Katherine Addison's Blog, page 37

UBC: Gould, Wonderful Life

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I'm not saying anything startling or new when I say this book is awesome.

So, for one thing, it's a book about writing and about mythology, and how what we think we know limits what we see and therefore what stories we can tell, a problem which Gould addresses both in terms of paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale and in terms of Gould himself looking at the paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale. So he talks about how Charles Doolittle Walcott got everything wrong (except for the names--surely some subconscious tingle was telling him these little animals were weirder than he thought they were) because he saw what he expected to see when he looked at them. And then Gould talks about himself looking at Drs. Whittington and Conway Morris and thinking he knew what he was looking at; surely when you have a conservative paleontologist ("conservative" in its proper dictionary meaning, not its political meaning) and his young, radical, fire-breathing graduate student, the two must butt heads.

But they don't.

Gould is perfectly transparent about the tangle he gets himself in because he lets his mythology do his thinking for him. So he's talking about how the stories we tell create mythology (like the myth of the discovery of the Burgess Shale, which in point of fact happened in an utterly undramatic field-science kind of way) and then how, in turn, that mythology once created limits the stories we can tell. The paleontologist and his graduate student collaborate with the other graduate student (who gets left out of the picture in the mythology precisely because he doesn't fit the false binary) to completely re-form our understanding of the evolution of multicellular life on Earth. The animals of the Burgess Shale are mostly not proto-crustaceans as Walcott labeled them. Some of them aren't arthropods at all.

This book is also awesome for two other reasons:

(1) Gould's enthusiasm (which I admit I found both endearing and infectious) for explaining the creatures of the Burgess Shale to his lay audience. And his passionate commitment to the notion of an intelligent lay audience that he can explain them to.

(2) the creatures themselves which are holy shit not even kidding the most unheimlich things I have ever seen, including tarantulas, which used to be my #1. (I like spiders, but there's something about tarantulas, the way they move, or the way they look like they ought to be inanimate but aren't . . .) I kept having to remind myself that Opabinia is (a) two inches long and (b) extinct, and even then it didn't really help with the way my spine kept trying to crawl up into my skull to hide.

But the animals of the Burgess Shale are weird and amazing and beautiful in their own way, and their principles of design are far more imaginative than anything I've ever read or seen in science fiction . . . except maybe "Or All the Seas with Oysters."

Maybe.



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UBC: Keppel & Birnes, The Riverman

The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer by Robert D. Keppel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book makes a fascinating counterpoint to Ann Rule's bookends, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story and Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer. It charts Keppel's path from the investigation of Ted Bundy's murders (which I've had to tag "the ted murders" instead of by geographical location as I usually do, since Bundy ranged from Washington State to Florida) to the investigation of the Green River murders . . . to the bizarre suggestion by Ted Bundy that he could be an invaluable resource in efforts to find the Green River Killer. And to the apprehension in 2003, more than ten years after Bundy failed in his efforts to beat the electric chair, of Gary Ridgway, and the ways in which Bundy's predictions do and don't match up with reality.

Keppel recognizes easily that Bundy is projecting himself onto the GRK, at the same time that he's driven mad with jealousy that somebody else is hunting on his territory. The simplest evidence of this is the way that Bundy keeps insisting that the GRK must be a Tacoma native, as Bundy was himself. Bundy keeps trying to swap himself in when he talks about the GRK (arguably, the only way that a person utterly lacking in empathy ever could proceed under those circumstances), and it's fascinating when he's right and equally fascinating when he's wrong, especially because the point on which Bundy was most consistently wrong was his assessment of the GRK's intelligence. Bundy was very smart (though never as smart as he thought he was) and he prided himself hubristically on his intelligence, so it's not surprising that he attributed the same intelligence to the GRK. But the interesting thing is that Ridgway isn't as smart as Bundy. In her book, Rule argues that the reason he went uncaught for so long was that he was such a loser, nobody could take him seriously as a serial killer. I wouldn't go quite that far (I think her own loathing of him may have colored her assessment, FOR WHICH I DO NOT BLAME HER), but I think Ridgway did survive uncaught as long as he did because he didn't have Bundy's prideful self-conception of himself as the most intelligent guy in the room. He was cunning, but he never tried to get "smart." And, horrible and counter-intuitive as it is to put it this way, he was a much more stable personality than Bundy. Bundy fell the fuck apart once he was on the run; his murders in Florida just became wilder and wilder and more unlike the careful, carefully thought out attacks he made on his victims in Washington State, and I think the very intelligence he prided himself on, that weird semi-accurate self-awareness that he shows in his interviews with Keppel--because he can never see himself entirely accurately, can never see the pits he's digging for himself to fall into --is part of what unbalanced him and made him need more and more and more, more murder and more violence and more of what he was able to recognize was depravity. (It's interesting that his last murder was a child, and his probable first murder--the one he refused almost hysterically to confess to--was also a child.) Whereas Ridgway, without that relentless over-clocking, was able to murder and walk away and murder again and eventually back off almost entirely. He never stopped killing between 1984 and 2001, but he slowed way, way down. If serial killers are addicted to murder, as Keppel and Bundy and Ridgway all suggest, in remarkably different phrasings, Ridgway was able to control his addiction; Bundy was not.

I've been struggling with how to describe this book in comparison with Rule. They're very different; one way to put it would be that Keppel writes like a cop and Rule doesn't, except that Rule was a cop, so however she writes is how a cop writes. A stereotyping way would be that Keppel writes like a man and Rule writes like a woman. Keppel tells Bundy, as part of the endless intricate pas de deux that the two of them dance, that he's not interested in the "why"--why Bundy was a serial killer--and while that's not actually true, since Keppel is intensely interested in why serial killers do what they do, the hunt, the kill, the afterparty--which, jeez, is a horrible metaphor, but both Bundy and Ridgway revisited their victims' corpses, partly for reasons of necrophilia (Ridgway admits to this without much apparent agonizing, but Bundy tied himself up in thirteen different kinds of hell-drenched knots over it: again, intelligence and self-awareness are not necessarily your friend if you're going to go in for this sort of thing) and partly for reasons of possession. They were both far more closely attuned to the places they left their victims' bodies than they were to their victims themselves. Which only makes sense; they only knew their victims for a matter of hours at the outside, but their relationships with those places stretched out over years. In 2003, Ridgway couldn't identify most of his victims from photographs, but he could lead detectives to exactly where he put them, and this despite the fact that the victims hadn't changed in the last 20 years and the land most certainly had. Keppel says that no one ever had any luck searching for Bundy's unfound victims, even when Bundy had described the location very precisely, and I wonder if it's because Bundy was lying, as he very well may have been, or if the land had changed in ways that the searchers couldn't adjust for but Bundy himself would have been able to. Moot point. Ridgway, with no investment in his own intelligence, took the plea bargain; Bundy, trying to prove he was the smartest man in the room, kept holding back the information until there was no leverage left in it.

Okay. Long tangent. What I was saying is, Keppel's interested in why, but he's interested in the why of serial killers as a class. He's not interested in Theodore Robert Bundy or Gary Leon Ridgway. And while he's outraged and grieved by the murders of these forty-eight plus young women, he doesn't have any interest in the sort of biographical detective work that Rule does. He's content with name, age, race, time and place last seen, when determinable, and the umbrella category of "working in prostitution." Other details are haphazard and mostly chosen because the irony makes them immediately memorable: Cheryl Wims, who was murdered on her 18th birthday; Cindy Smith, who'd moved back from California the day she disappeared in order to turn her life around; et cetera. And this is 100% okay because he's not writing the same kind of book Rule is. Rule's writing the story of the Green River murders, and that must include the stories of the victims. Keppel is writing about how he learned about catching serial killers through his work on the Ted murders and the Green River murders, and through his extraordinary interviews with Ted Bundy, as Bundy tried to teach him how to ask questions that would enable Bundy to answer him. (This is what The Silence of the Lambs looks like in real life. No Anthony Hopkins, no pretty FBI rookie. A middle-aged cop and Ted Bundy, whose manipulations were pathetic and terrifying at the same time and who wasn't, at the end, holding all four aces the way he thought he was. Hannibal Lecter is never pathetic, even in captivity, and there's part of me that says that makes him a horrifyingly irresponsible romanticization of men like Bundy and Ridgway.)

Very different perspective from Rule, but equally an excellent book.



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UBC: Rule, Green River, Running Red

Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is an excellent account of the Green River Killer's reign of terror, from the discovery of Wendy Lee Coffield's body in 1982 to his long, gruesome interviews with detectives as part of his plea bargain in 2003. Rule, as a famous true crime writer living in the south Seattle area, found herself a part of the story even as she was trying to prepare to write about it (to a lesser degree than happened with Ted Bundy, but I'm sure the coincidence was horrific for her), and I think part of what makes this book so engaging (if that's not an inappropriate term) is in fact Rule's own engagement with the story. Not just her empathy, but her deep personal knowledge of the geography that, as it would turn out, was so vital to Gary Ridgway himself. Her own fear informs the book (especially the literally fear-full moment when her daughter identified Ridgway as a man who frequently came to Rule's events); it's not as much a memoir as The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story, but it has some of that same feel.

Rule is also interested in the victims' sad, short stories (most of the girls Ridgway murdered were between 16 and 20) and clearly went to a lot of trouble to find their families and to listen to what they said. Her coverage is uneven, as it would have to be. You call tell that Opal Mills' brother, Tracy Winston's mother, Mary Bello's mother, and Mary Bridget Meehan's family gave extensive interivews, simply by the detail that Rule goes into; other victims are just names and the circumstances pieced together of their deaths. And then the ghastly afterlife of their corpses.

So if something possesses you to want to read about the Green River Killer, I do highly recommend this book.





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UBC: Levingston, Little Demon in the City of Light

Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is engaging, well-written, certainly entertaining as only belle epoque Paris can be. It features some of the same people as The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science, since one of the centerpieces of this story is a remarkable piece of forensic detective work. It never really answers its own questions, which bugged me a little--no discussion of modern understandings of what hypnotism can and can't do and how Gabrielle Bompard's story stacks up, and so no need to come down off the fence about whether she was as under Eyraud's thumb as she said she was or whether--as he maintained--she was the one controlling him.

Levingston occasionally has the lightning-bug problem--e.g., in describing what Emile Zola thought of women, he uses the word "distrustful" instead of the word he means (as is abundantly clear from context, even if I didn't know enough about Zola's misogyny to tell), which is "untrustworthy." But he uses primary sources--one of the French detectives kept a diary, which is worth its weight in gold--and he tells his story with flair.



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Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 4

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.

Chapter 4: Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narratives (1682-1700)

I have three things I want to say about this chapter.

1. If you need an example of unconscious male chauvinism at work, I have a beaut:

Mrs. Rowlandson's literary success during her lifetime and her more enduirng success as the originator of a major stream in the American mythology were not due to artistic skill. She was a sensitive woman, a careful observer of both external circumstances and conditions of the mind or soul, reasonably well read in Scripture, and capable of writing clear, vigorous, often moving narrative prose. But the power of her narrative to touch and illuminate the deeper structures of Puritan thought, feeling, and tradition is due less to conscious art than to the fact that her experience, training, and state of mind were accurate reflections of the experience and character of her culture as a whole. Her greater degree of natural sensitivity and her experience as a captive made her more capable than her fellows of discovering and revealing the character of her soul, but the soul she revealed mirrored the aspirations and anxieties of Puritan America.

[...] Unlike Mrs. Rowlandson, [Cotton] Mather was a conscious artist, careful in his selection of material and in his presentation of a consistent point of view. Whereas Mrs. Rowlandson was absorbed in her confession and her memory, Mather is detached, highly conscious of his audience and its reactions, and determined to illuminate fully the theological and historical character of the events he portrays.
(Slotkin 112-13)

I find this passage hilarious, most especially because he's picked Cotton Mather of all people as his exemplar of a "conscious artist." And it is an absolutely beautiful example of unconscious bias being made manifest. (I also like how he always calls Mary Rowlandson "Mrs. Rowlandson--it's better than calling her "Mary," but seriously, you can't just call her "Rowlandson" the way you call Cotton Mather "Mather"?)

2. What Slotkin is actually saying in this chapter, when he's not busy getting in his own way, is fascinating. He's talking about the Indian captivity narrative both as distinctly American and distinctly Puritan, demonstrating how the lens of the narrative is used to refract American Puritans' cultural anxieties about (of course) the salvation of their souls, but also about their choice to leave England, the generational conflict between the original emigrants and the first generation born in America, and about the Indians, both as threat and as a temptation to abandon the strict and rigorous course of an upright Puritan life.

It should be noted, although Slotkin doesn't, that many Puritan women did abandon the upright Puritan life in exchange for what their captors' culture offered them. He cites Eunice Williams (the subject of John Demos' excellent book, The Unredeemed Captive</em>), but he doesn't show any real understanding that there's an alternative narrative going on behind the racist, patriarchal mythology he's interested in. As I've said before, he consistently offers a demonstration of the very phenomenon he's interested in describing.

He makes an excellent point that the wilderness in the captivity narratives is both an allegory of Hell and an allegory of the psychomachia of the Puritan soul, their psychological landscape. This means that, for Puritans, without the grace of God, the human mind is literally Hell. This explains so much about Calvinism. And his description of the protagonist at the beginning of the captivity narrative, before the Indian attack: "The world seems secure, but apocalypse lies just below the surface of the mind, the world" (104): reminds me strongly of John Clute's definition of horror, that the progress of the narrative (and I'm paraphrasing very loosely) is the revelation of the truth beneath the deceptive surface of the world.

3. Slotkin's argument would actually benefit substantially from feminist theory, because when he describes the cultural work of the Puritan captivity narrative, what he's very clearly describing, although he doesn't seem to recognize it, is rape fantasy. (Which I mean as something quite distinct from actual rape.) The captivity narrative, which is a type of the conversion narrative--he remarks of Rowlandson, "as a good Puritan she longs for some 'affliction' of God to be visited upon her, in order that her sinful will might be overborne by a stronger and purer force of holiness than her own" (103), and this is very clearly the same kind of longing at work in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"). Rape fantasy, not real rape. But he also remarks that captivity is "the only acceptable way of acculturating, of being initiated into the life of the wilderness" (102), i.e., against the (feminized, because passive) protagonist's will, and I think an awareness of the subtext of rape fantasy at work in the conversion narratives on which the captivity narrative is patterned would have given him a much stronger and more incisive argument about the mythology that the captivity narrative creates.

UBC: Whalen & Martin, Defending Donald Harvey

Defending Donald Harvey: The Case of America's Most Notorious Angel-of-Death Serial Killer by William Whalen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



In its own way, this is one of the strangest books I've ever read.

William Whalen was a defense attorney, appointed by the court to defend Donald Harvey, a nursing assistant accused of murdering one of his patients in what could very plausibly be called a mercy killing. Except that when Whalen asked Harvey if he'd killed other people, Harvey said yes. When asked how many, he said he didn't know. When asked to give an estimate of the top limit, the number he knew he hadn't killed more than, he said seventy.

Whalen was now the defense attorney for a serial killer--and the police didn't know it.

I don't know that I agree with all of Whalen's choices, but I admire him very much. He made the best, most ethical decision he could under the circumstances, and he stuck with it. He found a way to use the revelation of the full extent of Harvey's crimes to save Harvey from the death penalty and he ensured that he would never have the opportunity to kill again.

I use the word "opportunity" advisedly, because Harvey was one of the most opportunistic murderers I've yet read about, matched only by Marcel Petiot, the subject of Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. Both of them killed based simply on who was available to them, age, sex, race, class, all matters of complete indifference. And Harvey, very clearly from the evidence presented in this book, had a kind of weird disconnect, a short circuit, where he skipped straight from I'm annoyed with you to poisoning. Boyfriend behaving like an asshole? Sprinkle arsenic in his food. Boyfriend's friend trying to break up your relationship? Give her hepatitis--you work in a hospital, you've got access to all kinds of nasty shit. Nosy neighbor asking too many questions? Give her your poisoned leftovers. So he not only killed on the job, he killed (and poisoned without killing) on an almost random basis at home. And he didn't get caught and didn't get caught and didn't get caught, mostly because poisoning! is just not what people think of, even when they're exhibiting all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning (Harvey is not the only serial killer who's used this to his advantage). And the hospitals where he worked were so much more concerned about their image and their vulnerability to lawsuits that they essentially taught him he could kill with impunity. The hospital where he was working when he got unlucky, and the cyanide-poisoned corpse of his last victim happened to cross paths with a forensic pathologist who was an expert on cyanide, comes off particularly badly, since their reaction to staff coming forward with concerns was to tell them to shut up if they wanted to keep their jobs.

This book is fascinating for the inside view it gives of the defense side of criminal law, and for Whalen's very careful portrayal of Harvey. (Harvey cooperated fully and read and commented on the manuscript.) Whalen is very protective of Harvey and fond of him in a weird way, but he never forgets that although Harvey is charming, and is certainly very attached to Whalen, he's not capable of friendship. He's manipulative and a liar and willing to do whatever is necessary to get what he wants. (Whalen is lawyer-careful and accurate about noting inconsistencies in what Harvey says about himself.) Harvey also apparently functions extremely well within the closed world of the prison--that "productive member of society" tagline that gets trotted out. Harvey is a productive member of the limited and artificial world of the penitentiary, even though he could never be trusted outside.

He gets superb performance evaluations.



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Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 3

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.

Chapter 3: A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625-1682)

But first, a wildly out of context quote from the incomparable Stephen Jay Gould: "Mythology does have its use as a powerful aid to narrative" (Wonderful Life 81). Gould is talking about a different subject, but the same problem: the way that mythology shapes stories, the way that it's easier to tell the story the mythology expects than it is to tell what really happened. And the way that that warps the story you're trying to tell.



So the thing that Slotkin is really atrociously awful at is differentiating what he thinks from what his subjects think, just as he's atrociously awful at remembering that his male Europeans are not the only subjects in the game. In fairness to Slotkin, I should make clear that he is well aware of the Puritans' racism, and he explicitly recognizes it as a massive problem, so it isn't that he agrees with them, it's just that he can only see them from the perspective of the default-white default-male historian looking back at them. Please take it as a given that I find this intensely exasperating and creepy.

(His use of Heart of Darkness as a completely unremarked-upon intertext in chapter title and epigraph is certainly symptomatic.)

I also wish Slotkin would close-read and really dig all the meat out of the sublimely self-blind entitlement of Increase Mather's definition of Native Americans: "the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers have given to us for a rightful Possession" (Mather, qtd. in Slotkin 84)--or the more delicate dance of abdication of responsibility in John Underhill's account of an atrocity he participated in (as perpetrator rather than victim): "Mercy they did deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it (Underhil, qtd. in Slotkin 74) and later:

Many [of the Pequot Indians] were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out, . . . which our soldiers received and entertained with the sword. Down fell men, women, and children. . . . Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. . . . Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.
(Underhill, qtd. in Slotkin 76)

Slotkin certainly registers the way Puritan writers shift agency onto God--it's the culminating point of his chapter, that they shift glory as much as blame (at least they're consistent): if they do terrible things, it's God's will, but if they survive, it's also God's will. No personal heroism, which is Slotkin's point in my cut-text. I picked it because there's a secondary connotation that I think is equally apt: the lack of human heroes in the accounts of King Philip's War. Because really King Philip's War and the wars that followed it will have no human heroes, in the sense of those who triumph because they are brave and their cause is just. The Native Americans are defeated, and the Puritans are treacherous and vile, and the in-fighting between the colonies means you can't even ascribe them the virtue of loyalty to their own side. Slotkin talks about the Indian Wars as the "distinctive event of American history, the unique national experience" (78), and while he means that unironically (because for him only the (1) white and (2) male Americans have a subject position and everyone else exists to be acted against or upon), it's still, horribly, true if you read it the other way, if you read this "unique national experience" as one fundamentally of betrayal and injustice and self-righteous bigotry providing all the explanations. And that's the distinctive event of American history.

Why, yes, I am bothered by our current national nightmare, thank you for asking.

Slotkin is very good at conveying how the Puritans saw and understood America and their own place within it. America was a wilderness peopled by cannibals, witches, and devils; it was a microcosm of the universe and the externalized stage of the Puritan psychomachia. The Puritans themselves were sinners subject to the wilderness' temptations, with the potential to fall and become as beasts; they were also always and forever world without end the protagonists who acted upon this stage, the especial favorites of Providence, for whom this continent had been offered up that they might have a proving ground. Puritans saw themselves as the center of the universe, their spiritual defeat being synonymous with the destruction of the world (I described this as "catastrophic solipsism" in a marginal note, both in the sense that something bad happening to you personally becomes CATASTROPHE on the grandest macro-scale, and in the sense that your solipsism becomes catastrophic to those around you). And if you believe that, and you believe that everyone who is not One Of You is either damned or a tool of the Devil or both, then, well, yes, the way that Puritans formed their mythology of America makes perfect, dreadful sense.

(...I should probably apologize for posting this on Thanksgiving.)

UBC: Rule, ...And Never Let Her Go

And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



One of the things that reading Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa reminded me of is how important taxonomy is. The way human beings are wired means that (1) it's hard for us to talk about things we don't have names for and (2) we understand the world by categorization and comparison, so being able to put like things together in groups is an incredibly powerful conceptual tool. It's true in biology and geology and meteorology; it's true in literary studies, where if there's a theory I have an allegiance to, it's genre theory, precisely because it lets you talk about why it's meaningful that some texts have certain things in common, like "revenge tragedy" or "comedy of manners." And, at least for me, it's true in criminology.

I've already, semi-flippantly, christened one genre of murder "why buy the cow?" and my exemplar is Chester Gillette. I'm calling this other genre of murder, which has many things in common with "why buy the cow?", "every woman's nightmare," and my exemplar is Thomas Capano, the subject of . . . And Never Let Her Go.

Capano is everything I was talking about in my review of The I-5 Killer, a man who obsessively stalks and harasses and ultimately murders a woman for the crime of trying to end their relationship. He would not leave Anne Marie Fahey alone, and although she was scared of him, the sad thing is, she wasn't scared enough. Capano was a monster, and the two things about him that horrified and repulsed me the most were that (1) after he murdered Anne Marie Fahey, he lied about her, calling her "ditzy" and "airheaded" and suggesting she was absolutely the type of woman who would just waltz off for a weekend, skipping a dinner date with her family and boyfriend, and not tell a soul, when she was not, when she was anything but. He habitually lied about the women he pursued, claiming it was they who came onto him, and they who were obsessive and clingy (and also sluts, don't forget sluts), and he told much worse lies than calling Ms. Fahey an airhead, but for some reason, I found that particular example of his lies just loathsome. And then (2), when he was in prison and trying to finesse and finagle his way around the rules (because rules do not apply to Thomas Capano), he not only allowed, but encouraged his teenage daughters to talk on the phone with, write letters to, and send their pictures to a sex offender, specifically convicted of indecent exposure to a minor (I looked the man up. He's in the sex offender registry of Florida and Delaware.), so that the man would do Capano favors. And not even big favors, like the guy he tried to get to burgle and vandalize his lover's house, or the guy he tried to get to put out a hit on Capano's brother for testifying against him. Not big favors. Little favors. For little favors, just so that Thomas Capano wouldn't have to obey the rules, this proudly overprotective father was coming very very close to pimping out his daughters. Again, not the worst thing he did, but for me personally, vile.

Capano reminded me, in a number of very creepy ways, of Ted Bundy, particularly in the way that being subject to the rules that apply to the defendant in a criminal trial drove them both just nuts, and I think the biggest difference between them is that Capano was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a devoted, loyal, wealthy, powerful family, and he parlayed that into a lot of personal power. (He made a kind of side-career out of "fixing" things for his brothers when they were caught doing drugs or bribing politicians or stalking, kidnapping, and raping their ex-girlfriends. And when he was caught, early on, harassing and stalking a young woman, his connections to Delaware's old-boy network let him slide out of trouble as smooth as silk.) It took a lot longer for Capano to come up against someone he couldn't make do what he wanted, and so he got caught for his first murder instead of, y'know, his thirtieth.

The "Bechdel Test fail" label applies to Capano, just as it applies to Bundy and Woodfield, but that's a much more overarching categorization; Capano is different from Bundy in important ways, too, particularly in the fact that he murdered Fahey because she was under his control and trying to escape. Bundy murdered strangers; Capano murdered someone he claimed to love deeply and then disposed of her body the same way he would a toy he'd broken, dumping her body off the Atlantic coast in a spot known as Mako Alley.

This is a very good book--Rule has a very complicated story to tell, and she lays it out probably as clearly as is possible. There was just one place where she made a false step, and it's so weird and jarring that I'm actually going to discuss it. Capano's long-time lover, Deborah MacIntyre, who he made buy the gun that he intended to use to murder Anne Marie Fahey (and meanwhile MacIntyre has no freaking idea that Fahey exists; she thought Capano had left his wife for her and that he was faithful to her, while he was actually involved with Fahey and with at least one other woman), when she finally realized, because of his relentless pressure on her to commit perjury to protect him that when Capano said "love," what he meant was jealousy, in exactly the way that a little boy is jealous of his toys and won't share them with his siblings, she released the lawyer Capano had told her to hire and found her own. The new lawyer worked in partnership with his wife, who was his paralegal, and there's this weird weird moment where Rule says:

Debby liked the Bergstroms and felt protected for the first time in many long years. They were no-nonsense people who were demonstrating that they cared about what happened to her. Dee, particularly, was intuitive about Debby's feelings. Women know how other women feel, although it is almost impossible to explain this to a man.
(Rule 447)

Okay, first of all, bullshit. There's nothing about having two X chromosomes that makes you magically "intuitive" about the feelings of other people with two X chromosomes. I have two X chromosomes, and I'm about as intuitive as a cinderblock. There are experiences that women are more likely to have in common with other women than they are with men--sexual harassment springs to mind (although I am of course not saying that men are never sexually harassed)--and thus more likely to understand, but that's not what Rule says, which leads to the second problem: what exactly is the "this" that is almost impossible to explain to a man? Over the page, the second half of this weird little alien inclusion may explain the "this":

Dee Bergstrom understood Debby's anguish and explained to her husband and the all-male prosecuting team that very few women would be able to turn off overnight a love that had lasted for two decades. Often to their own detriment, women cling to memories of how they perceived their relationship. For the moment, Debby was fragile, but she was doing her best to break free of Tom.

"We don't wake up one morning," Dee told them, "and just say, 'I don't love him anymore.'"
(Rule 448)

But that doesn't actually help at all. Why would men not understand that it's hard, even in the face of excruciatingly cruel and obvious betrayal, to stop loving someone you've loved for nearly half your life? That horrible situation is not exclusively the property of women and any human being with functional empathy should be able to understand it.

If it's that, looking objectively at Capano and MacIntyre's relationship, the male prosecutors didn't understand why she loved him in the first place, well (a) that's not what Rule says, (b) that's an excellent question, and (c) it has much less to do with sex/gender and much more to do with the relationship between an abuser and their victim, and that relationship can be between two men, two women, or an abusive woman and a male victim just as much as it can be a relationship between an abusive man and a female victim.

If she's trying to say something about the particular way in which gender expectations and socialization constructed the relationship between Capano and MacIntyre, and the way in which Dee Bergstrom, as another woman socialized with the same expectations as MacIntyre, could grasp that more easily than a group of people socialized male--and, as part of that package, not taught to take women's emotions into account--then she needed to say it much more carefully. Because what she did say jarred me straight out of her story--and it stands out, because in this 650+ page book, that's the only time she tries to draw that "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" line. Everywhere else, she recognizes that Capano was a manipulator and a user, and that men were his victims, too, although not to the same extent.

No one was his victim to the extent that Anne Marie Fahey was, and one thing that this book does excellently well is make you understand the terrible loss, both Anne Marie Fahey's own loss, the life she was finally putting together, facing her demons, getting the help she needed, but then the loss of her to everyone who knew her. What Capano ripped apart can never be repaired, and Rule shows that very very well.



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UBC: Thomsen, Ghost Towns

Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West by Clint Thomsen

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is a well-designed and attractive little book, with fascinating subject-matter, breath-taking photographs (Bannack, Montana, and Rhyolite, Nevada, are especially stunning), and terrible text. It reads like a Freshman Composition paper, and not a very good one, with sweeping overgeneralizations, no understanding of what constitutes meaningful evidence, and a raging case of thesaurusitis, like saying that Deadwood, South Dakota, is "brusquely named" or (reprehensibly) my favorite, that Calico, California, was founded "the year after Bodie's population climaxed" (38). There are other problems, like the mysterious absence of Native Americans from his presentation of the American frontier, but you won't be surprised when you reach them.

So, photographs five stars, and if--as I did--you find the book for cheap, worth it. Text, one star.



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UBC: Le Gros Clark, Man-Apes or Ape Men?

Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa by W.E. Le Gros Clark

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book is about taxonomy, which is like genre theory for living things. I love it.

I imprinted on Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind at an early age, which is how I recognized Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark's name. Aside from being fascinating, this book is an interesting historical artifact. It was published in 1967, just before the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, and it provides a snapshot of what was going on in palaeoanthropology in the middle of the controversy over Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Homo habilis, Zinjanthropus, Telanthropus, Paranthropus, Pleisanthropus, Meganthropus and all the other specimens given names of their own. It was a nontrivial problem; one of the things going on in this book is a examination of the way in which we can't talk accurately about things we don't have accurate names for: "Probably nothing has done more to introduce confusion into the story of human evolution than the reckless propensity for inventing new (and sometimes unnecessarily complicated) names for fragmentary fossil relics that turn out eventually to belong to genera or species previously known" (9), and the purpose of this monograph is to realign and correct the unnecessary overproliferation of names in discussions of pre-human evolution.

Le Gros Clark was an anatomist, and dude knows his shit. I won't pretend that I could follow the ins and outs of his exhaustive discussion of australopithecine skull (or even worse, australopithecine pelvises), but he explains himself carefully, and I certainly did come out with a clear understanding of exactly why australopithecines are not apes and are not human beings. He writes very clearly and carefully, and what I love most about him is the way he lays out and explains all the steps in how taxonomy works. Why do you name one fossil Australopithecus and one fossil Homo? How do you decide whether two specimens found in different places with very different provenances (which I know is totally not an appropriate word in palaeontology, but every fossil has a different story of discovery, and that story can make a huge difference in how the fossil is interpreted) are members of the same species? Le Gros Clark uses statistics like John Henry's hammer, showing the range of variation in well documented species like Homo sapiens and then showing that the differences between specimens called Australopithecus africanus and specimens given new and glorious names of their own fall well within statistical variations for a single species.

He is extremely stern about the way palaeoanthropologists overemphasize the uniqueness of every find but he also emphasizes over and over again that what he and his colleagues are engaged in is a process of discovery and that part of that process is making mistakes. He analyses his own mistakes, and other people's mistakes, and he ends with a really lovely defense of making mistakes:

Probably no scientist, however distinguished, has been invariably correct in the interpretations and theoretical hypotheses that he has advanced to explain his observational or experimental data. Hypotheses are of vital importance for progress in all branches of scientific knowledge, for only by formulating hypotheses is it possible to put them to the test by further observation and experiment, or by the application of new and more refined techniques. It is perhaps the fate of many hypotheses to be superseded sooner or later. If they are genuine scientific hypotheses, that is to say, if they are hypotheses that accord reasonably well with the facts available to their authors at the time and are susceptible to the test of observation and experiment, they will have played their part in promoting and accelerating the advance of scientific thought and research even if eventually they are discarded. A well-known Scottish author, Samuel Smiles, once remarked, over a hundred years ago, "Probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." There is a great deal of truth in this aphorism, and certainly those who have made so many and such important discoveries by their energetic field work readily may be excused if one or other of their hypotheses should eventually prove to be unsubstantiated or untenable.
(Le Gros Clark 134)

He means specifically Robert Broom and Raymond Dart, who discovered and championed Australopithecus africanus in the face of tremendous opposition (of which Le Gros Clark is also sternly disapproving), and who were fundamentally right, even if some of their conclusions were overenthusiastic. And like the rest of this book, Le Gros Clark is saying, This is how you do science. It's a process of mistake and correction, making a hypothesis, testing it, reformulating it--or rejecting it for a new hypothesis. The fact that that is what the book is about means that it doesn't matter that it's out of date and some of its conclusions are obsolete. (Le Gros Clark did not like Homo habilis, considering the Olduvai fossils to be well within the range of variation for Australopithecus africanus, but he lost that battle. And of course Lucy is waiting just over the horizon from where he's standing.) And I personally love the fact that Le Gros Clark's science is taxonomy, the science of names.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter . . .



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