Maigret and the Black Sheep (Simenon, 1962)

 Simenon. Maigret and the Black Sheep. (1962) A respectable retired manufacturer dies of a gunshot from his own pistol while his wife and daughter are at the opera. It’s not suicide, but murder. But there seems to be no reason for anyone to want him dead. Maigret patiently digs up the facts that reveal the murderer’s reasons for wanting to kill. Family secrets and incomplete, misleading, or false answers to questions delay the resolution of the story in the satisfactory Simenon manner. Maigret wins again.

I confess that the TV versions of Maigret make the reading more pleasurable. Simenon is good with dialogue, but poor with visuals. If you like Maigret, this one will please you, perhaps even more than it pleased me. **½

Dumb Birds (Kracht, A Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, 2019)

 

Matt Kracht. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (2019) Early in his life, Kracht suffered exposure to the mysteries of bird watching. It took, but it left some emotional scars. So he wrote this book, a nicely done satire on field guides, and a fairly gentle put-down of bird watchers. I enjoyed it. But some of the more tight-assed members of the tribe may take offense. It does get a bit repetitive.

 Recommended, but you have been warned. **½

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins, 2009)

 Richard Dawkins. The Greatest Show On Earth. (2009) Most of Dawkins’s work has been the attempt to convince people that Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design, is wrong. This book is his marshalling of the evidence that evolution is real, and that we have increasing knowledge and understanding of how it happens. The basic principle is random variation constrained by deterministic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s because most mutations do not improve the organism’s chances of surviving long enough to breed, or to outbreed siblings and cousins, that the few favourable mutations not only gain a foothold but spread. IOW, while mutations are random, their effects are not, and that is enough to guarantee that most beneficial mutations will usually spread while deleterious ones will not (if they haven’t killed their hosts). One consequence is that the best versions of essential genes are conserved across species. The preservation and spread of favourable genotypes is what “natural selection” actually means.

A well done book, which in the end is the best refutation to the pseudoscience peddled  by the creationists. Recommended. ****

Footnote: It seems to me that one of the motivations for Creationism is a misreading of the Bible. The assumption seems to be that the factual truth is primary. Or Fundamental. Or even the Only Truth. Therefore there is only one legitimate method of interpreting the biblical texts, namely to assume its factual truth. From this point of view, only factual truth can guarantee the truth of whatever moral or theological or other propositions the reader wishes to assert.

But the assumption that factual truth proves moral, theological, and other abstract truths has a fundamental problem for the believer: By making factual truth primary, religious truths are logically contingent. That means that any changes in factual truths may change religious truths. At some level, fundamentalists seem to understand this, hence their insistence that the factual truths they read into the biblical narratives cannot be contradicted. It also means they must find ways of proving the truth of the facts as stated in the Bible.