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. *** 

Kinsey And Me (Grafton, 2013)

Sue Grafton. Kinsey and Me. (2013) A re-read. I enjoyed the stories perhaps more this time, since I knew them well enough to suss the solution, and so could enjoy watching Grafton drop the clues and lead up to the final twist.

The second half of the book is tough reading. It’s  a series of short stories and sketches that amount to a (fictionalised) memoir of Grafton’s mother (“Vanessa”) and her relationship with her daughter (“Kit”). They inflicted pain on each other, unintentionally, but effectively. Each needed the love of the other, each tried and failed to do it well. Vanessa’s alcoholism barred the path to the easy companionship they both wanted. Grafton herself says she “learned the secrets of the human heart” from her mother. One secret is that we fear we do not deserve each other’s love. But love is not about deserving.

Recommended. ** to ****

Speer's Prison Years (The Secret Diaries, 1976)

 Albert Speer. Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976) The diaries were secret in that it was forbidden to send out more than one letter a month. But friendly guards helped Speer smuggle his diaries out. He selected and edited his notes, and this book is the result.

It’s surprisingly compulsive reading. The revelation of the man’s character is what kept me turning the pages. I’d recently watched The Rise of the Nazis documentary series. The historian who discussed Speer pointed out that he had carefully doctored the record of his work as war production manager for the Reich. I’m not sure to what extent these diaries continue the attempted deception. In the early years, Speer repeatedly muses about how he was enthralled by Hitler’s architectural ambitions. Later, he castigated himself for admiring what he now sees as grandiose kitsch (a word he does not use), and refers to how his responsibility for war materiel production has burdened him with guilt.

He also discusses architecture, and his hope that he could reestablish an architectural practice on release. He confesses to a taste for traditional styles, and wonders how he might fit into the modern fashions. As the years pass, the hope of early release fades in the face of Soviet intransigence, his musings about a possible professional future fade also.

The most genuine sounding passages are his sorrow that he’s missing the growth and development of his children, and the inevitable failure to establish a close parent-child bond. There aren’t enough visits and letters. It's clear that his family have made the best of their situation, and their father figures less and less in their lives.

An essential book for anyone who wants to understand the 3rd Reich. The desire to build huge monuments seems to be a universal trait of tyrants. ***

A Memoir (World War II)

 Planes glide through the air like fish

     Before I knew why airplanes stayed up, I thought they glided through the air like fish through water. Later I found out it wasn’t like that at all, a fish can’t fall to the bottom of the lake because it has a pocket of air inside it, but a plane stays up because it moves. Sharks don’t have a pocket of air, they must keep moving or they will fall to the bottom like an airplane falling from the sky.
     We lived by a lake, whose clear water revealed the bottom six or more feet down. The fish were dark slashes against the grey green silt, or a swift gleam of silver as they turned. In the mornings and evenings, the fishers went out on the lake to set and fetch their nets.
     The fishers stood up in a long flat bottomed boat, leaning and straightening as they pumped the square-bladed oar, he tall and stooped in the stern, she short and round in the bow. They’re shovelling water, I thought, I didn’t understand how that could move the boat forward. The fishers stuck the small fish onto pine splints which they ranged in the smoke house chimney. The smoked fish tasted salt and sweet at the same time when one gnawed them off the wood.
     I watched the fishers mend nets, watched their hands and fingers move out and back with a twist as they fed and knotted the line with a flat, narrow piece of wood. I didn’t see how the line could make a knot with only one end free. The nets hung on frames made of pine poles, moving in the wind like waves on the water, bleached white and soft by the sun.
     Many years later, in another country, I learned Bernoulli’s equations and Boyle’s law, and understood how air moving over the wing made the wing lift the plane. For a few weeks I understood the equations that defined drag and turbulence, too. Now I understand only their meaning, a lovely interplay of velocity, pressure and viscosity, with which the airplane designer and pilot co-operate.
     I learned a lot of other things too, I understood the engineer’s and metal worker’s craft, their exquisite skill lavished on the bombers that glided through the sky, making death beautiful and distant.
     The bombers looked like fish against the sky, gleaming silver, but not like fish, sliding across the blue air, steady and inexorable, and making a sound you felt in your bones, a sound that struck across the sky and flowed into the earth and came up through your feet and made your teeth buzz. Then black flowers bloomed on the horizon where the railway junction was. Many years later I saw pictures of black chrysanthemums, they bloomed like smoke against a blue sky. My friend’s mother died among the roots of one of those flowers, but that was before he was my friend, before we even knew of each other’s existence.
     One day a plane came in low over our house, and fell into the lake, trailing a black and orange flag that stretched out behind it, longer and longer as the plane fell towards the water. My mother said my brother could see the pilot’s face, I must have seen it too as I stood next to my brother, but he can remember it and I can’t, I wonder if that’s why he hides his melancholy. I hide mine too, but not in the same way, he bursts out in sudden attacks of craziness, roaring like a monster, pretending to be Grendel, or the giant that ate an Englishman and ground his bones for bread. My Grandpa read us that story, I loved the bits where Jack steals the gold and the hen and the harp, and runs to the beanstalk along the winding cloudy road. The harp betrayed the thief, an early lesson on the deviousness of artists.
     I tell people I’m fine, when they ask. I ask them, too, and they tell me they are fine. We tell each other we are fine, making up a fine story about how fine the world is, and what a fine time we are having this fine afternoon, while we eat a fine meal made on a fine barbecue in a fine garden owned by a fine neighbourly neighbour.
     For several weeks, I understood the equations that explained airplanes, then we wrote a test and I forgot them. I didn’t forget what they explained. Whenever I look at a plane I see the air flow over its wings, faster on top and slower underneath, holding up the plane, a plane that weighs more than the largest steam locomotive ever built, and as the jet climbs into the sky like a man going up a flight of stairs, I know that if the air peels off the wings in unseen swirls and whirlpools, the plane will crash, but we won’t make a white splash in the water because there’s no lake under us, just grass and asphalt. A black and orange flower will bloom in the field at the end of the runway.
     When the fishers pump the oar, eddies and swirls peel off it and press against the blade, and that presses the boat forward. What brings down the plane moves the boat. Nature has her ways, if you work with her, she rewards you with flying planes and gliding boats.
     My cousin and I used to go into the park next to our house. The oaks and beeches and maples and pines and firs and sycamores made it a quiet place, the only sounds the rustle of the leaves high above us and the scuff of our feet in the duff. We thought of it as a secret place, known only to us, a source of treasure, a landscape of adventure. Once we saw the wreck of an airplane caught high in the branches of the trees. We took one of the transformers that had come loose and fallen to the ground, and for a long time after we had fine copper wire to play with, varnished a rich mahogany red. My cousin told me we could make snares and catch fish, or make electrical stuff, if we wanted. Just thinking about the possibilities hidden in the coils of fine, dark red wire was enough, it made us happy. We hid the transformer in the gazebo and took it out to relish the technical perfection of its windings, fine as hair.
     A day or two after we found the transformer we were forbidden to go into the park, a prohibition we could not understand until we heard talk among the grownups about the dead pilot of the airplane hanging in the branches of the sycamore tree. We waited for our chance and crept back into the park but the wreck had been removed. As usual, the grownups had spoiled our fun, but we were used to it, and went about our business.
     When it rained, the snails came out of the underbrush, their shells banded yellow and black and sometimes orange. The shells gleamed in the wet. I gathered up the snails and set them on the pine-log railing of the gazebo and waited for them to race each other. The snails came out from their shells, waving their antennae, testing the air for danger. They crawled over the curve of the railing and fell into the grass and disappeared.
     One day the sirens moaned while I was building forts and jetties with the rocks at the edge of the water. I ran up the slope to the road, a cyclist rushing home knocked me over. The wheels of his bike scraped my bare belly, there was no other injury. My mother dressed us in two layers of underwear, and two layers of overcoats, the topmost one made from a bright red blanket. We must have looked like little red snowmen. The woollen vest itched, I cried with vexation in the cellar. We heard the bombers fly over, they seemed closer this time, perhaps the cellar magnified their sound, it came out of the ceiling and the floor and the walls. When the bombs hit the railway yards, we felt the thump, and a small cloud of dust drifted down from the ceiling. The lights flickered and went out. One of the grownups lit a candle, the light made a boundary around us like a wall. We huddled up next to Mother, and felt secure. But the vest still itched.
     When I hear sirens in a war movie these days, something grabs my throat and squeezes tears from my eyes.
     I visited the lake again recently. The mountains that stood on the opposite shore still stand there, self-sufficient and silent. High above them, a con trail divides the sky. I can’t see the plane, but I know it glides through the air like a fish glides through water.

The Disordered Cosmos (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 2021)

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The Disordered Cosmos. (2021) A mix of science, history of science, memoir, sociology, and psychology. Prescod-Weinstein’s thesis is that while Western science has given us unimaginable insight into the structure of the cosmos, it has also ignored, deprecated or suppressed the contributions of women and Indigenous people. Worse, it has often dismissed their contributions as mere superstition.
     I found this book both exhilarating and painful to read. Exhilarating because of her skill in explaining the abstruse and esoteric concepts that are the core of modern physics. Painful because of what it cost her to achieve these insights. She played the academic game, and achieved academic career success. She’s now using her position to try to change the culture of science. I hope she succeeds.
     One thing her book confirms: Modern physics is mostly about how we cannot know what we would like to know. The equations describe mysteries so well that we can predict the interactions we will measure in our experiments and observations. But exactly what the interacting entities are is unknown, and likely unknowable. Given invisible matter and contestable energy, we may never know more than a tiny fraction of the cosmos, and understand less. Perhaps we are limited by our very nature: we are stardust, electromagnetic entities.
     Read this book. ****

Hillerman's Memoir Doesn't Disappoint

 

Tony Hillerman. Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir (2001) Hillerman is one of my favourite writers. His police procedurals set in Navajo country integrate plot, character and setting better than most fictions. Because of them, I want to visit that part of America, but I doubt I will make it there.
     This memoir begins with his childhood on a hardscrabble farm in Oklahoma, where his mother taught him to have low expectations, because then he would be seldom disappointed. But the dominant attitude here is gratitude for all the breaks that came his way: his luck in surviving the war, benefitting from the GI Bill, learning how to tell a story as reporter, and a happy marriage and family life. The war damaged him both physically and psychologically, damage that he plays down. But that damage also encouraged his gift of imaginative empathy. The narrator of the novels has the same voice as the narrator of this memoir. I like this man.
     Footnote: Hillerman’s memories of his war add to its history in the best way: the point of view of those that actually fought it.
     Recommended. ****

Planes glide through the air like fish

A comment by an ex-airman in a newsgroup prompted me to publish this as a separate post. It's also available on the Page of Stories.

 

Before I knew why airplanes stayed up, I thought they glided through the air like fish through water. Later I found out it wasn’t like that at all, a fish can’t fall to the bottom of the lake because it has a pocket of air inside it, but a plane stays up because it moves. Sharks don’t have a pocket of air, they must keep moving or they will fall to the bottom like an airplane falling from the sky.

We lived by a lake, whose clear water revealed the bottom six or more feet down. The fish were dark slashes against the grey green silt, or a swift gleam of silver as they turned. In the mornings and evenings, the fishers went out on the lake to set and fetch their nets.
    The fishers stood up in a long flat bottomed boat, leaning and straightening as they pumped the square bladed oar, he tall and stooped in the stern, she short and round in the bow. They’re shovelling water, I thought, I didn’t understand how that could move the boat forward. The fishers stuck the small fish onto pine splints which they ranged in the smoke house chimney. The smoked fish tasted salt and sweet at the same time when one gnawed them off the wood.
    I watched the fishers mend nets, watched their hands and fingers move out and back with a twist as they fed and knotted the line with a flat, narrow piece of wood. I didn’t see how the line could make a knot with only one end free. The nets hung on frames made of pine poles, moving in the wind like waves on the water, bleached white and soft by the sun.

Many years later, in another country, I learned Bernoulli’s equations and Boyle’s law, and understood how air moving over the wing made the wing lift the plane. For a few weeks I understood the equations that defined drag and turbulence, too, well enough to pass the test. Now I understand only their meaning, a lovely interplay of velocity, pressure and viscosity, with which the airplane designer and pilot co-operate.
     I learned a lot of other things too, I understood the engineer’s and metal worker’s craft, their exquisite skill lavished on the bombers that glided through the sky, making death beautiful and distant.

The bombers looked like fish against the sky, gleaming silver, but not like fish, sliding across the blue air, steady and inexorable, and making a sound you felt in your bones, a sound that struck across the sky and flowed into the earth and came up through your feet and made your teeth buzz. Then black flowers bloomed on the horizon where the railway junction was. Many years later I saw pictures of black chrysanthemums, they bloomed like smoke against a blue sky. My friend’s mother died among the roots of one of those flowers, but that was before he was my friend, before we even knew of each other’s existence.

One day a plane came in low over our house, and fell into the lake, trailing a black and orange flag. My mother said my brother could see the pilot’s face, I must have seen it too as I stood next to my brother, but he can remember it and I can’t, I wonder if that’s why he hides his melancholy. I hide mine too, but not in the same way, he bursts out in sudden attacks of craziness, roaring like a monster, pretending to be Grendel, or the giant that ate an Englishman and ground his bones for bread. My Grandpa read us that story, I loved the bits where Jack steals the gold and the hen and the harp, and runs to the beanstalk along the winding cloudy road. The harp betrayed the thief, an early lesson on the deviousness of artists.
    I tell people I’m fine, when they ask. I ask them, too, and they tell me they are fine. We tell each other we are fine, making up a fine story about how fine the world is, and what a fine time we are having this fine afternoon, while we eat a fine meal made on a fine barbecue in a fine garden owned by a fine neighbourly neighbour.

For several weeks, I understood the equations that explained airplanes, then we wrote a test and I forgot them. I didn’t forget what they explained. Whenever I look at a plane I see the air flow over its wings, faster on top and slower underneath, holding up the plane, a plane that weighs more than the largest steam locomotive ever built, and as the jet climbs into the sky like a man going up a flight of stairs, I know that if the air peels off the wings in unseen swirls and whirlpools, the plane will crash, but we won’t make a white splash in the water because there’s no lake under us, just grass and asphalt. A black and orange flower will bloom in the field at the end of the runway.
    When the fishers pump the oar, eddies and swirls peel off it and press against the blade, and that presses the boat forward. What brings down the plane moves the boat forward. Nature has her ways. If you work with her, she rewards you with flying planes and gliding boats.

My cousin and I used to go into the park next to our house. The oaks and beeches and maples and pines and firs and sycamores made it a quiet place, the only sounds the rustle of the leaves high above us and the scuff of our feet in the duff. We thought of it as a secret place, known only to us, a source of treasure, a landscape of adventure. Once we saw the wreck of an airplane caught high in the branches of the trees. We took one of the transformers that had come loose and fallen to the ground, and for a long time after we had fine copper wire to play with, varnished a rich mahogany red. My cousin told me we could make snares and catch fish, or make electrical stuff, if we wanted. Just thinking about the possibilities hidden in the coils of fine, dark red wire was enough, it made us happy. We hid the transformer in the gazebo and took it out to relish the technical perfection of its windings, fine as hair.
     A day or two after we found the transformer we were forbidden to go into the park, a prohibition we could not understand until we heard talk among the grownups about the dead pilot of the airplane hanging in the branches of the sycamore tree. We waited for our chance and crept back into the park but the wreck had been removed. As usual, the grownups had spoiled our fun, but we were used to it, and went about our business.

When it rained, the snails came out of the underbrush, their shells banded yellow and black and sometimes orange. The shells gleamed in the wet. I gathered up the snails and set them on the pine-log railing of the gazebo and waited for them to race each other. The snails came out from their shells, waving their antennae, testing the air for danger. They crawled over the curve of the railing and fell into the grass and disappeared.

One day the sirens moaned while I was building forts and jetties with the rocks at the edge of the water. I ran up the slope to the road, a cyclist rushing home knocked me over. The wheels of his bike scraped my bare belly, there was no other injury. My mother dressed us in two layers of underwear, and two layers of overcoats, the topmost one made from a bright red blanket. We must have looked like little red snowmen. The woollen vest itched, I cried with vexation in the cellar. We heard the bombers fly over, they seemed closer this time, perhaps the cellar magnified their sound, it came out of the ceiling and the floor and the walls. When the bombs hit the railway yards, we felt the thump, and a small cloud of dust drifted down from the ceiling. The lights flickered and went out. One of the grownups lit a candle, the light made a boundary around us like a wall. We huddled up next to Mother, and felt secure. But the vest still itched.
    When I hear sirens in a war movie these days, something grabs my throat and squeezes tears from my eyes.

I visited the lake again recently. The mountains that stood on the opposite shore still stand there, self-sufficient and silent. High above them, a contrail divides the sky. I can’t see the plane, but I know it glides through the air like a fish glides through water.

Rumpole's Creator

   John Mortimer.   Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) A re-read, and just as exhilarating and moving as the first time. Mortimer’s style is anecdotal: he’s a story teller, but an artful one, who knows how to bring the story to a point, a punch-line, or a twist that recasts the whole meaning of what he has told. The ambience is wry amusement at the follies of being human, and melancholy regret for the losses that make up our lives.

     The reminiscences about his father were made into a TV show, Voyage Round My Father, which I’ve seen, and recommend. Available on Youtube.
     Mortimer was apparently a good lawyer. His practice clearly informed Rumpole of the Bailey, which has the same combination of amusement and regret as this book. He was married twice, and had four children. He’s reticent about the details of his private life; the impression is of the same mix of joy and frustration that most of us know. Wikipedia gives more information.
     This book is worth reading in part because it’s a witness to England as it was between the world wars and after the second one. For Rumpole fans, it’s worth reading in any case. ****

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

****

Oliver Sacks: The River of Consciousness

     Oliver Sacks. The River of  Consciousness (2017) Posthumous collection of essays assembled from notes and edited from drafts. As the title suggests, Sacks is thinking about consciousness, the hard problem of philosophy and neurology. In one essay he wonders if consciousness is a discontinuous sequence of moments.
    Vision seems to be discontinuous he says, citing experiments measuring the response times to changes in the visual field. I think it's obvious that vision is discontinuous: the light-sensitiva molecules in the retinal cells decay when struck by light, and must be rebuilt in order to decay again. This process takes about 1/10th of a second. Then the nerve signals generated must be processed so that the human can see. This can take longer than a 1/10th of a second, since objects must be recognised, etc. The fastest conscious reaction times to an expected visual stimulus is about 1/6th of a second in children and teenagers, and double or triple that in adults. Responses to unexpected visual stimuli take much longer. Thus the visual contents of consciousness are constructed from perceptions that take a sizeable time to assemble. the same applies to the other senses. The unbroken stream of consciousness is an illusion. It can be a dangerous one, since what feels like an instantaneous reaction takes at least half a second. At highway speeds a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.
     Sacks also has interesting observations of the subjective passage of time. His patients vary enormously in the rate at which they process sensory information, and that processing relates to the feeling of time passing. He tells of taking photographs several  minutes apart of one of his post-encephalitic patients, then binding the prints into a flip-book, and seeing the patient slowly lift his arm. Conversely, some of his patients entered a high-speed phase, and reported that they found the world around them moving unbearably slowly.
     The book feels unfinished. Most of the essays consist of extended notes. Sacks didn’t have time to rewrite for continuity, style and clarity, and this sometimes shows in a banal or cliche phrase. However, for any fan this is an essential book. For the general reader it serves as a very good introduction to some of the conundrums of consciousness and mind. ***½
     Correction 2018-11-10: At highway speeds of about 100km/h, a car travels about 14 metres in 1/2 a second.

If you want ot be a writer: Stephen King On Writing

     Stephen King. On Writing (2000). Subtitled “A Memoir of the Craft”. I’m not a fan of Stephen King, not because he’s a bad writer, but because horror fantasy doesn’t move me. I read some of his short stories way back when, and thought they were well done.
     King writes both about the nuts’n’bolts (grammar and style, narrative pace, character, etc) and his own experience as a writer. The book is worth reading for both. If you need some guidance to improve your writing and work habits, read this book. If you need some inspiration and emotional support because you’re not sure you can hack the writing life, read this book. You will improve your mastery of the craft, and you may discover your writing groove. Or you may discover that you’re not a writer after all. Either way, the book is worth reading.
     More take-aways: Writing is a compulsion, it’s what you have to do to maintain your sense of self.
     Reading a lot is essential to your development as a writer.
     A story is out there, like a fossil to be discovered. Writing it is uncovering the fossil.
     Interesting for any Stephen King fan, and for anyone who's curious about the writing life. ****

Great Depression Memoir (Why Shoot the Teacher, Braithwaite 1965)

   Max Braithwaite. Why Shoot the Teacher (1965) Autobiography dressed up as fiction. The names have been altered, and probably some details too, to prevent too easy identification of the people whom Max met and worked for in his first job. He detrains at “Bleke”, Saskatchewan, and avoids frostbite on the ride to the school only by running behind the wagon from time to time. A foreshadowing of his mostly depressing experiences teaching in a one room school in the middle of the Great Depression.
    His teacherage consists of two rooms partitioned off in the school basement, populated by mice. There is no human company within sight after the children go home. Nor a tree. The farmers are barely able to feed themselves and their livestock, never mind a teacher, yet they manage to eke out some entertainment and pleasure at a dance and the Christmas pageant. At the end of the school year, Max decides to leave. He notes that never once did Lyle King, the school-board chair, call him by his name. Max doesn’t mention his name either.
    The book was made into a film, available on Youtube. It reconstructs the book into a story. Braithwaite’s book is a series of extended anecdotes and musings about his job, education, the economy, the society that surrounds him, and so on. It adds up to his experience of the Depression, and has the ring of truth. Braithwaite developed a reputation as a humourist, but there’s damn little humour in this book. The title has nothing to do with the book. But it’s worth reading all the same, especially if you want to get a feel for what it was like to live through the Depression on the Prairies. **½

Political Anecdotes and War Stories: Memoir by Charles Lynch

    Charles Lynch. You can’t Print THAT! (1983) Lynch describes himself as a Political Voyeur, and that he is. He’s also an excellent story-teller, his natural talent honed by the demands of newspaper reporting. He’s also opinionated, a small-c conservative, with a grudging respect for the Liberal party, and a somewhat uncritical enthusiasm for the Progressive Conservatives, with whom he shares a superstitious fear of debt. He loved fishing and music. He began his career before the 2nd World War, was a war correspondent, spent most of his working life in Ottawa. He thinks Canadian politics (and history) is anything but dull, and his tales prove it. Extremely readable, recommended, a sourcebook for anyone who’s contemplating writing a history of Canadian politics in the 60s and 70s. More about him on Wikipedia.  ****

Lessons learned: Now that I'm in my late 70s

Six years ago, on the occasion of the birthday that marked him as an elder, David Brooks of the New York Times asked his readers to tell him what they had learned. This is what I sent him. I found it while cleaning up old files on the hard disk. Since then Jon died, and I learned another lesson: Life is losing what you love.

                                     An Old Man, by Peter Paul Rubens ca 1605

Subject: Over 70: lessons learned
From: Wolf Kirchmeir
Date: 28/10/2011 11:05 AM
To: dabrooks@nytimes.com

Hello, David Brooks,

I won't bore you with all the platitudes, which are true: you do learn that aggression doesn't pay, that love matters most, that family and friends are what make life worth living, and so on.

One thing I've learned looking back is that many times what I thought was important at the time turned out to be unimportant; and what I thought was merely another hum-drum choice turned out to be life-changing. Often, you can't even pin-point the choice: it was just another more or less reasonable response to the situation you faced.

For example, choosing a car seems flatteringly important at the time: it has to be the right make, the right model, and not too much of a second choice compared to what you really, really wanted but couldn't afford. But in the end, it's just a box that takes you from here to there.

Our decision to move from Alberta to Ontario to take a one-year contract at a university didn't seem very serious at the time. We could always do something else in a year or two. I needed a job, and this was the one that came up. When it was done, I could have gone to post-grad school for a Ph. D., but I took a job as a highschool teacher, because I was tired of being a poor student, our children were growing up, and I knew I could teach. I planned to teach for three or four years, saving my pennies, and then pursue that Ph. D. But teaching high school English became my career. Despite its many frustrations, it was very satisfying.

Most satisfying was meeting former students, often years later, and finding out what a good life they had made for themselves. Some of them told me of something I'd said in class that changed their life, because it made them see things from a different angle, or confirmed something they knew about themselves. I was always surprised at what they remembered: Often, I couldn't recall it at all. It was just a throwaway line uttered as part of a larger, oh-so-important point I was making about Life, Literature, and the Universe.

Once at the mall in the nearby city, I met a youngish man who'd been in my class some 20 years earlier. My former student had a good job at the mill, was married, and happy with his life. He was carrying a paperback book. I remembered him as surly at having to read all that junk he didn't like, at having to read at all. But he had become an avid reader of history and historical fiction. "You said that when we would find out what we liked, we would start reading," he said. Did I? I probably did. It's a teacherly thing to say. I couldn't recall. But I think for this man this remark confirmed something about himself, his love of the past.

Some years ago, our priest asked if I would become a lay reader, as he had two points, and wanted someone to read Morning Prayer while he presided at the Eucharist at the other parish. I agreed, he said I should preach a sermon, too. OK, why not?

And so I embarked on a journey that has led me from a fairly conventional mix of Lutheran and Anglican belief to the insight that God, however you imagine him/her/it, dwells within us. All religions teach this. How you express this insight doesn't matter. What matters is that it has meaning for you. We become more fully human to the extent that we recognise the Spirit in ourselves and in each other. And because we are all, as the phrase goes, vessels of the Holy Spirit, it is utterly evil to do any kind of violence to another human being.

Peace,

Wolf Kirchmeir
age 71
Blind River, Ontario

Looking for Tiny Trains and Loving it: In Search of the Narrow Gauge (1996)

     Bob Wetham. In Search of the Narrow Gauge (1996) When Wetham’s father was posted to Peru in the 1970s he developed a love of trains and narrow gauge ones in particular. In this collection of reminiscences and photographs he tells of several of his journeys, most of them in South America. He really did go out of his way to see and ride the last narrow gauge trains. A few of the lines have become tourist lines, but most have long since gone.
     The book focuses on the journeys, not the technical details of the lines. Wetham spent a very cold night in Patagonia, and years later returned on a guided tour. He risked permanent disappearance in Africa, and endured surveillance by police and army in other parts of the world. He comes across as a nice guy who’s happy to share his passion for trains. Oddly, it’s a page turner, I think because he tells things as they happened. The photos are well printed, too, I wish there were more of them. But in the pre-digital photography and printing age, pictures and printing were more expensive than they are now, a bare quarter century later. Recommended for anyone who likes trains and travel. **½

Movers and shakers no more

     John Mortimer. In Character (1983) Collection of interviews of important, influential, and interesting people, first published mostly in the Sunday Times. Mortimer has the knack for getting people to talk frankly about themselves, and knows how to assemble the quotations that reveal and illuminate character and life. He’s an engaged interviewer, more than willing to give us hints of his own reactions and impressions.
     We end up believing that we know these people. We certainly know them better than we knew them before, but are Mortimer’s versions of them the real thing? That’s a pointless question: a person is their interactions with other persons. Mortimer’s willingness to give us his side of the interplay convinces me that we get an accurate record of what was done and said in that interview, even if obviously edited. What I make of these people is up to me; but in every case where I had prior and alternative knowledge, my impression of those people was enhanced and clarified. I’m left feeling that I would like to spend some time with any of these people, politicians, novelists, journalists, bishops, actors, artists, etc. I’m not sure whether I would have such a good time as Mortimer had, though.
     It’s also a record of its time. Many of the interviewees are now at best semi-remembered. The interviews remind me of the politics that seemed important at the time, and 30-odd years later, they show that some problems are as difficult to solve as ever, not because they are insoluble, but because the attitudes and values that cause them continue to prevent action. We humans are an irrational animal. As often as not, irrelevant feelings and wishes interfere with the ability to accept reality, and to fix what can be fixed. ***

Goon for Lunch (book review)

     Harry Secombe. Goon for Lunch. (1975) Secombe played Neddy Seagoon on The Goon Show, his tag line was It’s all rather confusing, really. These pieces, written for Punch and other magazines, make up a glimpse of an autobiography. He grew up in Swansea at a time when children spent as much time as possible out of sight and hearing of grownups. He was in North Africa and Italy for most of the War, and didn’t like it. But he did meet Spike Milligan there, and they ended up doing skits together, which  helps explain the Goon Show.
     The pieces are mildly funny, they recount small injuries and large confusions. I enjoyed reading them, both for the reminders of post-war England and for Secombe’s company. He was a nice chap, on the evidence. His Neddy Seagoon is not far removed from himself. In Italy, he and a comrade were almost blown up removing an unexploded bomb from a house in a village that had been recently vacated by the Germans. His comrade believed the bomb was a dud. It sounds like a Goon Show incident. I suspect that the craziness of War fed into a lot of Milligan’s scripts.
     The book is out of print, but worth a search. ***

Stratford Mosaic

     Gerald Jaggard. Stratford Mosaic (1960) Jaggard owned The Shakespeare Press, an antiquarian book shop on Sheep Street which he inherited from his father Capt. William Jaggard, who compiled the first Shakespeare bibliography. Peter and I visited his shop at least once. Besides the books, there were many memorabilia; it had the air of a museum.
     This collection of memories is an odd mix. It focuses on the Shakespeare Club and its role in developing the Birthday Celebrations, as well as some remarks on the first Memorial Theatre, the fire, and the new Memorial Theatre. He tells of the Gower Memorial, the Fountain in Rother Street, and the Mop, an annual fair that I remember with affection. He ends the book with brief memoirs of Marie Corelli, Sir Archibald Flower and Capt. William Jaggard.
     Jaggard was himself a member and later the Secretary of the Club, which gave him access to the minute books. His selection of highlights shows how the Club’s focus shifted slowly from enjoying their common admiration for Shakespeare (and good food and cigars at the annual banquet) to promoting Stratford as tourist town. As a record of some of the behind the scenes events, it’s a valuable resource. I’m not so sure about it as a history or as an impression of Stratford. Jaggard meticulously and repeatedly records all the honorifics and professional qualifications of the people he mentions. His bardolatry several times drops over the edge into self-satire. He waxes romantically and lyrically clichéd when describing Stratford as a beauty-spot. According to him, Sir Archibald Flower was man of pure civic virtues, with no warts at all. And of course Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard of Immortal Memory, etc.
     An amazing performance. My grandmother gave it to me. It mentions two of my ancestors, John Morgan, stationer and book seller (my great-grandfather), and F. C. Morgan (Uncle Peter), who was briefly librarian at the Theatre, and later Librarian and Curator of the Hereford City Library. Jaggard's brother Geoffrey contributes nicely turned verses describing the streets of Stratford, most of them decorated with pleasant drawings by D. R. Mathews (uncredited). Published by Christopher Johnson (London), which I suspect was a vanity house. I found nothing about it online, but several copies of this book are available. If you are a fan of Shakespeare and Stratford, you could do worse than add it to your collection. **½

In Defence of Processed Food

In September 2015, a CBC program on school lunches pointed out that "healthy" choices are difficult because standards were set in the 1940s when the US Army found that it had to reject a large percentage of recruits for being underweight or otherwise malnourished. Modern processed food is too good, it seems, and is making our children obese.
                     
That reminded me of the days when a large part of a family's time was spent "putting up" the preserves for the winter. Fruit was dried, or made into compotes, jams, and jellies. Cabbage was converted into sauerkraut. Vegetables were pickled or boiled nearly to death and put into sealers. As these cooled, the air inside contracted and pulled the lids down into an airtight seal.

One of the major events at Rutzenmoos was the making of sugar syrup and molasses. The women in the household chopped and sliced sugar beets, then cooked them in the big washing kettle, a copper bowl inset into a purpose built stove, which was normally used to boil the washing in a soap and lye solution as part of the weekly washday rituals. It was of course perfectly sterile. The syrup was a golden colour, the molasses were a nice sticky dark brown. I don’t know whether the syrup was further processed to make sugar, I paid little attention to it. I  concentrated on the molasses, whose taste was I can still sense in my oral memory. Wonderful stuff!

Without processed food, we would have starved.  People nowadays have no idea how important processed food is for survival, and even less how much time was spent in processing it. The food industry made processed food cheap and plentiful. Most of them made wholesome food. But as recently as the 1940s and 50s, governments had to pass regulations to prevent food adulteration, or to enforce safer (and more expensive) processing methods on the less scrupulous manufacturers.

In fact, it was our ancestors' discovery of how to store and process food that led to our eventual dominance of the ecosystem. Until people knew how to grow grains and process other food, they could not live in temperate climates where fresh food is seasonal. True, some people have learned how to use technology to live in very inhospitable climates, the Inuit for example; but they survive because, as luck would have it, their prey contains vitamins without which they would die. That, not technology, is what enables the Inuit to live in the Arctic.

The present day reaction against processed food comes largely from people who have no personal memories of how important processed food is for us. The fact that we can get fresh fruits and vegetables year-round has also helped distract people from this insight.

There’s another fact, which perhaps should be better known: Human digestive systems do not do a very good job of digesting fresh foods. Cooking is a kind of pre-digestion. It breaks down cell walls in fruits and vegetables, and degrades the proteins in meats, making both more nutritious for us. Without cooking, we would get a good deal less value from the food we eat. True, cooking also destroys some vitamins, but usually there’s more left over than we would get from the uncooked food. The same is true of calories. Many starchy foods are essentially indigestible until they are cooked.

Processed food has achieved a bad rep. I think it’s undeserved. In fact, it’s because our food is generally so wholesome and nourishing that the fearful among us fasten on any smidgen of evidence that suggests food is not as good as it might be, however trivial the failure is in the larger scheme of things.

Portland Holiday (2015)

     Peter Kirchmeir. Portland Holiday (2015) Privately printed by my brother. A nicely done, chatty account of a month in Portland by my brother and sister-in-law, house- and cat-sitting for their son and daughter-in-law. I think it’s a good travelogue for the city, so if you know Peter and can scrounge or borrow a copy, read it. Fun and informative. Too much reliance on the spell-checker for proof-reading, a failing of pretty well all printed matter these days. *** (and yes, I’m biased).