Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Among the many already-written books keeping Lee company in her apartment was a copy of Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, which she had read, as she put it, umpteen times. Crusoe had been shipwrecked twenty-eight years, and Lee must have identified. Ages had passed since she had published Mockingbird, yet there she was surrounded by loneliness, struggling with a book that didn't seem to want to be written, on what must have felt, at times, like her own Island of Despair. Her father, like Crusoe's, had wanted her to stay home, but she had gone adventuring instead and was now alone in her apartment notching her days.

In an opening letter from author Casey Cep, she explains that when she first learned that Harper Lee would be publishing the novel Go Set a Watchman, she travelled to Alabama in order to write an article on the book's surprise release for The New Yorker. While there, she learned of a different book that Lee had been trying to write in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird; a true crime, in the vein of In Cold Blood (for which Lee had acted as a research assistant for Truman Capote before Mockingbird hit the public), and the more that Cep learned about the bizarre tale of a Black serial killing voodoo preacher, the progressive white lawyer who represented him, and the vigilante who took down the fraudulent preacherman – and the more she learned about Harper Lee's struggles to put the story on the page – the more Cep felt the urge “to pick up where she left off”. You might say it takes some chutzpah to accept that torch and carry on where the fabled Harper Lee had failed, but the resulting Furious Hours is a compelling and rich narrative. Who knows what Ms Lee might have made of her material if she hadn't so firmly blocked her own way, but Cep does the story proud. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)

Ghost bells, war cries, the clanging of slave chains: if ever a land came by its haunting honestly, it is Eastern Alabama. In the long empty miles between towns there, the highways rise and fall over hills that keep most things out of view and make every sight a sudden one. Where the pavement ends, the roads turn to dirt as red as rust or blood. Pines and oak trees line them, tattered moss hanging from their branches like wraiths. At night, the fog is so thick that anything can disappear into it or come walking out of it.

The Reverend Maxwell claimed that he was afraid of what was out there, too. All his life, he insisted that he was innocent – of his first wife's murder, of his neighbor's death, of his brother's death, of his second wife's death, of any crime whatsoever, of the practice of voodoo. All claims to the contrary, he said, amounted to vicious gossip spread at the expense of a righteous man widowed twice in only two years. The fact that he had insurance on all those who died did not suggest a motive; it showed only that he was a scrupulous spouse and sibling.

Furious Hours is separated into three sections: The first tells the life story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell; the second is the life and career of Big Tom Radney – the lawyer/politician who not only got rich helping Maxwell collect on the proliferation of life insurance policies that the Reverend held on the people around him, but who also defended the man who shot Maxwell down in public; and the final section is on Harper Lee: her life, career, and what she was up to in the years that she had self-exiled from public view. Each section is jam-packed with detail, and as I always find with this kind of book, these details are of varying degrees of interest to me. I didn't really like when the story of Willie Maxwell was interrupted by the history of the life insurance industry – starting in the Roman Empire, through the Great Fire of London, to America's Civil War days. (But then I did like the included nugget that the man to best capitalise on London's post-fire building and insurance boom was named Nicholas If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-for-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone.) The following suited me perfectly (which only proves that Cep, nor any nonfiction author, could possibly suit all tastes, all the time):

There were courts in Alabama even before there were courthouses. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a judge in Baldwin County presided from the fork of an oak tree, with the jury on his right, the spectators on his left, and another oak – one for the hangman – not far away. In Jasper, the seat of Walker County, the judge sat on a big rock, the jury on a bigger one. Over in Randolph County, the judge's bench was a stump, and those he sentenced to jail did their time in a hollow log along the Tallapoosa River. After one prisoner nearly drowned after the river flooded and carried the log off the bank with him inside it, the court turned over a wagon instead, put prisoners underneath, and had a sheriff sit on top.

Being a poor Black man from Alabama in the mid-twentieth century, there wasn't a whole lot of information about Willie Maxwell outside of his court cases; so where there were rumours of him practising voodoo, Cep gives us a look into conjuring; where he was a circuit preacher, we learn about revival tents; where Maxwell worked in pulpwood, we learn about the industry. Being a progressive up-and-coming Democrat in George Wallace's segregationist South, there's plenty of meat to put Tom Radney into context (I loved that when he was defending Maxwell's killer, this former hobnobber with the likes of JFK included in his summation to the jury, “I am only a simple country lawyer...”) But the real story begins in the third section, with Harper Lee – a section that explains the history of Go Set a Watchman, her complicated relationship with Truman Capote, the starts and stops and writer's block that kept her from publishing anything of note beyond what she referred to as “The Bird” and a few short magazine pieces. Because Cep tells us what Lee wanted to accomplish with Maxwell's story (which she eventually thought she might novelise, as honouring the victims in nonfiction felt unworkable), this seems a fitting revival of Lee's ideas; and since Cep so carefully details Lee's reclusive post-Mockingbird years, she sheds a light on where Watchman belongs in Lee's story (which pretty much fits Cep's original assignment). Maybe this felt a bit like three different stories, but I liked them all. Informative and interesting, a compelling read.

Late in the Day

I'm not saying that the past was good, she went on, – or fair, or better, or anything. But nothing will ever be more beautiful than this, will it? It's surpassingly beautiful.

In the opening pages of Late in the Day, we are introduced to Christine and Alex in their London flat as they listen to classical music after dinner, a novel held but unread, a darkening sky contemplated out the window; the perfect vignette of privilege and repose (although even here, there are a few hints of cracks in the veneer: Alex chose the music without consultation, and Christine refuses to ask him what it is because “he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn't know”). The phone rings and it is their friend Lydia, calling to inform them that her husband dropped dead at work – and the peaceful vignette is smashed apart. Christine thinks, “Unheard of for anything to harm Zachary. He was a rock, he was never ill. No, nothing so numb as a rock: striding cheerful giant with torrents of energy.” As Alex would later say, “The loss is so much more, we can't even...to take his death as yet more evidence of the supreme shitty law of life that takes away the best and uplifts the worst.” Kind and garrulous, rich and generous, patron and defender of the arts, it doesn't take the reader long to realise that Zachary was the linchpin that held this group together; not long to realise that their four lives had intertwined even further back than the dramatic opening had suggested. With Zachary gone, and Lydia helpless and numb, Christine and Alex invite her to stay with them for as long as needed – forcing decades-old undercurrents to bubble to the surface.

The book is divided into seven long chapters, and alternate between the present and the past. We learn that Christine and Lydia attended grammar school together (attracted to one another as the only two girls who regarded their elitist education with irony; reading The Communist Manifesto on lunch breaks and mocking the Founders Commemoration Day together), and that Alex and Zachary met at boarding school, where Alex's history as the son of a dissident Czech novelist made him just enough of an outcast for Zach's large patrician heart to embrace as a foundling. The foursome meet when the girls take a French course that the older Alex is teaching in college, and Lydia is immediately attracted to the brooding intellectual who seems to be the only man immune to her beauty and charm. Although she had initially tried to set Christine up with Alex's friend Zach, when Lydia – a queenly idler from modest roots who could both turn her critical thinking on and off and luxuriate in her own selfishness – learned that the fabulously wealthy man was actually interested in her, she scooped him up and they were soon married. Not long after, Alex – who had written one volume of poetry before disdaining his muse – went after Christine, and although she was afraid of “the force of his manner, his knowledge and inexorable critical judgment”, she also “felt the glow too, the golden good fortune of being chosen”. As Christine drops her PhD in English for a career as a painter, Alex decides to become a schoolteacher – which he is very good at, and which he finds fulfilling – Zach and Lydia move to NYC and home again, eventually opening an art gallery in a converted centuries old chapel, where Zach finds every opportunity to promote Christine's work. Each couple has a daughter of similar age, who have inherited an intriguing combination of their parents' traits, and Alex also has a son from his first marriage to an actress. I know I said I didn't want to give away too much of the plot, but this barely scratches the surface.

The point-of-view moves fluidly and omnisciently through the characters over time, but primarily, this feels like Christine's story, and she's the one I had the most empathy for. Always a conciliator, Christine is constantly explaining away Lydia's egotism as a charming trait, and whenever Alex makes one of his prickly intellectual pronouncements, Christine tries to smooth the situation with gentle irony – which nearly always leads to a massive fight. We see how, in the past, Zachary's presence was able to make things right in these situations, but with him gone in the present, everything is out of balance. I want to preserve here just one example of how Hadley interplays the past and present, with Christine's thoughts from today:

Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals. She couldn't remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, prising away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession.

And a scene from the past that undercuts everything that she now believes (even if she'll never know about it):

Chris' work, for instance, Zachary persisted, wanting to persuade his friend in this moment of openness between them. He wanted to open it wider: embrace the women inside their intimacy. – How has she been able to make her art so freely? It's poured out of her, hasn't it? Why hasn't she felt the heavy hand (of history) on her shoulder?

Alex looked startled, before a shutter fell across his expression, across some secret. It took him aback, Zachary saw, to have Christine's work invoked in the same scale as anything he, Alex, might have done. Zachary was startled too. He hadn't known that Alex didn't take his wife's work quite seriously: didn't, in their horrible old schoolboy phrase, really rate it. He must have only been kind, and condescending, and keeping a domestic peace, when he had acquiesced for all these years in seeming to rate it. The implications of Alex's mistake – Zachary was sure it was a mistake – seemed for a moment fairly tragic. And the night's happy mutuality deflated, each man was disappointed in the other. – As you say, Alex said drily, but with finality, as if it were the end of any discussion he wanted to have. – It pours out of her.

There is beautiful landscape writing (the part set in Venice was incredibly charming), relatable motivations, and big questions explored. Through music, literature, and painting, Hadley examines humanity through the lenses of art – it was uplifting to watch the widowed Lydia discard her usual pulp fiction reads for some nonfiction that showed her a “revelation of the framework underpinning things” and that set her mind afire with ideas and connections – and these passages felt natural and of the characters. I loved the dialogue, and the format, and the plot. I loved the whole thing.

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

“The sun does shine,” I said, and then I looked at both Lester and Bryan – two men who had saved me – each in their own way. “The sun does shine.”

And then the tears began to fall.

In the foreword to The Sun Does Shine, attorney Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, begins with: “On April 3, 2015, Anthony Ray Hinton was released from prison after spending nearly thirty years in solitary confinement on Alabama's death row.” Falsely convicted of capital murder on inaccurate circumstantial evidence and lies, Hinton's journey through Alabama's justice and penal systems is a harrowing cautionary tale: what happened to Ray Hinton could happen to any American – and in particular, the poor and marginalised – and it's extraordinary that he left Holman State Prison on his feet instead of in a body bag. And while Hinton's personal situation illustrates the injustice of sending an innocent man to death row, the story that follows in Hinton's own words – in which he grew to know and accept the humanity of those who were sent to the electric chair; even of those definitely guilty of the most heinous of crimes – argues against the use of capital punishment for anyone. I cried repeatedly throughout this read – not just out of empathy for Hinton's struggles, but in recognition of the grace and dignity with which he faced them. An essential and moving read.

Justice is a funny thing, and in Alabama, justice isn't blind. She knows the color of your skin, your education level, and how much money you have in the bank. I may not have had any money, but I had enough education to understand exactly how justice was working in this trial and exactly how it was going to turn out. The good old boys had traded in their white robes for black robes, but it was still a lynching.

Growing up outside Birmingham, Hinton had been cautioned about the dangers of being black – white folks loosed dogs on black children, black homes were repeatedly firebombed up on “Dynamite Hill”, Hinton and his best pal Lester knew to jump into the ditch and hide if they heard a car coming along the highway on their hour-long walk home from baseball games (this same Lester would eventually visit Hinton every Friday throughout his thirty year prison stay). But through it all, Hinton's remarkable single mother (his father had been hurt in a mining accident and institutionalised) showed him unconditional love, taught him right from wrong, and gave him faith in God. When he was arrested for the murders he was eventually convicted of – crimes that available evidence and a better lawyer should have cleared him of – Hinton finally realised the real truth: every card was stacked against a poor black man in his hometown; none of the police, court officers, or jury were interested in the truth; they only wanted a conviction, and he would do. His first years on death row were filled with anger and despair as his appeal – handled by the same disinterested court-appointed lawyer as his original trial – snaked slowly through the system, but he eventually had an epiphany:

Despair was a choice. Hatred was a choice. Anger was a choice. I still had choices, and that knowledge rocked me. I may not have had as many as Lester had, but I still had some choices. I could choose to give up or to hang on. Hope was a choice. Faith was a choice. And more than anything else, love was a choice. Compassion was a choice.

Hinton remembered his mother's frequent instruction to find ways to serve others and he began to reach out to his fellow death row inmates, eventually winning them small privileges (including running a book club when they hadn't previously been allowed books at all) that helped them all feel like more than animals penned in 5x7 cages, twenty-three hours a day. Hinton even befriended a former white supremacist (Henry Hays, who participated in the beating and lynching of teenager Michael Donald in 1981) and mourned the day that he was led to the electric chair (which, by the way, was in the same building as the death row prisoners, and after every execution, the inmates would be forced to breathe in the smoke and stench of death until the air cleared). Hinton befriending Hays, who grew to see the error of his former hatred and who would eventually call Ray his brother and his best friend, proves Hinton's belief that none of us are the worst thing we have ever done; that all of us deserve a chance at redemption.

Knowing right from page one that Hinton would remain on death row for thirty years, it's excruciating to watch his rollercoaster of emotions as various appeals are granted, denied, or bounced back to lower courts. But again, it's Hinton's grace and decency – even at his lowest points – that lifted him up and that shine through these pages. I think that most people agree that it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to execute one innocent man, but after The Sun Does Shine, it would be pretty hard to defend the death penalty at all.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me.

I really wanted to be able to say that I liked Maid – I think it will be hard to explain why I didn't like the author's story without it sounding like I blame poor people for their situations – but ultimately, Stephanie Lane doesn't come off as very likeable, there's no insight into how her situation relates to the larger problem of institutionalised poverty, and this memoir is simply not well written. As always, the emotional trap is to rate a book higher because the topic is important – which poverty certainly is – but while Lane is getting plenty of recognition for this book, it was just okay for me.

One of the greatest things about a willingness to get on your hands and knees to scrub a toilet is you'll never have trouble finding work.

After presumably partying away her twenties and wistfully dreaming of attending college for Creative Writing one day, Stephanie Lane found herself pregnant at twenty-eight by a casual boyfriend; an abusive and emotionally manipulative man who screamed at her to get an abortion when he heard the news. Although Lane was in favour of abortion in principle, she “began to fall in love with motherhood”, and determined to keep her baby. When her homelife with the abusive partner became dangerous after the birth of Mia, Lane eventually escaped to a homeless shelter – with no money, no family support, no job, and no prospects. Eventually, Lane began working for a cleaning service, and the meat of this book describes how hard it is to live and raise a child on minimum wage at twenty-five hours a week, even with the support of government programs. 

“Welfare is dead,” I wanted to say. There was no welfare, not in the sense they thought of it as. There was no way for me to walk into a government office and tell them I needed enough money to compensate for the meager wages I needed in order to pay for a home. If I was hungry, I could get a couple hundred bucks a month for food. I could visit a food bank. But there was no cash to buffer what I actually needed to survive.

At one time, Lane was receiving funds from seven different government programs, and I totally understand how frustrating it would be to deal with that level of bureaucracy; to deal with all the red tape, time in government offices that could be spent working, to have grocery store cashiers and other shoppers in line evaluate what you're purchasing with methods the government makes obvious came from them. But while Lane has a valid point about how demeaning all of that is, she also complains that the WIC program stopped allowing coupons to be redeemed for organic milk, that she couldn't use her childcare vouchers for Montessori preschool, that her Pell Grant – which covered tuition for part-time college courses – didn't cover textbooks or courses over the summer. More than one person who noted Lane using government programs – from friends to strangers – said “You're welcome”, as though, Lane sneers, they paid for the items personally out of their taxes. And while I agree that's an awful and petty thing to say to someone, weren't those items paid for out of other people's taxes? Which is, of course, the way it should be, and no person who needs help ought to feel ashamed for receiving it, we're all in this together, but there's just something a bit entitled to Lane's tone throughout.

I cannot deny that Lane worked hard in near-impossible circumstances: raising a child basically alone (despite his emotional manipulation of their daughter, Lane sent Mia to her father's house every other weekend and whenever she could convince him to give a hand with childcare); running a household and constantly worrying about the bills; attempting to get a degree part-time to improve their lot; (literally) breaking her back to scrub other people's nastiness out of their homes. Lane spends a lot of the book talking about these big homes that she cleans – snooping through their medications, judging the messes they make; writing sometimes as though she's jealous of what they have, and then turning it around as though she feels superior to them:

My clients' lives, the homes they worked so hard to afford, were no longer my dream. Even though I had long since let that dream go, I still, in my most honest moments, while dusting rooms covered in pink, flowers, and dolls, admitted that I desperately wanted the same for my kid. I couldn't help but wonder if the families who lived in the houses I cleaned somehow lost one another in the rooms full of video games, computers, and televisions. This studio apartment we lived in, despite all its downsides, was our home. I didn't need two-point-five baths and a garage. Anyway, I saw how hard it was to keep them clean. Despite our surroundings, I woke up in the morning encased in love. I was there. In that small room. I was present, witnessing Mia's dance routines and silly faces, fiercely loving every second. Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.

Eventually, Lane applied for scholarships and student loans in order to prioritise her schooling over working just to get by. Although she continued to clean some homes privately, she balked at the idea of getting licensed or insured: there was no way she was going to make housecleaning feel so permanent. And that was another problem that I had with this book: Lane continually writes as though cleaning other peoples' homes was demeaning, basically beneath her, but while her good fortune did lead to a degree (and a book deal), there are millions of other poor women out there still doing the housecleaning without hope for better. And they probably work for more than the twenty or twenty-five hours a week that Lane complains she found so exhausting. In Roxanne Gay's review, she notes “the lack of acknowledgment of white privilege and how that made the arc of her narrative possible”, and I couldn't agree more. Lane had things very hard – and much of that was due to her own choices (choosing to become a mother without savings, a job, a supportive partner, or a home; choosing to remain in a city which offered no community support or gainful employment; choosing to juggle school, casual employment, and single-motherhood) – and I admire her obvious hard work and ability to overcome her circumstances. However, this isn't the kind of story that can be used to explore the general issue of poverty, and neither is it particularly heartwarming – for me, it pretty much fails on the large and the small scale. This is a low three stars.

Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

This book is reverie and not argument. My title is the book in a single phrase. What is it to be “possessed by memory”? How does possession differ in these: to possess dead or lost friends and lovers, or to possess poetry and heightened prose by memory?

Nearing ninety, legendary critic Harold Bloom has assembled in Possessed by Memory a sort of memoir out of his favourite poems (alongside passages from the Old Testament and Shakespeare), which, with his own thoughts interspersed, give proof to the wonderful epigraph by Oscar Wilde: “That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul”. Written over six years, we watch as Bloom's body inevitably declines, and more urgently, we watch as he “monthly” says goodbye to his friends and colleagues of many decades; he has, indeed, entered “the elegy season”. I must confess that much of Bloom's thoughts on writing are beyond my understanding, but I learned much from the still active professor; this is a dense yet rewarding read. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I am aware that some readers may turn away from Possessed by Memory because what they regard as heretical or at least esoteric distracts from the reading of poetry. I address not them but those who yearn for what I would term a Shakespearean reading of the best poetry made available to us, here in our Evening Land, of the tradition sparked by Homer and Isaiah. That tradition is dying. As a literary and religious critic, I wish to rally a saving remnant.

I am enthralled by the image of the insomniac Bloom reciting long stretches of by-heart epics and poems to himself in the middle of the night: I remember having to memorise a handful of shortish poems while in school, and they are lost to me now. In a society that seems to be ever turning away from our cultural foundations, I can relate to Bloom's urge to “rally a saving fragment”. However, because my education was not steeped in poetry and psalms, I couldn't always make the intertextual or exegetical connections that Bloom seems to take for granted with his readers. I can only take it as given as Bloom relates one poem to another; links one poet to the next (as he so often does):

A lifelong brooder on the problems of poetic influence, I have learned that one ultimate canonical test for poetic magnitude is provided by the sublime progeny a poet engenders. By that test, Wordsworth, William Blake, Shelley, and John Keats can be awarded the palm over Byron. Each of them lived on in the cavalcade of Anglo-American poetry, from Tennyson and Browning through Whitman and Emily Dickinson on to Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. I can think only of early Auden as a poet who attempted to carry on Byron's legacy, with indifferent success.

And I am even more lost when Bloom speaks in the jargon of poetry:

The transcendental impulse that powers Shelley's Pindaric flights is not alien to Keats, yet he turns away from it as Shakespeare did, choosing Ovidian flux and change over Platonic yearnings for a premature Eternity.

And if I may be permitted a minor complaint on format: Possessed by Memory often reads like a collection of essays instead of one linked work. Not only could I not really see an overall theme (other than an aged Bloom sharing whatever poems/high prose he felt like writing about), but many definitive statements were repeated throughout the essays, each time as though for the first time: that Johnson had inherited from Pope a distrust of the Sublime; or that Blake, like Milton, was a sect of one; or that Tennyson knew the quantity of every English word except for scissors; or that Whitman writes as though he is ahead of us and waiting for the reader to catch up. But who am I to criticise the critic?

For the most part, this is a collection of other peoples' (mostly Western white males) writing; Bloom's own thoughts take up not much space at all. However, I will put here some of what I found most intriguing:

Since childhood, I have meditated upon this agon of Israel with the Angel of Death. I interpret it not only as an allegory of Jewish history – indeed, of universal history – but also as the story of my own life, and the lives of everyone I have known, loved, taught, and mourned. In the half-light of my incessant nocturnal wakefulness, I begin to conceive of it as the struggle of every solitary deep reader to find in the highest literature what will suffice.

From childhood through old age, I have been made uncomfortable by a God who demands sacrifices that are also thanksgivings. Post-Holocaust, this will not work for many among us, and I frequently retreat from the Psalms to the poetry of Paul Celan, which has a difficult rightness, and does not seek to praise what can no longer be praised.

My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespearean or nothing.

The deepest lesson I have learned from Johnson is that any authority of criticism as a literary genre must depend on the human wisdom of the critic, and not upon the wrongness or rightness of either theory or praxis.

Now almost all of my friends among the poets and critics of my generation have departed. Mourning for so many men and women does not diffuse an individual grief yet makes it seem less urgent.

I have no doubt that Possessed by Memory will be of most interest to those who better speak Bloom's language, but I found many points of connection here myself; most especially when Bloom was writing intimately of his decline and his losses. In its way, it's a perfectly fitting memoir; the capstone of a deep reader's life.

I was so enchanted by the Oscar Wilde epigraph - it seems to perfectly describe my own aspirations here - that I'm going to quote it in full:

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...

Tunesday : Master and Servant

Master and Servant

(Gore, M. L.) Performed by Depeche Mode

There's a new game
We like to play you see
A game with added reality
You treat me like a dog
Get me down on my knees

We call it master and servant
We call it master and servant

It's a lot like life
This play between the sheets
With you on top and me underneath
Forget all about equality

Let's play master and servant
Let's play master and servant

It's a lot like life
And that's what's appealing
If you despise that throwaway feeling
From disposable fun
Then this is the one

Domination's the name of the game
In bed or in life
They're both just the same
Except in one you're fulfilled
At the end of the day

Let's play master and servant
Let's play master and servant

Let's play master and servant
Come on master and servant

It's been a few years since I was trying to remember here all the alternative songs my university friends and I used to love to dance to at the clubs (songs like 88 Lines About 44 Women and I Wanna Be a Cowboy), and while I did have a Depeche Mode song in there (Blasphemous Rumours), I had totally forgotten about Master and Servant until I heard it on a playlist at the gym this week. And, of course, I thought it was a hilarious song to have in that context - although, as in the cartoon I chose for the header, our trainers are more gentle and supportive than dominating drill sergeant - and, of course, I was totally motivated when I heard my jam; pumping barbells and singing along, even though Rudy said she had never heard this song before (I'm sure no one in that group had ever heard this song before)

There's no deeper meaning to this week's song choice: it simply reminded me of being young - a time when a group of us would dance in a circle, unironically singing about how S & M is a lot like life, as if we knew anything about either one - and I'm putting it here so I don't forget again.

The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound Unanswered Questions About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life

For the 50th anniversary of "The World Question Center," and for the finale to the twenty years of Edge Questions, I turned it over to the Edgies:

"Ask 'The Last Question', your last question, the question for which you will be remembered."

– John Brockman, Editor, Edge

I'm not familiar with the projects going on at Edge, but as I received an ARC of The Last Unknowns, and as I'm not uninterested to discover what leading thinkers would choose as their (as yet) unanswerable questions “for which (they) will be remembered”, I was pleased to delve into its pages – and it's not quite what I was expecting. It is simply an assemblage of three hundred or so questions; one per page; often with its author's credentials taking up more space than the question itself. Many of the questions were quite intriguing, and many, to me, were not; and overall it felt like there was something missing – the history or context around why these particular questions were being posed. The idea behind the project is still useful (and I'd imagine of particular interest to those who are familiar with Edge), and I am ultimately enlarged by having now read it. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)

I've selected a few representative questions, those which I found cheeky:

David Christian (Director, Big History Institute, and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University):

Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?

Rolph Dobelli (Founder, Zurich Minds):

Does this question exist in a parallel universe?

And those that I found pointless:

Laura Betzig (Anthropologist, historian):

Will we ever live together in a hive?

George Dyson (Science Historian):

Why are there no trees in the ocean?

Those that I found intriguing:

Lorraine Justice (Dean emerita and professor of industrial design, Rochester Institute of Technology):

What might the last fully biological human's statement be at their last supper?

Barnaby Marsh (Evolutionary dynamics scholar, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University):

How much of what we call “reality” is ultimately grounded and instantiated in convincing communication and storytelling?

And those that I found too arcane for me to contemplate:

Bart Kosko (Information scientist and professor of electrical engineering and law, University of Southern California):

What is the bumpiest and highest-dimensional cost surface that our best computers will be able to search and still find the deepest cost well?

Alexander Wissner-Gross (Scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, investor):

Can general-purpose computers be constructed out of pure gravity?

There were several repetitions of theme throughout the questions – how can science be better communicated, how can science (or more specifically, AI) create a more just society, what are the limits of human knowledge – but I think the following was my favourite question; not only the most interesting to contemplate, but the best fit for the brief:

Max Tegmark (Physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; researcher, Precision Cosmology; scientific director, Foundational Questions Institute; president, Future of Life Institute):

What will be the literally last question that will preoccupy future superintelligent cosmic life for as long as the laws of physics permit?

I enjoyed my time with this book – though to be fair: it took me longer to review than to read – and I think it's a useful springboard to look into the work of those thinkers who most intrigued me.

Mind Picking : What a Difference a Week Makes

So, last Wednesday was my mother-in-law, Bev's, 79th birthday, and with her Alzheimer's and other health issues, it felt like a blessing to have her so present and happy and enjoying her cake and family purposefully serenading her out of tune. I was at work on her actual birthday, but there was a plan to get the whole family together on the Saturday for more cake, more bad singing.

Then on Friday evening, Bev collapsed getting out of the car, and as the evening wore on, she was squirming in discomfort, not really able to tell her daughter Rudy where she hurt or what was wrong. As she obviously grew even more uncomfortable, Rudy called 911, and by the time the paramedics arrived, Bev was squirming with her eyes squeezed shut. The Paramedics forced her eyes open to assess her, and when they pointed at Rudy and asked, "Do you know who this is?", Bev answered, "That's my daughter"; and that's the last thing she said.

When they arrived at hospital, the ambulance was in a queue with ten others, and despite Bev's now semi-conscious state, she and Rudy spent hours on a stretcher in the hallway (it's apparently a rule that the paramedics need to stay with their charges until handed over to hospital staff, so Rudy marvelled at all of the paramedics sitting around the hallway, chatting and laughing and playing on their phones while who knows how many people were out there still dialling 911). It took until around 11 o'clock to get in to the emerg, and until around 4 before they had their own curtained-off area. Tests were conducted, Rudy attempted to snooze on the chair that was found for her, but eventually, Dave went over to keep their Mom company while Rudy went home to shower and change.

Dave hadn't been there long before a doctor came to him with some news: enzymes showed that Bev had had a heart "event", the true severity of which couldn't be determined without invasive tests, but in her weak state, it was unlikely that she would survive anything drastic. The team was willing to proceed with whatever course of action the family wanted, but to be clear, "she is very, very ill and it's unlikely she will recover to even where she was before". Dave called me with this news, so I rushed to the hospital so he could go and talk to his father and sister in person. When they all returned, it was clear that putting Bev's DNR - which she signed off on as her final wishes years ago - into effect was the compassionate course of action: by now, Bev was tightly curled into a fetal position, with her hands clamped into claws, and her toes splayed unnaturally; her rolling and moaning but not conscious. I asked the doctor exactly what state she was in - is this a coma? - and he explained that because of her Alzheimer's, Bev's brain didn't know how to deal with the insult to her body and went into a hypoactive delirium state; she was basically asleep and would likely never wake up. The doctor ordered "comfort only" - pain relief, but no nutrition or hydration - and we settled in to wait for nature to take its course; which this doctor said could take hours or days. As the day went on, we were admitted to a hospital room, family began to visit to say their goodbyes, and more than one person commented that there ought to be a kinder end than waiting for the body to starve and dehydrate.

Sunday was much the same - with more family and friends coming through - and it began to wear on us that we were in a shared room (with a sick old man in the next bed, of all things), and the whole situation seemed to lack dignity. We waited all day for a doctor to come around, and eventually, Zach overheard an exasperated doctor asking a nurse out in the hallway why we were asking to see him. When Dave heard that, he went out and insisted on seeing the doctor, and he came in to give us a rather condescending lecture on our situation - we had chosen comfort only, there was no medical intervention taking place, so we weren't in need of a medical team. By this time, Bev had opened her eyes, but the doctor explained that "the body will do what it will do but the basic facts have not changed". She was out of the hypoactive delirium state, but her body was still failing. When he said that she could last like that for a week or more, I asked if there wasn't a more dignified situation - no possibility of a private room? A transfer to hospice? He agreed that hospice would be a better setting, and said he would put in an order to get things rolling the next morning when the appropriate staff arrived.

Dave spent Sunday night at the hospital by his mother's side, and Monday proceeded much the same way. Family and friends came by to say their goodbyes, but as Bev was now looking at people and answering yes and no to questions, it felt even more brutal that we were withholding food and water; yet, we were cautioned not to have false hope - Bev's body could not survive the heart attack without a massive intervention, and she couldn't possibly survive the intervention. Even so, this no longer looked like passing peacefully in her sleep.

I spent Monday night at the hospital by Bev's side, and as Tuesday morning dawned, she began speaking in longer and longer sentences. A social worker and representatives of the hospice came by, and Bev was so alert that they asked her if she would be able to sign the transfer request papers - which so appalled me: Bev hasn't signed anything important in years, and I didn't want her to be told that she was going to die. The only good part of Alzheimer's is that she has never understood when she's been sick - from general frailty to cancer, she worries about nothing. After they left, Bev turned to me and, smacking her lips together, said, "Boy, it's funny, but I sure could use a drink." No doubt! No food or water, not even an IV, for three days - but there I was, alone, and had no idea what was allowed; would a glass of water needlessly prolong the inevitable? I did have the sponge and jar of liquid (water with glycerin?) that we used to swab her mouth, so I ran that over her tongue and lips until she said she felt better. Soon after, the social worker returned and took me out in the hallway to say that the talk of hospice might be premature; Bev might not be that sick. She said, "I know the family has an end of life plan that you're trying to put into effect..." And I interrupted, starting crying, and said, "We don't have a plan. We're tying to respect her wishes. If she's dying, we want something better for her than this crappy room. But if she's not, then we want to know what the next steps are." She nodded and said that she'd meet with yet another doctor. I quickly called Dave to let him know that the situation might be changing, and he rushed back to the hospital with his father and sister.

When we met with the new doctor, she explained that while Bev had definitely had a heart "event", there was no reason to believe that it had irreparably damaged the heart. And if she began to ask for food and drink, no matter what the ultimate outcome, providing both is part of the comfort care plan that we had requested. And, since hospice can only accept patients with a prognosis of less than three months, a transfer would be premature. I asked, "Are you saying she has at least three months left?" All I could think of was the fact that we had been starving her for four days at that point; speeding up what we had been told was the inevitable; half wishing that there was a kinder way to let someone go than watching them waste away. The doctor replied, "The body will do what it will do and we can only reassess day by day".

They sent in a speech pathologist to test Bev's swallow - which worked perfectly - so she was immediately put on a liquid diet and began to drink juice and water, eat custard and yogurt. They sent in a physiotherapist to get Bev walking around a bit again. Bev began to improve.

Wednesday saw Bev getting stronger, and on Thursday the doctor came in to say they were sending her down for a CT scan - just to rule out any kind of stroke. Within a half hour or so, Bev turned to me and said, "You know, I keep wondering if I maybe had a stroke. I sure would hate for anything to happen to my memory." I smiled and said that maybe she heard the doctor use the word stroke and we would be going down for a CT scan to make sure she hadn't. That was also the day that I had seen a flock of swans flying across the sky on my way to the hospital, and when I told Bev about it and remarked that it really must be spring, she said, "That's right. You always know it's spring when the swans return from Capistrano." That simply made me smile - I see no reason to ever correct the odd misrememberings that Bev comes up with, so I just replied, "That's what they say."

Friday morning, the doctor came in to say that the CT scan showed nothing, the echocardiogram showed no massive damage to the heart, and with Bev eating and mobile and not suffering any apparent effects from the "event", she would be ready to go home within a few days. Stunning. The speech pathologist came in to see her, the physiotherapist came to take her for a walk, nurses who had watched us say goodbye to her the previous weekend came in to hug her and call her the miracle lady (to Bev's bewilderment), and suddenly, word came that she could be released that day. Rudy eventually had to go to work for a late appointment, so Dave came to help me, and by five o'clock, we were wheeling the mother-in-law whose funeral we had all but finished planning out to my car and I drove her home.

We had previous dinner plans, but afterwards, we all went back to my inlaws' house and had another birthday cake, accompanied by terrible singing.

Bev obviously doesn't consciously know what happened to her over the last week, but I think that deeper down she might. I spent a lot of time just sitting beside her hospital bed this week, and many times she would get into a loop (as Alzheimer's has crafted her speech and thoughts) about gratitude and not taking any of our days for granted and being so happy to be surrounded by family, which is all that matters in the end. I just smiled and agreed and tried not to cry. A week ago we had my lovely mother-in-law dead and buried, and while that day will come, it's not here yet. What a difference a week makes.

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies

Tita was literally "like water for chocolate" – she was on the verge of boiling over. How irritable she was!

Like Water for Chocolate was my book club's pick, or else I likely wouldn't have picked this up on my own. And as much as it didn't knock my socks off, I'm not unhappy to have read this: author Laura Esquivel makes some interesting choices in the writing of this telenovela-like magical-realism romance and it brought some not unwelcome diversity to my notion of “the novel”. My biggest complaint: Since this is essentially a romance, I wish I could have cheered for the central romantic union; but Pedro never seemed worthy of such a strong, resilient, desirable character as Tita, and that annoyed me throughout and in retrospect. 

His scrutiny changed their relationship forever. After that penetrating look that saw through clothes, nothing would ever be the same. Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour. In a few moments' time, Pedro had transformed Tita's breasts from chaste to experienced flesh, without even touching them.

¡Ai, caliente! As the youngest daughter in a traditional Mexican family at the turn of the twentieth century, Tita De la Garza has been informed by her tyrannical mother, Mama Elena, that it will be Tita's duty to forswear love and marriage and take care of her mother unto death. When a young man, Pedro, and Tita fall in love at first sight, Mama Elena refuses to condone their relationship – offering instead her eldest daughter, Rosaura, for marriage. In order to stay close to Tita, Pedro agrees to the arrangement, and thus begins two decades of the pair living in the same house; secretly burning for one another while Mama Elena and Rosaura scheme to keep them apart.

The narrative is told in twelve chapters that follow the months from January to December – while skipping ahead days, weeks or years at a time – and each chapter opens with a recipe that Tita (as the overworked cook for the family's ranch) is preparing in the text of the chapter. I liked the way that each recipe was thematically related to what was happening in the story, and that while the cookbook-like descriptions of recipes are suddenly interrupted by the narrative's action, they would always be picked up again in the text:

Drying her tears, Tita removed the pan from the heat herself, since Gertrudis burned her hand trying to do it.

Once the custard is cool, it is cut into small squares, a size that won't crumble too easily. Next the egg whites are beaten, so the squares of custard can be rolled in them and fried in oil. Finally, the fritters are served in syrup and sprinkled with ground cinnamon.

While they let the custard cool so it could weather the storm to come, Tita confided all her problems in Gertrudis.

In a time and place where women (and particularly youngest daughters) had little agency, it was satisfying to see what power Tita wielded through the food that she prepared. Further, bringing in elements of magical realism, Esquivel ensures that Tita's suppressed emotions are released into the food she cooks – and that seems a fitting revenge for someone chained to the kitchen, denied a voice. 

I get that the power plays between the women of the De la Garza household are a mirror of the Mexican Civil War that is referenced as ongoing in the background at the same time – with Tita and her freedom-fighting sister, Gertrudis, acting as the rebels against the dictatorial traditionalism of Mama Elena and Rosaura – but if this is meant as a work of feminist rebellion (as I believe it is), it's not quite satisfying enough to have Tita fighting for a traditional domestic role with Pedro, or that she would turn her back on a more intellectually stimulating match with the local doctor because Pedro makes her burn; for years. And for a book that so closely relates the steps to recipes as diverse as a wedding cake, matches, and tooth powder, I was underwhelmed by the skimming over of what seemed like major events:

Chencha figured this lie would cover her with glory, but unfortunately she wasn't able to tell it. That night, when she got to the house, a group of bandits attacked the ranch. They raped Chencha. Mama Elena, trying to defend her honor, suffered a strong blow to her spine and was left a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down.

Filled with interactive ghosts, alchemical transformations, and a fantastical ending, Esquivel follows in the tradition of other Latin American writers of magical realism – and like I've said before, this is a genre I don't quite connect with. Although it's the men like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata who are remembered in the history books from this time in Mexico, I do appreciate that Esquivel brings in the women's stories; assures us that Tita “will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes”. I just wish she didn't throw her life and love away on the undeserving Pedro. Looking forward to book club. Three stars is a rounding up.

Further thoughts after Book Club: I wasn't able to attend the February meeting at which this was picked (I was at the Bowie Tribute concert instead), so while I had heard that Like Water for Chocolate was suggested by a couple of members who think of this as their favourite book, I had forgotten who they were by the time this month's meeting came around. And not having loved the story, and not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, I decided that I would be generous in my statements. Side note: At one point in the month, I suggested on the Facebook page that we should make recipes from the book to bring to book club, but once we all started reading it - and saw that the recipes involved boiling pigs' heads and baking cakes made with 170 eggs - that idea was soon forgotten. (But I did make and bring Spicy Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies. ¡Ai, caliente!)

So, wanting to not look a jerk, I sat back with my wine and cookies (and soup and tortillas and chickpea salad and brownie; for the first time since I joined boot camp, I had a little bit of everything), and let others do most of the talking. Nat said that she thought of it as a "telenovella-Cinderella" (which wasn't far off my overall description), and she decided to take the fantasy bits in the vein of the movie Big Fish; that they were simply an exaggerated storytelling style. And then Carrie said that she liked the magical realism parts the least of all, and Pat - who is someone else's Mom and was the oldest member there this week; not afraid to tell it like it is - argued that she doesn't think that any of it is meant to be taken seriously; she thought the book was a comedy and she laughed her head off at every ridiculous thing that happened. Now, I may not "connect" to stories with magical realism, but I'm enough of a snob to want to respect it as a literary device, so that's when I redirected the conversation with my observation that the women in the family were a microcosm of the Mexican Civil War playing out in the background, and that led to an interesting conversation about tradition vs revolution (and especially Tita's desire for but lack of action regarding rebelling against her mother).

And then we talked about the love story - why would Tita wait twenty-two years for the wimpy Pedro when she could have had a modern and intellectually stimulating life with the doctor? And that's when I realised that my "microcosm" observation needed to include the men as well: It now seems obvious to me that Mama Elena and Rosaura represented the traditional and the dictatorial, Gertrudis was the rebel (like Pancho Villa), but Tita was all of the Mexican people caught in the middle. Looking at her situation from twenty-first century Canada, it's probably condescending and ethnocentric of me to regard the (white American) doctor (representing modernisation for the Mexican people) as the obvious choice when of course Tita would feel the pull of Pedro and the traditions and safety that he represents. By waiting for Mama Elena and Rosaura to die before they officially got together - by making sure that Esperanza was safely married (to modernity and not beholden to her mother's care) - Tita marched into the future by evolution rather than revolution. I left the meeting liking this book so much better, having learned from everyone there. That's a great feeling.

Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens's London

Early in the morning of Wednesday, 6 May 1840, on an ultra-respectable Mayfair street one block to the east of Park Lane, a footman called Daniel Young answered the door to a panic-stricken young woman, Sarah Mancer, the maid of the house opposite. Fetch a surgeon, fetch a constable, she cried: her master, Lord William Russell, was lying in bed with his throat cut.

Murder by the Book has such an interesting premise: A burglary that ended with the gruesome murder of an upper-class gent in his own bed is ultimately blamed, by the tried and condemned murderer himself, on a novel that seemed to glorify the devil-may-care lifestyle of the rapscallion vagabond thief. Apparently while researching a previous book on Charlotte Brontë, noted biographer Claire Harman kept coming across references to this shocking murder and its ties to the Victorian literary world; and while the concept and the details are, indeed, intriguing enough, Harman doesn't quite create a rewarding read out of the material. This book feels both too dense and too shallow; there are too many names and we don't get to know any of the people behind them well; there are too many small (and insignificant) details and frequent conjecture; and it all comes across as a little dull. Excellently researched, not satisfyingly executed. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

So much had been written about the contagion of Ainsworth's novel, so many column inches had been expended on quantifying the evil impact of the theatrical and the broadside versions and the shows at the penny gaffs, that the public had got used to seeing Ainsworth's book blamed for a sudden and steep increase in petty criminality, but having responsibility for a murder placed at its door took criticism of the book into a different stratum.

It was interesting to read of the rise of both literacy and the accessibility of cheap reading material in Victorian London, and subsequently, novelists' quest to feed the demand for exciting reads. One trend was to novelise true crime in the “flash” vernacular of lower-class criminals, and the most popular novel to appear in this vein was William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard: about a charming thief who uses his wits to keep one step ahead of the law and the gallows. Anauthorised theatrical adaptations of Ainsworth's story soon followed (which drove book sales, so he didn't really mind), and cheap penny dreadfuls sensationalised the basic plot even further. When criminals – from child pickpockets to a mentally ill man who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria – began to cite Jack Sheppard as the inspiration for their acts, it was hard to lay all the blame at Ainsworth's feet: he took a true story and made a good yarn out of it; many others took the story even further, making a popular folk hero out of a character who ultimately slit the throat of a victim as she lay in her own bed. Newspapers were filled with letters and articles denouncing the bad influence of these types of stories (the type of denunciations that would eventually be repeated against comic books, heavy metal music, and video games), and the giants of the literary world attempted to take back control of what sorts of stories ought to reach the public. Again, all of that was interesting, but Harman goes a bit too far by trying to develop a parallel story about this debate's influence on Dickens and Thackery; two authors who seem to get shoehorned into this book at every available opportunity:

Charles Dickens, who was living nearby in Devonshire Terrace, must have followed the unfolding news with more than usual interest. He was writing a story – Barnaby Rudge – that begins with the brutal stabbing in his bed of the elderly Reuban Haredale, by an undiscovered intruder. Life, it seemed, was imitating art. And at his desk in Great Coram Street in Bloomsbury, the young illustrator and journalist William Makepeace Thackery was bothered by the noise of the news-seller's cries outside: “Here is a man shouting out We shall have this Lord William Russell murder,” he wrote to his mother, “a nuisance and so it is the stupid town talks of nothing else.” Little did he realize how much more talk there would be in the coming months, nor how closely this crime touched his own concerns.

We see how each author reacted to the trend of using flash vernacular, we read of their interest in the murder of Lord Russell and their decisions to watch his murderer's hanging (and each of their transformations into advocates against public executions). Sure, all of this is interesting to someone who likes books about books and authors, but running in parallel to a not-very-exciting police investigation, criminal trial, and attempts to fill in an unreliable confession with conjectured facts, it all felt a bit like padding. On the one hand, it felt like padding to read that Edgar Allen Poe was delighted to meet with Charles Dickens when he came to America; that Poe was inspired by the raven in Barnaby Rudge to write his most famous poem, which is quoted at length. Yet on the other, I did find it interesting to learn that Dickens' pet raven, Grip, who served as his own inspiration, was eventually stuffed and made its way to the Free Library of Philadelphia in honour of Poe. And that must be the greatest challenge in writing this kind of a book: Harman obviously did extensive research, and she can't possibly know which bits any individual reader will find interesting; put it all in and it risks feeling padded and dull. 

The murder itself – along with the ensuing investigation, trial, and incarceration/execution scenes – were of even less interest to me as presented, so I really can't call this my cuppa tea. Pity: it still seems like such a winning concept. Three stars is a rounding up.