Pearl Harbor on Dec. 6, 1941. Found this on the East Tennessee Veterans Honor Guard FB page.
Call this a sneak attack, coming on the eve of the date that will live in infamy.
I just had to write down today’s date for some reason, and it got me to thinking about Martin Cruz Smith. Well, specifically, one of his less-known novels, December 6. You ever read it? Here’s a synopsis from Wikipedia:
In late 1941, Harry Niles owns a bar for American and European expatriates, journalists, and diplomats, in Tokyo’s entertainment district, called the “Happy Paris”. With only 24 hours until Japanese fighters and bombers attack Pearl Harbor, Niles has to consult with the local US ambassador, break up with a desperate lover, evade the police, escape the vengeance of an aggrieved samurai officer and leave the island, the exit points from which are all closed. Having grown up in Tokyo, Niles is fluent in the Japanese language and culture, and is highly streetwise.[2][3]
In other words, he’s streetwise for a gaijin, which is a word that comes up frequently in the book as Japanese folk interact with him. But it’s been awhile since I read it. I’ve never reread it as often as I have Rose and some of his Arkady Renko stories, especially Red Square. Although the one that pulled me and so many others toward his work was his amazingly brilliant first Renko story, Gorky Park.
So — are any of y’all fans? I’d like to have a discussion about his stuff sometime. The dude can tell a story. His characters are a bit repetitive — it’s like the same people crop up in both 1870s Lancashire and 1980s Russia — but he makes it work. It’s actually kind of fun to see a familiar character, just with a different name, show up in an entirely different situation…
“A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,
and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.
Back in those days, it seems, farming was kind of haphazard. Seed was scattered in ways that today would seem quite haphazard. Whenever I read that passage, I think, why didn’t they put the seed IN the ground? Had the dibble not been invented, or what?
Which reminded me of my theory of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
It suddenly hit me as I was reading one of those books about the history of our species, from hunter-gatherer days until now — which as y’all know I frequently mention. I don’t remember whether it was Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, or what. But it was one in which the idea that the big move to agriculture was a decidedly mixed blessing.
Oh, it afforded advantages to the cultures that embraced it, in a competitive sense. As Jared Diamond stressed, the peoples who moved the earliest, and the most successfully, to food and fiber production dominate the world today. That’s how Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire with a handful of Spanish soldiers. He not only had the guns and the steel, but smallpox had spread ahead of the Conquistadores and had hit the Incas pretty hard just before he arrived. More than that, he had writing — not him personally, but the scribes he had along. He knew how Cortez had taken down the Aztecs, and followed suit. Emperor Atahualpa hadn’t known either the Spanish or the Aztecs existed.
It’s why Maori conquered and wiped out the Moriori — former Maoris whose forebears had moved away and gone back to hunter-gathering — on Chatham Island. You may not have heard about that, though, since the Maoris themselves were eventually dominated by European newcomers.
But that’s not my point. The point is that some of these things I’ve been reading make the argument that the big advantage that farming offered had a steep price. Basically, the farming life sucked compared to hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, people worked less each day, and on the whole ate better. They went about and gathered what they needed, and had plenty of time to chill after that. They didn’t think about the future. They didn’t worry about their land, or the weather over the coming months, or the price of cotton. They weren’t the slaves of the farms they worked day and night to keep going.
I was thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me — that’s what the first chapters of Genesis were about. In the Garden, Adam and Eve could just stroll around naked and eat their meals off the bounty of their property, and life was good. Then they fouled up — they couldn’t obey one simple rule — and got booted out. And then they were cursed with farming, in no uncertain terms:
Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.
Which certainly sounds like a raw deal to me.
And it hit me: The people who composed the story of Adam and Eve — and later wrote it down — were on some level remembering the switch to agriculture, and saw it pretty much as Yuval Noah Harari did, thousands of years before he wrote that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” And they saw it as the ultimate human fall from natural grace.
So did I make some great discovery? No way. This was too obvious, and had been too obvious for ages. Search for “garden of eden hunter-gathering,” and you’ll see this idea all over the place. I liked this summary:
Apparently, the trauma of this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a huge and lasting impact on humanity. We’ve never forgotten it. It’s burned into our consciousness. And, that’s why it’s the subject of the Bible’s foundational story. The Torah tells us that when humans were first created, we lived in the Garden of Eden, where we ate the fruit that God provided for us. We didn’t have to work hard or grow anything on our own. In other words, we were hunter-gatherers….
I don’t know where I was when everybody else was talking about it. All I can say in my own behalf is that I realized it on my own. All the talking that people do about Adam and Eve — usually, unfortunately, in the silly arguments between biblical literalists and those who think a story about the Earth being created in six days means all faith is bunk (both sides seem to have trouble grasping the concept of allegory) — and I’d never heard a reference to this.
And it sort of blew my mind. I love it when I see connections to things I had not previously seen as connected — such as the Bible’s foundational story of life on Earth, and the findings of secular scientists and philosophers in our own age — and this was the Mother of All Connections. It tied everything about the origins of humanity and our world together.
And the most amazing thing is that it appears as though the originators of the Eden story had some memory — consciously or unconsciously — about what had happened to people ages earlier, long before writing, before Abraham, much less before anthropology, archaeology, DNA testing or carbon-14 dating.
You know, it’s hard to find accurate pictures of those earliest boats. So I went with this one…
I’m making a point of reading new books these days — by which I mean books I haven’t read before. For instance, right now I’m reading Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’ trilogy on TR, released in 2001. I’m getting to it about a decade after reading the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. But I guess that’s OK, since it took Morris way longer to get to writing it; the first book came out in 1979. I’m very much enjoying it, but at a leisurely pace.
That doesn’t mean I no longer indulge in my favorite way to waste time — reading the same books, over and over. And lately I’ve been drawn back to books about homo sapiens and how the species and our world developed. Right now, Guns, Germs and Steelis sitting on the kitchen table, and I thumb through it while eating (something I wasn’t allowed to do as a kid, but I’ve made up for that lost time).
And that got me onto this subject. I was reading a passage about the settlement of this continent, and Jared Diamond made a brief reference to archaeological discoveries that place humans here way before the Clovis culture came along. You see, the conventional thinking as he was writing was that people got here in about 11,000 B.C. Meanwhile, we have sites, including right here in South Carolina, that show indications of human presence as early as tens of thousands of years before that.
Diamond, writing in 1997 — well before some of the more startling claims about Topper — was sort of dismissive of these kinds of sites:
I wondered whether Diamond would be any more impressed by these more-recent claims. But I don’t know Diamond, and I don’t have his mobile number. So I reached out to the only archaeologist I know around here, our own Lynn Teague. I went over to her Twitter feed, and changed the subject by asking about what was on my mind. Looking back, I suppose I could have shown a little more interest in what she was writing about, but you know, the number count is limited on tweets. Lynn answered right away:
Some of the pre-Clovis sites are real although population would have been very low. Others inspire less confidence. When artifacts or butchered bone are found there are often complicated issues of stratigraphic integrity to resolve in deposits possibly more than 11,000 years old.
Yeah, just what I was thinkin’, Lynn. But I went on to ask…
Boats are a definite possibility for early migration. Over thousands of years there could be any number of failures and only a few successes. It is also uncertain that early groups were ancestral to later populations. Small groups may have arrived but died out.
Lynn’s answer satisfied me as much as one can be satisfied with regard to this question. Of course, that’s a minimal level of satisfaction. If I ever get a time machine, one thing I’d like to use it for would be to take a bunch of Dick and Jane books to the first modern humans just as they prepared started to break out of Africa and into Eurasia — long before they got here, by anyone’s reckoning — so that they could take up reading and writing and leave us some records.
I figure that by now, their books would be available in paperback, and maybe even free on Kindle…
OK, admittedly it’s not boffo in, say, Marvel Universe terms, or last year’s “Top Gun” sequel. We’re talking more of a niche thing here. In fact, few of my readers here will take interest, unless they are avid Le Carré fans. (Which they should be.)
There’d be nothing blowing up, or people flying about under their own power in colorful tights, or other improbable things. In fact, maybe this idea might not be right for you, Hollywood, in your current state. Can we book Shepperton?
But it would be good. I’m excited about it. Just as I was excited last year, when I read one of Mr. Le Carré’s last efforts, A Legacy of Spies. It was such a gift to those of us to whom Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opened such a wonderful world half a century ago.
It’s at this point I will lose you, dear reader, if you’re not into Le Carré….
Basically, Legacy plunged back through the decades to resurrect favorite characters from Tinker, and from the earlier masterpiece, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. It was better than a high school reunion, way better. (At least, I assume that. I didn’t go to my 50th reunion; I’m not even sure that there was one. I had only been in touch with one of my 600 classmates — our good friend Burl — and he died two years before such a gathering would have taken place.)
Better in the sense that it wasn’t just wandering about glancing at name tags and trying to figure out who these old fogeys were back in your heyday. This book took one of our very best friends from those days and plunged him back into the events of that intense time, in a way that was immediately relevant to all concerned.
To set the scene — Peter Guillam, George Smiley’s long-ago protégé, is in retirement on a farm in France. Out of nowhere, present officials of the Circus (or former Circus) descend on him from their garish new building on the Thames, requiring that he come to London and dive into the records and explain to them what happened to Alec Leamas — and to what extent Control, and Smiley, and Peter himself are responsible for those shocking Cold War goings-on.
You know how tediously judgmental these young folks can be about such things — come back, old man, and justify yourself.
I’m not going to tell you any more, except to say that as Peter endures their interrogations and immerses himself in the official, and unofficial, records, much of the novel takes place in his flashbacks, and the past comes very much to life.
I really enjoyed reading it last year.
So imagine how pleased I was to see Peter Guillam himself appear before me just last night, much older but still the same former head of Scalphunters.
OK, not the fictional character himself, but the next best thing: It was Michael Jayston, who portrayed him so perfectly in the 1979 Tinker Tailer TV series (possibly the best TV show in history), alongside Alex Guinness as Smiley. He was Guillam. Sorry, Michael Byrne and Benedict Cumberbatch, but he was, and you were not — especially not you, Benedict.
Here’s how it happened — I had just come in last night from a late-evening walk, finishing up my 10,000 steps for the day. My wife was watching the very last episode of “Murder in Suburbia” (an underrated ITV cops programme that only lasted two “seasons,” as the Americans call them) on Britbox, and she called my attention to the screen and said, “Look who it is!” She was talking about Olivia Coleman. But a couple of seconds later, someone else showed up.
It was Michael Jayston. It was Peter! Much older and greyer, of course, but unmistakably the same guy. He even had the same hair cut, and the same expression he wore when listening to Ricki Tarr tell his tale about the mole.
Of course, this had first been aired in… July 2005, shortly after I started this blog. And while he looked perfect for the part on the screen, he’s now, um… 87. Oh. Dang….
But so what? 2005 was just minutes ago, and this is Peter Bloody Guillam! Certainly he’s stayed in shape! But let’s get moving. I’m envisioning a high-quality TV-series rendition of A Legacy of Spies here, and I can’t wait to see it! And no one else (especially not you, Mr. Cumberbatch) could play the main protagonist.
I stand ready to help in this noble endeavor. Writing, casting, whatever you need done.
In fact, it occurs to me that Alex Guinness is no longer available, and here I am. Of course, I’m somewhat young for the role, unless you want me for the flashback scenes.
But I’ll do anything you need. Be the third assistant gofer to the gaffer, whatever. Let’s just get started…
And suddenly, there he was — Peter Guillam, much older! (The guy in the middle. Duh…(
We all have shaken our heads over those stupid kids today who can’t seem to make their way through so much as a sentence of 19th-century prose:
Like all the others who managed to make their way through Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school, I read this with a mix of smugness and horror. Then, naturally, I scrolled to the next declinist indicator, the next sign of the cultural apocalypse.
What I did not do was click through and read the whole Heller piece (though I have read it now, I swear it!). Even more conspicuously, I definitely did not go pick up a copy of “The Scarlet Letter” or any other 19th-century novel and begin reading it for pleasure.
“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. And any response to the question of what’s happened to the humanities has to include the same answer. The Harvard undergraduates who can’t parse a complex sentence from the American Renaissance are part of the problem. But so is the Harvard-educated newspaper columnist and self-styled cultural conservative who regularly unburdens himself of deep thoughts on pop TV but hasn’t read a complete 19th -century novel for his own private enjoyment in — well, let’s just say it’s been a while…
Oh, Douthat lets us know he’s started to read, say, Les Misérables, but only gotten a hundred or so pages into it. He has similarly failed with shorter works.
He cites some of the things that he lets get in the way: website browsing; looking at his iPhone, “even at a live performance;” and long-form television, an obsession he attempts to justify by talking up Golden Age TV’s supposed literary virtues.
I have to confess to all of those, plus:
The little work I do these days to pay the bills.
Naps, which fortunately I’m able to blame on my stroke.
My fitful blogging.
And other stuff…
So it is that, while I have boasted a number of times here about how awesome “Moby Dick” truly is, and how I’m reading it with great enjoyment and a commitment to finishing it, I have failed to get anywhere near the point at which they finally find the white whale.
Douthat goes on from moaning about the problem to prescription, but I’m not sure how workable his medications are. For instance, he refers to a piece in the WSJ headlined, “College Should Be More Like Prison.” To be fair, the idea is more reasonable than it sounds — the author of that piece (which, alas, I cannot read, since I let that subscription lapse) was referring to things she has learned from teaching maximum-security inmates. But I find it hard to imagine it being a practical cure for the rest of us.
I’ve gone on and on about, for instance, what diving down the Rabbit Hole has done to our ability to think, and to have a functioning representative democracy. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten, and I’m still at the whiteboard working on the diagnosis. I await the inspiration that leads to a remedy…
These days people love to quote Pogo’s twist on a famous saying: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Which works in this instance.
But I’m thinking of the saying that Walt Kelly was playing on, from Commodore Perry: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
Perry had captured two ships, two brigs, a schooner and a sloop from the British at the Battle of Lake Erie.
I, for one, cannot yet claim that the current enemy is ours. In darker moments, I fear that we have struck our colors, and we are his…
I haven’t seen any such resurrection — I mean the bookstore one. I just Googled to see if it came back when I wasn’t looking. I see no such signs or wonders.
As y’all know, my favorite store of any kind in the entire universe was the Barnes & Noble on Harbison. And they closed it, and replaced it with some stupendously unappealing thing called a “Nordstrom Rack,” thereby adding further insult to the injury. I went in there once. They didn’t even offer coffee, as I recall.
If my store is coming back, let me know, and I’ll run there almost as fast as the Apostle John ran to the empty tomb. (I say “almost” because he was young and spry, and, well, that was a much bigger deal. Infinitely bigger, if you will. But I still want my store back.)
Just roll away that stone, and watch me. I want my store back…
(I say “almost” because John was young and spry, and, well, that was a much bigger deal. Infinitely bigger, if you will. But I still want my store back.)
Yeah, I’m on about my Raskolnikov Syndrome theory again. But hey, I haven’t mentioned it since April, so…
The theory is that people lose their minds — and often become shockingly violent — when they cut themselves off from other people. Ten years ago, I summarized it in part this way:
I’ve long had this theory that people who do truly horrendous things that Ordinary Decent People can’t fathom do them because they’ve actually entered another state of being that society, because it is society, can’t relate to…
You know, the way Raskolnikov did. Brilliant guy, but as he cut himself off from family and friends and sat in his grubby garret brooding on self-centered theories, he became capable of horrible things. Well, you know what he did. If you don’t, read the book. Everyone should. I suspect it’s what made Mel Brooks say, “My God, I’d love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, ‘Well done, you god-damn genius.’ ”
Anyway, it’s come up again because of this piece I read the other day in The Washington Post., headlined “Americans are choosing to be alone. Here’s why we should reverse that..” It included some scary numbers, to me:
And now for the scarier news: Our social lives were withering dramatically before covid-19. Between 2014 and 2019, time spent with friends went down (and time spent alone went up) by more than it did during the pandemic.
According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the average American spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline.
By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37 percent decline from five years before). Social media, political polarization and new technologies all played a role in the drop. (It is notable that market penetration for smartphones crossed 50 percent in 2014.)
Covid then deepened this trend. During the pandemic, time with friends fell further — in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58 percent decline relative to 2010-2013)…
On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone….
Take that, and combine it with the Rabbit Hole, and you have a dangerous situation, with a society that is dangerously alienated, and no longer understands what a fact is. And yeah, I’m talking about the 2016 election, and the “stop the steal” cult, but a lot of other stuff as well.
Look around at some of the bad craziness going on, and this helps explain it…
Of course, I refer to the funeral of King Edward VII, on May 20, 1910.
Y’all remember that one? It was a biggie. I cite the first paragraph of The Guns of August:
I don’t mean to disrespect Her Majesty’s funeral yesterday, by any means. Based on all I’ve heard and the few photos I’ve seen (the reverence, the solemnity, the dazzling colors — except for the two disgraced princes in mufti), it was splendid — as it should have been.
I’ve just got this one on my mind because a couple of days back, I started re-reading the Tuchman book. I’m using the term “re-reading” loosely here, because I didn’t finish it the first time. After it shifted to the Eastern front, it seemed to bog down. All I remember about it was the incompetence of the tsar’s government (sort of like Putin’s in Ukraine), which gave me a bit of insight into why the revolution happened.
So I decided to start over, partly because I knew the first chapter was awesome, beginning with that portrait, excerpted above, of the old world that was about to end — that ruled by closely related kings, attending the funeral of their kinsman. He was known as “the uncle of Europe,” which Mrs. Tuchman explained thusly:
Anyway, I had remembered all that — not each and every relationship, or even the precise number of royal highnesses and such in the cortege. But I had remembered the main points — the pomp and splendor, the significance of this last gathering of the fam, and the general reasons why this was all to come to an end.
But I didn’t remember everything. And that’s my point. When I was young, I remembered any book I had read — no matter how much earlier — in absurd detail. Not photographic memory exactly, but I remember details clearly, and could quickly find them. Long before Google, I could in a brief moment find a quote I wanted in a book read 20 years earlier, by leafing through it thinking, OK, it was in the upper part of a left-hand page, and it was before this… but after that… a couple more pages… there! And when I got there, it was as I had remembered.
To some extent, that’s still there. And I remembered there were certain alarming ideas current in Germany at the time, and how I was impressed when I first read about them, thinking, As much as we make of Nazi ideology, this stuff didn’t just come from the twisted mind of Hitler a generation later….
But I had forgotten her portrait of the most prominent of those foreign cousins riding in the cortege — Kaiser Wilhelm II. “William” was glad his uncle Edward was dead. It meant, he thought, he — and Germany — would get more recognition, more respect. Note the way the author describes the kaiser’s reaction to Edward’s triumphant visit to Paris a few years earlier:
(Sorry about all the long screenshots, by the way. I would copy and paste much shorter quotes, but Google Books won’t let me, so I do this. I know it’s rather unsatisfactory. I don’t do it just because I’m lazy; retyping introduces a greatly increased possibility of errors.)
I’d forgotten what a cranky, needy child the Kaiser was. Of course, he comes across a lot like Trump — all that whiny me, me, me. Maybe it strikes me more strongly now because I first read that chapter pre-2016, when Trump was still this ridiculous figure from the 1980s whom we are all free to ignore.
Now, I think, Well, as messed up as our democracy not is, and as much as I like and will miss the queen, here’s another reason to appreciate that we don’t have a monarch. Think about it. As much as Trump tried to become king — on Jan. 6, and so often before and since — he failed. But imagine how much more awful things would be were he a sovereign, and his identification with the country were such that he was the country and the country was him? (Yes, I know this isn’t the Middle Ages and things were different by 1914, but there’s still the psychology of identification that lies at the heart of the idea of monarchy.)
Of course, if we had a monarchy, Trump would never have been the king. But let’s not get lost in speculative details.
Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is to bring up one of the few fun parts of getting older: It’s forgetting things, and enjoying the delight of rediscovering them.
It’s not that I’ve become a goldfish. I remember most things, and since I’m an intuitive type, I pretty much always remember, and can accurately describe in general terms, the forest. Which is what matters to someone who thinks the way I do. But I let go of a lot of the trees.
I first saw this coming on maybe 15 or 20 years ago (or, from my perspective, a few days ago) when I suddenly realized that I longer remembered all of the lyrics of every single Beatles song. I had always taken that knowledge for granted, and now there were many holes in it. Big deal, I was able to say to myself — those weren’t details I needed in my life. Still, it was a loss.
Then, about the time I entered my 60s, the delightful thing came along: I didn’t retain any new TV shows I saw. Oh, I remembered what Jethro did in “The Beverly Hillbillies” back in the mid-60s. But I could watch an episode of some British murder mystery and enjoy it in 2012 or later, and then come back in a year or so with NO idea whodunit, and enjoy it all over again. Because my personal hard drive was no longer adding this stuff to the database.
Which is awesome. Lately, my wife and I have been rewatching “Endeavour” from the beginning, and having a great time. Oh, something about a scene will be familiar; I might even say “I know this scene; this is the moment I realized the writers were basing this episode on ‘The Great Gatsby’.” But I still won’t know what’s going to happen. And there are episodes I don’t remember at all.
Which is great. It’s so much easier to be entertained whenever I want to be. I don’t have to look so hard for “new” content.
For some time, I’ve been thinking, What if this could happen with books, too? I mean, what if I could completely forget O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, and start over and experience it for the “first time” again? That would be bliss.
I’m not there yet, by any means. But this bit of forgetfulness with the Tuchman book is a promising beginning…
Which, frankly, was about what I expected. I think if Tolkien thought what had happened (in his imagination, not Tommy Westphall’s) in Middle Earth 3,000 years earlier was as compelling as The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, he’d have written the stories out, rather than summing them up in an appendix.
It concentrates on those Oxford writers as besieged Christians taking comfort from their friendship — and their work — in a time and place of growing indifference and even hostility to faith, and it’s worth reading. You can probably do so without subscribing as I have — as I recall, America still uses the model in which you can read two or three pieces before the pay wall goes up.
Frankly, when I read Lord of the Rings, I saw it as a warning against the isolationism that was so dominant in Britain and this country before the Second World War. (The writing of the work started in 1937 and continued until several years after the war.) I tended to see Sauron as Hitler, Saruman and Wormtongue as the quislings who were undermining Europe — I mean, Middle Earth — ahead of the orc blitzkrieg, and Gandalf as the sort of Churchill/Roosevelt figure who ran about trying to wake everyone up before it was too late.
But yes, Tolkien’s mind was working on deeper levels as well, as the piece in America notes:
Everyone loves an underdog, of course, but these tales feel more meaningful than a standard superhero film because their authors had their eyes on a deeper set of truths. Sin and corruption are real, but salvation is still available. They knew, as Tolkien explained to Lewis in the early years of their friendship, that the Christian story is the truest story, of which all others are echoes. When all appears to be lost, we always have recourse to the deep magic from the dawn of time.
Recently, I drew your attention (or tried to, anyway) to a homily by Bishop Barron in which he used the experiences of Bilbo Baggins as an example of what God expects of us — that we’re supposed to get out and encounter the world and have a great adventure, not sit comfortably in our hobbit holes smoking choice Shire pipeweed, and enjoying the copious food and drink of our larders.
Anyway, however you interpret it, it helps for your story to have a point, and consist of more than breathtaking CGI scenery and battle sequences. Those can leave you feeling rather empty…
First, a complaint that’s unrelated to the subject: For some time, I’ve been meaning to write something about the sudden death of the newspaper headline. I’m still going to write it, but I’ll just touch on it here.
Back when there were real newspapers everywhere, journalists had an important ethic — to tell their readers everything they needed (or might want) to know about the subject at hand as quickly as possible. Do it in the headline if possible. Then, if you couldn’t do it in the hed, you did it in the lede. People should be able to read nothing but the hed and the lede and move on, and know the most important facts about what the story was about. If the story was a tad too complicated for that, certainly you finished telling the basics in the next couple of grafs — then, assuming you were writing in the classic inverted-pyramid form, the importance of the information you related diminished with each paragraph.
You did this for two reasons. First, those rabid lunatics on the copy desk (no offense to copy editors; I’m just describing them the way a reporter would) were likely to end your story randomly wherever they felt like ending it, in order to cram it into inadequate space, so you needed to get the best stuff up top. Second, you saw it as your sacred duty to inform the busy reader as well as you could. A reader who didn’t have the time to sit down and read the stories should be able to glance over the headlines on the front page and at least have a rough, overall idea of the important news of the day. A reader with a little more time should be able to get a somewhat deeper understanding just by reading the front, without having to follow the stories to the jump pages. And so forth.
But no more. Now, the point is to get readers to click on the story. So you get “headlines” that say things like, and I am not making this up, “What you need to know about X.” When there was room in the headline to just tell you what you needed to know. Or they make it clear that the story is about a particular person, but don’t name the person. The idea being that if you aren’t willing to click, then you can just take a flying leap. (There’s another, even more absurd, reason why the person is often not named, but I’ll get into that another time.)
Different ethic — if you want to call it that.
But you see what I just did? I wrote 414 words without getting to the point of this post. See what writing for an online audience, without the discipline enforced by the limited space of a dead-tree newspaper, can do to you?
I went on that tangent, though, because I was irritated by a story headlined, “What Types of Exercise Reduce Dementia Risk?” That grabbed me on account of knowing someone — a good friend, you see — who will soon be 69. And he might care to know. But did the story tell me? No. At least, not in the first 666 words. After that, it finally gave me a subhed that said, “Start by doing what you like best.”
Which meant we were getting somewhere, but not exactly. Still, I forgive this writer and her editors, because she had an excuse: She doesn’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. At least not an answer that would satisfy me — or rather, my friend.
So, in a way, my long digression about bad headlines was even less relevant than it seemed. Oh, well. At least I got some of that out of my system. But I’ll return to the subject in another post, with examples.
Back to the exercise thing — while there are no answers, there are… indications, such as those from three recently-published “major long-term studies” that “confirm that regular physical activity, in many forms, plays a substantial role in decreasing the risk of developing dementia,” and further tell us that “Vigorous exercise seems to be best, but even non-traditional exercise, such as doing household chores, can offer a significant benefit.”
That’s good. But I went into this hoping — that is, my friend went into it hoping — that the stories would endorse the Wally Schirra approach.
Did you read The Right Stuff? Well, you should have, and if you haven’t, go read it right now, and return to this point in the post when you’re done…
Did you enjoy it? It’s awesome, isn’t it? Well, I always liked the part where Wolfe is telling about how the people in charge of the Mercury program encouraged our nation’s first seven astronauts to engage in frequent exercise. And John Glenn, demonstrating what a Harry Hairshirt he was, would go out and run laps around the parking lot of the BOQ. But most of the guys agreed with Wally Schirra “who felt that any form of exercise that wasn’t fun, such as waterskiing or handball, was bad for your nervous system:”
Nothing against John Glenn. He’s a hero of mine, as for most Americans alive in that time. I was really disappointed that he didn’t do better in his bid for the presidency in 1984. I was definitely ready to vote for him.
But I like Wally’s approach to exercise. And while the data may not all be in on precisely the best exercise for keeping one’s nervous system functioning properly, it seems a good idea to “Start by doing what you like best.”
OK, I remember that Obi-Wan let Darth win. It was a deliberate sacrifice, which I’m sure means a great deal in the theology of the Force, or would if there were such a theology. For us caught up in the film, I suppose the point was that it was so important to let the guys rescue Princess Leia, and even more importantly, destroy the Death Star (remember what it did to Alderaan), that he was willing to give his life to make it happen. (I’m not entirely sure why he couldn’t do all that and beat Darth, too, but I suppose Darth needed to live so there could be another movie, and so Anakin could be redeemed in the end.)
But anyway, he lost. And in this case, I’d rather see Rep. Cheney win and You-Know-Who lose. But I guess we can’t have everything.
My point, if I have one, is that this reminded me of something I’ve thought about a good bit lately. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for several years, but I’m not asking you to be impressed — I suppose others have thought about it for millennia. It was when I was reading Rubicon by Tom Holland.
And as always, when I read about those days, I’m struck by how much the Trojan War comes up. Over and over and over again. It’s like the Greeks just had this one story they kept going back to, and of course, the Romans — as industrious as they were in so many other ways — couldn’t be bothered even to come up with one story of their own, so they stole the Greeks’. Which was their way.
If they came up with another story — like the one about Odysseus/Ulysses — they couldn’t even separate that new one from the big one. Sure, that’s about him and his boys being lost for years on the way home — but they were on the way home from… the Trojan War.
It even comes into the Romulus and Remus story, although I’m always forgetting how exactly.
Seems like they could have come up with some other stories. But they didn’t. They liked that one, and they stuck with it. Sort of makes me feel bad that I’ve never read the originals — not the Iliad, or for that matter the Aeniad. But you see, I have no Greek beyond Kyrie Eleison, and my Latin — despite the best efforts of the legendary Mrs. Sarah T. Kinney of Bennettsville High School — remains inadequate to tackling literature. I mean, I know that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, but I don’t know what comes next.
And yes, I know millions of people over the ages — or a lot of them, anyway — have contented themselves with translations, but it just seems that after all this time, I could have made myself learn Greek. But I didn’t, so I leave it alone. I know the basic story, though — that horndog Paris caused a heap of trouble, and it went on for a bunch of years, and ended with a fake horse. I content myself with that. At least I don’t have to study Communism or Nazism or anything to get what the war was about. Pretty basic, really, even though it’s a bit hard for a modern mind to fully grasp why most of those other people went along with having a war over it.
That’s not my point, though. My point is that I started thinking about it again lately when I read a piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined, “The Power of Our New Pop Myths.”
Yeah, I know — the paywall. Actually, it’s getting in my way at the moment, too — some problem with my password I’ve had for about 20 years. Which I’m not going to change. But anyway, the subhed is “Marvel, Star Wars and other franchises have become central to our culture by returning to a primal form of storytelling.,” and it begins like this:
And so forth. It’s sort of related to a complaint I frequently voice about Hollywood being unable to come up with fresh stories. They just keep recycling the same yarns. (How many Spider-Man origin movies have we had in the past few years?)
Kind of like with the ancient Greeks and Romans, but at least we have more than one story. There’s Marvel, there’s Harry Potter, there’s Bilbo Baggins, and Dune if you like. There’s the Matrix. All of which are at least entertaining, the first time you hear them.
And of course, between the Trojan War and Peter Parker, we Westerners who have at least paid some attention to the actual bases of our culture have had, with the help of the ancient Hebrews, the rich stories of the Bible, and a religion that speaks to me and many others of eternal verities, which if you’ll forgive me, I find even more meaningful than learning about the Kwisatz Haderach.
Which brings me back to Bishop Barron, who as you know continues to impress me with the power of his Sunday sermons.
He had a good one this week, in which he got all Jungian on the way to teaching an important lesson about what God wants from us.
His title was “Go on a Hero’s Journey,” and in it he gets into such stories as “The Hobbit.” It’s about how comfortable Bilbo was in his Hobbit hole, as hobbits tend to be, and beyond that about the inconvenient fact that that’s not what God wants. Like the dwarves who invade Bilbo’s sanctuary, and like Gandalf, he wants us to get out there and have an adventure, one that actually matters.
Anyway, I’m not going to recite the whole sermon to you; you can watch it below. I recommend it highly…
Hold it right there — no sequel will be as good as this.
Especially not the sequels of one certain genre — messianic fiction. You know, the type of story where you’re all in suspense as to whether the protagonist is The One, and eventually everyone learns that yes, he is. All of which happens in the first book, or movie, or whatever.
After that, you have sequels in which the author or director tries really, really hard to reproduce the magic of the original, usually by being super repetitive in terms of plot.
Some of you will disagree strongly with this Top Five list — I’ve found that in the past when I’ve pointed this out. But I think a lot of that is that the author or director just did an exceptional job of recreating the magic of the first, and you loved the first so much you loved the others, too. But for me, after the reveal has occurred, I’m ready for a different story — or at least, a story about a completely different messiah.
Here’s my list of examples. Oh, and for those who haven’t read or seen these, HUGE SPOILER ALERT!
Dune — I loved the first novel. But it turned into the worst generator of sequels I’ve ever encountered. Nevertheless, they kept coming out, even after the author was dead. Think about it: By the end of Dune, we learn that Paul is definitely the Kwisatz Haderach, all his main enemies are dead, and he even becomes emperor of the known universe. How do you top that? You don’t. Herbert certainly didn’t. The following stories try way too hard, and take liberties with characters that I found highly objectionable.
Harry Potter — This one will engender some of the strongest objections. But I was totally satisfied by the first book: Harry is rescued from a cartoonishly horrible life by Hagrid, who informs him not only that he is a wizard, but “a thumpin’ good’un I’d say, once yeh’ve been trained up a bit.” So he wanders in awe about Diagon Alley, and goes to Hogwarts, and spends the full school year there. You learn all about the magical world, and how it differs from that of muggles. And then, when it’s all over, Harry comes back to Hogwarts, and spends another whole year doing many of the same things. And because my kids and so many others loved the stories so much, I read the first three books or so in a vain effort to keep up, but then I stopped. But, you will cry, the stories after that get so serious and dark! Well, that’s not an attraction to me. Life is serious and dark enough, and this was a children’s story.
The Matrix — Let me confess, up front, that if I even tried to watch the sequels, I’ve since forgotten them. Frankly, I had no interest. “The Matrix” (the film, not the graphic novel) had bowled me over completely. I thought it was great. But then I was done. Neo was The One, and he could kick agent butt without breaking a sweat. What else did I need to see?
Star Wars — I’m flying in the face of some people’s religion here, but no, “The Empire Strikes Back” was not better than the original movie. Nothing was better than the original movie. “Empire” was good — especially the parts on Hoth — and other works in that fictional universe have sometimes been very engaging, especially “The Mandelorian.” But the first film contained everything that I would most enjoy from the characters and their respective arcs. And the overall premises of the fictional universe were fine for one film, but got a bit thin beyond that. A story such as this is fun, but needs to remember not to take itself too seriously.
The Godfather — Again, the second movie was most assuredly NOT better than the first. Yes, that’s that wonderful section that tells the story of how Vito became Don Corleone. But hey, that was in the novel that the first movie was based on — it just got left out. The first movie tells us how Michael, seemingly the least likely son, becomes the don’s successor, and seals the deal by overcoming all the family’s enemies. But he also becomes something terrifying, as the look on Kay’s face in the final shot drives home. I don’t need to see him manifesting his monstrosity in the second tale, as the family itself becomes consumed.
Not all sequels fall flat. Here are some that really worked:
Post Captain, and the other 18 books that follow Master and Commander. I refer here to the book, not the movie — which unfortunately based its plot vary roughly on the 10th book in the series, and pilfered good bits from various others. Each book tells a complete story, and the 20 taken altogether tell a saga of immense scale. Each deserves more than a film of its own. Each book should be a full season of a masterful television series — one that would last 20 years. Anyway, the “sequels” work because while the characters and the historical universe are the same, each story is fresh and different. And compelling.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Yep, it’s a sequel — to Tom Sawyer. And it starts out in the tone of a sequel to that light celebration of youth in the 19th century, and a particularly amusing one at that. But Twain set it aside for several years, and then came back and turned it into the Great American Novel. If you’re the pedantic type, you might say that such an uneven book can’t be a great anything. But America is filled with different voices telling different stories, and its actual history is buffeted by mood swings and changes of tone. So it’s no surprise its greatest fictional work should be so “uneven.”
Note that none of those are of the “revelation of a hero’s destiny” type — what I referred to earlier as the “messiah” story.
I could mention more that worked and didn’t work, but I guess that’ll do for now…
The most impressive bit of prehistoric art I’ve ever seen, from the Cave of the Hands in Argentina.
Or to spread it more broadly, like that — by which I mean Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari — and like some other, similar books I’ve read in recent years. They include:
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, the sequel to the previous.
In that post, I mentioned that I had just finished, on New Year’s Eve, reading Sapiens. And stated my intention to charge forward and spend the whole year reading other interesting new books that would broaden my mind, instead of rereading things I’d read multiple times before, such as the volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novel series.
So what have I been doing? Well, the last few days I’ve found myself rereading Sapiens. And I’m again being thoroughly fascinated by all the interesting things I had already forgotten, even though I had read it so recently. (An aging thing, I guess. I never had trouble in school remembering things over summer vacation. But I guess I don’t retain things that easily now, being less “impressionable.”)
Just this morning, I was reading again how we humans messed up our lives with this whole Agricultural Revolution thing. And how we couldn’t help ourselves. But this time I took time to leaf to the back to check out a footnote, and found it was referring to… Guns, Germs and Steel. Yeah, I thought I had read something else that told me giving up hunting and gathering was a raw deal… not that we can do anything about it.
There’s a connection here somewhere to my decreasing interest in the “news” of the day, and the same stupid, overly simplistic arguments about what’s going on around us being offered by “both” sides — you know, the ones and zeroes people. (Not that I ignore current events entirely. For instance, this morning I learned a lot from a piece in The Wall Street Journal about the shadow war being conducted between Israel and Iran — something I had known next to nothing about.)
More and more, I’m interested in the Big Picture. I’m more fascinated, for instance, by how sapiens outlived (and quite likely of course, killed off) the Neanderthals — except for a few bits of DNA that I and other people of European ancestry are anachronistically carrying around. That interests me more than, say, how the billionahuhs are exploiting the proletariat — or, if you prefer the “other” interpretation (among the two and only two that we’re allowed), how the job-creators are building a better world.
I’m not sure that what I’m talking about here is “Big History,” which I’ve heard a good bit about recently. A lot of that has to do with all those billions of years before our ancestors came along and started walking on two legs. And those eons seem a bit… sterile… to me. I’m more interested in the last few million years — and particularly the millennia between what Harari calls The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution (between about 70,000 and 10,000 years ago), and what happened in the few millennia after that, shaping the world we now live in.
The books I’ve listed at the top of this post fit right in that sweet spot. So, to some extent, does one of those books I asked for for Christmas: The Discovers, by Daniel Boorstin. I started to read it long before I developed this recent interest, and remember being impressed at his description of one of the greatest bits of “progress” that has ever oppressed us: the measurement of time. But before I finished it, I misplaced my copy, and have been wanting for all this time to get back to it.
I also want to read those novels in that small stack as well. I mean, I know what happened to Thomas Cromwell, but I’m interested to find out how Hilary Mantel tells the tale.
But I want to read more in what I think of as the Sapiens category — the story of how humans got from hunting and gathering to where we are.
I’m particularly hoping Lynn Teague reads this, and has some good ideas. She’s the only archaeologist I know, and these books fit largely within her field…
Yes, he could, I thought as I read it. And then I thought of something else: Was any of his other, more familiar, writing this good? Or was he even better than usual when trying to be ingratiating to Marilyn Monroe?
First, I admit that I haven’t read a whole lot of Steinbeck. I hate to admit that, seeing he was, as Wikipedia asserts, “a giant of American letters.” I never quite finished his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.
The only two books of his I know I’ve read all the way through are Of Mice and Men (more than once, I think) and the somewhat less celebrated The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. So, you know, I’m not even qualified to draft a Steinbeck Top Five List.
Those were good books (even though, let’s face it, Mice and Men was a downer). But did it have passages that grabbed you as insistently as this does: “He has his foot in the door of puberty, but that is only one of his problems. You are the other.” (And you know he’s not exaggerating, because this is, you know, Marilyn Monroe.)
Poor kid. It would be a rough obsession to have, being that age at that point in her career. I was only 8 when she died, so the effect was different.
Anyway, yeah, I know, I need to finish Grapes of Wrath. I truly feel obligated to do so, sort of the way I feel about Moby Dick. But the thing is, I’m already fully convinced of its greatness, and it’s import as a slice of American life at a critical moment in a critical place. But come on, despite all these years of not letting myself see the movie until I’d read the book, I already know how it ends. And not to give anything away, but it’s kind of a bummer, too.
You know how I have made this resolution to finally start reading all the good books around the house that I have asked for over the years? I don’t know how many there are, because they’re all over the place and I haven’t done an inventory.
I say that because something about the martyred theologian has been brought to my attention a couple of times in recent days.
It’s the fact that he considered stupidity to be more dangerous than evil. And in my book, when a guy who stood up to the Nazis and was executed for trying to rid the world of Hitler says something like that, we should sit up and take notice. Because he knew a thing or two about evil.
Here’s a quote:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
This addresses a question I’ve been pondering a good bit over the past six years — since, you know, 2016. I haven’t written that much about it, because I don’t feel like I can answer my own question — and raising it just gets people so upset. So what’s the point?
Oh, I’ve referred to it in passing. Deep down in a post, you can find me saying things like, So which is it: Is Trump evil, or stupid? Or rather, since he’s obviously both, which is the main problem? What are we dealing with?
Then, of course, the next logical step is to ask the same question regarding his supporters. Because Trump isn’t the actual problem. Trump was an idiot, and a slimeball, for decades, and we all knew it. He was famous for these characteristics. But no one took him seriously. He was just some gross clown at the edges of our society. Sort of a Kardashian, or one of those people on Jersey Shore.
Then, in a complete reversal of American political history up to that point, people started voting for him. So the question becomes, what happened to them — these voters? Yeah, we’d had a long buildup of gross, mindless partisanship for two or three decades leading up to it, and a lot of it was ugly, but what caused it all to go off a cliff in 2016?
I’ve written a good bit about that. But I’ve generally avoided that one question that keeps occurring to me: Is it evil, or stupidity?
Whenever I’ve been about to tackle it with some determination, I dismiss the question as itself being stupid: Obviously, both things are at work. There’s a lot of foolishness out there, and a lot of plain, rotten meanness.
And does it matter what label we put on it? Well, yes, I think so, at least on a moral plane. Being stupid doesn’t make you a bad person, does it? And yet, people often get more offended at being called stupid than evil, don’t they?
So why go there? These folks seem angry all the time anyway; why make it worse? The thing to do is try to think of something to do or say that would make things better, not just increase the massive heap of ill feeling in the world.
In fact, that’s the last thing I want. I want to turn down the temperature, calm everything down, get people to stop being furious and start listening to each other and learn how to live together. To stop thinking in terms of ones and zeroes, and start seeing each other as fellow humans.
But the fact that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these things makes it worth trying to understand better what he was thinking. He wasn’t some idiot Twitter partisan sniping at the “other side” to elevate his own side (“You people are stupid!” “No, we’re not; you are!”). This was a thinking, spiritual man willing to wrestle with moral complexity, and to give everything in that cause.
And there he was, face-to-face with the greatest evil of the past century, if not of all history. And he sat there in his prison cell and wrote that as bad as evil was, stupidity was the greater danger.
Of course, some of why he did this is self-evident: Nazism was stupid. It was an ideology for brutish, ticked-off people, for brawlers battling in the streets, outraged at their lot in life between the wars and wanting something that would show the rest of the world how wrong it was.
But of course, it was also evil as all get-out. Which parts were mainly evil, and which parts mainly stupid? And what was the relationship between the two factors, as they worked together to make horrors happen?
Seems worth exploring. So I need to read that book…
It’s not the best le Carré ever, because we have to face the fact that the Alec Guinness version of George Smiley is out there, in both “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People.”
But if you consider only adaptations of the non-George novels, I think this is the best.
And I wasn’t expecting that — at all. In fact, when I heard they had remade The Little Drummer Girl as a TV series back in 2018, I was, as usual, irritated. Why mess with success?
The 1984 version, starring Diane Keaton, wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty great. She was good as Charlie, Klaus Kinski was just as good as Kurtz, and Yorgo Voyagis — of whom I had never heard before or since — was very impressive as the conflicted, lugubrious Israeli hero Gadi Becker.
Yeah, they messed with it. For instance, they turned Charlie into an American. Because, you know, Diane Keaton. But beyond that, I was well pleased.
But still, when I fell victim recently to a come-on from AMC+ (a free week! which of course wasn’t enough to get me through this one show without having to pay!) I immediately had to go check it out.
And then, I had to watch all the way through. These last couple of days with COVID helped me get it done.
And from the beginning, I realized, “This is better.”
Especially if you appreciate dramatizations that are true to the book, in every possible way. And of course we don’t see that nearly enough. I had had high hopes for “The Night Manager,” which is probably my favorite non-Smiley le Carré. But you couldn’t get more than a few minutes into it before everything was turned this way and that. Worst of all, they updated it (shudder). As le Carré reacted at the time:
But a novel I had written nearly a quarter of a century ago reset in present time? With none of Pine’s trip to northern Quebec in the story? None of Central America? My beloved Colombian drugs barons replaced by Middle Eastern warlords? No zillion dollar luxury yacht for Richard Roper? A new ending to the story, yet to be discussed? What did that mean?
One change worked: Jonathan Pine’s handler was changed from a man to a pregnant woman. I’m still not sure whether that was an improvement because of the maternal aspects of looking after an agent in the field, or simply because the actress was Olivia Coleman. Probably both.
But the other changes didn’t work. Especially not the new ending.
But this was true right down the line. Time, place, characters and plot. Which is great because it’s a fantastic story, filled with delicate features and contradictions that could be thrown completely off with the wrong changes.
The moral ambiguity of the story is doubled, partly because of the extended time format. And that’s essential. No one — not agent Charlie, not her handler, not anyone — is supposed to be entirely sure who’s right and who’s wrong in this counterterrorism story.
And then there’s the casting. The unknown (to me) young woman who plays Charlie is just what the role demanded. She’s supposed to be an unremarkable little actress who feels she’s never been able to realize her potential. Now I realize: How could that be Diane Keaton, who at 38 was such a big star that they’d change the main character’s nationality to get her? She needs to be someone you look at and try to figure out and decide whether she’s up to the overwhelming task.
And you do. She makes you do that. A lot of women should love her in this. First, she’s not a willowy supermodel type like Ms. Keaton. Her figure — as you discover when the head of the terror cell makes her strip to her underwear as a safety precaution — is at best “average.” And yet, she has this quality that draws men’s eyes. You completely believe the thing you have to believe about Charlie — that she can bewitch everyone from her fellow actors to international terrorists.
They had to do the same with Gadi Becker. You had to believe that he could enthrall Charlie, and that it was so obvious that Kurtz, head of the Israeli team, could bank on it. And yet it was something Becker himself did not value.
As for Kurtz: Klaus Kinski was perfect, but if anything — if you’ll allow the logical impossibility — Michael Shannon is more so. An American, of course, but one who can really act, and makes this intense Israeli real. But what has Shannon ever done that wasn’t great, from Elvis to the cop in “Boardwalk Empire?” His characters are always bigger than life. And kinda scary.
I saw the above image when Samuel Tenenbaum shared it on Facebook, and it reminded me of the book I am finally almost, almost, almost done reading, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
It reminded me of something I keep thinking of while reading the book. I keep thinking, Yeah, maybe we’re the homo that is the most sapient, so the name of the species works. But are we really smart enough to keep going?
I suppose you noticed a day or so ago that, thanks to Omicron, the United States just set yet another record for new COVID cases in a day.
This, despite all the free vaccines and boosters. This, despite the fact that it’s perfectly obvious how to avoid passing on infections, which create new, more contagious (and more likely to overcome vaccines) variants as they reproduce through the population.
We know what to do. We — as a total population — just don’t do it in sufficient numbers to snuff this thing out.
A virus is about as stupid a life form as you can imagine, if you even want to call it a life form. It doesn’t even form cells, much less anything remotely resembling a brain, in contrast to the huge hunk of gray matter than homo sapiens has been blessed with.
But over and over again, it keeps outsmarting us.
So maybe, in Darwinian terms, it’s the one that deserves to win out.
I don’t believe that. I really don’t believe it at all. I’ve got a lot invested in this big-headed species to which I belong. I know we can do better. In fact, I keep getting kind of ticked at Yuval Noah Harari as I read his book, because again and again, he declines to give our species the kind of respect I think it deserves. Or that I at least want to think it deserves.
But time and time again, we just don’t do what we know how to do. It’s like we’re trying to shove ourselves toward extinction. Which ticks me off. And really, really disappoints me…
As y’all know, I worry a good bit about what the internet is doing to us. But I don’t worry about “artificial intelligence” taking over the planet in some deliberate, organized way like in “The Matrix.”
That’s because I don’t see it as intelligent, either in a bad way or a good way. Oh, it’s capable of some impressive tricks. Some of them, like Google Maps, I think are pretty wonderful. But intelligent? Nope. I worry about the things it does that are the opposite of intelligent. And I worry about how it’s making us dramatically less intelligent. That’s what all those “Rabbit Hole” posts are about.
And on the good, useful side of intelligence, I’m never going to trust it to operate any car that I or people I love are riding in — or driving next to. Yep, it can react more quickly and often more logically than a human to many situations. But it is so very, very far from being able to see and understand everything we do.
My email today provided two examples that brought all this to mind for me, yet again.
First… I recently wanted to re-read Post Captain, the second book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, for the first time in years. But I had lost my copy of it. I figured if I bought another, I might lose that, too. So I bought access to a Kindle version, which I can read on my iPad’s Kindle app.
And now, using the “brilliant” capabilities of Amazon’s recommendation code, it sends me invitations to read some other books in the series, having no clue that all of those are sitting, well-thumbed, on my bookshelves.
OK, you say, that seems reasonable. A clerk in a bookshop could make the same mistake. Seeing me buying Post Captain, he might reasonably say, “Hey, if that interests you, have you read the other 20 books in the series?” And I wouldn’t think he was stupid at all.
But that clerk isn’t the vaunted, imperial technology of Amazon, which supposedly has instantaneous access to everything about me that’s on the Web, and possesses an uncanny ability to process all that information and act effectively upon it, even to the point of planting (with my help!) two spies — my Echo devices — to listen to everything I ever say in the privacy of my home.
Which should not make it hard for it to know that I am a compulsive blogger — something not hidden at all, since the blog bears my name — who bores the ever-loving crapola out of all my readers by mentioning my Aubrey-Maturin mania over and over and over again, for years on end.
No, again, I’m not saying a human couldn’t make the mistake. But if a human being was in touch with all that information, and was able to process it constantly with superhuman speed, he wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I haven’t read HMS Surprise. (The Stasi wouldn’t have made that mistake in even a casual effort to manipulate me, and East Germany ceased to exist well before the rise of artificial you-know-what.) So he would just suggest something else.
No, Amazon isn’t stupid for doing this. It’s just utterly failing to impress me with its supposedly amazing intelligence.
OK, I sense I’m losing you on that one. The example doesn’t come across as sufficiently stupid to you, even after I explain why it drew a snort of contempt from me.
So here’s another one. My Ancestry app has recently stopped defaulting to my tree when I open it. I have to tell it I want to open the tree after it has shown me various offers of really cool stuff that’s supposed to make me super-impressed at what Ancestry has to offer me.
And the one it keeps offering first is something it calls “your Photoline.” And there’s one of my great-great grandfathers, along with his son my great-grandfather, my Dad, and me.
I infer that Ancestry expects me to react like this:
Wow! That’s me! And there’s my Dad when he was young! I wonder who those other, old-timey guys are! Am I related to them? Can Ancestry really tell me amazing things like that? Where did it find all these pictures?
And so forth.
But here’s the thing: Ancestry has these pictures because I put them on my tree. Every single one of them. I not only scanned them, but I recognize the way I cropped them in Photoshop. I remember wondering whether I should remove that streak across the picture of me, and deciding to leave it because the streak is part of the story of the picture.
(That’s a mug someone at The Jackson Sun shot in the newsroom’s studio in 1985 to go with a story for the business page about the fact that I, the Sun‘s news editor, was leaving to become news editor of the Wichita paper. The streak is there because the Sun had recently started trying to save photographers’ time by shooting such routine mug shots with a Polaroid camera. They’re quicker, but often they leave streaks like that — which I suppose makes them sort of like “artificial intelligence.” I’ve always liked the picture anyway, including the cocky grin I had, because I didn’t know yet what an awful place to work the Wichita paper would be.)
There’s some human stupidity here, too. A human thought this would be a great way to pull people into Ancestry, and wrote (or caused to be written) the code that would automatically skim the database for such pictures, and match them up. And it might have impressed someone utterly clueless, like those celebrity guests on that PBS show who are so amazed to learn who their grandparents were.
But why doesn’t this brilliant code know where it got the pictures, which was from me, the guy it’s trying to impress? It doesn’t seem like that would take many ones and zeroes at all. It seems like the one thing it ought to know the most easily. Even a pretty dumb human would know that.
Anyway, I’m not worried about this kind of intelligence taking over. Oh, it can perhaps destroy society, by destroying our ability to think clearly. But it can’t run the place… or drive a car to my satisfaction, either…
Oh, and don’t even get me started on referring to a single person as “them.” Of course, plenty of human do that, unfortunately…
Any of y’all remember Kent Babb, who used to cover sports at The State? He was very good at it. Y’all know I don’t really follow sports, but I used to read his stuff whenever I noticed the byline, because it was that good.
Anyway, he’s at The Washington Post now, and you may be interested in reading a piece he wrote recently about youth football culture up the road in Rock Hill. The news peg was the horrific Phillip Adams story, but Kent went deep into the culture Adams grew up in, one in which football is everything, and when it’s over, young guys tend to get lost.
That’s the part of the post that might interest some of y’all. The rest just interests me, most likely.
Apparently, Kent made a similar, even deeper dive into prep football in a whole other place, and has written a book about it, as I discovered recently on Facebook:
Throughout the 2019 season, I embedded with the Edna Karr High School football team in the West Bank of New Orleans. It’s a story about a championship program and how its head coach, Brice Brown, is a football savant who just sees the moving parts of a complex game in his mind.
But more than that, it’s about how Brown teaches life and survival skills to a group of at-risk kids in a city besieged by gun violence. This is a city where, in 2016, an 18- or 19-year-old Black male was 56 times more likely to die by gunshot than the national average. It’s a place that has big dreams but not much hope. The main player character, a soft-spoken linebacker named Joe, desperately wants to get to college. But “college” is something he can barely imagine; he has only seen references to it in movies. Joe’s mother is in prison, and Joe used to be her lookout, begging her to come inside at 3 a.m. If not for football, it’s very possible Joe wouldn’t have reached his 18th birthday….
Well, that dug up some memories for me. I commented:
Wow, Kent! I attended Edna Karr when it was a junior high, 1965-67. I didn’t even know it was a high school. Did anyone in the book happen to mention the legendary Olaf Fink? He was my PE coach in 8th grade, and he was also a state senator…
I guess it was the fact that this was about sports that made me think of Coach Fink, rather than other educators who made an impression on me back then. Kent replied:
Man, I didn’t know that. I don’t remember Olaf Fink’s name coming up, but Karr and the West Bank have undergone many dramatic changes since Katrina. It’s not a magnet school anymore; it’s a citywide charter that became a huge melting pot in 2006 because it was among the only schools in New Orleans that sustained minor or zero damage.
I saw that this morning, and wrote back:
“Since Katrina” doesn’t mean that much to me, since I went there from 1965-67. According to Wikipedia, it was still a junior high until 1990. And when you look it up now, it’s apparently in a completely different location, near the river. Confusing. Wikipedia shows it in the old location. Better yet, Coach Fink is the one individual person mentioned in connection with the school. Famous in his day, but I’m not surprised people don’t remember him now. I learned from my brief research that he died in 1973.
Wow, Coach Fink. My old buddy. I was the scrawniest kid in his P.E. class. I didn’t get my growth until a year or two later (and was still super-skinny after getting my height). Coach Fink took notice of this one day when we were doing gymnastics and learning to tumble. He had this safety device that consisted of an adjustable leather belt with ropes attached to both sides. When we tried to do walkovers or whatever, we’d wear the belt while two other guys held the ropes to hold us up and keep us from breaking our necks.
Problem was, the tightest, skinniest holes on the belt left it still too loose to hold me. I reported this, and Coach scoffed, saying that was impossible. So I showed him it was possible, and he was impressed. From then on, I had a new name. Coach Fink called me “Sego,” which I suppose means nothing to younger people, but everyone got it back then. Sometimes he said “Metrecal,” but eventually settled on “Sego,” and that stuck.
From then on, I was sort of Coach Fink’s pet. He decided to make me a leader in the class. He deputized me to be in charge of various things. At the start of class, when we had just gotten dressed out and before he and the other coaches went back into the coaches’ office to smoke and watch game films and whatever else coaches did, he’d say, “Sego, run ’em through calisthenics!” And I’d tell the guys to line up — and they would, perhaps amused at the little guy being in charge but totally accepting that Coach had delegated his authority to me — and I’d stand in front of them and lead them through jumping jacks and such before we went out and played ball or whatever. Like the other boys, I just accepted this as my role; I don’t remember questioning it. After all, Coach had named me “Sego,” and that’s who I was.
Looking back, I suppose that experience helped boost my self-confidence. So you can blame him! But seriously, my ego was already pretty big in the academic classes, and now I had this added thing. Which was nice, for a kid who got picked last for games on account of being the little guy and having unremarkable (at best) athletic skills for overcoming that. (No one ever said admiringly of me, “Yeah, Sego’s little, but he’s an amazing playmaker at point guard!”)
Coach Fink. The first time any of us heard the name, we’d laugh, because this was at the height of the Rat Fink craze. (Let’s hear it for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth!) That his first name was “Olaf” only added to the effect. But that was when we’d heard of him but not yet met him. He was an imposing figure, and his natural authority loomed over that of the other coaches. Also, we heard that he was a “state senator.” I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but it sounded important, which seemed fitting.
Anyway, Kent and I wrote back and forth a bit more about Karr Junior High (unfortunately, I was unable to help him on the origin of the name), but that part of the conversation kicked my memory into gear, and I thought I’d share.
Sorry I haven’t posted lately. Things have been crazy. I’ll try to get back to it soon…
– “Who is your favourite person from history?”
– “Sherlock Holmes.”
– “Well, he’s fictional.”
– “Whoa! I think you’d better check your facts there. Fictional? Who took care of the business with the giant dog that was eating everybody? It wasn’t Watson. Don’t tell me, I suppose he was fictional too? Maybe there was no giant dog….”
— The IT Crowd
I was kind of excited, initially, about the interactive feature I found Sunday on my Washington Post app.
The headline was “Pick the best fictional detective,” and it was presented in an interactive graphic meant to evoke the NCAA tournament “brackets” that everyone (even I, despite my lack of enthusiasm for sports) filled out mere days ago.
So, you know, if you enjoy both mysteries and sports, it was extra fun. A cool idea.
But this is no proper way to figure out even who you, yourself, think are the best detectives, much less who the best actually are. (For instance, say two of your five best detectives face each other in the first round — that means one of your top five gumshoes won’t even make the top 32, assuming you’re starting with 64. That’s not right. No way it’s right. It’s a false system of selection. With basketball, it works. Not with detectives.) Another problem is that too few of my fave detectives were even on the bracket in the first round.
The only professional, scientific way to determine the top dicks is to draft an actual Top Five list, and then argue about it with everybody. Stands to reason. The immemorial custom of the blog, and so forth…
Coming up, I was never a big fan of mysteries. I wasn’t an Agatha Christie enthusiast. Nor was I into Conan Doyle, even though I always enjoyed the Basil Rathbone movies. I just wasn’t that much of an admirer of formulaic fiction. Just as I’m not big into blues, or reggae. To me, the songs just sound too much alike. One is fine, but not a whole album. I mean, you know, a blues progression is a blues progression.
Even with Edgar Allen Poe — I preferred the horror stories to “The Purloined Letter.” I got into Poe when I was about 10, and we 5th-graders shared the stories to chill each other’s blood. And “she was buried alive!” does that way better than “the letter was in plain sight!”
But then, things happened. I started reading books that broke the mold, such as Martin Cruz Smith’s wonderfully original thriller Gorky Park and Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB. And you know what a le Carre fan I am. Well, his first books about George Smiley cast him as a Christiesque amateur solver of mysteries.
And then, along came streaming, and my wife and I got hooked on a range of British murder mysteries and police procedurals. And entirely new forms, such as Nordic noir, and, believe it or not, Welsh noir.
Anyway, here’s the list. I’m sure I’m leaving out somebody awesome, but let’s get the party started:
Arkady Renko — The only Russian in the bunch — almost the only non-Brit, come to think of it — he just blew the doors off the genre when he arrived in Gorky Park, and kept it up over the next few novels. I love a book that puts you in an unfamiliar place and makes it real, and that novel made you feel you were actually in the middle of the Soviet criminal-justice system in the middle of the Cold War — even though Martin Cruz Smith had never been there (just as Patrick O’Brien had never been aboard a Royal Navy frigate during the Napoleonic Wars, but he could absolutely put a reader there). I also think highly of Renko’s American counterpart in the novel, William Kirwill, but it would be cheating to put him on the list, too. Just please don’t picture William Hurt from the movie when you think of Renko. That was a horrendous instance of miscasting. For Renko, you need a Daniel Day-Lewis, to invoke my last Top Five list. He would have been perfect, when he was about 35. Kirwill, however, was perfectly cast — when I was reading the book long before the movie, I was sort of picturing Brian Dennehy.
Sergeant Gerry Boyle — OK, I don’t understand the Irish Garda system all that well, so I’m not sure that Boyle technically is a “detective.” But he’s a good copper, anyway. And again, I’ve got my last Top Five list on my mind, because this was the wonderful, deeply flawed character brought to life by Brendan Gleeson in “The Guard.” The other night, I watched a few minutes of “48 Hours” — which frankly is about as much of the film as I ever could stand. Anyway, you know the rumpled, interesting character Nick Nolte is trying to play? Gleeson does it right in “The Guard.”
Detective Chief Inspector Gill Murray — The cop show we’re currently obsessed with is “Scott & Bailey,” but I couldn’t choose between Rachel and Janet. Of the two, of course, Janet is the grownup (usually), but I still didn’t want to choose. Anyway, even though she sort of gets third-place billing and isn’t even in the 5th season, Gill is far and away the best cop on the show. Possibly because the actress, Amelia Bullmore, actually wrote some of the episodes, but her character just gets smarter and smarter.
Christopher Foyle — This is the star of “Foyle’s War,” a cool series in so many ways. It’s historical. It’s about WWII. It’s about how life on the home front was affected, and not in the usual way, like folks saving tin cans or whatever. Also, it’s got Honeysuckle Weeks in it, and the fact that Foyle has her as his driver should qualify him alone, if only on the basis of her awesome name.
George Gently — OK, I really debated whether to put this one in the Top Five, but I’m doing it out of frustration as much as anything. It really ticked me off that Prime let us watch the first season “free,” and then cut us off. I hate that. And I’m anxious to see the rest. But he also makes the list because he’s probably the best of a type that you see so much in these productions: the world-weary old hand, filled with almost as much irony and cynicism as investigative skill — of which he has plenty. I just think he does this better than Morse, or Lewis in his modern-day iteration, or Tom Barnaby, or Foyle, or any of those guys. I also think Lee Ingleby — whom Aubrey fans will remember as Hollom in “Master and Commander” — does a great job as his troublesome young assistant.
HONORABLE MENTION (or, to be honest, the next five, because I couldn’t stop)
Gene Hunt — There are lot of reasons to say Gene is not a good detective, even the opposite of a good detective, and Sam Tyler mentions most of them at great length, and repetitively, on “Life on Mars.” That’s sort of Sam’s thing, other than being confused about whether he’s a time traveler or just a guy in a coma. But Gene has certain rudimentary, atavistic skills, such as fairly decent gut instinct. And awful as he is, fans of the show eventually get to enjoy Gene as a guilty pleasure. A very guilty pleasure, because he is awful. In fact, he’s so awful that I think it’s kind of a libel on the world of 1973 to say senior cops were like this and got away with it back then. But if you get picky, you won’t enjoy the show anyway. I should also add that this is kind of a Jayne Cobb thing. I call Jayne my favorite character on Firefly because as a grandfather I don’t want to admit it’s really Kaylee. In this case, for Kaylee, substitute Annie Cartwright. She does get to be a detective late in the series, but most of the time, she’s a WPC. I think this picture is of the moment when Sam asks her first name, and she says “Annie!” Which is when the viewer starts to love her.
John River — This is my first entrant from the world of Nordic noir. And the ways in which it qualifies as Nordic noir are confusing. It’s set in London. River is a London cop. But he’s played by a Swedish actor. Of course, what makes it noir is the tone. River, you see, talks with dead people, and they talk back. All the time. Which can be an advantage when you’re a cop, if not a fun one. Also playing a key role is Nicola Walker. She’s not a household name — I had to look it up right now — but when she pops up in any role she’s impressive. Here she is as a guest star — playing a pivotal role — on “Scott & Bailey.”
Jimmy Perez — This is the protagonist of “Shetland.” I went back and forth on whether to choose him or the semi-hero of the Welsh noir (it was actually originally in the Welsh language, but then released in English) “Hinterland,” Tom Mathias. Both are cops out in the boonies, trying to do a tough job under trying circumstances. Ultimately, I go with Jimmy because he’s more stable.
Jimmy McNulty or Bunk Moreland, you decide — I just had to get someone in from what may be the best American cop show of all time, “The Wire.” I thought I’d go with McNulty since he was kind of the star, and because his bend-the-rules detective work got the ball rolling in the first episode. But “McNutty,” as Bubbles, unquestionably the best fictional snitch ever, called him, was a screwup. So I’m offering his partner Bunk as an alternative. Of course, he could be a screwup, too. But they were great together.
Douglas Archer — Just to pull someone in from the weird world of alternative history. I initially read this as a Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) fan, but this kind of stands out from his other books. Archer of the Yard is a classic British detective, who in 1941 finds himself working for the SS because the Germans went ahead with their invasion of Britain, and it was successful. And because you still need to catch bad guys, right, even when you’re working for worse guys. This was a great tale — way better than weirdly similar stories like Fatherland (Detective Xavier March, a 1960s cop working in a Germany that did not lose the war, is a sort of combination of Archer and Arkady Renko). I’ve never seen the TV series, because it’s on the premium level of Hulu, and I’m just not going to pay for that. I’ll just say that the actor playing Archer doesn’t look right at all, based on photos I’ve seen.
Yeah, I know — all white guys, except for one lady-type person, and Bunk, who I know you’re already suspecting I snuck in for diversity’s sake. (But I didn’t. Bunk’s awesome.) Yeah, well…. I just couldn’t get into “Luther,” as great as Idris Elba is. Speaking of Bunk and Elba — the thing about “The Wire” is that the best characters were not the cops. In fact, by far the best character in the show was an armed robber. And Omar was not only black, but gay, if you’re keeping score. Unfortunately, this is a detectives list.
And I considered a bunch of women, and almost put Marcella on the list. She’s fascinating. But man, that series really took Nordic noir (although it was set in England) to some weird places, and we got to where we couldn’t watch anymore. And while I’m somewhat intrigued by Chloé Saint-Laurent on the French cop series “Profilage,” she’s technically not a detective, and I’ve only seen her in two episodes so far, so I don’t yet know how good she is.
And no, Jackie Brown, about whom I thought for a second, wasn’t a detective. If I were doing a Top Five Flight Attendants List, she’d be a great candidate. Along with Elaine Dickinson…
Oh, but wait! Back to “The Wire”… “Beadie” Russell was awesome! And she sorta became a detective during the course of the series, right? There are just too many fictional detectives out there for me to know where to stop. If I did this again next week, my Top Five might be five completely different people…
In late 1941, Harry Niles owns a bar for American and European expatriates, journalists, and diplomats, in Tokyo’s entertainment district, called the “Happy Paris”. With only 24 hours until Japanese fighters and bombers attack Pearl Harbor, Niles has to consult with the local US ambassador, break up with a desperate lover, evade the police, escape the vengeance of an aggrieved samurai officer and leave the island, the exit points from which are all closed. Having grown up in Tokyo, Niles is fluent in the Japanese language and culture, and is highly streetwise.[2][3]
