Work: Love it or hate it, you need it. (Lapham's Quarterly 04-2, Spring 2011)

 LQ 04-2: Lines of Work. (2011) “Work fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.” That’s one of the quotes scattered through this collection. It expresses one end of the range of attitudes to work, adumbrated in the curse laid on Adam after the Fall: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. At the other end we find St Benedict’s Ora et Labora, “Work and pray”, often rendered as Laborare est orare, “To work is to pray.”
     We humans need purpose and structure in our lives, and work provides that. The lucky ones have work that satisfies. Most have work that earns enough to survive, while providing much of the social life without which we cannot thrive. The unlucky ones toil at soul-crushing labour, which as often as not is neither valued nor rewarded as the necessary effort that enables our survival and keeps the rest of us in relative comfort.
     William Morris (not included, an instructive omission, I think) was one of many starry-eyed reformers who recognised the inhumane aspects of industrialised work, and wanted a return to what he believed was the golden age of craft. He thought of craft as work that not only earned a living but engaged the worker’s skill and imagination. Morris failed to see that even craft relies on the toil of labourers that relieves the crafter of the necessity of spending time in the work that sustains their life.
     There are many descriptions of actual work in this collection, most by people who found a way out of the labour that they describe. One is by Orwell. His account of how the workers at the grand hotels of Paris discharged their duties would have convinced me never to stay at anything above a one or two star establishment. Maybe things have changed since the 1930s. I would have included an excerpt from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
     The other pieces describe or discuss the context of work, or of the relations that working with others makes possible. Work makes up the single largest part of our lives. Irksome or satisfying, necessary or optional, we can’t escape it. It’s the necessity that irks. When we choose how to occupy ourselves, that freedom erases the negatives.
     Most of my jobs have been more or less interesting, at least until I mastered the requisite skills. But usually, my co-workers were more important than the work. I worked most of my life as a teacher, work that was sometimes frustrating enough that I wondered whether I could continue. I did, and now I miss the classroom and the staff room.
     As always, recommended. ****

Banks and his Brother: Strange Affair (Robinson, 2005)

 Peter Robinson. Strange Affair (2005) Banks is recovering from nearly dying in the fire that destroyed his cottage. His estranged brother Roy leaves a message asking to speak to him about a matter of life and death. Banks goes off to London to find Roy.
Meanwhile, DI Annie Cabot investigates the murder of a young woman shot at close range in her car. The two threads intertwine, of course. More murders, international sex trafficking, shady business deals, etc, and we have a nicely done puzzle satisfyingly solved. But the story telling is dilatory, the a ambience sometimes pure cliche, and the characterisation too often 2D. The title’s link to the story is obscure, like a bad cryptic crossword clue. Below Robinson’s standard, which still makes it a cut or a half above average. **½

Celebrities: A culural constant (LQ 04-1)

LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a

peculiarly 21st century aberration. This collection may cause a revision of that opinion, and perhaps a more sanguine attitude. It had that effect on me, and prompted a number of reflections. Herewith a small sampling.
     True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.
     The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.
     Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.
     There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps.
    Recommended. ****

Maliick's Pillow Book: Random musings and barbs.

     Heather Mallick. The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick (2004) Mallick was still writing for The Globe and Mail when she published this book. The Globe eventually dismissed her because of her caustic remarks about rich twits who think they’re the Universe’s gift to the rest of us. She titled this collection of notes “Pillow Book” in homage to Sei Shonagon. Like a commonplace book, a pillow book is a collection of quotes. Like a journal, the quotes are written by the collector.
     Mallick is about as open a writer as I’ve ever read. She seems to hold nothing back. I’m sure she’s left out some of her rawest bits, after all, one’s readers’ sensitivities must be respected. What she’s included adds up to a portrait of a person on whom nothing is lost, one who finds nothing human alien to her. But Mallick does show her distaste for the detestable. Fundamentally, she’s a satirist in the Juvenalian tradition, which means she’s a moralist. Her morality is simple: Don’t hurt people. But otherwise, you can do (and say) what you want.
     As you might guess, I enjoyed this book. Even the bits that annoyed me. Mallick’s sharp eye is matched by a clear style. Recommended. ****

Past Reason Hated: Early DI Banks Shows Robinson's Skills

Peter Robinson. Past Reason Hated. (1991) Caroline Hartley, a beautiful childlike woman is found stabbed to death, with a recording of Vivaldi’s Laudate Pueri playing on repeat. Banks believes that the answers he needs will be found in her past. Newly promoted Detective Constable Susan Gay, newly married Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley, the cast of an amateur production of Twelfth Night, (directed by Susan’s former teacher), the dead woman’s lover, a mysterious poet, the dead woman’s dysfunctional family, and other obstacles on the path to enlightenment delay Banks long enough that there’s almost another murder.
      An early Banks, but Robinson’s ability to develop character and ambience make for a satisfyingly long read. My copy was well-used, and will be passed on. Recommended. ***

The City (Lapham's Quarterly 03-1, 2011)

 LQ 03-4: The City (2010) The city is, I think, one of humankind’s great inventions. Through

most of our existence on Earth, there were no towns and cities. They became possible when agriculture improved enough to support a fairly large proportion of non-agricultural workers. Nowadays, in technologically advanced countries, about 5% of the population works directly in agriculture. It’s likely that building towns began when agriculture enabled supporting about 5% of the population as non-agricultural workers. But even so, pretty well every household raised all or most of their food well into the 18th or 19th century. Cities in the modern sense required not only more efficient agriculture but more efficient and cheaper transport. This may be why the first large cities were all on navigable rivers and/or next to good harbours.
     But from the beginning, towns and cities were disliked. Most of the excerpts in this collection attack the moral laxity and material excess of cities. The tension between the city and the country has varied, but it’s always existed. Cities have been targets of robbery, a.k.a. wars of conquest. They concentrate cultural and intellectual resources. That in turn fosters innovation, which raises suspicion and worse in the surrounding rural communities. In the relation between city and hinterland, exploitation and mutual dependence are often hard to distinguish, another reason for rural suspicion of the city. The first states, hierarchically organised societies with large power and economic differences, were cities. Larger States resulted from wars between cities.
     I like cities. I also like the small town in which I live. I doubt I would like it so much if I couldn’t get most of the advantages of city life as easily as I do. Communications technology provides more choice than we can manage; we’ve learned to limit our sources to make choice easier. Materially, pretty well everything I would want from the city is available by mail or special order when not available locally. Still, cities are increasing in size and number. Almost half of humankind now lives in cities. It’s will be more than half within a decade.
     Many comments in this collection indicate express praise not for human cities, but for the City of God. That golden city is not only the expected destination of the faithful, it is a counter example to the human cities that failed to live up to the expectations of their detractors.
     Recommended. ****

Humans at Play (LQ 03-4 Sports & Games)

 

    LQ 03-3: Sports & Games (2010) In 1938, Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, in which he argued that play was necessary for the creation of culture. His insight has become a cliche. This LQ collection demonstrates its truth, albeit indirectly, since it focuses on what we North Americans mean by its title. Huizinga included the arts, politics, etc in his concept. It seems to me that Huizinga’s argument amounts to saying that inventing ways of living that go well beyond finding food and reproducing is species-specific behaviour for humans.
     Play in the narrow sense is widespread among mammals. All young mammals play, and many species of adult mammals play, too. That is, they engage in some behaviour for no apparent reason other than they like doing it.
     Humans of course do more than that. We invent rules and customs around play, and spend an amazing amount of resources on it. Extend the concept to include the arts, and we humans act as if play is the purpose of life. But we find elements of play in all other aspects of human culture. It’s obvious in fashion, for example. The use of science to create useful technologies disguises that it, too, is a form of play. And all technologies eventually become at least adjuncts to play. Huizinga’s relabelling of our species is apt.
     Like other aspects of human culture, the variety of sports and games tends to distract attention from a fundamental unity. Sports and games range from pure pleasure to intense competition. All cultures engage in sports and games for both purposes. This collection shows that while humans have invented an astonishing variety of sports and games, their use is bounded by this range.
     Recommended. ****

Trivia Quizzes: "Quote...Unquote"

Nigel Rees. Quote...Unquote (1980) We like trivia. Maybe because every now and then some trivial fact turns out to matter. It may link some new fact to our store of knowledge, thus reassuring us the universe has a meaningful pattern. Or it may become the significant bit needed to solve a puzzle, or reveal some secret, or lead us to some deeper insight. All this helps explain why collections of trivia sell. Like this one. It’s an amusing selection of semi-esoteric quotations. Most are presented in quizzes, thus flattering the reader in its expectation that they will recognise most of the quotations. Taken as a whole, they make up a pointillist portrait of the 19th and 20th centuries.
     One of the quizzes asks the reader to amend such misquotes such as “Money is the root of all evil”, “ I knew him well, Horatio”, “Play it again, Sam”, etc. Misquotes like these are an example of our tendency to recall meanings but not the words used to express them.
     Cheeky illustrations by ffolkes. Fun, recommended if you can find a copy. **½

Trickster tricks make for a good life

 

    Tomson Highway. Laughing With the Trickster (CBC Massey Lectures, 2022) I learned that what I had learned about First Nations cultures was woefully incomplete. Read this book. It will educate you, and entertain you. Highway shows what he means when he says that Indigenous people laugh a lot. Life’s a blast, even when it isn’t. The Trickster deludes us, but also makes life interesting. The Creator made us for enjoyment.
     Threaded throughout this hugely exuberant romp through life is the dark narrative of the clash of Indigenous and Settler cultures. We Settlers have a lot to learn. A brighter thread, told mostly through Highway’s life story, is that Indigenous peoples are adaptable. Their cultures thrive because they have been able and willing to adapt. They don’t try to preserve their way of life, but to live it. And if that includes telling their stories in Settler languages, well, that’s life. And if that adaptation causes Settlers to adapt, too, well, that’s even better life.
     Highway ends with a brief account of his brother’s death. Rene told him, “Don’t mourn me, be joyful”. The last sentence of the book is, “ I have no time for tears; I’m too busy being joyful.”
     Read this book. ****
Footnote: Another essential book is Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer  understand that all insights about the world are provisional and at best merely good approximations to the truth; and at worst they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Travelling (Lapham's 02-3, 2009)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 02-3: Travel. (Summer 2009) Migration is forced, travel is chosen. We

succeed at both because humans have survived by keeping on the move, whether within a territory suitable for hunting and gathering, or by removal into a new territory. We share wanderlust with other animals, which suggest that it’s a condition of species survival.
     This collection tells us what we already know: Travel confirms our conviction that there’s no place like home, and prompts wonder and even delight at the variety of human ways of living and making a living. Which effect predominates depends on the traveller. The evidence shows that the self-centred make poor travellers.
     Tourism is the invention of the leisure class, of people who did not depend on trading profit to finance the journey. But apart from that, there’s little difference between tourism trading, and exploration. Travel reveals as much about ourselves as about the places and people we meet. The modern variety of tourism developed from the Grand Tour, paid for by parents anxious that their offspring would acquire experience useful for a successful career in the higher branches of capitalism and government. The educational component still predominates: the tourist industry offers education as the reason and excuse for spending time being carried across water and land while being cosseted by “the staff”.
     Many of the pieces here are firsthand accounts, which satisfy the reader’s wanderlust without requiring the tiresome nuisances of actual travel. The fictions use the differences between the traveller and the strange lands as opportunities for allegory and satire, or demonstrations that growing up entails self-discovery. Hence the many plots strung out along the roads taken, or not taken, by the hero and their companions.
     I enjoyed the collection as much for its reminders of my own travels as for the experiences of the narrators. ****

Canadians Have Had A Lot to Say: Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005)

    

Lisa Wojna Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005) A re-read. Canadians have had a lot to say about themselves and their fellow-citizens, not to mention the inordinate amount of scenery that we live in. Wojna’s collection is a commendable one. The book’s a keeper. A few samples:
     The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by perfection in government. (William Davis, Premier1971-1895).
     There’s an old saying which goes: Once the last tree has been cut, and the last river poisoned, you will find that you cannot eat your money. (Joyce MacLean, the Globe and Mail)
     You have to drop out of school now and then if you want to get and education. (Pamela Peck, PhD, anthropologist)
     The Liberals talk about stable government, but we don’t know how bad the stable is going to smell. (Tommy Douglas, founder of the CCF, which became the NDP).
     If you’re not annoying somebody you’re not really alive. (Margaret Atwood)
Recommended. ****

Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****

Collage

 Marker and collage on tea-stained tissue 2023

Peanuts Forever (7 Peanuts compilations)

    

Charles Schulz. Good Ol’ Snoopy (1958), Let’s Face it, Charlie Brown (1960), This Is Your Life, Charlie Brown (1962), You’re Not For Real, Snoopy (1965), Snoopy and the Red Baron (1966), He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968), You’re in Love, Charlie Brown (1969)

     Had another look at the Charlie Brown paperbacks we accumulated when our children we little. I’m still a Peanuts fan. Schulz’s talent was to see the connection between children’s frustrations and adult ones. And he was a master of graphic expression. A wiggly line for a mouth, a drooping doggy head, a dot and curved line for raised or scrunched eyebrows - it’s

amazing how much emotion is conveyed by so little ink. Schulz also knows how to pace a joke. Many of the strips have the build-up and punch line of a stand-up comic’s joke, but are impossible without the graphic. Such as Snoopy lying on his back on the roof of his doghouse while the rain pours down. There’s only one thing wrong with this...The rain keeps running down my nose and eyes.

     Some of the strips have taken on a different resonance these days: Lucy to Linus: See that building there?... If you ever want to borrow a book, all you have to do is go in there and tell them which one you want, and They’ll let you take it home. Linus: Free? Lucy: Absolutely free! Linus: Sort of makes you wonder what they’re up to.

     I thoroughly enjoyed rereading these books. I’ve decided to keep them. ****

Drowning off Martha's Vinyard (Craig - Death in Vinyard Waters)

Philip R. Craig. Death in Vineyard Waters (1991) Originally The Man Who Walked Into The Sea. Ex-Boston cop J W Jackson doesn’t like the verdict of suicide pronounced over the body of Marjorie Summerharp, a 70-something academic whom he met at a party and liked. She’s made enemies, and we all know that academic feuds are among the most vicious on Earth. Jackson knows the tides and the currents, and the supposed time of death doesn’t fit where she was found many hours later. He tells his doubts to the sheriff, who decides to wait and see while Jackson does the sleuthing.
     The story unfolds slowly. Jackson is a likeable character, with a strong sense of honour. This interferes with both his love life and the investigation, when Ian McGregor, his rival for Zee Madeiras’s affections, may have a motive for removing Marjorie. There’s gentle satire of the summer denizens of the village, some sharp academic talks, and a send-up of some purveyors of expensive wellness. There’s what may be the slowest chase ever, involving two identical sailboats whose speed hardly differs. There’s also a lot of lore about fishing and clamming and other bucolic tasks and pastimes.
     A nicely done entertainment, second in the series. Above average for the genre. **½

Milo drifts into trouble and love (Milo Talon, 1981)

  Louis L’Amour. Milo Talon (1981) Milo drifts into town and takes on the job to find a missing heiress. At stake are not only a megabuck in gold but also ownership of mines and railroads. Talon is not the only one looking for a slice of the wealth. Tangled past family relationships create a nice mess of legalities and logistical problems. One of these problems is a nicely shaped, smart and hardworking young woman. Talon resists the inevitable slide into love and marriage until he succumbs immediately after the final showdown.
     From L’Amour we expect good writing, plausible characters, accurate settings, and enough mystery to keep us turning the pages. He delivers, again. ***

Shake Hands Forever (again)

Ruth Rendell. Shake Hands Forever (1975)  A re-read. I posted two earlier reviews. This time, it was (almost) new again. But the denouement, although expected, was still a nicely paced surprise. 

An escape from a dysfunctional marriage eventually leads to a murder arranged in hopes of complete escape from the past. Robert Hathall’s mother finds Angela Hathall strangled in her bedroom. Wexford’s convinced that Hathall did it, but he couldn’t have, because he was at his work in London and then with his mother on the train during the time Angela died. Wexford fumbles an interview, which prompts Hathall to complain to Chief Constable Griswold, who orders Wexford off the case. Lacking the usual resources, Wexford turns to family. With the help of his nephew (now Supt. Howard Fortune), and a bit of timely luck, Wexford cracks the case.

A nice variation on the impossible murder. Rendell is good at plausible psychology; it’s psychological insight that leads Wexford to the solution. Love, greed, and the yearning for respectability provide the impetus for murder. A few longeurs slow down the narrative, but  perhaps Rendell wants us to feel Wexford’s frustration at the slow pace of investigation. Another very good W Rendell mystery. I liked it even better than the first two times I read it, hence the higher rating. Maybe the trade paperback format, with its larger print, had that positive effect. ***½

Death Times Three (Rex Stout, 1985)

 Rex Stout. Death Times Three (1985) A posthumous collection: two previously published stories, and one thoroughly reworked one. Typical Stout puzzles, barely plausible, ingeniously plotted to make the solving appear difficult, a familiar ambience, etc. The real charm of the Nero Wolfe tales is Archie’s style. Stout gives him a mix of laconic brevity and subtle riffing on cliche and stereotype. We believe the story because Archie sounds like someone we’d enjoy knowing, having  drink with, and listening to. The pleasure is in the reading. I don’t know whether I’m like most readers, but I recall very little of the story itself – not the puzzle, not the perpetrators, not the innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders whose natural reticence or amour-propre interferes with the investigation, nor their names. I enjoyed reading these three tales as much as I’ve enjoyed any of Stout’s confections, which means a lot. ***½

People are not what they seem: Wycliffe and the Four Jacks.

 W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Four Jacks (1985).  A Re-read. See https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2018/09/wycliffe-digs-into-past-wycliffe-and.html for earlier review.

     Wycliffe and Helen are on holiday in a small Cornish fishing village, now become a trap for “emmets” or tourists. David Cleeve has received four Jacks of Diamonds. He knows what they refer to, and he’s afraid. But he doesn’t tell Wycliffe enough to warrant police protection. Then a girl is murdered, and a couple of days later, Cleeve himself dies in a fire. The tale develops nicely as Wycliffe and DS Lucy Lane (newly assigned to his team) gather the facts that solve the crimes. They have their roots in ancient crimes and betrayals. Along the way, human weaknesses and vices complicate and distract the search.
     A competent entertainment. Burley knows how to pace the story, and gives us just enough ambience and character quirks to lull disbelief into comfortable acceptance. A must for Wycliffe fans, a good read for anyone who like police procedurals. ***

Mordecai Richler's Take on Humour

Mordecai Richler. The Best of Modern Humor (1983) Well, when it comes to humour, we disagree. Richler likes satire, and some of the selections are quite cruel. And many of the pieces here are neither satire nor humour, but merely slices of (usually sad) American life.
     The best pieces, or rather, the ones I liked best, are the earliest ones, such as Leacock’s Gertrude the Governess, or Simple Seventeen, or Maurice Baring’s King Lear’s Daughters. Maybe that shows that absurdity is the only universal humour. Or else that I like humour that takes some premise to absurd lengths. I studied logic in my younger days, and learned that reliance on logic is often unreasonable. Logic merely calculates the consequence of some premises, which often reveals some hidden silliness in the assumptions on which the self-diagnosed rational man bases his argument.
     Leacock’s “nonsense novel” satirises how love romances violate common sense and common knowledge. Little has changed in the hundred odd years since he wrote that Nonsense Novel. Baring takes the opposite tack: he makes Regan a suburban housewife of the type that knows what’s best for everyone, but especially herself. The piece shows that this type of woman (and man) is at least as old as humankind.
     But most of the pieces reveal one or another of the deadly sins and their effects. But like Woody Allen’s Kugelmass Episode, they tend to be more sad than funny. So Kugelmass can enter a fictional world, and make love to fictional women? He’s still a sad sack who can’t deal with the realities of his life, and whinges to his therapist about how the universe doesn’t provide the romance that he needs.
     Nevertheless, this anthology is a keeper, if only because it brings together many disparate pieces that would be difficult to find. ** to ****.  

Dull train ride: Compartment K (Reilly)

Helen Reilly. Compartment K (1955) Three murders, one in New York, one on a Canadian train, and one at a lodge in the Rockies, are tied together by one man’s desperate need for money to satisfy his greedy wife. A complicated plot, characters that are approximately 1.5 D, a style laden with ascriptive adjectives, told through the focus on a young woman who almost loses the man she truly loves. What kept me reading was the puzzle, which I partly solved not because of the clues but because of the vague impressions of the character who done it. The denouement relies heavily on facts which were at best hinted at but not fully disclosed until explained by the redoubtable Inspector McKee, who spent most his time at the other end of a phone line.
     I had tried to read this book several times in the past. I decided I’d better read it all the way through this time. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can claim some kind of success in getting through it. On the other hand, one can hardly claim credit for enduring self-chosen tedium.
     I bought the book second-hand because the first third or so is set on a train. One doesn’t get much of a sense of a train ride, though, mostly because Reilly doesn’t (or can’t) describe anything other than the passengers' clothes, which she details with a fashion-reporter’s eye. The cover misleads: the Canadian train was hauled by diesels, not steam; North American trains don’t have buffers; and the blurb is too complimentary. That it’s from a New Yorker book note is an even greater puzzle than the one McKee solves. Not recommended, except perhaps as a curiosity. *

The Dark Tower (C. S, Lewis)

 C. S. Lewis. The Dark Tower. Edited by Walter Hooper. (1977) A posthumous collection of miscellaneous works, some rescued from the bonfire Lewis's brother made of unpublished drafts and other papers. They demonstrate Lewis’s inventiveness, and his ability to make abstractions concrete. I did not read the (incomplete) title story past the first two or three pages, but the shorter pieces held my interest.
      It’s a pity that Lewis was unable to finish his riff on Menelaus and Helen of Troy. He posits that Helen has aged, as have Menelaus and the other Greek heroes. Trouble is, the Greek soldiers would never accept a plain(ly) middle-aged woman as a prize worth their ten years hard fighting, not to mention the deaths of their comrades. So what’s Menelaus to do? He hopes that Egyptian sorcerers can provide him with a beautiful counterfeit, but just as they call on the new Helen to appear, the manuscript breaks off. Bummer.
      Mixed recommendation of ** to ****.

Education Substitute: And Now All This (Sellar & Yeatman)

 Sellar & Yeatman. And Now All This. (1932) A follow-up to 1066 And All That. This copy is from the 3rd edition, also of 1932, so the work enjoyed a certain popularity. Whether that derived from the success of the previous volume, or from genuine enjoyment and admiration is difficult to say. The premise is that Education consists of What We All Know. Hence a book that retails this information will make expensive schooling obsolete. I found the humour generally tedious, depending on puns (obvious), misspellings and garbled recall (usually strained), and deadpan absurdities (some quite witty). I guess you had to be there. See the sample page.
     This copy has been very thoroughly read: The spine is

broken, most gatherings are loose, and a couple of torn pages have been mended with sticky tape. The decorations are pleasant enough. The casual racism of text and pictures is jarring nowadays, but does serve to remind us that some of what any given generation takes for granted will certainly offend their descendants. Recommended as a soporific, and as a curiosity demonstrating that fashionable humour ages quickly. *

A Comic Ride: John Gilpin

  William Cowper. Illustrated by C. Gifford Ambler. The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782/1947) John and wife decide to celebrate their 20th anniversary at The Bell in Edmonton (north of London). Because the chaise will not accommodate the whole family, Gilpin decides to ride. Unfortunately, the horse has other ideas. William Cowper heard the story and made a ballad of it. C. Gifford Ambler created an illustrated edition for PM Productions in 1947. My copy was a gift from Aunt Anne to my late brother Peter in 1948, probably for his birthday.
It’s a charming book, and a charming ballad. I liked it well enough back then to remember John Gilpin as the hero of a strange story about a ride that went wrong. Rereading it now clears up my confused and gappy memory, and confirms my impression of a gem of comic verse. Out of print; used copies sell for £5 and up. Plus shipping.
     Recommended. ***

Appleby's Other Story (Innes) & Compartment K (Reilly)

 Michael Innes. Appleby’s Other Story (1974) An undemanding and forgettable read.

Appleby’s retired, but is drawn into a problem involving dubiously provenanced paintings, shady art dealers and dealings, insurance scams and such. The owner of a possibly unrecognised Old Master painting is shot just before Appleby and his friend Chief Constable Col. Pride arrive to see the painting. Despite his retirement, Appleby tackles the case. Much tugging of local cops' forelocks ensues.
     The puzzle is fair, the solution somewhat strained. I enjoyed reading enough to keep going, but the only impression that now remains is that Innes wrote a lot of dialogue. The characters are barely more than 2D, and Innes is relying on his fans’ knowledge of the Appleby series to flesh out the ambience. Good of its kind. **½

Helen Reilly. Compartment K (1955) Three murders, in New York, on a Canadian train, and at a lodge in the Rockies, are tied together by one man’s desperate need for money to satisfy his materialistic wife. A complicated plot, characters that are approximately 1.5 D, a style laden with ascriptive adjectives, told through the focus on a young woman who almost loses the man she truly loves. What kept me reading was the puzzle, which I partly solved not because of the clues but because of the vague impressions of the character who done it. The denouement relies heavily on facts which were at best hinted at but not fully disclosed until explained by the redoubtable Inspector McKee, who spent most his time at the other end of a phone line.
     I had tried to read this book several times in the past. I decided I’d better read it all the way through this time, and have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can claim some kind of success in getting through it. On the other hand, one can hardly claim credit for enduring self-chosen tedium.
     I bought the book second-hand because the first third or so is set on train. One doesn’t get much of a sense of a train ride, though, mostly because Reilly doesn’t (or can’t) describe anything other than the clothes, which she details with a fashion-reporter’s eye. The cover’s misleading: the Canadian train was hauled by diesels, not steam; North American trains don’t have buffers; and the blurb is too complimentary. That it’s from a New Yorker book note is an even greater puzzle than the one McKee solves. Not recommended, except perhaps as a curiosity. *

Freedom: We don't agree (Lapham's Quarterly 25 01)

Lapham’s Quarterly 25-01 Freedom (Spring 2023). This collection shows that there has beenprecious little consensus on what  freedom means. Most of the pieces assume a political context. Some discuss the moral meanings, usually in contrast to licence. There’s a good deal of story-telling about the effects of oppression, of the struggles for political freedoms. There’s some discussion of self control versus external control. But most of the pieces explicitly or implicitly assume that freedom means the ability to do what one wants to do, with as few constraints, limits, or consequences as possible. Some think that freedom means no consequences whatsoever. But most writers recognise that, since we live with other people, our freedoms and theirs may conflict. Freedom has limits.

    None of the writers refer to the engineer’s concept, which (briefly) refers to how much the design parameters may vary. In practice, it means that the fixing of some variable limits the range and even the availability of some other variable(s) in the design problem. Decide X’s value, and Y’s value is limited, or fixed. Or Y may be impossible to include.  That’s an operational definition, one that I see applicable to politics, social relations, career decisions, and so on. For example, if you decide that a free market means minimal regulation by the government, then only customer demands or preferences will influence such things as a business’s labour or waste disposal practices, etc. In short, you can’t have it all. Exercising your freedom to choose X limits or prevents your freedom to choose Y.

     Many people believe that unpleasant consequences of some choice are limits on their freedom. That belief animated the protests to the covid-19 pandemic measures imposed by governments and businesses. Taken to its logical conclusion, that belief implies that the criminal is an oppressed victim of unjust law, a conclusion that the protesters would not, I think, accept. Thus, reasoning about freedom becomes a nice example of why reason isn’t always reasonable. That also explains why people have disagreed about the concept. Every definition of freedom implies unreasonable conclusions.

     A good collection, as always. ***

Give the Devil His Due: The Screwtape Letters (C S Lewis)

C S Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (1942) A re-read. The letters tell the story of a recent convert to Christianity that Screwtape wants to recapture for Hell’s delectation. Unfortunately, despite his excellent advice on how to exploit the weaknesses of human nature, his nephew Wormwood fails. The object of his devilish affections dies in a bombing raid after achieving another step on his journey to full discipleship.
     Ah, those weaknesses in our nature. They’re all caricatures or dark inversions of our strengths and virtues. Lewis understands that only too well. For example, the false humility of wanting “just a little toast and tea” instead of the three course dinner on offer, which imposes extra work on the host. The apparent self-abnegation disguises the actual selfishness of the perpetrator. Lewis also understands the difference between genuine pleasures and their counterfeits as labelled in the list of seven deadly sins. Enjoying food is good. Gluttony is bad. The book is worth reading merely for these and many other psychological insights.
     For Christians, the extra dimension of theology adds more insight. For example, Lewis believes that pleasure and joy are divine gifts. The Devil can’t produce anything like them; at most he can misdirect the desire for these gifts. Simple pleasure is beyond the Devil's power. Thus, Screwtape loses his temper when contemplating the innocent pleasure of a human splashing about in his bath. How dare the Enemy endow this abominable mix of flesh and spirit with the ability to enjoy mere sensations! At best, the Devil can pervert pleasures, or encourage over-indulgence, or shift the focus from the pleasure itself to the ego, thus making them means instead of ends.
     The letters also hint at Hell’s political ideology, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to fascism and other totalitarianisms.
     One of Lewis’s best. I’ve read it several times now, and every reread reveals more subtle insight and wisdom. Recommended. ****

Orwell's last words:The Decline of the English Murder.

George Orwell. Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (1965) Posthumous selection of previously uncollected essays. Orwell laments the banality of mid-20th century murders compared to the ingenuity of late 19th and early 20th century ones. For example, the desperate attempt to combine respectability and middle-aged passion as seen in the Crippen case.

     Most of these pieces discuss literature and art. Orwell observes the  political and social links between novels and the author’s life and times. Thus, he notes that Dickens accurately diagnoses the harms done by the mercantilist economics of Victorian Britain, but doesn’t see them as any more than the failings of individuals to exercise the common human virtues of empathy and generosity. Orwell doesn’t use the word “systemic” but the concept is implicit in all his social and economic critiques. He knows that any system makes some behaviours easy and others difficult. Change the system and some behaviours will increase and others decrease. To put it another way: We can choose only from what’s available to us; and we will tend to choose the easier or less costly alternatives.
    Orwell’s writing, as you can see, prompts rambling and ruminative responses. He’s also a pleasure to read. Recommended. ****

Religion (Lapham's Quarterly 03 01)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 03-1: Religion (2010) Excerpts from practitioners, theologians, sacred texts, anthropologists, philosophers, and critics of religion. My take-away: the testimony of religious adherents and the observations of the critics add up to several principles. 

     First, religion is species-specific behaviour. All known human societies have practiced some form of religion. Religion consists of customary rituals performed on certain occasions, some of which are tied to the annual seasonal cycles.

     Second, stories are told to explain the religious significance of the rituals. When writing was invented, these stories were written down, and some came to be seen as god-inspired or -dictated sacred texts. All societies claim that their religious stories are true, while those of rival religions are more or less superstitious or worse. This attitude I label religionism. My experience and the occasional survey data indicate it’s the most common form of religious expression.

     Third, religion is usually transactional: Appease or please the god or gods of your religion, and you will have a good life.
     Fourth, the major religions all include the same range of religious expression, from literalist fundamentalist religionism to mysticism. Most adherents to any given religion are indifferent to mysticism, but become hostile when mystics tend to ecumenical acceptance of all expressions of faith.
     For me, the most important inference from these widely varying expressions and critiques of religion is that faith is primary, religion is secondary. Religion works best when its adherents know it’s a limited, incomplete, and at bottom incoherent attempt to express the faith that animates it, which is that the Universe makes some kind of sense, and that human life has some purpose.
     Recommended. ****
     Footnote: for more, see Karen Armstrong’s books about the development of religion.

Running Wild (J. G. Ballard)

J. G. Ballard. Running Wild. (1988) On 25 June 1988, someone murdered the 32 adult residents of Pangbourne estate and kidnapped 13 children. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Greville’s notes chronicle his investigation and eventual solution of the mystery.
     Ballard has imagined a disturbing event. It’s his critique of the philosophy of child-centred education that protects children from stress, failure, and evil. Convincing and creepy, it’s a book that sticks in the darker nooks of one’s mind.
     Recommended, but I suspect most readers will not like it. ***

Politics As Usual (Lapham's Quarterly 05-04)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly 05-04: Politics (2012) As far back as we have written records, we have politics. Politics certainly predates writing, since it meets two human needs: The communal need for social regulation; and the individual need for social structure and  influence. That means politics is about power, which means it conflicts with the human needs for freedom and autonomy. There’s a tension between the need for amicable social relations with one’s neighbours and the need for non-interference by one’s neighbours. This tension creates all the problems that politics is intended to solve. Unintended side-effect: Politics affords the power-hungry the opportunity to satisfy their powerlust. As humans combine into ever larger groups, the result is ever more powerful government.

     In short, politics is a mess. Thoreau considered it a necessary evil. Others have proposed ideal states in which everyone is happy and free. These fantasies are derived by more or less rigorous logic from some set of premises that the proposer believes are self-evident. Circular logic and question-begging abound.

     An excellent collection, as usual. May still be available from LQ’s stash of back issues.

     Recommended. ****

Boney solves the case: Death of a Swagman (Upfield, 1945)

 Arthur Upfield. Death of a Swagman (1945) A swagman dies at a remote shack used to house whoever is sent to check on the wind-driven water pump. An ex-actor who runs a funeral business, and can inhale a cigar’s worth of smoke. An ambitious police sergeant who benefits from Boney’s tutelage. The sergeant’s wise young daughter who captures Boney’s heart. The usual cast of miscellaneous farmers and their hired hands. Boney himself, arrested and imprisoned for a week, during which he paints the fence around the police station an "eye-offending yellow" and learns a lot just by listening. Another nicely done puzzle and several slices of early 20th century Australian outback life. The solution is just barely plausible. Recommended. ***

Psycho-pathologies trigger murder: A Guilty Thing Surprised (Rendell, a Wexford case)

 Ruth Rendell. A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970) Another re-read. Rendell is perhaps too fascinated by psychological pathologies. This time she uses Wexford as the stalking horse, and he does a reasonably good job of unravelling the puzzle. The novel works, but it’s not the best Wexford. Still, any Wexford is better than the average in this genre. I read the book over two evenings and wasn’t close to the solution until about the 3/4 mark. I count that as good entertainment. This copy was a nicely printed trade paperback, which increased the pleasure. **½

Obsolescent Science: This Idea Must Die (Brockman, 2015)

John Brockman, ed. This Idea Must Die! (2015) A reread, and worth it. The contributors sometimes contradict each other. Their mini-essays constitute a course in science. It seems that explaining why an idea is no longer useful or may have become an impediment requires explaining it clearly enough that the reasons for killing it make sense. I enjoyed reading these arguments again.
     One idea that’s not mentioned as worthy of forcible retirement is that Science Describes Reality. It doesn’t. It constructs conceptual models of reality. Several of the essays attack one or another of these models as misleading or worse.  But all the arguments start with the assumption that what’s made the idea obsolete is that it no longer describes reality well enough to warrant acceptance. But taken together, the discussions show that science doesn’t describe reality at all.
     We can’t apprehend reality. The best we can do is to compare our perceptions, the simulations of reality that our brains construct. When we do that, we discover whether we perceive the same similarities and differences. We discover whether our perceptions have common structures. Science uses experiment and observation to methodically examine, and mathematics to describe these common structures. Thus science is about how we perceive reality. We do pretty well, actually. Mathematics is the language of structures, which is why it works so well in science. It’s also the only universal part of language. There is more to be said about the universality of mathematics, but this comment is already longer than it needs to be.
     Thoroughly enjoyable, and highly recommended. ****

How Writing Changed Us: Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong (1982)

Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982) A careful survey of the state of orality studies, or better, the study of spoken language. Since the 80s, the field has proliferated, with increasing emphasis on how we generate speech in different contexts. That spoken and written language were different was obvious. What was less obvious was that the written language was not the superior mode. In fact, spoken language, exhibiting as it does the vagaries of regional and class dialects, was often deprecated as a primitive and even degraded form of the proper language as recorded in writing.
      Ong does not attack this attitude directly, but shows that an oral culture uses language differently than a literate one. He’s concerned that literate readers of the earliest writings aren’t aware enough that these are records of oral compositions, and hence of oral modes. He does a wonderful job of describing and explaining how people without writing construct(ed) their songs, stories and orations using standard tropes and repetitive patterns as scaffolds for building the performance in real time, and certainly each time adapted to whatever audience listened to them. What Homer memorised was not an unbroken stream of thousands of lines of verse, but pieces of the story, which (he) would select, adapt, and reconstruct. Ong’s evidence is both field work by anthropologists who recorded the myths and histories of non-literate peoples, and also the bits of speech embedded in the epics as recorded.
     Ong (and his fellow scholars) go a step or two further. They claim that literacy changes the way we understand the world. What’s written is read, not heard. The text takes precedence over the writer, and eventually become detached from the writer. When we read old books, we read them as independent and objective witnesses to the past, often not realising how much we reconstruct a text, any text, as we read it. Hence the mistaken belief that we can understand the “literal meaning” of a text.  In an oral culture, speech and speaker are one: the story exists only while it is being spoken, and the relation between the audience and the speaker’s utterance is personal, immediate, and fleeting. A written text preserves what was though and understood generations before us. A speech exists only while it’s spoken, and memory of what the now dead ancestors thought and understood is reinterpreted every time it’s spoken. Written law can be consulted. Spoken law depends on trust in the speaker. Grasping the difference between the oral and the written may help us understand why so many of our present day conflicts are about what words signify. We tend to believe that if we understand the text we understand reality, and if we understand reality, we know the truth.
     I found the book heavy going at times, and have already begun to re-read it. Ong’s style is clear, and he has nice dry wit. His observations cast a new light on the effects of electronic media. The Wiki article on him adds a great deal to my comments.
     Recommended. ****

Borden Chantry, a typical Lamour Hero.

 Louis L’Amour. Borden Chantry (1977) L’Amour makes Westerns believable. He does this

by making his heroes human, often being a little obtuse, sometimes too stubborn for their own good, and several grades below super-hero skill-levels. Borden Chantry is an unwilling marshal, taking the job because a drought and poor prices forced him to suspend ranching. A dead man lies in the street. It looks like a bar fight gone wrong, and several townsfolk suggest further investigation isn’t needed. But no one knows the man, and the few clues to his former life suggest that no mere drunken brawl led to his death. So Chantry is left with a mystery. The town drunk, who may know more about the dead man, is killed, leaving his son an orphan. Chantry realizes that the killer has tried to hide his tracks and motivation. Chantry’s strong sense of duty leads him to risk his life in solving the puzzle. A nicely done short novel which would make a nice movie in the High Noon mode. A potboiler, but a very good one. ***

Wings Above Diamantina (Upfield, 1936)

 

 Arthur Upfield. Wings Above Diamantina (1936) Nettlefold, owner of Coolibah Station, and his daughter Elizabeth find a pretty red two-seater monoplane in the dry bottom of seasonal Emu Lake, the only flat piece of land in Emu Lake paddock. A comatose woman is trapped in the passenger seat. How she got there, why she has been drugged, and who tried to kill her by staging a plane crash are the questions that define Inspector Napoleon “Boney” Bonaparte’s) latest case. He finds the answers of course, and a case of true love not only thrives, it rescues a young man from the effects of what we now call PTSD. Well done in every way, a classic of its kind.
     The Boney novels would make a good TV series, but the dated racial attitudes and language would likely be edited out, thus losing the Ozzie ambience and historical accuracy that is part of their charm.
     Recommended ***