Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) & The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

     Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) Davies’ wit and sharp satirical observation makes this a book to enjoy. He is practising his style. Most of these paragraphs are very well formed, with exquisite sentences. Occasionally, they end with Marchbanks’ side of the response to his comments, most of them unflattering to the ladies whom he presumably regaled with his wit. The comments provide an indirect portrait of the still stuffy and narrow views of the respectable Ontarian, on which Marchbanks honed his wit. This social conservatism has moved West. The stereotypical Albertan now espouses the morality of the mid-20th century Ontarian, and suffers from the same urge to impose it on the rest of the country. I found myself eager to read selected passages aloud, an urge that Marie accommodated with her usual good grace. She even laughed at some of Davies’ passages. This copy is a first edition, but without wrappers. ***

     Robertson Davies. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) This volume too, is a first edition, but a second printing. In this earlier volume, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second one. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit). Although there have been changes for the better since the 1940s, sixty years later we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed. The blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children’s sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand. Update 2013: Families can now claim a deduction for music lessons and the like as well.
     Marchbanks’ struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become much more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn’t, therefore, become better. There’s more to the good life than creature comforts.
     The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions). He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences appear to be lengthy to the eye, but not to the ear. (Davies writes for the ear, a rare skill and even rarer ambition). But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. “If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another.”  “New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto.” “If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be.” *** (2007)

Les Kozma, ed. Along These Lines (2004)

     Les Kozma, ed. Along These Lines (2004) The Canadian Northern Society has collected both oral and written history of the Edmonton - Camrose - Stettler - Calgary line, along with some of its branches. Kozma has done a nice job of arranging these. He begins with an account of how the CNoR Society came into being. We now take specialist historical societies for granted, but when they decided that they could and should preserve and recondition Meeting Creek station, such societies still had carried an aura of the quixotic and impractical.
     It’s a book to dip into, not to read, and like many such local and personal histories has more meaning for family and friends than for the casually interested rail fan. A grad student, however, could make much of the details mentioned in passing or assumed as general knowledge. The history of the railroad worker hasn’t been written. This is good documentation for such a book. The photos are reasonably well reproduced, but a few too many betray their origin as low-res scans of the originals. A map would help immensely, and its lack is the only serious fault. I detected no typos, which indicates careful editing. ** (2007)

Cyril Freezer. Model Railways on a Budget (1987)

     Cyril Freezer. Model Railways on a Budget (1987) Pre-DCC, pre-NEM standards, pre- high quality plastic molding, and it shows. But Freezer writes a nice breezy style, addressing (his younger) readers directly, and dispensing many useful hints. The hints still have value, despite our high tech models, and his advice about how to figure out the budget applies to many more departments than model railways.
     This is the second time I’ve read this book in less than a year.  It’s as fresh the second time round as the first time. I must have read it when I bought it in September 1987, but I can’t recall. I’m at the age where books I read years or decades ago are easier to recall than books read this week. **½ (2007)

Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections

     Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections. Calvin, the real version of Dennis the menace, and Hobbes, his stuffed toy tiger, are no longer with us. Watterson gave up drawing the strip some years ago, and all we have now are these splendid collections, and more recent ones with the Sunday panels in colour. They repay repeated reading, with Hobbes’ wisdom contrasting with and complementing Calvin’s innocent mischief. Calvin’s only moments of evil occur when he is trying to get the better of Susy Perkins, his neighbour and classmate, who thinks him to be the weirdest kid she knows. But she likes Hobbes, so she can’t quite hate Calvin.
     Calvin embodies pure boy, Hobbes is his imaginary playmate. The strip is a mix of Calvin’s real and imagined adventures. He hates school, and goes to great lengths to avoid homework. Yet his imagination shows that he’s no dummy. Hobbes expresses what Calvin presumably knows to be the better, more mature, more realistic attitudes and insights, but he is also pure jungle cat, just a whiff and a whisker away from real teeth and real claws and a real appetite for juicy little boys. Calvin’s alter egos, Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man, are his escape from realities he doesn’t like. His imagined embodiments as a tyrannosaurus that eats and crushes his enemies give him some solace. The line between fantasy and reality is a thin one. The veil that separates the inner and outer worlds tears often. Calvin knows when he is fantasising, but he also wishes that his fantasies were real. And sometimes they come too close to reality for comfort.
      The strip’s charm arises from this mix of reality and fantasy, maturity and childishness, acceptance of what is and escapes into imagined worlds where little boys are heroes that fight for justice or prehistoric lizards exacting vengeance. The effects range from mild amusement through wry sadness and to spluttering, gasping hilarity.
Many comic strips merely illustrate the text. Watterson’s drawings and text merge perfectly. In fact, the drawings often expand and extend the text’s meanings. I like his work a lot. **** (2007)

Olek crochets a cover for a locomotive

Olek is an artist that crochets covers for miscellaneous objects, some of which are other art works. Here's her latest: Polish locomotive I like her attitude.

Update 2025-06-21: The link no longer has images, but it's still worth reading for the story. Here's an image I found online:

Frank Ellison. Frank Ellison on Model Railroads (1954)

     Frank Ellison. Frank Ellison on Model Railroads (1954) This is the first model railway book I ever bought. It cost me 35 cents, or about 1½ hours babysitting money. I read it to pieces, and sometime in the 1970s rebound the book with cardboard covers and vinyl tape. The vinyl tape cracked when I opened the book a couple weeks ago, so I took the covers off, and decided to reread it before repairing the book.

     Frank Ellison emphasised operation “in a railroad like manner” when most people were still content to build models and run them round an oval a few times. Back then, building a layout, the locomotives, and the cars took so much time and effort that there wasn’t much energy left for actually operating the pike. Ellison set out to change that. His series of articles in Model Railroader, suitably edited, make up this book. About half the book deals with operation: the peddler freight, the through freight, passenger trains, engine changes, and so on. He reminds the reader that even a small layout with a few spurs can host a peddler freight and provide hours of entertainment.
     He believes scenery is essential as a backdrop or stage setting for the actors in the drama of railroading (he was a scene designer, builder, and setter by trade).  Thus, scenery, and how to design it to fool the viewer into believing the train is passing through miles of country, occupies most of the second half of the book. He spends less time on building models and adapting locomotives. With his theatrical background, he thinks of rolling stock as merely actors; it’s the roles they play that matter, and a good actor can play any role. Prototype fidelity matters less to him than the overall impression and reliable functioning.
     Ellison’s style is direct and clear. He is chatting with the reader, not pontificating. His casual assumption that model railroading is a man’s game jars nowadays, especially since so many women have declared themselves to be part of the hobby. He also assumes he’s talking to people who can afford to spend a fair bit of cash on their pastimes, which means he also assumes at least a high school education.  His materials and processes are dated, in fact many are impossible these days, since they have been replaced with plastics and electronics. But other than that, his points are as valid today as they were back then. He’s one of the pioneers of the hobby, one of the people who recognised early on that there was more to it than the craft of making miniatures. His influence is still with us. *** (2007)

Sue Grafton. C is for Corpse (1986)

     Sue Grafton. C is for Corpse (1986) Kinsey meets a brain-damaged young man, who believes he was run off the road in an attempt to kill him. He thinks he knows something that may make him a target. Kinsey agrees to investigate, but before she can get started, he dies, apparently of a brain hemorrhage. Kinsey has his $1000 retainer, and refuses to give up. She does find the killer. The corpse of the title conceals a murder weapon. As usual, Kinsey faces deadly danger in the denouement, and once again suffers injury. But the killer, a pathologist, will pay for his dastardly deeds.
     This outing moves as swiftly as the other books in the series, but the plotting feels a little stale. There’s a subplot involving Kinsey’s handsome but 80-year-old landlord, Elmer, and a 60-something gold-digging hustler who wants to take him for all he’s got. Kinsey manages to prevent that, too. The dialogue moves the story briskly and reveals character, but the whole piece feels too formulaic to be truly satisfying. That doesn’t make me any less a fan, though. ** (2007)