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Digital Presence

As we leave the Covid-19 pandemic, new ways of life are emerging. New vaccinations have entered the fall flu shot ritual and we cautiously wait for an annual “summer covid surge.” Management experts debate the effects on productivity of a “return to the office,” and cities fret over declining tax revenue from empty office buildings.

I’m reminded of a productivity study, perhaps ephemeral, I heard about in high school. A factory experimented with lighting. They increased light on the factory floor and productivity improved. They increased light more. Productivity improved further. They were on a roll. Then someone noticed that lighting costs were high, so they decreased lighting. Astoundingly, productivity increased again. After fiddling with lighting for some time, they concluded that changing the lighting in any way short of darkness increased productivity.

I keep this story in mind while thinking about working from home.

There’s nothing easy about managing a workforce. As a cynical observer of business management, I’ll hazard that short term decisions on remote work depend more on preferences and prejudices rather than objective analysis of pros and cons. Nevertheless, eventually, a smart manager will figure out a solution in their organization that gives them a winning edge and it will be written up in the Harvard Business Review, thus becoming common knowledge.

I doubt that the smart solution will be a return to 2019. Some increase in working from home over pre-pandemic is likely, but the form and extent of that increase is still unpredictable. In any case, I will be thunderstruck if one solution is best for all enterprises.

I worked remotely long before the pandemic. I still live on a homestead farm that goes back to my emigrant great-grandparents, a heritage I will not relinquish, but I don’t have the farming gene.

Most of my career has been with multi-national corporations. For nearly thirty years my official corporate office was on the Seattle east side, a two hundred mile commute from the farm. I’ve burned outrageous airmiles, sometimes effectively commuting between the northwest corner of Washington State to a job in New York City, but most of the time my real office was in the old farmhouse on Waschke Road from which I participated in and led development teams that stretched all over the world.

I have faced the challenge of remote work. I’m not here to say that I have answers, but I have experience.

Before I go on, I should disclose that I’m an introvert. After meeting face-to-face, I seek time alone to relax and recover. After online interaction, I’m often energized. However, my preference for online connections does not reveal anything about the quality of those interactions, only that I am open to them.

Aside from the remoting forced by pandemic lockdowns, online interaction is particularly suited to the 21st century.

Having lived in the same geographic location for over seventy years, I am aware of how much life has changed in my community. When I was growing up, we had far fewer neighbors than today and most were more or less related. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, who was arguing with whom, and what they were arguing about. Calling ahead to announce a visit was unheard of and knocking was often optional. I note that in this, our life was similar to Jimmy Carter’s account of growing up in rural Georgia.

That has all changed. I have a nod-and-a-wave acquaintance with everyone living on “our” road and the four-lot development that has popped up at its end, but I don’t know all their names, and I’ve never entered most of their houses. I’m content with this relationship. My circle of friends is no longer limited to physical proximity, and I am glad it is not, because I now communicate daily with friends in every U.S. time zone and beyond.

I read and write daily emails, message, and video conference with a group of friends who share my interest in Victorian novels, software architects from my former career, a group who lived in the same dormitory fifty years ago on the South Side of Chicago, and friends from my church, which happens to be close to my old corporate office in Seattle not the farm. This bunch includes astronomers, lawyers, surgeons, geophysicists, psychologists, and chemists, very different from the narrow physical community of sixty years ago.

This in an improvement in life.

For those who cling to the magic of personal proximity, I point to Christian and Zen Buddhist communities. Today, churches hold daily online prayer sessions following centuries old traditional rites. Zen sanghas hold online zazen meditation following traditional practices. These things work. They don’t replace face-to-face interaction, but they add opportunities that didn’t exist in the past.

Is humanity about to become a disembodied digital phantasm? No. Digital connections augment physical presence, they do not replace it.

But we are entering a new world.

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Rex Stout and Truth

“I think people actually love truth a lot more than a lot of people think they do. I think that people really want truth and love truth, and in a detective story, the truth is the hero of the story.”

Rex Stout discussing the popularity of mystery stories with Eleanor Roosevelt on radio, July 30, 1951. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2020/10/rex-stout-on-the-air/

Periodically, I take a deep dive into the world of the mystery writer, Rex Stout, to re-experience the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories. My PhD advisor and great mentor Herrlee Creel once told me my thesis was coming along okay, but I’d do better in life if I wrote it in readable English. He told me to read Rex Stout and write like him. I’ve been trying ever since.

The list of authors, literary critics, academics, and statesmen who have praised the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin stories ranges from John Le Care to Jaques Barzun, all the way to Henry Kissinger. Stout is read on many levels: sheer escapism, social commentary, and the study of human nature are among the reasons. I read the stories to discover the sources of Stout’s greatness; not only to learn the tricks of his trade, but also to examine his insight into the world he lived in.

Stout and Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald

Stout is not cynically realistic like Hammett, nor is he lyrical like Raymond Chandler, and he is certainly not deeply psychological like Ross Macdonald. Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald are firmly rooted in the west coast, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Stout is a New Yorker from the Midwest. The west coast bunch surveys humanity with clear cold eyes; on the surface, Stout is only a short step above an “Oh Gosh Golly, how sophisticated” recent arrival to the big city.

Just when I think I have pushed a pin through Stout’s chest and mounted him under glass, I notice that Stout’s Inspector Cramer has more depth in his admiration-tainted frustration with Wolfe and Goodwin’s antics than any of the Dickensian caricatures who populate Chandler’s LA, or that Archie’s wise cracks have wheels within wheels.

In Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald’s California the police and city governments are often venal and corrupt. In Stout’s New York, Wolfe revels in luxury. He connives for big fees and repeatedly skirts ethical boundaries. Murderers whom Wolfe thinks may get off in court are forced into suicide. He lies for his own purposes. He snatches the choice bits off the serving platter ahead of his dinner guests. Honest and stolid Inspector Cramer knows all this, yet he, and we poor readers, admire Wolfe, a force for justice that transcends quotidian ethics.

This Dive

My latest dive has been into three books: Target Practice, a compilation of pre-Nero short stories; Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel, published in 1934; and And Be a Villain, a post WWII novel published in 1948.

I had a purpose in mind: the Nero Wolfe novels are often said to have sprung to life fully mature in Fer-de-Lance. Was that true? I set out to compare Wolfe’s debut with Stout before and after Wolfe.

Target Practice

Target Practice is a collection of short stories published between 1914 and 1917, roughly twenty years prior to Fer-de-Lance. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy them. The words on the page were good: clear, concise, to the point. But the plots felt contrived, disconnected from the characters, and almost all the endings were more like general social comments than the inevitable consequences of the stories themselves.

Stout’s switch to writing mysteries in the mid-1930s conveniently solved his story ending issues. Mystery writers have an advantage: the ending is set. When hidden truth is revealed, the mystery is resolved and the story is over. Mysteries can still fail in many ways, but finding a resolution is seldom a challenge.

The two stories in Target that I liked best were mysteries with strong endings: “Justice Ends At Home” and “Heels of Fate.”

“Justice” has been described as proto-Archie-Wolfe. An office boy and a lawyer who work together in the story are said to be prototypes for Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. I see the similarity, but the duo in “Justice” are bland compared to Archie and Nero. However, Stout showed much of his later flair for the tension through carefully paced revelation of the truth of deception and crime at the heart of the story.

In “Heels of Fate,” I saw more of the future Nero Wolfe. In this story, a livery stable owner has the Nero role; a country lawyer plays the Archie-narrator. The lawyer has none of Archie’s panache. The livery stable owner is decidedly not an arrogant epicure like Nero, but he sizes up a situation and schemes to deal out justice without regard to conventional ethics. “Heels” is a tight and absorbing story and, unlike most of the other stories in Target, the ending is both startling and satisfying.

Fer-de-Lance

When I began to read Fer-de-Lance, I was surprised. Archie and Nero are there, but not fully formed. Archie’s wit and style show only rare hints of what is to come. Nero is crafty, claims to be an artist and a genius, but he is not the great man he becomes in the ensuing books.

The iconic brownstone house and office doesn’t have the rich texture that appears later. There’s no red chair for Wolfe’s client or the huge custom chair for Wolfe’s bulk. The giant globe is still to come. The Wolfe posse is present, but barely. Fred Durkin, Saul Panzer, and Orrie Cather appear, but no Inspector Cramer. Purley Stebbins is a name only. There’s a newspaperman, but he’s not Lon Cohen. The posse has few of the enduring characteristics they take on later. Saul Panzer, New York’s greatest freelance operative, is not a freelance. He’s on retainer with Wolfe.

Most surprising was the writing itself. Raymond Chandler is known for his startling similes. For example, “a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart,” from the first paragraph of The Lady in the Lake. Much of the humor in Archie and Nero comes from Archie’s apparent non-sequiturs that reflect deep knowledge.

The arch non-sequiturs are largely absent from Stout’s pre-Nero era, but appear in Fer-de-Lance. An example: “the house was brand-new, wood with panels and a high steep slate roof, one of the styles I lumped all together and called Queen William.” That’s Archie talking.

Both Stout’s Archie and Chandler’s Marlowe twist our sensibilities. Marlowe flaunts his jaded vision while Archie mocks his own knowledge and taste.

Many of Wolfe’s characteristics appear in Fer-de-Lance. Throughout the series, Archie is the detective who digs out evidence, passing on information, evidence, witnesses, and suspects to Wolfe, who is the active hunter, directing the search, manipulating evidence, setting traps, and, in many cases, meting out judgement and punishment. Ultimately, a Nero Wolfe novel is a recount of Wolfe’s quest for truth from evidence that Archie gathers.

To my taste, Stout’s word craft, characterization, and scene construction in Fer-de-Lance took a step back from the quality of the short stories, although the overall construction is better and Stout’s sure hand with dramatic tension moves the story on. Stout said he changed his entire approach to writing with Fer-de-Lance. Maybe he had to relearn some of his style.

And Be a Villain

I won’t say much about And Be a Villain. During WWII Stout vigorously supported the war effort on radio and the Writer’s War Board and devoted less time to writing mysteries. And Be a Villain is a product of Stout’s post-war burst of stories. It is the first of the Arnold Zeck trilogy in which Archie and Wolfe confront and eventually defeat Zeck, a coldly calculating gangster with a vast organization.

Villain has all the features of a fully realized Wolfe novel. Wolfe’s posse appears in full regalia. The brownstone is complete. Archie wise cracks his way through a mess of unpleasant characters and awkward situations. Wolfe is high-handed. He ignores Zeck’s threats; when the truth comes out, Wolfe sidesteps Zeck’s wrath.

Stout’s statement to Eleanor Roosevelt quoted above is a great insight into the success of the Wolfe-Archie mysteries. Stout’s relatable characters help, the wit and humor that touches almost every page contribute, but Wolfe’s intent pursuit of truth is the principal attraction.

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I’m Not Leaving America

A lot of folks are thinking about leaving America for better places. This season, many Americans are dissatisfied with our response to the pandemic, the state of our society and culture. America in general.

I’m staying. Here’s why.

America is special to me, but not because we don’t make mistakes. We have made many mistakes, poor decisions, and we never quite agree on anything. Yet we are the wealthiest nation on earth because we also continuously correct ourselves and discover solutions to our problems.

We are no longer a new nation. America has been a constitutional democracy for centuries. We hear that American democracy is under attack today, but democracy is always under attack from all sides: right, left, and center.

Always. If you think not, you haven’t paid attention. Take heart, you’re not alone. Even historians have a bit of rose tint in their glasses. In this country, standard histories tend to gloss over attacks on democracy. If you disbelieve, go to the newspaper archives and see for yourself what folks were thinking about Hitler in the late 1930s. The 3rd Reich had its American backers. And it’s not only American democracy under attack. One way of reading Thucydides, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is as an analysis of attacks on Athenian democracy.

The losing side in every American election, from high school class president to U.S. president, claims the election was defective. Republicans thought so in 2020, Democrats in 2016, and on down the line. No one likes to lose, so we come up with reasons, any reason we can latch onto: voter fraud, door-belling the wrong neighborhood, the electoral college, gerrymandering, hanging chads, lying politicians, external conditions like the weather, pandemics, or foreign wars. Some excuses have some truth, others not.

More than anything else, they’re excuses.

When I was a software developer, I always tried to build self-correcting systems that made seriously bad choices and errors so obvious, so blatant, they were immediately corrected.

American democracy is a self-correcting system. That’s the secret to our success. Over and over, things go sideways, millions of eyes focus on the issue, and we work it out in the fervid and contradictory jumble of thought and effort that is our society. Americans disagree with each other, but our freedom to investigate and think for ourselves coupled with our election process always favors effective solutions.

Solutions in a free society are not cheap or easy. Among a free people, you are free to say that things are bad, say something nasty, say what people want to hear. No matter how false or outrageous your statements, you’ll get attention and some people will believe you. There’s money to be made. Unscrupulous folks take advantage of this and always have, but in America, people decide for themselves and solutions that work eventually appear. The attention-getting phantasms fade away, but until they fade, they are often viciously destructive.

This is not the first tough time for the U.S. A civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the forgotten economic crises of the 19th century were all tough. The 1918 flu pandemic was a killer. Many of us once believed owning other humans was morally right. These tough times were addressed with new ideas and solutions that rose to the top from the chaos of a free people.

America’s 2021 is not easy. Nearly 800,000 dead in less than 2 years— more than the population of Seattle or Denver, more than the U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cherishing our freedom, many more of us have died than in autocratic states with more draconian mandates.

The pandemic has generated difficult economic issues, which, like covid-19, no one has seen before or anticipated.

Who thought a disease that kills mostly the old and sick would lead to a truck driver shortage? Labor shortages may have been predictable, but who predicted the Great Resignation?

We haven’t found the American solution to the pandemic yet. Mandatory lock-downs, masks, and vaccinations have worked in China. Their pandemic death rate is minuscule and their economy is nearly fully recovered. But the solution is not to double down on methods that clearly have not worked here. Instead, we have to find the American solution.

Now, the world faces the Omicron variant. No one knows if it will fizzle away or rage like the Delta variant, but all the experts say that variants will continue to appear and every variant has the potential to evade the vaccines and kill more.

More medicines, faster easier testing, ideas no one has noticed yet, all may be part of our solution.

We will find the American solution. It will not be autocracy or abandoning our freedom. If any entity can tackle this challenge, it’s the United States of America.