Dave Cooks the turkey and other mishaps (Home From the Vinyl Café, 1998)

Stuart McLean. Home from the Vinyl Café. (1998) The second collection. It begins with Dave Cooks The Turkey, which has become a fixture on CBC's  As It Happens during the week leading up to Christmas Eve, when they play Alan Maitland reading The Shepherd. It’s as funny on the page as in the audio. The rest of the stories are the same quality. They have the ring of truth, no matter how bizarrely the situation develops. As in Laurel and Hardy movies each consequence follows logically from the previous one, driven by circumstances and character, and ends in bizarre catastrophe. The stories are also elegies for a way of life that’s past, a way of life that never existed, except in the rosy-dark memories of our childhoods and youth. Nostalgia is the common leavening of these tales. They evoke wry smiles and bitter-sweet memories.

Recommended. ****

Travels Across Canada: Stuart McLean's Welcome Home (1992)

Stuart McLean. Welcome Home. (1992) McLean took a few trips across the country, and stayed in several small towns. Then he wrote this elegy for what was already rapidly disappearing 30+ years ago. It’s pretty well gone.

Relevant anecdote: In 2023, we had a family reunion in Donalda, Alberta. The town no longer has a grocery store. It does have a hotel with a bar and a restaurant that serves meals on weekends. When I first went there in the 1950s, the town had a bank, a couple of service stations, a dairy, a grocery store, a school, a railroad line that served the grain elevators, and so on. Most of the businesses are gone or have been converted into homes. The town is now a suburb for Camrose, about 3/4 hour away, a typical commute these days. They have a community hall, where the local caterers served us several excellent meals. We had a good time.

McLean has the gift of the telling detail that concentrates the meanings of his story in one memorable moment. The people in these towns know that their way of life is ending, but they refuse to capitulate. Community is strong, and as long as you have family and friends, life is worth living. It's over thirty years since McLean's tour of Canada. It would be a gift for another one, but I don't know of anyone who could do it.

Highly recommended. ****

Cooperman and the TV Business (The Cooperman Variations, 2001)

Howard Engel. The Cooperman Variations. (2001) Benny Cooperman’s languishing from a lack of love (Anna is in Europe) and lack of work. High school not-quite-flame Stella Moss shows up and hires him as a bodyguard. She’s now Vanessa Moss, head of Entertainment at NTC TV network. The puzzle is, Who has been trying to kill her, and will they try again? The usual complications ensue. There are a few more murders, and it’s all tied up when Cooperman is nearly done in himself, on a sailboat yet (a near-death experience telegraphed so strongly that telling it here is no spoiler.) 

Engel, who had some first-hand experience of the business, has concocted a nicely done satire (or is it an exposé?) of the TV business. It could well be that several of the characters are based on CBC/CTV/Global people, but who am I to untangle those clues? As happens in most of Engel’s books, the past casts a long shadow over the present. Engels’ strengths are characterisation and social ambience. He writes a soft-boiled style that nicely conveys Cooperman’s schlemielness. The title is a rather laboured pun.

A couple of the books were made into TV movies starring Saul Rubinek; look for them on YouTube. Pity that there wasn’t a series. I like these books. *** 

Kinsey and Me: Grafton tells all. Almost. (2013)

 

Grafton. Kinsey & Me. (2013) And introduction by Grafton, which comes as close any author can to explain the source of fictions, followed by several short stories about Kinsey Millhone, not especially memorable, and a series of interlocked semi-fictions based on Grafton’s life. These are memorable,

Grafton had a difficult childhood, as the phrase goes these days. There’s no doubt that this shaped her moral altitudes, which of course spill over into Millhone’s uncompromising attitude to evil, and the compromises she sometimes makes with the law in order to achieve justice. Insofar as justice can be achieved. Crime fiction trades on our yearning for moral balance, and the best crime fiction reminds us that it’s at best precarious and always a little off.

A brief essay on the evolution of the hard-boiled P.I. genre is worth reading both as a defence of the genre and for insight into how women have improved it.

A necessary book for Grafton’s fans, and interesting both for fans of crime fiction and those who are curious about the intersection of life and art. ***

S Is the Self Real? (Hood, The Self Illusion, 2012)

 Bruce Hood. The Self Illusion. (2012) An excellent overview of the implications of neurological

research on questions of awareness, both of the external world and of the self. Hood’s reporting of the research is IMO fair, based on my (gappy) knowledge derived from reading several dozen miscellaneous sources.

I think that the term “illusion” is unfortunate, since it suggests that the Self is not real. It is as real as all the other simulations generated by the brain. I note that the Self is centred on the body, and that my sensations of my body’s shape and colour etc are the same kind as my sensations of the shapes and colours of other bodies and objects in the world around me. So I conclude that these sensations are simulations, not illusions. As simulations, they must match reality well enough that I can do whatever it takes to survive and procreate. Evolution rewards mechanisms that enable those processes, so I conclude that the simulation my brain creates is good enough for those purposes.

Study of other organisms has revealed that their senses are not exactly the same as ours, so presumably their simulations of reality are different. This stance suggests that the famous conundrum about what it’s like to be a bat can be reframed as not knowing what a bat’s simulation of reality is like. But then we can’t know exactly what another human’s simulation is like either. A favourite question of my students was “How do we know that we see red the same way?” The answer is, we don’t. But we can tell whether we see the same differences between red and green. If we don’t, the we agree that one of us is red-green colour blind.

This principle of comparing perceptions underlies all scientific research. Science has expanded from describing and classifying perceptions to recording measurements and devising mathematical models that predict the measurements. If we record the same measurements, then presumably we have stumbled on some constant in the simulations, and may infer that this implies some constant aspect of reality.

Hood spends some time discussing free will, and concludes that free will is also an illusion. There is no free will because all decisions are determined by a multiplicity of factors, starting with how our genes and environments interact to produce our individual brains. He reports cases of how tumours have changed people’s personalities and perceptions, and how removing the tumours has changed people more or less to back to what they were. It’s clear that if perceptions and altitudes change when the brain is damaged in some way then the notion of free-willed choice becomes questionable at least. That’s important because of our assignment of moral and hence sometimes of criminal guilt.

It seems to me that this approach to the free will problem misses the point. As framed, there is no way to distinguish between a freely willed and a determined choice. Both ways of choosing finally depend on preferences. Reasoning cannot choose, it can only present options. Whether our brain simulates a free choice, or we actually perform one, the result is the same. For free choice will act on options exactly like determined choice. Basically, we choose. Hood argues that insight into factors that influence or determine choice, and the extent to which the chooser cannot control them, should guide our notions of guilt and responsibility. I think he’s right.

All in all, a book well worth reading. ****

Dyer foresees the Future (Future: Tense, 2004)

 Gwynne Dyer.  Future: Tense (2004)

I’ve watched a video of Dyer making the same points as he makes here: Terrorists cause very little damage compared to other risks, but because they choose their targets carefully, they get an enormous amount of publicity. They also get a disproportionate response. These two effects make terrorists seem more dangerous than they are, help spread their ideologies. and lend legitimacy to their claims of political importance. The ripple effects are increased risks of wars between nations.

The context of Dyer’s remarks is the Middle East, the economic and political decline of the Muslim world, and the rise of the West. (An irony he doesn’t emphasise is that the Islamic terrorist groups are incapable of making the weapons systems they use, which they buy from Western sources).

Dyer makes a few predictions, which have failed only in details such as timing and who did what to whom. The general forecast, that the Middle East is the most likely place for triggering a world-wide war, seems at present only to prescient. He also called for a stronger consensus that such a war must be avoided. We can only hope that such a consensus will stop and reverse the current escalation of the quarrel between Israel and Iran.

Dyer says that the Israel helped Hamas establish itself, calculating that political rivalry with the PLO would prevent the Palestinians from achieving their goal of nationhood. The Wiki article on Hamas does state that “Numerous Islamist leaders, including senior Hamas founder Mahmoud Zahar, met with Yitzhak Rabin as part of "regular consultations" between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO.[27]”, which supports Dyer’s claim.

The “new world order” foreseen by Dyer is a shifting in the economic and military balance between the US, Russia and China, expressed in part by proxy wars and skirmishes. Most of those will be in the Muslim world. Terrorism will continue to be a useful bogeyman for any politician who needs some street-cred. In other words, business as usual. Dyer did not foresee Putin’s rise and his goal to Make Russia Great Again.

Dyer is a dispassionate observer of power politics. Power hunger is a widespread human trait. There’s an equally wide-spread hunger for rule by a powerful leader, arising from the mistaken belief that only a strong leader can protect the tribe and keep order. That is one of the main drivers of war.

A book worth reading. ***

Millennium (Varley, 1983)

John Varley. Millennium. (1983) One of the best time-travel stories I’ve read. The frame is simple enough: In the far future, humans have adapted to the Earth they polluted, but those adaptations enable survival barely long enough to reproduce. Homo sapiens is dying out.

A Gate provides access to the past. It’s used to gather as many genetically strong humans as possible in order to send them off to a distant planet to start over and recreate human civilisation. The team grabs people who are about to die, thus preventing any disturbance of the time stream.

During a snatch of people from a plane about to crash, a stunner is left behind. It’s up to team leader Louise Baltimore to recover it. But Bill Smith, a smart investigator of plane crashes, notices something’s not quite right. Complications ensue.

Varley is an excellent narrator of the work of investigating plane crashes, and has invented plausible logistics of time travel and the reasons for the Project. His characterisation is good enough that we care for the people. Smith and Baltimore, the two main narrators, are both damaged by life and  circumstances, which makes their decisions and hence the results more believable.

Recommended. ***