Armed Gunmen, True Facts, and Other Ridiculous Nonsense

A Compiled Compendium of Repetitive Redundancies. Richard Kalls. Pantheon 2005.

Pretty much the title says it all. In all honesty though this book could actually be a long chapter in some other book - or an essay. Extremely important in order to remind us not to abuse our language, but they really had to insert a great number of "fillers" in order to stretch this out to something even remotely resembling booklength.

VG

House of Invention

The Secret Life of Everyday Products. David Lindsay. Lyons Press, 2000.

Extremely fascinating read - it shows much more than the creation of things like the disposable razor, the screw thread, the electrical outlet. This is actually more of a treatise on the entrepreneurial spirit that used to pervade this country. This book acutally supports my theory that America was actually built during the last decades of the 19th Century, and that we've actually been on a steady decline ever since . . . made more interesting by the fact that most of these inventions came from that time, and the only significant invention after that time mentioned in this book is the Nautilus machine - in 1970.

However, this book also is a great study of the people who create and disseminate, and in that text it can actually be read as a casebook on slightly abnormal psychology, as this text is replete with stories of sometimes slightly more-than-offbeat characters.

Some of the highlights: Gillette, who made the razor, spending most of his time and energy writing books about future utopian humanitarian society, eventually completely irritating his financier. The man who made vaseline, wandering the countryside like some carnival barker, promoting the product for one singular use for which it was NOT used: although it was great for everything else. The Kellogg brothers - (and now I know what was the inspiration for the movie The Road to Wellville!) and how they made breakfast flakes: they used to grind the cereal for the daily mixture with a giant machine in the basement, but one time they acidentally left the stuff there, and came back after three days to find it crusty and dried . . . however, once they found out how to dry the stuff without the corresponding mold, they had the very first breakfast cereal. Then the screw thread, developed about 300 years ago by a Frenchman who wanted to create robots. And the condom, with no discernable "inventor" but made lively by the stories that have sprung up around it.

My favourite however, was the story of the lady who invented the bra. Quite the libertine, actually, and I'm quite certain that her life could me more than just a chapter in this book - but rather has its place in the annals of Victorian erotic literature.

I hope that has tantalized your taste for this tome. I would say check it out . . . definitely a fun read!

VG

a night without armor

Jewel Kilcher. Harper Collins, 1998.

Took me awhile to pick up this book, I figured some folky singer who had one megahit in the early nineties, writin' poetry? c'mon . . .

and when I did start to read it I found them to be a bit jeuvenile, sorrry to say, and they somewhat reminded me of old hippie poetry, sorta like Gary Snyder's Turtle Island-type stuff - the autobiographical stuff is completely there: raised in Alaska by DIY-hippie musician parents, etc.

But the latter half of the poems start to get better. Basically when her focus is off of herself and is put on the characters she sees - then her work starts to come alive, to become more poignant, more pertinent.

"Sara Said"
"Grimshaw"
"Underage"

Those are my favourite from the collection.

Also, the best songs are the ones where you can actually hear Jewel singing them, if she ever made them into songs. I suppose that indicates that she does have a distinctive "voice" (both literally and metaphorically/poetically.

VG

A Time Not Here

Photographs by Norman Mauskpf, essay by Randall Kenan. subtitle: The Mississippi Delta. Twin Pal - I forgot what year, need to find out - think it was pretty recently published.

Anyway, this is a beautiful book, absolutely beautiful. The B/W photographs are stark and powerful, yet full of soul and have some smooth motion in them, and poring over them I swear you can actually feel the thick air of the Mississippi Delta lumbering by . . . you find yourself swatting at a mosquito on your neck. You inhale the thick fumes of cigar smoke from the two old old men playing checkers on the wooden deck - you HEAR the strains of the old guitar.

These pictures are that powerful.

The essay is just as good - the language flowing and lilted, as though the prose was set the the lowdown jazz straight from the gutbucket - I kid you not : IMHO, this essay sounds like it was written with the soul of Langston Hughes and the rhythm of Kerouac.

Like I said, beautiful book. A must for anybody who collects nice books or anything that perfectly captures a small significant section of Americana.

VG

NTC's Dictionary of Euphamisms

Bertram, Ann. NTC Publishing Group, Chicago. 1998. subtitle: the ost practical guide to unraveling euphamisms.

The book's promoted as being helpful to ESL students, and that would be its greatest strength, most definitely - also, I like the way that they have included more than just the "duhr-ty" words, (even though those are the most popular!) So it's good giving an overview on that respect.

However, the edition is really replete with many so-called "Politically Correct" connotives, many of which have frankly never caught on, and it's possible that a person could consider this edition, ahem, out of date

(which is really a shame, considering that it's only 8 years old. Nice comment on the condition of our culture, isn't it?


consider this: this sentence that I'm writing will be out of date the moment I attach a period to the end of it.)



Now it's old news. Frighenting, isn't it?


Anyway, back to the book: it purports to be slightly tongue-in-cheek about the PC terms, but even so, it puts a lot in there. I mean, come on! "Nondisabled" ?? means "able bodied" but it's a great commentary on our language, in that we are SOO desiring of making all people feel included that we will cast a FOCUS upon their differences in order to set the non-related group against it in order to increase the sense of inclusion. That is: call attention to it, thereby setting up the primary group as the somehow lesser group, in order to make the disenfranchised the primary.

whoa. I sound like a real jerk there, I know, but you kind of see the point. Nondisabled is like calling all blondes "nonbrunette" or all righthanded people "non-southpaws."

While I believe firmly that America should be all-inclusive, I also believe that we should stop making our language sillier than it already is. Let's make these words and use them in comedy shows, but not make dictionaries replete with them, OK?

Actually, I've spent too long on this one book and kind of gotten off on several different tangents and haven't really gotten to any one point, so I'll just leave you with this: even though this book indicates that it thinks PC is silly, it's really rather tame on the subject.

All in all, good for a few phrases. Like I said, I'd recommend it for ESL and those who study the history of the English language in by-decade increments.

VG

A Way of Seeing

Photographs by Helen Levitt, with an essay by James Agee. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1989.

Amazing B&W photographs - not amazing for any sort of technical brilliance, but because of the moment in time that they captured - New York during the 1940's. What you notice mostly is the shots of children, doing things that were then innocent, but today would be frightening, i.e. playing with toy guns, looking up girls' skirts, etc. What was in our collective memory as somewhat scatalogical, yet still inherently innocent, explorations into violence and sexuality, something to be worked out and grown through, today is indicative of all that is frightening in our society.

Also, I was startled by the apparent mixture of race and culture - in an era in which there was still supposedly such divisions along colour boundaries, there seemed to be a lot of black kids playing with white kids playing with hispanic kids. Maybe that was just the take that Levitt had on life at that time, but that came through.

Lastly, the obvious - no young adult males. There were only children, women, and old men. You possibly wouldn't even have noticed the lack unless you had prior knowledge that these were shot during WWII, but it is kind of haunting to realize that the country truly, indeed, had EVERY young male in a war somewhere around the world.

VG

The Chronicles of Narnia

CS Lewis.

Just finished all seven. The entire collection. I should have done that years ago.