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Retiring to Channel Rex Stout

 

This blog announces my retirement. Bear with me.

Herrlee Creel was a Sinologist, an expert on all things Chinese. In addition to his more scholarly works on early China, he wrote a book on Confucius, another on Chinese philosophy that began with the Confucians and stretched all the way to Mao Tse Tung. Both of those books appeared on the New York Times best seller list. He is now fading into the past, replaced by younger scholars who have the benefit of new archaeological discoveries, thawed relations with China, and renewed interest in China’s past, but his books are still in print.

He was both my undergraduate advisor and my PhD advisor. I turned in a first chapter of my undergraduate thesis to him. I wrote about that event earlier in the Vine Maple Studio. If you are interested he Rex Stout, he has a large following. Read about it at The Wolfe Pack.

When I became a graduate student, Creel was not so forgiving. He had a reputation for severity with his PhD advisees. After I turned in a second or third thesis chapter, he demonstrated his severity just for me. I have never, before or after, felt so inept, unsuitable, devoid of aptitude, unworthy and generally like something we’d shoot if it got near the granary.

He said nothing about the content of the chapter, but he took apart almost every sentence and word in it. I had written in the usual abysmally pretentious graduate student style. Abstractions were piled on abstraction. Subjects were carefully hidden. The pipes were clogged with meaningless word and pointless adverbs. Creel did not direct me to Strunk and White. I suspect he did not approve of Cornell. He said that I had missed the point of his old advice to read Rex Stout and said that he expected me to pay attention this time.

I abandoned my PhD not too long after that when I realized that I was not on a path likely to lead to gainful employment, but I spent the next forty years ruminating on Creel’s advice.

Last May I was summarily retired from my job as a software architect by being laid off. This was a blessing. Retirement doesn’t merit a gold watch or a pension anymore, but you get a severance package when you are laid off, and severance packages for 23 year employees can be better than winning at Jeopardy. Since I already had been thinking about retirement, when the rumors of a layoff began to circulate, I knew my opportunity had come and I dropped hints that I would not mind being on the list. Retirement came suddenly, and I probably would have put it off a few years, but here I am.

I can now pursue Creel’s advice with the diligence that he expected me to apply. I am writing a mystery in Rex Stout’s style. This will be the PhD thesis I did not complete. A first draft is close to half done. The characters and setting are all different, but I am trying to use every bit I have learned in four decades of study of Archie and Nero. I imagine I will publish it on Kindle and maybe a few people will enjoy it, but, no matter who reads it, I will meet an obligation.

As an aside, I am also working on my second technical business book. If you are interested, check out my technical site, Cloud Standards.

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61st Birthday

Riding the ferris wheel

Today is my birthday, sixty-one years old. It’s a mixture. I feel it in my arthritic knees that creak and hurt when I stand up and cause me to think of ways to avoid going up stairs. I enjoy my grandsons, one of whom told me this week that I was not boring like grandpas on TV.

Suddenly, many things of interest, like the Supremes second hit single–Baby Love–and the discovery of the structure of DNA, took place forty or fifty years ago. And the people listed in the New York Times obituaries are no longer old fogies I never heard of. This makes makes me feel very old.

But I was also cheated, missing out on being a grown up. I jumped from kid to old guy. As a kid, I looked forward to the day when the classes would be over and I would be the teacher at the front of the room, assigning the homework and grading the tests, but that never materialized for me. I still have a ton of homework and I am still taking tests.

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Racism and Jack London

This 4th of July was the one hundredth anniversary of the fight between the first black world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, and Jim Jeffries, who was described as the “Great White Hope,” who was expected to regain the world championship for the white race. Jack London is said to have coined the phrase “Great White Hope,” and if he didn’t, I’m sure he would have if he had thought of it. This phrase, and many others like it, turned the fight into a wildly dramatized spectacle.

Jeffries was touted by Jack London and the rest of the press as the answer to Johnson’s victory over the previous white world champion in Australia. Johnson was a black man who  fought fairly and well, but the press seized a ready audience, and held him up as a villain and a usurper, ready to fall to a white hero.

The Fight

A hero, “The Great White Hope,” was found in Jeffries, a former world champion fighter who had retired to his alfalfa farm in California. The battle between Jeffries and Johnson in Reno, Nevada, was to be a victory pageant for the white race. Millions of dollars in wagers were expected to change hands. Johnson was by far the superior fighter, in top condition, and a better tactician. Jeffries was over-confident, out of shape, and not the equal of Johnson. The fight was to have lasted forty-five rounds, but in the third round Johnson delivered a left hook to Jeffries eye that disrupted his vision and the “Great White Hope” was out in the fifteenth.

American Racism in 1910

The United States, and much of the rest of the world, was a racist place in 1910. As much as anyone may reject racism, I suspect that any white person today who thinks he or she would not have been a racist in 1910 is fooling themselves. Not that it was right to be racist in 1910; it was horribly wrong. The vast majority of whites in 1910 were horribly wrong about race.

I have no evidence, but I suspect that my great-grandparents would have cheered for the “Great White Hope” with complete sincerity. If I had been born in 1849 instead 1949, I probably would have cheered too. But I am very glad that I was born in 1949 and have lived to see a black president. The intervening hundred years was not a waste.

London’s Racism

What of Jack London? Of course he was a racist. Everyone was in those days. And he must be counted among the most despicable because he used racism to sell himself as a journalist. I count myself lucky that I am reasonably certain that my great grandparents never confronted a black person in their entire lives, so their beliefs may have been wrong, but the damage was small. But London built his career on appeal to popular beliefs, and the superiority of the white race was one of his foundation stones. He urged many people on to acts that shed much innocent blood. His descendants– and as an appreciative reader of London, I am one– get little comfort from that.

London’s Legacy

But let me ask a counter question: if Jack London had not written a line, would we be better off today? That is an unanswerable question, but today is my day to step into the ring and take a few punches. The fact that I like Jack London is a clue to my answer. London may not have been open to non-whites, but he was open to the poor and the underdog. Over and over again in his writings he addresses justice and opportunity. And unlike so many authors of his time, London’s heroes do not become rich by befriending the wealthy or discovering buried treasure. His heroes struggle and fight for their places, which they win or lose on their persistence, intelligence, courage, and integrity.

Whatever London’s intentions, the virtues that London espoused, applied by whites and non-whites alike, assaulted racism and eventually dealt it blows as mortal as Johnson’s left to Jeffries’ eye in the third round. Jack London was a despicable racist, like most whites in 1910, but he also brought us a step closer to the end to racism.