Miss Pym Disposes (Book review)

     

Josephine Tey Miss Pym Disposes (1947) Miss Lucy Pym, suddenly famous for her book on psychology, has been invited to her friend Henrietta’s Leys Physical Training College as a Friday lecturer. Despite herself, she agrees to stay on, initially to help  out as a substitute teacher. When Henrietta chooses Rouse, the least popular student (and exam cheat), for a post at a prestigious girls’s prep school, the whole College is seriously annoyed, and Lucy too. Rouse is  hurt when a boom falls on her when she starts an early morning solo practice; she later dies. Lucy Pym has a crucial clue, which points towards Innes, the girl who should have had the post, and is awarded it in place of Rouse. Instead of giving the clue to the police, Lucy confronts Innes, who promises to atone for the crime by burying herself in the West Country, which she had worked all her life to escape. But on the second last page of the book we find out that another student is the culprit.
     On this bare bones of a plot, Tey has constructed an astonishingly engaging book. Wikipedia informs us that Tey loved gymnastics, and trained at Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham (more here). This experience no doubt informs the portrait of the college and its students. I have no doubt that the characters are based on Tey’s recollections of her fellow students and the Staff. I thoroughly enjoyed these portraits, and the reminders of what communal life in a boarding school is like. I think the plot is merely an excuse for Tey to write a semi-fictitious reminiscence of her school days. It’s also an opportunity to examine the ethical issues surrounding the death penalty.
     The style is somewhat breathless, with italics scattered here and there. We experience the whole story from Lucy Pym’s point of view. She thinks of herself as a very ordinary person, at least in comparison to the intellectuals whom she has criticised in her book (a rebuttal of current Psychology as understood from reading 37 books on the subject). But that very ordinariness makes her extraordinary. She is an essentially and instinctively good person. She has an acute sense of other people’s personality and character, even though she cannot always put her intuitions into words. But the dialogue, the little asides, the girls’ comments on each other, Lucy’s sensitivity to mood and atmosphere, all combine to give us a lively sense of being present in her world. One cannot ask more than that from any story teller.
     I’ve read Tey’s The Daughter of Time, a much more carefully plotted tale of detection, in which  Inspector Grant, convalescing, reads up on Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, and solves that mystery, at least to my satisfaction. It’s a very, very good detective yarn. But Miss Pym Disposes is the better work of art. ****

Julia Potts (Link)

Courtesy of one my RSS feeds, I came across Julia Potts. Here's a link to her Vimeo site. Check out the other videos. They're charmingly oddball.

Tough Politicians (1)

“In These Tough Economic Times,” politicians claim, “We Have to Make Tough Decisions.”

Funny how tough it is to reduce unemployment benefits, assistance for poor families, disability pensions, housing subsidies, programs for homeless, and so on. Tough to cut staff for parks, environmental monitoring, basic research, community recreation programs, food inspection, drug testing, and so on.

I guess it must really hurt those politicians to make these tough decisions. I mean, the pain of having to say no to people who need help. The ghastliness of having to deny essential services. Doesn’t bear thinking about. The poor devils must be lining up for treatment for PTSD - Post Tough-decision Stress Disorder. We really should be feel more kindly towards these politicians.

After all, they do our dirty work.

The really tough decision would be to raise taxes, of course. Especially at the top end of the income pyramid.

If Ever I Return, Peggy-O (Book Review)

Sharyn McCrumb If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) I bought this for 25 cents as a time-filler. It’s a bit better than that. McCrumb interleaves several stories, all of which at least illuminate the main plot: an ex-hippie folk singer trying to rebuild her career buys a house in Hamelin. She receives a postcard with a veiled threat, then her dog is killed and mutilated. A high school girl who looks like her younger self disappears and turns up murdered like the dog. Eventually she confronts the murderer, and shoots him.
     McCrumb is good at relationships and the reach of personal history. The story is set in the post-Vietnam era, and the effects of Vietnam on the soldiers sent to fight (and die) there figure in the plot. A high-school reunion feels like a bass-line under the main melody: these people grew up during ‘Nam, and many were drafted. McCrumb is also good at mood and ambiance, and social satire. The whole thing is more than the sum of its parts. The leisurely pace of story telling hints at The Andy Griffiths Show (alluded to a couple of times), but it has darker shadows than that sunny world. A better than average read. **-½

Outliers (Book review)

Malcolm Gladwell Outliers (2008) This is an important book. It demonstrates that individual success depends on many factors beyond the individual’s control. They all come down to the same thing: you have to be in the right place at the right time, with the right personal and material resources. If you can then exploit the opportunity presented to you, you will be successful.
     One example of a factor that you can’t control is your birth date. The selection rules for players in amateur hockey leagues specify birth dates. If you are born near the beginning of the range of dates valid for you, you will be about one year older than your team mates born near the end of that range. That makes a lot of difference for young players: for 8-year-olds it’s a difference of about 12% in physical maturity, and sometimes more, given different rates of maturation. On average, the boys born in January will be taller, heavier, stronger, and more agile than those born in December. They will outshine their younger team mates, and will be more likely to advance to the next level of play.
     The same consideration applies to children’s school experience. It applies to whole generations: the people who were born in the 1940s grew to working age just as the baby boom got under way, and a huge demand for work ensued. I belong to that generation. It was easy for us to find work because there was huge and expanding demand for it.
     I’ve recently come across a snide remark about Gladwell’s method of framing a thesis, telling an illustrative story, then drawing wide-ranging conclusions. This is certainly a danger in inherent in Gladwell’s method. However, this book includes a lot of data, too, data that support Gladwell’s conclusions.
     In any case, anyone who insists that his or her success is entirely due their own efforts has a rather limited experience of life. There are undoubtedly many other people with the same talents and skills, and the same willingness to work hard, who did not succeed, simply because at some crucial point on their career path the opportunity they needed was not available. This is not to downplay the importance of hard work: there also people of similar skill and talent who did not take advantage of similar opportunities. But all of us have had success in large part because of things we could not have foreseen, people who offered us chances simply because we were there, and factors over which we had no control whatsoever.
     A book worth reading, especially since it prompts questions about how to adjust systemic factors which penalise so many talented people. ***

Irreligion (Book review)

     John Allen Paulos Irreligion (2008) Paulos examines the usual arguments for the existence of  a god, and demonstrates all the ways in which they fail. It’s worth reading for that alone, especially if you are one of those who has an itch to prove that a god exists. Paulos, unlike some of the more strident arguers against a god’s existence, accepts that spirituality is a human trait. I don’t know if psychopaths lack it; if they do, it would suggest why so many people tie good and evil to a god. Paulos admits that he has never had religious feelings, hence he doesn’t want to discuss spirituality more extensively. But his demolishing of the proofs of any god’s existence should comfort those who believe, as I do, that “God exists” is not a theorem but an axiom. What matters is what you derive from that and related axioms. The record of religionists is not good; their attempt to prove the existence of their god(s) doesn't help.
     There is of course a question that Paulos doesn’t deal with: What would be the (theo)logical consequences of a valid proof of a god’s existence? I think it would make that god contingent. The general form of the proof would be, “If this Premise is true, then 'God exists' is true.” But that would make that god’s existence logically dependent on the truth of the premise. Ontologically, that makes that god's existence contingent on the existence of whatever the premise asserts. That should give the God-provers pause.
     I think that we tell stories because that is the primary human mode of making sense of the world. Cause and effect are abstractions based on narrative structure or plot. Stories are models of what happened or what could happen. We demand that they have the ring of truth. Just as the smith knows the quality of the steel by the sound it makes on the anvil, so we know the quality of the story by how it feels when it collides with our experience, our sense of how the world works.
     Science is a communal story, created by the method of hypothesis testing. At any given time, the hypotheses we are capable of proposing are suggested and constrained by what we already know, ie, by what we understand of previous hypotheses tested and found robust enough to pass that test of truth. Our knowledge of how the world works is thus always limited. I believe it will always be limited.
     Myth is also a communally created story. It arises out of our sense that knowing how the world works is not enough. We want a satisfying answer to why.  Myth too must have the ring of truth. It must satisfy our sense of what it feels like to live in the world. We want to feel at home. We want to feel our lives have meaning and purpose. At any given time, our apprehension of a myth’s meaning is conditioned and constrained by our sense of the pattern of our life. This apprehension of meaning is limited. I believe it will always be limited.
     Read Paulos’s book if you want to free yourself from the trap of literalism and simplistic logic. ***

Malala Yousafzai

So the Taliban shot a 14-year-old girl to prove how tough they are. After all, they are fighting against the satanic evils of the world, right? That takes a Real Man, with a Real Man's courage, right? Only a Real Man can withstand those fearful forces of secularism arrayed against him, right?

The Taliban, like fundamentalists of all religious persuasions, are terrified. They are fearful of losing control, unable to face uncertainty, panicked by different beliefs. They make their religion a defence against reality. But religion used this way is mere superstition. It cannot protect from the fearful suspicion that the universe does not align itself with your desires.

In short, the Taliban have no faith. Faith is the confidence to accept people with different beliefs than one's own. Faith is the self-assurance to ground honour in oneself. Faith is the ability to tolerate doubt. Those who lack faith fear that other people think differently, are frantic that other people's behaviour will destroy their reputation, are spooked by the uncertainties of life and panic-stricken that they cannot control the world around them.

So they shoot a 14 year-old girl that wants to learn, to think for herself, to think differently. Who has faith that whatever she learns will deepen her understanding of her world and the people who live in it, and will enable her to do what is best for her and her community. Who wants education for everyone, including girls and women. She has the faith they lack. That's why they shot her.