Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (2001) by Larry Millet
GoodReads meta-data is 404 pages rated 4.04 by 1552 litizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana
Verdict: Elemental.
In the dry summer pine forests of deepest Minnesota fire is an ever present danger compounded by the sparks flying from railroad trains owned by Robber Baron J. J. Hill. Meanwhile, Eugene Debs has been organising railway men into unions hostile to Hill. Trouble is brewing.
A new ingredient comes to this combustible mix when Hill begins to receive threatening letters signed by the Red Demon which promise ruin to the businessman. While having the character of blackmail threats, strangely the letters do not demand money. This is a new one for Hill.
When pursuing these letters his own trusted investigator disappears, Hill goes to the top of the tree by sending an agent to recruit Mr Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, London SW. Hill offers a princely sum for Holmes’s services who he is more intrigued by the the situation than attracted by the dosh. He and Watson set sail for the new world and then take the train to the NorthWest frontier of St Paul.
There follows a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse in the later 19th Century woods of Minnesota with much detail about railroads, engines, tracks, switches, flying sparks and embers, trestles, telegraphs keys and posts, along with the axe men who live among the pines. Holmes and Watson pose as London Times journalists doing research for a feature piece on rough-hewn ways of life in the north woods. As if.
They discover a cast of characters among the rustics, which includes a retarded sheriff, a clever brothel madame, a prissy woodsman, a flannel-shirted thug, a skeptical newspaper editor, while Holmes and Watson consume vast American servings of food. It comes to a head when the summer drought makes a perfect fire storm.
Larry Millet
The text has footnotes relating to the Holmes cannon, and the historic events upon which the story is based. The telling is all rather theatrical as though the book aspired to being a screen play and much of Holmes’s work seemed pointless to this reader. Still it is diverting.
GoodReads meta-data is 327 pages rated 4.0 by 48 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: [Grrrr.]
A bus loaded with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is bombed on the way to a Black Sea coastal resort. A joint Israeli-Bulgarian investigation follows. Sort of…
A Bulgarian detective who is a man’s man, constantly smoking, drinking, and cursing, and having a pissing contest with every other man he meets, is half of one team; the other is a Mossad data analyst who has never been in the field before, but her father came from Bulgaria and she has a smattering of the language. The set-up is promising, combining spreadsheets with head banging.
What follows is a disjointed series of backstories, punctuated by Man’s Man clumsy efforts to rape/seduce the Israeli who proves resistant to his crude efforts. None of it is played for laughs, and we all know that in time she will relent because he is, after all, a man’s man. The clichés abound without any substance. Blind Freddy spotted the mole about two hundred pages before Man’s-Man did.
Nor is the Israeli any better. After riding for several hours in a car just as bored as the reader is, she is asked to drive for a while, and after taking the driver’s seat goes ballistic to find the car has a stick shift and not an automatic transmission. Was she asleep for the preceding four hours when they drove down the road that she didn’t notice the gear changes up and down the hills of eastern Bulgaria with her single companion driving. And she is an intelligence analyst. Doh! (Don’t blame her, she is written that way.)
Much is made of identifying the bomber in the first half of the book and then this theme disappears. Evidently it did not really matter that much. It seems there was little reason to follow the trail.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in Bulgaria and I preferred that travelogue to listening to that man’s man feel sorry for himself. What a snowflake! Nor is the Israeli any more interesting. A five-second scan of the reviews on GoodReads reminded me why I never bother to do that.
Ellis Shuman
The mechanical Turk alerted me to this title after I read a concise history of Bulgaria. I tried the sample and found it not to my taste but assuming there were not many Bulgarian krimis in English and this might be the only one to hand, even the best one, I persisted. Grrr, as above.
GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 4.78 by 27 litizens.
Genre: Autobiography.
Coach Thompson is a legend and it is easy to see why. This man is a straight-shooter with a fast draw. He transformed the Georgetown Hoyas from also rans to leaders with dozens of titles and trophies and what is more important, and singular, 97% of his players graduated. Coach was an educator on and off the court.
It is a long gruelling story of racism as Coach learned the games behind the game, and he learned them well. Among his teachers were Red Auerbach who saw this gangly youth in a pick-up game on a playground one summer and encouraged him to stay in the game. Coach later played two season with the Celts as back-up to Bill Russell, giving Coach plenty of time to study the game, front and back. (Bill never sat down.)
But most of all there were his parents whom he wanted to make proud of himself, and so he worked at it. Did he ever! The towel on his shoulder became a signature. It reminded him that his parents spent their lives working 60 or more hours a week cleaning up behind white people so he could better himself, and when he said that in an interview a storm of angry protest broke with the Pox News haters who regarded it as a provocative remark. In another of his trademarks, he shrugged and repeated it, because after all it was true. But as we know truth has no value to Pox News.
In one telling passage he takes a list of examples of things coaches do, like arguing with officials, defending players before the media vultures, benching players, and shows how such actions are reported when a white coach does them, and when a black coach does them. When he argues a ref’s call a white coach is feisty, when a black coach argues he is intimidating; when a white coach defends a player he is fair and a black coach who does that is stubborn; in benching a player a white coach is disciplined and a black coach is angry; and so on. Some of the examples can be found in 2020, by the way.
When he started recruiting for the Hoyas at Georgetown he often went after unschooled athletes that were regarded as high risk by other colleges, including at least two with prison records to whom he gave a second chance. As long as they kept their grades up to graduate, he guaranteed their scholarships even if they did not make the team. This arrangement so impressed parents that they drove their boys to take it and to make the team to pay off the implicit debt. Rival coaches were not sure if this was madness or underhanded, and made a fuss about it both ways. One of those second-chances was AI. The cognoscenti will get The Answer. The fine upstanding white young men who played against AI taunted him as a jailbird. Yep. [Swish.] AI always had the last laugh.
Hard though it is for this cynic to believe, the University administration stood behind Coach even when his teams lost, and he was burned in effigy, labeled ‘nigger,’ on campus. On other occasions his university office was ransacked with a message for this African boy to go home! Need I say it, Georgetown University is Catholic school and a bastion of the liberal elite, and yet scratch the surface and there it is.
He himself had been cut from the Olympic team because of the unspoken quota on black players, and he knew it. This is one of the reasons why he was never grateful for his accomplishments. He had earned them, and he knew others had also done so but were denied them by unseen, unspoken, unbreakable racial quotas.
One observer (Michael Jordan) called him the Aristotle of basketball for his training of kings of the court. Coach thought of himself as a teacher who used a basketball to instruct in the use of one’s talents, in teamwork, in courtesy, in civility, in responsibility, in the value of education…..in the Georgetown way, never back down and always applaud an opponent’s well-earned victory.
I have always liked Patrick Ewing, and now I know why. Surely the best NBA center never to make it to a final. This is the coach that channeled the Van Gogh of basketball, Allen Iverson, into a productive career without parallel.
The Answer.
Coach has some choice words for that old chestnut that blacks have biological superiority as athletes, too, seeing in it yet another way to belittle the accomplishments of blacks. He attributes the success of black athletes to intelligence and a drive to succeed, and the ability to succeed where there are fewer racial barriers, sports being one of the domains where the barriers are lowest these days.
The janitors, laundrymen, ballboys, porters, ushers, maids, attendants, security officers, and doormen at hotels and arenas all welcomed his teams because the players said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and never left a mess for someone else’s mom and dad to clean up. A player who violated such norms of courtesy and civility would find himself with his 21-point scoring average on the bench until he learned that 70% of Hoya basketball was off the court.
John Thompson was the first Division I coach to hire an academic advisor for the team, a woman. He then hired a trainer, a woman, whom he promoted to assistant coach so that she could sit on the bench in games (and also get on a higher pay grade), readily available for injuries. Both appointments threw the NCAA into a frenzy trying to find rules to block such changes since both were white women it also set off a media feeding frenzy. Use your imaginations just a like a Pox journalist. Both these women worked for Coach for many years.
Hoya scheduling had been historic. Every year was the same as last year. No more when Coach came on the scene. He wanted to play arch rivals at home, or not at all. (And if these rivals refused to schedule at Georgetown, he leaked it to the press to embarrass the rivals.) He wanted to play and beat teams that dominated post season tournaments in early season games. He also wanted a better gymnasium for his team(s) and fill it with shouting fans. To further these ends he engaged in an infinity of negotiations in the games behind the game. He seldom compromised, and that got him the reputation as a trouble-maker, but he noticed white coaches were seldom asked to compromise and he stuck to his guns.
Then there is the deflated basketball he kept on his desk about the other 70%, but, well, read the book. The title is explained on the last page, but I didn’t get it.
Coach admits his many mistakes, civil, social, and tactical, and hands out praise to many who worked with the Hoya teams. The telling is episodic marked by basketball seasons. In that respect it is not easy to read though the ghostwriter’s prose is smooth.
Coach with Patrick Ewing, lately his successor at Georgetown.
Recent news from GT suggests things have gotten worse in subsequent days. Autobiography is never a completely reliable source, to be sure.
Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe (2004) by Thomas Eccardt
GoodReads meta-data is 348 pages rated 3.78 by 65 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: The Micro Seven!
Go ahead list them!
Ordered by population.
Population
Area in km2
Per capita GDP US$
Vatican City
825
0.49
–
San Marino
34,232
61.2
60,551
Monaco
38,300
2.1
115,700
Liechtenstein
38,784
160
98,432
Andorra
77,543
467
42,035
Malta
514,564
316
48,246
Luxembourg
626,108
2,586
112,045
Source: Wikipedia
These entities have most of the features of a state, though the most dubious inclusion is Vatican City. While each is unique, in general they have survived largely as a convenience to their larger neighbours, usually because they had nothing those neighbours wanted. Their existence was written into treaties at one time or another. Luxembourg was a buffer between France and Germany. Monaco made many compromises with France to retain such sovereignty as it has. Only Malta and founding member Luxembourg are in the EU, but most accept the Euro.
The only one with significant natural resources is Luxembourg which has long produced high quality steel. None is self-sufficient in food. They have all issued post stamps for revenue. Andorra made itself into tax-free shopping mall. Monaco has that casino. Liechtenstein has Swiss banking secrecy even if the Swiss no longer do. San Marino has a nonpareil stone cutting and stone working craft. Malta has Maltesers. The other major asset Malta has, along some of the other micros, is an expatriate community that supports it.
The micros represent collectively and individually a residue of European history. The Knights of Hospitaller played a major role in making Malta European when Charles V of Spain gave the island to the Knights (in return for a first round draft pick [checking to see who is paying attention]). Then there are the 13th Century Grimaldis in Monaco who passed from pirates to princes, the come-lately Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the co-princes of Andorra, and the fiefdom that is/was Liechtenstein, a country named after a family. Only San Marino stands apart with its 13th Century origins as a republic (and by the way being a republic does not make it democratic, see a political science 101 textbook for the distinction). Of the Vatican, well it is a medieval monastery writ global.
During the Spanish Civil War, to avoid that conflict Andorra pretended to be French, and then to avoid World War II to avoid that conflict it switched to pretend to be neutral Spain. Dual nationality can be handy. San Marino supported fascist Italy but did not declare war on anyone while the Italians lost their black shirts at the casino in Monaco. During the war many (of the few) Liechtensteineans (take that spell checker!) embraced Austrian Nazism, but after the war they dusted off neutral Swiss cow bells. During World War II the German dismembered Luxembourg and its steel went into tanks, while Malta was bombed to ruination.
Luxembourg has laboured to integrate itself into Europe and the UN, and Malta has trod the path of de-colonisation along with many other African and Asian states though it seldom associated itself with them.
I am ready for Eggheads! I can distinguish Monaco from Monte Carlo, and I know how the Grimaldis got the title prince, and I am telling all! First, Mount Charles in Italian is Monte Carlo, and it is a rocky rise named for an earlier Grimaldi, and the area now is where the Croesus clan lives, as in ‘as rich as Croesus.’ Monaco City is where the casino and historic belle époque buildings are to be found.
The first Grimaldis who seized the area and ruled by the sword were nautical pirates who tired of salt water. One of them, trying to establish the legitimacy of his rule, wrote letters sent by couriers to all manner of dukes, kings, princes, popes, and signed himself as Prince of Monaco. After doing this for years and getting little response, because it was convenient in a geopolitical struggle a king of Spain wrote back and addressed him as prince to secure access for shipping to and from Naples.
Well, thereafter this Grimaldi make sure anyone and everyone knew that the King of Spain said he was a prince, and that made it so! Does that still work?
Liechtenstein is the only country in the world named after a family. Roy Licthenstein is no relation. or maybe he is and just cannot spell.
It is alleged that San Marino hosted about 100,000 refugees from World War II, about ten times the resident population. Many were Jews escaping from the German killing machine in 1943. I did find that number hard to credit.
The mechanical Turk consulted the algorithms and the stars and recommended this title after I had read concise histories of several European countries. I bit out of (idle) curiosity.
GoodReads meta-data is 344 pages, rated 3.91 by 66 litizens.
Genre: Hybrid – academic krimi.
Verdict: Different.
In which the untenured professor of industrial sociology Stanley interviews female workers about job satisfaction and is almost murdered, almost loses his wife, and does not get tenure. But learns a lot about the specialised porn film industry in Los Angeles, far away from home in small-town, down-state Illinois.
When the opportunity arises to go to LA and interview a cohort of workers the hapless professor is quickly in way over his head, but perseveres. After all he knows how to interview people, so he starts interviewing people and when one of them is murdered he keeps on interviewing, and adding things up.
The investigating police officer starts out as a stereotype but there is more to him than meets the cliché, and that is nicely done. The character are differentiated, and the setting is, well, distinctive. Likewise his wife proves more than a match for the odd circumstances. These good qualities are diluted by a denouement that is too much deus ex machina for this reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, 4.67 by a paltry three litizens. Read faster you lot!
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Razor tongue strikes again.
The redoubtable Maggie has been burrowing away in Romania when…. This is the fourth title in Bailes’s series of tributes to the Universal Horror films. In her archeological pursuits Maggie usually works with Amy. Confronted with a problem on a dig, they had a division of labor; Amy retires to the library to research it, while Maggie hits it with a spade to see what happens.
The title gives away quite a bit, but Maggie didn’t read it and when trudging through the snow during a winter storm in the Carpathian Mountains she is glad of a welcome and a warm fire in the Gothic castle on the hilltop; she shows no surprise to meet the Lord….Dracula. He’s kindly old gent, bit pale, but it is deep in a long winter, and he keeps telling her to unwrap the scarf from her neck… Keep the spade handy, Maggie! Readers want you on deck for later titles in this series.
The time line is fractured but immortals like Dracula don’t wear watches and the cast of characters got lost on me. I did think too much was made of the English village doctor in the first third of the book and then he more or less disappears. But in general Bailes ties up all the loose ends by the last page! Can one say of the Count: The End?
Robin Bailes
Bailes hosts a zinger You Tube channel called My Dark Corner of this Sick World on which he savages bad movies once a week, and more. Highly recommended for the brilliant editing and razor sharp commentary in 5 – 7 minutes. Plus you can chart his ever changing hair styles and speculate on the reasons why at no extra charge.
A Concise History of Bulgaria (2d ed) (2005) by Richard Crampton.
Goodreads meta-data is 287 pages, rate 3.71 by 114 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: Be glad, be very glad….
Bulgars are not Slavs and they were not always all Christians either. One early Bulgar ruler negotiated with the Roman Pontiff and the Byzantine Prelate for the best terms to convert the kingdom to Christianity. This episode seems to prefigure much of the following history for the Bulgars, dealing with internal divisions between Bulgars and Slavs, while holding off two powerful neighbours. By the way he got the best deal from Constantinople though later it was reneged. That, too, recurred: Deal followed by no deal.
When the Bulgarian Empire waxed it needed a common language for cadastral lists, i.e., tax collection by another name. Cyrillic script was developed within its borders for that purpose. At times the Bulgarian lands reached from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea.
The bigger it got, the bigger target it became for Magyars, Serbs, Russians, Greeks (inevitably Byzantine tax collectors), and finally the Ottomans who were less inclined to negotiate than the Byzantines had been. Later enemies of the Ottomans saw in the Bulgars an ally.
Bulgaria and Bulgarians inevitably were sucked into the recurrent wars between Russia and Turkey, each side quick to take revenge on the smaller, third party. Bulgarians long saw Russians, because of Christianity, as saviours. In 1878 Russians and Ottomans agreed to permit a Bulgarian state, but later the same year the Treaty of Berlin pared down its territory to weaken it. The result was to dispossess many ethnic Bulgarians whose cause became the main foreign policy target for successive Bulgarian regimes, justifying the Serbian war (1908), the First Balkan War (1912), and the Second Balkan War (1913), and World War I allied with Germany and with the ancient enemy, the Ottomans in return from promises of new borders that would encompass all Bulgarians (and some others besides).
An Ottoman army officer in the First Balkan War, Kemal Ataturk, envied Bulgarians their unity, nationalism, and language. While the Ottoman Empire was gigantic in comparison, it was also disorganised, dispirited, and disunited. There was nearly nothing in common to rally the troops. Later when he became the philosopher-king of Turkey, he created a Turkish language and a panoply of national symbols to match those he had seen among Bulgars.
In the Great War Bulgarian troops held off an Allied Expeditionary Force operating from Greece for years, despite being outnumbered and outgunned at times. But the human and material cost was considerable with dead, wounded, and displaced refugees. In the Treaty of Versailles it lost considerable ground and several hundred thousand ethnic Bulgars migrated into its new, reduced borders, causing many dislocations. Tsar Boris III initiated a long period of authoritarian rule in 1918.
With the intrusion of German hegemony in the Balkans, Boris III entered into a passive alliance with the Nazi regime. In return for this association Bulgaria was to occupy Macedonia, lately part of Yugoslavia, and Thrace, taken from Greece, and there was a complicated arrangement with Rumania, too. True many residents of these territories were ethnic Bulgars, but not all. These early gains were popular until resistance in them occurred and casualty lists arrived. Boris insisted that the Bulgarian army, undertrained and ill equiped with few capable officers, was totally committed in these territories, and had to remain as a buffer and deterrent to any attack from Greece or Turkey. Ergo Bulgaria did not take part in the war on the Soviet Union, though German troops and supplies for the East passed through its lands. Pressure from the Germans led to anti-Jewish measures but Bulgaria made little effort to enforce them. Also to placate Hitler it did declare war on England and the USA, a symbolic gesture that led the Allies to seize Bulgarian assets, few as they were, and to bomb Sofia and elsewhere. It never did declare war on the Soviet Union despite increasing German pressure.
In the 1930s there had been parliamentary elections in Bulgaria in which voting was compulsory for men and optional for married women. These affairs were carefully managed, administered, and manipulated to get the result Boris desired (as in Florida and Texas), but nonetheless they occurred and sometimes threw up surprises. Remember it was not until 1979 that woman got the vote in enlightened, Western, and democratic Switzerland.
Tsar Boris III
In August 1943 upon returning from a meeting with Hitler, who raged at him about deporting Jews more than fighting the Soviets, at age 49 Boris died. Rumours of poison soon circulated. He was succeeded by his six year old son and a coup d’état followed. Thence came a succession of governments, some self-appointed, and efforts to steer between the Soviets and Nazis, pleasing neither. Bulgarian Jews who were Bulgarian citizens in Bulgaria had the best chances of survival, but not the Bulgarian Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens even if in Bulgaria, still less those from areas outside the map lines of Bulgaria at the time. It is no doubt a more complicated and messy story. In latter 1944 the Bulgarian government dominated by communists changed sides and declared war on Germany in a desperate effort to assuage the all-conquering Soviets. Italy’s 1943 switch saved it from much Allied retribution but the Bulgarians had no such luck with the Soviets who used the Bulgarian Army in the remainder of the war as cannon fodder and then in the subsequent peace punished Bulgaria as a defeated enemy.
While there were plenty of home-grown anti-semites, Germanophiles, and fascists in Bulgaria in these pages they never seemed to have much influence on the government or army. Don’t know quite why even after reading this book, when such types were so influential in other places.
The Western allies left Eastern Europe to the Soviets and by 1947 Bulgarian was a one-party state with a monotone press. The repression that followed was, well, repressive, violent, erratic, relentless…. Bulgaria became more Red than Moscow most of the time. When regime change came to Moscow, Bulgaria’s north star was gone. The incredulous response of Bulgarian communists to the indifference of Gorbachev’s Russia would be amusing were it not so destructive. As long as Bulgaria was Red, Moscow had subsidised it, but with Gorbachev the subsidies stopped…abruptly. The result was a disaster that got worse over the following years of the New World Disorder.
With Russia indifferent, the only choice was the West, i.e., the EU and NATO, and Bulgaria has tried to fit into both, but, well, the rule of law is one problem it has in common with Romania (and now Washington DC).
The book ends with a nice reflection on the vexed history of this crossroads, that inevitably is at the margins of either East or West.
Richard Crampton
It seems to have been my week in the Balkans. On the night table is Robin Bailes’s The Immortal Dracula (2020) set in contemporary Transylvania and on the day table is this title.
Bulgaria has tried to manage two large, aggressive neighbours in Germany and the Russia. When I read about Finland’s efforts during World War II to work with but not join the Nazi Axis powers, there were a few allusions to Bulgaria’s efforts to ally with Nazi Germany on its own terms. How did that work? Time to find out. See above.
GoodReads meta-data is 285 pages rated 3.85 by 310 litizens.
Genre: Mythology.
Verdict: The beginning and the end.
Life is a battle and life is a journey, it is often said. If so, then Homer covered it all. Ten years of battle followed by ten years of journey.
Manguel passes lightly over the caltrops that plague classrooms, was there anyone called Homer, did he live at the right time, were the texts written, could he have witnessed anything, was there a Troy,…? (We visited the site of Troy in 2015.) These obstacles often obstruct college readers. Well, I know they impeded my first readings, but Homer rises above the pygmies and prevails. While those controversies come and go with the tide of tenured controversialists, Homer endures.
The book charts the passage of the two books through European culture with the sure hand that Manguel always displays, and with some of the most compelling insights this reader has ever encountered in a lifetime of reading (about) these texts. The obvious comparison is the essayist Umberto Eco, who has become a showman, all form and no substance; in contrast, Manguel has both form and substance to spare.
For example, he lays bare the love stories within the Iliad, missed by those who see only a war story, that is, Achilles for slave girl Briseis, Patroclus for comrade in arms Achilles, Hector for wife Andromache and she for him, Priam for son Hector, and Paris for ineffable Helen. All of these are blotted out by the dark fate that brings them into collision. Love does not conquer all but is omnipresent. By the way, the only survivor in the foregoing list of lovers is Briseis.
When Hector and Andromache, he holding their young son, Astyanax, embrace Homer closes this scene of familial love by saying ‘the bright helmet lay at his feet.’ The fate it betokens is inescapable.
Yes, it is war, and there is killing, but as Manguel notes Homer describes the deaths of warriors individually and no two of them are the same. He gives to each of the fallen a name and a distinctive turn of phrase, more than sixty of them. There are no unknown soldiers here in mass graves. Each of them is a tragedy in which a noble spirit becomes a thing dragged in the dust. If it is a war story it is also the first anti-war story in its merciless detail.
A recent translation.
Both Achilles and Odysseus tried to dodge the draft. Achilles hid among women while Odysseus feigned madness by plowing sand. But neither could escape fate. In the afterlife Achilles laments the fate that befell him, though he partly chose it, making it all the more bitter.
In his decade-long return Odysseus remained staunch to Penelope, giving way only to goddesses where he had no choice. The one mortal woman who came to him, he politely declined. Circe and Calypso he could not decline. (Try that one sometime with Mrs and see what happens.)
I liked the story of Alexander Pope’s rendering of the Iliad. Pope knew no Greek (and only some autodidact Latin) and thus did not work from a Greek text or an early Latin version, but rather compiled the existing English translations and synthesised them into a single text, and then edited it to get the right effects. While the result is thus not a translation from the Greek text, the emotional resonance is perfect.
While Manguel covers much he could not mention Madeline Miller’s beautiful novel Circe (2018) and I wish he could have done so. Perhaps in a second edition. What would he make of this splendid novel? Nor does he mention the drum-beat cadence of Christoper Logue’s War Music (2003), a translation of parts of the Iliad. Nor does he mention any of the audible versions now available, though he does note some of the public recitations that have become a fashion. I was tempted by one in Sydney last year until I realised that it was standing room only. That is, to say the audience was to stand for three three-hour sessions over three nights. Include me out.
Nor does he mention Homer’s contention that heroes need poets more than vice versa for without poets to tell the story and make it memorable no one would know what heroes have done. Poets can versify other things, if there are no heroes, but for heroes without poets there is only oblivion. I looked for the passage just now but could not find it readily. Perhaps a reader can lay eyes on it.
Alberto Mangual
There is no discussion of the philology of the foundation text of either poem. Indeed, is there a foundation text somewhere in the world? I assume the Homeric texts came to Europe through Spain via Arabic translations, but have no confirmation for that assumption from these pages. Hold on, Wikipedia has it that the oldest complete, authentic text was middle Greek from the Tenth Century AD in Byzantium. It was the basis for Latin translations at the time, but has since itself been lost, either to a private collector, or – more likely – to destruction. A Latin translation might have been taken to Florence when the Medici’s offered a bounty for such treasures.
A title in a series concerning books that changed the world, I have read at least two others in this series. One was adequate and the other not, but this one rises well above the series as a stand alone title.
GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 3.37 by fifteen litizens.
Genre: biography.
Verdict: [See Edmund Burke]
Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945) was head of the central intelligence service, the Abwehr, in Nazi Germany from January 1935 to December 1944, appointed by Adolf Hitler. He went into the Imperial German Navy in 1912 and during the Great War served on a U-Boat, based at Pola on the Adriatic Coast of Austria, and we were there a couple of years ago on the way to Venice, sailing in South American waters during World War I. Fluent in Spanish, while doing so, he set up coast watching networks that observed Allied shipping movements. This was the beginning of his career as a spy.
His boat was interned with engine failure in Chile, and he made his own way back to Germany by stealth. Another credit in his spy book. He passed himself off as an Argentine when travelling through Bristol while the war was still on and went on to the neutral Netherlands and from there to Kiel.
The 1918 armistice took most German seamen by surprise, having had a steady diet of propaganda, they expected the British to capitulate at any moment, and had little idea how dire the military situation was, and even less knowledge of the privations on the home front. They were either isolated at sequestered naval bases far from the front and cosseted from the privations of citizens, or in ships far away at sea.
In the disorder of 1918-1920 that followed the armistice he took the side of order, as he understood it, and helped organise Freikorps resistance to the Spartacus Revolt. There is no doubt he feared a Red Revolution like that in Russia and he did everything he could to thwart such an occurrence in Germany, though how much he would have known about the Red Terror at the time is unclear to this reader.
These were confused and confusing times. He spend much of the 1920’s on missions to Spain as the Weimar Republic tried to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles restrictions on ship building with Iberian complicity. In so doing, he built up a network of agents and contacts that would came to serve other purposes.
When his name kept cropping up in League of Nations inquiries into Versailles compliance, the Navy hid him on one of the ageing battleships it had been allowed to retain, which he commanded for three years. His reputation as a mastermind of intelligence and his demonstrated ability as a commander brought him back to Berlin at a time when the intelligence services were being re-organised and were free(r) from conditions in the Versailles Treaty.
While centralisation was opposed by the many independent intelligence services, the compromise was to put a Navy, rather than an Army, man on top, and that was Canaris just as the Nazis completed the seizure of power, which inevitably led to another re-organisation with the SS, the SD, the SA, and the Gestapo dividing up the great game. Somehow Canaris steered through these sharks to keep the Abwehr independent and focussed externally on military matters. To do so he maintained good relations with Rudolph Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and the other Nazi cannibals. He must have joined the Party but I cannot remember right now. Through the 1930s he was drawn ever more tightly into the regime, and promoted to fleet admiral.
Along with many others in the armed forces as Hitler’s determination for war developed, Canaris wrote history memoranda. History memoranda are written and filed so that the author can say later, ‘I told you so!’ But without making any great effort to act on the conclusions. For an example see the career of Robert McNamra. This author takes those memoranda at face value, but this reader sees cynicism in many of them, including those by Canaris. He, like many generals, wanted to slow the rush to war, the better for Germany to be prepared. Later he was revolted by the exterminations that swiftly followed in Poland, but soon concluded there was nothing he could do about them.
The endless back-biting, power plays, undermining, arrogance, and selfish self-promotion among the Nazi leadership is impressive. It seems incessant with every kind of calumny employed. Of course, such goal displacement is common in any organisation, however, in this instance it is such a difference of degree to be a difference of kind. Lies, distortions, half-truths, malicious rumours are all the currency of promotion to the point of killing rivals, all the while putting everything in writing. Canaris was a master of this game, though he himself seldom wrote down anything, but he was such a big target that he attracted a host of enemies who compiled dossiers on his every move and utterance. No fool, he must have known that. But he always seemed to have a credible response to the repeated accusations.
From 1935 to 1940 there was occasional talk about a coup d’état to replace Hitler, but it was only desultory talk. The author blames the Allies at times for not supporting such clandestine efforts, but any Allied support, no matter how subtle, might equally have galvanised a furious nationalistic response. From go to whoa, Germans were responsible for what Germans did. End of story.
In July 1944 his name was linked to the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler. The fact that no evidence supported such an association was itself taken as proof of how devious he was, and he was arrested, isolated, humiliated, tortured, and executed, as were scores of others who had nothing to do with the plot or plotters. It was convenient for generals and diplomats to blame everything on the Abwehr, which after all had not won the war for Germany. So they did, hoping in vain to save themselves.
The book ends at his execution with no concluding chapter. Too bad. I came to see him as something like Albert Speer, a technician who played all sides of the table. There is no doubt he shielded many enemies of Hitler, and saved some Jews, and did not energetically promote the aggressive war, and discouraged Spain from embracing the Nazi regime, but all this can be seen as investments in alternative futures, and that seems in keeping with a man who had no deep convictions. On the other hand the Abwehr provided a constant stream of valuable tactical and strategic intelligence to the German cause.
While I always found this enigmatic character curious, I have had little taste to read about the terrible times and things in which he was involved. Still I ventured to read the Kindle sample of this biography of Canaris, and morbid curiosity kept me going.
The biggest question for me is why the Germans did not realise that the Enigma Machine had been compromised. It was originally a navy device and Canaris must have had knowledge of it. It is not mentioned in these pages, according to my memory. It is comparable to the German failure to realise in World War I that the British had cracked their most secret code even as the evidence mounted. On this latter instance see Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram, which is discussed elsewhere in this blog. The obvious answer in both cases is arrogance. In WWI the Germans did not believe their complicated cypher could not broken. Period. In WWII the Germans could not believe their complicated cypher machine could be broken. Wrong both times.
GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.66 by 2195 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
Verdict: Amen, Sister! Tell it!
In which are chronicled the further adventures of Professor Jason Fitger who has become chair of the fractious Department of English at Payne State University after the longterm incumbent decamped over the summer. Fitger is immediately deluged with a backlog of administrative paperwork, including a Vision Statement. To be budgeted each department must submit such a statement that meets the approval of the Provost.
The University President’s main task is constantly lobbying the state legislature to slow the continued, inexorable erosion of Payne’s appropriation. In her absence the University is run by the above mentioned Provost who is seldom seen, and any effort to secure an appointment fails. Indeed some long-serving deans have never seen this shadowy provost.
In the age of McKinsey management, Payne University is dedicated to cutting deadwood, increasing quality, and turning anything and everything to a profit. The Business School has become a Forbidden City unto itself selling degrees. The sciences have been tailored into applied research and development laboratories for the industries owned by Payne donors. Drug and medical insurance companies fund and own the life sciences. Those sciences that could not secure private funding have disappeared, e.g., astronomy, with the planetarium now used for storage. The University president dreams of a future where there will be a Division of Numbers and a Division of Words, and she will then have only two direct reports to delegate to the Provost.
All the while, the administration has grown from one building to three while the student population has increased and the faculty members decreased. (Once remodelled the planetarium will be the fourth admin building.) Faculty members are constantly summoned to training sessions to keep abreast of Payne’s many, conflicting priorities. Indeed, one member of the English department has been dispatched to sensitivity training for twelve consecutive weeks. There are rumours that the consultant who runs the sensitive training is from North Korea.
A nefarious plan is afoot to eradicate all humanities departments at Payne State University. How could that be done? Not so hard when one thinks about it. Get this! That Vision Statement must be endorsed unanimously by all members of the Department with signatures! That is the killer. There was, there is, there never will be anything that all members of the English Department will agree on! Nothing.
The first line of defence is to dispute the composition of the Department. Do all the adjuncts, associates, emerita, or honoraries count? Do the drudges who do all the work count? The part-timers, the temporaries, the underpaid grad students, and the unpaid interns: Do these transitory peons four-to-a-room in the dank and dark basement count? Does anyone even know their names? Fitger’s forays into the cellar do not go well.
When the academic year begins the English Department has no Vision Statement and hence no budget, but it has more students than any other department on campus, students whose expectations have been inflated by the endless trumpeting of all those administrators recruiting students (= cash flow). It falls to Fitger to cajole, coax, bribe, coerce, or blackmail members of the English Department one-by-one to endorse a statement while dealing with the flood of students. Oh, if it were only that easy. Then there is a really big Kapow!
The catalyst for the explosion is the Shakespeare requirement. All majors in English have had to do a one semester course on the Bard since time out of mind, taught by the most senior member of the Department who is long past retirement age but whose pension was looted by corporate shenanigans facilitated by McKinsey management. His whole being is embodied in this course. He is also the only member of the faculty with a record of publications making him untouchable. But the Vision Statement has opened the whole question of the curriculum, and from the can wriggle the worms of post-modernism in its many forms. The Bard may only survive because the Po-Moeans cannot agree what should replace him.
Then comes the Mission Statement followed by ……
Ah, life without a budget means, among other things, that meetings cannot be held because meeting rooms are rented to departments. In the same McKinsey spirit only the student toilets and hallways are cleaned. To have offices and faculty toilets cleaned, Departments have to pay for it from the budget. No budget, no meetings and no cleaning. Still less can Fitger’s desk-top computer be repaired, nor the broken window replaced in the Department secretary’s office. Though as long as the window is in disrepair the contents of the office are not insured, as he is repeatedly reminded by the Safety Officer whose job is to harass him, not to repair the window.
Lest a reader think this rent-seeking is fantasy, when a director of a unit I was enjoined to prepare a budget that included renting the teaching rooms we used. Nothing came of it at the time but it was a trial run.
Venality, back stabbing, undermining, intransigence, solipsism, this book has it all. Innocent readers might think it is exaggerated.
Rather than agree and survive, members of the English department would rather disagree and perish. This revealed preference partly arises from a failure of imagination. Tenured members of the Department cannot imagine their own demise. Never fear, that unseen Provost can imagine it. In short, tenure means that a professor is entitled to a specific job, but if that job itself is eliminated, there is nothing to which that professor is tenured. If I am a tenured professor of Albanian political theory, when the position of professor of Albanian political theory is eliminated then so am I.
In the end Fitger proves what everyone thought. He is much too inept (nice) to be a head of department, and that is what saves him, and the Department. The last service done by the Shakespeare teacher is something to ponder.
Julie Schumacher
I waited for more than year for this title to become available on Kindle but it didn’t so I got it in hardback, because I could wait no longer to read of Fitger’s latest escapades.
With the great personal restraint I have long cultivated, I have not told a story about the conversation I once had when acting dean with the head of a department about accommodating curriculum changes in which he happily agreed that (1) he and his department would not cooperate and (2) as an inevitable result there would be fewer of them. So be it! Compromise was not an option. Sssh. The cognoscenti will know which department that was.
