An Unkindness of Ravens (book review)

    Ruth Rendell. An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) A late entry in the Det. Inspector Wexford series. A neighbour’s husband goes missing, two months later a dog digs up the body. He’s a bigamist, supposedly with a lech for young girls. And so on. A well done puzzle with enough red herrings to stock a fish farm. Feminism, incest, Jenny Burden’s pregnancy, Reg and Dora’s visits to the theatre to watch their daughter perform, tennis matches, a second murder, an attempted murder, ravens with women’s heads printed on T-shirts, and wet weather all figure in the story.
     Uncharacteristically for a Wexford, twisted psychology motivates the crimes. A pleasant enough entertainment. **½

A Flea in Jesus's Ear

    Karl Heinrich Waggerl. Und Es Begab Sich (And it Came to Pass) (1953) A collection of very short tales around the birth of Jesus Christ. A flea that creeps into Jesus’s ear and tickles him. A shepherd boy who show the baby Jesus how to suck his thumb. Etc. Waggerl was known for his sentimental stories; his style is that of the story-teller, albeit somewhat more formal than we now expect. The little book is nicely decorated with coloured wood cuts. I received it as a gift a few decades ago, and will pass it on. **

Ask the Cards a Question, the Answer is Murder

    Marcia Muller. Ask the Cards a Question (1982) Nice little potboiler in which PI Sharon McCone deals with an alcoholic friend, two murders in her apartment block, her intermittent relationship with Lt Greg Marcus, theft, a couple of sad sack husbands, and so on. Well plotted, undemanding narration, with a bit more edginess would make a good TV series. The title refers to two kinds of cards, one of which is the clue to the motive that leads to the murderer. I like this series, but don’t go out of my way to find the book. **

Candide, a puppet

     Voltaire. Candide (1759. This edition, 1930, Illustrated Editions Co, New York) I first read this book some 50 years ago, and couldn’t remember a single thing about it. In fact, I knew the famous “Let us tend our gardens” line that ends it only from 3rd party discussions and references. So you may think that re-reading would be a revelation.
     Well, the revelation is the reason that the book was a blank: it’s the most boring, uninvolving, mechanically constructed “story” I’ve ever read. I suppose in its day it was daring, provoking, a poke in the complacent citizen’s eye, an insult to the philosophers, and so on. But that’s just a reminder that there wasn’t much reading matter available in Voltaire’s day, and the average was pretty low. It didn’t take much to effort to jump over the bar, and Voltaire did not exert himself. Or else the book proves that fiction is somewhat more difficult than essays.
     I just didn’t care about Candide or any of the other characters. It’s clear I was supposed to react to the horrible things that were done by various evildoers, and to laugh at Candide’s naive insistence that despite these horrors the world was the best it could be, and so on. But the characters are mere ciphers. They are satirical theses with labels attached.
     Compare Candide with Gulliver’s Travels, published about 30 years earlier, and known to Voltaire. What a difference. Gulliver, a naif like Candide, is fully rounded. We believe Gulliver’s reactions and feelings because they spring from his character. What’s more, he changes. He moves from one naivete (that the world is as it should be) to another (that there’s nothing good in the world).  Candide is a badly made puppet, and Voltaire an unskilled puppeteer. Voltaire is also inconsistent: people cheerfully steal the treasures Candide brings back from Eldorado, cheat him when he sells parts of it, renege on their promises, but he always has a few more diamonds to sell. Why doesn’t someone just beat him up and rifle through his pockets? In the fantastic world that Voltaire has posited, that omission is flat out incredible.
      I took four evenings to get through this book. Overrated. *

The Polaroid SX-70

An ad in the May 1975 Esquire says "Polaroid's SX-70. It won't let you stop." Right. If you could afford it. In today's money, each print cost $2 to $3. Way beyond the average person's disposable income bracket. But when digital photography became cheaper and better than film, that promise was fulfilled.

A lot of analogue tech of the 60s, 70s and 80s prefigured digital tech. Or: Digital tech to a very large extent fulfills the yearnings and promises that anlaogue couldn't.

On reading old magazines

Recently, I discovered three boxes of magazines from the 1970s that we’d moved from our old house to this one over 30 years ago. They’re headed for the recycle box, but I decided to look through them first. I found time machines. The magazines are Saturday Night (Canadian, published from 1897 to 2005), Esquire (American, still published), and Omni (American, 1978-1995). I’ve been (re-)reading Saturday Night and Esquire.

Some impressions: I’m surprised, but shouldn’t be, how quickly celebrities fade. Very few writers (for example) that seemed so important 40 years ago are still read these days. Hemingway may stand for writers who are important because they articulate the anxieties of the time in a way that feels authentic to their readers. Now they are of historic interest, and nostalgia triggers for the elderly, who vaguely recall the intensity of reading those books. But attempts at rereading them usually fail. I couldn’t get past the first half-page of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, for example.

The same is true of movies: Godard, Truffaut and others of the French New Wave Cinema had a huge influence on movie-making, but my vague recall of their films doesn’t translate into a desire to see them again.

But politics have staying power. The same issues that propelled Trump to the White House were the stuff of comment and argument in the 1970s. Some writers (Kenneth Galbraith chief among them) warned that capitalism was morphing into something destructive. “Trickle down economics” was a fraud perpetrated on the voters, as was globalism. Both were used as covers for a massive transfer of wealth to the 1%. The magazines offer both starry-eyed defences of these new economic arrangements, and dire warnings. The left-right divide was not yet as strong as it is now; “liberal” was still a positive label. But “new” conservatives were gaining respectability. Terrorism came mostly from the far left, not the far right.

One of the most prescient articles is “A Few Lessons in History from Harry Truman”, by Merle Miller (Esquire, January 1973). Miller provides extended quotes from a series of interviews, done as preparation for a biography. Truman was a reader, as a boy he “always had his nose in a book.” He knew American history and the Constitution probably better than any President before or since. The article summarises his views of the Presidents; his judgments are blunt. Most relevant for today:

Miller: I gather you think the system can take a bad President now and again and still survive. Truman: Maybe so, and [Taft] might have been a good one, but I’m talking about the Presidency of the United States. And the fact that during the four years Taft was in the White House the country started going to hell.

It went to hell because the “money men” got hold of the government. Taft’s economic policy was trickle down without that name. In general, Truman sees the political divide in the USA as between the money-men and the people. Recent events confirm his view, I think.

Most ads were “lifestyle”. Cigarettes and alcohol were sold as experience enhancers and status signifiers. Your choice showed that you were an expert of some kind. The same appeal to display in expertise shows up in the ads for amplifiers, speakers, cassette players, TVs, cars, clothes, travel destinations, all touted as must-have pleasure machines for the social striver. Ads are both more subtle and more blatant these days. Plain vanilla advertising has pretty well disappeared. But many ads back then were different only in the brand names. For example, brandy as a sign of taste and status: the ads not only make the same appeals, they look much the same, with a an elegant young man holding his snifter while a nubile female lounges at his feet holding hers. He’s looking straight out at you, it’s the power-stare. She’s looking up at him. The setting is some kind of semi-outdoor space with large windows and the kind of furniture that’s sold as increasing the elegance of a room.

Some of the tech was ahead of its time. “Quadraphonic” was an early attempt at what we now call surround sound. I heard a demo in a record store, it was awesome. But without at least four speakers, and the room to put them in, the effect was lost. That expense doomed it. There were small, pocket-sized 35mm cameras, but their small lenses limited their usefulness. And there was Polaroid’s SX-70, the best “instant camera” until digital cameras.

There’s fiction, too. In the mid-70s, both magazines published one or two stories per issue. Some of the authors have lasted (eg, Atwood), most were merely fashionable (eg, Barthelme), some were considered classics of the time (eg, O’Hara). About half are still readable. Most still had the kind of knotted plots that had become the standard for pulp-fiction, but mostly without the gore.

It was/is strange to read articles about current events and issues that I now think of as history. That’s perhaps the greatest charm of old magazines. There’s an online Esquire Archive. One month free, then $4.99/month, about half the single copy price.

2017-03-10