Grimes experiments with poetry (Send Bygraves!)

 

 

Martha Grimes. Send Bygraves (1989) A tour de force: a series of poems that tell the story of a murder and the involvement of Bygraves, an elusive detective. Each segment experiments with a different verse form. The result is a series of sketches or set pieces that together provide a handful of way-stations on the road from suspicion to moderate certainty. I started reading this some years ago, and couldn’t get past the first few pages. This time I managed to persevere to the end. What kept me reading wasn’t the story, but curiosity about how Grimes would fit her tale to each set of poetical conventions and restraints. Her experiments are generally successful. I still don’t know exactly what the story was about, or how Bygraves did or did not solve the puzzle. I did suss that Bygraves is called but never answers.            
     A nicely made book, with an illustrated hardcover, interesting illustrations (which may elucidate the tale, but I’d have to re-read to figure out whether and how), and deckle-edged pages of excellent paper. A gift item suitable for Grimes fans, I suppose. Not a keeper. **

Two by L'Amour: A soft-spoken hero, and a tarnished knight.

 

Louis L’Amour. Guns of the Timberlands (1955) Jud Devitt, a man used to getting what he wants, arrives at Tinkerville. He aims to get at the timber upstream of Clay Bell’s ranch. The plot is complicated by a local man with a hidden agenda, Devitt’s fiancee Colleen Riley, and a motley crew of lumberjacks, outlaws, upstanding citizens, cowhands with dubious pasts, and so on. L’Amour allows himself editorial comments on the need for law, order, and fair dealing. Bell is good with his fists as well as his guns. He wins, of course, and gets the girl, too. A good entertainment, made into a movie in 1960. **½

Louis L’Amour. The Quick and the Dead. (1975). Duncan McKaskel and his family are travelling west. A passel of bandits want the loot in McKaskel’s wagon, and his wife Susanna. Con Valian meets up with them, tells them they will need to fight to preserve their lives and their possessions. McKaskel believes in negotiations with reasonable people. He’s wrong, and the story tells of his unwilling acceptance of the facts of life on the lawless frontier. Valian sticks around, despite himself.
     The reluctant knight in tarnished armour is a common figure in L’Amour’s novels, as is the Easterner endangered by his blithe assumptions of safety. L’Amour’s great skill is varying the stories, enough that I’m never bored reading them. This was also made into a movie, starring Sam Elliot. I’ve watched it, see my review elsewhere on this blog. ***

Maurice Sendak: Two for beginning readers

 

Two by Sendak: In the Night Kitchen and Chicken Soup With Rice. Maurice Sendak had the gift of remembering what it’s like to be child, and so to know what kind of story appeals to children – not the ones concocted by authors with M. Ed degrees anxious to teach both reading and suitable life lessons. Sendak also knew how to make his pictures not merely illustrations but integral parts of the story.
     In the Night Kitchen tells a dream, in which Mickey falls into the kitchen under his house, where the bakers are busy baking bread and rolls. The bakers look remarkably like Oliver Hardy, and make a Mickey cake, from which he escapes. Chicken Soup With Rice praises that estimable dish in verses that tell us how it suits each month of the year. Well done, very good for beginning readers. Fantasy, clever rhymes, surprising ideas, what more could one want? ****

 

Political Satire. It's a page-turner! (The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis)

 

Terry Fallis. The Best Laid Plans (2007) Who’da thunk a political novel could be a read-through page-turner? Well, almost, I don’t set aside enough time to read through the whole book in one sitting. I did anticipate the pleasure of taking up where I left off, which was always rewarded.
     Daniel Addison leaves political hack work when he discovers his lover in the House Leader’s office having a non-political encounter. Broken-hearted, he retreats into academe. But one last political job must be done before he can relax and enjoy teaching and research. He must find a Liberal who is willing to stand in a riding certain to be lost to one of the most popular Conservative Finance Ministers ever to wear shiny new shoes on Budget Day. He manages to find one, his landlord Angus McLintock, an engineering prof doomed to teach English For Engineers. Daniel proposes a deal: He’ll teach the course if Angus will stand for the Liberals. Assured that he will lose, Angus is happy to oblige.
     And so begins an engaging story of how McLintock wins (what else did you expect?), Addison heals his broken heart (ditto), and various other characters receive their just poetical desserts. Not quite as funny as I expected from a book winning the Stephen Leacock Award, but slyly satirical, robustly indignant, sappily romantic, unobtrusively informative, with enough witty asides to satisfy my taste for irony. It was also the 2011 winner of Canada Reads, a CBC-sponsored competition in which miscellaneous celebrities argue for their book. I’ll add my recommendation to whoever promoted this one. ****

Glossary: Riding = electoral district. Shiny new shoes = Canadian political tradition, the Finance Minister wears brand new shoes when introducing the Budget. CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and s couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.
     Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.
     He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.
     He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.
He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.
     I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.
     Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****