Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)

 Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock at McGill, and Ward at U of Saskatchewan. Like Leacock’s, Ward’s humour is witty and sly. Like Leacock, he cultivates an naive avuncular persona, so one lets down one’s guard. Then they slide in the rapier and skewer the target. For example:
     I have no particular reason to be prejudiced against goats and monkeys, for my first hand contacts with them have been limited to those in a life limited spent largely among politicians and university  professors...
     You can see, I hope, why Ward is my kind of humourist. My copy, a Christmas gift some years ago, is a reprint by the Western Producer, a weekly published in Saskatchewan to provide information, instruction and amusement to farmers and their families. Sometime in the 1970s or 80s, they began a program of reprinting books relevant to the Western Provinces. Ward received the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1961.

      About the title: Ward was delivering empty bottles to the local bottle depot. The gentleman who received his offerings mentioned that he found a lot of mice in the empty beer bottles. It seems they crawled in to enjoy the leftover dribbles left  They avoided wine, however, perhaps because stale wine sours.

     Recommended. ****

Losers that Win: Morley Callghan Stores

 Morley Callaghan. The Lost and Found Stories (1985) A conversation between Morley Callaghan and his son Barry led to the discovery of a box of manuscripts “up there with the bills.” Callaghan apparently dumped all his bills into a box. I don’t know how he settled his debts. Barry sorted through the manuscripts and selected 26. My copy is a reprint.
I enjoyed these tales in an often gloomy kind of way. Callaghan worked as a reporter, so he saw a lot of losers. Most news is about someone messing up. I think this enabled him to imagine stories about ordinary people.
     The characters in these stories achieve at least a kind of insight, and often slightly larger victories, such as mended relationships, or escapes from the life-destroying consequences of a more or less unwittingly bad decision. Callaghan writes a plain style, reporting rather than telling the tale. Only his assumption of omniscience raises these tales above news reports. Not that any of them would qualify as printable news. The fates of ordinary people facing everyday dilemmas aren’t exciting enough for newsprint.
     It’s Callaghan’s insight into how people feel and think that makes these stories worth reading. That, and Callaghan’s generally amiably charitable attitude towards the failings of his fellow humans. Underneath that attitude there’s what I now think is a typically Canadian ruthlessness of observation. Like Munro, Govier and others, Callaghan doesn’t try to make his characters nice people.
     Recommended. ***

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all expect the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the limited data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

New Blog: Kirkwood Tales

I've created a new blog for my stories etc. It's called Kirkwood Tales  The Page Stories  and Other Fictions on this blog will be transferred to the new blog.

New Blog: Meditations

I've decided to move all my sermons to a new blog. Its name is Kirkwood-Meditations. I hope it will be helpful and interesting.

Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***

I'm an old man now (A poem)

 A Poem

I’m an old man now.
The weight of my memories
bears down on my days.
The truck there carries freight,
I carry my thoughts.
They pool like a lake.
The wind fractures the past.

The news showed a broken building
sliding into the street like water.
Gravity pulls the water over the edge;
a missile nudged the wall into silence.

I don’t hear much these days, cunning devices
in my ears catch the sound as it passes,
add and subtract. The words gleam
like crystals. But it’s not the light
of insight that dazzles.
The years have carried me
past too much indifference.

I’m granted nonsense,
cool and joyful, foam on the lake,
nudged by the wind
towards the silent stony shore.

I hold the coffee cup
and gaze at the garden.
Daylilies gleam like words.
They will fade before nightfall.
They will not know the dark.

2023-06-23 & 08-04/2024-03-21

 © W. Kirchmeir