Liza Cody et al., editors. 3rd Culprit (1994)

  

   Liza Cody et al., editors. 3rd Culprit (1994) Collection of short stories by members of the Crime Writers’ Association. Most of them are plot-twist tales, such as “Good Interments”, in which an older maiden lady discovers that marrying and murdering elderly gentlemen of means is a good method to enrich herself, until she marries an elderly gentleman with the same aims. Most of the writers have sunken back into relative obscurity, but a few (Paretsky, Westlake, Rankin) have increased in popularity and output.
     Genre writing is a cruel trade; one has to catch the reading public’s taste at just the right time, and a TV or movie deal or two will also please. There are far more skillful and entertaining mystery writers out there than one can possibly read or even know of. The occasional anthology like this one will present the lesser known ones. The CWA has done its members proud. For the reader, this is a fine collection of above average crime writing. I won’t keep this ex-library used copy, so if you luck into one of our local yard sales, you may find it worth a dollar or two. I did. ***

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia (Art Gallery of Ontario, to 15 August 2015)
     We’ve always liked Emily Carr’s pictures, but we’ve seen very few of them. So it was a treat to see so many of her paintings and drawings in one place. We went through the show once, then had lunch with Sowtons, then went through the show a second time. That hour or so of percolation through the subconscious helped: I was more sure of what I liked and why.

    Like many artists, Carr was always trying to define her vision, to find ways of expressing and sharing her experience. Every one of her rare meetings with other artists in Canada and Europe prompted her to experiment with composition, brushwork, and colour. She saw movement or life everywhere. It’s hard to realise that the totems and houses that she painted in her early years were in fact derelict and rotting away. In her last paintings she overlays the nearly abstract arrangements of sky, earth, sea, and trees with swirling strokes that express her sense of movement, of intense interaction between these elements. The most effective paintings show trees and earth rising into a blazing whirlpool of light. Lawren Harris gave her the confidence to move towards abstraction. She knew her energetic brushwork looked like van Gogh’s; her comment that van Gogh was crazy but knew about “go” or life shows I think that she was proud of the implied compliment, but characteristically played it down.
     The show also includes drawings and sketchbooks. Carr was trained in water colours, like many young women of her class and time. She clearly had superior talent; her watercolours of totem poles and villages show great technical skill and are more than mere documentation. She made up a lovely little book narrating a tour to Alaska that she took with her sister. Her later sketchbooks show that she tested her visual ideas obsessively, returning again and again to trees, sketching them as flowing forms that become gestures as much as pictures.
     The show included vitrines displaying artworks, masks, and other objects made by West Coat First Nations. These give us a context for Carr’s fascination with First Nations art, but also remind us that for many Europeans their beauty must have been an uncomfortable revelation.
     A good show. Go see it. ****

The Mitford Snowmen (2001) & Esther’s Gift (2002)

     Jan Karon. The Mitford Snowmen (2001) & Esther’s Gift (2002) Two Christmas cards disguised as books. The Snowmen even includes a note from Hallmark offering “products” related to the story. It’s pleasant little squib: one of the merchants starts building a snowman, the others join in, and the mayor appoints herself as judge, giving everyone doughnuts and cocoa as a prize. The Gift is an orange-marmalade cake, which Esther’s husband computes costs $43. But Esther decides to give seven of them, as she always has. Recipe included, and it looks good.
     Nicely made objects, essential for anyone collecting Karon’s Mitford series, but of merely passing interest to anyone else. I’d like a sample of that cake, though. **

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)

     [A Member of the Whip Club] Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) Foreword by R. Cromie, 1971. This version is based on an earlier one, with additions and corrections. Obviously hastily printed, with numerous typos, and bleeding ink on many pages. This is a photolithographed copy of the original.
     Anyone who likes to know how the language develops will find this a useful source. Besides, it’s entertaining, which I think was the intention of the compilers. Like any specialised dictionary, it’s also a snapshot of the culture. To judge from this list, the 18th and early 19th century was a brutal time. There are multiple words for hanging, for theft (a trade with many specialties); begging; prostitution and prostitutes; copulation; drink; jokes and japes, many of them cruel; and frauds. There are many more words for women’s than for men’s private parts, which either reflects the fact that a man compiled the book, or that women aren’t as interested in talking about men’s parts as men are in talking about women’s.
     The picture of daily life and its dangers and pleasures is a good antidote to the romanticised one that most readers of Austen take from her books. But it also helps us grasp the subtext of 18/19th century literature better. Many words and phrases have improved or worsened in meaning; some have become innocuous colloquialisms in one of their senses. “Rum” has become a negative. “Quip” has become to mean a one-line joke. “Plump” was slang or cant back then, and is now ordinary usage. And so on. We still fear burglary, theft, and robbery, but it was much more of a daily (and nightly) threat then than it is now.
     Many of the terms are “jeering appellations” of people suffering from some physical flaw or disability, or merely the effects of age. “Hopping Giles” referred to as man with a limp, as St Giles was the patron of lepers, etc. I don’t know if we are kinder now, but we don’t have near the number of such terms as are listed here.
     There are a few surprises. “Yorkshire Dolly” refers to a contrivance for washing, by means of a wheel fixed in a tub, which being turned about, agitates and cleanses the linen put into it, with soap and water. A washing machine, which is not as modern an invention as we may think.
     The net effect of reading through this list of words is the feeling that life is a lot safer and more pleasant now. ***

Waves (link)

Boing-Boing provided this link to photos of waves by Roy Collins. Go take a look. ****

Solar energy and the Stirling engine.

The Guardian reports that a combination of mirrors to focus the sun's heat and a Stirling engine to drive a generator could be the game changer for solar energy. The Stirling engine works by moving gas between a heated cylinder and a cooled one, or by moving the gas between a heated and a cooled end of a single cylinder. Any source of heat will work. Wikipedia has an article about it here. Stirling Builder is dedicated to the engine, and has some free instructions on how to build one. The main advantage of  Stirling's invention is that it can exploit much smaller temperature differences than the steam engine.

Prometheus (2012)

     Prometheus (2012) [D: Ridley Scott. Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce, Michael Fassbender, et al] A couple archeologists (Rapace and Marshall-Green) find a Significant Cave Painting on Skye, of all places. The painting shows the same constellation as found in other ancient images (here Scott and his writers use a rather loopy speculation), and apparently persuade the Weyland Corporation to fund an expedition to the far side of the galaxy to find the Planet of Origin. It seems the human race was seeded on Earth by some genetic engineers who used their own DNA to make us. Or whatever. A good deal of Mystery and Mayhem ensues, only Rapace survives, but on the Origin Planet the Alien we know and love to fear has been born.
     As several reviewers on IMDb have pointed out, the plot is full of holes, the characterisation is variable, and the Deep Questions that supposedly animate the story aren’t really answered. Actually, they’re not very clearly put.
The best you can say for this movie is that it’s interesting. The visuals are pretty good, and Rapace plays a thankless role well. So does Fassbender as David the bio-robot. Worth a look if you want to know something more about the Alien universe.
     About the title: Prometheus was the god who gave humans fire, despite Zeus's prohibition. For this he was chained to a rock where an eagle came and ate his liver every day. Being a god, the liver grew back. I suspect we're supposed to think of the pale-grey creators as Prometheus, but in such a thematically muddled story, it doesn't really matter. *½