In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally I may add a section or a link related to books.
Just Finished:
Death in the City of Light by David King- The story of French serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot. I stopped off just when the trial began. This was my primary reading focus for the past week.
I will admit to being a bit confused when an accused serial killer did everything in the courtroom from snarking the lawyers and the judge to telling a guard, “Fuck you” in open court!
I completely forgot that France (and most of the world, for that matter) use an inquisitorial legal system as opposed to the Anglo-American adversarial legal system. On one hand, a better explanation of what was taking place might have helped. On the other hand, as disorienting as it seemed, it actually did add color and suspense.
Apparently, the results of the two systems aren’t all that different but I do wonder whether, say, Orenthal James Simpson would have been found guilty under the inquisitorial system (where I think he would have been compelled to testify in a criminal trial under that system and he would have had to face quite a different jury). Or whether Oscar Pistorius would have been found innocent by a jury of his peers (SA, from what I can tell, seems to utilize a hybrid of both legal systems).
My interest in this book: Of course, Petiot’s crimes were, to say the least, horrific...even more so because some of his victims were Jews wanting to escape France, as they thought that Petiot was part of the Resistance (and that’s simply a special kind of unspeakable evil).
But what does something like “unspeakable evil” even mean in the context of the Nazi Occupation and the crimes of the Gestapo? What does terminology like “French criminal underworld” even mean in this type of world? Some of these French criminals became collaborators under the Vichy government. If French criminals (esp. those that became collaborators) had been his only victims, would Petiot have gotten off (he did, after all, admit to those killings)? Petiot thrived in this environment of the systemic evils of Vichy/ Gestapo Paris every bit as much as Jeffrey Dahmer thrived on the systemic racism in American society and law enforcement.
An appendix of, say, a primer in French criminal procedure would have been helpful as well as a some of the actual sensational news stories (King does provide ample notes and references for these) and maybe even a transcript of certain key moments in the trial. Overall, a very interesting and really good read. I almost want to reread Jean Genet, now.
Now reading:
The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States by H.L. Mencken- Found a fifty cent copy of the 4th edition of this Mencken classic at my local library. Reading the 4th edition introduction, where it seems that Mencken’s efforts were a lot like what I read in The Professor and the Madman. I will go through this one veeeeeeery slowly...about 50 pages a week, or so.
Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball by Onaje X. O. Woodbine- The writer, a former Yale University basketball player and currently an Instructor in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Phillips Academy Andover, approaches street basketball in the Roxbury section of Boston from a spiritual point of view as opposed to the (quite tired) sociological POV. the narratives are pretty good thus far. A little bit too much academic jargon for the subject matter, to me, although it isn’t overwhelming.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace- The final and unfinished novel of David Foster Wallace (who committed suicide in 2008)...just got to the part about the man who died getting sandwiched in the --el doors...yeah I do remember struggling through the first 100 pages of this now.
Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is next.
And I’ll be re-reading my heavily annotated copy of Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I want to re-read the section on pedantry, which seems sorely lacking in 21st century conservatives; at least the Birchites of old had wackadoodle sources that they could cite and take out of context. Even that veneer of respectability is gone, nowadays.