Michael W Jackson – Page 6 – Political theory and practice

La France occupée

L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942) The Murderer Lives at No. 21. IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1 h 24 m rated 7.3 by 3,700 cinematizens.

La main du diable (1943) The Carnival of Sinners (The Hand of the Devil). IMDB meta-data is a runtime 1 h 20 m rated 7.3 by 1,800 cinematizens.

Le Corbeau (1943) The Crow. IMDB meta-data is a runtime 1 h 43 m, rated 7.8 by 11,000 cinematizens.

DNA: France occupée (1940-1944).

Genre: Noir.

These three films, among others, were made by Continental Studios during the German Occupation of France, each of the trio starred Pierre Fresney and were directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, credited or not. They were united in another way, too, after the Liberation, all of them, but especially Le Corbeau (The Crow) were banned. Why? Each showed France, French society and people in a bad light.

This social criticism of France by Studios managed (very loosely as it turned out) by Germans, got Clouzot and Fresnay ostracised (and briefly imprisoned) along with the co-star in two of the movies, Suzy Delair. However, cooler and wiser heads prevailed and the ban was lifted quickly.

This background reminds us that the producer and director did not have a free hand in these labours. Indeed, even at this distance it is impossible to watch these three individually or in seriatim without seeing a watermark of the Occupation, but as a covert critique rather than an overt affirmation. Read on.

In L’Assassin habite a boarding house’s inhabitants, men and women, are examined in the search for a serial killer. The vanities, foibles, pretexts, dissimulations, vices, incompetences of each is laid bare as the detective (posing as a roomer) moves among them. (Jules Maigret used this vantage point in Madame Quatre et ses enfants, the film version of which in 1991 is discussed elsewhere on the blog for clickers.) Suffice it to say there is more than one murderer at numero 21. It is an allegorical tale of what France has now become in 1942: Schemers, spies, thieves, cheats, and liars. Nothing is as it seems to be because it is worse.

La main du diable is even more explicit in its analogy to the Occupation: Make a deal with the devil for the time being and discover that time never ends, as long as you live. Fresnay who played the charming and jocular detective in L’Assassin here is a tortured soul who can find no relief from his Faustian bargain. He is France occupé both cursed and blessed: blessed to be out of the war and cursed to be occupied. The only way out is death. Grim.

These two might have been forgiven and forgotten but then came Le Corbeau and no one forgets its relentless condemnation of picturesque, bucolic, rural, and eternale France as a nest of vipers, stinging each other to death. The parallel to the Occupation is obvious to any viewer at the time yet the German censors let it go. The plot engine is a campaign of poison pen letters at a time when the Occupier encouraged French citizens to denounce each other in anonymous letters just like those portrayed in the film. While Fresnay carries the film, the elder doctor played by Pierre Larquey is mesmerising at times. Watch for the scene with the swinging light fixture to see what I mean. The final act condemned the film twice over when a nun commits a murder. A nun! Is nothing sacred. Non.

Continental had a repertoire cast and they appear and reappear in these three and its thirty other films.

***

By the way many will have seen, and surely remember, Fresney from Le Grand Illusion (1937) as the world weary aristocrat who sacrifices himself to pass the baton of moral leadership onto the energies of the working class Jean Gabin.

Fresney soldiered in WWI and had his last screen credit in 1975.

Meh

Absolutely Anything (2015)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1 hr and 25 m, rated 6.0 by 49,000 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy, sorta.

DNA: Brit Bruce Almighty.

Verdict: Absolute power bores absolutely.

Tagline: More dog!

Blessed and cursed with absolute power by an astro-genie, Hero takes a long time to realise what is going on, and then fumbles the ball. It is a frenetic race from one gag to another, and then to its undoing.

There are pleasures, but they are few. Loved the ice queen BBC book reviewer who hates books and never reads, but makes and breaks the careers of writers. All too easy to believe.

The talking dog was one joke that went on…far too long. But for being loquacious there is too little of the dog, though it finally does save the day (and the world), but not the film.

***

Rather think some of the players had stern words with the agents that committed them to this film.

In this fluff our hero does not make a deal with the devil, he has absolute power conferred on him as a lab-rat test. He sacrifices nothing for it, and gains little from it. Ergo, what’s the point?

For All I Care, not.

For All Mankind (2019)

IMDb meta-data is 41 episodes of app 48 m each, rated 8.1 by 70,000 cinemtizens.

Genre: Alt History.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Right Stuff (1980) played by college boys.

Tagline: On and on it goes where is stops, does anyone care?

The Russkies got to the Moon first, and it’s time to catch up and escalate. N.B. I have watched only the first three episodes before getting bored.

As a period piece it is well done, though I would have liked a lot more 1960s music. Maybe that’s just me.

All the historical faces are there from Walter Cronkite to the astronauts and their entourage. So far the Soviets are The Other with a flag.

There is some very clever use of Nixon’s Whitehouse tapes. Likewise the portrayal of Werner von Braun is certainly more lifelike than the drooling madman in the Dial of Destiny. On von Braun one might see Robert Harris’s V (discussed elsewhere on this blog, click on).

I liked the hiatus from Armstrong and crew, but if there was an explanation that I heard, but, well, let’s say my attention was divided. But so far there is just too little about the scientific, technological, and engineering complexity of the problems each of which had never been done before. Instead the real problems seems to be with family, with women, with political priorities, with macho rivalries, and so on. I hasten to add the wives get their due in a way, but still the focus of the problems does not seem to be space flight, but each other. The human drama, I guess the marketing department would say, but we don’t need space or the Moon for that.

***

The acting is superb, though the writing and directing are uneven: some scenes are attenuated and others rushed and much is omitted in favour of alcohol and sex. There is too little on the everyday racism and sexism of the time, but perhaps that is coming in later episodes, though it seems unlikely to me that a black would have been inducted into the program at the time.

I do like the story arc with the Mexican girl, but it is a frail reed to hang so much upon.

***

I made the mistake of reading the semi-literate review on Roger ebert.com which included the following irritants with the quotation marks followed by my fulminations follow the – sign.

‘random Russian’ – This man was first in a highly selective program, hardly a walk-in off the street. Nor is he unknown for he is named. In short he was not just anyone.

‘the film wonders how that would feel’ – first I’ve heard that film has feeling. I’ll be more considerate around it from now on.

‘lofty ideas that are heavily considered’ – Heavily, man.

‘the highly renowned John Glenn’ – Doubt the author even knew who he was.

‘reoccuring’ – recurring is so much simpler. No doubt this writer also speaks of ‘myself,’ uses ‘orientate,’ and ….

‘the story seek(s) compassion’ – more reification (look it up) with the story at work.

‘spreads its charisma thin’ – ditto.

‘she has big reasons’ – little reasons never get any consideration. Is this sizeism? Woke up!

‘a striking reinforcement of the toxics masculinity’ – Huh? Plural?

It ranges from annoying to incomprehensible. Sounds like teenagers talking about it on the bus, which would perhaps please the author, but might insult the teenagers who are usually more cogent.

Sherlock vs Martians

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds (1975) by Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman.

Good Reads meta-data is 226 pages, rater 4.26 by 3,652 litizens.

Genre: Holmes +

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Doyle réchauffé.

Tagline: In which H G Wells is corrected.

Those Martians arrived but made the mistake of involving Sherlock Holmes. The story follows in broad the H. G. Wells outline but with vigour and ingenuity that breath life into Wells’s expository lectures. It also integrates some of Wells’s other stories into the account. The mix works well.

Holmes is aided by Dr Watson and also by Doyle’s redoubtable Professor Challenger, the greatest genius among mankind according to Professor Challenger. The action consists of (1) staying out of the clutches of these invaders and (2) observing them closely to find weaknesses. Holmes, of course, is nonpareil at observation (followed by inference), and that makes for fascinating reading. Challenger and Watson also add intel to the picture.

The resolution is neat and simple, even more so than in the original.

Manly Wade Wellman was a prolific author and wrote this title with his son Wade Wellman.

This is not the first title to bring together Wells and Holmes. I read without interest, Sherlock Holmes and the Time Machine (2020) a while back.

Because I read War of the Worlds on Kindle this title was suggested to me, causing me to remember that I read another entry in this series many years (2014) ago involving Teddy Roosevelt (2010) by Paul Jeffries. However I found it lifeless, both Teddy and Sherlock were waxworks. Still I tried another one this time.

Now that I have read this one, the Mechanical Turk at Amazon is offering me more of the same, and I am tempted by some like: Eric Brown, Sherlock Holmes and The Martian Menace (2020) and Doug Murray, Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Missing Martian (2022). Stay tuned for more.

The War of the Worlds Began

War of the Worlds (1894) by H. G. Wells.

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.83 by 316,380 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: In the beginning.

Tagline: And so they came.

When I saw that there were more than 12,000 reviews posted on Good Reads…. I realised there was need for one more!

The opening narrative is perfect, and it has been retained in the 1953 film version (the only one I have watched), though I endured the first three episodes of the 2019 Anglo-French television production. The latter did not retain the narrative but opted for something else which I have now forgotten. No doubt something the producer thought the audience could relate to, i.e., sex, money, or both. It has run to 24 episodes, but even the first three had already discarded Wells’s story.

Back to the book, it starts well with that omniscient narrative, and the first landing and contact, and to be sure there are some gripping scenes that made it into the 1953 film. Hiding out, confusion, despair, regret, destruction are all described by the hero who survives by accident. He wanders around scenes of incomprehensible catastrophe and describes the Martians and their devices in some detail. In this account Wells shows more imagination than most science fiction film makers today. Hero also reports that the Martians to be vampires in rather more detail than any contemporary film maker would venture. Implicitly, one reason they have come to Earth is to harvest living human blood, and they cage survivors for later consumption, some of which Hero sees. The 1953 film omits this aspect, and so leaves completely unexplained why they came and later how they came to be infected.

The one film version I have seen changes the curate into a one-scene fool and deletes the soldier. These two were crucial to Wells, though admittedly they do not advance the plot, but that is because there is no plot to advance. Wells was an expository writer and his novels seldom had plots, and this one doesn’t. The aftermath of events are described while we wait….

As to religion, while he had to include the conventional appeals to the all mighty to protect himself in Victorian England, he despised religion (see any biography of the man), and in between prayers and invocations, these pages show the pathetic uselessness of religion in such a crisis. Indeed, the curate, while hiding from the Martians, prays so fervently that he is about to give away their hiding place with his ever louder hosannas so that Hero clubs him to death with a meat clever to silence him. I doubt this murder is in any of the film versions.

The soldier is another whipping boy for Wells. His working class instincts for survival are admirable but anything more than a half-return to savagery is beyond his intelligence. Not that hero has anything better to offer himself for all his intelligence as he acknowledges.

Instead of these characters the film versions invariably insert a love interest and or a family, where none exist in the original. Something for Average to identify with, I guess, but it takes away emphasis from the Martians even if it does provide a plot.

By the way, in Wells’s text the title is somewhat misleading, for on Earth the only country invaded is England. The unspoken assumption seems to be that it is the leading power of the world and once it is subdued the rest can done piecemeal.

I said I have only watched one version through to the end but I have sampled many others in this endless franchise. While on a long flight I even saw a few minutes of the version that midget did.

There is an ingenious twist on this invasion in The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013). Recommended. There are also Russian and Soviet versions.

What is absent from the films I have sampled, and a quick scroll down the Good Reads reviews confirms it is the absence is any reference to what was likely Wells’s intention.

And what is that, you ask?

Go ahead, ask it!

Consider this Martian invasion as a metaphor for British colonialism for it is the only country attacked; it is singular: Strange unknown creatures descend from unimaginable ships and conquer all with incredible weapons, while remaining largely impervious to the resistance of the native peoples.

Why have they come? Why are they here? Why is it now? What can we do? In reply to none of these questions can the native religion provide either an explanation or assistance. Nor can the technology of their weapons protect them against these advanced beings.

Thus do European colonists subdue the native population, and proceed to live off its back.

When these Martian colonists take over, what slows their conquest, and eventually stops it is the world itself, its vegetation (there is a lot of gardening in Wells’s text that never makes it into the films) and bacteria.

I complained about the plot because there is too much ruminating by hero during his wander. It is not a quest but simply a walkabout. And in these lengthy asides, not only is the action, such as it is, stopped, but the timeline is broken repeatedly with post hoc interpolations, so we know from early on all will be well for Hero.

As is de rigueur for Wells, there is also an egotistical element when hero goes on about being a misunderstand intellectual, especially at the end. But in this dose it is less distracting, irritating, unnecessary than in some of his other novels.

Having unavoidably been exposed, if only in passing, to so many entries to this franchise, I realised that I had never read the foundation text, now I have.WW 1

Put it on paper!

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2023).

Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.50 by 92 litizens.

Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Social History.

Verdict: One for trivial pursuits.

Tagline: Get it down on paper!

It was a double whammy. First paper and then the convenience of the notebook to carry it around.

The paperful office was the technological marvel of the age. Papyrus, clay, and parchment were the media before paper. Papyrus won’t grow anywhere else but the shores of the Nile River, and it does not travel well. Clay, well impermanent and easily changed. Parchment, expensive and also easy to alter. Hence palimpsest. None of these media facilitated commercial activity beyond goodwill and memory. Altering something on clay or parchment was child’s play. That way lies fraud. Keeping either quick notes or detailed records on them was not feasible.

Then a binder of books of parchment, began to experiment with flax and hemp, and discovered he could make paper. Soon an experienced worker could make 4,000 sheets (slightly larger than A4) a day. The binder used this paper to record the accounts of his business, and was able to do so in a detail that exceeded everyone else. Soon others wanted to do the same and he began selling them paper.

All this occurred about 200 kilometres from Florence, and businessmen there heard of and tried this new development. Paper gave them a competitive advantage in the detailed records they could keep. In time, letters of credit replaced the risky and difficult task of moving gold and silver coins. These letters made the Florin of Florence the stable currency of choice around the Mediterranean and as far north as the Netherlands. In the long fallout the Dutch currency was called a florin well into the Twentieth Century.

Then the second innovation occurred: Double-entry bookkeeping. (See Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Click away.) This method of matching assets and liabilities adding up to zero was a revolution comparable to Copernicus’s conceptual breakthroughs at Padua. Florentine business flourished with these new found intellectual technologies.

Ledgers, day books, receivables, inventories, catalogues, expense sheets, contracts, and more were quickly and easily recorded and were relatively fraud proof.

Popes made use of these technologies to distribute and receive funds from the Catholic Empire. The Medici became the preferred agent for a number of Popes, and profited greatly from it.

From the Thirteenth to the early Sixteenth Century Florence bustled, and one of the ways the rich indulged themselves was through art works. To save their souls they commissioned religious art, and for their own diversion private art in oil, canvas, marble, granite, and more.

All of this artistic explosion was worked out in notebooks, which became essential to artists, who could now do drafts, studies, cartoons, and the like, as Giotto may have done to create the lifelike figures he did.

The most famous notebook user among artists, was of course Leonardo da Vinci who recommended the constant use of notebooks. He carried one affixed to his belt. Mostly he used them for sketches of the constant motion of nature, but he also recorded plans in them by mirror writing and in a code. He filled thousands of pages only a fraction of which remain.

Likewise, later the irascible Isaac Newton made extensive, life-long use of notebooks to work out his mathematical ideas. Historians of science have used them to map the evolution of his concepts.

Paper also fuelled European exploration when Portuguese navigators started to keep logs, draw charts, or map islands with fresh water. These innovations were soon taken up by Portugal’s ally, England and these technologies made the world more familiar and smaller.

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus started with notebooks but switched to cards in developing his system of nature.

When the hospital practice of intensive care began in a Danish hospital during a polio epidemic, the notebook, monitoring patients, was almost as important as the tracheostomy tube.

Agatha Christie always had a notebook at hand and filled hundreds of them with ideas, snatches of dialogue, room maps, plot ideas. Since she worked on several novels at once, alien that she was, and she did not date the notebooks, researchers make careers out of relating the finished book to notes scattered through dozens of notebooks over years. It seems she read back over the notebooks periodically and extracted material from them years later.

The police ‘inspector’ was so named because when shifts changed his job was to inspect the notebooks the Bobbies carried wherein they recorded their rounds which were countersigned by worthies along the way to prove the officer did indeed do the assigned round. The worthies might be Anglican vicars, school teachers, shop keepers, or publicans. The police notebook was thus in the first instance for management control. But officers soon began using them to record observations and events on their patch as further proof of their diligence. The police notebook as we knew today on cop shows came, like most innovations, from the bottom up.

I found the opening product placement add for Moleskine put me off but I kept at it. For years I carried a notebook in a back pocket and there are shoeboxes of them in the office closet. I still use them to keep track of my gym activities. But these days to make notes I use Siri.

Forbidden Planet

The Forbidden Planet (1956)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 7.5 by 53,000 cinematizens.

DNA: Of the time.

Verdict: A Keeper.

Tagline: Shakespeare did it.

A crew lands (a spaceship) where they are not welcome to save survivors (who do not wish to be rescued). They find the Tin man Robbie with the personalty of Ariel in the body of Caliban. Prospero is Mr Miniver, an icy but ever so polite host. Honey West as Miranda is such stuff as dreams are made of. (She had her last IMDb credit fifty years later.)

Frank ‘Antonio’ Drebin (his last posthumous credit in 2011) leads the merry crew including Bart Maverick, a cast of television regulars, and a painful comic relief who could and did better in other credits. They are all decked out in grey on gray garage mechanic boiler suits.

Then they encounter Id, and Id gets ugly. Very. Marvellous son et lumière show.

Though the Krell are the premise, we never see them. Yet they dominate everything.

***

What a high risk investment this film must have been at the time. No big name actors, a B-movie genre, an invisible enemy, a psychoanalytic explanation, and the voice of J. Michael Anthony from the Tin Man. Conspicuously lacking is any Cold War resonance, which was a staple for Sy Fy of the time. Surprisingly Prospero is a philologist not a physicist. Again inconsistent with the norms of 1950s Sy Fy, though the storyline was made to fit it. Nor was there a nuclear threat, rather the evil is within us…all!

The local Dendy, with its eight screens, devoted one Saturday to a Sy Fy revival – May the 4th be with us. About twenty films were cycled during the day from 10am onward and I chose this one, rather than the big ticket items in the larger theatres Blade Runner, Total Recall, and the Wraith of Khan. (I was tempted by the chance to see Ricardo Montalban’s pectorals again but passed.) One film was enough for me, and I chose this one.

Forbidden Planet screened in theatre 7 upstairs in the back around the corner, seating sixty, and it was completely sold out. And not all were geriatrics. Far too many of whom used their phone screens during the feature. Such is our time.

Here is a curiosity: on You Tube is this film backwards. Yep. It runs backward from the credits, both the audio and video. Yep. Why, one might ask? Good question to which there is no answer.

Judging by the crowds from the Nerd Kingdom about the Dendy on my entry and exit, the day must have been a commercial success. I can only imagine the work that went into corralling this collection of material.

My thanks.

Milkshake?

Space Milkshake (2012)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 5.6 by 2012 cinemtizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: O’ Canada.

Verdict: Droll, irritating, amusing.

Tagline: Beware the yellow rubber duck.

Dark Star Quark, Inc has the contract to collect near-earth space debris with its scow, the Regina, and a crew of four: Hobbit, Lana Lane, Mr Sulu, Major Carter, and that other guy. I know that is five, but we never see but only hear Sulu because he is not a member of the crew.

Major Carter and Hobbit were an item, with no other alternatives, but now she wants someone taller. New Boy (Five) comes straight from the Corner Gas school of acting, and bumbles around. Lana keeps to herself, until….

Through their own inattention and incompetence they collect some trash that was…alive! Not good. Lana is the first to go, sort of.

There follows an hour of good natured confusion with a denouement. Though the destruction of earth, inter-dimensional travel, the murder of Lana, artificial humans, and more are surfaced, none of these themes is developed. But the duck has its day!

Moreover, no one seems to mind that the android killed Lana. Nor is there any explanation of the title.

On the other hand it is so unpretentious that it is easy to like. No priestly voiceover to lecture the audience on its climate sins, no heroic posturing by a wannabe who isn’t waving a plastic gun, no boy genius with designer fuzz to save the day by adding 2+2…. It was not made to the Hollywood formula aimed at prepubescent boys with arrested development by prepubescent boys with arrested development.

It is compounded of a mixture of Star Gate, Star Trek, Quark, Dark Star, and, let us not forget Corner Gas.

A Gallic binge

Subway (1985) with a runtime of 1h 44m, rated 6.5 by 16,000 cinematizens; Le doulos (1962): 1h 48n, rated 7.7 by 12,000; and Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958): 1h 31m rated 7.9 by 29,000.

When prowling around streaming outlets I came across these, one after another, during our Cronulla staycation. I watched them in this order.

Subway has the frenetic energy and mordant wit that director Luc Besson’s films often have. It also has Isabelle Adjani melting the screen. A tuxedoed thief on the run finds refuge in a Paris Metro station (Châtelet?) where he discovers he is not alone. The plot, which makes no sense, is an excuse for the to’ings and fro’ings. This is another characteristic of Besson films. It is all on the surface, but it is fun while it lasts.

Le doulos is Jean-Pierre Melville, the director, out-noiring American film noir. In contrast to Subway this is all serpentine plot. All the threads come together in a downward spiral. Each member of this ensemble is doomed. The moodiness and the movements are compelling in this seedy world of criminals where no one escapes fate.

By some miracle of city planning there is always a parking place in Paris for the Yank Tanks these villains drive. The title is a slang word for an informer, someone who talks, tattles, through or behind his hat.

But the best for last is Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, made when the director, Louis Malle, was a boy of twenty-six. When most that age are making student films of 10 minutes, he directed this feature length masterpiece. Moreover, he did everything against expectations. The elegant, suave, and handsome Maurice Ronet is a reptilian villain, while up and comer Jeanne Moreau is a luminous fallen angel. The close-ups of each of them are unsparing. Sometimes against black backgrounds the characters seem like puppets, and perhaps that is what they are. Compelled by their own instincts, and unable to control themselves, each, in a different way, is driven to a bad end, along with a pair of innocent bystanders, who are not so innocent by the time the film ends.

The tension and drama are all the more remarkable because so much of the screen time is confined to an elevator car.

Moreover, there is a perfect soundtrack from Miles Davis that sets the mood in the middle.

Did Malle read Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage; it would seem so.

7 – 11 Life

Convenience Store Woman (2018) by Sayaka Murata

Good Reads meta-data is 163 pages, rated 3.69 by 280,087 litizens.

Genre: Fiction; Sub-species: chick-lit.

DNA: Japanese.

Tagline: Irasshaimasé!

Verdict: Meursault with a purpose.

Keiko didn’t fit in. This fact she had learned in primary school when, during a recess, two boys were fighting and everyone shouted for them to stop. She stopped them. A gardener’s spade came to hand and she whacked one of the combatants with it. End of fight. She had done what everyone wanted, and now she was the one in trouble. Go figure!

There were many other ways in which she was an odd duck. She showed no interest in the girlish concerns of clothing, cosmetics, boys, family, and so on. She just drifted along on the ebb and flow of those around her, having learned to conceal her indifference to these matters and much else, well nearly everything else. For camouflage she copied the dress, mannerisms, and speech of those around her, but none of it had any inner resonance. She is an A.I. robot in these ways, programmed from the outside in by the environment.

When she graduated from high school she got a part-time job at Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” a convenience store, and found her niche. Here she comes to life with energy, initiative, commitment, interest, and more. The growth and expression of her symbiotic relationship with the convenience store is the core of the novel, and it is charming, if a little unnerving. (Footnote: See Michel Foucault on life in the social machine.) The store gave her purpose and structure and she dedicated herself to it in return. She became obsessed with personal hygiene because the store required it. She ate a proper diet and slept the requisite hours so that her strength was equal to being on her feet during eight hour shifts. She no longer had to decide what wear but happily donned the prescribed uniform. She learned to use morning weather forecasts to stock the shelves, to know when regulars would arrive, how to scan items and make change instantly.

But most of all she had learned to read the store, to know by the sounds, smells, drafts when something had to be done. The crinkle of cellophane wrappers might imply a need to restock shelves. A draft of cool air, a refrigerator door was ajar. A certain click might mean a rack is empty. The store was mother and child to her and she cared for it in all ways.

She always volunteered for more work, not because she wanted or needed the overtime pay (since she had nothing to spend it on) but because it kept her focussed on what the store needed. The store shielded her from the pressure to conform to the expectations of her parents, her peers, the society,…and life beyond the store and in return she cared for its needs.

It may sound dopey but it is done so well that is only a belated second thought. Meursault of Camus’s L’Étranger would get it.