​Dead Souls
 
Lately I’ve been having trouble finding stuff I want to read. I have to have stuff to read.
It used to be I would read anything, even my own work. I always finished what I started.
Lately though I need, basically, something that shows some intelligence. Some insight, a new perspective, prose that shows someone is thinking about what she is writing.
Combine that with my having become lazy, and wanting something entertaining and pleasant to read, and I can’t find enough.
So it occurred to me that I had never read Gogol’s Dead Souls. Mertvie Dushi. It’s one of the very few Great Books I never read. Turns out I don’t even own a copy. Or I lost it.
So I found a Dent classic version for 2$ on kindle. I also won’t buy stuff on Kindle for above the $9.99 suggested pricing unless it is something really special. Mine are under that, after all.
I discovered that one reason I hadn’t read it is a very banal reason. I tried to read it in Russian and Gogol likes lots of very specific detail, like for example what kind of suitcase his hero, Chichikov, carries. This is the kind of vocabulary no one has in a foreign language. Not even Russian to English dictionaries.
The other reason is more interesting.    
Gogol meant to write a kind of Russian Divine Comedy, with an Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, but he only finished the first volume, his Inferno, about the hellish aspects of Russian life in his time.
So Dead Souls is deliberately awful and banal. It resembles the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses, which concerns exhausted mediocre people thinking and speaking in cliches. Chichikov has invented a scheme whereby he buys dead serfs, who have died after the last census, and thus still are registered as alive, for a pittance from landowners, who are glad to sell nonexistent serfs. “Souls” is used the same way aircraft and ships use the term, for people on board. Chichikov takes out loans using the dead souls as collateral. He then defaults on the loan, and keeps the money. The creditor can only repossess the dead souls.
Think of bundled derivatives or tranched mortgages.
It’s tricky though because everyone he deals with is suspicious, paranoid, stubborn, incompetent, lazy, stupid and hypocritical. Their conversation is clicheed banalities and sanctimonious hypocrisy. Chichikov becomes a kind of less well meaning Don Quixote, where every endeavor gets bogged down in carriage wrecks in rainstorms on the way to recalcitrant landowners, fistfights, arguments, misunderstandings, cheaters trying to cheat each other and the like. It turns out his easy money requires strenuous and dangerous amounts of work and ingenuity, which he does not possess. Slapstick and comedy of errors.
So previously I had gotten bogged down in the banality and mediocrity of the characters, somehow missing the satire, which starts in the preface. Gogol asks his readers to kindly send letters of criticism of his book’s characters and situations to him for his edification. He suggests that many of his readers probably know things about Russian small towns or landowners or government regulations or sheep or livestock or whatever that he, Gogol, is ignorant of. He welcomes suggestions. He says that many readers probably have acute suggestions about what his characters ought to have said instead of what he records them as saying. His readers probably have acute insights into the personalities of his characters, which he Gogol failed to notice. He requests readers kindly forward all such helpful suggestions to him for his second edition. He adds that since he is rather slow on the uptake, it would be helpful if the readers explained all their points in prose which even a not particularly bright person could understand, and to kindly not stint on explaining everything at adequate length, not to assume that he will grasp points which have not been fully detailed. He requests that critics also not stint in helping him correct his inadequacies.
Why the coin didn’t drop when I first read this, I don’t know. Perhaps the Russian was over my head. Gogol is of course being hilariously, even sadistically, satirical. Over the course of his writing career, Gogol undoubtedly received scores of letters, and reviews of his work, which did exactly what he recommends. These were far from useful or gratefully received of course. Mostly they were consigned to the round file, possibly even before he had read the first paragraph. Every reader could do a better job, in their mind, than Gogol did. Not.
Dead Souls is a find, in other words. In concept, execution, character, sociological insight, style, thought and human relevance. Someone should have written one about the Great Recession.
If all of these characters, references and authors are unknown to you, think of what Kenneth Braithwaite complained bitterly to me about in Miami decades ago. He said that perhaps even worse than the colonists’ physical enslavement of Africans was what he called soul murder. The slaves’ entire culture and language was taken from them during the middle passage. I pointed out to Kenneth that in my writing class at a middle ranked university, Texas State, only one of my 30 plus kids had ever heard of Chopin. And that girl was from Peru.
Would you call that soul suicide? Dead souls?

If you don't get around to seeing The Big Short, which is a very entertaining account of how and why the 2008 economic meltdown occurred, complete with the personalities involved, here is a short nonpartisan explanation.  Most people still don't understand it, but it isn't that complicated.
A lot of salesmen sold mortgages that they knew were bad, to people they knew would probably not be able to pay them off.  They did this because they got a commission and fees off every mortgage they sold, but none off those they declined.
Banks both federal and private made the bad loans because they could then sell them to investors, and so would not get stuck holding the loan if it defaulted.
They were able to sell the bad mortgages to investors, first, by bundling them into huge CDOs with thousands of loans, bad and good, so investors had a hard time figuring out that many of them were bad.  They figured bundling them together made the package stronger. Actually it meant that if some of them failed, the whole package would collapse. Second, the banks got the rating agencies to rate the CDOs triple A, so they would look good to investors.
The rating agencies rated them AAA because they got paid to. They were paid, a lot, not to rate or evaluate the investment, but for giving them AAA.  If they did not, the banks could go to another agency which would cooperate.
These were cheap adjustable rate mortgages, so as soon as the rates went up, the home owners, who could barely or not at at all afford them anyway, defaulted.
The banks and investment companies went bankrupt.  Many had bought the CDOs themselves!  A good con artist believes his own con.
The federal government, Republican and Democratic, bailed out the banks, except Bear Stearns.  The other alternative was to let the financial system collapse into another world depression, like in 1930.  The banks were too big to fail, too big to jail,  which was another reason the didn't hesitate to make bad loans.
The banks took the billions from the government and used it partly to award bankers with huge bonuses, in the hundreds of millions.  From the bankers' point of view, they could tell their stockholders that they had gotten billions of free money from the government, saving the bank, so they deserved a big bonus.
The good news now is that the economy finally recovered and the banks paid back the fed, so the taxpayers got their money back.  The bad news is nothing has changed.  Those wonky financial instruments, like CDOs, are still around, the banks are bigger than ever, and not one single person went to jail.  Some investors tried to sue the rating agencies for fraud, but were laughed out of court.

​

​I've discussed this issue with many other riders. Some agree with me and many don't. I thought some disagreed partly because Americans are so moralistic about public life-- or have such high standards for public figures, if you prefer to put it that way. But some Australians were even more negative. Of course, Australians tend to be super American is some ways.
So let me lay out the argument.
First, let's establish what Armstrong did and has admitted to: four forms of doping. He blood doped by reinfusing his own red blood cells to enhance his blood's oxygen carrying capacity. He took anabolic steroids to increase strength and muscle. He took Epoetin to manufacture extra red blood cells. And he used anti-inflammatories and steroids to tamp down on soreness and inflammation while he was riding the Tour de France, to enhance his short term recovery.
Then he lied about it.
He also attacked, sometimes in court, ex-colleagues and employees who ratted him out.
So why forgive all this?
Let's start with the fact that in the Armstrong era, all professional riders doped in this same way. The playing field was level, and he was not taking unfair advantage of anything except superior expertise in not getting caught.
That seems like a big charge to make. How do we know this? First, it's common knowledge among everyone in the cycling community. Professional bike racing was a chemically enhanced sport in those times, and may have been since it's inception. The greatest racer of all time, Eddie Merckx, was caught using amphetamines.
At the time, there was some discussion among the Tour directorate about leaving the sport like that, as doping is so hard to prevent. Wiser heads prevailed, or at least were swayed by financial considerations about the public's opinion of their sport. That is, the officials and governing bodies bear most of the responsibility for this state of affairs, in my opinion. If everyone knew about it, so did they, and yet they elected to look the other way, or to rely on ineffectual, purely cosmetic attempts to regulate doping.
The riders, like Armstrong, were young kids who wanted to win bike races, which is a noble ambition in my opinion. It's a dangerous and demanding sport. They had to obey their coaches, like all athletes. Their choices were to give up the sport, or ride as amateurs, or to dope, which was the only way to win. The Tour de France is won by minutes, after 2000 miles of racing and three weeks of riding. Even a tiny edge is decisive and doping was a big edge. One of the reasons so many people were convinced Armstrong doped, even though he passed all his drug tests, was that it was thought to be impossible to compete that successfully at that level against riders who did dope. And the coaches, the directeurs sportif, had to go along with doping to stay in business.
Blaming only the riders is yet another way for coaches, reporters, team owners to bully the actual athletes, whose prowess they may resent. The old fart with the money is the alpha dog. And don't you forget it.
Second, the speed of the peloton, the main group of riders in a race, has dropped by a couple miles per hour since effective anti-doping strategies have been in force. Course records or climb times set during the doping era have never been equaled, despite the facts that the bikes are lighter and faster, there are more competitors from all over the world, and the training is more intense than ever.
Now, that is, riders are tested as soon as they turn pro to establish baseline blood chemistry; they are tested multiple times a year, and at unannounced times. A rider who came in second one year was disqualified for the following year because he said he was abroad when the tester come to find him, but a reliable witness said he saw him in Italy, not abroad. He never tested positive, but that was enough. Riders and their vehicles are searched at borders. Moles are planted in their entourages. People are followed. Garbage is examined.
Third, almost without exception, the riders who came in second and third to Armstrong in the Tours he won, and the riders who won just before and after his string of eight victories, have admitted to or been caught doping. In fact, usually when someone is disqualified, the runner up is given the title. But not in this case, because the Tour direction has no confidence that the riders who came in second, and have not undergone the kind of scrutiny and investigation that Armstrong has, were not equally guilty.
And yet no one but Armstrong has been banned for life from professional sports. The rest got suspended for a season, mostly.
You could say that punishing him severely has a deterrent effect, but I do not believe that. Present day riders look on the Armstrong years as ancient history, with different mores, different forms of testing and even different chemicals available. The deterrent is the focus on present day riders and teams discussed above.
Well, what about lying about it? Kind of the way Nixon and Clinton got busted not for the original offense but for lying under oath, obstruction of justice, suborning witnesses and the like.
Not comparable. Taking prescribed performance enhancing drugs is not illegal. It's against the regulations of the sport, but had Armstrong not been an athlete he could have taken all the drugs his doctor prescribed him without any penalty. Besides, he ain't President of the United States.
And if you are going to do it, you have to lie about it. It's the same act. You can't dope and then say you doped. What would be the point? I regard this second offense as a kind of entrapment, though it does bear out the old Catholic dogma that once you commit one sin, the others follow.
I don't really have any excuse for him attacking other riders and ex-employees who squealed. They went along with him until it wasn't convenient, so I can't say I'm very sympathetic to their plight, but it was pretty vicious on his part too.
What I can say is that winners are not always nice guys. You can admire their athletic ability, their drive, their determination and their focus, but to expect all of them to be exemplary in all other ways is probably too much to ask. A certain amount of narcissism and selfishness kind of comes with the territory. Me first.
The Australian said I was justifying someone acting like a mafia don enforcing omerta. I admit he had a point.
Still, I feel at this point that Armstrong has been punished enough. He's been out of professional competition for years, suffered financially, lost prestige. No matter what happens his reputation will never be the same.
In fact, given the good work his cancer institute was doing, and the exemplary, if illusory, role model he was providing, it would have been better if his prosecutors had looked to the present day sport instead of digging around in the past. The lawyer who chased him down, spending years and millions of dollars, said Armstrong showed a win at all costs mentality which he found reprehensible, but, as so often, he was describing himself.
A very useful and essential, and much neglected, concept for my conclusion here is one only known to people who study history seriously or professionally. It is called historicity. You cannot judge people and events from other eras and cultures as though they were living in your world. George Washington owned slaves. Today that would earn him opprobrium and jail time. And you can't say he didn't know it was not kosher even then. You can look at statements he made, and the abolition of the slave trade in other countries from much earlier than his period.
But while condemning slavery unequivocally, you have to give him a pass on that. It was accepted in his time. He was a very great man and a very admirable figure in very many and very important ways. You hope someone will transcend his time but it is unreasonable to expect he will in every way. Washington certainly did in so many other ways. It is intellectually and morally incorrect to pretend that the standards which hold in your time are eternal truths. It's provincial and arrogant. Things change, and they keep changing.
​So the Armstrong era was the era when professional bike racing was a chemically enhanced sport. You can't change history. The races he rode and won were great triumphs. They belong in the glorious history of the Tour. He won 8 Tours by his own efforts, skill, determination, strategy and physical prowess, adhering to the standards of bike racing which prevailed in his time.
So it's time to prevent doping in the sport now, not in the past. And to give Armstrong back the honors he won on the road, mano a mano.
He was, I believe, the greatest Tour rider ever. Perhaps not the greatest racer, as Merckx won so many other races besides his 5 Tours, including the hour record--in fact one third of all the races he ever entered; but Armstrong, besides winning 8 tours by defeating on an equal paying field all the riders competing in the environment as it was then, was the only Tour victor who was the best both in the mountains and in the time trials. That is, most Tour champions are time trial specialists who can limit their losses on the climbs, riders like Merckx, Hinault, Induran or Anqueteil. Sometimes a great climber who can limit his losses in the time trials will win. But only Armstrong consistently won both. He was the best time trialer of his time and also the best climber. Laurent Fignon only achieved that once, and only won two Tours total.
You can ask questions, like, would Armstrong have won if he and the other riders had not been doping? This is like, could he have beaten Merckx if they both rode at the same time? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein laid that one to rest early in the last century. He said questions based on hypotheticals have no answer. As he put it, "If I were a duck, would I lay eggs? I have no idea. I'm not a duck." It's hard enough to answer real questions.
We can continue to sanction riders who dope, and enforce and enhance anti-doping measures without trying to rectify the sport's past. As the second placed Oscar Pereiro said, less than enthused about the first place the Tour direction offered him after first place Floyd Landis had been disqualified for testosterone, "You win the Tour on the road." Not in a law court. Or as another rider put it, though concerning an entirely different kind of case, involving Bernard Hinault ( AKA le Blaireau, the Badger). "Pour nous, dans le peloton, c'est le Blaireau qui porte le maillot. For us, in the peloton, it's the Badger who's wearing the jersey."
So the prosecutors and bureaucrats may have taken Lance's 8 yellow jerseys away from him, but for at least some of us who have actually turned a crank in anger, pour nous dans le peloton, c'est Lance qui porte les maillots. He's already paid whatever debt he owes for participating in the toxic culture of the 90's Tours de France.

​A similar thing has happened to journalism. Journalists bemoan the demise or at least weakening of print journalism, saying the reduced readerships means the research staffs, editors and journalists have become fewer and that therefore the public will become increasingly poorly informed. Well, the demise or weakening of the NY times and the like is indeed a bad thing. But there is an up side. The problem with the old print system was "the boys on the bus" syndrome. That is, if there was a crisis in Egypt, large numbers of journalists would assemble in Cairo, all stay in the same hotel, and all report more or less the same story. None of them would speak Arabic, none of them would have a deeper long term knowledge of the country, and then the next week they would all fly to Paris to cover the next crisis, stay in the same hotel etc. At present, blogs on the internet are written by Egyptians. In fact many Egyptians, living in many parts of Egypt and speaking all the local languages. They are university professors, politicians, everything, and they have a huge experience of the local history, customs and intimate familiarity with the principal players. It's difficult for an outsider to filter out who to listen to, but there are also links, blog editors and increasing mechanisms to lead interested readers to the best sources. It's really hard to maintain that readers are less informed now than they were in the heyday of the Times.

I should write a whole book about household rituals.  Scholars of the history of religion tell us that rituals come before their ideational content.  So too speak, Masses were said even before there were words about Jesus.  Even animals have rituals.  Besides bower building birds and the like, ethnologists observed a recently captured dolphin pair, from a group that only ate squid, their specialization,  swimming thrice around their tank with a fish they were fed held in both their mouths before consenting to eating it.  Everyone has obsessions and compulsions that are pretty ritualized too, whether to "poor marriage choices" or shopping or eating or whatever.
Some of these rituals are cultural determined.  One would be the placing of washed dishes in a special ritual container called a "dishwasher."  It does not actually wash dishes, at least none of the ones I have seen do. You have to rinse the dish, remove all the particles or stuck on bits of food, wash off the grease, and then the "dishwasher" will perform a water based ritual, after which you "unload" it.  The process is not any quicker or more convenient than washing the dishes "by hand," which is the ritual phrase for not using a dishwasher, which of course equally requires hands on.
Then there is urinating in the bathroom or rest room, formerly called the WC or water closet, signifying "toilet" in ritual terms, as actual references to urinating or defecating are taboo.  The room in question is of course not for resting or bathing in this context.  And I no one even knows what a water closet would be.  
​After urinating, the ritual is completed by washing your hands, formerly known as an ablution, a term of art for ritual washing.  I'm not speaking here of defecating, as there are sound hygienic reasons for washing our hands after that exercise.  Urine however is sterile.  Unless you have a UTI, urinary tract infection. (You would know if you had a UTI.)  Further, the bathroom itself is probably the cleanest room in your house, with surfaces deliberately designed for antiseptization.  And if you bathed in the morning before putting on clean clothes, as most do, the organ in question may be he cleanest part of your body.  It would make more sense to wash our hands before touching it. Not mush more sense though. So, in short, the exercise is a ritual.  That is to say, an activity which has a symbolic meaning but no actual practical function.

3/15/14.     I miss my mom. I miss my dad.  I miss Fats Waller.  It's sad.  It's not right.  Think of all the rent parties he could still play if he were around.  That sly smile and the wit.  If someone dies in their 90's people say he led a long, full life.  100 years is not a long time. Even in modern history.  
 
      3/12/14  I was remembering when I visited a friend when I was about in third grade.  It was unusual for me to visit someone because the class I was in was tracked so it had kids from all over the city instead of one neighborhood and also I was very shy so I didn't have many friends.  I had a really good one when I wasin first grade who lived next door.  We would howl like wolves when we wanted the other one to come outside.  So no ringing doorbells and dealing with parents.  I even went with him to his Granpa's farm once.  Then we moved. I had another one in fifth grade.  We were disaffected intellectuals avant la lettre.  Then we moved.  Then one in tenth grad, but that's another story.
         I was far to shy to be asking his parents anything so when I strained my elbow--subluxated the joint-- I didn't let on.  I held it in a weird protective position for while and it was hard for my friend to interest me in any of his proposed entertainments for a while.  Then his Mom asked if there we something wrong with my arm.  "No," I said and ran off with it in a normal position.  It had long since popped back into place so that went fine.
       Then I had to go to the bathroom.  I figured out where it was myself, being too shy to ask, went in, and locked the door behind me.  After I finished, I discovered to my horror that I couldn't get the door open again.  The lock was stuck.  The prospect of banging on the door and yelling for help was a fate worse than death.  I would have sooner stayed in the bathroom the rest of my life.  
        So I climbed out the window.  I'm sure, being well behaved within my lights, I closed the window behind me.
        Fortunately I was picked up and went home before anyone else had to use the bathroom. 
        I can't remember ever being invited back.  I can imagine retrospectively that for them I was probably that weird kid who held his arm funny, was hard to play with, and then played that mean trick with the bathroom.