IMDb meta-data is 19 episodes of 25 minutes to date, rated 7.5 by 101,362 Kiwis.
Genre: Horror
Verdict: 3D (Dry, Droll, and Deadpan)
Tip One: Watch in sequences. You’ll see why. Tip Two: The delivery is often fast, there are asides, and sotto voce comments that are best appreciated by turning on subtitles. We have seen all the episodes and we are watching them again but to be specific these comments concern Season 2, Episode 6 Mobots.
Sergeant Ruawai Maaka briefs the duty watch at Wellington Central Police for the morning. Once again he urges officers not to use of pepper spray on lunch! Too late for those who tried it for breakfast but had the nozzle turned the wrong way around. Captain Frank Furillo never had this problem.
After the others have their assignments, e.g., assisting the spray victims to the medic, changing the channel on the television, making tea, Sarge turns to the crack Hardly Normal Squad of Officers Karen O’Leary and Mike Minogue. These secret squirrels retire to the concealed room behind the bookcase in the back hall. What’s going down? All over the Mt Victoria area old mobile phones and other discarded electronics have disappeared from kitchen drawers, sheds, garages, under stairs, attics, coat pockets, and closets. First these items disappeared into these recesses and then they disappeared from them. Wow!
Thereafter Sarge Maaka offers the running commentary of a police reality television show as O’Leary and Minogue scope the doings, starting with O’Leary’s mum who lives in the area. Yes, this is Mrs O’Leary without a cow. The cow turns up in another episode.
There is a delightful scene with a snake, sort of, and a taser that makes Davis Quinton of Dog River look responsible.
To assist the field officers Sarge has called in a tech head, who begins by undoing everything his predecessors did, reinstalling all the software, and then rebooting in the middle of the operation for beta testing. Doing all this gives Tech time to pick his nose.
Loved the interrogation with the transformer. Updates are indeed dangerous. Try this IOS, Punk! After seeing this object lesson, for the moment I am holding off Catalina.
So far we have had no references to the Bee Hive in Wellington, though surely that is a tempting target.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.95 by 150 citizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Ditto
The Set-up: Post war life in a picturesque small village in Little England is the locale. There is much description of the settlement, the weather, the railway embankment, the culverts, along with the habits and peculiarities of the residents. Two long established families have been forced in the last generation to sell their properties. One house was bought by a wealthy titled lady, while the other by a parvenu businessman.
Among the cast are two spinsters who keep, breed, and sell dogs in a disheveled house that belongs to the landlord farmer, whose own finances are precarious. He is also the landlord for some others.
There is a young war-bride widow who never thinks of the past, along with her younger sister and the two of them live with their mother in another property rented from the farmer now that they have had to give up their erstwhile manor to the titled lady buyer.
Nearby is an irascible major who treats his wife like a slow-witted subaltern, and she loves it, with a nephew in residence who mopes around like an impoverished member of the Lost Generation of 1919.
Her ladyship of the newly-bought manner has a ne’er-do-well son in tow. He had been in the army but that is barely mentioned. [Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.]
These characters amble about, occasionally ricochet off each other and carom here and there for two hundred pages before the two sisters get paired off with the parvenu and the farmer, while the nephew and moper continue to ne’er-do-well and to mope.
Elizabeth Fair
This is the first of half a dozen novels set in Bramton Wick, and I suppose the characters continue, but I will probably not find out for myself. While the book is very well written and the dissection of the various characters is gentle and insightful, there is no momentum in it.
None of them has any ambition, any desires, any blood, any purpose, any mission, any thing to motivate them for the day ahead, or the reader for the pages ahead. It is as though each waits off page to come on and act out the prescribed role and then retire to the wings. That social type has been exemplified for the time being now on to the next.
It is, however, a study in the managing social relationships and that gives it the title Chick Lit. Most of the management is done by the sisters and it is through manipulation, not communication, but it is amusing, mild, diverting, and well intentioned, if utterly pointless. I hasten to add that Chick Lit does not have to be pointless, Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend and the Overdue Life of Amy Byler, both discussed elsewhere on this blog, are certainly Chick Lit and they have momentum. Barbara Pym’s comedies of manners, several of which are discussed on this blog, also have a claim to the genre Chick Lit avant le mot, and her characters have vitality and meaning that seems to lack in the book under review. Likewise, the Jon Hassler novels that feature Miss Agatha take the label Chick Lit proudly and let me tell you Miss Agatha has purpose.
IMDb meta is 1 hour and 17 minutes, rated 5.1 by 332 cinematizens
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: Incomprehensible
‘The virgin sacrifices to the gods of a ghastly galaxy!’ The marketing tag line.
Somewhere in middle England Dr Joe uses a radio telescope half an hour a week. This access infuriates the Director who tries to KPI Joe off the ear piece. There is much gobbledegook about the radio telescope for connoisseurs. It seems a storm in a screenwriter’s teacup.
Doc has a loyal secretary who is sometimes Sandy and at other times Zena. Continuity editor please note. He also has an underling to order around.
But (what a surprise) a few hours before the plug is pulled Dr Joe gets a call: from outer space! He answers the call. Big mistake. He was warned not to do so by the Carry On accountant who just happens to be there for annoyance.
Next thing you know a Dalek on an asteroid sends a robo-ship to Earth to space-nap the lot and plonk them down in a one room set and they end up donning shower caps with USB cables on them. No Hollywood ego would have put those on, although it was amusing to imagine it.
This is the A-Team. The first and last line of Solar defence!
Once they plug in they become Eggheads! No, they become the Solar System’s first and only line of defence. Oh? Let’s review this A-Team: Doc who cannot get a research grant, underling who waits for loser Doc to tell him what to do, a secretary who doesn’t know her own name, a Carry On accountant, and the cleaning lady (who sensibly refuses to wear a shower cap). This is it. This is the best we’ve got. Only they can save us from a Republican apocalypse. We’re doomed! Doomed!
There is an unrelated aside with human sacrifice, as per the marketing tg line cited above. Ho hum. The knife man moves so slowly the fraternity brothers fell asleep during this episode. Really he will never fulfil his Killing Performance Indicators at that speed and doesn’t.
They play a PAC Man arcade game with the unnamed, unidentified, and unknown invaders — probably Europeans looking for terra nullius — and win! ‘Fire!’ is repeated eight times in this segment to give the illusion of action. [No sale!]
Journeyman Sy Fy author Murray Leinster wrote the story which was adapted into a screenplay by John Brunner. That is a good pedigree but it hardly shows in the finished product. Admittedly there is some awareness of the laws of physics in contrast to so much Sy Fy: There is a lag in signals. The angle of declination is determinate. Yet we have flames in space.
More importantly, we have a title that makes no connection to the story and some very poor acting.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 44 minutes, rated 6.5 by 3213 cinematizens.
Genre: War, Fantasy.
Verdict: Ahab, tank whisperer.
Context. In the July and August of 1943, near Kursk in South West Russia, an enormous tank battle occurred as the Nazis launched their last major Eastern offensive, putting into the maw a million men (Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Croatian, and more) with 3000+ tanks. Big, huh? But the Soviets saw that bid and raised it, offering to Ares more than two and half million men with 7000 tanks. The air fleets were likewise enormous. Events far away determined the eventual outcome when the Western Allies invaded Sicily leading the Nazis in Russia to fall back because reserves of men and material intended to sustain a counter-attack in Russia were diverted to Italy.
Set-up. After one tank engagement in the weeks this battle dragged on, a badly burned Ahab is pulled from a T-34 and miraculously recovers from his near fatal wounds in ten minutes. This is Comrade Found who becomes the tank whisperer. He communes with the steel hulls of burned-out hulks and confirms that his tank was destroyed by the titular White Tiger tank.
This is a long way from the Soviet propaganda films about the Great Patriotic War like Two Soldiers (1943), It Happened at the Donbass (1945), The Star (1953), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), ….. where bare and barrel-chested hero workers rip German tanks apart with one hand while hold Lenin’s testament aloft in the other. In this film there is blood and grit, and no one turns to Lenin for solace. Moreover, the tank whisperer is a non-entity, pigeon chested, cross-eyed, monosyllabic, and stooped. This is no Hollywood hunk taking time off from the steroids and the gym.
But once Found recovers in record time from burns — he is reborn, he is back in a tank seeking out the White Whale of a Tiger in some mixed up zoology. White proves so destructive and elusive that the Soviet Army dedicates a small unit led by the Tank Whisper to seek and destroy it. Shoot ‘em ups occur. Tank whisperings save Ahab but the great White gets away again and again. There is talk that it has a ghost crew as well as magical powers to cloud men’s mind. It is the S-H-A-D-O-W tank! Talkative German prisoners tell everything they know which is not much without even getting a cigarette in return.
One of dozens of books on the battle.
That occupied the first hour plus, then — inexplicably — we cut away to a ceremony led by Russians with a German Field Marshall surrendering in the presence of American and British flags and at least one American general officer uniform. The Nazi delegation includes all arms: Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe. Huh? From 1943 to 1945 in a flash. The White Tiger made no further appearance in the last two years of the war.
There follows another half hour with several pointless scenes in a ruined city, perhaps Berlin, which I watched with one eye. It ends with an incomprehensible monologue from guess who? Only one ear was required for that: Found says the White is still out there waiting. Ah huh…, and…. Nothing.
By the way, there are no women in the film after Tank Whisperer leaves the hospital, apart from a few passing in street scenes at a distance.
Leaving aside the last half hour it had some mystery, which was never resolved, and so just became an excuse for blown ‘em up and shoot ‘em up. Tant pis. The early musings of a couple of the characters were a good start but they became repetitive rather than informative, not a patch on similar musings in The Thin Red Line (1998) or Castle Keep (1969). Still when I compare it to the trailers I have seen of recent Anglo-American war films White Tiger has a verisimilitude completely lacking in them. There is not a bareheaded, bare chested Brad Pitt in sight reminding us his food-fad diet, the hours a day he spends in the gym and at the make-up chair.
I cannot forbear, and why should I, from mentioning that one reviewer on the IMDb refers to the setting as the winter. Winter in July, well maybe, in Boston but not in west central Russia.
Not my usual far but I found some references to it that made it sound more thoughtful than the usual shoot ’em up. Not so, I found.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute run time, rated 5.7 by 128 cinematizens
Genre: Howdunnit (not Whodunnit).
Verdict: All hat, no oil.
‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’
Unlike The Whistler, The Shadow did not need to spy on people to find out their secrets: he got up in the morning knowing them. Moreover, The Shadow had ‘the power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him,’ completely unnecessary where the fraternity brothers are concerned, but handy nonetheless. Still it left the brothers wondering about women’s minds. Nor did The Shadow need a gimmicky off-key whistle like you-know-whom. Finally, he was voiced once by Orson “I am a Genius” Welles. It ran to 677 episodes from 1937 to 1954. Most of which have been lost to ravages of indifference. But some can be had from Audible.
What a pedigree to take to the movies! What a flop the movies were and are!
In the movies he knows from nothing and back again. His mind is the only thing clouded. His gimmick is a black cat suit for a costume party. He is surrounded by people who know his secret.
Lamont Cranston interferes in police investigations to the amusement of his uncle, the Police Commissioner. His faithful driver is an oaf. He ridicules his girlfriend, Margo Lane whose single contribution to proceedings is to wear silly hats. Yet this is the Shadow. Hardly! A mere silhouette of his radio self.
This Shadow is so pathetic he has to hold a gat on the cops while he explains things to them. Not a cloud in sight. However in this outing the police do figure it out and there is a nice scene toward the end when the Irish Inspector No-First-Name Cardona and Lamont piece it together based on nothing but the clock and the script.
But to back up: Four sneaky types fall off balconies to break their necks and die, apparent suicides. Each was alone when taking the concrete dive. No one pushed them. Were they drunk or drugged? No. Were they following a Des Moines Sky Mall map? No. Were they by some scriptwriting coincidence suicides? No. Were they raptured by the Kool Aid? No. What then?
That is intriguing but the weary and dreary direction undercuts the suspense. Later the explanation involves either Indiana (Jones) or Australia, sort of.
There is also a neat idea about a secret lab in a warehouse that is not integrated. The only critic linked to the IMDb entry who bothered to comment on it said the plot was ‘not wholly coherent,’ exemplifying understatement.
Kane Richmond as Lamont Shadow has the profile of a superman double, chiseled features, powerful jaw, a brow untroubled by thought, a masterful baritone voice, broad shoulders, an effortless glide of step, a toothy grin, and the confidence of a schoolyard bully. Yet, strangely, he has no presence on the screen.
Margo gets some compensation for the twenty-four carat sexism throughout. Her best line is a reply to Lamont is: ‘Don’t yell at me until after we’re married and then don’t you dare!’ Even better when Lamont is trying to open a safe with much manly posturing as he prepares to pick the lock, she reaches past him and opens the door which she had noticed was not closed but which Lamont had not, so busy was he preparing for his display of masculine genius. Hssss [sound of ego deflating].
On the radio The Shadow and The Margo were a team and all business but on film they seem to be auditioning for a comedy show on the way to a masked ball, and failing. There is much, too much, slapstick with the black costume that he always has handy. The comic relief is annoying as usual.
It is little wonder that translating this successful radio serial to film failed. The radio audience would have found it to be a failure as above. The scriptwriter used bait and switch, and the audience switched back to radio.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.4/5.0 by 351 by litizens.
Genre: krimi, period.
Verdict: serious and intense.
Vienna: In 1888 Gustav Klimt is arrested on suspicion of murder when one of his models is found dead! Klimt is an uncouth giant from whose hand comes those ethereal paintings. That was a striking contrast.
His friend and commercial lawyer Karl Werthen promises to help him. To Klimt it is all some kind of joke and he treats his incarceration as a research trip. But the murder was the fourth in a series and the Pox News clamour to scapegoat Hillary is loud, though an advisor to the police minister tells Werthen that Klimt is not the guilty one but public opinion demands a scapegoat, and well…..Hillary is not available so it might just have to be the big guy.
Gustav Klimt
Werthen is ill equipped to investigate a murder but his old friend from Graz (been there) Dr. Hans Gross is an accomplished criminologist, as he says repeatedly. Gross is passing through the capital of the Empire en route to the University in Bukovina to take up the Chair of Pompous Pontificating in that remote corner of the Austrian Empire. To extend his stay in Vienna Gross is ready to lend a hand.
While Werthen is strait-laced, upright, and uptight, Gross is ready to get down and dirty, crawling around the crime scene with a magnifying glass or probing a corpse in the mortuary. Werthen finds all that distressing, disturbing, and distasteful, but Gross’s effort does turn up clues missed by the plodders.
Gross concludes that the murders have been calculated to implicate Jews. About halfway through (per the Kindle measure) someone observes Gross and Werthen. Ominous. Is this the perpetrator watching those who seek him. His perspective recurs now and again thereafter.
A Kimt painting of flowers
The conceit is that Gross has written several textbooks on criminal investigation which have been read by Arthur Conan Doyle who then used the techniques therein revealed to create Sherlock Holmes. Gross assumes everything stems from sex and cites Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to that effect. To avoid censure Krafft-Ebing wrote his book in Latin – Psychopathia Sexualis. (We passed Krafft-Ebing’s mansion a few week ago when traversing Vienna.) They seek out a young Sigmund Freud for advice but he is out of town for the moment.
The malevolent observer arranges for a red herring, and muses on his duties. Gulp!
Then the story seems to end half way through and there is a romantic interlude in which Werthen gets married to live happily ever after. As if!
Then the krimi resumes. Odd construction. What would Aristotle make of this disunity? Same as me. Annoying is what I made of it. One character mentioned the sewers (shades of The Third Man) in passing and leaves it at that. The mention alerted this reader but nothing came of it. False alarm.
Vienna in 1888
The story starts again, and includes a stay to the Lower Belvedere which we visited in September 2019. The plot goes around and around and includes the much exploited events at Mayerling and even Sissi with a head of hair to make Farrah Fawcett cringe. In the end our heroes prevail, but only just.
There are many nice touches. Foremost is the study in corruption of the prince who masterminded the whole thing in the name of saving the Austrian Empire, chiefly from those Magyars. Franz Ferdinand is also a nice portrait of nobody’s fool. Then there is the Emperor whose sole concession to modernity is to make himself available to receive petitions from citizens twice a week for an hour. Otherwise, Austria in 1898-1899 as portrayed in this novel clings to the past. Motor cars are discouraged. Electricity, despite the role of one of its citizens — Nicoli Tesla — in it development, is not used by the government for illumination. All the sixty Austrian generals based in Vienna are seventy or more years old. The body politic was a gerontocracy with sclerosis, lacking a mirror of self-knowledge.
J. Sydney Jones
Jones has a compère in fin de siecle Wien and that is Frank Tallis whose books include Vienna Blood, Death in Vienna, Vienna Woods, and Fatal Lies discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Having just spent a week in Vienna I recalled many of the streets and byways that figure in this book.
GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.
Verdict: Parody plus
In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many. He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.
There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat. Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others. As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine. Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.
This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study. There is no discernible cause of death. Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.
Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case. He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.
It has all the Upfield features:
A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.
A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.
Grizzling about government while relying on it.
Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.
His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.
A school of red herrings among the cast.
A crime within a crime to roil the depths.
An off-stage persona who was there all the time.
A beautiful woman to admire Bony.
Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.
Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other. Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both. (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both. A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut.
Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!) Litterateurs write only words. [Snort!] They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary. Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?
Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names. There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.
By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down. Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep. Damn GOVERNMENT!
Spoiler ahead.
Here is where it gets complicated and interesting. Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?
Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself. She is a story teller par excellence. Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little. Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it. I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]
Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism. The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt. His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit. Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure.
In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.
Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.
You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’ When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books. The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog.
Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.
* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words. They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk. I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.
In his Outline of History (1920) H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.’*
Catastrophe is winning.
After one hundred and fifty years of free public education, the Enlightenment project seems to be spent. Instead of reason and evidence, even ostensibly educated people celebrate, parade, and worship passion. Emotions are regarded as superior to reason. Thus I have oft heard that it is praise to say a scientist is passionate, whereas I would prefer a scientist to be cool and detached, letting the facts and evidence lead to the conclusions, not the emotions. Ditto for journalists, doctors, teachers, and ambulance drivers and more. But no, they are congratulated for passion not competence, discipline, restraint, diligence, tenacity, skepticism, preparation, endurance, and the like.
To say someone is competent, knowledgeable, effective, precise, industrious, or professional is faint praise compared to attributing passion.
Indeed the self-advertising of universities follows the crowd, touting passion not perfection, belief not doubt in proclaiming their virtues.
Emotional reactions are simple, binary, as when cheering on a sporting team. These days even the self-appointed newspapers of record, having forsaken the historic mission of public edification, put sports figures and celebrities on the front page in the vein attempt to hook buyers and readers by passions, not by information, insight, knowledge, or long and slowly accumulated intelligence that came from sitting still and reading or patiently listening. Favoured instead is the direct intuition of passion.
Press that button!
The White School House at Corning Iowa last time I saw it.
Admittedly education itself has changed in that century and a half. In the last two generations in a comfort born of the sacrifices of others, the denizens of higher education have largely devoted themselves to undermining the Enlightenment project, while enjoying its benefits, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and passed that on to their students who have gone on to become school teachers, parents, journalists, and community leaders. Witness the world they have made today in Whitehall and the White House where volume and repetition have replaced facts and evidence. Passionately saying it is so now makes it so.
Intellectuals were the first to find facts irrelevant and spread the word in seminars, lectures, and books. The word has spread and now grows of itself. Truth is no longer privileged. This I have been told for years in seminars, conferences, and theses. All knowledge is tainted. Everything is opinion. (See Plato’s Republic Book Ten.)
*If some smartypants out there could supply the volume and page numbers I will thank them personally.
GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages, rated 3.68/5.00 by 28 litizens.
Genre: period krimi
Verdict: Nifty.
Edna Ferber (1885-1958) and firebrand, fictional suffragette Winifred Moss are travelling in Budapest in 1914. The trip is R and R for Suffragette after a gruelling period of arrest and torture in London, while Edna is escaping her cloying mother, ensconced in Berlin. From Kalamazoo, Ferber’s parents were Jewish, one Hungarian and one German, thus she travels with the languages for Mitteleuropa.
With its hotel upstairs featuring English plumbing the threadbare but comfortable Café Europa is favoured by English-speaking travellers. It is likewise convenient to the sights and sites of Buda (though few figure in this story apart from the Chain Bridge and the Castle).
In act one The Travellers observe the betrothal of a young American heiress to a sclerotic Austrian count. She previously had been courted by a dashing Hungarian, a scion of a porcelain fortune, but her parents arranged a marriage to the count, who is supremely indifferent to the whole matter, but his mother is the match-maker on that side. The American parents want the marriage to get the lustre of aristocracy, while the mother wants the gelt. The girl does not seem to mind but acts like the spoiled child she is. It is all very Edith Wharton [without her subtlety], until…..
The bratty heiress is murdered in the garden at midnight! Who dun it?
Act two opens with the local plod Hovarth investigating only to be pushed aside by a bumptious, idiot from Vienna who must arrest someone to satisfy aristocratic pressure. Neither the parents nor the match-making mother seem to care about the dead girl, but both parties are embarrassed by her murder. Talk about blame the victim.
Act three sees the murder of another American tourist: Buzzing around from the beginning is an annoying Hearst journalist named Harold. He goes here and there stirring and sewing sensationalism, malice, and half-truths. Think Pox News with energy and there it is. Harold differs from Pox journalism in having a certain puppy charm. Then Harold is shot dead in the street.
Act four: Meanwhile, Edna and Suffragette fall in with some local artists, reluctantly.
After much to’ing and fro’ing the cast gathers, ostensibly, in a wake, but we know the denouement is coming at 90% on the Kindle. We know this because, deus ex machina, while falling sleep the night before Edna and says to herself and the inevitable portrait of Emperor Franz Jozef on the wall in her hotel room: ‘That’s it!’
Act five offers an explanation of sorts: It turns out the murder….. Whoops, Spoiler ahead, take warning! Everything is political. Brat’s father is not only rich, stupid, and vain, he is also the owner of Colt Firearms and a matrimonial union with the Austrian Empire would feed the weapons to its army. Yes, it is a long bow, but there you have it. The best way to scuttle the union is to murder her. Sure makes sense. But then, maybe that sort of thing does to some tiny minds.
Harold of Hearst had begun to figure it out, and so he also had to go. Bang!
Spoiler. In keeping with the great tradition of krimis the murderer is the least likely, the seemingly gawky busboy, who is in fact a thespian terrorist. Another long bow.
The hindsight is thick throughout, everyone knows war is coming, quite how they could be so sure is left to one’s imagination when so many others, including many of the decision-makers, were taken by surprise. It was made fact by repetition. There had many conflicts in the Balkans already and another was perhaps inevitable, but the prescience in these pages anticipates the Great War not another armed border dispute.
The multiple-sclerosis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is well done. Everywhere is the picture of Franz Jozef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other constituent polities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once President of the German Confederation, yet the regime is comatose. He leads his peoples in clinging to the past. He will not promote to general a soldier less than seventy years old, only if all eight grandparents were themselves nobility may one enter the court circle at the Hofburg, telephones are forbidden in imperial buildings, he has never ridden in an automobile, though aged he ascends six flights of stairs each night to his army cot rather than have a new-fangled elevator installed. Electricity is banned from official buildings. He favours only those who do the same.
Yet in Paris, in London, in Berlin modernity is bursting out in all forms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, jazz, dance, short skirts, women smoking – none of these practices are permitted in the K and K (for King and Emperor) lands. French, English, and German armies are promoting young officers with technical educations and embracing new weapons and tactics, while in K and K the cavalry sabre remains the ultimate weapon.
The descriptions of the modern art as a revolution itself, destroying the old order, are very well done and quite arresting. Even the Hearst hack is conscious of something in the art he sees, though he cannot articulate it and it does not delay him long from the spoor of cheap sensationalism.
While thinking Edna and Suffragette drink Bulls Blood wine. During our recent visit to Budapest, I asked about this very wine, recalling its role in completing the PhD dissertation long ago. The vintner said it was an export label first applied to vast quantities of red wine Hungary traded to the Soviet Union in return for oil in the 1960s. It would seem that the Soviets then bottled it and traded it to Canada for wheat. In turn I traded it for words at the typewriter. Yes, I know, there are extensive entries for it on the web but if read closely, they do not contradict the essence of the intel above.
Ed Ifkovic
Edna Ferber had a long and distinguished career as a writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist. This is the sixth in a series featuring her.
William Rufus KING was a Vice President of the USA? True or False.
True. Briefly.
When? 1853. Yes only in that year, but not the whole year. Considerably less than twelve months.
From Alabama, he was New Hampshireman Franklin Pierce’s Democratic running mate in the 1852 election. Though the two did not meet during the nomination or campaign. Uh? Yep and there is more, or rather less.
In 1852 to give geographic balance to the New Englander heading the ticket, King was nominated in absentia, having travelled to the hot and humid climate of Cuba for his health. (Maybe he should have gotten a second opinion.) After the Democratic ticket won, a special act of Congress allowed King to take the Vice-President’s oath of office at the US consulate in Havana on 24 March 1853. A little later he returned to his home in Alabama and died there on 18 April 1853; he was Vice President for little more than three weeks, none of it spent in Washington D.C. He must have the title for the shortest VP term, though John Tyler is often credited with that. Tuberculosis was the killer, perhaps to make a comeback aided by anti-vaxxers near and far.
Pedants note. The Wikipedia entry credits him with forty-five days in office, longer than Tyler as above. How that number is arrived at given he took the oath on 24 March and died on 18 April is one of the mysteries of WikiWars. In the Wikipedia text he is credited with holding the office from 4 March (when President Pierce took the oath) though the text also clearly states King did not swear the oath until the 24th of March because he had not been in D.C. on 4 March. Members of Pedants United (PU) are sure that he was only VP after he took the oath, not when the office was vacated, or when Pierce was sworn in. Those who agree may tell anyone they please.
I first came across this spectral Vice President reading a biography of Franklin Pierce, discussed elsewhere on this blog for avid clickers.
