Robert Paul Weston is a bit of an oddity, at least in terms of classifications. He was born in England, though was raised in Ontario. He also received an MFA from UBC, then promptly decamped back for England. As far as I can tell, he did write much (most?) of Zorgamazoo while at UBC, so I shall count this book for the Canadian Challenge, but not any of his subsequent books (4 so far).
I'd say the book comes across as a fusion of Edward Gorey (a bit forgotten nowadays), particularly in the quasi-gothic ink illustrations throughout the book, and a bit of Lemony Snicket in the plotting. There might even be a bit of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere in the mix.
The single most notable thing about the book is that it is written entirely in rhymed couplets. For the most part, the reader just jumps into the story and it is noticeable but not completely distracting. There are some moments where the rhymes get so outrageous that they recall some from Byron's Don Juan. But this is part of the fun. Another aspect that occasionally draws attention to itself is the typography and design. Occasionally the words get smaller and spiral inwards, or they get twisted around. A few words are scribbled like graffiti and other words are in an Olde English font.
The story is a fairly basic quest. Katrina Katrell needs to escape from her truly terrible governess, and she is saved by the bumbling Zorgle, Morty. (Zorgles are something like talking bears but with horns on their heads.) Katrina is a rash adventurer-type, whereas Morty is risk-averse, though he is the one tasked with finding the missing Zorgles of Zorgamazoo. As much as he wants to decline this quest, he decides he needs to at least try, to make his old man happy (his father was a famous adventurer). Needless to say, the two form a pair that are greater than the sum of their parts.
The story zips along pretty quickly. It valorizes having a good imagination and being true to one's friends. All quite acceptable in children's lit. It even has a lesson that may be a bit too subtle, in that sometimes one can use a bit of jujitsu on an adversary and convert them so that your interests are aligned. Other enemies are just bad through and through, and they can be squashed (like the aunts in James and the Giant Peach). Obviously, knowing the difference is important. Saying too much more would probably spoil the fun.
This book is aimed at children from roughly 8-12, but older children might be entertained. However, it is more likely that teens would just not find the book cool enough for their taste, and they might have to wait until adulthood until they might find is acceptable to read and enjoy it for the cleverness that imbues this book.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Philosophy and literature
What a huge topic! I am only going to be nibbling on a tiny corner of it, namely authors who were deeply concerned with and influenced by philosophers. I should also say that I will immediately discount all the Boomer and Gen X authors influenced by Ayn Rand and her Objectivism (if you really want to grant her self-centered and selfish libertarianism the status of a school of thought). It could be argued that a slightly more interesting batch of novelists were the descendants of Nietzsche or rather are influenced by any number of bad interpretations of Nietzsche (I'm looking at you, Jay McInerney).
I suppose there are good and bad aspects of being overly influenced by philosophy. An author may want to tap into something larger than just the doings of certain characters that "strut and fret" across the stage. However, being bound too deeply to ideas that are of one's time can date a work so quickly, particularly if one gets roped in with a philosophy that ends up on the outs. It's kind of interesting how Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman and perhaps to a lesser extent Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne are all tied together with Transcendentalism. It's hard to imagine a philosophy that has less sway in contemporary America than Transcendentalism. Indeed, few people would read these authors to understand what is going on today, though many people do read them (often in a cluster) to understand what was going on in New England in America's youth. Melville is clearly another writer who went deep, drawing on a number of philosophers. I am convinced that Melville's Pierre is a direct response to Kierkegaard, but I have never had the time to write down all my thoughts on the subject. Maybe some day it will at least be the basis of a blog post.
I've hung onto a number of books of philosophy from university, though I don't have an actual plan on how to get through them. This is clearly a weakness of the TBR pile, and maybe I will open it up to more non-fiction and philosophy in, say, 2015. I'm heading into that time of life when it is time to reflect more on the meaning of life (what little there is or may be). I'm probably more likely to read those early philosophers who tended to be better writers (Plato, Bacon, Montaigne, Rousseau) than the group that followed from Hegel and tended to be crap writers (Kant and Heidegger and Wittgenstein).
For me, two of the more interesting/deep novelists of the late 20th Century are Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Both sort of tackle the issue of meaning in an era late capitalism, though they don't frame it quite that explicitly. I'm not sure either really namechecks specific philosophers (I certainly can't recall off-hand), but their books often strike me as not dissimilar from Montaigne or Rousseau where deeper meaning is extracted from everyday life. And of course, death. DeLillo's White Noise is actually quite profound in showing how people can go a little crazy when they think too much about death, particularly their own. I do plan on rereading this novel by the end of the year in a critical edition that does frame it against these big questions.
Anyway, let me turn to the original impetus for this post. I just learned that NYRB is publishing an updated translation of Montaigne's Essays, with the John Florio translation at its base. This (the Florio translation) would have been the version that Shakespeare read (assuming that he wasn't actually a super-literate nobleman who read it in French). As I discussed a bit when talking about going back to find which version of the Bible that Shakespeare used, it can be really interesting to see what the Great Authors of the past had access to, especially in cases where the translations were a bit flawed. As it happens, I have a fairly complete version of Montaigne's Essays (of which I've only read a few). This version seems a bit more complete (about 75 pages longer) and has a bit of a hook in that Stephen Greenblatt goes into some detail on how and where Shakespeare borrowed from and/or argued against Montaigne. It definitely sounds like something up my alley. So that's really all I have for today, and I apologize for not going a bit deeper. Maybe another time...
I suppose there are good and bad aspects of being overly influenced by philosophy. An author may want to tap into something larger than just the doings of certain characters that "strut and fret" across the stage. However, being bound too deeply to ideas that are of one's time can date a work so quickly, particularly if one gets roped in with a philosophy that ends up on the outs. It's kind of interesting how Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman and perhaps to a lesser extent Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne are all tied together with Transcendentalism. It's hard to imagine a philosophy that has less sway in contemporary America than Transcendentalism. Indeed, few people would read these authors to understand what is going on today, though many people do read them (often in a cluster) to understand what was going on in New England in America's youth. Melville is clearly another writer who went deep, drawing on a number of philosophers. I am convinced that Melville's Pierre is a direct response to Kierkegaard, but I have never had the time to write down all my thoughts on the subject. Maybe some day it will at least be the basis of a blog post.
I've hung onto a number of books of philosophy from university, though I don't have an actual plan on how to get through them. This is clearly a weakness of the TBR pile, and maybe I will open it up to more non-fiction and philosophy in, say, 2015. I'm heading into that time of life when it is time to reflect more on the meaning of life (what little there is or may be). I'm probably more likely to read those early philosophers who tended to be better writers (Plato, Bacon, Montaigne, Rousseau) than the group that followed from Hegel and tended to be crap writers (Kant and Heidegger and Wittgenstein).
For me, two of the more interesting/deep novelists of the late 20th Century are Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Both sort of tackle the issue of meaning in an era late capitalism, though they don't frame it quite that explicitly. I'm not sure either really namechecks specific philosophers (I certainly can't recall off-hand), but their books often strike me as not dissimilar from Montaigne or Rousseau where deeper meaning is extracted from everyday life. And of course, death. DeLillo's White Noise is actually quite profound in showing how people can go a little crazy when they think too much about death, particularly their own. I do plan on rereading this novel by the end of the year in a critical edition that does frame it against these big questions.
Anyway, let me turn to the original impetus for this post. I just learned that NYRB is publishing an updated translation of Montaigne's Essays, with the John Florio translation at its base. This (the Florio translation) would have been the version that Shakespeare read (assuming that he wasn't actually a super-literate nobleman who read it in French). As I discussed a bit when talking about going back to find which version of the Bible that Shakespeare used, it can be really interesting to see what the Great Authors of the past had access to, especially in cases where the translations were a bit flawed. As it happens, I have a fairly complete version of Montaigne's Essays (of which I've only read a few). This version seems a bit more complete (about 75 pages longer) and has a bit of a hook in that Stephen Greenblatt goes into some detail on how and where Shakespeare borrowed from and/or argued against Montaigne. It definitely sounds like something up my alley. So that's really all I have for today, and I apologize for not going a bit deeper. Maybe another time...
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Fed up with early Feb.
You know when you're just having one of those days...
This is the fourth or even fifth day of a really painful, persistent cough and I am about to lose it.
Stuff that would bother me a little is setting me off like crazy.
And it is everything today:
Now I have just enough perspective to not fire off an email I will later regret, or to flounce off the bulletin board, or who knows what else. But it is hard keeping calm, in these stressful times, even when healthy.
I have found I am getting less and less out of the bulletin board scene, so I think I will temporarily block it from my browser, as well as Slate. If I change my mind, I can always come back. I did so once before, which was a lot more mature than giving up my account there. I also have a lot of users there on ignore (and I think the place would function a lot better if more posters ignored those posters of a trollish persuasion). When I do rejoin, I am definitely going to ignore one more user who is this weird control-freak, hall monitor type always going on about whether a CD release is legit in the E.U. under PD laws or not and then scolding Americans who happen to get their hands on an import. I've totally had it with him.
I've heard that Firefox or Chrome have some feature where you can actually block people in comment threads, which sounds like something right up my alley, though to be honest, avoiding comment threads in the first place is an even better strategy. I basically only read them on Slate, and, as I said, I've decided to take a break from Slate for a while as well.*
I am relieved that I was looking at the wrong calendar page, and I don't have a concert to go to tonight. In retrospect, I think going out Sat. was probably a mistake, and I might well have been better today, even had I pushed off going until Monday. But I don't have 20/20 foresight, and it was worth it to me at the time.
I will give maybe 50% at work today (and report the rest as sick time), and try to actually get a bit rested. I have one concert to see next week, and I should have recovered by then. I was sort of tempted to see Measure for Measure this Sat. (sadly no Sunday matinees), but I am not buying a ticket until I know for sure I have beaten this cough. It's closing night, so it might sell out before I am certain, but then it just wasn't meant to be.
* Oddly enough it is more straight-forward to block specific sites in the standard release of IE than in Firefox. However, it looks like LeechBlock is close enough to what I want. I'll give it a trial.
This is the fourth or even fifth day of a really painful, persistent cough and I am about to lose it.
Stuff that would bother me a little is setting me off like crazy.
And it is everything today:
- The annoying guy from work manages to load more work onto me, even when I am working from home
- The insufferable bores from the one bulletin board I still belong to are so sure they are right, even dismissing people's personal experience
- Clicking on one too many shoddy click-bait articles over at Slate
- But mostly I'm just sick of being sick.
Now I have just enough perspective to not fire off an email I will later regret, or to flounce off the bulletin board, or who knows what else. But it is hard keeping calm, in these stressful times, even when healthy.
I have found I am getting less and less out of the bulletin board scene, so I think I will temporarily block it from my browser, as well as Slate. If I change my mind, I can always come back. I did so once before, which was a lot more mature than giving up my account there. I also have a lot of users there on ignore (and I think the place would function a lot better if more posters ignored those posters of a trollish persuasion). When I do rejoin, I am definitely going to ignore one more user who is this weird control-freak, hall monitor type always going on about whether a CD release is legit in the E.U. under PD laws or not and then scolding Americans who happen to get their hands on an import. I've totally had it with him.
I've heard that Firefox or Chrome have some feature where you can actually block people in comment threads, which sounds like something right up my alley, though to be honest, avoiding comment threads in the first place is an even better strategy. I basically only read them on Slate, and, as I said, I've decided to take a break from Slate for a while as well.*
I am relieved that I was looking at the wrong calendar page, and I don't have a concert to go to tonight. In retrospect, I think going out Sat. was probably a mistake, and I might well have been better today, even had I pushed off going until Monday. But I don't have 20/20 foresight, and it was worth it to me at the time.
I will give maybe 50% at work today (and report the rest as sick time), and try to actually get a bit rested. I have one concert to see next week, and I should have recovered by then. I was sort of tempted to see Measure for Measure this Sat. (sadly no Sunday matinees), but I am not buying a ticket until I know for sure I have beaten this cough. It's closing night, so it might sell out before I am certain, but then it just wasn't meant to be.
* Oddly enough it is more straight-forward to block specific sites in the standard release of IE than in Firefox. However, it looks like LeechBlock is close enough to what I want. I'll give it a trial.
Children's museums, Canada-specific
My daughter asked kind of out of the blue whether Toronto had a children's museum. Vancouver doesn't have one, though its Science World skewed very young in my opinion and basically is the de facto children's museum. Seattle has one near the Space Needle, though I honestly don't know how good it is. I said we might make it there on our visit in a few weeks, assuming we stay overnight.
Well, it turns out that Toronto had a children's museum but not for very long (basically 1997-2003 -- and primarily at the site of the shuttered observatory next to the ROM). It has been homeless for quite some time, but now has glommed onto the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and come up with the Children's Own Media Museum. Part of me kind of wants to throw up in my mouth a bit, since kids already play obsessively with new technology, particularly phones, tablets and even laptops. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of money for them to spend a whole afternoon doing more of that. And part of me thinks it is just a cynical ploy to cash in, and apparently not even that successful of a ploy, given how poorly they did with their last Indiegogo campaign. Yet they think they will come up with a space in downtown Toronto by early 2014. It is true that some of the things they had the kids experimenting with, while a mobile lab over the past few years, do look a bit cool and are more on the technology side of things (not purely communications) like a 3-D printer display. And fair or not, I've heard that the Ontario Science Centre is looking pretty shabby and outdated (and it certainly skews younger than it used to) and is pretty far out from the urban core. So this might be a much more convenient outing, if it does manage to open in 2014 or so.
Now there are some other, perhaps better, options in the near future, i.e. while the kids would even want to go to a children's museum. London, ONT has a pretty good one, and we might make that part of a visit to Stratford some day. More than likely that would be 2015, as if I do go to Stratford it would just be a quick solo trip this summer. And then if we visit Ottawa/Gatineau, which we most likely will do, there is one on the Quebec side of the river.
Of course, I do intend to take the kids to ROM and we'll probably do a lot of art enrichment at AGO, but it is kind of weird that there is currently no dedicated children's museum in Toronto at the moment.
Well, it turns out that Toronto had a children's museum but not for very long (basically 1997-2003 -- and primarily at the site of the shuttered observatory next to the ROM). It has been homeless for quite some time, but now has glommed onto the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and come up with the Children's Own Media Museum. Part of me kind of wants to throw up in my mouth a bit, since kids already play obsessively with new technology, particularly phones, tablets and even laptops. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of money for them to spend a whole afternoon doing more of that. And part of me thinks it is just a cynical ploy to cash in, and apparently not even that successful of a ploy, given how poorly they did with their last Indiegogo campaign. Yet they think they will come up with a space in downtown Toronto by early 2014. It is true that some of the things they had the kids experimenting with, while a mobile lab over the past few years, do look a bit cool and are more on the technology side of things (not purely communications) like a 3-D printer display. And fair or not, I've heard that the Ontario Science Centre is looking pretty shabby and outdated (and it certainly skews younger than it used to) and is pretty far out from the urban core. So this might be a much more convenient outing, if it does manage to open in 2014 or so.
Now there are some other, perhaps better, options in the near future, i.e. while the kids would even want to go to a children's museum. London, ONT has a pretty good one, and we might make that part of a visit to Stratford some day. More than likely that would be 2015, as if I do go to Stratford it would just be a quick solo trip this summer. And then if we visit Ottawa/Gatineau, which we most likely will do, there is one on the Quebec side of the river.
Of course, I do intend to take the kids to ROM and we'll probably do a lot of art enrichment at AGO, but it is kind of weird that there is currently no dedicated children's museum in Toronto at the moment.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Sick again, 2014 edition
It's been a rough weekend up here in Vancouver. My wife and son have had a perpetual cough for close to a week. I finally succumbed on Friday. I guess the combination of being around sick people at work, home and on long transit rides was finally too much. I'm fortunate in that I don't get sick too often, but I'm pretty miserable when I do get sick. It is a small mercy that the kids can now mostly fend for themselves when the adults get sick, and we don't have them signed up for anything where we have to drive them all over town.
Anyway, one of the VSO concerts I was really looking forward to was on Sat., so I basically napped all day and drugged myself up and grabbed a handful of cough drops. Since the program was repeated on Monday, I probably would have just rescheduled, but I was to meet a friend from work and his girlfriend. I had convinced them to go and given them my "buddy" tickets. We met up for Thai beforehand. It really was fairly mediocre, so I shan't be going there again. I was particularly discouraged at how long the noodles were (with no knives provided).
I made it through the opening piece - Brahms' Academic Overture with no major problems. Then they did Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. It was quite brilliantly played, but I have to say it seems particularly cruel to pick a piece like that -- with absolutely no breaks between movements -- for the height of cold/flu season. I found myself in the final movement just wishing for it to end, so I could cough. I came so close. I ended up doing a half-cough, half-sneeze about 2-3 minutes from the end. Anyway, it was beautiful, though I would have enjoyed it more had I not been so sick. I have noticed that, even when I am feeling well, I find the Orpheum fairly dry and cough-inducing. I wonder if they actually have a dehumidifier working up on stage to counteract the impact of Vancouver's climate on the woodwinds. (I usually sit in the first few rows.)
An awful lot of people cleared out at the intermission, but I was actually there primarily to see the Shostakovich symphony at the end (number 9). Otherwise I would have gone home as well. I found The Smile of Maud Lewis by Korndorf to be really trite serialism, which didn't fit at all with the rest of the program. I would have been a lot happier had it ended after about 5 minutes. I noticed a fair bit of coughing, as some others in the audience seemed to not think it worth the effort to keep it in. Not everyone disliked the piece, however, and my colleague's girlfriend seemed quite taken with it. I thought they did a very nice job with the Shostakovich. I did have one coughing jag in the middle, which was unfortunate, but I think all in all, I made it through without disturbing my fellow concert-goers too much. It is quite hard to focus on the music when you are also trying to keep it together. It's happened to me before, but this is the worst time I've had in a couple of years. There was one free concert in Chicago (also a Shostakovich symphony) where I really couldn't stop coughing, and had I been a bit closer to the aisle, I would have left. And I would have left irregardless had it been a full-priced concert. I still feel badly about that. That was a strange outing, as I can't remember feeling particularly sick, heading into that concert, but maybe I have just suppressed that to alleviate a bit of the guilt. This time around I knew there would be some issues, but the plans had already been made. Anyway, not surprisingly, TransLink bus service let me down again pretty badly at the end of the evening, and I ended up waiting for the 49 in the cold for 25 minutes. In general, going the other direction and catching the Fraser bus is better, but the supposed construction has screwed me over to many times to trust that either.
So I tried to sleep/nap a lot on Sunday to recover. I guess it must have been a slow news day as the overdose death of Philip Seymour Hoffman totally dominated the news for what seemed like hours. It is certainly sad and somewhat unexpected, but I just thought it was too much, and I went back to bed. I slept through the first half of the Superbowl (as apparently the Denver offense did as well). I thought Bruno Mars did a pretty good halftime show, though I thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers should have been allowed to play at least 2 songs! I read a bit more and tried, for the most part, to take it easy.
I'm actually not feeling too bad at the moment, though the cough hasn't vanished. If I can get VPN to work, I will probably work from home, but it was really being quite quirky and the system upgrade they did last week has not helped, so I may end up schlepping myself out to New West after all.
Anyway, one of the VSO concerts I was really looking forward to was on Sat., so I basically napped all day and drugged myself up and grabbed a handful of cough drops. Since the program was repeated on Monday, I probably would have just rescheduled, but I was to meet a friend from work and his girlfriend. I had convinced them to go and given them my "buddy" tickets. We met up for Thai beforehand. It really was fairly mediocre, so I shan't be going there again. I was particularly discouraged at how long the noodles were (with no knives provided).
I made it through the opening piece - Brahms' Academic Overture with no major problems. Then they did Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. It was quite brilliantly played, but I have to say it seems particularly cruel to pick a piece like that -- with absolutely no breaks between movements -- for the height of cold/flu season. I found myself in the final movement just wishing for it to end, so I could cough. I came so close. I ended up doing a half-cough, half-sneeze about 2-3 minutes from the end. Anyway, it was beautiful, though I would have enjoyed it more had I not been so sick. I have noticed that, even when I am feeling well, I find the Orpheum fairly dry and cough-inducing. I wonder if they actually have a dehumidifier working up on stage to counteract the impact of Vancouver's climate on the woodwinds. (I usually sit in the first few rows.)
An awful lot of people cleared out at the intermission, but I was actually there primarily to see the Shostakovich symphony at the end (number 9). Otherwise I would have gone home as well. I found The Smile of Maud Lewis by Korndorf to be really trite serialism, which didn't fit at all with the rest of the program. I would have been a lot happier had it ended after about 5 minutes. I noticed a fair bit of coughing, as some others in the audience seemed to not think it worth the effort to keep it in. Not everyone disliked the piece, however, and my colleague's girlfriend seemed quite taken with it. I thought they did a very nice job with the Shostakovich. I did have one coughing jag in the middle, which was unfortunate, but I think all in all, I made it through without disturbing my fellow concert-goers too much. It is quite hard to focus on the music when you are also trying to keep it together. It's happened to me before, but this is the worst time I've had in a couple of years. There was one free concert in Chicago (also a Shostakovich symphony) where I really couldn't stop coughing, and had I been a bit closer to the aisle, I would have left. And I would have left irregardless had it been a full-priced concert. I still feel badly about that. That was a strange outing, as I can't remember feeling particularly sick, heading into that concert, but maybe I have just suppressed that to alleviate a bit of the guilt. This time around I knew there would be some issues, but the plans had already been made. Anyway, not surprisingly, TransLink bus service let me down again pretty badly at the end of the evening, and I ended up waiting for the 49 in the cold for 25 minutes. In general, going the other direction and catching the Fraser bus is better, but the supposed construction has screwed me over to many times to trust that either.
So I tried to sleep/nap a lot on Sunday to recover. I guess it must have been a slow news day as the overdose death of Philip Seymour Hoffman totally dominated the news for what seemed like hours. It is certainly sad and somewhat unexpected, but I just thought it was too much, and I went back to bed. I slept through the first half of the Superbowl (as apparently the Denver offense did as well). I thought Bruno Mars did a pretty good halftime show, though I thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers should have been allowed to play at least 2 songs! I read a bit more and tried, for the most part, to take it easy.
I'm actually not feeling too bad at the moment, though the cough hasn't vanished. If I can get VPN to work, I will probably work from home, but it was really being quite quirky and the system upgrade they did last week has not helped, so I may end up schlepping myself out to New West after all.
Scams
I'm not quite sure why I starting thinking of scams, though I suppose they are tangentially related to double-dealing and dishonesty more generally.
There are a few classic literary "scams" where the narrator is scamming the reader. Of all the unreliable or semi-dishonest narrators, I think my favorite is the one from Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. That is such a good novel. I will definitely have to read that again one day. Personally I wasn't nearly as taken by the dishonest narrator of Martin Amis' Success, though it was somewhat curious to have to (mentally) go back through half the chapters and take them in a totally different light. I think where I had some problem with this convention (of the unreliable narrator) is that this was all interior monologue, and one would have to be so unbelievable deluded to lie to oneself to that extent about one's job and social life. I mean really, why would anyone go to that much trouble?
Certainly some novels go into great detail about scams (where the reader is in on the caper). I think the most extensive is probably Les Liaisons dangereuses. On the whole, my feeling is that scams and capers work just a bit better on the screen (The Sting, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Trading Places) where the fast pace of cinema (compared to reading a novel) can overcome the inevitable plot holes.
Still, it can be interesting reading about small cons in novels (when they don't overwhelm the main narrative). I think I did like Molly Keane's Conversation Piece a bit more because the father was just a bit of a scoundrel who managed to keep putting one over on his relatives. I'm sure I can come up with a few other examples, but I'm blanking at the moment.
I've only been scammed a few times, but every one still rankles, since there is such an abuse of trust involved. I guess one may not even count as a scam, but I am still out $20 with no prospects of getting it back. I was at a gallery in the Downtown East Side and they were publishing a small book of transit photos. Well, I kept coming back to pick up the book, and it was just never ready. And of they never called as promised. The last time I went by, the gallery had closed with a sign directing people to some on-line site. I will try one last time to go through the particulars to either get my cash back or the printed book, but I am not holding my breath.
The other is more genuinely upsetting. It was late at night in Chicago, and a Black woman came by and pounded on my door. She claimed to be from the floor below and that she needed taxi fare to get to her job or something. She had some elaborate set of explanations, including a phone number I could call. I kept pushing her away and she finally said something like you don't believe me do you. Playing up the Black-white thing and so forth. It is very hard to look someone in the eye and say you think they are lying to you. Particularly inside an apartment complex when you are supposedly neighbors. It isn't nearly so hard in the open square. Anyway, at the end of the encounter, I was only out $20, but it still is upsetting that people will willingly erode trust in others for such a short term gain. It is what is so odious and noxious about common criminals. They are willing to smash other people sense of security for what is generally a small gain. I do loath such people. I generally don't think they can be rehabilitated, so in this arena, I tend to favor the harsher sentences found in the States rather than the quite light sentences for property crimes that are found in Canada and the U.K.
There are a few classic literary "scams" where the narrator is scamming the reader. Of all the unreliable or semi-dishonest narrators, I think my favorite is the one from Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. That is such a good novel. I will definitely have to read that again one day. Personally I wasn't nearly as taken by the dishonest narrator of Martin Amis' Success, though it was somewhat curious to have to (mentally) go back through half the chapters and take them in a totally different light. I think where I had some problem with this convention (of the unreliable narrator) is that this was all interior monologue, and one would have to be so unbelievable deluded to lie to oneself to that extent about one's job and social life. I mean really, why would anyone go to that much trouble?
Certainly some novels go into great detail about scams (where the reader is in on the caper). I think the most extensive is probably Les Liaisons dangereuses. On the whole, my feeling is that scams and capers work just a bit better on the screen (The Sting, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Trading Places) where the fast pace of cinema (compared to reading a novel) can overcome the inevitable plot holes.
Still, it can be interesting reading about small cons in novels (when they don't overwhelm the main narrative). I think I did like Molly Keane's Conversation Piece a bit more because the father was just a bit of a scoundrel who managed to keep putting one over on his relatives. I'm sure I can come up with a few other examples, but I'm blanking at the moment.
I've only been scammed a few times, but every one still rankles, since there is such an abuse of trust involved. I guess one may not even count as a scam, but I am still out $20 with no prospects of getting it back. I was at a gallery in the Downtown East Side and they were publishing a small book of transit photos. Well, I kept coming back to pick up the book, and it was just never ready. And of they never called as promised. The last time I went by, the gallery had closed with a sign directing people to some on-line site. I will try one last time to go through the particulars to either get my cash back or the printed book, but I am not holding my breath.
The other is more genuinely upsetting. It was late at night in Chicago, and a Black woman came by and pounded on my door. She claimed to be from the floor below and that she needed taxi fare to get to her job or something. She had some elaborate set of explanations, including a phone number I could call. I kept pushing her away and she finally said something like you don't believe me do you. Playing up the Black-white thing and so forth. It is very hard to look someone in the eye and say you think they are lying to you. Particularly inside an apartment complex when you are supposedly neighbors. It isn't nearly so hard in the open square. Anyway, at the end of the encounter, I was only out $20, but it still is upsetting that people will willingly erode trust in others for such a short term gain. It is what is so odious and noxious about common criminals. They are willing to smash other people sense of security for what is generally a small gain. I do loath such people. I generally don't think they can be rehabilitated, so in this arena, I tend to favor the harsher sentences found in the States rather than the quite light sentences for property crimes that are found in Canada and the U.K.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Landing point
I really don't know when this happened, but across all my browsers, it is now counting my visits as page views. I think the problem is the intersection of how cookies are stored and
some change that Blogger has made, since this all worked perfectly fine a
few months ago.
This is particularly annoying as I often do go back and make edits, especially in the first couple of days after I put up a new post. I guess I will continue to do so, but as a bit of a sop to getting accurate counts, I will always come to this post first and subtract views of this page automatically. If I really cared that much, I could go with Google Stats, but it is all pretty irrelevant, as I am not attempting to monetize this blog.
So I guess of the 13K+ views, maybe 12K are not my views and I should discount the future views by 10-15%. I have noticed that a very large number of the "real" views are only places like vampirestats that don't represent actual readers. But I'll try not to let that discourage me too much. I have 4 or 5 posts that I want to get to in Feb. and then I'll largely be caught up.
This is particularly annoying as I often do go back and make edits, especially in the first couple of days after I put up a new post. I guess I will continue to do so, but as a bit of a sop to getting accurate counts, I will always come to this post first and subtract views of this page automatically. If I really cared that much, I could go with Google Stats, but it is all pretty irrelevant, as I am not attempting to monetize this blog.
So I guess of the 13K+ views, maybe 12K are not my views and I should discount the future views by 10-15%. I have noticed that a very large number of the "real" views are only places like vampirestats that don't represent actual readers. But I'll try not to let that discourage me too much. I have 4 or 5 posts that I want to get to in Feb. and then I'll largely be caught up.
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