HAL is Dead: Douglas Rain

Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died.

An Early Sackett tale: Ride the Dark Trail

Ride the Dark Trail (1972) Some time ago, I found a stash of about a dozen books by L’Amour at the food bank’s yard sale. I sorted out the Sackett series, and began reading them. This is the 2nd one.
  Logan Sackett drifts into Siwash, a town run by a greedy bully, John Flannan. Logan immediately makes enemies when he defends a young girl. He just doesn’t like the way the men in the saloon treat her. He takes her to the MT ranch, which Emily Talon is defending against Flannan’s attempts to run her off. Flannan has killed Em’s husband, and Em shot Flannan through the knees in retaliation. So it’s as much a feud as an attempted robbery.
     Turns out Em is a Sackett, so of course Logan has to stay to help her out. Eventually Em’s sons Barnabas and Milo join them, but the final showdown is between Logan, Em, and Flannan. Along the way, Logan is shot and beaten up, but he manages to survive, because he’s one of the meaner Sacketts.
     L’Amour shifts point of view a few times, but most of the story is told by Logan. Some loose ends aren’t tied up: will Logan settle down, or will he continue to drift? Read other stories in the Sackett saga to find out! The book is a page turner, despite the occasional asides into history and geography and such. There are also odd lapses in style, with Logan now and then using decidedly bookish phrasing to describe the landscape  and weather. I’m on a L’Amour binge, so my rating is probably a bit high. The title has no obvious relation to the plot, unless “dark” is taken to mean “dim, hard to see.” ***½

Canadian and US political attitudes

     Fire and Ice (2003) Michael Adams, founder of Environics, summarises the results of three Canadian and American surveys, which suggest that Canadian and American values are diverging. At the time (and still to some extent today), it was taken for granted that Canadians were becoming more American. This book makes a persuasive case for the contrary. In particular it shows that, measured with American scales of values, Canadians are more post-modern, more liberal, more community minded, more inner-directed, etc, than Americans. In general, Canadians lie outside the range of American attitudes and values, and are off some scales entirely.
     Two things struck me about Adams’s results:
     a) The drift into what we now call Trumpism was already well-established by the early 1990s. The main difference between then and now is that the disaffected Americans who occupy the “Exclusion and Intensity” quadrant of Adams’s “maps” have begun to vote. They’ve also, I think, become more numerous and more intense.
     b) The divisiveness that has characterised America from about Ronald Reagan onwards has become more prevalent in Canada.
     Fifteen years is a long time in cultural change these days. The Millennials, who tend towards liberal values in Canada and to libertarian values in the USA, will I think become more politically active and influential. Check the Environics website for updates in Adams’s project to track cultural change. ***

Commercial art from 30 years ago: Graphis Annual 83/84

  

  Walter Herdeg, ed.  Graphis Annual 83/84 (1983) Just what the title says. A survey of applied art as used in advertising, illustrations in books and periodicals, logo and trademark design, packaging, and so forth. Graphis was one of the premier magazines for commercial artists. I used to buy it from a shop across from OCAD back then, to inspire my students. What’s interesting is how dated these examples are. Commercial art is slave to fashion and fad. Which prompts the inference that fashion itself is just another form of commercial art.
     In any case, fashion and commercial art feed on each other. Both are always a step or two behind the current styles in entertainment, which in turn is behind the latest developments in the arts. There was a nicely done weekly fashion news show on TV  a few decades ago. Most of the news covered fashion shows in New York or Paris or wherever. The background music was relentlessly blandified disco. This at a time when the prevailing music styles were acid rock, reggae, and hiphop. The intended ambience was of up-to-the-minute awareness of how the cool life was lived, but the actual effect was to make fashion seem hopelessly naive and, er, old-fashioned.
     Nevertheless, the Graphis annual is worth looking through. Not only as a record of bygone visual styles and assumptions about marketing, but because commercial art surrounds us in a way that fine art does not. Commercial art has become our  habitat; fine art is confined to cathedral-like museums that we enter with hushed voices and unarticulated expectations. Yet our taste has, I think, been shaped by the commercial art that has become the seen but unnoticed visual environment. ***

Photos as Social History: New York, Sunshine and History

    Roger Whitehouse. New York: Sunshine and Shadow. (1974) New York from 1850 to 1915, in photographs. A splendid collection of photos, with informative captions, adding up to a social and economic history of the city. We forget that New York began as a scattered collection of villages and hamlets, which were absorbed into the city as it expanded northward from its beginning on Manhattan Island. The early photos show buildings surrounded by fields. The roads were surfaced with gravel and mud. The elegant streets of middle and upper middle class houses became slums when their former residents moved ever further away from the city centre.
     Study and contemplation of these photos shows, I think, why New York became the world class city that it now is: from the beginning, its residents focused not only on making money, but on using that money to invest in amenities. Modern accounting methods would not have justified ventures such as the building of the street railways, or of apartment and office blocks at a country crossroad. Some of the earliest mansions of the oligarchy were built in the middle of fields, but the streets were already laid out to accommodate the carriages and cabs and streetcars that followed the first builders.
     Reproduction of the photos is above average for the 1970s. Whitehouse has done his research. A secondhand-book sale find, given to me. A keeper. ****

Humans Survive: After Doomsday by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson. After Doomsday (1962) Not a post-atomic-holocaust novel. This time, it’s the aliens who have destroyed Earth. Sterilised it, in fact. But a handful of Earth ships that were in interstellar space have survived, and these preserve Earth’s heritage even while they hunt and eventually find Earth’s killers. Typical SF pulp from the Golden Age (1940-60s), with its plausible but hokey science of FTL travel, its motley collection of alien civilisations, its courtly love romance between hero and heroine, but unusual in its assumption of women’s equality to men (within a strictly 1950s moral framework, however).
     Anderson’s not only a skilful craftsman (the story moves along at a nice clip), he’s also wildly inventive, albeit within a rather limited understanding of sociology and biology. A sterilised Earth would no longer have any oxygen, for example, for without green plants there would be no regeneration of the oxygen that would have been bound to carbon etc when the planet burned. The aliens just aren’t alien enough: they are really just humans with funny body-plans and peculiar bio-chemistry. Of course, inventing a truly alien psychology is by definition impossible: we can imagine only variations on our own. But within these limits, Anderson’s a cut or two above the rest.
     This is a relatively early book, clearly a potboiler, but an above average example of the genre. I enjoyed reading it. **½

The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2002)

     Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point (2002) Gladwell developed the book from an article in The New Yorker, and it shows. While the whole text is interesting, longeurs do threaten to set in before the halfway mark. Extending the text to book length required adding examples, which means repetitions. I read the first four chapters over a couple of days, then took almost three weeks to finish the book.
     Gladwell examines the tipping point in a social context, and identifies the factors that trigger a “social epidemic.” His bibliography suggests that he didn’t look at chaos theory, else he would have realised that he was discussing a classic chaotic system: a network of feedback loops that can change size and state very rapidly when one or more variables reach some threshold.
     It’s a tricky business identifying those variables and thresholds. Gladwell is most interesting (to me, anyway) when he discusses how experience established some of them. For example, Hutterites have found that when a colony reaches 150, it must fission. They’ve made it a rule. Just why group size has a negative effect on how well the group fulfills its goals when it passes 150 is “not well understood”. A priori, there is no reason to suppose that communication should become compromised at this size, but that’s what happens. The group size effect is important for management theory and practice: Gladwell has a case study that examines how one company rigorously enforces the group size rule when organising projects and expanding capacity.
     Gladwell is most interested in how insights into several factors can be be used to control and to trigger social epidemics. Marketers love the book for this reason, as the pre-title blurbs make only too clear. Group size, message “stickiness”, and the behaviours of key figures he labels connectors, mavens, and salesmen are key factors. He wrote the book before the rise of Facebook and other social platforms, which have magnified and accelerated social epidemics. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading. It certainly clarified my thinking about why and how Facebook has exacerbated tribal divisions.
     Despite its age, the book is not outdated. Recommended. ***½