Barrel Fever (Sedaris, 1994)

  David Sedaris.  Barrel Fever. (1994) A very mixed bag. In some of the stories, Sedaris comes across as the little boy that tries to shock his elders. But the elders are not shocked. Merely irritated by having a good story spoiled by affected naughtiness. Or if in a more kindly mood, perhaps amused that Sedaris feels that naughtiness is necessary to make his stories worth reading.

Many of the stories read like fictionalised memoirs. Staying true to background reality makes them involving in a personal way; Sedaris comes across as someone with a deep and charitable interest in his fellow human beings, but also with a sardonic awareness of their (our) self-delusions, and of the ways in which they (we) strive to keep our amour propre intact. That justifies the cover blurb describing him as “shrewd, wickedly funny...” despite its exaggeration.

His essays are better, I think. He is both outsider and insider, which adds flavour and spice to his observations about what are after all fairly ordinary slices of a fairly ordinary life. His ability to see what’s odd about the ordinary makes his writing both funny and valuable. It also reassures us that our own fairly ordinary lives are worth living after all. *** 

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. ***

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. ****

People worth knowing: Eleanor Wachtel's Original Minds

Eleanor Wachtel. Original Minds (2003) Sixteen edited interviews originally broadcast on CBC’s Writers and Company. I’ve read writings by most of them, and met Desmond Tutu when he visited the Anglican Diocese of Algoma during his tour of Canada. He was, despite the horrors of apartheid, a cheerful and happy man. All are worth listening to, but I especially enjoyed the interviews with George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, and Oliver Sacks, perhaps because they are among my favourite people.

     Wachtel is a wonderful interviewer. She may begin with a set of questions, and clearly shifts to some questions she wants answers to, but her interviews sound and read like conversations. She prompts her guests with comments and questions directly related to what they’ve just said. She’s also done her homework: one always gets the impression that she’s read at least the two or three most important works by her guests.

     A book worth re-reading. Find the program here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany. ****

Difficult Essays by George Steiner.

George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays (1972-78) Steiner is one of my heroes: his insights into how we use language have I think not been surpassed. They have certainly helped stimulate modern linguistics, which has widened its focus from the comparison of available texts to include the study of actual speech. Herewith some stray thoughts responding to and prompted by these essays.
     The study of spoken pre-literate languages has produced some unexpected results, such as that not only the lexicon but the grammar of a dialect can change radically within a speaker’s lifetime. (McWhorter, The Power of Babel). Writing slows down the rate of language change. It also, eventually, spawns two forms of the language, written and spoken, each with its own conventions and usages missing from the other.
     Steiner’s critiques of Whorf’s and Chomsky’s stances on the nature of language (Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature) feed into experiments by Pinker and others that have shown that grammatical gender, for example, affects how people feel about the world around them. That supports Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes our experience. But Bickerton’s researches into pidgins and creoles suggest that pidgins reveal the essential features of all human languages, and the creoles show how languages acquire first the regularities that we label “grammar”, and then the idiosyncrasies that differentiate them, and eventually make them new languages. Those findings support Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate.

     Steiner’s stance is that neither Whorfian nor Chomskyian hypotheses can account for actual language. This reminds me of the surprising success of computerised translation, which depends not only on dictionaries, but also on statistical features such as the most likely adjective-noun combinations. “Style” also can be statistically defined, and so can some genres. Combine these ideas with AI pattern-matching systems, and an AI algorithm can write a credible sports news report when given a handful of facts about the game.
     Steiner wrote these essays before ubiquitous personal computers, which limited his speculations and predictions about the future of reading and books (After the Book?). He correctly predicted that audio-books (cassettes) would gain market share, and that hard-cover books would lose out to other formats. What would he make of e-books and texts preserved in the electronic web? I think his judgement would stand. What he calls “deep reading” would continue to decline. The kind of awareness of other texts, past and present, which characterises serious literature, would become the preserve of a literate elite. The rest of us would be semi-literate: able to decode text, but unable (and increasingly unwilling) to take the time to relate texts to each other and to the present moment. Which is exactly what has happened. Since serious literature is historical in its very essence, the awareness of history, especially of its messiness, its ethical ambiguities and contradictions, has also declined. I haven’t read more recent essays by him, so I don’t know whether my speculations about his opinions are accurate.
     I think semi-literacy tends to simplistic literalness, a resistance to and intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to recognise irony or handle metaphor, and a suspicion of any text that assumes familiarity with allusions to the past. The digital world is an eternal present, with yesterday already receding into the mist-obscured ancient past.
     I read several of these essays twice. A book that’s difficult in Steiner’s sense, but well worth the effort. His language is ornate, laced with Latinisms, but so appositely that even unfamiliar words yield their meaning(s) transparently, and enrich the reader's understanding. ****

George Steiner 1929-2020

[British Council]

Doing Science

John Brockman, ed. Doing Science (1991) Brockman founded “The Reality Club”, an invitation-only assembly of scientists and other thinkers, whose apparent purpose was to think big-picture thoughts about science. Etc
      Each of the essays in this collection is worth reading. A couple that impressed me:
     Big Trouble in Biology, Lynn Margulis’s attack on Neo-Darwinism, which she characterises as a religion, and which she opposes mostly because it’s reductive, and fails to account for the dynamics of ecosystems. In the 30 years since her essay, biology has begun to shift its focus to ecology. Increasingly, the governing stance is that organisms exist not only as individuals, and as members of genetically defined breeding groups, but also (and I think primarily) as members of a network of interlaced feedback loops.
     “A network of interlaced feedback loops” is one way of describing chaotic systems, the subject of an essay by Ralph H. Abraham, Chaos in Myth. and Science. Abraham posits that science is informed by the same myths that inform and regulate all other aspects of our social systems. In Western mythologies, “chaos” is bad. The recent discovery of chaos mathematics and its applicability to ecosystems, the weather, human societies, etc, as well as a  still incompletely catalogued slew of physical systems, requires a restructuring of the mythologies in which Chaos figures a source of disorder, strife, and evil. Chaos must be seen as the partner of order.
     How to Tell What Is Science and What Isn’t, by Richard Morris, concludes that pseudoscience is crazy in the sense that its truth would require denying large swaths of what we know to be true. However, Morris hasn’t noted the difference between science as knowledge of what’s real (an ontological enterprise), and science as way of acquiring reliable, if limited, knowledge (an epistemological enterprise). Thus, “what we know to be true” is always tentative, which guarantees that pseudoscience will sometimes include notions that will eventually turn out to be true enough to count as science.
     A keeper. ****

Provocative entertainment: Hitchens arguing

Christopher Hitchens. Arguably: Essays (2011) Published the year before his death, the book is a compendium of pieces Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair, Slate, Newsweek, and other periodicals. Hitchens doesn’t like humbug, stupidity, fraud, cruelty, and other evils. He likes compassion, art, sense, democracy, peace, food, friends, literature, and other good things. He rails against the evils done in the name of religion, distrusts and hates all ideology, despises weakness that arms itself with a gun, and the British royal family. The latter was surely the deciding reason to migrate ot the USA and become a citizen. His love for America gave him reason to point at and criticise its failures to live up to its ideals. He was a journalist, and saw many of the horrors of the 20th century firsthand. His education at Oxford (he read philosophy, politics, and economics) gave him the habit and skills of thorough reading. He was a lifelong socialist, and hated both left and right ideologies.    
Despite his rage at the cruelty and folly of humankind, most of his writing is witty and engaging. If you find this book, read it. ****

The Fascination of Everyday Things: Margert Visser's The Way We Are

     Margaret Visser. The Way We Are (1994). A wonderful potato chip book, but more nourishing. Margaret Visser wrote a column for Saturday Night, Canada’s defunct general interest and arts magazine. Her editor, John Fraser, persuaded her to collect them into a book. Here it is, and if you can find a copy, buy or borrow it. You won’t be disappointed.
     Visser has a knack for giving you both the essence of some topic and some off-the-wall riff on it. These essays often prompt further reflection. My favourite: she ends In Flagrante Delicto (an essay about blushing) thus:
     We blush above all when we think that other people think that we are different from what we want them to think we are.
     Which reminds me of my tentative definition of “honour” as our mutual acceptance of the public images we’ve created of ourselves as being better than we know ourselves to be. “Dishonour” is the revelation that we are not what we pretend to be. Hence the widespread misconception that some bad behaviour reveals “what a person really is”. What a person really is all the behaviours they are capable of. Most of us never discover all that we are capable of, but few, I think, understand how lucky they are. ****

Gratitude

   Oliver Sacks.  Gratitude (2015) Four essays written towards the end of Sacks’ life, lovely and loving meditations on life and death. This book was given me, and it is a gift in all senses of the word. The second essay, My Own Life, ends, “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been and enormous privilege and pleasure.” Amen

****

Two anthologies: Montaigne and Keillor

     Michel de Montaigne. Four Essays (1680. Translated by M. A. Screech) In one of these essays, Montaigne discusses conversation, by which he means discussion, sharing of opinions, even debate. He’s laid back about other people’s opinions. He’s more concerned with how well people say things, which he thinks is a clue to whether they originated their ideas or merely stumbled upon them. What he wants from his interlocutor is a sense of the person, of the character and the mind. His essays give just this sense of Montaigne the person: he’s curious, he lets one idea lead to another, he has strong opinions, but above all he’s a man who enjoys his world and thinking about it. Screech translates Montaigne as a conversationalist: reading these essays we hear the voice of a man talking to us, entertaining us and himself with the reach and liveliness of his mind. ****
     Garson Keillor. Truckstop and Other Lake Wobegon Stories (1995) A handful of Keillor’s tales, a pleasure to read. On its 60th anniversary, Penguin issued a number of small books of excerpts from its wide range of reprints. This is one of them, and anyone who lights upon Keillor for the first time will want to read the complete editions. I’ve read them all before, but they are as fresh as when first read, or heard on The Prairie Home Companion. The six stories here all deal with the Krepsbachs, and add up to s small novel. That’s Keillor’s genius, his ability to chronicle the lives of the people of Lake Wobegon over dozens of tales. ****

Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003)

     Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003) Another collection of essays about the Science of Everyday Life. Ever wonder why honey piles up on your toast as it flows off the spoon? Or why some people are able wake up pretty close to the time they want? Or why you can skip stones on water? The answers are out there, but most of them are incomplete, and lead on to other puzzles. Everyday physics and chemistry is much more complicated than the simplified models of reality that are studied in the lab. Ingram is one of the best popular science writers we have. This book was nominated for the 2003 Science in Society book award.
     The chapter on why bread always lands buttered side down alone is worth the price: the table is just high enough that the toast rotates over 90 degrees before it touches down. It doesn’t always land spread side down of course, occasionally it’s swept off the table with a spin that stabilises it. Spin is one of the main factors in skipping stones, too. Recommended ****

Truth

Adapted from my post in comp.ai.philosophy 2010-07-19
Thread: Truth (Was: Re: PROOF INFINITY DOES NOT EXIST!)

     I don't think "exist" is a good word to use about truth. I prefer "subsist" as the technical term. But that's a side issue. This sub-thread on truth is marred by an absence of definition. Exactly what is meant by truth? What do the other contributors to this thread mean?
     All the examples used are statements, which should be a clue. That is, an implicit stance in all the arguments so far is that truth is a property of statements. I don't think that is a good enough concept, as part two of this screed will I hope demonstrate.

A) Formal (logical) and contingent truth
     I taught formal logic in high school (I sneaked it in under the aim of "teach critical thinking"). As you might expect, some students twigged to the fact that "truth" is a vague, ambiguous, polysemous, slippery term. Our discussions covered the following points.
     "Logical truth" is clearly defined: A statement is "logically true" when it has the form X = Y, where X and Y are well-formed statements in some language, and the rules of inference allow the transformation of X into Y, and vice versa. Note that this is a characterisation of a statement.
     However, it is not clear that X or Y are themselves true. A logical argument can demonstrate that some conclusion follows from some premises. If the premises are true, then so is the conclusion. But logic cannot demonstrate that the premises are true. You can show that the premises follow from some other premises, and so on, until you get to the axioms. But the truth of the axioms must be assumed. Therefore we need some means for agreeing on the truth of the premises.
     At this point in the discussion, students started invoking experience, common sense, obviousness, etc. And realised that "what is true for one person is not true for another." It was difficult to get them past that, but in the end most accepted that some replicable procedure could guarantee a limited truth: If we have the same experience, and say the same or similar things about it, then the odds are that what we say is true, more or less. If we differ, then what we have said is more or less wrong. Since someone can always disagree about what we have said, all statements about common experience are more or less wrong (and conversely more or less true). This too is a characterisation of statements. Here we have contingent truth.

B) Truth as a relationship
     So, what do we mean when conceive "truth" as a property of statements? A statement is an image of a concept. It has the same relationship to a concept as a photograph has to its subject. Of both we say that they are "true" if we apperceive some similarity between the statement and the concept, the photograph and its subject. Ditto for a theory (model) and the slice of universe it refers to.
    IOW, "truth" is a relationship between image and object, where "image" can be a sentence, a picture, a piece of music, an equation, etc, and "object" is whatever those images "are about".
     That relationship between image and object is an unanalysed given: we either get it or we don't. It rests on some formal equivalences, on patterns. We are a pattern-perceiving species, so much so that we often perceive patterns "that aren't really there", in the sense that a slightly different point of view may destroy the pattern, while a "real" pattern can be perceived from several (sometimes drastically different) points of view. Science has been characterised as the search for patterns that remain the same no matter how you look at them: these patterns are called symmetries.
     In a sense, we are democratic about truth, as other posters seem to be claiming. That is, if a lot of people can see the same pattern from many different points of view, and/or if many people can replicate the pattern by some agreed-upon process, it is "really there." But we are also elitist: some patterns can be perceived only after more or less arduous training. But amongst those who have undergone this training, there is a pretty strong consensus on what the "real" patterns are, hence on what can be truthfully said about them.
     It should be obvious that consensus truths are contingent. They are also empirical: Some unanticipated future experience may change our notion of what they refer to, of their limits as true statements. This is so even in the realm of formal truths, where we often do not know a priori whether any two statements are logically equivalent, or whether some set of premises implies some set of conclusions. Only the experiment of devising proofs can decide the question. And those proofs may show that the equivalence or conclusion is limited to a range of values (i.e., objects that it refers to). In this respect, mathematics resembles empirical science.
     For more on how we arrive at some consensus about what's true, see Bas van Fraassen's The Empirical Stance (Yale University Press, 2002).
     Disclosure: Bas and I were classmates many years ago, and discussed much of what I've distilled above. He discusses these themes much more expertly than I can. Hence my recommendation of his book. We do not entirely agree: Ask two philosophers a question, and you'll get four answers. At least. ;-)

Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989)

     Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989) Jay Ingram hosted CBC’s Quirks and Quarks for many years. Here, he’s written a number of essays on questions that a curious mind might ask about its immediate surroundings: walking, cocktail parties, asparagus, swarming insects, yawning, and so on. The essays are clear, explain what can be explained, and indicate what’s not (yet?) understood. Bite-sized chunks, ideal for casual reading; I enjoyed this book, and read it faster than was likely good for my appreciation of the universe’s enduring mystery. **½ (2012)

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984)

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Subtitled And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. A collection of Darnton’s essays on the subtitle subject: academic, and apparently intended for a reading list in French history. (My 2nd-hand copy has blue highlighter marks throughout). The cover blurb quotes Newsweek’s opinion this is a “brilliant work of popular history”, a somewhat excessive judgement. The essays are interesting, but not, I think, to most of the public. I learned a lot, mostly along the lines of how hard it is to recover the mind set and unspoken assumptions of our ancestors. Visiting the past entails a culture shock.
     I have some experience of culture shock, having been taken to England in 1945, and spending time alternately there and in Austria until 1954, when we emigrated to Canada. This perhaps makes it easier for me to imagine a different way of thinking, but there is still an impenetrable barrier, which no amount of reading of historical documents will remove. But Darnton does make me aware of just how much of a difference in worldview there must be.
     The essay on a reader’s response to Rousseau, which quotes and interprets an enthusiast’s letters to his book seller, is probably easiest to apprehend: we all know what it’s like to enjoy or endure an enthusiasm for a particular author, and fantasise about what (s)he is really like: to believe that one has somehow come to know a person intimately whom we can encounter only through their printed words. In this case, I found myself once again irritated by Rousseau, who I think has much to answer for. He made sentimentality respectable, no, worse, he encouraged people to believe that having the right attitude was more important doing the right thing.
     Oh, about the title essay: Darnton re/deconstructs a cat massacre, and shows us that it was a not too veiled attack by the workers on their masters and mistresses, whom they despised as not only taking a large profit from their work, but also as less than qualified in the metier. One of the things that we may have difficulty understanding these days is a society in which the middle and upper classes not only thought of the lower classes as below them socially, but thought of them as hardly human beings. It’s no wonder that resentment triggered brutality of a type we can barely imagine.
    Overall, a book worth reading, but I recommend reading it one essay at a time over several weeks. **½

Henry Petroski. Remaking the World (1999)

     Henry Petroski. Remaking the World (1999) Jon gave me this book for Christmas. Petroski wrote historical essays for American Scientist, a magazine that appears to carry on the original intent of Scientific American, which was much more focussed on technology (and even DIY) than the current version. His essays are very much like Gould’s, but the style is somewhat more neutral and pedestrian. I get little sense of Petroski’s personality, which is a pity, since his choice of subjects indicates a lively mind and wide range of interest.
     His emphasis on the non-technical aspects of engineering is important. Most people lack scientific and technical insight (we need a word like “illiteracy” for this), which means that the context of engineering works is often incomplete. The yearning for quick fixes prompts politicians and their constituents to trust the technocrats too much (see the “heightening” of “security measures” at airports recently). On the other hand, nimbyism and paranoid Ludditism result in know-nothing rejection of economically viable and ecologically effective solutions (see the resistance to H1N1 vaccination).
     All in all, a good book, with useful nuggets of information here and there. For example, “bug” as a glitch or unexpected flaw in design predates computers. Petroski quotes a note in Edison’s diary, in which Edison refers to “Bugs – as such little faults and difficulties are called –”. I’ve suspected that the “insect in the electronic works” was a story a little too pat to be true, and am happy to have my suspicion confirmed. *** (2010, previously posted)

Richard Feynman. The Meaning of it All (1998)

     Richard Feynman. The Meaning of it All (1998) The text of the John Danz Lectures given by Feynman in 1963. The contemporary references are steeped in Cold War attitudes, even though Feynman is generally a very humane and open-hearted man. The three lectures deal with the uncertainty of science, the uncertainty of values, and the unscientific attitudes and beliefs that Feynman saw around him. The tone and style is very much that of speech. I’ve seen a couple of films on Feynman, and I can hear the cadences of his speech in the text. That helps, as the syntax is generally quite informal, which makes for occasional ambiguity. But all in all, Feynman’s thinking is clear and straightforward.  A pleasure to read. *** (2008)

Simon Schama. Scribble, Scribble. Scribble (2010)

     Simon Schama. Scribble, Scribble. Scribble (2010) Schama‘s TV series impressed me hugely, so I couldn’t resist buying this book. He’s passionate and personal about his subjects, supporting his insights and judgments with thorough scholarship. These occasional pieces for the most part deal with non-scholarly subjects such as cooking, travel, politics, and ice cream. He’s one of those foodies who makes you believe you can cook, at least while reading the essay. Even his most casual investigations entail historical and cultural research. He’s a scholar no matter what, especially when he’s discussing art, which changes the way you look at pictures. He tells us enough about his life and family that we believe his more focussed responses to what he’s talking about.
     And “talk” is the word. Even if you hadn’t heard him on TV, I think you’d hear a voice here. The voice of a man who’s found what he likes, what he wants, what matters to him, and can share his intellectual and emotional engagement. The essay from the beginning was personal. The charm of Montaigne is our sense that we are in his company when we read him. This goes for Schama, too, and exhilarating company it is. ****

Lynn Truss. Talk to the Hand (2005)

     Lynn Truss. Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss discusses the ways in which manners have changed for the worse, with occasional acknowledgments of improvements. I agree with her. Civility and good manners may be the least of moral issues, but like all moral issues, they deal with the fundamentals, here how we deal with each other in public. Good manners is the most basic realisation of the golden rule: Deal with other as you would like them to deal with you. The word Truss invokes is “respect.” Respect is acting out the assumption that the other person is as important as yourself. That’s all. Easy to understand, isn’t it? So why is it so hard to do? ***½ (2007)

Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) & The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

     Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) Davies’ wit and sharp satirical observation makes this a book to enjoy. He is practising his style. Most of these paragraphs are very well formed, with exquisite sentences. Occasionally, they end with Marchbanks’ side of the response to his comments, most of them unflattering to the ladies whom he presumably regaled with his wit. The comments provide an indirect portrait of the still stuffy and narrow views of the respectable Ontarian, on which Marchbanks honed his wit. This social conservatism has moved West. The stereotypical Albertan now espouses the morality of the mid-20th century Ontarian, and suffers from the same urge to impose it on the rest of the country. I found myself eager to read selected passages aloud, an urge that Marie accommodated with her usual good grace. She even laughed at some of Davies’ passages. This copy is a first edition, but without wrappers. ***

     Robertson Davies. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) This volume too, is a first edition, but a second printing. In this earlier volume, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second one. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit). Although there have been changes for the better since the 1940s, sixty years later we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed. The blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children’s sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand. Update 2013: Families can now claim a deduction for music lessons and the like as well.
     Marchbanks’ struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become much more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn’t, therefore, become better. There’s more to the good life than creature comforts.
     The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions). He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences appear to be lengthy to the eye, but not to the ear. (Davies writes for the ear, a rare skill and even rarer ambition). But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. “If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another.”  “New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto.” “If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be.” *** (2007)

E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967)

     E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967) A collection of essays intended for senior high school. It’s clear that 40 years ago senior high school was still seen as serious education, and not merely the accumulation of credits for admission to the post-secondary training grounds. Buxton and his collaborator start with Montaigne and Bacon, and continue with a well done survey of the essay in English from the 1700s to the 1960s. Almost all the selections are worth reading still; only the most recent ones, from the mid-20th century, show that when it comes to recognising classics, it’s not an advantage to be a contemporary of the writer. I read almost all the essays, though, and enjoyed them. ** to *** (2006)