Culture – Page 7 – Into the Woods

A strange book about fairies

Source: eBay

The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. W.Y. Evans Wentz, Oxford University Press, 1911.

The English historian Ronald Hutton has persuasively argued that there is no continuous history of paganism in the British Isles. Rather, during the 19th Century there was a revival of, and a romanticization of, interest in Celtic paganism. This book, published in 1911, is almost certainly a product of that romanticization and revival. Yet, despite the apparent credulity of its author, W.Y. Evans Wentz, there is much in this book that is genuine, in that Wentz’s interviews were with old folks who were describing actual folk memories as opposed to any new material made up by 19th Century romanticizers.

My biggest surprise with this book is that it is superbly written. The first few chapters are lyrical, picturesque descriptions of the places where Wentz traveled to do his interviews — Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, and the Isle of Man.

First editions of this book are rare and very expensive. At present, two first editions are listed on eBay, one at $750 and the other at $999.95. Because the book has been in the public domain for quite some time, there are many reprints for which the text, I assume, was taken from Gutenberg.org.

Wentz, though he obviously was very intelligent and wrote beautifully, must have been quite a poseur. One of the photos of Wentz on Wikipedia shows him dressed in an elaborate Tibetan costume. It seems there wasn’t any form of mysticism that he wasn’t into, including Theosophy. Yet I think Wentz’s book about fairies contains real scholarship with his snapshot of folk beliefs — folk beliefs that I suspect actually were continuous and accounts of which he captured from about 1907 to 1910. Wentz’s papers are at Stanford University and Oxford University.

Only for the woke

I was greatly amused a few weeks ago to read that right-wingers were having fits because Chick-fil-A, a company that struts its “Christian” right-wingery, was market-testing a cauliflower sandwich. I had never been to a Chick-fil-A for two good reasons: I don’t want to patronize a company that struts its right-wingery, and I haven’t eaten chicken for years.

But today, while on a grocery run to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods in Winston-Salem, I felt a bit peckish, and I happened to be near a Chick-fil-A. So why not try out the cauliflower sandwich and have a bit of fun thumbing my nose at the deplorables? It seems the test sandwich is available only in Denver, Charleston, and Greensboro/Winston-Salem. Those three places are places that vote blue.

Surprise, surprise. It tasted just like fast food, though fortunately it didn’t taste like chicken. If the cauliflower sandwich is still on their menu a year or two from now, perhaps I’ll even go have another one.

Great Expectations, but not what we were expecting

It’s certainly not my intention to be so contrary in my taste in books and films. It seems I just can’t help myself. While everyone is raving about The Last of Us, with its 96 percent RottenTomatoes rating, I thought (at least after three and a half episodes, which was all I could endure) that it was the worst sort of television trash — dumb and snarky dialogue, irritating low-life characters, and just another lame zombie movie, a genre that refuses to die but really, really ought to.

And now there is a new version of Great Expectations. Its RottenTomatoes rating is 38/33, but it’s one of the best period pieces I’ve come across in a while. I don’t understand this. What’s wrong with me?

All too often (particularly, I think, on HBO) scripts try to deceive us with quirk, snark, zingy insults, and then more quirk and more snark. But real imagination is much less common.

This version of Great Expectations does not stick to the Dickens. It’s re-imagined, and I would even say that it’s improved upon, though I haven’t read Great Expectations since high school. The dialogue is excellent. The cast is superb. It’s very adult. If it were a book, it would be banned in high schools as well as in universities in Florida.

The series started yesterday (March 26) on Hulu. Two episodes have been released so far. The next episode (of six) will be released on April 2.

Here’s a link to the trailer on YouTube. I highly recommend it.

When design was soft and kind

My IBM Selectric I, made in 1974, restored by a former IBM field engineer. The Selectric I typewriters were introduced in 1961. Click here for high resolution version.

I have written in the past about how today’s taste in automobile design is for aggressive-looking, mean-looking, vehicles. Even Volkswagen, whose designs used to charm people, now makes cars that look like they’re sneering at you. The 300-horsepower Arteon Volkswagen looks like a bully, with a vaguely sadistic expression. The sociology of this is no doubt disturbing. But let’s talk about designs that charm, and soothe, and purr, and lower one’s blood pressure, like petting the cat.

The IBM Selectric I typewriter, I believe, is not only the most beautiful typewriter ever made, but also is one of the most beautiful machines ever made. It was designed by Eliot Noyes. It first came on the market in 1961. The Selectric II came along in 1973, and the Selectric III in 1980. The Selectric II and III, though still beautiful machines, don’t have the please-pet-me cat-like curves of the Selectric I, and they’re too wide and industrial-looking to be charming.

Maybe not everyone would see a cat in the design of the Selectric I, but I do, not least because it reminds me of the Jaguar S-type, which was introduced during the same era as the Selectric I, in 1963. I have not been able to find the name of any particular designer for the Jaguar cars. But it seems clear that Jaguar design reflects the taste of Sir William Lyons, also known as “Mr. Jaguar,” who ran the company until he retired in 1972.

For five years, I have been driving a Fiat 500. It’s mouse gray. Though the Fiat 500 is one of the most popular cars in the world, Americans (other than a few people like me) wouldn’t buy them, and Fiat stopped selling them in the U.S. My guess is that the unpopularity of the Fiat 500 is not just because it’s small. It also looks like a mouse, or maybe a vole. Driving a Fiat 500, I suspect, is very healthy for one’s blood pressure, at least until some mean-looking car with a mean driver gets behind you.

It pleases me greatly that typewriters are having a renaissance. And it’s not just typewriter veterans like me. Most of the interest is coming from members of Generation Z. There is a very active Reddit group. It’s charming, really, that young people buy typewriters before they have the slightest idea how to use them. For example, with manual typewriters, they don’t understand that one strikes the keys rather than pressing them. A common question with older typewriters is: Where is the “1” key? That drove me crazy, too, when I was about nine years old, until someone told me to try the lower-case “L” key. Nor do the Generation Z types know that, to make an exclamation point, one first types a period, then backspaces and types an apostrophe. The Selectrics, though, all along had enough room on those tilt-and-rotate type balls for a “1” and a “!”.

Restoration of the IBM Selectrics is very challenging. Fortunately there are still a few old guys around who used to work for IBM. Some younger people are learning. Parts, of course, are no longer made. Some nylon parts in the Selectrics, such as the main drive hub, almost always have cracked, and that doomed an old Selectric. This problem has been solved by people who use 3D printers to make replacement parts, usually out of aluminum.

There also is a lot of interest in learning what kind of typewriters our favorite writers used to use. J.R.R. Tolkien favored the very expensive Varityper machines. Isaac Asimov loved his Selectric I. There are photographs of Hunter S. Thompson with his Selectric I, which was red, like mine. According to the Washington Post, Jack Kerouac used an Underwood portable, Ernest Hemingway used a Royal Quiet Deluxe, and Ayn Rand used a Remington portable. It is sometimes said that it was from Remington Rand that Ayn Rand chose her last name (her birth name was Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), but I believe that has been disproven. I have rarely typed on Remington typewriters, which is fine with me since I can’t stand Ayn Rand.

Still today, IBM is proud of the Selectric typewriter’s history, and there are articles on IBM’s web site including an article on the Selectrics’ cultural impact.

My bossy 15-year-old cat, Lily, would never tolerate another cat in the house, preventing me from becoming a crazy old cat person. But homeless and scroungy old typewriters, like cats, beg to be rescued, fixed up, and looked after in a forever home.

⬆︎ A 1966 Jaguar S-type saloon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

⬆︎ A Fiat 500. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

⬆︎ Isaac Asimov with his IBM Selectric I. The illustration, by Rowena Morrill, was for the cover of Asimov’s Opus 200.

⬆︎ Type sample from my IBM Selectric I, which uses a fabric (as opposed to film) ribbon.

Euell Gibbons, 1974

Euell Gibbons, near High Point, North Carolina, February 1974

I came across this photo today while going through an old box of photos. I have sometimes mentioned to people that I once went foraging with Euell Gibbons and took a nice picture of him, but I had never scanned the picture, and I had forgotten what box the photo was in. Today I came across the photo while sorting through my disorganized archives.

It was February of 1974. A reporter friend at the Winston-Salem Journal (which was the first newspaper I ever worked for) had arranged an interview and a foraging trip with Gibbons, who probably was on a publicity tour. My reporter friend asked me to go along, since I at least had a bit of experience with foraging while she had none.

Even on a strawberry farm in February, Gibbons found plenty to eat. After the foraging, the owners of the strawberry farm had invited us to fix lunch in their kitchen, using our foraging finds.

I still remember taking that photo. I saw the row of ducks on the far end of the field, and I realized that if I made a quick dash to get into position, I could get a photo of Gibbons with the ducks in the background. The Winston-Salem Journal, of course, had photographers, and copy-editing, not photography, was my job. But rather than sending a staff photographer over to the next county, they trusted me to come back with pictures.

Sadly, Gibbons died the following year. He was quite a cultural phenomenon in the early 1970s — outdoorsman and natural foods advocate. I am pretty sure that Stalking the Wild Asparagus has been kept in print for all these years. I lost my first edition years ago but replaced it with a new edition that doesn’t seem to have a date other than the date of the first edition, 1962.

Carnival Row

Vignette and Philo, before Philo got his ridiculous hat and his bad haircut.

When the “Carnival Row” series started in 2019, I ignored it because I misconstrued what it was. It’s fantasy. But because of the name, and because of the stupid hat that Orlando Bloom wears in the promotional photos (under which is a very unbecoming haircut), I assumed that the Orlando Bloom character was a carnival barker and that the series had to do with a bunch of dysfunctional people rejected by society who traveled with a carnival. I was wrong.

A second season starts this Friday on Amazon Prime Video. The first season is now streaming again, and I took a closer look. “Carnival Row” actually is the name of a rough street in an imaginary city that is a lot like a gothic, pagan, somewhat steampunk London of the 19th Century. The Orlando Bloom character, Philo, is a detective who tries to protect the odd people who live on Carnival Row. Philo has a secret (which is revealed in episode 3). Some of these odd people have hooves. Some have wings and can fly. The ones with wings are called fae, and they’re a lot like human-size faeries. One of the fae, Vignette (played by the very fey English actress Cara Delevingne), has a grudge against Philo (also explained in episode 3).

After four episodes (of eight) in the first season, I’ve discovered that “Carnival Row” is a good bit of fun to watch. The sets and settings are excellent. The cast, which includes Indira Varma, is expensive. If this series had better writers rather than writers who are somewhere short of excellent, it would be great. It’s the writing that falls short, with dialogue that’s just not quite good enough for the cast.

In short, “Carnival Row” probably deserves its weak Rotten Tomatoes score of 57/88. But when there’s not anything better to watch, it will do.

As for anything better, I am mystified why “The Last of Us” has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97/91. To my taste, it’s pure junk, nothing more than yet another lame zombie series, a useless genre that should have died twenty years ago. “Zombie genre” is a double entendre — a genre that keeps stumbling around and refuses to die. Yes, episode 3, which a friend persuaded me to watch, was completely different. But episode 4 (I won’t watch any more of it) went right back to the usual boring zombie nonsense. I wasted a lot of popcorn watching four episodes. Even perfectly popped Orville Reddenbacher with sea salt, real butter powder, and brewer’s yeast couldn’t make “The Last of Us” fit to watch.

Meanwhile, “Mandalorian” season 3 will start on Disney+ on March 1, a series that’s more than worth its popcorn.

Don’t we have heretics anymore?

Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 2022. 546 pages.

I almost never read bestsellers, and this book reminded me why. This book makes me want to go read some Jordan Peterson or something to wash the politically correct taste out of my mouth. Please don’t misunderstand me. My own liberal political views would almost surely be classified as 100 percent politically correct. But that doesn’t mean that I think that political correctness makes for good literature. Do we really need to be harangued and hectored about what we already know? There’s something insulting and condescending about that.

R.F. Kuang’s harangues in Babel: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, are about capitalism and British imperialism. Good grief. Isn’t it about 150 years too late for that? Then again, make that 250 years, because writers should be ahead of their time, not behind.

There was another clue that I should have checked in advance before I bought this book or spent umpteen hours reading it. That’s the rating that Babel got on Goodreads, a wretched hive of mean and mediocre-minded readers if there ever was one. Truly good books (if they get read at all) will almost always get marked down by vindictive readers ganging up to push a book’s ratings down if the book contains the slightest whiff of heresy. Goodreads doesn’t think very highly of heresy or boat-rocking. Whereas books like Babel will get mostly 5-star reviews from the hive. Babel would be boat-rocking only if Charlotte Brontë had written it, when Victoria was on the throne.

R.F. Kuang is a good writer with, obviously, a remarkably good education and many interesting ideas. But that’s no guarantee that she can write a good novel (though she can write novels that are guaranteed to get published). Sure, the world is still dealing with the consequences of British imperialism and slavery. But we know that. A novelist’s job — particularly a scholarly novelist like Kuang — is to be on the leading edge, not to grind (at great length — 546 pages) a very old axe. What could she add to what ahead-of-their-time scholars have already written?

As for the mediocrity and vindictiveness of Goodreads, check out some of the 1-star reviews of, say, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, or John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, both of which rocked the boat a little too hard. Kuang’s Babel has a higher Goodreads rating than either of them. Babel also got a slightly higher Goodreads rating that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), which rocked the boat too much for mediocre readers and told us things that some people weren’t ready to hear. The Color Purple was not, as far as I can determine, a bestseller, and it’s on a list of the 100 books most frequently targeted for bans. Alice Walker was brave and heretical. Books like Kuang’s just invite approval.

Kuang’s characters are really very sweet, though. The atmosphere she stirs up in old Oxford is appealing. Some of her asides on linguistics are very interesting. But would you be surprised if I told you how diverse her four main characters are? One is Black, one is Chinese, one is an Indian Moslem, and one is white. The white character’s cluelessness is a foil for the what the other characters say to educate her.

Though, as I said, Kuang is a good writer, I think she lost control of this novel. Three-quarters of the way through, the dialogue loses it polish and the plotting grows careless.

But the greatest weakness of this book is plain old failure of imagination. All the gothic frills of fantasy are present, but all that remains underneath that is a rant and a harangue with no new insights. And not a whiff of heresy to redeem it.

The Berlin Philharmonic, on line

Months ago, I downloaded the Berlin Philharmonic’s app on my Apple TV. But the slowness of my rural internet connection wouldn’t support it — not even close. Using a cellular hot spot, my download speed typically was about 2 Mbps, though sometimes in the past it was even slower than that. And then suddenly, when I made one of my periodic checks to see if T-Mobile’s home internet service was available to me, I was told that it was. I signed up. T-Mobile sent me a router. That was last week, and I still consider the new setup to be on probation. But now I’m getting real broadband speeds, sometimes as high as 100 Mbps download — somewhat slow by urban standards but a miracle here in the sticks. To celebrate, I splurged on a one-year “season ticket” for the Berlin Philharmonic. It is changing my life.

I would love to know how the economics of their on-line presence is working for the Berlin Philharmonic. It must be one of the richest orchestras in the world, though, like many rich musical institutions including the Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic must have taken a huge hit during the Covid pandemic. The concerts went on, sometimes to an empty house, on line only; and sometimes to a reduced audience, with everyone spaced four seats apart. It would seem, though, as things return to normal, that the orchestra’s “Digital Concert Hall” not only has expanded the orchestra’s audience but also is making money for the orchestra. A one-year subscription costs $150. The quality of the video and audio are superb. The orchestra has a packed schedule, and most concerts are streamed live. With a subscription, there are 733 concerts available in the archive. The quality of the video, the audio, and the production is extremely good.

One of the hardest parts of living in the sticks is the cultural isolation. I am surrounded by deplorables. There is, of course, a strong culture of folk music and country music in the Appalachians and the foothills. But frankly it doesn’t do much for me. Most of the locals who do country music have little or no musical training. There is just no substitute for superbly trained musicians doing the kind of music that superbly trained musicians do.

During my years in San Francisco, I often bought season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony. When I didn’t have season tickets, an old friend who was in the orchestra would give me complimentary tickets. It’s a good thing to support one’s local orchestra. Thanks to the disappointingly slow expansion of broadband into rural areas, an expansion which is finally reaching me, I find that the Berlin Philharmonic is now my local orchestra. Though there is no substitute for the collective experience of actually being in a concert hall, watching (and listening to) a live or recorded concert actually has some advantages. One gets to see the orchestra, the conductor, and the soloists from up close and from many different angles. The Berlin Philharmonic video is so good that you can sometimes read the music on the music stands. The presence of the audience also makes a difference, something that becomes clear if you watch one of the orchestra’s somehow-sad Covid-era concerts in an empty hall. Especially when watching a concert live, as I did last Saturday, one can almost imagine being there.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s “Digital Concert Hall” has apps for most devices. You also can watch in a web browser. Their web site is here.

When retro is way better

That was my telephone number in San Francisco for many years. I apologize to whoever has that number now.

A little Googling shows that the first cell phones became available in March 1984. I admit that I was fascinated and aspired to own one. It was not until 1995, though, that I first acquired a cell phone. That was when I went to work for the San Francisco Examiner, and they assigned me a phone as a 24/7 tether to the office.

The cell phones of the 1990s actually were quite good, though they were big and heavy. As long as you had a decent signal, the voice quality was as good as land lines. Then cellular service started going digital. We were promised that digital would be much better than analog, but that was a lie. By 2008, cellular providers no longer had to support analog phones. They dropped analog service in no time.

The end of analog service in 2008 was an ugly landmark in the history of the telephone. Voice quality dropped appallingly, as cellular carriers “compressed” the audio in order to be able to support more customers. A telephone conversation became an ordeal.

But another ugly landmark had occurred in 2007. That was when the first iPhone went on the market. The iPhone looked nothing like a telephone. It was flat — an absurdly unsuitable shape for a telephone. The reason it was flat, of course, was because the screen had become the most important thing. Even the old flip phones, which people now make fun of, were better telephones, because they had a bit of curve in them and accorded at least a little attention to the location of the human mouth and ear.

Telephones have fascinated me since I was a child. One’s telephone was one of the most loved objects in the house. In those days, it was the only two-way connection to the outside world. We actually used our telephones to have long talks with our friends in those days, and we enjoyed it. But by 2010, I had come to hate telephones. I wasn’t the only one. I hated them when they rang. I especially hated it when other people’s telephones rang. I hated telephones when I had to talk on them. I hated listening to other people talking on their phones, which was almost impossible to avoid in public places until (what an improvement) texting became more prevalent.

The red phone in the photo was my land line during my years in San Francisco. I love that phone, and I’ll never part with it. Was there ever a design better than the old telephones made by the Bell System and Western Electric? Young people today have probably never talked on such a phone. I will never forget them.

But for years my red telephone went unused. I experimented with services such as Verizon’s fixed cellular service, back around 2018, but that worked very poorly, because Verizon signals were so weak in rural areas.

But rural cellular service here has gradually gotten better. With a T-Mobile hot spot in my attic, I actually can get a data signal strong enough to be able to use cellular over WIFI, which, at least where I am, gives better voice quality than a direct cell phone connection. And I found a device that allows me to dedicate one of my cell phones to sitting on a shelf and imitating a land line, with my old red telephone connected to it.

The device is called a “Cell2Jack.” It costs $39 on Amazon. You can plug an old telephone into it. If your house has telephone wiring, you can connect the Cell2Jack to your house wiring. The device uses Bluetooth to become a telephone client of your cell phone. When I first bought the Cell2Jack, I wasn’t satisfied with its audio quality. But after a firmware update, plus T-Mobile’s recent improvements, the device works remarkably well. Not only can I use my old Bell System phone on those occasions when I can’t avoid a dreaded phone call. I actually can hear without straining my ear and my brain to try to understand the person (or robot) on the other end of the line.

As for talking on a flat, slippery device with a screen, I’d rather be beaten.

⬆︎ Some designs are just too perfect to ever give up.

Now fully in the public domain: Sherlock Holmes

Illustration from the December 1892 issue of Strand Magazine

Each year on January 1, copyrights that are 95 years old expire. It was 95 years ago, in 1927, when the last Sherlock Holmes stories were published. (Copyright laws vary by country. In the U.S., copyrights expire after 95 years.)

Those who profit from copyrights will attempt all sorts of novel legal arguments to keep the profits going. Think Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter, as well as Sherlock Holmes. Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain is one of the few institutions that track the public interest in copyright laws. Here is a link to their post on Public Domain Day 2023, with a list of some of the books, movies, and songs that are in the public domain as of today.