Two anthologies: Montaigne and Keillor

     Michel de Montaigne. Four Essays (1680. Translated by M. A. Screech) In one of these essays, Montaigne discusses conversation, by which he means discussion, sharing of opinions, even debate. He’s laid back about other people’s opinions. He’s more concerned with how well people say things, which he thinks is a clue to whether they originated their ideas or merely stumbled upon them. What he wants from his interlocutor is a sense of the person, of the character and the mind. His essays give just this sense of Montaigne the person: he’s curious, he lets one idea lead to another, he has strong opinions, but above all he’s a man who enjoys his world and thinking about it. Screech translates Montaigne as a conversationalist: reading these essays we hear the voice of a man talking to us, entertaining us and himself with the reach and liveliness of his mind. ****
     Garson Keillor. Truckstop and Other Lake Wobegon Stories (1995) A handful of Keillor’s tales, a pleasure to read. On its 60th anniversary, Penguin issued a number of small books of excerpts from its wide range of reprints. This is one of them, and anyone who lights upon Keillor for the first time will want to read the complete editions. I’ve read them all before, but they are as fresh as when first read, or heard on The Prairie Home Companion. The six stories here all deal with the Krepsbachs, and add up to s small novel. That’s Keillor’s genius, his ability to chronicle the lives of the people of Lake Wobegon over dozens of tales. ****

Caroline Graham. Death in Disguise (1992)

     Caroline Graham. Death in Disguise (1992) An Inspector Barnaby Mystery. Looking at the date, I see why this series is hard to find: paperbacks published twenty-some years have been pulped and made into boxboard.
     The series became the basis for Midsomer Murders on TV. This book is well done. Graham is especially good at satirising fruit-loopery, in this case a New Age commune living in an ageing manor house. At times, this part of the story verges on farce, but Graham has an ill-suppressed fondness for some of these loopy people, who after all are merely trying to find what we all want, calm and a sense that the Universe isn’t too arbitrarily horrible. The murder puzzle is well set up, but a crucial detail about the killer’s past is omitted. The first victim is put down as an accident; the second and third are clearly murders. The main problem is that no one has any motive to kill the group’s leader, while the third murder looks like self-defence.
     As with all mysteries, we aren’t too involved with the victims, but we do care about some of the suspects. Barnaby is quite likeable, but not as complex as his TV self, but Sergeant Troy is much less likeable than his TV version. The other characters range from a despicable parvenu (but even he has a pitiful need to gain the love of his only child) to a pathetic traumatised boy. The murderer is your garden-variety sociopath: it’s clues to his character that should tip off the alert reader.
     A well done entertainment, which I read because I wanted to see the source of the TV series, which I like very much, even when it stumbles. I likely won’t read another Inspector Barnaby mystery, though. **½

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.