“A Delicate Truth”

It is not axiomatic, that the ideal Vorleser of a work  should be its author.  (One would not wish to sit through a performance of Heart of Darkness, or A Brief History of Time, under those terms.)   But  David Cornwall turns out to be a perfect interpreter of John Le Carré, in a recent audiobook recording.

Three of the secondary characters have a distinct local accent:  Glaswegian, Welsh, and Irish.  His rendition of these  fixes in pleasure and memory, what are in any event well-sculpted personalities.  The Welshman, who shows up one day in a remote village, rickety caravan in tow, and with a mysterious past (and demons lying inside), is a reprise of the Jim Prideaux character, who so memorably opens Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Two of the central characters -- professional diplomats -- have professionally and personally  rather flat affect.  (Again, cf. TTSS's Smiley.)The author is sufficiently confident about his own work, to let that happen, without worrying that we’ll be bored.

The story-arc hangs together nicely, moreso than in most of the thrillers we have waded through.
The novel (published 2013) is quite in tune with the times, in selecting, as theme, the beating-up on contractors in the defense/intel field.

Footnote:  The title of the book is as smarmy as that of  An Inconvenient Truth.   But it is a sight better title than Our Kind of Traitor , which we critiqued here.   One wishes to believe that neither stemmed from the author, but were foisted upon the novels by some publisher's underling (chained  drooling  in the basement, and let loose only for such functions) who normally has the last word in such marketing-related decisions.

The Thriller Literature (expanded)

From time to time (not too often nowadays), I am seized by a hankering for a whodunit, or (in a different mood) a thriller.   Such a yen is as elemental and sensuous as that for a milkshake or hamburger.  Yet while the latter are a snap to satisfy, the only check being a rather abstract concern about cholesterol and expanding waistlines,  it has become increasingly difficult even to half-satisfy the craving for thrillers or mysteries.  We must sadly conclude that the chefs and confectioners  have done their work better than have the authors.

Time was, in the 1950’s, myself a lad of eight and nine, such satisfaction could as readily be had as that of a hamburger -- both being limited only by my own exiguous financial resources, the principle income to which was provided by a weekly allowance, first of a nickle, later of ten cents.   This happy circumstance, which has proven unreproducible in later life, resulted from the perfect intersection between my uncomplicated ladly desires, and the workmanlike industry of the team of anonymous ghostscribblers at the Stratemeyer Bookbarn, who regularly churned out the Hardy Boys.

Eheu!  ubi sunt?

[Footnote:   Now even those simple pleasures, while of course subjectively unrecapturable,  cannot easily be objectively reviewed, since the whole series was bowdlerized, dumbed-down, and politically corrected, beginning just around the time I stopped reading them.]

Herewith, somewhat in the forlorn spirit of A Guide to Fine Dining in Oshkosh, or The Antiquities Museums of Gary, Indiana,  our attempts to provide anyhow a bit of reflection and guidance.

*

Commercial Break

A private detective  confronts the uncanny;

an ecclesiastical mystery:

Murphy Calls In a Specialist

[Kindle] [Nook]

*

A Superior Thriller

[Well, at least, that was the title I started with, as I began reading Michael Connelly’s Chasing the Dime.  It flags midway;  towards the end, I just wanted it to wrap it up and get it over with -- the fewer arbitrary last-minute plot-twists  the better.]

The background to Connelly’s thriller is highly promising:  hi-tech industrial espionage, such as has been brilliantly depicted in the movie “Duplicity”, and the thriller Paranoia, by Joseph Finder, and (even better) Neil Stephenson’s unclassifiable Cryptonomicon.  And the immediate premise, the McGuffin as it were, is likewise delightful:  A sciency guy, trying to make a killing in business, having moved into a bare apartment after his divorce, and with (accordingly) a new landline, immediately gets a host of calls for a mysterious “Lilly”;  the callers never leave their names, but hang up.   Apparently he was assigned a discontinued number previously used by a high-priced call-girl.  Instead of simply asking the phone company for a new number stat, he is intrigued, and is drawn in deeper, and deeper, beyond his depth …

There are some excellent high-tech vignettes early on (I once worked in that milieu, and can testify), but they peter out.   The real disappointment, though, is that the author, instead of trusting his instincts (for some voice within  was surely calling to him here) and allowing his protagonist to pursue his ananke unfettered, trumps up some frigging dimestore-psychology miniseries sentimental backstory, “explaining” why the protagonist  reacted as he did.   He thus progressively abandons any engagement with the unconscious drives that impel us, with results that are ultimately banal.

To be fair … The prose is literate, intermittently humorous; and there is just one Chandleresque fragment:

She had  looped over her shoulder  a purse that looked big enough to hold a pack of cigarettes  but not the matches.

~

C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes that that of Orpheus  retains its power to spellbind, even in a bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels, become as dust  upon such summary.

We venture now  upon that territory  where words fail …  We have ourselves depicted the obsessive pursuit of das Ewig-Weibliche, in the story  “Lost and Found”, reprinted in the collection I Don’t Do Divorce Cases (available here).

~

Blogspot for detective fiction:

http://discretionassured.blogspot.com/

~

[Update, 29 October 2013]   People keep viewing this post, even though it doesn’t really say anything interesting.  So at least I’ll say something more along these lines, even though it won’t be especially interesting either.

Exhibit B:  The King of Torts, by John Grisham (2003).

The couple of times I’ve tried to read a Grisham book, the writing was so bad -- simply at the paragraph level -- that I had to toss it aside.   But this one begins really well.   Some tasty phrasing (“He stutter-stepped forward, [ankle-]chains rattling.”), and surprisingly likeable characters, with fine writerly observation of the family dynamics in the country-club scene.  The ostensible plot premise is ridiculous, but I figured it was just a ruse -- the first layer of the onion, which would be peeled, Spanish-Prisoner-fashion, until we reached the center and either found the key or (post-modern fashion) found it hollow.

The initial premise, which sets the action going, is perfectly adequate for genre fiction:  A company has been testing an experimental drug to treat addiction , which alas turns some of its users temporarily into homicidal maniacs.   Testing is discontinued and the drug is never marketed.   Fair enough so far.   Only now the novelist adds:  In addition to the usual sort of testing in faraway hapless third-world countries, some testing went on right in Washington , on hardcore addicts-- but in such secrecy that there could not be, without inside information and enormous investigative effort, any way of proving this.  And, the small handful of actual murderers having either died or recovered from their drug-induced homicidal mania, and the victims being all of them the usual lowlifes, the books have been closed on these cases, as being just the sort of thing that goes on all the time among the marginal population in D.C.  --  Okay, a bit of a stretch, but we are happy to pay out thus much rope to the author, and see where he will run with it.

But then, Grisham goes off on an absurd tangent:   A shady character contacts a burnt-out no-rep Public Defender, and offers him wealth beyond the dreams of avarice if he will simply … Well, not so simply, because it makes no sense, neither in Realityland nor in fiction.

The P.D. is supposed to go somehow snuffle-out the ‘families’, the ‘bereaved’, of the late lowlifes;  whom-all, given their life-styles, were not exactly close.

Next, he is supposed to REVEAL THE WHOLE DASTARDLY PLOT;  and offer to pay them off, with millions.

Now, by intra-novelistic hypothesis, the dark facts were a priori  unlikely to surface;  whereas this ‘strategy’ is playing with dynamite. 

OK so, we who have been schooled on David Mamet and other artisans of the scheme-within-a-scheme, will already have surmised …

-- No -- Cut;  life is too short;  not even worth dissecting to criticize.

At the point at which I bailed out,  the novel threatened to become a Tendenz-roman -- an anti-tort tract:

“That’s outrageous!”

No, Clay, that’s mass tort litigation at its finest.  That’s how the system works these days.”

Now, abuses of tort law are indeed worth fighting and even satirizing;  but fiction is not an especially effective vehicle, especially if you start out with a plot that seems to take place on Jupiter.

~

Relax with the Murphy brothers,
tough-talking, pistol-packing,
two-fisted private eyes:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

~

I won’t have anything to say about the works of Tom Clancy, which are too well known to need notice, but merely advert to an apparent deep cleavage in his oeuvre, and an odd publishing decision by Putnam.   They put out a nice hardbound edition boasting “Two Complete Novels”, with font large enough for these aging eyes:  Red Storm Rising, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin.   Yet, offering these bound together is like confecting footwear out of an oxford for the left foot, paired with a wooden clog for the right.  For while The Cardinal of the Kremlin is quite in line with the other Jack Ryan thrillers, with a solid plot and a scattering of excellent lines, Red Storm Rising -- not one of  the Ryan series -- seems to be written for twelve-year-olds.   I flipped through the thing in increasing disbelief -- not a single good thing to say about it anywhere.  It read more like the script for a video game than a real novel:  and indeed, pursuing the thing into Wikipedia, I learned that such is exactly what it has become.

The decent thing to do in a case like that, is to use a separate pen-name for potboilers that are unlikely to appeal to readers of your main line.

[Update 18 July 2015]  I thoroughly enjoyed Joseph Finder’s 2014 thriller Suspicion.   The only other book of his I’ve read -- likewise excellent -- is his industrial-espionage thriller Paranoia (2004).    Only after-the-fact did I realize that the books share an identical premise to trigger the action.

In both cases, a likeable protagonist engages in a piece of legally sketchy behavior, not for selfish reasons, but to aid another.  And in both cases, another party, with a sinister agenda of their own, discovering his role, use that leverage to grab him by the short-hairs and force him into extremely delicate and dangerous behavior.

The fact that I didn’t realize until afterwards that, to that extent, I was reading the same book over again, simply illustrates the role of motifs in literature.  It is no crime to swipe them, to reuse them consciously or unconsciously.  In the Middle Ages, that was taken for granted.   And even today, in genre fiction, it is recognized to be no harm no foul if the book or movie employs such tried-and-true vignettes as the Spy Called Out of Retirement (the Cincinnatus motif), or car chases, or femmes fatales.

[Update 19 July 2015]  By an accident of meteorology, I found myself in the atrium of the local library, a lethal heat outside, and A/C like an ice-blanket within.  Seeking an excuse to remain amid the soothing cool, I browsed a bit, and stumbled upon another Joseph Finder -- Buried Secrets (2011).

Today, sheltering indoors, I curled up with the book.   This time, parallels to Suspicion  leap to the eye  immediately.

*  Both novels focus on a teen daughter, product of swank New England boarding schools, abducted by a sinister crime organization (in one case genuinely, in the other only initially-supposedly, a Latino drug cartel).

Now, I myself never had a daughter, and didn’t attend prep school:  but with the slightest tip of the die, I might well have done so.  Therefore these themes are of personal interest, as being might-have-beens, real in a closely adjoining alternate universe.  

So, I read and imagine.  Along the way, I meet the slang that has come into currency since the Beatles broke up.

*  The central target of elaborate blackmail is a very wealthy man who made his pile in high-finance, hedge-fund type activity.  In either case, he has an over-manicured tarty trophy bride, whom we see in her “soapstone-topped” sparkly kitchen.  In both cases, in addition to his criminal pursuers, the magnate is being closely monitored by Federal law enforcement (FBI bzw. DEA), who are wise to his game.

 About halfway through, though, Buried Secrets begins to unravel.  Oh well.

~

 Seeking a book suitable for a bedtime story, I picked up a "Grantchester" novel by James Runcie, specifically Sydney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (consciously echoing titles from the Harry Potter series).  It has two things going for it:  a not-quite-contemporary English setting; and an ecclesiastical detective protagonist (the cover calls him a "clergyman-sleuth", rather recalling the old designation of gentleman-cambrioleur).

Unfortunately, the plotting is weak, the style merely workmanlike, and the theological content -- which made the Father Brown stories so uniquely fine -- nonexistent.  (I tried my hand at one of those -- Father Brown meets Sherlock Holmes -- here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-narrow-escape.html )

Only in the very last story does the author comes up with a nice ‘high-concept’ premise:  During a performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, when the actors all stab Caesar, apparently one of the knives was real, and the gentleman playing Caesar dies for real.  Only -- that plot isn’t really pursued, even along such elementary lines as autopsy.   Instead, Runcie goes in for a spate of virtue-signalling, loftily condemning those who, in 1953, failed to adhere to the politically-correct line on homosexuals prevailing 2012.   He makes the murderer be a homophobe; boo.

 

 ~

E. Phillips Oppenheim was once an extraordinarily popular author.  His The Spy Paramount (1935) was recently re-issued in a handsome paperback, in the series “British Library Spy Classics”, for a song -- or, remaindered at Daedalus, for a snatch.  The back-jacket copy accurately describes the book as a forerunner of Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” series -- a debonnair spy, of no particular politics, who zips from locale to locale as though in a movie.  Since the book was published shortly after the Machtergreifung, and is set in western Europe, I had high hopes, for a period feel at least.

The book is terrible.   Plot, dialogue, characterization, sense of period or place, all are throwaway.   Where Raymond Chandler’s advice to thriller authors whose muse had fallen mum, was to “have someone come through the door with a gun” (after which, you’ll think of something), the earmark of this school is to have bigwig snarl or splutter something --

“That is all very well, General,” the Prime Minister declared impatiently.

The titular character is never shown actually doing or saying anything intelligent, nor as displaying genuine bravery as opposed to bravura, but he gets praised constantly:

“Fawley is the only man in Europe today who can save us from war.”

It’s like the fantasy of a nine-year-old.  From the psycho-developmental perspective, the book represents a case of arrested development, well below the level of, say, the Hardy Boys, who are modest, resourceful, brave but not foolhardy, respectful towards their detective father from whom they learn much.

 

~

John Grisham, The King of Torts (2003).  (Rescued from my wife’s throwaway-pile, retained to some period of cerebral insufficiency and rainy days.)

(1) The novel begins with a hapless Public Defender, who is stuck with the case of a typical pointless young black D.C. murderer.   Only, it turns out there’s a funny drug angle --  prescription drug that might have homicidal side-effects.

(2) Later, a Man of Mystery  enters the scene from nowhere, and (unaccountably) gives the P.D. inside dope, that leads him on towards fortune.

(3)  Later still, an old-hand superstar tort-lawyer takes our erstwhile P.D. into his confidence, proposing a partnership.

So far, nothing much of interest.  But I stuck with it, imagining developments that really would not have been than difficult to unroll:

(1’) Manchurian Candidate scenario.  International implications.  The random D.C. shooting was only an experiment.  Ultimate target:  The President.

(2’) M. of M. is working for …. (shadowy entity  too numinous to name).

(3’) A “Spanish Prisoner” scenario -- obviously the superstar is playing the P.D., maybe even working for the company P.D. is suing.

Only … None of that comes to pass.  Instead, it’s all just more of the same -- this lawsuit and that lawsuit, ultimately descending to the level of some mismixed bricks in Baltimore.  It is like reading the Baltimore police blotter for a year -- nothing is significant in itself, and nothing relates to anything else.

How could the author bother to write such drivel?  Why do people buy it and read it?

Riemann Conspiracy denialism

The evidence for the existence of a vast, tentacular nexus known to insiders as the “Riemann Conspiracy”  (that is just a cover-name, but it’ll do) has been growing now daily  for several years,  and is far too powerful to ignore.

Just this morning -- front-page headline in the Washington Post:

In N.H., wary voters reject the status quo

Evidence suggests that times are good, yet many voters said their dominant emotion is fear — and the sense that somebody is keeping them in the dark.

Of course they are:  they don’t want U 2 know !!

And yet, despite all that, some people are still in denial:

Riemann conspiracy denialists

The latest twist in this intricate saga  appeared this morning on the front page of the business section, in the New York Times:

Hong Kong’s Disappearing Publishers

The story concerns the shadowy (and absurdly named) “Mighty Current Media” (the tongue-in-cheekily unidiomatic business-name will remind insiders of the “Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company”, run by another Riemann operative, Leopold T.).  It reveals that, since October, no fewer than five of its top operatives have physically vanished.

That in itself might raise eyebrows, though you might just shrug and turn the page, under the misimpression that “disappearing” referred merely to hard a financial climate forcing some media outlets to fold.   But now look at how, in the Times website, the headline has already been censored-down (doubtless in response to a frantic call on the red phone) to the yawn-inducing

In China, Books That Make Money, and Enemies

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/international/in-china-books-that-make-money-and-enemies.html?ref=international

This, citizens, is how the truth gets deep-sixed !

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearances

The real story, to the extent that we are permitted to reveal it (names, dates, and facts have been changed) is that a small, fly-by-night Hong Kong publisher, whose public string-pullers are British and Swedish (fronting for the real owners), operating under regulations different from those on the mainland, masquerading as but a tabloid outlet of the gutter press, has managed to release, hidden in a forest of ridiculous check-out-counter-style “exposés”,  which no serious person would so much as glance at, some genuine inside dope that goes to the heart of one of the Riemann sub-conspiracies.   (That clever scenario is reminiscent of the “Six Days of the Condor” caper, where the truth had been hidden in the form of a novel.)  The book, disguised as a sort of Harlequin-romance-cum-international-thriller, was titled

Whirling Shadows of Spies

(Again:  A deliberately idiotic title, to deflect suspicions from the real intent.)

The moment the authorities got wise to this, they raided every distribution point and pulped the entire edition.   And then -- in a twist that only happens in real life, being beyond the capacity of potboiler-writers to imagine -- they themselves issued a contrary book with an identical title  and distributed it widely, so that anyone attempting to research the issue will find his queries flooded with references to this red herring.  (The New York Times, for example, was completely taken in.)

~

Well, I’ve got to sign off now -- someone is at the door.  (Which is puzzling, since nobody knows of my whereabouts at this isolated mountain retreat.)   More -- inshallah -- anon.

Meanwhile you can introduce yourselves to the basic outlines of the Riemann Conspiracy, via a series of revealing leaks, beginning here:

Riemann-Verschwörung

La conspiration Riemann

A Spicilegium of Sequels

For the literature-loving public, our cup runneth over.

First, a long-lost novel by Harper Lee, a sequel (or prequel) to To Kill a Mockingbird:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/07/scholars-cast-doubt-on-status-of-newly.html

Then, a previously unpublished fragment -- no more than a fragment, but how fine! -- of Mr Charles Dickens

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

(Though scholars have raised questions concerning these, we believe them both to be genuine.)

And now, a new story from Ms Beatrix Potter,  queen-mistress of bunny-love!

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35407846

Unfortunately, not with her own inimitable artwork, but that of a journeyman; as, this:

This rediscovery of a beloved English children’s-tale, is the best news since a couple of years ago, when the Incunabula Department of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva)  managed to unearth this previously unpublished gem, featuring the world’s greatest linguist ever, Doctor John Dolittle:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html

Yet another reason never to say anything online, anywhere, ever, at all

From this morning’s news:

A former Countdown champion hunted down and attacked a teenager after she posted a bad review of his book online.

Richard Brittain smashed a bottle of wine into Paige Rolland’s head as she stacked shelves in an Asda supermarket in Glenrothes, Scotland.

He tracked the 18-year-old down online through her social media accounts after reacting badly to her analysis of his self-published title.

Brittain, 28, who was crowned Countdown champion in 2006, travelled 500 miles from his home in Bedford to the Fife town.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11986144/Teenager-bottled-by-ex-Countdown-champion-for-giving-his-book-bad-review.html

PS:   Every book I have ever read  was simply wonderful.

(With the possible exception of some by certain dead guys.  Only, even they might have their fanatical fans.   So, yeh, I totally loved “Paradise Regained”.)

Further proof (if more were needed) that “silence is golden”:

No comment!

String Theory for Trump Voters

A high-powered team of cybernetic linguisticians have run detailed studies and concluded that, from the standpoint of syntax,  Republican Presidential front-runner talks like a fourth-grader:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-4th-grader-linguistic-analysis/

That, as regards vocabulary and grammar, merely.  From the semantic-pragmatic standpoint, he speaks like a schoolyard bully.

~

This, however, is by no means to criticize our (potential) next President.   (How foolish would that be, after all;  he’ll have the power to revoke our Junior Woodchuck Blogger License.)   Nay more, we have concluded that it is time to board that train before it leaves the station;  and accordingly, we are preparing a series of scholarly monographs, written at a fourth-grade level, for exactly this audience. 

The debut volume is called String Theory for Trump Voters, Simply Explained.   It responds to an express desideratum from the top.  “So what are these stupid little … stringy things, anyway?” the candidate mused in a recent broadcast.  “Sounds totally bogus!”

(A prerequisite for this opus  is the prequel, written at a third-grade level,  Quantum Field Theory is our Friend!)

Other titles in the series:

The Homoousian Controversy:  a Trumponomic perspective.

The Gospel according to The Donald.

In a junior-auxiliary line aimed at lower-information voters will be versions of the smash-hit “for Dummies” series, rewritten in Googolian “Simplified English”.   Offerings include:

“Computers for Dummies” for Imbeciles

“Intermediate Arabic for Dummies” for Deaf-mutes

and the unique, twice-distilled

“ ‘Algebraic K-Theory for Dummies’  for Morons”  for Trisomy-21.

Major credit cards accepted.

Bloggers avant la lettre

Re 16^th century England:

Men, and sometimes women, wrote for the amusement of themselves and their friends, not for publication.  Their verses were handed round, copied out into the manuscript books, of which many survive  in public and private libraries, and admired in a small circle.

Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. III: Renascence and Reformation (1908), p. 180

Scholars cast doubt on status of newly-discovered manuscript

The literary world has been abuzz of late with a literary find, accompanied by a whiff of suspicion:  Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which presents a picture disturbingly different from what we all read in high school, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Its publication status has been questioned.  It is a sort of a sequel, or rather a prequel, or maybe a pre-written sequel;  the history of the manuscript, and its “discovery”, is obscure, and the lawyer at the center of the intrigue  keeps changing her story.   There’s a bodacious editor involved, who, one commenter suggested, may have done a sort of Maxwell Perkins on Lee’s manuscript:  “There’s what Lee wrote, and then there’s what got published,” the latter being a much more acceptable narrative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/media/a-new-account-of-watchmans-origin-and-hints-of-a-third-book.html?_r=0

Atticus Finch redivivus ?

[Update 27 July 2015] Another nay-sayer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the-watchman-fraud.html

Fortunately, such skeptical doubts do not attach to the equally spectacular recent publication of a lost fragment of Charles Dickens:

A Lost Fragment of “Our Mutual Friend”

In a literary climate so rife with hoax and dark doings, it is a pleasure to be able to present this impeccable find, saluted by all the experts.  Although the circumstances of discovery of this treasure are nothing short of scandalous, the manuscript itself is undoubtedly genuine.

Amazon, Boko Haram ink pact

In a move that pleased the market,  Jeff Bezos, the Imam of Amazon, shook hands with Abubakar Shekau, President and CEO of Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'Awati Wal-Jihad (ticker symbol:  Boko Haram), in a deal to merge their operations.

“It’s a natural fit,” observed one Wall Street analyst, who requested anonymity since he has already cut a sweet deal on tomorrow’s joint IPO  owing to insider access.  “It will take the fabled marketing smarts of Boko, as evidenced by the celebrated Schoolgirl Caper which captivated world attention, not to mention their hilarious, crowd-pleasing recent video,  in which Shekau himself did stand-up,  and will blend that with Amazon’s reputation for absolute savagery in the ruthless pursuit of business dominance in all regions of the globe and all areas of commerce whatsover, ripping the innards out of any publisher or bookseller who dares oppose them, and scattering the entrails by the side of the road.  Plus there’s the reported Amazon Fleet of Drones."

With this move, say the experts, the new entity (which will be docketed on the NY Stock Exchange as Boko Book  © ) is well positioned to challenge the feared behemoth Google  in the struggle for total World Domination.

The supreme leaders of Amazon and Boko 

unite to divide up the spoils.

[Update 6 September 2014]   Evidently blindsided by Boko-Book’s bold move,  Google has hastily joined forces with the ISIL.

Once again, the synergies are similar.   From its origin as a rag-tag band of a few dozen ill-favoured and defeated Iraqis, the ISIL has used unparalleled powers of media-savvy self-promotion to catapult itself to the rank of a world-historical “Caliphate” ™.  For its part, Google is known as the merciless take-no-prisoners global juggernaut second to none.  

The ticker symbol of the new entity is ISIU (Imperial State of the Intergalactic Universe).  Shares were up moderately in early trading.

 "Ordering a child-bride online?  Free shipping with ISIL Prime !"

[Update 21 Dec 2018]  Amazon is evil:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-alexa-insight/kill-your-foster-parents-amazons-alexa-talks-murder-sex-in-ai-experiment-idUSKCN1OK1AJ

If that link doesn't work, the Reuters story was picked up later here:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/kill-your-foster-parents-amazons-alexa-talks-murder-sex-in-ai-experiment.html

Egyenletesen sürü számsorozatok

We have oft lamented, how … hard things are, particularly in math and physics.  Let alone actually coming up with any worthwhile contributions yourself, nor even simply “keeping up with the literature”, but merely :  taking in -- understanding one  classic work done forty years, fifty years, a century ago.

I have on my nightstand  volume one of John von Neumann’s Collected Works (so titled, in English, and published in 1961).   Now, most Americans, myself certainly included, think of von Neumann -- “Johnny” to those who knew him -- as a Princeton luminary equal to those of Gödel and Einstein, and who, even more than they, was significantly responsible for ushering American into the front ranks of modern math and science, and best known to the general public as the co-author of the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), whose subsequent significance has only grown.

Yet those more familiar with the man will also be aware that he was born in Budapest, where he attended a German-speaking high school, eventually pursuing post-graduate studies in Switzerland and teaching at the University of Berlin.  He moved to Princeton in 1930 (a wise move, as things turned out), and remained there to the end of his days.

Accordingly, the reader confronted with his Collected Works, will be prepared for many of the early papers to be in German.   For this reader, that presents no problem at all.  But in any event, the Pergamon Press has organized this collection, not by date, but by topic, the first volume containing  “Logic, Theory of Sets, and Quantum Mechanics” (spot the odd man out, but anyway).   For the technical reader, rather than the biographer, that is convenient and commendable.  (Cf. the philologian Hugo Schuchardt, in “Sachen und Wörter”, second paragraph:  “Stofflich geordnete Glossare  gewähren manche Aufklärung, die in alphabetische geordneten vermißt sind.”)   And you would expect that, thus organized, each volume would contain a mixture of articles in German and (later) English, with the exception of those treating of the theory of automata, or the game theory, which he never wrote about before coming to America, since he invented both of them here.

Yet the first volume contains no single article in English -- but does have one in Hungarian, whose title I have placed in the subject-field of this post,  pour épouvanter les érudits.

The Perils of Publishers

A story I showed around to friends having met a friendly reception, I sent it off to an appropriate publisher, whose name I shall not stain by mention, lest it join the rogues gallery of those  who rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter, back in the day.  The periodical was chosen, not at random, but as having been the one to spring upon an unsuspecting world  my first mystery story, the eponymous offering of the later collection I Don’t Do Divorce Cases, available at your local bookstore -- or rather, might be, if local bookstores any longer existed, which they do not;  still, you can find copies online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and at a price too nugatory to allude to.   And yet, like that base [ethnicity deleted], who threw away a pearl, greater than all his tribe (an incident recorded in the annals of our nation’s literature, somewhere), the editor -- at that particular juncture, on that particular day, the moon being in some unfavorable phase, and Mars having passed into the House of Detention -- did not choose to pick it up.  Whereupon the spurned offering, like some younger son packed off to the Colonies, shows up, uncloaked against the bitter winds, upon this very site, as though upon the doorstep  of an unfeeling world, to be gawked at by surfers and idlers:  and all for less than the price of a penny.

(“A Narrow Escape”:  vide infra.)

A typical publisher, in his lair

~

These dark events have prompted me to reveal the following vignettes, fruit of my similar experience the last time I attempted to venture  where angels fear to tread.  (The period covers my time in Princeton, an epoch you might have an opportunity of reading about, should ever my current publisher, asleep at the switch or possibly kidnapped by pirates, or spirited away by faeries, come out with the collection Princeton Follies  as long ago promised!)

Appropriate beverage to accompany this narrative:  

            Fifty-year-old port.

Consonant soundtrack: 

            Something tenebrous for the chamber,  with plenty of cello.

~       ~       ~

ANNALS OF THE UNPUBLISHED

A stifling day in August.  The editor is having her periodic indisposition.  Over the transom my manuscript comes.

*

The publisher stops by the office of the tweed-clad editor; coughs, hesitates; he hates to say it  but… "…the pressure of investors.  And that comes down to circulation.  Now unfortunately, no-name material, however we-would-both-agree worthy, -- does  not  sell. So…"

The editor bites his lip and nods.  With determination he reaches into the slush pile.  Ha!  Something-or-other by some nobody  named “Justice”.  Discard without reading.

*

"Well there's only room for one of them, and this Princeton fellow shows real promise.  Your cousin's stuff is glittery, but shallow -- no staying power."

Casting about for a comeback and finding none, she abandons debate; then relaxes, as a cool smile forms upon her face.

"Pretty funny, coming from someone whose contract is about to be renewed – by my uncle."

"I—By-- ?  Well yes, I take your point.  Style, substance, all that, your cousin's got it, or may someday; let's go with it."

*

He shakes his head from side to side.  This is good, dammit, this is good, and from – what is his name?  from Princeton?

Enthralled, he scarcely notices  as the mother ship hovers outside the window of his fifty-seventh-floor office.  A beam enters slowly, completely silent.

Later, the office is empty.  The incident is never explained.

*

Syphilis: the Silent Killer

            In a shed in Tijuana, a sordid night of bought amours.   The man leaves behind a couple of silver dollars, takes with him something he hadn't bargained for.

            Years later, with another, a child is born.  The boy seems healthy, becomes an editor, moves to New York.

            That morning, a manuscript from an unknown author, from – New Jersey, of all places.  Yet he reads with growing interest.   A realization dawns.  He puts the manuscript down slowly, as he gazes at the framed portrait of Maxwell Perkins on his wall.  Their eyes seem to meet.

            He presses the buzzer.  "Miss Anscombe?  Something extraordinary…"

            The sound of a scraping chair from the outer office.

            Yet at that moment the spirochaete, having lain  long undetected, while having silently multiplied many times, obeys its bioprogram  and unleashes the full fury of its corruption.  Intelligence, morals --  nothing is spared.

            -- "Yes, Mr. --?"

            "Huh?  Um, -- oh,  -- Mother, the sun! give me the sun! ---  Ahhh… --  whyncha call up Bret Easton Ellis, see if he has anything left moldering at the bottom of his drawer."

Cruore spumantem

 

New states are born free,  yet everywhere  they are in chains.

-- Ernest Gellner, “Democracy and Industrialization” (1967)

One gets the impression, after a slackening  following the end of the traditional Cold War, and the period of high hopes for newly-independent nations, born both of the breakup of the Soviet bloc, and the retreat of European colonialism  from the continents they once stabilized  tant bien que mal,  that lines are being drawn, for some wide-ranging upcoming conflicts.  But their pattern is not yet clear.  The antagonisms and (very unstable) alliances  will likely be determined as much by climate change, and water shortages, and the general worldwide “scissors effect” (Trotsky, before his time) as any traditionally recognizable allegiances.

Europe is nervous.  It looks south, and sees its future in Lampedusa.

[On that matter, consult the article "The Anchor", in the current New Yorker.]

Hannibal ante portas!

World population growth has been leveling off, save in the one region least able to feed itself, Sub-Saharan Africa.   And so the population presses north.

Fears of political submersion and cultural annihilation  would drive the privileged population into an ultra attitude:  liberalism would go by the board. … One can hardly feel very confident that Europeans-in-Europe, faced with a situation analogous to the one facing settler populations [e.g. Boers in South Africa, Jews in Palestine] -- no other world to which to retreat, and in danger of submersion -- would behave in a way markedly better than did or do the colons.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 178

It is notable that this was written in the early 1960s, just before a wave of Western romanticization of the Third World arrived.  Gellner in 1964, like Enoch Powell in 1968,  was looking farther down the line.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible ???

*

The 1996 book It Takes a Village, by Barbara Feinman (writing as “Hillary Clinton”), was meant -- commendably -- to point to the need (which in practice, in America, had never been denied, until recently) for community involvement in child-rearing, beyond the autarky of the nuclear family.  Such was the unquestioned state of affairs during my own childhood:  church, school, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Little League, summer camps, YMCA, …  The need has become more acute in this time of fragmented families, or households that were never a full and normal family at all.   The book dissents, though in liberal guise, from the new-hatched doctrine that all you need for healthy happy productive children  is a baby-mama and her welfare check.

The title purports to translate an African proverb (which has enough truth not to quibble with;  see Wiki for originals);  and indeed, in the setting of traditional Africa (which largely no longer exists), it is true enough.  But in our own time, such does not suffice.  In the words of an especially perceptive socio-historian, writing over half a century ago:

A Greek village can produce a little Greek, a Nuer village can make new Nuers … It is however awkward to say that (for instance) a French village can produce a Frenchman.  Can it?  It can certainly produce a French peasant, who is a kind of Frenchman.  But a Frenchman without qualification?  [Meaning not: “a Frenchman without qualifications”, for that is exactly what a village can produce, but:  a Frenchman tout court.]

Village-size social units  are no longer competent to produce fully life-sized human beings.  A Nuer village can still produce a Nuer, but it is incapable of producing an effective Sudanese citizen.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 158

Note the date.  The insight is striking, now that Sudan itself has fragmented into two, and the fragments themselves are dysfunctional.   A friend who has followed the Sudanese situation for years, reports that the race war between Nuer and Dinka  is currently absolutely savage, though this finds little reflection in the press, which (understandably) has its own space-limitations for Third World meshugaas.

This (widely anticipated, though unspoken) result, illustrates once more  the instability of micronationalisms;  and exemplifies (Gellner again), the tenet, “The world is richer in cultural differentiations, and in systematic injustices, than it has room for ‘nations’.” (http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/spheres-of-influence.html )

(More here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/rise-of-la-racaille.html)

*

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

 

*     *     *

[Update 21 April 2014]  When I suggested that battles over aqueous resources  might occasion fierce and feral realignments, I had principally in mind  certain regions of the Mideast.  But cf. this headline from today’s LATimes:

Lake Mead, the reservoir that supplies 90% of Las Vegas' water, is ebbing as though a plug had been pulled from a bathtub drain.

Now, that particular pickle  leaves one ambivalent.  What a blessing, were that urban blot upon the desert  to evaporate without a trace!   Still, in a general way, it is not a good thing  when lakes dry up.

~

There was also an update today on the little-followed Nuer/Dinka bloodbath:

According to the United Nations mission in South Sudan, rebel forces entered the town of Bentiu in Unity State and separated groups of residents — who had sought refuge in churches, mosques and hospitals — by their ethnicity and nationality.

Members of the ethnic Nuer community who did not support the rebels, along with South Sudanese people from other ethnic groups and Darfuris from Sudan to the north, were targeted and killed.

At the Kali-Ballee Mosque, “more than 200 civilians were reportedly killed and over 400 wounded,” the statement said. Some rebels used FM radio to broadcast ethnic-based “hate speech” and encouraged “men from one community to commit vengeful sexual violence against women from another community,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/world/africa/ethnic-groups-targeted-in-south-sudan-killings.html?_r=0

[Update 26 April 2014]  And yet, remarkably, the riverains of the Tiber are currently actively welcoming the flood,  deploying the Marina Militare and the Guardia Costiera, not to defend Italy’s borders, but to make them more porous, at taxpayer expense:

Polémique : Mare nostrum coûte cher

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5826955

Malta cannot believe its good fortune, as the Italian navy proactively undertook to rescue migrants in Maltese waters as well;  that overwhelmed island has accordingly seen its unwanted influx drop to zero:

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/38170/italys_mare_nostrum_taking_over_maltas_refugee_burden

[Update 16 September 2014]  Meanwhile, as Italy and Malta bend over backwards to help aliens attempting to reach their shores illegally, the traffickers themselves care less than nothing for their fellow Africans:

Up to 100 children may have been among 500 people who drowned after a migrant boat was sunk by traffickers near Malta last week, a migration body says.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spoke to four survivors who were rescued from the water.  Four survivors told the IOM that the traffickers were Egyptian and Palestinian.

They said that had been forced to change boats three times since leaving Egypt in early September. However, when told to switch to a smaller vessel which many passengers deemed unsafe, a violent argument ensued.

The traffickers then rammed the larger vessel, causing it to begin sinking immediately, the survivors told IOM.

"After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing," one of the survivors said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29225371