The FBI Caves

So the FBI caves.   I think this is a big deal with implications far beyond the immediate kerfuffle.  Back in the Pleistocene when I went to law school, I was taught that the one non reviewable decision was the decision not to prosecute.  It's a rule that his never been completely immune to criticism: we can all think of cases where a prosecutor seems to have buried a contentious case without any obligation to explain himself to the world or anybody.  But mostly I'd say it has worked pretty well.  The thinking seems to be that prosecutors must have some freedom of motion, and that in general, a mistake in deciding not to prosecute is just nowhere near as harmful or invasive than a mistake in deciding to go forward.

Lately I think we've heard more criticism of the no-prosecute rule, particularly in the realm of "sex cases"--rape or abuse
.  I suspect that most prosecutors think that cases of this sort are just rough to prosecute, too easy to lose--and that losses may defeat the whole purpose of the enterprise.  And I haven't any doubt that there are some prosecutors who think these cases just aren't that-all important anyway.

Whatever.  What's sure is that we are hearing a progressively louder chorus of complaint from victims and their advocates that their concerns just aren't being taken seriously enough--and that one path to reform would be to compel the prosecutor to explain or justify his no-prosecute decision.

If I were a lawyer likely to get embroiled in this kind of controversy, I'd be opening a new file on the FBI decision to turn over.  Either yea or nay, I'll be needing to bone up on all the arguments so I will be ready as the issue evolves.

Only Hurts when I Laugh

On the street leading over to the gym I pass (from memory): renal care, dialysis, prompt care, convalescent hospital, veterans' mental health and outpatient services, children's  health, pain therapy, clinical lab, allergist, internist, cancer care.  

I think I may have missed some.  Lester Thurow the economist used to say we can't get rich taking out each others' appendix.  His attitude strikes me as a failure of imagination.

The Chancellor

Okay, so that's over.


I'm in the peanut gallery, so no more than a malign observer, but here's s lightly edited version of  an email I sent to a friend back east.

Oh, it's been a running sore for a couple of years, ever since that pepper spray business.    Of course the chancellor didn't personally pull the lever on the canister but she never seemed to get on top of the story, never came across as understanding that it was real (my stars, was it really five years ago?).  At long last, it has turned  into a war of the press releases.  The University President says:

... numerous instances where Chancellor Katehi was not candid, either with me, the press, or the public, that she exercised poor judgment, and violated multiple University policies...

And the Chancellor (or, her  highly skilled lawyer) gets to say: 

 CLEARED OF ALLEGATIONS OF NEPOTISM, CONFLICTS, FINANCIAL 

MISMANAGEMENT OR PERSONAL GAIN IN UC INVESTIGATION, 

You could say it is a Hillary problem.  The chancellor apparently not guilty of any felony but she has a colossally tin ear and she's greedy.  I mean, board of directors of a text book company?  Why wasn't that prohibited?  And paying to scrub Google?  How rookie is that?

OTOH, at least some of the opposition to her came from people who just thought it would be fun to destroy a chancellor.

I think she is unmarketable outside Davis now so Davis is stuck with her (i.e., as a faculty member .  Also her husband and her son and her DiL--four nice paycheck with bennies).

FWIW I think the president winds up with a bit of mud on her shirtwaist too.  I believe she had/has been hoping to join the Clinton administration .  She is probably not completely out of the running, but good managers don't let this kind of problem happen in the first place.    

Ex Cons, Nutso Right Wingers, Partakers of Crystal Meth

[Repurposed from FB.]

I note the existence of a literary or cultural genre.  Probably been around for a while, I'm just late getting to the party.  The subject is the bleak and disordered life of those in the vast interior heartland.  High desert is probably best, Vegas best of all.  Cast of characters heavy on ex cons, nutso right wingers, partakers of crystal meth.  I'm thinking of movies like 'Melvin and Howard,' TV shows like 'Fargo,' or 'Reno 911!' (now that one was funny).  The topic lends itself to lo-o-ong form journalism, where dreary shapelessness  is almost a virtue--this one is a particularly noteworthy  exemplar, effective precisely because it isn't very good (Hanna Rosin's 'Murder by Craigslist,' by contrast, was top notch).  I read (or watch) this stuff.  I'm not certain what the appeal is but I suppose it is a kind of porn for aging academics who live in their head (guilty, your honor).  I do, however, believe I can identify the inaugural artifact--patient A on the blasted-waste circuit.  That would be 'The Executioner's Song,' Norman Mailer's nonfiction novel about the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore,  i never actually finished 'Executioner's Song,' but that's okay: I suspect maybe it never does end but just wanders on and on and on...  Life's like that. 

Can There be a "Nation" without a "Constitution?"

Caution, I pretty much blew this one off without critical scrutiny or even rereading.  Hope it makes some sense.  I will, at a minimum, certify that I was t least stone sober, except for caffiene.

I suppose the kewl kids would sneer at my innocence but hey, the kewl kids don't read me anyway.  So,  for all the non-kewl out there somewhere, a question: can there be a nation without a constitution?  

Allow me to explain.  I was reading something the other night that mentioned a nation that "did not have a constitution."  In context, I think I understood what the author meant.  He was writing about 19C Century European revolutionaries who carried round pieces of paper with the words "human rights" in bold letters.  The kind of thing a public spirited citizen might wave at a Trump rally.

But is this definition sufficient, or even necessary?  We all know (of) nations whose "piece of paper" are a form of light entertainment (if in bad taste), having little or nothing to do with how the nation is governed.  Perhaps more tellingly, we Americans have grown up making uneasy jokes about Britain as a nation where they don't write their constitution down--a nation without a piece of paper, but still with a constitution.  

We have never felt clear about just exactly this can mean, but for purposes of comparison,  consider this example: must a language have a grammar?   On first thought, we can all remember grammar books, just as we might remember Miss Gooch (Sister Gooch?) with her ruler in the seventh grade, beating the rules into our impervious little skulls.  So, yes.  Language, grammar book, grammar.  Think a little harder, though, and we notice something important.  Languages have grammar long before there are language books.  AS grammar is a set of conventions that define the language.  The language is what the grammar is.  The written grammar--ah, that most often comes later.  Or perhaps, not at all.

So, a grammar tells us how the language is constituted, written or otherwise. And can't we now apply the same point to the nation?  The nation must be constituted somehow--else it wouldn't be a nation.  Am I right, or am I right?  And aren't there plenty of "constituted" nations that (like the Brits) do not have a "written constitution," but who are still nations (in the sense that they are "constituted") anyway?  Isn't it true that they have to have some sort of "constitution" (written or not)--else they wouldn't be nations at all?

I can think of at least one reason why it is so easy to miss this point.  That is: we tend to think of both "language" and "constitution" as imposed from the top, by some authority. Think the French Academy.  Or, sure, think the Supreme Court.  But both languages and "constitutions" can bubble up from below.  Matter of fact, as a half-relevant aside, I think this helps explain why Noam Chomsky the student of linguistics is also a professed anarchist.  He certainly understands that languages can bubble up from below.  And he seems to think something the same about the larger social framework.

I can think of another objection, perhaps more important, though I don't quite know how to deal with it.  That is: when those 19C hotheads talked about "constitution" and "rights," they meant, specifically, some sort of framework that would impose imitations on "the government"--that would allow a kind of "private" space where the king's writ did not run.  And their belief was you weren't going to get this kind of protection without a piece of paper  If that is the point, then I guess it is at least coherent, even attractive.  But you are still left with the question of how you define the "nation" aside which those protections operate.  

Quick final note: I blur the distinction between "nation" and "state."  Maybe I'll deal that one later.

Might-have-beens: A Self-Assessment

I seem to be sifting the detritus of an only moderately well spent career.  I'm remembering my first big break, when Norm Isaacs gave me a job in the City Room at the old Louisville Times in the spring of 1960.  In retrospect, I am surprised he took a chance on me but he didn't have a big budget and the skill threshold was not that-all high.   I don't remember what I said in the interview but here is what I would say if I had a chance for a do-over.

I want this job because you are a great platform.   You've got the resources to support good work and it looks like you have the disposition to put them behind stuff that you think is good.  I'd like to use that kind of opportunity to make things better for us both.

There is a lot I need to learn about the reporting trade and I hope to develop and improve as I go forward.  For the moment, my goal concerns the public use of money: budgets, taxation, public spending.  I want to be a policy wonk.

I'm young and green and not well trained but I am a quick and motivated learner.  I'd love to have a chance to put these talent into play.  I hope you'll give me the scope.

--

I did get the job, of course, and loved it, and learned a lot, although nothing like the sophisticated program I set for myself in retrospect.   They did offer a great platform and they did give me some scope and I am eternally in their debt.  But when I left journalism at the age of 28, I figured I had plateaued out, would never have a chance to learn or do anything more sophisticated than what i had done already.  This was perhaps a common attitude for the time but in retrospect, it was an utter failure of imagination.  I don't regret the careerI did  undertake thereafter--not at all-but I marvel at the opportunities I so blithely set aside in doing so.

Of course, all this is absurdly hypothetical.  Norm is dead, the Times is dead; most of the people I worked with (and they were an amazingly talented bunch) are long gone.   And I am feeling a bit woozy myself.  But in retrospect, it chills me to recall--when he asked me "why do you want this job?" I probably answered with something along the lines of "duh."

Reconsidering Ike: A Thought Experiment

I came of political age (I will not say "maturity) during the Eisenhower administration.  Instructed by Herblock, I thought of him as an amiable doofus with a pretty good golf handicap.  Time and the great scholarship of Fred Greenstein have taught me different.  The doofus part was largely an act, a cover.  Meanwhile, I wonder how anybody could have thought the the man who commanded the winning armies in one of the most successful wars in human history should be dismissed so liability.  I've come round to the point of saying (with a glint of wry irony) the Ike was really the best president of my adulthood.  He was, after all, a champion of stability and good order at home.  And the man who sent the troops into Little Rock.  And the one who warned us against the military-industrial complex.

And yet, and yet.  He tolerated McCarthy for far too long.  He tolerated John Foster Dulles until the day (Dulles) died.  He gave us George Humphries, "Engine Charlie" Wilson and Ezra Taft Benson. Is that really the best we can do?

Well, he certainly wasn't perfect.  But on the "tolerate" thing.  I think it is fair to say that one essential quality in a great general is that he knows how to pick his  fights: he wants to battle on his chosen turf, and on his own terms.  Isn't it fair to say that with McCarthy, at least--yes, he did not move early, and he seemed at times almost not to notice the mischief the great ruffian was causing. But what if he had injected himself earlier?  Would he have, in fact, succeeded--or could it be that he would have damaged himself, while leaving McCarthy even stronger than he had been  before.  With Dulles, I suppose the case is harder.  Ike seemed to acquiesce in a good deal of the foreign interventionism--Iran, Guatemala--that looks so misguided today.  At the same time, one always had the sense that Dulles' most unsettling excesses were Dulles freelancing, with little or no support from the less excitable chief executive down he street.  Civil rights--complicated again, I think.  When he sent in the troops, I think the general view was the he was far more offended by the affront to federal authority than he was by the plight of black students.  Yet I don't think it is fair to call Ike racist in any modern sense.  His flaw was more that he simply didn't get it: he had known (seemingly) happy Pullman porters, officer's club waiters and such like, and he didn't understand why their fellows weren't willing to settle for their place.  A failure of imagination, surely--and a failure of imagination can be a failure. But it is not the same as active racial hostility.

And yet, and yet.  I'm very far from totally convinced of my own case.  I do think there is a lot to respect in his domestic record (and admire in his war record).  I wish he had done more, or done it better.  I suppose in the end I fall back on the first principle of modern politics: the job of every Republican president is to make the last guy look good.  By that standard, I think he looks pretty good indeed.

How Cervantes Became Cervantes (Hint: It Took Most of a Lifetime)

A quick shoutout for .s delightful for William Egginton's new book about Cervantes.  It's a sort of a biography but it's better described as an account of how Cervantes became Cervantes (hint: it took most of a lifetime) and, more precisely, what is so distinctive about him, why we think of him as the man who invented fiction. The takeaway is that Cervantes shows us characters from the inside and the outside so we can share their inner life while observing it.  Egginton credits the insight in part to the aufhor's work in the theatre and I am thinking (though Cervantes almost certainly did not know of) William Shakespeare's more or less simultaneous career. Example, Rosalind in As You Like it--a girl dressed up as a boy telling a hearer what she would think if she were a girl (closely similar stunt in Twelfth Night, only doubled).

A particularly elegant instance is has handling of Cervantes tradition of the great narrative epics--in particular the work of Tasso and Ariosto.  Egginton recalls the scene where Don Quixote sees a cloud and thinks it is an advancing hostile army.  There are two clouds, remarks his realist companion Sancho.  Oh, goody, says the knight, we are surrounded.  Whereupon the knight describes the armies in lapidary detail--what they wear, what they carry.  Egginton's points out how the descriptions are almost an exact copy of his great narrative predecessors--with a difference.  That is: Tasso and Ariosto are telling us what the armies looked like.  Cervantes is showing us what this half-mad observer thinks they look like.  Appearance and reality, objectivity and subjective consciousness.

I love it, with one minor qualification.  Specifically, Ariosto is the eternal ironist.  He tells you the story as if true but all the time he is nudging you in the ribs as if to say "you don't really believe this, do you?"  But no matter.  Cervantes figures out how to take that unreality and make it part of the story.

[Repurposed from FB].

Walking the streets of Shakespeareville [sc. Ashland, Oregon] I'm thinking: there is a lot of money sloshing around this town. No, silly, not aggravated-felony Wall Street money but nice comfy 100-500k UMC money for people who do not have to budget for their lattes. My guess is that many of these folks will vote for Hillary although they have not ripped the Bernie sticker off the Prius. They are earnestly, sincerely concerned about the plight of the dispossessed and they really think we should Do Something About it. But the fact is, when they go to dinner (with a nice glass of wine) they can pretty much set their concerns aside. 

Hot baths. Simone Weil says that almost all of human life takes place far from hot baths. These people are mostly close to hot baths.

--"Presque toute la vie humaine s'est toujours passée loin des bains chauds."

-Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force.

Thought Experiment

  [Repurposed form FB]. 

Though early, it is tempting to speculate on what the structure of the Republican party will look like in the aftermath of the election. Here's a scenario:

1--Trump loses badly, but not catastrophically (yes, I know--everyone has been wrong on this one before).

2--The insulted and the injured will overflow with rage in their conviction that they have been cheated (cf. "stab in the back," Weimar Germany, post-1918).

3--They will coalesce into a new party uniting racists, exclusionists, evangelicals and--oh yes, those who see their lives as in calamitous decline. It is not at all clear that Donald Trump will be their leader, or even want to be. Maybe Ted Cruz.

4--Distinct from the insulted and the injured will be a much smaller rump of the great and the good--those who have built their career on dangling shiny baubles before the eyes of the lesser mortals to distract them while the danglers scooped up tax cuts and related goodies. Also known as "which way are my people going so I can run out and front and lead them?" It is even less obvious who the leader is here. The Bushes are too old and boring. Romney is too boring. Paul Ryan is, well, boring. But it may not matter much; at the moment, there simply won't be very many of them. 

5--And the Democrats, don't they have the same problem? To an extent, yes, but for the moment they will be too busy choosing garments for the inauguration ball and (if they are smart) trying to stifle their gloating.

Could be worse; could be the other guy wins.

Social Trusts and the Shadow of Kershaw's History

The topic for the moment is social trust, with a side order of ethnic animosity.  I'm inspired by Roger Scruton's admirable essay in Prospect   where he defines social trust:

[S]ocial trust—the sense that we are bound to each other by a shared loyalty, and that we will stand by each other in emergencies. Social trust comes from shared language, shared customs, instinctive law-abidingness, procedures for resolving disputes and grievances, public spirit and the ability of the people to change their own government by a process that is transparent to them all.

I'm a huge fan of social trust, perhaps due to the fact I grew up in a place where nobody has bars on the windows and if   you dropped your wallet in the parking lot, you could be      pretty sure somebody would return it to you be evening.  We had one cop.  He was part time and if you got into mischief, I think he would have just called your mother.  It's the kind of thing you get (or we think you get) in Scandinavia, maybe Switzerland and New Zealand, possibly parts of Canada.

But my attitude was not always so benign,  In truth I found the home place boring and was desperate to cut myself loose.  I dreamt of getting to Damon Runyon's New York (I   never got there, perhaps because it did not exist). In adulthood' I've had the good luck to sojourn in a lot of places but I've often said that my vacation of choice would be Izmir in  1912 before the expulsion of the Greeks and the murder of the Armenians.   Which is to say, I like social trust but I              also like "diversity"--a word whose modern meaning did not, in my youth, so much as exist.

But thar's the problem, isn't it?  "[S]hared language, shared  customs."  Really?  Do we need shared language, shared customs?  Put othe other way round, can we build social trust without them?  I must say, I certainly hope so.   I want a woworld where we can have it both ways.  And this is where Ian Kershaw comes in, via his splendid history of inter alia,  the restructuring of Europe in the aftermath of World War I.  

You can see where this is going.  Retrieve your old history notes from your mental storage-bank and you'll recall how the post-War period experienced (a) an efflorescence of creative nationalism; plus (b) a wave of venomous hostility to anything perceived as outside the particular nationalist model.

The famous Wilsonian program of self-determination turned into a cruel hoax.  Italians grabbed Germans.  Germans inflicted themselves Czechs.  Romanians got Hungarians and Hungary got Slovaks.  Russians, no thanks to President Wilson, gained and kept just about everybody in sight.  And nobody understood the Balkans (as usual).  Indeed, the places that accomplished most by way of establishing ethnic homogeneity were those in which it was done by brute strength--think Greece and Turkey.  Some of these restructuring stood the test  of time better than others.

Some of these new orderings proved durable--Italy still has its Germans today.  Others lasted a long time.  But remember what happened in the Balkans in the 90s. No, don't remember it, the whole fiasco is just too unpleasant.  

I don't mean this to be the end of the story.  I certainly don't want it to be.  But it does seem that establishing social trust across cultural boundaries is a challenge enough to daunt the best of us.  I'll try to think about it some more, but meanwhile, will somebody turn off the damn TV?  (Bleak joke.  We don't have TV, which means we are safe from the GOP convention).

Still Getting in the Swing

Wrote about 4/5 of a lovely post just now on "social trust," but it seems to have disappeared.  If you got it, know that it is incomplete .  Technical problems.  My desktop is down and I am trying to compose on my IPad mini which is about like trying to skate on one foot,  I think I'll just leave it until Mon when, I hope, I get my computer and thereby my life back. 

Kershaw Takes the Long View

 I read Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler some years ago with pleasure and profit.  Now at the urging of the Missus I am rooting around in To Hell and Back,  his big-picture history of the 20th Century, particularly the early chapters on the runup to and the aftermath of World War I.  It's a somewhat mind-bending experience in that I studied this stuff with some avidity in college 55 years ago (I was a late starter).  I loved it then and I'm surprised that I remember specific bits and pieces that seem to have stuck with me down through the years (also the entertaining showmanship of Jim Sutton at the U of Louisville as he flourished his deck of 5x7 note cards in a dauntless effort to keep his night students awake).

But what gives me a bit of the yim yams is how different it looks from the vantage of great age.  Or rather, I suppose "yim yams" is too strong.  There is no radical discontinuity.  I'm still the same person.  I didn't bring much to the table back then (did someone mutter "callow?").  I've got a lifetime to measure it against now.  In a way, I suppose you might say the same is true of Kershaw.  He's a bit younger than I but still, he's got a lifetime of experience to draw on.  At least as to Germany (which is pretty much the center of his story so far)  he has pretty much earned the right what he damn pleases.

One perhaps trivial point on which I'm specially appreciative: he gives lots of casualty figures, both for wars and for battles,  More satisfying still, he breaks down the general category into the specifics of dead and wounded.  Numbers are important here: it's good to get a sense of just how awful (in the strict sense) all this was.

Related point: to the best of my recollection, in my youth we passes pretty lightly over the Russian Civil War.  I don't think I ever grasped that it was actually more costly in human terms (for the Russians) than the great war itself.  And the Kronstadt Rebellion, where the revolution turned on, as it were, its own.  Trotsky said he would have them "shot like partridges" and proved as good as his words.

Another, perhaps larger, point: the radical reorganization of society as a whole with a dozen or so new nations, all of the, "democracies" of a sort.  And actually not such a bad sort.  Maybe only Czechoslovskia got its sea legs but for so many, it was an inspiring new departure.  In any event--I've got other things I want to get to, but I think I'll have to stick with Kershaw--I'm dying to know how it works out.  

Another Test

Xxx

Testing an IFTTT Link

Testing an ITTT Link.

Book Lists, I Love Book Lists

When I gave thought to beginning posting again, it occurred to me I could post here and cross post to Facebook.  But I can just as well post to Facebook and cross post here.  So here we go: an item I put up at FB a couple of days ago.  As i say, I love these lists: kind of a mark-to-market self-assessment.

===

Oooh, I love these book lists. The question was: can you name 10 books that made a direct and immediate difference in how you think? Sure can. In chronological order:

Arthur Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order. Explained the unspoken political and social presuppositions of the world I was born into.

Mark Sullivan, Our Times. Helped me to understand the Ohio of Warreen G. Harding, under whose shadow I was living at the moment.

Bertram Wolf, Three Who Made a Revolution. Thrilling. Showed me what it was to have a political and social imagination.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.* I wasn't all that much of a reader when I was a kid, so I didn't have a basis comparison. Imagine my surprise, in later life, to realize that I had started at the top. Read it in time to be wary of the Viet Nam War.

Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberland. Helped me to understand Kentucky during my time there as a reporter. By a country lawyer who nailed it better than any journalist I know.

Grant Gilmore, Secured Transactions, First few chapters--on the history of chattel security--taught me more about how the law works than any other book, ever.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Too short.

John Dos Passos, USA. Why have I never been able to sell the people I care about on this marvelous tapestry of American life?

George Eliot, Middlemarch, I had a girlfriend in my early 40s who told me that no one was fully adult until they understood Middlemarch. She was right,

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. I finally got round to Prousf in my 50s. Reassuring to know that, however much longer I may live, I will never be short of ideas to chew on.

*Spelling error corrected. Cripes, can't any of you guys out there read proof?

From the Crypt

Hah!  I see I have had 130 hits today on a blog the has been  moribund for nearly two years.

On review of my Facebook stuff, I can see that I have been trying to blog over there.  I think it may be easier to link to FB now than it was a couple of years ago.  That being the case I just might start blogging again, with FB links.

But not today. Still thinking about it.

To My Readers, if Any There Be...

The answer is I'm fine, thanks for askin.' Just that my blogging tastes seem to have changed, at least for the moment. Maybe they'll change again. In the meantime, if I feel I have something to say, I suppose I will post it here but then link it over to my Facebook page. If you'd care to try to follow me on Facebook, here's a link (I also have a Twitter account but it is even more dormant than this--I really do not get Twitter).

The already-published stuff will, of course, stay up.

From the Inbox

From her corner office in New York’s Rockefeller Center, [Rebecca Patterson] the chief investment officer of Bessemer Trust Co. is putting $55.7 billion in client assets under geopolitical stress. ... 

Patterson joined Bessemer, the world’s third largest multi-family office, from JPMorgan Chase & Co. two years ago. The average family has $43 million in assets under supervision at Bessemer and the wealth of its founder, steel-mogul Henry Phipps and his descendants, remains the largest  ... 

Phipps founded Bessemer in 1907 to manage his wealth after selling his interest in Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan. The company is named after Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the steel-making process that was instrumental to the success of Carnegie Steel, according to Bessemer’s website. The closely held firm opened to other families in 1974 and now has about 2,200 clients, according to the website. It offers services including investments, estate planning and tax advice, and supervises $97.5 billion in total assets.

Link.

Meanwhile...

But Ferguson has also been home to dramatic economic changes in recent years. The city’s unemployment rate rose from less than 5 percent in 2000 to over 13 percent in 2010-12. For those residents who were employed, inflation-adjusted average earnings fell by one-third. The number of households using federal Housing Choice Vouchers climbed from roughly 300 in 2000 to more than 800 by the end of the decade. 

Amid these changes, poverty skyrocketed. Between 2000 and 2010-2012, Ferguson’s poor population doubled. By the end of that period, roughly one in four residents lived below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012), and 44 percent fell below twice that level. 

Link.

Shakespeare the Player

Well, here's a blessing.  I'd call it an unbought grace, except that I bought it, in a used bookstore, on impulse.  That is: Shakespeare the Player, subtitled "A Life in the Theatre," a book by one John Southworth, hitherto unknown to me who, if I have the right IMDb  page, hoofed it out through a lifetime of mostly second-tier assignments as stage and screen actor (IMDb says he died in 2004).   The career context is important because what we have here is a man with a message, or a mission: arraying himself against a formidable (albeit not unanimous) phalanx of contrary critics, Southworth wants to put the theatre at the center of Shakespeare's universe, and to put the Shakespeare at the center of the theatre--to make him a working actor who got into playwrighting because the company needed a material, not merely a playwright who traded pen for buskin just to fill up an idle hour.

This book must have been a labor of love, perhaps not unlike his acting career. So far as I can tell, the academics never took him seriously (returning his own favor) and I don't suppose many of his fellow actors were willing to give much time to what is, at the end of the day, a pretty dense book.  Southworth may not be a scholar but he has done a scholar's job of combing the record for any forgotten bauble that might adorn his argument.  He does what he can to demonstrate not merely that Shakespeare was an actor, but rather also to to identify the parts he played and (sometime) why.  Most of this is near-bald speculation which any anonymous reviewer would have savaged on his first read.  But most of the guesses strike me as pretty shrewd and I am delighted to take them in default of a better.  He also offers up 10 pages of excerpts to show how the young Shakespeare early in his career echoed so many of the playwrights around him. Not plagiarism: precisely not. Southworth's point is rather more that if you live in that world (memorizing whole globs of stuff and playing a different play every night), you were bound to riff on habits of speech that you heard from those around you.

All of which builds up to the takeaway argument at the center of the book. The question is the old favorite: what was Shakespeare doing in the "lost 80s," when the trail goes cold in Stratford, years before it warms up again in London.   Southworth's answer: no, not that Shakespeare was a sailor, a soldier, a spy a servant in a great house.  No: Southworth argues that he was right there in the theatre, learning his own trade.

I have to confess this suits my own prejudice nicely.  I never thought to make the point as strongly as Southworth. But it has long struck me that Shakespeare almost from the beginning--in Henry Vii, say--seems to know stuff that an outsider wouldn't know.  He might not have reached full maturity as a poet (though Southworth thinks a lot of this stuff is better than it gets credit for). But he knows theatre stuff: he knows how to do theatre stuff: how to shape a scene how to get characters on or off stage.  So far, so good. Southworth's point is that he cannot have learned that kind of stuff on the fly in a few months. It's the kind of skill you build up only through long experience under careful tutelage.  Southworth argues that Shakespeare's situation suggests exactly that: entirety plausible (uh oh) that he  honed his skill by the tedious practice of stuff that actors do

I guess I can understand why this book wasn't a natural hit, not even among the enthusiasts: too jaunty for the academics, too dense for those who have to go rehearse their lines.  But it's a compelling story, carefully documented which goes far to make Shakespeare's world even more three-dimensional than it might have been already.