S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967)

     S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967) Bottersnikes are nasty, scale beasts with sharp teeth, and their ears turn red hot when they are angry (which is most of the time). Red-hot ears are useful for starting fires. They live in garbage dumps and are very, very lazy. This deprives them of the comforts of life, so they are very, very bad tempered. Gumbles are agreeable, soft and furry, and squishy. They giggle a lot, and live in the bush, where they chat, play games, soak up the sun, and do just enough work to feel comfortable. Bottersnikes want Gumbles to work for them, so they put them in jam tins. Gumbles occasionally get away from the Bottersnikes, but as soon as they get the giggles, they are helpless, and the Bottersnikes put them in jam tins again. And so on.
     This is a Puffin book, designed to make eight-year-olds giggle like Gumbles, I suppose. However, the premise promises more than it delivers. The humour is strained and contrived as often as not, and the stories don’t have much point. That’s probably why this book never had a sequel, and its characters never showed up on TV. The author is Australian. Maybe the book’s humour is too Aussie for me. * (2002)

Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980)

     Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980) Six women write about their fathers, all priests in Algoma Diocese. These men come across as focussed on their work, willing to accept all kinds of hardships, devout and dedicated priests, and more or less easy-going fathers. They also had a wide range of interests, worked hard establishing various programs for the youth in their community, and enjoyed life. The daughters all clearly loved their fathers, and don’t tell us much of the flaws they must have had, but concentrate on the kinds of anecdotes that every family accumulates about its members. A few personal remarks reveal the closeness of these pioneer families. The overall effect is one of impressive dedication to one’s lifework, and of men who gave more than they got from their communities.
     There are also a number of really funny stories, all of them true. The one that sticks in my mind is the one about a bride’s worth. After the wedding (which was a grand affair, with more than the usual number of flowers, decorations, and pretty dresses), the bridegroom asked the priest what he owed. “Whatever you think your bride is worth,” said Mr Balfour. The bridegroom dug in his pocket, and found fifty cents, which he handed over to the priest.
     Worth reading, and a useful and more than entertaining addition to anyone’s collection of local histories.*** (2002)

Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968)

      Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968) Bradbury was at one time a favourite of mine, but rereading these stories makes me wonder at my early taste. He over-writes, is all. When his style matches the story’s theme, the effect can be very good; but much of the time the style seems intended to add a significance that isn’t there, like the swelling chords of a banal piece of pop music. Or something like that.
     In any case, only a few of these stories satisfied me. The best is “The Million Year Picnic,” in which a family escapes from a nuclear war on Earth and settles on Mars. Bradbury’s style suits the mix of elegy and hope in this story perfectly. In fact, the Mars stories generally work better than most of the other stories, even though there’s no attempt to make them consistent with each other. Bradbury uses Mars as a fabulous new Frontier. The themes of new beginnings and escape from the evil old world are what really interest him, and Mars permits him to play effectively with them.
      “Zero Hour” I have in a dramatised version on tape; it’s much better as a radio play than a story. A couple other stories work the motif of the hidden invader, recognised too late – very Cold War.
     But Bradbury’s most persistent theme and motif is the Lost Past, or its variation, Lost Childhood. In one form or another, these show up in every story. One of the best, more a meditation in the form of a narrative than a story, is “The Trolley,” in which we take the last ride on a trolley about to be replaced by buses. Here, Bradbury’s fey and whimsical style is an almost perfect match for the nostalgia of the piece, which never quite descends into mawkish sentimentality, though a couple of times it comes close. * to ***-½ (2002)

Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey

     Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey (book) and Eric Bentley (lyrics). This is not the book that the Stratford (Ontario) company used. I have no idea how the different versions compare in terms of fidelity to the German; this one advertises itself as including every word of the German text. I’ll have to read The Beggar’s Opera now, for comparison. Anyhow, the script is fairly straightforward. Brecht’s insistence on spelling out his theme is rather irritating, he knocks you over the head with it. His use of “epic drama” techniques is also rather obtrusive; or rather, his “actor’s tips” about this feature in my opinion demonstrate that he didn’t really understand theatre very well. Recent scholarly work has shown that his scripts were in large part written by others.  Considering the obtuseness of his advice to actors and the virtues of the script, I can well believe it.
     Reading this script so soon after seeing the debacle at Stratford probably prevented my enjoying it. However, Bentley’s lyrics are not as good as the traditional ones. Mack the Knife especially suffers from what appears to be Bentley’s attempt to reproduce the German text. ** (2002)

Charlotte Vale Allen. Dream Train (1988)

     Charlotte Vale Allen Dream Train (1988) I’ve been collecting fiction with a railway theme or setting; this is the most recent one I’ve read. Joanna James, photographer, has a gig riding the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, the luxury train cruise that’s the remnant of the original Orient Express. The book is a romance presented as part travelogue and part quest.
     Joanna encounters a variety of people and situations. She makes friends that reflect and refract her character back to herself and so help her on her voyage of self-discovery. Memories of her dysfunctional family intersect with her responses to her new friends and acquaintances. She comes to terms with her family’s past, discovers that she can be her own person, and who that person is; and chooses the man that’s right for her. As in all proper quests, the goal is the integration of a broken personality, in this case the competent and highly skilled professional with the shy, self-effacing, injured and repressed child that never grew up. Simple plot, simple theme. The book is well written in a style a cut or two above cliché, the characters have the kind of depth we expect from a moderately serious TV mini-series, the train trip is wonderful.
     Marie said the book was superficial, and it is, but there are enough hints of depths below the surface to persuade us these people matter, at least while we are reading about them. The main characters are too good to be true, the darkness of the human heart is glimpsed on the periphery and throws only a few shadows, and the crises are triggered by external events, not by weaknesses or flaws of character. But in all these respects, the novel conforms to the demands of its genre, so why cavil at them? The book is above average of its kind. I enjoyed reading it. **-½

Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000)

     Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) It looks like I read this last year, but I can’t remember. Re-reading it, it’s not hard to see why. While Seife provides lots of interesting information, and explains a good deal, his writing is at best workmanlike, and often sloppy. I suspect the sloppiness may be the effect of trying to “explain complex ideas in simple language,” but the result is often conceptual blurriness and even error. I found myself mentally rephrasing many of his statements. For example. He says that Cantor compared the size of rational and irrational numbers. He of course means the size of the sets of those numbers. Since he already explained what a set is, and uses a very clear metaphor to illustrate how one compares sets without actually counting, there’s no excuse for such sloppy language. He does have a knack for the illustrative metaphor: comparing sets is like asking everyone in a stadium to sit down, he says. If some seats are empty, then there are fewer people than seats. If there some people left standing, then vice versa. If there are no empty seats and no people standing, then the two sets match: they are the same size. Well, that’s very well done; so why the sloppy language a page or so later?
     Seife also occasionally uses a technical term without explaining it. For example, towards the end he talks of the heat death of the universe as the ultimate result of its continuing expansion. But in the next sentence he refers to this as death by ice (in contrast to the fiery death of the big crunch). How these two terminologies can be reconciled may be a mystery to him; it certainly will be a mystery to many readers.
     Seife’s understanding of history consists of conventional wisdom, which also occasionally misleads the reader. Overall, however, his philosophical points are well made, and the power of Zero to confound metaphysics and theology is clearly conveyed. The appendices illustrating several mathematical and logical arguments in detail are concise and clear. I like the one that uses the a=b, ab=a^2 etc proof that 1=0 (or 2=1) to show that Winston Churchill is a carrot.
     In short, this is an adequate introduction to a number of mathematical, physical, and philosophical problems and their solutions, with a good deal of pleasantly conveyed history along the way, and will do for a high school library. ** (2002)

Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993)

     Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993) A collection of “alternate history” stories, which I began in August, and mostly read in September, and finished on October 1, so I’m counting it as a September book. The eras range from ancient history to the far future. As with all such speculative sociology, the theories underlying the stories tend to be simplistic, but that doesn’t often detract from them as stories. After all, contemporary fiction suffers from the same deficiency. Plausibility does not depend on factual truth.
     Turtledove’s vision tends to be dark: history is driven by greed, hate, prejudice and sheer ignorance. Occasional glimmers of honour, truth and justice flicker fitfully here and there, but they are strictly personal virtues, not systemic attributes of a society. A couple of his stories are pure fantasy; the rest hew pretty closely to reality as we know it. One of his repeated notions is that Muhammad became a Christian monk, so that the Muslim world never came into being. The contrary vision, that Islam became the dominant culture of Europe, also informs several of his stories. An alternate worlds story takes us to a North America whose Revolutionary War was incomplete, and hence no unified polity ever emerged: a mish-mash of independent former colonies and states still tied to England, as well as aboriginal fiefdoms, has led to a state of perpetual warfare, and a very delayed Industrial Revolution.
     Like many pre-perestroika writers, Turtledove carefully use ethnic names to denote an “international” space culture. However, he does not assume that the Soviets will endure in their present form; his alternate future Russia breaks up into a re-established Czarist empire and a federation of reformed Soviet states.
     Not that it matters. Closer reflection shows that Turtledove uses the alternate history settings in otherwise very traditional ways. There are adventure romances, fantastic fables, hard-science mysteries, tall tales, and so on. Two stories comment on the role of the Jews in our world (Turtledove is a Jew) and both stories work very well, both as stories and as lessons. An amusing collection; I omitted one story that was getting tedious, but enjoyed the rest. ** to ***. (2002)

Coronet Magazine, August 1960

     Coronet Magazine, August 1960. Reading old magazines reminds us how much popular culture can change. The assumptions which we use in our daily lives, in our interpretation of everything from advertising to political news, change far more thoroughly in some respects than we like to admit.
     Consider the cover story: “Can Catholics Ever Accept Birth Control?” The author, William Clancy, says no, on the grounds that birth control violates objective natural law, which the Catholic Church has always accepted as God-given. He means objective moral law, of course, not natural law as we generally understand it. His argument was published as a serious contribution to the debate. It would probably not be published in a general interest magazine nowadays, based as it is on the arrogant assumption that his moral law is the only objectively true one. But it does explain why the hierarchy still opposes all conception control, while it accepts conception avoidance, on the grounds that the latter is more natural than the former. Why taking advantage of the fertility cycle of a woman to prevent conception is natural while taking advantage of mechanical or chemical processes to achieve the same end is not, is a question that I have long puzzled over. [Note 2013: even in 1960, many Catholics had already "accepted" birth control, and now a majority have done so. The hierarchy still uses Clancy's arguments to condemn it.]
     The general tone of articles on technical and scientific topics is very positive. Science and technology will improve our lives; side effects can be fixed easily with more science and technology. Even though Carson’s Silent Spring had been published some years earlier, and was still a best seller in 1960, its effects on general attitudes to the environment were still small. In particular, there seems to have been no sense of the inter-connectedness of things: That a solution over here will cause a problem over there. It took a few real disasters, such as Bhopal in India, repeated oil spills, and real effects on people’s health from pollution, to make her message real to most of us. The optimistic and hopeful attitudes toward science have been replaced by suspicion and hostility, an equally irrational response to what is after all the only means we have of knowing how the world really works, and figuring out ways to protect ourselves from its dangers. But I suppose I should keep in mind the rah-rah hyping of genetic engineering: it eerily echoes the happy acceptance of the wonders of the plastics and chemical industries in the 1950s and 60s. Think of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character is told to get into plastics if he wants a great future.
     The feminist revolution had as yet no effect in August 1960, if this magazine is evidence. There are a couple of articles about how to be a good wife. They were presumably amusing then, but they don’t strike me as amusing now. But they do explain Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. The implicit and sometimes explicit patronising of tone towards “the little woman” in these articles (and in a photo story about Zsa Zsa Gabor), and even more obviously shown in the ads, must have offended many women even back then, and certainly offended any woman who thought about her status.
     The political articles don’t come close to the kind of stuff people published a mere three or four years later. 1960 was really still the 50s, and there is a respect shown towards politicos that no one feels any of them deserve nowadays. On the other hand, the kind of journalism that exposed the Watergate scandals isn’t possible anymore either, not since the media have been “consolidated” into ever greater conglomerates, and “convergence” has blurred the lines not only between the media, but also between advertising, information, and entertainment.
     The ads are the most telling. They are straightforward, and the longer ones, with lots of text, take a sensible tone, as of one man speaking to another. I was charmed by the ad for The Empire Builder, a streamlined train, which depicted a senior executive who is taking the train from Chicago to Seattle so as to have time for reflection about a big deal that his underlings have been negotiating, underlings who have flown to Seattle in order to have everything ready for the great man when he arrives
     All in all, what strikes me about this (and other magazines from the same time) is the naivete and hopefulness. Most of the articles are puff-pieces of one kind or another, or are designed to create an image of America the Good and Beautiful and Fun To Live In. People had not yet become as utterly cynical and almost hopeless as they have nowadays. Looking back, we can see the mistakes we made back then; but our reaction to those mistakes will certainly lead us to make equally bad or even worse ones. ** (2002)

Cohen and Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos. (1994)

      Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos (1994) Cohen and Stewart attempt a meta-story here: that of how the chaotic, messy events on one level of reality (or perhaps merely analysis) produce regular and orderly features at a higher. An excellent book, often heavy going for anyone without at least a smattering of a variety of disciplines, but also often offering high spirits and sly irony.
I read it when it first appeared, but had forgotten almost all of it. Only a few marginal notes (typo-corrections, mostly) testify to my former reading.
     But I realise that many of its ideas have become commonplace for me. Chief of these are four. The first is that theories or models may or may not represent reality as it is. They are certainly work-alikes. That is, their observable external relations are the same as what they model, but there is no guarantee that their internal workings are the same. Nor is it ever possible to discover whether models are more than work-alikes, since attempts to get inside the black boxes merely produce more models with the same ontological deficiency.
     The second idea is that of emergent features: that it is impossible to predict, and often impossible in practice to explain, how the behaviour of one set of entities gives rise to features observable at a larger scale (or “higher level.”) Related to this is the idea that to explain how something happens is not the same as predicting what will happen. Science’s attempt to combine explicability and predictability, indeed most people’s belief that they are the same, has kept us from noting and investigating many things, or has misdirected our investigations. Ironically, it was just such a misdirected investigation (that of trying to derive a model of the weather from statistical data) that led to the discovery of chaotic systems, and prompted the development of chaos theory. Mandelbrot, also, testifies to this irony: according to Stewart, he said he had studied fractals a long time before he realised that he was looking at a new class of mathematical objects.
     The third idea is that the genome does not describe the organism, but merely the production the proteins that interact with each other and the environment to produce the organism. Understanding this puts a huge question mark over all genetic engineering. We simply cannot predict all the effects of transferring a gene from one organism to another. The fact that at present a very small minority of such transfers actually work to produce any result, let alone the desired one, shows that genetic engineering is still the crudest form of trial and error. But the genome-as-blueprint metaphor has great power, probably because of its simplicity, and because people do not understand blueprints, but think they do. Everyone has seen blueprints, for example in the weekly home-plans feature carried by many newspapers. The fact that such plans are really directions to the builder, and do not contain enough information to describe the final building, is lost on most people. That is why the metaphor misleads. People do not consider the blueprint as a recipe, which is really what it is. It might be better to make the metaphor explicit, and think of the genome as a program or recipe. A recipe for a cheese omelette does not describe the omelette, it describes how to make one. It takes ingredients and a cook and a stove to make an omelette. Just so, a genome does not describe an organism, it describes how to make one. It takes a zygote and a womb and an organism to make one.
     The description of the process of development is indirect, too, and consists mostly of instructions to make or stop making proteins. The proteins themselves react with each other and other chemicals, under the influence of temperature, pH, etc, and the result is a developing organism. What’s more, the proteins affect the genome’s functions: the products made under process A trigger instruction X, which stops process A and starts process B. B triggers instruction Y, which starts process C, which triggers instruction Z, which stops process B; and so, in all sorts of interlaced and intertwining instructions and processes.
     Finally, Stewart and Cohen have a healthy respect for the limits of scientific explanation. More than most popular science writers, they emphasise the fuzziness and tentativeness of science. This is a good thing, if only to remind us all that knowledge, even the most strongly supported, is never certain. If only religious folk understood this and accepted it, they might have more faith. **** (2002)
     Update 2013: It now appears that genetics is even more complicated than Cohen and Stewart knew. The environment (i.e, other cells, the chemical bath surrounding the cell, the organ of which it a part, the organism embedded the external environment, ...) turns genes on and off, which in turn affect the cells interaction with neighbouring cells, the chemical bath that surrounds it, and so on a wonderfully recursive dance. And just within the last year or so it's been discovered that genes can be transferred "horizontally" between species,probably via the microorganisms that inhabit it). See this National geographic article. The problem is that we don't have a language to describe the dynamic web of reactions that constitute an organism. In ordinary language, an organism is at best a gearbox. In fact it's something much more difficult to describe. we are thrown on the mercy of our metaphors. Her's one: an organism is shape created by its substrate, in the same that a fountain is a shape created by its substrate: water for the decorative fountain in your garden; plasma on the surface of the Sun.

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals

 

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals (Ed. Alan Downer, 1953) Reading this reminded me once again how much a play depends on performance, especially if it is written in a style we do not expect in a play. Nowadays, we expect dialogue that’s close to the way people actually speak; we even expect sentence fragments and jumbles. Shakespeare’s style is closer to our expectations, so that he is easy to read once one has learned the early modern English in which he wrote. Sheridan’s language is much closer to our own, yet his eighteenth century formalities interfere with comprehension in way Shakespeare does not. Even Mrs Malaprop, who mangles the language, does so only at the level of vocabulary. All Sheridan’s characters speak in the same formal periods; a few minor differences in oaths don’t amount to enough of a distinction to enable us to read the play easily.
      Two years ago, Marie and I saw a performance in Stratford, England. It was wonderful, because the actors could make these stilted sentences sound natural and expressive. That performance struck a fine and beautiful balance between hamming and exaggeration, between the artificialities of theatre and the realities of life. The result was a play that drew you into its preposterous premises and made you believe, even while you knew you were watching a carefully crafted illusion, one that emphasised its illusory qualities in the set design and staging. Actors are a great gift to a playwright, especially one who has been dead for couple hundred years.
     The plot is pure soap opera: girl wants unsuitable boy, Father wants boy to marry suitable girl, a rival wants the girl’s money, servants are loyal to whoever pays them the most, and the older folk discover that the cooling coals of passion can be blown into hot flame. In the end, the right people marry each other, as they should, or else what’s the point of a comedy. Along the way there’s a lot of good clean and not-so-clean fun. Staged by a competent crew, one enjoys both a preposterous story made believable, and the realisation that one is seeing pure theatre. *** (2002)