Political theory and practice – Page 61

Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman.

Good Reads meta-data is 624 pages, rated 4.1 by 81,342 litizens.

Genre: Poetry

Verdict: Exhilarating!

To say that Whitman’s poetry is exhilarating is just a start. It zips, it dips, it soars, it flies, it ponders, it races in a cascade of verse. About 400 poems are combined in this book, which began as a collection of twelve, and became his life’s work as he revised, edited, amended, and augmented it.

It also departed from the conventions of poetry in its celebration of the immediate, material world and the human body in contrast to the mannered abstraction that prevailed at the time. The verse is blank, by the way, and rhymes are few and far between, and that also made it odd. For its time it was also explicit about sex, and implicit about homosexuality.

No one in the literary establishment would touch it in 1855, as a consequence he printed it himself in the 95-page first edition. (One sold in 2014 for $US 305,000.)

The narrative voice is without a doubt Whitman himself (and sometimes that is explicit in the verse) as he surveys man, woman, child, beast, and nature. He sees himself in all the others and they in himself. When he sings of himself he includes one and all, slave and free, male and female, living and dead, victorious and vanquished, owner and drudge, lilac and rose, dog and cat, vegetable and mineral, high and low, black, white and red, yellow and black, urban and rural, owner and labourer, prostitute and lady, believer and atheist. The tone is ever affirmative, though the later entries, forty years after the first edition, and after his years as an ambulance driver in the Civil War, and after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, shade into melancholia. One of his duties as a driver was carting and burying amputated limbs.

It was denounced from the pulpit, banned in Boston, and burned as obscene. That free publicity increased sales. When reviewers tore into his work, he published these reviews in the following editions of ‘Leaves of Grass.‘ At one point a thousand copies were sold a week for months on end. New printings were invariably new editions as he included more poems and more hostile reviews, and they sold out in a day.

By 1919 it had become a part of the American literary canon though quite how that came about it is a mystery in the vigorously contested Wikipedia entry. Who championed it passes in silence in this wordy but vague entry. But more than one reader puts Whitman in the pantheon with Shakespeare and Dante. Well, this reader does.

These days PhDs earn tenure by finding fault with the poems, with Whitman, with the air he breathed. There are a few sips of this bile in the Wikipedia entry. Confident this reader is that Whitman’s verse will outlive all the spite and spittle of these pygmies.

Quoting lines and passages do not do it justice. It was meant to heard and I listened to it in Audible edition that is superb. Robin Field’s voice is not distracting, the diction follows the cadence of the prose, and brims with energy, as it should.

Below is a list of some of the individual poems:

By Blue Ontario’s Shore,

O Captain! My Captain!

Dalliance with Eagles,

Faces,

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers,

I Sing the Body Electric,

Native Moments,

The Open Road,

The Sleepers,

Song got Myself,

Spontaneous Me,

Song of the Open Road,

To a Common Prostitute,

The Untold Want, and

A Woman Waits for Me.

During World War II it was one of fifty books distributed freely to members of the US Armed Forces and auxiliaries as exemplars of Americana. What would be distributed today? Surely not books, but videos to reflect one hundred and fifty years of free public education in which literacy has declined. Perhaps it would be episodes of ‘Say Yes to the Dress?’ Or a collection of garbled tweets from a twit.

Whitman was fired from his day job by his boss who read a few pages and found it filthy. The grass of the title by the way is in the hand of a child which the narrator says is the handkerchief of the Lord.

Some of the entries on Good Reads reach a new low of self-indulgence, even for that forum, when a one-star rater admits to not reading such filth. Others offer anagrams of the title that reflect their scatological personality. Fatuous as these entries are the authors took the time and trouble to post them. As usual most of the comments are about the commenter and not the alleged subject.

Letter to a Hostage (1944) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Goodreads meta-data is 39 pages, rated 3.93 by 594 litizens.

Genre: Musing.

Verdict: A period piece.

Though it celebrates the grit of his comrades in facing the Nazi juggernaut of 1940, the pamphlet was banned in Vichy France because it was dedicated to St Ex’s very good friend and the captain whom he admired, Léon Werth, a Jew. St Ex got out but Werth did not. It takes the form of an extended letter, musing on life that does go on. Ironically St Ex did not survive the war but Werth did. Slight though it may be, St Ex has as always an uncanny knack for finding the le mot just each and every time, some lyrical, and some mournful.

The first draft was to be the preface to Werth’s novel, Trente-trois Jours, about the Defeat and the flight of refugees. But when Werth went into hiding in the Jura, and St Ex escaped to Lisbon where he revised it into a more general reflection on time and place and recast Werth a symbol of all of France.

That is why the Vichy authorities banned it. Treating a Jew as French was bad. Explicitly admiring this Jew for his patriotism was worse. But making him a symbol of FRANCE was intolerable.

As always with St Ex the sky is there, and so is the sand of the Sahara.

Yet even here idiocy is to be found. One reviewer on Amazon says that St Ex ‘fought valiantly to keep France from becoming Socialist at the hands of Charles De Gaulle, and it probably cost him his life.’ Yep. Was that a Tweet from the Twit in Chief? There is no point in trying correct this nonsense, best just to savour it.

Mick Herron, Joe Country (2019)

The meta-data is 352 pages from Amazon, rated 4.5 by five litizens. It is not on GoodReads yet.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Whoosh!

The denizen of Slough House are joined by a new Regent Park cast-off named Lech Wicinski, who had child pornography on his MI5 laptop. How dumb was that! So dumb that only a robot would suppose it true, and once supposed off Lech goes to the endless exile of Slough House, while his girlfriend (tipped off by an anonymous caller) goes ballistic and walks out. Just when it seems things cannot get worse he meets Jackson Lamb. Worse now has a name.

Of course Lamb does not believe anyone is that dumb but he does not care about injustice, as long as it leaves him alone. In another dumb move this injustice bumps into Lamb and he goes to work, as only he can. Though the beautiful Emma Flyte, briefly head dog at the Park, refuses reassignment to Slough House after falling afoul of the very malevolent Diana Taverner on the First Desk, she pitches in when Slough House denizen Louisa Guy (even more unstable than usual) sets off for Wales in deep winter, while Catherine Standish, sober for now, tries to corral Jackson Lamb with no success. Situation normal.

The meta-data does not lie. There are 352 pages but they flew by.

The office politics that Lady Di gets up to are straight out of McKinsey, and the absolute depravity of her political masters would make Pox News executives envious, the contract thugs loose in Wales are there to murder a child who saw something (though I was never quite sure what) and it is all in a day’s work for them. Bien sûr, Taverner was not so stupid as to believe Lech had pornography on his lap top but she exiled him faire encourager les autres. While whoever planted the material on his laptop may be a security threat, she is more interested in using the incident to terrorise subordinates into even more slavish obedience than fixing the leak. To fix it would mean revealing that the leak occurred on her watch. Lady Di does not admit to errors! With priorities like that is it any wonder she has risen to the top in the world where managers manage per McKinsey?

As usual there are thrills and spills with the Slow Horses from Slough House. Emma gets her pretty face shot off, Lech was not cut out to be a field agent and gets cut to pieces, Cartwright survives to keep feeling sorry for himself, Louisa likewise is surprised to be alive along with the intended victim, Catherine is even more tedious sober than when drunk, and Jackson Lamb could not care less as long as the world leaves him alone.

Meanwhile, back at Regent’s Park, Lady Di plans her next move up the greasy pole, enumerating the heads she will step on to get there. She is always sure the enemies are inside the tent, not outside. Meanwhile, the German plant in the Park who engineered the distracting pornography remains in place undetected. That plant may be a threat to national security but it is no threat to Lady Di – so all is good at the First Desk.

Helen Tursten, Night Rounds (2012)

Goodreads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.78 by 2817 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: meticiulous

Inspector Irene Huss is on the job after a nurse is murdered in a private hospital. This is the second instalment in the series following ‘Detective Inspector’ Huss (2004). As the police go to work the staff of the hospital, its owners, the medical consultants, patients and their visitors are questioned, and the interstices of the nineteenth century building are examined. Tursten knows this world well from her earlier career as a nurse.

What follow is a police procedural rich in the locale both the city of Göteborg and of the hospital. Its principal owner is the surgeon in chief, who has a trophy wife and the debts to prove it. It is February and the freezing rain becomes a pivotal character in the plot. When the temperature rises to freezing, it is cause for smiles, but when it rains and then freezes again, there are no more smiles but plenty of black ice.

There is a split among the nurses, some have been working at this hospital since it was owned by the surgeon’s father, and others are twenty year old contractors who come and go. The old guard nurses are loyal to the past, including its ghost, and the contractors just want to get paid. Ghosts or not, there are some haunted characters in this hospital of Otranto.

Even as Huss and the team investigate more murderers occur that may be related or may not. Along the way we see street people who have long since become non-persons to the social services, some faked qualifications that no one has the time or interest to check, and Huss herself is so preoccupied with things at home (two teenage children, a dog, and a husband in that order of priority) that she makes mistakes.

While her immediate superior tries hard, his roots are in the old school when women made the coffee and they show through, but Huss grits her teeth and bears it. Both that such sexism is present and that Huss ignores it, riles some GoodReads reviewers who qualify for the Snow Flake Award. Curiously one such writer condemns the books as easily forgotten and then dwells on this sexism in detail. It seems the writer both forgot the book and remembered it. Take that Aristotle, a thing can be itself and not at the same time. So much for the law of the excluded middle.

I have also read ‘Fire Dance’ (2014) and liked it.

Helen Tursten, An Elderly Lady up to No Good (2018).

Goodreads meta-data is 173 pages, rated 3.85 by 2859 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Predicable.

A Swedish widow in Götenborg, the eighty-eight year old Maud, lives in an enormous, inherited flat that is the envy of many. She appears harmless and helpless, yet she is in fact irascible and deft at turning the perceptions and prejudices about elderly ladies against others in five loosely linked stories (or is it incidents) in the collection. The covetous neighbour is bamboozled and strung up by her own mobile, the aggressive tourist got stuck in the wrong place by a knitting needle, an antique dealer trying to con her out of her belongings finds himself no longer growing old – and so on. Maud leaves a string of bodies behind her.

When Inspector Irene Huss (there is an in-joke here) notices that Maud’s name keeps coming up on reports about these deaths, she smiles and moves on. What could a harmless and helpless old woman do anyway. Why nothing at all.

Except…!

While the stories were repetitive, Tursten’s afterword about the stimulating challenge to write about a perpetrator rather than a plod was charming, but not quite in proportion to the reading it took to get there.

The sign is nigh!

A sign of the coming Apocalypse appeared today.

While gasping and groaning at the gym this morning, my glance unfortunately fell on the television screen broadcasting the egregious Channel 7. That was bad. Worse followed. There came the sign of the Beast: flared trousers coming back.

Yes, there under the yakkety-yak trivialistas appeared a banner proclaiming that fashion experts (ponder that combination of words ‘fashion’ and ‘expert’) predict the return of the Beast – bell-bottomed pant legs.

Catastrophe was only narrowly averted when last these devils appeared: 1969. Will thoughts and prayers be enough this time? Hardly! Bring on the Terminator!

The method of History Today in five factlets.

In response to popular demand here are a few words about how the daily dose of five factlets history has been selected and presented over the last twelve months.

To survey one day in history, write the report, find images, and post the completed work takes about an hour.

Why five items and not ten or one? Five seems enough to offer a range of events spread over time. On some slow history days it is a stretch to get to five. Only once did I included six (on April 24), rather than five, because I could not decide which to cut. I did another time by mistake.

Priorities

To start with the obvious. Only events that have been dated and recorded can be included. Moreover, the event(s) have to be registered on one of the web sites that are harvested. (See below.) We do not know when Columbus first thought about going West to find the East, but we do know the day he sailed, or when a Zulu chief united his people.

The International Date Line was ignored. Too complicated.

A daily dose should have a range of times into the past. Per Edmund Burke, the future is also part of this time travelling exercise, e.g., the birthdate of James T. Kirk, first contact with the Vulcans, or the next visit of Halley’s Comet all qualify.

A daily dose should offer a geographic spread around the world. Events in the United States dominate the web sites but I tried to garnish that with a mix from elsewhere, the more exotic the better. Hence Timbuktu and Ulan Baator have appeared in the dose.

From one day to the next the daily dose should be varied, not dominated by same kinds of events from the same places. This standard is hard to achieve because recorded events are, well, recorded, like patents and there are a lot of them.

Where pertinent emphasis goes to the Enlightenment agenda of science, reason, music, literature, and humanity. Scientific discoveries, the publication of books, and acts to comprehend human wholeness frequently make the list.

Of course not everything is done in a single event but grow from chains of events, trials and errors, and accident. The development of the telephone, for one example, had many (mis)steps and several of these have made this list. Blind allies are part of the story.

There are two idiosyncrasies. First, the odd and obscure are sometimes included for amusement, though they leave little behind. An example is tightrope walking over Niagara Falls. Second, items with which we have a personal connection will be included and these associations will be mentioned in the text.

Sounds easy, but it is not as easy as all that. Each year there is a spring concert season in Vienna, and in a few April weeks much enduring music has premiered. Sporting achievements are clustered at the certain times, e.g., the Summer and Winter Olympics. Nobel Prizes announcements are also concentrated.

Labelling.

To give the reader an overview I occasionally tagged each item with a place and a genre, for example, D.C., Politics. I do not have a set list of genres but apply one as seems best on the occasion. I started doing this for an editorial check on the scope and range on a day.

Exclusions.

No wars, no battles, no slaughters, no pogroms, no lynchings, no boys blowing each other up, are not listed though there are far too many of them because, well, these things need no further circulation or thought. The first shots fired on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861 were not included, despite the fact that we have been on Fort Sumter. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor was likewise passed in silence, though we have been to Pearl more than once. The principle is to give these events no further currency and publicity. The emphasis here falls elsewhere with very few exceptions.

Neither are births and deaths included. We all have to be born and that hardly seems a distinction. That which an individual creates, discovers, makes, conceives, writes, does, and leaves to the world comes later. Similarly, death is not always the end of the influence individuals, some of whom grow more significant when viewed in retrospect.

Exceptions are made when it suits me, like Niccolò Machiavelli’s birth and the start of Operation Dynamo or instances of George Custer’s stupendous incompetence.

Qualifications

Dates are required, and not everything is dated as noted above. We do not know the day when Chinese astrologer-astronomers first trained their eyes on Mars, yet surely they did. The date when Pharaoh commissioned the Sphinx is unknown, but we do know when it was found. There are few dates associated with the empires and civilisations of black Africa. Written records favour events like patents and publications.

But even with publications there are lacuna. On what day of the week, month of the year, and year was Plato’s Republic published? Of course, it was not published as we use the word today, and he did not present it whole but worked it out piece by piece. But we can know the exact date upon which the earliest Latin rendering of the Republic was sold at auction (and for how much).

Most of the recorded events come from the Northern Hemisphere and follow the seasons there with more items in the Spring and Summer than in mid-Winter (apart from Canadian hockey). There are far fewer items from sub-Saharan Africa and insular South East Asia. I was surprised at how few items I came across from Spanish America, considering how long it has existed, its vast extent, and it large population. No doubt that reflects the sources I used. The compensation for continental paucity is that when items from these under-represented regions appeared, they were very likely to be included because they are exotic.

The Report

Once five items are in hand, the next step is to double check with Wikipedia or Google about details. Some of the History today websites seem to have been prepared by web crawlers, misspellings and missing text occur, along with direct contradictions. Others are unfathomable, cryptic. Think of the tweets of President Twit and that is the illustration. Garbled. I have included a sampling of some of the mystifying ones below.

There follows a Google search for an image to illustrate each item, to give readers some eye candy as relief from text. The pedant in me finds that maps that show the distance and route are very useful. Instances of technology, say an early telephone, show us how far developments have come since that beginning. In all cases Wikipedia is the final authority.

Nearly all the sources I consulted use the present tense which flattens history and so I have edited the summaries to use past tenses. Homer nodded and sometimes I forgot to do this.

Sources

The following web sites are consulted in the order listed. Over the year the list grew.

Library of Congress
Australia Today
National Library of Canada Today
New Zealand History
People’s History
History Net
History Channel
Today’s Historical Events
Nebraska History
On This Day in History
Scope System History Today
Daily Dose of History
Wikipedia

Why did I do it?

It started on a whim when I realised these history-on-this-day websites existed. I had a look and made a short list for our own amusement. Reviewing the historical list for the next day soon became an evening ritual at Alpha Prime. When I mentioned this ritual to someone, that person suggested blogging it, and I started. By posting a link on Facebook to the blog, it is made known, and it seems to attract hits on the blog, about sixty every twenty-four years. (Yes, I have sampled the count.) Because other items are on the blog the thought is to give them exposure, too, through a Facebook link.

Like all good things, it will came to an end when the year was completed.

Examples of incomprehensible or trivial examples.

Of course house fires, the comings and goings of celebrities, and car crashes are world news to the ABC AmBulance Chasers, but here are a few examples that I found without merit. They are the full text as I found it.

1156 Henry II Jasormigott leaves Bavaria

1779 Earl d’Orleans sails back to Brest

1913 1st US milch goat show held, Rochester, NY

1942 German occupiers take silver anniversary coins in battle

1957 1st edition newspaper the Ware Time (in Suriname), 1,700 die

1960 Dutch 1st chamber commends soccer-law

1963 WCTI TV channel 12 in New Bern, NC begins broadcasting

1982 Rolling Stone Keith Richard house burns down

1984 Morocco Showcase opens

1985 7 die in car crash in San Jose, California

1990 Steve Allen, installed as a new abbot

1993 Eastern Tennessee begins using new area code 423

1996 “7 Guitars” closes at Walter Kerr Theater NYC

2013 Minibus collides with a train in Lasi, Romania

Gnus Besede in Reči

Never before have I beheld poster featuring Michel Foucault. But in Novo Mesto (Slovenia) I did.

It advertised a play in which Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre trade inscrutable remarks, so the Slovenia guide claimed when asked. By the way ‘Novo Mesto’ means New Town, so we felt right at home.

The abomination of words and words is the AI translation.

The Promised Land (2019) by Barry Maitland

Goodreads meta-data is 321 pages, rated 4.16 by 167 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Masterful, again.

In the thirteenth instalment of this series David Brock has gone into an uneasy retirement, and his protégé Kathy Kolla has been promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. When Hampstead Heath becomes a killing field for the screenwriter’s old crutch, the serial killer, Kolla mobilises and strikes, arresting the unlikely but clearly implicated small-time publisher John Pettigrew who lives nearby. Forensic evidence points to him, as do witness statements.

Pettigrew’s brief entices Brock into acting as a private inquiry agent to see what can be seen. While Brock is reluctant, he finds Pettigrew convincing and he is bored in retirement so he begins to turn over stones before he realised Kolla was the officer in charge, leading him into conflict with her.

There are more twists and turns and after another murder forensic evidence and witness statements in this case now implicate Brock, who finds himself on remand. At first he treats confinement as a joke, then a mistake, then a respite, then he registers that it is not going to end. Angry as she is at Brock for sticking his nose in, Kolla is dead certain he is innocent and whips herself and her team into a frenzy to put it altogether piece by piece. Kolla seems to have outgrown her constant hormone attacks of earlier novels in the series. In these pages she concentrates on the job, not on feeling sorry for herself.

While the summary above may be conventional, the execution is so deft, so focussed, so speedy that the reader will not find it stale or clichéd. One of the nicest aspects of these books is the author does not find it necessary to create false tensions, e.g., by having an interfering and incompetent superior. Kolla’s boss wants results and works hard at making sure that happens. There are no stupid cops forgetting to lock doors, or smoking round the back while evidence disappears. If anything, these police are almost too good to be true, even the one who was ready to believe anything to get a result concludes it cannot be that easy.

Barry Maitland

The tension is in the master narrative and not distracting sidelines. And like the first entry in this stable, ‘The Marx Sisters’ (1994), discussed on an entry on my unlearned blog, at the heart of the mystery is a book, and what a book it is.

M J Trow, ‘Lestrade and the Sign of the Nine’ (2000).

Good Reads meta-data is 223 pages, rated 3.91 by a scant 46 litizens

Genre: krimi, pastiche

Verdict: clever and refreshing, but with a sour aftertaste.

In the world of Victorian England in the year 1886 all is not right with the world. Across the green land the (lecherous) rector, the (plagiarist) novelist, and the (cheating) speculator have one thing in common: they were murdered! There is only man for this job: Sholto Lestrade, Inspector, Scotland Yard. Maybe so but while he gets on with it and another five seemingly respectable Victorians are murdered and each, it turns out, was a despicable villain beneath the veneer of respectablility. With each of the eight victims is an inscrutable symbol [see front cover below].

As Lestade goes hither and thither, arriving always too late to stop the next murder, he keeps running across an annoying prat accompanied by a bumbling doctor, Holmes and Watson they are by name. Lestrade has neither the time nor the patience to sort these two out, but why are they always underfoot. Indeed, who are they?

The book opens with workmen excavating a foundation where they find a limbless body in between discussing Georg Hegel’s influence on Karl Marx’s philosophy of history in a cockney accent so thick it took this reader sometime to realise what they were talking about, but when dawned the realisation there followed the guffaws. So unexpected! So well done! That alone was worth the price of admission.

Lestrade manages to avoid the tide of history, but has to deal with two, one after another in quick succession, Home Secretaries who want a immediate resolution without any fuss, no expenditure, and no inquiry into respectable gentlemen, as well as machine guns, while dreading his inadvertent agreement to appear in the Police Annual Review for Charity to imitate Sarah Bernhardt.

That would seem to be more than enough, Yet there is also larded through it some racism, homophobia, and sexism. While these attitudes reflect the Victorian times, they do not advance the plot, limn any character development, or enrich the context. What they do is distract and irritate the contemporary reader. They are, in short, gratuitous. Strangely in this day when virtue display is so routine few reviewers on either GoodReads or Amazon refer to this business. I would have thought it offered a perfect chance to strut one’s virtue.

This title is number 12 in the Sholto Lestrade Mysteries from the industrious Trow who also has two other series since he cannot keep his hands off the keyboard.

I’d be willing to try another Lestrade in the hope that the racism, sexism, homophobia was not ingrained in the writing. But only one, least the Victorian setting licenses the author’s prejudices.