Technical Difficulties

Bondeson, Jan. The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. 2001. N.p.: Da Capo Press, 2002.

James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. The Maul and the Pear Tree. 1971. N.p.: Warner Books, 2002.

Jakubowski, Maxim, and Nathan Braund. The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. 1999. 2nd ed. London: Robinson-Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2008.

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These books made an inadvertent trio, which actually was interesting for the chance it gave to watch the evolution of London's police force, from The London Monster, where all detection & apprehension was down to private citizens, through the muddle of overlapping jurisdictions in The Maul and the Pear Tree, to the clear understanding of roles in 1888. Private citizens might try to help the police, but they weren't doing their job. There were also several very instructive comparisons to be made about the historiography of crime.

( details, for them as wants them )

Inadvertent trio, yes, but they worked well together.

1. Beowulf socks FTW!

2. yuki_onna has an excellent rant about the portrayal of the USSR by Western authors, which has some common ground with my rant yesterday about the portrayal of pre-Enlightenment cultures by post-Enlightenment authors.

3. Cake Wrecks' Sunday Sweets this week include this impossibly adorable Baby Cthulhu cake.

4. jaylake wants pictures of what you're doing today. As he says, "Not exactly a contest. More like group art."

ETA: My contribution, feeding feral cats:



(Link, and other pics: 1 (without zoom, so that's the actual distance between him and me), 2, 3.)

5. I was hoping to go spectate at a horse show this weekend, but the RLS and associated dyshypnia (is that even a word? sleep dysfunctionality is what I mean--I suppose dyssomnia would be the other option) mean that I have not been able to drag myself out of bed before noon, and the show is two hours away. So no ponies for me, which makes me sad. (The RLS makes me tired and frustrated and stressed, which doesn't help, either.) You are welcome to post things that might help me be more cheerful, although please note that that is posed as an invitation, not a demand.

Liddell Hart, B. H. The German Generals Talk. 1948. New York: Quill 1979.

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Reading this book was a very strange experience, a little like reading alternate history, because it is a dispatch from the world of the gentleman professional soldier. Each of those three words, "gentleman," "professional," and "soldier," is crucial.

Liddell Hart was himself a professional soldier¹, and he clearly approached the German generals, not just on that basis, but with that as a kind of secret handshake: a tacit promise not to ask certain questions or bring up certain unpleasant facts. The word "Jew" does not appear in The German Generals Talk, nor do the words "Russian prisoners of war." There are no Einsatzgruppen; there is no Babi Yar; there is no deliberate policy of starvation against the population of Ukraine. (N.b., this book was published in 1948; the Nuremberg Trials were held in 1945 and 1946; those unasked questions may be partly, but cannot be entirely, the result of innocent ignorance.) In this book, World War II is a textbook war, fought for political reasons which gentlemen professional soldiers do not understand.²

"We are but simple soldiers!" goes the refrain. "We are uncomplicated manly men, with manly maps and manly tanks, doing the gentlemanly work of warfare! We are as innocent of politics as babes unborn!" Now, Liddell Hart recognizes that this ostrich-like attitude caused a lot of problems for the generals in terms of their failure to oppose Hitler while they still could, but he never seems to consider the possibility that it is disingenuous, even though his descriptions of the infighting among the officers of the Reichswehr and later the Wehrmacht make it perfectly perfectly plain that the German generals were not innocent of politics in the social sense, even if they vehemently preferred not to know what Germany's right hand was doing. He accepts the generals at face-value--and as gentlemen.

That, too, is a recurring refrain. Liddell Hart tells us how gentlemanly and pleasant the German generals are; the German generals remark on how gentlemanly and pleasant Polish generals are . . . around and around in a mutual admiration society circle jerk. All of the German generals seem to have read Liddell Hart's books on military theory; certainly, they all go out of their way to tell him how much they admire them. They bear their unpleasant imprisonment with dignity and understated humor, and Liddell Hart never seems to wonder just how carefully they might be tailoring their performance to their audience.

And he responds by believing them when they tell him they were professional soldiers and held themselves apart from politics; he joins them in pretending they didn't know and weren't responsible. He only asks them about the conduct of the fighting, not what went on in German-occupied territory, and he never asks "why" beyond loyalty to the Fatherland. (The only general described as an ardent Nazi in the entire book is one who is conveniently dead. Ditto the only one specified to have died still asserting his loyalty to Hitler.) And he empathizes with them, as if their imprisonment were unfair--ETA to clarify, as if the international brotherhood of the gentleman professional soldier did transcend national and ideological loyalties and should be understood to transcend national and ideological loyalties. As if the reasons for the war should be treated as irrelevant in assessing the men responsible for conducting it. (Notice, please, "conducting," not "fighting.") As if those reasons did not exist after war was declared.

Obviously, I don't agree with Liddell Hart's attitude, but that's because I don't accept the construct of the "gentleman professional soldier" as a good thing. It seems to me to be a shield behind which commanding officers can hide from the reality, on one side, of why they're being asked to fight (it's particularly brutal in this case, what with the Holocaust we aren't talking about), and on the other, of what they're ordering men to do: go out and die by the millions. It lets them talk about "the troops" as an undifferentiated and unimportant mass; the only thing that matters is whether you have enough of them to shove about on your manly map and beat your manly opponent. Who will shake your hand with a cry of "Well played!" and make an appointment for a rematch on Tuesday. Dead men (and women and children) have nothing to do with you.

It makes me a little angry.

With that very long caveat, this was, in fact, an interesting book; it gave me a very clear understanding of Hitler's mistakes in the invasion of Russia and thereafter (basically, after the winter of 1941, it's all the same mistake: the refusal to allow any retreat for any reason). And it gives a very clear sense of the generals' frustration, on the professional level, with Hitler and Hitler's lapdog generals Keitel and Jodl, who made their plans and gave their orders from bunkers nowhere near the front and without any understanding that their manly maps were not the territory.

And it was a window on a mindset I don't understand.

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¹His Wikipedia entry says that, though highly decorated, he only saw about seven weeks of actual combat--though he was gassed badly enough that he eventually had to retire from the army. I hypothesize unkindly, and probably unfairly, that this may be part of why he was able to hang onto the "gentleman professional soldier" idealization for so long. My judgment, I should make clear, is not on Liddell Hart's bravery, ability, or indeed his own sense of honor and gentlemanly behavior, merely on his (possibly willful) naivete.

ETA 01/02/2016: Sadly, this anecdote is untrue. I can't bring myself to delete it, because it's such a marvelous story, but it is PURE FICTION.
Wikipedia also offers this anecdote (from a biography of the Dulles family by Leonard Mosley), which I include here because it makes me like Liddell Hart a good deal better:

During the planning for the Suez Crisis, Hart had been asked by Anthony Eden to submit plans for a campaign against Egypt. After his first four drafts were rejected for a combination of contradictory reasons, Hart was nettled and sent back the original when asked for a fifth version. Eden liked it this time; he called for Hart and patronizingly said; "Captain Liddell Hart, here I am at a critical moment in Britain's history, arranging matters which might mean the life of the British Empire. And what happens? I ask you to do a simple military chore for me, and it takes you five attempts-plus my vigilance amid all my worries-before you get it right." Hart replied, "But sir, it hasn't taken five attempts. That version, which you now say is just what you wanted, is the original version." According to Leonard Mosley, there was a nasty silence while the prime minister's face reddened. Then he reached for an antique inkstand and, maddened, threw it at Hart. Hart sat still for a moment and then, with a tactician's instinct for the devastating counterstrike, stood up, seized a wastepaper basket, and jammed it over Eden's head.

²I see from that Wikipedia article that this is the American "condensed" version of the book published in the U.K., The Other Side of the Hill. But since that title is an explicit reference to Liddell Hart's program of showing the German generals as gentlemanly professional soldiers just like the gentlemanly professional soldiers of the Allies, I doubt this tactful ellipsis is corrected there. If someone has read The Other Side of the Hill and can comment one way or the other, please do!

Fatsis, Stefan. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Stewart, George R. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party. 1936. 2nd ed. 1960. Lincoln, NB: Bison-University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

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Word Freak is an enjoyable book. Not too deep, and I could do with a little less of Fatsis's "goggling at the sideshow freaks" attitude. Perhaps this is because I recognize a number of similarities between the subculture of competitive SCRABBLE and the subculture of science fiction pro-/fandom, and, yeah, the jokes get old. On the other hand, I do very much like the way he charts his own descent (or ascent, depending on how you want to look at it) from relatively ordinary journalist to SCRABBLE geek. He's not a geek at the start of the book (which makes it a little disconcerting to read, if you are a geek), but he is one by the end.

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( if you're squeamish, just walk on by )

I'm teaching Sir John Denham's poem, "Cooper's Hill," today, and since the poem is extremely interested in topography and the view from Cooper's Hill, I did a Google image search.

And discovered that what the really famous Cooper's Hill, which is in Gloucestershire, is known for is cheese rolling.

I am so not making this up. My imagination isn't that good.

(Check out some of the pictures on the Event page to see just how freaking steep that hill is.)

Denham's Cooper's Hill is in Surrey.

Project Gutenberg has put online The International Monthly Magazine 5.2 (1852), which includes a lengthy, illustrated discussion of St. Anne's Hill, site of Chertsey Abbey, which features prominently in Denham's poem.

The River Thames Society, on their Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide site, has an awesome aerial view-cum-map of Cooper's Hill. SurreyProperty.com has views from Cooper's Hill: of Windsor Castle, of the Thames, and a third, which is very bucolic but also uninformative. Also a couple of views of Cooper's Hill, which now has an Air Force memorial at its crown. And, of course, Runnymede at its foot.

Can anyone, btw, tell me if Denham would have been able to see St. Paul's from the top of Cooper's Hill, or is that just poetic license?

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1997

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This is a very hard book to read, I give you all fair warning. The photographs, in particular, are hard to look at, hard to force oneself to understand. On page 407, that really is a German soldier posing for the photographer as he takes aim at a Jewish woman and her child. On page 224-25, those really are pictures, taken by a German soldier as mementoes, of Jews waiting to be massacred.

I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.

Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.

That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.

Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.

I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.

This post is going to have almost as much disclaimer as actual content, but I need to articulate it.

So. Caveats and disclaimers: I know, as my subject line indicates, that "Trouble with Emily" and the other stories in Hospital Station were published in book form in 1962 and should not be excoriated for being a reflection of their times. I know, furthermore, that James White later did that most difficult and beautifully human thing: he changed his mind. Later Sector General stories have female characters, Murchison even gets upgraded from nurse to pathologist, and my favorite Sector General protagonist, Cha Thrat from Code Blue--Emergency, is female. Of course, Cha Thrat is also nonhuman, and we'll get to that down the screen a bit.

But.

The stories in Hospital Station (they've been spackled together into a quasi-novel, but they're connected novellas, really) are about the rejection of bigotry and prejudice. Conway, White's most frequent Sector General protagonist, gets read the riot act not once, but twice, for his disdain for Monitors, and it is perfectly clear that his attitude--the attitude of an uninformed pacifist toward the Federation's fighting force, and an attitude, as Williamson's explanation makes clear, that the Monitor Corps has in fact gone to a good deal of trouble to instill in people of Conway's class background--would be more than enough to get him booted from Sector General if it weren't for the fact that in the course of "Sector General" he learns the error of his ways and straightens up and flies right. Williamson is equally scathing toward the patients being brought into the hospital from fighting an interspecies war. Sector General stories preach tolerance and liberal thinking, and honestly that's one of the reasons they're good comfort reading. They're Utopian problem-solving stories, and I love them.

But.

At the end of "Trouble with Emily," O'Mara (Sector General's Chief Psychologist--and there's a whole 'nother critical essay about how he gets there in "Medic") and Conway are discussing Conway's progress from raw, self-righteous newbie to a valued part of the Sector General staff:

      "... It has been apparent since you first arrived here," the Major had told him, "that you mix more readily with e-ts than with members of your own species. Saddling you with Dr. Arretapec was a test, which you passed with honours, and the assistant I'll be giving you in a few days might be another."
      O'Mara had paused then, shook his head wonderingly and went on, "Not only do you get on exceptionally well with e-ts, but I don't hear a single whisper on the grapevine of you chasing the females of our species ..."
      "I don't have the time," said Conway seriously. "I doubt if I ever will."
      "Oh, well, misogyny is an allowable neurosis," O'Mara had replied, then had gone on to discuss the new assistant.
HS 112

Now, this is the same O'Mara who is described in the previous story as a "latter-day Torquemada" due to his zeal in "guarding against wrong, unhealthy or intolerant thinking" (HS 82). The Spanish Inquisition probably didn't mind a little good woman-hating either. An aversion, even a slight one, to another species is a problem, but hating half your own? Enh, no big. You'd only waste your time "chasing" them anyway.

I sound bitter, don't I? It's because of the sucker-punch. Even in these early Sector General stories, there's very little blatant misogyny (and, as I said, later books adapt and correct their worldview); White's careful building of a world almost embarrassingly rich in species diversity means that most nonhuman characters are referred to as "it"; all Earth-human characters are referred to by last name only (and rank, if they have one). It's easy to miss the fact that there aren't any female doctors, especially if, as I did, you grew up reading science fiction and fantasy that didn't have female characters, and learned to read as if the male pronoun were genuinely the generic gender-neutral object that eighteenth-century grammarians and their followers have tried to make it. You make compromises to get the story. That's how it works.

Misogyny is an allowable neurosis. I read past it the first time I read "Trouble with Emily," and I nearly read past it this time. But something shook me out of the story so that I parsed the sentence, not as a piece of dialogue between O'Mara and Conway, but as something that James White in 1962 thought it was perfectly all right to have a sympathetic, intelligent parental figure say. And then I sat there, staring at the page, feeling winded and a little sick. Because I like James White and I like the world of Sector General and it hurt to discover that Sector General's all-embracing tolerance didn't extend to me.

I exonerate James White of deliberate malice. And it's not like I'm going to go out and burn all my Sector General books, or sell them to the used bookstore, or even stop searching for the ones I don't have. But still, the unthinking bigotry--in a series of stories carefully and obsessively concerned with the refutation of bigotry--says something about science fiction and something about 1962 and shows us why we're glad that people can change.