Two books I didn't finish

     Kinky Friedman. When the Cat’s Away (1988) Friedman is one of those authors who thinks that obvious puns and wordplay are signs of wit and intelligence and will persuade the reader that plot, character, and narrative structure must be up to the same level. They aren’t. Or rather, they are, namely abysmally low. Didn’t finish this book, even though it was a present from RoRo, so I felt a little guilty tossing it.


     Graham Wright. Jog Rummage (1974) Billed as a fantasy in the same league as Tolkien’s work, this book is tedious in the extreme. The world Wright imagines never takes on the kind of compelling reality that a fantasy world must, else we lose interest. There are a few puzzles that I may regret never solving, such as why the world seems to be in darkness, illumined only by a Moon that occults at regular intervals, and the differences between the Rats and the Jogs, but I can live without that knowledge.

     (2005)

Four track planning books

     John Armstrong. 18 Tailor-made Track Plans (1983) I’m reading a number of track planning books. Why? Because I don’t to get down to actually building a layout, I suppose. Anyhow, these plans show how a different aspects govern or influence the plan. Lots of good ideas. Armstrong’s favourites, the double-sided backdrop and the empties in - loads out pairing of mine and power plant - show up on most plans. He also tries hard to make walk-in plans, and will accept an 18" aisle in order to achieve it. A couple of his plans could be cut up and rearranged to fit the 12'10" x 12'6" space I have available. Armstrong is always a pleasure to read. ***

     Mike Schafer ed. Railroads You Can Model (1976) A collection of good prototype information and rather strange track plans based on the railroads described. Armstrong would have done a better job. I don’t know who designed the plans. They are OK for operation, but waste space, using neither staging yards nor two-sided backdrops. The result is huge layouts, well beyond the capability of most people to build without assistance. The plans include interesting examples of how to adapt prototype track layouts to models, but otherwise this book has little value. That may be the reason it went out of print early on. *

     Linn Westcott. HO Railroad That Grows (2nd ed, 1972) The update consists partly of rewriting for clarity and concision, partly of redesign of the illustrations (including some new ones), and partly of updating the bench work and other technologies. The concept is still one of the best: write a book that follows what people actually do, namely set up a loop of track, then add to it. But show ways of changing and undoing earlier work so that the end result is a more interesting layout. I’m not sure how a novice would interpret this book. Would the bite-size projects reassure, or would the total of the work done intimidate? Anyhow, the book covers all the aspects of model railroading, and as such this book is as good as any other for introducing a neophyte to the hobby. **½

     Mike Schafer, ed. More Railroads You Can Model (1978) Better than the first book, since the plans assume a fixed space, and so show buildable layouts, whereas the first book showed assemblages of possible track plan elements. There’s also some use of two-sided backdrops and greater use of staging. The discussions of possible operations are more thorough. The Graham County RR is shown as a shelf layout with some care taken with the scenic design, the Milwaukee’s brewery branch is shown as both a shelf and a 4x8 two-deck switching pike, which would work quite well if structures were chosen to emphasise the cramped quarters of down-town railroading. But as with the first book, the real value lies more in the information about the prototype than in the track planning. Layout design has come a long way since these books were published. **½
      (2005)

Love sonnet

Love sonnet

You can’t write a love sonnet these days.
Regular rhythm & rhyme are out of fashion.
Let line and subject wander any way
they want.  You can’t limit passion
to fourteen lines.  So they say.
Now memories of your skin and hair distract
me. Your eyes, blue and grey, recall skies of fall weather,
bounded by winter’s cool and distant pact
that defines our endings. We don’t know whether
in our encounters we should yield or act.
But either way, we know we’ll be undone
by love’s illusion that we will still be one.

(2006 & 2013)

Death is Now My Neighbour (1997) TV episode

      Death is Now My Neighbour (1997, a Morse Special) A young woman is shot through a drawn blind, the murderer aiming at her silhouette. The only clue is a silly greeting card from a lover. The next morning, her neighbour, a journalist, is shot to death. Morse is in top form, and Lewis supplies the missing link when he realises that a pair of initials written down by the second victim indirectly point to the murderer. The motive for the killings derives from academic ambition: a new Master of Lonsdale College is about to be elected.
     A satisfying mix of blackmail, secrets, sex, abuse of power, and assorted minor sleaze. But if one hasn’t ever seen a Morse, one will be hard put to follow the allusive and elliptical style of narrative, which depends on the viewer’s familiarity with Oxford, Morse, Lewis and academia. The solution is plausible, and fairly solved. The acting hints at enough back story that we engage with each character, even the maid who brings the breakfast to the hotel guests. As usual, Dexter has an uncredited part, this time he says a Latin grace. A couple of bonbons: we discover Morse’s given name, and he meets a woman that’s his intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional equal. Fade-out on their arm-in-arm entry into a posh hotel.
     The episode feels like a series-ender, but there will be two more, and Lewis will apply the lessons learnt from Morse in his own career as Inspector. The series succeeds because of the consistency its fictional world, and because it pays attention to the effects of evil. We also like Morse, despite his flaws. Or because of them. Take your pick. This is the third of fourth time we’ve watched this episode. It wears very well. ***

W. A. D. Strickland. Chronicles of a Garden Railway (1968)

     W. A. D. Strickland. Chronicles of a Garden Railway (1968) Strickland is an engineer, and it show. He doesn’t tell us enough about some things, and too much about others. The organisation of the book is somewhat haphazard, too. However, the personal tone, the odd flashes of family history, and so on, make up for these formal faults, and the result is a charming chronicle, just as the title promises. As with many English books, the illustrations are either badly or not at all keyed to the text,  it’s as if the person responsible for the pictures hadn’t read the book. The technology of garden railways has much improved since Strickland built his 4mm scale, 16.5mm gauge layout, but I doubt that anyone today has had any more fun building and operating a garden railway. It’s quite clear that it was a family hobby. It helped that Strickland, like his wife, was an avid gardener. The information about suitable plants is worth the price of the book (15/- or 75p in 1971). ** (2005)

D. A. Boreham. Narrow Gauge Railway Modelling 2nd rev. ed. (1978)

     D. A. Boreham. Narrow Gauge Railway Modelling 2nd rev. ed. (1978) Donald Boreham represents the old school of railway modellers rather than model railroaders, though he does admit to a liking for prototypical operation. His book is short on technical details (especially drawings; the descriptions are sometimes less than clear), and long on anecdote and personal observations, all which makes for a charming and randomly useful book. As is so often the case, the photos have little or no relation to the text. The drawings of miscellaneous Welsh and other prototypes at the back however are worth the price of the book. ** (2005)

John Betjeman. Ghastly Good Taste 2nd ed. (1971)

     John Betjeman. Ghastly Good Taste 2nd ed. (1971) Betjeman wrote the first edition when he was very young, and had decided opinions based on little knowledge. It shows. While the book is an entertaining read, as a history of architecture (which it purports to be) it lacks the factual grounding that even tendentious polemic (which this is) needs in order to convince. His few annotations indicate that he did change his mind or taste as the years went by. Its thesis, that architecture languishes because of a general lack of understanding and taste among its consumers, is as valid now as it was when he wrote this rant. Worth reading, and in some schools of architecture good, and perhaps necessary,  for a class discussion, but otherwise already dated and quaint. Not worth keeping, though. * (2004)

O. S. Nock.S World Atlas of Railways (1978)

     O. S. Nock.S World Atlas of Railways (1978) Nock has an undeserved reputation as an expert. His work is riddled with errors, some of them so obvious they indicate careless proofreading, others the kind that are easily checked. The worst are the ones that imply wrong conclusions, chief among these the errors of omission, and his bias towards the UK. A Janes World Railways this isn’t. This big book has its uses, though, especially since it gives a snapshot of the state of rail in the 1970s, over thirty years ago now, and the expectations of the time which haven’t been fulfilled. There is for example no real understanding of the intermodal revolution, despite the fact that by 1978 about one third of all traffic in North America was of this type. It’s a “popular” work, ie, it caters to the expectations and prejudices of the nonspecialist. A very mixed bag of useful and useless information. Some good pictures here and there. Varies: * to ** (2004)

(Kalmbach Books) Popular Model Railroads You Can Build (1977)

     (Kalmbach Books) Popular Model Railroads You Can Build (1977) Reprints with revisions of four project railroad series. There are only two clues to the age of these articles: one, the repeated use of “man” for “person”; and two, the old scenery building technology of wadded newspapers and hard shell. Apart from that, the layouts are quite modern, with staging tracks and an emphasis on operation. **½ (2004)
     This is the last of the book review from 2004.

Penelope Lively. Next to Nature, Art (1982)

     Penelope Lively. Next to Nature, Art (1982) A group of “ordinary people” book an art-week at Framleigh Place, a decaying country house in Warwickshire. Its owner, an example of the decaying gentry, and his so-called staff are a bunch of self-centred twits, whom the ordinary twits at first regard with the awe due self-professed artists. A number of more or less strange things happen, and each of the ordinary folk achieves a kind of epiphany, while the artists remain stuck in their unskilled ruts (and rutting), with the exception of Bob the potter, an excellent craftsman and the only one with a real sense of what making things entails. A pleasant enough romp, with some mild but accurate satire of the silly sixties’ trust in doing your own thing, this book is worth reading – once. ** (2004)

Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing (2013)

     Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing (2013) Krauss shows how the universe as we know it came to be. He reviews not merely what we now know (or may hypothesise), he gives us the history of the investigation. He does this by showing that the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” can be rephrased as “How did something arise from nothing?”, which makes it answerable. The alternative phrasing, “What purpose does the universe fulfill?” is unanswerable. It’s also pointless to try to answer it, for if there is no evidence of purpose, any answer is mere speculation, driven perhaps more by wish-fulfilment than an real desire to know the answer. Science deals only with answerable questions, which means the “unanswerable” puzzles of late night, beer-soaked sophomore restructured in operational terms. “Operational” here means “answerable by some objective method”. If you can’t re-phrase the question so that it points to some method or evidence that might answer it, then it’s a non-question.
     In short, by dealing with the epistemology of the question, Krauss clears the ground for an answer. The answer is, as Sir Arthur Eddington and others have repeatedly reminded us, “stranger than we can imagine”. Or as Krauss himself puts it, “The universe is cleverer than we are”.
     And what’s the answer? That “nothing” is unstable. It cannot persist. It must, sooner or later, produce something. That something may wink in and out of existence in a very short time, or because of some random imbalance in its constituents inflate into a universe such as the one we inhabit.
     Krauss is careful to limit his claims. Based on what we know, mostly evidence garnered from predictions derived from quantum theory, the Universe is 13.72 billion years old. That’s four significant figures, ie, +/-  10 million years (which is roughly the amount of time there have been hominids on Earth). But there are still unanswered questions. One of the implications of "something from nothing" is the multiverse, a possibly infinite collection of universes, most of which would not operate on the laws of physics that give rise to matter, and hence to stars and galaxies, and hence to life, and hence to us. There is at present no way to test this hypothesis, and it looks like there may never be one.
     Does Krauss make convincing case? Yes. He deals briefly with Creationist objections to evolution and cosmology. I like his “If you have no problems with an uncreated God, why do you have problems with an uncreated universe?” He does admit that he has no proof of the non-existence of some kind of god, but he declares that he doesn’t want to live in a universe created by a god of arbitrary whims and laws. He much prefers the amazing universe that physicists and cosmologists have revealed. It has one curious feature: because it is expanding, it will eventually reach a state where any future cosmologists will be able to know only their own galaxy. We live in a time that we are able to see evidence of the origins and history of the universe, and can extrapolate to a time when most of that knowledge will be practically impossible to discover. Why? Because it depends on observable evidence. Once those observations aren’t possible, neither are the testable hypotheses that we have been able to make.
     A sobering thought. It should, I think focus our attention on the more important big question: What kind of meaningful life can we live in a universe without apparent purpose? The answer is of course, a life that has meaning in human terms. If we begin \the construction of an answer with the observation that some of the things we do tend to damage or extinguish us individually and as a species, and that other things that we do tend to enhance our lives individually and as a species, then we won’t go far wrong in choosing rules of life that give us meaning and purpose.
     The book is longer than it needs to be. But it’s still worth reading. ***

Niall MacKay. Over the Hills to Georgian Bay (1981)

     Niall MacKay. Over the Hills to Georgian Bay (1981) Niall MacKay provides a summary history of the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, which connected the namesake towns (a rarity in railway naming), and provided J R Booth, its promoter and owner, with a means of bringing his lumber to market. If the Cashman Creek bridge, whose foundation had been undermined by a flash flood, had been replaced, the railway would probably still exist, as it was the shortest route by far between the Upper Great Lakes (and hence the Midwest) and New England (and hence European markets for lumber and other natural resources), and might now be one of the main west-east routes in North America. At its peak, it was running trains an average of twenty minutes apart.
     It was amalgamated with the Canada Atlantic Railway, which was the largest privately owned railway at the time. It ran through sparsely settled country, and after sale to the Grand Trunk, and later incorporation into Canadian National Railways, it was one of three routes across central Canada, a fact that assisted the decision to in effect abandon it, especially since the other two routes served more densely settled regions. It crossed Algonquin National Park, which meant a fair amount of tourist traffic before roads (built as Depression make-work projects) opened up the park to cars and busses.
     MacKay has mined the photographic sources, and these supply a good deal of the interest of this book; one wishes the pictures were larger and more clearly reproduced, but 23 years ago the printers were still limited to half-tone and letterpress. The profile and line map are well done, the general location map less so, since the latter doesn’t show enough of the surrounding settlements, roads etc. Nevertheless, the book gives one an excellent picture of the railway and the country it ran through. **½ (2004)