Three more Ngaio Marsh rereads: Death in Ecstasy, Vintage Murder, Death in a White Tie

This copy of Death in Ecstasy was printed in 1943, and contains a note requesting the reader to forward it to the armed forces for the entertainment of the troops

Ngaio Marsh. Death in Ecstasy (1936), Vintage Murder (1936), Death in A White Tie (1938). More re-reads. Marsh has become a steady seller, hence the three novels published in 1936.

Between Vintage Murder and Death in a White Tie, Alleyn has met Agatha Troy and solved a rather grisly murder perpetrated at her studio summer school (Artists in Crime). She has a walk-on part in Death in a White Tie, which ends with her accepting Alleyn’s proposal. There’s a good deal of sentimental back story about their courtship and Alleyn’s mama wishing Troy were her daughter-in-law, etc. Fox has stiffened into a cardboard cut-out; in later books, Marsh shows us a good deal more of Alleyn’s team, but they never become fully realised characters. The murder of Lord ‘Bunchy’ Robert Gospell following a debutante ball is nicely set up and solved, and Marsh shows once again that she has a sharp eye for human folly. She’s really a satirist; her depiction of the Alleyn-Troy romance is rather awkward. In later books, she shows them as a married couple comfortable with each other and supporting each other’s careers.

I enjoyed these re-reads. I don’t try to puzzle out the solution, I prefer to watch the ‘tecs doing their stuff. If I get a sense of whodunit (or have a vague memory from a previous read), I still want to see how Alleyn and Fox come to their conclusions. You may want to shut the book where Alleyn and Fox discuss the case, and work out the solution yourself. I don’t.

I especially liked Marsh’s evocation of a touring theatre company’s life on the road (railroad) in Vintage Murder.

Recommended to all fans of the classic English murder mystery. ***

Three by Ngaio Marsh: A May Dead, Enter a Murderer, The Nursing Home Murders

Ngaio Marsh. A Man Lay Dead (1935) Ngaio Marsh. Enter A Murderer (1935) Ngaio Marsh. The Nursing Home Murders (1936) Three re-reads. Entertaining, and revealing: Marsh’s narrative skills improve over these first three Alleyn novels. The novels are also excellent data for understanding the social  milieu of the 1930s: prejudices that to us seem glaringly obvious are taken for granted and even approved as common sense. There’s increasing awareness of caste and class differences, but they don’t yet grate on people’s nerves. Freudian psychology has its day, and figures in the characters’ psychology. It may even supply motives, or make them intelligible. “Modern” means current and cutting edge fashion, as it always does. Many of the objects used to signal culture and hence character are now coveted antiques.

I enjoyed these rereads. **½ and ***

The age of these books has made them accurate historical novels.

The World of Agatha Christie (Martin Fido, 2012)

Martin Fido. The World of Agatha Christie (2012) A series of two-page spreads on topics that add up to a life and a survey of the works, and their adaptations to other media. I learned a few new facts about Christie’s ancestry and early life: she had an upper middle class upbringing. Her service in a hospital during the 1914-18 war no doubt widened her view of life, which helped her devise convincing plots and characters.

Her wartime marriage to Archie Christie meant more to her than him. As Mary Westmacott, she wrote love romances. I think she needed to write them to work out her feelings of abandonment and betrayal by Archie Christie.

A good summary of Christie’s life and work, but not a keeper. **

Sketch of a Road Trip (Mike Glover, The Big Lonely 2009)

 Mike Glover. The Big Lonely (2009) Glover took a trip across the country (one of many), and self-published this book of sketches. They are notes for his paintings. He likes old buildings, old machines, boats, lonely rocks and trees. The cover image shows his taste. The drawings are accurate records of the subjects, seen from an angle that creates a pleasing composition. The objects look self-sufficient, as though they existed apart from the humans that made them, or the human that sees and records them. In his paintings, this self-sufficiency creates a kind of solitary, elegiac mood. Glover gave me this book in exchange for a few items for his model railroad. I’m glad to have it. ****

How the oil cartel changed global trading (Paper Money, by Adam Smith, 1981)

Adam Smith. Paper Money. (1981) A discussion of the effects of the oil crisis of the early 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and nearby countries formed OPEC. This resulted in what Smith calls “the greatest transfer of wealth” in the history of Earth. Its effect on money was to devalue the dollar, which now has about 1/10th of its former value.

In 1980 or thereabouts the second round of inflation began. Central banks everywhere raised interest rates into the double digits. Ordinary folk like us faced mortgages offered at above 20%. We paid 23% on the line of credit we used to build our house. The bank manager asked his central office to approve a mortgage in the high teens. As that rate came down year-by-year, we maintained the high mortgage payment, and so paid it off in less than half the originally calculated time.

Smith has managed to turn his tale of accounting, interest rates, monetary policy and such into a page turner. That’s the effect of both the large number of stories about his interviews with bankers, economists, money market gurus etc, and of his style. He tells the story of his investigations, which reveals the story of the two huge rounds of inflation and the restructuring of the global banking system. He writes high journalism: Factually as accurate as he can make it, larded with analysis and theory, all conveyed as his personal experience and thinking.

A side effect of reading this book is a better understanding of why Trump’s tariffs (if sustained) will lead to another round of inflation, and probably another restructuring of the global banking system. Another effect is a clearer insight into international trade: Basically, it’s bartering, with the values of the goods in the contracts and account books denominated in US dollars. A possible (and based on Smith’s explanations IMO a likely) outcome of the tariffs will be the loss of the US dollar’s status as the global currency.

Highly recommended. ****

Footnote: As of this posting, Trump has rolled back tariffs on several types of food. It seems the tariffs have begun to bite, and the voters are unhappy.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

Mike Higgs, compiler. Dan Dare: Operation Saturn (1989). Originally Eagle V3-47, February 1953, to V5-31, May 1954.

Granny Morgan subscribed to the Eagle for us. The cover comic on every issue was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. He wore a very 1950-ish uniform, he had a batman who was loveable working-class clown, and he showed proper deference to his commanding officer, a grey-mustachioed figure of probity. His sidekicks were a Yank and a Frenchman, but of course Dan the Englishman was the leader of this multi-national space force. The space ships were technically impossible. The first trip was to Venus, home of two antagonistic tribes separated by a fiery equator. All very simplistic, but it satisfied our desire for space opera.

This story begins with “black cats”, robot ships that attack and destroy inner-planet space ships. Their origin is Saturn. An evil scientist-entrepreneur offers to help the space force on their mission. He is of course a traitor who will deliver Earth to the evil emperor who wants to rule the solar system. And so on. Dare and the oppressed races who inhabit Saturn’s moons win, of course, and the would-be emperor dissolves into glittery stuff, maybe gas or maybe dust.

Rereading this story, I see what I didn’t see at the time: the jingoistic assumption that Britain would rule the space-waves, that English daring would solve all problems, that the lesser races needed the leadership of Dare, that the other powers would happily cede leadership to Britain, etc. Eagle was founded by an Anglican clergyman who wanted to counter-act the influence of Beano and other English comics, and the increasing influence of American comics. Eagle was printed on slick paper, with lots of wholesome content, such as centre-spreads illustrating and describing interesting technical achievements. Dan Dare served as the hero-model that would raise a generation of wholesome and upright English boys to wholesome and upright English manhood, ready to take their wholesome and rightful places in the post-war utopia. Or something like that.

We collected our copies. Before we came to Canada, I cut out the centre-spreads dealing with railways. I kept them for years. When the Dan Dare comics were compiled into books, my brother subscribed. This one was an extra copy that he offered to me. I was glad to have it. Rereading it triggered nostalgic memories of 11 Broad Walk, Sunday walks with our uncle and the dog, and listening to radio comedy shows with Grandpa that Granny disapproved of. The Dan Dare story is a slap-dash creation; no publisher would waste ink on it nowadays. It could have been done more carefully, with more plausible physics, fully developed characters, and aliens that were more than funny coloured humans. As it is, it was a nostalgia trip for me. **

Starlight (Bester, 1976): Classics from the Sci-Fi Golden Age.

 Alfred Bester. Starlight (1976) A combination of two previous anthologies. Bester is IMO an under-rated sci-fi author. He was a competent genre writer, and several of his sci-fi stories are classics. For example They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, which tells of a man and a woman marooned in a city after an unexplained catastrophe that removed all other humans. She’s careful to tot up all her “purchases” at the stores. He’s anxious to find a TV repairman so that he can watch his favourite shows. Read it to find out what happens. The twist at the end is typical of Bester’s stories. He wrote for a market and did it well. I enjoyed re-reading this collection. ** to ****.

The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

The Door To Anywhere (Pohl, 1967)

Frederik Pohl. Door To Anywhere (1967) Retitled reprint of The Tenth Galaxy Reader. Pohl’s selections are all worth reading; several have become classics of short science fiction. The 60s saw a shift from techno space opera to fictions speculating about the social and psychological effects of technical progress. Or rather, innovation; the stories generally clarify that innovation and progress are not synonyms.

Two samples: The Tunnel Under the World, in which miniature androids living in a miniature world harbour the minds and memories of real people, thus making them ideal test subjects for adverting campaigns.

An Elephant for the Prinkip, in which a spacer contracts to deliver an elephant to a collector of beasts. It’s a joke tale, but fun. The narrator ends up with are responsibility he didn’t count on. He should’ve read every word of the contract.

A good record of what sold in the 1960s sci-fi market. Recommended for any sci-fi fan. *** 

Nero Wolfe in Montana (Death of a Dude, 1969)

  Rex Stout. Death of a Dude (1969 Archie’s a guest at Lily Rowan’s ranch, on a rare break from work. There’s a murder, Archie’s stuck for various reasons, the main one being that he’s an outsider who believes the obvious suspect is innocent. The community believes the suspect acted out of exculpatory rage at the seducer of his girl. Archie’s attempts to find the real killer interfere with the sheriff’s investigations. A lot of people don’t want to talk. And so on.

Surprise, surprise!  Nero Wolfe travels to Montana to lend a hand. He ups the gastronomic and investigative ante. Lily Rowan helps out. Several people serve as plausible suspects for all the plausible reasons. The case ends happily for the people who deserve it. The reader (me) spent a pleasant few hours absorbing this concoction. Recommended. ***

Pym: The Sweet Dove Died (1978)

 Barbara Pym. The Sweet Dove Died. (1978) Leonora, a self-absorbed woman of a certain age, obsessive about her appearance and other people’s manners, decides that James, nephew of her long-time (and never-to-be-successful) wooer Humphrey will make a wonderful accessory. While on an antique-hunting trip for his uncle, James meets Phoebe, who seduces him despite himself, and later tries to assert property rights in him. But then James meets Ned, an even smarmier and vicious version of the self-absorbed narcissist than Leonora. In the end, James escape the clutches of both Phoebe and Ned, but Leonora decides that Humphrey will make a better dancer of sycophantic attendance.

Pym has a sharp eye for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and moral laziness. Her style is blandly descriptive, leaving it up to the reader to have both moral insight and the ability to make the moral judgments on her characters. Perhaps she also expects us to agree that these, too, are human beings, and deserve some measure of happiness despite their flaws. If so, she’s succeeded. After a couple of starts, I was drawn in. You may be too. Recommended, but Pym is an acquired taste. ***

Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.

Excellent Women (Pym, 1952)

 Barbara Pym. Excellent Women. (1952) Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman (deceased), narrates this tale of apparently uneventful lives. She’s generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing, but every now and then a throwaway remark reveals a sharp moral intelligence. She knows phonies when she sees or hears one. She has part-time work with an organization that helps impoverished gentlewomen, but we are told nothing about it.

Mildred is one of the excellent single or otherwise unencumbered women that every functioning, well-run parish depends on to do what needs to be done, because after all they don’t have much else to do, do they? Mildred’s a spinster. Her responses to the few men in her life show that it’s by choice. Everard Bone, an archeologist, is the one man who’s her equal in intellect and insight. But he’s emotionally awkward, so nothing comes of the couple of times she visits him. The Wiki article on Pym’s novels indicates that between books Mildred does in fact marry him; but as she’s background scenery in other books, we know nothing of their courtship and marriage. 

I enjoy Pym’s books. There are fierce undercurrents beneath the placid surface flow of the narrative. Every now and then, a swirl or eddy of indignation, or unwitting cruelty, or exasperation reveals that even the most humdrum lives include the usual quota of pain and suffering, most of it undeserved. This book has a good deal of this, but includes compensating (if small) pleasures and joys. Well, not so small when compared to the pain. Recommended. ****

Maigret and the Black Sheep (Simenon, 1962)

 Simenon. Maigret and the Black Sheep. (1962) A respectable retired manufacturer dies of a gunshot from his own pistol while his wife and daughter are at the opera. It’s not suicide, but murder. But there seems to be no reason for anyone to want him dead. Maigret patiently digs up the facts that reveal the murderer’s reasons for wanting to kill. Family secrets and incomplete, misleading, or false answers to questions delay the resolution of the story in the satisfactory Simenon manner. Maigret wins again.

I confess that the TV versions of Maigret make the reading more pleasurable. Simenon is good with dialogue, but poor with visuals. If you like Maigret, this one will please you, perhaps even more than it pleased me. **½

Dumb Birds (Kracht, A Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, 2019)

 

Matt Kracht. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (2019) Early in his life, Kracht suffered exposure to the mysteries of bird watching. It took, but it left some emotional scars. So he wrote this book, a nicely done satire on field guides, and a fairly gentle put-down of bird watchers. I enjoyed it. But some of the more tight-assed members of the tribe may take offense. It does get a bit repetitive.

 Recommended, but you have been warned. **½

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins, 2009)

 Richard Dawkins. The Greatest Show On Earth. (2009) Most of Dawkins’s work has been the attempt to convince people that Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design, is wrong. This book is his marshalling of the evidence that evolution is real, and that we have increasing knowledge and understanding of how it happens. The basic principle is random variation constrained by deterministic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s because most mutations do not improve the organism’s chances of surviving long enough to breed, or to outbreed siblings and cousins, that the few favourable mutations not only gain a foothold but spread. IOW, while mutations are random, their effects are not, and that is enough to guarantee that most beneficial mutations will usually spread while deleterious ones will not (if they haven’t killed their hosts). One consequence is that the best versions of essential genes are conserved across species. The preservation and spread of favourable genotypes is what “natural selection” actually means.

A well done book, which in the end is the best refutation to the pseudoscience peddled  by the creationists. Recommended. ****

Footnote: It seems to me that one of the motivations for Creationism is a misreading of the Bible. The assumption seems to be that the factual truth is primary. Or Fundamental. Or even the Only Truth. Therefore there is only one legitimate method of interpreting the biblical texts, namely to assume its factual truth. From this point of view, only factual truth can guarantee the truth of whatever moral or theological or other propositions the reader wishes to assert.

But the assumption that factual truth proves moral, theological, and other abstract truths has a fundamental problem for the believer: By making factual truth primary, religious truths are logically contingent. That means that any changes in factual truths may change religious truths. At some level, fundamentalists seem to understand this, hence their insistence that the factual truths they read into the biblical narratives cannot be contradicted. It also means they must find ways of proving the truth of the facts as stated in the Bible.

Why the Toast Always Lands Buttered Side Down (Yes, there's an explanation).

 

Richard Robinson. Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Science of Murphy’s Law. (2005) Just what the title says – an investigation into failure, and our propensity to underestimate the probability that something will go wrong. We evaluate the odds as high or low in terms of our desired outcomes. So we buy lottery tickets. We evaluate risk in terms of our fears. So many people would rather drive than fly. Selective memory supplies the misleading data that confirms our fears or supports our desires. So we see coincidence as proof of some rule or of divine protection.

And so on.

Many of these mistakes in parsing the universe are summed up in proverbs. A watched pot never boils. Oh yes it does, but the few times you watch it, it seems to take forever. The extended version is the apparently universal experience that something works perfectly well until you show it off to someone. It’s especially embarrassing when that something is you playing the piano.

All in all, a nicely done, often amusing, and mostly painless reminder of the science that explains why the world often doesn’t work the way we want it to. By the way, toast does land buttered side down more often than not. That’s because it usually drops from about table height, and thus has just enough time to turn over so it’s buttered side down just before hits the floor.

Recommended. ***

What's the Economy For? (Patel, The Value of Nothing, 2009)

Raj Patel. The Value of Nothing. (2009) Modern economic theory ascribes a value of $0 to externals. For example, treating effluent before discharging it into the nearest watercourse costs money, but untreated effluent costs nothing. More precisely, leaving the purification of effluent to natural processes costs nothing. 

Since we believe the aim of our economy is to maximise profit, we believe that the aim of our producers is to minimise cost, which in turn means to maximise externals. It also means minimising the provision of social goods, which cost money. Thus the drive to minimise taxes, which pay not only for necessities but also for amenities. Finally, the drive to maximise profits spurs the quest to privatise public goods such as education and parks, and to oppose the transfer of necessary services such as healthcare from private to public organisations.

Patel’s book is an extended discussion on the value of those external processes that suppsedly cost nothing. Hence the title. He begins by estimating the full cost of those zero-cost externals. An example is the $3.95 hamburger whose true cost is about $200.

Like many others who have meditated on the costs of using nature to do our dirty work, he concludes that these externals provide services of value, if only the monetary cost avoided by using them. From that starting point, he widens his discussion. The book is an argument for an economy that recognises that ecosystems are fundamental, and instead of treating them as zero-cost, treats them as the essential and hence most valuable part of the economy. He understands that any change to our economic systems entails changes to our politics, and discusses those as well, adducing examples of successful local, communal control.

Well, that’s a simplification of this book, which touches on everything that’s implied by the question What is the economy for? 

Recommended. ****

Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh, then Think.

Marc Abrahams. The Ig Nobel Prizes 2 (2004) The Ig Nobel Prizes were devised at Harvard. They’ve grown in size and prestige. Many Nobel winners have happily participated in awarding them, and most winners of the Ig Nobels have felt honoured by the recognition of their research, which First makes you laugh, then makes you think. Traditions such as folding the event program into paper airplanes to be launched at the stage, and a rigidly enforced time limit on the acceptance speech, maintain the Goonish ambience.

Anyone can nominate anyone for an Ig Nobel. Some of the prizes are not so subtle satiric critiques of pseudoscience and other nonsense, but most are awarded for valid scientific discoveries, and many are more significant than a quick read my suggest. Like anecdotes, they may prompt deeper questions than the one they answered.

This collection is well worth whatever you pay for it. I found my copy at a yard sale, hence wildly under-priced compared to its value. A few examples:

2001 Ig Nobel for Astrophysics, to Rex and Rexella Van Impe, evangelists, for their discovery that black holes meet all the criteria for Hell.

2004 Ig Nobel for Public Health, to Jillian Clarke, high school student, for her investigation of the 5-Second Rule for food that falls on the floor. (It fails, but by how much depends on the floor covering).

2024 winners here: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

A valuable reference work. Recommended ****

Le Carre, A Murder of Quality (1968)

 

John Le Carre, A Murder of Quality. (1968) A murder at a B-list public school brings Smiley out of retirement when Miss Brimley, a war-time colleague, receives a letter that disturbs her. The puzzle is nicely knotted and solved, but what kept me reading was Le Carre’s skewering of pseuds. Carne School prides itself on upholding standards of behaviour long past their relevance. This is the crack through which the light escapes and the darkness of murder seeps in.

Le Care’s other strength is characterisation. We want to know more about these people. Le Carre presents the characters as they present themselves, and I was deceived by the murderer and his victim as much as every other character in the story was, including Smiley himself. The final unravelling of the mystery satisfies psychologically, which is rare in mysteries that turn on deceptions that we wish to see punished. Odd, that we want both justice and justification.

Recommended. ***½

A Movie version (1991) is available on YouTube.

Guns, Guns, Guns: A History of Gun Violence (Lapham's Quarterly, 2018)

  Lapham’s Quarterly, A History of Gun Violence. (2018) A depressing read, with enough data to show that humans have generally expended more effort and skill on making effective weapons than any other tool. War has always been as much about the combatants’ ability to manufacture effective weaponry as about their mastery of strategy and tactics.

The perfection of the hand gun by Colt, Smith & Wesson and others has made gun violence almost as normal as bread. It has also made killing so easy that murder has become the default ingredient of many crimes that would be successful without it. The US Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution has encouraged a sense of personal entitlement that has spread into all other aspects of communal life, so that conflict is for many people now the prime mode of relating to others.

As usual, an excellent overview of the subject, consisting mostly of firsthand accounts and analyses based on knowledge of the history. But a melancholy read. The cover is an interpretation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Recommended. ****

Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****

Darwin Awards 3 (2003)

 Wendy Northcutt. The Darwin Awards III (2003) A Darwin Awards are given posthumously to people who have removed themselves from the gene pool by means less than wise, and have thereby presumably removed deleterious genes. The tales recounted here raise a mix of laughter, astonishment, and pity, but never in the same proportions.

An example: In Finland, in October 2001, a group of friends were stranded by the side of the freeway after running out of gas. No one stopped to help, so one of them lay down the middle of the roadway, expecting traffic to stop. It didn’t, and his unwise attempt to help caused his demise. Confirmed.

The editors are careful to distinguish between confirmed cases, probably true ones, and personal accounts. Mildly amusing illustrations add to the charm of the book. And it is oddly charming: the generally high level of confidence displayed by the award winners before physics and chemistry interfered with their aims is admirable.

Recommended if you can find a copy. ***

Poppies (photo)

The oriental poppies are in bloom. They are about 10-15cm (4-6 inches) across. Photo taken after rain, 19th June 2025.

Frontier Woman (L'Amour, The Cherokee Trail)

 Louis L’Amour. The Cherokee Trail (2012) A posthumous work, prepped for publication by L’Amour’s heirs. The gaps in the story show, but don’t affect the overall impression. Unusually, the protagonist is a woman, who establishes her cred by horse-whipping the incompetent operator of the stagecoach station whom she’s replacing.  Her husband was supposed to take the job, but he was killed by a renegade rebel officer. A quiet fellow-passenger signs on to help out, and of course eventually “sparks fly”, as the current cliche has it. All in all, a workaday job of entertainment. It would make a good basis for a video, assuming the makers were willing to pick up on the hints about the self-reliance of pioneer women. Not up to L’Amour’s usual standard, but I liked it.

**½

Jake and the Kid (W. O. Mitchell, 1961)

W. O Mitchell. Jake and the Kid (1961) A selection of the short stories based on the radio series that Mitchell wrote for the CBC. Mitchell’s Crocus, Saskatchewan, is very like Leacock’s Mariposa. Like Leacock, Mitchell hides a sometimes bitter satiric insight under slathers of sentiment, poetic justice, and a laid-back style of yarning. I recall listening to some of the radio series when we first came to Canada.

This collection is termed ‘A Novel’, which stretches the concept a bit. The stories do form a kind of a plot around the conflict between Jake Turner and Miss Henchbaw, the schoolteacher who persists in correcting the Kid’s understanding of history as told by Turner. There is a kind of resolution when Miss Henchbaw revises the Kid’s nomination for Golden Jubilee Citizen.

Mitchell has an excellent ear for dialogue, and understands human nature only too well. He does tend to soften his depiction of human evil into mere mischief or pardonable error. But he never glamourises virtue. Jake is the Kid’s hero, but we, who see past and through the Kid’s hero-worship, see Turner’s flaws. This use of the innocent eye also resembles Leacock. It’s a Canadian thing, I guess.

An enjoyable read. Recommended. ***

The Crime of the Century (Amis, 1975)

 Kingsley Amis. The Crime of the Century (1975) Amis wrote this as a serial for the Sunday Times. Skillful, nicely plotted, with occasional flashes of satire, but not a classic of the genre. Retired Det. Supt Barry is called in on the caser of serial killing. The unknotting of the case is wordy, and while the clues have been fairly planted, there aren’t enough of them to justify the solution.

It’s not exactly a page-turner, but I did want to know how it all turned out. Perhaps its brevity (130 pages in paperback) is the reason for the mild disappointment. There’s large cast of interesting characters, but Amis sticks strictly to procedure. I would have liked to read a more expansive narrative, with back stories and intersecting plots. Oh well, Amis wrote it to order, and he delivered as contracted. I suppose an Amis fan or student should read this. For the mystery fan, it’s passable, just. **

Does Anything Eat Wasps? (New Scientist, 2005)

 New Scientist). Does Anything Eat Wasps (2005) Yes, lots of things eat wasps! Even other wasps eat wasps. You will find long (but incomplete) list on pages 82 to 84 of this wonderful collection of questions asked by readers of New Scientist.

For example, How much does a human head weigh? (About 10 lbs/5kg, which helps explain neck pain, but not the kind triggered by annoying cousins and neighbours). How many species of microbes live on and in the human body? (Nobody knows for sure, and since the question was asked, DNA surveys suggest it’s in the thousands at least. As for population, it’s likely in the trillions.)

Other readers (some of them even experts) provide the answers. An index makes this not only fun but useful. Highly recommended. Only downside: Once you’ve found an answer to a question, you just have to read the next question and its answers. And the next one.... ****

It's a Good Life... (Seth, 2004)

 Seth (G. Gallant). It’s a Good Life, if you Don’t Weaken. (2004) A collection of stories collected into a novella. The plot is the eventually successful search for information about Kalo, a Canadian New Yorker cartoonist who seems to have disappeared from history.

Seth writes graphic novels. His drawings are essential to his story. Their elegiac ambience supports the hero’s view of life as a series of losses. He likes old things, imagining that life in the Olden Days was simpler and morally easier than now. His search for Kalo is semi-successful. He finds the rest of Kalo’s work, and discovers where and why he retired from cartooning. It’ a humdrum story of having to make a living, but in the context of Seth’s unease about his own purpose in life, humdrum takes on existential significance. The title of the story is one way to express that significance.

I liked this novella, and will likely read it again. (This was a second reading.)****

North Channel, Lake Huron, Blind River ON, 2025-04-29

 

I take a few photos of the North Channel about once a month. This a recent one. Windy, about 5C, looking south. Click on it to see it full-screen.

Fin de siècle fiction: Daughters of Decadence (Showalter 1993)

Elaine Showalter. Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter has selected a representative sample of short fiction written by women around 1890. These stories were published in women’s magazines and literary journals. The writers were at least semi-professional. Like their male counterparts, they wrote to satisfy the market, which at the time wanted moody pieces that suggested sensuality and luxurious indulgence in emotions, or melodramatic examinations of moral failure and just punishment.

The pieces that Showalter chose have an edge of defiance and rebellion. These writers knew their skills were equal to those of their male competitors, and naturally they did not like the lower pay and lack of recognition. They were  part of the second wave of feminism, which among other things gained the vote.

Given the heavy political freight these stories carry, are they worth reading? Yes, but like all fin-de-siècle art, they are as interesting for what they tell us of our ancestors’ taste and sentiments as for their artistic merit. As stories, they are well constructed. They cover a wide range of genres, from naturalistic fiction to romance to fantasy. I like the satire and social critique that most bring with them. They’re generally set in the upper middle and upper classes. The dialogue is artificial, but oddly enough it gives an impression of truth. I suspect that’s because men and women of those classes were always on their guard. They could not assume the language of intimacy among equals without also suggesting a sexual intimacy that could damage their reputations.

The stories are about personal and social relationships. Most tell of the emotional costs of presenting oneself as available, or withholding oneself because of some unsuitability. Women must play their roles, and so must men. It’s all very civilised in tone and style, but often viciously mean in substance. Many of the male characters display their prejudices and misogyny unwittingly. It’s no wonder that the critics objected, especially to the stories that suggested or showed that personal happiness requires the freedom to make moral choices for oneself.

The anthology apparently was assembled for use in a course on feminist literature, but the stories don’t need academic justification for reading them. If you like short stories, I think you will like these. If you also want to know something about the taste of your ancestors, I think they are good data. If you see popular literature as the mirror of the moral and ethical concerns of its times, these stories are essential reading.

Recommended. ***

What "100 year flood" really means

How likely is a "Hundred Year Flood" this year? Does the likelihood change when you've just had one?

I have a subscription to an online new source. Many of the stories it publishes are open for comment. One of the reports was about a Turkish geologist, Naci Gorur, who was trying to raise earthquake awareness. I saved the following comment because it makes a crucial point about what the probabilities of "rare" events actually mean. The highlighted sentence sums up the math. Percentage odds are not intuitive. I've added the calculation below Repetto's comment. I used my computer's calculator to do the arithmetic.

[ by R.C. Repetto, Amherst, MA]

People can't deal with probabilities, such as "a hundred-year flood". If there was one ten years ago, they think they're safe for another 90 years. No, they face a one percent probability there will be one next year and more than a ten percent chance* there will be one in the next decade. That misunderstanding and shortsightedness is why people still move into disastrous locales, such as Florida or Phoenix or the mountainous regions of the West. It makes a mockery of the claim that "we" can adapt to climate change. We haven't and won't, until it's too late.

* If the odds of some event is 1 percent (one per hundred) per year, then the odds that it will happen within the next 10 years are (1.01^10*100)-100, or 10.4%

Footnote: If you knew there was a one percent chance of having an accident every time you drove your car, would you drive it?

A ramble through Stuart MacLean's Mind (The Vinyl Café Notebooks, 2010)

Stuart MacLean. The Vinyl Café Notebooks (2010) Just what it says. McLean sorted them according to themes. The tone is a mix of Welcome Home and the Vinyl Café stories.

An enjoyable read, even, I think, for people who aren’t fans. As in the stories, McLean sometimes pounds home the themes, which to me feels like he doesn’t trust his readers. Then I see an online post of some supposedly true-life story whose lessons are explained at (usually sentimental) length. And I recall the student who had trouble understanding anything more than the literal content of the stories. Which means, among many other things, that we tend to think that’s what’s easy for us must be easy for everybody. And so we come to so-called common sense, which is neither, most of the time. It’s just the notions that seem obvious to us, limited by our experience, and our brain’s depressing tendency to take a single example as proof of a generalisation.

OK, looks like I’ve committed Mclean-like ramble of thoughts.

Recommended. ***

A Poker Hand's A Clue (Eric Wright, The Last Hand, 2001)

Eric Wright. The Last Hand (2001) Charlie Salter is approaching retirement, and has been assigned office duties.  An apparently simple murder case turns out not to be. Salter gets the case because one of the people close to the victim wants him to do it. He’s assigned Terry Smith, a brand new constable, an immigrant from Glasgow, to work with him. After a lot of palaver and fact checking, we find out what we probably inferred around the quarter mark: it was a passion-driven murder. A very large pile of misleading information and surmise has to be cleared away, mostly because a lot of it, if true, would implicate a lot of important legal people in corruption and scandal.

A good read, but not a great one. Salter goes off into the sunset of retirement happy that he’s played one last hand. A poker game figures in the solution by providing the clue that unravels the knot.

OK, that’s enough cliches. I enjoyed the book because I like the Salter series. The book could have stood a lot more story about Salter and Smith.  **½

Nasturtium

 

September 2009. This was a test of the close-up capability of my then-new Canon SX-20 digital camera.

The Library of Babel (The Universal Library) (long read)

Some thoughts on the Universal Library problem

The problem was fictionalised by Luis Borges. It may be stated thus: Can we specify a procedure for writing a Universal Library? A universal library contains all texts ever written and ever to be written, in all the languages that have ever and will ever be spoken, and many more that will never be spoken by anyone. The paradoxical answer to this question is yes, and several proofs exist that such a library is not only possible, but is of a finite size, albeit a very large one. One such procedure (adapted from one described by Martin Gardner) is the following:

Suppose a book of 100 pages of 100 lines of 100 characters each. Each such book contains a total of 10^6 characters, including the space. Using the Latin alphabet in upper and lower case (52 characters), 7 punctuation marks and the space, and 10 numerals bring the total to 70 characters. The total number of books, if each contains exactly one permutation will be 70^(10^6), a very large number. It is so large that if every atom in the universe were a printing machine printing at the rate of one character per second, it would take many lifetimes of our universe to print all the books.

Clearly, very, very large library. Does this library in fact contain all possible books?

Each book in the library is a specific combination of characters. Each such combination is 10^6 characters long. Given that any printed book is a combination of characters, that combination will occur at least once somewhere in the library. A book shorter than 10^6 characters will occur many times, since there will be (100-n)^(10^6) permutations of the characters filling out the book to 10^6 characters.

The same consideration applies to books not yet written, for each such book is a combination of characters. Books that will never be written by anyone will also occur in this library. And since all spoken languages can be represented by some scheme of matching characters to sounds, books written in all possible spoken languages will occur in this library.

This summary proof shows that all books ever written, ever to be written, and never to be written occur in this library, many of them more than once. Since every book can be printed with typographical errors, all possible combinations of typographical errors will also occur. In short, not only will all possible books occur, all possible variations on each book will occur. What’s more, a very large proportion of the books will be nonsense in any language, including languages not spoken on Earth (if there are such.) That includes Klingon, and any other fictional language.

This Universal Library is too large. It’s clear that “too large” means not only “utterly infeasible”, it also means “containing too much nonsense.” But mulling over the consequences of the procedure for constructing the library is a useful exercise in handling very large numbers, numbers that are unimaginably large. The Universal Library problem shows that we can conceive of entities that we cannot imagine, and that we can reason accurately about them.

Can the Library be made smaller? Yes, by using an encoding scheme that compresses the data. One might work as follows.

Suppose we use binary code. The we use only 2 characters, and the size of the library will be 2^(10^6), still a very large number. Is it smaller than the library using 60 characters? Yes. The fraction is [2^(10^6) / 70^(10^6)], a very small fraction. 

That’s still enormous, though. Is it enormous enough to contain all possible books? Paradoxically, yes. Every character will be encoded in binary, and hence every combination of characters will occur as a combination of binary characters. What’s more, since binary code can be represented by some combination of alphabetic characters (e.g, a for 1, b for 0), this binary-coded Universal Library will be included in the alphabetic one, once for every encoding of the binary characters. For example, (a,b), or (one, zero) and their equivalent in every possible, known, and unknown language. No wonder encoding the universal library using the alphabet is so inefficient.

Hence the supposedly larger set of books containing every possible combination of 70 characters will be contained in the smaller set of books containing every possible combination of only two characters. Thus, the library utilising 70 characters encodes its information very inefficiently. Can we improve that efficiency?

Suppose we limit ourselves to English books. Since any conceivable language should be translatable into English, surely we can reduce the size of the library? Yes, we can. We need only ensure the inclusion of every combination of characters that represents an English translation of a book written in some other language. But our multilingual library would include all translations of all books into every language. Limiting ourselves to one language to represent all possible books omits those multiple translations. If there are L possible languages, then there are L! translations of all books into all languages. Thus limiting ourselves to one language, the library’s size will be  {[2^6(10^6)]/L!}. This will be a fraction of the multilingual library. But it will still be enormous.

Nevertheless, we can estimate its size. Suppose there are 500,000 English words. Suppose the average length of an English word is 10 characters, including one space. Then each of our English books of 10^6 characters will have an average of (10^6)/10 or 10^5 English words. The size of this library (in binary characters) will be 2^(10^5) books. This is still very large: it’s [2^(10^6)]/[2^(10^5)], which is 10% smaller than the complete library. Not much of a saving. What’s more, it will be this size regardless of the total number of languages.

AI: A Conceptual Problem

AI is really a conceptual problem.

What is "human intelligence"? I think for most people it's a fuzzy concept combining self-awareness, reasoning, information processing, problem solving, symbol manipulation, insight, etc. In other words, not clear enough to make good sense when thinking about machine intelligence.

What is "thinking"? ChatGPT seems to think, but all it does it string together words and phrases and sentences, based on some probabilities that were calculated during its training. I've tried it several times, and what I notice about it is that it uses vast amounts of cliche. Which is not at all surprising, since cliches by definition are more likely to occur in text than original tropes. Its output makes sense, but it's yawn-inducing boring.

On the other hand, I think all those processes, plus processes not yet understood or recognised, are necessary for sentience and self awareness. Will machines get there? Maybe. The real danger is that we will confuse their making sense with wisdom, and rely on them to do things only humans should do. Such a judge guilt and innocence.

Footnote: The most common imagery of robots shows them as humanoid. But all robots currently at work are machines that look nothing like human beings. They're basically arms.