How often has the office of Vice President been vacant? Or in other words, how many US presidents have served part or all of a term in office without a vice-president? More than one might think. Read on for the answer and the explanation.
Eighteen presidential terms were served in whole or in part without a VP. One president who served two terms had no VP for part of each term. A blank space in the VP column means that the VP became President.
The situation can arise in one of two ways. The incumbent president may leave office by death or resignation, yielding to the VP leaving no VP. Or the opposite may occur. The VP may leave office through resignation or death. In either case once the office of VP is vacant and there was until the 25th Amendment in 1967 no constitutional means to fill the office. Two VPs and one President have resigned.
That is about 40 years without a VP between 1812 and 1974. That is about a quarter of the total years.
The most curious example would be Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President who succeeded Abraham Lincoln. If he had been impeached there was no Vice President to succeed him. According to the constitution at the time the office would have gone to the President of Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio (who was an advocate of female suffrage), and that made him unacceptable to many Senators. To further complicate the picture, Wade had not been re-elected and, as a lame duck, his term would expire before the remainder of Johnson’s term, and that would mean… [Trouble].
Three incumbent presidents were not re-nominated by their party: Tyler, Fillmore, and Pierce. In the cases of Tyler and Fillmore that was due to internal ruptures of the Whig Party. The Democrats declined to re-nominate Pierce.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.17 from 190 litizens.
Genre: policier.
Verdict: It grew on me.
The first entry is the series Seymour of Special Branch set in 1906. Young Seymour has been recruited to Special Branch due to his several languages, because his anglicised name hides Italian and Russian ancestors, and his ambition. His remit is the docklands of London’s East End — long before it became the upmarket enclave it is today — where migrants speak those languages and more.
Then one fine day he is called to the FO (Foreign Office) from whence he travels to Trieste to find out what has become of the British consul, one Lomax by name, who has gone missing. Because Seymour is not a gentleman by birth some in the FO do not want to send him, but others suggest that his background and work with foreigners equip him for the job. Off he goes.
Ah, Trieste. He finds a different world there which he slowly absorbs and the absent Lomax dominates the story. Seymour poses as a low-level FO messenger charged with reporting on Lomax’s disappearance. He questions the office staff in the consulate, Lomax’s friends, and the police. In doing so he learns about the tensions in Trieste between the Austrian masters and the Italian population leavened with Serbs and Croats, along with the Big Enders and Little Enders. That a Great War might be sparked by a small event is presaged with a heavy hand.
Even better is the slow development of a picture of Lomax, who at first blush seemed to be an alcoholic idler, but as Seymour peels away the surface he finds depths in Lomax: ethical, technical, artistic, and political, belied by his al fresco life at a café.
In a minor register the tug of war between the city police, who are Italian, and the Austrian secret police is well handled. They cooperate reluctantly but are bitter rivals for status and budget. Linguistic nationalism is one of the master narratives.
The futurist artists with whom Lomax mixed are also brought to life that made me appreciate Italian Futurism’s effort to break with the past through art.
The parallel to the murder the Archduke at Sarajevo is evoked quite explicitly with unerring hindsight. Likewise Seymour’s dalliance with the only young woman in the novel is strictly routine. On the plus side, Seymour does grow up a little in the story, and thinks twice about some premature conclusions, particularly about Lomax.
Michael Pearce. He has at least two other series of krimis which I will sample and report.
I read it while we were in (the once Free Territory of) Trieste: having seen Miramar, Casa Revoltella, the grand canal, piazza central, and so on.
This sign was still there when we here in Trieste in September 2019.
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (2005) by Roger Pearson.
GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.86 by 140 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: As irreverent as the man himself.
No one can say nothing about Voltaire (1694-1778), good or bad, that he did not say himself. Everything about the man was fiction, starting with his name, and that is a fact. Born François-Marie Arouet he later took the name we know him by, and PhDs since have tried to figure out why he needed a nom de plume since he bragged no end about what he wrote, and why that name and not something grander, say, like Almighty.
The obvious answers do not lead to tenure: He wanted to be different so he made up his own name. And why that one? He was a wilful brat, the youngest and last child, much indulged, and called, as a result, le petit volontaire. Translate it this way: petit means small, of course, and volontaire means will, so the little wilful one, i.e., brat. See: volontaire becomes Voltaire by striking out the middle letters ‘on.’ Instead the PhDs have become anagramalogists and offer a host of convoluted reasoning to arrive at tenure via the obscure. Occasionally he ennobled himself with a ‘de’ in front of Voltaire. This jeu has likewise kindled a blaze of academic gibberish.
From this start he became, like an air-headed celebrity today on morning television, famous for being fatuous. Many people today will recognise the name but be unable — I have asked a few on trains bound for Wynyard — to name any of his accomplishments. Start here: he published about ten million words in every literary form, plays, poems, odes, essays, novels, history, and science in two thousand pamphlets, plays, histories, novels, essays, and books. In addition he conducted empirical scientific research into optics, chemistry, and more. Put that in the Research Quality Framework! Then there are the letters, thousands of them, most composed to last.
All of this in an age of control through censorship that a modern McKinsey manager can only dream of. He was twice convicted of naughtiness and did porridge for eleven months the first time. That lesson was learned. The second time he arranged for a bribe, er, a Florida campaign donation to the jailer. On other occasions when the McKinsey managers of the day were intent on KPI-ing him he found it best to absent himself to the countryside where few Parisians ventured, and then to England and Switzerland. Then there were at least two beatings he suffered, arranged by people who felt offended by his words. It is all theatrical enough to make Orson Welles jealous.
How’s this for a story. When he needed money, on the advice of a mathematician, he borrowed money to buy enough tickets in a state lottery to win a packet while paying back the loan and to be rich thereafter. He used this wealth to claim his father’s inheritance which had been tied up in Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Again a well-placed campaign contribution to the Florida attorney-general freed up his inheritance and he was set for life. Others might then have retired to the bottom of a bottle, or to an estate to kill defenceless creatures. Not so for Voltaire who went for bigger game that could fight back and did – mainly the corrupt Church. He also thereafter remained a lifelong investor and an avid follower of financial news.
He liked to claim at dinner parties, offering many details, that he had been sexually abused as an altar boy. (Is such a thing possible in the age of Enlightenment, one asks, putting down the newspaper.) This experience, he went on to say, explained all of his failings, and none of his successes. Noel Coward was a bore in comparison.
He admired the intellectual freedom and social atmosphere in the Netherlands and later in England, but hated the weather and the food in those northern reaches. Chief of his inspirations were William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. Some say that the story of the apple falling on Newtown started with Voltaire’s quill.
He often published books anonymously or with pseudonyms to escape the wraith of royal and ecclesiastical censors. Let’s remember how serious that is: The royal censor had an axe and the ecclesiastical censor had a bonfire.
Thereafter some printers would blackmail him with threats of exposure unless he paid up! That was bad. What was stupid was that he could not help but brag about these anonymous publications in letters which blew his cover. What a windbag he was. Though there seems to be no evidence that he reviewed his own pseudonymous works as Anthony Burgess did. That is a trick he missed, one of few.
Polymath he was and spent weeks and many francs doing experiments in physics the better to understand Newtown so as to explain him to Francophones in the baleful grip of René Descartes’s metaphysics.
This frail and anaemic looking man never lacked for energy or wit. While often ill and always complaining of bad health he could never sit still, not even for painting and sculpture to immortalise him. He grew wealthy with his endless negotiations and investments, and at about sixty, persona non grata from France, Prussia, Saxony, Austria, and elsewhere he took up residence in the semi-autonomous canton of Gex across the lake from Geneva to continue his war on ignorance and corruption central, namely the Church.
He was free; he was rich; he was old; he could say what he wanted without trying duck and cover. He let loose with a barrage of invective, took up lost causes of individual victims of the Church, besieged officialdom in five countries with petitions and letters. An avalanche of pamphlets, plays, essays ridiculing, admonishing, mocking the high and mighty came forth. More than once he double-tracked: dictating one essay to a secretary, while with quill in hand he was writing another.
He was a Euro celebrity and the world came to him. He held court with hundreds come to catch a glimpse of him. To handle the crowd and to give the locals a show, he hired a dozen retired dragoons as an honour guard and decked them out in silk and ermine. He invested heavily in watchmaking and gave clocks to anyone and everyone to develop a market. He even gave one to the Pope, which was accepted, much to his delight, since it was made by a Huguenot protestant. That somewhere in the interstices of the Vatican time was regulated by a protestant technology amused him no end, and of course he could not keep this to himself so he spread the word, which eventually got to Rome and the clock came back. That amused him even more. The Church giving back loot rather than taking it, as it usually did.
As an aged, valetudinarian, ectomorph, celebrity he bought property and was a fearsome negotiator. Vendors liked the idea of selling to this celebrity, so he first beat the best price down, then quibbled about the timing and currency of payments, then wanted complicated buyback provisions, and more. At first he did this to ensure that his de facto wife would have a cash settlement if and when he died before the descent of distant relatives, blackmailing printers, tax famers, Church vultures, and other shysters. But then she died, and he kept doing it as sport. He outlived most of the people who agreed to his terms and got richer and richer. Yet he argued the margin with publishers, pursued plagiarised editions with vigour, and pinched every sou, while spending freely.
He likewise negotiated with the local priest, bishop, and archbishop the terms under which Easter would be celebrated in Gex, and he was so persistent, dogged, and slick that he always got his way though in one instance Easter was delayed while he pressed his case. God had to wait for Voltaire! He loved that.
Like Thomas Jefferson he was a deist, that is, one who believed god, an intelligent being, made the world. It was then up to us to make the most of it. This deity did not expect to be worshipped and did not intervene in the world. The Church that promoted those beliefs was an elaborate hoax to control the unwary to the benefit of the Pat Robertson wannabes. Jefferson’s deism is ignored by all those small government types who quote him, yet it is there on the walls of the memorial in DC for those that have eyes to read.
While he combatted the Inquisition at every turn, seeing it to be the logical conclusion of The Roman Catholic Church, he was an incorrigible and unpleasant anti-semite.
While he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were contemporaries with Volatire the senior who encouraged the young Rousseau, but…. There are several ‘buts.’ Though they cohabited in Paris and later in Geneva, but never met face-to-face. Voltaire criticised some of Rousseau’s essays and the thin-skinned Rousseau bristled and never forgave or forgot. (Check out Jacq’s autobiographical Confessions, which surely take a prize for pettiness.)
In heady early days of the French Revolution its leaders legitimated themselves by gathering to Paris its intellectual precedents. Huh? Yes, well, they dug up Rousseau and Voltaire and installed them in the Panthéon. They have since been across the aisle from each other. I rather think whoever did that got the joke. The Panthéon was one the first places I went to on my first visit to Paris, and there they were, and still are.
Roger Pearson
I had no ambition to read a biography of Voltaire but the stars aligned to direct me to it, and I — weak reed that I am — bent. When harvesting titles from tripfiction.com for our 2019 sojourn in Mitteleuropa links led me from Austria to Switzerland (because I have found virtually no interesting krimis set in the land of cuckoo clock I looked*). One of the titles listed there was ‘A Visit from Voltaire’ by Dinah Lee Küng (2004). I asked for a sample (and will get to it). And once I did that the Amazon mechanical Turk spat out other suggestions, including this title.
Earlier in the week when dog walking we encountered Rousseau the poodle whose predecessor, we recalled, was Voltaire. See the alignment of the stars is apparent in retrospect. It’s that kind of neighbourhood.
All of this was confirmed on our travels when I noticed a picture of Voltaire in the reception lobby of the hotel in Venice, though I forgot to ask why it was there. Still it meant Voltaire expected me to do the homework.
*Before the pedants strike, let me add I have read Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but his stories are generic, not rooted in Switzerland, and Friedrich Glauser of whom the less said, the better. I started Tracee de Hahn’s ‘Swiss Vendetta’ but how can I read anything written by a Tracee? ‘Night Train to Lisbon’ starts in Zurich but, well, the train left. Maybe it was Geneva, and that is the point. The origin was just a rainy day anywhere.
IMDb meta-data is twenty-seven hour-long episodes rated 8.0 by 51,306 idiots.
Genre: Derivative
Verdict: The Bickersons in space. (Well, not that good, but like that.)
A group of Star Trek wannabes mix with CGIs while imitating a Seinfeld episode. Oh hum.
No characters, no character development, no narrative, no mystery, no awe, no story, just a few ever more lame gags that could have been situated anywhere, decorated with a lot of rubber face masks. The mental level was frat boy with keg.
I did like Arbor Day and the best use of the Kardasians, but not enough to persevere after episode three. It was mercifully free of the repetitive high volume shoot ‘em ups that now comprise Star Trek movies.
Though in one shoot-out the determined efforts of one alleged character to present right profile regardless of the circumstances was apparent. So was the absence of officers from the bridge on several occasions. Is that anyway to run a starship?
The name Orville I suppose is a tribute but nothing is made of it. Apollo 11 carried a splinter of a strut from Kitty Hawk lend by the Smithsonian Museum. (Figure it out, Bro.) Now that was a tribute.
GoodReads meta-data is 254 pages, rated 3.69 by 397 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: I wanted to like it but didn’t.
Setup: In November 1941 Edgar Rice Burroughs, yep père Tarzan himself, has taken a vacation in Waikiki to finish a book free from distractions of home and hearth. One of his sons has tagged along to carry the luggage. Burroughs is a man’s man and mixes with the uniforms that populate Hawaii, and distrusts 40% of the local population who are Japanese. In addition there is German in the next door cottage, who can only be up to no good.
A ’man’s man’ to be sure but at this time in his life Ed B was a teetotaller who did not smoke. Real men did both to prove their manhood. However Ed paid his manly dues by killing defenceless creatures for sport, and making sexist and racist remarks.
ERB was prone to bad dreams (caused by indigestion) and these he dutifully recorded in his adventure stories. Hmmm. We can be glad he did not have diarrhoea.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is nice hook at the start that describes the 3000 deaths in the attack on 7 December as murders, and then adds to that total the murder at the start of this story. Clever, but insubstantial. Too much hindsight after that as everyone assumes a war with Japan is coming. More likely many thought that little yellow Nips would not dare take on those manly men.
Enjoyed the description of our home-away-from-home Waikiki as it was in late 1941. While much has since changed some things have not, like Fort DeRussy.
Read it before but doing so again on the Kindle.
Does it really matter what colour trousers each character wears, tan or white, linen or cotton? Max seems to think so, padding out every scene with such useless detail.
Goodreads meta-data is 360 pages, rated 3.4 by 104 litizens.
Genre: chick phil
Verdict: More Voltaire!
Harassed, transplanted mother of three and aspiring novelist caught in a maelstrom of home renovations in an alpine village where school girl French is no match for the Vaudois accent is going spare while husband and father commutes long distances and works longer hours in Geneva saving the world for a Red Cross agency. She is close to breaking when….
Then one Saturday morning in mid-catastrophe of sick children, kaput hot water heater, overnight blizzard, absent husband, an oddly dressed chap appears in the house and who speaks a stilted English and reassures her all is well. She finds that strangely comforting until she realises he is not the doctor in fancy dress come to see her children and that no one else can see him. So it begins.
Misses is well schooled in Topper films and The Ghost and Mrs Muir and knows what not to do – no blurting, no blabbing. Disconcerting though the apparition is, he translates the Vaudois patois into English for her, much to the shock of some of the workmen lounging around the house on the pretext of repairing something. That jolt pleases her no end and she cuts the apparition slack.
Thereafter her visible invisible man is ever present, and he wastes no time in letting her know he is V O L T A I R E and is SHOCKED to learn that she has never read a one of his innumerable works and countless words. Pas un mot! Incroyable! To placate him she sits him down at the PC to read his Wikipedia entry which he begins to edit. They have bonded into the odd couple in this journey.
The author wisely does not try to explain everything in the interest of keeping up the momentum. Where did de V come from? Why is he there? How does she keep from blurting out his presence? How is it that his ectoplasm can strike letters on the keyboard but nothing else, and why does it react so strongly to the smell of coffee? De V adjusts quickly to some things like Wikipedia and he is flummoxed by others like doors. Though the author cannot forbear a tedious backstory. Too bad. That certainly brings the momentum to a halt.
Indeed at halfway through the backstories of the author – boring! – supplants V. That is a fatal error. Her backstories of drunken and lecherous journalists are as dull as the ideological prose such hacks regurgitate everyday. If I wanted to keep up with such twits I could read the Australian newspaper, if it could be delivered to my remote fastness.
Although I did find arresting her story of the effort of an African president, while being interviewed, to rape her as he denounced humanitarian imperialism. She had wanted to question him about the murder of international aid workers in his country. Then she understood why he only granted exclusive interviews to women. Something the hacks had figured out long ago, but did not bother to pass along. Such is the sport. Fortunately the president was a smoker and a heavy ashtray came to hand.
‘Humanitarian imperialism,’ a quick check with Professor Google confirms, is much denounced by PhDs. More than thirty thousand hits on books, articles, symposia, and op-eds from the learned. Nothing surfaced about either rape or murder as the antidote to this scourge.
Back to Vaudois, also amusing was the temerity of the newcomers to question Swiss Rail when a minor accident occurs at the local train station. The incomers raise the question of procedure in rail safety, and a stunned silence follows. No one questions Swiss Federal Railways (SFR, SBB, CFF, FFS, or VFS) by any of its many names. To do so is worse than swearing in church. Gasp!
Dinah Lee Küng
Once an American tourist opened a window on stuffy street car in Zurich and the whole coach load of chattering passengers who had been fanning themselves fell into an astonished silence, shocked that anyone would take such a liberty without seeking written permission from the Federal Council.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.2 by 72 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: A lost picture found.
The set-up: Captain Hugh Drummond, called Bulldog for no reason whatever, embarks on his twentieth film, played in this instance by that irresistible sot, Tom Conway who has his brief way with women, one after another. The fraternity brothers lost count at two. Situation normal.
Bulldog tracks down a set of stolen lead soldiers to find a long lost Anglo-Saxon treasure trove stashed just before the Battle of Hastings. It is a tried and true formula used by Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. Bulldog borrows some gear from Lara Croft and sallies forth with a cast of flunkies and leading ladies in his wake.
This is one of the many studio B quickies done in five days of shooting and subsequently lost to the ravages of indifference, until 2001 when a much deteriorated 16mm print turned up on Ebay from which the You Tube offering derives. It is nearly impossible to watch. The images are stretched, the surface flyblown, and the dialogue out of sync. All too much like a keg party at the House. Think of it as a Salvador Dali version of a film. It is available on DVD now in a cleaned up copy but I am not motivated that far.
GoodReads meta-data is 385 pages, rated 3.84 by 83 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Too much shoot ‘em up, not enough think ‘em up.
Time: 1970s. Place: South Korea.
The US Eighth Army had about 60,000 personnel in South Korea at the time. So many people, so many of them bored, all of them with access to American goods at wholesale prices while across the street from each camp was a thriving blackmarket. Result, a lot of low level crime. Buy the whiskey, cigarettes, radios, washing machines cheap on the base; cross the street and sell them for a profit. Illegal but profitable.
Then again put 60,000 people together in small spaces leading regimented lives, and friction results. Crimes against persons follow. Then add the money in blackmarket transactions and the felony fires flicker.
By the terms of the alliance with South Korea, the Eighth Army polices itself with a Criminal Investigation Division, of which Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are two investigators. They are both lifers and have been doing it a long time.* (This is the thirteen title in the series.) Their names and ways are known.
Both North Korea and South Korea are armed and dangerous. The piracy of the USS Pueblo in 1968 with the subsequent murder of one crewman in captivity, the crippling of two others, and the beating the rest into putty, is fresh in everyone’s mind. Ergo there are a lot of angry GIs who want revenge or at least who will make sure they are not next for the cement mixer.
The air along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) sizzles with tension. Talk about a misnomer, there was then no place on earth so militarised with a million armed men on each side of the line, many of them straining at the bit. It got worse when new North Korea artillery brought Seoul within range.
Bad as all that is, it is worse still in the Joint Security Area, that bubble inside the DMZ where those Blue Huts are with a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) dividing them in half.
The curb between the two is the DML.
JSA is an assignment no grunt wants because it is THE tripwire that (and all who dwell there) would be the first to go. Poof! In principle both sides have free movement within this small area, in practice everyone moves slowly and every move is watched with angry eyes.
Late one night Sueño and Bascom are roused from their cots in Seoul and ordered north to the JSA where they find the Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of the night shift standing guard over a dead body, that of a ROK soldier assigned to the JSA. Ten feet away stand a squad of NKs with AK-47s in ready. The corpse is sprawled over the MDL within the DMZ at JSA in the ROK. OK? The Chicken Colonel orders Sueño and Bascom to pull the body back to his side, while the NKs get twitchy. Sueño and Bascom do as ordered and begin their investigation into the murder of No-Go, as his friends called him, a ROK grunt who did warehouse duty in JSA.
What was No-Go doing in the middle of the night at the MDL? He should have been abed many yards away. Moreover, who split his skull with an entrenching tool?
The easy answer to the last question is the NKs. But why? They’ll do anything! Wait! If the NKs wanted him dead, they would have shot him. Period. No that answer is too pat, though some in the Eighth see it as another Pueblo incident. Meanwhile, life goes on, that is, crime goes on, and Sueñp and Bascom have other investigations to pursue.
They get mixed signals about continuing to investigate No-Go’s murder, but as always Sueño never knows when to quit, and Bascom goes along for the ride. Then the Eighth settles on No-Go’s buddy PFC Fusterman as the guilty party and begins to railroad him to clear the air. Convicting Fusterman will defuse tensions is the thinking of some. Others suppose the opposite, giving in the NKs a pass on this one will encourage other incidents. Back and forth goes the seesaw that Sueño and Bascom ride. It is pure McKinsey management pushing responsibility down to the lowest level, so when things go wrong the blame falls on those who have no choice in the matter.
It gets more complicated (too complicated for this reader) when a criminal gang horns into the plot. Sueño and Bascom drink a little less alcohol and bed fewer passers-by in this outing than in the earlier titles, but they still get beat up and shot at enough to get re-accredited as cartoon heroes. All that leaves this reader cold. As does Sueño’s repeated hormone attacks. Really Sueño zip it up for a while.
What is fascinating is the ways and means of investigating within the interstices of the Eighth Army. There is always a paper trail if one knows where to look and whom to ask, even when the perpetrator has tried to erase it, there are all those copies in triplicate times triplicate, and these two lifers can follow these snail trails. They know a lot of other lifer sergeants with whom to trade information. The sergeants’ network holds many an army together.
Further, Sueño has learned to speak Korean and his interactions with the locals are very well realised. He may be a ‘big nose’ but he knows and respects the ways of Koreans. No-Go had a family and Bascom and Sueño find out a lot through them. Fusterman had a family, too, and its members send a lawyer to defend him in the Court Martial. While feisty, she is an underdeveloped character in this telling, too easily misled while loudly proclaiming her savvy and contributing nothing to the story. Don’t blame her, she is written that way.
Inspector Kill and Officer Oh from the Korean National Police put in a welcome appearance. Kill is a dedicated man but he takes orders, and Oh remains enigmatic but a good friend to have in a tight corner. These two like nothing better than slamming up villains of any kind and sometimes it suits them to work through Sueño and Bascom.
Then there is the climatic firefight in the JSA which seemed gratuitous in the context of softly-softly, though it was noteworthy that one of the weapon wielders on the Sergeants’ side was a woman MP whose quick wit prevented a further disaster. The madness of Colonel Peel, another officer in the mix, is, well, madness. Though there is an implied complexity in the NK officer Kwon that might have been better brought to the surface when to save his family he refused to defect.
By the way, the fiction then as now is that the JSA is administered by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, consisting of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Neutral? As if. These representatives are seldom seen and never heard.
Grant Limón license, because many strange things have happened in the unique place that is the JSA.
Martin Límon, himself a lifer.
There is a superb Korean film, much more low key than this book, called ‘Joint Security Area’ (2000).
Lobby poster.
We saw it after we visited the JSA in 2004, and even in 2004 when things were not as tense as in the 1970s, the JSA crackled. At the time I was visiting professor at Korea University.
*Lifer means someone in for the maximum enlistment of twenty years. Not quite literally life but it most feel like is sometime.
GoodReads meta-data is 383 pages and it is rated 4.06 by 1246 litizens.
Genre: Chick Non-fic
Verdict: A cackle! Then a bore.
Executive Summary: Dedicated introvert bites the bagel and tries to live as an extrovert for one year. Disasters follow.
Long Summary: Self-diagnosed Shintrovert* (shy + introvert) goes all out to be a self-confident extrovert and talk to anyone and everyone on the street, on the bus, in the supermarket, in London. London! That was bound to fail. Luckily she was not charged with numerous violations of civil code of mutual indifference that rules Britannia.
The phrase in the title ‘Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come’ is her main social gambit. Maybe that explains a few things right there. She seeks professional help from a variety of consultants, while using friend apps. Do such things exist? Yes, they do. Both the consultants and the apps are real.
The social media apps match isolated loners with other isolated loners, although neither of them admits to it, with a view to a meeting. Some of these meetings consist of awkward silences, others are trips to a film where nothing can be said. Progress on extroversion scale: 0.
The consultants are varied, one teaches her to be charismatic by smiling, nodding, and offering a firm handshake. Was that Hitler’s method? Gandhi’s? Now we know. Others heckle her to thicken the social skin. Both get paid. Another listens to her talk and then gets paid. [No comment.]
She also reads the abstracts of social psychology journals to lard footnotes through the pages. Cargo cult: If is is in print, then it must be true, right? Check out Pox News for the latest on that.
I did keep flicking the pages but it got so-o-o-o repetitive. It is like far too many clever pieces published in the New Yorker magazine that are then puffed up into a book. Emphasis on puff. At sixty pages it was an amusing ride, at 383 (!) it was as tedious as a continuous family get together for Thanksgiving that lasted a year (with no survivors.) It went on and on for no other reason than to go on and on than to tear pages off the calendar.
Alright already, I know that many readers take it seriously as a psychological self-help guide, but you don’t have to be sick to laugh out loud, and I did. As usual the legion of GoodReads reviews are therapy for the writers and uninformative for the reader. Par for that course.
*Shouldn’t that then be ‘shy-introvert?’Autocorrect objects to both versions so nothing to choose there.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1192 cinematizens. (I do worry about some cinematizens when I see ratings like this.)
Genre: noir
Verdict: Oh hum.
In his first feature film a rake-thin Dr Leonard McCoy has a bad dream and tells the world about it, repeatedly. His Georgia origins are pronounced. (Get it?) He was born Jackson DeForest Kelley. Can you believe any parents would do that?
The dream opens proceedings and it is very well done, with spinning and shadows. In it there is a femme fatale, to be sure, and man bent over a safe in conservatory with four mirrored doors.
A robotic, and so perfectly cast, McCoy emerges from behind one door while the couple are intent on the safe behind another door, and he stabs the man to death while the femme scoots.
He then wakes upon a sweat, and begins to blab, while striving not to blab, he blabs to his brother-in-law of the chiselled chin (Paul Kelly) who laughs it off, slaps him around to straighten him out, and finally begins to think something might have happened. Chin is a copper and he has his ways of finding out things, namely, a slap on the chops. After the pair of them with their wife and girlfriend, respectively, just happen to go on a picnic on the grounds the very mansion possessed of a conservatory with four mirrored doors. Small world.
Sidebar: By now the fraternity brothers had passed out from boredom and beer in equal measure.
Thereafter Kelley and Kelly are on the case. McCoy cries, faints, trembles, and is useless, while Chisel-chin does all the running, thumping, and shooting. As we Noiristas realised from the second act, the harmless little man next door was an evil genius who had hypnotised weak-minded McCoy into hiding in the conservatory closet to surprise the safe cracker and moll.
The moll was Harmless’s wife who was going to run off with the cracksman after he cleaned out Harmless’s safe. Not nice to be sure.
Turns out robot McCoy had no responsibility because the yegg attacked him when he appeared out of nowhere ergo he acted in self defence. Sure, tell that to the judge, which he did. The end.
The dream sequence at the beginning derives from ‘Spellbound’ (1945) and anticipated later imitations. In this outing it lacks the gravitas imparted by Alfred Hitchcock who added doses of Salvador Dali hyper-reality to it in ‘Vertigo’ (1958). Strangely ‘Fear in the Dark’ is not included on the IMDb list of more than a thousand films with a dream sequence, but it does index many Donald Duck cartoons. Did A.I. compile that list?
One of the reviews attached to the IMDb entry – Film Noir of the Week – goes on and on for about 3000 words interpreting the film as a homosexual love story between Chisel-chin and trembling McCoy. Believe it, Ripley! I watched a different movie.
McCoy had just come out of the army and was branching out from his pre-war career as a radio singer. (!) His acting peaked in this outing, though he had a career as a villain in westerns on television before The United Federation of Planets was desperate enough to draft him. He remained robotic.
