darkness keeps people perpetually selfish in a tedious grind of gimme gimme gimme and self-absorbed in an adolescent way.

Families can Seldom be Explained

Daughters and Sons – Ivy Compton-Burnett

In this 1937 novel, Compton-Burnett relies on dialogue to tell the story of a troubled family in late Victorian England.

At 84 years of age, matriarch Sabine Ponsonby sees no reason to ease the tyranny she has imposed over her family. Her daughter Hetta proves the adage that an apple never falls far from the tree, domineering and disparaging any expression of defiance. She’s been keeping her brother Gerald since his wife died from childbirth a dozen years before. Gerald is a writer of popular books, “over-praised and over-rewarded,” say his sons, but whose popularity is slipping. As a father, he is as insecure and dithering as a pater out of Jane Austen.

The grandchildren, for all their sarcastic chafing under Hetta and Sabine’s repression, are brow-beaten, self-conscious and ashamed for being fed and clothed. As for the two grand-daughters in their middle 20s, Frances aka France is a budding writer like her father and Clare is defeated, depressed, and eager to grasp any straws that will keep her sanity afloat and get her out of the house. In their late teens and getting ready for college, the two grand-sons are Chilton and Victor, loquacious, witty and theatrical, though Chilton rides Victor with no mercy. The despots have forced youth into their own constricted world within the already claustrophobic family Ponsonby. The despots then blame and shame youth for being narrow and inept in the outside world.

The twelve-year-old grand-daughter Muriel, given life at the expense of her mother’s death, has never had a chance to be loved in such a loveless family. Her brothers and sisters jeer at her for being a “backward child.” Witnessing her grandma and aunt using words to cow and hector the vulnerable, Muriel knows the lie of “sticks and stones …..” Though uneducated, Muriel has developed the ability to identify who holds power in the family. So she sees the soundness in the other old saw, "man is a wolf to man."

To my mind, there is no other word but wicked for the mindless and brutal snuffing of innocence. Like illicit sexual attraction and hanky-panky of various stripes, wickedness in ICB’s novels just happens as an everyday occurrence. The Ponsonbys, shut in on themselves for a long time, have become, in Clare’s word, “sordid.” They don’t know or care there are other people around to witness their fighting. Keeping up appearances has become less essential because anxiety about change is taking up more room in their heads.  With Sabine’s aging and inevitable decline, power relations become unclear and with greater uncertainly for what the future holds comes greater anxiety.

The stress is expressed in uncomfortable situations with friends like the brother-sister twins the Macrons and the Seymours, who comment on the action like a Greek chorus. “So Alfred [the Macron’s nephew] is a tutor now,” said Miss Marcon to her brother Stephen “and people will get the best out of him. I wonder what that will be. People are always at their worst with their families, so we can’t have any idea.” The climax of this novel is one of the most awkward dinner parties ever, one of the worst since Titus Andronicus tricked Tamora into eating that unfortunate pie.

To tell her over-the-top stories of family life, ICB developed a style of focus and flexibility that was totally her own. All that is not necessary is eliminated. No descriptions of furniture or decorations. Very little business related to moving in and out of rooms and carriages. Time of the year, weather  – about zilch. Minimum of telling about appearance or body language. Like Miss Austen, ICB dearly loves springing surprises on the reader, usually with bleakly comic results. ICB expects the reader to just keep up. Focus. Read it twice, thrice.

ICB’s novels are almost entirely in dialogue, with ordinary vocabulary woven in elaborate grammar. She developed a daring technique in which there is the main conversation (often among the powerful) and a muted sub-conversation of comment (usually among the victimized). The despots, of course, know full well that the muffled dialogues are symptoms of discontent and resistance.  ICB captures “blind forces blindly crossing” in a plausible way. Communication fails, with incalculable and destructive results.

Another marker of ICB’s style is she givers her own twist to turns of phrase and proverbs. For instance, she has Charity Marcon observe, “But families can seldom be explained, and they make better gossip without any explanation. To know all is to forgive all, and that would spoil everything.” Shameless gossip Evelyn Seymour explains to Charity the degree of his and his father’s curiosity: “Our curiosity is neither morbid nor ordinary. It is the kind known as devouring.” ICB also parodies the Victorian fondness for funny names: we have a vicar named Dr. Chaucer, a governess Miss Bunyan, and one of the Seymours is Jane, though she is not a wife and not near perfect, which make her a lot of fun.

ICB uses the familiar accessories that we hardcore readers have enjoyed in Trollope and Dickens and Collins – family strife in the country house, plot-driving births marriages deaths, manipulative wills – but throws in sensational elements that curl this reader’s snowy locks. And poker-faced ICB puts our over-civilized people, with the snorting savage licking their chops lurking not far below the surface, in situations that bring out their real selves.

It’s dreadful, funny, amazing.

Reviews of novels by ICB

·         Pastors and Masters (1925)

·         Brothers and Sisters (1929)

·         Men and Wives (1931)

·         More Women than Men (1933)

·         A House and Its Head (1935)

 

A Nonfictional Unhappy Family

Note: I read this memoir because my reading in 2021 has been filled novels about unhappy families, such as Howards End by E.F. Forster, Murder Once Being Done by Ruth Rendell, The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon, The Worm of Death by Nicholas Blake, The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, and Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family by William Makepeace Thackeray and way too many stories starring family tyrants by Ivy Compton-Burnett. I just had a yen to read about a non-fictional dysfunctional family. 

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man - Mary L. Trump

Mary L. Trump is a clinical psychologist and niece of the former president of the United States (hereafter, Former). She is the daughter of Fred, Former's older brother, a figure who always lived in the baleful shadow of his father, Fred Senior. Fred Sr calls to mind a monster in the Dickens manner, like Mr. Murdstone. We are totally persuaded that this cold, insensitive, cruel and stingy man, full of self-importance and no humor or imagination, could establish and maintain an emotionally dysfunctional family climate all his life. The only values ​​he honored were money and endless attention to work. For lots of people, their self-worth hinges on the money they make and the assets they hold and for Fred Sr, it seems as if monetary value merged with human value.  

Fred Sr thought being a commercial pilot for TWA was the same as being a bus driver in the sky. Feeling betrayed that his oldest son Fred turned his back on the family business, Fred Sr did his best to blight Fred’s existence, to the point that ridden by alcohol Fred had to give up a fine career as a pilot to return with his tail between his legs to the family business.

Former, on the other hand, was the apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. The author makes the argument that Fred Sr was a sociopath and this rubbed off on Former, who saw being a “killer” would win his father’s love and approval or at least shield him from his father’s blaming and shaming. Former demonstrated as much ambition and showmanship as to fill the void where a sense of fairness, courage, and respect for people should have been. There are such people who have nothing – zilch – nada - where a sense of right and wrong exists in most people. Such people with no conscience are sociopaths.

The author was a witness to all this, and her contempt for Former her uncle and for her paternal side in general fuels this memoir of her family. The tipping point for her in deciding to write the book, too, was the treatment of children and families at the southern border during Former’s regime. Anyway, the book is in fact more about Fred Sr and the damage he did to his wife and kids than about Former. If she sounds angry at times, one forgives it since her father was ruined by Fred Sr’s mindless brutality and part of Fred Sr’s legacy was denied to her and her brother. But because she is a psychologist, I think her suppositions rang true on what makes her father’s side of the family tick.

Anyway, I have the same horrified if mild interest in Former as anybody else interested in the pathology behind tyrants, I guess. I’ve found that when I think about Former, I catch myself to respond to my own anger and disgust and then I wish and pray, “May you be happy, Former. Because maybe if you are happy, you will be content in retirement and leave us alone in 2024.”

Note: I moderate comments to this blog and will delete hateful shit. Happily.

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 30

 

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the Hell of it.

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1961 mystery begins with a teasing cat and mouse game where it’s unclear who’s trying to get away with what. So the reader who’s reading too fast may be completely puzzled by the unexpected plot twists.

The events start with investment guru Carter Gilman having breakfast with his daughter Muriel. He still feels a little hungry and asks his daughter to prepare another helping of the old-fashioned bacon and eggs and buttered toast American breakfast that caused widow makers to take guys in their early sixties to their eternal rewards.

When dutiful daughter Muriel returns from the kitchen, she finds her father has vanished. The daughter begins a search and eventually finds a pool of blood, a broken chair, and $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills scattered around pop’s workshop. In father’s briefcase, she finds a note saying to contact attorney Perry Mason if something unexpected happens.

Muriel calculates things are crazy enough to follow the instructions and leaves a message with Perry Mason’s office. Before Perry makes a call back, secretary and office manager Della Street announces that, among other things, Edward Gilman set aside time the day before to come in a few hours to discuss confidential matters.

A person pretending to be Edward Gilman eventually arrives at the meeting against all expectations, and then odd stuff starts to happen. Perry Mason gets a threatening call and a strange assignment. Eventually, what Shemp Howard would call a corpus is found and the puzzle is ready for Perry Mason to figure out.

I’m not partial to late career Mason novels. However, this is a good story a story involving dodgy private eyes, blackmail, and murder.

Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #21

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic Play: I seem to remember from a lecture in a Wes Civ course that in Aeschylus’ time the authorities wanted the citizenry to attend plays so that they could have discussions about them, feel more connection with each other, and thus become better citizens. Glad I read this, besides Buckley’s high-flown language that reminded me of Marlowe, it had a lot of ideas for such a short play.

Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus

Fire is a mysterious force that has always attracted and repelled humankind since we realized we were an animal apart from the other animals. It’s understandable, then, that fire is a vivid metaphor for reason, that divine spark of a gift that not only helps us become virtuous (if we choose) but intelligent and creative enough to advance in the arts and sciences.

Fire warms but it also consumes. It never stays still. It can be put out but it flares up. Again, it’s natural that the gods would not want humans to possess fire or reason. Reason says change is inevitable, an awful notion to conservative gods that want to maintain the established order, that desire human beings not to be akin to gods but to stay in caves, hunting, gathering, living lives nasty, brutish, and short.

Prometheus, though, gives the gift of fire/reason to human beings. So Prometheus will be punished by Zeus for bestowing this gift because what’s true nowadays was true in the ancient days: no good deed goes unpunished. Nothing is completely good or completely bad. There’s always upside mixed in with downside, risks blended with benefits. Prometheus gave people fire, taught them crafts and arts and technology, for which he was severely punished by Zeus, who perhaps thought humans would be happier without fire, sadder and more discontented with the knowledge of good and evil and shame and pride, more fearful due to the certainty that we’re all going to die someday.

Aeschylus' Prometheus is one pissed off, proud and vengeful hero. He sacrifices himself for humankind and takes responsibility for his own actions, which he considers just, in contravention of the laws of Zeus, CEO of the gods. In fact, Prometheus claims to have seen the future and announces that Zeus will lose his power. Armed with knowledge and technology, humans beings will see a day when they will no longer need the gods or have to fear them.

Zeus has always seemed to me such a sexual predator (like Orange) that it seems a more interesting take that Aeschylus paints him as a tyrant (like Orange): sullen, stupid, blundering, surrounded by toadies too dumb to give useful advice, cynically telling people this is just the way things are, you’ve got to go along to get along, you have to bend to necessity and you’re foolish if you don’t. Aeschylus has Zeus’ minions respond to Prometheus' fate in the typical beastly ways chuds respond to their strong-man’s every foul decision. Vulcan is saddened by it, but dutifully carries out Zeus’ sentence to fetter Prometheus to the rock. Mercury just delivers messages as he’s told to, since assuming that whatever authority does is right is a lot easier than thinking. The character Power likes hurting people, as happy as a Capitol Stormer to have his violence fomented and blessed by a leader.

I don’t know if Aeschylus is making the claim that resisting authority and persistently putting a thumb in the eye of conservatism is the way we make progress. Nor do I know if Aeschylus is claiming that the abuse of power is inevitable no matter who wields it or even if it is, victimization at the hands of power is an inescapable fact of life. All I know is that I get the feeling that there is no solution to the problem that power seems to make gods – and people, not matter how well-intentioned – overconfident, inattentive, and lack judgement. 

And tyrannical, never forget tyrannical.

And We Thought Henry was the Odd One

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death - Deborah Blum

Many people, I think, have had a mysterious experience. In grad school in 1993 I lived in an apartment in which, even when alone, I had the uneasy feeling someone else were there. Though the apartment complex in a semi-suburb was on a busy high-speed road, I also had the uncanny feeling I was in a remote place, far away from other people. I saw shadows where shadows were impossible. My wife had strange dreams in which she felt she was up near the ceiling, being dragged out of the apartment.

Afraid of being thought crazy by American friends, I described these odd doings to fellow student Wen-ying from Taipei. She said matter-of-factly, “That apartment has a spirit.” After I got the job that sent me to Latvia, I had to break the lease. Expecting to pay a penalty, I told the manager of the complex I had to leave and was surprised when she said, “Oh, that apartment. No charge.”

I’m a rational guy. Show me. I don’t like mysteries in real life. I think alternatives to medicine, cryptozoology, ETs and UFOs, ESP and remote viewing, shadow people, psychic predictions, crop circles, black-eyed children and New Age woo are frauds, hoaxes, and urban legends. But a piece of the paranormal – spirits, that is – I have had an experience I can’t explain.

So I have a little sympathy with the scientists, in the late 19^th century, thought that things supernatural - mediums, hypnotists, and diviners who used wands of hazel wood to find water – could perhaps be studied scientifically to arrive at a rational explanation for baffling phenomena. After all, at that time new discoveries and theories in the fields of geology and biology had rocked the ways of understanding the world and humankind’s place in it among thinking people.

Like a rigorous scholar should, Blum and her assistants did deep research in the primary sources of correspondence and publications of the scientists who tried to collect and evaluate data in order to develop theories that could rationally explain phenomena such as spiritualism. Happily, she focusses on our hero William James, but she provides much curious information about his English colleagues, such as William Crookes, William Barrett, Edward Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Fred Myers, Henry Sidgwick, James Hyslop and others.

Blum also tells the story of mediums the American Leonora Piper and the Neapolitan Eusapia Palladino. The two women could not have been more different. Piper was modest and quiet while Palladino was, well, quite the diva. Blum details the abusive treatment - like hog-tying them -  meted out to the women to ensure they did not cheat. This reminds us that the system that protects the rights and welfare of human subjects in research we have now did not spring out of a laudable history in which researchers treated subjects with dignity and respect.

Blum is impartial when she relates not only how the researchers were troubled at not being able to develop theories to explain the phenomena they were witnessing but also the rage that the scientific community felt that the research was being conducted at all. Skeptics thought the research would lead the general public to believe there really was something to paranormal. Blum captures these various conflicts in her clear narration.

Worth reading for readers into cultural history and light intellectual history.

John Putnam Thatcher #20

Something in the Air - Emma Lathen

This 1988 mystery is the 20th appearance of the Wall Street banker, John Putnam Thatcher. His bank, the Sloan Guaranty Trust, has a 30% interest in Sparrow Flyways, a ‘no frills’ carrier that has had great success as a result of the deregulation of the airlines in the late 1970s. Steady growth and profit-earning have buoyed the stocks of the employees who own about 30% of the company.

The success of the company has made a media darling out of its charismatic CEO Mitchell Scovil, a born salesman. Accordingly, he has fallen into patterns of thought that sometimes strike leaders who have achieved much in only a little time. He has convinced himself that a flourishing Sparrow Flyways is the result of his entrepreneurial genius, with only slight contributions from the co-founders, legions of subordinates, and plain dumb luck. Lacking self-awareness, he has become more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, most dangerously for himself and others, less skillful at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

Mitchell Scovil is developing a grandiose plan to make the regional airline go national. Many employees, nervously watching the established competition and their stocks, are against expansion. After a loud meeting, the spokesman of the workers is murdered at Logan airport. The cops focus on Scovil. And our hero John Putnam Thatcher, in his unassuming way, figures out the real culprit.

Besides the excellence characterization of clueless leadership, Lathen features two strong female characters. Eleanor Gough has been quietly resourceful and proficient at many tasks since the inception of the airline. But she gradually realizes that she must get Scovil to see the risks of expansion. Unlike Scovil, she feels responsibility for the employees and their livelihood. She feels it unjust that though Scovil is too willing to gamble with risks, the employees would be the ones to suffer most if expansion was a bust. With her sense of duty, she becomes more liable to throw her weight around. During an interview with Thatcher: “For the first time in his life, he realized that an expression of ladylike attentiveness is the feminine equivalent of a poker face.”

The other interesting female character is auditor Phoebe Fournier. She’s young and intelligent with figures, but not good at reading people. She sees other people too much as mere means to her ends, not living breathing people with lives just as vivid and real to them as her life is to Phoebe. Lathen has fun putting Phoebe through hoops on her long winding road to the realization that she’s not the smartest, most important person in every room. Lathen usually has a set piece that involves public chaos; to get Scovil’s attention Phoebe sets up an industrial action that is a hilarious disaster.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Latsis (economic analyst) and Martha Hennissart (attorney). Both knew the worlds of business and the federal government, so they felt at home the constantly changing business environment and the variety of personalities to be found in the public and private sectors. As old-school feminists, they have acerbic fun satirizing men who know full well and deplore that other business executives are kept afloat by their secretaries but never in a million years would think that the secretaries be paid commensurate to the service they deliver to the company.