Hildegarde

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here, it’s ridiculous.  It just turned eight o’clock on the morning and it’s already seventy degrees, and very muggy, so that seventy feels like eighty.  It got to nearly 100 yesterday, and it’s supposed to do the same today and tomorrow. 

It’s a good thing I’ve got a lot of work to do.

In spite of all that, however, I’ve got a complaint.

I just finished a book that I enjoyed all the way through, and then I got to the last ten pages.

And I hated the ending.

I mean that literally.

The ending seemed to me to be a) facile, and b) predictable and c) to negate, in fact, what the author thought she was trying to say.

C, above, is the most important point.

I felt the same way about the ending to the movie version of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, a book I’ve loved for decades.

The book is about the spiritual journey of a man named Larry Darvell, who is compelled by his experiences in the Great War to go find the meaning of life.  He finds it in Buddhism, and in detaching himself from all passions.

And at the end of the book, that’s what he does.  He gives up his small private income and his life in Paris and goes back to America to drive a cab, to practice moderation and “continence,” by which he means celibacy.

And yes, I know.  This sounds awful.  The book is wonderful nevertheless, and you have to remember that it was written long before Western celebrities had taken up Buddhism as a hobby.

The Buddhism as a hobby thing, however, is a good reason not to see the Bill Murray remake of the movies.  When I talk about the movie here, I’m talking about the movie with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power.

And, as I said, the ending to that movie is truly, mind-numbingly awful, because at the end of it, what Larry does is confront his old girlfriend from Chicago and charge her with all her sins, with complicity in the death of a mutual friend, with selfishness and jealousy.

And there is, of course, a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from such a scene.  Isabel really is a monster of self-centeredness.  You want to see her smacked around a little, even if only verbally.

But having Larry actually do it makes everything we’ve heard about Larry’s spiritual journey null and void.   He has not reached the shores of enlightenment.  He has not changed his very soul.

It’s as if all the industrialists at the end of Atlas Shrugged had gone–oh, gee, okay, we meant what we said, but we’re making an exception for Social Security.

I’ve had people tell me they felt this way–betrayed, let down, annoyed, angry, I don’t know–by the endings of some mystery novels, where either the murderer isn’t caught, or where he can’t be punished in one way or the other.

A mystery novel, however, has the conventions of the genre to deal with.  Readers come to a mystery with the expectation that the perpetrator will be revealed and punished, either killed during the action or arrested for trial and imprisonment later.

The book I was reading was a mainstream novel, which means that the conventions are fewer and the expectations should arguably be less.

The ending still did something more than merely annoy me, and it ensured that I would never read this particular book again.

It didn’t quite get me to a place where I wouldn’t read another book by this author, but if I did read another book and the ending did the same thing to me, that would probably be it.

Is this sort of thing general?  Do we all do this?

We talk a lot about how a book opens, and how important it is to keep the reader’s attention so that he or she goes on reading, but it seems to me that after that we mostly take it for granted that if the book hooks and holds us, the ending will be all right.

This book I just read proves on its own that that isn’t always the case.

And that doesn’t even get into the phenomenon of books whose real endings take place a good whacking hunk of prose before the technical ending, so that you get the bang-up you want and then have to read another 50 pages of meandering for no reason anybody can figure out.

The real ending of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for instance, is when Fred and George rout the evil Umbrage with their fireworks.  Everything after that is mostly anticlimax.

For myself, as a writer, I put less thought into my endings than I do to most of the rest of the books, and it occurs to me that this has probably always been a mistake.

I don’t think I’ve ever done this sort of thing, though, where the last ten pages makes the entire rest of the fiction completely pointless.

Maybe I should say that at least I hope I haven’t.

I wasn’t going to write a blog entry today, because a mess of a night with a couple of family emergencies–minor, but energetic–meaning that I am LITERALLY running on no sleep.  Okay.  I conked for about an hour after lunch, sitting up on the love seat.

But still.  I’m in no shape.  And I know I don’t take any responsibility for typos usually, but today I can barely see the keyboard.

I just want to post an explanation.  A number of people have been reading and responding to older posts, some very old indeed, and I just don’t know if I ever explained everything or not.

So here goes:

1) The literacy in the title of the “Literacy Quiz” is CULTURAL literacy. 

2) And I knew exactly what I was testing–I was trying to find out just how much trouble my students were going to have with their textbook.

All the questions on that quiz were pulled from a composition textbook that consisted of some straight chapters but mostly essays and articles from various writers.

All those items were mentioned in the text without any explanation whatsoever.  For instance, the writer of an essay might say, “The Europeans of the new century thought they were too civilized to engage in the kind of self-interested bloodiness of their ancestors, but in just a few months they would find themself involved in a conflagration that would make June 15, 1815 look like a kindergarten rehearsal for a very adult play.”

Okay, that was a terrible sentence.  I’m tired.  But you see what I mean.  If you don’t know what June 15, 1815 is, you can’t understand what the writer is saying.

All written work above a certain level of difficulty is full of allusions like that.  There are literally thousands of references across the culture that most writers simply assume most readers will just know. 

And “getting” the allusions goes a LONG was to being able to understand what a writer is saying.  In some cases, if you DON’T get them, you also don’t understand, period.

The textbook we were using was not a difficult one, and it was written for students of at best moderate academic ability.  Most of these students struggle daily with understanding the books and articles they’re asked to read, and they struggle not because they didn’t drill in phonics but because they have no cultural context to speak of.

I could get a hundred questions of that kind just by sitting down with the editorial/op ed pages of the New York Times on any given Sunday (that’s an allusion–did you get it?), and I sat down one afternoon in my living room and got nearly a hundred from just two pages of McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues.

All writers use allusions.  They have to.  No writer would ever get anything written if she had to explain everything, all the history, all the literature, all the art, all the politics, all the current events. 

That test did me in good stead as long as we used the book it was based on, because it told me where I had to stop and outline what they  needed to know to understand what they had to read. 

Without it, I would have failed a lot more people than I did, and I was not a cream puff.

And I don’t think being able to Google it is a substitute for knowing.  For one thing, lots of them didn’t even realize an allusion was present–they had no idea there was anything to do a search for.  For another, if you have to stop 15 times in the course of a 1000 op ed to look stuff up,  your understanding of the piece as a whole isn’t going to have been much better than if you hadn’t bothered. 

Be reassured, however–they didn’t get grades on that test, and it wasn’t part of their final grade for the course.

It was for my information.

And my information was depressing.

When I was in high school, I went through a period of reading everything I could get by any living French writer I had ever heard of–on the unformed assumption, I think, that if I couldn’t get up and move to Paris right that minute, I could at least anticipate the move by living there in my head.

I was about fifteen at the time, and I hadn’t yet figured out what later because obvious.  Hemingway and the other expatriate Americans whose lives I envied hadn’t spent much time talking to the French.  They talked to each other.   They really didn’t talk to French writers.

I think it took another ten years before it occurred to me that there might be a reason for that.

At any rate, at the time, there was a set of more or less uniform paperback editions of Sartre’s works, including The Words, and Nausea and a collection of plays including No Exit.  In the collection of plays was one called The Respectful Prostitute, and it has the distinction of being the first work I ever read that I knew I was supposed to respect and simply did not, at all, no compromises.

I don’t mean I didn’t like it.  I didn’t like a lot of things, but in most of those cases I understood, instinctively, why what I didn’t like should still be considered “good,” in the sense of “done well.”

I didn’t like Thomas Hardy.  I could tell that his novels were done well.  I just didn’t want to be in the same room with them.

The Respectful Prostitute was not like that.  The problem was not that I didn’t like it, although I didn’t.  The problem was that it was rank, outright awful.

We’ve talked here, on and off, about whether we can say objectively if a book is good or bad.  The Respectful Prostitute is a play, and I’ve never seen it performed.  I also read it in translation, and translation can be either good or bad in itself.

In spite of all that, I feel perfectly confident in saying that the thing was awful.  It was Sartre’s attempt to “address” the racisim of the pre-Civil Rights era American South–it was written in 1946–and even at the age I was I knew that the man knew nothing about America, nothing about the South, nothing about race relations, and not a whole lot about how human beings actually responded to each other. 

The play does not fall flat.  It’s worse.  It seems to take place in some alternate universe where wooden automatons spout all the lines you’d expect them to if you’d read a tract on The Negro Problem, but none of the lines you’d expect them to if you’d ever met any people.

I have no idea if that’s clear.  The experience of reading that play was so cringingly awful that I can remember finishing it even today–remember where I was, what I was doing, everything.  It was my literary equivalent of the Kennedy assassination.

I am really not trying to imply here that Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is bad in the way Sartre’s play is bad–it isn’t.  In fact, it’s a very good book, if by “good” I mean one that keeps me interested and makes me want to go back for more.  In fact, it even makes me want to check out Barbery’s first novel, which concerns the same apartment house and some of the same characters.

What the two works share, though, is this:  in both (all the time in the Sartre, on and off in the Barbery) it’s quite obvious that the writer is writing about people he or she does not know and does not understand.   Sartre’s play is bad because he didn’t understand any of the characters he thought he was writing about.  Barbery’s book is better–and often good–because she does understand most of them. 

But, a few preliminary notes:

1) My guess is that most of the people who read this blog would not consider this to actually be a novel at all, if they read it.  It’s not “literary” in the way that Ann Beattie or Michael Chabon is literary.  It doesn’t focus on adultery and campus politics. 

It is, however, also not a “story” in the sense people mean when they say “that book has a good story.”

It is told in the first person from two points of view:  Renee, a working-class but ferociously self-educated concierge in a high-end apartment house in Paris; and Paloma, a twelve year old girl in one of the families with an apartment in the building.

Things happen to these people, and to the people around them, but the point of view sections are both meant to be their diaries.  And, as with all diaries, they not only report events, but discourse on ideas.

And there are a lot of ideas.

2) This book spent over a year on the New York Times best seller list.  That’s a long time, even for the Times list, which is skewed in favor not only of independent bookstores but of a certain kind of independent bookstore. 

The writer is a professor of philosophy, and the book was supported by what sounds from the description like the French equivalent of the NEA.  

National Endowment for the Arts, not National Education Association.

So this is not only French literature, it is, in a way, Official French literature. 

That leaves me with some interesting questions.  Did this book do less well, commercially, in France than it did here? 

The point of the Endowments–whatever they’re called–is to support art the government thinks is good but that has trouble finding an audience or appeals only to minority taste.

Any book that spends a year on the Times list is definitely paying its own way. 

Maybe French readers like French novels less well than American readers do?  I don’t know.  It would be interesting to have an answer.

3) The story of Paloma, the twelve year old girl, is essentially Catcher in the Rye, except that where Holden Caufield wanted to go back to childhood, Paloma wants to kill herself after setting her family’s very expensive apartment on fire.

This is not a spoiler.  She announces her intentions to do this in her first point of view section.  She has, however, all of Holden’s ideas–the alienation from her family and school and friends; the conviction that adults are all phony and inauthentic.

Barbery, however, went considerably farther than Salinger ever did in making the family the locus of awful–this is a group of people so determinedly neurotic, the cat is on Prozac. 

4) The story of Renee, the concierge–fifty-something and ugly, child of a working class background with no real formal education–is where I found the problems with characters who just don’t ring true.

Oh, Renee herself rings true enough, although being an American I have trouble connecting to her situation in some ways.

Where the thing goes off the rails is when we meet Renee’s equally working class friend Manuela or when Renee talks about her people growing up.

I know that most people in the “knowledge professions” think that anybody who does manual or menial work must be downtrodded, alienated and emotionally numb, but I’ve got people like that in my family, and that’s not who they are. 

I kept wanting to shake Renee and go–oh, stop projecting. 

5) Renee and Paloma have one big thing in common, and that’s that they’re both trying to hide how smart they are.  Renee believes that if she allows the rich residents of the apartment building to know she reads philosophy and literature instead of watching television and behaving like a member of the proletariat, they will–well, I don’t know what they’ll do.  Maybe fire her.  It’s never made clear.

This is where I had trouble, because, at least in NY, nobody would think twice about the concierge reading Heidigger or the guy running the kiosk on the corner reading Proust. And they’d both probably be in night school getting a degree, anyway.

Paloma doesn’t want to let anybody know how smart she is because she doesn’t want the kind of pressure she thinks her family would put on her if they knew.   And that would be thoroughly believable, except–

6) If you’re going to make your character a super genius, you’ve got to be VERY careful.  I’ve got exactly one supergenius in the whole of the Gregor Demarkian series, and I’m very careful never to show him doing any of the things he’s supposed to be a genius in.

So much of this book is from Paloma’s point of view that Barbery doesn’t have the luxury of doing that. 

That means that we’re constantly privy to Paloma’s thoughts on everything from French food to world politics–and those ideas are, well, what can I say?

Not particularly original, for one thing.  Paloma has managed to come up with pretty much the same set of complaints and observations as dozens of adolescents I’ve known, including myself.

And there’d be nothing wrong with that–it’s actually all entertaining enough–if I wasn’t being encouraged to see Paloma as much more than this. 

Given what’s actually here in the book, what makes Paloma stand out is not her brilliance, but her calm embrace of sociopathology.

And I’m willing to bet almost anything that that is not the way the author intended me to think of Paloma’s plan to commit arson and suicide on September 16.

7) When I was looking through various reviews and reports of this book before I read it, I came across a delighted review of the audio edition saying that it was wonderful, most of the chapters that were little essays on philosophy had been cut out.

This made me nervous about the book in a number of ways, but I can now say the reviewer was wrong–you don’t want to give up the chapters oh philosophy.

At the beginning of the novel, Renee is reading Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, a book about how all we can know is the workings of our own consciousness, we cannot ever really tell that there is an outside world that exists–a sort of apotheosis of solipsism.

And all I could think was:  well, if you WANT to be depressed, go spend your afternoons with transcendental phenomenology.

I’ll spend mine with Jane Marple, and I’ll be fine.

But then, outside of a year or two in adolscence when I was striking poses, I’ve never been the alienated kind.

Good book, really, for all the complaints–and I will read Barbery’s other one.

It’s Saturday, and barely seven o’clock, and my day has already gone to hell in a handbasket. Seriously.

I’m in one of those not in any position to make sense moods where I don’t even want the  Beethoven, never mind the Bach.  And I just realized that I may have made yet another mistake in figuring out what happened.

But I’ll go back and look at that in a minute.

First, a couple of notes.

I always thought of the Carl Upchurch story not as being about being saved by the Humanities, but about being saved by rigor.  The point about Shakespeare was not that it was good or affirming or whatever, but that it was difficult to read.   In order to make any sense out of it at all, he had to work at it, hard, and over an extended period.

I always thought it was that–and then the fact that he did succeed in understanding it–that was the point.  Twenty odd years of secretly thinking he was probably stupid (because he couldn’t do that kind of thing in school) were replaced by the realization that he could.

Some people are thugs because they think that it’s the best they’re able to be–it’s thug or victim, because they’re not good enough to do anything else.

I’m with Mique that whether “education” makes us better depends to a large extent on what that education consists of.  It’s not just the lack of rigor in the Humanities these days that gives me pause, but a formal educational system that over-rewards conformity on every level.

Walter Russell Mead made the point yesterday in an article on the present state of crises in the world–that the people we call our experts these days have large come  up in a system that requires conformity for success. 

The guy who thinks his English teacher is wrong about Shakespeare or his history teacher is wrong about the Civil War gets a lower grade than the guy who goes along to get along, and the guy who goes along to get along gets a better college placement than the rebel.

And that’s especially true the better and more elite the college, because in an applicant pool where pretty much everybody has straight As and ranks in the first three in her class, even a single hiccough can make you look not ready for prime time.

But my point yesterday was not to revisit the are the Humanities good for anything wars, but to ask about change.   I think it’s true–can’t remember who said it–that some people don’t change because they don’t want to bother, or even like where they are–but I also think it’s true that some people don’t change because they think the attempt is hopeless.

I’m also not sure that we should make such a big deal about the “difference” between somebody who has anger but learns to control it and somebody who learns simply not to have anger.

Learning to control the anger IS a change, a big one, and it has an enormous impact on the people around you.  I also think that it would be counterproductive to define “change” only as the radical result of getting rid of the trait completely.  My guess is that it’s probably not possible to get rid of the core trait.  The only possibilities we’re looking at are controlling it, or not.

And that makes the whole issue of sex and change even more interesting.  I’m pretty sure that it’s not possible to change who you are attracted to or what turns you on sexually.  I’m not sure you can’t change who or under what circumstances you have sex. 

We do know it’s possible for some people, including some people with really strong sex drives, to remain at least interpersonally celibate for long periods of time.  We even have records of some of their struggles from diaries and autobiographies.  None of them seems to have freed himself of sexual desire, only of sexual congress. 

But I think when the issue is put like that, it becomes fundamentally different from the argument we’re now having in public about Michelle Bachmann and her husband.

Maybe I’m the only one who’s been watching this here, but for about a week now there’s been a minor media bouhaha about the fact that Michelle Bachmann–who’s trying her hand at getting the Republican nomination for President–signed a “family values” pledge that, among other things, claims that the American black family was more cohesive under slavery than it is now.

It was also opposed to gay marriage. 

When the slavery thing didn’t have much traction, the media started looking into Bachmann’s life, and what they found was Bachmann’s husband, a man who advocates training homosexuals not to be homosexual any more.

He is also a man with distinctly “gay” attributes–as lisp, very effeminate body language, etc–and that has caused a huge fuss as well, although only Jon Stewart has been pointing out the man’s mannerisms on television.

But it occurs to me that “I think homosexuals should change so that they’re no longer attracted to same-sex partners” is one thing, and “I think homosexuals should change so that they no longer ACT ON their attraction to same sex partners” is something else.

And yet both sides seem to behave as if it’s only the first proposition that is being suggested, or that’s even possible to be suggested.

I don’t know if I’m making sense here.

Maybe all I’m saying is that we haven’t really managed to define what we mean by “change,” and we’ve got to do that if we’re going to be able to ask, or answer, the question of whether or not people can do it.

It’s the 15th of July, and for those of you who were confused on Wednesday–that was my birthday, but although I was born on Friday, the 13th, it wasn’t a Friday.  And I like Mozart.

This morning I got up very early and tried to do something resembling sensible work.  I even managed it, for a while.  Then I went to look at Arts and Letters Daily, and found an article about how reading and writing about literature does not make you a better person.  It might even make you worse.

The article itself was not all that interesting.  For one thing, I’ve never really held the opinion that reading and writing about literature, whether High Cult or lower, will make anybody better.  The idea that that’s something it can do has been the cause of some truly terrible young adult novels over the years.

It also seems to me to be a self-evidently destructive way to think about reading, or about studying the Humanities.  It is a version of the same vocational impulse I’m often driven to distraction by when we have our periodic dust-ups about the Canon.

What’s the canon for?  It makes you a good person.  Wheee!

No, it doesn’t.

The actual claim in the Humanities, of course, is not that the Humanities make you a good person, but only that they make you a better one–better than you would have been if you had not studied them. 

Robert has pointed out that there is no feasible way to test this–in order to do it properly, you’d have to get each person to live his life twice, once with the input of literature and once without.

Unlike Robert, I don’t think we should dismiss questions just because we have no standard method of testing them.  To do that would be to dismiss most of the great questions of human existence.  The scientific method, and the quantification that goes with it, do wonderful things with quanta, smelting, and vaccinations, but they’re never going to get us to understand love or hate or heroism or evil. 

For better or worse, if human beings want to understand themselves, they’ll have to rely on inexact methods approached through metaphor.  But I don’t think that means that we cannot come to an understanding of what is actually true, in these areas as in others.

But all that to the side, my question this morning is this:  never mind if literature can make us better–can anything?

Is it possible for men and women to change for the better at any point beyond childhood?  Is it even possible in childhood? 

It used to be said of young people in their twenties that their character had been “set,” and the assumption seemed to be that after that point there would be no significant change in any direction–and changing for the better would be harder than changing for the worse.

The reason I brought up Carl Upchurch is that he is a famous example of somebody who at least claimed not only that he changed for the better–well, that was obvious–but that he’d done so because of literature.

As a young man, Upchurch was a gang member and violent criminal in Philadelphia.  He eventually went to prison for armed robbery, and when he got to prison he was just as violent as when he was out.

He eventually landed in solitary confinement, and after being there for a while he started being bored out of his skull.  Then he found that there was at least one thing in his cell he could use for amusement–somebody had left a book behind.

The book was a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Upchurch’s account of all this–it’s in his autobiography–is very funny.  How he forced himself to read the thing because he had nothing to do.  How he read it about twenty times before he began to figure out what it meant.  How he found out that you could get books from the prison library in solitary if you asked for them–only to realize that he didn’t know the name of any books.

But he was pretty sure Shakespeare had written other things besides sonnets, so he asked for that.

And it went from there.  He ended up earning a degree, publishing a couple of books, and becoming a rather successful writer and activist for prison reform. 

I have no idea whether or not the story is factual as told.  I do know that Carl Upchurch definitely did change, and for the better, and did it at a time when we tend to think people’s characters have been “set.” 

When he left prison he was no longer violent.  In prison, he settled down to study and work in a way that he never had before, and that he seems to have had no prior training in.  He read nothing and then he read Shakespeare. 

The Christian tradition, of course, relies heavily on the idea that people can change, and for the better, and do it at any time in their lives.   That’s what the entire idea of being “born again” is all about. 

And we as a culture tend to retain vestiges of the Christian idea that change is possible at any time–or at least that change is possible in most areas, given the right combination of circumstances.  We’re heavy on the circumstances, and when manipulating those doesn’t get us the changes we want to see in human beings, we find totalitarianism a more and more attractive prospect.

Of course, when we think there is something not capable of change, we tend to adhere to its changelessness with just as much ferocity as we do to our conviction that if we just raised them right, children could be transformed into noncompetitive, cooperative altruistic automatons that always make the “right choices.”

Chief among the things we think are unchangeable are what we call “sexual orientation,” or don’t call that–things having to do with sex.  People are born gay or straight or bi and no amount of environmental conditioning will change it.   What’s more, any attempt to change this is morally wrong.

We actually feel the same way about bad sex–like pedophilia, or “sexual predators” (rapists)–we just put it into different words.   We talk about them as being unnatural, and perverted, but we treat them as if their predispositions to do what they do are inborn and irradicable aspects of the human personality.  That’s what the sex offender registry is all about, and that’s why we think that the Catholic Church, faced with priests committing pedophilia, should have removed them permanently from access to children:  these people are incapable of change, this is not something you can learn to stop or train yourself out of. 

Even God can’t fix that one. 

But the question remains, of course–what can be changed, what causes the change, why do some people change and others not?

And, while we’re at it–what do we want to change?  And what should we want to?

And no, I don’t have the answers for any of it. 

I only know that, in real life, unlike in novels, human change is often only temporary.

Today there will be Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.

Loud.

This is a story I did not know.  It came up in the Bourgeois Virtues book, and I’ve been walking around it ever since.

On July 15, 1995, a Dutch force under the command of the United Nations handed over 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serbs–without firing a shot.  They did this even though the Dutch forces were where they were to prevent just this sort of thing.  And, when it was over, the resulting inquiry found that they did it because their commander did not want to incur any Dutch casualties, which would have been inevitable if the Dutch forces had resisted the Serb demands.

Okay, I know, you all probably knew all about this.  All I can say is that in 1995 Bill was sick and I had a child under the age of 2 in the house.  I wasn’t paying attention.

But what actually struck me about this story isn’t something I would have known about if I’d been paying attention to the news at the time, and that I might never have heard about except in the way that I did, by chance.

In the aftermath of the massacre–and there was a massacre, of those 8000 men and boys plus some women and some children and infants in arms; the largest massacre in Europe since WWII–the Dutch army and a vast majority of the Dutch people were not only not ashamed of themselves, but positively vociferous in their insistance that it wasn’t their fault.

It was the fault of the Canadians, who had had control of Srebrenica for a couple of years, but had pulled out to let the Dutch move in.

It was the fault of the French, who had failed to provide air cover.

The Dutch commander had done the right thing, because he knew that if he opened fire some of his men would be killed, but he had the word of the Serb commander that none of the men and boys would be killed, they would just be examined to find the ones among them who were war criminals. 

Since the Dutch commander knew that he could get some of his forces killed by resisting, and he couldn’t know that the Serbs would slaughter all those 8,000 people, he’d done the right thing.

Now, there are a few obvious things I could say here.  The Serbs were not known for their honesty, and they’d been carrying out “ethnic cleansing” raids all over the area for years.  Anybody who’d thought about it for thirty seconds could have figured out what the Serbs were going to do.

This was especially the case since the UN forces were in Bosnia to begin with precisely because of the possibility of precisely this kind of thing. 

The attitude of the Dutch commander seems to have been that the worst possible scenario was not a genocide of the Bosnian Muslims, but any harm at all to Dutch forces, who were–what?  Armies sustain casualties in war.  If this army wasn’t supposed to sustain any casualities, maybe it wasn’t actually an army?

The first thing I thought of was that, if this army had been commanded by an American, a number of things would have happened that didn’t happen in the event.

First, the entire world would be outraged.

Second, the American people would have been outraged, the commander would have been court martialed, and the term “heads will roll” would not have been metaphorical.

But, you know, let’s get past that for a minute.

What really gets me here is this:  I’ve talked a lot on this blog about how we all live inside narratives.  I’ve always felt that we have to live inside narratives in order to live at all.   We tell ourselves stories to explain ourselves to ourselves.

From this side of the Atlantic, the contemporary European narrative seems to be:  we’re the ones who will stop the genocide forever.  We had it in WWII, and as a result, we’ve built the first truly anti-racist society on earth.  We’re better than the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese because of it.

What strikes me about the actual events and their aftermath in Srebrenica is that there doesn’t seem to be any narrative at all in it.  There’s no story there, just the kind of sullen, self-righteous excuses  you get when you catch a petty thief shoplifting pantyhose.

There’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said.  There’s no shape.  There’s no arc.  There’s nothing. 

I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening looking around with Google, trying to see if the Dutch had ever come up with a cohesive narrative for this, but they seem not to have. 

I kept wondering if I looked long enough if I would find a kind of metanarrative for pacifism–some story that would justify the idea that no matter what the consequences to other people, it is important for you to make sure your own are not in danger of any harm.

It can’t be impossible to come up with such a narrative, or another narrative that would explain away the same facts.  The Germans have managed to come up with two or three to encapsulate Naziism.

It doesn’t even have to be true.  As far as I can figure out, the French managed to invent a brave resistance movement nearly out of whole cloth, and to place in it men and women who were seen to collaborate during the occupation–and nobody has ever really and definitively called them on it. 

The lack of a narrative–the seeming lack of a need for a narrative–I find really astonishing.  It seems to me to speak to something very deep rooted, a conviction that self preservation is all that matters and that everybody must feel that way, that there is no other way to feel, that everybody really feels that way, and ought to, and lies when they say they feel differently.

That it is wrong to feel differently.

I’m probably blithering here.

But for years I’ve heard that the US went into Bosnia and did what they UN did not, and now I know what all that is about.

And I must admit, I’m feeling very glad to know that we did, in fact, think differently.

Because that thing–that lack of a need for a narrative to explain what should have been an obvious horror–that seems scarier to me than Fascism and Communism put together.

I’ve got work to do.

Every once in a while, I do this thing where I post questions on FB in order to get answers that mean…I don’t know what.

The questions are always about mysteries, and mystery writers, and mystery reading.  Sometimes I don’t do questions so much as I do comments.

I also always do this from my phone, which means that the proofreading is even worse than usual. 

Over the last couple of days, I posted two things:

First, a question about the detectives in detective series, asking what age people preferred them to be, and if that age was different if the detective was a woman.

Second, a complaint about one of the Great Cliches of long-running series:  the book or episode where the murder victim is the wife/husband/significant other of the detective.  Sometimes this isn’t a book or an episode, but merely the back story.  Either way, I have become heartily tired of it.

The complaint generated very little in the way of response.  I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of people like the Great Cliches of the genre, and that I’ve just got professionals’ disease.  I read so much of this stuff and with so much attention, I’m sick of what other people can love because they don’t run into it so often.

The quesion about age, though, did generate a lot of response, and I found those responses odd.

Most people wanted their detectives to be around 40 or 50 if a man, and around 30 or 40 with a woman. 

And a lot of the people who said this were considerably older than those ages themselves.

The general opinion seemed to be that a detective much younger than that wouldn’t have the wisdom or experience to be a good detective, and a detective much older than that wouldn’t be in good enough physical shape to make a good story.

Since I’m of the little grey cells persuasion not only of detective writers but of detective readers, I found this odd.  My detectives never spend their time racing around chasing crooks or escaping from psychopaths. 

But I also found it odd because a fair number of the people who responded in this way read Christie on a regular basis, and both Christie’s most famous detectives are elderly.  Poirot is at least 60 when we first meet him in A Mysterious Affair at Styles.  Miss Marple is over 70. 

Maybe it’s just my age and my predisposition, but I find myself drawn more and more to older women detectives, even when that means the woman has to be an amateur.  I’m not really big on amateur detectives.

Maybe this is a case of What It Looks Like.  I’m Getting On, so to speak, and I’d like to see some examples of women who are also Getting On who are living what I think are interesting lives.

Interesting is a rather loaded word.  It seems to me that whether or not you believe in God and the afterlife, the simple fact is that we get only one chance at this life here, and the best idea would be to put it to good use.  All of it.  The thought of sort of just sitting back and letting the last twenty or thirty years spin out doing not much of anything does not please me.

Nor does the fact that so many of the people around me seem to just hate the idea of being older.  I live on the edge of a couple of Upscale Enclaves of the sort where aging seems to have become the equivalent of leprosy.  Women, especially–but also men, more and more frequently–not only dye their hair but get face lifts, they work out and diet until they’re more skeletal than they ever were at twenty, they force themselves into three inch heels that would have killed their feet long before they got arthritis.

And there are others that are even worse–except that I don’t know how I’m using the word “worse.”  Consider Carolyn Heilbrun, the mystery writer Amanda Cross, who killed herself a few years ago because, she said in a note she left to her friends, she didn’t intend to endure the indignities of getting older.  Here was a woman in good health, with a successful career, financially comfortable, surrounded by friends–and she didn’t want to endure the indignities of getting older? 

What did that mean, exactly?  She didn’t want to get sick, or watch her body breaking down?  She didn’t want to be increasingly invisible because people don’t look much at older women?  She didn’t want to live around a lot of old fogeys in a retirement community?

Miss Marple did her best work because she was mostly invisible–and because people assume that “little old ladies” must be vague and naive and sort of stupid, none of which she was.   She sat and she knit and she had tea and she listened, and she knew more about evil than a case-hardened homicide detective with twenty years on the job.

Okay, Miss Marple is fiction–but certainly there are many older people, and especially older woman, who do a great deal with their lives.  They’re not all breaking down physically, or even slowing up very much.  A friend of mine posted on FB that she had just spent the day with her 85 year old aunts, and they’d run her ragged.  My own father was vigorous and independent in his own  home well into his eighties.  His father was an absolute dynamo, walking almost ten miles a day every day until he just fell over from an illness he’d decided to ignore on the conviction that he was eighty three, and there was no point in fussing about it.

Okay, I agree, it would be a little silly to watch a detective chase a murderer across the rooftops of New York when he was 85, but then I don’t read the kind of book–or write the kind of book–where people chase other people across rooftops.

And most 83 year olds are not in the kind of shape my grandfather was in.

Still, it seems to me that people get a lot done in that interval between 60 and 80, and maybe people like Carolyn Heilbrun wouldn’t feel it necessary to kill themselves rather than face old age if the fact of that was a little more evident in things we read and watch.

I really love Miss Marple, but there are only a few books of hers available, and her more modern imitators tend to go heavy on the cute.

But then, I watch the Joan Hickson A&E Marples–and remind myself that Hickson herself was in her eighties when she made them. 

She died at ninety two.

The day before yesterday, a woman I had once gone to kindergarten with, died. 

She was not a woman I knew well.  I don’t think I’d see her since I was sent by my parents to my eventual girls’ school. 

I remember her very distinctly, however, because for some reason–completely inexplicable to me–she forms one of those sharp and distinct memories of childhood that will not quit, no matter what.

For a long time, we rode the school bus together–Patty and her sister and me.  Her family had a small house on an absolutely enormous plot of land, all lawn, sloping up into the distance past where we could see. 

And Patty and JoBetty had the reputation, in school, of having the most wonderful and distinctive clothes.  I think their mother made them, but I’m not sure.

What I remember is Patty getting off the bus, clutching a little stack of books in her arms,  while the starched layers of crinolines under her skirt swayed and bounced with her movements.

I have no idea why this memory should be so clear for me, but it is.   And because it is, I found hearing about her death sort of shocking.  It came via a FB post by a member of our once mutual school class, a man who has grown up and stayed in town and kept in touch with everybody.  Periodically, he invites me to come to the annual quasi-reunion gathering of the tribe, even though I went away to school and didn’t graduate from there.

Patty Foshay is dead, and in my mind I can still see her walking down the aisle of the school bus, books clutched, skirt flashing.  I have no idea if JoAnne Coffey is alive or dead or what, but I can still see her, too, in a set in a middle of a row at the Palace Theater downtown, just behind me, screaming her head off.

She wasn’t ill or wounded.  We were at a matinee showing during the theatrical release of A Hard Day’s Night, and she was screaming at the Beatles.  We were not, by the way, together.  I remember her and what she was doing, I think, at least in part because I was so astonished at it.  I had heard of girls screaming at the sight of the Beatles, and I had seen the Ed Sullivan Show when the Beatles were on (and half the audience was screaming girls), but I think that somewhere in the deep wells of my brain I didn’t quite believe it.

When we all came out of the theater into the day, JoAnne had screamed herself hoarse.  We all went down to the little coffee shop owned by my brother’s godfather and JoAnne sipped at something, unable to say a word.

Sometimes it seems to me that all my memories of the time before I was in college are essential trivial–that they’re about things that didn’t really matter very much.

There were some, of course, that were not trivial.  I can remember where I was and what I was happening when each of my grandmothers died.  My mother’s mother died when I was very small and we’d just moved into the house in Stony Hill.  My mother waylaid me in the bathroom there and sat down on the edge of the tub to explain it to me.  The bathroom was a riot of Fifties elegance.  It had black wallpaper with pink flamingos on it.

My other grandmother, the one I’m named after, died when I was twelve, on a bright day in late spring.  I was in the kitchen of that same Stony Hill house when the call from the hospital came.

But then, I remember something else.  I remember my grandfather, my father’s father, clambering onto our back porch in the middle of the night, pounding and pounding on the door and saying, “George, George, come quick now.  Mama–mama is passing away.”

My father’s father imigrated in his twenties from Asia Minor, sick of being a citizen of Constantinople in Istanbul.  He never got rid of his accent.

My grandmother, my father’s mother, came from Samothraki, and by the time she died she had no accent and owned half the town she lived in.  Sometimes when I’m down that way, I make a point of passing by the place she owned, a solid little house with a long building to the right of it.  My grandparents bought it when my father was still a boy, and raised chickens there.  My father sold hot dogs from a stand built a bit to the left. 

By the time I came along, the chicken coops had been refitted as cabins for a cheap motel.  The hot dog stand had been refitted as a single apartment for rent.  I spent long week-ends in this place, playing Communion at a window with a wide ledge just a few steps up from the living room on a strange little landing. 

I was going through a period of violent envy of all the girls in my class who were Catholic.  They got to make their First Holy Communion in special white dresses with veils.

Here’s something else I remember, so well it might as well have happened this morning.

My father had a friend with a daughter who was about my age, but went to school in a different town.  One afternoon, our entire family went over to visit them, and I was left outside on the lawn with the girl.  I don’t remember her name. 

I do remember that there was a croquet set on the lawn, and I had never seen a croquet set.  She offered to teach me how to play, and I agreed.  She proceeded to knock her ball through all the hoops and declare herself the winner.  I not only never got a turn, I still don’t know how to play croquet.

A couple of years later, she stole my brand new Girl Scout knife while we were both at girl scout camp.  My father explained to me that she had “problems” and we weren’t going to make them worse by causing an uproar about this.  He bought me a new Girl Scout knife, a better one, thick and green with the Girl Scout logo on one side of it.

Actually, my father was always showing up with the daughters of friends of his, I think as his way of trying to find me somebody to be friends with in years when I didn’t have many. 

One of these was a girl named Kelly Tartanis, whose mother had left the family and who was having trouble finding friends herself.  We ended up going out to the movies together–same theater as the Beatles one–to see a matinee of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  When we came out, all the telephone wires on both sides of the street were lined with birds, packed together as if they’d been glued wing to wing.

It was also my father’s idea that I should join the Rainbow Girls, which was the teenage girls’ auxilliary to the Masons.  It fascinated the hell out of me that they actually used blackballs to decide to keep or reject new members.  I also learned the colors of the rainbow there.  Other than that, I remember very little about it.

Sometimes, it seems to me that memory is a very odd thing.  I don’t seem to remember the kind of things I’m supposed to.  I remember a lot that shouldn’t really matter, and that certainly couldn’t have made much of an impression at the time.

But it’s been that kind of day, and it’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Now I think I’ll go see if I can do something sensible.

For some reason or the other, I’ve spent the last couple of days having the worst pollen-induced sneezing fits so far this summer.   They’ve been bad enough so that I’ve sometimes sat around thanking The Universe Broadly Conceived for the fact that they didn’t happen a week ago, because sneezing like this I’d never have gotten my revisions done. 

They may having something to do with the fact that a) last night we had a power outage that lasted about three and a half hours and b) today, I had to go running around in a car without air conditioning.

Whatever the reason, I’m sneezing.

But I’ve also been reading the comments, and checking out a few things, so here goes.

And I’ll get to the hedgehog–and Trollope’s Paliser series–sometime, someday.  It gets a little crowded in July.

But here goes.

1) I did a little further checking into Western Sky Financial and found this:  although I’m sure it’s much easier to get a loan from them than it would be to get one from your local bank, it isn’t actually easy.

The loan application is long and detailed, and requires all the information that your bank would ask you, and lots more than your ordinary credit card application. 

As far as I can figure out, you’d need to prove at least $3000 a month in income, which isn’t riches but isn’t living in a cardboard box poverty, either. 

They also check your credit rating, so they can’t be accepting just anybody, for just any reason.

This brings us to the question of why somebody in this position–with at least $36,000 a year in personal income, with a steady job they’ve held for a while–would want a loan like that.

And of course there are reasons that obviously stem from desperation:  the hospital won’t operate without a downpayment, you need bail, whatever.

But my guess is what we’re actually looking at is this:

2) The runoff from the new credit card consumer protection laws that went into effect a couple of years ago.

There was a time back there when somebody–it might have been Bank of America, but I’m not sure–said they’d pretty much issue a credit card to anybody who walked in the door and had or opened a checking account. 

The Feds were understandably worried about this, because the banks issuing these credit cards were FDIC insured, which meant that if they went bust the Federal Government had to make their customers whole, up to $250,0oo per depositer.

New banking law went into effect, further regulating such things as what interest rates banks were allowed to charge on credit card debt, when they were allowed to charge it, and what fees the banks could collect.

Contrary to what some of us believe sometimes, banks are not usually raving full bore loonies.  They want to make money, and they expected to make money on the credit card debt they allowed to the bottom rung of their credit card holders.

The problem was that, with the new limitations on interest and rates, they could no longer make money on those bottom rung holders.  You have to charge a lot of interest to make sure you can make up for the truly astonishing rates of default in that bottom rung.

Once the banks couldn’t charge those rates, they started dumping their bottom rungs of card holders and refusing cards to bottom rung applicants who asked for them.

But

3) Those bottom rung applicants still needed credit. 

And in step people like WSF.

Like Robert, I’m not happy with the idea that the government should step in to protect me from myself by making sure I shouldn’t be able to make the deals I want to make, even if those deals are demonstrably and objectively idiotic.

(I have no trouble with the credit card regulations, because their real purpose is to protect the government (and the taxpayer) from having to bail out federally insured banks.)

But the simple fact is that most of the people who are going to qualify from WSF’s 139% (or worse) interest loans would have qualified in the old days for a bank credit card with a 45% top rate and a punishing but still restricted fee schedule–and been better off.

They are, in other words, collateral damage–but not the kind of collateral damage that can be easily solved by “getting the government off our backs” or “putting in place consumer protections with real teeth.” 

Both of the usual responses leave something to be desired. 

The consumer protections people simply will not deal with the problem of where the people on the bottom rung will go to get loans.  They seem to think that lenders will continue to lend to that bottom rung even when they can no longer charge the highest interest rates.

The government off our backs people have two choices:  advocate the end of federal insurance for banks or tell me why I should keep bailing out the depositors of banks who do stupid stuff like give credit cards to people who think “financial planning” means making sure you have enough left over from the keg party to hit the casino.

There is, in fact, no answer here, no actual way out of the problem.  But that’s a gloom and doom scenario for another day.

At the moment, I want to suggest a book, one that oddly intersects with all this talk about bottom rung borrowers and usurious finance companies.

The book is called The Bourgeois Virtues:  Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre N. McCloskey.

This is one of those books I recommend that I know, instinctively, most of you will never touch.   It’s long, it’s complicated, it’s nonfiction, it’s on an aggressively “intellectual” subject–bleh.

What’s worse, in this case, is that I can’t actually pin a genre on it, and it’s only the first of what is supposed to be at least a four volume investigation of the topic (it may have expanded to six).

The topic is an attempt to prove, through historical example, that capitalism both requires virtue and inculcates it in those who practice it, and that these virtues are not the self-interested ones of Ayn Rand but a combination of the pagan ones (justice, temperance, fortitude, courage) and the Christian ones (faith, hope and love (caritas/charity).

I can’t pin down the genre because this woman has one of the most distinct writing styles I’ve ever encountered.  Reading this book is like getting drunk with somebody who has an IQ of 250, the reading habits of Father Tibor Kasparian, and virtually total recall.   You go from Anaximander to Madonna videos to Napolean to the rise of Dutch mercantilism to the Tokugawa shogunate to Thomas Aquinas to…

I want this woman’s mind.

She knows and has worked with practically everybody (both Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, for instance), and teaches Economics, History, English and Communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She seems to read about eight languages. 

Oh, go here:

http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/main/bio.php

Oh, and she’s a transsexual, and a practicing member of a liberal Episcopalian church who definitely identifies as Christian.

The whole thing is just sort of dizzying.

The book, in the meantime, is very, very good. 

And the works cited is 30 pages long.

And other people should look into the subject–which includes the subject of why the bourgeoisie is so thoroughly vilified even though what they’ve actually done is generally positive for the welfare of human beings. 

And after that–well.  All I can say is that a friend of mine just send me a HUGE box of golden age fair play mysteries (lots of Sayers), I’ve still got to talk about the hedgehog, and the passing of the News of the World will surely put fans of the page 3 girls into mourning for weeks.

After all, you could say she was attractively built.