Book Review: Black Cat, January 1904

Black Cat, January 1904
42pp text + 24pp advertising.

I could find no information about The Shortstory Publishing Company of Boston, Massachusetts. This issue of Black Cat is Vol. IX, No. 4, Whole No., 100, so it was around for some time. Searching on the magazine's name yielded more; it was begun in 1895, and lasted well into the 1920s. This copy cost 5 cents. By 1919, when Henry Miller wrote for it, it cost 15 cents.
The stories are typical high end pulp fiction: the style is quite "literary", a word I put in quotes because the writers use what they and their readers presumably think is good writing. The stories all have twists, a couple are shaggy dog stories. As entertainment, they are pleasant and innocuous enough. As evidence of the intended audience the stories are wonderful, and the ads provide an even better insight. The demographic appears to be middle class, people who want to better their position, by taking correspondence courses for example. Several ads offer instruction leading to a career as an advertising writer or manager, others offer editing and revision services to would-be authors, and of course there's the usual quota of nostrums and health foods.
Several ads offer sets of leather-bound volumes at half price, the ostensible reason being a "binding error", or "scuff marks." All these offers originate at the same address, but have different names attached. "Only 30 sets" are on hand, apparently. These ads appeal to the same attitudes that show up in ads of the 1950s-80s for whiskey or recorded music showing a well dressed man or couple in a book-lined room. Several ads are for railroads, which implies better than average income: travel was expensive around 1900. A fascinating magazine.

Contents:
My Oriental Visitor (Harry Stilwell Edwards) A visitor to the narrator (how he gets into the study isn't clear) tells a fantastic story about the provenance of a small ivory carving of a cat. Turns out he is the narrator's son Style is high flown "oriental". **
The Death Pearl (Frank Lillie Pollock) Two friends fish for pearls, one find a gorgeous pink one. His older friend tries to steal it, which causes a rift. Some time later both attend a reception at which the hostess wears the pearl. The older friend grabs and tosses it, it explodes: it was part of a nefarious plot to kill the man's enemy, containing a mysterious explosive that would blow up only after a period of gentle heat (provided by the hostess's deep decolletage.) An over-plotted tale, as this summary shows. *
With McGann in the Equation (Richard Barker Shelton) A thief arrives at a sleepy town in the swamps, and tells the denizens that he's a detective waiting for a thief, and deputises a bunch of them. When the real detective (McGann) shows up, he is of course detained, and the thief escapes. *-½
The Passing of the Gooba (Mrs. Willis Lord Moore) A satirical account of how a con man sets up a major scam, using "eastern philosophy", etc. The satire attacks not only the gullibility of "practical men", but also social climbing, and materialistic greed. The writing isn't as sharp or subtle as in Stephen Leacock's version of the same plot, but it hits its target. **-½
A Pair of Paper Aunts (F. Wendt) An 18 year old girl must return to America without her aunt. The lack of a chaperon disturbs her, so she invents all sorts of reasons why the aunt, whose name still appears on the passenger list, cannot leave the cabin. A young man makes her acquaintance, and eventually gives her a letter from his aunt to hers. The girl of course reads the letter, which changes her attitude to the young man, but when they each reveal their trickery, they part on bad terms. Only a mixup in their trunk keys, luckily discovered in the customs hall, saves their relationship. A nicely done little love story. **-½

Theatre Review: Apple (Vern Thiessen)

Thiessen, Vern Apple (2006)

We saw this play in Elliot Lake, played by the Gateway Players of North Bay, offered as a 2007 Quonta entry.

The adjudicator's remarks were a model of constructive criticism. He was able to lead the production team into recognising their mistakes, or questioning their choices, without in the least putting them down. His remarks about acting were entertaining and instructive. He was far, far kinder than I would have been – he obviously loves theatre, and theatre people, and that love was contagious. By and large, the adjudication rescued a rather dreary evening.

The Gateway Players did a valiant job, and during the adjudication explained why they thought it was a good idea to interrupt the play with frequent blackouts for scene changes, why the lighting was too dim, why the set was a mix of abstract and realistic scenery. One thing the adjudicator did not ask was why the director thought that the actors should speak their lines in very measured, and often obviously portentous tones. The actors worked hard, and did a very good job with a very thin script. The director used music (mostly songs by Peter Gabriel) to bridge the scene changes and provide atmosphere. These would have worked better if we had not been distracted by the busyness of the stage hands.

Overall the production was a good deal less than the sum of its parts. I agreed with all adjudicator's judgments except one: he claimed this was a brilliantly written play, but I think the script was bloody awful.

It seems Thiessen has a reputation for brilliance: http://moderntheatre.suite101.com/article.cfm/this_apple_is_delicious is a laudatory review of the Toronto premiere of this play. But if this play is evidence of Thiessen's normal standard, his reputation is undeserved. The characters are cardboard, possessing only enough features to propel the plot, which reminds me of a TV movie of the kind made to provide a "vehicle" for a fading star.

Oh, yeah, the plot: Dysfunctional marriage between bland husband Andy and driven real-estate-agent wife Evelyn. Husband has been fired from his government job, gets no sympathy from bitchy Wife, and offers none in return when she complains about her job. He meets medical student Samantha in the park, has affair with her – she has an orgasm the first time they're together. Wow! Student has no goals in life, just wants to enjoy the moment. Wife is engaged to sell Student's condo (inherited from her mother). Neither knows they have a man in common. Then Wife develops breast cancer. Husband now has a full-time job: to care for Wife. The intern handling her case for the specialist is – the Student! Husband breaks off affair. Husband and Wife reconcile (and have orgasmic sex on stage to prove it.) Wife dies. Husband and Student meet in park again, she wants to get back together with him. He refuses. The End.

But why should we care for these people? Just because someone has lost a job or develops a fatal disease is not enough reason to feel any more than an abstract compassion for them. We have to believe their lives matter to them, but how can we do so when so little of their lives is revealed? I suppose the wife's acceptance of her mortality, her reconciliation with her husband, his devoting himself to her and giving up the sexy student, are all intended to show how the smell of death can be morally therapeutic. Or something like that. There are repeated references to living in the moment. The characters remark on the beauty of the park, the sunlight, the air, in identical phrases, etc and so on and so forth. The adjudicator claims the script was written like a piece of music, by which he presumably had these repeated motifs and their variations in mind. I found the language flat and uninteresting – the repeated references to the beauty of the park became irritating to me. "Beauty" is a word that fails to convince me.

The characters are flat, they engaged neither my interest nor my sympathy, despite the actors' skill. For example, the husband claims to have loved his government job, but we never know why – beyond making that claim, he says nothing about it. So on what grounds should I believe that he loved his job?

Thiessen has a knack for using incomplete phrases and sentences to express social awkwardness, but that has limited use in a play that supposedly explores how and why people make the choices they must make. He also suffers from the regrettably wide-spread notion that scattering fuck yous about makes dialogue more realistic, since such strong words must express rage, mustn't they? Well, no, actually. The phrase worked best when Andy and Evelyn used it good-naturedly to express affection.

Thiessen has another gimmick: at intervals, the student appears dressed in doctor's whites, and lectures about the progress of cancer. I suppose the technical, medical language is intended to comment on the action, and to heighten the reality and emphasise the emotion of the dialogue. Unfortunately, Thiessen didn't bother to get the facts right - the student tells us that cancer "invades" the cells, which is an elementary error. It put me off, so I was not disposed to look kindly on the superficial characterisation, the sophomoric assumption that a life-threatening situation is in itself enough to evoke pity and terror, and the attempt to heighten realism by using foul language and explicit sex. There were quite a few funny bits, but neither the script nor the direction indicated that they were intended as such.

BigDog, an animoid robot

Just check it out. There are seven videos in all.

http://gizmodo.com/368651/new-video-of-bigdog-quadruped-robot-is-so-s

Cute li'l beastie, eh?

Movie review: Away from Her

Away from Her (2007. D: Sarah Polley. Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie, Olympia Dukakis)

Fiona's developing Alzheimer's results in her going into a long term care home. Grant has a very difficult time adjusting to this. At the home, Fiona starts a relationship with Aubrey, a fellow patient. His wife Marian takes him out of the home because she can't afford to keep him there without selling her house. Fiona becomes depressed. Grant comes to ask Marian to bring Aubrey back for a visit. She refuses. Later, Grant and Marian have sex. Marian sells her house, and brings Aubrey back to the home. When Grant is about to bring him to Fiona, Fiona has a lucid spell, as predicted by the nurse, and recalls that recently Grant was reading her Auden's Letters from Iceland. Grant is ecstatic that she remembers him. Fadeout. And that's the plot, based on an Alice Munro story.

Sarah Polley's adaptation of Munro's story, with its multiple layers and constant moving back and forth in time, is brilliant. The film mimics the unexpected and confusing rememberings that Alzheimer's patients are said to experience. The editing helps, with repetitive establishing shots and subtle shifts in colour, sound, and editing. The three leads are very good. The characters are all vulnerable, and it's that vulnerability that I think makes the film convincing.

Christie's performance as Fiona is wonderful. She changes from knowing that she is deteriorating, to repeating increasingly inappropriate social phrases, to being barely aware of where she is. Pinsent as Grant has captured the essence of a man used to having the supports of career, social rank, and a satisfying marriage, who realises that he can barely survive on his own, and must accept a diminished role in his own life. He doesn't realise that he has been defined by his surroundings and relationships all his life; he has believed that he was somehow self-defined. When Fiona loses her self to Alzheimer's, Grant loses his self too. He says he could not ever bear to be away from her, that's why he married her. In fact, he couldn't be himself without her; and now he must learn how do that. Dukakis as the no-nonsense wife-caregiver, who copes by pretending she is self-sufficient, knows she too needs comfort, even if only the illusion of a brief connection in bed. In the end, we have only ourselves. Those we love, and who love us, no matter how close we are, will always be apart from us.

Yet the movie isn't quite satisfying. It's a depressing story, and has its strongest moments at the beginning, when Fiona charts her own descent into non-self, and decides, while she still can, that it's time for her to go. It's Grant who can't accept the loss, who hopes that the stay in the home will be a short one, who wants to believe that Fiona is just being her quirky self, that therapy will bring her back. Towards the end, as he comes to accept that Fiona must move to the second floor (where the end stage patients are housed), we see that he will somehow survive in his new role as mere visitor. When at the end Fiona has one of those lucid times that the nurse has told Grant she will have, he accepts her embrace, blissed out by her mere presence. Is this a note of hope or of resignation? A recognition that we must accept small mercies gratefully, or the delusion that things will return to normal? Or a setup for even greater heartbreak? The ambiguities arise from the vagueness of Grant's character. The movie doesn't give us the answers, nor should it, but it should give us a clearer sense of how Grant has changed. ***

Solar Power and subsidies

An article in today's New York times reports on thermal solar power plants being built in the SW states. Costs are high, compared to coal fired plants, and a subsidy is provided:

"The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

I don't know what else Mr James said, but his comment is disingenuous. Coal and other fossil fuels receive subsidies of all kinds. The oil and coal companies receive tax rebates to compensate them for the diminishing supplies of coal and oil. The power companies receive rebates for building the plants in the first place, and more rebates for installing pollution control equipment. And everyone involved externalises the costs of whatever pollution remains after scrubbing, and of course the cost of CO2. Externalised costs are indirect subsidies. We all pay for them one way or another.

No one knows exactly what these subsidies amount to in cents/kWh, but there's no question that it's high. One thing is for sure, though: power generated from fossil fuel is not priced to reflect its actual costs. If it did, solar power would look a lot more attractive, and there would be a lot more effort to conserve power. There's not much point in increasing electricity supply if there isn't also an effort to cut electricity use.

The illustration used to help the reader understand the potential of solar thermal power is also interesting: "A megawatt is enough electricity to run 1,000 room air-conditioners at once." One of the things that struck me when I visited south Texas some years ago was the lack of insulation in most of the homes. Proper insulation would cut power consumption for air-conditioning by a third or more. The use of ground effect heat pumps would cut the remaining power demand by 75%. These two modes of conservation should be heavily subsidised. The payback in dollars for each installation would be ten years or less. The payback in energy savings would be substantially less.

Update 2020-03-03: The efficiency  of solar power cells has increased  substantially, They now convert a higher percentage of solar energy into human-usable energy than plants do. Dow has developed a method of painting solar cells onto any surface, which could make just about any surface available for generating power. The other problem of solar (and wind) is storage of surplus power. Betteries, heat sinks, and pumping water back into reservoirs are all feasible, Denmark has become the first country in the world to eliminate all fossil fuel power plants. Oil prices remain low, while extraction costs continue to trend up. Without subsidies the oil business would have folded long ago.

9/11 Conspiracies

     Try the following link: Prison Trains

     Funny, eh?
     Then look at the comments. While most people see the humour (such as it is), a few earnestly propose or point to what they believe is the truth: that 9/11 was "an inside job", conceived to provide excuses for the reduction of civil liberties and engagement in foreign wars.
     Well, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade centre did provide those excuses, on which the Bush administration has acted with too many signs of glee. Not that they wouldn't have used some other excuse if 9/11 hadn't happened. They have been trying to find an excuse for a pre-emptive attack on Iran (also a former ally in the Middle east, by the way), citing Iran's nuclear weapons program as reason enough. A number of factors, which I needn't enumerate, have prevented them from acting on this excuse.
     I don't think there will be a strike on Iran in the foreseeable future. The next President, Republican or not, will have enough problems to deal with, without adding a gratuitous one.
     The ancient Chinese are said to have cursed their enemies with "May you live in the most interesting of times." We do live in the most interesting of times. But then, we always have.

Theatre Review: The Drawer Boy

The Drawer Boy, by Michael Healey. Gore Bay Players, Gore Bay ON, June 27 2007.

Two bachelor farmers, Morgan and Angus, friends since childhood, live together. Angus has been damaged by war. Morgan tells him the story of how they met two English girls, Sally and Frances, brought them back to Canada, and lost them in a car accident. This story fills in the gaps in Angus's memory, for five minutes or so. Myles, a young actor, asks to stay with them in order to learn about farming, as his collective' is 'writing' a play about farmers. This affords an excuse for a number of more or less corny jokes about how the uncouth farmer takes in the sophisticated city slicker.

But Myles overhears the story, and uses it as his scene in the play. Morgan and Angus see the rehearsal, and when they return from the theatre, Angus remembers not only Myles but the story as well. His memory seems to be restored, until Morgan has to admit that he made up the story. The injury that robbed Angus of his memory also made him moody and depressed, until Sally and Frances left them. Not much of a story, really, but Healey presents and reveals it layer by layer until we are left with what seems to be the truth.

The three actors did a creditable job, making us believe their characters and the gradual unfolding of Angus' and Morgan's history. Myles was played a little too much on one-note, but then he's not a complex character. Naive and trusting, he accepts Morgans deceptions and tricks at face value, and thinks he can somehow cure Angus. He almost succeeds, too. Morgan was more subtly portrayed, and he is a more complex person. Who would have thought that the boy who loved action and adventure, who went to war because he wanted an adventure, would be so sensitive to his friend's needs, and invent such a tale to comfort him? Angus was the most difficult character to play, as his memory loss and repetitive compulsions tempt the actor to caricature, but this did not happen here. The transition into apparently full recovery of memory, his realisation that his memories are false, and that the truth would hurt, and his relapse into the forgetfulness that keeps him happy, were very well done. The set was a simple, semi-abstract portrayal of the kitchen and porch. Lighting shifted attention to the two acting areas, and colours, though simple, effectively signalled shifts in time. The music (what play these days doesn't use a soundtrack as a movie does?) was blessedly unobtrusive, and served more to reinforce the mood than guide it.

All in all, a very good production. Walter Maskel can be proud of his cast and crew. Marie and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you get a chance to see it, do so.