Sarah Monette's Blog, page 26

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Borg

Thus far I have woken up:
once dreaming of vaccuum cleaners only to discover the seal on the damn mask had slipped
once with the tubing wrapped around my torso like a pageant sash
somewhere between "several" and "countless" times with the tubing wrapped around my neck like a squamous or possibly batrachian version of "Porphyria's Lover"

Things are getting better. I'm not yet noticing any improvement in my general level of fatigue, but I no longer feel like my little Cthulhu machine is actively sabotaging me. So that's something.

UBC: Tucher & Flanders

Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. 2011. New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St. Martin's Press, 2013.

Tucher, Andie. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.


This is another inadvertant pairing, but even aside from the part where both Flanders and Tucher are talking about murder, they're both talking about popular culture in the nineteenth century and the way the snowballing literacy rate created popular print culture. And how popular print culture addressed the phenomenon of murder.

Tucher is interested in a very narrow window: 1836 to 1841 in New York, from the murder of Helen Jewett by Frank Robinson to the murder of Samuel Adams by John Colt. She is particularly interested in the way these two murders were reported by James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald and the development of the "objective" style of newspaper reporting. I have some problems with the motivations she ascribes to Bennett (mostly in that I'm not sure he was as self aware as she thinks he was), and it turned out in the last chapter that she was aiming for an argument about journalism that I don't agree with, but the part about the history of the penny press in New York was excellent.

Flanders' is a much larger book, in every sense of the word, larger in scope, larger in outlook, larger in physical dimensions (556 pages vs. 257). Ignore the pretentious title (and the doubly pretentious sub-title): nowhere in her argument does Flanders claim that the Victorians "invented" murder, nor that they "created modern crime." The Invention of Murder is half an overview of the famous murders of the nineteenth century in England, from the Ratcliffe Highway murders to Jack the Ripper. (Although, oddly, Charles Bravo is nowhere to be found.) The other half is an exhaustive teasing out of what happened to those murders (those murderers and those victims) as they were swallowed by the increasingly insatiable maw of Victorian print culture, and the particular ways in which they were fictionalized. Broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, penny-bloods (later called penny-dreadfuls), novels, plays, puppet shows, waxwork exhibits; she even notes racehorces and greyhounds named for murderers. She also follows the unfolding of detective fiction as a genre and the development of the institution of the police. And if nothing else will convince you of the inadvisability of time travel, the utterly horrific standards of justice in nineteenth-century England should do the trick.

This is a very good book, very well-written, very entertaining. If you're interested at all in the process by which fact becomes fiction, it is endlessly fascinating. In the cases where I know enough to tell, she seems to have her facts straight. (She gets some details wrong about Jack the Ripper, but everybody gets some details wrong about Jack the Ripper, and it's mean to cavil.) I inevitably disagree with some points of her interpretation, but nothing that really gets in the way.

This is not a true-crime book. Flanders pays attention to the victims and the murderers (and the victims of legal murder), but she's interested more in the cultural transmission of their stories than she is in trying to uncover the truth (or "truth," if you're feeling particularly skeptical today) about the murder of Francis Saville Kent, for instance, or Adelaide Bartlett's husband*, or the Marrs and the Williamsons back in 1811. The historiography of murder, rather than the history.

---
*Frederick Bartlett died from swallowing liquid chloroform. The general consensus is his wife murdered him, but nobody knows how the hell she got him to swallow the stuff.

The third night, which is at least more successful than not

Things you never want the technician to say: "Wow, I've never seen that before."

The best guess is that that particular Cthulhu machine is defective; they gave me a new one rather than trying to get clever. So last night, I set it up, with the distilled water for the humidifier and all the connectors connected, and it did in fact turn on with the menu screen and everything.

And eventually, I went to sleep.

I would not say that I slept well. It's difficult, for one thing, to get your head comfortably situated without disrupting the seal on the nasal pillows (which is what they call the thing that fits in your nose). Then there's the part where rolling over requires a good deal of forethought and planning ( lydy , I do not have the type of rig that allows the tubing to be anchored, but the suggestion about up and over was helpful nevertheless--thank you!). On the other hand, I only got the tubing wrapped around my neck once. And speaking of the tubing, it is EXACTLY like a tentacle; it has a mind of its own and flails about the bed in an exasperting way, especially if you have gotten up and are coming back to bed and trying not to wake your long-suffering spouse as you grope about--NOT HELPED, I might add, by the way the menu screen backlights itself whenever the machine is turned on or off. I mean, the light is great, you can practically read War and Peace in the original by that light, even if you don't read Russian, but it's awfully hard on the other person trying to sleep in the bed.

The sensation of having air blown into one's nostrils all night is disconcerting and got into my dreams, which were weird even for me. (There was one about Punky Brewster (which I watched maybe all of three times, and which I have not thought about in a good thirty years--proving that the brain stores everything, just in case), in which Punky grows up to be a very noir, hardboiled cop.) And I kept waking up, either because I was making horrible snorting sounds or because I was dreaming I was making horrible snorting sounds.

Or maybe that's the sound a moonbeast makes right before it tears your face off. I dunno.

mirrorthaw has to get up about an hour before I do, so when his alarm went off, I admit it, I wrenched the thing off my head and TURNED THE FUCKER OFF. And gleefully rolled over to go back to sleep.

The second night, in which I am rejected by the collective.

We consulted the manuals, we examined all the plugs and connectors, we tried everything we could think of to try, which between the two of us was pretty much everything except sacrificing a goat, and we didn't try that only because we didn't happen to have a goat handy.

The machine sat there and blinked. Sometimes it blinked slowly, sometimes it blinked quickly, sometimes it did double-blinks. It would not turn on, it would not turn off. It. Just. Fucking. Blinked.

Tomorrow, obviously, I will be calling the home health people, and inquiring if, perhaps, my Cthulhu machine is defective.

You may imagine my excitement.

My first night in the Cthulhu machine

Well, the assimilation is off to a rocky start.

Yesterday I went to get my CPAP machine (after a little bit of drama about whether my health insurance company would authorize the damn thing before my appointment: there was a message on the answering machine Thursday night saying they needed to reschedule because the authorization hadn't come through, but mercifully, when I called yesterday at noon, the nice woman on the phone double-checked for me, and they'd gotten the authorization that morning--insert huge sigh of relief here). The sleep clinic does not itself provide the machines; one has to go to a "home health" provider--the one I chose, purely on the basis of geographic convenience, is in a strip mall. It's next door to a furniture store, so, basically, the interior of a warehouse has been converted into a cubicle maze. The effect is a little unheimlich.

My respiratory therapist was very nice, very patient, and clearly used to working with people who are not even remotely comfortable or confident when faced with a piece of new technology. He commented several times on how quickly I picked up on things, and I refrained from telling him that there was nothing to pick up on.

Which is just as well, because the blow to my pride is heavy enough as is.

So I brought the thing home, got it its distilled water, and last night set it up on the two-drawer filing cabinet that serves as my nightstand. And plugged myself into it.

The first problem I have with the CPAP machine is purely on my end, because it's the insult to my dignity. For those of you who also have to assimilate yourself at night, I'm starting out with the nasal pillows, rather than either of the more strap-heavy mask options, and I just feel goddamn fucking ridiculous. I am reminding myself, believe me, that this is necessary; that it is probably going to improve my quality of life immeasurably; that it is a piece of medical equipment; that there's nobody to see me but mirrorthaw , and if I know anything in the world, it's that he won't think less of me; but I still just cringe. From this perspective, and this perspective alone, the mask would actually be preferable, because I wouldn't feel quite so much like I was wearing the world's worst elephant costume.

But anyway (as Mike Ford always said when looping back from a tangent). That's an attitude problem, not actually a problem with the technology. The second problem--and I'm sure I'll learn to cope better--is that I could not, last night, figure out how to sleep in any configuration except lying on my side facing the machine. Which isn't terrible--it's better than sleeping on my back--but the combination of the RLS and the remaining stiffness (and titanium) in my ankle joint mean that I kind of need to roll over occasionally. And every time I tried, the weight of the tubing pulled the nasal pillows down enough to break the seal. When I go to bed tonight, I'm obviously going to have to practice before I turn out the light.

The third problem is the stumper. I woke up once last night around two, went to the bathroom, came back. No particular difficulty, aside from trying to negotiate the machine and the tubing and the nasal pillows in the pitch black dark and agonizing over whether I was making enough noise to wake my long suffering husband. Then I woke up again around four-thirty, went to the bathroom, came back . . . and managed to do something to the machine that my kind and patient respiratory therapist had not taught me about. All it would do was sit there and blink its status light at me. It would not light its menu screen, it would come on, it would not go off. It just sat there and fucking blinked. I unplugged it and plugged it back in again. No joy, just the blinking as if it was trying to tell me something in Morse code. Possibly S.O.S. By this time, I had woken my long suffering husband, so I turned on the light. I still couldn't see anything wrong. Finally, I said fuck it, if I haven't used the machine for the required four hours, I just won't be in compliance tonight, and--(I admit) with a certain amount of vicious satisfaction--unplugged it.

By that time, (a) I was pretty thoroughly awake and (b), worse, my RLS was awake. Even the relief of being able to roll over wasn't enough of a counter-balalnce. So I got up, came downstairs, and wrote this blog post. At some point later today, when I feel less like heaving the machine through the window, I will have to get out the manual and try to figure out what I did. But for tonight, my quality of sleep has been drastically disimproved by my little Cthulhu machine, and I am sitting here doing a slow burn at my unoffending computer monitor. I know that it's just that it's new; there are inevitably going to be some, er, teething problems (although that's an image I would have been better off not coming up with). But seriously. Goddammit. The offered solution for my sleep disturbances is seriously disturbing my sleep.

I disapprove .

UBC: Swanson

Swanson, James L. Manhunt: the 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. New York: Harper Perennial: 2007.

This is a book that does admirably what it sets out to do. It is a fast-paced, compelling account of President Lincoln's assassination and the last twelve days of John Wilkes Booth's life. Swanson extrapolates from his primary evidence a little bit, to make a narrative out of disjointed testimony, but I don't think he ever goes quite as far as fictionalizing, and although I'm dubious about the reliability of the journalist George Alfred Townsend, whose at best secondhand account of the macabre journey of Booth's body Swanson seems to regard as eyewitness testimony, in general I think (given that I know absolutely nothing about either Lincoln or Booth scholarship) Swanson treats his sources fairly and with sympathy for everyone involved--even for the largely undeserving Booth. As with George Alfred Townsend, Swanson treats the memoir of Booth written by his sister Asia Booth Clarke as objectively reliable, even though the evidence of Booth's own writing shows that his sister, sadly championing, out of her own miserable situation, a dead and reviled underdog, was remembering him with all the benefits of nostalgia. Certainly the fact that Booth was a FLAMING RACIST NUTBALL was irrelevant to Asia Booth Clarke, and probably--in fairness to her--she didn't see the less attractive sides of his personality. Being a "Southern gentleman," he would have been careful not to show them to the ladies of his family. But Swanson's other evidence shows Booth to have been the apotheosis of the charismatic asshole: a breathtakingly self-unaware narcissist (Swanson quotes a splendidly horrifying letter to his mother in which, without even so much as a glimmer of an awareness of irony, he describes performing in the North during the war as being a slave); a man so fanatical about his white supremacist patriotism (regarding the Confederacy, not the Union, as his patria) that he sincerely believed he would be thanked and congratulated by both North and South for getting rid of Lincoln and was shocked, upon reading the newspapers, to discover that he was being reviled and anathematized instead; and a man, despite his ability to inspire others with devotion, with no loyalty to anyone save his own supremely importat self. It is possible to feel sorry for John Wilkes Booth, but it takes some doing.

Manhunt is certainly not, and does not pretend to be, a scholarly book, although Swanson does provide an extensive bibliography. The writing is mostly competent, and Swanson mostly manages not to get in his own way. I enjoyed it a great deal.

Adventures in sleeping

I didn't go to any costume parties, and I haven't been trick-or-treating in almost thirty years, but I can truthfully say that this year I was the Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween.

On October 31st, I went into the Wisconsin Sleep Clinic for a polysomnogram--or, in plain English, a sleep study. A polysomnogram diagnoses a great many different sleep disorders: sleep apnea, parasomnias like periodic limb movement disorder, sleep bruxism (teeth-grinding), etc.. But, of course, in order to do this, they have to wire you for umpteen gazillion different measurements. The process takes about forty-five minutes.

My extremely nice and cheerful technician put four sensors on my scalp (attached with a revolting gummy paste) to monitor brain waves; one beside my right eye and one beside my left eye to track eye-movements; one along my chin to check for bruxism; a microphone taped to my throat to monitor snoring; one sensor on each shoulder, one on my left side and two on my right side--all checking on the work various chest muscles were doing; one on each leg to track involuntary leg movements. Then there were two bands, one just under the armpits and one at the floating ribs, to measure lung expansion, and a clever little device that attached to the lower band and noted sleeping position (back, left side, right side, stomach). There was the inevitable finger clamp to measure blood oxygen levels. And there were two--not one, but two sensors that hooked into the nostrils. The tech remarked that she was fairly sure the people who designed the sensors had never themselves been the patient in a sleep study.

All of these sensors had wires, and all of the wires plugged into a box like a switchboard or a circuit breaker, which was hung on a hook over the head of the bed. If the patient has to get up in the night--as, in fact, I did--the tech comes in, unplugs two wires, and hands you the box, which you then carry with you as you do whatever it is you need to do.

Once all the sensors are in place and the box is on its hook, the tech goes back to their control room, and leads the patient through a series of little exercises to calibrate everything. The only particularly difficult one is the not-blinking one. And for some reason, I had a hell of a time faking a snore.

And now comes the hard part: you have to go to sleep.

I was at a severe disadvantage, because my tech told me the doctors prefer it if patients sleep on their backs. This makes any apnea that may be present more severe and thus easier to detect. Which totally makes sense, but I never sleep on my back (except for those six plus weeks after I broke my ankle when there was no other position I could manage). I hate it and find it miserably uncomfortable--and moreover, speaking of my right ankle, it requires a certain amount of jury-rigging, because my ankle can't bear any weight on it in that position for any length of time.

But I cooperated. I lay there on my back and tried to sleep. There was a little red light and a little green light directly facing the bed (smoke detector? more monitors? I have no idea), and I could feel them glaring at me even with my eyes closed. For a while, I could hear the patient in the next "sleep suite" talking to his technician. My feet were freezing (which my long-suffering spouse can attest never happens). And after a while, inevitably, my RLS began increasing in severity, like a toddler trying to get a distracted parent's attention, going from the need to move to actual twitching. At the point it began actually jerking my leg up, I cried uncle. Or, more literally, I asked the tech to come help me take one of my narcotic pills, which I had thoughtfully packed along with me. (You're wired for sound, remember--it's like Star Trek, where you talk to an empty room and the computer, or the tech, hears you.) We also rigged an extra blanket over my left foot and right shin.

And then I lay there and tried to go to sleep some more.

I was eventually successful, which I know because I woke up some time later. My arms and heels were aching from staying on my back, and I was horribly wide awake. Eventually, in desperation, I asked the tech to come unhook me, on the theory that getting up, going to the bathroom, and coming back would remind my body that the next part of the routine was going back to sleep. The tech also told me I was okay to sleep on my side now, which was a nearly miraculous relief. The mirror in the bathroom said, Bride of Frankenstein, à la H. R. Giger; the box was heavy and awkward. Getting back in bed required yet more careful jury-rigging.

And then I lay there, on my left side, and tried to go back to sleep.

I know I succeeded, although I think a lot of it was somewhere between dozing and dreaming about lying there, on my left side, trying to sleep, because when the tech came at 6 to unhook me, she definitely woke me up. One of the questions she asked me in the debriefing was how many times I remembered her waking me up. I know she had to come in once because the finger clamp had worked itself loose, and I think there was a second time she woke me up, but I can't now remember what it was about. She asked how many hours of sleep I felt like I'd got, and although it was probably somewhere around 8, I had to tell her it felt like 5.

Free of the wires, I went to shower--a desperate necessity to get rid of the gummy paste in my hair. And the shower was fine, everything going well, until I went to adjust the water temperature, and the handle stuck. Stuck fast, like it wasn't even designed to move, and as best I can tell, informing the rest of the apparatus that full-on hot was what was required. It was not hot enough to scald, but it was certainly hot enough to be quite uncomfortable, and I got through mostly on brute stubbornness and the fervent desire to get the adhesive off my skin. It was, however, very effective as a wake-up call.

I got out, got dressed, got my stuff together, wound my hair up--still feeling a little Bride of Frankenstein-ish, made a last futile attempt to turn the shower off, and went off into the pre-dawn emptiness of a medical clinic to find someone to tell about the shower. Long empty hallways in one direction, long empty hallways in the other direction--I finally found the control room and knocked. (I'm still a little baffled by how surprised they were that I bothered to tell them.) And having done the best I could, I went to investigate the "continental breakfast"--by which, it turns out, they mean single-serving cereal packages and a jar of Kellogg's fiber bars. The Continent cries out in vehement protest.

I ate--considerably startled when the semi-Muzak I was semi-listening to threw the line "stares into space like a dead china doll" at me--and went out to the waiting room to wait for my long-suffering spouse to come pick me up (due to migraine issues the night before, I had not felt confident in my ability to drive safely). Patients and night-shift technicians went home; day-shift receptionists and technicians and the first patients of the day started coming it. I felt stiff and underslept and not entirely free of adhesive residue.

Friday afternoon, I got a call with the results. I have, as it turns out, mild sleep apnea--meaning that my breathing is obstructed between 6 and 10 times an hour while I sleep. Sometime soon, I will be going in to get a little Cthullu machine to keep my airways open.

And hopefully, before too much longer, I will stop spending every day feeling quite so goddamn tired.

UBC: Goodman, Boessenecker, Gardner

3 books this time, two mediocre, and one quite good. I'm discussing them in that order, with the Boessenecker & Gardner together because their subjects harmonize--it wasn't a planned diptych, but they turn out to make excellent foils for each other.

Goodman, Jonathan. Murder on Several Occasions. Illus. Nina Lewis Smart. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007.

This is a collection of true crime essays by an English writer, apparently very well known. Goodman is too précieux for my taste, which, given that I am someone who will use précieux in a sentence, probably tells you about as much as you need to know. He seems to be modeling himself at least somewhat on William Roughead, but at an even further remove from the Victorian/Edwardian writers that Roughead was modeling himself on, and with a kind of archness that I found deeply off-putting, the style simply gets in the way. The more modern the crime, in particular, the more jarring the elaborate flourishes of the prose became. There may have been a deliberate intention to create an alienation effect, but if so, I found it to be a poor choice and in somewhat dubious taste.

(I've blogged about my aversion-compulsion relationship with true crime as a genre before, so for now let's just say that I was rubbed the wrong way by Goodman's air of handing round the popcorn.)

I thought that was going to be all I had to say about Goodman, but then I hit his essay, "Doubts about Hauptmann," in which he forgets to be arch because he is consumed with venomous fury toward Sir Ludovic Kennedy and his book The Airman and the Carpenter. Murder on Several Occasions was worth buying for that essay alone, because when he's mad enough to spit nails, Goodman is an excellent writer, clear and vicious and compelling. That essay was worth the irritation of some of the other essays in the book.

The essay on George Smith (he, as Dorothy Sayers says, of brides-in-the-bath fame), "Also Known as Love," was also very good, and although I disliked Goodman's essay on Burke and Hare, mostly because he was defending Robert Knox, but without any evidence that Knox ought to be defended (if Knox didn't know for a fact that his dissection subjects were murder victims, he certainly had enough evidence that he should have been asking some very pointed questions; one possibility is marginally less culpable than the other, but only marginally), the postscript about Bishop, Williams, and May, who tried the same get-rich-quick scheme in London in 1831, made up for it.

Boessenecker, John. Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. [library]

I wanted this book to be so much better than it is, because I realized (as a consequence of To Hell on a Fast Horse, which I'll get to in a minute) that one of the things that fascinates me about the quote-unquote Old West is how permeable the boundary between the outlaws and the lawmen was. You can see it in a highly compressed form in the matter of Tombstone, but it's visible in the careers of any number of men (including both Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), how which side of the line they stood on depended on what day it was and which way the wind was blowing.

Boessenecker is not interested in this question. He is, in fact, the opposite of interested. He is interested in idolizing the lawmen in late nineteenth-century California and demonizing the outlaws. It is a telling detail that he uses, without irony or any sense of possible problems, the word "badman" to describe the law-breakers he discusses. It is true that some of them were very bad men, but that completely unselfconsious labelling of them says way more about Boessenecker than it does about any of his subjects.

Unfortunately, this simple binary of good and bad makes his potentially fascinating subject matter flat and largely uninteresting. He writes flatly uninteresting hagiographies of John C. Boggs, Steve Venard, Ben K. Thorn, Doc Standley, and Tom Cunningham (sheriffs and marshals, and of them, the only one who stands up off the page is Doc Standley, and that because his sense of humor is palpable in the anecdotes Boessenecker relates), and then flatly uninteresting and unnuanced accounts of Captain Rufus Ingram, Bill Miner, Kid Thompson and Alva Johnson, Ben and Dudley Johnson, and George and Vern Gates. The last section of the book, about lynchings, was actually compelling despite Boessenecker, because even he couldn't flatten out the deeply problematic nature of the relationship of lynching to the law, and the fact that--especially in regards to the Modoc County lynchings--the law could be so grossly partisan and incompetent as to be practically "badmen" themselves.

Boessenecker has no grasp of how to tell a story. He swamps the reader with trivial details, uses the passive voice to elide important questions of agency, and is incredibly frustrating because of his refusal to examine any of the difficult issues raised by the history he presents. On the other hand, he has certainly done his research, so if you need a source for this particular corner of history, he is, if nothing else, a good place to start.

Gardner, Mark Lee. To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010.

This book is the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, and what makes it a really good book is that, for Gardner, that story does not end with Billy's death. It isn't a simple story, either. Gardner is very aware of the ethical questions Boessenecker avoids and very aware of the forces pulling and pushing against each other in New Mexico in the 1880s. Billy wasn't an outlaw because he was a "badman," although he was certainly not a good man, either. He was an outlaw because he ended up on the wrong side in the Lincoln County War, and because the Governor of New Mexico felt that it simply was not necessary for a man like him to keep a promise made to a man like Billy. (Of all the awful people in this book--and there are a lot of them--Governor Wallace may actually be the most repellent.)

And Pat Garrett wasn't a simple cardboard saint like the lawmen in Boessenecker's version of history. Gardner makes it clear that Garrett could have been an outlaw instead of a lawman; both before and after he killed Billy, he was involved in deals that were shady at best and he, like Wyatt Earp, was a gambler, a man who was never going to stop looking for the big score and thus a man who was perpetually in debt. His own, only dubiously solved, murder was in the middle of another ethically fraught tangle, once again in Lincoln County, around the still unsolved disappearance of Albert Jennings Fountain. Gardner is aware, as Boessenecker refuses to be, that history is messy and full of questions to which there are no answers, and his efforts to find answers anyway, to puzzle out the motivations of Billy the Kid as well as the motivations of Pat Garrett, are what make this book worthwhile and satisfying in a way Boessenecker isn't.

New Kyle Murchison Booth novelette

"To Die for Moonlight," at Apex Magazine.

Due South: "Easy Money"

Due South 4.2, "Easy Money"
Original air date: September 30, 1998
Favorite quote:
RAY: How'd he beat us?
FRASER: Well, he must have taken a short cut.
RAY: He knows short cuts?
FRASER: Well he does study maps.
RAY: What kind of maps?
FRASER: Road maps, street maps, topographic maps . . .


"Easy Money" is not my favorite Due South episode, and I will tell you why.

1. Of all the infinite possible flavors of Fraser, didactic is my least favorite.

2. I'm not a big fan of flashbacks to childhood in TV and movies, precisely because they are so extraordinarily hard to do right. And this one falls apart for me because I just don't believe that
3. And I just figured this out walking home from work today, because I was thinking about childhood flashbacks and how, in this particular case, I would much prefer to have Gross-as-Fraser tell Ray about this meaningful episode of his childhood over being stuck watching it for half the episode. And then I thought of an instance where that actually happens, in "The Promise" (2.5):

FRASER: Ray-- All right. Listen. When I was little, my grandparents took me on vacation to Aklavik.
RAY: What, for a little sun and sand?
FRASER: Well, hardly. It's a thriving urban center. Anyway, one day I . . . I wandered off alone when they were window shopping. There I was, all alone in a big city. The point is, Ray . . . I became hungry. . . . Very hungry. And I knew no one. I had no money. I . . . I was desperate.
RAY: So you ate a polar bear.
FRASER: Well, don't be ridiculous, Ray. I boiled my shoes. My--my Oxfords. My left Oxford, to be exact. Boy, did my grandmother ever tan my hide for that one.
RAY: Oh, that's a good one. So what's the point?
FRASER: The point is, Ray, that to be young and alone is frightening. Without proper guidance, we . . . we'll do things that are out of character

And I realized what it is that bugs me about the flashback in "Easy Money." The little boy in Fraser's story in "The Promise," the boy who gets lost in Aklavik and boils his left Oxford--that boy can only be Benton Fraser. But the boy in "Easy Money" who runs away from home and shoots a caribou only to discover that he has done a horrible thing--that boy could be anyone. There's nothing about this story that makes it belong to Fraser in the way that his left Oxford does. And that makes it thin and easy to see the clichés through.

Otherwise, this is a didactic and predictable episode like "One Good Man." It's another episode, like "Spy vs. Spy," that looks like it may have originally been written, at least partly, with the original Ray Vecchio in mind. The city mouse vs. country mouse thing is much more part of the first two seasons of Due South than the second two, even with the irony of Fraser now playing the part of the city mouse, and Ray's exchange with Quinn looks Vecchio-ish to me:

RAY: So, how'd it go today?
QUINN: Not well.
RAY: Well, I coulda told you that, these companies only believe in one thing - money.
QUINN: Money.
RAY: Yeah, it buys lawyers, politicians, access, that's the way it works.

That's the first Ray's refrain, not the second Ray's. We also have the motif of Fraser keeping his money in his hat, which is a big deal in the Vecchio seasons and less so in the Kowalski seasons, and the Fraser-and-Dief-tracking-in-Chicago motif, ditto. The episode spends a lot of time wandering back and forth across Chicago, killing time, and the only interesting thing about either of the villains of the week is that one of them is named Stor(e)y.

What does work in this episode is the part that was written specifically for one of the characters on-screen: Ray Kowalski's history with his father: "My dad slaved away at this meat-packing plant and um....he wanted me to go to college, he said, y'know, he didn't want me to have the stink of dead animals all over me. And I dropped out, I went off to the Academy. Day I graduated almost killed him. He said, you're gonna have a stink on you all the same, bad people. What kinda life is that? There's a delicate echo of the main-plot's flashback device; Mr. Kowalski is a meat-packer who doesn't want his son tainted with the "stink of dead animals," but he can't keep Ray from making his own (bad) decisions--and notice that in "Eclipse," Ray talks about his job as a police officer in language that must be an echo of his father: "I've humped this job for a long time. Bad hours, bad food, and bad guys. And for what?"--just as Quinn knows he can't keep child!Fraser from shooting the caribou, even though he also knows it's a mistake.

Ray's story also sets him up as another main (male) character in Due South with a highly problematic relationships with the memory of his absent father, and that gets brilliantly undercut at the end when Ray's parents show up at the precinct. Unlike Fraser's father and unlike Ray Vecchio's father, Ray Kowalski's father is still alive, and this is both an opportunity for Ray and, as their incredibly awkward reunion shows, the unveiling of a whole new set of problems in negotiating adult masculinity, a problem which the A-plot is maybe trying to talk about, as Fraser mentors his mentor, but Fraser is so utterly not-undercut in this episode, so utterly honorable and right and true, that there's no traction on his relationship with Quinn--unlike his relationship with the ghost of his father, which routinely shows him to be as crotchety and human as anybody else.

There is one moment where the use of Quinn as a surrogate for Bob Fraser ("You shoot a Mountie," Quinn says to Kelly, "they'll hunt you for ever.") does work, and that's the moment at the very end:

FRASER: You know there's a short entry in one of my father's journals that reads 'My adversaries appear ready to listen. I'm nearing victory.' And that entry was written the day before he was shot.
QUINN: Your father acted heroically.
FRASER: Yes. But he's not here. At least ... [he looks around with great thoroughness] he doesn't appear to be.

And I say this works not because it's almost the only time in the episode when we get a hint of the quirky guy behind Fraser's Mountie mask, but because of that crucial he's not here. The acknowledgment that heroism and idealism, however much they are appropriate and necessary to the idealized and idolized figure of the capital-F Father, are not as valuable as the real presence of the real human father (notice also that there's no mention, in flashback!Canada, of child!Fraser's father, only of his grandparents). Fraser doesn't quite say that he'd rather have his father alive than a hero, but he comes as close, maybe, as he's equipped to.