Michael W Jackson – Page 2 – Political theory and practice

Involuntary Witness (2002) by Gianrico Carofiglio

Good Reads meta-data is 274 pages, rated 3.90 by 7130 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Italy

Verdict: Nolo contendere.

Tagline: Proving what might not have happened. (Yeah, not punchy.)

When a young boy is found dead near a beach resort one of the usual suspects is arrested and fitted to the crime. Being a Senegalese peddler, the racial stereotypes in the court of public opinion have him convicted before the handcuffs go on.

Hero reluctantly gets involuntarily involved and slowly picks apart the circumstantial case against Peddler. There is much insider detail about the judiciary, the judicial system, and policing in Bari, way down south. The telling is smooth and packed with asides into the humanity of all involved, though mostly that of the lawyer, though not of the police officers who do have a cardboard quality.

The main events are in the court room where Hero casts doubt on the certainties of the prosecution. The means by which that is done is fascinating, a seminar in defence by obfuscation. There is a very great deal of talk. One defence summation is timed at more than two-hours. Could the judges, let alone a jury, cope with that much exposition? (Many social-psychology experiments conclude that a person’s attention span is no more than 20 minutes at a time.) They must have been made of stern stuff and elastic bladders because I am sure students could not withstand a 2 1/2 passive lecture.

Along the way we learn much about the lawyer, his life, his loves, his habits, his car…[TMI]. On the other hand we learn only a little about the Senegalese peddler, apart from the facts that he is a legal immigrant, multi-lingual, and – spoiler – maybe innocent of the alleged crime. That is another thing we do not learn, who committed the crime, how, and why. This story does not follow that Perry Mason trope, that the best way to prove a client innocent is to find the guilty party.

I said ‘maybe’ above because I was not quite sure what I was supposed to think. Nor was I sure whether the police officers’ superficial effort was (1) to calm public opinion with a quick arrest or (2) if they really believed he was guilty, but (3) were too lazy to make a proper investigation, (4) because his being black was sufficient for conviction. Whoops there I go again tying myself into knots over nothing.

Also under the heading of unknown is what lawyer had to say to his ex-wife that was so important. OK, may I blinked.

This is the first in a series by the author, a retired judge who managed a number of mafia trials, and lived to write these tales unlike some others. Both are major achievements.

Holy cow! Yep.

Holy Moses (2018)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 15m, rated 5.7 by 182 cineastes.

Genre: Unknown.

DNA: Northern Ireland / West Texas!

Verdict: Intriguing!

Tagline: Holy cow!

An Irish nun confesses her original sin, and then goes to work in a snowy field with a calf, which promptly vanishes. Poof! Cut away twenty-five years later to the desiccated scrubland of West Texas to see there, in an empty roadside diner, a short-order cook cleaning a stove who hears a thump behind him, and turns to see…[hint, not a customer for an early coffee.]

But wait there is more after he telephones the sheriff and wanders around in a daze.

The film is two halves joined by the calf, well that is the continuity. I found it mysterious and compelling, perhaps, due to the urgency of the players, but there was no resolution. It seems from the IMDb there has been no further development, so having set it up, the producers didn’t know what to do with it, or could not swing the finance to do what they had in mind. Tant pis.

Oh, did I mention the burning bush? Or the man in the dog collar?

L’ultimo sole della notte (2017)

L’ultimo sole della notte (2017) The Last Sun of the Night.

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 42m, rated 6.6 by 52 cineastes.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: Italian.

Verdict: S-l-o-w. V-e-r-y.

Tagline: oh hum.

In the near future a glum young man with designer fuzz goes about his dreary business in a barren cityscape. His blank look never changes. Italy is under siege both within as well as from without. He lives alone in Safe Zone 13 (his wife is in Brazil on business and can’t return because of the crises) and we see only two other residents and hear references to a few more unseen.

We learn this much by flashbacks that are poorly sign posted and confusing as the characters wear the same clothes and look the same in the flashback past as the current present. Don’t film school schools teach techniques to signal this distinction?

No, I never did understand the title. What some of it did was to bring to mind the last days of Salò Republic late 1944 or the Hot Autumn of the so-called Red Brigades of 1969.

Oh, and I would hardly call it SyFy but the IMDb does. It is a fiction set in an alternative present.

A dental tale.

Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth (2013)

Good Reads meta-data is 188 pages rated 3.49 by 9040 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: Mexico.

Verdict: Humorous, creative, then tedious, and finally tiresome.

Tagline: A dental autobiography.

A discontinuous and disjoined narrative of Hero who was born with extra teeth and then by a convoluted story becomes fascinated by teeth, and not just his own. He becomes an auctioneer and that brings him into contact with teeth; teeth put up for auction. A tooth from Plato or Virginia Wolfe. And so on. Disbelief is suspended at the factory door.

Author was commissioned to write the text for corporate murals in a juice factory and in so doing, she asked workers about themselves, their work, and so on, and incorporated a lot of that in the pieces that constitute this book. (Or is that ‘comprise’? I have forgotten the rule that distinguishes them. Pedants, please enlighten me.)

The result is a series of short pieces threaded around Hero, barely. Each is well written but there is no momentum and I wasn’t sure why I should keep reading it. So I didn’t. Maturity, that is.

Well, I liked the reference to the horse’s teeth. You know the one. Yes, you do. In debating an obscure theological point of dogma, savants become vexed about the number of teeth a horse has. They argue from first principles, though of course, different first principles, on and on. Pages are filled with decretal (look it up) references, Biblical verses, Ex cathedra assumptions, and scholasticism logicism. Careers were made and broken on the wheel of peer review in this debate. At no time, do these magi consider examining a horse.

The story is often attributed to Francis Bacon, as it is in these pages, but a brief investigation of the internet suggests that there is no text to support that paternity claim. The most likely conclusion I found in the five-minutes of my own research is that it was concocted (by a journalist) in the early Twentieth Century who gave it authenticity with a fabricated pedigree by referring to an exact date, 1432, and the lustre of Sir Francis Bacon’s name. Accordingly, file it under the heading of ‘He never said it,’ along with many other commonly cited remarks.

Aristotle often gets indicted for a similar dental lapse but of course…. It is more complicated when one bothers to consult his text of De Anima where he wrote ‘males have more teeth than females in the cases of men, sheep, goats, and swine….’ ‘Ah huh!’ I hear.

This observation is taken by some to denigrate women, though quite how is lost of me. Do women want to be in the company of sheep and swine along with men as a kind of identity? It is also cited as evidence that Aristotle was a fool for not counting teeth. He, the first and probably the greatest empiricist, did not count THE teeth! Indeed I have heard this trumpet sounded in more than one conference presentation on the circle of purgatory I occupied during my career. Well, let’s turn the pages of De Anima and we find there further comments that suggest he did count teeth, including women’s, in a story of a woman of eighty spawning wisdom teeth at that advanced age. What we might conclude from all this is that the woman or women he examined did have fewer teeth than the man or men he examined, and it being of incidental interest he left it at that. But of course, among you readers are various numbers of teeth due to congenital deformations, accidents, decay, violence, surgery, and age. Moreover, at different times of life we each have a different number of teeth. See complicated. Need it be said, yes of course, nothing is obvious to the purblind: the text of De Anima does not assert, state, imply or support the inference of masculine superiority because of dentures.

Moreover, none who mount the soapbox on this point themselves ever do any dental counting in sheep, swine, or women nor cite anyone else who has. That is a thesis topic in search of an author.

By the way, Bertrand Russell played a role in spreading and legitimating this furphy as he did others. Bertie was never one to check the original text when the muse inspired him, and he has become a secular saint whose word is law to be repeated but to be tested.

Vtorzhenie (2020) Attraction 2 : Invasion

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2h 14m, rated 5.4 by 6,600 cineasts.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: Russia.

Verdict: Oh hum.

Tagline: He’s back.

This is a sequel of Attraction (2017) discussed earlier on this blog. It adds little to the story. This outing is mostly shoot ‘em up with the unseen aliens. This confrontation seems to have been caused by Lazarus Romeo’s insistence on returning to Earth to copulate (off camera) with Juliet. So, that old Hollywood trope is vindicated: they have come for our women! Cf. The Mysterians (1957), Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965), Mars Needs Women [1968], and Lobster Man from Mars [1989] to name too many.

Needless to say, the Russian arsenal — depleted in Ukraine — is no match for these aliens, and it is up to Romeo to thwart his own kind and save Earth. Thousands have to die so that Romeo and Juliet can do anatomy. Huh? Well, it made sense to the screenwriter sitting at a keyboard in a dark room in front of a blank screen with a deadline to earn the rent money.

As with its precursor the acting and staging are excellent, though honours must go to the Madman (Alexander Petrov) who steals the shows with his wild-eyed drooling. He is so much more, well, alive than the reborn Romeo who remains tall, handsome, and wooden.

There are minor amusements in the observations on life. (1) Google is here but does not have a hospital scene this time. (2) The determination of people to snap selfies even as they are hammered to bits by the alien force was another. (3) But the best one is the effort of Romeo to buy twenty two-litre bottles of mineral water from a supermarket. He has money; he knows how to shop, but he is in a desperate hurry to save the world…with water. (Yes, I know but see the above aside about the screenwriter.) He fills a shopping cart with the bottles and pushes to the front of the queue at the check out desk. As the clerk scans the first one, he say there are ‘Twenty in all!’ and slaps down the rubles to cover the cost.

But no, the clerk has to scan each bottle individually and so he frantically passes them up to her and then throws them back in the cart, waving off her efforts to bag them. When the total costs comes up he pushes the rubles at her.

But no, she first asks for his loyalty card. ‘What? No loyalty card? He can sign up right now, and get a 5% discount on this, his first purchase.’ She begins tapping on the screen and asking his name, address,….

By now he is jumping out of his skin, as she waits for his response because…. (In this case it is more like a tree shedding bark, but I could not quite work that in.)

He takes off, leaving the money, and pushing the cart out to the parking lot, where…. Is his mention of Orion a tribute to an earlier and excellent Soviet Sy Fy film, Orion’s Loop [1981], discussed elsewhere on this blog?

Had he filled out the form, he would two hours later have gotten a text asking him to rate his experience at the check out! Even as the world burns, data that will never be used is collected. Is this the superpower convergence I used to hear about from pundits?

The room full of silent generals we see once or twice made me wonder who was invading Ukraine if all this brass was drinking tea.

Giulio Leoni, The Kingdom of Light (2009).

Good Reads meta-data is 398 pages, rated 2.85 by 220 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: medieval period.

DNA: Italian; Species: Firenze; Sub-species: Dante.

Verdict: Second time around.

Tagline: Stupidity is god’s will. (That explains a lot.)

It is a world where whatever happens is god’s will, and that is that. Any further consideration is blasphemous. Faith not reason prevails…for most. In this stifling and stultifying milieu Messer Durante is an exception, one of only a few, who looks beneath this sanctimonious carpet to the see the warp and weft that weave the Church’s hypocrisy. According to Dante (1265-1321), god means for us men (but not women) to make full use of our abilities. But this makes him a non-Believer or worse in the eyes of most others. In short, it all has a contemporary resonance.

Dante is a Prior for a two-month term of office. Six priors comprise the executive of the city-state government of Florence, and during their two-month terms, they live in the office dormitory. The short term is to discourage strong government by promoting rotation of the office, and the residency requirement makes it a full time job: Those are the fictions. This duty is unwelcome to those with a business to manage, a farm to tend, a sick wife to mind, or travel to do and they try to avoid the call to duty. Ergo, often the incumbents are layabouts with none of those concerns. The priors are nominees of the guilds that dominate local commerce and that commerce dominates the secular city. The historic Dante was a prior from the apothecary guild. He had qualified for this guild because it was relatively easy, he had an interested in science, and it afforded prestige for which he was hungry from go-to-whoa. But no, he was not a drug dealer.

In this story most of the priors are timeservers, some reluctant, others more willing, but Dante takes it very seriously when the dead start to pile up in the strangest places and in the strangest ways. Those who answer god’s telephone tell him to back off, but he keeps going through the murk of Guelph, Ghibelline, greed, graft, and grievance.

Confession. I never did understand how the woman in the box worked or what the eight-sided hall of mirrors had to do with anything. Maybe you do. Inform me at your leisure.

***

I have read this before but was moved to do it again after reading a biography of the poet discussed elsewhere on this blog because now I thought I now know him better.

Aniara, again.

Harry Martinson, Aniara (1956).

Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Epic poem; subspecies: Blank verse.

Good Reads meta-data is 157 pages, rated 3.85 by 3001 citizen’s.

DNA: Sweden.

Verdict: 47.

Tagline: Helvetet är andra människor. (Hell is other people.)

The basis for an opera, and four films. Whew! Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 for being the second most important book published in Swedish. Double whew! The only Nobel Prize for SyFy, apart from those in economics.

What’s the story then?

Aniara, a routine shuttle carrying 8,000 people, lifts off for Mars from a despoiled Earth. (‘I told you so,’ said Greta, again.) It is a three-week flight aboard this Volvo ferry with its casino, IKEA shopping mall, theatres, and such mod cons with 2000 rooms each with an en suite bathroom(?). Millions have taken this ride before. But hardly has this one left Earth orbit for the jaunt when the unimaginative writer’s friend, a meteor shower, strikes. The contractor who built Aniara did not anticipate such an occurrence and the ship is damaged. Like the mighty Bismarck, the Aniara’s rudder is mangled and the craft cannot be steered. Instead it is thrown well off course toward the light-centuries distant Lyra constellation.

Pippi Longstocking, Max von Sydow’s knight, Inspector Beck and other Swedish stereotypes are on board. The crew attempts repairs to no avail, and there is no emergency road service from Volvo for Aniara. These 8000 are condemned to live out their lives, as are their descendants, within this metallic shell on the way to Lyra where they will never arrive (because the ship itself will wither en route into a Marie Celeste hulk). What meaning is there in this existential crisis? See above.

(Was this the basis for StarLost in 1973. Hope not. But it is a trope in a lot of SyFy before and after 1956.)

In addition to all the other short term diversions the ferry has Mima with its minder. What is Mima? Mima is an AI as conceived in 1956. It is referred to in the same casual I might refer to my iMac, and so I can only guess what it is. Mima is there to inform, entertain, educate, and pacify passengers during the short trip to Mars. It has a repository of tapes, both video and audio, but it also receives and intercepts transmissions from the ether, including from Earth. Intended to function mostly as a diversion for three weeks at a time, when left on continuously for the years of this journey it becomes increasingly self-conscious, and it is aware of the situation. It is sentient enough to realise the hopeless situation even as it itself wears out, those flash drives and circuit boards don’t last forever, and sentient enough to feel dread of the darkness to come. The minder became the central character in the two film versions I have seen.

So for the first few months or even years Mima keeps up a happy face, but like Grock the clown it grows melancholy as it ages and becomes decrepit. The CDs wear out from repeated spins. It receives incomprehensible transmissions, perhaps from alien beings. It loses contact with dying Earth long before all that.

(Note to self: turn off iMac before it becomes sentient.)

Mima mirrors the hopes of the passengers and as this robot loses hope, so do they, or vice versa. On board the population re-enacts much of the stupidity of life on Earth. There is wasteful use of resources that are not infinite on Aniara. Salvation cults come and go. Orange demigods strut and fret. First there is unlimited orgy followed by celibacy. Human sacrifice was a short-lived fad. (Get it?) Through it all Aniara drifts on.

While we learn much of Mima’s moods, the passengers keep eating and drinking. Those supplies seem infinite for this three week crossing which has stretched to more than twenty years within a few pages.

It is partly a take on a common Cold War setting of mixed group of survivors of a nuclear war, having to deal with each other. e.g., Five (1951), Day the World Ended (1955), On the Beach (1959), This is not a Test (1962), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) and many more. This trope has since been done to death and well past that in the Post-Apocalyptic genre that has exploded in recent times. But in this case none of the passengers are distinctive personalities.

Not born of woman‽

C. L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’ (1944).

Good Reads meta-data is 40 pages, rated 3.87 by 101 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Thoughtful.

Tagline: Abandon clichés all who read here.

A diva who was horribly disfigured and mutilated in a theatre fire, slowly is recovered, that is, remade into…? That is the question. On the one hand her brain has been placed in an artificial body, say like MurderBot as discussed elsewhere on this blog.

In that way her life was saved by the heroic efforts of a team of doctors and technicians, but now, how shall she/it live? That is another question.

A take on the mind/body problem, as well as personal identify and autonomy, especially for a woman. Some of the Good Reads reviewers, as usual, entirely miss the point.

A compelling if protracted story with an ending, happy or otherwise. I heard it commended by Gary Wolfe in a Wondrium lecture and sought it out. It took some seeking but I found it in a collection selling for $500 on Amazon and $5 on Abe Books.

Inspired by this reading I got another one of hers. To dodge the sexism of the age, she often wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett or Lawrence O’Donnell.

The Sun is God (2014) by Adrian McKinty

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.33 by 823 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Kabakon.

Verdict: Oh hum.

Tagline: The coconuts did it.

Setting – German New Guinea in 1906, where a retired Brit has gone to hide from his troubles, but mercifully we are spared his backstory.

Sweltering in the heat and humidity, swatting a long list of insects, Brit ponders the fate that brought him to this malarial shore, when a local German colonial official pays him a call. Oh, oh, has Official come about the creative writing he did on his residency application. No, but on that self-same application Brit said he had served as a military police officer in the Red Coats. That fact was not one of his lies. Official would like Brit to investigate, unofficially, a recent death on the island of Kabakon.

After the de rigueur hesitations, Brit complies to set off in the company of a liberated woman travel writer, and a minor colonial administrator along as his minder. Delicacy is required because the island is owned by a wealthy woman, a planter, who bought it outright from the German authorities long ago, and so is private property. Ergo the Brit is a surrogate for the Germans. The European residents who live on it pay her a rent and mind their own business. It is one of them who has died in circumstances that are cloudy.

Once enisled things get even more delicate because the islanders are vegetarians and nudists. Most are German but not all. Brit sees much sunburn some of it where the sun does not usually shine and forests of mosquito bite pustules on their bare flesh. The manly features of several of the men are fully described though these details are unlikely to figure in the plot. The women are not scrutinised to the same detail by our shy narrator. Yet he had to be told of the drastic steps two of the men have taken to leave behind the temptations of the flesh. Maybe he needs new glasses.

The dozen or so Kabakons are sun worshippers who live on hot air and coconuts with the occasional banana. They be heliotarians, fruitarians, and breatharians. What a trifecta. They also endure the sledge hammer sun, the monsoon rains, and the devouring disease-carrying insects. Sado-masocists in short.

There is a lot of manners and mores between the clothed and the unclothed, Germans and Brits but little detecting. The few natives mentioned are ciphers. Indeed, there is so little detecting I was left unsure what there might have been to detect.

There is an abrupt change of narrator in last chapter or two that confused me.

***

I chose it for the exotic context of German colonialism. In the Pacific this empire included: German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Nauru, the Mariana and Caroline Islands, and Samoa as well as concessions extorted from China, and some other rocks in the sea. (There were also more extensive holdings in Africa.) Kabakon is so singular it does not shed any ambient light on the other colonies.

I listened to it from Audible, which was sometimes inaudible on the street.

Castlemaine Murders

Kerry Greenwood, Castlemaine Murders (2003)

Good Reads meta-data is 263 pages, rated 4.06 by 5,039 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Strine.

Verdict: She’ll always be Essie to me.

Tagline: The Honourable is at it again.

Miss Phryne Fisher puts the 1929 world to rights after an unpleasant discovery at a St Kilda funfair. Eventually, the piste leads her to the titular town. There is a great deal of preliminary padding of time and place and couture with many side- and backstories and little momentum through the three-quarter point but it does accelerate when finally she gets to Castlemaine.

She makes an inauspicious arrival bound and gagged in a flour sack. While thus restrained she concludes it took three men to kidnap her, the two who accosted her on the dark streets of Melbourne and another waiting in the the car to make the getaway. So the odds are three men to one against her. ‘About even then,’ she concludes and in due course she proves to be right. These men, stupid as they are, failed to remove the pistol from her silk-stocking holster, the knife concealed in her handmade shoe, or the sap in her hidden pocket. Such carelessness will have its reward.

By the time constabulary belatedly arrives she has overcome the villains, having coshed one, stabbed another, and drawn a bead on the third, or something like that.

We spent a day in Castlemaine a few years ago and found much to like in it, including das KaffeeHaus, the Buda Historic Home, and the regional Art Museum. I also bought some fine Murray Cod for dinner from ‘She Sells Sea Shells.’

These comments derive from listening to the Audible reading while on my Newtown patrols, morn and eve. At times the traffic, air, foot, and wheel, drowned out the sound, adding to the mystery.