Whenever I learn of another rant on hate radio 2GB I pause. The ‘GB’ in the name comes from the initials of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who inspired the founders of the station in 1926. This fact is absent from both the station’s current website and its Wikipedia entry.
Bruno championed science, fact, religious toleration, freedoms for women. He ridiculed corrupt authority in the Vatican as a giant Ponzi scheme. He could never ingratiate himself with established authority in universities. Not enough nationally competitive grants. He was also a scientific peer of Galileo.
This statue of him is in Rome near the spot where the hate masters burned him.
He was pursued by the Inquisition across Europe until, exhausted, he finally succumbed for refusing to compromise the truth of scientific fact for the ideology of the Roman Church, just as Socrates did for refusing to pander to the idiocracy. The shock jocks of the age rejoiced as Bruno was burned at the stake as they had done when Socrates was poisoned. Hollow triumphs for the shock jocks, because their names are forgotten while those of Socrates and Bruno live on. Obscurity likewise awaits all of today’s the kings of hate.
Though hate radio has a large following, no doubt it’s practitioners view these followers with contempt. See A Face in the Crowd (1957) with Andy Griffith for the illustration. Or check out Jimmy ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ Jones.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour 19 minutes, rated 3.80 by 1062 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy FY.
Verdict: Time stood still.
Mars Needs women again (see below). Rather than place ads on Facebook to recruit airheads, they send a cute little Tardis space ship, three times as big inside as outside. Head of Mission is a snide queen of the Nile abetted by a bald garden gnome with triple ears that you want to tweak.
At the same time NASA, which is presented as a military operation, has found the perfect astronaut: handsome for photo ops, silent so as not to give anything away, and stupid enough accept this role. He is great grandpa Data, an android. This fact is super secret least the American public fail to support spending money on droids.
The two missions cross paths when Droid aborts, ejects, and bails over Puerto Rico! Why? Good question. Would the answer be tax credits to film there? There is a little travelogue of beaches and seaside.
Nile’s minions in white overalls and fishbowl helmets round up party girls who seem to take it is all as part of the fun. Meanwhile, Droid’s keepers have come looking for him. The trauma of the abort injured him and now, as a public service, he goes around strangling people listening to pop music.
Of the 79 minutes, perhaps 35 of them are stock footage of beaches and waves and USAF planes taking off, landing, parking, sitting, more sitting. This footage insures there is no momentum or pace. Splicing this free footage then shows the minders boarding one kind of jet in Miami, flying on another, and landing in San Juan in a third. Mid-air refuelling we have all heard of, but mid-air passenger transfer was a new one.
The ears have it!
Nile keeps a retreaded monster ITT for devouring bystanders as an accessory on the spaceship and Droid and ITT duke it out. The fraternity brothers claimed the monster was a well-known Delt whose name they have forgotten, like their own some mornings.
Noteworthy moments in this parson’s egg include:
1.When Droid froze at the press conference, and the assembled blood suckers did not seem to notice.
2.The following scene when Droid’s coif is peeled to reveal the heartless brain of McKinsey manager.
3.The several sidelong, sneering glances exchanged between Nile and her Gnome reminded me of the reaction of some one-time colleagues to any sensible suggestion.
4.The many bikini-clad Anglas who party-on.
5.The complete absence of Hispanics in Puerto Rico.
6.The many off-duty GIs who stand around at parade rest, earning a few dollars as film extras. Plus see point (4) above.
The end, these were such welcome words as I watched this film on Isle de Saint Vincent.
Mars seems to lurch from one shortage to another. For proof see the following:
The Devil Girl from Mars (1954) – who come for men!
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) – who went with toys
IMDb meta-data runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.7 by 923 cinematizens.
Genre: ODH wanna be (that is, Old Dark House).
Verdict: energetic clichés.
In mid-career a much published krimi writer seeks inspiration in a change of scene, and reluctantly moves to Greenwich Village with his vivacious and enthusiastic helpmate who has neither a career nor a mind of her own. Credit Loretta Young’s extraordinary thespian talents to sell such a pretence. He is the droll Brian Aherne who is reluctant because wanted to live by a lake or stream, not a busy street.
While he has published a lot of krimis, to judge from the piles he moves around, none has been a best seller or satisfying.
The apartment (old dark) House has a cast of boarders from the doleful owner, to the snoopy restauranteur, oily art dealer, the terrified ingenue with an over-protective husband, the hysterical cleaning woman…. but no black stereotype for which omission much thanks, though it meant no pay-check for Will Best.
It is a great cast that includes Charlie Chan Tolar as the police officer come to sort out the body in the garden. Spider Woman is also on hand, though underemployed compared to the turtle.
Good scenes include the bed clothes slowly slipping off…. In 1945 that must have been close the censorship line. And it happens twice. And that’s the problem with the whole film: repetition.
The sticking door was amusing the first three or four times but not thereafter, and certainly not at the fifteenth time with musical accompaniment. The door is never explained and does nothing for the plot.
The plot holes were many. It was said that the corpus delicti in the garden was naked; if so why? Where did the clothes go? What was the motive for that murder? Indeed what was the whole blackmail narrative about? How did any of that relate to the cab driver’s opening comment about hauling away two stiffs? Did any of it relate to the missing previous half-owner of the establishment?
Released on 10 December 1942 there is no reference to war. In that month the Australian 7th Division pushed the Japanese from Buna, trailhead for the purgatory of the Kokoda Track. More generally, the Afrika Korps was trapped (by forces that included the Australian 9th Division) in Tunisia, the Germans were encircled in Stalingrad, and the Japanese had lost Guadalcanal where Royal Australian Navy ships served). Hindsight reveals that it was the beginning of the end for them.
Literati note. These books were published late 1942. I have read them all. What’s holding you back?
Le Silence de la mer by Vercors (Jean Bruller) – an idealistic German soldier gradually realises the fake news he had accepted when billeted with a silent French family.
The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck – an austere dialogue about the time to act set in rural Norway. Completely different from his other novels, a roman à clef.
Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz – a fictional autobiography of a reluctant charismatic leader.
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner – the grief of the title figure when his wife dies and the actions of those around him the very Deep South.
L’étranger by Albert Camus – Meursault stays ice cold under the blinding Algerian sun.
GoodReads Meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.65 by 519 litizens.
Genre: Popular Philosophy (as is Popular Science).
Verdict: More!
Classical historian Edith Hall delves into the mind and works of the one and only Aristotle her BFF. He is the leader of the pack as far she is concerned and there is no one else. The enthusiasm for the subject with the light touch, simple prose, punctuated with real life examples and references to the popular culture are delight. Though I doubt it got her tenure or promotion. On that more below.
At the outset she briskly dispatches two of the rotten tomatoes thrown at Aristotle. His remark that women lack deliberative capacity has empowered generations of the virtuous to hurl rotten fruit at him. Yet in the Politics there is a more fine-grained remark that women have deliberative capacity but it is not authoritative; if an interpreter were less interested in scoring retrospective points, this remark could be taken as a sociological fact of the time and place. In subsequent passages he goes to refer to wives running (ruling) the households of slaves, servants, extended family, provenders, tradesmen, and the like. This oikos is the economy which has become the god all worship now. Though, of course, he concedes less to woman than Plato does twice over.
The most common trope used to justify ignoring Aristotle is this remark:
‘Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made’ (Animalia 3). This obscure passage and paraphrases of it abound among those who specialise in cheap shots. Yes, Aristotle was wrong, but he was wrong because he was misinformed about observations, not because he did not value observations, though that it the drum most often thumped when this passage is cited. Let’s take that drumbeat seriously for a minute.
Though this statement is joyfully repeated on thousands of web sites, none of these bloggers themselves settle the empirical question empirically. No writer who has belaboured Aristotle with this remark has ever then said, and I counted (to be strictly parallel) my wife’s teeth and we have the same number. Think about that.
As any dentist will say, counting teeth is easier said than done. It is not just a matter of saying Aaah. Any ten people people on Oxford Street today may well not have the same number of teeth. Ditto dead bodies for the ghoulish. There are congenital omissions (I never had two adult molars), damage in childhood, and in Ari’s world most adult simply lost a lot of rotten teeth which accounts partly for all the soft food: olives, cheese, figs. But her main defence of him on this point is simply that it was a passing, incidental point in his biological studies which he cited from other sources as a fact. He neither proclaimed it himself, not declared it a priori. In the passage where it is cited, he draws no grand conclusion about the inferiority of women as thus proven by teeth. At most it proves difference.
The female of 1940s popular culture in film and fiction was flighty, easily frightened, weak, lacking concentration, physically inept stereotype. It continued into 1950s television where its steady diet went some way to make real the fiction it portrayed, repeatedly showing it so did make it so. It took a great effort — intellectual as well as social — to see through those shadows on the cave wall, single them out, test, and reject them, and for that All Hail.
The book is thematic starting the governing narrative of happiness, which is not an ephemeral feeling but a contentment and calm perhaps like zen, but she does not go that far. When I look at the gang leaders on television news these days… oh, did I say ‘gang leaders,’ I meant world leaders, none of them look contented and calm. They look driven, angry, confused even, bitter, overwhelmed, determined, purposeful in some cases. There are far too many angry old men who have never had anything to be angry about and aren’t going to take it any longer!
She does not mention Jean Vanier, Happiness – Aristotle for a New Century (2002). But it is a companion piece, though it lacks the depth of the volume at hand.
She goes on to treat such topics as Family, Friendship, and Mortality. There is also a discussion of discretion that made me uncomfortable. In my years as Associate Dean, Institute Director, Head of Department I made it a point not to exercise discretion. My rule was: what cannot be done for all that cannot be done for one. Believe me there were a great many instances of special pleading, mostly by staff, but some by students. But I knew that to concede one would set off an avalanche of more pleaders. To say yes, would be to open the flood gates.
Confession: I did make one exception. As Associate Dean there was always tsunami of special pleading about admission. Students whose track record made it abundantly clear they could not do the work of the course, wanted to pay the tuition. I aways rejected them on the ground that no one should be admitted to fail. Even so on one occasion a letter of appeal got through the buffers from one Veronica. She had done the HSC fifteen years before and hashed it. Since then she had done all manner of things including very successful study on TAFE, and she wanted to go to University to do things not available at TAFE. If she had applied on the basis of the TAFE results, she would have been admitted. However, in NSW one never escapes the HSC score and hers was so lousy that it pulled down the TAFE results. That ghostly and ghoulish HSC result was always going to be there. I admitted her. (Though I never made her acquaintance I noted that she graduated in minimum time with a credit average.)
Back to Aristotle and our author, who went to and spent time everywhere Aristotle did, walking where he walked. Who paid for that junket? Well whoever did spent the money did well. That tactile immersion adds depth to the page.
It is a book by an Aristotelian scholar but not one that is not written for Aristotelian scholars, and therein lies the reference to tenure above. Nor is it a textbook which a promotions committee might grudgingly acknowledge at a heavy discount.
Edth Hall who has many more titles for me to read.
When I gathered the meta-data from GoodReads my eye fell on a few of the niggardly comments, reminding me why I don’t read them. So pompous, so self-centred, so much like a department meeting.
Peersonal note. When we traversed the Anatolian plateau in 2015 one of our stops was Assos on the Aegan Coast. I was keen on this when I saw it in the program because Aristotle lived there for a time and married a woman from there. The tour guide assured me that in 2009 a statue of Ari had been erected to affirm the connection.
Our stay at Assos was rainy and the roads were clogged with desperate Syrian refugees who could see the European Union a few miles away across the water in the Greek island of Lesbos. The plinth for the statue of Aristotle was there but not the likeness. It had been vandalised and dismounted for repairs. I have since learned it was replaced in 2017.
I stood in front of the plinth for some snaps now lost in the labyrinth of computer bits and bytes. It was rainy and because I wanted the snap we missed the bus and had to walk back in the rain, getting soaked and never quite drying out for the rested of the trip.
IMDb meta-data is 49 episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.3 by 6734 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy FY
Verdict: Zzzzzzz.
The moon has solved Earth’s only problem, namely, where to bury the spent uranium to keep Kim Ill Jung’s hands off it.
The leads are a catatonic Martin Landau and confused Barbara Bain, the latter’s entire script consists of screenwriterese for medical gobbledegook. To create tension between playing with toys, see below, she objects to his actions on cue with the nonsense. No wonder she split.
So underwritten I watched only one episode in 1975 and painfully another in 2020.
In one part, it was an effort to cash-in on the market revealed by syndication of Star Trek, and also to continue where UFO (1970), another Anderson production, had left off. The Andersons, say no more. See below for more!
The leads were Americans with a following from their tenure on Mission: Impossible (1968+) but the production was Brit and Empire (including one Strine).
Some of the toys on display.
All of that is reduced to Lego toys by those very British producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (yes, Thunderbirds Are Go) from swinging London. Toys. Check. The second hallmark of an Anderson production is the absence of script. Check. The third is the absence of any humour, wit, or insight in favour of boring mechanical movement so we can see the toy models. Check. In spite of the Anderson kiss of death, it lasted two seasons, but took a hit below the waterline when the Andersons divorced and their lawyers fought over the IP, before the concept existed.
A few differences from ST are quick to see. The cast is only human. No Spock. But the biggest difference is the approach to problem-solving. When the usual problems are thrown-up (yes, that is exactly the right word), the response is for all eyes to turn to Landau. Leaden direction. Check. Another Anderson hallmark. He then goes into a catatonic close up. The fraternity brothers went the fridge for beer, and stayed there at this point. Then ignoring evidence or suggestions of others, he embarks on derring do. Still on the Anderson check list: stupid. Check.
Whoa! Martin Landau as an action hero? Hardly.
In ST for all of his action-hero posturing, Kirk always put the team to work, had conferences with them in private to canvass options, asked for evidence, delegated research for precedents. Two of his common lines in staff meetings were: ‘We need options’ and ‘Find answers.’ Off the specialists then went to seek and find…. along way Kirk would fight bare chested a few aliens and turn his bedside manner on for woman, human or not. The point is his staff didn’t stare at him waiting for oracular utterances, but instead worked at enlightenment pseudo science.
Fashions in space.
Then there are the nylon double-knit body suits with flared pant legs in beige. The less said about the fashions, the better. That is Barry Morse crouching in the lower left, trying to hide from the camera. At least he had enough sense to do that.
GoodReads meta-data is 428 pages, rated as 4.26 by 1301 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Unique.
Crazy Horse (1840-1877) was born an odd man out in the Sandhill country of Nebraska. He was of fair hair and fair skin relative to his people. There is no reason to suppose any European connection in his gene pool, just an aberration like Peter the Great’s height. When he was teenager a European described him as an albino with red eyes. Set apart from birth by appearance he became moody teenage loner, often preferring his own company to that of his peers. Aloof, he played little role in the tribe, though his father and brothers were leaders.
There had long been a trickle of European immigrants travelling west on the Holy Trail in the Platte River Valley, but the trickle changed after 1865 in two ways: first, Europeans established ever more permanent settlements along the way. They were coming to stay. Second, after the end of Civil War the trickle became a flood. These changes coincided with Crazy Horse’s manhood.
There were many conflicts, first, with the traditional enemies the Crow, Pawnee, and Utes for hunting grounds and winter quarters; there were few with the immigrants who passed though but when the army began to build forts the conflicts with the immigrants and army increased. The linguistic and cultural barriers provided much room for misunderstanding and conflict, as did the sense of superiority held both by the Sioux and the Europeans. Each thought the other primitive.
Even in Crazy Horse’s youth the demographics were clear. There were many more white men than red men at any one place. But it is also true that the many Indians had no history of cooperation, and for a long time many of them still perceived other Indians as the real enemy, which was reinforced by cultural norms that praised horse theft, ambush of traditional rivals, and the like. There were no cultural values for dealing with the white man and his guns and cannons. In addition, the usual Indian methods of warfare emphasised the individual warrior and not teamwork, coordination, or planning. Ergo even within one tribe like the Ogalala Sioux there was neither experience nor cultural reward for teamwork, coordination, or planning. The impetuous hothead who struck out on his own was the ideal.
Add to that the temptation of demon whiskey and some tribesmen sold out others to get the burning cup.
But the capstone was gold in Black Hills. Once it was found the whites did not pass through or stay in the forts, but penetrated the hinterland and spread out to find and to mine gold, and the army followed to protect them. This exploration led, inevitably, to many conflicts and escalating violence. Once the Civil War ended many in the eastern and southern United States looked to the West for a new life, to forget the past and gold was magnet for them and those who would live off them selling coffee, shovels, and the like. The demand for protection from Indians increased exponentially as the white population increased.
Crazy Horse proved to be skilful warrior and had many successes. He was thus anointed as a shirt-wearer, or leading warrior, who embodied the tribe. Later he lost this honour in a quarrel over a woman. Sioux leaders were supposed to be above such personal concerns, think Philosopher Kings, and he lost the title, though he remained the best warrior.
There were peace-makers and peace-keepers, straight arrows, and negotiators among both the Red and White, but there were also self-serving scoundrels, liars, hotheads, and the greedy on both sides. The Indian social unit was a clan and any joint action with other Indians was difficult after years or rivalry, hostility, and worse. It is also true that in the army were many officers who had learned that the gun solved all problems. They applied the Appomattox solution of overwhelming force to the Indians. The irony is that many of the US troopers in the Indians Wars were veterans of the Confederate army who had nothing and no one to go home to and no other means of livelihood but soldiering. They were determined to be on the winning side this time.
The white buffalo was a rarity and when one appeared it was taken by the Sioux to be sign from the gods. That Crazy Horse was so pale associated him in the minds of many of the tribesmen with this holy sign. Moreover, he himself came to find several of the white buffalo which was remarkable. The white buffalo is not a sacred cow, but rather is killed and returned to the earth as an offering to the gods. It was rare for a warrior to kill one white buffalo when Crazy Horse had killed two. In this way he was further set apart from his fellows.
There were also other signs of charisma. He survived being shot in the face by a jealous rival when all thought he would die. He was indeed marked out. His successes attracted envy and the envious started rumours to blacken his name, but his persistent modesty and serenity were proof against these innuendoes.
The sad story ends when Crazy Horse surrendered to live on a reservation, but was killed. How and why he was murdered is unclear, but murdered he was at a fort while under the protection of the United States Army. No inquiry was held and no one held responsible. Sounds like something that could happen today.
This book is written from the Sioux point of view, using the idioms and references of the Lakota. One might almost might call it a fictional autobiography. At the end is long list of the individuals whom she interviewed, and the archives consulted. Sandoz grew up in the Sandhills among the Sioux and they were a lifetime preoccupation for her.
Mari Sandoz
Following Charles van Doren’s advice from long ago, I usually skip the front matter of a book to read the book and make up my own mind, but for some reason I started to read introduction by the reprint series editor and found is self-deprecating, honest, devoid of clichés, self-promotion, and corporate-speak, and penetrating. I read it to the end, a rarity that.
A decade ago or so we went to Mount Rushmore and saw the site of the Crazy Horse memorial. The mental note I made then to find out more about this legendary figure was redeemed with reading this book.
Crazy Horse echoes: An Excelsior class starship bears his name in StarTrek: The Next Generation.
Like an NBA shooting guard, a writer needs a short memory to forget the mistakes, errors, misses, and rejections. Sandoz once said she had had more than 7000 rejections for her short stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction. She was so depressed by word ‘No’ at one time that she burned a bathtub full of manuscripts. In the early years she made a living as a school teacher by day.
Sandoz’s first book was rejected by fourteen major publishers before it won a prize sponsored by a magazine for a new writer’s first book. That was Old Jules (1935), followed by many others including Cheyenne Autumn (1953) and These were the Sioux (1961). The more she published about the treatment of Sioux the more persona non grata she became in Nebraska and she finally relocated to the East Coast to be near the publishers. Though now her likeness graces the state capital building in a hall of notables.
Alan Wilkinson’s Red House on the Niobrara (2012) is a tribute to Sandoz. It is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
GoodReads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 3.54 by 129 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: flying start, shuddering halt.
MetroPlex Studios begins pre-production work on a film version of Sherlock Holmes’s story The Speckled Band. So far so normal. What is less than normal is that for reasons unknown the studio has hired a screenwriter for the project who loathes the Sherlock Homes stories and is loathed by the Irregulars. He is one Stephen Worth, a vulgar representative of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction of the gentlemanly Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. As the fiction gods would have it Worth has an impregnable contract for the job and a clause that prevents the Studio from making the film without his script.
As the protests roll in from the keepers of the Holmes faith, the head of the Studio has a bright idea. He will employ a selection of these Irregulars as technical consultants. Their intrusion might cause Worth to quit, and if not, their intrusion might steer the project to a lee shore. It’s win either way. What can possibly go wrong?
We all know that answer to that closing rhetorical question, now don’t we. ‘Everything,’ in a word.
The five Irregulars whom he brings to California, houses, and hosts squabble among themselves over minutiae of the sacred canon in their competition for acclaim as the one true prophet of Holmes. Worth, the screenwriter nemesis, becomes even more obnoxious — some had thought that was not possible, but they were proven wrong — and determined to see the task through and tells everyone that, right to the moment he stops talking, because, Jim, he is d-e-a-d.
As the wind carries the news of the dissension and then the demise, Studio creditors begin to circle. All of this activity rouses journalists to smell the blood, and they splash headlines which prove that there is such a thing as bad publicity.
A roller coaster ride ensues, as the loyal Maureen tries to manage the situation while the police investigate, as the Irregulars pontificate.
Anthony Boucher
It starts fast and then bogs down into an all-talky drawing room investigation that takes most of the air our of the proceedings.
GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
In setting up PLEX at home to use with the DVD collection, I started with the eight Mr Moto films to renew acquaintance with an old friend who can keep me company as I do the NYT crossword puzzles in the evenings, after Eggheads and Antiques Road Show (UK). Moto was sired by J. P. Marquand of Massachusetts. More on PLEX below.
Marquand went on to chronicle Boston’s Beacon Hill snobs in such satirical novels as The Late George Apley (1938), a best seller in its day and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Those that followed include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and Point of No Return (1949). While searching for themes and voices in haute literature which was his abiding ambition, Marquand wrote spy novels to make a living. The first was Mr Moto Takes a Hand (1935) with five more to come. The ever so prim entry in Wikipedia brackets the Moto novels apart from Marquand’s ‘Literary novels’ in the way the semi-literate do. The Moto novels are completely omitted in the section on Marquand’s life and work but relegated to a seperate ghetto, lest the children be upset.
Taken as a whole there are two interesting things about the Moto novels. The first is that they were written by society author with no interest or knowledge of the worlds therein portrayed. Second, the central character is a secret agent who is cold, calculating, and deadly — licensed to kill long before the NRA came along and granted every drooler that right — in the service of the expanding Japanese Empire. Marquand no doubt wanted his spy to be different in a crowded market of fictional spies, and he succeeded.
The popularity of Charlie Chan movies inspired the transfer of Moto from page to film in 1937, and a transformation from a reptilian assassin into a genial cicerone for naive American innocents abroad in the big wide world. Into those new shoes stepped Peter Lorre, who was desperate for work. He became the Good Jap(anese) in these films directed by Norman Foster whose pace seldom slackened, though for no sane reason Foster was replaced on the last two films. Hungarian László Löwenstein became a yellow face, as it was called at the time, Japanese. And, though Lorre was a sickly weakling, by this transformation he became a cat burglar, judo expert, marksman, and endurance athlete. His perennial bad health and heavy smoking were no matter on film.
There is a third oddity with Moto that fades as the series continued. He murders villains. He does not arrest or sequester them, he just kills them. No European, still less a white-hatted Western, hero of the day would do that, taking the law into his own hands. The censor would not permit it, but they did permit it for an oriental. So in some of the early films he does what he did frequently in the book, saves time by murdering the villains. Only later does he go soft and start arresting them.
To balance that dark side, he is transmogrified into an American-educated, genial friend and protector of Americans abroad, while working for the International Police. He also got a first name: Kentaro. In the books, one of which I have read, he had only in initials, to wit, I. M. Moto. Say it out loud to get the point. It worked. The films were popular, but Japan was not and they came to an end. There is an uninformative entry on Moto in Wikipedia.
The films and their settings are these:
Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937) – Shanghai
Thank you, Mr Moto (1937) – Gobi Desert and Peking
Mr Moto’s Gamble (1938) – San Francisco
Mr Moto Takes a Chance (1938) – Siam jungle
Mr Moto’s Last Warning (1939) – Port Said, Egypt
Mr Moto in Danger Island (1939) – Puerto Rico
Mr Moto Takes a Vacation (1939) – San Francisco in archeological museum
Moto, Chan, Holmes were all broadcast after school and before dinner or practice. That is when and where I first became acquainted with them. Then some years later a series of Great Detectives aired on the CBC after the late news, and I watched most of them again.
The PLEX media player promises a custom-made private service akin to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. After loading the movies on a computer acting as a server, it translates and transmits them via the home wi-fi network to the television. In our case the computer is upstairs with the telly downstairs. Selecting a film is done with the Apple TV remoter. Sounds easy.
Kate, Queen of the Buttons to Push, had the devil of time setting it up, stopping and restarting at least once when nearly defeated by the comPLEXity of PLEX. Once that mission was accomplished, my part has been to load the database with movies and I, too, have found that perPLEXing. There is a mountain of information on the web, including You Tube, which I find of no use. It is like looking for a unicorn in a constellation to find answers to my simple questions among the geekerati. Most of the sites are in Geekese, while those that are not as technical are dedicated to showing how to change the background colours, but none about how to get it work in the first place.
Leaving those grumbles aside, when it works, it is a welcome luxury. No longer is there a hunt to find a DVD (shelved upstairs where there is some order, in the garage where there is none, or is it in the office), cleaning it, inserting it in the DVD player which can be shy at times, cleaning it again and reinserting it, (finding it is damaged [by canine teeth marks!] and will not play), finding the dedicated DVD remoter (with its usual dead batteries), and then watching the DVD skip over damaged sections though it has never been played before.
For further reading see ‘Plex (software)’ on Wikipedia.
Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.
GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.
Genre: biography, hagiography.
Verdict: Ineffable.
Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result. Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer. There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.
In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.
The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told. While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.
Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury. Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee. Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight. I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early. Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee. It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune. He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said. That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.
Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors. Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat. That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978).
Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s. By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.
The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources. There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography. More yields less in this case.
Douglas Southall Freeman
Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke. He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways. As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.
At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it. Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.
His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation. The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population. To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers. These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support. Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams.
I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential. The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised. Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.
There are two minor incidents that struck this reader. The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie. For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community. When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North. What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?
Indeed, what could?
The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy. There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses. No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets. No shot or shell for the artillery. Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker. But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.
So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame. Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated. Rien ne change jamais.
In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew. Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers.
I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod. This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog. In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it.
Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence. He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat. At most he might say, ‘Thank you.’ He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words.
Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all. In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence. After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’ Mosby nodded and walked on. Nothing more can or need be said. This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.
