The Martians are Coming, the Martians are Coming!

Frederik Pohl. The Day the Martians Came (1988) So the first fully staffed expedition to Mars accidentally discovers Martians, who live underground in tunnels that their ancestors must have built. That’s the first chapter in a series of tales that show how humans, well, Americans mostly, react to the news. Everyone is out for a buck or some other advantage. The Martians look somewhat like seals with more leg-like flippers. They like to huddle together and enjoy each other’s company. Apart from eating, that's all they do, really.
     Excerpts from magazines, scientific papers, Congressional records, media interviews, etc punctuate the narrative and display the official reactions. All the narrative threads come together in the final chapter, in which Pohl dispenses some poetic justice, just so’s we won’t totally depressed by his satiric insights into our weaknesses and vices.
     A nicely done satire. Pohl has a good eye and ear for the self-delusions that underpin most of the damage we inflict on ourselves and each other. ***

Holmes in London (photo album)

    Regent Street

Charles Viney. Sherlock Holmes in London (1989/1995) Viney links Holmesian locations to photos of late 19th and early 20th century London. A feast both for the nostalgia buff, and for Holmes fans. The photos are generally good, and all are as well reproduced as half-tone letterpress permits.
     Besides the excerpts from the stories with at least  one photo for each, what attracted me was the record of a London long since gone. And yet it lives on. Many of the elegant new buildings still stand. The great hotels were established then, and many still exist (some have been rebuilt). Advertisements fastened or painted on walls and windows and busses fascinate. The habit of “stocktaking”sales was already well-established. London was a commercial city, rapidly expanding and creating what we now often deplore as car-focussed suburbs, but their wide streets were built to attract people who could afford to own or hire carriages.
     An enjoyable book, well worth the $2 I paid for it at the local food-bank yard sale. ***

Memory: Lapham's Quarterly XIII-1

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII-1: Memory (2020) Another wonderfully wide-ranging collection of snippets, pictures, and essays. Most of it is memoir and reminiscence, usually accompanied by musings on the nature and power of memory. The common-sense but mistaken concept of memory as some kind of record that can be played back dominates these musings. We now know that remembering reconstructs the memory, often so vividly that only careful recording of different instances of the same memory will convince one that they were mistaken.
     A secondary thread is strung on the assumption that a good memory betokens intelligence and wisdom. That makes about as much sense as assuming that good spelling betokens writing talent.
     So what charmed me most were the memoirs, and the attempts by the writers to make sense of their lives by telling their stories. ****

Michel Lambeth, Canadian Photographer

Maia-Mari Sutnik. Michel Lambeth Photographer (1999) Lambeth (1923-1977) was a Canadian photographer with strong socio-political convictions, which at times interfered with his willingness to take on bread-and-butter assignments. His work as sampled here shows not only technical skill and a sensitivity to the human narratives surrounding his pictures, but also an aesthetic based on understanding the possibilities of black-and-white photography. He did work in colour too, mostly on assignment for Star Weekly, a newsprint magazine distributed with the Toronto Star and available separately as well.
     Sutnik clearly believes that Lambeth is a neglected figure in the history of Canadian photography. I think she’s right. He was one of many 1960s Canadian artists who objected to colonial reverence for British (and European) art, and neo-colonial diffidence vis-a-vis American art. Was he a great photographer? No, but he was a pretty good one, as the cover photo shows. He understood the power of black and white, and preferred prints with a short mid-range. He also had the gift of attracting his subjects’ trust, so that they did not feel the need to mask themselves in conventional poses.
     A worthwhile monograph. Sutnik wrote it accompany an exhibition of Lambeth’s work at the AGO. She asked some of his friends to write reminiscences. An online search will yield many images of his photos. **½

Ivan Eyre, not your Group of Seven acolyte

Don Bain. Ivan Eyre Pavilion Gallery. (1999) Eyre was Born in Saskatchewan in 1935, but spent most of his life in Winnipeg, where he taught art at the University of Manitoba from 1959 to 1992. He’s best known for his landscapes, and his blending of surrealism and abstraction in his figurative paintings. I find his work very interesting, but oddly unmoving. Perhaps there’s something in them that’s alien to me, and which I therefore cannot see. That would be Eyre’s take on my response, since he claims that we see only something of ourselves in any painting, and can’t see whatever else is in it. His figurative paintings (whose figures are often himself and his family members) seem to me to be coded expressions of his hidden self. That’s what makes their content interesting. I kept thinking “Freud”, which isn’t a compliment.
     The pictures are often striking in their collage-like layering of imagery and deliberately off-kilter composition. Their enigmatic signs and symbols make them suitable for the kind of public art that proclaims corporate support for culture. They don’t threaten easy social or political readings.
     His landscapes are, he claims, wholly imaginary; at any rate, he doesn’t paint from photos or plein air sketches. Several times on his travels he has discovered a landscape that looks like one of his paintings. He attaches a mystical significance to these coincidences. He’s also made a number of sculptures, which like his figurative paintings combine surrealism and abstraction.

     He’s definitely not a Group-of-Sevenish artist.
     We bought this book on a trip West, when we spent a day at Assiniboine Park and the Pavilion Gallery. Look up Eyre online, the available images cover a much wider range than in this book. It’s a well done summary of his life and work. **½

Flower Guide from 1927

Chester A. Reed. Flower Guide: Wild Flowers East of the Rockies (1927) Revised edition. With 320 Flowers in Color, Painted by the Author. A charming pocket guide, 5-1/2 x 3-1/4 inches, bound in buckram. The pictures are well done, the descriptions thorough, and clearly based on personal observation. The attached scans of pages will tell you more about this book than I can.

Lapham's Quartely XIII-3: Scandal

Lapham’s Quarterly XIII/3 Scandal (2020) Another collection of (mostly) unconsidered trifles adding up to a considerable anatomy of scandal. Scandal violates convention, not morality. Immorality is ignored or condoned to the extent that conventional manners ignore or condone it. But violate a convention, and the whole of society will gasp in horror, clutch their pearls, and avidly gossip about the fall of the great man or woman who stubbed their toe on a pebble of convention.
     True, immorality now and then violates conventional mores also, but since mores change almost as quickly as fashion, what was once enough to cast you out of polite society a few years later may well raise you to the pinnacle of current approbation. And if you flout convention with style and wit, the fashionable people will envy your ability to get away with the most heinous crime.
     The stories told here, most of them in contemporary texts, range from what we would consider minor transgressions of etiquette to major violations of morality and law. The range of present-day judgements on the sins of the past should warn us against facile assumptions of our own moral superiority. Moral behaviour for the most part is mere conformity to the prejudices of the time.
     Another excellent collection. Recommended. Subscriptions and back issues available online. ****