Matchbox Labels: Over 2,000 Elegant Examples from All Over the World, Jane Smith (Firefly). The title says it all, although some are not all that elegant. Like the drawings of the pigs of Hungary, the goats (and the rats) of Sweden, the cowbirds of Vilna, the shaving-cream can (or is it a space-ship?) of Prague.Still, the art attracts because it is primitive and colorful. Our favorites: the smiling cigarette package of Liége, the chess-piece representations out of Russia, the elaborate designs out of the Hongkong Match Factory, the smiling lions of Antwerp, the charming lighthouses of Pondicherry, and the "Vivekananda Beedies" of India.
The editor claims an unlikely hero for collectors of these oddities. She says it comes from E-bay's. The on-line company has brought together one place worldwide for those who wish to bid on matchbook covers. Smith offers it up as a one of the cheapest hobbies. I have a friend who has found a cheaper one. He buys up hand-written signs of guys who hang out at stoplights and freeway exits, willing to work for food. He has put them together in an art-gallery as "People's Art."
- Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese, (Tantor Unabridged Audiobook). The Romans didn't bring coal to Newcastle, but they thought that one could make it grow by adding fertilizer. They liked it for jewelry, smoothing it and shaping it, and sending it back home: Thus, it was the only jewelry in existence that you could throw in the fireplace if your honey didn't like it.
In 1900, coal provided 90% of the energy needs of the United States. It also turned the skies, buildings, streets, clothes, trees, birds, and your lungs black. In London at the time, 30% of deaths were ascribed to pulmonary conditions --- asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia --- caused by breathing coal smoke.
In England and the United States, up to a century ago, children worked the mines twelve hours a day. Why? They could fit into tiny spaces, didn't cost much, and best of all for the mine-owners, never went on strike. Can you imagine a bevy of these little guys, with blackened faces and miner's lamps on their heads, picketing the offices of Peabody Coal?
The later chapters tell of the one billion ton of coal used each year by utilities in the United States. The coal industry says it generates 85% of our electricity and 200,000 jobs. But these plants also generate nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, acid rain, global warming, ruined farmland, dead fish and the wheezles that many of us will carry to the grave. I listened faithfully, but it got so disheartening there half-way through #5 that I shut off the CD player (there are seven disks in all).
Shelly Frasier is the reader on this from Tantor. For some reason she reads as if she were a 21st Century Mae West; that is, in sing-song. However this ceases to be irritating by disk #2 since the material is more than a little interesting. What doesn't go away is me wincing every time she says the word "often." My Webster's Ninth tells us the only acceptable pronunciation is "of(t)en" --- with a little dot above the "o" and one of those funny looking upside down "e's." That means it should be pronounced "AW-fen," because the "t" is silent, like the "p" in swimming. That's a joke.
In any event, it is not pronounced "AWF-tin." Never.
- The Maze, Panos Karnezis (Picador). The year is 1922. A Greek army is trying to make its way across the sands of Anatolia after defeat by the Turks. The retreat is being handled, or mishandled, by a Brigador Nestor, who, when he isn't having men shot, is shooting himself. With morphine.
The characters include the one-eyed Father Simeon (who steals from the fast-dwindling food supplies), a communist traitor (who leaflets the dispirited army), and a correspondent (who never files a story). It is a deadly march of retreat, as seen through the eyes of a modern Voltaire or Joseph Heller.
- Event Cities 3: Concept vs. Context vs. Content, Bernard Tschumi (MIT). Tschumi builds things like stadiums and towers athletic centers and museums --- one of the latter backed up to the Acropolis, and featured in the New York Times as "Greece's Colossal New Guilt Trip."
They should feel guilty about this sterile, stumpy, retro-International Style pile that wouldn't be amiss in Donald Trump's collection of bastard structures. Why MIT press would produce a thick (640 pages) tribute to this lunchhead is beyond us, but here it is, filled with gaseous sketches and "project discourses" that could be better used as chewing-gum wrappers. "Concept --- not form --- is what distinguishes architecture from mere building" says Tschumi, and we find ourselves wondering, "How does he know?"
- Recollecting Freud, Isador Sadger (Wisconsin). Sadger was part of the "Wednesday Psychological Society" in Vienna in the early 1900s. But he was not a happy camper. This expose was published in 1930 as Sigmund Freud: Persönliche Erinnerungen but better should have been titled Siggy Dearest. Through Sadger's eyes, we get to see Freud as willful, at times charming and witty, at other times sullen and sarcastic. "For Freud was not merely the father of psychoanalysis," he tells us, "but also its tyrant!"
- To stay on course, it has to be said that Freud was not free from moods, yet, one could even say that now and then he had the mood of a hysterical woman.
Sadger has bad words for psychoanalysis, saying that it was "imported to the masses like a sport from England and America." We are reminded of a biography of Erik Erikson by his daughter, recently reviewed in these pages. It serves to remind us that those who stick around with the masters may well themselves get stuck in their own miasma of rejection.
- Call It Sleep, Henry Roth. (Picador). This novel came out in 1934, and this is the newest edition. A bitter father, an innocent boy, a overwhelming mother, all stuck in the Lower East Side in the first years of the 20th Century.
This one should not be reviewed. It should be read.
ASAP.
Trust me.
- The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story, Pamela Petro (Fourth Estate). Petro is interested in Kingsley and Lucy Porter, two antiquarians from the 1920s who studied and photographed the Romanesque churches along the medieval roads to Compostela, especially in Quercy and Rouergue in Southern France.
So far so good: her musings on the strange stone decorations of these churches becomes infectious. Unfortunately, in chapter three, the author is joined by her friend Annie Garthewaite, and things turn somewhat silly. In addition, the many photographs that the Porters took are reproduced badly, losing much of their power and interest for the reader.
- Documents of the Cornado Expedition, 1539 - 1542, Richard and Shirley Cushing Flint, Editors (Southern Methodist University Press). In 1540, the Mexican Viceroy sent Francisco Vázquez de Coronado up north to Cíbola to discover why previous messengers had been killed upon arrival. (Cíbola was part of present-day west central New Mexico, over 1,000 miles from Mexico City).
The entrada was highly documented, and this oversized edition from SMU contains thirty-four newly translated documents, along with maps, extensive notes, and a complete --- or as complete as possible --- list of the 400 Spaniards and Indios who participated in this undertaking.
The reason for the journey was, of course, rumors of a land of "many fine turquoises" and "metalworking," and there was intense competition to lead the expedition to "take control of the wealthy new land, or Tierra Nueva."
It was the usual butchery committed by the armed invaders on the native population, all done in the name of God and the King. In Tiguex, in order "that the Indians be made afraid," two hundred posts were planted in the ground, Indians were tied to them and set ablaze. "Thereafter," recounts Castañeda de Nájera laconically, "it was very unfortunate that this was done."
This volume is a major (and beautiful) sourcebook for those "who are interested in the history of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico."
- Falling for Reality, Michael A. Zangardi (Publish America).
Falling for Infinity is a first person twisty pretzel plot of alternate realities, quarter-century crisis angst, and
red-haired meanies. Equal parts The Matrix and American Psycho without the gore. With a few tablespoons of nutmeg you have this first novel by a self-described Washingtonian, Michael A. Zangardi.
Alec, whose name is revealed only in the last three pages of the slim 200 page shriller, is a pivotal player in the evolution of human beings. Hot on his trail are the Watchers: a red-haired, matriarchal society of super-beings intent on thwarting his development. However, what Alec has lost is his mind: the Watchers have created a false reality, an ideal life, an opiate to impede his Darwinian progress.
In between his rants against being a twenty-something, average looking male who never gets "chicks," against being a lonely twenty-something guy who "chicks" never speak to. and against obnoxious frat boys, elitist "chicks," he soliloquizes about beer and how it helps him speak to "chicks." At the same time, he's being hounded by a mysterious, cute "chick" who insists on showing him the real reality.
What is science fiction except tales of worlds where anything goes? The Force? Sandworms? Matrix Revolutions. Whatever it is, it kept me reading on in Falling for Reality, and the unpredictability compelled me to finish it.
The reality of this book is akin to watching a programme or movie on a television set whose tracking is uncontrollable. Maybe it's the constant shift from past tense to present tense, sometimes even in one paragraph. Perhaps it's the superfluous words: "diatribe," "pontificated," "espoused." Twice on one page "conscious" is erroneously used as "conscience."
What this book tells us most elegantly is how underfunded the school districts of Washington, D.C.
Or maybe the Watchers have me, as well.
Call It Sleep