Getting Docs on Track

How Doctors Think – Jerome Groopman

During daily rounds, the author, an oncologist and hematologist, became concerned that members of his medical staff were not thinking deeply or broadly, running to their mobile to consult decision trees and lists of symptoms. Like an old guy would, he first thought that These Kids Today weren’t up to the high diagnostic skills levels of The Days of the Giants, when he was an intern. But being a smart guy, he got over that knee-jerk nostalgia and started looking at the research on different ways of thinking among doctors.

Linear thinking is when step by step we go through data and draw a conclusion. This is not the method in medicine. Research among physicians indicate they think while they do. From their first step into an exam room, doctors blend observations of the patient, the history, the risk factors, and the exam. Their minds draw a conclusion from all this data. Doctors create a pattern in their mind and superimpose on the individual patient the template of a typical case of whatever disease they think they are encountering. This process comes up with the correct diagnosis in 80% of cases.

This means in 10 to 20% of cases diagnoses are delayed or incorrect. A 2023 study concluded because of diagnostic errors, total serious harms annually in the USA add up to about 795,000 people permanently disabled or dead in a year.

The vast majority of medical errors are thinking errors. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that heuristics – using shortcuts or rules of thumb as decision strategies – are a major source of error.

Anchoring is when the human brain anchors itself on the first bit of data it meets. This could be related to our human nature, hardwired into us from eons ago: sense movement in bush, assume snake not sparrow, run, escape. In a modern hospital far from the savannah, however, doctors fixate on certain features of the patient’s presentation too early in the workup.

Availability is another source of error. It is a bias that relies on what immediately comes to mind to make quick decisions and hasty judgements. For instance, the doctor sees 12 cases of flu in two days and figures the 13^th person he sees with the same symptoms is the flu. But really it is a something less frequent, for example aspirin toxicity which has similar symptoms to flu.

Attribution. Our culture teaches us stereotypes as a short-cut to sizing people up. Unshaven dude in the ER shows up in smelly clothes, griping his belly has swollen up, and claims he has only one drink a day. The intern can’t believe this old rummy has only one drink a day. But the attending says, Check for Wilson’s disease. And that is what it is. And the family confirms he has only one drink a day.

Confirmation bias is when we selectively gather and interpret information to conform with our beliefs. A type of confirmation bias in medical settings is called diagnostic momentum, the tendency of a diagnosis to be accepted and passed on, with little or no examination of the underlying evidence for its validity. 

How then do we answer, “When you hear the hoofbeats, it’s horses, not zebras?” Patients should ask doctors open-ended questions, such as “What else could explain the cause of my problem,” or “What does not fit the initial diagnosis,” or “What might be another problem in addition to this symptom.” Help the doctor think outside the box and out of the course of day to day routine.

The Ides of Perry Mason 67

Note: Epictetus, Seneca, and Aurelius analyzed fictional characters like Medea and Achilles from the Stoic point of view. So this month I apply the Stoic mindset to the crooked thinking of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966).  Perry Mason quoted Justice Learned Hand about “faith in the eventual supremacy of reason.” 

The Case of the Wintry Wife (Season 4, Episode 17, 1961)

Laura’s Impressions: Tyrant, thy name is Laura. Domestic despot Laura domineers over her family not only by keeping a tight fist on the purse strings but also by playing up her disability. Laura blackmails her accountant Roger into blowing up her husband Walter’s workshop. The sabotage would destroy Walter’s invention whose success would enable him to become financially independent and thus get shut of Laura and marry his lady love Phyllis. Laura’s diabolical scheme will also blow poor Phyllis to kingdom come.

My Stoickal Take: First, we had better get off our high horse about Laura the Terrible. How can we indict tyrants, says Musonius Rufus, when we are worse than they are? We have the same impulses but not the same opportunity to indulge our worst will to dominate and control other people. 

Second, recall Socrates saying somewhere that the tyrant is the most miserable of specimens. Sullen over being feared, grumpy over being hated, ever suspicious of plot and conspiracy, always keeping an ear cocked for grumbling in the ranks. How unhappy it must be to know everybody will exhale with relief upon one’s death and exchange high fives in the parking lot of the funeral parlor! 

Third, as for Laura’s vassals: they choose to be tyrannized. They all had the wherewithal to support themselves with jobs and get out from under Laura’s yoke. They could have voted with their feet a long time ago. 

Frances Pettigrew #3

The Wind Blows Death - Cyril Hare

Amateur sleuth Frances Pettigrew appeared in five of Cyril Hare’s mysteries, sometimes with Inspector Mallet, sometimes by himself.  Pettigrew is a remarkable character in that he explicitly rejects seeing murder as a parlor game. Such is his desire “to leave the business of detection to my betters” that he never offers help to the investigation, but always waits to be asked. Or dragged in.

In this 1949 mystery, Pettigrew is pressured by Chief Constable MacWillams to assist without the knowledge of Inspector Trimble of the City Division of the Markshire County Constabulary. A greenhorn, Trimble is in over his head as he runs the investigation of the strangulation of a visiting professional violinist who was hired to play a solo with the Markhampton County Orchestral Society. Since Pettigrew’s wife plays the fiddle with other enthusiastic amateurs, Pettigrew, who practices at the bar and has an unfounded reputation as a practical man, has been deputized to be the society’s treasurer.

 Cyril Hare was only 57 when he died, so the legacy is limited – nine novels and a handful of short stories. Hare’s mysteries are skillfully written, with sophisticated yet amiable humor, and often using a twist in the law in his reveals.

 This novel, whose UK title is When the Wind Blows, was considered by critics Barzun and Taylor to be “a masterpiece by any standards” on their classics of crime list.

Reading Those Classics #21

English Mystery Classic with a Series Character. This 1927 tale of espionage and international intrigue is a far cry from the rest of her work, which is often set in quaint villages and features the shocking motives and dark doings of seemingly normal people. I don’t get readers who say Christie is a cozy writer. In the last one I read of hers, Hallowe’en Party, she caused two children to be knocked off, both pretty gruesomely.

The Big Four – Agatha Christie

In the fifth outing of series hero Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective takes on an international quartet of super-crooks who are bent on ruling the world. The mastermind is sinister Li Chang Yen, doing the yellow peril schtick that pulp writers were so fond of in the 1920s. Perhaps driven off the rails by loneliness at losing her scientist husband, Madame Olivier is building on his work in advanced physics and chemistry in order to build a death ray in aid of Li’s fiendish plans for world take-over. Bankrolling their awful projects is American millionaire, Mr. Ryland, a Soap King whose first name is Abe, in the manner of the anti-Semitism that we also expect in the golden age of the pulps. The fourth member of the gang, an Englishman, is The Destroyer, a hitman who is – you guessed it in one, pulp fans –  a master of disguise.

And from what fortress will the gang rule the world? From a stronghold, dug in the side of a mountain in the Dolomite Alps in northeastern Italy. One marvels at Christie’s prescience, her ability to anticipate Sixties stand-bys of super-genius villains, wielding ultra-weapons, bent on world domination, from remote mountain fastnesses. It is inconceivable, mon ami, that Ian Fleming never read Agatha Christie. At least, Li Chang Yen does not wear an eyepatch like Emilio Largo in Thunderball. Pal Abe doesn’t plague a cat like Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. The Destroyer doesn’t destroy people with his bowler like Oddjob in Goldfinger. Nor does Madame Olivier squeeze dudes to death between her thighs like Xenia Onatopp in Golden Eye.

So, thank your lucky stars.

I can understand why reader-reviewers all over the interwebs regard this one with surprise and disappointment. The narrative seems cobbled together, with short stories stitched together less than seamlessly. And in the last quarter or so, it seems as if Poirot is lying doggo, while in his staunch loyalty Hastings is killing time in London, confident that it’ll be fine leaving his wife Dulcie Duveen, the self-styled ‘Cinderella,’ all alone for a year to run the ranch back in the Argentine.

I thought Christie connects set pieces well enough to make them fit into the story, even if the basting threads are showing rather. Dapper Poirot is still maddeningly conceited and Hastings brave and endearingly clueless. When Hastings observes that some frozen lamb (an important clue) comes from Kiwiland, Poirot says, “He knows everything – but everything. How do they say – Enquire Within Upon Everything. That is my friend Hastings.” “Enquire Within Upon Everything” was one-volume encyclopedia for domestic life, first published in 1856, and annually updated and reissued up to 1990s.

    ‘I suppose the Big Four couldn’t have had some diabolical contrivance concealed in the ceiling – something which descended automatically and cut the old man’s throat and was afterwards drawn up again?’

    ‘Like Jacob’s ladder? I know, Hastings, that you have an imagination of the most fertile – but I implore of you to keep it within bounds.’

Unlike Christie’s incomprehensible Postern of Fate, I didn’t just bail out. I actually finished this, enjoying the goofy incidents and enjoying the vein of humor in Poirot and Hastings’ conversations. Pulpy spy thriller was not really the artist’s forte but with her plain style, copious dialogue, steady action, and surprising twists, Christie was talented enough to entertain even when not putting her strengths to the test.

Albert Campion #19

Cargo of Eagles – Margery Allingham

Though finished by her husband after Allingham passed in 1966, the last Albert Campion mystery shows no falling off of powers.

Allingham observed changing times, but she loved the old England of out-of-the-way places with insular cultures as portrayed in her 1948 mystery More Work for the Undertaker. In this one she includes two youth gangs, the Mods and the Rockers. They were past their 15 minutes of fame by 1965, but their being out of place is balanced by the excellent portraits of the secretive inhabitants of Saltey and its long history of smuggling.

PI Campion has been asked by the Yard to look into a killing that may or may not be linked to the release of a prisoner. The ex-inmate may know the whereabouts of stuff of great interest to the government. The murder victim left her house to a woman doctor who was an outsider to Saltey. The old whodunit stand-by of poison pen letters adds to familiarity.

The wrap-up is based on notes that Alingham had made until she could not write anymore. I thought the ending worked quite well and could not identify where another author had to take the reins.

Recommended especially to readers who put Allingham in their Top 5 of Fave Mystery Writers.

Rosie the Epicurean

Note: I think his didactic use of ethics-lite is why Maugham has been popular with middle-brow readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he's giving implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy people be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can. 

Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham 

I looked at Rosie now, with angry, hurt, resentful eyes; she smiled at me, and I wish I knew how to describe the sweet kindliness of her beautiful smile; her voice was exquisitely gentle. 

‘Oh, my dear, why d’you bother your head about any others? What harm does it do to you? Don’t I give you a good time! Aren’t you happy when you’re with me?’

‘Awfully.’

‘Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years, and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.’

She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.

‘You must take me as I am, you know.’ she whispered.

‘All right,’ I said.

The narrator Willie is a young man. So in his inexperience he is angry, hurt, and resentful that Rosie is having sex with other men. She simply likes luxury, going out, good food, good sex.  In the conceit of youth, he's mortified that beautiful Rosie is sleeping with ugly old coots. Willie feels insecure and inadequate that he might be compared to richer, better-looking, more powerful men. Willie has yet to con that the best sex ever will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover, body and soul, forever and always.

Pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons with his irrational jealousy. She urges him to not give any thought to her sexing with other men since he’s just making himself miserable by obsessing about her other affairs. He himself undermines the contentment he can get in the here and now by focusing on what is utterly out of his sphere. He can’t control anybody’s feelings, thoughts, or actions but his own so he had better not give them a second thought. What’s is up to him is the stance that he takes toward everything, what is not up to him is better ignored.

Her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats. He would do well to live in the moment and just enjoy the time he spends with her, clothed and not. 

Take the long view. Sooner than a hundred years from now, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be yesterday's quaint tantrums (waltzing? D&D? wilding? QAnon?). Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and unhappy and discontented by fretting and stewing about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, Rosie advises Willie, take life as it really is. The eager acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire you and set you free. 

Maugham continues to be read, I think, because lots of hardcore readers in 2025 still think about the questions life asks and feel the need to, or simply like to, be reminded of things they already know. 

European Reading Challenge #17

I read this for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Embers - Sándor Márai

A proud people, tense, guilty and melancholy. But gifted, romantic and passionate. No, not the Poles. Not this time, anyway. Today we are talking about the Hungarians.

Sándor Márai’s Embers (A Gyertyák Csonkig Égnek, translated by Carol Brown Janeway), released in Hungary in 1942, was published by Vintage to wide critical and popular acclaim in 2001. The main characters are two old friends meeting for the first time in 41 years for a long-delayed showdown. Against reader expectations, the topic of their discussion only partially involves betrayal with a woman. The main subject is male friendships and its obligations.

The secondary subject is old age and in its train the inevitable passing of old values and once burning passions. On one hand, now that I am doing the “middle age in the rear view mirror” thing myself, I’m sadly certain that this theatrical, musty seriousness about getting old is simply impossible for me to take seriously. Think Bergman's ponderous movies like the pompous Seventh Seal. On the other hand even though a shallow American, I didn't feel the world created by the book was fake. There really must be people who live with so much vanity disguised as pride, so much barely concealed conceit about fluff. It must be horrible to live like this, blind and deaf to their own miseries.

This translation is extremely readable. The language is plain without being in the manner of a mock epic. For all the remembering and telling, instead of showing, it is quite the page turner. Count on a Hungarian writer to explore existential themes and the distinction between truth and facts, as if prescient of the awful experience of Hungary in WWII.

This novel would interest people into Hungary, the values of Habsburg empire, or looking to widen their literary horizons.

Reading Those Classics #20

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground 2. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, The Wilderness, The Middle Ground, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the second half of the fifth section, featuring characters managing the middle ground, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Artist at Home. In this story Faulkner examines artistic inspiration. A fiction writer and his wife have to take in a poet who may have some kind of personality disorder due to his rough childhood. An affair ensues. And out of the painful affair the fiction writer gets a story and the poet gets a poem. Sometimes that’s just how artists roll, I guess.

The Brooch. A southern gothic meets noir story in which a repressed male like Horace Benbow is tormented by a mother with rigid standards. Unusually, Faulkner gets explicitly intertextual, making reference to Hudson’s Green Mansions. The main character Howard Boyd reads that novel obsessively and has a schoolboy’s image of the doomed Rima: “All the separate and fragmentary beauty and melody and graceful motion found scattered throughout nature were concentrated and harmoniously combined in her. How various, how luminous, how divine she was!”

Grandmother Millard. Faulkner uses history as people remember it and as artist Faulkner imagines it, not as memoirists and historians wrote it down. For example, in this story Gen. Forrest is not the brute of historical truth but a down-home gentlemen with respect to the ladies. And the titular lady is a hoot. Kitchen clock in hand, Miss Rosa Millard times the family members and slaves when they do a drill burying the family silver, which amuses to no end her son-in-law Col. John Sartoris, who is fighting under Forrest. The comic story of southern romanticism is told by Bayard Sartoris, who narrated the intense stories in The Unvanquished, though chronologically this not intense story happens before those collected in that book. No fewer than eight magazines rejected this funny story of southern indomitability in the shadow of defeat. Maybe it just didn’t sit well in early 1942, just after the US entered WWII, when just the thought of the word ‘defeat’ probably made people feel sick.

Golden Land. Faulkner lived in Southern California in the Thirties. Although he didn’t get a novel out of it like Huxley or Hughes, he did get this short story. It is about a man who escaped hard-scrabble Nebraska and made a pile in real estate in Los Angeles. Only to end up a drinker, an adulterer, an abuser of his wife and kids, and a jailkeeper of his mother. The middle ground here is about the man and his mother suspended between Nebraska roots and substantial values and the culture of Hollywood which offers nothing worth enduring much less prevailing over, not even a harsh winter.

There Was a Queen. Aunt Jenny of Flags in theDust stars as the title character. She objects to the method her great-great-niece Narcissa uses to obtain the obscene letters sent to and stolen from her by Byron Snopes in Flags. A queen, however, must age and weaken, and her standards pass from the scene. This somber examination of the transience of generations is partly seen through the eyes of half-black and half-white Elnora who is loyal to Sartoris family but thinks Narcissa an upstart. Bayard and Narcissa’s son Benbow is the last Sartoris.

Mountain Victory. A disabled Confederate officer and his black companion make their way home to Mississippi after the surrender. They end up having to stay in the barn of a Tennessee mountain family. The elder son is a Union veteran with PTSD but the younger son and the daughter want to get the hell out of their dysfunctional family by accompanying the disabled officer back to his plantation. In fact, the officer’s curious backstory is that he is a descendant of the wily Indian chief who starred in Lo!. This tension-filled story is one of the longest in the collection with themes of defeat and the paradoxes of victory, the loss and recovery of the ability to feel fear, and the deep dysfunctions of unhappy families that are too much alone with each other.

Today is Labor Thanksgiving Day

勤労感謝の日 Kinrō Kansha no Hi. This Japanese holiday was established in 1948 as an occasion for praising labor and celebrating production. Prior to the establishment of this holiday, November 23 was celebrated as an imperial harvest festival called Niiname-sai (新嘗祭). Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender and Work in Japanese Companies - Yuko Ogasawara.

In large Japanese corporations, female clerical workers, known as OLs (office ladies), perform tasks such as copying, data entry, and serving tea. They are not part of the lifetime employment system and receive no job training, limiting their chances for promotion.

Ogasawara, in her PhD research, worked as an OL in a Tokyo bank, using participant observation and interviews with bankers, their wives, and OLs. She highlights the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, but his 1998 ethnography also argues that OLs resist male authority, both covertly and overtly. 

Men depend on OLs for clerical support, and their performance appraisals are influenced by their ability to manage OLs without conflict. OLs can hinder men’s productivity and career advancement if not treated well.

OLs use strategies like gossip, refusal to work, and gift-giving to manipulate their work environment. Valentine’s Day chocolates, for example, signal how well men meet OL expectations. 

The weak point of the book is the absence of any discussion of sexual harassment. I suppose we could conclude that it didn't exist in that particular bank and so a discussion was beyond the scope of the book. But it still would have been interesting if the interviewees had been asked about this phenomenon.

Overall, though by now the late Nineties is a long time ago, I think this book is worth reading if a reader is interested in gender relations, women's studies, or organizational behavior in Japan. The strong points of this book are it gives a look into a world not studied much before and challenges stereotypes of the exploited powerless OL’s. 

Though a PhD dissertation, it is written clearly with a minimum of the jargon of anthropologists, sociologists or management scientists (despite the title there is, mercifully, little talk of gender). The book supplies many real-life examples to support her assertions. 

Anybody interested in Japanese office life, organizational behavior or the resistance of oppressed groups should get much out of this book.

European Reading Challenge #16

I read this for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Beatrice and Her Son - Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was a doctor, playwright, novelist and short story writer in fin de siècle Vienna. He was Jewish so the Nazi regime pulped and burned his books, making them disappear from most of the German-speaking world. Though more scholars and readers have begun to pay attention in the last 20 years, he is probably best-known as the author of Traumnovelle (Dream Story) which served as the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s last movie.

Schnitzler’s short stories deal with people in bourgeois society, their marriages and adulteries, and the origins of sexual temptations. It was a society obsessed with sex but at the same time compelled to keep up appearances. In his stories, women consummate their desires, usually with worthless males, and pay heavy prices for pleasure outside of marriage.

In the short novel Beatrice and Her Son, Beatrice Heinold is the young widow of famous actor. Five years after his death, she is feeling the sap rise. The times and culture being what they were about the unacceptability of women’s sexuality, she feels like she is missing out on life. She is taking long, lazy summer vacation at a small lake village with her 17-year-old son Hugo. Every male she has contact with at the resort stokes her sexual fantasies.

She and her son are socializing with the bourgeoisie, highly educated, smooth and corrupt. So corrupt that Beatrice fears that a former actress has sexual designs on her teenage son. She asks the actress to desist, but realizes her efforts are futile, the boy is exploring his sexuality and nothing can be done about it. She learns that her dead husband was a serial cheat and in reaction she herself boldly -- takes a mad step.  A reader who’s kept their eyes open will rightly imagine that Beatrice's transgression will not go unpunished.

A fine story: convincing, comprehensible use of stream of consciousness, vivid word landscapes of Central Europe in the summertime. This novella was originally published in 1913 and immediately caused some critics to call for a ban.

The Ides of Perry Mason 66

Note: On the 15th of every month we publish something to do with Erle Stanley Gardner's contribution to mystery fiction. Below are reviews of the memorable episodes from the third season of the Perry Mason TV series that ran from 1957 to 1966, in 271 installments. Granted, the noir theme of "innocents facing impending doom courtesy of a hostile universe" was what PM was all about, but the third was to be the last season in which noir aesthetics were conspicuous.

The Best of Season 3 (1959-60)

The Case of the Spurious Sister (October 3, 1959). The first show of the season teems with noir tropes. Doubling, for instance. Peggy "The Big Sleep" Knudsen shines in brittle blonde glory as a blackjack zombie and so does her look-alike Marion Marshall, her partner in the old sister act of the title. In a lapse of judgement typical of noir protagonists, the dimbulb husband Karl Weber tampers with evidence in a big way, which naturally makes innocent him look guilty as hell. Helen and Walter Sprague are the honest moths caught in a gale of forces beyond their control, another perennial noir element. The real star is, however, the 1959 Edsel Corsair 4-Door Hard Top.

The Case of the Watery Witness (October 10, 1959). Disbelieving the chick that comes home to roost, a has-been movie actress cruelly rejects a young wife who claims that she is the star's thrown-away daughter. In her early fifties, Faye Wray still looks regal and imperious as the washed-up star with delusions of fame and entitlement. Douglas Dick plays his patented no-good, this time a blackmailing private eye. John Bryant for once plays a nice if designing guy though his niceness is undermined by his riverboat gambler looks.  Malcolm Atterbury plays the loyal agent protecting the has-been, bringing to the role a restrained pathos not often seen on the boob tube. Veteran of the stage Kathryn Card plays a housekeeper who pops the classic question, "Do you know how tell when someone is dead." We are treated to two Edsels, a 1959 Edsel Corsair 2-Door Convertible and a 1959 Edsel Corsair 2-Door Hard Top.

The Case of the Wayward Wife (January 23, 1960). As in The Case of the Purple Woman in Season 2, elegant Bethel Leslie plays the nice wife of a louse who ends up murdered and she lands in the dock. Purple Woman is about the dark side of the art business and Wayward Wife is about the literary racket, plagiarism, betrayal, and fraud. In an alluring combo of elf and hellcat, Madlyn Rhue plays a beatnik-lite artist with a troubled soul. All the characters, in the noir tradition, are battling against odds and circumstances, which gives the episode a weird anguished energy. 

The Case of the Wary Wildcatter (February 20, 1960). Gentle and delicate Lori March is lured into one of the most frightening traps of the whole series, with lights going out in a locked hotel room she can't escape and then suspicious cops treating her with savage contempt. Nobody could do the mirthless smile of the femme fatale like Barbara Bain. Harry Jackson puts in one of his two turns as the dastardly scoundrel (in other episodes he was the perp once and richly deserving victim twice). Finally, formidable Douglas Kennedy plays the part he was born to, a hard-hearted casino owner and extortionist.

The Case of the Mythical Monkeys (February 27, 1960). Louise Fletcher’s part as Gladys Doyle gives her a chance to display her acting chops as an independent-minded but naive young person. In the scene where she’s warming her wet self by a fireplace the Alabama in her voice gives her character a mixture of femininity and fight.  Sophisticated and svelte Beverly Garland plays a writer who gets in over her head with menacing and shaved Lawrence Dobkin, an archetypal scary white man in the Sterling Hayden tradition. In an episode that sticks to the original story, the veteran actors all seemed determined to put on a great show.

The Case of the Crying Cherub (April 9, 1060). Carmen Phillips goes all Nyu Yaawk as a feisty artist who produces paintings of cherubs for the market of society matrons with no taste. The cherub paintings are so awful as to be laughable and nauseating at the same time; thank heaven it was the heyday of black and white TV, all the pink would have made us lose our appetites. We meet noir stock characters, the tyrant dowager and her downtrodden son. Also familiar was the sendup of the art racket – the producers and writers often examined the pitfalls for greenhorns and idealists in the business sides of arts and entertainment

The Case of the Ominous Outcast (May 21, 1960). The corrupt small-town setting and theme of the past haunting the present are about as noir as it gets. A bearded stranger shows up in town. The stranger is the spit and image of a man that committed a terrible crime against the town 20 years before. So the peasants go crazy, mistaking him for a fiend from the past bent on dragging them to the searing hell they know they deserve. All the acting is persuasive, especially Margaret Hayes and Denver Pyle. Victim once, defendant twice, perp thrice on PM, Denver Pyle deserves much better than to be remembered as Grampa in The Dukes of Stupid.

Honorable Mention: In The Case of the Frantic Flyer Patricia Barry puts in a fine performance as the woman who’s never scarier than when she’s being coy and kittenish.  For animal lovers, Mason brings a large quadruped into the courtroom in The Case of the Bashful Burro. In The Case of the Madcap Modiste personal and professional conflicts end up in murder, plus a glimpse into what TV celeb journalism used to look like in those bygone days.  George Takei is persuasive in The Case of the Blushing Pearls and it is surprising to see Asian-Americans on TV as early as 1960.

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European Reading Challenge #15

I read this for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-39 - Antony Beevor

The Spanish Civil War was a world war between the two better-known world wars. The Republicans were supported by peasants, workers, anarchists, brigades of international socialists (democratic and not), and the Soviet Union. The Nationalists were the military, the Church, landowners, big business, monarchists, and they were supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. 

Beevor narrates the social and military history clearly, given obstacles. Barriers to comprehension are the large number of Spanish personal and place names; the numerous political parties, their acronyms, and their stances and supporters; and the emotions that churn as the reader works through shock, bitterness, disgust, horror, and passion that reading about this bitter conflict will provoke.

In the late 1980s, the Spanish-language version of this book won the Prize for Non-Fiction awarded by the newspaper La Vanguardia.  Readers with a serious interest in the topic will find this history fascinating.

Reading Those Classics #19

Classic Hard-boiled Mystery. This 1942 novel was his third that starred his series hero Phil Marlowe.

The High Window - Raymond Chandler

LA PI Marlowe is hired by a mean old rich lady to recover a rare coin that was allegedly stolen by her daughter-in-law. Later a killing baffles everybody, since the person of interest didn’t even know the victim. A second killing makes no sense either. Readers like me will be relieved that the plot is not as convoluted as The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely. Rousing action is on the skimpy side. Nor does the private eye do much detecting. Chandler, always experimenting with language and going beyond the conventions of the mystery genre, focusses on setting, character and theme.

Marlowe’s investigations take him to locations ranging from ritzy to sleazy. On the first page, we get a sense of the tasteless consumption of Pasadenans in the boom years during WWII. The client’s mansion is decorated with “a stained glass window about the size of the tennis court.” We are then introduced to the mean old rich lady, with her “pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.” 

No fault of Chandler’s that many writers imitated these dazzling expressions, too often not with as much taste. Of a dubious dealer in old coins: an “elderly party in a dark grey suit with high lapels and too many buttons down the front… Fuzz grew out of his ears, far enough to catch a moth … a Hoover collar which no decent laundry would have allowed on the premises nudged his adam’s apple  and a black string tie poked a small hard knot out of the bottom of the collar, like a mouse getting ready to come out of a mousehole.”

Our hero Phil Marlowe is the only likeable character, although we readers are happy when in the scene we find Merle, a young secretary who has lost faith in herself. Her broken appeal is believable and moves the plot. Tough and resourceful, Marlowe can deal with all types of crook, such as the drunken stick-up artist Hench and the smooth villain Vannier. 

But Marlowe has a profound side too. He relaxes by doing chess problems. When he delivers Merle back to her parents back in Kansas he thinks, “I had a funny feeling … as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”

Chandler brought serious themes to mysteries. In this one he examines the effect of power and coercion of human relations. For instance, his mean old client runs roughshod over her son and secretary for no discernible end beyond she can tyrannize them. Chandler looks at the corrosive effects of infidelity on marriage. Marlowe’s sensitive relationship with the police is more subtly and intelligently handled here than in most mysteries.

European Reading Challenge #14

I read this for the 2024 European Reading Challenge. 

Ashes and Diamonds - Jerzy Andrzejewski

This novel takes place in a Polish factory town over four days, just before and after the end of WWII.

On 8 May 1945 WWII officially ended, but Polish people didn't feel much like celebrating. They were suffering stress from the violence and brutality of six years of Nazi occupation. They were facing the task of re-building not only in terms of construction but also ruined systems of education, social services, and its armed forces. Various political factions fought inter- and intra-party feuds and individuals settled grudges. People felt their beliefs and relationships in chaos.

Andrzejewski later landed in political hot water because of the lack of clear ideological line in this novel. Besides presenting a panorama of that particular place in that particular time, Andrzejewski also deals with moral conflicts and existential dilemmas post-WWII writers all over Europe were treating.

Andrzejewski was Alpha in The Captive Mind. Far be it from me to get between two Polish intellectuals about anything to do with their country, but I don’t get the feeling that the author was working for any party hacks with ideological purposes here. The reader can find unanswered questions and characters are not presented in the black and white terms of socialist realism.

In fact, the road signs they come up to never offer clearly marked forks. Inevitably, we readers are invited to join that exercise “What would you have done?” Ashes or diamonds? We can never be certain of the role we will play nor can we predict what sacrifices we accept or deeds we shirk that may cause us to be remembered.

After the war, how does one get along with neighbors who you’re sure were the ones that denounced you? After the changes induced by the ordeal of war and imprisonment and torture, is it even possible to like and love people you liked and loved before the war? How do you deal with the disgust and frustration of the worst people in the world running your country as if it were a criminal enterprise run by bosses and their henchmen?

A fine choice for those readers that like historical novels or want a view as to what Poland felt like after WWII.  

Stoic Week 2024 3

Note for Day 3 Oct 30 Character & Virtues: This week I will apply the Stoic orientation to the irrational beliefs of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966). The first three seasons of the show often feature illustrations of the everyday vices that undermine happiness and tranquility. Just because we don’t use the old-fashioned words like “envy” and “malice” to describe motives doesn’t mean spite is never a motive in our postmodern-a-go-go age.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 Oct 28 Control | Day 2 Oct 29 Emotions | Day 3 Oct 30 Character & Virtues

The Case of the Nine Dolls (Season 4, Episode 9, 1960)  

Linda’s Impressions: Linda was left waiting at the altar when her best friend and cousin Margaret and her fiancée Clark eloped to Vegas. They had a daughter, Peggy, and they both died young. Linda can’t stand to be in the same room with seven-year-old Peggy because the child is unlucky enough to be the spit and image of her mother. Believing she can’t get over painful memories brought back by the child’s mere appearance, Linda literally hates herself for feeling such intense dislike for the little girl.

Character & Virtues: 

STOP: Being betrayed by two trusted people must have been a bitter blow. 

TIME-OUT: Take deep breaths, call on the four virtues.

OBSERVE: It’s no wonder Linda felt “crushed.”

IDENTIFY STOIC PERSPECTIVE: Linda can change her character by focusing on what she can change and what she can’t change. Her understanding and employment of the four virtues in daily life are under her control.

CHOOSE HOW TO HANDLE SITUATION: 

Fairness: Margaret and Clark had their reasons – they thought they were doing the right thing for them – reasons that we’ll never know. 

Temperance: So there’s little point dwelling on the unknowable and the pain of past betrayal.

Justice/Fairness:  A helpless, hopeless "I-can't-change" attitude not only hurts Linda, but it isn’t being fair to seven-year-old Peggy either. She can’t help looking like her mother and just wants to love and to feel loved, belonging to a family. 

Wisdom: Linda can't change the past but she can learn from it; e.g. “People - they’ll disappoint you so if you want something good get it from yourself.” 

Courage: Linda can step up to the plate now. Linda is the only family Peggy has left now. Linda could perform cousinly duties of sociality and kinship that might assist in getting over the “I can’t stand it” refrain going through her head and blighting her life. 

Stoic Week 2024 2

Note for Day 2 Oct 29 Emotions: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2024. I observed Stoic Week in 2023. I keep a Stoic journal, but I thought it would be entertaining to examine ordinary problems from one Stoic’s point of view, mine. This week I will apply the Stoic orientation to the crooked thinking of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966).

My Blog Posts: Day 1 Oct 28 Control | Day 2 Oct 29 Emotions | Day 3 Oct 30 Character & Virtues

The Case of the Howling Dog (Season 2, Episode 23, 1959)

Thelma’s Impressions: Thelma thought that Clinton was a “very attractive man,” perhaps assuming that his fine appearance indicated Clinton would be a charming lover she could spend time with. Maybe even forever. So, for Clinton’s sake, Thelma did away with two people. But though he helped her bury the victims, he rejected her. He worried that one day she would be afraid of him for having something on her, that one day she would be so afraid that she would speed him to an early grave. Justifying his worry, Thelma killed Clinton too.

Emotions: Provoked by the sight of a hottie, to paraphrase Epictetus, you had better exert self-restraint. In true noir fashion, infatuation might set off a train of events that gets out of hand. Aside from the risk of momentum due to irresistible attraction to unsuitable hotties, no one needs to be dependent on one specific person for happiness and serenity. Like sensible Elinor said in Sense and Sensibility "And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so."

Stoic Week 2024 1

Note for Day 1 Oct 28 Control: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2024. This week I will apply the Stoic orientation to the crooked thinking of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966). I’m open to the argument it’s silly to use a Stoic approach to look for life lessons in old genre fiction. My counter-argument is that the motives in the stories such as desire, dislike, foolishness, shamelessness, and the need for power are motives in real life just as strong in our present day as 75 years ago. Or 2000 years ago.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 Oct 28 Control | Day 2 Oct 29 Emotions | Day 3 Oct 30 Character & Virtues

The Case of the Candy Queen (Season 9, Episode 3, 1965)

Wanda’s Impressions: Wanda married at seventeen. Wanda felt jealous and hurt that her grandmother willed Wanda’s cousin Clair the candy recipe that Clair and her business partner Ed used to build a thriving confectionery company. Wanda felt bitter at being relegated to the role of Clair’s assistant. Wanda deplored Clair’s decision to can Wanda's crush Ed and replace him with Clair’s worthless gambler of a boyfriend. In court Wanda, under the influence of gobs of sugar that Perry made her eat on the stand, bursts out that she hates Clair because Clair always got what she wanted while Wanda never got her rightful rewards.

Control: Wanda's frustration and hurt are understandable in the sense that they are typical impressions people feel in response to perceived unfairness. Understandable beliefs but disputable. Maybe the granny did not will the formula to Wanda for a reason usual in the Fifties & Sixties: granny assumed Wanda was financially set for life in the traditional way, supported by a husband. No law requires last wills to be just. Granny did not have to be fair in her testament; it was her estate to disburse as she saw fit.

And Wanda would do well to get over "all or nothing" beliefs that are making her unhappy. No, Clair doesn't always get what she wants because nobody always gets what they want (just look at Clair’s poker zombie of a boyfriend). It's not true that Wanda never gets what she wants because nobody loses all the time.

Wanda had better not dwell on her pain at life allegedly dealing her a bad hand. Make a good marriage. Raise wonderful kids. Play with a golden retriever. Volunteer. A thousand things she can do, meaningful and ordinary, once she stops ruminating about allegedly missing out in the candy business.

Reading Those Classics #18

Children’s Classic. Sometimes it's fun and interesting to learn about writers and their curious lives. But other times we get more information than we bargain for and conclude we had better not know about authors and artists living lives as messy as our own. The author of this novel, E. Nesbit, had a complicated open marriage to a man who found it hard to make any money so she was the breadwinner under constant pressure to support a large family. See the article "E. Nesbit and the Happy Moralist" by Gloria G. Fromm. It’s so shocking it’s funny but one also feels how fraught home life must have been for their children. Nesbit was fictionalized in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. It’s not a flattering portrait.

The Phoenix and the Carpet - E. Nesbit

The children we met in The Five Children and It set off fireworks inside their house. I can provide first-person testimony that as jolly an activity as this is, count lighting fireworks inside a house as play that causes collateral damage.

So the mother in this novel has to purchase a rug to cover a burned spot on the hardwood floor. Being modest middle-class people that can afford only a cook and maid – it is set at the same time as Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, the early 1900s -  it has to be a used rug.

And after they unroll it, out tumbles an egg, which winds up in the grate where the heat hatches a phoenix. The wondrous bird is verbal, vain and culture-bound to ancient conceptions of hierarchy and traditional rites. He informs the children that the rug will grant them three wishes a day, just like the sand fairy they met in the previous book.

The resulting adventures are not so rousing, but they are told with an irresistible wit and zest. Nesbit goes all intertextual before intertextuality was cool. She alludes to novels by other writers like Arthur Moore (“‘It’s not lying to say she’s a disagreeable pig, and a beastly blue-nosed Bozwoz,’ said Cyril, who had read The Eyes of Light, and intended to talk like Tony as soon as he could teach Robert to talk like Paul."). Referring to the oft-parodied poem Casabianca, sensible Robert says, “No boys on burning decks for me!” Nesbit also recommends other writers ("I am not going to describe the ranee’s palace, because I really have never seen the palace of a ranee, and Mr Kipling has. So you can read about it in his books.")

Nesbit therefore ingratiates herself with us great readers by assuming we have read the same stuff, both good and bad, and thus have developed our own reading tastes:

If you had been stood in Jane’s shoes you would no doubt have run away in them, appealing to the police and neighbours with horrid screams. But Jane knew better. She had read a great many nice stories about burglars, as well as some affecting pieces of poetry, and she knew that no burglar will ever hurt a little girl if he meets her when burgling. Indeed, in all the cases Jane had read of, his burglarishness was almost at once forgotten in the interest he felt in the little girl’s artless prattle. So if Jane hesitated for a moment before addressing the burglar, it was only because she could not at once think of any remark sufficiently prattling and artless to make a beginning with. In the stories and the affecting poetry the child could never speak plainly, though it always looked old enough to in the pictures. And Jane could not make up her mind to lisp and ‘talk baby’, even to a burglar.

It’s incredible, bordering on magical, that Nesbit can connect with her kiddo readers and tune into multiple wavelengths on their ever-sensitive baloney detectors: reading preferences, suspension of belief, familiarity with literary devices and fatigue with stock characters and stereotypical girly-whirly behavior. Not to mention her play with word forms (burglarishness, “artless prattle” to “prattling and artless”) will appeal to a certain kind of lexophilic kid. She assumes kids respond to a mentor if the tuition has a light touch and talks to them just that way. When she is instructive, she winks and never goes on and on.

That the prose is in Edwardian British English is perhaps why the books are still widely read in the UK and read only by the hardest hardcore readers in the USA. Americans like the new and outlandish; the predicaments the English kids land in are rather mundane (though the theater fire at a performance of The Water Babies has its moments). Americans relish the incessant movement on a quest in the Oz books; in this story however the kids go to bed, "tired out and only too thankful that the evening at last was over." And though we Americans see ourselves as friendly and open, we still don’t really understand or connect with the niceness of the English, that ineffable combination of good manners and consideration, spiced with reserve. And the kids in this story are really nice, which may cause eye-rolling and groaning among hard-boiled American kids.

So yes Nesbit is well worth reading, as Gore Vidal observes, “… it is part of Nesbit’s genius that she sees [children] as clearly and unsentimentally as they see themselves, making for that sense of life without which there is no literature at any level.”

Stoic Week 2024 Announcement

 ENROLLMENT IS NOW OPEN FOR STOIC WEEK

Stoicism and Wellbeing

Stoic Week is an annual online event where individuals from around the globe endeavor to live like a Stoic for seven days. This is your chance to participate in a unique experiment.

Register here

The Ides of Perry Mason 65

Note: I post something concerning the mystery fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner on the 15th of every month. Recently I was talking to a 30-something - a masters in Library Science - who did not know who Erle Stanley Gardner was, though she did know Perry Mason. No reflection on her knowledge, I think, since culture moves on. There's no reason the past's mega-stars should be remembered. Transience, even for authors who've sold a half a billion novels.

Spill the Jackpot – ESG writing as A.A. Fair

Under one of his many pen-names, Gardner wrote 30 mysteries starring the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This 1941 entry, the fourth, opens with Bertha checking out of a sanitarium in Nevada. For six months she had been recovering from a combined form of flu and pneumonia. On her journey back to health, she has taken off about 100 pounds. Down to 150 pounds, her new look has attracted, for the first time in years, male attention.

On a plane to LA on a layover in Las Vegas, ad man Arthur Whitewell subjects Bertha to the male stare. Getting into conversation, he finds that his fellow passengers Cool and Lam are private eyes. He hires them to find a young woman, Corla Burke.  She disappeared a day before she was to be married to Whitewell’s son Phillip who’s desperate to find Corla. Whitewell’s family problem does not stop him from chatting up Bertha, exerting the fluent charm of a marketing guy.

As the investigation unfolds in the first hundred pages, as usual, Donald Lam faces a lot of challenges. Short and slim, he packs a punch that Bertha claims wouldn’t shoo flies from a jug of maple syrup. In a casino he is socked into next week by an attendant of slot machines. Accused of tampering with the one-armed bandits, Lam is then roughed up by the cops. Getting a line on Helen Framley, who may help with finding Corla, Lam is thrashed by Helen’s semi-psycho BF, an ex-prizefighter named Pug. Though self-absorbed in being attractive again, even Bertha notices Lam’s clothes are dusty and his face is out of alignment.

Then, after being yanked off a train back to the City of Angels, Lam is suspected of murder by menacing police officials. Mind, all this in just the first hundred pages. It’s non-stop action in Lam’s investigations, like when Patrick O’Brian puts our heroes through battle, failed regime change, flight on mules, pox, blizzard, ice fields, hard sailing in a mere cutter, and a lightning strike all in the one novel The Wine-Dark Sea.

When Gardner wrote as Fair, he gave himself permission to loosen up. He actually develops characters in this novel. Ad agency sharper Arthur Whitewell doffs and dons personas at will. Gardner gives a psychological acuity to Whitewell that is persuasive. Ex-prize fighter Louie Hazen is in fact deeper than his image as slap-happy. And Helen Framley is a persuasive examination of the Gardnerian Heroine: young, urban, independent, strong, active, down-right, and only human. Gardner inserts travel writing by having Lam, Louie and Helen hide in the desert for a time; Gardner loved to describe the feelings desert beauty evokes and the soul-satisfying chuck you eat when camping. On the desert sojourn, Louie proves he is not punch drunk by becoming an excellent camp cook and boxing trainer for Lam.

Gardner deploys quips and comic relief in the Mason novels, but in the Cool and Lam novels Gardner gives his keen sense of comedy more play.  Bertha is a marvelous comic creation, a blend of the canny and smarmy, cynical and hard-boiled, greedy and miserly. In this novel, the interplay between Bertha and Lam is hilarious, especially when Lam tells Bertha he’s quitting the detective business because he has fallen in love. Desperate to retain his smarts for her own selfish ends, Bertha pulls out of her hat practical, financial, and misogynist arguments against playing the fool blind to the wiles of women.

Lam however is inarguably Gardner’s best creation. In the Mason novels, Gardner never tried a first-person narration from Perry, Della, or Paul’s point of view. But here and in other novels, Lam tells the story, though he will withhold information from the cops, suspects, Bertha, their office manager Elsie Brand, and the reader. Lam is never overtly upright or high-minded. Yet the people he interacts with, from hard-bitten prizefighters to tough city girls, can tell he is clean and decent for all his tight-lipped and undemonstrative ways. An ex-lawyer, Lam is no fool about the ways of the world and how human beings are likely to respond to internal and external pressures. He uses his well-hidden moral compass to manipulate Bertha, clients and cops so that the innocent are vindicated, underdogs are rewarded, and the unjust and cowardly are punished. Without prating about ethics, Lam would agree with Jewish mothers who say, “You don’t need a brass band to do a mitzvah (good deed).”

Granted, Louie’s tutorial for Lam on the inner workings of slot machines was out of date by 1945. And I wonder about the retro advice on the road work and massage that goes into becoming a practitioner of the sweet science. The reveal turns on an implausible choice of a character. And Bertha acts uncharacteristically in a scene near the end.

But any concerns I have are trivial. Plot and incident are not really the thing to catch a king or a reader. I highly recommend this vintage mystery for its characterization, especially of the series characters. How often can you say that of a Gardner story?

Today is Sports Day

スポーツの日 Supōtsu no Hi.  This Japanese national holiday was established in 1966 as 体育の日 Taiiku no hi (literally Phys Ed Day). I’m pretty sure it was still called that when I was in Japan (1986-92). The Japanese associate the coming of autumn with reading books and enjoying sports. Anyway, it became Sports Day in 2000 as a new Monday holiday. Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Night Work: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club – Anne Allison

In the 1980s, Allison, now a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, conducted field research by working as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub. Her role involved entertaining Japanese business executives with karaoke, drinks, and flattery. Her 1994 book explores why large Japanese companies fund such entertainment for their male employees.

Allison argues that hostess clubs help white-collar men bond, foster company loyalty, and boost their egos. She claims that the interplay of work and play enhances job performance. The clubs offer short-term excitement without disrupting work commitments, as the interactions are non-sexual, maintaining a “respectable” image and preventing jealousy among colleagues.

Allison’s fieldwork included interviews and background reading. She found the hostess role manageable due to her teaching and language skills, though enduring crude remarks was challenging. She notes that not all business executives enjoy these outings, and their wives tolerate the extra hours as necessary for career advancement. 

Overall, the book is recommended for those interested in gender relations, women’s studies, or Japanese nightlife, despite some academic jargon.

Reading Those Classics #17

Classic Plague Narrative. The author released this popular history in 1949. Though it avoided footnotes and read as easily as a novel for non-expert readers, historians and epidemiologists regarded it as a model examination of a season of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the capital city of the USA in the days of Our Early Republic.

Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 - J. H. Powell

In 1793, Philadelphia was the busiest port in the USA. As such, it was the natural center of the banking, finance, and insurance industries. It was a major center for learning in the natural and medical sciences.

The winter of 1792-93 had been mild. The summer of 1793 brought a drought. Because the city had no water system, people caught and stored rainwater in rain barrels. Perhaps the mosquitos that carried yellow fever bred in those barrels of standing water. Or, perhaps the mosquitos were brought on ships that carried Francophone refugees away from an uprising of enslaved people that had started in 1791 in Haiti.

Per what was surely an undercount, Yellow Jack killed 5,000 people from August through November. Its symptoms start suddenly with fever, chills, headache, backache, nausea, and vomiting. It gets its name because jaundice makes the skin and eyes look yellow. There is no specific treatment beyond supportive care and attentive nursing, neither of which were available due to labor shortages caused by people fleeing the city in fear for their health and lives.

At the time a tiny number of observers wrote to the papers with the theory that mosquitoes transmitted the disease among humans, but doctors did not pay any mind because they were so embroiled in their own controversy as to the origin and treatment. Dr. Benjamin Rush and his supporters thought that the disease was caused by foul miasmas that in turn brought about imbalances among the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). So patients with yellow fever were to be treated with purges, such as bloodletting, vomiting, and pooping. French physicians, who fought the virus in the Caribbean and theorized it was contagious, used gentler palliative treatments. The public prints saw diatribes and screeds between the two points of view, so many that lay readers complained they were tired of reading about the controversy.

Powell judiciously tells about people who left the city and people who heroically stayed to do what they could. Leavers included the Governor of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. And, unsurprisingly, the entire U.S. Congress left the stricken city, thus demonstrating the courage we have come to expect from politicians.

The Mayor of Philadelphia, Matthew Clarkson, stayed to cope with the crisis despite a lack of governmental institutions. At the Mayor's request, volunteers from various walks of life came forward to work in their Assembly. From scratch, they arranged care for the sick, the old, the poor and the orphaned.  Powell also relates the heroic work of Black Philadelphians and Francophone refugees. Much to his credit, Powell does not express elation over heroism or wax indignant over people acting - shall we say - less than human.

In conclusion, this is a great read, especially in light of the clear social, economic and psychological parallels to our own pandemical experience. I’ve been a long-time plague buff, reading In the Wake of Plague in 2014 and Defoe long before this blog. But our pandemic only sharpened my interest, given my – our – first-hand experience: see The Great Influenza (John M. Barry); Flu (Gina Kolata); The American Plague (Molly Caldwell Crosby); The White Castle (Orhan Pamuk);  The Forgotten Plague (Frank Ryan); Year of Wonders (Geraldine Brooks); and Pandemic (Sonia Shah).

Reading Those Classics #16

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, the Wilderness, The Wasteland, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The reviews below cover the first half of the fifth section, The Middle Ground. These stories star characters managing the liminal spaces, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Wash. The title character is a poor white handy-man that feels connection with the cavaliers who “set the order and the rule of living” and went to war in the North to preserve their way of life. Not going to the war himself because he felt he had to take care of his own family, Wash put up with derision and mockery even from the enslaved. Wash had accepted as given that his white superiors really were gallant, proud, and brave. But Wash discovers that "the chosen best among them" were just evil braggarts who saw Wash and his kind – and Wash’s own family - as less than human. So disabused of his old meanings Wash decides that life makes no sense and does the old ultra-violence for which Faulkner is notorious. A powerful story of loss.

Honor. In this ironically titled tale, the WWI pilot that we met in Ad Astra, Buck Monaghan, is having a rocky post-war career, never holding a job for more than three weeks. He has ended up in the silly entertainment job of barnstorming. You would also think that the simple rule of honor says, “Don’t take up with anybody else’s wife” would be easy enough to follow. But, no. You would also think that a wing-walker would not take up with the wife of his pilot since the pilot could easily fix the wing-walker’s wagon but good. But, no. I mean, where would literature be if everybody acted sensibly, honorably? We’d have a literature of uplifting stories. Yuck.

Dr. Martino. A widow and her daughter meet an ailing doctor every summer at a spa in northern Mississippi. The doctor takes an interest in the fatherless girl and wants to get across to her the idea, "When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead." To beat fear, she does things like swim in snake-infested rivers, which of course scares her mom brickless. The story is narrated by a young man still too conceited to be sensible that even an alluring girl may have plans for herself that don’t revolve around oil-rich Yale men. He wants to marry the girl so he forms an alliance with the fearful mother to pull the reins in on the girl. Another story about the trapped female, like the shuttlecock girl in The Good Soldier, powerless to escape other people who are oblivious as to what the trapped female might want for herself.

Fox Hunt. This 1931 story is not connected to the world of Yoknapatawpha and is a Post-Depression acerbic look at the Roaring 1920s. It’s an examination of the degenerate ways of rich people from the point of view of their minions and hangers-on. Nobody remains unsullied by money, power, property, flattery, attention, the best tables. Harrison Blair is an Oklahoma Osage, a member of the band who were in the 1920s the richest group of people per capita in the world. Oil that is, black gold. Made rich by Texas tea, he is so fallen, so without values of either culture he’s between, that he brutally dispatches a fox just because his redheaded wife (another trapped female) is attracting attention from another man.

Pennsylvania Station. What could be ground more central than the majestic railroad station in New York City? And what more ironic than two homeless men soon to be driven from a warm waiting room in the majestic symbol of the city of business? The two down and out men, one young and one old, talk about the older man’s nephew. The uncle is an unrelatable narrator in the sense that he seems not to have tumbled to the fact that his nephew (“not bad, just wild as young men are”) is an unfilial son to his trusting mother. The uncle covers for the thieving shit by saying he was “confused” by shady actions that are all too clear to the reader. Besides the cruelty of children, death skulks in the background of this bleak story. The uncle is the last of a big family, though he was not expected to live beyond 20 years of age. He says, “But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don't believe he can stand it.”

Today is Autumnal Equinox Day

秋分の日 Shūbun no Hi. This Japanese public holiday was established in 1948 as a day on which to honor one's ancestors and remember the dead. Before 1948, the autumnal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shūki kōreisai (秋季皇霊祭). Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Underground in Japan - Ray Ventura

This 1992 memoir offers a unique perspective on the expatriate experience in Japan, focusing on workers from countries like Iran, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, rather than the more common narratives from North American and Western European language teachers and Zen seekers.

Ray Ventura, a Filipino university student active in politics during Corazon Aquino’s rise to power, decided to study labor realities by moving to Japan on a student visa. After his visa expired, he went underground, working in harsh conditions in Yokohama’s labor center, Kotobuki. Ventura vividly describes the difficult lives of Filipino laborers, who live in poor conditions and work grueling jobs while constantly fearing police and immigration officials.

Despite the hardships, Ventura highlights how these workers find freedom from familial obligations and build community through shared social values like hiya (shame), amor-proprio (self-respect), utang na loob (reciprocity), and pakikisama (camaraderie). He also discusses the motivations behind Filipinos moving to Japan, challenging stereotypes about their economic backgrounds.

Ventura notes that Filipino underground in Japan carry family and religious images for emotional support and to elicit sympathy if stopped by authorities. Religion plays a significant role in their identity, despite their engagement in activities like drinking and gambling. 

Ventura’s sequel, Into the Country of Standing Men, published in 2007, received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2008.

Expatriates in Trouble

Note: I am always up for a novel about expatriates in trouble (my favorite genre), especially set in China in the Twenties. See The Sand Pebbles and The Painted Veil.

Julia Paradise: A Novel - Rod Jones

This 1986 book was the first novel of this Australian writer, short at about 120 pages. It is set in Shanghai in the months running up to the massacres of Communists by the Kuomintang in 1927.

A Scottish doctor and Freudian psychotherapist Dr. Kenneth Ayers treats a woman who's an agitated insomniac and having hallucinations of pests and critters, and little girls jumping out of burning buildings. The patient, the title character, is the wife of a missionary and begins an adulterous Tuesday afternoon with the therapist. Describing disturbing scenes of incestuous rape, she tells him her case history as a victim of her father, a famous explorer and insatiable pervert.

The dry detached tone brings to mind Maugham and his stories of expatriates in trouble in Asia. Thematically it reminded me of The Year of Living Dangerously in the sense of centering on a complacent man who is tested by the pressures of social and political unrest in a foreign setting.  

Here the flabby hedonistic apathetic doctor has had it pretty easy in his life. He casually exploits local people and fellow expatriates, robotically breaking simple rules such as never with minors, never with force, don't treat people like objects. Through some twists and turns he sees the light and devotes the next 20 years to healing the sick in northern China. It is not a likely outcome but there is some fine prose in this even if the exploitation and harm of children and examples of sexual obsession get really hard to take.

If awards mean anything, this book won the fiction prize at the 1988 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for France's Femina Etranger prize in Paris. It could be one of those novels that reveals more complexity and artistic power on re-readings but I don't think re-reading is happening for me in this case.

The Ides of Perry Mason 64

Note: The 15^th of the month features a piece about Our Favorite Lawyer in the novels or on the tube. This novel was made into the second episode of the series, aired September 28, 1957. Darryl Hickman plays Steve Harris. He looks familiar because as a kid actor he was in The Grapes of Wrath, among others. His little brother Dwayne played Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of ~, a show I liked when I was around ten for Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs (Work!! still sums up my attitude) and Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy (even as a boy I knew the best girls were the smart kind loyal girls).

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece – Erle Stanley Gardner

Perry Mason’s would-be client, Peter B. Kent, has psychological, marital and commercial anxieties so severe that he is driven to walking in his sleep. The titular niece, Edna Hammer, tells a weird story as she seeks lawyer Mason's advice.

While sleepwalking, Uncle Pete took up a carving knife and wandered about his mansion. He was found by the police outside the bedroom door, which his alimony hound of a wife, Doris, had locked against his attack. Although Doris is making lovey-dovey noises about a reconciliation to support her disturbed husband, she wants big bucks. She might try to get Uncle Pete declared incompetent, warehouse him in a nursing home, and take charge of his sizeable estate and holdings. Edna Hammer wants Mason to facilitate Uncle Pete’s divorce so that he can marry his selfless nurse Lucille Mays.

As if the personal front didn’t provide enough anxiety to provoke midnight strolls, his iffy business partner Frank Maddox and Maddox’s niggling lawyer, John Duncan, are being difficult about contracts and settlements. Holed up in Uncle Pete’s mansion for negotiations, Mason makes no secret of his disgust quibbling about the verbiage of contracts instead of making a fool of DA Hamilton Burger in open court during a murder trial.

In an Agatha Christie move, Gardner has the characters spend the night in Uncle Pete’s old dark mansion. The next morning all hell breaks loose with a corpse found in the guest room and a bloodstained carving knife found under Uncle Pete’s pillow.

At the levers of the criminal justice mincing machine is Lt. Tragg’s brutish predecessor Sgt. Holcombe. He sensibly concludes that Uncle Pete is the culprit, in light of previous history of a sleep disorder, prolonged stress, and the carving knife incident. It’s up to Mason and his team to determine if Uncle Pete committed the murder at all and if he did, his culpability given he was sleepwalking during the commission of the crime.

The courtroom scene in the last third of the book is not too slow or too complicated.

In the early novels such as this 1936 mystery (the eighth of about 80), Mason is blunt and outspoken, not the gallant suave Mason of the Fifties. True to smirking, sarcastic pulp heroes, Mason is a hardboiled tough guy for the low-brows and a quick-witted professional for the high-brows. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He expresses outrageous opinions, like advocating blackmail as a way for a woman to get her money back from a man who squeezed cash out of her by pretending to love her. A self-confident and bold Leo, Mason brusquely disbelieves Edna’s astrological analysis of Uncle Pete’s character.   

Typical of the style of pulp magazines, the writing is so concise as to be terse, with dialogue briskly moving the plot.  Gardner catered to the male readers of Black Mask with lots of action, surprises, wisecracks and banter, and good old American scorn for and resistance to authority. Joy in foiling The Man’s determination to put an innocent person in the gas chamber may be an expression of defiance sharpened by the Depression. Also pulpy is the rapidly sketched out parade of characters:  a hypochondriac, a gold digger, a crackpot inventor, and a New Age niece before woo-woo really took off during the Age of Aquarius.

It’s odd that though Gardner assumed readers craved action over characters, we loyal Mason fans like not only the page-turning narrative magic but also the interaction among Perry, Della, and Paul. 

John Putnam Thatcher #22

Right on the Money - Emma Lathen

Given the background of this mystery is a corporate merger in 1993, I wouldn’t blame a reader to label "not likely to read" a mystery set in a business environment as dead as the dodo. In fact the author makes the merger the focus of good old American drive, pride, optimism, but also the stuff of Greek drama, with fatal flaws bringing about tragedy.

In the 22^nd mystery starring John Putnam Thatcher, the banker and amateur detective has to get to the bottom of the murder of a loudmouth so ambitious for attention and promotions that an insurance adjustor expresses surprise that the victim made it as far as 32 years of age.

Aqua Supplies, Inc. (ASI) is too big, too bureaucratic, and too complacent to fire anybody and so not able to develop new countertop appliances that middle-class consumers might actually want to buy. So it fixes to merge – that is, gobble up whole without so much as a belch – with Ecker, a small family owned and operated designer and maker of nifty percolators and such. Since the disability retirement of the Ecker heir, its main assets are its inventive but ageing founder and its highly talented female CFO.

ASI assistant division manager Victor Hunnicut rolls his eyes at the kool-aid stand ways of Ecker. His skill set, he realizes, would not make him a candidate for running Ecker so he puts his ambition above the interests of employer and makes plans to quash the merger plans. He fears that other middle managers will leapfrog over him, thus cutting him off from chances to shine for his superiors. While giving Ecker a get-acquainted tour, the hotshot comes off a snot and intimates to Ken Nicholls that factions in both companies are duking it out over the merger plans. Ken Nicholls is a junior banking exec who’s often sent by hero John Putnam Thatcher to gather information.

After the tour, things start to get criminous. The quaint old mill that stored Ecker’s financial computers and files for research and development is torched by an arsonist. Go-getter Vic Hunnicut is murdered at the annual trade show.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Latsis (economic analyst) and Martha Hennissart (attorney). Both knew the worlds of business at all levels from clerks to CEOs, so they felt at home in a constantly changing business environment and the variety of personalities to be found in the private sector. Sure the business environment has changed in the last 35 years, but human nature has not. As old-school feminists, they have acerbic fun satirizing businessmen who are buoyed up by secretaries and female middle-managers but attribute their success to their own intelligence and diligence. This is hardly a phenomenon unknown in 2024.

Click on the title to see the review.

• Banking on Death (1961)
• A Place for Murder (1963)
• Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award
• Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)
• Death Shall Overcome (1966)
• Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award
• A Stitch in Time (1968)
• Come to Dust (1968)
• When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for the Edgar Award
• Murder to Go (1969)
• Pick Up Sticks (1970)
• Ashes to Ashes (1971)
• The Longer the Thread (1971)
• Murder Without Icing (1972)
• Sweet and Low (1974)
• By Hook or by Crook (1975)
• Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)
• Going for Gold (1981)
• Green Grow the Dollars (1982)
• Something in the Air (1988)
• East is East (1991)
• Right on the Money (1993)
• Brewing Up a Storm (1996)
• A Shark Out of Water (1997)