Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (Book Review)

     Stuart McLean Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (2000) Number six in McLean’s series of Vinyl Cafe stories. A good read. Mclean is a very studied writer-narrator, he doesn’t have that air of spontaneous reminiscence that Garrison Keillor has. But like Keillor, he has a location and a cast of characters whom we get to know better every time we hear another story. Both have a knack for starting slow and presenting a series of events and choices in what at every step seems reasonable and logical, until we arrive at a bizarre scene that defies belief. Both also give shape to what at first seems a random series of events, but which lead to a satisfying conclusion. Both make us understand the importance of the insignificant. And both are able to make us feel part of the community whose history they chronicle.
     This kind of story has a long and honourable history. Many folk tales have the same structure. Charlie Chaplin and the comic duos of early film like Laurel and Hardy use the same device, as does nearly every sit-com. It’s a very flexible form, it’s really just one thing after another. This apparent randomness gives even the most outlandish anecdote an air of reality that suspends disbelief. It also enables assembling a group of seemingly unrelated events into a thematic whole, whose shape is often not seen until the end of the story. McLean’s popularity rests on his skill in using the form, and on his ability to infuse his tales with the ordinary virtues and vices of our common humanity.
I could summarise a couple of the stories here, but I won’t. You’ll get far more pleasure out of reading them yourself. ***

Death Notes (Book Review)

     Ruth Rendell Death Notes (Put On by Cunning) (1981) An elderly man drowns in his ornamental pond, apparently by accident. His fiancée tells Wexford that he thought his long-lost daughter was a fraud. The long and tangled and international case that flows from this is one of Wexford’s trickiest, but also curiously unengaging. It’s as if Rendell lost interest once she had figured out the plot. Wexford is still the centre of the narrative, but we know him well by now, and there are no new revelations of character. Burden, newly remarried, has mellowed, and also become capable of sharper insight. The secondary characters are nicely sketched, but that’s all they are, sketches. The villain is merely a stick figure on which to hang the crime. A pleasant read, but not Rendell’s best. **

Ronnie Barker's Book of Bathing Beauties (Book Review)

 

Ronnie Barker: Ronnie Ronnie Barker’s Book of Bathing Beauties (1974) A scrapbook of bathing beauties. Well, what did you expect? The majority date from around 1900 plus or minus a decade or two. They are oddly innocent to 21st century jaded eyes, but the themes embodied and expressed by them have no date: all women are beautiful, most men like to look at women, most women like to be looked at, and people who want to interfere with these elemental pleasures are blue meanies with neither a sense of humour nor an understanding of human nature. The date of the collection is significant: nowadays there would be a lot of fussing about objectification of women, and the book might not be published. Think of it as social documentation, a reminder that what we think of as erotic or naughty or sexy has a lot more to do with fashion than with morals. Anyhow, this is is clearly a "concept book", compiled and published to cash in on Barker's persona as a TV comedian.  If you want to know more about Barker, see his obituary at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1499900/Ronnie-Barker.html
**

Fred has a Friend

Angus arrived some months ago. The first few weeks he had no one to talk to, which made existence rather boring. Now he and Fred observe the humans of the house reading the paper or watching television. Angus and Fred also get to listen to the radio, in fact they are standing on one of the speakers. Whether they have ears in their feet, as some arthropods do, has not been determined. They no doubt converse on the usual subjects, but since I have no idea what these might be for a penguin and an owl, I can't tell you. They never talk in my presence. I can only infer that they discuss matters of interest from subtle changes in expression. Some killjoy has opined that these changes in expression are mere tricks of the light, but I firmly disagree. Both Fred and Angus strike me as eminently intelligent beings, the kind that take great pleasure in commenting on the passing show.

Links: music and theatre blogs

If you like classical music, look at Ken Stephen's blog: 
http://offthebeatenstaff.blogspot.ca/
Ken is a former colleague: he taught at Elliot Lake Secondary School, and retired a few years after I did. He was and is much involved with theatre, and has a blog on that subject, too
http://largestagelive.blogspot.ca/

The Eighth Champion of Christendom (Book Review)

Edith Pargeter. The Eighth Champion of Christendom (1945) This is a patriotic book, with

definite contrasts between the good and noble English and French, and the dastardly Germans. Of course it’s more complicated than that, and Pargeter can write, which makes this a book worth reading for its picture of war from a common soldier’s point of view.
      The plot is somewhat melodramatic, the characters just this side of stereotypical, and the style generally straightforward. Jim Benison, an ordinary bloke from an ordinary English village, signs up, spends a few idyllic weeks in France before the German onslaught, is separated from his unit during battle, makes his way back through German-occupied France to the coast, and almost dies when the boat on which he escapes is strafed. The Czech woman (married to French army captain, who is killed) who helped him is eventually shot by the Germans. You may read the story as a Bildungsroman, in which the naive hero learns not only what makes life worth living, but what stuff he’s made of. Benison has tougher mettle in him than he knew, and also more instinctive goodness. In other words, war brings out his character, as it will for any man or woman.
     Pargeter’s theme is the strength of the human spirit. There’s a lot of death, a good deal of heroism and cowardice, and odd dashes of sentiment. One would think from this description that the book’s a tediously us-vs-them tract, but it keeps you reading. It’s really a chivalric romance. Pargeter, who strikes me as a self-conscious artist, no doubt chose the title as a clue to the genre. Her Cadfael series (written as Ellis Peters) are even more blatantly romances, but it’s her skill at telling them in the naturalistic mode that makes them readable. Pargeter is especially good at creating mood and ambience, relying on familiar cliches that she varies just enough to make us see what she wants us to see. That naturalism also makes them eminently transposable into film and video. This book would make a good TV series, but the time for WW2 nostalgia has passed, I think. Still, I rate this book ***

Link: How to create good passwords

Steve Gibson offers a bunch of interesting stuff on this web page:
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

My takeaway: Use a line from a favourite poem, and mix in one or more numbers you know well, plus some randomly selected symbols.
Example: Shall I compare thee to a summers day
Transmogrified becomes:
Shall:I19compare40Thee?01to30a353summer's21day!

This is not one of my passwords, BTW. ;-) The reason such passwords work is that they are easy for humans to remember, but difficult for other humans to guess.