Please comment. Comments are moderated, so it may take a day or two for your comment to appear. Or send a mail to wolfmac@sympatico.ca If you quote, please also link to this blog. If you like this blog, please follow it. Highest review rating is four stars ****
The Winter Solstice has been marked in the Northern Hemisphere throughout human history, and certainly before. The feast celebrates the return of the Light, the victory over the darkness.
Whatever tradition guides your celebrations, I wish you all possible comfort and joy. My the Light that shines in each of us vanquish fear and give you hope.
Alan Vanterpool. Rivers & Rails (2014) A survey of bridges on the former Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific Railways, as well as the CPR’s High Level Bridge, and couple of road bridges within the city. The selection criterion was “Edmonton and district”, with a bit of stretch on the “district” part.
Basically, a catalogue raisonnée, with a diagram, statistics, and dates for each bridge, and whatever other data (location maps, photographs, news reports, etc) that Vanterpool was able to find. The photographs are generally too small, and at best adequately printed. The information seems to be as complete as Vanterpool could make it, with records of personal visits to some of the sites. The deeply-cut river valleys of the prairies required large bridges, which extended the technology of the time to its limits. Several were for a short time the longest and/or highest in the world. In short, they were pioneering efforts at spanning large valleys. A general essay introducing the book could have stressed this and other aspects of the history of bridge-building in western Canada.
Occasional Paper No. 1 of the Edmonton & District Historical Society. Worth having as data. **½
Peter Robinson. In A Dry Season (1999) Banks’s career is in bad shape, his marriage has just about fallen apart. Supt Riddle gives him the job of solving a very cold case when an imaginative boy seeking the Talisman finds a skeleton in the remains of a village long submerged under water but revealed when the reservoir dries up. Banks is assigned DS Annie Cabbot to assist him. The skeleton dates from the second World War, and bears signs of violence. Discovering the killer depends on the usual combination of carefully sifted and collated data, a couple of lucky breaks, and the imaginative empathic insight that Banks relies on to give him the necessary feel of the relationship between victim and killer.
The book is structured as a parallel narrative: one of the participants in those long-ago events has written a memoir-novel, which provides us, and eventually Banks and Cabbot, with part of the solution. The usual niggling details lead to the rest, justice is done, and some of the damage is healed.
An interesting experiment, this structure works reasonably well. I found the wartime story more than readable. I recall a few details of the last year of the war in Austria, and much more than a few details of post-war England, where we lived and visited between 1945 and 1954. That made Robinson’s evocation of war-time England more than a little engaging.
A well done novel, recommended. ***
Peter Robinson. Wednesday’s Child (1996) An early DCI Banks tale. A child goes missing, a gruesomely killed corpse is found above the town, DCI Banks and Supt Gristhorpe split the load, but the two cases converge (of course). The perp is a text-book psychopath. Robinson’s plotting is near immaculate.
I find these books a good read. Robinson’s ability to invest even secondary characters with enough suggestive detail for realism, and his leisurely but steady narrative pace make for a better than average entertainment. He keeps the gore to a minimum, sets the scenes well, and traces the twisting and turning and occasionally dead-ended path of the investigation clearly. Recommended, as is the TV series. ***
John Mortimer. Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2003) The last collection of short stories. Rumpole has recovered from his heart attack, but it takes some time for his career to restart. These tales show him in all his glory, objecting to and fighting against the inevitable miscarriages of justice caused by police tunnel vision and occasional corruption, presumptions of guilt by respectable lawyers who should be assuming the opposite, and biased judges. The impression that Mortimer is using Rumpole to vent his flustration at the misnamed justice system is stronger than ever. I won’t spoil you pleasure by recounting any of the tales. Buy or borrow the book, and enjoy finding out for yourself. For more information, check Wikipedia. Four novels were published after this last series of short stories.
Recommended ****
An ER nurse in South Dakota tweeted about some of her patients who deny they have covid-19.:
How does one react to this report? I can see that some people would deny their peril in any case. We don't want to face the near-certainty of death. But I suspect that most such denials would be versions of hope, a clinging to the near-zero chance of recovery. What this nurse reports is something else: denial triggered by politics, by ideological poison, by delusions promoted by a demagogue. What's worst about is that it prevents the comfort of family connection, of seeing and talking with loved ones.
Update: On reflection, I think that in these cases politics and ideology complicate what is a normal human reaction to the prospect of imminent death. I don' t think it's common, though.
Update 2021-09-09: I've now read stories about the Delta variant surge in Oregon and other places. The anecdotes are heartbreaking. Yet vaccine-denial and covid-denial continue, even in those places hardest hit by the latest surge in infections and death. The sad fact is that an unvaccinated person admitted to ICU has a less than 50% chance of surviving.
Comment on a report in New Scientist, October 31-November 6, 2020, pp. 10-13.
The latest data show that symptoms of covid-19 persist for up to four months in some people. Probably longer, as the study stopped at that point. The symptoms range from fatigue through “brain-fog” and memory loss through problems breathing. Blood clots threaten to provoke strokes. Headaches are common. Damage to heart, lungs, and other organs has been observed. Hospitalised people appear most likely to suffer these symptoms. The data are incomplete, but it’s likely that around 5% of people who recover from covid-19 will experience more or less serious symptoms two months or more after the onset of the infection.
I think that somewhere between one and five percent will suffer from “long covid”, defined as debilitating symptoms for two months or longer. That’s a serious consequence, since these people will need some continuing care, and/or accommodation at work. The more severe cases will be unable to work at all. The economic losses will be high, combining lost productivity and cost of care. Or, to put it another way: a significant proportion of human and other resources will be diverted from the usual economic activities.
Unanswered questions: Who is most likely to be affected, and why? What kinds of treatment will mitigate long covid? How long will it actually last?
Jeff Wilson. Basic Structure Modeling (2005) A well-done overview of the craft, with good co-ordination of text and photos. In the Olden Days, the photos would have been line-drawings. Each chapter deals with one main aspect (plastic kits, roofs, painting, etc). Wilson writes clearly, adding significant detail and tips in the right places, and cross-references to other chapters when the current topic skims over some important content.
Like any such book, best suited to the reader who has tried the craft and realises they need to know more. Wilson could have emphasised a couple of points, such as the need for painting both sides of wooden (and card) parts. I found it a welcome reminder and organiser of what I already knew, which added up to inspiration for building a couple more small cabins. Just need to decide on the colour first.... ***
Mark Hembree, ed. A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos (1991) An odd duck of a book. Four skilled photographers of model railroads (Dave Frary, Malcolm Furlow, John Olson, Paul Scoles) write about how they do it. Beautifully printed, deftly organised text, diagrams, and photos, a pleasure to look at, and to read if you want some insight and instruction. But the puzzle is, Who is the intended audience? Photographers who want to specialise in scale models? Scale modellers who want to take better photos?
The four photographers write well. They use 35 and large-format film cameras, hence the emphasis on lighting, exposure, and film choice. Anyone who took photography even semi-seriously in the pre-digital age will feel a few twinges of nostalgia reading about main and fill lights, daylight filters, four-minute exposures and the problems of reciprocity. The advice about lighting, focus, and depth of field is still relevant, and the photos repay study for angle, composition, and so on. The photographers were better known as modellers. That’s why this book is a puzzle: model railroaders looking at layout photos don’t think of them as photographs, but as documents, and inspiration.
A good book. ***
Spike Milligan. Open Heart Surgery. (1979) A book published to cash in on the spike in Goon Show popularity in the 1970s/80s. A few of the verses are worth reading twice. Most are diary entries, of interest only to Spike and those who care about him. I like the Goon Show, and love Milligan’s off-kilter squint at the world. But these verses don’t do it for me. Reading them, I feel like a voyeur. The decorations by Laura Milligan relate to the companion verses in their expressions of similar hurts. *1/2
Michael Baker. The Doyle Diary (1978) Reproduction of one of Charles Altamont Doyle’s sketchbooks, made while he was at Sunnyside, a lunatic asylum in which he spent most of the last years of his life. He was Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Arthur in his early reminiscences dealt harshly with his father, who was not the financial success he could perhaps have been. Later, Arthur mellowed, perhaps because both his medical and his personal experience showed him that Charles was a sick man, badly treated. Baker tells the story at length, not easy to do, because there is little documentary evidence of Charles life, and partly because there was a good deal of reticence about the details of his ill health. Baker concludes that Charles suffered from epilepsy made worse by alcoholism. Charles was not a pushy man, he lacked his older brothers’ ambition and energy. Dicky Doyle had a successful career as a cartoonist for Punch, for example. Perhaps alcohol was self-medication for his sense of failure.
The drawings and text of Charles sketchbook show us a man of gentle feelings and sometimes mischievous humour. He describes himself as a “harmless old gentleman”, which on the evidence he was, He certainly wasn’t a lunatic, even by the vague standards of the time. Long-term care homes existed, but were little more than hotels with some medical services, so the asylum was the only place to tend him when he became unable to care for himself and his family.
I don’t recall where I found this book, or when. And addition to a collection of Holmesiana, and a document relevant to the study of our treatment of the harmless ones among us. **½
Lorraine Janzen. Learning to see in the dark (2003) Janzen was teaching at Nipissing University when she published this book of poems. She is now professor emerita at Ryerson, and has earned a reputation as a pioneer in studying the relationship between text and image in illustrated books.
These poems are readable, and collectively show us a persona that’s sensitive to her world, and not quite sure how to reconcile the light and the dark. The title suggests a method, but there’s no guarantee it will work. As poems, they show a nice talent. Her ability to make something with words isn’t always as strong as her ability to imagine something worth making.
Nevertheless, here are some random lines that made me read twice:
Shuffling the leaves of past and present
I see footsteps everywhere
shadows so deep
you could disappear forever.
...
There’s a ghost
in my mother’s typewriter
It eats the endings of her words
...
There’s a hole in my heart
where you passed through
I’ve kept the bullet
wrapped in burlap
In the spring
I’ll plant it in my garden.
Most of Janzen’s verse is discursive, it’s rhetoric written line-wise to guide the voice into its meaning. You discover a mind alert to memory and meaning, even if not always sure of its insights. A good read for anyone who likes poetry, and certainly, I think, a souvenir for anyone who knows her personally. **½
Yesterday (November 2nd), I read an article in Junior Skeptic (included in Skeptic Magazine). It told the history of plagues, of epidemics, of pandemics. How an unknown disease killed upwards of 20% of the population of Athens (404 BCE). How a plague during Marcus Aurelius’s reign (161-180 CE) killed 20% or more of the citizens of Rome. How the first wave of bubonic plague killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people in Europe (it reached Constantinople in 542). The second plague pandemic killed about 1/3rd of the European population, and some settlements were wiped out completely. (The last plague epidemics occurred in the 1600s and 1700s.) How smallpox ravaged Europe. How the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, killing up to 90% of indigenous populations.
In every case, major political and economic change followed. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Rome became weak, and finally lost its hegemony a couple of centuries later. The bubonic plague finished off the western Roman Empire. And so on. A little extra research showed that the second and third waves of bubonic plague caused Europe-wide wars and re-arranged the remnants of the Roman Empire. Even the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 caused disruption: the Roaring 20s were as much a reaction to it as to the Great War.
And generally speaking, people forgot the great plagues almost as soon as they fizzled out. School histories tend to ignore them. In fact, I didn’t know about the Athenian epidemic until I read this article; and I thought I had learned a pretty good overview of ancient Greek history.
We don’t want to be reminded that we are subject to the random appearance of pathogens. Even now, when SARS-COV-2 is infecting people, there are many who claim it’s a hoax, or no worse than the flu, or caused by G5 phone towers, or whatever. Anything, it seems, rather than face up to the terrifying truth: we have no defences against new pathogens. And another, much less convenient, truth: that these new pathogens transfer from animals to us. Which means that as climate change alters ecosystems, it also alters the interactions between humans and other animals, and so increases the odds that a new pathogen will emerge.
One of the factors in today’s US presidential election is covid-19. Mr Trump persists in downplaying its severity and perils. Mr Biden persists in using covid-19 as a symbol for Mr Trump’s failures as a President.
We shall see what happens. But in any case, the American Empire has begun its downward trajectory.
See Wiki’s article on SARS-COV-2
A mermaid from a clip-art collection. The picture caption reads "Capt. Hailborne At St. Johns Newfoundland", the details suggest the 1600s, but the mermaid's welcoming gesture is a fantasy.
Virginia Eichhorn Consecrated Medicine. (2004) An illustrated monograph about Jane Ash Poitras, to accompany an exhibition at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Poitras is deliberate artist, she plans her works with meanings and messages in mind. Here, the meaning is indigenous medicine, and the colonial dismissal of indigenous knowledge and wisdom.
The pictures are not easy; they’re neither elegant nor pretty. They are layered compositions of collaged images in several media, surrounded by or overlaid with painted symbols and figures and texts. These add up to densely complex and not easily grasped meanings. One must read the work like a book, which I think is Poitras’s intent. Reading is both an intellectual and an emotional investment in constructing meaning. The layered images make us re-read the texts, and create both ironic distance and dissonant emotions. We both deconstruct and reconstruct meanings. It’s a journey from comforting cliche to unsettling insight. I think that’s what she intends.
Her personal history is I think the impetus for her art. She was a homeless indigenous child found and raised by an elderly German immigrant woman. She embarked on a conventional career as a university-educated micro-biologist. She apparently always maintained links to her heritage. She was not assimilated after all. But reconnecting to her indigenous self meant deconstructing the settler persona acquired in her adoptive home, and reconstructing her Cree self. Making art was her method. Her artworks invite us to share in her journey. Reading her art, we follow her on that journey, and we deconstruct the comfortable settler persona we’ve developed. What do we construct out of the wreckage? I hope it’s a new awareness of and respect for the indigenous people who were here first.
Poitras is part of the quest for what it means to be Canadian. It doesn’t mean what it was in colonial times. It doesn’t mean what it’s become in our multi-culturalist present. What does it mean, then? I don’t think we have the answers, but Poitras’s work contributes to the conversation. It’s a conversation whose meaning is constant reconstruction of the answers.
Go look at Poitras’s art if you get a chance. ****
Rainer Maria Rilke. Requiem (1909) Three of Rilke’s elegies, for Paula Modersohn-Becker, Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth, and an unnamed boy, the last in the boy’s own voice.
I’ve always liked Rilke. He uses an almost purely Germanic lexicon, and the simplest German syntax to create dense lines of poetry. He avoids poetic diction, and turns the vernacular to his purposes. Few poets in any language can match his ear for the music of vowels, or for subtle variations in rhythm. Repetition enlarges the meanings of words, extends our grasp of his intent, focuses the imagination:
So hab ich mich dem Allen aufgedrängt.
Und war doch Alles ohne mich zufrieden
und wurde trauriger mit mir behängt.
Nun bin ich plötzlich ab-geschieden.
[So have I urged myself onto the All.
Though All had been content without me
and became sadder when with me adorned.
Now sudden have I disengaged me here.]
So speaks the boy, after relating his discovery, his naming, of the world.
Written in 1908, published 1909 by the Insel Verlag, which set itself the task of printing and reprinting the best available classic and contemporary literature. I’m glad I found this little book in my father’s library. ****
Most of the rest are well-constructed, but not well told. Reading them, I don’t feel that the narrator felt compelled to tell me the story. For example, Hakanono, a satire on colonial attitudes, achieves its aim of showing the stupidity of assumed superiority, but in the end we care neither about the colonial administrators nor about the natives they despise. Well, I didn’t. And the suggestion of supernatural intervention didn't supply the frisson apparently intended by the author.
The stories are very much of their time, relentlessly well-intentioned in their depiction of life's shadows. Most of the authors (and I suspect the editors, too) haven’t forgiven life for not fulfilling the promises of childhood. They haven’t yet seen that the loss of illusion is necessary to gain what little wisdom we can bear. ** to ****
Arianna Huffington. Pigs at the Trough (2003). Here it is 17 years later, and the game continues. Some of the star players have been retired (some via criminal indictment), the rules have been tweaked to benefit the cheats more than ever, and the referees no longer pretend to control the game.
John Allen Paulos. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995) I bought this book because I’d read Paulos’s Innumeracy, a seminal book that I think every teacher should read. This book extends one of his themes, that the media are a prime source of innumeracy, and so tend to distort and misinform. Each section corresponds to a section of the paper, News, Sports, the Arts, etc. The misuse or misreporting of statistics features in all sections, but the unwarranted surprise at coincidences, and confidence in economic and sports forecasts, together come a close second.
Once again, Paulos muses on the vagaries of voting. Every voting system ever attempted has produced results that annoy a large section, sometimes even the majority, of voters. If he were to write today, he would note the vacuousness of political polling, which always produces more or less misleading results.
But mathematics is about patterns and processes, so even the society section, with its reports about charity balls, the doings of famous people, etc, gives opportunity for mathematical musing about relationship networks, and the interconnectedness of our social circles, which Facebook et al have made more obvious than ever in the 25 years since Paulos wrote the book.
This was a re-read, I enjoyed the book, but not as much as Innumeracy. ***
Update 2020 08 13: Percentages are real problem.
One of the most common errors is to report a percentage change without reporting the base rate. For example, "XYZ increases the cancer of some obscure organ by 150%". True, it increases the rate from 1 per 100,000 per year to 3 per 100,000 per year.
Another egregious error is to confuse percentage points with percentages. Thus, "Unemployment rate increases 2 %". Yup, it rose from 5% to 7%, which is an increase of 2/5, or 40%.
Lapham’s Quarterly 8-02: Swindle & Fraud (2015). An entertaining read, and for that reason possibly a misleading one. It’s fun to read a...
