Hildegarde

Well, the term is halfway done, and I’m predictably frantic, but the usual  mess has been exacerbated this time by a lot of small but inconvenient things.

At the moment, the most inconvenient of these things has been the fact that I dislocated my right shoulder.

It’s been suitably relocated, but it aches like hell, and I’m having a hard time typing and writing on the whiteboard.  Especially writing on the whiteboard. 

It’s making class very frustrating at the moment.

I do have a March list, however, and I’m going to outline it below, with notes at the bottom.

Going along with the usual practice up till now, I’ve included only those books I finished in March.

I should point out, however, that there would be one more book on the list for March if the shoulder thing hadn’t happened.   I was very close to finished when I suddenly had to start taking care of that, and I did finish yesterday.

But more on that NEXT month.

This month, we have:

15) Leslie Fiedler.  What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society.

16) Stephen King.  Duma Key.

17) Ann Coulter.  Mugged.

18) Dashiell Hammett.  The Thin Man.

19) Jean Favier.  Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages.

20) Joan Hess.  A Diet to Die For.

21) Leszek Kolakowski.  Is God Happy?  Selected Essays.

22) Ben Shapiro.  Bullies: How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

23) Lloyd C. Douglas.  Magnificent Obession.

The notes are going to get a little long, and I won’t go over all of these.  And I’ve already discussed one or two of them on the blog.

16) Stephen King’s Duma Key is an odd book.  Like almost everything else the man writes, the thing is enormous and also compelling, so I found myself reading compulsively but not knowing why. 

I don’t need a lot of incident in the books I read, and King is always exellent with character, but these were not particularly interesting people inhabiting a  not particularly interesting premise and with an ending that felt gratuitously tacked on.

In spite of all that, I kept on reading, and not just because I always finish what I start. 

I kept on reading because I couldn’t help myself, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t figure out why.

If I had the talent to do this,  I’d be a multimillionaire.  I think King is.

19) Jean Favier.  Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages.

Like most people who read a lot, I have a TBR pile that looks like a library fire sale, or worse.

This particular book arrived on that pile back in 1998. 

I’m not entirely sure why it took  me so long to get around to it.  You’d  think it would be a natural–my favorite historical period, and a subtopic of that period that I don’t know much about.

And as it turned out, there was a lot of very interesting information in this thing, things I’d never even considered and am glad to know.

Unfortunately, the thing was put together like a social studies textbook, proceding not chronologically but topically, so that there was no narrative to it at all.

It was one of the best illustrations I’ve ever had of something I tell  my students:  human beings are narrative animals. 

Whatever is not narrative tends to feel opaque, if not just untrue.

Add that to the fact that the writer–a French academic; the book was translated from the French–had to stop every few pages to insist that he realized he wasn’t using the term “capitalism” in the same sense in which Marx had so admirably defined it, and the experience was overall a disappointment.

22) Ben Shapiro.  Bullies:  How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America. 

This is, quite frankly, just a waste of time.  It contains nothing you haven’t heard before (with one exception), no even adequate level of research or documentation, and a lot of adolescent insults that are both gratuitous and rude.

This is the kind of book you give someone if you are trying to convince them that conservatives are stupid and offensive–a page out of the Don Imus/Michael Savage playbook.

The one exception wasn’t so much something Shapiro did directly as something he helped me to do.  He provided a precis of the actual events in the Trayvon Martin case with footnotes that got me started on what to look for to make it make more sense than it has  up to now.

For that I am truly grateful.  That case has been making me crazy for quite some time now–and I knew things were being left out of the mainstream news stories when the whole thing disappeared from sight rather abruptly–but this finally gave me an idea of what to punch into Google to get what I needed to know.

This was not a small thing.

23) Lloyd C. Douglas.  Magnificent Obsession.

This is a very old book, published in 1929 by a man who was once the best selling author in America and the man who wrote The Robe. 

It was in  my house when I was growing up, one of a set of Douglas’s works in matching bindings that went along with another set of works (by Maugham) also in  matching bindings.

These were the only books I ever knew my mother to own, although I  never saw her read them.

When I was a child I tried a lot of different volumes from these two sets.  I became an almost instant fan of Maugham, but I could never read the Douglas novels, no matter how hard or how many times I tried.

I picked this one up again because, through the magic of television, I came upon a movie made of the book in the 1950s, starring Rock Hudson as the young Bobby Merrick whose life is changed because of a religious idea.

Well, not quite.

Douglas was a minister before he became a novelist, and all his novels are “religious” in one sense or another. The Robe–which is the supposed story of the Roman soldier who won Christ’s robe when the soldier’s cast lots of it–is obviously and clearly Christian in a way most of us would recognize.

The Rock Hudson movie of this novel was not religious in this sense, and I thought, when I saw it, that they had probably taken a lot of the specific religious ideas out.

Now that I’ve read the book, however, the religion issue turns out not to be that simple.

The best way I can explain it is to say that the book does claim to be based on a Truth found in the Bible, and specifically the New Testament, the page on which this Truth can be found is never explicitly indicated.

What’s more, the effect of bringing that Truth into your life is–well, oddly stated. 

The idea seems to be that if you bring this Truth into your life, you can Enlarge Your Personality in such a way that you can do great things in your life that will be of benefit to all humanity.

It’s not quite the prosperity Gospel, because it’s not about getting rich or getting other goodies for yourself, but at the same time it’s more like that than anything else I can think of.

And Christianity as described in this is nothing at all like what most people these days would define as “Christian” at all.  It has no particular interest in things like the Virgin Birth or the Substitutionary Atonement, or even the nativity or the Resurrection. 

And it’s not the Social Gospel, either.

The point, however,  is that in all this, the movie was pretty faithful to the book.

Where it veered off into the mist was in the plot.  It  kept the opening premise and short sequence of events, then ditched the entire  middle, transformed the  nature of at least two characters beyond all recognition, made a short series of events at the very end into the entire middle of the movie and then got Bobby and Helen together at the end because–well, that’s  how the book wa supposed to end.

It was once said that the movies paid Helen Gurley Brown $50,000 a word for the title Sex and the Single Girl, and I know that movie adaptations are often  not really adaptations at all.

I still find it annoying beyond belief when movies do this. 

As to the book itself–it’s of a kind that was once the staple of  best seller lists and moderate reputations alike, and that  isn’t published any more than I know of.

It is largely a book about ordinary people living ordinary lives and having ordinary problems, but it’s  not the kind of thing contemporary “literary”  novels do, even when they can be described the same way.

I had a very good time with it, even if I didn’t ever get through the muddle to the Truth or where it’s supposed to be found.

I read Michael Fisher’s comment on the Magazine post, and I do want to point out some things.

First, in the article I was talking about, the women profiled were all young, just out of high school, and without children.

They each received substantial financial aid packages that included books, fees, AND room and board.  Transportation is almost never an issue on residential campuses, although transportation to and from home for holidays might be.

They were, in other words, in the perfect position to benefit from their opportunities. 

In fact, they were in a better position to benefit from those opportunities than many of their classmates with wealthier families, since a far smaller percentage of their packages required them to take on debt. 

In spite of all that, two of the three of them were bombing out of school, in one case for reasons the university involved had diagnosed as a form of self sabotage.

Self sabotage or otherwise, however, it was the case for both the girls who were about to drop out that the principle issue was the fear that getting an advanced education would inevitably mean becoming alienated from their families and the world in which they grew up.

That fear was not misplaced–moving up the social ladder DOES mean becoming alienated from your family and friends. 

This almost certainly has something to do with the fact that most people who report such a climb also report having felt alienated from their families and friends from the beginning.

If you don’t fit to begin with, you have less at stake when you walk out the door.

It is hard to see, however, what can be done about this sort of something truly draconian, like removing children from their poor parents at birth and raising them in a different environment. 

Simply giving them great schools and stressing upper middle class value systems during the school day won’t work.  Their families will  have a lot more time to work on them, and their family relationships will be a lot more important to virtually all of them.

My objections to the article I was commenting on is precisely in its attempts to obscure what is meant by “class.” 

Articles of that kind tend to veer back and forth between different definitions, intending to–and succeeding at–leaving the impression that ‘class” is another world for “socioeconomic status.”

But class is not principally about money.  It’s much more about ideas, attitudes, tastes, and habits.  There are plenty of educated-upper-middle-class people out there making working class salaries or less.  Their kids are in AP classes and getting scholarships at Harvard not because their parents have the bucks, but because their parents know things like the fact that it doesn’t matter what the sticker price of a college is, and AP will help  you get admitted and get financial aid, and financial aid awards can be negotiated.

Second, as to the risk thing–yes, I understand that risk is scary, and more often than not, when you take a risk  you fail. 

But risk is the name of the game.

The REALLY objectionable part of the bank bail out was that it uncoupled reward from risk.  It turned bankers into a protected class that did not have to suffer from their  mistakes, and let them keep the cash anyway.

Risk is scary, and it very often fails, but you should NEVER get serious rewards without it.

Ray Kroc went through bankruptcy at least twice–it might have been three times–and bad bankruptcy, too, with the house gone and the kids on the street and the family’s lives torn up and shredded and no idea where the next bottle of milk was coming from.

When he threw the dice again,  he had no guarantee whatsoever that he’d end up with McD’s instead of back in bankruptcy court.

If you don’t have the stomach for that kind of thing, I sympathize.  I don’t either. 

But the price of safety is–and should be–a much smaller reward.

And yes, yes, I k now–some people are Paris Hilton and have families with money that let them have all they want without working.

But part of the incentive for taking big risks is–and should be–the hope that you will be able to keep your children and grandchildren safe from the sort of risks you had to take yourself, and from the day to day grind that is the only other alternative.

I read the article from which Michael posted those comments, and a couple of other articles from the same site. 

The information is true, and it’s affecting–but it’s also completely irrelevant.

It’s certainly irrelevant to any discussion of “income inequlity.”

One of the things I have not been keeping a record of since the first of the year is the magazines I read, and I read a lot of them.

On one level, I hesitate to say I’ve “read” them, because,  unlike books, I don’t read everything inside the covers. 

Instead, I look around in them and see what I find interesting and read that.  Sometimes that’s a lot and sometimes that’s a little.  Sometimes issues get backed up over the course of months because I’ve got too much else to do.

Most of the magazines I read are more or less political, and they come from all sides of the political spectrum.  The standard list includes, among others:  Reason, National Review, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Weekly Standard, First Things,  The Progressive and The Objectivist Standard. 

If I can get ahold of them–and I can’t always–I like to get in Free Inquiry, The Skeptical Inquirer and The Humanist.

The point, I hope, is to get a look at all points of view.

This month, I find myself in one of those situations that is both annoying and frustrating. 

I have started a book that I ought to find very interesting.  It’s called Gold and Spices, and it’s been hanging around on my TBR pile since 1998.  It’s a history of the rise of commerce in the Middle Ages.  It has the advantage of being about my favorite historical period and about an aspect of that period on which I am not well informed.

And yet, for some reason, I just can’t get myself into it.  I’ve read almost 100 pages, and I will finish it, but I keep finding myself getting distracted.

When I get distracted, I’ve been flipping my way through the magazines at a much faster pace than usual, and yesterday evening I flipped through the one called The Progressive.

The Progressive is, in keeping with its name, a magazine of liberal opinion.  In fact, of largely left-liberal opinion.

It’s probably the magazine furthest on the left of the lift up there, in much the same way The Weekly Standard is furthest to the right.

I’ve got my preferences in issues.  Give me a stack of articles on the sequester, or Latin American, from the left or the right, and my eyes glaze over.

This issue was more interesting than that.  There were articles on unions and unionizing, for instance, and that subject has been fascinating me since the first of Scott Walker’s laws passed in Wisconsin.

I was about halfway through this issue when I came upon an article that was billboarded as being about the kind of place I teach in. 

I stopped and read it because–well, let’s face it.  It was directly related to my life.

And as I read it, it became  more and more eerily related to my life.  The terms the writer used, the descriptions of students and events, all sounded as if I could have written them myself.

Then I got  to the end of the article and read the bio.

I could have written it myself.

The writer teaches at the same place I do, although she is not somebody I know.

But although I could have written this article myself, the chances are almost certain that it is not the article I would have written if I ever decide to write about the place I teach.

It was, to put it bluntly, a Good News Bible.

The writer concentrated on the successes of the system, of which there are, most certainly some.

The successes are why there is not more turnover among teachers like me. 

You go along, convinced you cannot do this one more day without causing harm to yourself or others, because you’re just going to explode some day in front of class, or worse–and then the exception comes along, the one in a thousand who is able to work through the mountain of everything wrong to get out the other side, and you begin to think you’re doing some good.

The article was something of a hat trick.

The writer was able to say what she wanted to say and leave the impression she wanted to leave because the whole thing was an exercise in subjective experience.

She told story after story about students who had not only succeeded, but inspired her.  She provided absolutely nothing in the way of statistics, or description and analysis of the system, or–well, anything.

Everything this woman said sounded very good indeed, unless you knew that the stories represent much  less than a tenth of the reality of what goes on in our kind of place.

I’m not trying to disparage the success stories.  They’re real, and they can get you high for a month when they happen.

The problem is that we don’t know why they happen, aside from saying that some people are just like that.  We don’t know why are small groups of successes succeed.

As things stand now, we cannot use what we know about them to help anybody else.

A few months ago, there was a spate of articles about  how “class” is now more important than anything else in determining who applies to, gets into, and goes to a “decent college,” and who succeeds there once they go.

For  once, the articles really were about class–not socioeconomic status, but the set of habits and atitudes we bring to our day to day living.

Some of those articles made me absolutely crazy.  They were almost always written by people with the tastes and attitudes of the educated upper  middle class, and they kept stumbling over things that anybody with a wider range of acquaintances would have known  without having to think about it–

For instance, that outside the educated upper middle class, family always comes before work, career or ambtion–and if you find yourself in a conflict between work and family, the work goes out the window.

The educated upper middle class sees dropping out of college because  it’s estranging you from you family as a tragedy.  The people who do it see it as the only desirable choice.

All of that notwithstanding, the  habits and attidues that matter to the kids (and adults) who attend institutions like mine are much more basic:  keeping regular schedules, being on time to classes and appointments, turning in work on time and neat and complete, always doing the most and not the least possible.

None of these things depend on money. 

It doesn’t matter how much the one percent makes relative to the rest of us.

Poor people as well as rich people have these habits and attitudes and have had them all through time.

And, in terms of life outcomes, these things matter far more than how much money you grew up with.

The children of the educated upper middle class who  lack these habits and attitudes will fail. 

The children of the lower middle class and the poor who lack these habits and attitudes will crater, and they’ll crater early.

We can pour a couple of billion dollars into the K-12 system, provide all our students with private tutors and affirmative action, screw the entire system by reconfiguring all the standards until we can say more of our students “graduated” from this and “completed” that–

But as long as the kid is twenty minutes late to every class, hands in a handwritten half page on crinkled notepaper instead of a typed three page essay, shows up at  his job interview in a stained t-shirt with the F word on it and a backwards baseball cap–

As long as all that is the case, the kid is going to fail at just about anything we hope to help him to do, and none of the other things are going to make any damned difference.

I think I’d be less of a pessimist  if I thought anybody cared.

So, yesterday somebody observed to me that it’s been a week since I wrote a blog post, and I suppose it’s true.

It’s the time of year when I’m finishing another Gregor, which means I’m distracted a lot.

It’s more than a lot distracting to put a corpse face down in the middle of a busy city street and then not know how or why you got him there.

I know there are terribly organized people who write murder mysteries by planning everything out ahead beforehand with timelines and maps, but I’m not one of them.

Whatever.

It’s also spring break at my place, so I have a week without too much craziness in it, so I’ve got time.

Sort of.

Anyway, the last nor’easter of the year came and went without too much inconvenience where I live.  There is supposed to have been two feet of snow up in the northwest corner of the state, but we got nothing much more than a thick dusting and then temperatures high enough to melt it all before the end of the day.

I am not complaining.

What I did during the snow, after I’d done actual work, was to read Ann Coulter’s Mugged, and I’ll start there.

First, I’ve got to say that I have a volatile relationship with Ann Coulter’s books, and it’s not entirely my fault.

Yes, the woman is tendentious practically as a vocation, but she’s not the only one, and she’s at least honest about it.

Most of the time when people claim Coulter is “lying,” what she’s actually doing is one of three things:  a) expressing an opinion that infuriates them or b) saying something true that nobody wants to think about or c) engaging in humor.

That last thing endlessly fascinates me.  I can’t figure out if the people who go ballistic about Coulter’s sarcasm really can’t recognize sarcasm when they see it, or if they’re engaged in a deliberate attempt to use any excuse at all to engage in an orgy of moral self righteousness.

Okay, given the people involved, that might be a trick question.

But Annie is Annie, and I know what I’m going to get going in, so these things aren’t what bother me.

What does bother me is that the quality of research is incredibly uneven from book to book. 

The book on Joseph McCarthy was incredibly well researched.  I spent four or five days on the Internet trying to check out various claims, and Coulter always came up accurate.

Even in places where I uncovered critics claiming that one statement or another was inaccurate, further digging always proved Coulter’s version right. 

Godless, on the other hand, was just a mess. 

What’s worse, it was a mess on subjects about which I had first hand knowledge.

What that book did was to take the activities of a very small group of people and blow them up as if they were majority activities and opinions.

And yes, I know that’s what progressives do with the Tea Party, but I don’t like it there, either, and I don’t see why I should have to put up with it at all.

All that said–Mugged is definitely one of Coulter’s best researched books, and it is also one of her more interesting  ones.

It is first a book about racial politics, and it’s a good one.

We talk a lot about how we should have an “honest discussion about race,” but what we mostly mean when we say that is that we should have a discussion about race couched in academic platitudes and social science jargon.

This book is an honest discussion about race, and especially about American racial politics.

Of course, it’s not the honest discussion about race that the people calling for the honest discussion about race want to have, but those people are still putting out academic platitudes and social science jargon, and we can’t blame Annie for that.

For what it’s worth, I did spend a couple of days checking out various claims (who did what during the Civil Rights era, who supported segregation andwho supported integration, the pattern of wins and losses in the Southern states after the Goldwater election (important verifying or debunking the existence of a “southern strategy)) and all the ones I did check out were solid.

What’s more important to me is that the book says things, out loud, that most people will not say, even though it’s obvious from their behavior that they think them.

Of course, this is Coulter, so the book spends way too much time calling people insane and doing other things whose entire purpose seems to be to get people frothing at the mouth and indignantly declaring how offensive she is. 

By now you’d think the frothers would have figured out that Coulter doesn’t care and that all they do with the frothing is give her a chance to laugh all the way to the bank.

But frothers–and there are frothers on both sides–never do seem to be able to figure that out.

That said, if you can get past the rhetoric, there are some truly valuable things in this book, including references to the studies that track what affirmative action actually does in contrast to what it says it does–and they’re social science studies, so I treat them with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, the fact that I had to go to a book by Ann Coulter to find them is very interesting.

All that being said, I would not recommend this book to everyone.

I think its ideas and its research would be valuable for everyone to know, but I also understand that Coulter’s style–aggressive, antagonistic and abrasive on purpose–upsets a lot of people just as a style. 

And people  upset with the style hear nothing but the style.

If you can handle the style, there’s a lot here to learn.

If you can’t, we’ll just have to wait  until someone comes along with a book with the same thesis and similar research meant for a wider audience.

That sounds like I want Coulter to stop writing the way she writes, but I don’t.

Our commitment to free speech is measured by how we respond to the speech we hate, not the speech we love.

Coulter long ago became the standard by which I measure the authenticity or hypocrisy of various people’s claims to be in favor of free expression.

If you think the proper response to Annie is to find some way, any way, to shut her up–

Well, you might consider the possibility that you’re not on the side you say you are.

I need to go off and do something sensible.

I haven’t read Criiminal yet, but I’ll get around to it.  Karin Slaughter is the only writer I read any more, mostly because she’s the only one who doesn’t seem to me to be operating almost entirely on cliches.

If the book does locate things like having to have a husband or father in order to open a bank account, and that kind of thing, in 1975,  I would say that was a little late for me.

I was 22 in the fall of 1973, when I first went out to graduate school, and I opened a bank account and (about a  year later) rented a house without having to get anybody’s permission at all.  In 1975, I moved to Michigan and did the same with bank accounts and rental property and even bought a very expensive bed frame and mattress on credit without having to get a husband, father, or anybody else to sign for me.

On the discrimination and harrassment front, the timing fits my experience a little better–not because I ever experienced much of it, but because I’ve got credible evidence from people I trust that there was a lot of it specifically in professions that had been traditionally male.

And especially in trades that had been traditionally working class male, which is what the police department–outside of particular divisions–would have been.

In all that time, though, I was actually grabbed only once, and not by an employer.  The man was roaringly drunk at the time, in the middle of the day, which was not surprising.  He was roaringly drunk most of the time.

The incident was infuriating but not frightening, and witnessed by half a dozen people.  One of them was coming to the rescue when I pushed the guy off and he fell to the floor.  He had to be helped up and gave no indication that he had any idea of what had just happened, or even of why he’d fallen down.

It might have been subterfuge, but neither I nor anybody else who saw what happened thought so, and if you’d known this man and his behavior,  you wouldn’t have either.

What really strikes me about this incident, looking back on it, what really seems different between the then and the now, is not that the man wasn’t hauled up on harrassment charges or threatened with having his tenure revoked, but that  nobody said anything or did anything about the alcoholism.

He’d been brought in the year before as a “name” in the profession, with automatic full professor status and tenure, and the fact that he was falling down drunk most of the time was never mentioned by anybody.

These days, we’d send him to rehab at the very least. 

I do remember a lot of sexual innuendo and dirty jokes.  If they came from people whom I did not believe posed any actual threat to me–and they always did come from such people–I just rolled my eyes and expressed my opinions about jerks.   

The problem of that, of course, is that exactly the same behavior might have felt much more threatening to other people. 

And it might even have felt legitimately much more threatening.

I’ve heard all the really stupid stories–the woman who wanted a print of a Goya nude taken off her classroom wall because she thought it was sexual harrassment, etc–and nobody wants to encourage that sort of mindless self-important pseudorighteousness.

At the same time, that sort of thing is very bad manners at the least, and I’m not sorry to see that it’s largely  no longer tolerated.

There was a very interesting series of posts on Facebook a while back, written by author and actress Fidelis Morgan (good books, available for e-readers, look them up).

Morgan worked on and off on BBC programs during the tenure of a now-dead TV star host named Jimmy Savile, who seems to have made a positive vocation out of groping the staff, among other things. 

The cover up of that behavior recently became a full-scale BBC scandal, with lots of people moaning and shaking about how-could-this-have  happened.

Morgan points out that it was not Savile alone who was guilty of such behavior, but most of the males in the business, and the women did what they called “putting up with it.”

All that said, I still don’t think it’s possible to be nostalgic for an era that was dead and gone before you were born.

So I don’t know what to call my thing about the thirties.

I listened to Gershwin again this morning anyway,  and tomorrow, for blog, I just may put on Artie Shaw.

 I’ve just started finishing a Gregor, and I seem to be in a very strange mood.

So, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here with the music going off behind my head.

But it isn’t the usual music. 

For some reason, the only thing that would do this morning was George Gershwin, from the only CD I own, called The Essential George Gershwin and made up almost entirely of classic recordings of things like “I Got Rhythm” and “Summertime.” 

I think the “Swanee River” track might actually have Al Jolson singing. 

But it’s like I said.  It’s going on behind my head, and I’m not in the mood to go into the other room to check the liner notes.

I k now it must seem, sometimes, to people who read this blog, that I only listen to classical music, or early music (as in medieval), or even just harpsochord music, but that isn’t true.

I actually like quite a few other things, including Gershwin–jazz of almost every variety, Sixties and early Seventies Rock and Roll, Fifties Rock and Roll, some more modern Rock and Roll, and lots and lots and lots of modern Country.

There are probably categories that I’m leaving out, but you get the picture.  I am about music the way I am about reading–I like practically everything at least some of the time.

The reason that I never talk about anything but classical on the blog is that I tend to write the blog right after I write the for real, which I do invariably in the mornings.

Music, for me, is tied really strongly to particular times of the day.  Jazz and Blues belong to the dark–not just to the nighttime, which can be very light very late in the summer, but to the dark. 

Gershwin isn’t Koko Taylor and he’s not John Coltrane, either, but I still tend to associate what he does with darkness.

Most of the time, it doesn’t even occur to me to put something like Gershwin on in the morning, and then there’s the problem with lyrics.

I really write better when I’m listening to instrumentals, and not to lyrics.

This morning, though, I’m not only in a Gershwin mood, I’m in a not-later-than-the-Thirties mood. 

Since it’s Saturday and I have a fairly clear day after I get the computer stuff done,  I’ll crank up the DVD player later and Watch Things while I correct papers.

It always helps to Watch Things when you correct papers, because when the papers get exceptionally egregious you can always turn your attention to–whatever.

The whatever this afternoon will be, I think, also up-to-the-Thirties.

I’ve got a couple of largish Charlie Chan collections (one from each actor), plus a good stack of Busby Berkeley musicals.  Any of those will do.

I do a lot of this kind of thing lately.  I pick an era and just let myself live in it for a while.

For a while, I worried that this was a weird form of nostlagia.  One of the eras is quite definitely the Fifties, and I have all the seven seasons of the Perry Mason television show that have been released. 

I’ve got some movies from the same period, too, and I want one that isn’t on DVD yet called The Girl He Left Behind.

Most of the eras I get “nostalgic” for, though, I can’t be nostalgic for, because I wasn’t alive when they happened.

There just seems to be something about the imaginative representations of these eras that seems to me to be more congenial to who I am, than the era I’m living in now.

Intellectually, I know this is not really true. 

I would not have enjoyed living in the actual Thirties, or the actual Forties.

What’s more, I did, in fact, live in the actual Fifties, and I was  miserable.

Still, there is something going on here, and I wish I knew what.

The best way I can explain it is to say that there is something about the underlying sense of living in these eras that feels better to me than that same underlying sense of living feels to me now.

Maybe it’s just that these eras seem to me to be so much less angry than ours is now, and so much less divided.

Of course, that insight–if that’s what it is–snags on another one, which is that angry and divided isn’t always bad. 

If the world is wrong or bad or corrupted, we ought to be angry.

And if only some of us see that corruption or want it fixed, then we ought to be divided.

For some reason, though, even the wrongness and badness and corruption–and even the wrongness and badness and corruption that would have personally affected me–seems less bad than a lot of what I’ve got at the moment.

I’m not sure just in what sense that is true, but it does seem to be true.

And for today, I’m not going to worry about it.

I’m just going to run a lot of Thirties movies, and listen to Gershwin in between.

My younger son told me this morning that I only had to look around.  There were birds of all kinds near the windows, and geese honking away in the sky, and no need to keep the heat more than halfway up–obviously, it’s spring.

I am, I will admit, a little skeptical.

Historically–if you can call my tenure in this house a history–we’ve had our worst nor’easter of  the season in the first  week of March.

I know this because my sons’ school always had the parents’ performance of its musical the first week of March, and since Greg always had a part in it, and it was always held at night, I often found myself struggling home in the dark in really, really awful weather.

So we’ll see.  Maybe spring is here.  Maybe there will be a two foot fall on Tuesday.

I will admit that spring has to come sometime.  It’s more or less required.

At any rate, the February reading report.

Anyone who has read the January report will note that this one is a lot shorter.

That’s partly because February is a short month, but mostly because life has swung back into gear.  I had manuscript revisions, and teaching started again, and I’ve started the new Gregor.

There have also been issues that I admit I never considered before starting this.

Those of you who read this blog semi-regularly know what kind of a fight I had to put up to read the Francis Bacon book, a problem that resulted in my doing something I almost never do–I read another book in the middle of attempts to read the Bacon book.

I have no idea at all how to indicate something like that on a list, or even if I should indicate it.

But, for better or worse, here’s the list for books finished in February:

10) Robert A. Heinlein.  Starship Troopers.

11) Louise Penny.  A Trick of the Light.

12) Francis Bacon.  The Major Works including New Atlantis and the Essays.  Edited by Brian Vickers from Oxford University Press.

13) Alice Hoffman.  Seventh Heaven.

              d) Raymond Chandler.  “The Simple Art of Murder.”

14.  Randy Alcorn.  Prolife Answers to Prochoice Arguments.

I won’t go on about the Francis Bacon, since I’ve already gone about it, except to say this:

The bad design is, sincerely, a shame.  There is a lot that’s interesting about this book, including information on one of the most famous murder cases in the history of England–the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overby, for which case Bacon was himself the Crown prosecutor. 

For those who asked–the “usual places” to look for a short biography of the editor (Brian Vickers) are at the front of the book, the back of the book, and on the back cover of a paperback.

The very last selection in that book is Bacon’s New Atlantis,  his attempt at a perfect-world-scheme in the tradition of More’s Utopia. 

It is depressingly exactly what you would expect, except with a lot more scientific gadgets.  On that score it can be properly labeled science fiction in the old sense of the term–that is, fiction that tries to anticipate the science of the future.

The notes tell me that Bacon did a not half job of projection.

Alice Hoffman’s Seventh Heaven is a contemporary “literary” novel.  I read very few of those, but I like Hoffman’s work in general.  I’ve talked here about her Blue Diary, which is the story of a man who committed a crime and escaped to make a life for himself for twenty years, only to be caught out when his case aired on one of those catch-the-criminal shows.

Seventh Heaven is less easy to categorize.  It is the picture of what happens to the people living on a single street in a housing development that is pretty much Levittown, over the course of a single school year, starting in the fall of 1959 and going through the spring of 1960.

I know  that doesn’t sound like much, but when I first bought this book, over ten years ago, I read it obsessively–a dozen times at least in the space of four or five months.

I was a little surprised to find that, coming back to it after several years, I’m still as entranced by it. 

Part of it is that I have known all those characters, and even that particular street.  Those things are, in this novel, just what I perceived them to be when I was living them. 

Undoubtedly both my perceptions and Hoffman’s are skewed by being the kind of people we are–but then, everybody’s perceptions are skewed that way.  There’s nothing to be done about it.

This is not the novel I would give to those of you who are impatient with “literary” fiction–but this is the writer of Practical Magic.  Literary or not, her work has been generally popular.

And all of it–including Seventh Heaven–includes at least some magic or indications of the supernatural.

Prolife Answers to Prochoice Questions was given to me by a friend a couple of years ago.  The friend is prochoice.

The book is written by a pastor and published by a religious press.  The pastor–Randy Alcorn–is both a prolife activist and a popular novelist of Christian books.

And he tries–he really, really tries–to present arguments based only on logic and scientific evidence that will speak to secular readers.

It doesn’t quite work, and the result is a schizophrenic hybrid, where secular discussion will suddenly erupt in suggestions for activism for your church.

Even so, the book  has several things to recommend it.

If you want a concise exposition of what prolife arguments actually are–instead of the press reports of what they’re supposed to be–this is a good place to start.  It’s clear and well organized.

My biggest problem with the book is that Alcorn persistantly melds legal and moral arguments, and at several points states outright that laws should have a moral foundation.

That means that when  he deals with the only argument I think can be made for legally allowing abortion–and I’m grateful to the man for actually knowing the argument exists–

Anyway, when he gets around to providing an “answer” for that prochoice argument, he doesn’t.

Instead,  he provides a moral argument.

But I’ll grant him the moral argument.  It’s the legal argument that I find unassailable, and he doesn’t deal with that at all.

For what  it’s worth, I still think the best prolife book ever written in James T. Burchaell’s Rachel Weeping.

And, finally–Raymond Chandler.

The essay above, “The Simple Art of Murder,” was recommended to me several times by more than one person, and I put off reading it several times.

The fact is that I don’t like Chandler as a writer.  I find him overwrought and pretentious and the worst kind of snob, and I never did understand what so many people found to love about his “noir” detective novels.

Contrary to the claims by  just about everybody, including Chandler himself, the hardboiled detective novel is no  more “realistic” than anything Agatha Christie got herself famous for, and is often less.

“The Simple Art of Murder” is Chandler’s broadside against just such writers of just such fiction as the stuff put out by Christie and Sayers, both of whom he castigates by unmistakeable reference.

But the writing is wonderful, sharp, sardonic, sarcastic and hysterical.

If Chandler had written like this in his fiction, I’d have already read all of it.

And that’s the month.

At the moment the issue is  more about how much I’ve got to do today.

So I’d probably better go do it.

Every once in a while, I stumble across odd situations in the local news, and I follow them until I can make sense of them.

I’m not sure that I can make sense out of this one, exactly, but I’ve got some ideas.

A little over a year ago, a homeless woman from Bridgeport named Tanya McDowell was arrested for “stealing education.”

In case you’re wondering what that means, it’s simple–McDowell supposedly lived in Bridgeport, but she took her child across city lines and registered him in a Norwalk school, giving a false address to give the impression that she and the child resided in the district where the school was located.

When I first heard this story, I had some questions that I thought were obvious, but that nobody else seemed to be considering.

The first of these was that I did not understand how, if the woman was homeless, she could be said to “live” anywhere in particular. 

Isn’t that the nature of homelessness?  McDowell might not have been living in Norwalk, but she wasn’t actually living in Bridgeport, either. 

All I can say is that there must have been some method of working this out, because McDowell was duly charged and sent off on a long and convoluted road that ended (more or less) yesterday, when she was sentenced to five years in prison for a series of offenses that were discovered during the investigation into “stealing education.”

In other words, Tanya McDowell was  nobody’s idea of a saint, or even of a reasonably responsible human being.  She wasn’t homeless because life had turned sour on her and she just hadn’t gotten the breaks. 

And my guess is that she also wasn’t very bright.  While out on bail on the “stealing education” charge, she managed to get herself arrested again for selling drugs to undercover officers.

But.

Here’s the thing.

It’s unusual to find a homeless mother trying to get her child registered for school at all.  It’s not just the fact that many of the homeless are either drug addicted or mentally ill or both. 

Even in the best of cases, what you almost always find are people who are almost terminally disorganized, whose skill levels and levels of education are low, whose sense of time is tentative and who tend to find it difficult to establish and maintain routines.

In McDowell’s case, the impression I got was that the basic issue was drugs, and that’s the way that goes.

But.

Here’s the thing.

McDowell’s attempt to register her child in a better school district was neither stupid nor irresponsible, even if it was criminal.

The Bridgeport schools are as bottom of the barrel as you can get. Not only are the academic achievement levels low–low enough to be called bottoming out–but there are endless problems with drugs, weapons, and gangs,  dizzyingly high levels of out of wedlock pregnancy, and drop out rates that just won’t quit.

If I had a child sentenced to spend his time in such a school, I’d do anything I could to get him out, too.

And when I ask myself whether I would think she was a better person if she’d just registered her child in the allowed district, I’m not sure my answer would be yes.

In the meantime, of course, everybody involved with this case and everybody who’s heard about it has been going ballistic.

There’s been enormous support for McDowell across the country and a general feeling that she should not have been prosecuted on the “stealing education” charge. 

In the meantime, the towns have been going nuts, scared to death that if McDowell got off lightly on the education charge they would be faced with a tidal wave of false registrations and a pool of severely disadvantaged students needing special conditions and circumstances they’re not in a position to provide.

And the Norwalk issue is ironic.  Norwalk is in no way one of Connecticut’s better school systems.  It’s a crowded industrial city itself. 

It’s just a lot better than Bridgeport.

McDowell has, by now, been hit with a fine large enough so that the chances are she will never get out from  under it.   She’s gone from being homeless with a chance (maybe) to pretty much permanently unable to get her life back to anything any of us would consider “normal.”

She’s lost her child.  She’s going to spend five years in jail on the drugs charges. 

She’s landed in a horrific and possibly unsolvable mess.

And it’s arguably all her own fault, especially with the drugs.

But.

Criminal or not, that thing with the school registration is a sign of something.

It’s a sign that there’s something truly salvagable here, something in Tanya McDowell that is deserves to be acknowledged.

I’m not too sure how.

I just know that coming down on her like this feels entirely wrong to me.

We are supposed to be getting a snow storm today–in fact, we’re supposed to be getting it already.  The web sites I go to for weather have been screaming about it for days, because that would make three week ends in a row with snow, and that would be very impressive.

At the moment, however, I’m sitting in my office, and it’s warmer than it’s been in months.  It’s a little cloudy outside, but otherwise than that, nothing is happening.

I don’t even have all the available heat in the house on, which is pretty impressive for this point in February.

Maybe it will cloud up later, and snow will fall on my head all afternoon.

I doubt it.

But I doubt it.

This morning the local news websites were hemming and hawing around “well, maybe mostly rain,” and the snow map didn’t even have the worst predictions over my neck of the woods.

I hate the phrase “neck of the woods.”

I’ve never understood what it was supposed to mean.

When I think about it, I always imagine Ents.

At any rate, Ents notwithstanding–

About a week and a half ago I read a book called A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny.

I read it because the author and I had both been mentioned in an article in Publisher’s Weekly.

For those of you who don’t know, PW is the industry magazine for booksellers.  Being mentioned there in positive terms is generally considered to be a good thing.

In this case, it was also not a hugely unusual thing.  She and I had been mentioned together before. 

And when it happened, as when it happened this time, I always told myself I’d have to get hold of one of Penny’s books and see what I thought of it.

So I finally did, and then–just to check it out–I posted a status to Facebook asking if anybody else had read Penny’s work, and what they thought about it.

Now, this is not a post about Penny’s book.  It was a good book.  I enjoyed reading it.  I would be happy to read another one. 

Her characters are engaging, the setting of the novel was intriguing, and the whole thing rang true.

What flummoxed me was the responses I got to my status on Facebook.

All those people liked Penny’s books, too, but they were nearly universal in cautioning me to read the series in order.  The characters develop from book to book, they warned me.

And they did think it was a warning.

But here’s the thing–I read a lot of series whose characters develop over time, and I almost never read them in order.

I’m sure there must be some advantages to reading in order, but there are also disadvantages. 

For one thing, I frequently come to series late in the day, so that there are multiple volumes out there and the earliest ones are already out of print.

For another, I have the firm conviction that every mystery novel should be able to stand on its own. 

Unlike novels of other kinds, mystery novels focus on a crime and its solution.  That crime and that solution needs to be thoroughly explored and explained within the single volume, or what you have is a very bad mystery novel.

It would be a very bad mystery novel even if its characters were marvels of completeness and complexity to rival Dostoyevski.

This attitude, that there is something compelling and necessary about reading a series in the order in which it was published, seems to me so wrongheaded that I don’t know how to approach it.

I do know that some writers create problems for themselves on this score by letting spoilers about earlier mysteries into the later ones, but not only do most writers not do this, I would say, from my experience, most of them don’t.

I’m also not sure that I care when they do.

Especially in cases where the earlier books are OOP anyway, I’m not sure why it matters–but even when the entire series is in print, I don’t read novels so that I can see if I can outwit the writer on the solution.

“I figured out who did it before the end” is not, for me, a reason to think that a detective novel is bad.

For me, the disadvantages to this approach to reading mystery fiction seem so obvious, I can’t understand why anybody does it. 

I don’t even take this approach to novel series where the continuity is the point.  The first novel I ever read in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent series was the third one in, and after that I read them as I found them.  It was definitely not in order.

Maybe I’d be less frustrated about this if I didn’t also think that there are people out there who would enjoy my books but who are not reading them because the early ones are not in print. 

Matters of personal future royalties aside, however, I really don’t understand why people do this, even though I know most people do.

After all, if you get interested in the development, you can always go back and reread the series in order.

The copyedited manuscript beckons.

It is trying to kill me.

Okay.

So I’ve been thinking about the exchange yesterday. 

And a number of things occur to me.

The first is that the woman who wrote the book reviewed in the NYRB obviously had an agenda–she wrote the book specifically to outline that agenda.

The second is that I tend to assume that anything that is presented to me as social “science” research is an exercise in “proving” predetermined conclusions.

I tend to assume that because that has been the case in the vast majority of instances when I’ve gone and checked out study protocols, etc, after I’ve read the reports of findings that sounded…well, off.

No control groups.  Tendentious or ambiguous survey questions. Sampling error that’s more like sampling abuse.  The nearly universal  practice of conducting studies using volunteer (and sometimes paid) college student  sample groups under the apparent assumption that there will be nothing significantly different about the responses of such groups from that of the responses of, say, a collection of garage mechanics who never graduated from high school.

It’s things like that that explain why I don’t get terribly upset when I hear that Republicans have managed to get a federal law passed forbidding federal funding  for social “science” research.

I mean, good for them.

But what I think is much more important is that this book, as reviewed–and even some of the statements of the reviewer, who isn’t really entirely happy with the ideas–

This book as reviewed seems to me to be one  more volley in the seemingly endless war to redefine human beings in a way that will make oligarchy–real oligarchy, not the imagined “corporations are evil” variety–respectable again.

In spite of the theoretically addictive nature of junk food, I find that I can take it or leave it, and if I decided I want to leave it, nobody can force me to take it.

The government can force me to take it if I don’t want to buy insurance from insurance companies or if I don’t want to pay for insurance that subsidizes “mental health” “benefits.”

The assumption of the book as reviewed are breathtaking,  if you think about it.

Rights, which were originally assumed to inhere in the person irrespective of his mental abilities, moral virtue, level of education, or anything else are, in works like these, simply presumed to need to be earned.

You get a right to make your own decisions IF  you use that right “responsibly,” meaning in the ways the people administrating rights belive to be acceptable.

But such a thing is not a right.  It’s a privelege granted to you by the people who control priveleges, which in this case would be members of the educated upper  middle class.

And–surprise!  surprise!–what these people mean by living “responsibly” and in accord with “scientific evidence” is living the way they do themselves.

The class bias of all these things is even more breathtaking than the rest.

This was blatantly clear in Bloomberg’s attempt to ban “sugary drinks” over 16 ounces at restaurants and other venues in NYC.

A venti caramel Frappacino at Starbucks is certainly a “sugary drink” and way more than 16 ounces, but it was exempt from the ban because–because–

Because People Like Us drink those, and they’re obviously not bad for us because we’re thin…unlike those stupid, undisciplined slobs who blight the prospect of our beautiful city by walking around bulging out of all that size XXX spandex.

But you can’t be judgmental.  It’s not their fault.  They really want to be Just Like Us, but they can’t manage it on their own.  They can’t control themselves.

So we’ll “help” them.

Most of the people who champion this sort of thing call themselves progressives, but these policies and assumptions are not progressive at all.

They’re distinctly regressive–a return to the morals legislation and the definition of human nature that plagued both the Middle Ages and the Victorians. 

I know I’m not the first person who has noticed that what all this is–including that book, as reviewed–is a class war considerably nastier and more unforgiving (and more truly destructive) than anything involved in our arguments about the capital gains tax.

But the fact that this is going on, and not only on issues like this, seems to me to be the very worst news about the state of the culture.

But that’s a subject for another time, and I’ve got a copyedited manuscript to finish with.