Flower Guide from 1927

Chester A. Reed. Flower Guide: Wild Flowers East of the Rockies (1927) Revised edition. With 320 Flowers in Color, Painted by the Author. A charming pocket guide, 5-1/2 x 3-1/4 inches, bound in buckram. The pictures are well done, the descriptions thorough, and clearly based on personal observation. The attached scans of pages will tell you more about this book than I can.

Lapham's Quartely XIII-3: Scandal

Lapham’s Quarterly XIII/3 Scandal (2020) Another collection of (mostly) unconsidered trifles adding up to a considerable anatomy of scandal. Scandal violates convention, not morality. Immorality is ignored or condoned to the extent that conventional manners ignore or condone it. But violate a convention, and the whole of society will gasp in horror, clutch their pearls, and avidly gossip about the fall of the great man or woman who stubbed their toe on a pebble of convention.
     True, immorality now and then violates conventional mores also, but since mores change almost as quickly as fashion, what was once enough to cast you out of polite society a few years later may well raise you to the pinnacle of current approbation. And if you flout convention with style and wit, the fashionable people will envy your ability to get away with the most heinous crime.
     The stories told here, most of them in contemporary texts, range from what we would consider minor transgressions of etiquette to major violations of morality and law. The range of present-day judgements on the sins of the past should warn us against facile assumptions of our own moral superiority. Moral behaviour for the most part is mere conformity to the prejudices of the time.
     Another excellent collection. Recommended. Subscriptions and back issues available online. ****

Photography in the mid-20th century: The Picture Universe

Tom Maloney, ed. The Picture Universe (1961) 25th Anniversary collection pf photos from US Camera. At one time, there were many photo magazines, most of them like US Camera thinly disguised monthly catalogues of photographic equipment. The photo captions always specified the camera, the f-stop, and the exposure, and usually also the film, and sometimes lenses and filters. The implication was clear: Buy the technology, and you, too, can be a world-class photographer.
     Well, if this collection is reliable evidence, world-class photographers were few and far between. Most of the photos in this book are safe compositions of safe subjects, including cats. A handful are images we’ve seen in many anthologies, such as David Duncan’s “1,000 yard stare” portrait of a US soldier in Vietnam. The text consists mostly of mini-bios of the more prominent photographers, most of them employed by newspapers and magazines. The notion that photography, even news photography, could be more than a technically excellent record of some momentary event, is beginning to influence picture-taking. There are hints of how photography would change in the 60s and 70s, when photographers began to exploit and extend the aesthetic vocabulary implicit in the medium.
     As a record of US photography, this is unwittingly a pretty good book. It shows us the many then-current competent photographers and images that have been all but forgotten. Then as now, working photographers made pictures that served their purposes, sometimes very well. The limitations of half-tone and letterpress on glossy paper don’t hide the technical excellence of the images. These people knew how to get the pictures they wanted.

    Then as now, a handful of photographers were moving photography beyond the workaday expectations. The few images made by Adams, Steichen, Lange etc seem to jump off the page, in part because they have been seen so often, but mainly because they are so different from the surrounding well-made competent craft.
     Nowadays, photography has become just another medium for image-making. Digital cameras are everywhere, and their built-in algorithms make technical perfection common-place. The emphasis, even for amateur photography, has become the memorable story, the astonishing event, the gob-smacking image, the exotic subject. Images and videos go viral when they confirm the viewers’ suspicion that the world out there pullulates with the weird and appalling, and only the misfortune of being stuck in a dreary backwater prevents one from living a vastly more exciting and terrifying life.
     Has this inundation of pictures done much good? I doubt it. We have lost the ability, or rather the patience, to look. In 1961, good photographers still aimed at making people look again. I think they achieved that objective. That so much of their work now seems merely competent should remind us that they had not yet discovered the full range of the medium. Nor have we.
     There were many other compendiums of contemporary photography. This is an interesting book, but not a keeper. **½

Esther Warkov: the Universal in the Personal

Beverley J. Rasporich. Magic on Main: The Art of Esther Warkov (2003). I bought this book some years ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and read it over the last two or three days. Warkov’s technical skill is astonishing. Her inventiveness even more so. This book is an attempt to come to terms with her work, but the author, wisely, I think, doesn’t over-explicate the pictures. She gives us a blend of biography and artistic development, which together with beautifully reproduced images of the pictures show us Esther Warkov as she is, or rather, as she allows herself to be seen.
     Warkov’s drawings are collocations of many images, some layered over each other, others transforming from one into the other. Subtle colouring achieved with coloured pencils over graphite add a feeling of dream and half-forgotten memories. Warkov makes art deliberately, she wants her imagery to mean and to signify. But exactly what they signify she leaves up to the viewer to decode. Allusions to her Jewish heritage, to contemporary anxieties, to modern life, to objects of personal value, these create a dense mesh of – something, which leads the imagination into unexpected byways. Every time you look at one of her pictures, you see something other than what you recalled of it.
     Warkov moved from precisely composed paintings, many on shaped canvases, to drawings on paper, to three-dimensional assemblages of folded, rolled, creased, cut-out drawings. She dubs the latter “three dimensional drawings,” made almost entirely of paper, but looking like wood, rusty metal, decaying clothes, faded photographs, bits of vegetation, vases, gloves, body parts – an exhaustive list would take some time to concoct.

  Tea House. Collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery.

     I like her work as presented here. Partly it’s the sheer craft skill of her work, but mostly it’s the unapologetically personal vision. She doesn’t make art to satisfy some current fashion of subject or style, or to accommodate some perceived demand of the art market. She makes art to make her own life meaningful. She shows us that the intensely and plainly personal is the universal. The book is available on the web, but there’s very little information about her. ****

Peter Arno, chronicler and satirist

Peter Arno. Peter Arno (1979) Introduction by Charles Saxon. Peter Arno documented the upper middle and upper classes of New York, city and State, in several hundred drawings, 248 of which are reprinted in this book, most of which were drawn for The New Yorker. He originated and refined several of the stereotypes that we still instantly recognise as symbols of excessive money and power, and of a lifestyle that has changed only in its outward show. He was himself born into this class; this insider status lends his observations the look of authenticity.
     I’ve always liked Arno’s drawings. Perusing this book for the 3rd or 5th time, I admired again the accuracy and subtlety of his line. He never uses two lines where one will do. Half a dozen lines combind into a profile show us a complete character, as in an irate 60-something man glaring at the grinning face of some TV huckster. The back cover shows a superbly elegant young man complimenting his hostess: “You do give such perfect parties, Alice. Is there anyone here you’d like to meet?”
     This time, I noticed more satiric bite and rage than I recalled from previous readings. One cartoon shows a lion tamer raising his whip against a lion lying cowering on its back. An old lion says, “If only I were twenty years younger and had my teeth!” A comment on animal rights? Yes, and an allegory on human rights, too.
     Well worth getting your hands on if you can find a copy. ****

Poirot Hunts a Serial Killer: The A.B.C. Murders

Agatha Christie. The A.B.C. Murders (1936) Poirot receives a letter announcing a murder, and taunting his ability to discover the killer. The police aren’t convinced, even though the murder happens as advertised. Three more letters and killings follow, which solid police work (mostly off-stage), and Poirot’s usual ability to rearrange the puzzle pieces so that they all fit, lead to satisfying solution. One of Christie’s best puzzles, but at this remove her inability to create fully rounded characters is painfully obvious. There isn’t even any advance in the backstory of Hastings (returned from Argentina for the occasion) and Poirot.
     I reread the book because of the 2018 TV series starring Malkovich as an elderly Poirot. That series omits Hastings, and makes several other major changes in the plot, which, with additions barely hinted at in Christie’s version, give us a darker and more plausible psychology of the criminal and his victims. Poirot’s success does not please him, since it comes at a cost of four lives and a blight on at least three others.
     Still, the book was entertaining enough. **½

Econ 101: Market Failure.

Econ 101: Market Failure

On a radio talk show this morning (June 14, 2020), I heard a guest use the phrase "The market didn't work as it should".

Where, pray tell, is it written that the market should work in any particular way? It's quite obvious to me that the market simply works as it works. There is no "should" about it. Unless you adhere to Neo-liberal economics, which has more than a whiff of elitist arrogance about it, and with its indifference to human psychology clearly implies that if only people behaved rationally, the world would unfold as it should, rewarding the right people with riches, and punishing the wrong ones with poverty.

And how does the market actually work? It aggregates human choices, is all. Left to itself, "the market" demonstrates that human desires, whims, greed, ignorance, powerlust, etc drive buying decisions far more often than rational self-interested understanding of the long-, medium-, or even short-term consequences of those decisions. When the unpleasant consequences appear, the Chicago School refers to "market failure".

"Market failure" is in fact the Chicago School's failure to account for reality.

The market never fails. It shows us what we believe is important. Important enough to spend money on, anyhow. Too often, those beliefs are mistaken. And that's a polite way to say it.

The US President: An Elected Monarch

The American President has the following powers (some with the "advice and consent" of Congress):

a) Propose legislation
b) Pardon felons
c) Issue edicts ("executive orders")
d) Conduct foreign policy and make Treaties with foreign powers
e) Veto or adopt legislation passed by either or both Houses of Congress
f) Appoint Officers of the State
g) Act as Commander in Chief of the armed forces

This makes the American President an eighteenth century King in all but name.

When the Founders of the United States composed the Constitution, they had a problem: How were the Powers of the State to be exercised, and by whom? The models of governance that they knew all had Rulers. A Ruler is both Head of State and Head of Government. Since the Founders knew that Rulers tended to morph into Tyrants, they saw their problem as that of limiting the power of the Ruler. And since the popular assemblies tended to replace law with current popular prejudice, they had to limit the power of Congress. And since Judges could make arbitrary rulings, they had to limit the powers of the Court. Hence the "three-legged stool", in which  Congress (which represented the People), the Supreme Court (which represented the Law), and the President (who represented the State) were set up to limit each other's powers.

So far, it's worked quite well. But as Mr Trump's Presidency shows, there was a weakness: The Constitution combines the roles of Head of Government and Head of State. This gives a rogue President the ability to ignore the checks on his power, especially when a political party sees him as an agent or instrument of their special agenda. No Ruler has ever been willing to be a mere instrument of some constituency, although they have been more than willing to use that constituency to acquire and consolidate power..

The irony is that while the Founders erected a Republic with an elected monarch, the hereditary monarch of the United Kingdom had already lost almost all the powers of a King. The  Declaration of Independence refers to the tyranny of the King, but it was Parliament that denied the Colonies their rights. It was Parliament, controlled by landowners and merchants, that saw the Colonies as both a source of raw materials and a market for their surplus goods. That  these factions were developing a party-controlled Parliament could also have served the Founders as warning. The Constitution makes no mention of political parties, and hence contains no mechanisms for controlling them.

The final accountability in America rests with the People, who every four years must elect their President, legislators, and other officers of government. In the long run, the People will choose freedom and responsibility, but in the short run they will often choose oppression and  licence.