GoodReads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 3.54 by 129 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: flying start, shuddering halt.
MetroPlex Studios begins pre-production work on a film version of Sherlock Holmes’s story The Speckled Band. So far so normal. What is less than normal is that for reasons unknown the studio has hired a screenwriter for the project who loathes the Sherlock Homes stories and is loathed by the Irregulars. He is one Stephen Worth, a vulgar representative of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction of the gentlemanly Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. As the fiction gods would have it Worth has an impregnable contract for the job and a clause that prevents the Studio from making the film without his script.
As the protests roll in from the keepers of the Holmes faith, the head of the Studio has a bright idea. He will employ a selection of these Irregulars as technical consultants. Their intrusion might cause Worth to quit, and if not, their intrusion might steer the project to a lee shore. It’s win either way. What can possibly go wrong?
We all know that answer to that closing rhetorical question, now don’t we. ‘Everything,’ in a word.
The five Irregulars whom he brings to California, houses, and hosts squabble among themselves over minutiae of the sacred canon in their competition for acclaim as the one true prophet of Holmes. Worth, the screenwriter nemesis, becomes even more obnoxious — some had thought that was not possible, but they were proven wrong — and determined to see the task through and tells everyone that, right to the moment he stops talking, because, Jim, he is d-e-a-d.
As the wind carries the news of the dissension and then the demise, Studio creditors begin to circle. All of this activity rouses journalists to smell the blood, and they splash headlines which prove that there is such a thing as bad publicity.
A roller coaster ride ensues, as the loyal Maureen tries to manage the situation while the police investigate, as the Irregulars pontificate.
Anthony Boucher
It starts fast and then bogs down into an all-talky drawing room investigation that takes most of the air our of the proceedings.
GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
In setting up PLEX at home to use with the DVD collection, I started with the eight Mr Moto films to renew acquaintance with an old friend who can keep me company as I do the NYT crossword puzzles in the evenings, after Eggheads and Antiques Road Show (UK). Moto was sired by J. P. Marquand of Massachusetts. More on PLEX below.
Marquand went on to chronicle Boston’s Beacon Hill snobs in such satirical novels as The Late George Apley (1938), a best seller in its day and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Those that followed include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and Point of No Return (1949). While searching for themes and voices in haute literature which was his abiding ambition, Marquand wrote spy novels to make a living. The first was Mr Moto Takes a Hand (1935) with five more to come. The ever so prim entry in Wikipedia brackets the Moto novels apart from Marquand’s ‘Literary novels’ in the way the semi-literate do. The Moto novels are completely omitted in the section on Marquand’s life and work but relegated to a seperate ghetto, lest the children be upset.
Taken as a whole there are two interesting things about the Moto novels. The first is that they were written by society author with no interest or knowledge of the worlds therein portrayed. Second, the central character is a secret agent who is cold, calculating, and deadly — licensed to kill long before the NRA came along and granted every drooler that right — in the service of the expanding Japanese Empire. Marquand no doubt wanted his spy to be different in a crowded market of fictional spies, and he succeeded.
The popularity of Charlie Chan movies inspired the transfer of Moto from page to film in 1937, and a transformation from a reptilian assassin into a genial cicerone for naive American innocents abroad in the big wide world. Into those new shoes stepped Peter Lorre, who was desperate for work. He became the Good Jap(anese) in these films directed by Norman Foster whose pace seldom slackened, though for no sane reason Foster was replaced on the last two films. Hungarian László Löwenstein became a yellow face, as it was called at the time, Japanese. And, though Lorre was a sickly weakling, by this transformation he became a cat burglar, judo expert, marksman, and endurance athlete. His perennial bad health and heavy smoking were no matter on film.
There is a third oddity with Moto that fades as the series continued. He murders villains. He does not arrest or sequester them, he just kills them. No European, still less a white-hatted Western, hero of the day would do that, taking the law into his own hands. The censor would not permit it, but they did permit it for an oriental. So in some of the early films he does what he did frequently in the book, saves time by murdering the villains. Only later does he go soft and start arresting them.
To balance that dark side, he is transmogrified into an American-educated, genial friend and protector of Americans abroad, while working for the International Police. He also got a first name: Kentaro. In the books, one of which I have read, he had only in initials, to wit, I. M. Moto. Say it out loud to get the point. It worked. The films were popular, but Japan was not and they came to an end. There is an uninformative entry on Moto in Wikipedia.
The films and their settings are these:
Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937) – Shanghai
Thank you, Mr Moto (1937) – Gobi Desert and Peking
Mr Moto’s Gamble (1938) – San Francisco
Mr Moto Takes a Chance (1938) – Siam jungle
Mr Moto’s Last Warning (1939) – Port Said, Egypt
Mr Moto in Danger Island (1939) – Puerto Rico
Mr Moto Takes a Vacation (1939) – San Francisco in archeological museum
Moto, Chan, Holmes were all broadcast after school and before dinner or practice. That is when and where I first became acquainted with them. Then some years later a series of Great Detectives aired on the CBC after the late news, and I watched most of them again.
The PLEX media player promises a custom-made private service akin to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. After loading the movies on a computer acting as a server, it translates and transmits them via the home wi-fi network to the television. In our case the computer is upstairs with the telly downstairs. Selecting a film is done with the Apple TV remoter. Sounds easy.
Kate, Queen of the Buttons to Push, had the devil of time setting it up, stopping and restarting at least once when nearly defeated by the comPLEXity of PLEX. Once that mission was accomplished, my part has been to load the database with movies and I, too, have found that perPLEXing. There is a mountain of information on the web, including You Tube, which I find of no use. It is like looking for a unicorn in a constellation to find answers to my simple questions among the geekerati. Most of the sites are in Geekese, while those that are not as technical are dedicated to showing how to change the background colours, but none about how to get it work in the first place.
Leaving those grumbles aside, when it works, it is a welcome luxury. No longer is there a hunt to find a DVD (shelved upstairs where there is some order, in the garage where there is none, or is it in the office), cleaning it, inserting it in the DVD player which can be shy at times, cleaning it again and reinserting it, (finding it is damaged [by canine teeth marks!] and will not play), finding the dedicated DVD remoter (with its usual dead batteries), and then watching the DVD skip over damaged sections though it has never been played before.
For further reading see ‘Plex (software)’ on Wikipedia.
Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.
GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.
Genre: biography, hagiography.
Verdict: Ineffable.
Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result. Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer. There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.
In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.
The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told. While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.
Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury. Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee. Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight. I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early. Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee. It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune. He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said. That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.
Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors. Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat. That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978).
Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s. By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.
The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources. There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography. More yields less in this case.
Douglas Southall Freeman
Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke. He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways. As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.
At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it. Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.
His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation. The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population. To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers. These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support. Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams.
I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential. The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised. Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.
There are two minor incidents that struck this reader. The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie. For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community. When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North. What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?
Indeed, what could?
The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy. There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses. No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets. No shot or shell for the artillery. Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker. But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.
So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame. Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated. Rien ne change jamais.
In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew. Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers.
I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod. This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog. In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it.
Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence. He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat. At most he might say, ‘Thank you.’ He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words.
Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all. In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence. After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’ Mosby nodded and walked on. Nothing more can or need be said. This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.
Guernsey Literary Society and Potato Peel Society (2018) by Mary Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
GoodReads metadata is 291 pages, rated 4.16 by 51,596 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: More, please.
It is set out in letters among a number of correspondents and that makes it an epistolary novel. It just starts and the reader slowly begins to identify the characters as the correspondence continues and broadens to include ever more letter-writers. While that approach makes demands on the reader’s concentration to sort out who is whom, it is preferable to the didactic laborious backstories that choke the opening of too many novels or form a giant roadblock in chapter two.
In the exchange of letters some of the history of Guernsey Island is brought out. Only twelve kilometres from the Cotentin (Cherborug) Peninsula it has been English since William Conqueror said it was, accordingly it has many distinctive features that are curious though not relevant to this novel. (Distracting historical aside: in the dark days of May 1940 the French Acting Minister of War proposed a general retreat to the Cotentin Peninsula which could then be blocked off from German advance and supplied from the British Channel Islands. That was Charles de Gaulle.)
In this set up we have an author looking for the subject of her next book in 1948 who comes across a reference to a Literary Society active in Guernsey during the German Occupation of this island, which began with a bang in June 1940. She researches both the Island and Occupation in the British Library and through secondhand contacts she begins writing letters to Islanders asking them about the Society. All the while she maintains an extensive correspondence with friends, publishers, suitors, relatives, and others in a mélange of sparking bon mots. The number of her Guernsey epistlers increases as Islanders learn of her interest.
That all may sound awkward, force, or clumsy, but it works in these pages. Both parts of the title have quite simple explanations for the attentive reader.
In the early going the German Occupation of the Channel Islands had propaganda value for Berlin and ‘Softy, softly’ was the approach. German newsreel cameras recorded the gentle hand of Nazi rule on these Brits in the hope that this propaganda might sap the English will to resist, but as the war became more difficult that changed. The first and major change was food.
Guernsey was to be self-sufficient in all things, a no-cost operation to the larger German war machine. The occupying German force was to be fed from the Island’s larder. After they finished, then the Islanders had the remainder. That arrangement quickly came to pinch and it got worse with time. Once the hens and sows are gone…. Well they are gone and so are their progeny.
The Nazis fortified Guernsey using imported slave labour — many were Polish and Russian POWS who were worked to death as the German McKinsey managers met their KPIs (Killing Performance Indicators). At its peak the figure of 16,000 is given for the labour force on Guernsey alone. The callous murder of these slaves showed the Islanders the colours of the Nazis. The steel and concrete gun emplacements, underground bunkers, tunnels, a hospital, communication lines, beach obstacles, tramlines, and mines laid (in sea and on the beaches) were out of all proportion to either its strategic importance or any tactical defence. There were more gun emplacements than guns, and more guns than gunners, and more gunners than ammunition. More watch towers than signalmen, and so on.
As the war went on the Nazi hand grew heavier and heavier on the Islanders themselves. Minor infractions were punished severely and the central character, Elizabeth, was deported and murdered at the Ravensbrück lager. There is much darkness in these pages but the mix with the light is well judged.
From June 1940 to May 1945 the Island was almost completely sealed off from the wider world apart from a few Red Cross letters that reported the deaths of Islanders in the British Armed Forces. These missives the Germans let through while others were destroyed. Several thousand children had been evacuated shortly before the German assault: bombing, parachutes, and then troop ships. None of the letters these children sent were delivered. No outgoing mail at all was permitted.
The blackmarket and collaboration are treated without the self-righteousness hindsight that is usually substituted for thought and humanity by the trolls.
Guernsey’s most famous resident, Victor Hugo, is mentioned not even once. Though a visitor for a few days, one Oscar Wilde, is. Though I found that reference unsatisfactory. Much is made of it, and then it is dropped and disappears from the story. Perhaps it got lost in the transition from one author to the other, which is explained in the afterword.
The authors
Yes, I know there is a movie (it recently screened at the Newtown Dendy) based on, derived from, related to, or inspired by the novel, and I wish the authors well with the royalties but having seen the hash scriptwriters make of novels I have no wish to see it. A scriptwriter, I was once told, never reads the novel for fear of going native but has an intern to do that, who then compiles a summary calculated to be what the scriptwriter wants to keep the job, and the result is made by and for prepubescent boys with arrested development. Academy Awards follow.
There is a literature on the Occupation for those who wish to pursue the details, and the variations for the other Channel Islands, but this novel is rooted in the lives of members of the Society and their fellows. There is a considerable bibliography on the British Library web site.
There are also a number of television documentaries including:
Enemy at the Door (1978-1980) – twenty-six part television series. I have a vague recollection of having seen some of these episodes but nothing remains in the memory palace. Check You Tube.
The Channel Islands at War (1981) – a three-part film documentary narrated by John Nettles when he was starring in Bergerac (1981+) set on Jersey. Those two experiences led him to write Jewels and Jackboots: Hitler’s British Isles, the German Occupation of the Channel Islands 1940-1945 (2012).
Island at War (2004) – six part series on the telly.
There is a considerable bibliography on the British Library web site.
GoodReads meta-data is 273 pages, rated 4.19 by 901 litizens.
Genre: nonfiction, popular science
Verdict: Hive mind.
In this beguiling, informative, and elegant study, the author tells us much about the bees and a little about himself and other bee-ologists.
All that buzzing, flitting, and waggling that bees do is purposive behaviour and the more closely it is studied the more the purpose(s) are revealed. While hearing someone speak Cantonese sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated when one learns to hear, speak, and write it, the meanings encoded within it gradually appear. So it is with language of bees in their activities.
While the main focus of the book is on site selection for a new nest when a hive swarms (i.e., divides), there is much about how the hive comes to that juncture. An important part of that story is the division of labour among bees. Among the 10,000 bees in a typical hive in upstate New York where most of the research underlying this study was done, a certain percentage are foragers who leave the hive’s nest each morning with the first light on dry days to harvest from sources of food to carry back to the nest.
At certain times some of the emeritus foragers become scouts for a new nesting site. The number is not a great. maybe 50-100 in a hive of 10,000. This is highly specialised role and only a few undertake it. When each single bee finds a potential spot she examines it and then reports back to the hive, which absorbs the input from all of the several scouts. One spot may be scouted by many bees, but another will be scouted only by a few. Yet the ultimate selection may be that latter which only a few scouts initially reported. But as it gains favour, more scouts will visit it and report back.
The bees’ decision is not clouded by history, ego, institutions, or ideology. Site selection shows no preference for doing what they did last time or the time before. Swarms do not try to return to areas used previously. History is not a determinate. Nor does ego enter into it. Even scouts who continually brought back data about a reasonable site, go along with the swarm when it opts for an alternative. Nor are there institutional constraints like a fixed calendar or an electoral college. Still less is there an ideology (or religion) that takes precedence.
It is all so unlike human decision-making where history is always a factor: we keep repeating what we already did (even when it no longer works). Ego which is all for many of us: my way or the highway (for you or me). The fixed calendar prevails in the timing of elections. And ideology: god told me this is THE tree. Compared to much human decision-making, the bees are rational.
There are rare occasions when a hive mind cannot decide. In such instance the hives may (1) stay where it is too long and suffer the fatal consequences or (2) the swarm leaving the hive may itself divide, dawdle, and dither and likewise suffer the consequences delivered by the changing seasons. In these two cases all members of the swarm perish.
To explain the bees’ hive mind the author makes analogies to human decision-making, particularly the fabled New England town meetings, but I fear he has seen few of those or he would have seen history, ego, and ideology driving out assessment, fact, and science. Perhaps he was influenced at a remove by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), which rather idealised these meetings. (Dahl changed his mind later in How Democratic is the American Constitution? [2001].)
The methods this author uses to study bee decision-making are ingenious, labor intensive, amusing, and fruitful, yielding a plethora of data as well as stings! The location of a new nest is a life-or-death decision for the members of a swarm and it may take several days for it to be determined. And sometimes the site is not adequate and the swarm dies. This failure is not due to mistaken decision-making so much as the intensity of the elements. The swarm may have chosen the best available site, but not even that site could not withstand the depth of that particular winter. Sad to say, a surprising high percentage of swarms dividing off from a hive, die as hostages to climate and weather. Perhaps a third of them meet this fate. The mortality rate among bees is surprisingly high to this neophyte.
I did find much of the exposition too technical for this layman.
N.B. Many bees were killed in the course of this study. Many.
All these buzzing bees remind me of Dutchman Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]). In it Mandeville implies that private vices lead to social benefits, and that conversely private virtues may lead to social collapse. That is, society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals bound by convention and regulated by law who are more interested in themselves than anyone else. Social cohesion results, paradoxically, from competition and conflict. All benefit from a rules-of-the-game cooperation which constrains the competition and conflict. Hobbes’s war of all against all is brought constrained by baselines with a rulebook and some referees.
If, however, competition and conflict are replaced by a rule of singular virtue, the result will be ruin. The effort to regulate every aspect of life according to (someone’s idea of) virtue will strangle productivity, cooperation, and more. Think of a society ordered by Pat Robertson! Or Rush Cancer. Thomas More. George Pell. Fred Nile. Alan Jones. Bernie Sanders. A monocular society weakens itself.
While the metaphor of the bees may bring to mind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that is more focused on economic production and distribution, while Mandeville’s remit is more social than economic.
Inspired by this book I read a sample of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (2019) but found it so convoluted and cryptic it made no sense to me, probably destined for a Booker Prize. However, at the time it rated a respectable 3.25 from 8 litizens on GoodReads.
I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce. The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s. This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name. He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.
The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive. This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans. The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure. French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.
The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended. A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps. None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan. That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.
Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem. Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance. Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated.
In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves. All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile. Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region.
The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title. Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story. We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.
Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!
One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority. The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions. Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily. And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive. Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.
In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed. The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable. In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive. Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice. However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.
Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else. Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble. His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows. There is an iron law in that.
Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists. The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files. Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion. Selim provides the muscle when that is needed.
Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate. Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen. He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.
Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases. Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned.
Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right. No burka and veil for her. She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways. She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.
Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo. If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made. Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length. And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.
No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life. In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.
A word of warning for those who start at the beginning. Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone. The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel. It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first. Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.
1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988.
2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989.
3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990.
4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991.
5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992.
6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.
7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993.
GoodReads meta-data, 576 pages, rated 4.45 by 40 litizens
Gerne: Biography
Verdict: Visionary
Lachlan Macquarie (1762 – 1824) was the longest serving early Governor of the New South Wales Colony (1810-1821), and without a doubt the one who did the most to shape Sydney and beyond. Today the Hospital, Mint, Barracks, and Parliament House still standing proud on Macquarie Street are his testament. He was a visionary and a reformer who gave convicts a second, and at times, a third chance at redemption. He battled the Colonial Office to develop New South Wales, while dealing with the many local conflicts. To anticipate what follows, the Colonial Office did not want New South Wales to prosper, while the locals were more interested in undermining each other than laying the groundwork for the future.
How did he come to these qualities and why was he chosen for New South Wales? Those were the questions that prompted me to read this biography. Below are the inferences I drew from it. They are not questions pursued explicitly by the author who concentrates on the day-by-day record.
Macquarie grew up poor but proud and made a second home in the British Army. Long before he arrived in Sydney Town he was well travelled and much experienced. He had served in the Army in North America during the last stages of the American Revolutionary War, the West Indies, India, and Egypt and between these postings had traveled through Persia, Russia, and South Africa.
He recurrent dream was to prosper in the Army and retire to the life of a Scots laird back home. At times to secure that prosperity he cut corners with some very creative accounting. In the fullness of time this sin came to light and he managed to live it down, though it blotted his chances for promotion for years.
He often idled away the hours sketching how he, as a highland laird, would lay out a property of crofters in Scotland for the benefit of both master and men. These thoughts and jottings were the seeds that later fell to earth in Sydney. When they did, they were nurtured by the great cities he had seen on his travels, Bombay, St Petersburg, Alexandria, and London.
That the Army, albeit reluctantly, gave him a second chance seared into him and he tried thereafter to live up to it. That second chance was largely due to the circumstances for it was during the Napoleonic Wars when experienced officers were at a premium. If he had been dismissed, then someone else would have to be found to take his place and responsibilities.
In the grounds of Hyde Park.
He was a correspondent who wrote many letters, often keeping copies of his own, and he retained, as one did in those days, the letters he received. In the stereotypical manner of a thrifty Scot he also kept careful records of his incomes and expenses. This penchant for keeping notes and records made him an unofficial accountant many times where he weakened to the temptation to fiddle the books. This penchant also left behind an extensive archive mined in these pages.
During more than a decade in India where he saw combat and did a great deal of organising and marching, he married an Anglo-Indian woman, Jane Jarvis, who subsequently died young there. He was also in the last battle at Alexandria in Egypt to expel the French. At the time, democracy was identified with the excesses of the French Revolution and, ironically, Napoleon, and so Macquarie reviled it.
New South Wales was roiling with the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh when Macquarie was dispatched to put oil on the waters. He had spent years managing-up, that is, stroking his superiors in the hope of promotion, and had become something of the patient and persistent diplomat. He needed those qualities when he got to Australia.
In Sydney he found there a three (or more)-sided conflict among the free settlers (sometimes called squatters), the irascible Governor Bligh and his supporters (mostly his own family and appointees) and the convicts (who had revolted earlier at Castle Hill, and among whom there were further divisions between criminal and political). The rebellious free settlers wanted to use the convicts as flexible slave labour in a gig economy avant le mot. In the absence of McKinsey managers, the egregious Reverend Samuel Marsden provided the bellicose but shallow justification for that. Bligh did not care about the convicts but he did care about his authority to tax, especially rum to reduce the rampant alcoholism he found there. Psst, he also got a cut of the taxes he collected.
The accounts of this conflict read like today’s news when members of the elite spent most of their time securing their prerogatives from each other, sometimes through litigation which brings it out into the open, rather than doing their jobs. One reviewer recently noted of a Commonwealth regulatory agency that it was unlikely much work got done considering the volume of suits and countersuits among its directors over the intemperate remarks arising from arguments over car spaces, leave allowances, salary increases, name plates, and so on. Sounds like a university department where within every tea cup there is a storm.
Macquarie proved tenacious and held on against the Marsden-MacArthur gang for a decade but in the end, they were many and he was one, and they wore him down. Having slowly risen in the ranks to Major General, he resigned, and to please the Colonial Office his successor Thomas Brisbane undid much of Macquarie’s efforts at emancipating convicts. Brisbane wanted the job because he wanted to study the southern sky and built the Observatory on the hill today near the Harbour Bridge where it still stands.
The Colonial Office wanted transportation to Australia to be a fearsome prospect that would deter criminal from offences. Stories of Macquarie’s efforts to build a comfortable life and redeem convicts, so many of whom were petty thieves with a single offence committed in dire straits, were expensive and also counter-productive to the Colonial Office. Nor should we forget the many Irish political prisoners who got swept up in a round-up to meet the KPIs of the day.
Macquarie tried to make peace with the aboriginal people but not very hard or consistently, and yielded all too quickly to the demand of free settlers for a military response. It almost seems to this reader that he used the occasion to show the settlers he was indeed a soldier and the Appin Massacre of natives followed. Neither women nor children were spared to the cheers of the Pox News of the day. Relations between the new comers and natives never recovered thereafter when gun powder become the arbiter of the civilising Christians, though it pleased Marsden and his cronies.
Though the author is coy about it, Macquarie contracted syphilis in the usual way while in India and it blighted much of his subsequent life. His second wife, Elizabeth, for whom Lady Macquarie’s Chair was carved in the Botanic Gardens where it remains today, had at least six miscarriages that might have been the consequence of that disease and its treatment with mercury.
A few years ago we saw an exhibition at the State Library about Macquarie and at the time I wondered what his inspirations and sources had been. Hence, I was primed for this biography when the tide brought it to my notice.
Macquarie was not a reader, it seems, not even the Bible. There is nary a mention of a book in this study of the man. Note also that he spelled his name in a variety of ways (as have I).
However it was spelled, he liked seeing his name on things, hence the many places and features in Eastern Australia and Tasmania bearing his name. He travelled around the realm far more than any of the predecessors and most of his successors, bestowing his name as he did so. It would please him, I am sure, to note that a university now bears his name.
The lighthouse on South Head was another of his buildings.
In the middle 1970s I boned up on Australian history reading Stalinist Manning Clark’s turgid six-volume A History of Australia (1962+) which recounts much of Macquarie’s story. Clark identified with Marsden, whom I found as objectionable as recent churchmen who want to tell others how to live. Not knowing when to quit, I also read Herbert Evatt’s rehabilitation of Bligh, The Rum Rebellion (1943). It was another instance where the author seemed to identify with the subject. Neither of these titles is recommended.
Back to the book at hand, there are nits to pick. First is the editorial decision to parallel much of Macquarie’s early biography with developments in New South Wales. No doubt this is one way to show the context that Macquarie found when he arrived in 1810, but this reader found it distracting and padded before 1810 was reached. Moreover, much that is included in this parallel, is never mentioned again and so is hardly background. After all Macquarie himself did not have the benefit of all this background and hit it head on.
Second, much of the expression is clichéd. There are references to ‘higher ups,’ ‘sent off in scores,’ ‘bigwig,’ ‘put up his hand for,’ ‘splash his cash,’ ‘top brass,’ ‘heart of gold,’ ‘mojo,’ ‘gunned down,’ ‘two sidekicks,’ ‘the cut of his jib,’ ‘on the nose,’ ‘never going to fly,’ ‘leading lights,’ and so on and on. Lazy and vague are these uses. No doubt someone thought they were lively and would attract readers like Alan Jones’s listeners. As if!
There are also plenty of anachronisms, but my favourite is a reference to a ‘slide rule.’ Its original conception dates to 1622 when tables of logarithms were combined in handbooks. Its modern form emerged in latter Nineteenth Century in France for military engineering and artillery plotting. It is just possible, though unlikely, someone in Macquarie’s Sydney had a nascent equivalent, but unlikely, and in any event it just clangs as a metaphor. Might as well refer to jet flight. By the way, I still have the slide rule that got me through the required science courses in high school and Physics in college, and which I used a lot in graduate school in the study of voting and elections. It was a great day when I learned to use it. Trivial fact, the engineer cum novelist Neville Shute called his autobiography Slide Rule (1954); he wrote two landmarks in Australia literature: A Town like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).
Grantlee Kieza
While picking away I also note the propensity of the author to read Macquarie’s mind as in: ‘he glanced down to admire his patent-leather dress boots,’ he was ‘reminded of the wild country he had been born into,’ and more.
Finally, a declaration of interest. We live in a well-defined area of Newtown that was once called O’Connell Town, the first street of which was O’Connell Street named by Sir Maurice O’Connell who was Macquarie’s 2-i-C and then married Bligh’s daughter Elizabeth. We walk around park a block away in what was once called the Bligh Estate, which Elizabeth had – after years of litigation with crown authorities and competing relatives – inherited from her father.
IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.5 by 845 cinematizens
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Chandler Lite.
Montana’s own Philip Marlowe encountered a duplicitous son, an unscrupulous mother, a deranged secretary, a sty-eyed Peter Lorre wanna-be, incompetent but not venal cops, a crooked coin dealer, the mandatory blackmailer, and assorted thugs led by Michael Anthony, all in a day’s work. He got beaten up a couple of times without taking any aspirin. He outsmarted Plod and got the girl.
It has superb cinematography by Lloyd Ahern who makes the viewer feel that Santa Ana Red Wind from the Mojave desert, and prepares each scene with a shot worthy of the best noir film. This was his first credit and it is superb. It was followed by the Miracle on 34th Street. He spend most of the 1960s and 1970s in television. Leaden direction was by John Brahm (a Nazi refugee who surely moved faster in real life than in this still life).
The screen play derived from Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942) which had been the basis of the Mike Shayne film Time to Kill (1942), which film has more wit and energy than the title under consideration, but lacks the cinematographic artistry of Ahern.
By the way, the coin really was minted in New York in 1787 and one sold in 2011 for $US 7.4 million Iron Men!
all, look at who just stepped off the magazine page.
This was George Montgomery’s first major lead, and a casting mistake This clean-cut, well-dressed and pressed, callow, neatly combed. and innocent country boy with a western slur is not the clipped, chipped, shopworn, exhausted, cynical, and jaded city-slicker Marlowe of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, or even the elegant Robert Montgomery, who each played the part once.* On the other hand, Nancy Guild is perfect as the edgy naif secretary, though her career only offered a mere 11 credits. Let’s hope that she quit while she was ahead.
But while acting kudos are on offer, the best has to go to Florence Bates as the murderous and thieving mother who put Ma Barker to shame. Bates had majored in mathematics at the University of Texas, and then completed a law degree and practiced for sometime in San Antonio. All this would have been unusual for the time and place for a woman. The Great Depression uprooted her and drove her into acting to make a living.
*Later incarnations of Philip Marlowe include Robert Mitchum and Powers Booth, both of whom certainly qualified as shopworn, and two another egregious mistakes: a twitchy Eliot Gould and a geriatric James Caan.
By the Canino Test I speculate that Bogey, Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum would survive, but not Gorgeous George, Robert, and certainly not Jim or Eliot. Powers Booth? A borderline maybe.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 32 Dali minutes, rated 3.3 by 1,998 suckers.
Genre: Junk.
Verdict: Ditto.
Ah, our old friend the mad scientist, Dr Professor Emeritus John Carradine, is at it again with his mute and deformed Igor. After being dismissed from The AeroSpace program for ‘going too far’ (huh? Isn’t going far the point of the space program?) and after reading Dr Frankenstein’s case notes, JC has set about creating a superhuman for space flight by piecing together a creature from corpses gathered by Deformed Igor. Warning! This is not someone to sit next to on the bus as it goes through a tunnel.
The creature Doc enlivens with a tweet is badder and madder than is even producer-director Ted V. Mikels and sets about killing scantily-clad young women to 1960s A-Go-Go music. A single Ford Mustang figures in several of the scenes. (Is this the Director’s own wheels being used as a tax write-off?)
What’s for lunch, Doc?
Those who originally funded Frankenstein’s nationally competitive grant want to claim the intellectual property to show community impact of the research and in no time at all the FBI, the ARC, the CIA, the NH&MRC, the SPCA, and — whoa! — Santana are in pursuit. The fraternity brothers were gripped by the latter’s frontal assembly.
It gets worse, but it goes on. There are so many gaps and gaffs it is impossible to summarise and it takes itself so seriously that it is as digestible as stone soup. Yet it had long-delayed progeny in Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2004), Astro-Zombies: M3 – Cloned (2010), and Astro-Zombies M4: Invaders from Cyberspace (2012). Yes these titles are listed on the IMDb. ‘But what about M2,’ asked the fraternity brothers?
JC once claimed that he had appeared in more movies than any other single actor. On some days he did his part in three films like this Z-grade effort. The IMDb credits him with 351 appearances and that is surely a type-two error. In comparison, Wendall Corey, who also graces this egregious effort, has a mere 79 credits, including Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966), discussed elsewhere on this blog. For the cognoscenti Corey co-starred with the imperishable Montgomery Clift in a remarkable film called The Search (1948).
By the way, the script is credited to Princeton graduate and one-time US Navy salt Trapper John. He hung up his typewriter after this disaster and dedicated himself to living it down. More Purgatorio for you, Trapper.
