comments on life

On gluten intolerance

2012-01-16T08:07:00.000-08:00

I am a rare North American celiac/coeliac/gluten-intolerant individual because I grew up in a family with others who had also been diagnosed and so was never "alone" the way many people who come to realize they "have this" are. There are so many of us in my extended family that we have tables of gluten-free food at family events (including weddings and funerals.) Yet even coming from a family of (medically diagnosed) celiacs many of my relatives had difficulty persuading doctors to administer the appropriate diagnostic tests.

I have recently come to realize just how isolated other individuals are who come to suspect they are, or are diagnosed as, gluten intolerant.

Over the next few days I am going to update this post with links to various resources for other celiacs. Anyone who has questions or suggestions is invited to post them as comments and I'll try to either answer or provide links to others who can.Update the first:What are the symptoms/signs that you might be a celiac? If there is any chance you have celiac disease you need to immediately get all gluten out of your diet.Gluten may be places/foods you won't immediately suspect. The first thing you need is a good list of safe foods and a good list of foods that are not (or may not) be safe.

100 years ago today: The tale of the typewriter

2011-12-29T16:03:00.000-08:00

One hundred years ago typewriters were expensive and still comparatively rare. People who had mastered the skill of using these machines were often themselves referred to as "typewriters." In some cases (as mentioned in passing in E. F. Benson's An Autumn Sowing, published in 1917) the person who was being hired to type brought their machine with them. It was a tool of their trade and one which required an investment in order to yield returns.

One hundred years ago today one could buy a yearly subscription to The Tensas Gazette (St. Joseph's, LA) for $1.50. A "Standard Sewing Machine" (non electric) with all attachments included could be bought for $15.00. A very nice automobile could be bought, new, for $700.00 and a "young man's" suit for $15-30.00. One might pay between $2.50 to $4.00 for a pair of shoes.

A Royal Standard Typewriter cost $75.00. It is hard to realize now that the typewriter was in many ways as revolutionary a device as were word processors in their day. They were not cheap yet they were not so expensive that only a member of the upper middle class could afford one. Of course members of the upper middle class did not use typewriting machines, they employed human beings to do so for them. Almost from the first days of typewriters invention expert users were predominantly women. Indeed it has been convincingly argued that typewriters played an important role making the office a safe and acceptable place for women to work. (see The Woman and the Typewriter: A Case Study in Technological Innovation and Social Change, Donald Hoke, Milwaukee Public Museaum)

100 years ago yesterday: Libertarian remedies in action

2011-12-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

100 years ago yesterday a New York jury acquitted Max Blanck and Isaac Harris of criminal negligence in the fire that killed 146 women and men in the Asch Building (Triangle Shirtwaist) fire (TRIANGLE CO. HEADS ACQUITTED ON CHARGE OF MANSLAUGHTER, The New York Evening World, December 27 1911). The families of the victims were barred from the courtroom the day the jury return with its verdict and a cordon of police escorted Blanck and Harris out of the building and to the subway.

Neither man was ever convicted in criminal court for any of the deaths that day although in 1913 they were lost at case in civil court and were instructed to pay $75 in compensation to the family of each person who died. In that same year Blanck was arrested and fined $20 for once again locking workers in at his factory.

Many people today think that the men who owned the Triangle Shirtwaist factory were convicted and it was that which led to improvements in workplace conditions for American women and men but that is almost the opposite to what actually happened. It was the anger among the public after witnessing business owner after business owner get at most a slap on the risk for endangering the lives of their workers that led to state and federal regulatory bodies that worked to prevent these tragedies from happening in the first place.

In other words, we have "real world" data that indicates that the Libertarian remedies for bad work places, bad managers and bad products did not work.

100 years ago today: Some are more equal than others

2011-12-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

One hundred years ago today, December 13 1911, this is what the left hand side of the front page of The New York Evening World looked like:

Princess Louise was not an American. Her husband was not an American. Her children were not Americans. Neither the Princess, nor her husband, nor her daughters were (or had been) involved in negotiations with the American government. The steamship in question had not departed from, nor was it heading to, the United States of America. Had the Princess Royal, her husband or their daughters, been injured or even killed there would have been no direct or indirect impact on the government of the United States.

The miners whose desperate raps signaled to rescuers that there were still men alive in the "ruined colliery"--they were citizens of the same country as the editors, writers and readers of The Evening World. The collapsed mine and the dead and endangered miners were not even located on the other side of the country let alone across an ocean and off the coast of a different continent. Yet the news of that scores of men had yet to be rescued after the explosion at the Cross Mountain coal mine was not even one of the two most important stories of the day as one can see:

One could make the argument that the stories about Sheepshead Bay and Ethel Conrad were of parochial interest to New Yorkers. One might even make the argument that the trial of the "labor bombers" in Indianapolis was also relevant to New Yorkers because, "New York, Brooklyn and Hoboken Ask Evident to Use in Local Prosecutions" though that relevance does not seem so pressing that it merits sharing the top half of the front page with news of a mine disaster in Tennessee. But the news about Princess Louise? That unmasks the news values that underlie the choice and placement of stories. News about the lives of rich and socially "important" people from other countries was at least as important as the lives of working class Americans.

The last bodies of trapped miners were not located until December 19 1911. Those two men, Alonzo Wood and Eugene Ault, had survived long enough to build a barricade in an effort to protect themselves from the gasses in the mine and to write farewell messages to their families on the wall.

100 Years Ago Today: Paging Rick Perry re the Department of Energy

2011-12-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

The Democratic Banner (Mt. Vernon, Ohio. December 12, 1911, page 1.) HUNDRED DEAD IN MINE BLAST / Briceville, Tenn., Is The Scene Of Latest Catastrophe. There had been an explosion in the Cross Mountain coal mine (near Briceville, TN) on December 9. When The Banner went to print it was still unclear exactly how many men had been in the mine when the explosion occurred and what the chances were of anyone being rescued. After several days 5 men were pulled out of the mine alive. The dead numbered 84. The Bureau of Mines, which had created May 16 1910 as a response to a number of severe mining accidents in the United States, led the rescue efforts.

According to The United States Mine Rescue Association, During the three years leading up to the establishment of the U. S. Bureau of Mines, 1907 to 1909, there were 50 coal mine disasters in which 5 or more miners were killed. Total killed - 1,773 (Historical Data on Mine Disasters in the United States.) "Bureaucrats" from that department pioneered or popularized technologies to rescue miners (including the use of canaries as a early warning of dangerous gasses and equipment for miners so that they could "self-rescue.")

In 1995 Congress closed the U. S. Bureau of Mines transferring oversight of health and safety to the Department of Energy while cutting 66% from the budgets of the various programs that were farmed out to Energy and other departments.

Yes, one of the federal departments that Rick Perry is so eager to slash is responsible for the health, safety and rescue of American miners. Maybe Governor Perry would like to explain his eagerness to cut an agency responsible for the safety of miners to the families of the 29 miners who died April 5 2010 in the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV. Maybe Governor Perry would like to explain his eagerness to the American miners who risk their lives every day.

Or maybe the names of the people who died and the mines that have become graves have slipped his mind along with the name of the Department that is responsible for their welfare.

Translating genius

2011-12-10T13:03:00.001-08:00

One of the challenges of the reader who wishes to read a book written in a language they themselves cannot read is to select the best translation. Readers may fall back on the advice of reviewers or use the literary reputation of a proxy, for example an editor or series such as "Penguin Classics."Of course the choice challenge presupposes that the reader has access to more than one translation. It also suggests that there is a single "best" translation for all readers. In many cases neither is true.

Kit Whitfield's excellent series of deconstructions / analyses of the first sentences of famous and notable books has fostered in me the habit of thinking of "first sentences" as I reshelve my books. So, earlier today I noticed my copies of Eugénie Grandet as I filed some of my Austens away, and pulled them out to consider whether I should nominate the first sentence of that book for analysis. But which first sentence I wondered, the English or the French. The English first sentence didn't completely evoke the French book that I remembered. So I sat down and read the first several pages in French and then in the English of more than one translation. All of which made me think about the problem of translations. We talk about reading The Iliad or The Aeneid or The Bible or Beowulf but few of us are actually reading the words originally written. We are experiencing these works of genius through the eyes and minds of translators. So we do not really have, as readers, an opinion about any of those works--we have an opinion of those works as mediated by those who translated them.

Look, for example, at the first several hundred words of Eugénie Grandet:

Note #1: for those who don't read French--just skim down to the English translations. The point I am making in this piece does not require knowledge of that language.

Note #2: in French there are several more sentences before the first paragraph ends. The different font colours indicate the places in the text translators added paragraph breaks.

This is how Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet begins:

Il se trouve dans certaines provinces des maisons dont la vue inspire une mélancolie égale à celle que provoquent les cloîtres les plus sombres, les landes les plus ternes ou les ruines les plus tristes. Peut-être y a-t-il à la fois dans ces maisons et le silence du cloître et l'aridité des landes et les ossements des ruines. La vie et le mouvement y sont si tranquilles qu'un étranger les croirait inhabitées, s'il ne rencontrait tout à coup le regard pâle et froid d'une personne immobile dont la figure à demi monastique dépasse l'appui de la croisée, au bruit d'un pas inconnu. Ces principes de mélancolie existent dans la physionomie d'un logis situé à Saumur, au bout de la rue montueuse qui mène au château, par le haut de la ville. Cette rue, maintenant peu fréquentée, chaude en été, froide en hiver, obscure en quelques endroits, est remarquable par la sonorité de son petit pavé caillouteux, toujours propre et sec, par l'étroitesse de sa voie tortueuse, par la paix de ses maisons qui appartiennent à la vieille ville, et que dominent les remparts. Des habitations trois fois séculaires y sont encore solides quoique construites en bois, et leurs divers aspects contribuent à l'originalité qui recommande cette partie de Saumur à l'attention des antiquaires et des artistes. Il est difficile de passer devant ces maisons, sans admirer les énormes madriers dont les bouts sont taillés en figures bizarres et qui couronnent d'un bas-relief noir le rez-de-chaussée de la plupart d'entre elles. Ici, des pièces de bois transversales sont couvertes en ardoises et dessinent des lignes bleues sur les frêles murailles d'un logis terminé par un toit en colombage que les ans ont fait plier, dont les bardeaux pourris ont été tordus par l'action alternative de la pluie et du soleil. Là se présentent des appuis de fenêtre usés, noircis, dont les délicates sculptures se voient à peine, et qui semblent trop légers pour le pot d'argile brune d'où s'élancent les oeillets ou les rosiers d'une pauvre ouvrière. Plus loin, c'est des portes garnies de clous énormes où le génie de nos ancêtres a tracé des hiéroglyphes domestiques dont le sens ne se retrouvera jamais. Tantôt un protestant y a signé sa foi, tantôt un ligueur y a maudit Henri IV.^[1]

Here are the first two paragraphs of Marion Ayton Crawford's Penguin Classic translation^[2] of the same book:

In some country towns there exist houses whose appearance weights as heavily upon the spirits as the gloomiest cloister, the most dismal ruin, or the dreariest stretch of barren land. These houses may combine the cloister's silence with the arid desolation of the waste and the sepulchral melancholy of ruins. Life makes so little stir in them that a stranger believes them to be uninhabited until he suddenly meets the cold listless gaze of some motionless human being, who face, austere as a monk's, peers from above the window-sill at the sound of a stranger's footfall.

One particular house front in Saumur possesses all these gloomy characteristics. It stands at the end of the hilly street leading to the castle, in the upper part of the town. This street, which is little used nowadays, is hot in the summer, cold in winter, and in some places dark and overshadowed. One's footsteps ring curiously loudly on its flinty cobble-stones, which are always clean and dry; and its narrowness and crookedness and the silence of its houses, which form part of the old town and are looked down upon by the ramparts, make an unusual impression on the mind. There are houses there which were built three hundred years ago, and built of wood, yet are still sound. Each has a character of its own, and their diversity contributes to the essential strangess of the place, which attracts antiquaries and artists to this quarter of Saumur.

Here is how Katharine Prescott Wormeley's translation^[3] begins:

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

Such elements of sadness formed the physiognomy, as it were, of a dwelling-house in Saumur which stands at the end of the steep street leading to the chateau in the upper part of the town. This street—now little frequented, hot in summer, cold in winter, dark in certain sections—is remarkable for the resonance of its little pebbly pavement, always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its tortuous road-way, for the peaceful stillness of its houses, which belong to the Old town and are over-topped by the ramparts. Houses three centuries old are still solid, though built of wood, and their divers aspects add to the originality which commends this portion of Saumur to the attention of artists and antiquaries.

In each case the translator was faced with the same task. They needed not to translate Balzac's original word for word but meaning for meaning and theme for theme. They needed to use words to paint the picture that Balzac wanted his readers to have of that town and that house. Balzac's style was inextricable from his themes. Yet the translator is also faced with the task of translating the original book so that it is accessible and understandable to readers who come from a different literary tradition. Such a reader might respond quite differently to the paragraph and sentence structure of the original that would have someone from the original audience. The (French) opening of the book is an extended word picture of a time and place. The sound of the language carries part of the load of "setting the scene." Reading the French out loud carries quite a different feeling than reading the English out loud.

Each translator chose to break up the original long, uninterrupted opening, into smaller paragraphs. I don't know to what degree the existence of earlier translations affected the two quoted above, however both chose to insert paragraph breaks at the same points in the text. I have read other translations that inserted them at different points.

To get a sense of just how difficult it is to pick the "best" translation consider the following. I originally read Eugénie Grandet in French. I was looking for an English "version" more for annotations and footnotes than for a translation of the words since I was sure that I was missing some elements of the book that readers of Balzac's time would have appreciated. I agree that for the modern reader, especially for the modern reader brought up within the styles dominant in the English reading world, stylistic changes may make the book more readable. However, in my opinion, none of the translators quite nails that opening sentence. None of them are able to translate Balzac's opening into one that would repay the type of attention Kit Whitfield brings to the opening sentences she has analyzed.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of translators in general or these translators in particular. Perhaps Balzac's opening sentence could only be translated into English by Balzac himself--if he was fluent in the language. Perhaps the particular quality of that sentence cannot be duplicated in the English language. I don't know. I do know that the more I grapple with that single sentence the greater my admiration and respect for translators.

Note #3: One of the wonderful bonuses of Kindle/Amazon ebooks is that one is usually offered the option to download a sample of the book, generally the first chapter. This allows readers the opportunity to browse books much as one would in a book store or library. One doesn't need to own a Kindle to do this. The "Kindle for your computers" software is available for free. The sample chapter is downloaded to your computer and you can peruse it at your leisure. I looked for an number of translations of Balzac's books before I wrote this piece and ended up buying my third copy of the book.

^[1] Eugénie Grandet is in the public domain. The French text in this article is from the version on the Gutenberg.org website. insert footnote↩

^[2] Balzac, H. Eugénie Grandet. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955.↩

^[3] Also available on Project Gutenberg.↩

100 years ago today: Fighting demon nicotine

2011-12-09T15:37:00.001-08:00

Perusing the December 9 1911 issue of the The Logan Republican (Cache County, Utah) an opinion piece on the front page caught my attention, BANEFUL INFLUENCES OF CIGARETTE SMOKING. The article itself was a peculiar mixture of warnings similar to those offered by many medical doctors one hundred years later and warnings that seem utterly nonsensical to us today. The author, Doctor Adamson, warned that smoking and a smoke filled atmosphere was bad for the lungs:

A simple case of pneumonia, but the cough persistent and irritating and will not be relieved by the usual remedies. The case goes from bad to worse, resulting in death. The real cause CIGARETTES!

.......

should you ever visit a prize fight you will notice that just before it begins the referee steps into the ring and says "No Smoking." Now this order is not the result of false sentiment, modesty nor religion, he doesn't care how much you smoke, drink or debauch yourself, but he does know that smoke, even second hand, hurts the lungs and spoils the wind of the fighters and therefore will not permit it.

But Dr. Adamson also warns that cigarette smoking leads to a loss of "mental and moral control." He tells of a man who sat "rolling and smoking" cigarettes in his cell awaiting execution for the crime of shooting his wife to death. He tells of a "cigarette fiend" who actually "had a cigarette between his teeth when he killed his victim." He claims that "without exception" every troubled boy sent to the "Industrial school" was a cigarette smoker.

I wondered how common this perception of nicotine as yet another drug that led to "fiendish" (the common word at the time) behaviour was in 1911. Did this article reflect a common (or at least not uncommon) concern at the time or was it articular to communities such as the Mormons of Utah?

Poking around in the digital files of the Library of Congress one finds that the perception that cigarettes delivered a drug that rivaled morphine in its intensity and undermined the individual who smoked both physically and morally in newspapers across the United States and for years prior to, and after, 1911.

The Adair County News (Kentucky) ran an article THE CIGARETTE FIEND on the front page of the December 3, 1902 issue that captures the flavour of many:

"The cigarette." said a veteran inhaler of the poisonous weed the other day, "has caused the ruin of more young men than whiskey, morphine and 'dope' habits of all kinds. You don't believe it? Don't take my word, but go to the young man of twenty-five who has smoked cigaretts [sic] from his boyhood and ask him. He, like I, speaks from experience. It first robs him of manhood and will power. It incapacitates him for business. It creates a thirst for drink and to soothe his parched lips and tongue takes to strong drink--water doesn't have the desired effect. It robs him of honor and leads him to gamble.

It is fascinating to realize how hard the makers and sellers of cigarettes worked to counteract the fairly common perception that their product undermined the health and morals of its customers. One wonders if those who railed against the habit would have been more successful in preventing its widespread acceptance had they limited their attacks on it to the physical dangers it presented.

100 years ago today: Defending traditional marriage

2011-12-08T15:48:00.001-08:00

One hundred years ago the defenders of "traditional" marriage weren't worried about "same-sex" unions they were fighting against divorce and especially remarriage after divorce.

Take, for example this article DIVORCE REFORMERS SUSTAIN RUDE JAR on the front page of the December 8 1922 issue of the Arizonan Republican. Dateline Kansas City:

Reformers who hoped to check the indiscriminate granting of divorces in this city, received a shock today when W. W. Wright. divorce proctor, recently recently appointed to investigate the merits of divorce cases, was barred from participation in an uncontested suit. Theplaintiff's attorneys objection to theproctor was that he was in no wayconnected with the case and had noright to interfere. Judge Guthrie sustained the point. The office of proctor was created as the result of a popular demand that the divorce evil beabated. All eight circuit judges concurred In the demand. Since the Procter assumed his duties last month, few divorces have been granted. Formerlyall uncontested suits resulted favorably to the plaintiff.

Note the vaguely specified "popular demand" and the fact that in a non-editorial piece divorce was passingly referred to as an "evil." It was still extraordinarily difficult to get a divorce in England and difficulty (and expense) varied from state to state in America.

While some were most worried about the sheer fact of divorce others were more concerned about the issue of divorce and remarriage. For example, this article in the August 9 1911 issue of The San Francisco Call on the question as to whether any Episcopalian minister should be willing to marry John Jacob Astor (a divorced man) and his intended bride, Miss Madeleine Force.^[1] EPISCOPALIAN CLERGY UNITED AGAINST ASTOR (p. 1) written by Rev. D. G. Kelley:

There is only one class of divorced people that can be reunited in our church—the innocent parties where the divorce was secured on statutory grounds. The rector who would marry this couple ought to be deposedfrom the ministry.
Girl Needs Protection
As for this marriage, I call abominable if the girl herself, is innocentand decent. She should be protected.One of the greatest menaces to oursocial system is the laxity of our divorce law.

In paper after paper one comes across article after article about threat that easy divorce, divorce on grounds such as incompatibility and the remarriage of the "guilty" partner after divorce were to health of the nation. Some pundits argued that the age of consent should be raised, that people should have to wait much longer between the granted of the licence and the marriage itself and that remarriage should be allowed, even for the innocent partner, only after an extended period of time. And, much like today, citizens of states with one view of marriage, divorce and remarriage complained that they should not have to recognize marriages and divorces from states with different laws.

One hopes that in 100 years Americans will look back on the resistance to "same-sex" marriages much as Americans of today look back on the resistance to "no fault" divorces and remarriage of the "guilty" partner of 100 years ago.

^[1] Both John Jacob and Madeleine Astor were aboard the Titanic when it hit the iceberg. Mrs. Astor (noticeably pregnant), along with her maid and nurse, were given places in a lifeboat and survived the sinking the ship. John Jacob Astor, one of the many man not allowed a place on a lifeboat, died some time that night. Given the size of his estate (over 100 billion in 2011 dollars) it is fortunate that his body was one of those recovered from the ocean. ↩

Book Review: Letter of Intent

2011-12-07T14:57:00.000-08:00

Letter of Intent by Ursula Curtiss (1971)

Rating: 3-1/2 stars

Letter of Intent is a difficult book to rate, an interesting book to read and one which describes a world as different from our own as many one finds in science fiction or fantasy. If you are interested in a book about a woman, a book told from the point of view of a woman, a book that celebrates a woman's ambition to achieve comfort and status, or a book that relates, without any censoriousness, a woman who values men only for their instrumental utility then you will find this a compelling read.

Unfortunately after the reader follows the protagonist across years, the continent and several classes the ending is abrupt and in the opinion of this reader, unsatisfying.

Warning, past here there be spoilers.

From the time Celia (whose full last name the reader never learns) arrives cold, wet and with a sketchy grasp of English, at the Stevenson's to begin work as their new maid she begins to reshape herself. Celia telescopes her last name to Brett and leaves behind one employer after another as she works herself up the social ladder. She seldom finds men as useful or interesting as women for it is the women who have the skills she wishes to master (how to organize a dinner party, how to have enough food and liquor without spending unnecessarily, how to dress properly.)

Curtiss makes Celia believable. She has strengths (and weaknesses) that are believable of someone who had come from that particular place in American life. She leaves behind her a trail of broken lives and even deaths and yet she never actively works to harm anyone. She merely acts only and always in her own best interests.

When I first read this book (not long after it was first published in 1971) it stood out because it was a book about a woman who had no interest in men and yet, on the surface, was everything people expected of a woman. She cooked, she cleaned, she sewed, she dusted, she learned how to entertain, she learned how to be an interesting companion to the men she found useful. But she had no more real interest in any man than she had in a good coat. They were enjoyable as long as they fulfilled they function and would be discarded when they no longer did so.

On my most recent rereading of the book I also realized that Celia's is a story that would have to be told very differently today. Celia is able to escape the home she grew up in, change her name and discard former acquaintances as she moves up through East Coast society and then West Coast society in a way that no one could do now without paying for new paperwork and employing experts to build a new identity. Letter of Intent is written in a world where no one asks for anyone else's Social Security Card, where most transactions were still in cash, where you could open a bank account with almost no documentation and where by moving to a new town one could establish a new life.

Letter of Intent is also a book that passes the Bechdel test on the first page and never looks back. It is not a book that exudes conscious feminism but it is, in may ways, the most feminist of books. It is a book set in a world of women, that proceeds from the assumption that woman are a likely as smart, silly, slow, weak, strong as men. It is a book that stands back and looks with cold clarity on the ways and means through which women can fulfill their ambitions and until the very last page, it never suggest that a rational person would respond in any other way.

22 years ago: A massacre in Montréal

2011-12-06T16:50:00.001-08:00

Late in the afternoon of December 6 1989 the man, armed with a rifle and a knife, walked into one of the classrooms at the École Polytechnique engineering school (Université de Montréal.)^[1] He ordered the (approximately forty to forty-five) men to one side of the room and the nine women to the other. When the students did not immediately respond to his demand he fired a shot into the ceiling. Then he ordered the men to leave the room. The man told the remaining women that they were "une gang de féministes" and said "J'haïs les féministes [I hate feminists]."

The man then shot all nine of the women, six fatally. Exiting the classroom the man went up and down the halls of the École Polytechnique demanding "I want women." He went in and out of rooms, he went into the cafeteria and he shot one woman through the closed and locked door of her office. When the man heard one of the women he had shot crying for help he returned to where she was lying took out his knife and stabbed her to death.

The man injured ten women, four men and killed fourteen women.

Finally, the man shot himself

The initial response of the Canadian public was horror and anger. Why did this happen, people asked. And others answered, Why are you so surprised that something like this finally happened? The Montréal massacre (as the event became known) seemed emblematic to many of the endemic levels of misogyny in much of Canadian life. Women came forward with stories of the verbal (and sometimes physical) brutality in Canadian universities in general and engineering schools in particular.

The man had left behind him notes and letters that indicated that he believed that the only reason he had not been accepted into engineering school was because open slots were being taken by women. Yet even with the statements he made and the writings he left behind there was a backlash against seeing the man's actions as anti-feminist. Some who resisted that interpretation looked for some clue in the man's childhood. Others framed any emphasis on societal misogyny as anti-male. Barbara Frum (famous in her own right as a television journalist in Canada and, yes, the mother of that David Frum) claimed that to say that the man's actions were a hate crime was to "diminish" their horror. Yes, Barbara Frum argued that it would diminish the death of fourteen women if we were to acknowledge that they had died because they were women.

The following summer I sat in a science class at a different university and listened to the (male) Professor apologize that both his Teaching Assistants were women "they make us give places to women these days" he explained. I can't remember the rest of the lecture that day. I stayed after class and approached the Professor, "don't you think it is a bad idea to complain about being forced to give assistantships to women after what happened in Montréal last year?" I asked. "Typical woman," he answered, "over reacting to everything."

As I left the classroom I noticed another student had also remained behind--a sad looking woman. We made eye contact as I passed her, "thank you," she said, "I don't think you were over reacting at all."

In memory of my fourteen sisters:

Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Anne-Marie Edward
Anne-Marie Lemay
Barbara Daigneault
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Maud Haviernick
Michèle Richard
Nathalie Croteau
Sonia Pelletier

^[1] For those who don't know the details of the Montréal Massacre Wikipedia is a good place to start.↩

Maureen Dowd almost "gets it" - but not quite

2011-12-05T15:41:00.001-08:00

In her New York Times op-ed column of December 3 2011, Out of Africa and Into Iowa, Maureen Dowd gets off some great lines and comes close to a moment of political insight before backing away from such dangerous territory.

I am anything but a fan of Newt Gingrich but neither am I impressed with an argument against him that begins with ad hominem attacks.

Newt Gingrich's mind is in love with itself

proclaims Dowd as the first line of the piece. Well yes, I suppose that is an accurate statement to say that Gingrich thinks well of his intellectual capabilities. But Dowd should know, as someone who has spent so many years around politicians and politics, that the same statement can be made of a significant percentage of those who run for office (and perhaps an even larger percentage of those who succeed in that endeavor.) Unless people are engaged in politics for purely venal reasons they basically have to believe that their abilities / qualities are, in at least one crucial area, superior to those of their opponents. Even the venal candidates must believe they are better at something (even if is just the belief that they are better at stealing or lying and getting away with it) than than those they are running against.

So, Dowd's catchy opening line really reduces to the simple statement, "Gingrich thinks he is smart," or "Gingrich thinks he is clever" to which the response of this reader is "yes, so what? In what way does that make he different from hundreds of other people in Washington today?"

Dowd goes on to accuse Gingrich of being a "promiscuous" thinker without making it clear exactly what a "promiscuous" thinker might be. She states he is not a "serious" thinker, again without clarifying exactly how one recognizes the seriousness of another's thoughts. Perhaps she means he believes things that she doesn't take seriously. Perhaps she means that he doesn't spend his time talking about the things she thinks a serious person should talk about.

These same charges are made by pundits of the right about politicians on the left and pundits of left about politicians on the right. They have no essential substantive critical value.

Gingrich, Dowd goes on to tell us, "plays air guitar with ideas"--another charge that feels witty and cutting and yet reduces to vague meaningless when one examines it closely.

Dowd does attack Gingrich on more specific matters when she discusses his 1971 Ph.D. thesis “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.” It isn't clear from this op-ed whether Dowd herself has read the entire thesis or is responding to it based posts and comments on blogs. Gingrich wrote that thesis forty years ago and it would not be surprising to find that his opinions and conclusions may have evolved over the intervening time. The thesis was written by an academic who had never held a serious electoral or administrative position. It would be interesting to read the thesis in its entirety and then sit down with the former Speaker and ask him just that "have your opinions or conclusions changed now that you have held high political office?" I won't get a chance to do that and in the middle of campaigning season he would be foolish to offer anyone that opportunity.

What Dowd argues is that the thesis established Gingrich as an anti-anti-colonist and given his statements in the intervening years nothing has happened to suggest he has changed his opinions on colonialism in Africa. It is at this point that she makes the pithy charge

He’s Belgium. The poor are Congo.

And this is where Dowd demonstrates that she doesn't really get it.

Gingrich isn't Belgium, although he may be analogized as a senior colonial administrator. He is wealthy but he is not a plutocrat. He is a well paid and powerful functionary but he is not the locus of power. The 0.1% of are Belgium.

And while the poor are Congo so are the middle class and the working class and everyone but the 0.1% Congo. The richest of the rich are treating Americans and American resources as King Leopold treated the resources of the Congo.

Dowd, like so many American political pundits is being distracted by the show of partisan campaigning from even looking to see whose hands are actually on the levers of power.

100 Years ago today: "I could not work any harder than I had been doing."

2011-12-02T11:34:00.001-08:00

One hundred years ago Mrs. Anna Godfrey collapsed on a bench in a "fashionable" part of Chicago. Her hair was cut short and she was wearing men's clothes and so was charged with "masquerading in male attire." Mrs. Godfrey explained to the judge that she had dressed as a man and set out on a ten mile walk in order to get a job as a farm laborer. Her husband was bed ridden and she and her oldest boy each were able to bring home only a few dollars a week to support the family of six. Mrs. Godfrey dreamed of giving her four children a better place to live than than their home on a alley. As reported in The Tacoma Times (December 2, page 8)

Judge J. R. Caverly....discharged her. "You are a bravewoman," he said, "and deserve praise rather than punishment for your act."

but the only relief he could offer was

to take her children away from her and place them in a home

an offer Mrs. Godfrey turned down.

"No," she replied, "I will go back to the factory, where I worked the last four years, or I will get work as a scrub-woman, but I want to keep my babies in our own home....I told my husband thatsomething would have to be done. I decided to get a job on a truck farm, thinking that if I did well I could bring the family out and that would be better for the children than to stay on the alley. I didn't have a cent of money, so I started out to walk. For ten miles I went along, resting when my feet got sore and tired, and then starting out again.
"My husband thought that farm work would be too hard for me but I told him that 1 could not work any harder than I had been doing."

I hope Mrs Godfey was able to keep her babies. I hope she was able to make life better for her children. I hope that life got easier for her and not harder as the years passed. Take a look at this picture of Mrs. Anna Godfey in The day book (Chicago, Illinois. December 2, page 9) and remember her face every time a politician tells you that anyone can get ahead in America if only they are willing to work hard because many Americans, like Mrs. Godfrey, couldn't work any harder than they have been doing.

Book Review: Five Red Herrings

2011-12-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers (1931)

In short:

I don't care what happens to these people.^[1]
This isn't a novel it's a cross between a railroad time schedule and a crossword puzzle.
That isn't Lord Peter Wimsey--he's a generic wealthy, privileged member of the upper class who is given unreasonable amounts of access and information by local legal authorities.

Rating: 1-1/2 stars

Warning, past here there be spoilers.

It is difficult to know where to start with "what bothered me" about this book. Instead of just not caring what happened to these people (which might result in me simply not finishing the book) I came to be actively annoyed and resentful of the characters and thus, of course, the author.

First, when last the reader encountered Lord Peter Wimsey (Strong Poison) he had just had what seemed, to readers of the time, a life altering experience. He had finely met a woman (Harriet Vane) he could truly love, proved to the world (and more importantly the English justice system) that she was not guilty of having poisoned her ex-lover, and had his marriage proposal to her turned down. The reader might deduce that a wise man would give Miss Vane some time to recover emotionally from her recent travails and an even wiser man might be endeavouring to solve the problem of removing the shadow of King Cophetua from his sudden attraction to Vane. A few sentences from Sayers would have sufficed to suggest to those who had read the most recently published to Wimsey's exploits that he has retreated to the artistic colony on Galloway in order to recover from recent events. In fact that ploy (man removing himself from his recent haunts to avoid the pain of love lost) was an extremely common one in British fiction at the time. Alternatively Sayers could have indicated in the text that the events of this book preceded those in Strong Poison.

Second, Wimsey was not a character created new for this book. The reader has had a chance to learn how he entertains himself, what things he finds interesting, what people he likes to be around and what he does with his time when he isn't solving mysteries. The Wimsey in this book is hardly recognizable as the same man. I prefer to believe that the person styling himself "Wimsey" is actually a young male relative who shares the same first name and enjoys being taken for his more famous kinsman.

Third, the Bunter of this book is not the Bunter of the previous Wimsey books. Nor is he well used. Much of the story surrounds issues of alibis and no one is better situated to confirm (or explode) an alibi than a domestic servant. Yet, with a few exceptions, Bunter's "way with" female servants is not employed. Further, Bunter's numerous skills with photography and chemical analyses are not well used either. I prefer to believe that "Lord Peter" has calls to his servant "Bunter" rather his real name as part of the masquerade.

Fourth, I very much dislike the use of the ploy in which the murderer when faced with what the police say is evidence just rolls over and tells the entire story. This is a way for the author to avoid the issue of whether the charges (or the evidence) would have stood up in a court of law. In one of the early Dalgliesh novels P. D. James' detective is left, near the end of the book, sure that a particular character had committed a crime although he never presses charges. That character later writes to him: They [referring to his superiors] wouldn't believe you but you were right ^[2]. Dalgliesh's thoughts when he read the letter?

She was wrong, he thought. They hadn't disbelieved him, they had just demanded, reasonably enough, that he find some proof. He had none, either at the time or later, although he had pursued the case as it it were a personal vendetta, hating himself and her. And she had admitted nothing; not for one moment had she been in any danger of panicking. (297-8)

Fifth, the class relationships/privilege that underlie and intertwine with the plot of the book make the "murderer told all" ploy both necessary and extremely unlikely.

It was necessary because throughout the novel the police treat members of the gentry with kid gloves. A murder was committed and a very limited number of people (given the theory of the crime) could have done the deed. The police have reason to believe that the murder accidentally took an object from the scene of the crime. Yet at no point are the only individuals that the police consider likely suspects asked to go to the police station, their homes are not searched and (more important to the theory of the crime) neither is their painting equipment searched. I think that Sayer's herself was aware of that problem and that was one of the reasons that she waited so long to share with the reader what object Wimsey realized was missing even though he shares that information with the police.
It was extremely unlikely because the accused man was a member of a class used to being treated with kid gloves by the police. His first response would probably have been to contact the family solicitor. And the family solicitor would have pointed out that there was a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation of the crime.

Sixth, a good lawyer could make a very reasonable case that Lord Peter Wimsey was, if not the actual murderer, an accessory to the crime.

Wimsy had opportunity to remove the missing tube of paint himself from the scene of the crime. Neither the Sergeant nor the Constable were with him as he searched the deceased's effects. The solicitor might suggest to the police that Wimsey had in fact killed Campbell and now realized that he had a chance to muddy the waters by throwing suspicion on others. Since the police at the scene did not search Wimsey before he left there is no way to prove that he did not exit the premises with the tube of paint in his pocket. He would have no worry that Bunter (or faux-Bunter) would report any smears of white paint that were later left in his pocket.
Wimsey had an opportunity, during his first visit to Ferguson's place to plant Campbell's tube of paint in Ferguson's kit.
We have only Wimsey's word for it that he cannot paint well. For someone who "doesn't paint" he knows a lot about painting. And he did, after all, chose to spend his vacation among painters.
How many "lucky breaks" are we to accept in order for Ferguson to have made it to Glasgow in the way Wimsey "proved." Given how extremely important the creation of his alibi was how likely was it that he wouldn't notice that his watch had stopped? How likely was it when Ferguson on his bicycle missed the train that a car would have driven by at just the right moment so that he could hold onto the back and make it, with his bike, to the next station in time to catch the train? How likely is it that the driver of the car would have not noticed that he was trailing a bike behind him? How likely was it that not a single person would have noticed the car trailing a bike behind it? How likely was it that a man who had never been involved in crime would have been so successful at forging his train ticket and how likely that the forgery was flawed "just enough" to be noticeable when Wimsey needed it to be noticed?

If Ferguson had just stayed silent I doubt the police would have pressed charges. As for all the details Ferguson supposedly supplied? Well, we only have Sayers' word for them don't we?

Me, I have an alternative theory of the crime. Campbell was about to expose the faux "Lord Peter," they struggled and "Lord Peter" accidentally killed him (much as Ferguson supposedly did.) "Wimsey" and the faux "Bunter" work together to stage Campbell's accident but when "Wimsey" realized that the police would probably work out that Campbell had died hours before the apparent accident he began to remove and plant evidence that will muddy the investigation. After "Wimsey" and "Bunter" have checked out all the alibis of the six suspects they work together to incriminate Ferguson. The careful reader with notice that "Bunter" is for the most part absent from the later portion of the story as he worked in the background to lay down all the clues for the police to follow.
Why didn't Ferguson fight harder? Chief Inspector Parker mentioned to his wife (the sister of the real Lord Peter) that her brother was involved in investigating a crime in Galloway. Lady Mary knowing where her brother actually is informs her rather stodgy elder brother. The faux Lord Peter is the black sheep in the family and they are used to paying people off to cover up for his various escapades. Ferguson is offered a very substantial "gift" in return to agreeing to claim guilt. A few words to the wise and the judge in Scotland was happy to lead the jury to return a sentence of manslaughter with a recommendation of mercy. And faux "Wimsey" and faux "Bunter" are on their way to the colonies on the next available ship.

^[1] The eight deadly words in any book review. As per Wikipedia: "The phrase was coined by Dorothy J. Heydt in a June 11, 1991, Usenet posting to rec.arts.sf-lovers in reference to The Copper Crown, a novel by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison:↩

^[2] James, P. Shroud for a nightingale. London: Sphere, 1977.↩

100 Years ago today: Living before antibiotics and vaccines

2011-11-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

100 years ago today the following story ran on the front page of The Logan Republican (Logan, Cache County, Utah).

SECOND DEATH IN LINDBLOM FAMILY

Once again the sympathy of the community is forcibly drawn to the bereaved and suffering at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Lindblom North Main, Logan. Members of the family were recently stricken with scarlet fever and Thursday marked the second death within one week. The first to succumb was a little three year old girl, and on Thursday John Joseph, a five year old boy, passed away and was burled according to quarantine regulations yesterday afternoon. It is understood that other members of the family are suffering from the dread disease, but are not dangerously ill. Friends and neighbors have done all in their power to assist the afflicted family, but the nature of the malady has prevented the performance of many a charitable act.

One hundred years ago public health officials in the United States knew about germs and even knew how many diseases were transmitted. Unfortunately that didn't mean they could cure those diseases. Once an outbreak began there was little they could do other than educate the public as to hygienic measures that could be taken, warn them as to the symptoms to look for, cancel large public gatherings and implement quarantines. Diphtheria killed less frequently than it had in previous decades because of the development of an antitoxin but vaccines had yet to be developed. Antibiotics had yet to be discovered. Health officials kept a careful eye on the number and severity of cases as one can read in this article in The Washington Herald November 30 1911, p. 12:

HEALTH OFFICERS ASK CO-OPERATION / Several New Cases of Diphtheria Reported

With the announcement that fourteen new cases of diphtheria were reported to the office during the past week, the health department, in its weekly bulletin, which was issued yesterday afternoon, urges the of the people of the District in fighting the disease. At present there are thirty-two such cases recorded on the books of the offices.
"The number of reported cases and the prevalence of the disease is altogether higher than it ought to be," reads the report. "Diphtheria is a preventable disease, and as such should be prevented. It is far better to prevent disease than to treat it, either at home or in hospitals. During the prevalence of diphtheria a simple sore throat should be considered suspicious and a physician called at once and a culture taken. The wise thing Is to take no chances. Treatment with antitoxin should not be delayed in positive cases, and it should given in doubtful or suspicious cases.

Officials would try to limit the spread of these diseases by preventing the likelihood of those most vulnerable vulnerable of coming in contact with others who carried the germs. Often, as reported in The Virginia Gazette, (Williamsburg, VA November 30 1911, p. 1) schools were closed to limit the spread of infectious diseases:

THE SCHOOLS ARE CLOSED / Several Cases of Contagion

In order to prevent a probable epidemic of diphtheria, the Williamsburg school board last Friday morning decided to close the public schools until next Monday. The disease has gradually spread over the Peninsula and reached here a few weeks ago. On account of it schools in Charles City and other places had to close for a few weeks. In only one county were any deaths thus far.[sic] Antitoxin has saved many little lives....every precaution has been taken to prevent contagion, and strict quarantine is maintained where the disease exists.

We live in a post vaccination-antibiotic world. Most of us who live in what is often referred to as the "industrialized" world and were born in the last half century have never experienced the type of quick moving, virulent and deadly epidemics that used to sweep through communities every several years. Most of us have no memories of schools being canceled and swimming pools closed for fear of the dangers associated with crowds.

And we forget that much of the world still lives with the fear of measles, cholera, malaria, typhoid and other diseases most of our doctors have never seen.

100 Years ago Today: Women literally fighting for rights

2011-11-29T14:16:00.001-08:00

The right to vote, the right to sit on juries, the right to practice many professions, indeed the right to engage in all aspects of public life were not just given to the ladies when they asked for them nicely. In fact those rights were not handed over after women demanded them. In fact they were not ceded to women until women had demonstrated that they were willing to fight for them. Yes, I know that in the end men voted to give women the vote but that was only after a long battle. Even today the political, social and economic forces in our society are predominantly male and the governments of countries that do grant the franchise to women seem to have no qualms at all in dealing with countries that do not allow women the right to vote. Or sit on juries. Or to work in the same professions as men. Or to drive. In some of the countries that most limit the civil rights of women are considered to be the closest allies of the United States.

I wonder, was it that experience of having to fight simply to be accorded the same basic rights as others in society that sensitized many of the women of the suffragette era to issues of animal cruelty? The women of 1911 weren't just handing out pamphlets and giving speeches in order to stop the cruel treatment of animals -- they were on the front lines of the fight putting themselves into harm's way for the stop the mistreatment they saw going on all around them.

For example, consider this story on the front page of the New York Tribune of November 29 1911:

ARMED, SHE HUNTS HUNTERS / Mrs. E. W. Murray Drives Men from Country Place

Mrs. Evelyn Wentworth Murray, of New York, who is an energetic member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Anímals, and has caused numerous arrests in New York City and Somerset County among teamsters, helped her watchman chase three hunters from her country place today. She said the men deliberately shot at her her Italian watchman, Jack de Luci, when the latter attempted to drive them off her estate....Mrs. Murray gave chase to the men with a .38-calibre revolver as they fled across the fields....Mrs. Murray was followed by de Luci, who carried a pair of revolvers, and fired an automatic shotgun at the men.

Mrs. Murphy wasn't the only woman who was willing to risk her own life to protect animals as one can read in this article on page 12 of the New York Evening World of November 24 1911:

WOMAN FOUGHT MOB OF 2,000 TO ARREST DRIVER / Miss Campbell Tells How SheHeld to Horse While Crowd Struggled

Miss Catherine Campbell, Secretary of the Bide-a-Wee Home, today told how she battled for an hour yesterday afternoon in front of her home....with a crowd of 2,000 persons, because she insisted upon arresting an eighteen-year-old driver for kicking his horse in the stomach.
The crowd turned unexpected against the valiant woman and tried to take her prisoner away from her. She was dragged a block clinging to the horse's bridle. the animal was knocked down three times by the struggling mob, each time limping to his feet, with Miss Campbell still cling to his head.

Our foremothers did not, for the most part, life quiet sheltered lives in those "halcyon" days before women had the vote. It was only a few months since the Mayor of New York had stopped the practice of paying male teachers more (substantially more) than female teachers with the same qualifications. Of course the United States of 1911 was a dangerous place for many people. African-Americans were given little protection by and from officers of the law. There were few laws labor laws and safety regulations in work places were either non-existent or seldom enforced. "Eugenic laws" were becoming more and more popular and domestic violence was routine.

The "good old days" were not so good for many people. And things got better because individuals were willing to fight to make things change.

100 years ago today: We remember the wrong names

2011-11-27T08:47:00.000-08:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

Down near the bottom of the front page of The Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA) of November 27 1911 there is a small headline: WILL BE HANGED TO-DAY / White Man Must Pay Penalty for Murder of Negroes. The focus of the short article that follows is not the nature of the crime but the historic nature of the punishment:

There was a follow-up article on the front page of the same newspaper the next day:

Indeed this was an historic occasion. A white man had not only be found guilty of murdering an African-American he had been given the most severe penalty possible for doing so. But there is something very wrong that it is his name that was recorded in these newspapers not the names of women he killed. That is why I have redacted the murderer's name from these articles.

This story was picked by the Associated Press and the article varied from paper to paper across the United States by headline and length. For example, the headline near the bottom of the second page of the November 30 1911 edition of the Hopkinsville Kentuckian was Unusual and the accompanying article was simply:

NAME REDACTED, a white man, was hanged at St. Mary's, Georgia, for the murder of a negro woman and her daughter.

In The Titusville Herald (Titusville, PA) the piece ran on page 8: WILL HANG TODAY

For the murder of a negro woman and her daughter near Kingsland; Ga., NAME REDACTED, a white man, will be hanged here tomorrow. This is believed to be the first time in the history [sic] that a white man has been executed for killing a negro.

If the name of the first white man in that area of the United States executed for killing an African-American was of historic interest surely the names of the two women he murdered -- the first African-Americans in that area of the United States whose murders were treated with the same degree of severity as were murders of white women -- deserved to be recorded.

Even The Appeal, an African-American newspaper, did not include the names of the two women when it picked up the Associated Press story. Which leads me to suspect that the story was sent out without their names. But the name of their murderer was not only put out on the wires, it was mentioned in major newspapers because his death marked an historic first. His name and his story have become part of the tourist industry of the town where he was hanged because he was also an historic last. He was the last man hanged at that jail. So his story is repeated and even dramatized for the tourist trade.

The name of the murderer was in all the newspapers I read. A little bit of digging turned up the name of the man who arrested him. I know the name of the (white) woman who had taught one of the murdered women to read and write. I know that that murdered woman was proud she was literate and proud of the hard work that she did to earn a living. I know that she made a habit of writing her name on the dollar bills she received when she was paid. I know that it was the possession of money with her name written on it that led to her murderer being caught. I know that family members of the white woman who taught her sat on the jury that heard the case. I know that the older woman was walking home with her daughter when she was attacked by a white man who intended (at the very least) to steal all her money. Perhaps she feared that even greater harm would be done to her daughter. I know that the older woman fought her attacker and I know that he murdered her and her daughter and then took the money from their corpses.

But I do not know the name of the mother or the daughter. I don't know how old either were. I know only that one white man took away their lives and that their place is history has almost been wiped out by the disinterest of those who record these kinds of things.

One hundred years ago today the State of Georgia enacted official revenge for the murder of two black women. It is their names that should be remembered not that of the man who murdered them.

Re: Reading Atwood

2011-11-26T15:13:00.001-08:00

Over the last few weeks Kit Whitfield has published a series of, deconstructions and analyses of famous novels using the first sentences as each as hir point of departure. I recommend these posts to anyone who wants to read excellent and jargon free literary analyses.

As a fan of Kit Whitfield both as a writer and as a literary critic I began scanning my own shelves for books I would love to see hir analyze. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale immediately caught my eye. I had been a science fiction fan from the time I was in grade school and so when I learned that Atwood had written a book set in a patriarchal dystopic near future I looked forward to reading it with some excitement. By the time I finished my excitement had morphed into annoyance which was shared with many other fans of science fiction. Much of that annoyance could be organized under three headings: genre blinkers, genre blindfolds and genre insecurity.

Genre blinkers

^[1]

^[2]

The Handmaid's Tale

I owe Margaret Atwood two apologies

Now, as I read my morning papers, I see bill after bill being passed into law in various American states that could have been included in the backstory Atwood provided for the dystopian America. Now, as I read my morning paper, I read about legal efforts to claw back from women the rights they have recently won. Now, as I read my morning paper, I read about official efforts to disenfranchise portions of the American population. Now, as I read my morning papers, I read about legal efforts to further entrench Christianity (and only certain flavours of Christianity at that) into American law.

In short, every day as I read my morning papers I realize that I should not read The Handmaid's Tale as a non-science fiction writer's attempt to write within an established genre but as chilling and insightful examination of the American political/social psyche.

Genre blindfolds

Romeo and Juliet

Genre insecurity

that her dystopian novels...are not science fiction but speculations about the future.

The New York Times Sept. 21 2009

Crime and Punishment

The League of Frightened Men

how

genre insecurity

If Atwood feared that some of her readers would make a category error when reading The Handmaid's Tale if they considered the book primarily as a piece of science fiction then I must confess that in my case her fear was accurate. I read the book years ago very consciously as a piece of science fiction. Yesterday I picked it up again, looked at the opening sentence and wondered what Kit Whitfield would make of it. Then I read the second sentence. And then the third. What a strange experience it was for me. This was a book I knew well and yet reading it now was a new experience. I set aside everything I (thought I) knew about how patriarchies should work, I set aside everything I knew about how dystopias should could into being. I finally read the book that Atwood wrote and it was a thing of wonder.

Rating: 5 stars

^[1] Of course, there was something less than unanimity as to exactly which books and short stories those classics were.↩

^[2] In science fiction the charge "unrealistic" can mean 'this isn't the way in which the physical universe actually works' or 'actual sentient beings do not respond in these ways to these circumstances.' However if a particular exception to scientific realism/truth/accuracy has deep roots in genre writing then it gets a pass. And since science fiction writers generally wrote from a narrow range of real world experiences readers had long since learn to accept as "realistic" behaviour and attitudes that would be considered highly unrealistic/believable in other cultures, classes or social groups. Readers who were women, African-Americans and members of the working class had simply come to learn that however people acted in the real world this is how they functioned in the world of science fiction. Which may explain why so many readers who belonged to those groups disliked science fiction as genre and read little of it. ↩

Batman and the case of the missing women

2011-11-25T16:15:00.001-08:00

As I reshelved books earlier today I was thinking of Deconstruction: The Bechdel Test an article by Ana Mardoll which had been posted recently on The Slacktiverse.

<Temporary derail> I am always in a constant struggle to keep books from taking over my desk, the floor of my library, the window sill of my library, the side table by my bed, the space next to my plate at the kitchen table and every other surface in the house which will hold a book. Yes, I pull books off the shelf to check quotes, to compare writing styles, to verify when something was published, to nail down a reference. But surely I don't pull enough books off the shelves to explain why sometimes it is difficult to pick one's way from the door to the chair and why every single book I needed to look at today was already off the shelf and in some unmarked pile. Approximately once a week I make a reshelving sweep through the house. By the next morning books will apparently have left the bookcases of their own accord to scatter themselves at random throughout my home.</Temporary derail>

I considered the book on top of the next 'to be shelved' pile in the light of that article. Batman in the forties. "Of course," I said to myself, "there is virtually no chance that an early Batman cartoon would pass the Bechdel test." Then my ~~talent at procrastination~~ academic rigour kicked in and I sat down to verify whether the early Batman comics did indeed 'fail' the Bechdel test.

I turned to page 10 and the first comic included in the collection--Case of the Chemical Syndicate, originally published in Detective Comics #27, May 1939. So, the first Batman (btw, he is referred to as The Batman throughout) fails the Bechdel test by the first criterion. Not only does it not have two women it doesn't even have one woman. Not even a silent woman standing somewhere in the back of a scene.

"Well," I say to myself attempting ~~to put off any more work~~ to maintain academic rigour, "one shouldn't make broad generalizations from a sample of one. I really need to reread more of these early comics."

So I moved on to Batman's official Origin story, first published in Detective Comics #33 in November 1939. As I turned to that story I noticed, with some excitement, that I could see not one but three drawings of a women. Strike that--they are drawings of the same woman. Bruce Wayne's mother (not given a name--she is described only as Thomas Wayne's wife) is first drawn standing terrified by her husband's side as the family is accosted by a gun wielding criminal. Two frames later she is drawn holding her injured husband and she has actual lines Thomas! You've killed him. Help! Police....help!. In the next frame the young Bruce Wayne is shown looking at the dead bodies of both his parents.

An improvement over the first comic since there was at least one woman. Or at most one woman. And she does get to speak. And be immediately killed. And she isn't given a name.

Sigh. On to the next comic in the collection--the origin story of Robin-the Boy Wonder originally published April 1940 in Detective Comics #38. And right there on the first page of the story I see a woman. In a trapeze perfomer's outfit (bra and short shorts) standing silent in the background. On the second page she gets a line of dialogue Nicely done, John and in the next frame she gets another as John (Grayson) cries Mary and Mary (Grayson) screams John! as they both plunge to their deaths.

Reading on I finally find a scene with two women in it. Of course it is a gambling den, neither of the women has lines and but at least they (and the lone woman in one of the frames on the next page, provide some relief from an otherwise completely male world.

I could go on but it is actually too depressing and distressing to do so. The real problem here is not that most of the leading characters are male nor is that most of the name characters are male. The problem is that the Batman comics is set in a world that is so overwhelmingly male that it is easy to identify and count the number of women drawn in each of these early stories.

So, the early Batman comics don't just fail the Bechdel test, they fail it spectacularly. They fail it in a way that signals to their readers not only that women don't have interesting stories to tell, or that women aren't good at crime fighting---it signals that women simply aren't.....

100 years ago today: What's in a name?

2011-11-24T15:46:00.001-08:00

We can tell much about a society by examining the words that they use (and don't use) and how they use them. For example, consider, this short headline on the front page of the November 24 1911 evening edition of The World (New York): THREE YEARS FOR AUTOIST GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER.

First, the word "driver" usually means "the person who drives that means of transport most common in society." Thus in this article WOMAN FOUGHT MOB OF 2,000 TO ARREST DRIVER on page 12 of the same edition of The World the driver the woman fought to arrest a man who was kicking the horse drawing his cart. Today the word "driver" will generally be understood to mean "person who drives a car." If the vehicle in question is not an automobile then that fact will be clearly indicated in the text. ("The driver of the tractor was not injured in the crash.")

In the America of 1911 automobiles were by no means rare but were still not the most common means of transportation for most people. If the headline had read THREE YEARS FOR DRIVER GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER it would not be clear to the reader of the time what type of vehicle had been involved in the accident. Because the word "driver" left ambiguity as to the type of vehicle involved writers used a number of words, such as autoist and automobilist.

Reading the newspapers of 1911 one soon realizes not only that automobiles were comparatively new and uncommon things but also they were viewed with alarm and concern by much of the population. Often the wording of the article implied/suggested either intentionalilty on the part of the automobile or that these machines were inherently difficult to control and therefore always dangerous. Often people are identified as being in the vehicle or riding it but there is no indication as to who (if anyone) was actually driving it.

FIRE CHIEF HURLED FROM HIS SPEEDING AUTO BY COLLISION / On Way to Blaze Langdon of Brooklyn and ChauffeurAre Tossed Over Fence (The Evening World November 24 1911 p. 3)
"While returning from visiting a patient the automobile in which Dr. Claggett and Lew Ferguson were riding became unmanageable and the two were violently thrown out when the machine turned turtle" AUTO TURNS, TWO ARE HURT (The Norfolk Weekly News Journal July 28 1911, page 1)
"According to bystanders the automobile, coming along Third street and trying to turn north into Broadway,did not turn sharply enough and ran into the car, which was going along Broadway." WOMEN INJURED INAUTOMOBILE CRASH / Mother and Daughter Thrown From Machine That Collides With Streetcar (The San Francisco Call April 7 1911, p. 11)

Second, let's think about the word "manslaughter." As I wrote in my post yesterday (Questions of Personhood) even after gaining the vote, women still were not able to exercise the same rights and privileges of citizenship as did enfranchised men. Language was used in ingenious and slippery ways by those trying to find reasons why not to allow women to do (or not do) various things.

It had long been accepted that the "people" whose rights were protected in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution were both men and women. Legal figures did not argue that the 4th amendment's protection of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" did not extend to women. When the law said that "no man shall kill" or "no man should steal" or "no man should speed" or "no person shall kill" or "no persons shall steal" or "no person shall speed" then it was understood that those restrictions extended to women.

However, when the law said "all persons may" or "all men may" then prevailing social/legal opinion as to whether women had the same rights as men depended on whether that action was one traditionally accepted as appropriate for women. A good example of this was the shocked responses to Mrs. Craig Biddle's decision to smoke in public. The problem wasn't that a person was smoking in public since men were allowed to do so. The problem was that a woman was exercising a privilege that had traditionally been enjoyed only by men. As I wrote in an earlier post, When Smoking is a Civil Right, attempts were made to restrict only the rights of women to smoke in public while continuing to allow men to do so.

In 1911 the exact meaning of the word "man" in legal documents seemed to vary on the basis of whether the right, privilege or protection undermined or supported the status quo. There were still many who wished to accord some of the rights and privileges accorded to "men" only to male human beings. And if you read the news in 2011 you will find that there are still many people attempting to do the same.

100 years ago today: Questions of personhood

2011-11-23T13:59:00.001-08:00

Winning full rights in society isn't a matter of battlefield set pieces--it is like taking a city one street and one house at a time.

One might think that the women of California having earlier in the year won the right to vote would have then been automatically accorded all the rights and privileges enjoyed by those who had already been enfranchised. This was not the case. Watching women who had already won the right to vote then have to separately struggle for the right to do things such serve on a jury highlights the degree to which women had not been treated as second class citizens because they didn't have the right to vote but rather had been denied the right to vote because it served the powers that be to treat them as second class citizens.

Case in point--the article JURY SERVICE ONLY FOR MEN, DECLARES WEBB / Attorney General Gives Informal Opinion on PresentLaw of California on the front page of The San Francisco Call November 23 1911:

Jury service is not a political right, he [Webb] said. "It is a duty incident to citizenship. It is in the nature of a burden which may by law be cast upon all or certain citizens. It is a judicial service, the performance of which is enjoined by law upon some citizens and which other citizens are debarred from performing because they do not possess the qualification which the law prescribed for those by whom this service shall be performed.

Webb was being disingenuous at best. Serving on a jury is not only a duty it is a right. First, if only a specific subgroup of society is able to serve on juries then only their perspective on the law will be reflected. Second, if women are barred from sitting on juries it will have a substantial impact on their ability to function as lawyers and judges. Third, if women are barred from juries it will have a substantial impact on their ability to run for and win any political position that involves the courts or the law. Even were it true that individual women were statistically more likely to suffer from particular impediments that would stand in the way of serving as jurors there was already in place a way of examining all jurors before selecting them to hear a case. Just as some men were found unfit (in general or for the purposes of a particular case) to be jurors so could unfit women be dismissed from jury duty.

The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled unconstitutional state laws that debarred men from sitting on juries on the basis of their race and yet specifically allowed that citizens of all races could be debarred from juries on the basis of their gender. Given the wording of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

and the words of the ruling in U.S. Supreme CourtStrauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1879)

The very fact that colored people are singled out and expressly denied by a statute all right to participate in the administration of the law as jurors because of their color, though they are citizens and may be in other respects fully qualified, is practically a brand upon them affixed by the law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others.

Reading the opinions in that (and similar) cases one is forced to conclude that the court did not consider women to be, in truth persons.

In the words of Burnita Shelton Matthew, from "The Woman Juror" WOMEN LAWYERS' JOURNAL Vol. 15, No. 2 (January 1927)

Since the adoption of woman suffrage, women have arrived, so to speak, and are demanding the why and wherefore of their exclusion from jury service. Evidently they are not satisfied with the reasoning of the great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone. He held that the common law requires jurors to be free and trustworthy "human beings," and that while the term "human beings" means man and women, the female is, however, excluded on account of the defect of sex. If it be, as Blackstone says, a "defect of sex" that bars women from the jury box, the women claim that the defect lies in the masculine, not the feminine ranks. Anyway, in these modern days, women always take what Blackstone said with a grain of salt. They remember that when expounding the common law – a law which actually bristled with injustices to womankind, and which even permitted a man to beat his wife, Blackstone remarked that under it, a female is "so great a favorite."

As women are dissatisfied with Blackstone’s reasoning, so they are dissatisfied with the reasoning of the United States Supreme Court. That court has decided that a state can not bar colored men from jury service because the debarment would brand them as an inferior class of citizens, and deprive them of the equal protection of the law which is guaranteed by the National Constitution. Since the Constitution guarantees that protection to persons and not merely to negroes, that doctrine should apply to women as well. However, with the curious ability which judges of the male persuasion have manifested to regard women as persons at one time, and not as persons at another, the court in this case said that certain restrictions might legally be put upon jury service – such as limiting it to males!

I will write more about court cases that specifically address that question the personhood of women in a future post.

100 years ago today: Protesters attempt to occupy the House of Commons

2011-11-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

Next time someone describes those involved in the various Occupy movements as dirty hippies you could always reply "No they are acting like English ladies in Edwardian times." On November 21 1911 women had attempted to force their way onto the floor of the House of Commons in London to protest the government's refusal to pledge support for a bill that would give women the right to vote. Forced back onto the streets many of the women had thrown stones, smashed windows and then physically resisted the police attempting to arrest them. From the November 22 1911 edition of The Marion Daily Mirror (Marion, Ohio. page 1) REAL WAR SAY SUFFRAGETTES / Jail Sentences no Deterrent to Women Wanting Ballot / WON'T SHRINK FROM STRUGGLE

    Black eyes and scratched faces were numerous among the prisoners and several declared that their entire bodies were masses of bruises. They charge that the police were under orders to handle them as brutally as possible, short of inflicting serious injury, by way of discouraging them. To this end, they assert the officers struck them in the faces, pinched them, twisted their arms, ripped off garments and in some instances treated them with actual indecency.
    The leaders say these methods will not deter them for an instant from continuing their campaign until suffrage is granted them. They will also do their utmost to create disorder in jail as outside of it. They will refuse to work, the prison attendants will be resisted, there will be hunger strikes, the prison furniture will be smashed and every method resorted to to force the government to surrender.
    In last night's encounter scores of policemen were hurt. A number were stabbed with hat pins. Some had their eyes blackened, their noses bruised or teeth knocked out by brass knuckles in women's hands.

One hundred years ago "respectable" English ladies were willing to endure harsh treatment and jail sentences just for the right to vote. Today many women (and men) seem unwilling to even make the walk to the ballot box in order to prevent women from having their very right to life taken away from them.

The business of blaming the victim

2011-11-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

Some of my best book finds have been at a particular type of library sale. When professors (or the bookish well off) die their adult children sometime pack up all the books and give them to a nearby library. A few years ago several libraries within driving distance had sales that consisted entirely of books they had received this way. Many of the books were in wonderful condition and they differed in subject (and even language) from those one found at the usual library sale.

At many of these sales you bought large paper bags when you entered (usually $5.00 each) and you could walk out with as many books as you could pack into them. After you packed all the books you had found into the bags there was almost always room to add a pamphlet or small book. Since those were afterthoughts (or rather, they were "why waste any space in the bag" thoughts) I didn't always look over them very carefully until I got home.

One of those little "extra" pamphlet/books was Heal Thyself: An explanation of the real cause and cure of disease by Edward Bach. This particular copy was printed in England and from the condition of the spine I doubt anyone had ever actually read it. When I checked the copyright page I noticed that although it was first published in 1931 the particular copy I had was printed in 1991. This caught my interest--although there been a lot of changes in medicine in those sixty years there seemed to have been no edits or additions to the original text and quick check on Amazon indicates that it is still in print.

So, who is this Edward Bach and what is his book about?

Edward Bach was a homeopath who didn't believe in the "germ theory" and did believe that illness arose from disharmony between the personality and the Soul ^[1](50). Bach concocted remedies from flowers on the basis of his psychic and intuitive relationships with plants. Nelsons Homeopathic Pharmacy (the largest manufacturer of homeopathic remedies in the UK) use Bach's "mother tinctures" to produce the Bach flower remedies that they still sell. On January 28 2009 Nelsons announced Nelsons, the UK’s largest manufacturer of natural healthcare products, is proud to have been selected by Duchy Originals to manufacture the new Duchy Herbals range of natural herbal tinctures, which have been launched this month – the key post-Christmas cold and flu season. Duchy Originals is the Price of Wales' organic food company. According to its own website Duchy Originals embodies HRH The Prince of Wales's commitment to what he calls a 'virtuous circle' of providing natural, high-quality organic and premium products, while helping to protect and sustain the countryside and wildlife.

I will leave aside for another day my discussion of the scientifically questionable value of any of these homeopathic "remedies" and instead will focus one of the beliefs of Bach (and of some others within the alternative medicine community) that both makes it impossible to test their products in any scientific manner and which also causes deep and often lasting emotional as well physical harm to many of their clients.

Bach was a victim blamer. If you read his magnum opus it is clear that he believed that the person who was sick was themself responsible for the illness and that no cure could be effected until they first "healed themselves." That means that Bach's claims that his nostrums were effective were unfalsifiable. If the remedy didn't work it was the fault of the patient not the medicine:

Let it be briefly stated that disease, though apparently so cruel, is in itself beneficent and for our good and, if rightly interpreted, it will guide us to our essential faults....Suffering is a corrective to point out a lesson which by other means w have failed to grasp... (8)

We can now see how any type of illness from which we many suffer will guide us to the discover of the the fault which lies behind our affliction. (17)

Thus we see that our conquest of disease will mainly depending on the following...secondly, the knowledge that the basic cause of disease is due to disharmony between the personality and the Soul; thirdly, our willinghness and ability to discover the fault which is causing such a conflict. (50)

Victim blaming is at the very heart of Bach's theories about illness. Indeed, without such victim blaming his theories would collapse under the weight of the scientific evidence against them. So, those who depend on such remedies instead of conventional medicine suffer great emotional distress even if their physical problems are quite minor.

^[1]Bach, Edward. Heal Thyself: An Explanation of the Real Cause and Cure of Disease. Saffron Walden: C.W. Daniel, 1931. ↩

100 years ago today: Dying for drugs

2011-11-21T15:58:00.001-08:00

One hundred years ago today Walter Wyman died as a result of a carbuncle. Wyman had access to the best medical care in the United States, perhaps the best medical care in the world. He was surgeon-general of the United States Public Heath and Marine Hospital Service. Details of Wyman's illness can be read in CARBUNCLE KILLS HEAD OF PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE (The Washington Herald, Nov. 21 1911) and DR. WALTER WYMAN DEAD (The Boston Evening Transcript, Nov. 21 1911).

It is easy for us to forget now deadly boils, abscesses, carbuncles and even small cuts could be in a world without penicillin, sulfa or all the other drugs we now have access to. Wyman had been hospitalized for other reasons but it was the infections that resulted from the carbuncle that killed him. This was not at all unusual in 1911 and even today people in the "western world" still die of sepsis.

Next time you (or someone else) is fantasizing about how well you (or they) would fare "come the apocalypse" remember that even those with the guns and the food stores are likely to be brought low not by other human beings but by simple blood poisoning. Or measles. Or mumps. Or influenza. Or rabies. Or tetanus. Or......

100 Years ago today: Calling on San Francisco

2011-11-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One of the things that jumps out at the reader of the newspapers of one hundred years ago is how clearly the "flavours" of different regions, cities, states and even classes survives over time. It isn't that the newspapers of the relatively undeveloped territories and comparatively newly admitted states reflected a more rural and geographically isolated view of the world than did the newspapers of the larger cities. Indeed, one of the surprising things one finds that most newspapers, once they reached the stage of daily (or at least six day a week) editions, included news from all over the world. It is easy to follow the news of the rebellion in China, the Italian campaign in Northern Africa, the unrest in Mexico and the major political issues in Canada and Great Britain.

Armed with some knowledge of the history of segregation and "Jim Crow" laws in American history one isn't too surprised to come across an almost gleeful description of a lynching in a newspaper published in a southern city or town. However it is not difficult to find the same story picked up several days later in a newspaper printed in a northern city. One may more often come across the descriptor "colored" after someone's name in a southern newspaper than those in the north but that may be due more to the fact that there were fewer African-Americans living in the regions served by some of the northern newspapers.

While most newspapers made an effort to cover news of national and international interest some events and concerns are simply more salient to one community than they would be for another. For example, much of the front page of The Tacoma Times of November 20 1911, was taken up with news about the water emergency of nearby Seattle. Reading the headline is enough to explain why the editors of The Tacoma times felt their readership would be very interested in that particular story.

SEATTLE PEOPLE RUSH HERE / Panic Stricken Over Water Shortage

But why, the casual reader might wonder, did The San Francisco Call run so many "human interest" stories about this fellow named Ishi? The following are just a few of the headlines about Ishi that appeared in the The Call over the previous few months.

ISHI GIVEN JOB AS VALET TO PHARAOH (Nov. 20 1911)
ISHI LOSES HEART TO 'BLOND SQUAW' (Oct. 16 1911)
ISHI, THE LAST ABORIGINAL SAVAGE in AMERICA (Oct. 8 1911)
CLINK OF COINS CONSOLES ISHI (Oct. 20 1911)
ISHI NURSES FEUD OF HIS ANCESTOR (Oct. 23 1911)
ISHI, THE ABORIGINE, TO BE AT HOME TODAY (Oct. 22 1911)

Who exactly was this Ishi? As Georges T. Dodds explained in his review of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides:

In 1911, an emaciated man who spoke an unknown language wandered out of the mountains of Northern California and was jailed as a vagrant. "Discovered" by Dr. Alfred Louis Kroeber (Ursula K. Le Guin's father) and his associates in the anthropology department of The University of California at Berkeley, this wilderness man was identified as the last survivor of the white man's slaughter of his Californian Native American tribe, the Yahi, and probably the last entirely free-living Indian in North America.

Ishi appeared out of the mountains at a liminal time in the history of the state of California. The west coast was no longer a frontier. The only areas of the contiguous United States that had not yet been admitted to the Union as states were interior territories. Comfortable in their assurance that they have "won" the battle and displaced (often by killing them) the original inhabitants of what became California people could exoticize and fetishize this lone remnant of those they had deplaced/replaced and erased. And like shoppers anxiously reading Consumer's Digest after making their purchases, the public gained assurance that they had done right every time Ishi was reported to have done something "savage." See, they could think (or say), see how childish he is. He is better off now. Someone like this couldn't build the great cities we have erected on the coast. Ishi's people could not have forged a nation that spread from coast to coast.

Ishi had become for the readers of The Call a symbol of their power, their might and their (self perceived) meritocratic right to control the lands on which Ishi's people had once lived.

100 Years ago today: Marked from birth to death

2011-11-18T15:45:00.001-08:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago the "color bar" in the United States was quite firmly in place. Indeed it was so well entrenched that when reading newspapers from one hundred years ago it is easy to overlook many of the "every day" and pervasive aspects of segregation. Of course it stands out when, I have mentioned in other posts in this series, newspapers are reporting on lynchings but many of the rules that governed what African-Americans could do or where they could go are invisible to the casual reader of long ago newspapers. For example, it wasn't necessary for "whites only" to be included in an "for rent" listing because housing was so segregated at that time that contemporary readers would knows simply from the address whether the house or apartment in question was in the white or "coloured" part of town.

Sometimes it is a "by the way" and casual item that makes the modern reader sit up and remember just how heavily segregated life was for African-Americans in almost all areas of the United States in 1911. Here, for example, are the birth, death and marriage announcements on page 2 of The Washington Herald November 18 1911:

From the moment an African-American was born to the moment they died they were marked as "other." If they were born in the same hospitals it would not be in the same rooms or even on the the same floor. They didn't go to the same churches and they were no doubt laid out at different funeral homes.

How carefully must African-Americans have negotiated the byways of a new town? If an African-American moved to Washington D.C. one of their first steps was probably to get a copy of The Washington Bee, the local African-American newspaper. If you glance through the pages of the November 18 1911 edition you will find some ads for the same stores and services as in The Washington Herald and some ads for different stores and different services. Readers could assume that any business that advertised in the pages of The Washington Bee would serve African-Americans. In fact one can find on page 3 of that edition an answer as to how people figured out if businesses were friendly to African-Americans:

Of course, there were businesses that would take money from African-Americans but not treat they as well as they did white customers. And there were businesses that wouldn't even take the money. If African-Americans patronized businesses run by other African-Americans they could assure themselves of good service at the same time that they supported their own community. As the writer of the article on page 4 SUPPORT YOUR OWN put it:

Since there are so many "Jim Crow" theaters in the city, The Bee would advise the colored people to support their own theaters. There is no reason for ninety thousand colored people to support moving picture theaters that have been set apart by white men for Negroes and bar them out of their theaters down town.
Let us support our own.

Too often the history we read of the United States excludes the voices, faces and stories of African-Americans. The great businessmen and businesswomen are white, the doctors and nurses are white, the inventors and mechanics, the painters and poets---everyone is white. Because the "others" are invisible we forget that they too were being born and dying, marrying and divorcing, running businesses, schools and hospitals. Reading papers such as The Washington Bee is a reminder that there was a thriving and interesting separate community of African-Americans whose stories are still not being heard.

Book Review: Strong Poison

2011-11-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers (1930)

Now that's more like it.

After a comparatively weak outing in The Unpleasentness at the Bellona Club both Wimsey and Sayers are back to fine form. Sayers adroitly introduces a new character to the regulars of the Wimseyverse while allowing characters introduced in previous books to grow, change and interact in convincing ways. Sayers demonstrates here how an author can delegate important parts of the action to "non lead" characters without undermining the detecting authority of the main characer. For example, the intelligence and initiative of Miss Murchison reflects well on Miss Clipsom as the person who recognized her talents and abilities. The intelligence and initiative of Miss Clipsom reflects well on Wimsey as the person who recognized her talents and abilities. Chief Inspector Parker, unlike the "official" detectives in so many series based on the sleuthing of unofficial detectives, is not stupid, not a bad detective, not slavishly dependent on and impressed by the amateur sleuth nor childishly resistent to pay attention to the opinions of someone who has often been right in the past.

Sayers plays absolutely fair with her readers in this murder and its detection. The final piece of information, the final datum necessary to solve the case, was something that anyone who was well read in British murder trials could be expected to know (althought they may be forgiven if they forgot that they did know it.)

This reader's main regret after finishing this book is that Sayers never wrote a novel, or series of short stories, that centered around Miss Clipsom. Clipsom was what I think Agatha Christie wanted Miss Marple to be, a convincing demonstration of the acuity and worth of the neglected spinster. I like to think of the many tales that Miss Clipsom could have told about what really went on behind the doors of polite British society. And then I realize that Miss Clipsom, being Miss Clipsom, would have either brought the matters to the attention of the relevant authority or taken with her to the grave those things which were immoral rather than illegal.

Rating: 4-1/2 stars

100 Years ago today: Calculating the cost of living

2011-11-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

One of the difficult things to negotiate when reading fiction not only set in but, more importantly, written in the past is determining how much things cost and how much they were worth. For example, when Agatha Christie's short story "Philomel Cottage" was published in the November 1924 issue of Grand Magazine^[1] its readers found it quite reasonable that a comfortable country cottage with heating, electricity and plumbing (not a given at that time in England) could sell for two thousand pounds.^[2] Alix Martin (from whose point of view the story was written) had been able to buy it outright because she had inheriting "a few thousand" pounds--an amount that yielded "a couple of hundred a year"--on which she would be able to live. Meanwhile in "The Manhood of Edward Robinson" (originally published in the December 1924 issue of Grand Magazine) the titular character buys a very, very nice car for just under 500 pounds.^[3]

However the modern day reader cannot simply deduce from those two data points how much it would cost to live in a certain fashion in the England of the mid 1920s since at that time very few people (even well to do people) owned their own cars and almost everyone who considered themselves part of the "gentry" aspired to having several servants. The cost of eating dinner then is hard to compare with the cost of eating dinner now unless one knows what the food cost at the store, how much it cost to cook it, how expensive it was to heat the house, buy the china or pay for the hot water used to prepare and wash up the dinner.

One of the best places to go for that type of invaluable information is old newspapers where advertisements and want ads provide the modern reader with information about what people wanted then and how much they were willing to pay for it.

Page six of The Tacoma Times of November 16 1911 gives today's reader a sense of what various things cost in Tacoma at that time:

One could rent a furnished apartment for $12.00 to $16.00 a month
Both men's and women's "long" coats could be bought for $10.00 apiece.
$1600.00 would buy you a 40-acre farm along with two houses.
For $1150.00 you could get 20 acres of cleared land 3-room house, barn, 6 stalls for cows, 4 large cherry trees, about 20 apple and pears, a good stove.
A (live) rooster could be bought for $5.00 and a (live) hen from $1.25 to $2.00
A sewing machine cost $5.00
You could rent a 5 room house for $10.00 a month
An upright piano could cost anywhere from $80.00 to $150.00
A "small grocery and cigar store" was on sale for $250.00
Hotel rooms were available from 25¢ a day
Houses in the city were for sale at prices varying from $900.00 to $1700.00
For $2200.00 (only $200.00 down and $15.00 a month) you could get a 7 room house that stood on two lots--on a paved road, with a sidewalk, sewer, and gas already connected. Both a steel and a gas range were included in the sale price.
Looking over that list some things jump out at one. The costs of a "good" coat was surprisingly high. A piano could easily cost as much as a year's rent. There seemed to be a much greater variation in "how people lived" than there are today. (Good) hotels rented out rooms on a monthly basis. Furnished apartments were quite common. People took rooms in boarding houses. Rooms and apartments were available with housekeeping included.

This is before the dawn of the "homeowner" society in North America and England. Yes, there are houses for sale in the city, but a surprisingly large number of the houses are either for rent only or far sale or rent. Outside the city the house came with the land almost as an afterthought whereas today it is often the land that comes with the house.Given the costs of houses, pianos, farms and apartments on page six it isn't surprising to find this item in the wanted column:

A young man with $4000 savings would like to get acquainted with a good, honest lady.

$4000 was indeed a substantial amount of money at that time and I imagine that the young man in question was able to get acquainted with at least one good honest lady.

I wonder what happened next........

^[1]Republished in 1934, under the same name, as part of the short story collection The Listerdale Mystery.↩

^[2] The reader can deduce from other details in the story that Alix Martin inherited approximately six thousand pounds in bear bonds.↩

^[3] Republished in 1934 as part of the short story collection The Listerdale Mystery.↩

100 Years Ago Today: Suffering Suffrage

2011-11-15T14:51:00.001-08:00

WOMEN DESTROY CREDIT / Oregon Official Says Suffrage Hurts Western Cities ran the headline in the New York Tribune of November 15, 1911. According to the article, the corporate counsel of the City of Portland, Oregon (Frank Salisbury Grant) had told the Major of Boston (John F. Fitzgerald^[1]) that by granting women even limited suffrage western cities were doing damage to their credit ratings. According to Grant western cities that granted women partial suffrage had more difficulties raising "Eastern" capital than did similar western cities that accorded women no voting rights.

Of course, even if Grant's claim were true it still wouldn't be a good argument against giving women the vote else one is opening up the door to arguing for and against the rights of anyone^[2] to vote purely on the basis of whether it would help or hinder the city in which they live to get credit. However Grant's was concerned about what was right he was concerned about what was good for business:

Especially are women juries in civil cases the cause of much concern to business men, according to Mr. Grant.^[3] Their lack of training and complete absence of everything but feminine ideas concerning things they know nothing about lead many parties to civil suits to waive jury trials and rely upon a single judge's opinion, he declared.

Leaving aside the validity of either of his claims (that business men were more likely to waive jury trials in areas where women have been granted partial suffrage and that female civil juror voting patterns differ from those of male civil voting patterns) let us consider his claim that female jurors vote differently than do male jurors because "they know nothing." Perhaps female jurors were more cynical about the claims and arguments of the overwhelming male businesspersons who came before the court? Perhaps female jurors, knowing that they had little to no chance of ever opening or running a business suffer from fewer conflicts of interest in such cases than did male jurors. Perhaps female jurors were more inclined, given the socialization of the day, to think about what was right or wrong rather than what was profitable or good for business.

There is a tinge of real anger and concern in the statements of Grant. He, and many others, were becoming very concerned that sooner than later women across the United States would become fully enfranchised. That would not happen until the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment however women had been voting in some states and territories for decades. The areas that granted suffrage were not notably poorer or more badly organized than were the areas that denied women the vote.

Of course there was, even as Grant made these statements, a campaign going on in his home state to extend the franchise to women--which happened in 1912. Perhaps what Grant should really have been worried about is that his statements would be read by the men and women of Portland who would be voting in the next civic election.

^[1] Maternal grandfather of John F(itzgerald) Kennedy.↩

^[2] Even male, adult, white, American citizens.↩

^[3] The rather "interesting" sentence construction is in the original.↩

Technology and the mystery writer, part one

2011-11-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

Technological changes may require that mystery/detective writers make changes to plots, circumstances, and situations that have worked well for a long time. For example, the current ubiquity of cell phones has made it harder for the writer to explain just why it was that Charater One did not simply call Character Two to let them know that Character One's car has broken down and thus their arrival will be delayed. Just a few decades ago such a breakdown might result in Character One having to walk for miles/kilometres on a dark road on a stormy night in order to reach a farmhouse from where a call might be made to the nearest garage. What opportunites this simple circumstance opened up to the inventive writer.

Someone writing a similar story set in current times needs to explain why Character One didn't simply call Character Two (and the towing service) on their cell. (The standard explanation now is usually "the car broke down in one of those areas with little to no cell phone reception.) Sometimes the explanation as to why modern technology could not be used becomes rather convoluted and requires some (or a lot of) suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader.

The Agatha Christie short story Philomel Cottage is a good example of a story that would have be written very differently if it were set in present day England rather than the England of 1924.^[1]. In 1924 it was still almost disturbingly easy for people to move from one place to another and begin anew. Even long distance [trunk] telephone calls were unusual (and expensive.) There were no fax machines, no video conferencing, no television, most newspapers carried few photographs and it was highly unlikely that someone in one country would even see a news article that had been published in another country. If someone grew up and stayed in a small town or a closed community then they probably had few secrets from other people in the same community or social circle but it was often nearly impossible to find out much about the background of someone who had lived far away or had been out of the country for an extended period of time. That was one of the reasons why people would actually present letters of introduction (from people already known to the community) when they moved to a new place.

As Philomel Cottage begins Alix King is worried that a face from the past will bring uncertainty and unhappiness into what seems to be a perfect married life. What happens to Alix and her husband over the next few days is an example of Christie in her quietly chilling mode rather than the comfortably cozy mode that most modern readers associate with her name.

In this reviewer's opinion one of Christie's best short stories and well worth the read (or the rereading.)

^[1] The story was published in Grand Magazine in 1924 and then in 1934 republished in the short story collection The Listerdale Mystery.↩

100 years ago today: Copyright and the moving picture industries

2011-11-14T07:26:00.001-08:00

Today when we hear about the "moving picture" industry and copyrights we expect another story of some portion of the film industry charging others with infringing on the copyrights they hold. 100 years ago the news was about copyright infringement in the other direction.

In the November 14 1911 edition of The San Francisco Call reported (COPYRIGHT DECISION HITS PHOTO PLAY MEN)that on the previous day the United States Supreme Court had handed down a decision affirming the 1908 lower court ruling that the Kalem Co. had violated copyright when it filmed an adaptation of Ben Hur without permission from the copyright holders.

The importance of this decision in upholding the rights of writers is not recognizable only in hindsight. The New York Times not only reported it on the day they followed that up with a piece in the Topics of the Times on November 15 1911 which argued in that some vague "public benefit" should not stand in the way the rights of those who create through "mental effort" owning and benefiting from the that which they produced.

The Tardis in the Library, part four: The Sweet Smell of Class Essentialism

2011-11-13T14:45:00.001-08:00

Anyone who wants to get a sense of just how strong (and unexamined) the class essentialism of the "gentlefolk" of England still was in the period between the two World Wars should read popular fiction written at that time specifically aimed at that class.

Take, for example, one of Agatha Christie's short stories, The Listerdale Mystery, originally published in 1925 [1]. Class essentialism doesn't lurk in the background of this story--it is the point of the story.

Warning, past here there be spoilers.

As the short story, The Listerdale Mystery, opens Mrs. Saint Vincent and her two grown children, Barbara and Rupert, have been "reduced" to living in what they refer to as "cheap furnished lodgings" after her late husband "speculated unfortunately" and in consequence they lost most of their money as well as Ainsley, the home in which their family had lived for generations. Money has become scarce indeed. Barbara has been unable to find a job doing the type of work she has recently trained for (shorthand and typing) and is now considering taking any type of job if only someone would hire her. The family clearly see themselves, not only as in dire straights, but as suffering in a qualitatively different manner than all the other people living in the same house or in the "dingy line of houses opposite," because because the St. Vincents had known what it was to live otherwise.

Mr. St. Vincent had both speculated and "borrowed" and thus a different family now lived in the house that was for generations home to the St. Vincent family. His widow explains it all by saying that her husband was not a businessman. To which this reader responded (out loud I must admit) "then why the hell did he put his family at risk by borrowing and speculating?"

The St. Vincents are running so short of money that soon they will not be able to afford more than a bed-sitter and Barbara will have to receive Jim Masterton (a potential suitor) in the common sitting room just like everyone else. Meanwhile Mrs. St. Vincent fears that the "tone" of their surroundings is have an influence on her son:

he's quite different from what he used to be. Not that I want my children to be stuck-up. That's not it a bit. But I should hate it if Rupert got engaged to that dreadful girl in the tobacconist's. I daresay she may be a very nice girl, really. But she's not our kind.

Everything changes when Mrs. St. Vincent answers a curious advertisement in the Morning Post

To gentlepeople only. Small house in Westminster, exquisitely furnished, offered to those who would really care for it. Rent purely nominal. No agents.

It turns out that the rent is indeed small enough to be of little concern even to a family as short of funds as the St. Vincents. Especially when it turns out that the beautiful Queen Anne house comes not only with furniture but also with a butler (Quentin), cook, maid and flowers and game sent weekly from the estate of Lord Listerdale (the owner of the house.) The St. Vincents are told that Listerdale has gone to Africa leaving behind instructions that his various properties be rented at extreme modest rates to the "type" of people who would truly appreciate them.

After the St. Vincents begin to wonder if Quentin has actually made off with Lord Listerdale it turns out, of course, that the real Quentin has retired and Lord Listerdale has taken his place in order to make up for a life of selfishness by rescuing the groups he sees to be in dire need of his help--the "genteel poor."

I thought I'd try a little altruism for a change, and being a fantastic kind of fool, I started my career fantastically. I'd sent subscriptions to odd things, but I felt the need of doing something - well, something personal. I've been sorry always for the class that can't beg, that must suffer in silence - poor gentlefolk. I have a lot of house property. I conceived the idea of leasing these houses to people who - well, needed and appreciated them. Young couples with their way to make, widows with sons and daughters starting in the world.

And thus, by the end of the story, the truth has been revealed and all ends happily. Lord Listerdale has fallen in love with Mrs. St. Vincent while serving her as a butler and so will marry her and take her away to live a life of leisure, comfort and no dingy rooms. Jim Masterton and Barbara have become engaged now that he has seen Barbara in a setting that showed off her true gentility. Rupert is no longer spending time with girl in the tobacconist's (or is doing so very quietly and on the side as have generations of his forebears.)

All ends well as a genteel family who were in danger of losing their class status are rescued without making the least effort of their own.

The class essentialism is laid on so thick in this story that if it were penned today one might presume that it was a parody or a pastiche. A wealthy man who had inherited property and income frittered it away. His widow and children are forced to live just like ordinary people. There are no inherited treasures in the house where they now room and it seems not to occur to them that particular aesthetic tastes might be social constructions or indeed that the people with whom they are now living never had enough money to "waste" it things that were not utilitarian. Nor does it occur to them that the cracked and cherished items that are now heirlooms were, when first purchased, expensive symbols of status as must as aesthetic choices.

Perhaps the reason that members of this class "do not beg" is that the usual response they get when they go to charitable organizations is to be told that they still have more than do most people in England. Or perhaps they don't beg because to do so would be to lose the one asset they still have-- their "genteel" status. That status would get them in the doors of clubs and accepted at universities that might not otherwise accept them. That status allows them to marry into families were still turning away all but the richest of the "non-genteel."

Note too how in this story there is no questioning, by any involved, that the "genteel" can be recognized almost immediately. And of course they can. Having gone to the same schools, read the same books and frequented the same society they all speak the special code. They all know the really important things in life such as which fork to use for each course at dining table and how many minutes to linger over the port after dinner.

The message to the readers is clear. The only truly worthy charity is charity to those who once had more than most people and now have to endure the horror of having no more than the average person. And the short story is a comforting read to current “members" of the genteel telling them they need not worry if they are temporarily displaced by the current economic upheavals since they, like the St. Vincents, can be assured that their class status will always protect them from the vagaries of modern economic life.

[1] It was originally published in Grand Magazine as "The Benevolent Butler." In 1934 it appeared under the name The Listerdale Mystery in the short story collection of the same name. ↩

100 years ago today: When smoking is a civil right

2011-11-11T17:01:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I blogged about the fact that newspapers across the United States picked up the shocking story about Mrs. Craig Riddle smoking in public. I ended that piece by making a statement might have seemed overwrought:

Mrs. Biddle may have chosen to smoke in a public place simply to demonstrate her social prominence. Yet in a way Mrs. Biddle was a pioneer of women's rights to the full enjoyment of citizenship just as were women who were campaigning to extend suffrage to women as well as men.

Well, 100 years ago today the following headline WOMEN MAY SMOKE IN PUBLIC SAYS CITY COUNSEL ran on the front page of The New York Evening World. The city counsel had responded to a question from an alderman as to whether an ordinance could be passed forbidding women from smoking in public. The counsel replied:

My opinion is that the courts would more likely hold an ordinance prohibiting public smoking by women to be void than valid.

It is possible also, that such an ordinance might conflict with Section 40 of the Civil Rights law, providing that all persons shall be entitled to equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges in inns, restaurants, hotels &c.

The counsel was making the point that forbidding women from engaging in behaviour that men were allowed to engage in was against the law. By creating this situation Mrs. Biddle provided the opportunity for hundreds of thousands of people to realize that that law existed and what its implications were.

The Blandings Break Their Fast: Mr. Blandings and the directed negotiated reading, part four

2011-11-11T15:03:00.001-08:00

Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the differences among the three presentations of the Blandings story will necessarily involve implicit and explicit spoilers

Jim Blandings, having survived his morning shave, is now sitting at his dining room table drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning newspaper. Muriel and the children (Joan and Betsy) are breakfasting with him. Jim turns the papers of the paper and notices that a small piece has been cut out. Jim demands to know who "did it" and after Betsy indicates that it was she, goes on to complain:

Haven't I repeatedly told you not to cut up the paper until I've read it?

When Betsy explains that she used it to complete an assignment handed out by her teacher without asking for any details Jim snidely comments, "Another of Miss Stellwagon's so-called progressive projects?" Muriel responds by admonishing Jim -- asking him what the point is of sending his daughters to an expensive school if "you undermine the teacher's authority in your dining room?" Jim responds by arguing that since he is in the advertising business, "[k]eeping abreast of the times is important."

Jim finally invites his daughter to read her finished assignment to him and Betsy fetches her notebook off the nearby sideboard as she explains:

Miss Stellwagon has assigned usto take a classified ad and write a human-interest theme on it.

Jim protests that he would like to have his breakfast without "social significance." Betsy reads the assignment:

Forced to sell.
Farm dwelling.
Original beams.
Barn.
Apple orchard.
Trout stream.
Seclusion.
Superb view.
Will sacrifice.

Jim is not impressed. To him the ad is simply an example of someone trying to sell something and make some money. When his daughters quote Miss Stelwagon's description of advertising as a parasitic profession Jim counters by pointing out that is his job in advertising that pays for his daughters' tuition.

Since the writer of the original Mr. Blandings short story and novel (and co-writer of the film) was himself an advertising man living in New York City he had no doubt had sentiments expressed to him similar to those the Blandings children bring home from school. The criticism of advertising as the means of encouraging people to spend more than they have on things that they would not otherwise have desired predates the Second World War. So why did the writers have Blandings put forward such a weak defense of his profession?

I think that this is one of the ways in which the movie allowed for negotiated and counter-dominant readings. The audience experiences the events on the screen through the POV of Jim Blandings. They are encouraged to root for Jim throughout the movie. At the same time the screenplay allows room for the audience to mock Blandings as a victim of his own propaganda. He defends encouraging other people to buy things that they don't need with money they don't have. And soon the Blandings will be building a house that they don't need and in the process run through money they had had no intention of spending.

So, the audience member who watches the "typical" New York family have breakfast served to them by their maid while criticizing the teachers at their daughters' expensive private school can have the enjoyment of feeling that Jim and Muriel are headed to disaster.

If Jim had responded to his daughter by explaining that it was advertising that fueled the American capitalist engine and that, indeed, making other people buy things they couldn't afford and would not want otherwise was the very heart of his job. In fact it was at the very heart of the booming post war American economy. Jim would have been right but his rightness would have alienated him from parts of the audience and cut off avenues of negotiated readings of the scene.

It is a fine line that the writers/director walk and it speaks to the skill with which they did so that one may not even notice that a line is being walked until one has watched the film several times.

Timeline glitch Jim complains about Betsy having cut something out of his morning paper. Exactly when did she do this? Apparently the ad was cut out, put into her notebook and she wrote an assignment based on it in the few minutes between showering and having breakfast.

100 years ago today: One of these things is not like the other

2011-11-10T08:55:00.001-08:00

Headlines on the front page of November 10 1911 issue of The San Francisco Call (California) [NOTE: Like many newspapers of the day The Call used multiple stacked headlines for many articles. Where there are more than two headlines in the original not all of the "lesser" headline are included below. The original capitalizations/spellings have been retained where possible. In a few cases the words are "best guesses" due to the condition of the scanned newspapers]:

REBELS FALL BACK FROM NANKING LEAVING 1,000 DEAD / Manchu Dynasty in Last Desperate Stand Holds but Two Strategic Points
ROLPH BEGINS HIS TASK PLANS LAID TO BUILD UP CITY / SUPERVISORS TO ORGANIZE PRIOR TO NEW REGIME
TWO MEN ARE MISSING AFTER GAS EXPLOSION / Others Are Seriously Burned by Fire Which Swept Hunters Point Drydock
PRINCE APPLAUDS MINISTER'S CRITICS / Von Bethmann-Holweg Defends Morocco-Congo Pact in Reichstag
WOMAN SUSPECTED OF SLAYING THREE / Chicago Has a New Chain of Deaths Resembling the Vermilya Case
MRS. CRAIG BIDDLE SMOKES IN PUBLIC / Philadelphia Society Leader Puffs "Cigawette" in Believue=Stratford Restaurant
THOUSANDS HIDDEN BY WOMAN FOUND / Cobwebbed Corners in House Where She Died Yield Small Fortune
MAN SCARED DUMB BY "COP'S" GREETING / Chicagoan Had to Get" Doctor to Find Lost Voice
"GOLDEN RULE" CHIEF ORDERED ON DUTY / Doctor Certifies Kohler's Physical Condition. Is "Good"
ALLEGED RUSSIAN ANARCHIST JAILED / Teofil Klempke Held at San Luis Obispo as Terrorist
MAETERLINCK GIVEN 1911 NOBEL PRIZE / Noted (Belgian Author Wins Award for Literature
HUSBAND SOLD WIFE FOR CENT AND HALF / Admits Deal With Former Convict; Calls It a Jest
TARKINGTON IS SUED FOR $10,000 DAMAGES / Author in Europe When Chauffeur Ran Down Man
PARSON AND BROTHER LOCKED UP AS SPIES / Italians Arrested Ohio Citizens on Sightseeing Tour

All save one are about foreign affairs, crimes, actions of public officials or institutions. Save one. Mrs. Craig Biddle was in the news for having broken the norms for the performance of social place. Since she was wealthy and a member of "society" and since her actions took place in an expensive, although public, venue she was stared at rather than being hounded, arrested or physically chastised.

Mrs. Biddle's actions took were in a place considered "public" and therefore her defiance of the public norms of gender performance were seen by the editors of the time as newsworthy. Her actions were particularly troublesome to the behavioural norms of the time because she was wealthy and well connected. If poor woman, women of colour, women who were immigrants or the children of immigrants, violated the social norms then their acts were understood and reported as a commentary of the shortcomings of the women in question. When a women as well educated, wealthy and well versed in social norms acted as did Mrs. Biddle then the social norm, as much as the woman, was in danger of being held up for examination and criticism.

For those who are imagining that both the write-up of this article and the choice to put it on the front page is due to the fact that the newspaper in question is the product of a small town and produced by people who are at best part time newspaper writers and editors that is most certainly not the case. Not only is San Francisco at this point in time a fairly large city, this is not a local story. Mrs. Biddle's act took place in Philadelphia and the story in the local Philadelphia paper was picked up and distributed nationally. For example, you can find a similar headline SOCIETY STIRRED AS MRS. BIDDLE SMOKES IN PUBLIC / Philadelphia's Social Mentor Daintily Puffs Cigarette in Fashionable Restaurant in The Evening World (New York, page 21) on the same date. This write up on page 37 of the December 23 1911 issue of Godwin's Weekly (Salt Lake City, Utah) gives some sense of how seriously people were taking Mrs. Biddle's actions:

The important thing to remember is that in 1911 women still did not have the right to vote in much of the United States. They could not sit on juries. They had limited access to, and rights in, the public sphere. We might now look back and laugh off Mrs. Biddle's actions as silly and even dangerous to her health. And Mrs. Biddle may have chosen to smoke in a public place simply to demonstrate her social prominence. Yet in a way Mrs. Biddle was a pioneer of women's rights to the full enjoyment of citizenship just as were women who were campaigning to extend suffrage to women as well as men.

The casual cultural colonialism of the gentleman archeologist

2011-11-09T15:20:00.000-08:00

The following conversation takes place in E. F. Benson short story Monkeys between two Englishmen (a surgeon and a gentle archaeologist) about the details of the latter's current work in Egypt:

"But odder still are those old Egyptians of yours, who thought that there was something sacred about their bodies, after they were quit of them. And didn't you tell me that they covered their coffins with curses on anyone who disturbed their bones?"

"Constantly," said Madden. "It's the general rule in fact. Marrowy curses written in heiroglyphics on the mummy-case or carved on the sarcophagus."

"But that's not going to deter you this winter from opening many as many tombs as you can find, and rifling from them any objects of interest or value."

Madden laughed.

"Certainly it isn't," he said. "I take out of the tombs all objects of art, and I unwind the mummies to find and annex their scarabs and jewellry. But I make an absoulte rule always to bury the bodies again. I don't say that I believe in the power of those curses, but anyhow a mummy in a museum is an indecent object."

"But if you found some mummied body with an interesting malformation, wouldn't you send it to some anatomical institute?" asked Morris.

"it has never happened to me yet," said Madden, "but I'm pretty sure I should."

"Then you're a superstitious Goth and an anti-educational Vandal," remarked Morris.... ["Monkeys" in Benson, E. The Collected ghost stories of E.F. Benson. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992., pp. 556-557]

Readers who know E. F. Benson only through his Mapp and Lucia books, a comic series of novels set in mostly the "quaint" English communities of Tilling and Rye and concerned mostly with the efforts of Emmeline Lucas (Lucia) and Miss Mapp to rule over social set, would probably read the above conversation as a humourous (and not particularly well informed) parody gentle surgeons and archeologists. But Benson is not speaking from ignorance or glancing acquaintanceship with such men. Benson knew well the society in which both these characters can be presumed to have grown up just as he also knew well the world of the classically educated, upper class gentlemen archeologist.

Benson was himself the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury and graduated from Cambridge with a degree in archeology. After graduating he worked on archeological sites in Britain, Egypt and Greece. This is a world in which he worked for many years. The casual way in which these two Englishmen treat the graves of other people, the religious beliefs of the other people and even the right of other people to own and control their countries (and the bones of their ancestors) is carefully drawn in this and other stories.

Morris condemns as superstition Madden's willingness to at least rebury the bodies from the graves he is plundering. Madden feel no compunction about taking upon himself the decision as to whether to rebury the bones he finds or to "donate" them to a museum. It is clear that to both men the Egyptians of the day had no right to determine the fate of their own country, their own people and their own treasures.

Neither of these men is a villain. Each believes that he is acting for some greater "scientific" good. It is interesting, however, that the scientific good always aligns with that which is of most utility or benefit to them. As Benson shows us, the gentlemen archeologists of England did not twirl their waxed mustaches as they plundered the many civilizations within the British empire. They were sometimes almost excessively polite. They explained, to any "native" who dared expostulate that what they were doing was wrong, that to stand against them was to stand against progress, science and Britain's imperial destiny.

Polite, gentlemenly plunderers----but plunderers all the same.

The sources of our discontents

2011-11-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

Every weekend The Slacktiverse posts a "blogaround." Most, but not all, of the links are to posts published over the last week by members of the The Slacktiverse community [Section One]. A small number of links are to stories that one person in the community thinks others in the community may be interested in [Section Two]. There are usually a link or two to a petitions [Section Three].

While formatting the first section of the weekly post (links to posts published on elseboards) is reminiscent of copy editing working on the latter two sections is far more similar to serious academic research or old fashioned newspaper fact checking. Fact checking is a skill which is not well taught (if it is taught at all) at school and yet is a vitally important tool when one is assessing validity and weight of any information.

A short primer on fact checking

Whenever possible use primary sources. Just because source ZZ says/writes that Person A said Y in interview N doesn't mean that they actually did so. In a surprisingly large number of instances Person A said no such thing. Or Person A did write/say that but not in interview N. It is possible that Person B was actually the one who said that. It is possible that Person A said one thing in interview N and later said the opposite in interview M. It is possible that Person A never said anything on that topic at all.

Does this mean that source ZZ consciously mischaracterized (lied about) what Person B said/wrote? Not necessarily. The secondary source could themselves have been depending on another nonprimary source (that is, technically the secondary source was actually a tertiary source) or the secondary source may have misremembered or misunderstood the primary source. The reasons why it happens are less important than the fact that it does happen.

Assess the credibility/expertise/informedness of the secondary source.

Check to see whether further information casts doubt on the claims of the primary source If one reads/researches enough one soon finds sources that state, without the least amount of equivocation, that one will find dragons in this area of the Europe and sea monsters in that part of the ocean. You will find sources that claim to have proof that lead has been turned into gold, that a certain saint levitated and then flew around a cathedral and that some historical figures were hiding tails under their cloaks. Just because a primary source said the something was true doesn't mean that it was indeed the case. Often it takes little more than reading/listening to the primary source in order to discount it claims . This is sometimes the case even when the original work was done comparatively recently. For example, a particular political/psychological study was conducted within the last forty years. In the introductory material the authors emphasized that they had made special efforts to obtain a sample that was diverse enough to warrant generalization to the wider American population. On careful reading of the study it emerges that the samples were from two American college towns in the same general area of the country.

Bad information doesn't disappear. Just because something is in the library or on the internet doesn't mean that it hasn't been refuted somewhere else. Books full of bad information don't get recalled and they don't have warning notices pasted to their front covers. Internet sites are not taken down when it turns out the material on the page has been proven wrong. Always look for independent verification.

Always check to make sure that the "independent" proofs/references are actually independent Check all the references in the secondary sources. One sometimes finds that all the many references in your secondary sources lead to same, single, initial source. For example, one person may post an account of a bad experience with a particular store or institution on facebook. Someone reads about it on facebook and writes it up in their college newspaper. The local town newspaper picks up the story from the college newspapers. A larger regional newspaper picks up the story from the town newspaper. A website reports on the bad experience using the article in the regional newspaper as verification of the information in the original facebook posting. At no point has anyone made an effort to independently verify the claim in the facebook article.

100 years ogo today: I wonder what happened to Rosemary's baby?

2011-11-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

One of the headlines on the front page of The Sun (New York, Nov. 7, 1911) gave me a momentary chill ROSEMARY FINDS A BABY. The story that followed evoked little of the famous book by Ira Levin or even more famous movie directed by Roman Polanski. On the surface it is a sweet human interest story but if one ponders the unexplored implications it becomes less sweet and more disturbing.. The Rosemary of the headline was the eight year old daughter of a New York banker. Playing in the kitchen one evening she thought she heard, over the sound of the rain, the cry of a kitten or a puppy. When she opened the door to investigate she found that the cries were actually coming from a small (they later estimated about 3 weeks old) baby. Rosemary and Mary (the family cook) brought the baby, dressed in clothes that were soaked through from the rain, into the kitchen. The baby boy was washed, dried, given some hot milk by spoon and brought up to the family dining room while the family ate dinner. Then Mr. Hollister, Rosemary's father, sent for the local police who came and took the baby away. Mr. Hollister inquired of them what would happen to the infant and he was told it would probably be sent to Bellevue.

Later that evening Rosemary saw a young woman standing in the same area where they previously found the baby. She ran when she realized she was being watched. Rosemary chased her to ask if she had been looking for a baby and the young woman responded that she had been looking for a friend.

The New York Evening World ran a longer version of the same story on page 8 LITTLE ROSEMARY FOUND BABY LIKE IN FAIRY STORY with many sentimentalizing details -- but note, it is the eight year old daughter of the banker who is sentimentalized in the story. The writer describes to the reader "touching" details of the way in which Rosemary was eager the next morning to call to find out how "her" baby slept during its first night on the ward at Bellevue. The baby is small, it gurgles and brings Rosemary great joy. But there is not even a passing query as to why the child was left or what might have driven its mother to do so. The Hollisters are clearly well off since they have a cook, a butler, a footman and other servants. Did the baby's care-givers think that this comfortable family might take their child in? Did they realize that after drying him off the Hollisters would hand him over to the police who would in turn deliver him Bellevue where he would become just another abandoned child for them to minister to?

There is no prominent follow-up to this story in either newspaper the next day. Which is not surprising since the story was not actually about the baby (who remains nameless) or the mother (whose existence is but hinted at in the article.) The story is about the exquisite sensibilities of Rosemary Hollister. Having told the "sweet" story of the wealthy little girl who "found a baby" and was still excited about it the next day the newspaper moves on to other stories because to write more would involve asking questions that might make the readers feel uncomfortable. And so the story faded from view to be replaced the next day by different human interest stories.

But the story isn't over in my mind. I wonder if the young woman was the mother of the abandoned baby. Or perhaps a friend or relative of the mother. I wonder what happened to the little boy. Mr. Hollister had asked the police to let him know where they sent the infant. Perhaps, I hoped, Mr. Hollister would wake an interest in the child.

I wonder if the child had been put in a somewhat sheltered areaway while the woman who was looking after it searched for food. Had she been forced to resort to prostitution and had, she thought, tucked the child somewhere where no harm could come to it? Was Mr. Hollister the father and had the mother left the child by his kitchen in the hope that he would look after it.

I wonder what happened to "Rosemary's" baby?

100 years ago today: Pensions for public service workers were in the news in Washington, DC

2011-11-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

100 years ago today one of the headlines on the front page of The Washington Herald (DC, November 6, 1911) reads:

PENSION DEFICIENCY SHAME TO DISTRICT / Washington Lags Behind Other Large Cities / PROTECTORS NEGLECTED

The article goes on to compare the ways in which pensions and benefits are provided for/guaranteed in Washington DC with other major American cities (Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadephia....) The writers argue that the situation leaves the city open to an emergency and that those who protect their fellow citizens should not ever be dependent on private charity for the benefits that they have earned from years of service and dangerous work.

An article in The Washington Times (page 2) on the same day frames strongly protected pensions as something the chamber of commerce supported:

"The business men of Washington believe with the Commissioners," said Mr. Gude, "that Congress should make provision for their pension fund being kept up to the mark by permanent appropriation. It is not a matter of charity but of duty and the needs of the fund should be supplied by all the tax-payers.

It is fascinating to look back over 100 years and see public service/government pensions and benefits being framed not only as prudent but morally required by the very businessmen who are now being claimed as role models by modern political activists who wish to gut public service pensions and benefits.

Book review: Diary of a Provincial Lady

2011-11-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield (1931)

Occasionally, upon reaching the end of a book, a reader may find hirself unsure as to exactly how to rate/categorize it. This is exactly how I felt when I reached the last line of Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady. The book is either a light, enjoyable and forgettable read or a masterpiece. It is either wittily mundane or relentlessly subversive.

Let me digress for a moment before getting to the heart of this review to explain that the way I “discovered” this book and my own experience of reading it play major roles in my reception of it.

How I experienced Delafield

This is one of those books which made me actually laugh out loud while reading it. Not small giggles or demure chuckles but resounding belly laughs that were loud enough to bring the spouse in from some other room to ask “what’s so funny?” Each time this happened I would read the passage in question out loud (often barely able to do so without breaking into laughter again) and each time the spouse would respond with at a polite smile. “Yes,” zie would say, “quite amusing but it probably misses quite a bit from being out taken out of context.”

And that, of course, was the point. Delafield is not an author who can appreciated in excerpt or digest form unless the reader is already familiar with her style and created universe.

How I "discovered" Delafield

Much as the sentences in the book can be better appreciated in the light of all of the other sentences in the book, the experience of reading the book is further enriched, and indeed may only be fully achieved, if the book was read in the context of the other books published at the same time.

I "discovered" Delafield because of references made to her work among reviews of Angela Thirkell’s books. I would never have read Thirkell had not someone who read my reviews of E. F. Benson suggested her to me. I would not have reviewed E. F. Benson in the same manner had I not carefully placed Benson into the context of his time.

For today's reader E. F. Benson’s books might be understood/received differently if zie realizes that Benson set his stories in the same England (and to a large degree about the same types of people) as did Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and even, heaven forfend, H. C. Bailey. It is only when comparing the different ways in which these authors portrayed English society (given their varied backgrounds) that one can begin to see in full the larger story they were, probably unintentionally, telling.

The way in which Benson wrote about the gentry was informed by his own place within that class. Benson was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, the brother of prominent writers and thinkers and a very successful novelist and short story writer. Benson grew up, and lived, around people who were financially and socially secure. While Thirkell was technically part of that same class there were times in her life (especially when she was living in Australia) when she endured serious economic and physical hardships. She and Benson both made a living from their writing but Thirkell wrote to achieve a standard of living that Benson had always been able to maintain.

Thirkell’s books were, like Benson’s, often wonderfully light and yet if one looked carefully beneath the light and witty surfaces one detected uncomfortable undercurrents of concern in the output of both authors. In Benson books the concerns often centred around how to maintain a particular place in life as well as how to fill the moments of one's life when, as members of the gentry, individuals were as limited in number and nature of their hobbies and philanthropies as they were in choices of careers. In Thirkell’s books those concerns often focused around money and the future as members of a class once as secure in its financial as its social place see economic (and social) changes coming for which they were unprepared. The careers and activities which Benson's shows members of that class indulging in will soon be neither within their financial reach nor capable of supporting them financially.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

Delafield, in Diary of a Provincial Lady, does more than just touch on these concerns, she makes them the central focus of the book. The titular Provincial Lady and her husband are of the gentry and so there are a limited number of ways in which they can fill their time. And their every hour is indeed filled and yet over the period of time covered by the book they seem, to the modern reader, to have been singularly unproductive. For example, we read little of what the Lady's husband's actual work entailed (that is, the work for which he was paid.) The work of the Provincial Lady herself appears to have been to maintain the appropriate outward signifiers that the family belonged to a particular class/social group. She does some writing that is intended for publication and she does much writing that is not. Like many of her class much of her time is spent writing reading letters from friends and acquaintances and writing letters to friends and acquaintances.

It strikes this modern reader that much of the letter reading/writing done by the characters in this and other books of the time differs little in content from the gossip exchanged by teenagers over the telephone (when I was growing up) and now by text, tweet and facebook post. So why was it not treated as simple time-wasting gossip and tittle-tattle? Two of the reasons are fairly obvious: first, it is members of society discussing the affairs of other members of society--thus it is by definition of value and in point of fact a requirement for any who wishes to negotiate the fairly complicated byways of society life at the time; and second, that which was written still carried with the rarefied patina of literacy. It is not that long since the time that comparatively few people in Britain were literate and the reading and writing of letters was a sign of being a member of gentry. Additionally, of course, the ability to afford cost of keeping up such written correspondences was a marker of class status just as was having a telephone, making "trunk calls" and owning a car.

And the Lady (who remains nameless throughout the book) certainly sees herself as being busy:

Query, mainly rhetorical: Why are nonprofessional women, if married and with children, so frequently referred to as "leisured"? Answer comes there none.)

And the modern day reader (or a reader contemporaneous to Delafield but with far less money) might note that most women did not have the luxury of extra rooms in which young children normally eat their dinner and play in the evening or staff to look after those children. Nor did most women of the time (or now) have other people to make the soup, set the table, wash the dishes, bathe the children or clean their rooms.

August 3rd.--Difference of opinion arises between Robin and his father as to the nature and venue of former's evening meal, Robin making sweeping assertions to the effect that All Boys of his Age have Proper Late Dinner downstairs, and Robert replying curtly More Fools their Parents, which I privately think unsuitable language for use before children. Final and unsatisfactory compromise results in Robin's coming nightly to the dining-room and partaking of soup, followed by interval, and ending with dessert, during the whole of which Robert maintains disapproving silence and I talk to both at once on entirely different subjects.(Life of a wife and mother sometimes very wearing.)

The response of this reader (and I imagine the response of most working class women in the 1930s) is to wonder at someone who is so acclimatized to absolute leisure that even the task of "listening to one's child" become wearisome.

One of the major preoccupations of these "gentle" women in "financial distress" is the state of the kitchens and the quality of their “help.” Having servants to "do" for them is a vital marker of class. However changing financial (and social) times have made it harder to "get" good servants. Servants had taken to asking for larger wages and refusing to devote all the hours of the day and week to service. It was still at this time not uncommon to find people who forbade their servants to use the telephone, limited the hours they could socialize, limited who they could socialize with and even "renamed" servants who had what they considered to be unsuitable or difficult to pronounce names. With the rising levels of education and with more non-service jobs available to women people who wished to treat their servants as vassals or people who expected to receive top-class service for mediocre wages were finding it increasingly difficult to "get by":

Cook says that unless help is provided in the kitchen they cannot possibly manage all the work. I think this unreasonable, and quite unnecessary expense. Am also aware that there is no help to be obtained at this time of the year. Am disgusted at hearing myself reply in hypocritically pleasant tone of voice that, Very well, I will see what can be done. Servants, in truth, make cowards of us all.

The author has a cook, a governess/nurse for the children, a gardener and at least two maids. Yet nothing seems ever to get done and her life (from her point of view) is abundantly full of chores.The cook is invariably bad and servants invariably inefficient, emotional and prone to turning in their notice. The titular Lady never asks herself if she and her husband would get a better cook if they were willing to pay better wages. They don't ask themselves if the fault may lie with the employers rather than the employees. The Lady never considers how much more money she and husband would have if only she did the cooking and she looked after her children and he did more work around the house.

The answer, unfortunately, was that the Lady and her husband could NOT do those things and maintain their social place. One doubts that Robert would have kept his job. It is possible that their children would no longer be accepted at the schools which they would now be able to afford. So the Lady knows (whether or not she is aware that she knows it) that she and her family are caught in the trap of financially distressed gentility--that the most rational way in which to respond to the financial distress can only be carried out at the cost of the very thing the family was sacrificing so much to maintain: their status as members of the gentry.

So, is this book wittily mundane or relentlessly subversive? That depends on determining whether the reader is merely reading the subversiveness into the text or whether the author layered it carefully in between the seeming irrelevancies.

Delafield is clearly a technically proficient writer. For example, she captures that most mysterious and frustrating aspect of time—that it often seems to simply slip away from us. Even the most simple interactions can take an inordinate amount of time and so she (like us) looks back with wonderment at the fact that writing a few letters, running a few errands and do a few household chores can consume the better part of day and yet leave one with the feeling that nothing at all has been accomplished.

June 17th.--Entire household rises practically at dawn, in order to take part in active preparations for Garden Fete…..At ten o'clock our Vicar's wife dashes in to ask what I think of the weather, and to say that she cannot stop a moment. At eleven she is still here

She is equally good at pinpointing the necessary hypocrisies of successful socializing as in here when the diarist discusses the end of “dinner out”:

Exchange customary graceful farewells with host and hostess, saying how much I have enjoyed coming.

(Query here suggests itself, as often before: Is it utterly impossible to combine the amenities of civilisation with even the minimum of honesty required to satisfy the voice of conscience? Answer still in abeyance at present.)

Structuring the book as a diary allowed Delafield to write things which would be considered astringent or cynical were they spoken out loud but come across as insightful whimsy when confided only with the page:

I notice that conversation has, mysteriously, switched on to the United States of America, about which we are all very emphatic. Americans, we say, undoubtedly hospitable--but what about the War Debt? What about Prohibition? What about Sinclair Lewis? Aimée MacPherson, and Co-education? By the time we have done with them, it transpires that none of us have ever been to America, but all hold definite views, which fortunately coincide with the views of everybody else.

(Query: Could not interesting little experiment be tried, by possessor of unusual amount of moral courage, in the shape of suddenly producing perfectly brand-new opinion: for example, to the effect that Americans have better manners than we have, or that their divorce laws are a great improvement upon our own? Should much like to see effect of these, or similar, psychological bombs, but should definitely wish Robert to be absent from the scene.)

This reader wonders (and one wonders if the author wondered) if other (or even all) of the people present at that scene) were thinking similar things?

Delafield returns frequently to scenes in which what is being said by a character is different from (and sometimes antithetical to) what that character is thinking. Similarly she repeatedly presents the reader with scenes in which was is being done is the opposite of what was planned to be done and what characters said they would do (or were doing.)

Did Delafield intentionally write Diary of a Provincial Lady to be both a whimsical and homourous examination of the quotidian concerns of the unexceptional provincial lady or as a slyly subversive examination of the futility and hypocrisy of those clinging to the social status of gentry in the face of the economic changes in English life? Repeated readings have not allowed this reader to answer that question but they have provided me with pleasure, entertainment and a greater understanding of challenges facing British provincial gentry in the 1930s.

Rating: 4-1/2 stars

100 years ago today: Violence before video games

2011-11-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

"They", the punditry, the speakers for the kyriarchy, (the politicians, religious speakers, government officials, managers of major institutions and such) speak often of "the good old days" and lament the loss of the innocent and idyllic world of America before such modern innovations as women's rights, rights for people of colour and recognition of and respect for people who are QUILTBAGS. One standard response to such statements is to point out that one hundred years ago things were in no way innocent, safe and idyllic for many women, people of colour, people who were blind, people who were QUILTBAGS, people who were deaf, people who used wheelchairs......

The problem with that response is that by saying "yes, but not for...." one is conceding that there some grain of truth to the statement. The SFTK (speakers for the kyriarchy) are claiming that for those who do not fall into those groups the world, a hundred years ago, was a much nicer, safer, quieter place. The implication is that for the world to become a safer place for "those people" "their" people had to become less safe. Even though the SFTK might concede that it is fairer that everyone share the same amount of fear and unsafeness many will feel sorry for the pundits and their ilk because they have been asked to give up some of the safety and security that we all wish for.

But they haven't. The kyriarchy is not less safe than they were a hundred years ago. I don't know how many of them are speaking out of ignorance, how many are lying and how many have managed to convince themselves (and re-convince themselves when necessary.) The kyriarchy then, as now, had the means to buy for themselves the greatest amount of protection and comfort possible.

What about the "average" American then? Did they live in a safer, kinder, gentler world than does the average American today? No, the "average" American of one hundred years ago did not live in a world whose quiet slumbers were only rarely broken by violence or intimations of violence. Violence, crime and inequities lay all around them and they read of them in their newspapers every day.

For example:
The front page of the November 4, 1911 edition of The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, SC.

Deaths and/or injuries due to crimes:

HEADLINE: SHOT HIM DEAD / Edgar H Farrar, Prominent New Orleans Attorney, Killed by Thugs / HAD ROBBED HIS HOME (two men are pointed out to the attorney as the people who had robbed his house on the previous day, he pursued them on the street. One took out a revolver and shot him dead.)
HEADLINE: DID SHE DO IT / Nine Deaths in Chicago Arouse Suspicion of Murder Most Foul ./ WIDOW MAY BE CHARGED (two husbands, two step-children and some borders had died. It was either murder or, as the paper put it, "a remarkable series of coincidences.")
HEADLINE: RICHESON FORMALLY INDICTED / Minister Will Be Tried for Poisoning Girl (for weeks this story made the front pages across the United States. Richeson, a Boston minister, was charged with giving a young woman poison instead of an abortifacient he had promised her. The young woman was pregnant and such pregnancy would stand in the way of his marriage to a very wealthy woman.)
HEADLINE: BANDITS HOLDS UP TRAIN / They Fled When a Switch Engine Was In Sight. (somewhere between Bridge Junction and Hurlburt, Arkansas bandits stopped a train and robbed a train and its passengers.)
HEADLINE: Five Prisoners Break JaiL (in Brunswick, Ga)

Deaths and/or injuries due to lack of modern safety regulations:

HEADLINE: DEATH CAME SLOWLY / FORTUNE AND CREEPING DEATH WERE CREEPING / A Miner Pinned in a Shaft by a More [sic] of Rock and Lived Thirteen Day (minor who was trapped in a mine shaft and who slowly died over a period of almost two weeks)
HEADLINE: Four Killed By Train (a woman, her sister and two small children were killed by a fast train at a crossing.)

The SFTK like to blame movements (all those people asking for their rights!) and technologies (cartoons! television! the internet! video games!) for all the ills of the world. Don't fall for this line of argument. It is a shell game. Your attention is being directed away from the real cause for shortages, violence and inequities in the system--the kyricarchy and structures that maintain it.

The Tardis in the library, part three: Living the life of leisure

2011-11-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

I arrived there while yet the daylight lingered, and as my hosts were out, I took a ramble around the place. [1] (264)

In the world of Benson's narrators (and the people and places they visit) there are always servants around to greet arriving visitors, to carry their luggage to their rooms and to unpack for them.

after ordering tea to be sent up to my gorgeous apartment, No. 23, on the first floor, I went straight up there. . . . The unpacking had been finished, and everything was neat, orderly, and comfortable. . . . There were, as I have said, two beds in it, on one of which were already laid out my dress-clothes, while night-things were disposed on the other. (The Other Bed, 146)

These "gentle" men and women don't cook, they don't clean and they don't set the table. They write letters, they visit with friends, they play sports, they go for walks and drives and then they "dress' for dinner. Having changed from their daytime clothes they come down to a table already prepared for them and when finished their meals they go to the drawing room or (if male) drink port and smoke and then go to the drawing room. When they amble upstairs at the end of the evening the daytime clothes they previously shed will have been picked up and their night clothes laid out for them.

They need not even worry whether they might accidentally lock themselves out of their homes for there was always a servant to greet them:

He had forgotten his latch-key, but his housekeeper. . . . must have heard his step, for before he rang the bell she had opened the door, and stood with his forgotten latch-key in her hand. ("And The Dead Spake--", 177)

One might argue that the real fantasy of Harry Potter is that one could receive the type of service that ordinary "gentle" men and women once did without feeling uncomfortable that people might be tending to our needs, not due to devoted service but simply for the wages earned--as the ghost of Mr. Tilly learns to his discomfort as he listens in on his servants who have just learned of his death:

"Poor little gentleman," said his cook. "It seems a shame it does. He never hurt a fly. . ." The great strapping parlour-maid tossed her head. "Well I'm not sure it doesn't serve him right," she observed. "Always messing about with spirits. . .But I'm sorry all the same. A less troublesome little gentleman never stepped. Always pleasant, too, and wages paid to the day."

These regretful comments and encomiums were something of a shock to Mr. Tilly. He had imagined that his excellent servants regarded him with respectful affection, as befitted some sort of demigod, and the rôle of the poor little gentleman was not at all to his mind. (Mr. Tilly's Séance 278, 279)

Perhaps some of the popularity of Harry Potter and like stories of fantasy and magic is an attempt to recapture all the joys and comforts of times past without all of the baggage of class essentialism and economic inequities those comforts entailed.

[1] All quotations are from stories in: Benson, E. The Collected ghost stories of E.F. Benson. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. ↩

100 years ago today: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

2011-11-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

One hundred years ago today (November 3, 1911) one could read this headline SHALL CORPORATIONS RULE ODGDEN on the front page of the Ogden City (Utah) Evening Standard. This writer(s) of this editorial make the argument that that corporations are inherently "soul-less" and that THE CORPORATION WILL TAKE ALL IT IS PERMITTED TO TAKE, AND SOME THINGS THAT IT IS NOT PERMITTED TO TAKE. GREAT CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING POSSESSION OF THE WHOLE NATION..

It is striking that one of the key observations of the piece, that everyone involved with a particular ticket was a current or former member of a corporation, could be made of the incestuous relationship between large corporations and government today. And the question it asks--whether those people if elected would put the good of the corporation over the good of the people who elected them--if one that many are asking today.

The concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement are similar to those of the grandparents and great grandparents of the people protesting today and even a cursory glance at American newspapers from a century ago indicate that this is a truly grass roots movement. And the grass has very deep roots.

100 years ago today: Whether or not workplace regulations kill jobs the lack of workplace regulations does kill people

2011-11-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

One hundred years ago the headline on the front page of The Tacomo Times read GIRLS TRAPPED IN FIRE DIE IN AGONY. On the previous day (November 1, 1911) a fire had flashed through one of the rooms at the Imperial Powder company in Chehalis Washington. The company supplied explosives to coal mines and the eight women (aged from 14 to 20) who died were working in the mixing room. According to newspapers accounts at the time the fire started In some unexplained manner and ignited the uncovered powder which lay on the long counters of the mixing room. Seven of them died where they stood. One lived long enough to be taken to a hospital where she died a few hours later. A ninth body was reportedly found--so burned that even its gender could not be identified. From the description of the incident it seems that something, perhaps a spark, ignited the powder that lay on every surface and filled the air in the room. The room was, in a instant filled with noxious and fiery gasses. The women, working in a small area between the counters and the wall, had no hope of escaping the conflagration.

The state of Washington had passed laws regulating workplace conditions earlier in the year but they were apparently honoured more in the breach than the observance. And indeed in the initial report of this horror the official statements promised A strict investigation will be held by Coroner Sticklln. How strict, detailed and exhaustive was the investigation? Two days later one can read the following headline on the front page of The Tacoma Times: COMPANY IS EXONERATED. In the two paragraphs below the reader would learn, that the coroner's jury last night returned a verdict completely exonerating the company, although it was admitted that the cause of the fire was unknown. And so eight women were buried, six in a shared grave, and no one was to blame for the fire. One hundred years later a monument, paid for by donations of time and money, was finally raised over the graves.

After public outrage in response to the ease with which any responsibility for the deaths was evaded the company was findd less than two thousand dollars (for hiring underaged workers) and the powder making companies of the state were ordered to pay the families of the dead woman just under a thousand dollars for each victim. Dupont Powder's balked at paying any part of the fine since it would be, in effect, underwriting one of their competitors.

This is what the work places of America looked like without unions and government regulations. Take care that such conditions do not yet again become the accepted "cost" of having a job.

Apparently if you have met one......

2011-11-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

Fringe is one of my favourite television shows right now. It does require that one willfully suspend much of what one knows about science but for much of the time do can do so at least until the episode in question is over. The other night, however, while rewatching an episode from the second season (Episode 217, Olivia in the Lab With a Revolver) one particular line of dialogue stood out to me. Walter Bishop is engaged in doing one his favourites things: dissecting a corpse. Are you familiar with the Chinese notion of Ch'i? he asks Agent Dunham. After back and forth repartee with his son he goes on to further explain how this relates the current corpse on the table, The Chinese believe that all living creatures contain an energy, or Ch'i, and, that with proper training, a simple touch can affect their Ch'i..

Just think about what the writers of the show have to presume/think/know about the audiences of the show in order for that statement to 'work' for even a short period of time. It requires that the Chinese be seen as a monolithic "other." Walter does not say "many Chinese" or "most Chinese" he says the Chinese. As if each and every person in the People's Republic (of whom there are more than 1.3 billion) believes the same things. Even if we have never met someone from the PRC personally, even if we believe that, unlike almost every other culture we know of, all Chinese within a particular subculture will believe exactly the same things in the same ways--a little research demonstrates that there are subcultures/groups in the PRC who would be unlikely to believe in Ch'i. Consider, a) the PRC of officially atheist, b) that at least 1% of the population is Muslim (1% of 1.3 billion is a lot of people), c) that at least 2% of the population is Christian (again, 2% of 1.3 billion is a lot of people), d) that although some of the Muslims and Christians in the PRC may cling to some aspects of earlier Chinese beliefs some significant percentage of them are willing to risk death in order to adhere to their new belief systems.

Consider what it says about the intended audience of Fringe (and other popular television shows) that characters can make comments about the Chinese without the writers/producers/showrunners fearing a massive backlash against the ignorant and prejudiced statements being spewed by characters we are supposed to find sympathetic and loveable.

Just saying......

100 years ago today: It's as if it were part of their name

2011-10-31T15:01:00.000-07:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

While glancing through the inside pages of some newspapers published a year ago today I couldn't help but notice how the "race" of the people in the news was marked. One sees the descriptor "colored" after many a name but seldom reads the descriptor "white." This may have been one of the reasons why it seemed "objectively true" to people that African-Americans were disproportionately likely to be criminals--after all, you might imagine someone explaining, "every time I read about crime or court cases story after story is about a colored man or woman" [NOTE: Unfortunately the word that many a white American would have though in their head was far more offensive than 'colored' but I am not willing, even for the sake of exploring the internal self-justifications of the white American in 1911, to type it here]

Clearly the "default" human being in the mind of the writers (and most of the readers) was white. Certainly the default 'professional,' 'high achieving,' 'socially prominent,' or 'holder of political office' was white. Depending on the context and content of the article that white person was also usually a man. Since African-Americans had restricted opportunities in the American of 1911 and since most "white" newspapers gave limited coverage to the successes of African-Americans the reader reads only of "presumably" white people excelling and carefully marked "not white" people committing crimes.

Look, for example, at page 5 The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA: Oct. 31, 1911). The only instance on that page of a person being specifically identified as white was the story of the young woman who was released (and indeed given a ticket to her desired destination) after having been taken into custody when she suffered a memory lapse while riding on public transportation. The detail of her race explains why she was "given her freedom," as the article put it, with such care and consideration. As we look at the rest of that page we read about:

Jack Meyers, the young North Carolinian
Thomas Williams, a prominent druggist
James Easley. colored
Mary Shaw, colored
Charles Murray, colored, of Caroline county. a student (who was found overcome by gas in his hotel room by a porter)
George Robinson, colored, (who was kicked by one of the horses in the engine company)
David Johnson, colored (struck under the eye by a stone while working)
Daniel Tlmberlake, colored

The writers/editor use 'colored' where they would, for a white man, use a racially neutral descriptor, as in the case of Meyers and Williams. In one particular instance one can see how clearly that use and non-use of the racial descriptor indicates that the default presumption is "white:"

The hearing of William Brautigan, charged with pouring gasoline on Marshall Washington, colored

White the default is "white" the reader is not thinking, consciously, as they read each name, "Jack Meyers, white" or, more to the point "William Brautigan, white" and therefore falls easily into the misconception that the criminal class is overwhelming African-American.

How typical is this "marking" of African-Americans in American newspapers of the time? It is not strange to see it in a newspaper aimed at the white, middle-class of the one-time capital of the Confederate States of America but would one see it elsewhere? I turned to The Washington Times (District of Columbia, Oct. 31, 1911) to find the same phenomenon on the front page:

John Clark, colored, and his wife, Lilly, were held for action of the grand jury
For the assault she committed on her teacher In the National Training School, a colored Institution for missionarles and religious workers, Hannah Crawford, colored, was sentenced to serve six months

There were other stories about crime on that page but in no instance was the person charged with the crime, or suspected of having committed a crime, identified as "white." And, as the quotes above indicate, institutions and places, as well as people, were marked as "colored" as for example, the Plymouth CongregationalChurch, colored, Seventeenth and P streets northwest, will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. [The Washington Times (District of Columbia, Oct. 31, 1911), page 4.] As was the case in The Times-Dispatch the one area of paper in which the descriptor "white" was used frequently was the "Help Wanted" columns.

Of course, in many ways Washington D. C. was culturally a southern city. Some of the differences in the level and type of racial prejudice in different areas of the country can be seen looking at a number of articles in The Sun (New York) of the same day. Instead of referring to African-Americans as "colored" in The Sun they are described as "negro." In the page 5 story THEATRE BARRED A NEGRO And latter Causes Arrest of Lyric's Treasurer--A Test Case the reader learns that Baldwin, the African-American gentleman in question, had bought orchestra tickets to a performance only to have to be told that he and his guest could not be seated in the orchestra area. Indeed they were told that no New York theatre would seat them in the orchestra area because it would ruin the business. They were offered balcony tickets but Baldwin chose to press charges against the theatre manager.

While that story offers some hope (after all Baldwin was not attacked and was able to press charges) it also casts a bright light on the attitudes of theatre-going New Yorkers. There were enough of them who refused to be seated in an area that also seated African-Americans that theatres routinely practiced de facto, if not de jure, segregation.

Elsewhere in the newspaper stories routinely report that people are negro but never that people are white, for example: a Polish farmer and a Polish farmhand who does not speak English were fatally beaten by two negro [again, page 5.]

From reading the newspapers from the different areas one senses that there was less legal collusion with racial prejudice in some areas than others and that violence was used less often to support racial inequities in some areas than others. One senses that for all the appearance of a "friendlier" form of prejudice in one area than another the violence necessary to support and maintain the existing system was lying close to the surface ready to erupt if every the system was challenged.

100 years ago today: Meanwhile somewhere in the backwoods of Georgia

2011-10-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago the lead story in The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA) was the death of Joseph Pulitzer. The story of the newspaper magnate's climb from penniless immigrant to wealth and influence covered much of the front page of that (and many other) newspapers. As I reading about Pulitizer a much smaller headline near the bottom of the front page catch my eye: MOB SEEKS FUGITIVE: Negro Was Captured and Confessed, but Made His Escape. [Note: All headlines in this series retain the original rather idiosyncratic capitalizations.] According to this story, dateline Washington, GA, Walker had been "arrested" for the shooting of C. S. Hollenshead (one of the town merchants), had confessed, had been taken away from the sheriff and his deputy on the public square and had escaped from the crowd that had taken him. The latest word was that he was being hunted in Wilkes county by several hundred men with dogs. If the mob located him, a lynching is certain the reader is told.

As is true in so many of these stories of lynchings, it is clear that the local officers of the law put up at most token resistance to the vigilantes. What was less clear, from the limited details in this article, was how the man managed to escape from the crowd that had seized him. A search of other newspapers yielded slightly more information and details that made the incident even more disturbing. The headline in The Sun (Oct. 20 1911, New York) reads WHISKEY SPOILS A LYNCHING: Members of Mob Too Drunk lo Pull Negro Up After Hope Was Around His Neck and provides more background. No one witnessed the shooting of Hollenshead, suspicion fell on Walker because his wife "had trouble" with the dead man. Walker was brought into town in at 2:30 in the morning after being arrested and there just happened to be a crowd of approximately fifty men in the public square just in the right place to intercept the sheriff, his deputy and Walker on the way to the jail. The confession, if there was one, was obtained from Walker only after he was already in the hands of an angry mob and served the purpose of removing suspicion of another man (also African-American) already in custody.

From the description of what happened next, it seems that the crowd of men had been whiling away their time waiting for the sheriff to bring in Walker drinking for they were so drunk that Walker was able to escape from them--although only after they had put the noose around his neck.

The editors at The Sun seem to have found the whole affair rather amusing while the editors of The Times-Dispatch seem to want to assure their readers that Walker will soon be recaptured.

I sit here, 100 years later, and wonder what happened to Walker. Did he escape? Was his wife okay or did the angry mob go back to his home and take out on her the violence they were unable to visit on her husband? If Walker lived did he dream every night of that moment when the rope went around his neck and did he shiver with remembered fear every time he heard the sound of dogs in the distance?

Decoding social context clues

2011-10-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder how much the readers of a hundred years from now will miss when reading things written today. Will most readers of the future find overly subtle the things which we now view as anvils and Chekhov's guns? I know that many of today's readers when reading books written a century ago miss clues and signs that would have been crystal clear to the original intended audience. Take for example this sentence from E. F. Benson's Gavron's Eye (published in 1912):

Also it was said that, although it was a hot afternoon, she wore a big cloak.

It is a wonderfully telling line that informs the character's past and foreshadows the character's future and one that may go right by a reader today if they are not used to Edwardian writing as well as social and class conventions.

People talk much about "genre fiction" and the necessity of being genre-savvy if one is to get everything out of particular types of texts. Similarly, reading books written in earlier times or different cultures requires the reader to be "history/culture context savvy." The unsavvy reader may miss much of the careful characterization of the protagonist if, for example, they don't know about conventions that character is challenging or adhering to. Indeed they may even be aware that the character is acting in a particular way in relationship to a cultural convention because they are unaware of the convention itself.

How does one become context savvy? By doing a lot of reading. It helps if one can find editions with good annotations. Read many books from the same time/culture. Read books written a decade before and a decade after. If you are slightly obsessive compulsive you might consider ordering all the books on your shelves by date they were written so that you are aware that while Edith Wharton was writing this, Agatha Christie was writing that and T. S. Eliot was writing something else.

And if you are forced to share your shelves with someone who prefers the less heuristically useful convention of shelving books alphabetically by author's last name (within or across genres) then you at least have a publication order spreadsheet tucked away somewhere.

100 years ago today: Remind me again -- who was it who won the Civil War?

2011-10-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago the American Civil War was "fifty years ago." Just as the New York Times has been running a series of "100 years ago" articles on the events that led up to, and occurred during, the Civil War, fifty ears ago The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia) was doing the same.

It isn't surprising to the non-American reader that there would be many bitter and lingering memories of Civil War in Richmond Virginia. Virginia itself was one of the states that seceded and become one of the Confederate States. The northwest portion of the state, in turn, seceded from Virginia. This area was then admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863, as the state of West Virginia. Richmond became the capital of the Confederate State of Virginia. Many of the readers of the Times Dispatch were either veterans of the Confederate Army, were relatives of members of the Confederate Army, had lived through the invasion and occupation of their city or had relatives who had lived through the invasion and occupation.

What is surprising is the degree to which the Confederate cause is treated as dominant, triumphant, honoured and powerful throughout this (as well as earlier and later) issues of the newspaper.

Bear in mind that the demographic of the newspaper's circulation was not the poor and disadvantaged of society. It's readership was not primarily made up of those who had been displaced and overthrown by shifts in power after the conclusion of the Civil War. The Times-Dispatch is full of society news and advertisements for pricey goods. In addition to the section to the society pages there was separate section for business and investments. To the left of the banner on the front page is a box with the text "Children's page of T.D.C.C." and to the right a box with the text "Confederate and Geneology." Page 2 is games and puzzles.

On page 3 of the October 29, 1911 edition the reader will find the regular Sunday Our Confederate Column. To the right of the column is the poem The Veterans' Cross of Honor and it is clear from its words that the veterans in the title are of the Confederate Army since they are said to wear the U.D.C. (United Daughters of the Confederacy) cross and the reader is told The wealth of world cannot purchase this emblem/Unless the buyer wore the gray too. The President of the encounter described in the article on the same page GENERAL PENDLETON AND THE PRESIDENT is Jefferson Davis (the first and only president of the Confederacy.)

Page 4 is set aside for cartoons which largely depend on crude and offensive stereotypes of African-Americans for their "humour." The news in the society pages (and that is how they are titled) is of engagements, marriages and debutantes. The descriptions of the events (and the advertisements that accompany them) indicate that much of the readership is at least socially and financially "comfortable" if not more.

The Times-Dispatch had previously run articles about the final fate the great seal of the Confederate States. In this edition they print an "answer" to the question with a long interview with the man who had been Jefferson Davis' "body servant." SECRET OF THE GREAT SEAL OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES: James H. Jones, Body-Servant to President Jefferson Davis, Tells How He Hid It, and Will Never Divulge Place of Concealment. The next page is largely given over to the article Stonewall Jackson--Protest Against Picture as Drawn in "The Long Roll" By His Wife, Mary Anna Jackson, a piece written, as billed, by Jackson's widow to protest and contradict the verbal picture of him and his behaviour in the recently published "The Long Roll."

One might ask "so what?" These are just a group of relatively privileged people who can live with the myth of the glorious south and pen paeans to the gray clad "heroes" of the "War between the states." There are two answers:

First, the Union may have won the war militarily but they have clearly lost it culturally. The society that had grown up in the south since the war did not see slavery as having been a moral wrong. By mythologizing antebellum society they turned any call for civil rights and equal treatment for African-Americans as an attack on the southern society's mores and heroes. African-American were born, grew up and were educated in a society in which the people who had gone to war to deny them their rights were lionized.

Second, in general (except as "faithful body servants") African-Americans are for the most part absent from these pages. It is not in the "news" section of The Times-Dispatch that you read about lynchings. But if you turn to the "Help Wanted" section at the back of the paper you can see just how segregated life was in Richmond, Virginia was in 1911 and how delimited opportunities were on the basis of one's colour or one's gender.

Help Wanted: Male

Wanted, White and colored men to work In nursery and on packing grounds
WANTED-COLORED MEN WITH references wishing position as sleeping car or train porters, firemen or brakemen
WANTED WHITE MAN TO WORK ON dairy farm

Help Wanted: Female

SETTLED WHITE WOMAN OR GIRL wanted as general helper
WANTED, AN EXPERIENCED COLORED nurse for children.
WANTED. 50 WHITE AND COLORED women, cooks, maids, nurses
WANTED, A COMPETENT WHITE nurse

The Civil War may have been over but the battle for Civil Rights still remained to be won.

The Blandings' Bathroom Blues: Mr. Blandings and the directed negotiated reading, part three

2011-10-28T16:52:00.000-07:00

Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the differences among the three presentations of the Blandings story will necessarily involve implicit and explicit spoilers

Jim and Muriel Blandings have been awoken by the alarm clock, he has received his morning glass of juice from the maid and brought Muriel's morning coffee to the bedroom. One daughter has finished showering and the other was last seen diving into the bathroom.

There is still more morning misery at the Blandings' home for the audience to witness.

Jim Blandings is feeling very put upon. He daughter asks him, very sharply, why every morning he neglects to knock on the bathroom door before opening it. I beg your pardon. Jim says peevishly after his daughter is out of earshot. Once in the bathroom he is clearly annoyed that someone has been squeezing the toothpaste tube from the middle and that items fall out of the medicine cabinet when he opens it. Jim proceeds to take a shower and is still in the bathroom (now shaving) while Muriel showers. When he opens the shower door to give her a washcloth (and then later a towel) the mirror becomes too steamed up to be of use. Jim, again, sighs to himself as only the put upon can sigh. Then Muriel, fresh from her shower, gets in his way as he continues to shave blocking out his view of the mirror. He cuts himself shaving and complains. I cut myself every morning. I kind of look forward to it. She asks, Why don't you use an electric razor?

This scene leaves me with a number of questions:

Why is Jim so annoyed when his daughter asks him to knock before barging into the bathroom?
Why won't Jim put up another shelf/mirror in the bathroom so that the storage space is adequate to the number of people sharing the room?
Why does Muriel need to shower at the same time that Jim is shaving?
What bathroom does Gussie (the maid) use?

One answer to questions 1-3 is, of course, because if they dealt reasonably with their limited space there would be no need for them to move to a very large house in the country. And therefore there would be no movie.

A second answer to questions 1-3 is that if the Blandings arranged they lives more efficiently their "plight" would not evoke as much sympathy from an audience made up of people who took home far less money and often had far less space than the family on the screen.

However the questions do bring some interesting thoughts to mind.

1) Earlier Jim didn't knock before opening his daughters' bedroom door. Jim treats all spaces as his. To knock is to acknowledge that someone else at least shares control over a space.

2) Jim doesn't do things. He is an executive. He is a manager. He tells other people to do things. Even he would, I think, feel slightly silly hiring a handyman to put up a bathroom shelf. If it is something that Jim doesn't know how to do (or cannot see himself doing) and it isn't a task that he can easily and routinely delegate to others then it never enters his conscious mind.

3) I think we can safely assume that Production Code would find it totally acceptable for either Muriel or Jim to use the toilet while the other is in the room however Muriel has to fix herself up so she can look like a nice upper middle housewife at breakfast. In the "real world" she would probably do this by getting up long before Jim so that she could use the bathroom before he got up. Muriel does not have a job. She doesn't need to get ready for work.

4) For those who have never seen the movie it may be important to point out that Gussie is African-American. It would be quite unlikely for the white maid of a white upper class family to use the same bathroom as did they but it would be totally unacceptable for an African-American maid to do so. So I found myself wondering if there were meager toilet facilities "back there" in the space Gussie used. Or perhaps there were facilities out in the hallway that all the "help" in the building used? Whatever the answer some of the square footage of that apartment was out of bounds to the Blandings given the attitudes at the time towards African-Americans.

So far the audience has seen life at the Blandings only through the eyes of Jim. And Jim sees himself as a put upon individual living in the middle of chaos and clutter. Thus members of the audience don't think to themselves that the Blandings have far more room than do they and if only if they used a little bit of elbow grease and common sense most of their problems would disappear.

Escape from New York: Mr. Blandings and the directed negotiated reading, part two

2011-10-27T15:40:00.000-07:00

How did the director/screenwriters make the ordinary member of the film going audience feel sympathy for and empathy with the Blandings given that the Blandings were clearly members of a socially, financially and culturally privilege class?

By putting the Blandings into contexts and circumstances that were understandable to that public and which even made members of the audience share their frustrations.

Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the differences among the three presentations of the Blandings story will necessarily involve implicit and explicit spoilers

Let's begin by looking at where the film, book and short story start.The short story (and the book) each begin in medias res. The Blandings have already found the house which will lead to their adventure with home ownership, restoration, destruction and construction.

The sweet old farmhouse burrowed into the upward slope of the land so deeply that you could enter either its bottom or middle floor at ground level.....In front of it, rising and spreading along the whole length of the house, was the largest lilac tree that Mr. and Mrs. Blandings had ever seen. Its gnarled, rusty trunks rose intertwined to branch and taper into splays of this year's light young wood; they, in turn, burst into clouds of blossoms that made the whole vast thing a haze of blues and purples, billowed and wafting. When the house was new, the lilac must have been a shrub in the dooryard--and house and shrub had gone on together, side by side since then. That was a hundred and seventy years ago, last April. [1] 309; [2] 3

Thus we first meet the Blandings without having any sense as to why they are looking for a home.

The movie, on the other hand, delays our first meeting with the Blandings, and indeed the Blandings desire to buy a home, until after carefully providing the audience with the context for why the Blandings were looking for a home. Indeed the very first shot of the film is of New York and the first word spoken is Manhattan. The voice of the narrator is that of Bill Cole (who we soon find out is the Blandings' lawyer and Jim Blandings best friend.) For the first minute and a half of the movie we hear paeans to Manhattan (wide streets, gracious living) while seeing the opposite on the screen (people struck in traffic jams and screaming at each other, people scrambling to get onto overfilled subway cars, people crowded into comfortless diners.) The 'amusing' disconnect between what is said and what is seen signals the audience to "take with a grain of salt" pronouncements made by the characters. The footage of the miseries of life in Manhattan prepare the audience to see the city as something anyone would leave, if only they could.

Bill Cole then tells the audience about the Blandings, the atypical 'typical' New Yorkers that we are to sympathize and empathize with--but doing so only after showing the discomfort and indignities of urban life and by reminding us that Jim and Muriel Blandings are just like thousands of other New Yorkers. While the claim that the Blandings are like thousands of other New Yorkers may be technically true (since in a city of such size there may well be thousands of members of the upper 3% of American society) they are not typical of the average American sitting in the audience in the cinema.

These verbal directions that we should see the Blandings as sharing the same misfortunes as do members of the audience are further buttressed by the audiences first glimpse of Jim and Muriel as we see the couple struggle through the difficulties of getting up, getting dressed and getting breakfast in an apartment which seems overfilled with people, furniture and possessions and undersupplied with closets and storage areas.

We first meet the Blandings as their alarm clock rouses them from sleep. (Since all the Blandings share the same last name from this point on I will refer to each by their first name.) Jim and Muriel (each, as the Production Code preferred, in a separate twin bed) each try sleepily to take control over the alarm clock -- she trying to turn it off as he tries to turn it on. Then he makes his way across a room overcrowded with beds and dresser to the closet where he struggles to find his dressing gown among the clothes jammed in so tightly they seem not to need hangars at all. Having found his dressing gown he makes his way down the hall, knocking at the bathroom door to greet one daughter, going into the girls shared bedroom (we can see the twin beds) to wake the other, picks up the broom left behind in the living room, works his way around the table that almost completely fills the dining room, takes the cover off the bird cage and finally trades the broom he is carrying for the glass of juice that the maid has ready for him.

Insert here the sound of tires screeching. The Blandings have a maid. From all indications a live-in maid. Our supposedly typical New Yorker (Mr. Blandings) not only makes more than 97% of Americans and, unlike the vast majority of his generation, has a college degree, his family also has a maid.

Back to the movie....Once Jim has drunk his juice he trades the empty glass for a cup of coffee he takes back down the hall and gives to his wife who is still sitting, semi-comotose, in bed. Jim searches through the dresser for his underwear and socks. Directed by Muriel to look for his socks in the closet he clumsily moves around boxes only to have a number of them fall on him and the floor. Frustrated he heads to the bathroom. His daughter screams as he opens the door and enjoins him to knock before coming in. I find myself agreeing with her. Since he saw her running down the hall in front of him to get access to the bathroom before him it would seem only reasonable for him to check to see if she had finished using it before barging in.

By this point in the film it is fairly clear that Jim feels more than a little sorry for himself. It is not clear how much members of the audience are supposed to feel empathy or sympathy with him.

The movie has already passed the 10 minute point. We have met the Blandings, been shown how difficult, crowded and frantic life is in New York and are watching the family negotiate a morning in a crowded and badly organized apartment. The discomforts of their lives are being made salient to us and soon we will forget that in education, social and financial status the Blandings are quite unlike most of the audience.

The Blandings may be looking for their dream house. They already have a life that most members of the audience can only dream of.

[1] Hodgins, Eric."Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle" in Adaptations : from short story to big screen : 35 great stories that have inspired great films. New York : Three Rivers Press, ©2005.

[2] Hodgins, Eric. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. New York : Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004, ©1946.

Unintended consequences: Democracy and the waiting room

2011-10-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

Canadian health care story/question.

Earlier today I spent some time in a doctor's waiting room. I had arrived rather early (sometimes all the traffic lights do go your way) so I settled down with my ereader to while my time away. Waiting rooms are interesting places which can vary radically in the emotional dynamic from day to day. Sometimes there are anxious young parents (or at least anxious parents with young children) who feel guilty that their child may bothering other people in the room. Sometimes there are people who are clearly worried that the news the doctor is about to give them may be bad. There is usually someone who carries with them the aroma of tobacco smoke and next to whom no non-smoker wishes to sit.

Last time I was in that waiting room an elderly woman came in, clutching a plastic bag full of medications. I could hear her wheezing as she went to the receptionist and then I heard her reply that she was too confused right now to remember her own postal code. The receptionist took what information she could get and the woman sat down next to me. She was clearly disturbed and worried so I smiled and said a few words to her and soon she calmed down enough to tell me why she had come in for an "urgent care" visit. Her regular doctor was on maternity leave and so she had never been to this doctor before (which is why they didn't have all her information on file). Her seasonal asthma had flared up, her inhaler didn't seem to be giving her any relief and she was afraid she wouldn't be able to fly to visit her ailing mother if the problem wasn't brought under control. Soon she was telling us (me and spouse) about her mother and the hospital she was in and how much nursing had changed since she had been in training. And as her panic subsided, her breathing became easier and her respiration quieter. In a few minutes my name was called and I left her talking to spouse. My own visit was short since I was just getting the results of some lab tests and as I came back out they called her name and she smiled at me and waved as she went, in her turn, to see the doctor.

Today someone in the waiting room asked me about my ereader and in the course of the conversation I learned that she was an administrator at a heath care unit in a neighbouring community. The waiting room was unusually quiet for that time of day and she was musing about the problems of predicting patient loads. Then I got called back to see my doctor and when I came out she was no longer there.

As I drove home I began to think about the democracy of waiting rooms. Most of us will find ourselves, at one time or another, waiting anxiously in a room full of other people waiting anxiously. Waiting rooms are, for many of us, one of the few places we spend time with people from very different walks of life. What goes on in those waiting rooms tells us much about the society in which we live.

For example: I was in a doctor's waiting room in the US when a man came in who wanted to see the doctor. They would not schedule an appointment for the man, not because the doctor was not accepting new patients (he was) but because the man had no insurance. What he had, instead, was cash. He was willing to pay upfront to see the doctor. His request was denied. Until he could prove he had insurance he would have to go emergency at the nearest public hospital. He pled "but it isn't an emergency. It will take all day if they see me at all. I just want the doctor to...." I heard no more for the receptionist wasn't interested in what the man wanted or needed done. He had no insurance.

For example: I was in a room in emergency at a hospital in the US. My doctor had sent me there for a series to tests to rule out the worst case explanation of the wheezing/tickling in my lungs. I had been wired up and tested for one thing, blood had been drawn to test for something else, I had just had a CAT scan and now I was waiting to see the doctor. Through my door I could see a bedraggled elderly couple--her sitting on a stool and him the floor. She was crying and I gave them some tissues and learned that they had been waiting for 8 hours sitting on a stool and the floor. They were poor, from out of state and had no insurance. I sat in my private room (I had excellent health insurance through work) and waited in comfort for reports on my tests. They sat in the hall and finally someone came by and did something that looked and sounded painful to the suppurating lesion on her arm. Then my doctor came in, told me that there was nothing wrong, all the tests were negative and I was free to go. I checked out, paying a copay that was probably more money than that bedraggled couple had to their name.

Like most Canadians I have complaints about the short comings of our health care system--but the most important thing is that for the most part Canadians are all in the same boat. Canadians who are comfortably well off receive, for the most part, the same care as Canadians who are not. If there is a shortage of doctors wealth won't buy your way into a doctor's practice. If there is a shortage of rooms at the hospital wealth won't buy you a bed a poorer person can't lie on. When my American friends say, in condemnation, "you can't buy your way to the front of the line" I nod my head in agreement and approval. Because when you can't buy your way to the front of the line you are highly motivated to make sure that that line is never very long.

The poverty tax, part two

2011-10-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

I made a quick stop at the grocery store today. We were both in the mood for potato-leek stew so I wanted to get more leeks before our next regular shopping trip. Whenever I am at the store I check to see if there is a store special on anything we regularly use and which stores well. Today the brand of olive oil we use (and since we are vegans we use olive oil quite a bit) was on sale -- 23% off. So of course I brought a few bottles of olive oil home along with the leeks.

As I was putting the olive oil away (we always put the most recently purchased items at the back the shelf and move the oldest to the front) I realized that everything in that particular cupboard had been bought on sale. We can afford to take advantage of store specials because we have a freezer large enough to hold a substantial amount of food and a bank account that allows us flexibility in our budgeting.

Those who are poor, those who barely scrape by from week to week, and those who are living on food stamps cannot take advantage of the same specials as do we. So those who least need to stretch their food budget are most able to do so.

Yet another invisible tax on being poor.

100 years ago today: America at War

2011-10-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

While I was scanning the pages of American newspapers published 100 years ago one headline caught my eye:

RACE WAR IN SOUTH IMMINENT:National Guard Rushed to Oklahoma Town One--Negro Is Lynched and Two Others Are Shot--Negroes Mustering Fight Force [Medford Mail Tribune (Medford, Oregon) Oct. 23, 1911, page 5]

The article below gave few details of the events that led to the "troublesome negro" being lynched. Coweta, Oklahoma was, according to the first paragraph, under virtual martial law as the National Guard had been called out due to "threatened manslaughter on the part of the negro element."

My first thought was that the editor/publisher of that particular newspaper was overreacting to a vague report of unrest in Oklahoma. I decided to keep my eyes open for more news on the same story as I looked through the other newspapers. It turned out that in most cases, it would have taken more effort to miss the story than to find it.

The Arizona Republican put the same story above the fold on the front page:

SENDS CALL FOR TROOPS: National Guard Will be Needed in Ending Race War Which Broke Out Last Night in Black Belt of Oklahoma: NEGRO WHO RANAMUCK WAS KILLED: Trouble Occurred at Coweta in Heart of District Which is Populated Largely by Blacks From Far South [October 23, 1911, page 1]

[NOTE: In 1911 it was the fashion of many papers to have nesting banks of headlines which told as much of the story as many of the public would ever read.]
The particular details of the case are repeated, in more or less the same words, across many of the newspapers. An African-American shoved a white women off the sidewalk. The white man who had been walking with the woman, along with another white man then assaulted the African-American (Ed Ruse.) The next day Ruse returned to the town armed with a knife and looking for the man who had helped in the assault. According to the town officials (all white as far as one can tell) Ruse shot the Marshall when he was ordered to hand over his knife and then another African-American man, Ed Suddeth, rushed out of a nearby house and shot and killed the Marshall. From this point on the story becomes a confusing one of Suddeth being captured by a mob, hung, rescued before he was dead (for fear that his lynching would lead to a race riot) and then later shot at least fifty times.

There is no way of verifying exactly who started things and who did what to whom in what order. What is clear from the various accounts as that the officials (and much of the white populace) of the area viewed all African-Americans as monolithic group that were liable to rise up at any moment, violently assault any white people they came upon and destroy the town they lived in.

Geographical distance did not seem to lessen the fear that the African-Americans of Oklahoma were poised to begin an armed assault on the white population of the state. The Times Dispatch of Richmond, VA, was another newspaper that ran the story on the front page above the fold

BLACKS THREATEN TOWN Of COWETA: White Men Are Patrolling Streets and Guarding Homes.

The Call of San Francisco managed to suggest by its headline (front page, above the fold):

Fearing Attack Lynchers Cut Rope and Hide Captive in Vacant Building

that stopping an extra-judicial killing was a symptom of breakdown of social order.

What I realize as I read one newspaper after another is that any individual act of violence/resistance by an African-American was seen as a potential assault on the social order and that any group of African-Americans males larger than 1 was a mob that threatened the safety of white Americans. All African-Americans were suspected of working towards an armed rebellion and the overthrow of the existing government.

The question I ask myself as I read these articles is "why were the white authorities so sure that all African-Americans would rebel violently if given a chance." The answer is, of course, "because they were well aware of how African-Americans had been treated in the past and were still be treated -- and would themselves if treated the same way rebel violently against those who oppressed them.

The best evidence we have of how badly African-Americana had been treated was how much white Americans feared their vengeance.

A moment of terror and an "unsexy" charity

2011-10-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

Charities, like many other things in the modern world, go in and out of fashion. One week/month/year celebrities are lending their faces and names to one cause and a few years later the same celebrities are associating themselves with another. Some diseases are easy to dramatize. The story of the person looking for marrow donor or the matching kidney almost writes itself.

And then there are the causes and charities that quietly trudge along, never in the spotlight and yet for all that alleviating just as much misery as those that are better known.

This morning I couldn't find my glasses. I need my glasses to perform the routine tasks of life. I put them on before I get out of bed in the morning and I take them off only after I turn off the lights at night. Today I took them off to wash my face and when I reached out my hand for them they weren't were I expected them to be. I looked frantically at the things on the counter but I couldn't find them. Yes, I have a backup pair (which I keep in a spot I can reach even if I can see nothing) but the moment of terror remains with me. Without my glasses I would not be able to cook (I couldn't measure ingredients and nor could I safely use a knife.) I wouldn't be able to read (magnifying things won't solve the problem since I am severely astigmatic.) I couldn't drive. I couldn't knit unless someone else cast on the stitches and I couldn't crochet save by feel alone.

We who are privileged forget how life-changing the simple technology of "glasses" can be. There are hundreds of thousands of people who could live better, more comfortable, more remunerative lives with the aid of something we take so for granted that we know longer think of it as a medical technology.

Many optometrists and opthalmologists belong to groups that will accept old/used glasses. Groups of doctors go to areas of the world where people get no eye care or where most people can't afford glasses and provide the required necessary tests for free. They then match people up with the used eyeglasses closest to the prescription required. Yes, of course it would be better if everyone in the world had access to best of modern eye medicine but realistically that is not going to happen anytime soon. Just remember, the next time your replace your glasses to find a doctor/organization that can pass them on to someone whose life will be made, quite literally, clearer and brighter by an act of charity that cost you nothing.

100 years ago today: How we talked about the things we couldn't talk about

2011-10-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

One hundred years ago one of the stories on the front pages many of the newspapers in the United States told of the arrest of Rev. C. V. T. Richeson for the murder of Avis Linnell. Miss Linnell, whose body was found in the bathroom of the YWCA rooming house where she lived, was first thought to have died of natural causes and then, after the contents of her stomach were examined, was presumed to have committed suicide. Why, I wondered, would the police think that an attractive, talented and not noticeably depressed young woman would have committed suicide?

Miss Linnell. who was nineteen years old, and a student at the Conservatory of Music, was found dead in the bathroom of the Young Women's Christian Association home here. At first the police believed she had committed suicide, but later developments indicated that she had unknowingly taken cyanide of potassium sent herby some other person, in the belief that it would remedy her embarrassing physical condition. [The Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA) Oct. 21 1911, page 1]

At first the police believed that she had committed suicide but later developments indicated that she had unknowingly taken cyanide of potassium, which had been sent to her by some other person, and that she used it In the belief that it would remedy a certain embarrassing physical condition. [New York Tribune Oct 21, 1911, page 1.]

[Headline]AWFUL CHARGE AGAINST PASTOR NOW IN CELL
[SubHead]Cambridge Clergyman Accused of Murder of a Young Girl to Concel an Earlier Sin [The Bisbee Daily Review (Bisbee, Arizona) Oct 21, 1911, page 1]

Richeson is charged with furnishing a nineteen year-old girl, to whom he is said lo have been engaged to be married, and who in the course of six months would have become a mother, with cyanide of potassium and the inference is that he told her that by taking the deadly drug she bring about a desired change in her physical condition, when In reality he furnished the cyanide and deceived the girl as to the nature of its effect for the express purpose of causing her death sothat no entanglement might exist which could prevent his marriage to VioletEdmonds of Brookllne, whose father is a rich man. [The Sun (New York) Oct 21, 1911, page 1.]

Clearly what is at issue is not the concepts it is the words. It is crystal clear from the various accounts that Miss Linnell was pregnant and Richeson (the presumed father) was suspected of giving her the potassium of cyanide and telling her it was an abortifacient.

At the same time words (and concepts) that we would now find deeply shocking can be found on the same pages where the word "pregnant" could not be written.

The halfbreed was found in the brush near the scene of the crime early today and brought to the Oroville jail. There is talk of lynching.[The Tacoma Times (Tacoma, Washington) Oct 21, 1911, page 1]

From reading that article it is clear that if an "Indian" was accused of murdering a white woman by other white people -- then no one considered it necessary to go through the formality of having an actual trial. A lynching would do just as well.

Just as "everyone knew" that things such as premarital sex went on "everyone knew" that non-white and white Americans got treated differently by the American legal system. One hundred years they spoke circumspectly about sex and opening about legal inequalities. Today we speak openly about sex and circumspectly about legal inequalities.

But just as people were having sex then even if they weren't talking about it--bigotry and legal inequalities exist today even when we aren't willing to speak openly and honestly about them.

100 years ago today: Othering and diminishment

2011-10-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago today the University Missourian (Columbia, Missouri) ran the following article on the front page:
Head: Cinders Cause Suit
SubHead: Negro Woman Asks $300 Because Wabash Trains Soil Washing.

Emmeline Williams is not only identified in the subhead as a "Negro Woman" in the very first line of the article we are told that she is "a negress." In the second paragraph of the same article she is referred to as "Emmeline" without an honorific and with no last name.

The article, which is a roundup of the various cases currently before the court, next moves on to the story of "William Miller, a negro" who is later referred to as "Tude, as he is known in Columbia."

No one on the page is identified as "white" and no one not identified as "negro" is referred to only by their first name or not given an honorific on their first mention.

These are, no doubt, "little" things but it says much of what life was like for African-Americans that no matter what they did their "racial identity" was given as automatically as honorifics were given to whites and that the small dignities of life were accorded to white men and women but not African Americans.

Women's Rights and the Decline of Democracy, Part Four

2011-10-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Right now, in the United States, there are still places where people are being told that they have to ride at the back of the bus.
See:
City Human Rights Commission To Examine Sex-Segregated Bus Line

A driver observed and interviewed by The New York World did not intervene when a woman accompanying this reporter was forced to move to the back of the bus. The New York Post subsequently sent its own reporter, who was told by the driver, as well as passengers, that the front of the bus was reserved for men.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

‘Back of bus’ furor

Rosa Parks must be spinning in her grave!

A Brooklyn bus contracted by the city to operate a Williamsburg-to-Borough Park route -- catering to Orthodox Jews but open to the public -- is under investigation for allegedly forcing women to sit in the back of the bus, authorities said yesterday.

At Front of Brooklyn Bus, a Clash of Religious and Women’s Rights

Even though a private operator runs the bus, it was awarded the route through a public and competitive bidding process. Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, said the bus was supposed to be “available for public use” and could not discriminate.

[snip]

On Wednesday afternoon, the custom of women’s sitting at the back of the bus was evident, both in practice and in writing.

Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that “when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front” and that “when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas.”

If you read the articles (and the comments attached to them) the lack of outrage is noticeable. Why, I wonder, does forcing someone to sit at the back of the bus not spark massive anger and immediate reactions from government institutions? I suggest that the reasons are twofold: what group is the discrimination being carried out by and who is being discriminated against.

First, In certain areas of American politics today it is important to demonstrate that you are for Judeo-Christian ethics/beliefs and that you are a "friend of Israel." Ironically your friendship for Israel may be based on your belief that Israel needs to be around to be destroyed at the right time, but until then you are a friend of Israel. Specifically (for a secular Israel will not result in the rebuilding of the temple) this involves supporting the those groups within Israel that are least supportive of western values/women's rights. This political "third rail" is not equally electric in all communities in the United States but it plays a crucial role in New York politics.

Second, Women rights are always negotiable. They are something that will have to wait. Brutal and unequal treatment of women can be included as one of many charges against another country or leader but that is never enough to spur western countries to action. If men are not being jailed then the jailing of women will not bring down upon you the wrath of the United States. If men are not being mistreated then the mistreatment of women will not bring down upon you the wrath of the United States. Women rights are the last rights that will be insisted on, the last rights to be granted and the first rights to be lost.

One hundred years ago yesterday (October 19, 1911) the Mayor of New York decided to not veto legislation that mandated that the New York City school system pay all women teachers the same wages as male teachers. The first several times such legislation was passed it was vetoed. As the mayor announced his intentions he reassured his constituents that paying women more would actually lead to more male teachers getting jobs.

Women's rights don't seem to have traveled as far as we had hoped over the last 100 years.

100 years ago today: Don't worry--giving women equal pay will benefit men

2011-10-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

The World, New York New York, October 19 1911.

Headline: 14,000 WOMEN TEACHERS TO GET SAME PAY AS MEN

The newspaper reported that the legislature had passed the bill which mandated equal pay several times before and each time it had been vetoed. This time, according to the major

After careful consideration I see that I should accept this bill for the city. It gives the women teachers in our common schools equal pay with the men teachers in all the grades

and, as the mayor points out, this may actually redound to the benefit of men

Instead of lessening the number of men teachers it will increase it. The economical reason for appointing women teachers because they are paid less is removed.

Now, whatever the reasons the mayor had for not vetoing the bill it is interesting that he felt he had to (or wanted to) make the comment/reassurance that the bill would result in more men being hired. And it is important that in this day of fighting for equal pay for work of equal value that people be reminded just how recently in the United States one could openly and baldly pay a women less than a man just because she was a woman and he was a man. Laws had to be passed to prevent that from happening. And it would go on happening (and more laws would be required to be passed) for decades to come.

Channelling cynicism: Mr. Blandings and the directed negotiated reading, part one

2011-10-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

Why, one might ask, should we care about the troubles of the most fortunate? Why should we not mock, or even celebrate the things that try them?

Writers and artists have been dealing with that particular problem for as long as there have been writers and artists.

Timothy Daulton, in a comment to an earlier post, mentioned watching Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. In addition to the points Timothy made about the movie's relevance to circumstances today the movie also stands as a brilliant example of how the screenwriter/director/actors can deflect and channel possible oppositional responses to a narrative and (generally) successfully direct the audiences emotional responses in the desired directions.

Mr. Blandings began its life as an article in Fortune magazine in 1946 and was then published, in longer form, as a book. The movie is both faithful to and departs greatly from the original article. And the way in which it does both is instructive as to how an audience can be seduced and distracted into a dominant or acceptable negotiated reading of the text.

In the case of the movie this seduction/distraction might be argued to take place long before the movie begins with the selection of director, screenwriter and cast but I will defer the discussion of those choices until a later day and begin with first moments of the short story, the book and the movie.

Mr. Blandings, the short story, was published in 1946 and Mr. Blanding the movie was released in 1948. The United States was at the moment of publication and release in the midst of what was generally accepted to be a housing crisis. Housing starts had declined precipitously during the Great Depression and during the Second World War manpower and materials that might otherwise gone to building homes went instead into the war effort. With the end of the war hundreds of thousands of men returned to civilian life eager to get married, find a home and start a family but there were not available the hundreds of thousands of homes and apartments required for them to do so. So they lived with family or shared homes with other young couples in similar circumstances. So it is understandable that the "money people" in Hollywood would think that a movie about the troubles that beset a couple trying to build a house would evoke fellow-feeling among members of the audience. But the Blandings in the story, the book and the movie were very unlike most of the millions who desperately needed a home of their own.

If you check the US Census the median household income in the United States was $3200. Just over 3% of American households had an income of over $10000 a year. In the short story the reader learns that the final cost of the land and house was over $50,000 -- a figure well beyond the reach of most of the people who would go to see the film. The Blandings are not rich but they are very wealthy compared to the majority of Americans. A the beginning of the film the audience is told that Blandings is he's as typical a New Yorker as anyone you'll ever meet. And then we are immediately given information that proves that Blandings is anything but a "typical" New Yorker. College graduate, ad business, lovely wife,two fine kids, makes about fifteen thousand a year. Yes, Americans who lived in large urban communities make somewhat more than Americans who live in smaller communities with the 1948 median income of $3200 for those living in cities of more than a million. So Blandings was not making a typical New York income. Nor was the typical New Yorker a college graduate. Indeed, directly after we are told that Jim Blandings is a typical New Yorker we are given ample evidence that he is not.

So, how did the movie-makers ensure that audience members would, for the most part, side with the Blandings even while taking delight in their travails? Over a number of posts I'll examine the skillful way in which they pulled of this feat.

100 year ago today: Mitt Romney, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the 6,000 year old definition of marriage

2011-10-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

One hundred years ago today The Logan Republican of Cache County, Utah published the obituary of President John Henry Smith. At the time of his death Smith was the Second Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The obituary is, not surprisingly, laudatory but as I read it over I felt that there must be something missing. Smith had been one of the people who worked behind (and in front of) the scenes to negotiate Utah's transition from territory to state. He had been born in Iowa in 1848 son of Gordon Smith (a leader in the LDS) and must have known in his childhood and his early adult life many of the towering (and many married) figures in the LDS. Including his own father.

Reading that obituary made me think about a statement made not to long ago by Mitt Romney, We’re going to call marriage what it’s been called for 6,000 years or longer: A relationship between one man and one woman. Surely Romney is (and his followers are) aware that not too many generations ago his co-religionists did not consider a marriage to consist of one man and one woman (unless, of course, you are making the rather sophistical argument that each of a polygamist's marriages are between one man and one woman. But each woman was only allowed one marriage at a time while a man might have as many as he liked/could afford.)

How "hidden" was the practice of polygamy (or plural marriage as the LDS often referred to it)? The death of Smith was recorded in The New York Times of October 14, 1911. The last sentence of the obituary was Two wives, fifteen children, and eight grandchildren survive him.

Mitt Romney has, of course, a right to his own beliefs about the what marriage "should be" but, as it has been said elsewhere "you have a right to your own opinions but not a right to your own facts." It is not factually true that marriage has been called "a relationship between one man and one woman" for 6,000 years. Indeed in Utah it wasn't until President (of the LDS) Woodruff's manifesto of 1890 that Morman leadership stopped solemnizing plural marriages. Since those men who were already married to more than one woman were not called to separate from all but one the church leadership did not seem to be stating that those prior relationships had not been marriages and thus were acknowledging the fact that relationships that could be called marriages varied by place and time. If was, after all, not until 1904 the the leadership of the LDS issued a worldwide ban on plural marriage.

So, Mr. Romney, you have a right to your opinions, you have a right to your religion but you do not have a right to alter (or ignore) the historical record.

100 years ago today: Women, minorities and the law

2011-10-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

Many of the rights that women in the "western" world consider unquestioned and unquestionable are comparatively recent and thus, one might argue, have shallow roots and might be less secure than one might presume.

Consider this headline on the first page of The Washington Herald on October 16, 1911. "Court may have women for jury" with the subhead "Suffrage victory affects McNamara Case." The reader is told that given the recent passage of the women's suffrage amendment,[1] "Eminent legal authorities hold that women of the State are now on an equal footing with themen. so far as jury service is concerned," and given the fact that the court may find it difficult to seat a jury of men women "may be peremptorily summoned." The ruling of the judge that "there was nothing to prevent a woman serving on a jury." came after a "demand by Mrs Johanna Engelman thatshe be given a place in the jury box."

It may seem strange to us today that even after the suffrage there were questions about whether women could serve on juries and it is clear from the text of the article that they would be only if men could not be found. This clarifies one of the basic underlying issues that made women's fight for the vote and other legal rights so difficult--women may have been seen as citizens for the purposes of paying taxes and apportioning congressional seats, but they were not seen as completely, fully functioning adult human beings in the eyes of the kyriarchy. Thus rights and duties which one might imagine would have flowed automatically from the passage of suffrage did not.

The same page of The Washington Herald also gives one a rather frightening insight into the treatment of and attitude toward African-Americans in 1911 and includes a laudatory piece about a lecture on eugenics that was schedule to be given by Willet M. Hays [2] at the local YMCA.

The offensively jocular page 1 article about "Charles Charles" attempting to rescue a beleaguered elderly African-American woman gives the reader a sense of just how "free and equal" life was for African-Americans in Washington D.C. in 1911. On page two of the same paper one finds the article Will Celebrate Freedom: Washington Negroes to Commemorate Abolition of Slavery just about the article Veterans Will Convene: Confederates of Virginia meet at Newport News tomorrow. The placement of the two pieces seems an appropriate commentary on the reality of their lives--whenever African-Americans gather to exercise their theoretical rights they need look over their shoulders for the men who are still celebrated and honoured for having attempted to deny them those rights.

And, of course, The Herald's Page for Every Woman includes the requisite advice and criticism of mothers without which few family newspapers ever went to print.

[1] At the state level. The 19th amendment, which gave American women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920. ↩

[2] Not the Hays of the Hays Code. ↩

Hitchens is 'splaining again.

2011-10-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

Whether or not one agrees with Christopher HItchens' conclusions a surprising large number of people don't question the statements of "fact" on which he bases his argument. After all he is male, white, has what sounds to American ears a posh well-educated "British accent." He went to the right schools and speaks with the tone of authority--so what more is there to say?

The first thing to say that HItchens not infrequently is wrong. By this I don't mean that frequently I disagree with HItchens' conclusions but rather that sometimes he is simply wrong on the facts. And since he is wrong on some facts for all I know he is wrong on many facts. And since he is well-educated enough (and has enough resources) that he can easily find out what the facts actually are then he is either consciously lying, unable to conceive of the fact he could be wrong, and feels that the point he is making is so important that fudging or overlooking a few facts is acceptable.

Case in point, in his Slate.com article Lord Haw Haw and Anwar al-Awlaki Hitchen's wrote:

The United States happens also to be almost uniquely generous in conferring citizenship: making it available to all those who draw their first breath within its borders.

Now that statement is a piece of arrant nonsense. Leaving aside the past actions the American government denying access to citizenship to some groups of immigrants the country is today far from being "almost unique" in granting birthright citizenship. The number of member nations in the UN is 193. Let's round up and say that there are at the moment 200 nations. Over 30 of those nations recognize birthright citizenship. So the United States is among a minority of nations there need to be far, far fewer before the phrase "almost uniquely" become appropriate.

Hitchens may be suffering here from "old worldism." He himself was born and raised in Britain and most European nations do not grant birthright citizenship. However the United States, like most of the other nations in the Western Hemisphere, was built from immigrants and historically offered few bars to children of those immigrants becoming citizens. The mistake he makes here is not particularly relevant to the overall argument he is making however it warns the reader that he is arrogant and/or careless about facts.

A further, minor example of the same thing can be found later on in the same article when he writes of William Joyce:

He actually became rather a popular entertainment item in Britain, his arrogant drawling tones earning him the nickname “Lord Haw Haw.”

Despite that rather definitive statement as to why Joyce was known as "Lord Haw Haw" there is some question as which voice of German propaganda the original epithet "Lord Haw Haw" was used to describe. At least four different people were dubbed "Lord Haw Haw" during the war. We also know that some members of the British media simply used that phrase to describe any English language speaking German propagandists irrespective of their particular manners of speech.

Again, this is a minor point except that we become lazy listeners/readers and HItchens (like many other "respected" pundits") becomes a lazy writer/speaker thinker if the underpinnings of their arguments are not subjected to scrutiny.

Interestingly enough neither of these points is pertinent to the case Hitchens is arguing--indeed they obfuscate it. William Joyce (the Lord Haw Haw to whom HItchens is referring) argued as to his "true" citizenship as part of his defense against being executed as a traitor. He claimed that since he was actually an American citizen he could not be guilty of treason to Britain. al-Awlaki, unlike Joyce, was not tried in a court of law. al-Awlaki was not executed he was assassinated. In fact he was assassinated while outside the United States on the basis of the President "deciding" he was a traitor. In other words, the argument is not whether al-Awlaki was actually an American citizen but whether the President acted extra-judicially. To bring up any other points is to muddy the situation rather than make it clearer.

As George Orwell, one of Hitchens' favourite writers, put it. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Book Review: Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during Would War II

2011-10-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II

This small book(let) prepared for American servicemen stationed in Iraq during the Second World War is in its own way a masterpiece. The "voice" in which it is written is friendly and easy to understand and it is informative without being condescending. Individuals writing training manuals for governments and institutions today would do well to study this (among other manuals and booklets released during the war) for tips on how to write clear and useful instructions without descending into jargon and writing down to one's audience.

Reading it gives one insight into what was considered normal among American servicemen in 1943. For example, its readers are admonished not to "show race prejudice" because the Iraqis "draw very little color line," and soldiers are advised not to approach women on the streets not only to avoid offending Iraqis but also because that is not where the prostitutes could be found. The underlying presumption is that the men reading the booklet do draw more than a little color line and will attempt to locate prostitutes.

But the book also can surprise with its determined resistance to what is now called "mission creep" and cultural colonialism:

Sure, there are differences...But what of it? You aren't going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of "live and let live." (5)

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl writes in the modern day introduction

I wish that I had read it before beginning my own yearlong tour of Al Anbar in late 2003!

and I imagine that many of the pundits I hear every day on television would do well to read it before next they share they thoughts on the US involvement in Iraq.

It is short and aimed at someone with no more than a high school education so I think that they could manage it.

The teabag movement: Some archeological thoughts

2011-10-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Some questions crossed my mind the other day as I watched the coverage of teabaggers at a rally. At almost every rally there was at least one person festooned with teabags. 'Do these people think that the tea thrown into Boston Harbor in 1773 was packaged in tea bags?' 'Do they think that the tea the Founding Fathers drank was brewed using tea bags?' and 'Do they think that tea bags are historically associated with conservatism?'

As comic and irrelevant as those questions might seem to be they help to identify some of the misconceptions and misunderstandings that befall many in the teabag movement.

First, 'Do these people think that the tea thrown into Boston Harbor in 1773 was packaged in tea bags?'

No, it wasn't (and more on that below.) I ask the question because I am fairly sure that many of the people in the movement (many of whom are decorating their hats and caps with teabags) have no clear idea of what happened at (or caused) the original Boston Tea Party. Yes chests of tea were thrown into the Boston Harbor. Yes, the destruction of the tea was part of a larger action to protest taxation without representation. But much of the anger about the Tea Act of 1773 was that it was passed in part to support what we would now call a large multinational corporation (the East India Company) by allowing it to charge less for tea than its local (to Boston) competitors who were smuggling tea into the colonies.

If any group today did what the "tea partiers" did in 1773--trespass on private property and destroy merchandise and goods for the purpose of making a political statement against the government--they would be labelled terrorists.

Second, 'Do they think that the tea the Founding Fathers drank was brewed using tea bags?'

The rhetoric of the modern "teabaggers" is often that of originalism and constitutional essentialism yet there was at the time not a particularly strong association between that act of rebellion with the larger project of colonial independence. Indeed many of the early histories of the American Revolution played down or ignored what was then called "the act of the destruction of the tea" since it had been violence aimed at private property not the installation of an oppressing government. Given the laudatory rhetoric about corporations, capitalism and private property of many modern day teabaggers one wonders if they realize they are lionizing an attack on the very things they appear to hold most dear.

Third, 'Do they think that tea bags are historically associated with conservatism?'

If the tea baggers wish to associate themselves with the "old days" and "old ways" it would better serve them to sprinkle themselves with loose tea leaves. The brewing of tea with tea bags is a quite recent custom. The tea bag is the accidental creation of an American tea merchant who, about 100 years ago, sent out samples of his tea leaves in silk sachets which some recipients thought were to be used for the brewing of tea. It took some time for the practice of using tea bags become wide spread (especially in England) and even today many tea snobs consider tea brewed from bags rather than loose leaves to be of inferior quality. Indeed they argue that the use of tea bags is yet another sign of the modern day devaluing of the things that matter and the turning away from the manners and beliefs of our forefathers.

In short, the history of the tea bag and the act of the destruction of the tea suggests that the tea bag itself is a symbol of much that the teabaggers despise and the teabaggers' ignorance of the real history and meaning of the tea bag and the act of the destruction of the teat make the tea bag a perfect symbol of all the modern day teabag party stands for.

Spoiler warnings please!

2011-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

<reader rant>

Writing a "good" book introduction is a difficult thing--not least because of the fact that readers do not agree among themselves on exactly what it is they are looking for in an introduction. Some readers are looking for information about the life and career(s) of the author(s) while others are hoping that the introduction will place the book into a larger context. Some readers think that the larger context the book should be placed into is that of the author(s) thematic and stylistic growth (and perhaps decline.) Other readers think that books should be placed within the context of the time and culture in which they were initially written and/or published. Yet other readers would prefer that books were placed within the context of other books written/published at the same time and/or same genre.

I, myself, am open to many types of introduction. However no reader should stumble across spoilers in an introduction. If the writer of the introduction cannot discuss the book without spoilers then they, or the editors, should do the reader the courtesy of marking them plainly and unmistakably.

And yes, I did just have that happen to me. I curled up in a chair with a book I had not read before and glancing at the introduction hoping for insight into the placement of this book in the development of the author's style and choice of topic(s) I came across a massive spoiler. Yes, I will forge on and read the book but (warning to any editor who happens to come across this entry) I have made a note of the author of the introduction, will avoid reading any by the same author and will, if possible, avoid buying editions that include introductions by that author.

Avoiding spoilers and/or clearly marking them is an act of respect to the reader.

</reader rant>

But why Prunella Scales?

2011-10-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

I have been reading (and rereading) quite a bit of E. F. Benson lately. Benson is probably best known today for the novels about Miss Mapp and Emmeline Lucas [1] published between 1920 and 1939 and later bundled together and published in omnibus form in 1977 as Make Way for Lucia. Benson's writing styles (for he had more than one) and the things about which he wrote (he had several distinct subjects of interest) were extremely popular during his lifetime but subsequent to his death and the end of the Second World War his books fell out of print.

Benson's fortunes revived in the 1970s as many of his books began once again to be available in print however it is likely that many know Benson (and his characters Mapp and Lucia) more from the BBC Mapp and Lucia series than from the novels themselves. I did not see that television adaptation before I first started to read Benson. I chanced on a description of one of the Mapp and Lucia books in a critical review of another book I had been reading and I tracked down a copy of the The Worshipful Lucia in the local library. I soon began to hunt down every Benson book I could find. Since most were out of print I either found old battered Benson books in used bookstores and I downloaded those that were now in the public domain from online sources.

Yesterday I was trying to trace the origin of a theme (and style of writing) that I had noticed in Benson's writing as early as 1912 (Mrs. Ames) and in full flower by 1929 (Paying Guests). I wondered if there were hints of that theme in his earliest books so I pulled out my copy of Dodo: A Detail of the Day first published 1893 and first read by me in a battered old copy I no longer own. My current copy is one of three Dodo novels published together 1986 in Dodo: An Omnibus with.....as the cover proclaims.....a "New Introduction by Prunella Scales." 'Oh,' I thought, 'I hadn't realized that Scales had been a Benson aficionado before she was cast as Miss Mapp in the BBC series.' The second sentence of the introduction disabused me of that notion

I had read very few of his books before 1984, when I swallowed all the Lucia novels at once while preparing to attempt Miss Mapp in a television serial.

Scales was not familiar with any of the Dodo books before she was asked to write the introduction to the omnibus. The introduction itself is competently written but has as much depth and insight as one would expect from a high school student's "treatment" of an author. It doesn't help me as a reader to understand the world of the book, it doesn't help me as reader to understand Benson as a writer, and it doesn't really help the reader to place Dodo into the context of its time.

I understand why someone at The Hogarth Press decided to ask Scales to write the introduction since the BBC production of Make Way for Lucia did much to revive Benson's popularity. Scales was Miss Mapp for many people who had not read the books previous to their television adaptation. One can imagine the logic "people associate Scales with Benson so if we get her name on a Benson book it will help to sell the book." That may even have worked. However, that decision distresses me for two reasons.

First, I do not begrudge Scales the right to have opinions about the Dodo books but I wish that they had spent the money instead on a less famous but better qualified person who could have written informedly and usefully about the book(s) and the author. No reader who knows Benson only from the BBC adaptation and is not used to reading books written in the latter years of the 19th century is going to find Dodo an easy book to read. Putting Scales name on the cover may have sold more copies of the Dodo omnibus but only, I fear, at the cost of readers who never "got" the books and never bought another Benson (from The Hogart Press or any other publisher.)

Second, even in the few pages of the introduction Scales convinced me that she misunderstands Benson in much the same way as many writers of his time (and his subjects of interest) are misunderstood by people who come across them without the appropriate context. Scales writes of Benson:

one must not be too frivolous about this dear, gentle, funny writer, with his romantic cynicism and demure extravagance, his faultless ear and wicked tongue

and I watch Scales' (in my opinion dreadfully misconceived) performance of Miss Mapp and can only think how little she understands Benson. Benson could be icy, insightful, cynical and cruel. He had seen some of the horrors of life. He was for some time mayor of Rye (the 'real world' Tilling.) He was the son of an Archbishop of Chanterbury and the sibling of writers and intellectuals. None of his generation of the family married and had children. His parents had a famously "chilly" marriage and once widowed his mother lived the rest of her life with a woman friend. Underneath the glittering surface of Benson's books one can often glimpse the emptiness and hopelessness of the lives of his characters.

So, the answer to "why Scales" is--a short-sighted marketing scheme that did nothing to build a readership that would continue to buy Benson's less famous books and that helped to perpetuate a facile understanding of his best selling books.

[1] Queen Lucia (1920), Miss Mapp (1922), Lucia in London (1927), Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia's Progress aka The Worshipful Lucia (1935) and Trouble for Lucia (1939)↩

The death of Steve Jobs as seen through the eyes of western privilege

2011-10-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died just a few minutes after apple.com posted the announcement on their website. His death was not unexpected but I was still struck by it. For me, as for many other people who grew up in a world without personal computers and who were involved (in a far more tangential way than Jobs) in their development and popularization, this man I never met was vividly real to me. I am very aware of the impact that Jobs had on the development of much of the technology we now depend in the western world.

Almost as soon as Jobs' death was officially announced the responses poured in from people who ranged from customers, to co-workers to politicians. His death was not a surprise and I imagine that many of the formal responses to the announcement had been drafted weeks ago when it became clear that his health had taken a turn for the worse.

One of the constant claims/statements/arguments across the many expressions of sympathy was that virtually everyone in the world had been touched by Jobs. And that claim led to me think "how" and ask "for the better?" I have no doubt that the lives of those in the Horn of Africa, in Darfur and in Myanmar have been touched by the information revolution if we stretch "touched" to include "the individuals who hound the poor and prey on the weak have been known to use new technologies in order to perpetuate their power." I have no doubt that the lives of those in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq have been touched by the computer revolution if we stretch "touched" to include "they are now being killed in ways that would not have been possible without the computer revolution." And it is important to remember that not everyone who has been more directly "touched" by Jobs and Apple would describe the result as "for the better." The workers in Taiwan who committed suicide after enduring the working conditions in IPhone assembly plants would probably not have characterized they way in which their lives were "touched" as for the better.

I am not arguing that Jobs was a bad person. However I do think that we should take care not to universalize from the nature of his impact on the lives of comparatively privileged people to the impact it had on humanity in general. I do know that Jobs was a charismatic individual who could sweep a room of tech reporters off their metaphorical feet. I don't know that Jobs ever sat down and thought about what his wealth could do beyond "make more money" and "create more gadgets that he would like to play with."

Bill Gates was never Steve Jobs equal in terms of charisma. One seldom hears of Gates "wowing" a room of reporters. And Microsoft in its time has resorted to some extremely questionable business practices. But so too did Apple. Bill Gates has spent over a decade giving away much of the money that he made while he, too, was changing the world. We have not heard of Jobs doing anything similar.

Today there are people in the world who are safer, less hungry, healthier, more educated and have more hope for the future because Bill Gates has decided to work almost as hard at giving away his money as he once worked at making it.

Steve Jobs made life more fun, interesting and easier for that portion of the world that already enjoyed the most privilege and the greatest likelihood of having safe, interesting and comfortable lives. It would be nice to find out that Jobs decided that in death he would attempt to compete with Gates on the field of philanthropy just as in life he competed with Gates on the field of technology.

Hey there, politician, I'm watching you

2011-10-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

Ontario goes to the polls tomorrow (October 6th.)

It seems like such a small thing to do. Someday between the 9 in the morning and 9 at night I will wander over with my notice of registration and draw an X through the circle next to one of the local candidate's name.

Like most of the elections in which I have taken part the person I will vote for has little chance of winning. But it is still very important for me to mark my ballot. I read the local newspaper, I talk to other people on my street and in my neighbourhood and I do some research to find out the relative strengths of the different parties in my riding. I rank the local candidates from those I think are very bad for my community, my province or my country to those which are think are best. Then I have to sit down and work out the likelihoods. If 'VeryWorst' is leading 'NotMyFavouriteButAcceptable' by a small margin then I will vote for NMFBA (hoping to help keep VW from winning.) If one of the parties enjoys a comfortable margin locally then I like to sit down and take a good look at the minor parties in my riding. And sometimes I vote for one of those parties not because I agree with everything in their platform but because I think that they are talking about things which are very important and offering solutions and suggestions which should be among those seriously considered.

Canadian political parties can grow very quickly. Take, for example, the Bloc Québécois. That party began in 1990 as disaffected members of both the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals joined together informally. In 1993 (the next federal election) the Bloc won the second largest number of seats and became the official opposition. Because political parties such as the Bloc and Reform (which was born in the 1980s and by 1997 had replaced the Bloc as the official opposition) can grow so quickly there is room for new ideas and new conversations in Canadian politics. If the old parties won't talk about the things we care about then we just go out and form new parties that will.

Both the sense of power this gives to voters and the way in which the growth of new parties allows for new ideas to take root hit me today as I sit and watch the CNN coverage of the occupation of Wall Street. Few reporters talk to the protestors and most of the reports I listen to are interviews of the old regulars--the talking heads who I could have seen and heard anytime in the last two decades. One can imagine the logic of those of those who handed out the assignments and who edited together the news reports. After all, they must be thinking, what choice will the protestors have when next they vote? Everyone to the left of whatever point will be the "center" at that moment will have the choice of voting for a Democrat or strengthening the Republicans by not voting at all. Everyone to the right of whatever point will be the "center" at the moment will have the choice of voting for a Republican or strengthening the Democrats by not voting at all. The greatest degree of freedom in voting will be during the nomination processes but even then the voters will have a severely limited range of ideologies among which to choose and the barriers for entry into the "serious" nomination race will be high. Those who give aid and comfort to some portion of the monied and active elements of the kyriarchy will be given the money and the access to the media necessary to run a serious campaign. Those who do not, will not.

When it is members and functionaries of the kyriarchy who decide the candidates you get to chose between then no matter the tally the outcome is the same:

Meet the new boss
same as the old boss[1]

[1] The Who, Won't get fooled again.

The Tardis in the library, part two

2011-10-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

there are also tips in the 1943 Short Guide that absolutely would not see the light of day in the politically correct world of today. None of the men serving there need to be told, "Don't make a pass at any Moslem women or there will be trouble." But the guide continues with more advice that caused my jaw to drop; "Anyway, it won't get you anywhere. Prostitutes do not walk the streets but live in special quarters of the cities." If service members today do need this guidance, I can absolutely guarantee that they won't get it from an official War Department publication! (xi)

Two other pieces of advice stood out to this reader:

Be kind and considerate to servants. The Iraqis consider all people equal. (29)

Note that the soldiers are not told to be kind and considerate to servants because it was right to do so. Nor were they told that they should be kind and considerate to servants because it would make the United States look good. Nor does the booklet say "The Iraqis, like us, consider all people equal." The Iraqi attitude/belief that all people are equal is put forward as just another one of their cultural quirks about which servicemen should be forewarned.

Avoid any expression of race prejudice. The people draw very little color line. (29)

The American Army was at the time this booklet was issued a segregated institution. One can deduce that the troops for whom this booklet was published were overwhelmingly white, male and at least nominally Christian. They weren't admonished not to "feel" race prejudice, just to avoid expressing it. And they were to do so not because it was right or reflected well on the United States but because having "very little color line" was just another one of those strange Iraqi quirks.

These two points stand out because of the clear line against religious proselytizing and prejudice in the same booklet.

You probably belong to a church at home, and you know how you would feel towards anyone who insulted or desecrated your church. The Moslems feel just the same way, perhaps even more strongly. In fact, their feeling about their religion is pretty much the same as ours toward our religion, although more intense. If anything, we should respect the Moslems the more for the intensity of their devotion.(12)

So, in 1943 the authors of this handbook felt that the ordinary American serviceman was more able to feel fellowship and empathy with Moslems on matters of religion that they were about matters of racial and social equality.

Which tells us just as much about the America of 1943 as it does of the Iraq of the same year.

The Tardis in the library, part one

2011-10-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

I have time machines in my library. They work like magical one-way windows for when I gaze into them I can see and listen to people from times past yet they cannot see or hear me. Some, I think, suspect that people from the future might occasionally look in on them and so they are on what they feel to be their "best" behaviour. It is interesting and informative to see what they consider "best" behaviour." Other people from the past seem either to be totally unaware or totally unconcerned that people from the future might pass through every once and a while.

The other day I pulled out one of these time machines [1] only to find myself gazing at the life of two middle-aged men in London, England in the early 1920s. How different was their life than would be the lives of two similar men today.

First, they (Mr. Beaumont and Mr. Bradley) do no work and yet they are neither poverty stricken nor immensely wealthy. Apparently at that time there was a goodly number of people similarly situated. They may have worked for some time "in the City" but many of them had never worked, would never work and had lived their entire life on the income of investments bequeathed to them by aunts and uncles. [2]

Second, they have servants. At least one of whom 'lives in.' As the story opens they are faced with the disastrous news that their housekeeper, Mrs. Nicholson, is leaving them to get married. Mrs. Nicholson has been the mainstay of their comfort but in addition to her they also employ a gardener and "a girl" who comes in every day.

Third, not only do they do no cooking or cleaning or working they also do no shopping for the gardener grows and picks the vegetables and Mrs. Nicholson orders in the rest of their food as well as their wine and other household supplies.

Fourth, there is no suggestion that the relationship of the two men is sexual or even homosocial. They are just friends who find it convenient to pool their resources in order to have a well-ordered and comfortable home.

Fifth, it is considered not unusual that absent a women (wife or housekeeper) two men are unable to adequately see to the supervision of the servants.

Sixth, that when Mrs. Glover (Mr. Beaumont's sister) arrives she brings her maid with her and the two of them naturally take over the care of the household.

Seventh, the original readers of the story find it amusing but not beyond belief that Mr. Bradley would propose to the widowed Mrs. Glover in order to have a permanent replacement for Mrs. Nicholson.

Finally, two well off men living in the London of that time did not already have electricity in their home. Of course as the story begins they have no need of it since they had human beings to do all the work. Mrs. Nicholson got up before them, lit the fires, warmed the house, shopped almost daily, mended their clothes, supervised the washing of their clothes, planned their meals and cooked their meals. Someone (housekeeper, girl or gardener) weeded for them, dusted for them, made their beds, lit their candles, swept their floors and heated their water. When the men finally decide to get their house "electrified" it is not to make life easier for their servants but rather to save money and increase their comfort by replacing servants with the electrical equipment.

[T]hey had completely made up their minds, and having ascertained that every labour-saving device in stock could be installed in their house in three weeks, they dismissed the entire household with a month's wages instead of a month's warning, and moved across to the admirable hotel, where in comfort, they could superintend the refitting of their home. (68)

The devices were not "labour-saving" in the sense that they made the labour of the servants easier for the servants. The devices were "labour-saving" in the sense that the bachelors would no longer have to hire someone to do the labour.

What the one-way glass showed me was a world in which it was somewhat less "suspect" for men to live together in order to pool their financial aspects than it is today. It also showed me a world in which men value women (be they wives or housekeepers) more for their ability to ensure the men's physical comfort than for anything else. And it showed me a world in which "labour-saving" meant a way to replace someone who worked for a living with a machine.

In other words, less had changed than one might have thought.

[1] "The Hapless Bachelors" in Benson, E. Desirable residences and other stories. Oxford England New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Originally published March 1921 in Pearson's Magazine ↩

[2] I want to wave at them and warn them--this way of life will soon end. Taxation, inflation and the desire of servants to be paid wages large enough to allow them to house and feed a family will soon eat away your comfortable incomes.↩

Understanding the profession of writing

2011-10-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I have been working on reviews of books by two writers, E. F. Benson and Barbara Pym, and it struck me how difficult it is to untangle the writer from the profession of writing. Pym and Benson both wrote for money. That is in no way a criticism of either as a writer it is simply a statement of fact. Bills had to be paid and so they wrote in order to get money to pay the bills. Pym, whose books were initially successful experienced more than a decade during which publishers simply declined to accept her work on the grounds that it was "dated" and "out of style." It was only when literary critics embraced her as a great novelist that she was once again able to publish her books. E. F. Benson had a much longer, less lauded and on some level more successful career as a popular writer. His first (anonymous) publication was in 1888 and his last books were published in 1940.

Pym's enforced hiatus from publication and Benson's prolific career indicate that for a writer to have a successful career they need more than talent. They also need the luck to be good at writing in the style that publishers are looking for. For the writer who wishes to be constantly in print it helps if they, like Benson, have mastered more than one style, more than one genre, have a social network that includes publishers, have entree to the society/world that people want to read about and are good at pitching (or willing to pitch) the focus of their writing at the sweet spot of the buying public.

It is difficult to assess Benson as a writer, especially when one is reviewing the many short stories he wrote. Benson's stories seem to be carefully tailored to suit the particular magazines in which they finally found a home. The writer who is mawkish in one story will be acerbic in another. The writer who is lyrical in one story will be terse in another. Yet there are some things I feel very certain of--that Benson had a keener eye for the self-deceptions of the class to which he was born than many of his contemporaries, that he was a consummate professional for whom writing was craft as well as a profession, that he, unlike many of his class (and many who aspired to become members of that class) believed that servants were human beings with feelings that mattered but that like so many others he found the stories of those human beings not interesting enough to write books about.

I don't know if Pym was unwilling or unable to change her writing to suit the changing desires of publishers. I do know that her books are full of keen insights about the relationships between men and women, the relationships between members of the middle and the working classes, the changing role the Church of England played in the life the ordinary person and the ways in which academics interacted with each other. Perhaps Pym was unwilling to change her voice and views enough to make her palatable to the editors who were turning her down. Perhaps Pym didn't think that the stories she wanted to tell could be told in any other way.

In the end I am left with only the evidence that I can gather from reading what each author wrote. I personally wish that Pym had been able to publish more for I have greatly enjoyed the ones I have read. I wonder if Benson had not had to keep an eye on the desires of the reading public if he would have written more the books and stories I most enjoy--or less.

In the end I am glad that Pym wrote as much as she did and the Benson wrote so much that I enjoy.

The appearence of empiricism

2011-10-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

The article on npr.org Why The Trip Home Seems To Go By Faster has all the superficial appearance of hard science and empiricism. But there is a problem with it. A big problem. One which I suspect exists only in the writing up the information and not with those who are doing the studies the article described.

"Why people who always find the trip back shorter feel that way" doesn't make as good a headline. However it probably would have avoided the plethora of comments that either said "I always find the trip back longer" or "sometimes the trip back feels shorter and sometimes it feels longer."

One of the tricks to not falling for faux-empiricism (or bad science writing) is to look for sentences like this at the beginning of the second paragraph:

People will often feel a return trip took less time than the same outbound journey, even though it didn't.

"Will often" has no quantifiable meaning. If that sentence had read "some people always feel" then the writer could proceed to discuss studies that focus on those some people who always feel. If that sentence had read "people sometimes feel" then the writer could proceed to discuss studies that focused on what made the difference between the times the people felt one way and the times they felt another.

As the article is written the one thing I do know about the study it discusses is that if I really want to know what behaviours or experiences it is premised on I will have to find a copy of the original.

Just another (minor) example of bad science writing -- or rather bad writing about science.

Book Review: Earth Abides

2011-09-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

While I was rearranging some books yesterday my eyes fell on George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. Initially I was struck by the fact that Earth Abides, published in 1949, could be considered a direct ancestor of (among other) the movie Contagion and Stephen King's The Stand. Then I started to wander around my memories of the book (mentally exploring its territory.) After a few moments of reverie a strange sense of "exclusion" from the story came over me. What, I wondered, is standing between me total immersion in the created world of the book?

Further thought led to a hypothesis--one which I who had so long enjoyed the book, found uncomfortable. The only way to check it out, I decided, was to sit down and reread Earth Abides carefully looking for the data that would either support or undermine that hypotheis.

Below are the notes I made while rereading:

Warning: Beyond here there lie spoilers.

Trigger Warning: post-apocalyptic imagery, violence against women, dangerous childbearing conditions, misogyny, implied rape, rape culture

Earth Abides begins, the reader can deduce, several weeks after the outbreak of a disease which is air-born and deadly. Before Ish, who is in an isolated location gather data for his research, realizes that anything has happened most of the population of the United States has already died and civilization as he has known it has already disappeared. The book has always been one of my favourites (being a fan as I am of post-apocalyptic novels) because it is told primarily from the "ordinary person" point of view. We never learn how/where the epidemic started and we are not given glimpses of what decision-makers were doing. The book is a quiet examination/description of what life would be like for a rather ordinary person in those circumstances.

The book has two narrative points of view: that of Isherwood Williams (Ish) and an omniscient narrative voice that gives us limited information about what is going on elsewhere in the world as well as some background information about ecology.[1] Since the word "man" is used frequently in the sense of "humanity" it is possible that some person mentioned in the text was actually in the mind's eye of the author a woman however the first individual that we can be certain is a woman is not mentioned until page 18 [2]

In Sacramento, a crazed woman had opened the cages of a circus menagerie for fear that the animals might starve to death, and been mauled by a lioness (18-19)

Given the gendered allocation of jobs at the time the book was published it is reasonable to assume that the nurses mentioned later on page 19 were also (or at least primarily) women. We read of dead men. We read of a man hung from the a telephone pole with a poster announcing "Looter." We do not read about women.

The reader is given an insight into what Ish (and the author) sees as the most salient/worthwhile qualities of men and women when Ish finds a survivor, a man who has already nearly drunk himself to death and thinks,

The survivor might have been a beautiful girl, or a fine intelligent man, but it was only this drunkard, too far gone for any help. (32)

Later, driving around the streets across the bay from San Francisco, Ish finally comes across a living woman. She is in the company of a flamboyantly dressed (and Ish soon realizes, armed) man who makes it clear that woman "belongs" to him sexually.

He (Ish) wondered what the woman could have been in the old life. Now she looker merely like a well-to-do prostitute. (34)

The man speaks but the women does not. Neither does the teen-age girl who Ish later glimpses as she flees the sight of him. Of the few fellow survivors he meets, only the men speak to him.

Ish later embarks on a trip across what was once the United States. On page 60 he meets a family (that is, a man, woman and boy who have found each other in the aftermath of the epidemic) of, as the book puts it "Negros." Ish speaks to them but the reader learns only of the information he gleans rather than "hearing" any of their actual words. The woman, Ish notices, is pregnant.

Ish has driven across the continent and arrived in New York City before the reader "hears" the words of a woman:

"Call me Ann," she said. "And have a drink!--Warm martinis, that's all I can offer you! Not a scrap of ice in New York City" (72)

Ish meets few people for quite a while after this and they are described only in the most general of terms. Most of them are suffering from what we would diagnose today as post traumatic stress disorder. There are few details about these encounters. Ish seems emotionally flat and unreactive--which would makes sense given what has happened to the world he knows. The only being with whom he has opened up and formed an emotional bond is a dog who adopted him.This relative flatness of affect continues until on page 98 Ish hears a women say (of his dog) "That's a beautiful dog!" and he has met Em (Emma) the woman with whom he will settle down and have children.

Now, I understand why a male writer would write a book with a male protagonist but Stewart's skill as a writer makes it easier to miss some key and disturbing aspects of the story. Yes, as many modern day reviewers point out there is much implicit and a fair amount of explicit racism in the book. Yes, as many modern day reviewers point out there is both implicit and explicit classism in the book. Yes, as many modern day reviewers point out there is much implicit and explicit sexism in the book. However, in the opinion of this reviewer, the attitude toward women is actually far more disturbing than mere sexism and moves outside the boundary of misogyny to another, rather terrifying, territory. On rereading the book I am not really sure that women in this book are portrayed as actual human beings.

Early on in the story, long before Ish meets Em, he meets and, as he sometimes characterizes it, is seduced by a dog who he later names Princess. His interactions with Princess play a large part in him handling the immense psychological stresses of the first weeks and months after the epidemic kills off most of humanity. Princess accompanies him on his trek across the United States (for he does not really fully internalize the fall of the civilization until he see that New York City is now an almost empty shell abandoned by all by a handful of survivors.) Princess is instrumental in Ish's meeting with Em and the words he hears her speak, "That's a beautiful dog!" are about Princess.

Em and Ish may have sex the first night they meet but their interactions in this post-apocalyptic work fit into the gender norms of the decade after the Second World War. Em feeds Ish, they have sex (in the discrete way characters do in books written in the 1940s), she makes him breakfast and then:

They moved back, later that day, to the house on San Lupo Drive, chiefly because he seemed to have more possessions--books especially, than she did. It was trouble to move to the books than to move the books to them.(103)

Em changes the way in which she lives to fit into Ish's life. Ish continues to live in the home he was living in before he met her. He continues to entertain himself the way he did before he met her. Everything is the same with a few exceptions: now he has someone to cook his meals and share his bed. The reader learns that Em had been married and the mother of two "small children." Presumably husband and children died in the epidemic but the reader is left to infer that rather than being told. We never learn the name or even gender of either of the children. Em functions as a life force, a source of strength and a touchstone for Ish. He fears that she will die in childbirth and she reassures. The birth takes places "off screen" as one chapter ends with her pregnant and the next section begins some time after the birth. The reader is not told if the birth was easy or hard, only that the baby is healthy and Em is once again pregnant. Em and Ish have settled down to life in the remains of civilization. Ish reads novels and philosophy in the evening and Em knits.

A group of survivors grows up around Ish and Em until there are four adult women. All of them give birth at least once. We read no details about their pregnancies or their labour:

The Year 6 was an eventful one. During its course all four of the women bore children--even Maurine, who had seemed too old. There was, however--now that Em had led the way--a strong drive toward the having of many children. Each of the adults had for a time lived alone, had experienced what they now called the Great Loneliness, and the strange dread that went with it. Even now their little group was only a tiny candle against the pressure of the surrounding darkness. Each new-born baby seemed to give the uncertain flame a stronger hold and to push the darkness of annihilation back a little. (128)

And the cynic in this reader asks herself, 'what choice did any of these women have?' As one reads on one realizes that at no time does a lone woman join this group of survivors. Lone men are not encouraged to stay because of fears of sexual rivalry but since the Tribe (as they call themselvs) already have accepted polygamy the same fears would not bar a lone woman from joining up with them. Each man who joins brings at least one woman with him. One realizes that in this world there are no lone women. Women "belong" to men. Either the woman is lucky and belongs to a man who is "nice" to her or she unlucky. We she no women who are not part of group headed by a man. Since there is no birth control it seems strange to speak of there being "a strong drive towards the having of many children." It seems more likely that there is a strong drive (at least among the men) for having sex. Children are simply one of the results of that drive.

Though Ish thinks about the physical threats of pregnancy and childbirth before having sex with Em for the first time those fears are waived off by Em and seldom returned to. Em apparently has her children without trouble as do the other women. Again the cynic in me asks, what are the chances that the first 10 births after the "Great Disaster" would be trouble free? What are the odds that at least one of those women had a horrible labour? What are the odds that none of the children would have died? Indeed we read that it is not until "Year 11" that, for the first time, a child died a birth. The reader is given no details at all about that death. Was the labour long? Did the mother die of exhaustion? Did she hemorrhage? We read: "They thought that perhaps this death was caused from Molly's being old now. (134)" but one doubts that the "they" in that sentence would have been the women who held Molly's hand and wiped the sweat from her as she laboured.

Pregnancy and labour take place off stage just as does most of the other work done by women. Who makes the meals? Who washes the clothes? Who supervises the children? Who mends the clothes? All of this is the work of women. Em is praised often by Ish as the bearer of courage but her life, except for the moments when Ish needs her, takes place offstage and unconsidered. We know more the internal life of Princess (who is always running off after imaginary rabbits) than we do of Em. And, although the death of that child was first that had taken place at childbirth it was apparently not in the running when they came to name the year (something they did every year.)

When it came to naming the year, however, there was a dispute between the old and young. The older ones thought that it should be called the Year when Princess Died. . . . She had been ailing, an old dog, for some time. No one knew just how ancient she was, because she might have been anywhere for one year to three or four when first she picked up Ish. She had remained the same--always the princess, expecting the best of treatment, always unreliable, always ready to disappear on the trail of an imaginary rabbit just when you wanted her. But for all you might say against her, she had shown a very real character, and the older people could remember the time when she seemed very important along San Lupo Drive, almost another person.

By now there were dozens of dogs around. Nearly all of them must be children or grandchildren or great-grand-children of Princess. . .But to the children Princess had been an old and not very interesting dog of uncertain temper.. . . (134)

If Princess is "almost another person" to Ish--if Princess was "a very real character"--what is Em to Ish? The love of his life? The person who saved him from the post epidemic despair?

When Ish looked at Em, so many feelings boiled up within him that he knew any judgment he might try to make of her would be of no value. She, alone, had made the first decision to have a child. She had kept her courage and confidence during the Terrible Year. She it was to whom they all turned in time of trouble. Some strong power lodged within her, to affirm and never to deny. Without her they might all have been as nothing. Yet her power lay deep in the springs of action; in a particular situation, though she might inspire courage and confidence in others, she seldom herself supplied an idea. Ish knew that he would always turn to her and that she was greater than he, but he also knew that she would not be of help in planning toward the future. (141-142)

Em is a life force. And life forces don't have thoughts. They barely have feelings. Their "power," such as it is, is to support others. And when, now old and many times a grandmother, Em dies:

"Oh, Mother of Nation!" he thought. "Her sons shall praise, and her daughters call her blessed!" (283)

But we do not read of his grief, or her funeral, nor does he strive to name that year "The year Em died."

Ish survives Em, an old man even by the standards of longevity before the Great Disaster. He is encouraged to marry a young woman who had "no man to marry her."

He felt no love, but he took her. She comforted him in the long nights, for he was still a man in his strength. She bore him children, though the children seemed always a little strange to him--scarcely his, because they were not also Em's.(284)

And my flesh crawls at the idea of a young woman being "taken" by this old man. Even had she wanted to be a wife there was no reason for her to have to turn to an old man for among The Tribe other men had been known to take more than one wife. What was it like for her? Did she feel honoured to be taken by one of the few remaining "Old Ones" or had she secretly been horrified at her fate? Was she content to be the wife of a living, if old, paunchy and forgetful god?

Now no more children were born to Ish's young wife. Then one day she came to him with a younger man, and the two asked, respectfully, that Ish should give her to that one. (285)

We never learn the wife's name.

Ish, who is prone throughout the book to philosophizing and takes great pride and pleasure in marking the ways in which the old world has changed and adapted after the Great Disaster, spends no time on thinking of how things have changed for women. He is given a woman and then gives her to another man and yet he never pauses for a moment to ponder about this. He notices that this next generation cannot read but does not notice that the women of that generation have been reduced to property that is taken by men and given to other men.

The book ends as Ish's life comes to an end. He looks at the hills about him and notices that the hills that are shaped like a woman's breasts. He looks at the young men who have carried him away from the fire consuming the home that he has lived in for decades and he takes comfort in remembering the fourth verse of Ecclesiastes "Men go and come, but earth abides."

Yes, men come and go. Women, save as breasts and the promise of the earth's fecundity, have no part of the comforting vision of the earth abiding.

I still think that Earth Abides deserves a place as one of the most important and influential pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction written in the last century. I mourn that I will never again be able to read this book without the chill sense that in Stewart's future there would be no room for my mind, my knowledge, my skills, my insight or my ingenuity. In Stewart's world my only value would be my womb and my willingness to support the man who "took" me.

Rating: A uncomfortable 4-1/2 stars

[1] This narrative voice comes across as very similar to that in the movie Thread, similarly reporting information which may have devastating implication in a low-key scientific way.

[2] Stewart, George. Earth abides. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976.

And that's when the book lost me

2011-09-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

There are books (movies, tv shows) that leave one with a vague sense of disquiet. You know that they "lost" you at some point but you cannot quite put your finger on it. There are others that have a least one moment that one can point at and say 'there, there it lost me. I was no longer willing to willfully suspend my disbelief in the extraordinary things because the author has demonstrated that they don't even grasp the ordinary ones'

I had one of these moments in Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun

"Well...what does he want?"

"I don't know!" wailed Perry. "Something called 'Smarties' and 'Yorkies.' Drugs, I expect."

"No, Miles. It's British candy. Smarties are like M&Ms, and a Yorkie is a chocolate bar." Being a Canadian gave Diefenbaker an occasional cultural advantage over his more insular American colleagues.(19) [1]

Bimbos is a murder mystery set at a science fiction and fantasy convention. People encouraged me to read it because I was a fan of science fiction, science fantasy and murder mysteries. What could be better? And part of the fun, I was told, was figuring out all the inside jokes. What best selling author was this character a send up of and which former best selling author was being made fun of in that scene.

One of the most common descriptions of the book was "well observed" and everyone assured me that McCrumb was making jokes and constructing caricatures from the inside looking out not the outside looking in.

And then I read page 19. And after that page I could never quite trust the author again. For you see, I am a Canadian. I grew up seeing Smarties at every grocery checkout counter. I grew up seeing Smarties at every convenience store. I grew up getting Smarties on Hallowe'en. If I was asked if Smarties were a drug I would never, ever think to say that they were a British candy. I might say that they are candy covered chocolates that are vastly superior to M&Ms. I would not call them British.

So, if I can't trust McCrumb to get a detail like that right--why should I trust her about things I know less about that which candies are available in the convenience stores of Canada.

The rest of the book may be witty and full of inside jokes but I will never know. It lost me on page 19.

[1] McCrumb, Sharyn (2002). Bimbos of the Death Sun Rosetta Books

A cafetaria law-enforcer?

2011-09-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

One of the charges that Catholics have been known to throw at each other is the epithet "cafeteria Catholic" by which they mean "you pick and choose those aspects of Catholicism that suit you."

Well, apparently in New York there are public officials who consider it okay to be a cafeteria legal officials. They feel quite comfortable deciding which laws and regulations they will enforce/abide by and which they will not. So, the clerk whose actions are described in N.Y. town clerk: I won't sign gay wedding licensefeels that since it violates her religious principles for two men (or women) to marry each other she is free to "be the law" in her town. On this basis she feels free not to issue them a license for which they legally eligible.

What if she refused to issue license for people who are divorced? There a lots of Americans who belong to a church that does not allow divorce and remarriage after divorce. Would there be question as to how long a clerk who refused to issues licenses to people who had been divorced would keep their job?

Book Review: Jane and Prudence

2011-09-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym (1953)

Sometimes when I finish a book I feel that there is nothing much to say beyond “good,” “bad,” “the type of thing I think you would like”, or “how did this ever get published?”

Sometimes when I finish a book I feel that any book review that did it justice would have to be at least as long as the original book.

Jane and Prudence falls into that second category of book.

So, to begin by getting some of the business done before moving on to the meat of the review.

This is an excellent book. I feel that on technical points the writing itself falls short of the standard set by Pym in Excellent Women but it surpasses that book in terms of the nuanced exploration of character and the entwined exploration of the themes of class and religion in England in the 1950s and class, gender and food rationing in England in the 1950s.

Warning the first: For those who have yet to read Excellent Women -- one scene in this book containers spoilers about characters in that book.

Warning the second: This is one of those books which should be read without first reading the publisher’s description. For example, that of the Chivers Press edition of the book contains no information that cannot be gleaned without in the first few minutes of reading and mischaracterizes both the major characters, their interactions and what happens to each of them over the course of the story.

Jane and Prudence is set in the post WWII England when much of life still revolves around the problems and irritations that arose from the rationing of food. Rationing began January 8 1940 and continued even after the end of the war. Gradually, over the years, restrictions were dropped on various items such as clothes, chocolates, flour and soap but some items, particularly meat, were still rationed until July 4, 1954. These forced food shortages had the unintended consequence of making people much more consciously aware of how class, gender and social networks impacted who had access to which items.

The importance of meat is signaled early in the story, “people in these days do rather tend to worship meat for its own sake,’ said Jane, as they sat down to supper. ‘When people go abroad for a holiday they seem to bring back with them such a memory of meat.’” [1] (22)

Men, we learn as we read, can not be expected to endure the same dietary hardships as the women around them. For example, Jane and her husband Nicholas are having a meal at a local tea shop.

at last Mrs. Crampton emerged from behind the velvet curtain carrying two plates on a tray. She put in front of Jane a plate containing an egg, a rasher of bacon and some fried potatoes cut in fancy shapes, and in front of Nicholas a plate with two eggs and rather more potatoes.Nicholas exclaimed with pleasure.

‘Oh, a man needs eggs! said Mrs. Crampton, also looking pleased

This insistence on a man’s needs amused Jane. Men needed meat and eggs--well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did? Perhaps Mrs. Crampton’s widowhood had something to do with it; possibly she made up for having no man to feed at home by ministering to the needs of those who frequented her café.

Nicholas accepted his two eggs and bacon and the implication that his needs were more important than his wife’s with a certain amount of complacency, Jane thought. But then as a clergyman he had had to get used to accepting flattery and gifts gracefully.. (p. 65)

But, the reader soon learns, Nicholas wasn't getting extra meat just because he was a clergyman:

Mrs. Crampton now returned and set down before Mr. Oliver a plate laden with roast chicken and all the proper accompaniments. He accepted it with quite as much complacency as Nicholas had accepted his eggs and bacon and began to eat.

Jane turned away, to save his embarrassment. Man needs bird, she thought. Just the very best, that is what man needs. (67)

Jane isn't the only woman who is consciously (and sardonically) aware that society seemed to feel that it was vitally important that men have their meat:

‘Mr. Driver! Mr. Driver!’ Mrs. Arkright came out on to the lawn calling. ‘Your steak’s ready!”

‘Ah, my steak.’ Fabian smiled. ‘You will excuse me, Miss Morrow?’

‘Of course. I should’t like to keep you from your steak. A man needs meat, as Mrs. Crampton and Mrs. Mayhew are always saying.’ She waved her hand in dismissal.

Fabian hurried away, conscious of his need for meat and of the faintly derisive tone of Miss Morrow’s remark, as if there were something comic about a man needing meat. (73, 74)

Pym is also clear-eyed and politely but firmly aware of the class presumptions that underline the religious habits of the British gentry.

One may wonder when Pym allows the reader into the shallow and self-centered “musings” of Fabian Driver if that sharp eye is trained only a particular type of person--someone who is facile and in the end desires social approval more than the approval of God:

He walked slowly down the main street, past the collection of old and new buildings that lined it. The Parish Church and the vicarage were at the other end of the village. Here he came to the large Methodist Chapel, but of course one couldn’t go there; none of the people one knew went to chapel, unless out of a kind of amused curiosity. Even if truth were to be found there. A little further on, though, as was fitting, on the opposite side of the road, was the little tin hut which served as a place of worship for the Roman Catholics. Fabian knew Father Kinsella, a good-looking Irishman, who often came into the bar of the Golden Lion for a drink. He had even though of going to his church once or twice, but somehow it had never come to anything. The makeshift character of the building, the certain discomfort that he would find within, the plaster images in execrable taste, the simplicity of Father Kinsella’s sermons intended only for a congregation of Irish labourers and servant-girls--all these kept him away. The glamour of Rome was obviously not there.(70, 71)

Yet Pym later reveals not dissimilar thoughts in the mind of one of the more sympathetic characters, the sophisticated and educated Prudence

But then she imagined herself sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair after a day’s work, listening to a lecture by a raw Irish peasant that was phrased for people less intelligent than herself. Better, surely, to go along Farm Street and be instructed by a calm pale Jesuit who would know the answers to all one’s doubts. Then, in the street where she did her shopping there was the Chapel, with a notice outside which said: ALL WELCOME. The minister, the Rev. Bernard Tabb, had the letters B.D.; B.Sc. after his name. The fact that he was a Bachelor of Science might give particular authority to his sermons, Prudence always felt; he might quite possibly know all the answers, grapple boldly with doubt and overcome it because he knew the best and worst of both worlds. He might even tackle evolution and the atomic bomb and make sense of it all. But of course, she thought, echoing Fabian’s sentiments as he walked in the village one just couldn’t go to Chapel; one just didn’t. Not even to those exotic religious meetings advertised on back of the New Statesman, which always seemed to take place in Bayswater.(284,285)

Reading Pym makes this reader wonder if the petty and long lasting nature of the privations after the Second World War played a major role in breaking down (some) of the class structure and gender relations in England. People learned new skills during the war and they called on their bravery to withstand the dangers and the rigours of that time. After the war people were expected to return to their old jobs and their old ways of life as if they had not learned or experienced anything. Women who had held down jobs were expected to get married and settle done. But there weren't enough men around to marry even if the women wanted to do so. And the pettiness of the privations without actual physical danger to ameliorate their sting made people edgy and more likely to be critical and cynical.

The peace, even more than the war, was undermining in the old England much more than threats from foreign country. Men had gone off to fight a war to preserve the England in which they had grown up leaving behind women who were called to do things they never would have done in that old England. England was not conquered but nonetheless the old England was no longer there to return to and many of the women, if not the men, were questioning if they wanted to go back to the way things were before:

Rating: 5 stars

[1] All quotations are from Pym, Barbara (1986:1953) Jane and Prudence. Bath, UK: Chivers Press

Book Review: The girl with the dragon tattoo

2011-09-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

TRIGGER WARNING: Misogyny, domestic violence, torture, rape culture

The girl with the dragon tattoo by Steig Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland

Something niggles.

I finished the book in less that 24 hours in two sittings (I don't 'pull' all nighters any longer) so I suppose the first thing to say is that it is a page turner. Okay, it is a slow starting page turner but one which, after it finally does get up a head of steam, kept me reading nonstop until I finished it.

So on that level I certainly understand why the book became an international best seller. I get why the movie rights were snapped up.

But something still niggles.

I finished the book in a matter of hours while there are other books I have struggled with for days (and in the case of the one I am wrestling with right now, months.) But I am not sure how to rate the book. I am not sure what I would say to someone who asked me if I would recommend it.

The writing itself is competent although not great. However since I was reading it in English I cannot really speak to the writing style of the author can I? All one needs to do is read the same book translated by different individuals to know how much style can be created, changed and obscured by translators.

But something still niggles.

Finally, I realize what it is. Yes, the author was outraged at violence against women but by presenting so much of the violence as outsized and horrific he was undermining his message.

Few of us feel sympathy or empathy with serial murders. Few of use feel sympathy or empathy with sexual sadists and torturers. But that is not what most of the violence that women endure looks like.

Most of the violence and abuse that women suffer is banal.[1] Yes it sometimes escalates to a level of abuse that the next door neighbours and the police can recognize as unacceptable. But most of the time the soul destroying violence and abuse that women suffer is not the stuff that makes for best sellers.

Most rapists don't indulge in the type of showy behaviour that if witnessed by police ensure that the victim is never doubted or questioned. Most of the men who grope women, or make threatening and demeaning comments, go home to normal looking families and normal looking homes.

I don't need a man to tell me that torturing people in dungeons is wrong. I don't need a man to tell me that raping your daughter is wrong. I don't need a man to tell me that murdering people in slow and excruciating ways is wrong.

I don't need a man to defend women by writing books full of graphic descriptions of the mistreatment and torture of women to demonstrate that other men shouldn't do such things.

I don't want to feel that the person sitting in the train station reading the best-seller about how bad it is to hurt women is having their minds eye filled of material that otherwise they could only find in torture porn magazines.

So now instead of a niggle at the back of my mind I have a question. Doesn't a book like this help the guy down the street to feel he isn't doing anything really wrong if he only slaps his wife and if he only verbally abuses his children?

[1] Not, of course, to the person on whom it is inflicted. But it isn't telegenic and it isn't material for an international best-seller. It just destroys the minds, souls and often the bodies of those who endure it.

Books that just didn't work for me: Red Son

2011-09-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Red Son is one of those books which I very much wanted to like and yet somehow liking it eluded me.

The basic conceit of the graphic novel (what would have happened had Superman's spacecraft landed in the Soviet Union rather than the United States) seemed to be a perfect jump off point for a book that would at the very least amuse me. Instead I found myself strangely excluded/alienated by the book. After reading it for the first time I set it aside and returned to it again yesterday only to find it less interesting and more excluding than on my first attempt.

I think the problem was that I was looking for a book that grappled with the unexamined nature of Superman's support for "American values" by showing what we would think about someone of Superman's powers and nature if they had just as unquestioningly supported a different set of values. I was looking for a book that made its readers consider just how examined their own values were and just how examined their loyalties were.

Given the number/range of people who suggested that I might enjoy/appreciate Red Son I will assume that I didn't bounce of it simply because it isn't a well written/well drawn graphic novel. I am tentatively putting it into the list of "things which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't approached them with a misunderstanding as to which genre they belonged in.

Here's a thought about the question of Obama's birth certificate

2011-09-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

Who cares?

Yes, I know that the people who are trying to prove that Obama has falsified his birth certificate are "looking for a loophole" that allows them to get rid of him as President. I understand the short-term payoff (let's not take a chance this time on elections and impeachment by making him ineligible for office) but there is an underlying presumption/assumption being made by those on both sides of the argument.

It matters to them if someone is a "naturally born" American. On some level they don't feel that someone who has merely become a naturalized citizen is truly an American.[1]

There are many other countries where this whole line of thought seems at best silly. One could make an argument that someone who had only recently become a citizen of a country might be less likely to truly understand the hopes, dreams and needs of the its citizens--but that has more to do with the length of time one has lived in the country and the degree to which one's lifestyle had distanced one from the lives of most people than with actual citizenship.

It may not be unrelated that it was in the United States that I first heard people describe themselves as "cradle Catholics" to defend their opinions about some aspect of Catholicism.

In both cases it is just as likely that a new citizen/communicant would be more aware of the technical details than would someone who had never had to "work for" or "earn" membership.

So, just to throw a thought out there, next time someone is talking about amending the Constitution how about suggesting that they change Article 2--Section 1:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

to

No person except a Citizen of the United States shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

[1] Yes, I know that there was a brief flurry of discussions about a Constitutional Amendment when Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered a successful Republican governor. However an amazing number of Republicans I talked to felt that it would be just wrong to have a naturalized citizen as President. Democrats who were otherwise supports of Jennifer Granholm seemed similarly conflicted. [2]

[2] My how quickly things change in politics. Yes, there was indeed a time when it seemed that only Article 2-Section 1 stood in the way of either Governor making a serious run for their party's Presidential nomination.

[Fill in the blank] is a really bad detective, part two

2011-09-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'm curled up reading one of the books I got at the recent library sale. Normally I approach any detective story only after putting my disbelief on the back burner but when one is reading a book published in the last twenty-five years by an author best known for writing "friendly hard-boiled-ish" stories rather than American cozies one doesn't expected that crucial suspension to be challenged within the first few pages and destroyed beyond repair before finishing the second chapter.

On the very first page of Sue Grafton's "E" is for Evidence[1] we learn that Kinsey Millhone (the private detective whose point-of-view the reader shares) has just found out that five thousand dollars had been deposited into her bank account by someone unknown to her. Either it is an innocent error or someone wants to make it look as if she has deposited the money herself.

I immediately stop reading and check the copyright page to find out when the book was originally published. 1988. 'Hmmmmm,' I think, 'I wonder what five thousand 1988 American dollars would be worth today.' A few seconds later I have found an inflation chart. It would cost you almost 10,000 dollars today to purchase what 5,000 dollars would have bought back then. That is far more money than most people then would have made for several months work. The deposit was made through a night-deposit slot and almost no one used those or deposited that much money at one time except businesses. And businesses are unlikely to make a cash deposit both that large and a round number.

At this point I am ready for Millhone to call the police (to report "found" money and a possible attempt at money laundering) and the insurance company for which she is currently doing work investigating possible insurance fraud. Because a cash deposit that large looks to me (as it should to her) like either an attempt to bribe her or and attempt to make it look as if she has taken a bribe.

The willing suspension of my disbelief necessary to read the book is already being stretched. I have known people whose jobs were unmasking fraud and they are routinely suspicious of everything. I have trouble believing that Millhone merely phones the bank to report the error and then goes back to writing up a report to her insurance company/client of her current investigation into possible insurance fraud.

'Chill out,' I tell myself, 'you have the advantage on her. You know that this is important because it is the first chapter of a murder mystery. You have that advantage over Millhone.'

'She supposed to be a private investigator,' myself grumbles back, 'she supposed to notice things like that."

I persuade myself to read further.

Back in the pages of the book, Millhone is thinking about the events that occurred between being assigned this case of possible insurance fraud and the present. A company has filed an insurance claim after a fire at one of their warehouses. Millhone has been sent out to investigate. The company president says, after meeting her, I hope you are not going to give me any static over that. Believe me, I'm not asking for anything I'm not entitled to.(15. Millhone tells the reader:

I made a noncommittal murmur or some sort, hopinp to conceal the fact that I'd gone on "fraud alert." Every insurance piker I'd ever met said just that, right down to the pious little toss of the head. (15)

A mere four pages later Millhone leaves her handbag unattended in the office of the person who had set off her "fraud alert" while she is taken to the actual site of the fire. Yes, the man whose office it was disappeared from the scene after answering a telephone call and yes, she did remove her wallet and bring it with her. But she left her handbag behind. In one of the offices of the business she had been hired to investigate.

At this point myself is finding it difficult not to toss the book aside. Either Millhone is a bad detective or the author is 'getting things set up' by having her protagonist do something no moderately adequate fraud investigator would do. Either way, I find it difficult to care what happens for the rest of the book. And it is only page 19.

[1] Grafton, Sue. E" is for evidence : a Kinsey Millhone mystery. New York: Holt, 1988.↩

Book Review: The Virgin Heiresses (aka The Dragon's Teeth)

2011-09-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Virgin Heiresses (aka The Dragon's Teeth) by Ellery Queen (1939)

Two phrases came to mind when I finally put down this book: "backdoor pilot" and "eight deadly words."

Why did I find the first phrase applicable? According to Wikipedia: A backdoor pilot is defined by Variety as a "pilot episode filmed as a standalone movie so it can be broadcast if not picked up as a series".It is distinguished from a simple pilot in that it has a dual purpose. It has an inherent commercial value of its own while also being "proof of concept for the show, that's made to see if the series is worth bankrolling". This definition also includes episodes of one show introducing a spin-off.

One of the main characters in this book is Beau Rummell, the son of one of Inspector Queen's old colleagues who opens a detective agency with Ellery Queen. Much of the book is seen either seen through the eyes of Rummell or centers around him and his interactions with other characters. Rummell appeared in none of the books published previous to this one and continues to not appear in the books published afterwards. It feels as if the authors were either trying out a new character or a new style of writing. In the opinion of this reader they do neither well.

Which brings us to the second phrase, Dorothy Heydt's eight deadly words "I don't care what happens to these people." The characters failed to interest me enough to care whether they lived or died or were railroaded for committing murder. Ellery Queen himself seemed to have been replaced by an even more bloodless pod-person version of himself and the rest of characters rarely rose above being (very thin) cardboard cut-outs being moved around rather lackadaisically by authors who did not themselves really care what happened to most of them.

The measure of how boring, uninvolving and uninteresting this book was is that I didn't even have the heart to catalogue the racism, sexism, classism and essentialism of the story and characters.

Rating: 0 stars