Maurice Sendak: Two for beginning readers

 

Two by Sendak: In the Night Kitchen and Chicken Soup With Rice. Maurice Sendak had the gift of remembering what it’s like to be child, and so to know what kind of story appeals to children – not the ones concocted by authors with M. Ed degrees anxious to teach both reading and suitable life lessons. Sendak also knew how to make his pictures not merely illustrations but integral parts of the story.
     In the Night Kitchen tells a dream, in which Mickey falls into the kitchen under his house, where the bakers are busy baking bread and rolls. The bakers look remarkably like Oliver Hardy, and make a Mickey cake, from which he escapes. Chicken Soup With Rice praises that estimable dish in verses that tell us how it suits each month of the year. Well done, very good for beginning readers. Fantasy, clever rhymes, surprising ideas, what more could one want? ****

 

Political Satire. It's a page-turner! (The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis)

 

Terry Fallis. The Best Laid Plans (2007) Who’da thunk a political novel could be a read-through page-turner? Well, almost, I don’t set aside enough time to read through the whole book in one sitting. I did anticipate the pleasure of taking up where I left off, which was always rewarded.
     Daniel Addison leaves political hack work when he discovers his lover in the House Leader’s office having a non-political encounter. Broken-hearted, he retreats into academe. But one last political job must be done before he can relax and enjoy teaching and research. He must find a Liberal who is willing to stand in a riding certain to be lost to one of the most popular Conservative Finance Ministers ever to wear shiny new shoes on Budget Day. He manages to find one, his landlord Angus McLintock, an engineering prof doomed to teach English For Engineers. Daniel proposes a deal: He’ll teach the course if Angus will stand for the Liberals. Assured that he will lose, Angus is happy to oblige.
     And so begins an engaging story of how McLintock wins (what else did you expect?), Addison heals his broken heart (ditto), and various other characters receive their just poetical desserts. Not quite as funny as I expected from a book winning the Stephen Leacock Award, but slyly satirical, robustly indignant, sappily romantic, unobtrusively informative, with enough witty asides to satisfy my taste for irony. It was also the 2011 winner of Canada Reads, a CBC-sponsored competition in which miscellaneous celebrities argue for their book. I’ll add my recommendation to whoever promoted this one. ****

Glossary: Riding = electoral district. Shiny new shoes = Canadian political tradition, the Finance Minister wears brand new shoes when introducing the Budget. CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and a couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.

Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.

He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.

He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.

I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.

Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****

Update 2026-05-11: I've come across a video supposedly showing Feynman explaining why getting to Mars is impossible. It was generated using AI.  Th explanations are valid, but they're not quite in the style of Feynman. "Feynman" is shown in colour, but his facial expressions are limited, and he doesn't move around like Feynman actually did. Beware: there will be many more of these.

 

Judy Martin, textile artist.

OK, this is an excuse to post a photo of Judy Martin, a textile artist who lives on Manitoulin Island. See her latest blog entry here

She describes the inspiration for her work, and posts many, many photos of it. Enjoy!

The photo shows Judy at Four and Friends, Bruce Mines, July 2008.

Cicero didn't say this, but it's still worth a comment or two.

 

A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive in anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.”

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” (several of them lasting two or more days) as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all humans being sometime between 2025 and 2050.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors: small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders in the settlement. Worst case: back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins.

Update 2021-09-23: Typos fixed, and a couple of clarifying edits.

Numbers (Andrew Hodges: One To Nine)

 Andrew Hodges. One to Nine (2007) Hodges takes each of the first ten natural numbers (including zero in the chapter about The Unloved One), and talks about their significance and meanings. It’s mostly about the math, but Hodges has a large store of cultural relevance to share as well. Again, much of that is about the math: It took a surprisingly long time moving from the practical use of negative numbers to denote debts in casting accounts to the acceptance of their places in mathematics. The same is true of complex numbers, which were still labelled “imaginary numbers” when I was in middle school.
     Hodges writes an easy style, which should give this book a wide audience. But his inclusion of real math and problems for the reader to solve will limit his audience to those with enough math background to understand his narrative, even if only vaguely. Luckily, I am one of those. I enjoyed the book, skipped almost all the problems, and followed the math far enough to get the flavour of that which was beyond me. A tasty treat. ***

A wife goes missing, and DCI Barnaby must find her.

 

Caroline Graham. Faithful Unto Death (1996) A woman disappears, then a ransom note from her kidnappers demands 50,000 pounds. Her husband apparently suicides, but a couple of oddities attract DCI Tom Barnaby’s attention. Murder it is. And so a well-done police procedural proceeds.
   Graham’s Barnaby is a lot like DCI Wexford, but his sidekick DS Tory is nothing like Wexford’s DI Mike Burden. Like Rendell, Graham has a sharp eye for human frailties and self-delusion, but a much more acid tongue. I get the impression that she would have preferred to write a comedie humaine: the crime and its investigation are a pretext for character analysis and moral commentary. She has the gift of making every sentence and paragraph count: apparently throw-way asides add to ambience, sharpen context, clarify relationships, shift point of view. A good read. ***