Three collections: Peter Arno, Editorial Cartoons, and Urban Legends.

     Peter Arno: "You give such perfect parties, Alice. Is there someone here that you'd like to meet?" (1979) With an introduction by Charles Saxon. I’ve always liked Arno’s New Yorker cartoons. They have an edge to them. Arno also has an uncanny ability to present a social type and  milieu in a few brushstrokes. His career was with The New Yorker. Of the 248 drawings in this collection, 236 first appeared there. It’s a marvellous collection. I found it at the local food bank’s yard sale. It’s a keeper.
     Arno’s life started well, but ended sadly. He became a misanthropic recluse. Perhaps the politely silent contempt for an artist who was merely a cartoonist finally got to him. Saxon says that a visit to Arno’s studio showed how often he redrew the same image, trying to get it right. His obsession with composition, tone, texture, and line is the mark of an artist. That his pictures also conveyed social commentary and critique makes his work all the more admirable.
     The last cartoon of the book is the last one published before his death. A typically Pretty Young Thing, all perky bosom and thighs, is seated under a leafy tree. A satyr playing the pipes prances by. “Oh, grow up”, the girl says.
     Great book ****

     Guy Badeaux, ed. Portfoolio 13 (1997) “The year’s best Canadian editorial cartoons” the subtitle announces, and it is that. Worth studying not only as a reminder of what worked up our indignation and amusement back then, but also for what has and hasn’t changed. The cartoons range from wry commentary (Man reading paper with headline Banks Enjoy Record Profits says “I guess the times they aren’t a-changing that much...”) to savage (Western diplomat type wades through corpses while vulture labelled Karadzic perches on scarecrow labelled Dayton Accords, says “Getting rid of him would be too messy”).
     A document, a keeper, another find at the yard sale. ****

     Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) A beautifully printed and bound book. The contents are the old standbys, a good introduction to anyone who likes urban legends, the kinds of stories that Jan Brunvand pointed out always happened to “a friend of a friend”. Craughwell likes the naughty ones, often obscene, but always morally correct: the sinners get theirs, and then some. A good gift book, a little light on the in my opinion necessary commentary on the age and history of these tales, most of which have been around for generations and even centuries. Only the details of setting and technology have changed, the core narratives are ancient. Some of the tales apparently have figured in best selling novels. **½

Argosy (February 1955, January 1956)

 Argosy (February 1955, January 1956) Uncle Paul subscribed to this magazine, and sent his copies to Mother. I looked forward to them, I liked the ship on the cover, and every issue had one or more surprises. Most of the selections were reprints. The magazine reprinted short stories and excerpts from novels, as well three or four themed collections of short passages. There were several original stories, and part of a serialised novel. A prize crossword and one or more quizzes exercised the memory. Quite a feast for anyone who liked to read fiction.

         The stories covered several genres, adventure romance, fantasy, human interest, crime, and so on. No surprises, tried and true formulas, almost all with a twist at the end. One knew what one was getting. This was the magazine’s strength and ultimately its weakness. People turned more and more to TV for their fiction fix. But while it lasted, Argosy delivered well-crafted writing. Many of the authors were best-sellers at the time, others became so. These copies include Ray Bradbury, Paul Gallico, Edith Pargeter, Ludwig Bemelmans, Sean O’Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen.
    

 What’s just as interesting is the advertising. Most of it is for correspondence courses in writing, or career-enhancing skills. The ads are wordy, aimed at people who feel more or less unsuccessful, and want some way of improving their social and economic standing. It was a time when people were encouraged to feel that they could take control of their lives (Pelmanism appears in every issue), to overcome the  disadvantages of birth, education, and life history. Many ads include anecdotes (“original letters may be inspected at...”) testifying to the wonderful effects of the course or the nostrum.
   

  A pleasant read. Contents ** to ***

The Code (2012)

     The Code (2012) Presented by Marcus Du Sautoy. Three-part series about mathematics, and its role in describing the universe. An excellent overview and introduction to mathematics, clearly explained, with better than average visuals, and emphasis on everyday, real-life applications. The title alludes to Du Sautoy’s metaphysics: the code is a method of making sense of the world. The series is worth watching more than once, especially of you’ve forgotten most of your high-school math. Above all, it’s reminder of how much of our economy, our technology, our politics, our social life, even our  private lives is described and explained by the code, whether we know it or not. Understand the code, and you understand the universe.
     Or so it seems.
     Du Sautoy believes that mathematics underlies reality. I don’t. I believe that mathematics is one of many symbol systems we use to make models of our experience, models that are good enough to help us survive. We make mistakes in creating those models, and some models are more than a little off. The only check we have is that the models work. But I don’t think they answer the question of what’s really out there. If they did, then any model that works is a true representation of reality, at least insofar as it works, at least a partial truth, at least a limited glimpse of the real. Trouble is, we have models that contradict each other. When that happens we get into squabbles about which one is truer than the other. There’s no question that the religious models work in the sense that they give people a reason to get up in the morning. But they contradict each other, and they contradict mathematics.
     The mystery about mathematics is that it works so unreasonably well. Why? There is no good answer that I know of, there is none that satisfies me. But I think the observation that mathematics begins with physical interactions between us and the world around us offers a clue. Other animals do this too, sometimes so well that we want to ascribe conscious reasoning to them. It may be that a crow figuring out how to unlock a cage is reasoning consciously, but we’ll likely never know. We do know that we can devise algorithms that reason about the data that we feed in, and produce more reliable results than we do ourselves. Reasoning does not require consciousness.
     What then does require consciousness? The kind of understanding that enables us to choose the kind of reasoning we need, and more than that, to recognise and understand new problems, and devise the reasoning to solve them. It’s at this level of understanding that Du Sautoy’s belief in the underlying reality of mathematics occurs, and that I disagree.
     Not that it matters. This level is so abstract that it’s not about reality anymore, but about our images of reality. Those are all finally private. The wonder is that language enables us to share these private imaginings as well as we do. We can share mathematical models better than any other, which deepens the mystery.
     The series can be watched on TVO. ****

Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989)

     Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989) Don’t let the date put you off. Like Jay says, good science is timeless. It’s still true that if you have a certain pair of gene variations, you will not only metabolise asparagus to make your urine smelly, you will also be among the few who can smell it. Or that we still don’t a good handle on why we yawn (the latest research suggests that it’s connected with sex, which may explain why yawning is considered rude almost everywhere).
     Or that walking, which we master in a few weeks around the age of 14 months, is an extremely complex behaviour. Much more complicated than accounting. Which reminds me that the simple "hard" stuff has long been mechanised, robotised, digitised, and computerised. It’s the complex stuff that we still need people for, but because most people can do it quite easily, we don’t realise how hard it is to make machines that can do it.
     This was a re-read, and just as much fun as the first time round. It’s been reissued, so you should be able to find a copy. ***

   Update 20201213: Covid-19 has put another spin on easy/hard vs simple/complex: mos essential work is of this kind. But again, because it's easy for humans, we undervalue it and underpay its practitioners.

The Taming of the Shrew.

Photo copyright Straford Festival.



     The Taming of the Shrew. At the Stratford Festival Theatre. Directed by Chris Abraham. Ben Carlson (Petruchio), Deborah Hay (Katherina), Sarah Afful (Bianca), et al.

     In many ways a traditional Shrew, this production succeeds on many levels. Unusually, it includes the Induction, heavily adapted, but a good reminder that what we are about to see is a play put on for a gullible old drunken fool. It’s a mix of farce, fantasy, and fun, not to be taken too seriously. The company emphasised the fun, and worked together to produce high-quality theatre, inspired and shaped by the traces of commedia dell’arte in the script.
     Except of course that the play does raise serious questions, as all plays do. The director notes that in Shakespeare’s time marriage was being redefined, as if that were news: marriage is always being redefined. But the comment does remind us of all the other plays in which Shakespeare deals with courtship and marriage. Even the history plays, whose stories focus on politics and power, show us that the personal is the essence of all relationships, regardless of the social constructs from which we can never completely escape, and which most of us find quite comfortable and even comforting templates for our social selves.
     We can’t avoid the misogyny in the Shrew. Petruchio uses sleep-deprivation and hunger.  The best that can be done is to downplay the brutality, and present Petruchio as acting a part. Well then, does he truly tame Kate? Or does she too act a part, merely to humour this crazy guy, until she can figure out some way of living with him. That she is attracted to him may be inferred from their first encounters, when he persists in flattering her despite her hostile responses.
     How you answer these questions determines the meaning of the rest of the play. Perhaps she simply decides to play along; that’s how Hay plays it when on the return to Padua she agrees that the sun is the moon, and the elderly gentleman is a sprightly maid. She’s decided to play the role of dutiful wife, but why? Has she fallen in love with Petruchio despite herself? He’s like her, after all: has she scented an equal, unlike the self-satisfied fops and fortune hunters who are wooing Bianca?
     Kate’s final speech, in which she scolds the supposedly good wives for their frowardness, demands an answer to those questions. Its significance depends on them. The script doesn’t give much help; it’s certainly defective, and just how much Shakespeare contributed to it is unclear. That means a director can emend and adapt to suit their vision. Whether we read the speech as a final submission, or as an offer of love to a husband who will be her equal as a human being, Petruchio’s response is unambiguous admiration for this wench that has become his wife, and that’s enough, I think, to add a modern twist to the play’s ending. I suspect that many in the original audiences hoped for or confirmed the satisfactions of their own marriages. We want Kate and Petruchio to have a satisfying marriage, otherwise we can’t read that unpleasant middle passage as the parody of courtship that a farce demands. When the play somehow convinces us of the changing perceptions and attitudes in both these headstrong people, it has succeeded. This production does so. Go see it. ***
     Toronto Star review here, and Globe and Mail review here.

Hamlet. At the Stratford (Ontario) Festival Theatre.

      Hamlet. At the Stratford Festival Theatre. Directed by Antoni Cimolino. With Jonathan Goad (Hamlet), Seana McKenna (Gertrude), Geraint Wyn Davies (Claudius), Adrienne Gould (Ophelia), Tim Campbell (Horatio), Tom Rooney (Polonius), Mike Shara (Laertes), et al. An unimaginative, straightforward, and badly cut version. Like the curate’s egg, good in parts, but not adding up into a satisfying whole. I think the director forgot that Shakespeare is about character, not plot, not spectacle, not music. Doing Hamlet in early 20th century dress with rifles instead of swords and halberds may seem like a Real Cool Idea, but unless there’s some subtext that’s revealed by this costuming, there’s no point to it. In fact, it becomes ludicrous when Hamlet wanders around the castle with a rifle on his way to Gertrude after the play.
     The tricky questions in any production are about why the characters behave as they do; one must intuit their backstories. For example, why was Claudius accepted so readily as his brother’s successor? Was it because he turns out to be a skillful king? Or was he just the next available male in the royal house? Did he and Gertrude have something going? Even Claudius suggests that the wedding might seem to come to soon after Old Hamlet’s death.
     Any production of Hamlet stands and falls by the actor’s performance, which means by the director’s and actor’s conception of the character. Goad was competent, with very good moments. His scenes with Horatio all worked, these were clearly two men at ease with each other. But here and there he seemed unclear with the concept. Is his rage at Ophelia real, or merely an act? Or both? And what about the antic disposition, anyway? Is he acting every time, or does he act in order to cover a real breakdown? The text hints at these and many other possibilities. For the audience’s sake, the ambiguities must either be resolved, or clarified to avoid confusion.
     Most of all, this performance lacked energy and focus. Every player did a good job, most of the low-key and humorous scenes worked very well, but all in all, the play was piecey. The music was often too loud. The set design was I suppose intended to be dark, but it was dingy when it wasn’t merely dim.
    Richard Ouzounian gave the play a rave review.  He says,”Never have I seen a Hamlet in which people really talked to each other with such intensity. Every moment matters and every moment is played with full reality.” Well, I have seen several such performances.
     And here is Kelly Nestruck's review in the Globe and Mail.
     This Hamlet is #16 or 17 on stage and screen (I’ve lost count), and I can’t recall a less involving one. Maybe it was an off night. **

A. K. Dewdney. Yes, We Have No Neutrons (1997)

     A. K. Dewdney. Yes, We Have No Neutrons (1997) Nine examples of bad science, well told and well analysed. N-Rays as an example of wishful thinking misleading the investigator. Freud, theorising with no data and no testable predictions. IQ as a misunderstood and misappropriated concept, which still messes with people’s minds. SETI as an hypothesis with no hope of sufficient data to ever test  it.  Neural nets, a metaphor gone awry; plain Turing machines do better. Cold fusion, where ambition and inadequate experiments led to a gamble that didn’t pay off. Biosphere 2, poor design based on a grandiose vision. Rushton’s (and other sociologists’) misreading of the bell curve.
     The history is fairly told and complete, the analysis clear and on occasion harsh. Dewdney tries to be polite, but Freudianism and IQ mania have both caused harm, and he lets his anger show. A good book.
      Update on SETI: recent observations of planetary systems suggest that most stars have planets, which provides an estimate rather than a guess for one the terms in Drake’s famous formula for the probable number of intelligent aliens. But Earth-like planets seem to be rare, and those in a life-promoting orbit rare still, so the odds are if anything more clearly against our ever hearing from any aliens that re certainly out there.
Worth reading, as an example of clear reasoning as well as entertainment. ***