Hildegarde

So, the summer is winding down a little, and this book is finishing itself, and I thought that I would try, today, to answer a question from a friend of mine that I’ve been dancing around in my head now for several weeks.

The question is this: what would be the best course to take to teach somebody how to write?

In this case, what’s wanted is not just the mechanics (although those are important) as the ability to clearly state and develop and argument and/or an exposition.

And I’m sitting here writing this post about it today because it occurs to me that I don’t have an answer.  I don’t think anybody has an answer.  And that brings me to a couple of problems.

Because, obviously, composition can be taught.   None of us are born knowing how to write an essay, and some of us do learn. 

The same is true of rational thinking.  Most of us are not born knowing how to reason things true, knowing what a valid or invalid argument is,  but some of us learn.

And some of us, of course, don’t.  In fact, lots of us don’t.

And I find myself, when faced with a request for what would be the best course to teach someone, forced to admit that I don’t know of a single course or program that actually does the job.

Not one.

No composition course I have ever taught, or ever seen taught, has been able to consistently and predictably teach students to write better.  And none has been able to teach them to reason better–in fact, they do less well at reasoning than they do at writing.

The extent to which this is true is really staggering.  And I don’t think it’s true for any of the usually cited reasons.

At least on the college level–or the community college level–the disdain for grammar, punctuation and spelling that supposedly characterized Sixties English classroom is not in evidence. Every composition teacher I know, on every level, struggles mightily with the basics.

Maybe it’s just that we’re too late in the process, and all that had to be learned much earlier–but we have minimal success in instilling it now.

Nor is it always the case anymore that people entrusted with teaching composition were never trained to teach composition.

For a long time, courses in composition were taught by people with degrees in English literature, which meant that most of them knew nothing at all about how to teach writing.   They had not been taught how to write.  They’d been taught how to explicate.

These days, however, there are actual PhDs in the teaching of composition, and more and more people being hired for English departments are being hired precisely because composition is what they’ve been trained in.

It’s only at the highest tier places that the people teaching Comp are still former “English majors” in the classical sense of the term.  And the highest tier places are the places with the least trouble with students who can’t write.

Of course, they’re no longer places with no trouble with students who can’t write, so there’s that.

No matter what their virtues, people who get degrees in teaching composition are almost always people who are good at composition, meaning that most of them are like me–they have no idea why they write well instead of badly.

Some of them remember something about the way they themselves were taught, and some of them find those methods wonderful, or awful, and respond accordingly.   I don’t remember a thing about the way I was “taught to write,” and my suspicion is that I wasn’t.  I don’t think anybody these days learns to write in a classroom.

Of course, there are some mechanical things that can be taught–the proper structure of the five paragraph essay, for instance–but when people complain that this new generation of graduates don’t know how to write, that’s not what they mean. 

And although the grammar, punctuation and spelling thing is increasingly urgent, that’s not what people mean, either.

They mean that these kids can’t think their way out of paper bags.

And that is where I find myself completely stumped. 

A hundred years ago–literally by now, I’d think–the English public schools taught their pupils to write by forcing them to copy out classic essays verbatim, and then marking them down for every mistake, no matter how small.

I have no idea if that taught anybody to write, or to think, but I do know that the several generations that were the product of that system gave us some of the most brilliant writers in the history of the English language.

Well, at least, the most brilliant in terms of nonfiction prose.

I don’t know if their more numerous compatriots were as good,  or even any better than our students and new hires.

The more I look around, the more strongly I believe that being able to think your way out of a paper bag is the exception, not the rule.  And it’s been the exception in virutally all eras of history that we can document at all.

Yes, at the top of the pyramid are those writers whose works are destined to be classics who do very well at it–and then there’s everybody else, indulging left and right in non sequiturs, ad hominems, circular arguments and all the rest of it.

Hell, I’ve started to think that the US has abandoned baseball for straw man arguments as the national game.

I get brought back, again and again, to the feeling that we’re going about this all wrong, that we have assumptions about education that do not accord with reality.

I think that it’s possible that we’re tryinjg to teach the wrong things, or trying to teach them in the right way.

And I’m still on that kick where I think that putting a bunch of people into classrooms with a teacher at the front may be the least effective way to teach anything at all.

Which is not the same thing as saying that I know how else to teach it, because I don’t.

What English departments do–or composition programs, if the university in question has abolished the English department–is to tell themselves that the kids have “learned” the “skills” necessary if they can pass the exit exam.

The rest of us have to deal with them when they’ve passed the exam and promptly forgotten everything they learned to pass it.

Which means, to me at any rate, that they never really learned it at all.

Okay, this is depressing.

Tea.

So, let me see if I can write about something not so self absorbed this morning.  Not that it hasn’t been a long week-end and a long morning, because it has.  But.

What I’ve been reading the last few days is a book by Bruce Thornton called Greek Ways:  How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. Thornton is a classics professor at one of the state colleges in California.  I cannot, at the moment, remember which one.  He publishes essays on Victor Davis Hanson’s website, as well as other places.  Like Hanson, he’s an advocate of universal liberal education starting with a knowledge of Greek history and culture. 

The book is an interesting one in a number of ways.  For one thing, it’s an usual focus.  Thornton takes a number of particular issues which modern academics use to denigrate Greek culture and first explains the reality of them and then makes a case for why the Greeks should be applauded for their approach to these things, rather than castigated for them.

Well, okay, mostly he does that.  In the chapter on Greek homosexuality, he’s more concerned to explain exactly how it operated and therefore debunk popular ideas of a Greek gay paradise.

So far, I’ve read chapters on homosexuality, the status of women, slavery, and (I’m just at the beginning) war.

And I’ll probably talk about some of those and what this book says about them at some point, but right now, what’s got to me is a sort of side issue. 

A lot of us here (myself included) tend to talk about the differences between Plato and Aristotle as if they resided primarily in two places:  their understanding of politics, and their concern (or lack of it) for empirically-based observation and experiment in what we would now call the “sciences.”

The scare quotes are not because I think science doesn’t exist.  It’s because, to Aristotle and Plato, chemistry and biology and physics were all branches of philosophy, and the word “science” attached to any rational inquiry.  So ethics was a “science” in just the same way chemistry was, and both were also “philosophy.”  By the Middle Ages, theology would be called “the queen of the sciences,” and they meant the word.

But the problem with all this is this–for the Greeks, and the Romans, and the early fathers of the Christian Church, what was important about Plato was not his politics or his plan for a utopia.

In fact, Medieval thinkers didn’t have much use for either.  Plato lived in a democracy and posited an oligarchic totalitarian state.  Medieval thinkers widely assumed that the political organization ordained by God was monarchy, since the relationship between God and the human race was itself a form of monarchy. 

That impulse to monarchy is evident in the imagery that all Christians were taught to apply to Christ and his salvific mission.  He was “king of kings” and “lord of lords.”  He was not prime minister.

This radical difference in political approach and temperament is obvious in Augustine (see Civitas Dei), and for a long time it made me very confused when people would call Augustine a “neoPlatonist.”

No he isn’t, I’d think–he’s got nothing in common with Plato’s ideas about human society at all.  For one thing, Augustine would never have put up with a philosopher king.  No matter how attractive idea in the abstract, he knew too much about philosophers and too much about kings.  And he was especially convinced of the inability of men and women to perfect, on their own, a fallen human nature. 

Near the beginning of Thornton’s book, however, during a description of the nature and purpose of sexuality in classical Greek society, it suddenly hit me:  what made Augustine and most of the other Church fathers neoPlatonists was not their politics, but their epistemology.  They are neoPlatonists because of the way they define reality and the way they believe we perceive reality.

Think for a minute about the Platonic ideals, and the men watching shadows on the walls of the cave.

Men, Plato said, see only the shadows of the real world, which does not consist of the accidents and corruption all around us, but of ideal forms existing in eternity without decay or change.

Men, St. Paul said, as long as they live on this earth, see only “through a glass darkly.”  Reality is what lives with God in eternity.  Our bodies will rise with our souls on the last day, but they will be glorified bodies, not the weak, aging, decaying ones we have now. 

What Plato seems to have posited mostly as a metaphor, the early Christian Church seems to have accepted as fact.  What we see, what we live with, is temporary, fleeting and not-quite-real.  What awaits us in eternity is the real reality. 

Now we struggle against delusion and confusion, prey to animal appetites and to the ravages of change.  Then we will be as we always are, unchanging, eternal, and true to ourselves. 

To pass from this earth into Heaven–or even Hell–is to pass from Plato’s cave into Plato’s world of ideal forms, and there’s no metaphor going on whatsoever.

I’m getting that feeling again that I’m going around and aroung in circles, but the whole thing makes perfect sense, and is perfectly clear, in my own head.

Classical civilization passed into Christian civilization as a matter of evolution, not of conquest, because there was in Christian ideas so much that corresponded to classical ones. 

Some of the early Church fathers looked at classical Greece and Rome only in terms of the practices and customs of the age, and rejected them both.  I forgot who it was who demanded to know “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem.”

In the end, though, the Church fathers whose influence really built the Church (and the civilization) we know knew exactly what Athens had to do with Jerusalem, and worked very hard to maintain the connection through centuries of wars, conquests, barbarian sacks, Islamic expansionism, and all the rest of it.

And, of course, eventually preserving both the good and the bad of the political thought, both the impetus to democracy and the impetus to totalitarianism.

But I find it interesting to contemplate the core idea of neoPlatonism, the idea that the life we live here is a “temporary home” (thank you, Carrie Underwood) whose reality will only be realized in eternity.

I don’t know how you could prove that–or disprove it–at all.

And I don’t know what the implications would be of holding such an idea, what it would do to the way you behaved.

But I think I’ll go have some tea and fight with nurses.

Well, it’s four o’clock in the morning on a Saturday–okay, closer to four thirty–and I’ve been up for hours.  I got my work done.  I’ve got a really huge cup of tea.  It’s business as usual, except that my mother is in the hospital again.

Okay.  That’s business as usual, too, at least in one sense–I only found out about it when I called the night nursing staff at her nursing home to check up on her.

I do that every night, and I also call almost every morning, too.  Just to check in.  Because they never tell me anything.

I’d called the night before last to be told that she was doing really well, responding more and more to the nurses when they talked to her, able to get up and sit in a chair for a while every day.  In other words, doing a lot better than she had been doing.

Yesterday morning, I wasn’t able to call.  We had a ton of things to do and there wasn’t a place in the day that was also a place in the nursing staff’s day.

So I waited and called at eight thirty. 

And not only had they not called to tell me she was in the hospital, but the nurse I talked to when I called last night almost didn’t tell me either.  At first, she just said that my mother’s regular night nurse wasn’t in that evening.

Telling me about the hospital was a sort of side remark, almost an afterthought.

A good friend of mine says that this kind of thing is not unusual at nursing homes, that nursing homes resist communicating with the families of patients.

I’ve got no idea why that might be so.  The whole thing seems crazy to me, and the longer my mother is sick the crazier it gets.

The last time she was admitted to the hospital, her doctor had no record of her having any living children at all, and the hospital listed her family contact as my brother, who died in 2006.

In the meantime, she’s got a court appointed guardian–the only way the nursing home would keep her after my father died, unless I could move down there permanently, which I couldn’t–and he never contacted me or returned a single one of my phone calls for four solid years until about a month ago, when my mother was first admitted to the hospital.

Then he waited for nearly two days to tell me that my mother was in the hospital, answered maybe two e-mails once I finally got hold of his e-mail address, and has now disappeared into the mist, again. 

This entire system seems completely out of whack to me. 

And I’m tired.

So…

Somebody posted to the comments that I should go to jury duty and report.  And I did.  Go to jury duty, that is. 

So here’s the report.

First, you have to understand that I really and truly hate the parking situation at and around the Superior Court.  I’m not interested in parking in the municipal garage half a mile away–and the one place I’ve ever been mugged.  I’ve lived in New York, London, Paris and Detroit, and I got mugged in Connecticut.

I’m also not much interested in parking on the street, where you get forty five minutes and then have to run down from the jury waiting room to plug in quarters again.

So I got my friend Carol to drop me off on her way to work, and my friend Richard to pick me up.  And yes, these are the same Carol and Richard who appear in my acknowledgements pages over and over again because they keep saving my ass in all sorts of ways, and the ones who saved the manuscript of Hardscrabble Road when a virus ate my hard drive.

At any rate, Carol drove me in and dropped me at the Superior Court just before eight thirty.  I signed in and took a seat, and I will admit I was rather surprised at how few people were in the waiting room.   I’m willing to bet there weren’t twenty of us all told.  I know there weren’t as many as thirty.

The fact nagged at me a little, but not as much as it might have, because there was a new wrinkle this time–they let us keep our cell phones.  They used to confiscate them.  They don’t any more. 

So, I had e-mail to check, and lots of the people around me were playing games on their Blackberries.

Then the Clerk of the Court came up and turned the television off–I forgot to mention that this place has the single largest flat screen TV I’ve ever seen so that potential jurors can watch the news while they wait–

Anyway, she turned it off and played a half-hour video tape of instructions on What It Means To Be A Juror.   I’ve seen this video every single time I’ve been on jury duty in Connecticut, which is well over fifteen years now, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what it said.  I watched anyway, because I didn’t want this woman to decide nobody was paying attention and she had to run it again.

When the tape was over, the Clerk came back, turned off the television set again, and said, “You’re considered to have done your jury duty if you’re here as long as I need you.  If I don’t need you any more and you’re sent home, then you’ve fulfilled your obligation until 2013, no matter now little time you’ve spent here.  I called you in because we needed to pick a jury for a civil case today, but I’ve just been informed that that case has settled.  You can all go home.”

And that was it.

It was nine thirty, and I was calling Matt and Greg at home and Richard at work asking for somebody to spring me, and Richard came along and did it while I sat on the front steps of the courthouse in the heat and got harassed by a pack of little girls who were playing some kind of game that required running around and slamming into people.

Mostly me.

But that was not the end of it.  About an hour after I got home, we went out for a couple of minutes to the grocery store.  And when we got back, the mail was waiting for us.

In that mail, there was a summons to jury duty on September 24th.

It must have been sent out–well, I don’t know when it was sent out.  In the middle of scheduling me for yesterday, though, I’m sure.

They really can’t call you up more than once in four years, and I called the jury administration this morning and pointed out that I’d done my service yesterday, such as it was.  So that’s taken care of.

But still.

The whole thing makes me crazy.  I will never get on a jury in the state of Connecticut.  Between lawyers and judges who were family friends and lawyers and judges I dated in high school and law firms representing people I’ve either sued or been sued by–there just isn’t anybody left.

The one time I was on jury duty in New York, I did get put on a case, and a murder case at that, but the case ended in mistrial and that was that.   That case was interesting on a number of levels, not least of which was the fact that the defendant didn’t speak a word of English and needed an interpreter.  But I never did learn enough about it to make any guesses about what was going on there.

In the meantime, I read my way through a fairly early Agatha Christie novel called Three Act Tragedy.  I don’t remember ever having read it before, and I found it sort of disappointing.

The premise was actually very good, the mystery was pretty solid–but for some reason, the thing is written in a way that brings Poirot into the book almost not at all.

Christie always concentrates more on the suspects than she does on the detective, but this was not like that–Poirot shows up for a few paragraphs in the first third, then a few paragraphs for more in the second third, then gives the solution at the end.

The result was a book that lacked any definable shape.  It isn’t a detective novel in any sense of the word, not even the traditional rely on suspects sense–but it also isn’t any other kind of book.

I’m being vague here.

I will say it was a shame.  The last Christie I read–and only a couple of days ago–was Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and it was first class.  This just felt unsatisfying and drifty, in spite of having, as I’ve said, a really excellent premise and a really excellent mystery.

But I have been noticing something, to take us back to those discussions about what mystery readers are most interested in.

If what you’re concerned with is watching the detective detect, I don’t think Poirot’s your man.  He tends to ruminate a lot, go “ah, but I know,’ and then hit you with the solution in the end.

You can no more watch him detect than you can watch Santa come down the chimney.

I’ve got to run off and get serious.  We had a whole row of thunderstorm early this morning, and more are supposed to be coming.

The good news is that when I woke up this morning, only one of my eyes was welded shut.  It’s still an enormous pain in the rear, and it almost certainly means that I’m  having trouble concentrating, having trouble reading, and having trouble writing.

And I’m finishing a book, and I’m due to go in for jury duty tomorrow. 

Meaning that this is getting to be more than your usual distraction.

But in the meantime–

I wrote here several months ago about a Martha Grimes novel called The Old Wine Shades, about which I had a few complaints, not the least of which was the fact that the murderer was not caught and brought to justice.

We know who he is.  He is supposed to be a crimnal mastermind, and in a lot of ways is.  The basic story was very interesting.  But it bothered me–and it doesn’t always–that the man got away clean.

It turns out, however, that I may have spoken too soon.  The last day or two, I’ve been reading a book called Dust, also by Martha Grimes, and, I think, the sequel to The Old Wine Shades.  In it, our criminal mastermind murderer is back, apparently as a continuing character in what will be a set of subplots where Grimes’s detective, Richard Jury, tries to find some way to pin his crimes on him.

The idea of a criminal mastermind who continually thwarts the detective’s attempts to bring him to justice isn’t new.  Conan Doyle did it with Moriarity, and if I remember correctly there was something like that in the early Ellery Queen.

Okay, don’t quote me on that one, because I don’t really remember.  But you see what I mean.  It’s been around a while.

And yet, for some reason, I find it difficult to accept in this particular set of books.  Maybe the setting is too realistic. 

“Realistic” is the best word I can come up with here, but I don’t exactly know if it’s the one I want.  Grimes’s books are neither terribly realistic nor cutesy-cozy.  No police department in the world would allow Jury’s collaboration with an amateur detective named Melrose Plant, but the relationship is kept very low-key and it doesn’t jar with the more factually-based aspects of the stories. 

And there’s nothing unrealistic about the one that got away.  That happens to real policemen in real police departments all the time. 

The idea of a cop who won’t give up on the one that got away isn’t inherently unrealistic either.  There are enough true crime books out there about just that to make it practically a trope of real life, if real life can have tropes.

And, I have to admit it–I kind of enjoyed having the guy back.  He’s an interesting character on a lot of different levels.

I am, I know, sounding very contradictory and conflicted.  Maybe that’s the eye thing.  I don’t know.

I just know that this isn’t working for me, and I don’t know why. 

And the character does continue to the next book, which seems to be the one that’s out now.  And I’d read that one, except that I had a look through it in the store, and it did that thing with the extra-wide margins and the extra space between lines and the bigger print that publishers do when they want to make a book appear longer than it really is.

I coule have principled objections to something like that, but I don’t, really.  I just find books designed that way to be hard to read, and I’d rather wait forthe paperback and be comfortable.

Of course, sometimes they do that with paperbacks, and then I don’t read the book.

Ack.  My eye is still all gunked up, and I want to go somewhere and put ice on it.

Jury duty tomorrow, which, in Connecticut, lasts only a single day.

Some things, this state does do well.

Yesterday, I had a lot of running around to do, of the drive three hundred places, eat up seven hours and get very little done variety. 

And during that, I took some time off to sit down in the Barnes and Noble cafe and have one of those silly frappacino things, just to sort of sit there to take a breather.  And while I did that, I read through some magazines.

One of the magazines I looked at was the lated (July/August 2010) edition of The Humanist.  Mostly, that’s something I read to give myself a chance to roll my eyes.  I’ve said this here before, but the problem with The Humanist–and the entire American Humanist Association, as far as I can tell–is not that they’re “liberal” or “progressive” or even “left,” but that they’re stuck in 1968 in the worst way possible.

And this edition had a really good example of what drives me so crazy.  It was a special issue on climate change, and it contained the requisite set of articles all proclaiming that there are Rational People Who Accept Science and who therefore not only accept the popular version of climate change but believe we must drastically alter human behavior to reverse it and save the earth–and irrational capitalist ideologues and religious fanatics who deny that reality.

Then there was another article on the ideas of Freeman Dyson–scientist and atheist and rationalist–whose basic idea is that climate change isn’t the issue.  Human well being is the issue.  We should do whatever it takes to make sure everybody is fed, housed and clothed and if that means higher temperatures–so be it.

So, what?  It turns out that you don’t have to be a “capitalist idelogue” or a “religious fanatic” to think that the political prescriptions coming out of the climate change issue are wrong?

Imagine that.

Maybe they should let the rest of their writers in on it.

But it isn’t the climate change stuff I was really caught by.  It was a little sidebar about a project called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which started as a poster by the cartoonist Molly Norris in response to the censoring of images of and mentions of Mohammed on a South Park episode.

The poster led to an actual campaign for an actual day–May 20, 2010–to draw Mohammed on the Internet.

The sidebar consisted of quotes from a number of people who supported the project, and one of those people was the comedian/commentator Bill Maher.

Now, let me be clear here.  Bill Maher drives me crazy. I think he’s a pompous, bullying  jerk.  Religulous was just as much of a hatchet job as I’d expected. 

As to the content of the politics, we agree on some things (abortion, for instance, probably gay marriage) and disagree on others.

But there’s disagreement and disagreement.  What Maher was quoted as saying was this:

“I’m very glad that Obama is reaching out to the Muslim world and I know Muslims living in America and Europe want their way of life to be assimilated more, but the Western world needs to make it clear:  some things about our culture are not negotiable and can’t change.  And one of them is freedom of speech.  Separation of church and state is another–not negotiable.  Women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them.  Not negotiable.  This is how we roll.  And this is why our system is better.”

There was more, but nothing that changed the thrust.  And I could have said it myself.

And this is what I meant, a while ago, when I said there were libertarian socialists–people who supported, say, a wide welfare state but who still supported freedom of speech and all the rest of it, and who would resist attempts to make the welfare state into an instrument of violating individual rights.

If I’m in a room full of people who all agree with me and Maher up there, then whether they’re free marketers, welfare staters, or whatever, we’re all friends.  All that other stuff is policy.

The real fight is between people with attitudes like Maher’s and mine and–well, the people who were in my meeting the other day.

Maher is not a danger to my way of life, in spite of being so ideologically extreme in some ways he could make my teeth bleed.

The people in my meeting, though, are a time bomb under everything I hold dear.

P.S.:  By the way, when I said that these people in the meeting weren’t the typical English department, it wasn’t because I thought the typical English department would have thought differently than they did.

It was because no matter what the typical English department thought, it would NOT have been made up of the people in that meeting, most of whom did not have the kind of credentials to qualify.

I need tea.  And Martha Grimes.

It is, in fact, much later in the day than I usually write anything, but it’s been insane from off, and I’m just glad I got Gregor done and in the box (metaphorically, these days) before my allergies exploded and I had to go lie down with ice on my eyes again.

But it’s later in the day, I’ve got a lot of Diet Coke with lime wedges, and…well, here I am.

Annoyed.

The annoyance came a few days ago, actually, at a meeting I was required to attend for reasons that are beyond complicated.  And I won’t go into them.

Part of the meeting was a partial viewing of a PBS documentary called Sentenced Home, about two young men who were immigrants from Cambodia, who had been here since childhood, but who had, in their teen aged years, been members of street gangs and committed crimes for which they were convicted of felonies.

According to the film, changes in immigration law after 9/11 now makes these young men liable to being deported because a) they never bothered to get citizenship (they have green cards) and b) they are felons, although the law at the time they committed their crimes did not make them liable to being deported, and they’ve lived practically exemplary lives ever since.

Now, I’ve got some questions about this–I don’t understand, for instance, why this post-9/11 thing doesn’t qualify as an ex post facto law, which is unConstitutional–but that’s not really what I wanted to complain about.

I didn’t even want to complain about the accompanying “educational module packet” (I swear, English teachers love the word “module” because it sounds “scientific”), which started right out with a timeline declaring that 1492 was the date on which “the genocide of indigenious peoples” started with the arrival of Columbus.

Someday, honest to God, I’m going to take out commercial time on Cable television just to broadcast the actual definition of “genocide.”

But, like I said, that wasn’t it.  That was pretty much par for the course.

What got to me was the comments that went around after we’d seen the clip, which were–well, about as mind bogglingly stupid as anything I’ve ever complained about from students.

But you have to understand something.  By and large, the people who work in this place are not “intellectuals” as we usually use the term here.  Most of them don’t have PhDs, for instance, and most of them would be teaching just about anywhere else if they could manage it.

So I’m not sure  you could use what went on here as an example of what happens in a “normal” English department, because this is not in any way a normal English Department.

But here’s what I learned:

1) In spite of all the complaining they do about Fox News, most of these people are channeling Bill O’Reilly.  They think that the protections in the Constitution–due process, free speech, that sort of thing–only apply to citizens. 

2) They are all convinced that the US is “terrible” in its response to immigrants.  When I pointed out that most countries don’t allow immigrants to become citizens on any terms, they went, mhhhm, hummm, but–

Ah, but that’s when the shit really hit the fan, in the form of a woman, born Jamaican, I think, from the accent, and immigrated here from London, announced that every other country gives a safe haven so immigrants don’t have to fear being imported.

She knew this because she was an immigrant, and also because she had a cousin or a friend or something who was an immigration lawyer, and he’d told her that even if you got your citizenship, they could deport you any time they wanted to.

The whole thing was a truly remarkable performance, exacerbated by the fact that it was hot, they kept turning off the air conditioner so that people could hear the movie, I hadn’t had any sleep and I was ready to commit homicide on this woman by about a third of the way through the process.

One of the things that really got to me was the response to the clips of a woman from INS, who talked about immigration policy in terms of bestowing on people who asked for it a very valuable thing, residency in the US.

The objection to her seemed to be that she thought residency in the US was a very valuable thing.  That was proof positive of the arrogance and insularity of Americans.

So, I have to ask two questions:

1) Since the Cambodian men in the movie were fighting hard not to have to move someplace else–didn’t that mean they thought that residency here was a very valuable thing?

2) All those people who come here every year illegally, risking their lives and spending the last of their money to get across the border–aren’t their actions proof that they think residency here is a very valuable thing?

3) And if every other country in the world will give her a safe haven without having to fear every day that she’ll be deported, unlike here–why in the name of God is this insufferable woman here? 

I’m not talking about love it or leave it, now.  I don’t have a problem with criticism based on facts. 

But I think I was ready to completely explode by the end of the day.

How can I expect my students to know which war Pearl Harbor got us into if their teachers know about as much about anything as I do about changing a tire?

Okay.

Whine over.

I’m sorry to be so incommunicado here lately.  I have this really weird allergic thing that happens to my eyes in very hot weather, and it’s been very hot weather nearly all summer now.  I get up to work on Gregor for a while, and then my eyes swell nearly shut, and I have to go put ice on them.

It makes for a very uneven work day.  And if I have to go outside at all, I’m a complete mess by the end of the day.  And, of course, I do have to go outside.  All the time.

But I have been thinking about those last comments.  And one thing that’s occured to me is that I don’t know a single writer who could pull off an excellent detective story on a consistent basis.

Good enough ones, yes–but that it’s got to be mystifying but then look inevitable when it’s explained thing actually occurs in the field on a very infrequent basis. 

Christie had a couple–The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, At Bertram’s Hotel–but she, like most other detective story writers even in the Golden Age, tended to fall back on what I think of as the Really Complicated Plot.

In The ABC Murders, for instance, it all makes sense, but it assumes a murderer willing to go to Baroque lengths to carry out his scheme.   In A Pocket Full of Rye, the scheme is not only Baroque but full of  complicated confusions about nursery rhymes.

And I do tend to think that the best detective novel is the one where the issue is a really simple and straightforward murder.

And then there’s the problem posed by fair play.  If the writer is really playing fair with the reader, the chances are that at least some of the readers are going to “get it” before the solution is revealed at the end.

And sometimes time moves on, and what wouldn’t have been over obvious when the book was written gets that way.  For instance, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcass, her readers probably found an exsanguinated body on a rock in the ocean to be totally mystifying.  I went, “Oh, Russian royality, hemophilia” and had the thing figured out before I was halfway through it.

Sometimes the only way to make the thing go at all is to have the detective look like an idiot.  In The Case of the One-Eyed Witness, the police and Perry Mason both blithely assume that a woman wearing a heavy dark veil must naturally be our suspect,  trying to fake an alibi.  The first thing I thought of was, “hmmm, dark veil, you can’t tell who that was,” and had the thing figured out long before the solution.

But dedicated mystery readers will have the crime figured out before the solution, more times than not.  If they didn’t, you’d have to wonder if there was something seriously wrong with them.  This is, after all, a form with its own conventions.  The kind of reader who likes solving puzzles in detective novels is going to have those conventions figured out by the time he’s read a dozen.

As for the detective story making demands on readers–I suppose it does, and I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked any longer when I find out that even readers don’t like to do any work.

But it’s possible to read a detective novel without trying to figure it out, and I once used to know people who did that.

I’ve got to go put ice on this eye.  It’s making me nuts.

Well–let’s start here.  I don’t have a desired word count when I write.  There’s always a minimum, beneath which your publisher doesn’t think you actually have a book, but I get past that without too much trouble.

And no, the mysteries are no more complicated–but then I’ve never read or written mystery novels for the mystery. 

And I want to stress that thing about reading.  I don’t read mysteries for the mysteries.  I read them for the story, which in the best detective novels has to do with the relationships between people, usually the people who are the suspects in the case.

I am, in fact, so thoroughly oblvious to the mystery in a mystery that I often can’t remember it.  A very few mysteries–Murder on the Orient Express; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd–stick in my head so thoroughly that I do remember them, but I read those again anyway, because it doesn’t matter to me if I know who did it.

Which brings me to where I’m at at the moment, which is in the middle of a Perry Mason novel called The Case of the One-Eyed Witness.  I’m reading it hard on the heels of Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.

And although the two writers are very different in some ways, in one they’re exactly alike:  these books are about the detection, period.  Not about the detective (although Perry Mason proposes to Della Street in this one, and she turns him down because she doesn’t want to have to leave work and stay home.  Ah, the Fifties!).

I’m not saying that the books are about their plots–that’s not quite right.  The plots are formulaic, really, and pretty much the same for both. 

What these books are about is the puzzle as a puzzle.  Christie spends time getting you into the lives of the suspects.  Gardner does not.   It almost doesn’t matter, because the primary focus is always on the complicated murder scheme and how it is unraveled.

I don’t think I ever realized how much Golden Age mysteries depend on the mysery.  The last time I read these things, I was very young, and that wasn’t what I took away from them. 

Maybe that’s a good thing, because if I had realized that that was the focus, I might never have written any mysteries of my own. 

I keep thinking about that discussion we had with the people from the other blog.  This seemed to be the kind of thing they said they wanted, but almost no modern day mystery will give it to them. 

The weird thing is, I’m having a really good time.

Maybe this is about what my brain can hold, what with all the other stuff that’s going on.

Maybe it’s just been a long time since I’ve done this.

I wonder why people stopped writing books like this, though, and why nobody seems to want to publish them anymore.

One of the odd things about writing a book–for me, at least–is that I often get to the point of having to stop before I’m ready to stop there.

Which is a sentence which makes very little sense, I know.

I think the problem is that when I start to write a book, the project feels absolutely impossible.  A book is a really long piece of writing,  so long that part of me can’t imagine anybody really doing it. 

And I know I’ve written a lot of books by now, some of them considerably longer than whatever it is I’m writing now.

It just feels impossible, that’s all.  So, when I start working, I find myself  pushing and strainoing to make sure there is “enough” to make a book. 

Then there comes a day when I suddenly seem to have too much.

This sort of silliness has been exacerbated by two factors–on perennial, the other temporary and recent.

The  perennial one is the fact that I never have any sense if a book is good.

I do know when a book is actively bad. I have no trouble noticing active crap, which is why the book that’s out now, Wanting Sheila Dead, was written twice. 

But if a book is better than that, I just don’t know, and won’t know until I read it myself  after it’s been published.

The more temporary and recent thing is the fact that the last two books I’ve written have been written in periods of great personal crisis.  It’s hard to keep a sharp eye on where you are in the manuscript when your mind keeps wandering to the latest disaster.

And the disasters have effects.  I’m usually at this stage in a novel around the month of April.  Now it’s July, and not only is it too hot to work in my office for whole swaths of the day–my office is a sunroom–but my allergies are going absolutely insane.    Some of those allergies affect my eyes, which means that I’m not only unable to see for the customary reason (I’m blind as a bat), but because my eyes keep tearing up.

I don’t really mean to moan and groan here.  The point of this wasn’t to make a complaint, but to state a fact.

This morning, I realized that I was on the home stretch of this one–a nice, complicated one, small town, lots of odd characters with unpleasant natures, and no social issue more complicated than whether or not small towns should have working police radios.

You think I’m kidding, but a small town near here had a referendum on that very subject–and it lost. 

If you want to commit a crime, there are areas of Middlebury, Connecticut where the cops are just not going to get the call.

But I’ve got calls to make, and I’ve just finished a Christie (Mrs. McGinty’s Dead–Poirot, and a good one) and started on an Erle Stanely Garner Perry Mason (The Case of the One-Eyed Witness–complicated opening, too early to tell), and it’s impossible to sit for much longer in this sun room.

Plus, I have tea.