Delusions of Perfection (Lapham's Quarterly 7-02: Revolutions)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7-02: Revolution (2014) Like the collection on States of War, this one is tough reading. People have committed more atrocities in the pursuit of an imagined perfection than for any other purpose. Religious persecution is one example. Revolution is the other. We should perhaps be thankful there is no third.

     There are many noble phrases recorded here, but they all express the same delusionary superstition that some final, permanent solution the the problems of humankind will usher in a perfect way of life. Reading them was bad for my equanimity and blood pressure.

A necessary read. Recommended. ****

Oh, To Be Young Again! (Youth, Lapham's Quarterly 7-03)

Lapham’s Quarterly 7-03: Youth (2014). “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” sang Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night. But the response to that insight is mixed. Some mourn what they recall as a time of promise and energy and sweet, sweet love of the world and the people in it. Others are glad it’s over, and they can, at last, embark on a life planned and controlled by themselves. The evidence gathered here suggests that the latter attitude is the more common one.

Me, what I recall from my childhood and youth surprises me in two ways. One, I can’t actually imagine the Me that was six or twelve years old. The photos of me, the letters that my mother kept, the oddments that I know were once precious to me, none of them translate into Oh, now I know what it was like. And two, when I think of the dumb-ass things I did as a teenager, I’m surprised I’m still here to remember them. A fraction of a second one way or the other would have meant my death.

Nevertheless, reading other people’s thoughts and reminiscences does trigger a hint of a feeling of what childhood and youth was like. The imagination supplies what memory cannot.

Recommended ****

Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. **** 

My Life Among The Apes (Fagan, 2012)

Cary Fagan. My Life Among the Apes. (2012) Short stories, winner of the 2012 Giller Prize. Some first-person, and mostly including a dash of sometimes dark comedy. Very Canadian, in that they tell of the mundane defeats and victories of our lives. Most feel autobiographical, and not just because of the 1st person narrator.

The title story is in part about the narrator’s infatuation with Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees. But we humans are apes, too. Just very clever ones. Clever enough to solve problems, but not clever enough to avoid the unpleasant consequences of some of the solutions. One of the sadder stories is about the narrator’s attempt to please the woman he’s about to dump by accompanying her on her dream vacation to learn chair-making. The after-story makes it clear that he never really understood what he lost. But that’s life.

Worth a read if you can find it. My copy was in the library’s summer book sale. ***

A Pinch of Snuff (Hill, 1978)

 Reginald Hill. A Pinch of Snuff (1978) Pascoe’s dentist Jack Shorter, who likes watching porn, tells Pascoe that he thinks a brutal attack on one of the characters in a blue movie was real. Pascoe can’t find evidence to corroborate, until Ellie (who’s being wooed by a feminist group) watches the same film and tells him that the scene in question involved two different actresses. Still no joy when he investigates. In the meantime, the dentist is accused of statutory rape. As you may surmise, the two cases eventually coalesce, and assorted baddies are arrested. But it leaves Pascoe with an even bleaker view of human nature. Even Dalziel is subdued by the way some of his friends are bent out of shape by betrayals of trust.

Well plotted, more complex than earlier novels in characterisation and the understanding of how evil grows like mold and rots everything it touches. The title is rather grisly pun. Recommended. *****

An Unkindness of Ravens (Rendell, 1985)

Ruth Rendell An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) Joy Williams, neighbour and acquaintance of Dora Wexford, tells her that “Rod is missing”. At first, it looks like Rodney Williams has done a bunk. He’s a sales manager for a paint company, and shortly after his disappearance a letter of resignation is sent to his boss. But then his car turns up abandoned and partly cannibalised.

The investigation is complicated by a group of militant feminists who believe in sexual apartheid. Mike and Jenny Burden are expecting their first child, which causes stresses that Mike doesn’t know how to handle. The Williamses are a dysfunctional family who keep secrets and bend facts. It’s one of Wexford’s most frustrating cases, taking several months to solve. But it’s one of Rendell’s better Wexford novels, with a nice repetition of a paint colour motif, and a well done placement of red herrings. Recommended. ****

Getting Away With Murder (Engel, 1995)

 Howard Engel. Getting Away With Murder (1995) Abram Wise, Grantham’s premier (and never charged) gangster summons Cooperman and engages him to discover who wants him dead. Cooperman has doubts, but Wise was right: he turns up dead a few days later. Cooperman’s failure to protect him doesn’t stop him from trying to find out whodunit. With a little help from his Grantham cop friends, he solves the case (of course). The roots of the crime lie far in the past. The solution explains why Wise has been untouchable.

Engel’s talent is for misdirection, amusing side-trips, and multiplication of characters and subplots. Cooperman is a likable private eye, with a realistic understanding of the perils he bumbles into. Engel has written a first class entertainment. ***