Epistemophilia: Emma Goldman, no Ragtime

I listened to a podcast of the Leonard Lopate show today about the history of labor movements in the US and inevitably Emma Goldman's name came up. The author Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union) said that while Goldman was a union supporter, she was too hot for most of them to handle after McKinley's assassination in 1901. Dray says the killer, Leon Czolgosz, claimed to have been encouraged and influenced by Goldman. I knew Goldman lost favor with the anarchist movement by speaking out in favor of Czolgosz but I'm not really clear what the extent of her beforehand relationship was. Evidently, he had met her briefly and was a big fan of her speeches but they don't seem to have been particularly close. The way Dray phrased it, I couldn't tell if he meant that Goldman suggested Czolgosz kill McKinley but if that's the case, no one knows.

Dray also mentioned that Goldman was deported in 1919. Wait, does that mean she wasn't American? Actually, it looks like she was born in Russia and moved here when she was around 16. Granted, most of my knowledge of Emma Goldman comes from the movie Reds in which I don't remember Maureen Stapleton having a Russian accent. And probably the main reason I grew up liking Emma Goldman was first because I loved the movie and second because I loved Maureen Stapleton, partially because I figured she was related to the lady who played Edith on All in the Family (is that even true? Ah, Wikipedia says she is no relation to Jean Stapleton.) Oh well. Still a great movie. I can't believe my parents took me to see that when it came out. I was 12 I think. At the time, Jack Nicholson naked and Warren Beatty peeing red made a bigger impression on me than the politics but I surprisingly still found the movie engrossing even though it was long enough to have an intermission.

Final thoughts on Knots and Crosses

So, I finished the first Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel. I was thinking it was adapted at some point by the BBC. Close, it was ITV. I knew Rankin was mad popular in the UK but evidently his books account for 10% of all crime book sales in the UK (is crime book the same as mystery? This statistic seems a bit dodgy.)

I liked several things about the book, including the way multiple protagonist viewpoints are woven together. Rebus is getting hand-delivered anonymous letters with bits of knots and matchstick crosses in them at the same time that there is a serial killer on the loose in Edinburgh who abducts and kills young girls. He finally tells his sort of girlfriend (and policewoman who outranks him-nice touch) Gill who wonders if he is sending them to himself. Meanwhile, his stage hypnotist brother is making money on the side as a drug courier and a local crime beat reporter is onto the story and convinced Detective Sergeant Rebus is involved too. And then there's the matter of Rebus' history with the SAS and some sort of secret elite training disasater that he can't recall which caused him to have a nervous breakdown. I like how the book incorporates the POV of the girlfriend, the brother, Rebus' daughter, the reporter and Rebus' two partners. It muddies the story to keep you from guessing anything and Rankin's writing is good enough that all of it compelling.

What I didn't like is I suppose Rankin is trying to show that Rebus is on the verge of cracking up again. This leads to a few confusing scenes like his first time in the sack with Gill. What happened? He couldn't get it up? I really don't know. Also, in the last third Rebus regains his memory and realizes who is behind the notes-once Gill convinces him they are related to the case-and the abductions turn personal. Rebus runs out into the city to find the killer (connected to the fucked up SAS event Rebus couldn't remember) and....stops into a pub to drink whiskey and bullshit with the clientele. Really? A child killer with a personal grudge against you has kidnapped your daughter and you decide in the middle of your search to do some shots and buy rounds? This scene as a standalone was fine but was so out of place it kind of shit all over my suspension of disbelief. It felt stapled in from earlier in the book, where it belongs.

I did like how Rankin ended the book on a minor character's fate. What happened to Rebus? Well obviously he lived since he's in 16 more books. Kind of a bold choice. I also liked learning about Edinburgh. I hadn't read anything based there so I got to do some reading on it. Edinburgh and Glasgow are only 42 miles apart. I didn't realize they were so close. Edinburgh fancies itself the culture capital of Scotland and the people there seem especially outraged that crime would be taking place. I gather they expect that kind of thing to occur in Glasgow, not the capital. I've read a few books now set in Scotland during the 80's and it seemed like a pretty dismal place economically then. I hope things have improved. It doesn't make the economic collapse news the way Ireland, Spain and Greece does at any rate.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots

I really like the PRI show The Changing World, but it can be a bit up and down. Their recent two parter on  polyezniy-or useful-idiots was however one of their best. The term was coined possibly by Lenin but in practice really refined by Stalin to describe Westerners who were either blinded by the idealistic falderal of Soviet idiology or just susceptible to flattery (or both) and were thus unable to see the misery of Russians under the Soviet rule. Or just didn't care. Stalin was said to have been capable of being quite charming when he wanted, as befits a psychopath.

Some of the people name-checked: Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw (who apparently admired Stalin's Pygmalion-esque manhandled transformation of Russia) and American singer Paul Robeson. They played a clip of Lessing herself being interviewed about it and it was rather mortifying. The story of Robeson was particularly sad because he was lured by the Soviet propaganda about the lack of racism in the Soviet Union (interesting to think of this in terms of the rising number of racial incidents against Africans in Moscow now.) He would travel to the Soviet Union to see old friends who were largely in prison by then and were pulled out and cleaned up for his visit so he could see they were fine. They were promptly shipped back to their labor camps afterwards. Robeson even recorded the Soviet anthem in English. I see a clip on YouTube of him singing the Chinese anthem as well.  Mao and Stalin? Could you pick two worse leaders in the 20th century? Dude, I hope you figured this out before you died in 1976.

The most interesting story though was about an NYT reporter named Walter Duranty who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Russia in 1931 where he reported that NO ONE died directly as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan (they estimate 10 million people died in Ukraine.) The Pulitzer, interestingly, is still on display at the Times-along with a placard saying many people disagreed with his receiving it, including Times' staff.

Here's more interesting trivia about Duranty: in his former life he collaborated with Aleister Crowley on some poetry and in some vague sort of debauchery.

There has been some rumbling lately that Russia is once again becoming a country we should be wary of, thanks in part to Putin. The PRI documentary also mentioned he is trying to whitewash Stalin's image in the history books of Russian students. This might explain why on an NPR story about the Volga River, some people expressed dismay the name was changed back to Volgograd from Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, btw, is possibly the bloodiest battle in history.

Part II of the documentary looks at some more recent useful idiots, like those who supported the Hussein regime in Iraq.

Things I am wondering about today

First, what is it about Winter that makes me so listless and unmotivated? Is is the Holidays? Is it that December in Ohio is like living on one of Saturn's moons sans the lakes of Methane? (and the new arsenic-based life. Or...not.) I haven't finished a book in a week or so. I can't seem to concentrate on the one I'm reading and it's a bunch of short stories about the devil. Who doesn't like reading about the devil? I remember I used to work with some fundamentalist people and they were into this book called The Adversary-which is actually the literal Hebrew translation of Satan, I'm always amazed when fundamental types stumble on a legitimate fact-about how Beelzebub was hiding under your bed and making you watch porn and sleep late on Sundays. Satan, he brings readers together. Not even Old Scratch is motivating me currently though. After I work out, I want to sit in front of the television and wish I had a Snuggie.

There seem to be several books called The Adversary so I dunno which one they were getting so excited about.  One of those same people also told me very seriously that Ouija boards are a way that demons can attack you. Ok, making fun of people who believe this stuff is such a cliche but really I'm fascinated. FASCINATED. How can someone be so irrational about one thing but otherwise a functioning, reasonably intelligent member of society? For a cheap thrill, go to Amazon and read the Ouija board reviews. Too many silly parodies but still, intriguing psychologically. Some people are offended they would make a pink one, the better to snag the Hello Kitty crowd.



I did at least find a book on flags of the world at the library that I've been reading. Being able to identify world flags is my new obsession--along with my old obsession of reading reference books cover to cover. I learned that the Confederate flag (obviously not a world flag, thankfully) is an example of a saltire or Southern Cross (or crux decussata if you dig the whole Latin thing.) It's actually the second official flag design the Confederacy came up with and was intended as a battle flag. Some people complained it was "too white" (which is kind of what was wrong with the Confederacy) and looked like a surrender flag. The original flag looked too much like the US flag and apparently troops got confused on the battlefield. Funny the little illuminating details you can pick up in the most random of ways.

I had a history professor in college who said the Civil War was just about States Rights and not slavery which was doomed to end anyways and everyone knew it by then. I repeated this for a few years-the guy was an American history professor so he's know, right? I dunno if that's really accurate though. Wasn't the state's right to allow slavery the question? Lincoln apparently went through several mindsets on the slaves and thought at one point that people would never accept them as citizens and wanted to ship them to Liberia.

Moving on--the damn dog pulled a muscle or something a few weeks ago in the park and I had to take him to the vet. He was prescribed an NSAID called Previcox. What I found curious is the package says it's not for human ingestion. Ok, why not? Not that I need to take my dog's arthritis meds (I have my own-yay?) but I'm curious. I can't find an answer online but I did learn it's a Cox 2 Inhibitor which is what Vioxx was. Hence the "cox" in the name I suppose. Cox 2 is an enzyme that is linked to pain and inflammation and maybe cancer.

I Googled about it and found a story about a guy whose lab died from presumably a bad reaction to Previcox. Disturbing. Luckily, my dog didn't have an adverse reaction. Unluckily, he still seems to be having trouble with his front leg so I might be buying xrays in the new year.

Epistemophilia: quasars and the Catholic Church--both destructive in their own way

So, I was listening to an Astronomy Cast recently about quasars. Here's the thing--I never really understood them. Typically people say something like, "Well, no one does." And this is on the happy occasion that I'm talking to someone who knows what a quasar is, vaguely.

Yes, I know it stands for "quasi-stellar object" or, originally, "quasi-stellar radio srouce" because it was first discovered by radio telescopes in the 1950's and the energy looked like a star but it was red-shifting like a galaxy. The degree of red shift indicated it was moving away from us very fast. Now they are considered high energy galactic nuclei. Wikipedia says that a galaxy hosting an AGN (active galactic nucleus) gets its radiation from the supermassive black hole at its center (I also learned that astronomers originally referred to these as "angry monsters." I like it.)

Wait, does this mean the Milky Way is an active galaxy? We have a supermassive black hole too. NASA says no. An active galaxy is any that emits enormous amounts of energy (xrays, gamma radiation, etc.) caused by an object at its center. I guess we don't emit enough. I expect that's a good thing, to understate.

So, quasars and black holes aren't the same thing, y/y? Correct. The current thinking is a quasar has a spinning black hole at its center. This site explains it well. The intense luminosity comes from gases in the accretion disc. All of the energy in a galaxy added up would equal one of the brighter quasars. They say a large star would have had to collapse to create its black hole.

Ok, on to something completely different. Nicaea. I heard it mentioned recently in a story about the Crusades and I realized I didn't know wtf it actually is. Greece? Turkey? Syria?  It's Turkey, Western Turkey. The town is now called Iznik. It was the capital of the eponymous Empire. One of the Byzantine emperors hid there during the Fourth Crusade-the one where Rome illogically decided to attack Constantinople in 1204. The Catholics then formed the Latin Empire which lasted until 1261. The Byzantines returned to power Michael VIII but Byazntine fell to the Turks under the rule of Constantine XI.

All good preparation for when  I eventually get around to reading Lost to the West.

In A Corpse in the Koryo, Inspector O meets a Finnish/Chinese prostitute named Lena who is also an intelligence operative living in North Korea. The obvious question as to why the hell anyone would live in North Korea on purpose is never addressed. But she mentions growing up on the shores of Lake Keitele in Finland. It's a lake in what Wikipedia says is central Finland (it looks like southern Finland to me.) Alas, I couldn't find anything really interesting about it but it's pretty. Here is a painting of it by a (surprise!) Finnish painter from 1905. The blue of the Scandinavian Cross in the Finnish flag is said to represent the many lakes of Finland.

First and last lines A Corpse in the Koryo

First:

No sound but the wind, and in the stingy half-light before day, nothing to see but crumbling highway cutting straight through empty countryside.

Last:

The girl's book I left where it was, and the flowers too. As I shut the front door behind me and turned toward the station, I thought I spotted a line of geese heading south. They were flying straight as an arrow, high in an autumn sky that was as blue as anything I'd ever seen.

Final thoughts on A Corpse in the Koryo

Whew, maybe not an ideal pick for holiday reading. A novel about North Korea not being a pick me up. Who could have predicted that besides anyone who watches the news ever.

This is the first book in a series about Inspector O, a policeman in North Korea. His parents died in the war (Korean War?) and his Grandfather was a WWII hero who hated the Communist regime. It broke his grandfather's heart when his older grandson went off to "School" (really the Kim Re-education facilities for youth which they still operate) and came back dedicated to the Great Leader. His grandfather was a carpenter which explains O's obsession with wood. He carries different pieces of wood to sit and fidget with. His boss Pak tells him that people wanted to turn him in for having a subversive habit. Let's take a moment and think about how wack North Korea is.

He also rhapsodizes about sandpaper and how hard it is to get. His grandfather hated sandpaper. Who does carpentry without sandpaper? Apparently it was invented by an American in the 19th century according to the book (Yahoo answers tells me the sanding technique may have been invented by the Chinese but an American first patented the production process. Interesting.)

He is used to having his home and office random searched by the DPRK's shadow security forces.

The story, as I mentioned, is confusing in the beginning. O is asked to take a picture of a car on the highway outside of Pyongyang (come to think of it, since Kim turns out to be connected to it, I'm not sure why he was asked. Or was this Kang's idea? I still don't totally understand this story.)  The camera has no batteries. Also, their office teakettle was stolen (O's inability to ever get a cup of tea is one of the few pieces of humor in the story.) This camera thing turns into an incident which the reader understands less than O even. His boss sends him to Kanggye, then Manpo where he meets Kang who wants him to break into what turns out to be a Military Security base. Why? Also don't totally understand. But then a murdered foreigner (a Finn as it turns out) is found in a room at the Koryo and Kang tells O that Pak wants him to return to Pyongyang.

It's at this point in the book where I really started warming up to O. The interviews with MI6 (I am guessing) were kind of confusing (I really don't understand how or why O would be allowed out of the country if he is a lowly Pyongyang detective but maybe that's explained in a future book) but by the end, they helped illuminate O's personality and dry humor. I really like how O keeps "forgetting" to wear his Dear Leader pin. I still don't understand why he wouldn't defect even more than Renko. North Korea give new meaning to shithole.

The dead guy in the Koryo, at any rate, turns out to have been a Finn who is working with Kang on his smuggling information. Kim, the psychotic Military Security leader, also has a car smuggling information. But he hates Kang and his whole department. Kang is trying to sneak his people out. He stays behind so he can get Lena, the Chinese/Finnish operative (or prostitute?), to leave with him. Military Security killed the Finn to send a message to Kang by putting him in the room he had just stayed in with Lena. There's also something about Japan but I didn't totally understand that either. My Asian history is pretty poor like most Westerners. The author mentions most Asians hate Japanese. That's kind of interesting.

By the end, lots of people are dead: Kang, Pak, poor Lena (bludgeoned in the Temple at Hyangsan by...Military Security?), the security officer who was a friend of O's and knew about the smuggling, the desk clerk in Manpo (choked by having his despooled Western porn video shoved down his throat), and maybe Grandma Pak and Kang's daughter, who if not dead is in a labor camp and wishes she were. Who isn't dead is Kim, the man who directly or indirectly killed them all. But, O has set him up to appear he is collaborating with the West by giving them a copy of his passport. Again, what the hell was O doing in Prague?

And the part at the very end after the shootout about O finding a corpse that isn't Kang--does that mean he got away? I think that is what it means. 

The end of the book is dated January, 2003 so this all takes place in 2002 I assume.

I complain about not getting the story but I did like it. Very well put together. Besides what I mentioned above, I don't understand why some people chose to help O. Were they all operatives of Kang? That's hinted at but the desk clerk giving him the bus schedule meant for Kang, I don't really get why he did that. It could also seem like a strange coincidence that everyone O ran into in the mountains seemed to know and have something built by his grandfather but that is where his family lived when O was young I think. The more you know about Korea and its history, the more you'll get out of this.