Posts by Dr. Boli
ART CORNER.
NOT DEAD YET.
“The guy with the world’s biggest pick collection.”
“You mean the Archbishop of Canterbury?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy.”
“I’m not sure I can just get you an appointment with him.”
“Why not? You got me in to see that guy Rockefeller.”
“First of all, the Archbishop of Canterbury is usually on the other side of the Atlantic. I don’t know how much you remember from your geography classes, but the Atlantic is big. It’s a long walk, and you’d get your feet wet, and there’s no streetcar. And second, even if he were right next door, I don’t know whether he’d have time. He’s busy.”
“What’s he so busy with?”
“He’s archbishop of the whole Anglican Church! He has to do archbishopy things! I don’t know—visit the sick and quiz them on the Thirty-Nine Articles or something.”
“Well, see what you can do.”
“Fine. I’ll try telling him you’re an Orthodox patriarch who wants to convert.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the doorway.
We both turned to look. The voice proceeded from a small impeccably dressed man, maybe five foot two at the outside, with a beard and mustache waxed and trimmed to points that looked like they would cut glass.
“Excuse me, Mr. Marlow,” he repeated, slowly turning his hat in his hands. “I hope I am not intruding.”
“Not at all. Come on in.” It was kind of superfluous to say, since he was already in, but if he was a paying client I wanted his money to feel welcome.
“Thank you,” he said. “I hope not to take too much of your time, which I am sure is valuable. In fact, I believe we can come to an accommodation almost at once, if you are willing to see reason. I am prepared to offer you a very substantial sum if you will let me have the thing right now.”
“What thing is that?” I asked.
“Oh, really, Mr. Marlow! I had hoped you would not be coy. Coyness is unbecoming in a gentleman. We both know the thing I mean.”
“Well, maybe we do, but one of us forgot.”
“Stop beating around the bush!” Suddenly he was very agitated, and his English was betraying more of a foreign accent of some sort. “I do not like beating around the bush! I do not like bushes! I do not like beating! I will be quite straightforward with you, Mr. Marlow, and I ask for the same courtesy from you. I am prepared to offer you thirty-five dollars, in cash, right now, for the Croydon.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Please do not play games with me, Mr. Marlow. I have never liked games. They are a waste of time that could be devoted to more important things. The Croydon, Mr. Marlow, is one such more important thing. I will make you an offer of thirty-eight dollars and not a penny more. No: I am not being generous—I apologize—I am prepared to be generous. I will add the penny more. Thirty-eight dollars and one cent, Mr. Marlow, for the Croydon.”
“Look, pal, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wish I could help you, but—”
Suddenly he whipped out a pistol. “I told you I do not like games, Mr. Marlow. My employer is quite insistent. He will have the Croydon. I was prepared to purchase it from you, but I have no objection to using other means.”
“You really think that gun frightens him?” Betty asked.
“Betty,” I said quietly, “why don’t you let me decide for myself what frightens me?”
“Have you noticed that it’s purple?” Betty said.
“What?” I looked at the pistol again. “Say, is that—”
“Yes, Mr. Marlow,” said the little man. “This is a water pistol, and you will suffer the inconvenience of being moderately damp for half an hour or so unless you produce the Croydon immediately.”
“Well,” I said, stalling for time, “I’ll have to think that over.”
“Give me that,” said Betty, and she suddenly wrenched the pistol out of the man’s hand.
“Hey!” he said, but it was too late for his objections. Betty had him covered with his own water pistol.
“Now talk,” I told him with menace in my voice.
“I have been talking since I stepped into your office, Mr. Marlow. I have hardly paused, in fact. It is not necessary to have your minion point a weapon at me.”
“Minion!” Betty said. “I kind of like that. Sounds more formidable than secretary.”
I tried again. “I guess what I meant was, tell me what I want to know. Let’s start with the basics: who sent you?”
“He has many names,” said the little man.
“Let’s hear some of ’em.”
“His full name is Terence Arnold Carr-Handley-Forrest von Kügel Patterson de Vol McSweeney,” the little man said.
“That’s quite a name.”
“I told you he had many names. But he is known more commonly as the Professor.”
“What’s he a professor of?”
“He is a professor of many things. He has graduate degrees in—”
“Forget I asked. So what’s this Professor think he wants from me?”
“Really, Mr. Marlow, there is only one thing anyone could possibly want from you. No offense meant, of course, but—the Croydon, Mr. Marlow. I have offered to purchase it, and my offer stands. Others will be more—shall we say straightforward? You might do well to unburden yourself of the thing now, or you will certainly have visits from men who are less squeamish than I about violent measures. I make you a final offer, Mr. Marlow. Shall we say forty-three dollars? And seven cents? Forty-three dollars and seven cents would be quite enough to replace those somewhat less than respectable shoes of yours several times over. You would be happy in the possession of a new pair of shoes, and the Professor would be happy in the possession of a trinket that can be of no value to you, and I should be happy in the knowledge of a job well done, and when the news that the Croydon was in the Professor’s possession penetrated the world of connoisseurs, you would not be bothered with visits from what we might call unsavory characters. A simple transaction now will spare you much grief later: that is my advice to you, Mr. Marlow, and you would do well to take it.”
“Well, I haven’t got the trinket,” I told him, “so it looks like you’re wasting your time here. My advice to you is to look somewhere else.”
He was silent for a moment. It was practically the first time I’d seen his mouth closed. Then he scowled and said, “I see. This is the game you have decided to play. Well, sir, I shall inform my employer, and I must say he will be disappointed. I should not like to be in your shoes, Mr. Marlow.”
“Is that some kind of threat?”
“No. They are truly miserable shoes: that is all I am saying. How do you walk in them? I offered you the means of replacing them, but you chose to refuse my offer, and now you are stuck wearing truly miserable shoes for the indefinite future.”
Betty uncorked the water pistol and dumped the water into the philodendron on the windowsill. Then she handed the gun back to our visitor. “But before you go,” she said as he was taking it, “I have one question for you. What is this Croydon you want so much?”
The little man pocketed his water pistol and smiled an enigmatic smile. “Mr. Marlow will inform you,” he said, and he plopped his hat on his head and walked out.
“Okay,” Betty said to me when he was gone, “so what’s the Croydon?”
“I have no idea,” I told her.
“Then why didn’t you ask him?”
“And have him think I’m an idiot? No thanks.”
“He already thinks that.”
“Seems to me I’ve heard the name before, though. Croydon… Was it a brand of watch?”
I was having some second thoughts while I was walking home that night. Forty-three dollars would have bought me a couple of really good pairs of shoes, and seven cents would have got me a phone call and two licorice sticks. If I could just think of some way of coming up with a Croydon, whatever that was, I could sell it to that little guy and solve a lot of problems at once. Maybe I could have a look through the old issues of Popular Mechanics at the library and see if they told you how to build a Croydon.
I had just about got as far as the door of my apartment building when a figure stepped out of the shadows.
“Stick ’em up,” the figure said. He was holding something in his right hand, but the light was behind him, and I could only see shadows.
“Is that a water pistol?” I asked.
“Don’t be a wise guy,” said the silhouette. “Hands in the air.”
“If you’re here to tell me not to ask so many questions, I’ve already got that written down on a piece of paper somewhere.”
“You know what I want from you. Fork it over.”
“You want a fork?”
“The Croydon, you numbskull. Give it to me now, or I’ll—”
“Stick ’em up,” said a voice from the darkness, and another shadowy figure appeared.
“Which one of us are you talking to?” I asked. As I said before, it pays to be thorough and precise.
“Both o’ youse. Hands in the air. I’m takin’ that Croydon, and you better be quick about it, or I’ll—”
“Hands up, all three of you,” said another voice, and another silhouette appeared behind the first two. “Now make with the Croydon, and make it snappy. I don’t want to have to—”
“Hands in the air!” said another voice. “I’m the one who’s going to—”
“Schtop in tze name off tze law!” came a loud voice from up the street.
“The cops!” said someone, and all the silhouettes scrambled and vanished in different directions.
In their place was the familiar pear-shaped outline of our usual beat cop.
“Platnauer!” I said. “I sure am glad to see you!”
“Faitz und begorrah, Herr Marlow! Who vass tzose men mit tze pistols?”
“Don’t know ’em,” I said, “but they seem to think I’ve got something they want.”
“Sure und ’tiss a fine tzing venn ein mann can’t valk down hiss own schtreet, bechabbers!”
“Ain’t it, though? Lucky you came along when you did.”
“Ja, tzat it iss. But if you vill pardon ein vort off advice, you ought to lay off tze picks, bedatt!”
“How do you know about that?”
“Vort gets arount,” he said with a wink. “Top o’ tze evening to you, Herr Marlow.”
He turned and walked away, spinning his nightstick.
I walked up the three flights of stairs to my apartment thinking that this case was getting deeper by the minute.
The phone was ringing as I opened my door. I picked it up.
A woman’s voice came out of the earpiece.
“My husband is missing,” she said.
SPEAKING OF ROBERT LUDLUM…
THE CATILINE CONSPIRACY.
The Catiline conspiracy is one of the most dramatic episodes in Roman history, because Cicero made sure we would remember it that way. Boissier’s specialty was bringing Roman history to life, and his portrait of Cicero is delightful. All the great characters—the haughty villain Catiline, the old grump Cato, the disappointed and cynical Sallust, the ruthlessly focused Caesar—are painted in indelible colors.
Until now, though, the book has never been available in English, even though several other books by Boissier were quite successful in English translation. Dr. Boli has remedied that omission for you, and once again our friends at Serif Press were kind enough to allow the preface to be reprinted here.
Gaston Boissier was known and loved in his time for his ability to make ancient history come alive for us. A writer of today, setting that as his goal, would probably write his history like a popular novel, with a straightforward narrative and short chapters with cliffhanger endings. Boissier takes almost exactly the opposite approach. He builds piles of fascinating little details; he takes amusing and enlightening detours to explore a character or a custom; he carefully lays out how he has come to his conclusions—all in a conversational style that soon makes us regard him as an old friend. A book by Boissier is an evening in front of the fire with a brilliant historian who loves his subject and is delighted to find someone to talk to about it.
Because Boissier writes conversationally, his personality comes through everywhere. He was in his early eighties when he wrote The Catiline Conspiracy, which came out in 1906; with a bit of subtraction, we can calculate that he lived through a very eventful period in French history. Marie-Louis-Antoine-Gaston Boissier (to give his full name, which we promise to do only this once) was born in 1823, so we can be sure that he remembered the June Rebellion of 1832; the attempted assassination of Louis Philippe in 1835; the February Revolution of 1848, and the revolutions of the same year all over Europe; Napoleon III’s coup and the establishment of the Second Empire; the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the Bloody Week; and the Dreyfus Affair. In addition, the papers brought daily news of socialist protests and anarchist outrages. Boissier was not wrong to compare this lifelong instability with the last decades of republican Rome—the more so because the characters in French history were constantly comparing themselves with the characters in Roman history. Napoleon III, in particular, thought of himself as the heir of Julius Caesar, and wrote a biography of Caesar that Boissier found a little naive.
Boissier’s attitude to all this tumult is, we are tempted to say, typically French. He is at heart a conservative, but he accepts turbulence with a Gallic shrug as the price of freedom. Given that it is inevitable, we can at least gain something from it by applying it to our understanding of the past.
This is really the secret of Boissier’s success as a historian. It is his creed that “Man changes only on the surface. We often run to doubtful and distant documents for explanations of events in the ancient world, when it would suffice to look around us to understand them.” The people of ancient Rome are just like us; they have different costumes and different customs, but the fundamental human motivations are the same. Therefore, once we know what their customs and costumes were, we can know them as well as we know our neighbors.
Many of Boissier’s works were translated into English shortly after they were published—including a book about Cicero and His Friends, which necessarily covered some of the same ground as this book. As far as we know, though, The Catiline Conspiracy (La Conjuration de Catilina) has never appeared in English before. This is therefore the place for your translator to make the usual excuses: that he undertook this work because better translators had neglected it; that he knows he has not done justice to the original, but any kind of Boissier in English is better than no Boissier at all; and that he offers his own labor as a small tribute to the many hours of entertainment M. Boissier has given him.
As for the method of this translation, it hardly has any. The intent is to give Boissier’s book in as close to the original form as possible, but in English rather than French. It was tempting to add some notes for modern readers about the French history to which Boissier sometimes refers; but to weigh down the text with notes would be to interrupt our conversation with M. Boissier, and the book’s conversational style is one of its chief attractions. Even this preface is perhaps more of an indulgence than the translator ought to have permitted himself; and having made that observation, he is glad to bring it to an end and leave you to a very pleasant evening with the distinguished French gentleman who is waiting for you by the fire.
Order The Catiline Conspiracy at Amazon. It is available in paperback or, for only a few dollars more, in a durable casebound hardback edition that may also be used for self-defense.
ASK DR. BOLI.
How do I build trust in my organization?
Be trustworthy.
What can I do to empower employees?
Figure out what your employees can do without your intervention, and then don’t intervene while they’re doing it.
How do I improve morale in the workplace?
Try money.
How do I energize my employees?
Employees are not electrical appliances or rechargeable batteries, so they do not need to be energized. If you give them tasks that use their talents and sufficient time to do them well, you will find that they have all the energy they need.
How can I improve my employees’ communication skills?
Try talking to them in English or whatever language they speak at home. If you are a native speaker of jargon, this may require considerable retraining on your part.
How can I drive prioritization and reimagine the workplace to support true flexibility and bridge the physical and digital divide to put everyone on the same page?
You see, this is what we meant about retraining.
I’ve heard that it’s good, for some reason, if employees thrive. How do I make them thrive, and how do I punish the ones who refuse to thrive?
Your employees are probably never going to thrive, so you needn’t worry about it.
I was thinking of using games to build trust, teamwork, and morale in my team. Do you have any suggestions?
Yes. Do not allow your “team” to discover where you live, and invest in a good home alarm system.
HOW WE SPENT 2022, AND WHY WE CARE.
In January, we explored A Remarkable Example of Crank Linguistics.
In February we learned about some Failed Inventions.
March being a good month for spotting weather, we were invited to a Free Weather Spotter Training Class.
In April, a Microsoft technician kindly answered for us some Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft Windows.
In May, we discovered an ancient Hittite inscription by King Warpalarpa of Tuwanuwa, whose name is not funny at all.
June brought an opportunity to Test Your Maketing Acumen so that you can see whether you are, in fact, responsible for the approaching revolution.
July brought us our first introduction to Mush Marlow, Private Investigator.
In August we delved into the mysteries of Cuba-You-Quit Way.
In September, the Dialogue of the Spider and the Fly explained, in a metaphorical way, how the Internet works.
October brought us The Adventures of Adventure Man facing pirates and Nazis and flying saucers and sea monsters, so, in other words, pretty much an average day.
In November, we had a chance to read Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle’s most popular poem to date: “If I Had a Time Machine.”
In December, we learned something about how Americans read the Bible from a loaf of bread.
Now onward into 2023, where we might promise you new and exciting things to read, but we would be lying. It will be more of the same.
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UNDERSTANDING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
Perhaps it would be easier for us to understand if we could find some analogue in our own world—some class of contemporary aristocrats who blindly toddle on into the apocalypse, honestly believing that the laboring classes are completely contented with their leadership. A class like, for example, business-school graduates.
Thus we turn to the Microsoft 365 Blog. Here are a few of the recent posts listed on the front page.
Build connections with Games for Work, a new Microsoft Teams app
Managers everywhere are struggling to find solutions to building trust, teamwork, and improving morale within their organization. Many are turning to games for help.
Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide
We are honored to announce that Gartner® has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Magic Quadrant™ report.
Empower and energize employees with Microsoft Viva
Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Microsoft Viva with new apps and services that help companies address the three business imperatives from our latest Work Trend Index Pulse Report, to empower and energize employees to do meaningful work in an uncertain economic environment.
5 ways Microsoft Viva helps businesses save time and money
A new Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Viva study by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Microsoft, details five ways Microsoft Viva can help organizations save time and money while improving business outcomes.
Why Microsoft 365 is teaming up with OREO THINS to give you a break
Breaks during the workday are essential to our well-being. That’s why Microsoft 365 and OREO THINS are teaming up to create the THINVITE, a 15-minute snack break delivered straight to your calendar.
Qu’ils mangent des Oreos! Now you understand how aristocracies can become so separated from the daily reality of ordinary existence that a cataclysm like the French Revolution becomes inevitable. And now you understand how close the next such cataclysm is.
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COMING ATTRACTION.
NOW HERE! Order The Catiline Conspiracy at Amazon.