Category: Culture

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.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical

If you still have a gloomy taste in your mouth from The Banshees of Inisherin, then here’s the perfect antidote: Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical.

We had recently been discussing Jane Eyre here, and I couldn’t get Jane Eyre out of my mind as I watched this. But Jane Eyre, of course, is not exactly a musical, whereas Matilda will probably become a classic. It’s a romp, with superb performances, excellent music, and brilliant singing and dancing. How does Britain produce so many talented children? Emma Thompson is so scary that I actually wonder if Matilda should have a PG rating.

Matilda can be streamed on Netflix.

The Banshees of Inisherin

I should have known better. When Rotten Tomatoes shows high critic ratings (97 percent in this case) but much lower audience ratings (76 percent), that’s a red flag for me. I almost always agree with the audience.

Why would a filmmaker waste a superb cast and beautiful settings on a meaningless and depressing story that is not worth telling? I’ll answer my own question: It’s because critics are bored. They fall for well-made films with nihilistic themes that can cut through their jaded hides. Critics are rarely in it for the story. They’re in it for the filmmaking.

As long as made-for-critics films like this scoop up the awards, filmmakers will keep making them. What a waste.

New trains!

The Washington Post has a story about yesterday’s announcement by Amtrak describing the $5 billion worth of new trains that Amtrak is buying. The trains will be named Amtrak Airo, and they’re beautiful.

Yes, the trains will be made in America — Sacramento — though the company is German. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is not mentioned in the story, but I suspect that he, and the Biden administration, had more than a little to do with this.

It was interesting to read some of the comments on this article. Train lovers are pointing out that the United States is still far, far behind other countries in its train infrastructure, not least because of the poor condition of our tracks. In Europe, everybody loves trains, and everybody rides them. In the U.S., liberals have never seen a train they didn’t love, and Republicans have never seen a train they didn’t hate. I wonder: Don’t Republicans ever travel abroad and ride the trains?

The recent railway strike that almost happened helped expose just how much fixing our railway system needs, both for freight and for passengers. About 30 years of successive Democratic transportation secretaries might do it.

My last Walter Scott post for a while, I promise

I had high hopes for The Bride of Lammermoor, the sixth novel by Sir Walter Scott that I have read. But it let me down. Though there was some fine Scottish gothic atmosphere — seaside castles, witches, and violent storms — the story really came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. I use the word pathos in a literary sense, as distinguished from tragedy. In pathos, unlike tragedy, there are no teachable moments in the calamity with which the story ends. There is only meaningless sadness. I was going to lower my estimation of Sir Walter Scott as a writer until I thought of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which also came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. It’s entirely possible that readers in the early 19th Century would have found some teachable moments, perhaps in the wrongness of older generations trying to control the emotional lives of young people.

The Bride of Lammermoor was published in 1819, so it’s just over 200 years old. A friend asked me if I thought that Scott’s novels, and the social issues he raises, are as relevant today as those of, say, Jane Austen. I would say definitely not. But even so, Scott does not deserve to be completely forgotten. I may, in years to come, return to Walter Scott, but for now I think my curiosity about his novels is satisfied. If anyone is considering reading Scott, of the novels I have read I would recommend The Heart of Mid-Lothian.

I have moved on to something completely different. I rarely read bestsellers, but I’ve just started Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It’s a new novel by R.F. Kuang. When I learned that the novel is about linguists and that it is set in London and Oxford, I bought it immediately.


I bought an 1869 edition of Lammermoor, published in New York.

All trans children should be so lucky

The above is a three-minute Christmas ad by J&B scotch. It leaves kind-hearted people in tears and probably leaves authoritarians in a state of rage.

We are surrounded by people whose intellect and moral sensibility are so meagre and so perverted that they actually believe that they know the mind of God. Even worse, as they undertake to instruct the rest of us, with their God this and God that, they believe that they have a heavenly mandate to police those who, being different, rub up against their notions about how God meant for people to be.

For example, the New York Times has a story this morning about nationwide efforts by right-wing Christian operatives to ban books about gender and sexuality. Nothing riles them like gender and sexuality. The story is “A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans.” Having lost the war against gay marriage, they still can’t let go. The new war is against non-conforming young people and their families. Acceptance and support are defined as abuse.

This mission to control human sexuality was brought to us two thousand years ago by the church — the same church that today continues to try to cover up its own sexual crimes against our young people. For example:

Southern Baptist leaders release a previously secret list of accused sexual abusers. Most of those who were abused were children. This is the same church that, in 1995, finally got around to apologizing for supporting slavery.

Thousands raped and abused in Catholic schools in Ireland. Children again. That story is from 2009, but, as cover-ups by the churches continue to fall apart, new cases are coming to light. For example: Irish police investigate abuse claims against elite Spiritan schools. “Spiritan” is a new name for an order that formerly was named the Holy Ghost order. Children again.

Pope seeks forgiveness for sexual abuse at Canadian residential schools. Children again.

That an institution with a long criminal record of abusing children still, in its blindness, tries to instruct and police the rest of us in the name of protecting children is mind boggling. Church people are merely twisting the ongoing authoritarian abuse of children into a new disguise. Having lived in San Francisco for 18 years, where many trans people go seeking acceptance and refuge, I have known many trans people. It is tragic that, even though people who cannot fulfill expected gender roles are, and always have been, born at all times in all places, they are still driven out of their families and communities. Something like 40 percent of such young people have attempted suicide. It’s sad not just for them. It’s sad for the rest of us, too. There is so much we can learn, if we get to know them.

I wonder if the J&B video will change any minds.