Michael W Jackson – Page 32 – Political theory and practice

The Barbarous Coast (1956) by Ross Macdonald

The Barbarous Coast (1956) by Ross Macdonald

Goodreads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.86 by 1,196 litizens.

Genre: PI.

Lew Archer agrees to find a run-away wife so that her husband can talk to her. He seems harmless; she isn’t. It is sixth entry in Macdonald’s sunshine noir oeuvre, featuring Lew.

The wife has latched onto a film contract, or to be more exact, a film mogul has latched onto her with the contract bait. Who will land whom? Who is the more unscrupulous and devious? It’s neck-and-neck on those criteria. The backdrop of Archer’s weary and gruelling investigation is So Cal Babylon:

“Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people’s heads, spread across the landscape, and solidified: North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It has become the nightmare that we lived in.” He is reacting to the people from across the country who come to Hollywood to live in that dream, and fail.

The dream went sour but we are stuck with it. ‘Huh?’ you may well say, but it is striking prose all the same. The Studios will do anything – yes, anything, including eating their own – to preserve the dream because that is where the money is. The title should refer to cannibalism.

As always with Macdonald few words are wasted. When furniture in a room is described it adds weight to the ambience, if the colour of a car is noted it reflects the mood, if a man’s suit is mentioned the bulge in his coat conceals a gun, and so on. There are no Vogue-Elle-IKEA descriptions as ends-in-themselves. Then there are the metaphors that sharpen the spikes. Macdonald is surely the inheritor of Chandler. The vision is bleak in all that sunshine, in all that post war wealth, in all that easy living, but somehow uplifting in the end when all the pieces fall into place and the decent people get on with their lives. There is no happy ending but there is resolution of a kind.

Spoiler: His standard plot devices are present. The villain, well the first villain since there are many, hired Archer as cover, there is a folie à deux in a middle-aged couple who ought to know better, there are unscrupulous fixers, crooked cops, wannabe starlets, honest working stiffs, innocent victims, sunshine grifters, musclemen, bathing beauties, in short, much of fictional So Cal.

Those connoisseurs who chart these things regard it as the last book in the first phase of Archer’s three-part career. Good as it is, the Archer books got better and better, it is true, and I thought there were times in these pages when Macdonald was trying too hard, or I simply missed the point, or a tangent contributed nothing. For a tribute to Macdonald’s career click the embedded link below.

https://www.januarymagazine.com/crfiction/rossintro.html

Snowflake alert: the book reflects the time and place in this portrayal of blacks, hispanics, women, homosexuals though none of this is emphasised. That said, the only honest people Archer encounters are a black pool man, a Latino gateman, and the wife’s sister, all of whom are crucial to the plot.

Embers & Dust (2016)

Embers & Dust (2016) via DUST on You Tube

IMDb meta-data is 11 minutes, rated 6.6 by 63 cinemtizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Charming.

In Appalachia an eleven-year old Gene dreams of the stars on the 1938 autumn evening when on the radio Orson Welles broadcasted The War of the Worlds. Gene’s share-cropper father, beset by the Depression, struggling to eke a living from a hard scrabble farm, aided by his emaciated wife, hounded by a foreclosing bank, all of them stunted by malnutrition, encourages Gene to dream of the stars. Touching.

‘I got all misty,’ Dobie. If there is an explanation for the title, I’d be glad to learn it.

The parents stepped straight out of the photographs in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), once read never forgotten. Yes, I know this book has been subjected to a pygmy attack of late. It is never too late for pygmies to sup on the dead.

Edward Tufte,‘The Cognitive Style of Power Point,’ page 156-185.

This is a chapter in his marvellous book Beautiful Evidence (2006) which ought to be mandatory study in business, engineering, economics, political science and much else.

In this chapter Tufte eviscerates those who practice McKinsey management by Power Point. There are some humdingers. One is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address reduced to Power Point KPIs. Thus drained of meaning, no would ever remember it. Follow the link below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-gettysburg-address-as-a-powerpoint/281636/

Likewise is the painstaking argument that NASA disasters have occurred partly because of the superficial decision-making using Power Point. Gulp! It is not just the low-bid contractors but the absence of specification, documentation, and clarification, favouring instead hierarchical bullet points and discussion. Technical papers are boring compared to the light show! When post-disaster inquiries asked for the technical studies from which the presentation Power Points were derived, they discovered there were no technical documents. Just the PP slides derived from — wait for it — discussions. Now that is engineering! Not! Maybe that is how low-bid contractors keep the price down, saving on printing costs. (We all know how expensive toner cartridges are.)

The curse of McKinsey is not just limited to Power Point, as Tufte shows. When at launch the heat shield problem was detected NASA officials decline to ask the US Air Force to turn one of its spy satellites on the space shuttle to get a look at the hole. Why? Because it would have compromised the KPIs of the management team’s advancement to promotion. Rather than find out right away how serious the problem was, the managers decided it was not serious enough to risk personal promotion. Eight astronauts died in that crash.

Remember that O-ring? I do. He is even more direct in the piece linked below.

https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdf

Dare we conclude similar light shows are the basis for other, military decisions, too. Probably, but these are only on the public record in Arlington. How Robert McNamara would have loved Power Point. Bad decisions, bad planes made efficiently!

Edward Tufte who does not do Ted Talks for the same reasons.

In politics, we know that the Blair governments in Great Britain operated by discussion with the attendant vagaries, having nothing in writing that could be leaked or revealed through Freedom of Information requests now or ever. No doubt this approach explains much.

Borkmann’s Point (2007) by Håkan Nesser.

Borkmann’s Point (2007) by Håkan Nesser.

GoodReads metadata is 336 pages rated 3.73 by 8,320 litizens.

Genre: Police procedural.

Verdict: Measured.

Chief Inspector van Veeteren is dispatched to sleepy Kaalbringen (Pop. 45,000) to advise the local plod on the investigation of a gruesome murder. Most covers of this tome show a butcher’s ax. VV is reluctant to go but needs must, while the local plod, only too glad to have someone with whom to share the blame, welcomes him. Had he looked for Kaalbringen on a map, he would have failed to locate it as it is fictional. While the author is Swedish the names of characters are a mix of Flemish, French, English, Polish, and Swedish – very Euro. Having said that, it is also true there are no Asians or dark skins around. So it is only Euro. (Though by the way the currency is not the Euro but the guilder.)

The individual characters are well delineated from the ambitious female constable to her bumbling male partner, to the soon to retire local chief of police with whom VV plays chess (which is a metaphor for the plot but also a part of it), to the chief’s heir apparent who tensely strives not to put a foot wrong in front of VV and as a result barely moves.

Even as VV arrives another axed corpse is found and then a week later another, three in all: Chop, chop, and chop. The victims seem to have had nothing in common, and there are slight variations in the modus operandi, apart from the ax. The aresponsible media whips up public hysteria which drains police time and budget. It seemed pretty obvious soon enough who the culprit was….but it was a nice trip. Likewise, how could so many people have read the Melnike Report and not notice the missing page with and without page numbers?

The titular Borkmann was VV’s mentor long ago, and his point was that in an investigation there may come a time when gathering yet more information will cloud rather than clarify reality. At the eponymous point there is enough information, enough pieces of the puzzle are there and it is time to put them together. All pieces are not necessary to get the outline. A skilled investigator learns to recognise that point and then see the whole picture.

As in krimis, so it is in social science, far more information (data) is collected than is ever analysed. It is a design-fault in the way we do social science because the career incentives lie in doing something new, not in raking over old ground for meaning. In most studies the data, whatever form it takes, is examined once for immediate purposes of a publication, and then shelved. Truth to be told, despite two generations of emphasis on methodology most studies are so idiosyncratic in conception that raking them again by another researcher is not possible. I’ll cite PhD completions where the uniqueness of the work is always the money shot. Ergo Borkman’s Point rang a bell for this reader.

This is the second in a long-running series. I read it years ago but retained nothing from it except that I liked it, so when I came across it recently I re-read it. I expect to meet VV again in another book.

Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley

Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley

GoodReads meta-data is pages rated 3.72 by 1,372 litizens.

Genre: Satire.

Verdict: Mission impossible to parody reality.

A satire that parodies the Other Guy mercilessly and yet isn’t funny because it is too much like reality. How many different ways can i-m-b-e-c-i-l-e be spelled. Not many.

It is couched as a prison therapy project for The Other Guy’s seventh Chief of Staff, who writes a memoir of his turbulent, if short, career in the White House. Herb Nutterman had been happy as a catering manager, until he got the offer he couldn’t refuse.

Many names have been changed to protect the guilty. Though on GoodReads I see those who feel their pouts deserve a wider readership don’t get it. It is Dickensian. Get it? (No, well, look it up.)

Buckley’s imagination is unequal to the task of thinking of some grotesque stupidity, indecency, or crime The Other Guy did not commit. Buckley sets out to exaggerate and ends up with understatement.

I chose it because the author is a prince of the capital ‘C’ Conservative priesthood, scion of the singular William Buckley, who along with other keepers of that flame like George Will and Gary Wills have remained human and humane in the tsunami of offal that continues.

G.I. Confidential (2019) by Martin Limón

G.I. Confidential (2019) by Martin Limón

GoodReads meta-data is 198 pages, rated 4.04 by 52 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Rings true.

Another neat police procedural set in the jurisdiction of the US Eighth Army, 1970s South Korea. Ironmen George Sueño and Ernie Bascom investigate GI black marketing (selling everything from tax-payer subsidised cigarettes to washing machines bought cheap at the camp PX to Koreans for profit), drug dealing, stolen weapons, bored and dallying army wives, and such like, until one day a splash in a Hong Kong rag sends them North to talk to a frontline commander at the DMZ who keeps ordering combat alerts within sight of NKs. A quiet word off-line is what HQ wants, but where these two go thunder claps follow. ‘Quiet’ is not the word.

This is the 14th instalment in the long running series and par for the course with one addition and two subtractions. The addition is a strong-willed, razor-sharp journalist who stays one step ahead our heroes all the way, and what’s more is a woman. By turns, she bamboozles them, beguiles them, threatens them, outsmarts them, stays two steps ahead of them, manipulates them far more effectively than their superiors and then briskly takes her leave, while our heroes stand around gaping. Atta girl! The subtractions are from the Ironman quotient. In previous titles George and Ernie have enough alcohol and sex to float the U.S. Seventh Fleet on one liquid or the other, but not this time. Both are oddly dry on each front. Ernie’s zipper seems stuck for once, and George must be broke if he cannot drink dry every one of the many bars they enter.

As with every entry in the series, Límon’s knowledge, respect, and affection for Korea’s people, culture, history, and language shines through. He was a GI Lifer and spent half of that time in Korea. It shows and glows. Equally usual is the far-fetched plot, though as strange Sergeant Strange says to George and Ernie at one point, ‘In Korea most things are possible.’

Beck (1999+ )

Beck (1999+ )

TVDB meta-data is runtime 90 minutes each in 42 episodes, rated 7.4 by 4232 cinematizens.

Genre: Police procedural.

Verdict: Low key.

Good cop, bad cop, and many others. Martin Beck is slow and careful while his off-sider is mercurial and trigger happy. Sounds clichéd because it is, but it works in small doses in this long-running series from Sweden. How many Swedes are left after the body count in each episode? The first I watched had six deaths, and a lot of guns. More violent and gruesome than I like, but low key in that the characters to do not yell at each other, as is so common in Yankee krimis, mistaking noise and guns for drama.

There is usually a lot of out and about in Stockholm for eye candy, and a lot of use of drones. My two brief visits to Stockholm consisted mainly of hotel rooms, conference tables, meetings, and reports, leaving me with little idea of its geography of the many islands and bridges.

The plots involve biker gangs, Russian mafia, immigrant vendettas, corporate corruption, and the usual vices of screenwriters: drugs, money, and prostitution. That dearth of narrative originality is offset by the production that makes much use of expensive location shooting (from public parks, pleasure boats, old churches, bars clubs, glitzy corporations, and more) and nearly everyone in Sweden appears on camera as an extra. However, the repertoire company of leading actors from Sveriges TV is so small I recognised a good many of them from other roles. Still, the acting is superb, especially from the inner circle of coppers. A flicker in eye, a purse of the lip, a twitch of the shoulder tells much in these intense productions. No Yankee yelling is needed, nor any of the sanctimonious speeches common in Brit TV. Instead Beck sighs, and moves on.

Beck and Mikael Persbrandt as Gunvald Larsson

There is some light relief from Beck’s intrusive, genial, and persistent neighbour, Grannen who gives Beck the benefit of his advice on alcohol, women, sports, dining, travel, and more when they meet in the elevator, hallway, lobby, or adjacent balconies of the apartment building. As part of a mandatory staff development exercise, Beck was once required to write down the names of three people who mean a lot to him. The first two were easy: his daughter, and grandson, but it took him all day to realise the third was Grannen – the look on Beck’s face when he wrote that down is a treasured memory. Grannen is a Beck-opposite: extravagant, thoughtless, carefree, flamboyant, intrusive, daring….

Beck is played so low key at times he seems to be catatonic, whereas the hyperactive Gunvald is always ready, willing, and able to kick in a door, even if it leads to the toilet in police HQ. The man knows how to make an entrance. Beck, on the other hand, seems to suffer from low blood pressure and move ever so slowly. Indeed he has brandished a weapon only once in the ten episodes I have seen to date. He didn’t shoot…because Gunvald did it first — no surprise there.

Beck’s talents lie in managing the team of detectives and in interrogation where he is a hard man to fool. Don’t play poker with this man. He reads the tells very quickly. (If you don’t know what a ‘tell’ is, then don’t play poker with anyone.)

The stories are interesting but the resolution is often magic, making it more trip than arrival. However, they are strong on the motivations of characters and what a mystery that makes us to each other.

Some of the earlier episodes come from one of the ten-novel sequence of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965-1975) whence Beck originated (though many other characters from the novels are omitted, notably Lennart Kollberg). But many of the episodes are not derived from that source, just as well, because I found the last five or six Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels suffocatingly preachy with ideology supplanting humanity as the soapbox came out and human interest waned. But speaking of soap, I have to say that the episodes after Gunvald was written out have tended toward soap operas with the backstories taking over in continuing and endless, pointless melodramas: Will Emma leave Oscar? Will quiet Jenny get a new hair style? Will work-alcoholic Ayda take a day off? Will loquacious Claes ever shut up? Stay tuned for these and other equally trivial problems.

Equally, in the latter episodes the boy toys get bigger and more prominent. Every five minutes Beck calls out the SWAT team to knock down doors, blow up rooms, and swarm over a place, usually too late to find anything. But the SWAT members put on a choreographed show.

Other films have been made from the novels, including an earlier Sveriges production Beck (1993) in nine episodes with a different cast, and also the feature films The Laughing Policeman (1973), The Man on the Roof (1976), The Man Who Went up in Smoke (1980), and Roseanna (1967). This last film was based was the first novel of the series and is a personal favourite out of the ten books. The film version of The Laughing Policeman is set in San Francisco with Walter Matthau as the Beck substitute and loses everything in the transition, while The Man Who Went up in Smoke is an English production with a woefully miscast Derek Jacobi as Beck.

Aloys (2016)

Aloys (2016)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1,853 cinematizens.

Genre: PI.

Verdict: Enticing.

Set in contemporary Switzerland with nary a cowbell in sight, the depressed, dreary, downcast, and dull Aloys goes about his business of spying on people. Jealous wives hire him to videotape their husbands’ suspicious activities. Worried parents put him onto adolescents who may be using drugs. Insurance companies wanted evidence of deceits about disabilities. Deans want dirt to lighten the payroll. (Well, they do.) The work sounds more interesting than it is.

Aloys is robotic, though Robby had more personality than does he. His only friend, his father, just died, and he is now even more lonely, but, no, he does not vicariously live on his subjects. Indeed, he is strictly professional in his all his dealings. He is all but silent as he mopes around the tower residences where many of his subjects live, and where he himself lives when he is not riding buses through the Alpine mists.

He does catalogue and review his vast collection of surveillance tapes, and that seems to be his only pastime when not out filming more. He doesn’t enjoy it or do it for pleasure, but he does it obsessively, because there is nothing else to do. This is not a man looking for human contact, quite the reverse. In an elevator car at his residential tower Aloys pretends not to be there, or shrinks in on himself, when someone else enters.

This ordered, monotone world is interrupted with a suicide attempt by one of his neighbours, and then begins a game of telephone tag with a woman who is neither client nor subject.

It doesn’t sound like much but it works.

The actors are so ordinary, the set is so drab, the weather is so miserable that almost anything would be a relief. Yet in a way it is uplifting and positive by the end. I came across it by chance on SBS On-Demand when I was looking for, but not finding, Real Humans Season 2. Films from Switzerland are scarce and I had just read a solid krimi set there so I was primed, and I liked the enigmatic summary, so I took a look.

I found the four commercial breaks annoying, and they put me off further viewing on SBS On-Demand for a while.

Rafael Bernal, The Mongolian Conspiracy (1969).

GoodReads meta-data is 192 pages rated 4.03 by 2,182 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Nada.

Forget that title, down Mexico way our protagonist is an equal opportunity murderer without discrimination as to race, nation, gender, creed, orientation, height, age, colour, creed, or interest. It is very noir because every character says f**k in every sentence. Mongolia is as irrelevant as just about everything else in these pages.

Protagonist is told to be discreet and that his quarry is not Chinese. He then goes to Chinatown and asks the Chinese he finds there direct questions about Chinese. This is his idea of discretion. He did not graduate at the top of the class in Thug School. It gets worse, far worse. I flipped the pages — seemed like more than 192 — in the hope of a taste of Mexico City, but there is very little after some street names.

A long and didactic introduction by an enthusiast put me off lunch. Those who claim to know say this is the author’s masterpiece. Amen to that.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl

Good Reads meta-data is 514 pages rated 3.70 by 5,310 litizens.

Genre: Chick Lit.

Verdict: Fizzle.

Cutting from the chase, verbal pyrotechnics do not a story make. While every one of the 514 pages of this book crackle with wit and energy it reminded me of the wheels of car stuck in snow, spinning, spinning, spinning without movement; all the while digging itself in deeper. It must have been exhausting to write; it certainly is exhausting to read. By the Kindle meter I made it to 40% before resigning in, well, resignation. Ergo to qualify my second sentence above, the 205 pages I read crackle (and then fizzle).

If I had to find another metaphor for reading as far as that, I would say it is like reading only the footnotes to a book on a subject I neither knew nor cared anything about. And on they go for more than 500 pages in their ranks. Neither rhyme nor reason do they make to the reader but each one is perfectly formed.

That inspires me to a third metaphor. The teacher in a college creative writing class takes all thirty student essays and staples them together into a book. The parts, let us assume, are excellent, but the total goes nowhere.

It is impressive that someone could pour this much intelligence into blank pages and yet depressing that it leaves so little impression. Better for many of the pages to have remained blank. I found skipping pages made no difference to my interest or knowledge of the narration. That said, it is the sort of book that literary award panels seem to like: it is contemptuous of readers, flashy without substance, striving relentlessly to be different, and …. You get the idea by now or you won’t get it at all, in which case go directly to GoodReads and do not pass Go.

In similar territory Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (2004) was memorable, and frightening, but this similar book is neither.