Journal of No. 118

Catching up on books

2025-03-26T18:07:53Z

I've been remiss. In no particular order:

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett. Hey, it's a Discworld novel. It does what it says on the cover. I was never big into Discworld in its heyday, and I'm still not. The best parts, as is often the case, are little humanist asides. Chosen by work book club

The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. Really a fascinating nonfiction look at the development of forensic science in the 1920s and 1930s in the New York coroner's office, bringing a professional scientific eye to something that had been slapdash at best previously. Also an interesting look at various poisons. Each chapter is devoted to a particular poison and there's a wealth of historical detail on famous criminal cases and horrific industrial accidents and mishaps. Very good.

19th century interlude...

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K Jerome: Three upperclass twits go on a boating holiday by mistake. Hilarity ensues. There are some laugh out loud moments, and it's generally amusing in a Dave Barry-esque breezy way. Two n-words appear as landmines in the middle. Anyway a sample:

[Travelling with cheese in a close railway carriage] And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out. And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt themselves.

...

Now, I’m not like that. I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.

...

Rather an amusing thing happened while dressing that morning. I was very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water. It made me awfully wild, especially as George burst out laughing. I could not see anything to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more. I never saw a man laugh so much. I quite lost my temper with him at last, and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot he was; but he only roared the louder. And then, just as I was landing the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at all, but George’s, which I had mistaken for mine; whereupon the humour of the thing struck me for the first time, and I began to laugh. And the more I looked from George’s wet shirt to George, roaring with laughter, the more I was amused, and I laughed so much that I had to let the shirt fall back into the water again.

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Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson: The book that brough so many Midwesterners to California in the late 19th century, a romance in Southern California as Mexico gives way to the United States. Race prejudice from white Americans to Mexicans to natives. Miscegenation. Hidden treasures. Missed connections. Horse thieves and gunplay. Plenty of tragedy. I'm not sure it really presents a pleasant picture that should attract people, but there are a few lyrical passages of description of mustard fields and hills and whatnot that really are part of the SoCal landscape and may have felt exotic in Dubuque cornfields.

Back to a more modern century

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus: Female scientist in the 1950s has really bad experiences at UCLA, pretty bad experience at a Lawrence Livermore-esque lab, finds and loses love, has a second act as a TV cooking/chemistry host, and then a rushed final act where vengeances and come-uppances come up. Enjoyable, but a few cheats and gimmicks and dropped plot threads. On the last point, I'm thinking particularly of the host stating she's an atheist on her live TV show in 1960. Although there's a bit of a flap, the book trundles on and takes the express train to the finale without fully dealing with that.

That Librarian, by Amanda Jones. A Louisiana school librarian thrust into prominence when she stands up for a public library (not school library) being attacked by censors. She is vilified by some of the townsfolk, and ultimately sues a couple of the worst for defamation. She's be the first to tel you she's no saint or superhuman figure, and she's right about that. What I think is both charming and yet detracts from her reliability as the teller of her own tale is how much she indulges in some score-setlling with some of the folk in her own small town. It's petty and yet dish-y. There's some "I won't name any names, but everyone in my town will know exactly who this is." No, really:

Another huge disappointment to me was a local elected official whom I had thought was a friend. I will call her Katie, although people in my community will know the person I am talking about. I’m not bringing her up to settle a score—at least, I hope I’m not. I’m including her so that you know the whole story.

...[different person below]

I almost came unglued and wanted to ask her who was she to quiz me about religion, morals, and agendas when she had a very public affair while she was married, to a police officer who was also married, and both of their marriages ended in divorce because of it. I kept thinking that she had a ton of gall.

But on the good side, the book does do a good job of telling people how librarians deal (within the system) with challenges to books, and why that's probably an adequate and professional way to handle things, and the public can have its say. (And there's no need for grandstanding and running off to lawyers and politicians to start passing laws.)

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Space Chantey by RA Laffery: A tall-tale science fiction-y retelling of the Odyssey. Bonkers and genius in parts, but a little too bonkers. If Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is NOT BONKERS ENOUGH for you, this might be perfect.

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We the Corporations, by Adam Winkler

2019-11-03T18:29:12Z

A UCLA law prof traces the history of corporate rights in America.

The book starts a little slow, but gains steam as we move away from antiquated entities like the Bank of the United States and closer to Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.

Not that I'm a great legal scholar, but I have no problem with a corporation being a fictitious 'person' for legal purposes. But it seems clear that certain rights should be reserved to people people. The overall history is one of corporations getting more and more rights -- and possibly too much at the present time. There were two major threads that I saw:

#1: The extent to which the law should 'pierce the veil' and treat the rights of the corporation as the same as the rights of the people that make it up. While the arrow drifted back and forth over time, it seems that the current situation is where the people behind the corporations get the best of both worlds. If it comes to liability, the people are protected and only the corporation can be sued. If it comes to rights, suddenly the people can exert them (as the owners of Hobby Lobby assert their company itself has religious beliefs and religious rights that correspond to their own beliefs and rights.

In some cases, this ambiguity is not necessarily automatically evil. In one case a corporation composed of black investors was allowed to rent a segregated space because the corporation was not black. In another, the NAACP was black enough to sue for racial discrimination.

#2: What sort of rights corporations have, as opposed to people people. For a long time there was a distinction (wrong, I think) that corporations had property rights, but no liberty rights. I don't see how 'freedom of the press' can only be an individual right. Maybe it was different when newspapers were just Ben Franklin personally setting ink to paper, but nowadays all newspapers are corporations. How could they not have access to freedom of the press? And so it was ruled in cases involving Huey Long and Louisiana newspapers. But from this necessary (in my view) extension of liberty rights to corporations, it has been a slide toward giving corporations the whole farm. So much so that now they can use their deep pockets to express 'speech' in the form of superPAC donations.

A point that Winkler makes is that we often hear about the women's rights struggle, or civil rights struggle, but no one talks about the corporate rights struggle. But to be sure there was one, and it leaned on these other struggles a great deal.

Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, when a scholar set out to identify every Fourteenth Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court, the justices decided 28 cases dealing with the rights of African Americans—and an astonishing 312 cases dealing with the rights of corporations. At the same time the court was upholding Jim Crow laws in infamous cases like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the justices were invalidating minimum-wage laws, curtailing collective bargaining efforts, voiding manufacturing restrictions, and even overturning a law regulating the weight of commercial loaves of bread. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted to shield the former slaves from discrimination, had been transformed into a sword used by corporations to strike at unwanted regulation.

A little snippet of California history:

On the justice’s next trip to California, Field and his bodyguard, Deputy Marshal David Neagle, were having breakfast at a train stop in Lathrop, about 70 miles due east of San Francisco, when Terry snuck up behind the justice and struck him. Neagle jumped up and shot Terry twice, once in the head and once in the heart, killing the former judge instantly. It was then discovered, however, that Terry was unarmed, and California authorities arrested both Neagle and Field for murder. To this day, Field remains the only justice ever arrested while serving on the Supreme Court, much less for a crime as serious as murder.

Another reminder of how the Republican Party has changed since the days of Lincoln (or even McKinley). immigrant voter reachout efforts:

Although state committees had traditionally managed the local campaigns, even for presidential candidates, Hanna centralized them all under his authority in order to be “the general staff of the whole army.” He reorganized the RNC’s executive offices and introduced an improved system of bookkeeping. He opened a branch headquarters in Chicago, closer to the midwestern voters whose support McKinley would need. He created the first nationwide advertising campaign to market a presidential candidate and produced over 100 million pieces of campaign literature printed in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Hebrew to appeal to immigrants.

School fighting for the right to be integrated:
...Berea College in Kentucky had moral [reasons to go to court]. At the time, the college, which was organized as a corporation like one of the earliest corporate rights litigants, Dartmouth College, was the only racially integrated school in the South. After Roosevelt’s fateful dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House, Kentucky lawmakers hardened their segregationist resolve and passed a law prohibiting any school from having a racially integrated student body. The college challenged the law on various grounds, including interference with its right to choose its own students. It was unconstitutional, the college argued, to prohibit “the voluntary association of persons of different races” absent compelling reasons.

Justices had somewhat more 'political' lives in the past:
Hughes had to resign from the Supreme Court to run [for President!]. For all his intellectual and prosecutorial gifts, however, Hughes was a poor campaigner and, in an upset, lost by only a few thousand votes to the incumbent Wilson. The lesson of his failed candidacy—that the judicial temperament is ill-suited to the rigors of the type of modern, commercial-style campaign first envisioned by Mark Hanna—would discourage future Supreme Court justices from running for national executive office. (William O. Douglas came closest in 1940 and 1944 when he was considered for vice president by Franklin Roosevelt.) Losing the presidency and a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court within months of each other, however, did not seem to faze the gifted Hughes. Like a cat with nine lives, he would go on to serve as secretary of state to two presidents and, in 1930, would be appointed again to the Supreme Court of the United States, this time as chief justice.

This case was about proselytizing in a 'company town', but obviously has some application (I think) to current companies that want to exclude certain sorts.
Although Black recognized that private property owners usually have the right to exclude whomever they want from their property, the “more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general,” the more the owner has to respect the constitutional rights of the public. Here, Chickasaw’s business block was “accessible to and freely used by the public in general.” Because Chickasaw was a town—even if it was really a company town—it could not silence religious minorities.

The world could use more Congressional committees humiliating people interfering with witnesses:
In 1966, Gillen sent out agents to look into [Ralph] Nader’s personal life, to see if the crusader was into “women, boys, etc.,” and to determine if he liked “drinking, dope” or anything else scandalous.11 When Morton Mintz of the Washington Post reported that Nader was being tailed, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee, was outraged at the apparent harassment of a congressional witness. He demanded GM president James Roche appear before the Senate, where the humiliated car executive was forced to apologize repeatedly.

Of the many things one could blame Rehnquist for, annoying pharmaceutical commercials are not among them.
“The logical consequences of the court’s decision in this case are far-reaching indeed,” warned Rehnquist. Not only would the court’s ruling inevitably “extend to lawyers, doctors, and all other professions,” it would also lead to “active promotion of prescription drugs, liquor, cigarettes, and other products.” In a prescient passage, Rehnquist predicted that pharmaceutical companies would soon be hawking their drugs directly to consumers: “Don’t spend another sleepless night,” he predicted the ads might say. “Ask your doctor to prescribe Seconal without delay.”

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Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden

2017-09-10T23:07:24Z

A 1968 collection of essays on the the Tough Guys of 30s fiction by diverse authors, primarily academic (including Carolyn See of UCLA (Extension at the time) - her dissertation was on the Hollywood novel, and her essay here explores the well-populated cross-section of Hollywood and tough guys). I picked it up at an estate sale on a whim.

Probably the best of the bunch and a good primer on the topic is "The 'Black Mask' School" by Edgar-winning UCLA Professor Philip Durham, focusing on the origins and contents of the eponymous pulp magazine.

Some essays are insightful, others veer off into academese, others display a surprising distaste for the whole topic:

"Although the novel is atrociously written, with ... a tone I can describe only as illiterate archness, it does contain some of the important elements of gangster fiction: an Italian hero, an unbelievable amount of brutality ..., quite a bit of very rapid and decidedly unexciting sex, a Robin Hood sort of romanticism, and some fairly knowledgeable accounts of the methods of criminals."

Of a different novel: "Chase apparently took all the elements he found striking in gangster fiction and magnified them as far as his imagination and the censors would allow; the result is one of the rarest of rare birds, a truly horrible book."

One interesting insight that caught me eye is the epigraph to an essay on Hammett, quoted from Angus Fletcher's Allegory: "[The 'daemonic agent'] will act as if possessed ... He will act part way between the human and divine spheres, touching on both, which suggests that he can be used for the model romantic hero, since romance allows its heroes both human interest and divine power. His essentially energic character will delight the reader with an appearance of unadulterated power. Like a Machiavellian prince, the allegorical hero can act free of the usual moral restraints, even when he is acting morally, since he is moral only in the interests of his power over other men. This sort of action has a crude fascination for us all; it impels us to read the detective story, the western, the saga of space exploration and interplanetary travel."

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