November 30, 2014 by mhasegawa

P.D. James, Queen of Crime

My mother introduced me to the mystery novels of P. D. James many years ago when I was a teenager. James didn’t publish often; she was not a twice a year or even once a year mystery writer. A new James was the occasion for celebration and we read all of them. I believe there were 18. The New York Times obituary outlines the story of her life.

She was born Phyllis Dorothy James on Aug. 3, 1920, in Oxford, the eldest of three children of Dorothy and Sidney James, a civil servant who did not believe in inflicting too much education on his daughter. The family settled in Cambridge when she was 11, and before she left the Cambridge High School for Girls, at 16, she already knew that she wanted to be a writer and that mysterious death intrigued her.

“When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall,” she was fond of saying, “I immediately wondered: Did he fall — or was he pushed?” But a marriage to Ernest C. B. White, a medical student, and World War II halted her plans for a writing career.

P.D. James, in 2010.

James was a hospital administrator for a number of years and used hospitals as the setting for some of her early novels. But

[a]fter the death of her husband at 44, in 1964, Ms. James took a Civil Service examination and became an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs. The work would supply her novels with the realistic procedural detail on which she prided herself.

Although she rarely describes actual murder, the dead bodies in her novels always make an indelible impression on the innocent bystanders who chance upon them. “To many of them, it’s a really appalling and dreadful discovery,” Ms. James said. “I think that the reader should share that horror and that shock, so I make the descriptions just as realistic as I can.”

Her primary detective, Adam Dalgleish, was designed to be the anti-Peter Wimsey.

Her intention with Dalgliesh, she told the British critic and writer Julian Symons in 1986, was to create a detective “quite unlike the Lord Peter Wimsey kind of gentlemanly amateur” popularized by Dorothy L. Sayers. Ms. James envisioned a realistic cop as her protagonist, a dedicated and skilled professional, and yet “something more than just a policeman, you see, a complex and sensitive human being,” she said.

A few months back, James was featured on the Barnes and Noble mystery section as one of the authors who discussed their favorite books. It was interesting that she picked Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair and Dorothy Sayer’s Murder Must Advertise, two of the more complicated stories by each author. Also on the list were a book by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine (A Fatal Inversion), the first Ian Rankin (The Complaints), and Sue Grafton’s V is for Vengance. I have to confess that I don’t care all that much for Rendell, but I liked the other books on her list, so maybe I’ll try again. There was one book, Dissolution by C. J. Sansom, I had never heard of before. On James’ recommendation, I ordered it and have it on my pile to read.

It is sad that there will be no more books by P.D. James, but I will spend them this next year re-reading and savoring all that she had left us.

Photograph: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

November 25, 2014 by mhasegawa

Grand juries, Ferguson, lots of questions and incredible sadness

What do I feel this morning after the grand jury failed to indict Officer Wilson on any charge? Just incredible sadness and weariness.

I served on a grand jury in Boston. It was supposed to be a six month gig, but turned out to be over a year because we were following evidence in a case. We heard maybe 75 or 80 different cases and I can only recall two in which we didn’t indict. One was a drug deal complete with very bad video and audio. We decided we just couldn’t see or hear well enough to know what was going on. There was another case, don’t remember exactly what it involved, where there was also not enough evidence. If I remember correctly, the prosecutors can find more evidence and present again to a different grand jury. In both cases where we declined to indict, they came to talk to us about why we didn’t do so. In my year and a half, we heard many cases of unemployment insurance fraud, one child porn case, several Big Dig contractor fraud cases, and the biggie, a public corruption case. We were constantly reminded that we were not a jury deciding guilt or innocence, but were just to decide if there was enough that a jury should hear the case. We were often given the option, as was the Ferguson grand jury, of indicting on one of several charges. We heard the prosecutor’s case only as the process was designed to determine if the prosecutor had enough evidence to go to trial. It is an interesting process.

We have no idea what went on inside that grand jury room. We don’t know if there were jurors who voted to indict and on which charges. (Grand juries usually need a minimum, but not unanimous, vote.) This was a special grand jury which heard no other cases. We do know that in this instance, the grand jury did hear from Darren Wilson the defendant. According to the New York Times summary of the case

The prosecutor usually chooses the evidence that a grand jury will hear, but in this case, the grand jury was given more latitude in calling witnesses and issuing subpoenas, according to Susan McGraugh, a law professor at the St. Louis University who has followed the case extensively. Grand jurors viewed photographs, forensic evidence and medical reports. Witnesses who testified include people who saw the events and police officers who worked on the investigation. While it is unusual in grand jury proceedings for the defendant to appear, Officer Wilson also gave testimony.

I watched Prosecutor McCulloch give his lengthy and sometimes repetitious statement on why the grand jury decided not to indict and I was left with several nagging questions. There had been an altercation at Officer Wilson’s car and Officer Wilson was the only one who fired a weapon. Michael Brown was clearly not armed. Why was he shot, from the front, twelve times? Why the press conference at night? John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker this morning, has many of the same questions.

A preliminary question to ask is why the St. Louis authorities scheduled such an incendiary announcement for after dark, even though the news that the grand jury had reached a decision had become public hours earlier. Surely, it would have been wiser for Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, to have met with reporters earlier in the day.

A more important question, also unanswered in anything but the most general terms, is this: Why did the grand jury decide not to indict the police officer, Darren Wilson? McCulloch’s press conference, when it eventually took place, was notably lacking in detail about the shots that killed Brown.

…

But we didn’t learn precisely how far away Brown was when Wilson shot him fatally, or what persuaded the police officer that his life was in danger, which is one legal justification in Missouri for shooting someone who is unarmed. According to some accounts, Brown had his arms raised when he was shot for the final time. Other accounts say that he was charging at Wilson. McCulloch, beyond saying that some eyewitnesses provided contradictory statements, didn’t say what evidence the grand jury had relied on in reaching its decision. He did say, though, that the grand jury had met for twenty-five days and heard from more than sixty witnesses.

I’m sure that there will be extensive analysis from legal scholars in the coming days and I look forward to reading them. I hope someone answers one of my questions which is: Did hearing from Darren Wilson make the grand jury feel this was a trial where they were to determine guilt or innocence?

Meanwhile, if the grand jury decision makes me sad, the reaction of the fools on the streets makes me even sadder. I’ve seen this too many times before – when Dr. King was killed, after Rodney King, right after Michael Brown’s death, etc. etc. John Cassidy writes

Perhaps the grand-jury transcripts, some of which were released late on Monday, will help clear up what actually happened. More likely, the exact sequence of events will remain in dispute, and so will the grand jury’s decision. Americans who believe that the legal system generally works well, and fairly, will be inclined to believe that the members of the grand jury reached the right decision. Those who believe the criminal-justice system is stacked against minorities, particularly against young African-American men, will be inclined to believe that this was another whitewash.

I am among those who can’t understand the grand jury’s decision, but burning police cars and Walgreen’s will not change the racism in the criminal justice system. There is more than enough blame to go around. The announcement made after dark and the declaration of martial law and calling out the National Guard before the decision created a confrontational atmosphere and, in the end, didn’t prevent anything. Prosecutor McCulloch’s long non-explanation explanation. The rioters who through their actions fulfilled every stereotype. There are no good guys here.

It just leaves me sad and frustrated.

Photograph: ADREES LATIF/REUTERS

November 12, 2014 by mhasegawa

Getting closer to things that really matter

Since moving to Vermont last summer I have seen stars I hadn’t seen in many year just walking out of my front door. I have watched summer change to fall and now to winter in a way not possible in Boston. With the leaves mostly gone, I could see the Connecticut River as I walked into town this morning. And it is not that I didn’t notice stuff when I lived in the city. I was a regular walker around Jamaica Pond, the Fenway, Boston Common and the Public Garden. I lived across from a 2 acre city park. And I did notice things. There was a spot on Jamaica Pond where there were almost always turtles and in the spring you could see the young ones. There were always birds to identify, plants to watch as they changed season. I could track planets in the Western sky from my bedroom window. But somehow it was different. Perhaps it was the fact that one could rarely get away from road noise. Or maybe it was just the feel, the pace of life clearly said “city”. But I was still seeing nature first hand.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Review section had a wonderful article by the nature writer and essayist, Edward Hoagland. I first came to know Mr Hoagland’s writing reading his collection of essays, “The Courage of Turtles”. His New York Times piece begins

“LIFE is an ecstasy,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay called “The Method of Nature,” a founding document of American transcendentalism. Life is also electricity, as our minds’ synapses and heart muscles would testify if they could.

Living molecules bear a charge and thus can intersect with others of their kind, as molecules of rock do not. We marveled at electrical displays plunging from watery clouds in the sky as perhaps divine until we finally learned to manufacture and wire electricity ourselves, lighting the dark, then muzzling it for mundane use, to the point of blotting out the sky.

To forgo seeing the firmament, as many of us do, for Netflix and the blogosphere, is momentous — nature “unfriended,” enjoyment less impromptu than scripted.

He asks

Does life become secondhand when filtered through a tailored screen? Text unenriched by body language or voice box timbre, film omnivorously edited. Is our bent straightened or warped more deeply? That’s our choice in what we Google, but in the meantime, will we notice the birdsong diminishing?

I think life can become secondhand but that doesn’t stop any of us from watching the news or movies or internet streaming of important events. I am addicted to NASA videos of events in space that I know I will never experience first hand. But Hoagland fears that we are becoming more and more estranged from live experiences.

I live on a mountain without utilities for a third of every year, so for nearly half a century I’ve swung back and forth to and from electrification. In the summer, living by the sun couldn’t be simpler. There’s more daylight than I can use, and I revel in the phases of the moon, the conversation of ravens, owls, yellowthroats and loons. The TV and phone calls resume before winter, though life itself does not seem richer than when I listened to the toads’ spring song or watched a great blue heron fish, amid the leaves’ ten-thousand-fold vibrancy.

The difference of course is that leaves, heron, loon and toad would not remain as glories when I returned to electricity. They are “electrifying” only when Vermont is temperate. I appreciate the utility of power in the winter, but many people seldom see a sunrise or sunset nowadays; they’re looking at a screen. What will this do? The Northern Lights, the Big Dipper — are they eclipsed like the multiplication tables? There was a magnetism to aurora borealis or a cradle moon, to spring peepers’ sleigh-bell sound or spindrift surfing toward shore under cumulus clouds, that galvanized delights in us almost Paleolithic.

Are we stunted if we lose it, a deflation associated with migrating indoors to cyberspace, Facebook instead of faces? It’s lots of fun, but will ecstasy remain in play in front of a computer screen? With microscopes and telescopes we are able to observe unscripted reality, or (if you prefer) Creation.

Dried Queen Anne’s Lace seen on a recent walk.

Something is lost when everything is experienced secondhand. Unfortunately most of us do not have the kind of double life experience Hoagland has had. Most of us live in urban or suburban areas. But we can be more mindful of the small things, get off our phones and our computers, turn off the television and experience things first hand for some part of everyday. You can do this no matter where you live.

Photograph by FortRight.

November 9, 2014 by mhasegawa

Some cartoonists view the 2014 mid-term election

There are some great cartoons this Sunday on the President and the mid-terms. Here are a few.

First from Signe Wilkinson

Another view of the President and Congress from Nick Anderson.

And my favorite from Stuart Carlson.

sc141107

I have to think that President Obama is expecting the Republican Congress to erect roadblocks and force him to veto some of their legislation (like repealing the Affordable Care Act), but I’m not sure there are many Republicans left who understand that their job is to actually govern. We shall see.

November 7, 2014 by mhasegawa

Remembering Anne Frank

For anyone expecting a rant about Tuesday’s election, this is not it. I think I may still be in a state of denial but I can’t write about it yet. My secret hope is that the Republicans will be so busy squabbling amongst themselves that they won’t be able to pass anything major – just talk about it. And they will be caught up in nominating a Presidential candidate, too. Whatever. For right now, i choose to think about Anne Frank.

I was 11 or 12 when I first read her diary, and like millions of girls around the world was inspired to start my own. I went on to read the play, see the movie and to purchase a large annotated edition which restored parts that her father had edited out. I don’t know if young girls still read her, but if they don’t they should. It was through Anne that I began to learn about the Holocaust.

Sunday, November 9 marks another anniversary of Kristallnacht, the progrom of 1938 that many believe marks the beginning of open prosecution of German Jews. The New York Times had a recent story about the anniversary and Anne Frank.

…People are fascinated or moved by the slimmest morsel of information about her. When watershed Holocaust dates come up on the calendar, like the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9 and 10 in 1938, Anne’s surviving relatives and friends are invited to share tidbits as well as tell their own often harrowing stories.

Survivors who knew Anne retain the sacred mystique of ancient scrolls — touchstones to someone whose story helped cheat Hitler of his delusion of erasing Jews from the world’s collective conscience. And organizations appreciate these relatives not just because they give life to statistics like the six million Jews killed but because the stories underscore their missions and serve as a draw for raising funds.

Anne Frank, in 1941. Her diary has sold over 35 million copies.

One of her playmates remember her.

Eva Schloss, a playmate of Anne Frank’s in Amsterdam whose mother later married Anne’s father, recalls an 11-year-old who hopscotched, shot marbles, gossiped and talked so much her friends nicknamed her “Miss Quack Quack.”

Anne also had an intense interest in clothing, boys and Hollywood stars like Deanna Durbin.

A cousin who now lives in New York recalled

Anne was a lively girl who could be something of “a busybody,” Monica Smith said about her young second cousin — and she often had ink stains on her slender fingers.

“She was a writer,” said Mrs. Smith, who also remembered that Anne had a generous streak: “She would bring me peanuts. We were not choosy in those days.”

As with anything, there is controversy. Who deserves to be considered a relative is a matter of much debate but

The personal stories relatives and friends tell are compelling, and not just when they intersect with Anne’s.

Monica Smith was born Dorothee Wurzburger in Stuttgart on May 10, 1923, six years before Anne, who was raised in Frankfurt. Her father was a manufacturer of steel used in Mercedes-Benz cars and was so important that the Nazis let him out of Dachau so he could continue conducting business. Mrs. Smith first saw Anne as a child of 3 when both went to visit grandparents in Aachen. Mrs. Smith’s grandmother and Anne’s grandfather were siblings, and their mothers were first cousins.

The memories grow clearer after Kristallnacht. Mrs. Smith’s parents put her on the Kindertransport to Holland that rescued 2,000 German-Jewish children, though one-third did not survive the Nazi occupation. Mrs. Smith, who was about 15, spent weeks quarantined in a barracks sleeping on a mattress on the floor, was taken to a more rural camp, and then to the Burgerweeshuis, an orphanage housing 75 refugee children.

Anne and her father, by then living in Amsterdam, visited the orphanage a dozen times, sometimes bringing treats. Mrs. Smith also saw Anne’s older sister, Margot, who was “totally different” — quiet and demure. Mrs. Smith remembers staying in the Franks’ modern apartment block on the Merwedeplein square and visiting Otto Frank’s spice-company offices on Prinsengracht — where he was to arrange for “the secret annex” that his family hid in for two years. And she remembers how engaged Anne and her father were with each other.

“The two of them were very close,” she said.

Mrs. Smith, a tall slender woman with a trace of a German accent, left Amsterdam a few days before the Germans marched in, reuniting with her parents in London, and immigrating with them to the United States. Adopting the nickname Monica, she scrubbed floors in the Bronx and worked as a saleswoman and clothing model at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. She married a Czech refugee, Francis Smith, and they had a son, Tony, who died at 4, and a daughter, Nicole Smith-Brody. Legally blind and hard of hearing, Mrs. Smith is filled with sadness when she thinks back to those days.

“What can be done to human beings!” she said.

What indeed?

No matter how you feel about using Anne Frank as a symbol for fundraising. No matter the arguments as who might be a “true” relative, the young girl who kept a diary and died just before she could have been liberated remains a touchstone at least for women of my generation. She is the one who taught us about man’s inhumanity to man. She was a girl who could have been one of us.

Photograph: Anne Frank Fonds, via European Pressphoto Agency

FortLeft

observations on politics, sports and life in general

Month: November 2014