Humans at Play (LQ 03-4 Sports & Games)

 

    LQ 03-3: Sports & Games (2010) In 1938, Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, in which he argued that play was necessary for the creation of culture. His insight has become a cliche. This LQ collection demonstrates its truth, albeit indirectly, since it focuses on what we North Americans mean by its title. Huizinga included the arts, politics, etc in his concept. It seems to me that Huizinga’s argument amounts to saying that inventing ways of living that go well beyond finding food and reproducing is species-specific behaviour for humans.
     Play in the narrow sense is widespread among mammals. All young mammals play, and many species of adult mammals play, too. That is, they engage in some behaviour for no apparent reason other than they like doing it.
     Humans of course do more than that. We invent rules and customs around play, and spend an amazing amount of resources on it. Extend the concept to include the arts, and we humans act as if play is the purpose of life. But we find elements of play in all other aspects of human culture. It’s obvious in fashion, for example. The use of science to create useful technologies disguises that it, too, is a form of play. And all technologies eventually become at least adjuncts to play. Huizinga’s relabelling of our species is apt.
     Like other aspects of human culture, the variety of sports and games tends to distract attention from a fundamental unity. Sports and games range from pure pleasure to intense competition. All cultures engage in sports and games for both purposes. This collection shows that while humans have invented an astonishing variety of sports and games, their use is bounded by this range.
     Recommended. ****

Trivia Quizzes: "Quote...Unquote"

Nigel Rees. Quote...Unquote (1980) We like trivia. Maybe because every now and then some trivial fact turns out to matter. It may link some new fact to our store of knowledge, thus reassuring us the universe has a meaningful pattern. Or it may become the significant bit needed to solve a puzzle, or reveal some secret, or lead us to some deeper insight. All this helps explain why collections of trivia sell. Like this one. It’s an amusing selection of semi-esoteric quotations. Most are presented in quizzes, thus flattering the reader in its expectation that they will recognise most of the quotations. Taken as a whole, they make up a pointillist portrait of the 19th and 20th centuries.
     One of the quizzes asks the reader to amend such misquotes such as “Money is the root of all evil”, “ I knew him well, Horatio”, “Play it again, Sam”, etc. Misquotes like these are an example of our tendency to recall meanings but not the words used to express them.
     Cheeky illustrations by ffolkes. Fun, recommended if you can find a copy. **½

Trickster tricks make for a good life

 

    Tomson Highway. Laughing With the Trickster (CBC Massey Lectures, 2022) I learned that what I had learned about First Nations cultures was woefully incomplete. Read this book. It will educate you, and entertain you. Highway shows what he means when he says that Indigenous people laugh a lot. Life’s a blast, even when it isn’t. The Trickster deludes us, but also makes life interesting. The Creator made us for enjoyment.
     Threaded throughout this hugely exuberant romp through life is the dark narrative of the clash of Indigenous and Settler cultures. We Settlers have a lot to learn. A brighter thread, told mostly through Highway’s life story, is that Indigenous peoples are adaptable. Their cultures thrive because they have been able and willing to adapt. They don’t try to preserve their way of life, but to live it. And if that includes telling their stories in Settler languages, well, that’s life. And if that adaptation causes Settlers to adapt, too, well, that’s even better life.
     Highway ends with a brief account of his brother’s death. Rene told him, “Don’t mourn me, be joyful”. The last sentence of the book is, “ I have no time for tears; I’m too busy being joyful.”
     Read this book. ****
Footnote: Another essential book is Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer understand that all insights about the world are provisional. At best, they are merely good enough approximations to the truth. At worst, they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Travelling (Lapham's 02-3, 2009)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 02-3: Travel. (Summer 2009) Migration is forced, travel is chosen. We

succeed at both because humans have survived by keeping on the move, whether within a territory suitable for hunting and gathering, or by removal into a new territory. We share wanderlust with other animals, which suggest that it’s a condition of species survival.
     This collection tells us what we already know: Travel confirms our conviction that there’s no place like home, and prompts wonder and even delight at the variety of human ways of living and making a living. Which effect predominates depends on the traveller. The evidence shows that the self-centred make poor travellers.
     Tourism is the invention of the leisure class, of people who did not depend on trading profit to finance the journey. But apart from that, there’s little difference between tourism trading, and exploration. Travel reveals as much about ourselves as about the places and people we meet. The modern variety of tourism developed from the Grand Tour, paid for by parents anxious that their offspring would acquire experience useful for a successful career in the higher branches of capitalism and government. The educational component still predominates: the tourist industry offers education as the reason and excuse for spending time being carried across water and land while being cosseted by “the staff”.
     Many of the pieces here are firsthand accounts, which satisfy the reader’s wanderlust without requiring the tiresome nuisances of actual travel. The fictions use the differences between the traveller and the strange lands as opportunities for allegory and satire, or demonstrations that growing up entails self-discovery. Hence the many plots strung out along the roads taken, or not taken, by the hero and their companions.
     I enjoyed the collection as much for its reminders of my own travels as for the experiences of the narrators. ****

Canadians Have Had A Lot to Say: Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005)

    

Lisa Wojna Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005) A re-read. Canadians have had a lot to say about themselves and their fellow-citizens, not to mention the inordinate amount of scenery that we live in. Wojna’s collection is a commendable one. The book’s a keeper. A few samples:
     The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by perfection in government. (William Davis, Premier1971-1895).
     There’s an old saying which goes: Once the last tree has been cut, and the last river poisoned, you will find that you cannot eat your money. (Joyce MacLean, the Globe and Mail)
     You have to drop out of school now and then if you want to get and education. (Pamela Peck, PhD, anthropologist)
     The Liberals talk about stable government, but we don’t know how bad the stable is going to smell. (Tommy Douglas, founder of the CCF, which became the NDP).
     If you’re not annoying somebody you’re not really alive. (Margaret Atwood)
Recommended. ****

Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****

Collage

 Marker and collage on tea-stained tissue 2023

Peanuts Forever (7 Peanuts compilations)

    

Charles Schulz. Good Ol’ Snoopy (1958), Let’s Face it, Charlie Brown (1960), This Is Your Life, Charlie Brown (1962), You’re Not For Real, Snoopy (1965), Snoopy and the Red Baron (1966), He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968), You’re in Love, Charlie Brown (1969)

     Had another look at the Charlie Brown paperbacks we accumulated when our children we little. I’m still a Peanuts fan. Schulz’s talent was to see the connection between children’s frustrations and adult ones. And he was a master of graphic expression. A wiggly line for a mouth, a drooping doggy head, a dot and curved line for raised or scrunched eyebrows - it’s

amazing how much emotion is conveyed by so little ink. Schulz also knows how to pace a joke. Many of the strips have the build-up and punch line of a stand-up comic’s joke, but are impossible without the graphic. Such as Snoopy lying on his back on the roof of his doghouse while the rain pours down. There’s only one thing wrong with this...The rain keeps running down my nose and eyes.

     Some of the strips have taken on a different resonance these days: Lucy to Linus: See that building there?... If you ever want to borrow a book, all you have to do is go in there and tell them which one you want, and They’ll let you take it home. Linus: Free? Lucy: Absolutely free! Linus: Sort of makes you wonder what they’re up to.

     I thoroughly enjoyed rereading these books. I’ve decided to keep them. ****

Drowning off Martha's Vinyard (Craig - Death in Vinyard Waters)

Philip R. Craig. Death in Vineyard Waters (1991) Originally The Man Who Walked Into The Sea. Ex-Boston cop J W Jackson doesn’t like the verdict of suicide pronounced over the body of Marjorie Summerharp, a 70-something academic whom he met at a party and liked. She’s made enemies, and we all know that academic feuds are among the most vicious on Earth. Jackson knows the tides and the currents, and the supposed time of death doesn’t fit where she was found many hours later. He tells his doubts to the sheriff, who decides to wait and see while Jackson does the sleuthing.
     The story unfolds slowly. Jackson is a likeable character, with a strong sense of honour. This interferes with both his love life and the investigation, when Ian McGregor, his rival for Zee Madeiras’s affections, may have a motive for removing Marjorie. There’s gentle satire of the summer denizens of the village, some sharp academic talks, and a send-up of some purveyors of expensive wellness. There’s what may be the slowest chase ever, involving two identical sailboats whose speed hardly differs. There’s also a lot of lore about fishing and clamming and other bucolic tasks and pastimes.
     A nicely done entertainment, second in the series. Above average for the genre. **½

Milo drifts into trouble and love (Milo Talon, 1981)

  Louis L’Amour. Milo Talon (1981) Milo drifts into town and takes on the job to find a missing heiress. At stake are not only a megabuck in gold but also ownership of mines and railroads. Talon is not the only one looking for a slice of the wealth. Tangled past family relationships create a nice mess of legalities and logistical problems. One of these problems is a nicely shaped, smart and hardworking young woman. Talon resists the inevitable slide into love and marriage until he succumbs immediately after the final showdown.
     From L’Amour we expect good writing, plausible characters, accurate settings, and enough mystery to keep us turning the pages. He delivers, again. ***

Shake Hands Forever (again)

Ruth Rendell. Shake Hands Forever (1975)  A re-read. I posted two earlier reviews. This time, it was (almost) new again. But the denouement, although expected, was still a nicely paced surprise. 

An escape from a dysfunctional marriage eventually leads to a murder arranged in hopes of complete escape from the past. Robert Hathall’s mother finds Angela Hathall strangled in her bedroom. Wexford’s convinced that Hathall did it, but he couldn’t have, because he was at his work in London and then with his mother on the train during the time Angela died. Wexford fumbles an interview, which prompts Hathall to complain to Chief Constable Griswold, who orders Wexford off the case. Lacking the usual resources, Wexford turns to family. With the help of his nephew (now Supt. Howard Fortune), and a bit of timely luck, Wexford cracks the case.

A nice variation on the impossible murder. Rendell is good at plausible psychology; it’s psychological insight that leads Wexford to the solution. Love, greed, and the yearning for respectability provide the impetus for murder. A few longeurs slow down the narrative, but  perhaps Rendell wants us to feel Wexford’s frustration at the slow pace of investigation. Another very good W Rendell mystery. I liked it even better than the first two times I read it, hence the higher rating. Maybe the trade paperback format, with its larger print, had that positive effect. ***½