The trugglemat / by Neil Brideau.
[Chicago, IL] : N. Brideau, c2007.
[MCL call number: ZINE 741.5973 BRIDEAU 2007; nine copies, no holds]
There is a grotesque creature who sneaks into town and eats up little children. Terrifying! But that’s not the worst of it — the monster seems to have warm, friendly feelings for our our unwitting, rhyming narrator. She is witness to the carnage, and the monster visits her regularly, but she is not eaten. And of course all the adults dismiss her boogeyman stories as fantasy.
* * *
Neil Brideau, the author and artist behind The Trugglemat, is also responsible for the excellent minicomic Spitting Pennies, which, I’m pleased to report, introduced the Library of Congress Subject Heading “Vomiting — Comic books, strips, etc.” to Multnomah County Library’s catalog:
Spitting pennies / by Neil Brideau.
[Chicago, IL] : N. Brideau, 2008.
[MCL call number: ZINE 741.5973 BRIDEAU 2008; five copies, no holds]
Filed under: history & geography
First class : legendary ocean liner voyages around the world / Gérard Piouffre.
New York : Vendome Press, c2009.
[MCL call number: 910.45 P662f 2009 ; three copies, no holds]
I have travelled by ship, a teeny tiny bit — not entirely surprising, really, since I have lived within 100 miles of the ocean for my entire life — but I’ve never been on a proper cruise. The times when I have slept on a ship, it hasn’t been the most pleasant experience. The engines were loud, the ship was crowded, the seas were a little rough, the ship’s appointments were less than desirable, or the trip was so long through a dark night that I was just plain bored.
But still, I thrill a bit to the romance of ocean travel. Shuffleboard and deck chairs, lavish dinners on heavy china, a library with shelves that have little rails on them to keep the books in; it doesn’t sound so bad. I don’t mean I want to take a trip aboard a modern megaship, or one of those special cruises where you get to hang out with Garrison Keillor; no, the cruise of my dreams is one that takes place in a bygone era when cruise fashions only came in natural fibers and when nothing on the ship was made of plastic; a time when you had to travel by ship, because airplanes were unavailable or reserved for daredevils with bottomless pockets. I am sure that if I were actually transported to the past to take an early twentieth century cruise I would waste no time in finding all kinds of fault with the operation, but since that’s impossible, I’m happy to daydream a bit with a nice picture book.
And First Class is a nice picture book. Individual chapters describe and feature photographs of voyages in different parts of the world, with a focus on the period between about 1890 and 1940. The essays that accompany the photographs are just meaty enough to give a sense of the history of the journeys well-off folks once took on ocean liners — and the pictures are beautiful.
* * *
If your’e truly charmed by this book, you might want to check out its companion:
First class : legendary train journeys around the world / Patrick Poivre d’Arvor.
New York : Vendome Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 910.4 P757f 2007; two copies, one hold]
I haven’t examined it, but my guess is that it also provides a pleasant and interesting diversion.
Filed under: fiction
The disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks : a novel / by E. Lockhart.
New York : Hyperion, c2008.
[MCL call number: y LOCKHART; 17 copies, no holds
also in large type at: LGE-TYPE y LOCKHART 2009; three copies, no holds
and in audiobook format read by Tanya Eby Sirois at: CD YA LOCKHART; five copies, no holds
and in downloadable audiobook format read by Tanya Eby Sioris; one copy, no holds]
One of the great strengths of fiction is that it can offer readers the opportunity to pretend to be someone they are not. This isn’t always an actual pleasure for the reader — sometimes it is quite agonizing to read the part where your protagonist embarrasses herself, takes an action that hurts a loved one, or makes a terrible mistake. But overall, there is real joy in stepping into another person’s skin while reading their story.
Adolescence is a precarious time filled with possibilities, broken promises, discovery, and agony — making it an excellent stage of life for a fictional protagonist. No one escapes their teenaged years unscathed. You try something new and fail horribly, you embarrass yourself by blurting out the wrong thing, you find you have no words available when you most want to express yourself, you wish desperately for things that are made impossible by the stupid rigidity of your life and circumstances, you take emotional risks without realizing they are risks at all and then get hurt, and so on. Adolescence is glorious in its suckitude. But at its best it is also a period of intellectual growth, burgeoning independence, and intense joy in the experience of living. A few soaring highs to go with the agonizing lows.
Frankie Landau-Banks is a more or less normal 15-year-old girl who happens upon a complex (and sort of infuriating) underworld at her exclusive private school. There is a group of boys, one of whom is Frankie’s new boyfriend Matthew, running a secret society. No girls allowed. This offends Frankie’s sense of fairness, but more importantly, she wants in.
She doesn’t want in just to break a barrier, or just to get closer to Matthew — after some self-examination, Frankie realizes that what she wants most is to be recognized as intelligent, interesting, clever, and worthy of the friendship and admiration of this powerful group of kids. But, not only do they dismiss her as too young and too female to be worthy of more than cursory attention, they don’t even realize it when she finds a way to insinuate herself into their affairs. After a few months, she is running their whole show, three steps ahead of even the club’s savvy co-president, masterminding elaborate pranks and creating an unheard of buzz among the student body. Obviously she’s going to get found out, right?
[thanks, Joanna]
These yams are delicious / Sam Sharpe
Chicago, IL : Viewotron Press, c2009.
[MCL call number: ZINE 741.5973 SHARPE 2009; six copies, no holds]
A frustrated cartoonist is trying to work, but is interrupted at his drafting table by his cat. And then he is interrupted again by his cat, this time wearing a space helmet and accompanied by, um, his cat. The cartoonist and the cat and the cat with the space helmet are then joined by the cartoonist in a space helmet, who reveals that they’re visiting from the future. Unfortunately, the frustrated cartoonist’s future self is a little cranky, and not very interested in giving counsel on what the future brings.
Sam Sharpe’s cartooning is beautiful, clear, and effective; and the story is so short, sweet, and odd that I found it merited re-reading several times, pretty much immediately.
My time annihilator : a brief history of 1930’s science fiction fanzines / [by Christopher U.].
Glendale, KY : [s.n.], 2008.
[MCL call number: ZINE 070.572 U 2008; six copies, no holds]
When people investigate zines today and try to assign ancestors, antecedents, or roots to them, the two places they generally look to are the punk rock fanzines of the 1970s, and the science fiction and fantasy fanzines of the 1930s. These are not the only places to find zine history, not the only past traditions that have affected today’s zine creators and readers, but it is true that the connections are strong. (Though of course there is no doubt that many latter-day zine creators have done their work without ever hearing of, or realizing they had any ties to either either punk or sci fi fanzine creators.)
And it’s easy to see why a devoted zine creator or reader might be interested in exploring the long-gone world of early science fiction zines in particular. Fandom of any sort creates an inherently intriguing sort of subculture — the very practice of fandom is a celebration of deeply connecting to a specific world, and showing off, sharing, and expanding on that world with other fans. There is something compelling about this intensity of focus. Perhaps the most magnetic aspect for latter-day zinesters, though, is the simple notion that there were people making zines 80 years ago, people without access to photocopiers, who’d never seen an issue of Beer Frame or Duplex Planet or Doris. We might be able to just barely imagine life in the 1930s, but adding an understanding of a long-gone subculture into that picture is difficult. Learning about antique zines begins to do the trick.
Christopher U. reports that he stumbled on a copy of The Fanzine Index at his local library. It piqued his interest, and he eventually tracked down an archive of early 20th century science fiction fanzines and examined them too. My Time Annihilator reports on and discusses this endeavor.
After a brief introduction explaining how he came across the trove of old zines, Christopher takes readers through a brief, helpful history of sci fi fanzinedom, covering matters both philosophical and practical. He discusses the social context that inspired 1930s and 40s sci fi zine creation; outlines typical fanzine formats, binding, and graphic design strategies; and explains some of the technical details of printing and distribution methods zinesters used. This is followed by a selection of excerpts from some of the fanzines he examined.
The explanatory parts are clear, interesting, and even show the potential to be of practical use for anyone who might want to use the methodology of zines of old. But overall, Christopher’s take is a little jaundiced — and perhaps rightly so. He sums up his experience reading through the zine archive in a section titled “Let down. . .”:
“. . . i found that actually reading these fanzines was massively boring. i really don’t know anything about obscure 40’s science fiction and the zines were so full of inside jokes and nerd jargon that not much of it made sense anyway. words like ‘gods, demons and beer’ were inexplicably written as ‘ghods, dhemons, and bheer.’ . . . after thinking about it, there really isn’t that much difference between the science fictions [sic] fanzines of the early 20th century and the punk zines of the 90’s. our zines deal with obscure bands, rambling stories about fests, tons of inside jokes and typographic slang (e.g. ‘have a crucial youth cruew sesh and get a riot grrrl ‘zine from the distro’). unless you happen to be steeped in modern punk culture, you would probably get as much out of the most recent MAXIMUMROCKANDROLL as i do out of ‘le zombie’ #59. which isn’t much.”
Still, you’re pretty likely to be charmed by old timey sci fi zinedom, if you look at the choice excerpts Christopher provides. My favorites are:
- A flowchart which takes science fiction plots from the opening word “Earth” through through a variety of grim finales like “so they kill us (The End),” and “which turns them into disgusting lumps (The End).”
- The cover of FemiZine number 11, from 1949, featuring a drawing of a group of women in a protest march with signs like “No new names for FemiZine” and “Down with Distaff.” It may be that I find this interesting mostly because there is no way to grasp the context, but it’s also true that the drawing is very cute — I particularly like the three ladies in front, who are all wearing heels and nice coats.
- A collection of post card zines, called “news cards,” typewritten with incredibly brief newsbites announcing new publications, travel plans, and in one example from 1943: “We humbly announce final issue. Paucity of worthwhile news forbids weekly publication; my imminent induction also a factor.”
* * *
Additional analysis of zine history and culture can be found in Amy Spencer’s DIY: The Rise of Lo-fi Culture (London ; New York : Marion Boyars, 2005), which I reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 30 and found interesting but flawed; and in Frederic Wertham’s The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press [1973]). Comics lovers among you may recognize Wertham’s name — he is most famous for his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which inspired the Comics Code. But his work on early fanzines is pretty interesting, and has lots of facsimiles to illustrate it.
Filed under: technology
Home-made : contemporary Russian folk artifacts / [compiled by] Vladimir Arkhipov.
London : Fuel Publishing, 2006.
[MCL call number: 621.9 H765 2006; one copy, no holds]
Everyone makes things, even people who don’t think of themselves as practical or creative or skilled. It’s natural for us human tool-builders to force the material of the world around us to give service in aid of whatever project we are engaged in. Sometimes we do this in style, and then we’re likely to call it art. But mostly, we just make do with manipulating whatever is lying around to do the job we need done now, whether or not the resulting tool or shortcut is sharp or elegant or lovely. And when objects themselves are scarce, why then we really get busy making do.
Home-Made is a catalog of objects making do, created by everyday Russians during the twilight of the Soviet Union. I can’t begin to characterize the entire collection, but I’ll mention a few items that charmed me:
- a flowered china teapot, its broken handle replaced with a utilitarian stainless steel affair held on with a bolt (page 82)
- a doormat/boot scraper made from discarded beer caps (page 24)
- a corner basin made from a galvanized wash tub (page 272)
- a basket with a handle, fashioned from a punctured rubber ball (page 219)
Each object’s photograph is accompanied by the story of how it came to be made, and a picture of the artisan, or of the person who explained the artifact’s provenance. All of the items are part of Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov’s collection of home-made things.
[thanks, Matthew]
Filed under: art & entertainment
Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume, 1936-1942 / photographs by Don James.
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 1998.
[MCL call number: 797.32 J27s 1998 ; three copies, no holds]
If you were to visit Los Angeles before the Second World War, you probably wouldn’t recognize the place. It was teensy, for one thing, compared to the vast sprawl of asphalt and low-rises you’d see if you went there now. And if you went to the beach, that would be different too.
First you’d have to get to the beach — not always easy, since the freeways hadn’t been built yet and the city was so small that everything surely seemed further away. Once you were wherever the road took you, you’d still have to get to the beach, maybe down a couple of miles of sketchy trail. If you were there to surf, you’d have to hump your board on your back, your homemade 10′ or 12′ long redwood board weighing about 90 pounds. If there was a lifeguard, he was probably a volunteer. Almost no one had a radio, unless it was in their car. Everyone smoked. Sunscreen hadn’t been invented and people thought a sunburn was a sign of health.
Don James’s pictures are a little window into this world, a series of glow-y 4″ x 5″ snapshots of surfers, sunbathers, and hangers-about amid the sunshine, sparkling water, and ramshackle coastline architecture. The collection is romantic, for sure, but it shows enough hunger and grit to come off as reasonably honest; and it’s definitely revealing of a place, time, and way of life you might like to visit, but which no longer exists.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Tools of the imagination : drawing tools and technologies from the eighteenth century to the present / Susan C. Piedmont-Palladino, editor.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 720.28 T671 2007; two copies, no holds]
It can be said that tools are simply mundane — they are a means to an end and nothing more. But it’s also true that a dedicated practitioner of a particular craft is likely to develop a preference for particular types of tools, and eventually to come to rely on a beloved individual ruler or chisel or level or brush or what have you. Why do artists become so passionate about their preferences for one sort of tool over another, so devoted to their own beloved instruments? Habit, tradition, the preferences of one’s teachers, and other factors all surely have a role. But another reason is that people who create know their work. They are specialists in the fabrication of their own craft, and therefore they understand why one pencil is good for line sketching, while another is best reserved for lettering, and a third for shading.
Many people who regularly use tools also find themselves building tools, devising new variations on old tools, and sharing their tool-making skills with other craftspeople. In a sense, these artists have two media: the medium in which they engage their artistic energy (painting, sculpture, music, carpentry, or whatever), and the medium of tool-making. An appreciation of this latter art is the inspiration for Tools of the Imagination — essentially it is an historical and thematic exhibition of architects’ and draftsmen’s tools. Tools for inscribing circles, arcs, and spirals make up the first chapter, tools for creating straight lines the next, and so on. Many of the tools included are outdated, but ingenious — like the graceful volutor (on pages 16-17), which draws spirals, or the pantograph (pages 82-83), a mechanical device that looks like a large, frightening insect, which assists the artist with hand-drawn enlargements and reductions. All in all, the tool portraits are lovely and fascinating.
Unfortunately, though the book presents an elegant array of antique tools and does a decent job showcasing contemporary tools, there seems to be a bit of a gap between tools used before about 1900, and those used after the beginning of the computer revolution in the early 1960s. While reading I often found myself wondering what lay in that gap. Would a compass manufactured in 1930 or 1970 or 2000 look significantly different than the compasses from 1850 (on page 8) and 1890 (page 10)? I might find out elsewhere, but there is very little in Tools of the Imagination to enlighten me.
Tools of the Imagination also suffers a bit from its own high design. The text is printed in silver ink, which is beautiful but can be hard to read when the light conditions aren’t entirely perfect. This isn’t really a severe handicap, but it does highlight how endless the pursuit of good design can be — a book is a physical object, part of its strength is its portability; yet this book has been made so that it is hard to read under low light or in bright sun, thus decreasing the strength of portability in this particular book. I found this rather ironic, considering the topic at hand.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Simple shelters : tents, tipis, yurts, domes and other ancient homes / written and illustrated by Jonathan Horning ; with additional material by Brock Horning.
New York : Walker & Co., 2009.
[MCL call number: 728 H8163s 2009; six copies, no holds]
Sound housing is one of humanity’s most basic needs, and yet city people here in the developed world often have very little notion of how even the most traditional and well-tested simple structures are actually constructed. If you find this troublesome, begin your own self-education with Simple Shelters. Jonathan Horning describes twenty or so traditional structures, geodesic and other domes, straw bale houses, provides a brief explanation of a variety of cladding types, and a short discussion of house orientation. The text is useful, but Horning’s drawings of each structure are the real lure of the book. His illustrations are lucid; particularly the detailed diagrams of the joints, ties, braces, and other component parts of each different shelter. Simple Shelters is itself quite simple — short, quick, and earnest — but it is well worth your attention.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Cities from the sky : an aerial portrait of America / by Thomas J. Campanella ; foreword by Witold Rybczynski.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2001.
[MCL call number: 779.36 C186c 2001; one copy, no holds]
There is something magical about the way the earth appears as you look out from an airplane. If you’ve flown before, you know what I mean, even if your only experiences have been in commercial jets with teensy little windows. Flying home to Portland, I nearly always find myself taken aback at the familiar but fairly awesome vista when the plane comes through the last layer of clouds and I can see the Willamette River stretched out along the valley, and the clutch of downtown skyscrapers snug between the river and the West Hills; or, approaching from the east, the incredible view of mountains all around as the plane descends over the Columbia. Flying over your hometown in a small plane is often even better — little planes are able to dart about a bit, and they fly low, so you might be able to pick out the apple tree in your front yard, a familiar church steeple, or the playground in a local park.
Aerial photographs can give you a taste of this feeling of flying without ever leaving the ground. Before Mapquest, before Google Earth and Multimap and all the other amazing mapping services on the world wide web, aerial surveys were special, restricted resources that most folks had very little chance to enjoy. You might have gone to a library to look up a United States Geological Survey orthophotoquad, or you might have seen the occasional aerial survey photograph illustrating a news article or in a historical museum; but comprehensive aerial surveys used to be the provenance of specialists. Engineers, city planners, military officials, land developers; people with a clear practical need for the information aerial photographs could provide, and with the money to fund them.
When specialists needed aerial photographs in decades past, often as not they hired Fairchild Aerial Surveys to provide them. Cities From the Sky begins with an introductory essay explaining Fairchild’s history — and it was a pretty interesting company. Its founder, Sherman Fairchild, spent his youth tinkering, building things, and inventing small devices of one sort or another. After developing a new and greatly improved aerial camera for the U.S. Army Air Service, he founded the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation in 1920, which made cameras, accepted commissions for aerial images, and took aerial photographs on speculation for use in newspaper stories. The spec photos were preserved in the company’s picture library whether or not they sold, and this vast collection of images (more than 200,000 by 1935) are the pool from which most of the content of Cities From the Sky is drawn.
The book includes about 100 giant pages of reproductions of aerial photographs, most of them angled views showing a panorama rather than the map-like earth-from-space kind. They capture cities and towns across the United States, though about 40% are of communities in the Northeast. The photographs would be interesting to look at just for their vantage points, but in fact they are fascinating for their historic value as well. The great majority were taken between 1930 and 1955 or so, and so they often include geographical, urban, and societal elements that are no longer present, or that have been irrevocably changed by later developments: the San Francisco Bay has no bridges; Monterey, California’s harbor is full of fishing boats resting from their labors in the still-active sardine industry (page 108); a U.S. Navy dirigible floats above the Hudson River in New York (page 35); downtown St. Louis is missing its Gateway Arch (page 84); Los Angeles’s Harbor Freeway is actively under construction (page 115); and the trains leaving Boston’s North Station are sending out enormous, picturesque plumes of steam (page 21).
* * *
Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. left a considerable record of its activities, and several libraries and archives have digitized part or all of their collections of Fairchild photographs, including the New York Public Library, the Digital Collections of the New York State Archives, Museum, and Library, Whittier College, and the Santa Monica Public Library.
* * *
Those of you who’d like to see more pictures of cities from high up in the sky should be sure to take a look at Bird’s Eye Views, by John W. Reps, (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998, reviewed in number 53), which reproduces 19th and early 20th century lithographs showing American cities and towns.
Filed under: technology
Meet Mr. Product : the art of the advertising character / Warren Dotz, Masud Husain.
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c2003.
[MCL call number: 659.1 D725m 2003: one copy, no holds]
Those readers who know me personally do not need to be reminded of how appalled I am to see the food advertising itself. Probably the most dramatic horrors are the signs for barbecue restaurants that feature a cute, cartoonish pig salivating, wearing a bib, and waving a knife and fork — but there are countless other examples: anthropomorphized donuts, dancing fruits and vegetables, and hot dogs that walk and talk, just to name a few. Ironically, at the same time as these characters disgust me, I also find them fascinating and compelling, which is, I guess, part of why they make good advertisements. They’re adorable. They’re disturbing. They’re improbable. They’re funny!
I think some of my discomfort with the food advertising itself is that the adorable little pig at the barbecue stand and its colleagues are actually encouraging consumers to eat them, which seems unnatural and perverse. Products-brought-to-life which encourage consumption of other types are not so aberrant — for example, it used to be relatively common for muffler repair shops to have a gaily painted life-sized robot-like statue made of mufflers and other auto parts out front to advertise their services. Certainly the muffler man, who is made out of mufflers, is encouraging people to consume mufflers. But since real mufflers are inanimate, technological products, and since we’re not actually eating them, it seems less grotesque for the muffler man to invite us in to have our cars serviced. His plea is that we patronize his establishment, because his purpose is to quiet the exhaust of an automobile. The pig, on the other hand, has many interests of its own, and does not grace this earth solely to provide barbecue.
But, philosophical discussion aside, it is clear that the cute cartoon pig with a bib, the muffler man, the animated hot dog are all charming and unusual and make us notice the products they promote. Some are clever and engaging. Others are horrifically stereotyped. Still others are so uninspired as to be instantly forgettable, unless perhaps they survive as cautionary examples for future marketers. Meet Mr. Product attempts to give readers a tour of a wide swathe of the world peopled by these unlikely creatures. After a brief history of the use of imaginary characters in advertising, the book displays hundreds of examples of “spokescharacters” who have been used to hawk everything from breakfast cereal to light bulbs to natural gas utilities. Many are personifications of the products they sell, much like the little pig at the barbecue restaurant, but others are more akin to live product spokespeople — Betty Crocker, Little Miss Coppertone, Mr. Goodwrench, Aunt Jemima.
Many, many classic favorites appear in the book, including:
- Uniroyal’s Nauga (page 176), alerting shoppers that the object to which it is attached is genuine Naugahyde,
- the Jolly Green Giant (page 21)
- Bibendum, the Michelin tire man (pages 14 and 207),
- Manny, Moe, and Jack (page 213), of the Pep Boys auto parts stores, and
- the 1940s version of the Jantzen diving girl (page 254) in her iconic red strapless bathing suit.
And there are plenty who never achieved total nationwide household-name sort of fame:
- the little duckling with a bib (page 151) who once graced the sign for Waddle’s diner here in Portland (“Eat Now at Waddles,” it said, though the example in the book is a little less direct),
- Mr. Zip (page 224), a very sketchy, high-on-smack-looking postal carrier used to promote the US Postal Service’s new Zone Improvement Program in the 60s,
- Miss Curity, the first lady of first aid (page 255), promoter of Curity bandages and tape, and
- the dapper Wool Council lamb (page 249).
Unfortunately, there is no index, though the arrangement of the book might help readers locate the particular spokescharacter they seek — eight chapters focus on characters who advertised food, drinks, products aimed at children, restaurants, technology, car parts and automobile-related products, household goods, and personal and leisure products.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The look of love : the art of the romance novel / by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.64 M159L 2002; one copy, no holds]
Lots of people enjoy romance, but few people in our culture would easily admit to being lovers of the straight-up romance novel, unless they fit a particular profile. Women can read them, but not feminists. Girls can read them, but not boys. You don’t read romances if you’re interested in “real” literature, and you don’t read them if you’re really smart and intellectual. Romances are formulaic and hackneyed, they present a narrow view of marriage, of love, of a woman’s ability to have a mind and a heart at the same time, and so on.
But still, millions of people read romances, and enjoy them. Part of the appeal, not surprisingly, is their evocative cover design — like their brethren in the rest of the pulp novel world, romances have long been sold on the strength of their beautiful illustrated covers. The Look of Love presents a nice exhibit of some of the best, and some of the most typical romance covers from the 1930s to the 1980s, along with a short history of the genre and some discussion of trends in cover design over the years. The explication is interesting and useful, but the covers are really the book’s reason d’être.
Some are so much of another era that it’s hard to see them as anything but arch and ironic: Nurse on the Run (1965, page 93) features a beautiful young woman in a whirling, startled pose, with red hair spilling out from underneath her nurse’s cap. Behind her are superimposed three calm, suave fellows, apparently the source of her turmoil (though none of them appear to have a care in the world). And the very first Harlequin (1949, page 11) is illustrated with a painting of a woman in evening dress at the top of a curving staircase. At the bottom is a man in a blue suit with a cap — he looks like a postal carrier to me, but here’s the title: The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman. So he must be a sea captain, not a mailman; I trust the woman is not actually the manatee.
Irony aside, however, there is a particular beauty about these illustrations. Some of this is due to the vintage, nostalgic quality of the art, no doubt enhanced by the plain fact that these days it’s unusual for newly published books of any sort to have pulp-style hand-painted covers*, but I think the idea of love itself is part of the appeal. The cover evokes the feeling that the story promises to bring out in the reader. The cover painting shows just a glimmer, a teensy frame out of the story — a longing glance at the unrequited beloved; a bit of labor shared by colleagues who maybe want to know one another better; the second two doomed lovers who are nonetheless magnetically attracted are just about to kiss. All of these moments are worth looking at, worth fantasizing about, worth mention in life generally; even if the particular situation being described in the cover painting is highly improbable and stereotypical, and even though novel itself might not be so great.
* Though there are counter-examples to this point — one I think of immediately is Hard Case Crime, which publishes both reprints and new novels in the mystery/crime genre, each with a specially commissioned painted cover. I have found their books very much worth reading, as well as worth appreciating as lovely objects.
Filed under: art & entertainment
I shot a man in Reno : a history of death by murder, suicide, fire, flood, drugs, disease, and general misadventure, as related in popular song / Graeme Thomson.
New York : Continuum, 2008.
[MCL call number: 782.42164 T483i 2008; two copies, no holds]
When I was a teenager, my mother made a mix tape labeled “Death” on one side and “Suicide” on the other. It was for a road trip, but she had it for years and I always loved it. Ever since I first heard this tape, I’ve been building a play list in my mind of all the other death and suicide songs I’d use, if I were to make my own tape. I don’t think I’ll ever actually record my own version, but the songs are lodged in a special place in my brain, asserting their relatedness to me every time the subject arises. I have other lists — songs about living through a violent revolution, songs that list lots of place names, songs appreciating difficult women, songs about sex that rely entirely on metaphor to get their nasty across, songs describing famous disasters, songs about the historical Jesus Christ, and so on — but the death and suicide songs are the most assertive, and the longest, list.
Graeme Thompson shares this interest in death songs. I Shot a Man in Reno is his take on the history, meaning, and social significance of death songs. He considers songs about suicide, murder, drinking yourself to death, the afterlife, mourning, and songs people want to have played at their funerals. Overall, it’s a pretty useful tour of death songs and what they mean in a cultural context, but I can’t say I loved the book. Really I think it’s just a question of taste — I didn’t find Thompson to be the most intriguing or well-rounded cultural or musical observer, so his critical analysis didn’t jazz me. I’m not going to recommend him enthusiastically, but I wouldn’t tell you not to read the book either. I’m sure it would suit other readers just fine.
However, I didn’t like it much. The thing I really couldn’t get over is actually quite petty.
Thompson promises in his introduction that I Shot a Man in Reno will not be merely a list disguised as a book. It is in fact a thematic history, not simply a list, but still it is true that when he gets really in the thick of his subject, Thompson tends to resort to listing songs, and it pretty much sucks. I can hardly cry foul very loudly here — when it comes to lists-posing-as-meaningful-prose I do, as regular readers have no doubt noted, live in something of a glass house. But really, Thompson’s listy bits seem designed specifically to invoke a mood in the reader. It’s as if he wants you to remember the songs, hear their melodies, recall their words. Great, if you’re familiar with them all, but kind of lame if you’re not. And I have a hard time imagining how anyone who is not a music critic or historian could possibly know all or even most of the specific songs Thompson mentions. It’s a pretty widely-ranging catalog.
It’s ironic, really, that this is the part that chafes — I was sort of hoping, when I picked up the book, that I would be exposed to some new songs, right along with a nice bit of analysis of death songs, a history of their roots, some stories about what they have meant to us, why they matter, and so on. Really I was hoping to learn about songs I’d never heard of before. And I did, but all I really learned about the songs Thompson lists is who wrote and sang them, their titles, and a teeny tiny bit about how they relate to the subject of death. I don’t know how popular they have been or what effect they’ve had on society, I don’t know the lyrics, and most importantly, I don’t know what they sound like.
It might be that Thompson listed lots of songs so that one or two of them would catch in the reader’s mind, and they’d be able to see the specifics of his point at that moment in the narrative. But for me, reading the list was like the literary equivalent of a conversation with someone who knows tons and tons about something, but can’t lay off the jargon enough to be able to talk with someone uninitiated with that subject. Perhaps I Shot a Man in Reno could benefit from a companion CD? It is hard to imagine getting the rights for all those hopelessly copyrighted songs, but it might help solve the problem.
Filed under: technology
Everyday drinking : the distilled Kingsley Amis.
New York : Bloomsbury USA, 2008.
[MCL call number: 641.21 A517e 2008; nine copies, no holds]
If you are already a drinker, no doubt you can carry on without the aid of experts — the imbibing of alcohol is not an art that requires any particular level of elegance or finesse. But, if you desire advice, or if you are interested in refining your skills, or if you’d benefit from a modest amount of humorous diversion, you might take a look at Everyday Drinking.
In this volume, Kingsley Amis, known as an author of fiction, but also a rather notorious lush, provides instruction on every aspect of drinking: choosing and buying alcohol, learning the facts you’ll need to discuss it with actual wine or liquor snobs, assembling bar equipment, planning a cocktail party, making the drinks, serving the drinks, fooling your guests into thinking the drinks are better than they in fact are, cleaning up, and managing your hangover. Amis’s advice is often helpful and the majority of it is quite sincere, but it is his snotty-pants tone that really makes the book worth reading. For example, in the section listing the most essential tools for the bar:
“1. A refrigerator. All to yourself, I mean. There is really no way round this. Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator on which they have a claim, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” (page 38)
Amis goes to lengths to educate readers about the various French and German wines, how they are made, how they ought to be drunk, and when it is better to remember that if you are British, you could just as well drink beer. He describes in detail a weight-loss diet for the drinking man, provides general advice to the drinking traveler, repeatedly cautions readers against imbibing too many sweet drinks (they are, in his view, sure-fire hangover-producers), and gives an artfully constructed plan for successfully posing as a booze expert in mixed company.
But his in-depth chapter on dealing with a hangover may be the best part of the book. It includes a helpful dissection of the hangover into its constituent parts. These are, chiefly: the physical, which, obviously, consists of the physical symptoms, headache, sensitivity to light, stomach upset, achiness, excessive thirst, etc.; and the metaphysical: “the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization” (page 79). Amis follows with practical advice for dealing with each aspect of the hangover. For the physical hangover, rest, liquids, a hot shower and/or bath, etc. For the metaphysical hangover, an initial affirmation that the ravages of the hangover are just that, rather than evidence of a greater moral or social failing on the part of you, the afflicted person; followed by a course of hangover reading and listening, carefully chosen to guide you from misery through to calm, without having to linger too long with self-reflection and self-pity.
Everyday Drinking collects three previously long-out-of-print volumes: On Drink, Every Day Drinking, and How’s Your Glass? The first is a compendium of drinking advice, arranged in topical chapters, the second is a collection of newspaper columns on various drinking topics, and the third is a series of drinking tests (multiple choice and essay) intended to gauge and improve the reader’s knowledge of drinking subjects. This newly reprinted and collected edition begins with a brief introduction and glossary for American readers — the glossary is a real relief to anyone who is not familiar with the odd Briticisms (and perhaps Amisisms?) Amis employs: “hock,” “the local,” “Malvern water,” “stroppy,” etc. The book also has a decent index, and although there is no bibliography following the text, the second chapter of On Drink (page 9 in this volume) is really a bibliographic essay on drinking literature (current to the early seventies, when this part of the book was originally written).
Filed under: art & entertainment
Lavoirs : washhouses of rural France / Mireille Roddier ; foreword by Billie Tsien.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2003.
[MCL call number: 720.944 R686L 2003: one copy, no holds]
In the 17th century, local governments in France began to build a new kind of municipal facility: lavoirs, or washhouses. They were simple, solid affairs (usually built of stone) designed to channel water for from streams and rivers into large basins, or catch it when it rained. Housewives and professional wash-women came to these communal facilities to launder clothing and linens, and they remained in use, in some places, until the time of the Second World War.
Many, many lavoirs have been demolished, but some remain, especially in smaller and more remote towns, and in towns where the lavoir was built together with another facility such as the town hall. For those of us who cannot make a tour of lavoirs, Mireille Roddier carefully and beautifully photographed several dozen for her book Lavoirs: Washhouses of Rural France.
I found the images startling — the buildings themselves are lovely in a utilitarian way, but noticing this, I also can’t help but notice that they are not being used. In every picture, the water in the basins and channels are still, and the large rooms are empty of people and laundry. The photographs look quiet, exactly the opposite of how they must have been when in use, full of women working, talking, splashing water; maybe laughing or singing or arguing. It’s eerie to see pictures of these lovely buildings with their picturesque pools and rills glassy and smooth in a way they would originally have been only at the start of the workday, or at night.
The bulk of Roddier’s photographs are preceded by an essay explaining the history of lavoirs as buildings and as civic facilities, regional variations in architectural style, and other architectural matters. The essay also discusses the social impacts of lavoirs, together with a brief history of their use and a bit of explanation of the place laundresses held in French society during the period when lavoirs were common and in regular use. All this is fascinating, and useful for explaining just what is represented in Roddier’s photographs, but the book would be worthwhile just for the beauty of those photographs.
Filed under: art & entertainment
45 RPM : a visual history of the seven-inch record / edited by Spencer Drate.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.66 F745 2002; one copy, no holds]
The 45 was once the very height of pop music cool. Singles were cheap, easy to carry around, and provided a quick musical fix without the commitment of an LP. If you wanted a hit, it came on a 45, adulterated only by a (usually) forgettable song on the B-side; whereas LPs were full of all kinds of non-hit nonsense you’d never hear on the radio.
But in addition to filling a particular musical niche, 45s were physical objects as well. Albums have album covers, where great strides in graphic design can be made. Or sometimes, not made. 45 RPM chronicles the evolution of singles’ cover art, from the 1950s when classical, jazz, dance music, and pop were all put out on seven-inch records; through the 60s, 70s, and 80s when Top 40 hits were all available as singles; and finally to the 1990s, when 45s were an important medium of the alternative music scene.
The images in 45 RPM are widely varied. Two Frank Sinatra records (on facing pages) feature lovely painted covers that look like nothing so much as hard-boiled pulp novels. Duke Ellington is caught in a terribly modern candid photograph, hatted, smoking while sitting at his piano and not looking at the camera at all. Fabian, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, Paul Anka, and Roy Orbison gaze directly at us, gorgeous and wholesome but maybe a little dangerous with their hair pomaded and sweet smiles on their faces. The Rolling Stones and Sam the Sham and the Pharos are all dressed up in costume. The Foundations, The Yard Birds, The Impressions, and America are just standing around in very stylish looking groups, as if their carefully arranged portraits were wholly candid. Al Green is relaxing in a white chair in a white room wearing a white suit and white shoes, radiating calm and cool. The B-52s are half cartoons. The Clash have assumed the position, hands up against the wall and facing away from the camera. In the selection of covers from the 90s, artists don’t appear at all — Instead there are cartoons, mock newspaper advertisements, photo montages, and a little more artsy irony than is perhaps truly necessary.
The record cover images are arranged in groups, by decade. Within each section, however, there is no firm logic apparent in the arrangement — if there are several records from a particular artist or group within a decade, they’re usually shown one after another, but that seems to be it. This is unfortunate, especially in the first decade during which the range of genres is broad. Also, each 45 cover is shown solo, with no caption or explanation accompanying it. This successfully highlights the visual aspect of the covers, but since some of them are completely wordless, it’s a little frustrating if you don’t recognize the band or the record. There is a discography in the back of the book readers can use to track down which record is what, but it doesn’t list page numbers or other clear identifying data, and flipping back and forth is inconvenient.
On the other hand, I will say that after looking through the book, I had a whole afternoon’s worth of songs playing in my head. Maybe visual stimulation is a really good way to get my brain to start replaying what it knows? I can’t say, but I will tell you that I as I type I’ve got Ella Fitzgerald doing “Cheek to Cheek,” Talking Heads with “Take Me to the River,” Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady,” Aretha Franklin doing “Freeway of Love,” Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and Elvis Presley’s “Are you Lonesome Tonight,” all playing in the jukebox of my mind. Catchy.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Soviet textiles : designing the modern utopia : selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection / Pamela Jill Kachurin.
Boston : MFA Publications ; New York : Trade distribution : Distributed Art Publishers/D.A.P., c2006. [MCL call number: 746.0947 K11s 2006; one copy, one hold]
Oh, it’s so easy to understand the pull of the Soviet dream of a workers paradise when looking at the cream of socialist-realist art/propaganda. Handsome tractors surging across uniformly fruitful fields, little stylized children in geometric smocks playing ball, gracefully belching smokestacks; all are repeated in bright, modern colors across expanses of plain, honest cotton fabric. The world depicted here is productive and prosperous. Children have time for play as well as learning, adults find joy in shared work; and no one knows want or cold or psychological despair.
In the brief period from about 1927 to 1933, Soviet designers engaged in a bold experiment — rather than continue to produce the floral patterns that had always been popular, they designed fabrics featuring collective farms and factories and their generous product, and other modern ideals. The notion was that these assertively socialist textiles, provided for everyday use, would help to radicalize and educate the population at large. Soviet Textiles provides a terse, cogent history of this movement, its origins, and its demise — gracefully illustrated, of course, with images of an idealized art deco cotton utopia on nearly every page.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Photobooth / Babbette Hines.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
[MCL call number: 779.2 H662p 2002; one copy, one hold]
I’m not sure I have much to say about Photobooth — though I can describe it, and I will shortly — the main reason for mentioning it here is simply that it is lovely and surprising and you are many of you very likely to miss it unless you have it pointed out.
You’ve been to a photobooth; everyone has. It’s a big box, as big, perhaps, as a car. You slide into it (maybe you jam yourself in with several of your closest friends), decide which color of curtain you’d like behind you, feed your quarters into the slot, and sit, pose, or mug while the box flashes at you once for each pose. Then you clamber out and wait impatiently for roughly two minutes while the box processes your negatives, prints them, and finally ejects a thin strip of pictures. They are probably over- or underexposed, blurry, or unflattering in some way. The paper is wet. They’re cheap, entertaining, useful, and eminently ephemeral.
Babbette Hines collects other people’s photobooth pictures, and Photobooth is an exhibit of her collection. They cover roughly 200 pages. Some are shown front and back to show notes people wrote on them, some are set in frames or pasted on to cards bearing messages. They show babies, lovers, holiday-makers, soldiers and sailors, friends, and single individuals. Some are serious, some are silly, some are poignant. Some look as though they are meant to grace a passport or other official document, some were clearly taken only for amusement, some are completely inscrutable as to intent.
You must get this book, because you must see these pictures.
* * *
Or you could get this one:
American photobooth / Näkki Goranin ; foreword by David Haberstich.
New York : W. W. Norton & Co., c2008.
[MCL call number: 779.2 G661a 2008; five copies, no holds]
It has a smidge fewer photobooth pictures, but it begins with a much more substantive introductory chapter, with a technical and historical discussion of the invention of the photobooth and its development as a commercial enterprise. The author, Näkki Goranin, is herself an photobooth artist, and several of her self-portraits are included in the book.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The forgotten arts and crafts / John Seymour.
New York : Dorling Kindersley, 2001.
[MCL call number: 745.5 S519f 2001; five copies, no holds]
One side effect of a curious mind is that it can be difficult to shake off idle questions. How do you properly thatch a roof? Were there once different kinds of thimbles for different sewing tasks? Is there a non-electric ancestor to the vacuum cleaner? But there is hope if your idly questioning mind inclines this particular way — these and many similar questions can be answered by consulting John Seymour’s The Forgotten Arts and Crafts.
In straightforward prose and clear illustrations, Seymour explains how things used to be made and repaired, who did the work, and a bit about their daily experiences. The book includes traditional arts, crafts and homemade products primarily from the western Europe and the cultures it has spawned, but this narrow focus allows for greater depth – for example, there are two pages on boot and shoemaking, and an additional two pages on clog making. And there’s a nice sidebar in the clog section about clogs made entirely of wood (with no leather upper part), and how they were called sabots in France, which gave rise to the word “sabotage,” because a clog is a handy weapon when you’re an oppressed worker. Well, Seymour doesn’t put it exactly like that, but you see what I mean.
The Forgotten Arts and Crafts is nice to leaf through, but it might also prove useful if you really do have a question like “what sort of tools might one use to make large quantities of butter by hand?” And there is an index, as well as an detailed table of contents and lots of arresting illustrations, so you should be able to find what you need in short order.
* * *
If you need to know more about the workings of mundane technology, with a more modern bent, you would do well to consult David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, which explains the how of everything from simple machines to the space shuttle.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The dawn of the color photograph : Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet / David Okuefuna.
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2008.
[MCL call number: 779.092 K12o 2008: six copies, no holds]
In the first few years of the 20th century, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented autochrome photography, a simple, inexpensive method for making color photographs with a standard glass-negative camera (the sort used by professionals at the time). The autochrome was a radical development — other color photography techniques existed, but they were expensive, complicated, and/or cumbersome.
Inspired in part by this technological development, French banker, pacifist, and philanthropist Albert Kahn conceived of an ambitious project — he recruited and financed professional photographers, provided them with autochrome plates and other equipment, and sent them around the world to photograph everyday life. From 1908 through the 1930s, these photographers recorded world events, wars (most notably the First World War), political change, religious practice, commonplace cultural events, national festivals, people at work, and of course the landscape of houses, streets, neighborhoods, cities, agricultural land, and the natural world. The project was named The Archives of the Planet, and eventually grew to more than 72,000 images.
The Archive’s photographers traveled far and wide, to teeny villages as well as important cities in nearly every corner of the world, and their work captures a world that is roughly a century old. European imperialism, the massive bombing campaigns of the Second World War, the spread of Western popular culture, industrialization, the Cold War, pollution, globalization and many other forces have made changes both to our cultural and physical geography. The Dawn of the Color Photograph collects hundreds of these pictures and presents them in a geographical arrangement, with David Okuefuna’s meticulous captions showing not only where and what is portrayed in each image, but often explaining how history has treated the buildings, cities, cultural traditions, and communities captured therein. It’s easier to understand what’s in the pictures with this bit of explication — at times Okuefuna reads quite a lot into the images, making assessments of people’s state of mind from their expressions, for example, but on the whole his captions are helpful and illustrative.
But the pictures themselves are frankly astonishing. The autochrome process* produces very different images than the color photographs we’re used to. The images are muted and romantic looking; a bit grainy. Even scenes that are brightly lit with full sunlight do not seem harsh – colors meld a little, and look more harmonious than they generally do in life. Autochromes require a long exposure time, so some of the images are clearly posed – and those that are not often include blurred shapes where people or animals moved during the exposure. The strange colors and long exposure combine to give the photographs a well-put-together look, a bit like theater promotion stills or fashion magazine shots. And yet most of the images are startlingly natural looking. The majority capture scenes of life as it is lived — marketplaces, people at work, street scenes — most of these seem as natural as they would captured in a fraction of a modern second by an amateur with a Brownie or an iPhone.
I looked through The Dawn of the Color Photograph several times before I felt ready to write about it. The first time, I simply flipped through and looked at the pictures. The second time, I read the introduction and the essays at the beginning of each chapter, and looked at the photographs more carefully. The third time, I went through the whole book and read each photograph caption. The fourth time, I flipped through again and revisited the images which had struck me most. I am not sure that I am done; I’m not sure I have seen even a substantial part of what is available to see in this collection of images. These pictures are very energetic and lifelike, and even though the people are mostly dead, many of the buildings and communities are scattered or destroyed, and the world is unalterably changed by time and other forces, these people and places do not seem gone. They seem real, alive, present. The people seem human, their cultures important, their habits interesting, their perspectives valuable. I think this is the magic that Albert Kahn was hoping to create.
* * *
* There is an appendix explaining the technical aspects of the autochrome process, which helps illuminate why the images look the way they do — and of course it’s also interesting because autochromes work so very differently than the photographic processes we typically use today.
Filed under: science
Rats : observations on the history and habitat of the city’s most unwanted inhabitants / Robert Sullivan.
New York : Bloomsbury : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2004.
[MCL call number: 599.352 S951r 2004; 14 copies, no holds]
Rats are bad. They inhabit our nightmares. In fairy tales and children’s books, rats are often cast in an evil light, in the company of wolves, crows, vultures, bears, cobras, and other scary animals. They are night-dwellers, their teeth are sharp and nasty, they infest ships and tenements and scavenge humanity’s leavings, they’re skittery when we startle them but vicious when their backs are against a wall; they are dangerous, they’re vermin, they don’t share our interests and we cannot have any kind of meaningful communion with them. These are the lessons of our culture. Rats are bad.
But human culture has more than folklore, more than tradition and street smarts and history. We have also science. The core methodology of western science is the trajectory of hypothesis, careful observation or test, and reasoned analysis. It is difficult to shake the fear, the nightmares, and the fairy tales about rats, but if we can do so, and follow this relaxation of basic emotional response with methodical examination, we may learn to understand rats a bit, predict their actions, appreciate their virtues, and maybe even modify our own systems to accommodate rats a bit better while still meeting our own needs.
And this is what Robert Sullivan set out to do. He spent a year observing the rats indigenous to a particular alley in lower Manhattan at night, while during the day he researched rat biology and natural history, rats’ impact in New York and other cities, rat extermination, and other rat-related topics. This makes for more of a history and less of a scientific study, but it is still true that Sullivan began with the premise that he should do his best to observe first, and analyze and judge second.
In the long run, the story is sadder than it is hopeful. Reading the first few chapters, Sullivan’s observations in the alley inspired in me a respect for rats and their abilities, their strengths. Sullivan’s diary of rat observations were like those of a naturalist in the wild — careful, methodical notations of events. He recorded patterns and attempted to identify individuals. When the rats did something he hadn’t seen before, he considered the environment around them and looked for rationales for their behavior, all the while trying to think like a rat might — or at least trying not to think only like a human. But Sullivan’s record of his observations is only part of the book: another significant portion of the text reports Sullivan’s interviews with professional exterminators and municipal rat control authorities. I found this depressing. Reading Sullivan’s reports of scores of conversations with people whose careers focus on killing rats, I began to teeter between sympathy for the hapless rodents (who, after all, are nocturnal scavengers because it is their nature, not because they are actually evil or vicious or sent by an enemy to vex humans), and a sort of generalized civic interest in their eradication from cities, for the benefit of urban humanity and to create a more harmonious urban ecosystem. Not a pleasant fence to find oneself sitting on.
Anyone fascinated, interested, or horrified by rats should find something in Sullivan’s text to pique their interest — but if you, like most people, already have a conception of rats as bad vermin, or as cuddly pets, beware that neither side wins in this narrative. Rats are shown as fascinating, even noble wild creatures; they are also shown as dangerous pests who will bite children’s faces as they sleep.
* * *
If you are looking for an book that takes a different line about rats, a book that casts them as intelligent creatures with a meaningful social network and complex interactions with the world around them, you can hardly do better than the children’s classic Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien (many publishers, 1971-present). It is the story of a widow mouse with a sick child who seeks the help of a community of super smart, super scary rats who live in a bramble bush. Mrs. Frisby’s husband had known these rats; they had all escaped from a National Institute of Mental Health laboratory together after several years of experiments. These experiments, and their results, are an important feature of the story — the rats and their mouse friends are bigger, stronger, smarter, and more long-lived than other rats and mice, because of their time at NIMH. So they’re not just rats, they’re special rats. But I’ll tell you, when I read this book as a child, I came away feeling sure that rats were more complex and admirable than I’d previously thought. And after reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I was plenty pissed off that humans are so often too lazy to find a way to do genetic research without torturing rats and mice.
Filed under: technology
The fruit hunters : a story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession / Adam Leith Gollner.
New York : Scribner, c2008.
[MCL call number: 641.34 G626f 2008; 13 copies, no holds;
also in audiobook format at: CD- 641.34 G626f; five copies, no holds]
Probably all of you have encountered a mysterious fruit at some time in your lives. Perhaps you met it in the produce section of an grocery store specializing in imports from afar, perhaps you ate it while traveling abroad or even just in another part of your own country. Perhaps you’ve never eaten this fruit; you’ve only read about it and wondered what it might be like to actually taste it.
Adam Leith Gollner traveled widely, ate every new fruit he could find, and scouted out scientists and farmers and weirdos who are obsessed with fruit — and recorded his experiences in The Fruit Hunters. It’s not really a book about fruit; it’s about people and fruit. In talking about the people, he has to talk about the fruits, of course, so you get some of both; but it’s the fruit crazies, the obsessives, the true believers who are really the focus. These people’s stories are so varied and bizarre that it’s hard to characterize them, but here’s a terse sampling of a few of the remarkable fruits and fruit-lovers you’ll find in Gollner’s text:
Fruitarians eat only fruit: for increased health, to build a closer communion with God, or to maintain a connection to primeval man. Some vary the fruit-only rule by eating a “caveman diet;” fruits and air-dried raw meat. Others eat fruits and mineralized rock dust. But all maintain that eating a diet overwhelmingly composed of fruit is the best, the purest, the most compelling. Gollner visits several fruitarians and dines with them, while discussing spirituality, the practice of traveling around the world following the ripening cycle of durian fruit (see below), and other topics.
Gary Snyder, an apple grower in Wenatchee, Washington, has invented a fruit product called the Grapple. This horrifying concoction begins as a Gala or Fuji apple, which is then permeated throughout with artificial grape flavoring. It’s available in blister packs of four at big box stores, and in some places, pre-sliced in baggies. Gollner visits Snyder and tours his facility, though the secret method for turning apples into Grapples is not revealed.
Eat a miracle fruit, a berry grows in the sub-tropics, and everything — seriously, everything — you put in your mouth for the next couple of hours will taste sweet. Gollner meets fruit people around the world who grow the berries themselves and are willing to share a few with him, but in the U.S. they’re almost unknown. The berries contain a protein called miraculin, which acts as a short-term befuddler for taste buds, making sour things taste sweet. Miraculin is banned by the FDA, very possibly due to secret pressure from sugar company lobbyists.
The durian is renowned as the foulest-smelling fruit on earth. Durians are famously banned from the subway system in Singapore, and they are unwelcome in many refined public places, such as fancy hotels, throughout Asia. And yet the durian is a beloved fruit in its home territory, and fruit tourists seek it out. Durian-scented condoms, Gollner reports, are popular in Indonesia.
The Fruit Hunters acts a bit like a history of fruit, but Gollner is a journalist and it shows. His writing style is informative while still a bit breezy, and the book is something like a very long lifestyle piece of the sort you might find in a highbrow magazine or newspaper. The facts-and-figures addict in me was a little frustrated at times, but on the whole I found the book quite captivating. And The Fruit Hunters easily passed one of the tests I use to see if I should review a book here in Duck Duck Book — while reading it, I often found myself wanting to read bits and pieces out loud to anyone who happened to be around, or sometimes, to a friend or colleague who I thought would enjoy a specific anecdote or factoid.
Filed under: technology
New York’s forgotten substations : the power behind the subway / Christopher Payne.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 625.4 P346n 2002; two copies, no holds]
Does it not seem that everything about a big city’s subway system should be underground? All the machinery and all the mechanisms to control the subway surely ought to fit neatly below the streets, as the stations and tunnels do. Even the transit system control room that sometimes features in action films is in a windowless room and therefore, filmgoers imagine, is probably underground along with all the other subway infrastructure.
But not everything that makes the trains go fits under the earth. Notwithstanding suburban lines and stations that are wholly aboveground, the power that electrifies the third rail or the overhead wire has to come from somewhere — usually somewhere well away from the tunnels and the tracks. In New York City, the subway system was built with strategically placed power substations near each line. In each one, electrical power from generating stations around the region was converted from high voltage alternating current to low voltage direct current, which ran the trains. In the early 20th century, each of these substations was filled with giant round machines called rotary converters, as well as a quantity of other mechanical equipment like switches, busses, gauges, and breakers.
These substations have now been taken out of service, or had their equipment replaced with more modern technology — but in the late 1990s as the last manual substations were being scrapped, photographer Christopher Payne visited as many as he could, and took pictures of the buildings and their equipment. In this slim volume, some substations are shown with modern electronic equipment side by side with out-of-date manual equipment. Some are disused hulks filled with crumbling machinery, weeds, and peeling paint. Some photographs focus on the incredible workmanship and decorative detail in utilitarian structures like cast iron staircases, window frames, and building facades. All of Payne’s pictures highlight the inherent beauty of the machines and their environment.
Payne introduces his photographs with a series of short essays on the history of New York City’s transit substations, the machines they employed, the methods of their operation, and the basics of how they worked. The essays are supported by dozens of historical and contemporary photographs of substation buildings and workers running the power conversion machinery, and many diagrams explaining the layout of the machinery and the principles by which it operated. Payne’s history and technical explanations are fantastically clear, and his own photographs are both beautiful and interesting. So you should find the book educational, if you want to learn more about the power that runs the trains; and should also find it engaging, if you are interested in the beauty that can be found in practical things.
Filed under: history & geography
Chaining Oregon : surveying the public lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855 / by Kay Atwood.
Blacksburg, VA : McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 2008.
[MCL call number: 917.9504 A887c 2008; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
When the United States expanded west, it was a major element of public policy to encourage settlers to go out there and carve their names into the land. Farming, ranching, and even mining all marked the territory as belonging to settlers — and land controlled by settlers was more American, in a cultural sense as well as a political one. Measuring the land, marking boundaries, and drawing maps showing what was there and who controlled each piece were important foundational steps that helped transform what was seen as wild space into a civilized, productive, and law-abiding nation. The first U.S. maps elucidating land ownership were drawn by draftsmen working for the General Land Office (later absorbed by the Bureau of Land Management), and they worked from measurements and notes taken by surveyors. The first surveyors in what is now Oregon and Washington began their work in 1851 after the passage of the Oregon Donation Land Act.
Land surveyors in the 1850s did much the same sort of work surveyors do now — except that these first surveyors in the Oregon and Washington territories were the pioneers of mapping in our region. If you look at a modern map showing land use and ownership in any part of Oregon or Washington, you’ll see properties measured with lines that were originally drawn by General Land Office surveyors in the 1850s. And here’s how they did it: they took basic (though often delicate) mechanical measuring equipment out into the valleys and the wilderness and measured. Teams of about five to eight men surveyed by hand, mostly in the rain and mud, often working from dawn till dusk. They walked survey lines in an area twelve to sixty miles wide from the southern end of the Puget Sound south to the California border in the space of five years. Chaining Oregon is a history of this project. Kay Atwood carefully and clearly explains the scientific and institutional history of the first surveys of the Oregon Territory — the bureaucracy, the technical challenges, local and national politics, the difficulties of weather and staffing and getting paid, and interactions between settlers and Oregon’s Surveyor General — while at the same time sharing relevant pieces of the broader history of Oregon.
In addition to their work of measuring and describing the land, surveyors kept detailed journals of their field work. These journals included notes about the weather, names of people they met or lodged with, conversations they had, meals they ate, and so on, as well as subjects more germane to the work, like where fences were, the quality of the soils, and the prevailing species of timber in forested areas. The bits more clearly connected to the work of surveying often show up on the maps — for example, a great swath of what is now east Portland is described on the map of Township 1N Range 1E Willamette Meridian as: “Land gently rolling soil good rate clay loam / Timber Fir a little Maple Cedar and Hemlock.” Atwood uses the whole range of information in the surveyor’s field notes (not just the businesslike parts), as well as the first survey maps and the correspondence and other records of the office of Oregon’s Surveyor General to build the core of a riveting history of a specific part of the Pacific Northwest’s past. She connects her basic source material to other documentation of life and civilization in early Oregon, and to secondary histories of the region and its people, but her most remarkable achievement is that she has made a largely technical story read like a completely human one.
The men who did the actual work, and those who administered it, are Atwood’s chief characters. The places they traveled and the land they described are also important to her story. Atwood did not set out to relate any of the many other interesting stories that are secondary to this central thread — the development of urban centers in Oregon, for example, or the struggles settlers faced when their individual situations did not neatly line up with federal land claim regulations. But she does make modest reflection on many of these other stories an important part of her narrative. Her descriptions of daily life in the towns of Oregon City, Portland, and Jacksonville are vivid. She clearly explains local and national party politics (normally an exceedingly confusing topic) in so far as they affected the project of surveying Oregon. And Atwood’s quotes from surveyors’ field notes about physical features of a specific spot are often followed by a brief but careful discussion of how white settlers had already irrevocably changed that piece land, and how this affected the lifeways and future prospects of the Indians who already lived there.
Many readers, even those interested in Oregon’s history, might expect a history of the state’s first land surveys to be dry and uninteresting. Perhaps other histories of surveying projects are indeed dry, but Chaining Oregon is engaging and clear, and reading it invites further study of many interesting facets of our region’s past and the people and events that shaped it.
Chaining Oregon is supplemented by extensive endnotes, a thorough if somewhat dry bibliography, and an index. As usual, I think the index is only minimally useful — it has almost no entries for surveying equipment and techniques, and neglects to provide access points for memorable subjects that are secondary to the narrative but which are so often the parts readers will remember later. However, the index provides adequate access to proper nouns and it is better than nothing.
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The University of Oregon Map and Aerial Photography Library has a lovely collection of General Land Office maps of Oregon on its website. You can’t view the maps online; instead you have to download them. But they’re pretty small files and it doesn’t take too long for them to download.
The Portland Planning Bureau has the two earliest General Land Office maps showing the townships were central Portland is now, in pdf form, as a part of its collection of online historic resources. Township 1N Range 1E is the map I quoted from above; Township 1S Range 1E shows the area south of what is now SE Stark St. (which used to be called Baseline Road, because it follows the Willamette Baseline!).
Since you’re reading this, I’m fairly sure you’re interested in books and information — and more particularly, that you appreciate recommendations about what to read next or thoughts about why a book, an article, or a film is interesting, how it connects to the rest of the world of literature, what it promises, and whether these promises are delivered on. You must, or why would you be reading Duck Duck Book? And so. I am pleased to recommend that you visit another couple of places where you can get suggestions about what to read and why: Multnomah County Library’s two new blogs, News Notes and An Embarrassment of Riches.
(Before I get one step further I must disclaim: as you know I work at Multnomah County Library as a reference librarian. So I’m biased in favor of these two blogs. And further, I am one of the authors of News Notes, which makes me even more biased in its favor. Now that I have confessed, I will go on to describe the joys of reading about reading in these particular spots, and you may judge the size of the grain of salt you need to take with my enthusiasm.)
News Notes recommends books and other diversions inspired by current news stories — sometimes providing an avenue for background research or suggesting reading that can help you put the news in context — and sometimes offering more of a stream-of-consciousness beginning with a bit of news, and moving on to whatever comes next in the mind of a librarian.
An Embarrassment of Riches is something of a free-for-all — it opens a little window into the minds of dozens of library staff people who share intelligent observations about a broad range of literature. As its authors say, An Embarrassment of Riches alerts readers to “the best of what the library has to offer.”
Take a look at both; my guess is that you’ll find some surprises.
Duck Duck Book 