Too Good to be True (book)

 Jan Brunvand Too Good to be True (1999) A compendium of the urban legends that Brunvand has collected. For each type he offers a few examples, with annotations. He tries to keep the tone light, but inevitably some of his jokes are laboured. Since many of the stories fit into several categories, he adds helpful cross references. This is an odd book to read through. The stories are bite-sized, like potato chips, and you read on expecting the next to be better. Sometimes, unlike potato chips, they are.
     I think it’s worth keeping as a reference book, although its role has to a large extent been superseded by the web: see Snopes, for example. My reactions to the stories varied from mild distaste to ecstatic hilarity. One effect of reading so many legends at once is a heightened awareness of urban legends: but I can’t tell yet how long that sensitivity will last.
     A random sample (not verbatim, but “improved”): An upwardly mobile couple moved into an expensive suburb. Their neighbours were quiet people, apparently retired, but rumoured to have connections to the Mafia. One evening the couple came home from a weekend trip to find their house had been burgled. They asked their neighbours if they’d noticed anything, but the thieves must have been experts, for nobody saw them. It was late at night by this time, and the neighbours suggested they wait till next morning before calling the police. Next morning, the couple found all the stolen goods piled neatly on their front porch.
     I found this book at Value Village.Unlike many of my used book finds, this one’s a keeper. ***

Henry Poole is Here (Movie)

Henry Poole is Here (2008) [D: Marl Pellington. Luke Wilson, Rhada Mitchell, Adriana Barraza] Henry thinks he’s dying, moves into a house on the street where he grew up, and waits for the end. It’s not to be. The little girl next door is traumatised by her father’s abrupt departure. A friendly neighbour tries to cheer him up. The real estate agent has arranged for a repair to the stucco and a repaint, which produces a water stain that looks vaguely like the face of Jesus as popularly imagined. A drop of blood appears, too. So the plot point is: Is that face really a miraculous appearance? Will the various wounded people be healed by their faith? Are the healings mere coincidence?
     Major themes, but the movie fails to come to grips with them. Faith and lack of it are seen as mere personal quirks, on much the same level as preferences for apple pie and cheesecake.
     On the other hand, it succeeds quite nicely as a character study. Henry is a baffled, angry, and sad guy who is afraid to hope. His response to the bad news may seem odd at first: he actually wanted to buy the house he grew up in, but it wasn’t available. But really he wants to know what his life has amounted to. His parents fought when he was young, he has no relatives or friends, all he has is a photograph of three smiling people: his father, his mother, and himself. Memories make us. What do Henry’s make him? Something of a failure, which is why his impending death seems such a randomly cruel fate. It’s not surprising that Henry’s paralysed into inaction. When he writes “Henry Poole was here” on his living room wall, it seems a fitting epitaph.
     But the people in the neighbourhood provoke him into action. He doesn’t like the picture on the garage wall, not what the credulous make of it. He doesn’t like the hurt that numbs his little neighbour. He doesn’t like the friendly believer who gives him pie as a welcome gift, and then spreads the word about the miracle. He’s attracted to the little girl’s mother despite himself; and when the little girl begins to speak again, something like a sense of worth begins to form in Henry’s nearly empty heart. He takes a sledge hammer to the wall of the garage, and the roof comes down on him. The tests in the hospital reveal that the  diagnosis of doom was false. The movie ends on a note of hope. Maltin gives it two stars, but I’ll give it **½

Eight Little Piggies (Book review)

Eight Little Piggies S.J. Gould, 1993. Collection of Gould's essays in Nature since last book. As good as ever, but somewhat repetitious in his concerns, naturally. He seems unaware of complexity theory (CT), which amongst other things suggests that evolution must be "punctuated." CT holds that a complex system can exist in limited number of states. Change from one state to another may be very rapid, catastrophic even. Thus, if an organism is a complex system, then its form (genome or phenotype) has a limited number of stable states. Thus, selective pressure (or genetic drift?) would shift the form from one stable state to another very quickly. Intermediate forms are not stable, and therefore could not exist for very long. Anyhow, Gould's emphasis on non-Darwinian mechanism and processes in evolution solves a number of puzzles.
     The most moving essay tells of the snails in Tahiti, which have disappeared since a British scientist spent his whole life describing them as a base-line for future study of evolutionary changes. Makes you wanna cry. (August 1994)
     Comment 2012: I realised some time ago that the Gould-Eldridge hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium is Darwinian to its core: when an environment changes very slowly, there is little selective advantage in the vast majority of changes, so that selective pressure operates against change. Thus the equilibrium, a time of very slow evolution, driven almost entirely by genetic drift. Evolution is the effect of selective pressure on the genome. Natural selection will operate to drive rapid change when the environment changes rapidly, and to conserve existing genotypes when the environment changes slowly. The question then becomes, How rapidly must the environment change to promote rapid evolution? The answer, I think, is a function of the generational die-off rate of any given population of organisms. If the die-off is too high, the organism will become doubly extinct: it will cease to exist, and it will have no progeny.

The Nursery Rhyme Murders (Book review)

THE NURSERY RHYME MURDERS. Agatha Christie. (Dodd, Mead & Co, 1970). The biography inspired me to read some Christie again. This book was a rummage sale item, but a good "reading copy" as they say. And it is good reading, too, vintage Christie with just enough realism in the characters to get you involved and ignore the preposterousness of the murder methods. Poirot in Hickory Dickory Death is not at his best: Christie had tired of him by this time, and gave him a very mechanical role. Miss Marple in A Pocket Full of Rye is very good. This story is more of a psychological thriller, with the killer being a true psychopath: charming, self-centred, and utterly without pity. The Crooked House is unusual, in that the hero is only peripherally engaged in the solution, but is personally very much part of it, as he is engaged to one of the suspects.
     Update 2012: A Pocket Full of Rye and The Crooked House were dramatised as Poirot cases for TV. I didn't notice this change, which indicates a) that I don't know or take the canon as seriously as many other Christie fans; and b) that the investigator matters less than the plot.
     Footnote: I will be posting some of book notes from the past from time to time. This one dates from 1991.

White Elephant Dead (Book review)

Carolyn Hart White Elephant Dead (1999) One of a series featuring Annie and Max Darling, she the owner of “Death on Demand”, a bookstore specialising in mysteries; he principal of “Confidential Commissions”, a company specialising in solving problems, which Max occasionally does. As here, when a blackmailer turns up dead in a van collecting donations for the annual White Elephant sale on the island which serves as the setting for this traditional puzzle mystery. Four suspects, a tangled path to the solution, with a final twist.
      A genre-tale stands and falls on the illusion of reality; its universe is after all what Northrop Frye termed romance. The trick is to entice the reader into the fantasy and accept it as life-like, if not like life (a distinction beautifully explained by C S Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism). We want fully rounded main characters, and a cast of secondary characters with enough hints of back stories to give us the same feeling of living in a community that we get from real life: for we do not know all that much about most of the people we know. The physical setting, the weather, the ambiance must also give that impression of there being more than the words convey. The best genre stories do just that, and that’s why huge numbers of people happily enter their worlds, and make their authors very rich.
     This book is middling-average. It’s a workmanlike job, but it lacks that intensity that makes me want to find the other books in the series. The characters have tics rather than traits. Annie’s quirk of recalling mystery characters and plots as she goes about her work of detection becomes mildly irritating after a while. There are arch references to “other pleasures” in her relationship with Max, but little of the dialogue that reveals nuances of love and respect. We know too little of the secondary characters, which the blurb describes as “dotty eccentrics”, but which consist of one quirk each. The ambiance is vague, with generic talk of sunshine and cool shade and such. So what kept me reading? The puzzle, which is well done, well enough that I spent a couple of enjoyable hours with this book. **

Subways without people (link)

Eerie subway photos. Take a look here: Nick Frank's Subway Photos Nicely done. Show how digital has changed photography completely. ****

Kid uses trash electronics to make stuff (link)

Here's a link to an article on the MAKE blog about a kid who impressed MIT engineers. Kelvin Doe at MIT

The Illusion of Progress

That's the title of an article in a recent New Scientist. Thesis: that we have lost more technologies than we currently have. Good point, and illustrated in a variety of ways. For example, the ballpoint pen has nearly eliminated the fountain pen. But what if a crash of some kind eliminated the factories that make pens? We know, in a fuzzy historical-fiction kind of way, that goose quills and other feathers were used for writing. I don't think we'd have much trouble reinventing that technology. But what about the ink? Who knows how to use oak galls to make ink? Or soot and, well, what exactly?. Could one use other dark, brownish liquids, such as coffee? I've occasionally tried tinting paper with tea or coffee, and believe me, they don't work every well.

The rule is: new technologies displace old ones. Our cumulative knowledge doesn't include obsolete technologies. At any rate, most of us don't. Specialists in certain histories may have the book knowledge, but very, very few have any kind of hands-on skills. Curiously, archaeologists are the most likely to have such skills. They've learned them in order to understand the tools they find, and sort them from bits of naturally fractured rock that aren't tools.

Turn on the Heat (Book review)

A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) Turn on the Heat Another Bertha Cool - Donald Lam tale. In mood a noirish version of the Thin Man stories plus a mild satire on the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin genre. Pure pulp fiction. Lam tells the story, and does most of the legwork. Unlike Wolfe, agency head Bertha Cool doesn’t solve the case. As in the Wolfe novels, the plot is incredibly convoluted; but Fair plays fair with the clues, if you want to keep score. Unlike the Wolfe novels, the solution hides a good deal of the truth from the police. A pleasant enough entertainment, if you don’t read too critically. One oddity: the cover shows an electric typewriter, but the story is set ca. 1940, when it was written. **

There's No History Here (Poem)

There’s No History Here

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows who believe they can rebuild the past.
Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that held
the coverlet together; these tales made up
of memories, misremembered names
and half remembered facts
don’t make a history.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.
Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back’s as far as memory
and memory of memories reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote and muted
by the space enfolding it.
The ghosts of those who came before us
don’t speak in the wind,
their language doesn’t
echo in the water filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet –
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck,
something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

I stop and listen.

The heat seems loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

Copyright 2012 W Kirchmeir

The Ferryman Will Be There (Book review)

Rosemary Aubert The Ferryman Will Be There (2001) “An Ellis Portal Mystery”. This is the third in the series. Portal was a judge, but alcohol and adultery led to homelessness. For a while, he lived in a cave in the Don Valley. He has succeeded in climbing out of the valley, literally and figuratively.
    Now Det. Sgt. Matt West  enlists his help in finding a girl whose father was murdered while stepping out of a limousine on his way to a film festival bash. The girl has gone back onto the streets. Portal’s curiosity and orneriness entangle him in the murder investigation, too. His  journey takes him through derelict buildings, fancy offices, and of course the streets and valleys of Toronto. Like any hero of a quest, he has companions on the way, but here they travel mostly in the background; half the time Portal doesn’t even know they’re there. The monsters he must defeat are drug dealers, traffickers in women, and his own memories. Several inconclusive plot-lines from the earlier books move a few steps towards resolution.
     The mystery, such as it is, resolves plausibly enough, but Aubert’s focus is on street life, the homeless, and Portal’s haphazard approach to redemption. Though the book isn’t a page-turner, it sticks with you. I want to know the details of the back story, told in the first two books, so I’ll look out for them. Above average entertainment. I can see it as a moody, bleak TV series, set in the ramshackle and grungy buildings and streets where the homeless scrabble for a living, contrasting with elegant, expensive spaces in which the mysteries of finance are performed. **-½

King Street at night

We were walking back to the hotel after a pretty good meal of Indian food at the Aroma (recommended) when I took this photo. I like Toronto at night, the mix of coloured lights, the reflections in the windows, the people on the sidewalks, the traffic, and of course the streetcars. Anything that runs on rails is worth watching. I know the photo is blurred, but I like the effect anyhow.