Michael W Jackson – Page 26 – Political theory and practice

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell

GoodReads meta-data is 387 pages, rated 3.96 by 9260 litizens.

Genre: Biography

Verdict: Merveilleux!

Michel Eyquem Montaigne (1533-1592), author of Essays, largely autobiographical. He is credited with coining the word ‘essay’ to refer to short written treatment of a single theme. After holding forth on subjects as diverse as vanity, certainty, torture, marriage, prayer, age, conscience, cripples, cannibals, anger, thumbs, sleep, liars, Cicero, clothes, nudity, early rising, he was likely to conclude by saying, Mais alors, que sais-je? or ‘But then, what do I know?’ Few of the essays stuck to the title topic, and wandered through digressions and asides in a conversational tone. Most were between three and nine pages in print. He was a blogger avant le mot. These were the fruit of his mature years, but how did he come to that point?

He had a hothouse upbringing even stranger than that of John Stuart Mill.

At birth his father had him then and there separated from his biological mother (the wife) and deposited with a wet nurse and her peasant family, where he remained for two years with no familial contact. Only on his second birthday was he taken home. According to his father this experience with the peasants was to imprint upon him an awareness of others.

Once he was home his father had decreed and arranged that everyone speak Latin. There was a tutor who was fluent in the dead language and he taught the servants, and his father a few Latin phrases to use to and before the boy. No one spoke French within his hearing. In this way, his father reasoned, he would learn Latin naturally as the Romans did. Latin was the language of the law, the church, the government, and the international language of the learned and that made it the bedrock of a successful career and life, reasoned his father, who knew no Latin until the tutor taught him a few phrases. By this time, his mother had other children and she ignored this eldest specimen child in his test tube.

On his sixth birthday he was sent to a residential boarding school sixty miles away where he stayed for ten years until age sixteen. He neither returned home nor was visited there by any members of his family, though there was the occasional letter in Latin from his father prepared by the tutor. It was only then at six years old that he heard French. While the teachers knew why he ignorant, the other students neither knew nor cared and were cruel in taunting and teasing him where he was nicknamed Michau. Having no choice, he endured it and says little about it in his autobiographical musings. At sixteen he returned to the home he barely knew.

His father hoped that these experiences would prepare his son and heir for life. He was not following any theory of learning, for he was himself uneducated and had a distant awe and respect for knowledge. Père Montaigne had filled his library with books he could not and did not read as totems for such learning (like the wall of unopened books behind Craig Kelly these days). He was an energetic member of the lesser nobility who worked tirelessly to improve his properties. However, he was better at starting projects – dams, bridges, retaining walls, weirs, levelling fields, clearing stones, fences, hen houses – than finishing them.

Michau became a magistrate (part notary, part lawyer, part judge) in Bordeaux when he was about thirty. Between sixteen and that age, not much is known of his life, though he learned to ride a horse and liked to do that. He did not like the duties of managing the property, and when his father died, most of those unfinished projects remained unfinished. As heir and owner he turned over management of the property to an agent, confirmed a complete break with his birth mother, and ignored his six siblings whom he barely knew. When he married he had a similar distant relation with wife and his own children. (There is an interesting explanation of the relevant manners and morēs of the time that is too detailed to summarise. Read it.)

He travelled to and from Bordeaux and was a dutiful magistrate, thorough, patient, insightful, and bored by squabbles over chickens. He wrote very clear briefs and rendered succinct judgements, which inevitably made him enemies because there was always someone disappointed at a result.

The work might have been boring most of the time but the times themselves were not. It was in the midst of the Troubles, aka a 60+ year war of religion among Catholics, Protestants, and variations of each. While the main fault line was Catholic versus Protestant there were factions within each so that sometimes they attacked their own. Three- and four-sided conflicts were common. One side would massacre several hundred of the other and retaliations would follow, until the blood lust abated and an implicit truce settled in. Then at an opportune moment, often when the victims were praying in a church, another slaughter would occur, and the dance of murder and mayhem in God’s name would begin again. God’s will, they shouted. (Starting to sound familiar?) Murdering defenceless people at prayer has been the practice in the American south for years. Still is.)

There was also an international dimension as Protestant England and Catholic Spain encouraged the conflicts in France so as to preoccupy it and reduce French influence in Europe. Consider contemporary parallels at leisure.

The city of Bordeaux, though a long way from Paris, was contested as a rich prize with claret wine, agricultural produce, fishing, and sea port, and one reason Montaigne resigned and went rustic may have been to opt out of this endless, murderous conflicts.

The Essays are not easy to read, though they are low key and can be amusing; they are also contradictory, vague, confusing, and stuffed with digressions and asides. Contradictions, there are more than a few. He says he is solitary and he also says he is sociable. He says he prefers books to people and he also says books are useless compared to a good talk with people. He says he is lazy and he also says he rises at dawn to read and write and spends too much on candles after sunset to keep reading and writing. He reticent and talkative with strangers in the same sentence.

Our author guides readers through the labyrinth of the stops and starts of Michau’s mental wanderings, often placing them in either his personal or historical context with a deft hand. The tone is informal and there are topical references to the contemporary popular culture. Most of these hit the mark. In none of them does the author try to supplant Michau, as some biographers sometimes do in shifting the focus from the ostensible subject to themselves. (See the comments on The King of Sunlight elsewhere on this blog for an example of this Me-ism syndrome.)

There are some fascinating insights in the Sixteen Century attitudes to sex and family that are best read. We are a long way from that time and place. But it explains his distance from his own family.

There are details, more than I wanted but which I perhaps needed, on the deadly influence of religion and Michau’s twists and turns to stay safe from condemnation from self-appointed, self-righteous apostles of one sect or another. One of his fears was that a Savonarola would appear and burn down the tower in which his library and cabinet of curiosities were housed.

Bordeaux was a Catholic city surrounded by a countryside of Huguenots. As a landowner and as a civic official Montaigne had frequently to navigate through these troubled waters. One of his principles was to get along with everyone, and he was pretty good at that. Though of course any time he was polite to a Protestant, a Catholic zealot would threaten his life, and any time magistrate Montaigne ruled in favour of a Catholic claimant, a Protestant fanatic would swear vengeance. In this climate conflicts over butterfly farms escalated. By and large Montaigne was more successful than many others at toning the conflicts down. So successful was he at it that he ascended to a higher office as mayor of Bordeaux in which office he was the first ever incumbent to be re-elected. He liked to say in later years that in his tenure nothing happened, and it took a great deal of work to ensure that.

All of these efforts at putting oil on troubled waters made his name known, and his nearest neighbour in the countryside began to cultivate him. That was Henri de Navarre, a Huguenot champion, who saw in Montaigne an honest broker to communicate with the Catholic court in Paris. In this vexed situation the Queen Mother, Catherine d’ Medici, became an active negotiator and Montaigne was instrumental in keeping a channel of communication open between her and Henri who was to became Henri IV. At times both Medici and Navarre offered Montaigne honours and positions which he steadfastly declined and ducked to stay out of the limelight.

Of Montaigne’s many aphorisms, one that particularly appealed to me was his advice ‘to have a room behind the shop,’ by which he meant a wise man (and yes he assumed only men as readers) would do well to have an escape room away from the public and his family, too, a room of his own. Thus he is an exponent of the Man Cave, as some refer to my private office. Montaigne recommended such a retreat as a place where everything is to your liking and no one else enters except by invitation. He trained a servant to clean the room in a way that did not disturb the papers on his desk, the piles books on the floor, the notes stuck to the walls, the curious oddments scattered on the shelves, and so on.

Another of his aphorisms was to stay at home: If you want to know about the world, read a book. But he was as inconsistent about this as about much else. His poor health became an excuse to travel, rather than lie at home. Off he went in search of water treatments, clean air, cosmic balance, a miracle cure, and snake oil unavailable locally. Once he started travelling, there was no stopping him. A two-week sojourn to a spa town two days away turned into a fifteen-month trip to Rome and back. At each stop he sent scouts ahead to see what was on the other side of the next hill, and as soon as they reported back, he had to see for himself, and so gradually he found himself in Rome. Along the way he filled his notebooks with interviews, sights, descriptions, drawings, and collected books and curiosities just like the tourist he was. By this time his name was known to the reading classes, and he was frequently feted along the way. He claimed to dislike this attention but always turned up when invited, the first to arrive and the last to leave. He spoke native Latin, fluent French, and a passable Italian so he was in demand.

Throughout his life he reworked the Essays in many editions,well, he added and added to the book, and it continued to sell well as it grew to three times its original length. He also violated his own rule of brevity and one essay is more than 250-pages long, with so many digressions and asides, not even this biographer can say with confidence what it is about.

The collection was also translated (and abridged) into English and Italian where new audiences found it. Over the years the Essays have been interpreted to death, the more so of late by the most dreaded of interpreters, Po-Mo PhDs in Cultural Studies. In the hands of some of these exponents the book has been taken to mean the opposite of what Montaigne said. The author skewers some of the most absurd of these sallies, though to be sure they are self-skewering, too. Reading her deadpan Stephen Colbert parodies of them is diverting.

She also charts Montaigne’s posthumous popularity among readers and intellectuals over the centuries with an amused eye. It is all in all a pleasant ride. Recommended.

The King of Sunlight (2005) by Adam McQueen

GoodReads meta data is 331 pages rated 3.95 by 39 litizens.

Genre: biography*

Verdict: Scatter gun does occasionally hit targets.

William Lever (1851-1925) was born a dry goods store owner’s son, who learned the business sweeping the floor. That was an especially onerous duty in the backroom where large bars of all-purpose soap were cut into one pound sizes. The trimmings that fell to the floor were profuse and sticky. This boy had a lot of trouble sweeping them up only to throw them away. That seemed like wasted effort and so the first of a long string of innovations came. He wrapped these floor sweepings neatly and labeled them soap flakes. After all, to use the one-pound lumps of soap a housewife had to scrape flakes off it, thus buying ready-made flakes was a labour-saving step and they could be sold cheap since they had been heretofore waste, and it proved popular and profitable. His father soon gave him his head and stood back.

There followed many other elementary changes that brought a competitive advantage, like cutting the soap into bars of a hand size. Later he distinguished between soap for laundry and soap for person with additives in the latter. And so.

He made his soap first a national and then an international business, scattering innovations like seeds in the wind. Some did not work out, most did. He was quick to make use of new-fangled advertising and made innovations in that, too.

The paternalism in him led to philanthropy, although he always denied that he ever gave anything away. It was all a business investment in his mind. He built an ideal community in Cheshire near Liverpool for his principal manufacturing plant, called Port Sunlight (after his most successful product line), which we visited in 2004. It reflects the man in that the architecture is varied, not uniform as it is in other model communities, and endowed with art works and green spaces galore. An art gallery was located between the residences and the factory so that workers on the way to and from home could walk through it for their edification. It provided a dry-cut when it rained and was designed to accommodate wet feet and umbrellas with drains and mats.

He collected art by the simple expedient of buying the complete collections of others, selecting for his private residences the works he liked, and using the rest to adorn Port Sunlight and Lever offices around the world. He was something of a magpie in collecting as the museum at Port Sunlight shows.

He established the eight-hour day at Port Sunlight. Paid the highest wages in the land, and turned gigantic profits much of which he ploughed back into Port Sunlight, while expanding the business overseas and vertically integrating it with suppliers. In time, with increased mechanisation, he cut the week from 6 to 5 and 1/2 to 5 days. He was widely detested for all this by business rivals who tried to blacken his name with smears and innuendo. Each of which he batted off with a team of lawyers.

He was a lifelong supporter of the Gladstone Liberal Party, including its efforts to end the state religion and grant home rule to Ireland, and was elected to parliament where his sole purpose was to advocate and agitate for a national old age pension comparable to that which he paid his retiring employees, both men and women. The norm at Lever Brothers was equal pay for equal work between men and women. He carried that over more generally and was an advocate of female suffrage. Thus he practiced and preached equality for women with men, but that was not enough for some people.

One zealot made an example of him by burning down his house (and all its familial and artistic contents), she said, to light a beacon for women’s suffrage, further saying that until that goal is achieved everything has to be attacked, even allies, it seems. It is a kind of Pox News logic of attacking a soft target. No one was home and no one was injured but it both hurt his feelings and angered him so that he rebuilt the house…in stone, so that it could not be burned again by another nutcase. It did not cause him to weaken in his advocacy of the suffrage, but he did take pleasure when the malefactor was slammed up.

His efforts at vertical integration in the Solomon Islands and then the Congo led him to realise how terrible colonialism was, and he treated the natives he dealt with better than any other European had ever done. This fact does not spare him the troll attacks on Wikipedia today where he is castigated for not having 21st Century sensibilities by people whom in turn will be castigated one day for not having 23rd Century sensibilities. History has become troll berate troll.

He was a micro-manager even as the business grew and grew to become an international behemoth. To do so he wrote – yes wrote, not dictated – 50,000 letters a year. The archive swamps most biographers. This one did not even dip a toe into it. As the majority owner he did not distinguish his private interest from those of the company and in time that came unstuck. Lever Bros did not quite recover from World War I and its aftermath, when prices fell, competition emerged, foreign markets disappeared. Lever tried to keep doing things the old way as the capital dissipated, until there was a management coup d’état in 1922-1923 and he finally let go of the reins, reluctantly, slowly, sporadically….

In the 1930s Lever Bros merged with United Soaps of the Netherlands and become UniLever which remains a diverse and gigantic multi-national. It long operated a large plant nearby in Balmain (established 1895) until land prices made it profitable to sell the area (for residences) and relocate to Minto south west of Sydney. Here are a few of the current UniLever brands: Vaseline, Ben & Jerry’s, Knorr, Magnum, Vif, Comfort, Domestos, Lifebuoy, Dove, Omo, Sunlight, and so on and on.

How his formative years led him to these ventures, how he learned and changed as he went, his relationship with his long-suffering wife (for he insisted throughout his life on sleeping in the open air on specially designed rooftops – true!), his response to failure (and he had a few), are invisible in these pages.

*The book has to be catalogued as biography but it isn’t, hence the asterisk above. It is a string of anecdotes that reflect the interests of the author more than the importance of the stories in forming or revealing Lever. It is also punctuated with the sort of snide, adolescent ad hominem cheap shots so prolific in Bill Bryon’s sophomoric books.

There is a short, grudging entry on Lever in Wikipedia that hardly does the man justice. Pedants note. There was a younger brother who worked in the business initially, hence the name, but left it after few years.

I listened to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 program Great Lives about Lever while on my walks across north Newtown, and recalling our visit in 2004 to Port Sunlight, I followed up with this book. Lever is certainly worth reading about but I cannot recommend this book to any serious reader. It is too self-indulgent, too one-eyed, and superficial. The author is the star of this show, not the subject.

The Vanishing Museum on the Rue Mistral (2021) by M. L. Longworth

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.09 b7 727 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Good ingredients spoiled by the chef.

This title offers an unusual locale: Aix-en Provence in high summer, with an unusual setting: a small, private museum of porcelain, and an unusual crime: the entire contents of the museum vanishes over an April weekend, leaving only the display cases anchored into the floor. Nor were there any signs of damage, no shards on the floor, nor of a break-in. The inadequate door locks were not forced, though a competent burglar would have made short work of them with a paperclip. The blinding sun and the burning heat slow everyone and everything down, except, it seems, the crims.

With such a good list of ingredients, I forgot my usual cautious Kindle sampling and bought it …. and found the execution of the recipe drained the ingredients of flavour. The prose is laborious, the descriptions as endless as they are pointless, the passages are padded well beyond any meaning. We are treated to detailed accounts of meals and also the deliberations in choosing the items to consume from the menu and every ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ that are uttered in a restaurant. Indeed there is far more of that than any account of the museum itself or its lost contents to the extent of my impatient reading.

I persisted in the hope that the text would achieve momentum, but after 25% on the Kindle-o-meter I gave up. Every time the protagonist moves, there is a laboured description of what he sees and does, none of it advancing the plot: he pushes his chair back, it squeaks on the tile floor, he stands up, he drops his napkin on the table, he nods to André the waiter, he walks to the door….[see if you can guess what he does at the door.] I doubt we will ever see André again, but we have invested in his name nonetheless.

For some reason reading this reminded me of a business lunch once that included heated avocado. There is a good reason why no recipes call for cooking avocado, and I was reminded of that at this lunch. When heat is applied, avocado turns a sick, mushy grey. A good ingredient ruined in the preparation. Maybe that is the association.

The author has a dozen books, and a career as a journalist and writing teacher. So there! What do I know. As usual, not much

Les petits meurtres d’Agathe Christie (2009+), Season 2.

IMdB meta-data is 42 episodes (for all three seasons) of 90m each, rated 7.6 by 1067 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi, species Christie.

Verdict: Delicieux!

Season Two is set in the 1950s to the mid-1960s, specifically after 1954 because that is when the très moderne Facel Vega coupé automobile driven by one character came (briefly) on to the market. The ensemble cast includes the dumb blonde in the office, the super cop, and the ambitious and impetuous journalist. It is set in Le Nord, near, but not in the city of Lille. There is plenty of the rain for which the North is famous.

Supercop learns to appreciate the goodhearted simplicity of the blonde secretary who painfully types his reports, exploits a journalist’s youthful fearlessness to blunder into situations, and they in turn appreciate his tenacity in ferreting out la verité, as Maigret would say.

The plots are derived from Agatha Christie, some from the Tommy and Tuppence sequence, others from Dame Marple, and Monsieur Poirot, aussi, but re-potted into French soil, and given a French twist.

While Supercop is a man of many talents, we are spared a backstory and he does not have a painful private life (so trivialised in most cop shows). Indeed, he seems to have little private life at all but he does like slamming up crims.

The redheaded journalist has two first names, Alice Avril, and provides the energy. Marlène the secretary is the emoting and emotional sounding board, while Supercop is the electronic brain. Together they are a kind of family of siblings. He is the older brother who enjoys teasing and tormenting the younger sister journalist, while ignoring the older clothes-horse secretary whose head is full of romantic nonsense from women’s magazines.

Loved the episode where he got a mobile phone in 1954. Yep, a war surplus US Army field telephone the size of a suitcase, which he carried around only to have the Telecom reception drop out at crucial moments. Very realistic. Minitel would have to wait.

Although many changes have been made from the sources, the villains remain the same, in so far as I recall the Dame’s stories. When the ghosts appear in Silent Witness, no effort is made to offer a Cartesian explanation, Horatio.

The touch is light, the movement is brisk, the dialogue sparkles, the villains are ever so polite, though too often the immediate effort to avoid an investigation by labelling the death a suicide or an accident is clumsy and irritating. The worst example is the L’affaire Prothero. Memo to script writers, stop messing about and let the team get on with it. Though in that episode the victim is so repellent we could hardly wait for his demise.

On the other hand, there are occasional dream sequences that are a hoot, as when the journalist is confronted by a dissatisfied and armed reader! (Dare we hope Rupert Moloch has such dreams?) When Marlène gets carried away in a romantic revery straight out of the women’s magazines she devours every day. Or when Supercop realises he cares about each of them and recoils in horror because his armour has rusted. Then there is the singular appearance of his anti-Cartesian mother, the mystic. More mère, please.

The tomboyish journalist has some Cinderella transformations.

There is also some superb acting when the script calls for it. The episode when it seems Marlène has been murdered elicits terrific performances from both Supercop and Journalist as they realise how much they loved her for all her genial incompetence. And Marlène plays a double role as herself and her dowdy, miserable sister. Chapeaux! A reverse Cinderella. Even more memorable is one character actor who says not a line, but the guilt, fear, and shame that cross her face are remarkable in two short scenes.

Anachronisms, there a few. In one episode a school teacher remarks in passing that she is ’gay.’ Surely no school teacher in 1954 would publicly to admit to being a lesbian to anyone, still less a police officer, though Marlène’s stupefied reaction is of the time and place.

Seasons One and Three are set in different time periods with different casts, and from a brief look they do not appeal to me. Each season had six episodes but this team was so popular more and more were made over the years to a total of twenty-seven. Season One is set in the 1930s and Three in the latter 1960s.

These are available on You Tube with subtitles. As always with You Tube, it is best to be quick. There are indications that more have been made and the search has begun. Some episodes can be found subtitled on DVD called (Agatha Christie’s) Criminal Games. Good luck.

Le Bon Marché

One of the oldest and biggest department stores in Paris is Le Bon Marché. To read a history of the origins, foundation, and life of this great enterprise I thought would be amusing, informative, and diverting. My imagination ran ahead to consider the nervous bankers who staked the first investment in this new-fangled idea. Then there was the genius who recognised the opportunity. Once a going concern I imagined the turf wars among its sections and ego conflicts among its personalities. The decisions about display, say for example, ladies undergarments. Over the years more than one cashier must have been tempted by the grisbi. I wondered what famous names had started a career selling hair brushes there, or in the back sorting stock for the shelves. Then there would be the customers.… Rich pickings for sure!

Yes, reading about that great ship, its crew and its passengers, sailing through good times and bad would be great fun and interesting. What a cast of thousands from slumming aristocrats to charlatans and grifters, provincial girls leaving home for the big city department store and accountants giving up private practice, the civic bureaucracy that would have to approve everything from construction to opening hours, to say nothing of the opportunities for kickbacks on orders, featherbedding nepotism in staffing, creative accounting and more. Then there would be the changing fashions in clothing, but also in plumbing and kitchens that a successful merchant must lead and follow. To stay afloat BoMac, as habitués once called it, must have been reinvented more than once: that means change, which of course also means resistance. The stories must be myriad.

‘Bring it on!’ I cried.

Regret followed immediately when I read the first chapter. Perhaps I should begin with a Content Warning. Beware! The book was written by a sociologist. In the name of discretion I do not enter the title of the book nor the name of the author.

In the first quarter of the book there is no sign of a human being. Instead there are structures and forces, movements and phenomena, masses and elites, classes and cleavages, times and tides, change and continuity, abstractions and concepts galore. It is likewise encrusted with caveats and qualifications that obscure whatever the point may be. This defensive, small-target approach exhausts the reader long before it enlightens.

No one makes decisions, no one makes mistakes, no one does anything – the gestalt does it all through its mechanistic extensions. There are no agents, only structures. Yes, a few names are named, but they are Sims not individuals with wills, hopes, ambitions, and other human cargo. They function as chess pieces on a chequerboard of sociological theories and concepts.

Was it Gerald Durrell who once described a jellyfish as a process? The fish is itself 95% water, immersed in itself – water. It is hardly (5%) apart from the water. To think of it as separate from water is to misconceive it. To abstract the jellyfish from water makes it meaningless, inert, in a word, dead. That image came to mind as I read this book, well the Kindle sample.

I could go on, and the author certainly did, but well it is not reading for pleasure and profit. If suffering from a toothache, this is a book to read because the concentration and effort it requires will take anyone’s mind off a dental pain…. Perhaps I should try Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) for some of this story, but I do not associate reading the didactic moralist Zola with amusement or pleasure.

Castle Shade (2021) by Laurie King

GoodReads meta-data is 360 pages, Rated 4.11 by 3005 litizens

Genus: krimi, species Sherlock, hybrid Mrs Holmes.

Mrs Sherlock Holmes (yes, you read that right) tackles vampires in this outing. After a sojourn in Monaco (wherein Monte Carlo is a hill on which the richest live) the Holmeses have decamped to the Carpathian mountains in dark and mysterious Roumania. In fact, Sherl went alone earlier while Mrs was still settling Rivera hash, and then he returned to fetch her along for the ride. And not just the Carpathians, but, yes, Transylvania (and not the so-named county in Kentucky). Holmes learns Roumanian in a few hours. Well, he is Sherlock.

The trolls have been posting threats against Queen M’s youngest daughter, and after consulting the shade of granny Vicky, Queenie enlists Sherl to square the deal. There be vampires!? Well maybe, but more likely someone wants to create panic about such creatures to blame the Queen, using the same playbook found in D.C. of late: the bigger the lie, the better. Can the Moloch Media be far away?

They are riding to the aid of one of Queen Victoria’s grand offspring, Marie of Roumania, Queen by a marriage to a German princeling who found himself on the Bucharest throne. Later the post-War communist regime devoted much energy to denigrating her, suggesting that she might have done good works. The king is an invalid and the crown Prince a wastrel who resents his mother’s efforts to rei(g)n him in while dad-king is too enervated to cope, leaving Marie the top dog.

Could the plot to discredit her be political? Nationalists who reject a foreign queen? Communists who see an opportunity with the king and eldest son useless? Is it international with Hungary aiming to reclaim turf? Is it about money? Or….is the personal political and vice versa?

The telling is superb though the villain was not altogether convincing but the trip through Transylvania was great fun. Strange what one finds in castle walls.

The Princess Ileana who figures in this story died in 1991 after years as the Mother Superior in a convent in Ohio. From Princess of the realm to negotiating the roster for cleaning the toilets is her story.

Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith

Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith

GoodReads meta data is 384 pages, rated 3.66 by 1652 litizens.

Genre: thriller, krimi.

Verdict: overweight.

In arid New Mexico in early 1945 thousands toiled at a secret project. One peon was a New Mexico National Guard sergeant named Joe, an Indian of some ilk. Naturally, others call him Chief (and he does strut around like one at times).

The peons hate each others, GIs versus civilian contractors, white versus black, white versus red, Anglo versus European, residents versus interlopers, Yankee Doodles versus Red spies, pencil necks versus he-men, mathematicians versus physicists, Greasers versus Jews, everyone versus the local Indians, and on and on. There may be a war on with the prospect of a million more casualties to come, but these thousands have plenty of time for their endless, mutual animosities. True to life then.

The title speaks to the author’s contrivances. The test site was called Trinity and the trinity mountain peaks are mentioned early on and then forgotten as our protagonist insists on calling it Stallion Gate, and though there are references to wild horses in the vicinity none put in an appearance.

The author did a great deal of research and it is stuffed on the pages — about pottery, about Filipinos, about Indian spirits, about boxing, and about the physics, without any dramatic effect. Alas, sorry to say that, but it is true for this reader. Joe is a man among men, and among women who fall over themselves to get at him – every author’s wet dream. He is a boxer, a (modest) war hero, a man of his people, a thinker, a man who never sleeps, and who roams around this top hush hush facility at will because he alone is trusted by one and all.

His notional superior is a purebred cardboard.

Am I jaded? Perhaps. I read recently a leaner version of very similar story in Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos (1998), which seemed much less padded, and less boy’s own. It also offered a subtle account of the strange bedfellows General Grove and Dr Oppenheimer.

Mind you, there are some fine moments in Stallion Gate in the description of a sunrise or the reaction to the conscience of the scientists versus those million soon to be casualties, or for that matter the 70,000 casualties that had already been suffered on Japanese soil at Okinawa in the typhoon of steel. Had the Bomb been used earlier, many of those dead might have been spared along with the hundred thousand Japanese who died there.

There is a distant personal connection through the New Mexico National Guard which was deployed to the Philippines in 1941 just before the Japanese invasion. One of my in-laws was in their ranks, and he was not as lucky as Joe. Who, by the way, seems strangely incurious about the Filipinos who saved him. He talks of them as though they were a mere plot contrivance. Hmmm.

Lightness, we need it.

Listening to Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Colette (1873-1954) the other day brought to mind Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).

How so?

Bragg’s panel members were absolutely determined to read into Colette’s wondrous prose all manner of weighty and sharp points about gender, equality, class, history, power, and more. When Colette wrote her sinuous and sparkling prose about sunflowers in a field, according to the savants, she was subtly undermine the patriarchy or denouncing it. When she wrote charming vignettes about Claudine’s schoolgirl crushes on the film stars, she was subtly attacking social class. And so for the prescribed 45 minutes, but this time I did not exercise the option of listing to the bonus five minutes afterward, so tedious and tendentious did I find the recitation.

When I thought about it later, Kundera came to mind. As for the heavy-weights in Kundera’s novel, so for the Colette panelists, only meaning has any value at all. If Colette wrote about flowers because she liked doing it, was good at doing it, and found it satisfying as an end in itself, it does not have meaning at all to these scholars. They united in denouncing her most effervescent novel, Gigi (1944) categorically and repeatedly, including gratuitous ad hominem asides.

It seemed to me as I listened, and it seems to me now in hindsight that the panelists were pursing their own agendas and not Colette’s. That she wrote Gigi in German occupied Paris, living in constant fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested…. That did not enter into the discussion. The lightness of Gigi was much needed when she produced it. That is remarkable.

Before and during the war she published life-style articles and some stories in publications that were anti-Semitic, pro-German, collaborationist, and Vichy. Again our panelists were silent. I expect she did so to eke out a living in hard times and from 1940 there were no other choices. All that seemed much more important in her life than their abstractions about gender, class, patriarchy, capitalism, and other way stations on the tenure-track. Survival. And to survive she looked to light side, the bright side.

Nor was much said about her short but noteworthy career as a journalist of which she once said, in a lesson few journalists these days heed, ‘you have to see and not invent, you have to touch and not imagine…’ (By the way, she reported crime – robbery, rape, and murder – for a Paris scandal sheet, not flower shows.)

I read a long biographical introduction to a volume of her memorable short stories years ago, and cannot identify it today, but some of it stuck with me.

Enclaves, exclaves, counter-exclaves… Lost yet?

Trivia of the week. Amaze you friends. Bore your family. Drone on and on. See below.

When is an international border not a border at all? There are enclaves, oh hum, yes, we all know that. But do we all know about exclaves, yes, and counter-exclaves. Fascinating, yes?

Belgium and the Netherlands were once a single entity called the Spanish Netherlands. Within that unity there were all sorts of medieval fiefdoms compounded by political matrimony and varied laws of inheritance, Papal territories, duchies, principalities, free cities, much of it tracing back to Charlemagne. Spanish hegemony had left all those pieces alone to concentrate on collecting taxes and flanking the French. In the centuries the lords and ladies had swapped acres here and there, bought and sold some, left others as inheritances, and traded land back and forth in their domains. Then in a long series of conflicts the Spanish left and later at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Belgium and the Netherlands divided into two distinct, sovereign nations – one a monarchy and one a republic – with an international border between them. Almost….

In 1815 not all of the rival claims to territory could be resolved and the great powers of the day, having divided the two, had no interest in such fine details in a couple of brand-new minor countries and left them dangling. Despite repeated efforts since then, a few of them continue to dangle to this day. Read on for enlightenment.

Baarle-Nassau is an incorporated municipality in the southern Netherlands near the border with Belgium, but NOT on the border. It is about sixteen (16) kilometres from the border. Yet some of it is in Belgium, yet it is wholly within the Netherlands and yet I repeat: some of it is ‘of’ though not ‘in’ Belgium. Sit down and take a deep breath.

Quiet in the back! It has nothing to do with diplomatic territory. There is no embassy in this hicksville.

Based on medieval practice, royal decree, rule of law, sanctified by the Roman Catholic Church, there were numerous exclaves (look it up as above) of a Belgian municipality called Baarle-Hertog within Baarle-Nassau. For the purposes of this exposition from now on let us refer to the Dutch community as Nassau and the Belgian one as Hertog. Make a note of that for the final examination. The fraternity brothers will want to copy that later when they recover from Saturday’s hangover before starting on Sunday’s after chapel.

With a similar basis in ancient ritual, church law, taxation, and inheritance Hertog in its turn contains within its constituents counter-exclaves of Nassau. While there are several maps that show this situation, none that I found make it especially clear. But I have included the best of the ones I found.

There are 22 separate Belgian exclaves in Nassau, some consist of a single residence, others are grassland, or one side of a street of shops. Within these 22 Belgian exclaves there are in turn 7 separate Dutch counter-exclaves, each within a Belgian exclave. Following so far? If not go back to the beginning and move your finger along the text very slowly. The border of these claves, en-, ex-, and counter-ex, run through buildings, between houses on the same side of street, and along the loading dock of a wine shop, and so on. In one frequently mentioned case the border bisects the front door of a private home, which accordingly has two street numbers, one on each side, 7 for Dutch and 22 for Belgian.

The total population of the two mingled communities is about 12,000, and these days its main source income is tourism as people come there to see the oddities. Selfies abound. A zig-zag international border runs down the main street so that two shops side-by-side are in different countries, complying with different tax laws, labor legislation, opening hours, social laws that define pornography, and so on.

The town has one bank and the border runs through it! Business is shifted from one side of the border inside the bank to the other as required. And, yes, before the Euro all the commerce took place in two currencies, Belgian Francs and Dutch Guilders. Daylight saving times also differed. For the literal minded that meant it could be 7:00 am in the bedroom and 8:00 am in the kitchen.

A stamped letter to a Dutch address 20 meters down the street mailed in a Hertog letterbox goes to Brussels to be sorted, then to Amsterdam, and then back to Nassau in a week. In contrast the Dutch postal system is not centralised and a letter from Nassau to a Hertog address with a Dutch stamp put in a Dutch letter box is sorted locally and delivered that day to the Belgian postoffice which then delivers it to the door.

Albeit a jigsaw puzzle, surface jurisdiction is clear, but underground is another matter. If a new apartment building is put in a Dutch counter-exclave within a Belgian exclave, the apartment building will produce more sewage, must the Belgians in the surrounding exclave pay for the pipes to be upgraded too carry it? And if they do, then the pipes must meet Dutch standards at both ends to integrate from the apartment house to the surrounding Nassau. And so on. The same would apply to an apartment block built in a Belgian exclave.

As to standards, the Dutch have strict zoning laws that lead to architectural uniformity, whereas the Belgians have no such scruples. One street will be Dutch uniform up to the border and then the houses will be ranch style next to terrace next to mock Tudor and so on. Then there is the state religion in Belgian but not so in the Netherlands. That effects church bells, church levies, Sunday opening laws, film censorship, and charity laws.

If a builder’s project straddles a boundary, then the building must satisfy two sets of building codes, labour laws, taxation… The result is that builders try to avoid that. The wine shop mentioned above is a case in point. The building is regulated by Nassau while loading dock comes under Hertog. In the case the bank both sets of regulations apply since the border bisects the bank rather than dividing into front and back. And you thought a development application for the local council was a pain.

There have been two mayors, two high schools, two of everything in this small town.

By convention, the location of the front door of a house, shop, building determines its nationality (and hence exposure to property tax, access to services, etc). If the front door is in a Belgian exclave though bulk of the house behind it is in the Netherlands, the whole property is treated as Belgian. Some property owners have arranged the front door(s) to be flexible so that it can shifted from one side to the other when taxes change.

During recent COVID lockdowns the Belgian and Dutch governments made slightly different rules, and they were dutifully reflected within the borders of Hertog and of Nassau. A Dutch restaurant was closed but the Belgian one next door remained open.

To deal with all the anomalies, at town hall they do a lot of talking at a conference table with the border drawn down the middle. But in what language do they talk, a question that became in whose language do they talk? Though local Belgians are Flemish and speak that language, the officials representing them have long insisted on speaking French. That insistence on French is partly a retaliation against the Dutch snobbery about Flemish as a dialect (of Dutch) that they cannot understand, so crude is it. After a time, the two sides settled on negotiating in English.

The European Union has avoided this problem, leaving it to the locals. Evidently they have found a way to deal with the blind-eyes of the central governments.

One wonders about the role those exclaves played in World War I when Belgian was conquered by Germany while the Netherlands remained neutral. When both countries were occupied in World War II, it unlikely that the Occupier paid any attention to these niceties, but… Well, maybe. And as soon as the uniformity imposed by the Occupier was removed, no doubt both parties reverted to their old ways. (I had long been convinced by the argument of the [Louis] Brandeis Brief that if people’s behaviour was changed by law, over generations their thinking would change. The laboratory of Yugoslavia demolished that belief where the old ways emerged.) And today one might wonder how policing occurs in this divided jurisdiction.

On the lighter side, a sit-com set in this burg would have endless possibilities for canned laughter from one side or the other.

Homework starts with the entry in Wikipedia. Then try B. R. Whyte, ‘En territories belge et à quarantie centimètres de la frontière (2004),’ a study of the Belgian and Dutch enclaves of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau.

There are many videos on You Tube but the most informative is Stefan’s from History Hustle. Search for ‘The world’s Strangest Borders between Belgium and the Netherlands: Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau.’

P.S. There are many other oddities, I since discovered in Central Asia among the one-time Soviet republics and in the Gulf of Persia between Oman and the United Arab Emirates. You have been warned! Maritime boundaries are even more vexed.

A Three Dog Problem (2021) by S. J. Bennett

GoodReads metadata is pages 288 rated 4.23 by 48 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Deft.

A very disagreeable housekeeper trips over a whiskey bottle and dies. Good riddance and all that. The tabloid press goes even more bonkers than usual. In distant Sydney the sanctimonious tones of the ABC are sounded since this housekeeper once talked to a Strine. It’s world news because the house the victim kept was Buckingham Palace and her employer is one Mrs Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor, Queen of all the Englands, and more.

All those Buck House officials lift the carpet to sweep the housekeeper (deceased) under it on the way to their knighthoods. Trouble is someone is standing on the carpet. Indeed, it is Her Self the Majesty who would like to know just how one trips over a whiskey bottle in a place where one has no business and one is not a drinker of spirits, and one is roundly disliked by so many. What really did happen? Of course, this one cannot be so direct. Circumspection is thy name, Queenie.

And while she is about it, HM would also like to know how a painting given to her personally many years ago by an obscure Tasmania artist went from her bedroom wall to a Royal Navy wardroom. Drinking tea there after cutting yet another ribbon (must 50 this year already!) when she noticed it. Too polite too inquire then and there, she went back home to check. Sure enough, not where it used to be. So hard to keep track of one’s 7,000+ paintings.

Do these two mysteries intertwine, the errant painting and the corpsed keeper? All those prim and proper (blinkered) officials in Buck House will never notice. Still something is not quite right about either the wandering painting or terminated housekeeper. No, this is a job for someone who cannot say ‘no,’ the junior Assistant Private Secretary (APS), late of the Royal Horse Artillery, gets the assignment. The instruction are ‘Find the route that painting took from the royal bedroom to the naval wardroom, and find out who put the whiskey bottle there to fall over (if that is what happened). And do so with such deft discretion that no one knows you have done it. Should keep you busy a day on two on top of all your other duties.’

QEII cannot do anything herself since she is scheduled twenty-four hours a day and under scrutiny from staff every one of those hours. Any deviation would be an earthquake. The portrayals of royal life are many and fascinating in these pages. The gravities on Her Britannic Majesty exceed those borne by most astronauts. The pecking order among the Buckingham Palace staff is positively Byzantine with invisible lines of demarcation guarded day-and-night by fanatics. The buck-passing and blame-shifting are constant. Is this is the incubus of McKinsey management.

The Palace officials (all stiff upper-lipped chaps) seem relieved that the obnoxious housekeeper is no more, and are happy to move on with no further unpleasantness. That is in the great tradition of McKinsey Management, blame the victim. Absent fuel, the tabloids find something else to lie about. Check Pox News or the Moloch Press for the latest in fiction. The chaps have even less interest in an odd painting of no market value that does not belong to the nation but to Elizabeth Mountbatten. No, to achieve satisfaction, HM will have to see to it herself, but – of course – she cannot be seen to be seeing to it. Good thing she has had years of practice of not being seen to be seeing to things, and getting them done. They call it reigning rather than ruling.

That there seems to be a systematic and extensive campaign of stalking and harassing women employed in Buck House soon becomes apparent to everyone except those stiff-lipped chaps who run the place. Even the none-too-perceptive police officer who had a look at the house keeper’s cadaver grasps that and says so, but the chaps don’t hear what they do not want to know. What happens under the carpet, stays under the carpet, that seems to be their mantra. Once under the carpet, everything is under control.

This is the second in this series I have read and lapped up. Though I admit there is far too much padding with descriptions of clothes, furnishings, and food. When that description is in Buck House it is part of the atmosphere but it carries on as the APS goes out and about and it does go on. And on. Every where she goes, we get the full-IKEA, full-Elle, and full-Gourmet accounts. Treacle.

While whingeing I add that I found the plot tangled beyond my comprehension. Still I enjoyed the ride and the insight into the life of Buckingham Palace. HM’s affection for the valueless painting is explained in a charming aside. The title, by the way, refers to the appropriate number of dogs to take on a walk if one wants to think through a problem. Fewer than three and they expect to be entertained by ball throwing; more than three and one spends the whole time minding them. Three is just right: Enough to entertain themselves but not so many as to distract one from cogitation. This is just one of the many charming nostrums to be found in the book.