Monday Book Report: The Divine Right of Capital

I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.

The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, by Marjorie Kelly

Returning to a book almost twenty years after its release may bring many pleasures, surprises, or insights. Reading an author’s words decades after they were written may cause us to nod our heads in thoughtful recognition of revealed truths, to shake our heads at prophetic predictions, or to bow our heads in respect for powerful words from the past. This book is not that book, however. Nor is Marjorie Kelly that author. This book—The Divine Right of Capital—is a puree of soft ideas, obvious observations, illogical connections, and unworkable prescriptions that caused this reader only to nod his head in fatigue, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs produced by trying to follow the fuzzy threads of Kelly’s various arguments, only to bow my head that only 19 years ago anyone could have been so naïve as to believe in the childish fixes proposed herein.

From the FEDS Notes of the Federal Reserve
Note that that tiny bottom strip is 50% of the people; the top two colors represent only 10%

Reading this book also underscores how lost the battle is that Ms. Kelly wishes to fight. She decries the overwhelming influence of money in politics … nine years before Citizens United vs. FEC institutionalized and sanctified such influence. She inveighs against the disparity between rich and poor, which has only become greater since this book was published in 2001 (as the chart from the Federal Reserve shows). She identifies the main problem of the economy as the primacy of shareholders in corporations, and then proposes almost laughable ideas to overcome this threat. (She even calls some of her ideas “pranks”, in a misguided nod to the Boston Tea Party as such a ‘prank’.) The book highlights the fuzziness of most business school thinking, combined with the earnest allusions of the public speaking crowd, mixed up with the legal analysis of a 1st-year law student and the historical references of an economist who reads about history books in The New York Times Book Review. The main feeling of the book is “What a waste.” But then, I chose to read this book, and now you don’t have to.

One might see a stirring of revolution in such cases. They represent small chinks in the supposedly impenetrable legal wall protecting shareholder primacy. Perhaps we might use these laws one day to drive a truck (or a Trojan horse) through that wall.

Muddling metaphors like mint in a Virgin Julep

There are good things in this book: nice historical perspectives, important background on corporate and constitutional law, the usual panoply of statistics and examples that must accompany every hortatory business book nowadays. But the good things are buried under writing that jumps from here to there and back again with little regard for the reader, using metaphors from something her friend told her about architecture, or that feeling she got in winter when there was lots of ice on the ground. It is the usual attempt to engage the reader by personalizing the narrative, but since there is no particular voice or real focus to each chapter, save to bring up the examples she wrote on notecards for this topic and that topic, her writing style reveals only the conventional adipose tissue between her bullet points, so much loosely connective fat like the meaningless mission statements now de rigueur at every business. She presents (debatably) useful information, but then undercuts her own argument with boilerplate truisms such as this: “As both quantum theory and chaos theory teach us, the next state of the world is fundamentally not knowable.” That sentence is not true, nor is it meaningful. (The “state of the world” is certainly not a meaningful subject of quantum mechanics (I’m guessing that’s what she’s referring to by “quantum theory”; I really doubt she means quantum field theory), and chaos theory applies to systems where slightly different initial conditions lead to widely disparate results, as opposed to the system we have now, where concentrations of wealth and power tend to act to keep and increase that wealth and power.)

But the weakness of those statues may have something to do with the weakness of the theory itself. Indeed, its bagginess and shapelessness do seem fatal to its real usefulness.

Twenty years ago, irony had not been completely beaten to death

Going through Ms. Kelly’s arguments and assertions really is not worthwhile at this late date. The dangers she warned about have come true, and then some. She was wrong only in her deluded belief that so-called ‘Business Ethics’ (which was also the title of the magazine she edited when this book was published) could prevent the slide into pure, brutal plutocracy; if anything she was a dupe hoping that right-thinking people could triumph over “the Corporate Aristocracy”, as she calls the enemy in her subtitle. Perhaps the most telling or damning comment on her ideas and her life’s work is the judgment passed on her by the current social media trendosphere: Marjorie Kelly has no Wikipedia page, nor has she a blue check mark next to her Twitter handle. (She’s just @marjorie_kelly, for what it’s worth. Please don’t tell her about this book report; she seems like a nice enough person.)

The proposed solutions she offers are less likely to succeed now than they were in 2001, when they were almost ludicrous. Her ideas for employee ‘pranks’ include wearing T-shirts protesting buyouts, signing corporate documents with a skull-and-crossbones stamp (alluding to Revolutionary Era protests against the Stamp Act), or running for a spot on the board of directors. These might work in a revival of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, but …. She has more practical ideas for business students, investors, CEOs … but most of these I have met have other, more pragmatic, ideas of getting while the getting is good.

Speaking of which: Time for me to go. It’s a ‘No’ from me, dawg. Read Jim Sculley’s biography instead. At least that one has a lot of laughs (none intentional, however).

Book Note, #409: The Camp-Meeting Murders

The Camp-Meeting Murders, by Vance Randolph & Nancy Clemens

A fairly pedestrian mystery story is enlivened by its depiction of small-town life in the South and by the peculiar spinster narrator, Bedelia Alcott, who plays the traditional part of the clueless detective in her misguided musings about the central crime, the murder of a Holy Roller at a revival meeting. James Berger, itinerant preacher of doubtful repute, is shot whilst in full faith-healing flood, with a silver bullet, no less. Written in 1936 (though my paper-wrapped digest edition was published in 1945), modern readers may be surprised by the lack of religious devotion shown by Aunt Bedelia, no-longer-girl reporter for the Durgenville Weekly Record, who no more thinks herself obligated to attend services on Sunday than most of the aforementioned moderns. This reader was disappointed by the surface level account of the fire-and-brimstone preaching at the titular camp meeting, which apparently affects the protagonist so much that she can’t remember what he said, only that it was very persuasive. The preacher is killed, complications ensue, secrets and secret liaisons are revealed, et cetera, et cetera.

Miss Bedelia is a passably interesting character, a sort of Missouri Jessica Fletcher with less insight, slightly less nosiness, and fewer writing credentials. Some authenticity is brought to the page in the fact that one of the two co-authors of the mystery novel was herself a newspaper journalist with the Kansas City Star. The other author, Vance Randolph*, brings much knowledge of backwoods beliefs of the folk living in the Ozark hill country, though only a smidgen makes it into this middling tale. There are a handful of interesting characters—my favorite is Witch Zaney—and a soupçon of local color. Most notable (again, to this reader) were the notes and tones of a faded time, such as the telephone exchange that closes after 9 o’clock in the evening. However, the book must come with a TRIGGER WARNING because of a needless plot device which will trigger people who are like my wife. (Email me if you’re unsure, or simply avoid this book you had no intention of reading anyway.) Hearty hill folk, however, will find it a pleasant way to while away a few hours.

*Lest y’all give me grief for not naming the female partner of the writing duo, allow me to point out that ‘Nancy Clemens’ is a pseudonym. Okay, fine. She was named Fern Shumate, and was a not infrequent collaborator with the Ozark folklorist.

Friday Vocabulary

1. roke — fog, mist; drizzle

The yellow sunlight now faded with the day’s passing, and the distant path across the moor disappeared as the roke rolled across the damp, grey heath.

 

2. peruke — periwig

He stuck his head through the wig door and waited patiently as James (or was it Jonathan?) placed the peruke upon his head and sifted the fine white powder over it.

 

3. cultivar — plant variety created by selective breeding

Ephraim Wales Bull developed the Concord grape cultivar to withstand the rigors of tough New England winters, going through tens of thousands of seedlings in the process, though he enjoyed little riches from his success.

 

4. septenary — of or related to the number seven or to a group of seven; a set or group of seven; a period of seven years; (music) the seven notes of a diatonic scale

Strangely enough, though the medical profession of the 19th Century recognized clearly the prevalence of the septenary ague by the commonly observed seven-day periodicity of the fever, modern medicine no longer observes this cycle among the accepted intermittent fevers.

 

5. batiste — soft light opaque fabric of cotton or linen, similar to (and sometimes synonymous with) cambric, used as linings, handkerchiefs, or lingerie

She sniffed ostentatiously into her black batiste handkerchief, giving public performance to her powerful spinster grief.

 

6. wit — (archaic) to know, to be aware of

Oh, the irony! I thought as I read mother’s diary, for I wot well what she wist not, that her lost love was as black a rogue as ever betrayed the heart of a lady.

 

7. salsify — edible winter root vegetable related to parsnip, also called ‘oyster plant’

We grow both parsnip and salsify in our small backyard garden, as both of these give great satisfaction from even small crops.

 

8. flinders — small pieces, splinters

The huge boulder tumbled down the side of the mountain and hardly slowed as it rolled right over the tool shack, bursting the outbuilding into flinders.

 

9. arseniuretted — combined with arsenic to form an arsenide

“The smell of garlic you perceive shows the presence of arseniuretted hydrogen,” he said, “the famous Marsh Test.”

 

10. vihara — Buddhist monastery

In the central hall of the vihara was a small brazier kept alight day and night, positioned beneath a small chimney hole cut through the roof of the central cave.

 

Analysis: The 4th Hundred Books

or, At Least The Unexamined Life Requires Less Math

As I mentioned a little while back, I have now read 400 of the books in my personal library since I started tracking my reading back in June 2015. Below is a sketchy analysis of the books in this last hundred books. Of course, as usual, I have not counted books in the “Comics & Graphic Novel” category from the count, though some data from the ten books in that genre that I read over the course of the books covered here do appear at times below.

I continued the fast reading pace I attained during the last century of books read, dropping only slightly from 2.79 to 2.97 days per book. (You math geniuses out there have already figured out that I read the last hundred books in 297 days.) The 6.5% increase in days per book read was overshadowed, however, by the roughly 8% or 10% drop in pages read per day. (The discrepancy here is the difference between total pages read versus only those non-comics pages read.) While the previous century of books saw a blistering pace of over 90 pages read per day, this particular set of a hundred books saw a page rate of 83.08 pages read per day—or 80.8 pages per day if we only count the non-comics. We’ll come back to a consideration of pages per day a little later, if that’s all right with you.

1 Book Read per 2.97 Days

Looking further at the books per day statistic, the speedy rate dropped further the total reading rate for the entire set of four hundred books. That total rate—which had been 4.60 at last report, dropped even further to 4.18 days per book read. If we include Comics & Graphic Novels, the rate goes down to only 3.70 days per book. (It had been just a smidge over 4 last time we checked.) Below is a chart showing the overall pace for each hundred books read, as well as the totals. (For those of y’all playing along at home, the timespan between the first and last books read is 1,675 days.)

Average Time to Read a Book

non-Comics All
1st hundred 4.83 3.63
2nd hundred 6.19 5.79
3rd hundred 2.79 2.74
4th hundred 2.97 2.70
All 4.18 3.70

This focus on book reading rate continues from my initial scratchpad calculation that I wouldn’t finish reading all of my book until Pearl Harbor Day in 2124. A more detailed analysis after the 300th book read brought that end date somewhat closer, to April 9, 2108. However, as I pointed out in the same article, the time to completion is complicated by the fact that I am still buying books; in fact, as that post noted, my book purchase rate is greater than my book reading rate. *Sigh* We’ll just set that issue aside for right now, though, and instead look again at the calculated time to completion with the latest information. Another quick calculation—this time taking over four hours (not including the several hours needed for my database dumps to work correctly)—gives me the figure of 8363 books unread at the moment. (This actually compares fairly favorably to my back-of-the-envelope reckoning of 9472 books owned, ignoring duplicates, which means I’ve read just over 1/8 of my collection—not too bad, actually.) Using the newly computed book reading rate of 3.7 days per book gives me an EFD (Estimated Finish Date) a trifle nearer in time than last report, though still in the next century. Specifically:

Reading Rate: 1 Book per 3.70 Days (includes Comics)

Time to Finish Collection: 84 & 3/4 Years

Estimated Finish Date (EFD): October 24, 2104

Unfortunately, all of the gains made towards bringing down my Time to Completion seem to have come from the breakneck pace of reading, and are in spite of incontinent book buying. Indeed, during the same time I read 110 books (including the 10 comic books and graphic novels), I seem to have acquired 438 new never-before-read volumes. This is obviously troubling, and even more than first appears due to the calculation made in that previous analysis of how long it will take me to read all of my books. There I came around to the following equation, defining how long will take to finish reading my library:

(2.3)   \begin{equation*} t = \frac{b_0}{R - P} \end{equation*}

Formula ${2.3}$ simply says that the time $t$ required to finish reading my library is equal to the initial number of books $b_0$ divided by the net consumption rate of books, which is the Reading Rate $R$ less the Purchase Rate $P$. As I noted in that earlier post, as long as the Reading Rate is greater than the Purchase Rate, I will eventually finish the collection.

At 300 books, $R$ was equal to 0.25 and $P$ was roughly 1.01. At 400 books read, however, $R$ has only risen two hundredths to 0.27 while $P$ is now a whopping 1.47 books acquired per day. (I say ‘acquired’ because this last few months saw a number of books given me by my father, who moved to Texas and pruned many things (not just books) before his move. I do not include the many, many, many copies of Ayn Rand’s Anthem that we were terrorized with at the end of the year and with which I still have not figured out what to do.) If these figures are used, and assuming $b_0$ is equal to 8363, we find that I lost my chance to complete my collection at the very end of the year 2000—but then, didn’t we all? Of course, as you’ve no doubt already noticed, this last number uses an overall figure for the Reading Rate $R$ while the Purchase Rate $P$ is only that for the last 100 books, so I’ve cheated a bit; but I’ve done so only to emphasize the very great, very real danger of the current situation. And oh yeah also because it’s kind of hard to calculate $P$ without getting into some Calculus. What? *Sigh* Okay. Give me a sec.

You know what? Never mind. Instead of looking at the actual curve of the Purchase Rate—which is what I really need to do to see what’s actually going on in that department—we’ll just take the Purchase Rate for the entire time I’ve been tracking books read in my database (=1.12) and use the more accurate figure of 6466 books for $b_0$ (this is the number of books in my database when I started the aforementioned tracking), which gives us a value for $t$ equal to … -7,607 days, or in other words … April 1, 1999. April Fool’s Day, eh? Well, that seems appropriate. That is, I missed my opportunity to complete this project on a date two months after the verdict in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. After all, didn’t we all? No, seriously though, this calculation means that—given the rates above—I could have only read all of my books at a time some sixteen years before I started reading my books. Yeah, I know. Math is weird.

In part, the desire to increase my reading rate has driven me to read some shorter volumes (though surprisingly the total pages read for this hundred books was only slightly less than the total for the previous hundred, as we shall see), which rationale might be thought to be behind my high number of children’s books read. In fact, however, the books in the Children’s category were read primarily because a) I only recently regained access to those books, and b) the books chosen leant themselves to double shelving and thus space saving on the shelves. An impetus related to that last drove also some of the lesser books read over this last slice, as I sought books I could let go of, thus also relieving somewhat my overburdened shelf space. This last endeavor, however, has proven to be difficult, in part because my reading rate suffers when I read most of the less well-written books, but mostly because it’s a pain in the ass. Looking at the figures above may impel me to take a course of action I have been resisting: to simply throw away (appropriately, natch) books that look ‘bad’, without reading them first. My heart aches at the idea, and my brain sighs at yet another datapoint I’ll need to capture or manipulate for this project. But the current hardship I have slogging through The Spirituality of Imperfection (which I would call instead The Banality of Feeble) or a book warning of the dangers of wealth concentration from 2001 may make such action inevitable.

With these caveats and explanations out of the way, let’s turn to the books I actually read in this last set of a hundred books. The full list can be found broken up into bite-sized chunks of 25 books each here, here, here, and … here. Genre fiction did not overwhelmingly predominate as it did in the previous hundred, though Mysteries and SF/Fantasy do represent almost half of the books read. Children’s books make up 14% of the total, while Nonfiction books were three-tenths of the hundred (non-comics) books read—lumping plays and poetry into the ‘Nonfiction’ category. Here’s the overall break down:

Books Read by Genre

Mystery & Thriller 26
Science Fiction & Fantasy 23
Children’s Books 14
Literature & Fiction 7
History 7
Poetry, Drama & Criticism 5
Other 18

And of course there is a chart

The breakdown of the two-and-a-half dozen Nonfiction books (ignoring Children’s books) is as follows:

Nonfiction Breakdown

History 7
Poetry, Drama & Criticism 5
Wacko 4
Computers & Internet 2
Militaria 2
Politics & Social Sciences 2
Religion & Spirituality 2
Arts & Photography 1
Books 1
D&D 1
End of the World 1
Outdoors & Nature 1
Reference 1

Continuing the analysis of page counts begun in the review of the previous century of books read, we find that I slowed my reading pace somewhat from last report. Though I began the 4th hundred books read at a speedy clip, I slowed a bit during the summer months, returning to form since October. Below is a chart showing the cumulative pages read over the last hundred books, to which I’ve added a linear trendline with which to more easily see the summer slump.

Reviewing the books I read during these sluggard months, I am not entirely sure why my pace slackened (though it still is much faster than the 34.4 pages per day I maintained while reading books #101 – #200). There are a few suggestive items, however. First, this slowdown begins just as I read my first (and so far only) ebook, a turn-of-the-century-before-the-last-one Norwegian mystery novel I had been unable to find in physical format. (It’s okay, I suppose.) I don’t have a mechanism for calculating page counts of ebooks, so it is simply a blank in the data. Second, this period also saw me read some books I had very little love for, including some works of the lesser Brontë sisters, the desultory mysteries of Amanda Cross, and some William Gibson short stories that weren’t as good as I remembered. This lack of interest may have lowered my attentiveness and thus my reading rate.

The dip in reading velocity can be seen in this chart depicting exactly that:

As is usual with such a chart, there’s a lot of noise at the beginning before the average rate begins to assert itself. This could, of course, be abated somewhat by considering a longer time span, by beginning the time period back when I began tracking pages read, but … let’s just wait until I’ve hit 500 books read, shall we?

The overall reading pace for the last hundred books clocks in at just over 83 pages per day, a significant decline from the 90 pgs/day over the previous hundred, but quite respectable for all that.

83.08 Pages Read per Day

Since I read 10 items from the Comics & Graphic Novels category, the above figure drops somewhat when those comics are excluded from the calculation. (I use the total books read for the generally promulgated Pages/Day rate, since the small page count of most comic books is reflected in this stat, whereas it is not in the Days per Book statistic.) Exempting those books gives a slightly lower page per day rate of 80.8 pages per day. Do not forget, however, that this figure reflects not just the fact that some non-comics pages may take longer to read, but also the fact that time spent reading comics is time not being used to read non-illustrated prose. The lower reading pace for non-comics is shown by the grey line in the figure above.

Once again rotating some axes, we find that the page count per book dropped 4% from last report, from 250 to 240 pages per book. If comics are included in this figure, the average becomes 224.3 pages per book (as opposed to 246.5 for this same datapoint from the last series).

Average Book Length: 239.98 Pages

The total number of pages clocked in at just below 25k, at 24,675. With comics etc. removed, we find that 23,998 pages were consumed in this last tranche of books. (Which of course means that, since I read 10 comics etc., that the average length for those excluded books was 67.7 pages.)

Total Pages Read (non comics): 23,998

The average rating dropped a bit from last report, falling from 3.94 to 3.79. Not too surprising, as I have been reading books that appear to be potential candidates for culling. There were many average books in this last set, and several that were worse than average. A slight surprise is found in the average rating for all books in the last set, including those in the Comics & Graphic Novels category, as a few ‘meh’ comics and one turkey brought down the overall rating slightly to 3.77. The delta between non-comics rating and total rating was reversed in the last set.

Average Rating for Books Read: 3.79

I am not entirely sure of my reading strategy for the next century, though I am tempted just to fly pell-mell through some of the many Mystery paperbacks that have been tempting me for quite a while. A return to Kregen and the life of Dray Prescot also seems appealing. Since completing book #400, I’ve read 4 novels and 1 business book, so there’s that.

I shall be back in a few days, with a belated look at the Best Books of 2019. (I’ll add the hyperlink here once that’s completed.) See ya!

Monday Book Report: Frenzy

James O. Causey’s Frenzy is a scathing noir novel about a vicious, vulpine grifter with big plans and bigger failures, a feral fox among wolves who wish to tear out his throat if he makes just one false step. He makes several. But he survives each beating, each attack, each checkmate by fast talking, flight, or the disdainful luck of the inveterate gambler. Along the way he manages to almost betray everyone and everything, though his loyalty is only to himself. Causey’s tale of Norman Sands, the amoral protagonist of Frenzy, is a brutal story of a lowlife already living in hell, who descends further and further as he tries to contrive one big score, one perfect deal that will leave him sitting pretty. It is a perfect novel of a man as far away from perfection as slimy creatures under a rock are far away from the clouds.

“Listen.” I took a deep breath and shivered. “I want you to stay away from me. I’m strong poison, do you understand? I slime everything I touch.”

Norm Sands perceives the truth about himself

Frenzy shows us the petty obsessions with women, money, and power which drive the corruption at the heart of some versions of the American Dream. The unrelenting action takes place in Mason Flats, a small town in Southern California where crooked pols and businessmen skim the cream from the vice and graft they connive at. Norm Sands returns to Morgan Flats a beaten and broken man, returns to the town he fled years ago, the town where his brother Matt tries to live down the dreams and aspirations he once had as the former high school quarterback who was going to go to law school. Norm has no big dreams to live down, merely wants a handout, until he sees again the petty crimes of his hometown, and has dark visions of cashing in on the big city sin he wants to import into this sleepy hamlet.

“Listen, darling.” She was fighting for control, enunciating very carefully. “If you stay in Mason Flats, you’re going to die. I don’t care about the damned money.”

“I care about the money.”

“No.” Her voice was lifeless. “You just hate to lose.” The simple truth.

More truth about Norm, when it will do the least good

Causey’s short book (clocking in at only 144 pages) shows a man without morals, though Norm Sands is no psychopath. He has had some bad breaks, made many more bad choices, and his snarling intelligence and criminal experience allow him to construct plots of betrayal and fraud where other men would simply walk away and lick their wounds. Norm cannot walk away, though he does flee when necessary; he is compelled to brazen out the most hopeless bluff, to play the turncoat in order to pay back his oppressors, to stake everything on just one more turn of the cards, though he knows in his hopeless heart that the deck will always be stacked against him.

I sat drinking coffee, listening to her talk about Paris, and trying to analyze the drowning sensation that hit me every time I looked at her.

This wasn’t love. Love is something warm and human, like the feeling I still had for Laurie. This was stark compulsion, chemotropic. For her I had killed two men.

The unexamined life is not worth living
From the back cover of Frenzy

But Norm is not just a con man. He wants power, and everything that goes with that. And that means a woman. Usually the boss’s woman, since the most desirable female is the one furthest from his reach. He is driven by lust rather than love, by an animal longing for rutting with the boss’s beauty. He is self-aware enough to know that such longing is madness, but that knowledge won’t stop him for a moment. Is this passionate desire his primary failing, the hamartia that will bring him down? No. This sexual hunger is merely one of ravenous appetites that drive him, that will leave him starving for any relationship beyond the merely transactional. He may find a kindred spirit, but their time together will always be measured in days, hours, until the next deal, the next gamble, the next betrayal.

No, the fatal flaw of Norm Sands is a simple one, perhaps the simplest. As Michelle Shocked noted, “The secret to a long life / Is knowing when it’s time to go.” Norm will always be a gambler, he will always hold out for just one more hand, will hope that ‘just one more’ will see his luck change. By the time he is ready to run, it is already too late. He may flee his pursuers for a time, may dodge the fatal bullet or blow this time or the next, but he has already lost everything by the time he is flying out the door. He may blame the attenuated threads of decency still lingering in his (a)moral fabric, the small bonds of humanity which foil his outlandish plans and cost him the evil success he craves. But he will sever every tie to decent feeling he has ever had, all for lucre and lust.

“I’ll steal for you,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll kill for you, anything—provided there’s no other woman, ever. You think I’m crazy?”

“No,” I said, holding her close, tenderly. “You’re not crazy.”

We sat like that for a very long time.

Norm and his lover discuss degrees of sanity

James Causey brings the amoral yearnings of his doomed protagonist to life in a brilliant first-person narrative. The cleverness and bravado of Norm shine out in the cesspools he thrives in, and the reader will find little morality to assuage the dark vision presented in this fast-paced thriller. At the same time, however, this is not a bleak tale of fated destruction à la Jim Thompson; Causey’s ‘hero’ always seems to have a choice as he takes each step and misstep towards the savage denouement. The cunning grifter may not be likable or even worthy of redemption, but Causey’s letter-perfect prose depicts a world of corruption and smalltime dreams that is quite enjoyable in some perverted way, and this tale of fraud and venality in Southern California may have relevance today, for all that it was written sixty years ago.

Friday Vocabulary

1. gyniolatry — worship of women

Perhaps Poul Anderson’s gyniolatry may seem to balance Philip K. Dick’s misogyny, though more likely both are perversions of the true view of relations between the sexes.

 

2. phenakistiscope — first device for viewing animated images, consisting of a revolving disc with distinct illustrations that appeared in motion when viewed in a mirror through slits also placed on the disc

Perhaps the first experience of the pleasure we today receive from widely available GIF animations was found in the 1830s by those patrons fortunate enough to view the clever looped illustrations of the phenakistiscope, though of course those 19th-Century viewers could only share the animations by handing the toy to another person in the same room.

 

3. faitour — (archaic) charlatan, cheat, esp. a fortune teller or one feigning illness

Would that I could make that infamous faitour die in sooth and stop forever his false seeming of sickness.

[the entry below was discovered to duplicate a previous vocabulary word from 2018, and has been replaced with the entry above]
scurf — morbid skin condition causing scales of skin to be shed in excess; scales of epidermis continually exfoliated from skin; any surface incrustation

The once beautiful pastry was now covered by a dark scurf of dried mold that sloughed off and dirtied the countertop as the ancient birthday cake was picked up.

 

4. diplopia — double vision

She had hoped that the crash was not as bad as it had first seemed, but when her diplopia lingered on for several weeks she realized that she needed to go to the hospital after all, if it wasn’t already too late.

 

5. dibble — tool for making holes in ground for seeds, bulbs, seedlings, etc.; to make a hole with a dibble

The children followed behind Mason with the small beet plants, inserting those into the holes he had made with his dibble, as the young boys and girls could not be trusted to dibble in a uniform and methodical fashion.

 

6. comber — long, curving wave

The small boat stood suspended for a moment at the top of the comber, poised at the peak of a precipice that was about to crash them into the rocks with its breaking wave.

 

7. montane — of or growing in or living in mountain regions

On their journey from the dying lake at the edge of the red desert to the wooded montane pasturage they only lost two sheep, though one ram injured his foreleg so severely he had to be dragged in a travois to the flock’s new home.

 

8. quern — small, hand-turned mill for grinding corn, grain, etc.

The Norse legend of the magical, salt-producing quern purports to explain why the seas are always salty.

 

9. paludarium — enclosure combining elements of an aquarium with those of a terrarium

Bobbi loved her new pet turtle, but her father quickly realized that the maintenance of the paludarium was much more work than he had expected.

 

10. kittle cattle — people difficult to deal with; things difficult to manage

You’ll soon learn that home remodels are kittle cattle, and that even small mistakes can grow to become insurmountable problems if not caught and corrected in time.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(American idiom, from at least 1835 forward*)

galley-west — into disarray or confused upset (usu. in phrase ‘to knock galley-west’)

All of my carefully laid plans were knocked galley-west by her failure to fully charge her phone the night before.

*Dictionary.com dates this from 1870-1875, but an instance may be found in Nathaniel Ames’s An Old Sailor’s Yarns, published in 1835.

Monday Book Report: Confessions Of A Crap Artist

Some trepidation is normal when visiting a old friend with whom one has not passed any time for many years. One fears that he has changed, that you’ve changed, that neither of you are the persons who once shared the deep intimacies and easy bonhomie that make up true friendship. How pleasant it is, therefore, to find mere moments after your reacquaintance that the bond you’d created is still strong and unsundered, that the joy and stimulus you’d found in the other’s company was unalloyed and lively, that—to put it frankly—you still were friends.

Such was my happiness upon rereading Confessions Of A Crap Artist for the first time in decades. I immediately found myself swayed by Philip K. Dick’s deceptively simple language, his seemingly deep understanding of human thought, and his deft keenness at slicing apart the worst tangles of people’s snarled relationships. I have always loved Philip K. Dick’s works, and reading this novel, which was his only non-genre fiction published during his lifetime, reminded me why. But did I speak of ‘unalloyed joy’ above? Sigh. No, I can’t really speak of Crap Artist in such terms, for I found its pleasures somewhat tarnished by one of Dick’s two primary faults, and in the process I broke my cardinal rule of never learning about the lives of the artists who create the works I love. A brief line or two in Wikipedia was enough to lower my estimation of Philip K. Dick the man; I still feel, however, that his oeuvre and this novel in particular are works of genius that will always be well worth reading. I shall always love Confessions Of A Crap Artist, even if I am no longer sure that I would want to have had Mr. Dick as a friend.

The plot of the book is quickly told: A high-strung woman and her successful husband move her mentally defective brother into their beautiful house in the sparsely populated land of coastal Marin County during the mid-1950s. The brother becomes involved with a local UFO group while his sister becomes involved with a (slightly) younger married man who has recently moved into the area with his wife. Complications ensue. The end. [See below for Trigger Warnings.]

But of course nothing is that simple; it never is with Philip K. Dick. Each chapter is told from a different point of view, a completely realized internal voice of the brother, the sister, the husband, or the married man that Fay (the sister) begins an affair with. The spot-on accuracy with which Dick depicts the thoughts and concerns and internal dialogue of each of these quite disparate persons is a large part of his genius as a writer. It is not so much a stream of consciousness as a deft recreation of the monologue that (as I imagine) we each keep up with ourselves as we consider our troubles and our environment. Anyone who reads much of the writer’s work notes his penchant and proficiency for writing in this style. It is this which makes Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? an entirely different work than Blade Runner (though who really wanted to see Harrison Ford as a henpecked husband in a dead-end job as a glorified repo man?). Dick’s ability to perfectly project the perceptions and foci of his characters is, in fact, the entire plot of Eye In The Sky, the first novel of his I ever read and a work written only a year or two before Confessions Of A Crap Artist.

But entering into the thoughts of his characters means surfacing some unpleasant thoughts, some of which are very dark indeed. We find in Confessions not only something of an apology for wife beating, but also the unrelenting hateful thoughts of people trapped in relationships that they have both fallen into and have also carefully constructed, tangled knots of patterns so deeply tied into their lives that only a Gordian solution can resolve them, but of course the blade of Alexander severs more than mere threads. We want to ask: Do people really think this way? Do they obsess over the imperfections they see in their partners while remaining entirely ignorant of their own deep character flaws? Of course they do. At least, I know I do.

But even saying “something of an apology for wife beating” points out the difficulty inherent in a work like this one. There are many for whom such a characterization will be immediately disqualifying, either of my review or of the novel. Happy is he or she who has never come close to the psychic tendrils of a couple in deeply twisted, malformed love. There are such pairs, wounded themselves, who proceed to wound each other with emotional cuts which may indeed lead to physical blows. I myself once knew a couple whose relationship teetered upon an unstable fulcrum of bad feeling that all too often pivoted from suppressed loathing to hateful words and possibly worse. Unfortunately for me, they considered me part of the family. To write about such twisted relationships is a rare talent indeed, and Philip K. Dick had such a gift.

Besides the gift, of course, he also had the insight and knowledge, and that knowing was likely garnered from personal experience. As a victim? Or as a victimizer? Well … let me just say that one of Philip K. Dick’s two primary flaws is his deeply rooted misogyny. His female characters are almost always just one of two stereotypes: either a palely beautiful waifish free spirit living beyond the constraints of ordinary, dull reality, or—and this is always more likely in Dick’s works—a shrewish harpy of coldly calculating evil and near psychopathy. As my daughter might say, “Awwww, baby … Who hurt you?” But the record shows that the hurting was not only one-way in Philip K. Dick’s case.

I make it a rule not to learn anything about the personal lives of the authors, artists, actors, musicians, creators whom I like. If I truly love a particular poem, picture, or piece of music or prose, I fear that I’ll lose my pleasure in that work if I know, for instance, that the poet got involved with a petty squabble with a fellow poet over imperialist ideals, each sniping and badmouthing the other in the contemporary press and society. And I’ve always known that Philip K. Dick had problems. You don’t have the record of ‘serial monogamy’ that he did without some deep-seated issues. (I’m looking at you, Dad.) But while trying to look into the history of this singular straight fiction novel by the science fiction author (though published in a limited run in 1975, it was written in 1959), I read a single sentence about his personal life on his Wikipedia page with seriously lowered Mr. Dick in my esteem, and which I now fear I will drag behind me every time I read his novels or short stories.

And that would be a shame.

The cover for the 1982 Timescape edition

Because Philip K. Dick is a brilliant writer, whatever faults he had as a human being. Indeed, human faults are his forte, and perhaps no other writer so perfectly captured the inner life and language of we imperfect humans as we go about just trying to live our dooméd lives. (Or, perhaps more likely, it is only I who think in this same unabating nattering way.) He writes of people afflicted with neuroses and perhaps even psychopathy, of the difficulty of true human relationships, of the almost impossibility of communication between men, women, and others who paradoxically are compelled to expend endless words in the attempt. And Confessions Of A Crap Artist is one of Dick’s three best novels.

As the novel runs through the internal musings of first one then another character, the tortured marriage of Fay and Charley Hume is strained to the breaking point. Finally we come to a chapter of true noir nightmare, in which one of the characters shatters the fragile world they have constructed. I had forgotten that chapter from my earlier reading, had perhaps even suppressed it, and it is one of the reasons for the Trigger Warning section below. I initially thought that this denouement disqualified the powerful writing which had come before, but found that the close of the novel used the horrific events of this chapter to uncover deep truths and to somehow reveal an even deeper humanity (in its best sense).

For we are all flawed human beings (The Bible tells us so), or at least all the interesting humans are. And love exists, if it doesn’t always triumph, not in spite of, but through the flaws, transcending in some strange way the burdens we humans seem always to bring to every situation. The Confessions of Jack Isidore, the ‘crap artist’ of the title, as he confronts his own flaws—it is easy to look at others’—leave us better people for having read them, like all the great confessions of literature have always done.

Trigger Warnings: Spousal abuse, violence. Do not read this book if you are sensitive to the same topics as my wife. If you are unsure what I mean, email me at steve@educatedguesswork.com.

Book List: 4th Century, Final Quarter

As I mentioned earlier this week, I recently finished reading book #400 since I started keeping count in 2015, and, since I’ve already caught you up with lists of the first 75 books in the last hundred books, here I’ll catch you up with the remaining twenty-five books making up the full hundred. (As usual, I do not include comics and graphic novel books in my count, though they are listed below.)

I already wrote about that 400th book read, John Fischer’s hortatory relation of his time in Ukraine with the UNRRA, Why They Behave Like Russians. The penultimate book in this last century was the Keufel & Esser Company’s Slide Rule Manual, which I had actually been working my way through for at least half of last year. (It took me quite a while to work through every problem in the book, particularly with my current schedule.) That book was actually a lot of fun, with only the typical number of mistakes in the problem sets, and I learned a lot and am now really quite impressed with slide rules. I was helped by the fact that my Pickett slide rule is a bit more sensibly structured than the Keufel & Esser rule featured in the book, since the positive and negative log scales are immediately opposite each other on my own rule. I also wish my vision were better; my astigmatism and poor eyesight means that my own error is probably greater than the expected rate.

Book #376, kicking off this last quarter-century of books read, was Lois McMaster Bujold’s Borders Of Infinity. This collection of short stories about Miles Vorkosigan was passable science fiction, but doesn’t inspire me to go out and read the novels. The book was, on the other hand, the highlight of the first five read in this latest tranche, though Mr. Popper’s Penguins was very nice, especially the Robert Lawson illustrations.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
376 11/21/19 Lois McMaster Bujold Borders of Infinity SF & Fantasy
377 11/22/19 Mark Dice Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True Wacko
378 11/23/19 Richard & Florence Atwater Mr. Popper’s Penguins Children’s
379 11/29/19 Frederick Franklin Schraeder 1683–1920 History
380 11/30/19 Tanith Lee Lycanthia SF & Fantasy

 

 

A much better set of books began with the best noir novel of all time, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. I wrote about this book at the time, and even tracked down the earliest film version of the novel (1935) to watch and compare with the better known Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake picture. I wrote about the movie here.

Don’t let the title fool you. A Brief Relations of the Adventures of Mr. Bamfield Moor Carew; For more than forty Years past the KING of the BEGGARS is really about a seemingly normal guy from a not entirely normal family in 18th-Century Devonshire who leaves home and goes off to wander with the gypsies and become a mountebank, imposter, liar, and swindler. This slim chapbook—obviously a reprint—is not his more famous autobiography published a year or two later, but is a rollicking good tale for all that.

Last among this next set of five books I read at the beginning of December is the first collection in August Derleth’s series of Solar Pons. I was surprised and not a little shocked, even, to discover that the éminence grise behind Lovecraft’s Cthulhu books has written quite the best pastiche of Sherlock Holmes it has ever been my pleasure to read. Indeed, several of these stories surpass even some of Doyle’s own post-Reichenbach tales. I went out and got more of the collection, and look forward to reading them (though I alloy my hope with my usual expectation of disappointment).

 

# Read Author Title Genre
381 12/2/19 Dashiell Hammett The Glass Key Mystery
382 12/4/19 Gavin Black Suddenly, At Singapore Mystery
12/5/19 Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides, eds. Anarchy Comics No. 3 Comics & Graphic Novels
383 12/5/19 A Brief Relations of the Adventures of Mr. Bamfield Moor Carew; For more than forty Years past the KING of the BEGGARS True Crime
384 12/9/19 L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt Wall Of Serpents SF & Fantasy
385 12/16/19 August Derleth Regarding Sherlock Holmes Mystery

 

The standout of the next five books I read was John Michell’s look at some of the delightfully strange people our forefathers knew well enough to ignore, the very sympathetic—not to say credulous—Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions. Michell has a touch of Colin Wilson’s disease about him, as his fascination with ley lines and sacred geometry proves, but he brings to life some ideas that, if they cannot be completely consigned to oblivion, ought to have as witty and trenchant explainer as this author. A source book for dives into the world of outré thought, much like McKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions or Akron Daraul’s Secret Societies. (Yes, I know that Daraul is a pseudonym; I even have his blank book.)

# Read Author Title Genre
386 12/17/19 William Gibson & Bruce Sterling The Difference Engine SF & Fantasy
387 12/18/19 Posters of World Wars I and II Arts & Photography
388 12/19/19 Phoebe Atwood Taylor Death Lights A Candle Mystery
389 12/21/19 John F. Michell Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions Wacko
390 12/22/19 John Dickson Carr Captain Cut-Throat Mystery

 

I’ve already written about three of the books in the next five I read: two of them I didn’t like, and one which I really loved. The good book here was Curt Hopkin’s first book of poetry, The Dog Watches and Other Poems, which you can either read about here, or—much better choice—buy your own copy and read it yourself and ignore my words about his words. I’m telling you: His words are better. Hopkin’s powerful poems were the last book I read in 2019, and seemed to ground me while all other tethers were torn and tattered.

# Read Author Title Genre
391 12/24/19 Phoebe Atwood Taylor The Mystery Of The Cape Cod Tavern Mystery
392 12/27/19 Patricia Moyes Dead Men Don’t Ski Mystery
393 12/28/19 Roald Dahl Charlie And The Chocolate Factory Children’s
394 12/29/19 Curt Hopkins The Dog Watches and Other Poems Poetry
395 1/3/20 Andrew M. Stephenson Nightwatch SF & Fantasy

 

Beginning the new year and finishing this last hundred books, a couple of quickie reads from the pulps, a not-bad historical mystery of the Ancient Roman ilk, and the two books mentioned at the top of this post. All of these were good, workmanlike texts, though the Doc Savage tale pictured here, The Annihilist, is much better written and plotted than Murder Melody (which threatens to descend into farce at points). No surprise that the first book was created by Lester Dent, holder of the primary pen behind the Kenneth Robeson house name used for the Doc Savage tales, whereas the latter was the first attempt by Lawrence Donovan at a full-length tale of the Man of Bronze.

# Read Author Title Genre
396 1/3/20 Kenneth Robeson Murder Melody SF & Fantasy
397 1/8/20 Kenneth Robeson The Annihilist SF & Fantasy
398 1/10/20 Lindsey Davis Silver Pigs Mystery
399 1/15/20 Lyman M. Kells, Willis F. Kern & James R. Bland Slide Rule Manual: Log Log Duplex Decitrig Computers
400 1/16/20 John Fischer Why They Behave Like Russians History

 

 

Still reading a lot of Science Fiction and Mysteries, as well as some odds and ends as I try to prune my shelves a tad. I will have a more complete analysis next week (I hope), when I shall look over the data for the full set of the last hundred books read.

 

The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links:

Friday Vocabulary

1. poioumenon — metafiction in which the process of writing or creation is the primary subject

He liked Barton Fink as a wonderful example of poioumenon, while I just liked it for John Goodman screaming in a burning hallway.

 

2. hotbox (also hot box) — (railroads) overheated axle bearing on rail cars and engines

But just as we were about to get under way, our car was removed from the train and placed on a siding due to a hotbox discovered by the yard crew, who could give us, however, no idea of how long we would be delayed.

 

3. tenuity — thinness of size; thinness of texture or density; paucity, weakness

The sheer tenuity if not outright vacuity of his thought is obvious from the misinformed connections he makes between the most disparate ideas, connections only possible to a mind trained on a rarified program of conspiracy and illogic.

 

4. mine-run — average, not special or distinguished in any way, run of the mill

Still, Pete was lucky to have had no mechanical problems during the race, for his mine-run pit crew had their hands full with basic tire changes and refilling the fuel.

 

5. bawdry — (archaic) lewd speech or writing, obscenity; the practice of a prostitute

He had imagined a Paris night life of decadent bawdry and exciting transgression, but instead had found only the same sullen forced revelry and nauseating drunkenness he had left behind at college.

 

6. imp — to engraft, to implant; (falconry) to graft feathers into a damaged wing so as to restore or improve flight

Jason used any feathers he could find for imping in new ones when his charges had suffered losses during their hunts, but he seemed partial to the crow feathers that he had in great supply.

 

7. coverture — legal doctrine under which a married woman’s rights and obligations (to property, to enter contracts, etc.) were subsumed under those of her husband

If a widow had been named as executor of her deceased husband’s estate during her coverture, she must fulfill those duties and settle the estate before remarrying, otherwise her new spouse will assume the office of executor in her stead.

 

8. gimlet — tool for boring holes, esp. in wood, consisting of a metal screw on a shaft with a handle at the other end

The lazy apprentices attempted to pilfer wine from their master’s stores, but chose too small a gimlet to penetrate fully through the thick wine barrels.

 

9. pricket — spike upon which to stick a candle; buck in his second year

At one point they had been a matched pair, but the one candlestick had been left out of doors quite often, and was thus worn and rusted, its pricket almost entirely broken off.

 

10. polyuria — passing abnormally large amounts of urine

They were worried, naturally, since polyuria is defined for all practical purposes as the production of more than three liters of urine in a twenty-four hour period, but their fears were allayed when they realized that he was drinking almost half a dekaliter of soda every day.

 

400 Books

I’ve just finished my 400th book since I started tracking such data back in June of 2015. The book which saw me cross this fictional milestone was an interesting look at the Soviet Union just after World War II, Why They Behave Like Russians, written by John Fischer and published in 1947. Fischer visited the Ukraine in 1946 as an official of UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Recovery Administration), and had some nice insights into the young Communist state—not yet 30 years old at the time of his visit—which were apparently quite controversial at the time, but which have been seasoned somewhat by the threescore and twelve years since. (I recommend reading political books, or books on so-called ‘current events’, many years after their publication; they then seem either sage or silly, and are consequently much more enjoyable.)

Completing this book means that I have read another hundred books* since the last such milestone reached on March 26, 2019. Thus almost 300 days (more precisely: 297) have elapsed since I read my 300th book since I started my meaningless tracking project. On average, therefore, I read one book every 2.97 days during this last century of books. This is a slight increase from the 2.79 days to read books #201-300. (The average for the first hundred books was 4.83; that for the second hundred was 6.17.)

   1 Book per 2.97 Days   

As usual, I’ll be back with more detailed analysis after I have a chance to massage the data into me-friendly form. As well, of course, I’ll be posting a listing of the last set of books read.

*As usual, I exclude comic books and their ilk from my calculations.

(My copy of Why They Behave Like Russians does not have a dust jacket. Indeed, upon closer examination I can see the telltale indentation on the back which shows this to be a book club edition. So here’s a picture of the original book dust jacket, grabbed from Goodreads, for those of you who like images. Quite frankly, however, the sans serif font used for the title page and chapter headings is much more attractive than the calligraphic font used here on the original cover.)