Robert Benchley Wants No More Sex

In the November 29, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, Robert Benchley concluded his weekly theatre column with this:

I am now definitely ready to announce that Sex, as a theatrical property, is as tiresome as the Old Mortgage, and that I don't want to hear it mentioned ever again. I am sick of little Southern girls who want "to live." I am sick of hearting fathers and mothers talk to little girls, Southern or otherwise, about "what lies before them." I am sick of rebellious Youth and I am sick of Victorian parents, and I don't care if all the little girls in all sections of the United States get ruined or want to get ruined or keep from getting ruined. All I ask is: don't write plays about it and ask me to sit through them.

I assume that Benchley was soon to get his wish.

Fat Americans and Skinny Italians

Italians conspire and shush politics with their wife-birds, bedraggled, bluntly confused. They are Europe's ambassadors to this crass continent of progress and cannibalism; we are the ones who fall the fastest, but our huge gravity will pull them down with us, all those staring dark-eyed peasants and pilgrims and artists. They would declare us guilty if we believed in their gods but their quaint piety is antichrist to our admittedly divided forces.

"You have broken the rules and wandered too far from us!" they scream at the back-ends of our boats, and we respond: "Denial of your beloved elder statesmen! They are too fat on food that took them too long to cook and eat! We, here, eat only the quick things, which we have invented ourselves, the burgers, the beans! Our fat is made of proteins alien to your history, and therefore we are brand new men and women!"

Canada Day!

Flowers are entirely Canadian on Canada Day; nobody in any other nation has these yellow flowers pollinated by RGB finches who wear spotless feather-robes! We've owned these flowers since we arrived in this country. Before that they were untamed and savage...their water came from streams bounded by beavers and soil and sparse human excrement. But then we came in ships with our rats, and we imposed order on savagery, and today these flowers bloom in coordination with us, fed by nutrients and liquids that we have previously inspected (or at least touched gently with smokestacks), and when these flowers bloom for us they shout "CANADA DAY!"

Don't Be a Farty Bugger When You Get Old

I rarely throw down a book in disgust, but after twenty pages of "You Had To Be There" by Robert Collins I feel like tossing it in the trash, and THEN streaking through an old folk's home.

Here's some advice for Mr. Collins, and for you as well, reader: If you're going to complain about the behaviour and beliefs of a younger generation, stop and ask yourself if your parents said exactly the same thing about YOU. If so, shut your farty old bugger mouth and get reacquainted with the world. If not, shut your trap anyway, because nobody likes a smug blog-reader who has nestled into the generation gap like it were a comfy couch or the very vagina of God/Family/Country herself.

First, the younger generation is not fundamentally different from yours, with the possible exception that they generally don't believe the same things you believed, probably because you wouldn't shut up about those things during their formative years.

Second, your generation was not The Best Generation Ever. Disregarding all the selective memory and willful blindness and massive generalizations you make about other people based on your own narrow peer group, don't forget that YOU BROUGHT THE YOUNGER GENERATION INTO BEING. It was YOUR social structures, YOUR upbringing, YOUR revolutions (or lack thereof) that brought us to where we are today. Before you point fingers at "the kids," ask yourself who their ARCHITECTS were. You, goofy!

And finally, your anecdotes about the superiority of your idyllic development are worth nothing whatsoever from a sociological standpoint. They are skewed and selective and personal and do not say anything about the development of the other people around you. Likewise, the snapshot behaviour of some teenager who cut you off in traffic does not a generational trend make...how do you think your grandparents felt when some kid almost ran them off the road during a drag race, Big Bopper tunes all a-blastin'?

I get this increasingly from a baby boomer family member who is CONVINCED that the world is going to hell. I'll grant that the population density is higher than it was (partly because those boomers just couldn't stop making babies), but when this person bemoans urban crime or the latest child-sex scandal, I can only point out the increasing millions of dollars that the Catholic church needs to spend to redress the long-ago crimes of pedophile priests. I can point to books from EVERY generation which describe that decade's Unprecedented Urban Crime. I can point to endless editorials from every year in every age about how Those Damn Kids Have No Respect.

When Robert Collins -- under the guise of teaching the next generation how their grandparents live -- tells me that his own generation was so chaste and patriotic, I say PHOEY. Kids his age were having sex, getting venereal diseases, and going to unlicensed practitioners to abort the children they'd conceived in the stable/carriage/roadster. A sizable proportion of Collins' fellow citizens wanted nothing to do with the second world war and did everything they could to stay out of it. Phoey again!

Collins is the archetypal crotchety senior citizen who wants to boost is own sense of nobility by denigrating others. The first twenty pages of the book are peppered with constant digs at the lazy baby boomers...those same boomers who now berate subsequent generations for their laziness.

Whenever somebody tries to start a conversation with me about "kids today" and the first words out of their mouth (or the first paragraphs in their book) have something to do with the immorality or incomprehensibility of contemporary popular music, I know immediately that there's no hope for them. They are crotchety old fogies already. They have already forgotten KISS, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, and every jazz orchestra that got their start in a Harlem nightclub.

Nobody's generation can claim superiority or wash its hands of today's problems, which is why "You Had To Be There" is going in the garbage can, and then I'm going to run through an Adult Education Center without any pants on, as soon as it's a bit warmer.

The New Yorker Hitler-Watch

I am near the end of the 1930 issues of The New Yorker, and I am interested to see when Adolph Hitler begins appearing in the pages. I knew he really began consolidating his power after the depression hit Germany, but I didn't realize he was already internationally-known by October 11, 1930.

Here is a brief jokey comment in the "Of All Things" section of that issue. It marks -- as far as I know -- the first mention of Hitler in the magazine.

Hitler threatens to cut off some important German heads unless the demands of his party are met. He evidently means to set up a dictatorship of decapitalists.

Such is the style of New Yorker political commentary at the time: puns, puns, and more puns.

Anyway, it's obvious that Hitler was a visible figure to Americans at the time -- they don't even bother to mention his first name -- but I wonder what the charming fellow was up to and which demands he wanted met.

Gary Jennings: Smut, History, Purity, Coincidence, and Torture

I'm re-reading "Aztec," the Gary Jennings book that I first read many years ago, and I have a few things to add to my previous post about the Jennings formula (at least as it applies this novel and "Raptor").

Yes, Jennings does his research, and combined with a perfect sense of pacing he manages to convey a realistic impression of what it was like to live at the time (in this case, to be an Aztec before, during, and after the Spanish conquest). I'm re-reading this particular book because I want to learn a bit more about Central American civilization, and "Aztec" is telling me a hell of a lot.

But Jennings isn't content to write 750-page books about dry old history, he must also introduce characters who are almost Ayn Rand-ian in their purity: the loyal and innocent servant, the battle-hardened and kind-hearted soldier, the intelligent and noble protagonist, the honest craftsman who pours his entire soul into his work.

These characters would be the first to disappear in an Ayn Rand novel, though, because they are so noble and pure that they can't even be CAPITALISTS (what sort of craftsman would give away his work for free simply because he is proud of what he does?), but they do share the Rand-trait of being such focuses of ideology that reality seems to WARP AROUND them. Thanks to their unswerving characteristics they form impossible alliances, get out of impossible (but clever) traps, and discover impossible things...you know, like Mayan eyeglasses.

During all of this they engage in meticulously-described sexual acrobatics, and they also witness meticulously-described tortures that make even the most hardened reader (me) physically ill. When reading either "Aztec" or "Raptor" you can rest assured that if things are getting a bit bogged down in philosophy or natural beauty, a flaying or an orgy is right around the corner.

As amazed as I am by Gary Jenning's audacity at writing historical novels which are simultaneously accurate and wildly exploitative and impossible, I have to admit that he's an incredible writer. In the pauses between the lesbian couplings and the guys whose guts splash out, his characters meditate on civilization and love, on warfare and writing, on the beauty of the universe and the beauty of the flowers. I have never read any other author who could pull this off so seamlessly that it becomes a genre unto itself...and for 750 pages, no less!

Here's to Gary Jennings. I wish I knew more about the man who wrote these books. In fact, I wish I could read at least one other review that bothered to mention this curious juxtaposition of brilliance and cheap smut.

A Quick Announcement

Backgammon was all the rage in New York City during the summer of 1930.

That is all.

Goat-Goo in Roman Plays

I've never had a sense of human history; other than Geography, History was the class I was LEAST interested in during school. But now I'm learning everything for the first time from scratch, and what fascinates me most about human history is how little we have changed.

It's for this reason that I'm thoroughly enjoying "Five Roman Comedies," a collection of Plautus and Terence plays translated into "modern verse" (eg., "the modern verse of Classical Studies professors in 1970").

It is really, really wonderful to know that we find the same things funny today that we did 2200 years ago: the irony of confused identities, the bumblings of a cocky idiot, the old routine of "Go quickly! And wait, don't forget what I told you to do! Now go, hurry! Wait, remember to be careful! Now hurry up and go! Wait a second, don't forget to be as quick as you can!"

Isn't this touching? Obviously our brains have changed little (if any) since Roman times, but neither have our joys and fears. And there is something ESPECIALLY touching that -- so long ago -- we had a theatrical system to entertain each other with, and that -- against all odds -- so many of these works have survived for us to read today.

Anyway, while reading these plays I'm torn between enjoying the "modern verse" translations and wishing they were a bit more literal. Like, I know instantly what "knucklehead" means to us today, but I sort wonder how the ROMANS had expressed such a thing. I'm currently reading the hilarious "Mostellaria," and the translator (Palmer Bovie) has really gone to town with the idioms. Here's my favourite section, which I hereby decree to be the best part of any play, anywhere:

TRANIO:

Why don't you go up in smoke? I'll see you inhale first,
you halitosis garlic-green rotten excuse for a rustic
retreat, with goat-goo on your feet. I repeat:
You whiff of damp air, what's it like down there in your pig-sty?
Whew! What a combination of nanny goat and mongrel bitch!

That's great stuff! Then, as now, we've always found it enormously funny when two unlikeable people insult each other.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "French Flit"

When I say repeatedly that the early New Yorker magazine didn't usually tackle serious subjects, I was obviously lying, because here is Dr. Seuss referencing the London Naval Treaty.

Okay, okay, the magazine HAD mentioned the treaty in the past, but only in the context of goofy wordplay or in "The Wayward Press," their semi-regular column about what OTHER periodicals were printing. Written by Guy Fawkes, this was a bitchy take-down of New York's newspapers, often criticizing inaccuracies, inconsistencies between papers, yellow journalism, or -- Fawkes' personal beef -- the misleading elevation of minor, trivial occurrences into headline-breaking NEWS!!!

So although The New Yorker never REALLY covered the London Naval Treaty, their treatment of it probably reflected the mood of the people at the time: that it was a blustery piece of diplomacy which never seemed to end and which would ultimately achieve nothing.

I particularly remember Fawkes' article about it, where he took newspapers to task for sending hordes of reporters over to London where they...sat around and did nothing. The conference was so long and clandestine that the London-based reporters would send back stories about the weather or about the niece of some minor figurehead learning to ride a horse, but the papers would trumpet this stuff as NEWS!!!!!!

Anyway, Dr. Seuss doesn't seem to be taking these issues on in his cartoon. He's just drawing funny Frenchmen. Bless him.

Boston vs. The Talkies

You thought Boston was only known for banning books? No ma'am, they had problems with talkies as well, according to the July 12, 1930 issue of The New Yorker.

SOME unhappy Bostonians tell us that things are being made harder and harder for the people of their city. Lately the censors got after the talkies, deleting passages of dialogue which were dangerous to morals. The way matters stand now there are passages in many films which can't be said in the town at any time, and still further passages which pass on weekdays but won't do on Sundays...

The movie people have to assign a man at a switch which controls the speaking apparatus, and he turns off the sound when a dangerous passage is reached...

This practice bewildered the audiences at first, but they are getting pretty good at lip-reading now and can follow the plot fairly well.

And it wasn't just Boston. Only a few months before this article was published the Hayes Code had come into effect -- though it wouldn't be enforced for another four years -- with the practical result of convincing many people today that America before the 1960s was a place of tranquility, harmony, and only the simplest of problems. Which tends to be the result of most broad prohibition attempts: misinforming people and creating a disconnect between actual events and cultural artifacts.

Check out the pre-code films, though, and whoa Nelly! That's the stuff.

Eat Your Eskimo Pie with the Six Brown Brothers While Playing Tops and Anagrams: A 1930s Trend Retrospective

The New Yorker was in a tizzy about humanism throughout 1930, as the philosophy had suddenly come back into vogue and gained national attention. Thanks to Charles Francis Potter and the establishment of The First Humanist Society of New York, discussing humanism became a frequent pastime among the New York intelligentsia. You can't pick up an issue of the magazine during this period without reading stories and sly jabs about the debates, the propaganda, and the reactionary religious response to the movement.

In the May 31, 1930 issue, Donald Moffat wrote "The Crime at Mrs. Ward's," in which a young man -- fed up with all the latest fads -- actually SHOOTS the guests at a swanky party when they are unable to tell him what humanism is. This supposedly indicates that lots of people gave lip-service to humanism at the time, and they loved to talk about it, but none of them had the faintest idea what it was all about (which seems strange to me, frankly).

Anyway, the interesting thing about the story isn't the heavy-handed plot, it's the long list of PREVIOUS crazes that are presented. Want to know what the highbrow fads were in New York between 1905 and 1930? Here you go.

...my friend acquired a leather-burning set, and happily joined the nation in burning Indian heads on leather--he was too young for the first ping-pong wave. He shouted 'Uneeda Biscuit' to street-car conductors and cabbies, 'Get a horse' to stalled motorists, and said 'ZuZu' to the groceryman. He was among the first of the 1906 diabolo addicts, and as the years rolled by he similarly took to his bosom put-and-take tops, Eskimo Pie, mah-jongg, Coué, scofflawry, categories (or Guggenheim), Queen Marie, crossword puzzles, sex, anagrams, badminton, Yo-Yo tops, and backgammon, as each in turn came into fashion. He seideled to Hoboken and taxied to Harlem when those were the things to do, and wrote little pieces on the social, artistic, and economic significance of....Charlie Chaplin, the Six Brown Brothers, short skirts, Joe Jackson, Lillian Gish, Will Rogers, the return of the corset, Rudy Valée, 'The Well of Loneliness,' Amos 'n' Andy, D. H. Lawrence, Krazy Kat, long skirts, Paul Whiteman, and kindred modern phenomena. He returned from France last summer wearing a beret and espadrilles, and he'd thrown away the top part of his bathing suit.

Whew! Some of them are self-explanatory. Here are my thoughts on the others that require a bit more explanation:

• Uneeda Biscuit: I assume this was just a joke on the name of the biscuit -- "Hey, you need a biscuit" -- along the lines of other knee-slappers at the time like "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Then you'd better let him out!"
• Zuzu: A ginger snap brand. Their advertisements said "For a bang-up time take five cents to the grocery and ask for Zuzu ginger snaps. You'll hit the mark every time!" I guess this was similar to the hordes of people who walk into Tim Horton's and say "Rrrrrroll up the rim to win!" It's the adoption of a catchphrase.
• Seidel: I have no idea what this means. A seidel was a glass of beer, but how this relates to traveling to Hoboken I don't know.
• I also don't get the "beret and espadrilles" and "threw away the top half of his bathing suit" references.

I love a good piece of culture-spew, and I also love a good mystery! Any insights?

Jobs: WATFAC

In the summer of '90 I had an amazing opportunity that I mostly squandered: I spent a few months working at WATFAC, the Waterloo Foundation for the Advancement of Computing.

I got into this because my computer science teacher at the time (Savio Wong) recommended me for their yearly student work program, which required some level of aptitude for computer programming. Not knowing C I was at a bit of a disadvantage, but I WAS a little BASIC wiz and I had some experience with dBase III, which would turn out to be the big asset.

What they wanted us students to do was to learn how to use the new software they were developing: Application Creation Made Easy (ACME). It was -- for the time -- an amazing package that integrated with their WATCOM SQL engine and a specially built "Foundation" library, and was supposed to do exactly what it said: make it easy for companies to create applications, particularly the types that were front ends for data storage.

Basically, you built a database using WATCOM SQL, and then you went into ACME to add a user interface for it. This interface was -- strangely and perhaps fatally -- built in a spreadsheet, where each cel represented a page. It was up to you -- the application developer -- to place fields for displaying and entering data, and buttons that the user could press, and write the behind-the-scenes code that controlled the flow throughout the program.

The first thing *I* did with it was create an interactive adventure that allowed the player to explore the WATFAC building, because it was a very strange place to work. Formerly located on the corner of University and Phillip (where "The Marble Slab Creamery" is now), it was a refurbished bank, complete with a vault in the basement where we ate our lunch. The whole place was a rigged-up nightmare of tiny rooms and running cables.

In addition we were occasionally overseen by Wes Graham, patron saint of Waterloo computing, wonderful and just a tad eccentric. During his bizarre orientation speech he used an "onion" metaphor to describe the way layers of information are peeled back, but then he got frustrated when he realized that onions don't have the cores that his metaphor demanded. This lead to us lowly co-ops -- so often with free time on our hands -- creating a grand mythology: Wes didn't want to "advance computing," that was just a front for his REAL project: the sinister development of a peach/onion hybrid called "The Ponion."

All of the games, drawings, and stories we made were based around the Ponion mythology. This was better than what the co-op University students were doing: playing battlechess across the local area network. WE never got caught (because our fun and games were created with company tools and looked like work) but when THEY got caught there was absolute hell to pay (and a memorable lecture to the whole group about teamwork and work ethic).

My problem was that I'd been placed in the only large room in WATFAC, a conference area that I called "the circus." This room hosted about twenty computers and was where all the nerdiest computer students were...and me. These guys were hardcore, they smelled a bit, they had loud voices and yawking laughs; the archetypal computer nerds. Since I was several years younger and I DID NOT KNOW C, there were frequent attempts to denigrate me, and equally frequent attempts by me to explain to them that they should try to straighten out their hygiene and their social problems, and never any work getting done because they were all yelling about the jokes in the latest Math newsletter.

Anyway, our REAL purpose at the company was twofold: to be beta testers for the ACME software, and to write full-fledged applications using it that could be demonstrated to local companies like Bell Telephone and the Waterloo Public Library. We were each randomly assigned an application that a company had shown interest in, and unfortunately I got the one I was least passionate about: a tracking program for expense accounts, under the watchful eyes of a local insurance company. It also had the worst name of them all; while others got names such as "InfoBook" and "InfoList," mine was "InfoExp." Difficult to say, even more difficult to enjoy doing.

What I remember most about this process was the attention given to the user experience, particularly in relation to hotkeys. There were few standardized hotkeys back then -- F1 for help was the only function key that had any real meaning across programs -- and the management quickly saw the necessity of standardization. So everybody brainstormed and came up with hard-and-fast rules for what each function key would do in every "Info" program, and we stuck to it.

Another thing I remember about the user experience was trying to organize data onscreen in a way that was friendly AND informative. While the other kids in "the circus" were outperforming each other trying to hack the ACME boot program with C in order to add esoteric and impossible-to-maintain features, I introduced my one innovation: ASCII graphics to create boxes around lists and to separate data from instruction. Simple and effective, but nobody had thought of it before. Within days everybody had a sheet of ASCII codes at their desks.

At the end of it all we had to give presentations of our programs to the companies themselves. I think I've blocked my presentation from memory -- not bad, but not great either -- but I DO remember the presentation that Mike gave.

Mike was the most obnoxious co-op there -- every day he'd make an endless string of bad computer jokes, along the lines of "Database engine won't start? Pour some gas in it! Hyuk hyuk hyuk! Right into the floppy drive! Hyuk hyuk!" -- and his application was for book filing and reference. He used to brag about how fantastic his presentation would be, and when he stood up there in front of the Waterloo Public Library board I saw an obnoxious, pushy braggart become a confused and stuttering fool. Plus all the books in his sample database were by Gary Gygax. Fail.

Eventually the job was over. I got a nice paycheck, a nice evaluation, and a nice reference, plus a free copy of ACME that I used as supplementary income (by creating a locker assignment application for our highschool).

What I remember most, however, is something I haven't even touched on: it was the first time I lived away from home. The parents of my friend Jeff -- who was also in the program -- owned student housing in the university ghetto, and they allowed Jeff and I to stay in an empty house while they renovated it. I remember many evenings mowing the lawn and painting the railings.

Looking back, it seems to me that I enjoyed this "moving out" experiment very much. My parents would drop in occasionally, and I spent some time wandering around the city and hanging out with Waterloo friends. This was when some women had been sexually attacked on the university campus, and I remember little groups of calm vigilantes wandering around campus and checking student IDs.

I also remember the first time I learned not to leave a kettle boiling when you leave for work. I remember playing Dragon Spirit obsessively at Flynn's arcade during lunch hour -- just to escape the airless, windowless lunch-vault -- and also that my Kate Bush obsession had reached its peak: my paychecks were going to vinyl bootlegs from Encore Records, and I picked up my first Peter Gabriel album (III) when I learned that Bush had done vocals for it. My mind was blown.

Now WATFAC is gone, and WATCOM is only really remembered for their compiler (though children of The ICON will remember WATCOM BASIC). Looking back, I think that ACME failed because it was released around the same time as Visual BASIC, and while ACME was more powerful it was also much harder to use. I'd love to see the program again someday.

And Wes Graham? When I went to the University of Waterloo many years later I was thrilled to see him as a "special guest" in a FASS show, playing a janitor. Everybody cheered. Now there is a road named after him.

Bless you, Wes, and your elusive Ponion.

Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai

I have so many guilty pleasures that I'm in a permanent state of mortification, and one of my pleasures is a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. It's not because I love killing monsters and collecting treasures; the actual BULK of a dungeon crawl game is incidental to me. What I REALLY like to do is to EXPLORE.

I've always gotten a thrill out of mazes, tunnels, and imaginary digital worlds. Unfortunately there are few games that are simply about exploring...pissy monsters are always attacking you and you have to solve anachronous "eight queens" puzzles at every second step. I'm of the opinion that the world (the real one) is waiting for a computer simulation of a rich landscape that doesn't necessarily have anybody else in it. The fact that I'd enjoy such a thing is creepy, really.

But anyway, my favourite games as a teenager were the ones where you could wander around a maze and map it, and then stare for hours at the map wondering what sort of cool place it would be to live in. Unfortunately back then I had a very low threshold for frustration, so I rarely succeeded in finishing the games that were so fun to explore: Ultima, The Eidolon, Alternate Reality, and...

...the Dunjonquest series, considered to be the first dungeon crawls for the 8-bit home computers. Originally developed by Jon Freeman (who is most idolized these days as being one of the creators of Archon) for his fledgling Automated Simulations company (likewise most idolized for later becoming Epyx), these games were all about wandering around mazes, killing monsters, raising your stats, collecting treasures, and running from Antmen who apparently used a vanilla-scented body lotion.

The Dunjonquest game that most people remember is "Temple of Apshai" and its two sequels, "Upper Reaches of Apshai" and "Curse of Ra." These three games -- like the "Hellfire Warrior" trilogy that followed them -- presented you with a very basic depiction of your surroundings, requiring you to actually read the room descriptions from the accompanying manual (or "Book of Lore.")

Originally written in BASIC in 1979, the first games required a great deal of patience and imagination, and the subsequent games -- with the exception of "Gateway to Apshai," a very different arcade-style adventure -- used the same engine. Even when the Apshai games were eventually released as a re-written, integrated, machine-language "Temple of Apshai Trilogy" -- the way most people remember them -- you still needed to shuffle your little character along featureless corridors, bumping into walls and slaying barely-animated 4-colour monsters.

So Dunjonquest games don't have a lot of appeal to gamers these days, and they've slowly faded away from the eyes of even the most nostalgic 8-bit fans.

Until now!

I'm happy to say I'm not alone in my love of these games, and I've been collaborating with Robinson Mason -- and scrounging the darkest corners of the internet -- to reclaim the programs. And not just the programs, but also the even more rare "Books of Lore" which are both essential for play and a delight to read.

While my compatriot tirelessly unearths more of the games and materials, I've been concentrating on reverse-engineering the BASIC code and mapping all the levels. I've discovered some interesting things buried in the convoluted rats-nest of oddly-ported BASIC, but that will come later. Right now, here are maps for the four levels of the first game, "Temple of Apshai."

I decided not to include room numbers, traps, or treasures -- that would not only clutter up my tiny drawings but would also spoil more of the game. And I make no claims to the 100% accuracy of these maps; they are complete and fully-connected, but their proportions may be slightly off. Click on an image to see a larger version.

Temple of Apshai - Level One


Temple of Apshai - Level Two


Temple of Apshai - Level Three


Temple of Apshai - Level Four


The maps for the next game ("Upper Reaches of Apshai") are coming soon (along with playing tips), and I expect there'll be a resource site starting up eventually. Until then, spare a thought to all those digital worlds that are locked up in decaying floppy disks in attics and basements, and consider rescuing them for one last time.

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

A $100 Hamburger in Every Stomach

In response to my "Plane in Every Driveway" post, pilot-friend and musician extraordinaire Chad Faragher had this to say:

Cool! Well, I have two opinions. The "dream" of a plane in every driveway was squashed for the same reason as a car in every driveway - infrastructure. Car travel was made popular by two things: service (gas) stations and paved roadways. Airtravel was made popular by airports with paved runways. But at the time ...of the invention of each, nobody believed it was possible to put enough gas stations around so you could get everywhere you wanted to go. and the idea of travelling anywhere you want to go without leaving pavement was absurd. But mass production made cars popular enough that people had to build the roads. Henry Ford actually conceived of a plane for every person too. For some reason, the idea never "took off". There was no supporting infrastructure for aircraft. At least cars had horse & cart pathways, wooden bridges etc. to build on. Modern pilots are pretty lucky to have things like controlled airspace, radar, transponders, GPS, modern weather reporting and predicting, satellites, etc.

I guess fear is a factor too. I know that some people that first rode in cars were scared to drive them faster than a horse could run. I'm sure people have plenty of reasons to be afraid of aeroplanes. They are particularly dangerous when things go wrong, so you have to put a lot of effort into making sure that things go right.

That brings me to pilot training vs car-driver training. If everyone got as much training to drive a car as pilots to do fly a plane, I think the world would be a safer place. On the other hand, piloting likes to be exclusive, after all, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

And finally, what do _I_ want to do with my pilot's license? Apart from the personal achievement of doing it (because it _is_ difficult) I really like the freedom of being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want. Although as we are constantly reminded, freedom isn't free. In fact, renting it costs about $150/hour.

I will probably visit many of the little hole-in-the-wall places in Ontario, but only for lunch ;) An afternoon in the muskokas, some sightseeing, and just generally answering the call of the open skies (referring to "the call of the open road" that motivates many recreational motorists.)

And another reason that must be mentioned, is the $100 hamburger. Although I'd be more inclined to go to Boston for lobster dinner or something like that.

Elizabeth Bowen, "The Heat of the Day"

I read a glowing review of an early Elizabeth Bowen short story collection in a 1930s New Yorker magazine, so I picked up one of her well-regarded novels: "The Heat of the Day." Written in 1948 and covering the London Blitz -- a period that fascinates me -- it should have been a satisfying read. Unfortunately it drove me crazy with tedium and frustration.

"The Heat of the Day" follows the complex interactions of a small group of characters in wartime London, none of who is unambiguously who they claim to be. Surrounded by the unique rules and sensations of a country at war, they both rely on each other and threaten each other, using ominous and largely-unspoken powers and secrets to make life difficult for everyone around them.

On the surface it has the plot of a thriller (an intelligence agent is blackmailing a woman because he knows her boyfriend is a traitor), but that's only the first layer and it's the least important. The second layer is the constant uncertainty of who is who, why they say what they say, and what sort of ominous secrets do they hold, not to mention the influences that war and secrets and uncertainty have on people's behaviour.

Unfortunately even THAT layer of plot is subordinate to the novel's real, central focus: the extremely complicated mental and emotional interplay between the characters whenever they gather in different combinations. I say that's "unfortunate" because the bulk of the novel is dense, head-to-head dialog that veers into psychology and philosophy for dozens of pages at a stretch. People come together, they debate, and they debate some more. They talk about their own thoughts and impressions in such an artificial way that it's like witnessing a therapy session for neurotic poet-philosophers:

"Anything one must say, one must say as soon as one can. One cannot time feeling--at least, as you know, I can't: I suppose that's where to women most men seem to blunder. No, you must face it: all along the line I'm not half so clever as you seem to have thought--or half-thought?"

And on and on and on.

People don't talk like that. It's not even artificial in a "deeper level of language" sort of way. It's not the kind of language that resonates, it's the sort of thing you'd read in the rough notes for a textbook. Everybody in "The Heat of the Day" both talks and thinks that way...and most of the novel is them talking and thinking, alone or in pairs, in a succession of increasingly dreary rooms.

But there's something else underneath it all which manages to hold it together: the mood. A sense of approaching danger and a deep, wicked, selfish wartime hopelessness. Most fascinating is Louie, a character so tangential to the plot that she need not even be there...but her petty, stupid uselessness is what informs the rest of the book and puts everything else in context. It all begins and ends with her, even though she has no actual influence ON anything.

That tells you something important about "The Heat of the Day," but I'm not sure exactly what. I found the book befuddling; though I'm impressed by Elizabeth Bowen's writing, and though I found the more tangible and restrained sections of the book to be beautiful and slightly terrifying, the book itself was an annoyance.

I've gotten my hands on a complete collection of her stories and I look forward to reading it: my impression of Bowen is that her obsessive and searching eye is much better suited to short stories.

The Drys Go Happily to Hell, Plus Cat Joke

In March, 1930, after ten years of expensive prohibition "enforcement" that did little except make bootleggers rich, Americans loudly debated whether to reform the Volstead act. It was obvious that people of all social stripes were still drinking almost as much booze as they had been previously, and it was obvious to most people that prohibition encouraged outright graft and corruption to the point where people just assumed that every cop (and government official) was on the payroll of crime syndicates.

But still the "Drys" held on. Powerful voting blocs had not yet reached the point of "repeal," simply asking for "reform." Magazines like The New Yorker had a field day with this whole debate, as often happens when opposing views become totally strident, polarized, pointless, and out of touch with reality.

So March 29, 1930 brings the first really great New Yorker cover that I've seen so far, drawn by Rea Irvin, probably the most constant contributor to the magazine since its inception. Just look at the happy grin of the "Wet" good-time girl falling to hell, and the awful drabness of the "Dry."

(As always, click for a bigger version)

I'm confused about the cat, though. Was this from some temperance meme of the day, or was the "Dry" a caricature of a notable cat-loving person, or did Irvin add it simply to add balance and humour to the cover?

We'll never know, but I DID find this great cat joke:

Amie Semple McPherson was an old time evangelist who was known for her dramatic sermons. Once she sent a little kid up into the choir loft and told him to release a dove out of its cage on cue.

So she was preaching away and said, "And the Lord will send a dove of peace..."

And the kid yelled out, "The cat just ate the dove. Should I throw down the cat?"

A Plane in Every Driveway

Either folks in the early '30s were positively airplane crazy, or the companies that built airplanes wanted to manufacture that impression. Issues of The New Yorker have contained airplane advertisements from the late '20s, but by March 15, 1930, the trickle of plane promotion has become a flood.

Half of the advertisements are devoted to commercial flights, either for vacationers ("Havana") or commuters ("New York to Boston"). The commuter flights were surprisingly cheap ($11 or so) and seemed to involve some level of comfort: in-flight food, heated cabin, the works.

The advertisements for PRIVATE airplanes are far more interesting. It seems you could buy a plane for about $1000, and by folding up the wings you could keep it in an ordinary car garage. The implication, by 1930, really was that you could store and use a plane enough to make the price worthwhile...though they're a bit vague about what you'd actually use the plane FOR. And they tend not to mention picky things like "runways" and "engine maintenance" and "maximum load."

I'm looking at an advertisement for a personal open cockpit biplane from the Travel Air Company. It's the story of a man whose wife -- after landing the plane "on the lower lawn" -- finally talks her father-in-law into "going up." He has the time of his life and is an instant convert to private air travel...but he never says "Wait a minute...what do you guys use this thing for?"

And that IS the question. Why don't we each have an airplane in the garage? I suppose because few of us have "lower lawns" to use as runways, and neither do our workplaces. Maybe most of us are afraid of heights. Or maybe air congestion would be too difficult a problem to solve. Or -- most likely -- the growing passenger capacity of commercial air travel made private planes less essential to most of those who would have bought them.

Today I only know one person with a pilot's license. I'll have to ask him what he plans to use it for. I hope he'll have some insight into the practicality of air travel.

PS: In the same issue of the magazine, the London correspondent laments the sorry state of air travel in England. Apparently the problem was that the airplane insurance was so high that each year's payment equalled the cost of the plane itself.

Eena, Deina, Pitera, Pimp

I'm reading "Lost Country Life" by Dorothy Hartley, based around Thomas Tusser's famous 16th century farming calendar.

Being totally unsourced and written in a know-it-all tone, some of the book seems a tad dubious; you wonder if, being 87 herself when the book was written, she held more stock than she should have in her own intuition, memories, and the homey parables of her mysterious gardener.

But at the very least the book is full of beefy (if scattered) information about the smallest tasks of the medieval farmers. If this isn't really how it was, then it is how it SHOULD have been.

Many of her insights provoke interesting questions, even if you don't exactly believe her answers. For instance: how did people with no education manage to separate a specific number of animals -- say twenty -- from a herd? With "shepherd counts," apparently, regionally-specific "four-finger" counts that used words instead of numbers. "Eena, deena, dina, das; catiler, weena, winer, was," you'd say in the West Riding, or -- if you were in Rochdale -- "Eena, deina, pitera, pimp."

She also explains how all those beautiful British hedgerows were built, and the crazy methods for making rennet, and the various uses of both cows and oxen.

It's taken me a week to actually start enjoying this book (due to its informal and poorly-organized preface), but now I'm learning all sorts of things I've always wondered. I'll never USE these tips for plowing a strip of land or washing a sheep, but it's fascinating to learn how medieval mind explained the mysteries of land and animal, and how they slowly began to innovate.

Burlesque, Then and Before Then

The state of burlesque occasionally appears in the pages of the old New Yorker, and every few years the reporters mention Minsky's. The Minsky Brothers kept a high-profile burlesque show going at the National Winter Garden, even through the late '20s and early '30s when the artform was unappreciated.

In the February 1st, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, theatre reporter Robert Benchley compared the cleaner Minsky style of burlesque with the "old Fourteenth Street or Old Howard days." Besides the somewhat "cleaner" costumes and a greater reliance on "effects," Benchley makes a (perhaps backhanded) compliment to the fuller figure:

The most noticeable change in burlesque...is in the structure of the ladies of the chorus. Gone are the leviathans of an earlier day, when women were women and gold teeth flashed like beacons above Scyllas and Charybdises which could sink a ship if given half a chance. The burlesque girls of today are agile wisps for the most part, although here and there one detects a form which, if given its quota of starches for a year or two, might approximate those which used to ply back and forth in irregular array behind Clark and McCullough, Tom Howard, and Jim Barton.

I love Robert Benchley's theatre reviews. "Scyllas and Charybdises?" Holy cow!

Anyway, Benchley goes on to say that what sets Minsky's burlesque apart from regular Broadway shows is the "informality in chorus dance routines." Each dancer can do whatever she wants "so long as they all get on and off the stage at the same time," though he bemoans their attempts at synchronized arm-raising.