Electronic Books Have Their Uses

I had occasion to look into electronic books while preparing for my recent trip to the Alps. I wanted reading material for the train and plane coming home, but didn't want to carry a bound swatch of paper for two weeks before I could read it. Since I was taking a PDA, I looked into electronic books.

My first impressions were disappointment. The titles on offer at several of the vendors were limited and decidedly third-rate, for the most part. Anything of any quality at all was relatively expensive -- what you'd pay for a trade paperback edition of the same work. This was discouraging, but I did select a couple of Hemingway titles that I hadn't read before: To Have and To Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls. In spite of having been written over fifty years ago (are they in the public domain?), they were $10 each.

The next barrier was selecting a reader. There were three formats available from the vendor I selected and you bought the e-book version for the reader you selected. The readers are free. Thinking this was the simplest route, I chose the Microsoft Reader.

I downloaded the MS Reader and installed it. Next, I had to "activate" it, which Microsoft is very big on and can be a significant barrier to getting their software to work. I'm not sure why one has to activate free software. In any case, I was unable to successfully activate the software and was, therefore, unable to use it with the e-books I'd just purchased.

My annoyance was great enough that I worked my way through the trackless swamp of Microsoft's support pages to find a link to a support function for the Reader. From what I could tell, the Reader is something of a deprecated product. There is no Reader support page, so I used the closest thing, a more general Mobile page. To their credit, I did get a rather stilted message advising me to do a couple of things that didn't work.

By that time, however, I'd downloaded another reader, "Mobipocket," and contacted the e-books vendor, who very quickly and kindly shifted my subscription to that reader. I should have gone with the Adobe reader in the beginning. It shouldn't be that expensive, nor that hard to get an e-book to work.

In the end, I found that it worked surprisingly well. The reader I used worked in portrait or landscape mode, offered excellent text clarity and zoom control, and was quick to turn a page with just a button click on the PDA. It opened each time from the spot that I'd stopped the time before. There were lots of other features for searching and moving about in the text, but I didn't use them much, once I started reading. I turned off the progress bar at the bottom, because it took screen space and displayed a discouragingly high page count.

The first one, To Have and To Have Not, was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Brennan, and Lauren Bacall and stands as one of my favorite movies. As a novel, though, it's something of a mess. Only the Bogart character, Harry Morgan, Brennan’s, Eddie, and a fragment of the plot where Morgan asserts that he won't carry human cargo, because that cargo can talk, made it into the movie. It's just as well, because William Faulkner made a fine screenplay out of those elements. Still, there is some wonderful writing in the book, especially when he's writing about the Gulf Stream and fishing upon it.

I found For Whom the Bell Tolls stunningly beautiful, a masterpiece. It is taut and focused. Its characters stand out, individuals. The language, aided by the transliteration of the formal address in Spanish to English, full of "thee" and "thou," is lyrical. And the action gathers relentless tension as the moment of the clash of armies arrives and breaks upon the characters. It must have been heartbreaking to write through the cruelty and waste of the Spanish Civil War, when it is so clear that the author loved the people and the country.

I found it easy to use an e-book in the same way I use a printed book. Once I got past the problem with buying and displaying the book on my PDA, the experience of reading was very similar. I'd use an e-book again, under similar circumstances, and more often if there were more, high-quality selections and they didn't cost so much.

Portland Waterfront Blues Festival – Saturday

A little delayed in finishing this, as it’s more than a week ago, but I thought I’d finish up, even so. Saturday’s schedule was heavy with zydeco bands, especially on the stage with the dance floor. I can appreciate zydeco – and there were some good bands – but I sometimes tire of washboard polka, even with lyrics in French. There were plenty of other fans, though, and the dance floor was teeming with sweaty dancers. So, after a good sample of the beat, I spent most of the afternoon wandering the grounds and sampling the two larger stages, where there were other delights to be heard.

I got to hear the last part of Buddy Flett and The Bluebirds, who played excellent, electric blues, though I note from their Web site that their latest CD features acoustic work. They were rocking for this set and I want to hear more.

I’d not heard of Teresa James before that day, but I was glad I did hear her then. That woman can sing. She has a strong, earthy voice and can pull both the humor and the, well, the blues out of a song. Her band, the Rhythm Tramps, was an excellent support. Another find of the festival for me.

We took the street car into the Pearl district for a dinner at the Bridgeport Brewpub, where we met our friend’s son and had a nice dinner. We closed out the festival with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and, best of all, Mavis Staples and the Staples Singers. Whew! What she lacked in voice, she more than makes up for in soul. And, as she performed, she took the time to remind us of what life was like for so many of our citizens while this music, her music, was being developed. It was a fitting closing to a wonderful experience. Great friends, great site, great music.

Portland Waterfront Blues Festival - Friday

We spent the better part of the day at the Festival, under hot skies moderated by a good breeze. While we waited for the "Delta Music Experience" cruise to begin, we wandered the grounds. S signed up for green power and cruised the samples at the Kashi booth (this is Ecotopia, after all). The Front Porch stage was hosting an amazing little band, fronted by Gunnar Roads (is that his real name?), a boy who looked to be fourteen, singing and playing guitar. The harmonica player also did some singing, but the kid was the hook. He could use some seasoning (maybe even a voice change) for the singing, but he played a pretty good blues guitar. I later saw him on the workshop stage with several other guitar players, hopefully soaking up what he could of their experience.

I enjoyed the cruise, up and back on the Willamette, on board the Portland Spirit. There was more security here (MARSEC 1), I suppose because we were on a boat, different and less flexible regulations applying. Once on board, that little unpleasantness was quickly behind us and it was music (and three bars) and scenery for the rest of the afternoon. We started on the top deck, for the scenery mostly, where the band was the Dylan Thomas Vance Trio, an acoustic slide guitar, violin, and drummer band. They played a rootsy, Appalachian-flavored blues vigorously and with passion. Vance played guitar and sang in a fine, deep voice, while the violin player really made that bow work. I bet he changes a lot of bow strings. The drummer did all his work standing up, using a series of drums hanging from his shoulder. Very good.

I listened to Too Slim and the Taildraggers, with Henry Cooper, for the return journey. I'd heard of them for years, mostly on Seattle radio adds, so it was cool to finally hear them, and up close. Very good rockin' blues -- a tight little trio, with Too Slim singing and playing a mean slide guitar, and a bass player and drummer. Henry Cooper joined for half the set, singing and playing a more blues-flavored slide guitar, too. They more or less repeated that set later that evening in the park.

There were a lot of people dancing on the cruise, but none of them could keep up with what looked to be a ten year old boy -- team jersey, long baggy shorts, and blocks of shoes -- who bopped and bounced and shimmied for the whole set, amazing everyone. His parents seemed amazed themselves, though this can't have been his first experience dancing. Too Slim, who was playing right in front of the kid for the whole set, seemed amazed himself, and gave him a Taildraggers logo t-shirt at the end of the cruise.

That evening, aside from Too Slim and Henry Cooper's set, was dedicated to some names from the past. Savoy Brown, who's name I only vaguely remembered from the sixties, played a really excellent set, I thought. The front man, Kim Simmonds really seemed to link up with the crowd, told some insightful stories, and played in a way that suggested that he was still in it for the music, rather than after that past glory. He played both old, some of which were familiar, and new songs.

The night's closer for us (though the Festival continued) was Eric Burdon and the Animals. I had never really connected with his music back in my youth, but he and his excellent band put on a good show. My youthful experience with his music was not, apparently, shared by most of the people around me, as they enthusiastically cheered and sang along to several of the old favorites. One neighbor remarked that "I've got to get our of here" was the unofficial anthem of his high school class. I enjoyed it, more for another example of how one can have a long career in music if you stay with the music. (Old hits don't hurt, but you'd better keep them fresh.)

Portland Waterfront Blues Festival – Thursday Night

I remember two things about the last time I attended the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival, in the late eighties or thereabouts. The first was seeing the somewhat grand, old man of British blues, John Mayall and his band.

The second is that I first saw and heard an Andean band. They were playing in a margin of the festival, but had drawn quite a crowd, and I was transfixed. I loved the exotic sound, the mix of roots and new, and the cheerful energy of the music. Not so different, in some of those ways, from the blues. Musically, that is the real memory of my first Festival.

From that time, and for the next several years, bands of itinerant musicians with lutes and little guitars and black derbies could be seen all over the country. I wonder what happened to them.

Thursday night's highlight, for me, was seeing Joan Armatrading. I've always admired her song writing and singing and it was good to hear that her voice is as strong as ever. She plays a mean guitar, too. I had a cassette of Me, Myself, I that I wore out. Time to get a CD or two.

Ashland 2007 – Day Three

Our final day was a day of comedy, starting with As You Like It, though it played a little darker than usual. The Depression era costumes and folk-blues songs helped to enhance the sense of hardship in the forest of Arden, even while the usurped Duke reminds his followers of the blessings in their situation. As usual, the company worked both the text and the situation – even without a clue from the text – for laughs.

Breaking our vow to eat at all new places, we had dinner at the Standing Stone Brewery for dinner. Outside, there was a jazz band playing, the same band as last year this time. They were very good, but left too soon.

As we like to do, we closed with a farce, Tom Stoppard’s On The Razzle, a confection, dedicated to the expression of every kind of joke, verbal and physical, available to the playwright. It was very funny, if not particularly lofty. A surprise for us, Emily Knapp, who appeared in several Harlequin productions a year ago, or so, played the Shop Assistant and the French Maid. This is the third young person we’ve seen in Ashland, whom we’ve also seen before in Harlequin productions.

Ashland 2007 – Day Two

Yesterday afternoon's play was Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. This was the first time I've seen this play. I like Chekhov – one of my favorite speeches in drama is from Uncle Vanya (Sonia’s first speech in Act 1). I liked the interplay of character and situation, as the economic destruction of feudalism, begun with the "catastrophe" of the emancipation of the serfs, continues. It was not as emotional as yesterday's productions, but I don't usually find Chekhov to be particularly emotional. As a playwright, he's more of an observer of humans – of his characters – rather than a manipulator of his audience.

We had a nice, English pub-style dinner at the Black Sheep Pub. It's a big place, on the top floor of the big brick building (which appears in very old photos of Ashland) on Water Street. The menu hit all of the pub-food marks that you'd expect and there were a few English beers on tap, too. I had a Newcastle Brown and some good fish and chips. J had a steak and kidney pie and a glass of red.

The evening's play was our first foray into the world as reconstructed by August Wilson, the beginning of his grand cycle (which I just realized has no over-arching title; refreshing) of twentieth century, African-American history, Gem of the Ocean. It was fascinating and beautiful. The characters of Aunt Ester and Solly Two Kings were beautiful and wonderful recreations of historical archetypes. They represented, respectively, the African past and it's present uses, and the continuing (continuous?) struggle, in the present, to come to inherit and make use of the promise of freedom. Their solemn and warm affection bridged these two elements and created a powerful collaboration. And when Greta Oglesby, who played Aunt Ester, sang, there was nothing to say but, "Wow."

Ashland 2007 – Day One

We were privileged to be able to spend another long weekend in Ashland for our annual visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The drive down here was so uneventful that I don't remember much of it at all. Talking books and good weather can do that.

We're staying in the Shrew's House, a bed and breakfast along Siskiyou Blvd. This is the first time in a B&B in several years and, interestingly, the first season for the proprietors, too. Last year, they were making their annual visit to Ashland, and staying across the street, when they needed an extra night, so they tried this place. As it happened, the place was for sale and, one thing leading to another, they bought it and moved here four months ago. Nice folks.

Staying here at the same time is another set of nice folks, a pair of couples who have been coming to Ashland for decades. They've been staying in this B&B for ten years. We've had some nice breakfast table conversations and, in one of the nice elements of a B&B stay, the owners will sit down and join us, too.

As for theater, our first day was an excellent start. The afternoon play was Tracy's Tiger, in the New Theater, put together by a collaboration of OSF folks from a novella by William Saroyan. I love Saroyan and have learned to trust adaptations and translations that they do here, so I was eager to see it and was not disappointed. There was great music, wonder, philosophy, and it affected me deeply. The notion of people "having" tigers, as we have a shadow on a sunny day, following them around and representing their bolder nature, made for excellent theater. I loved the characters of Nimmo & the psychiatrist, both played by Michael Hume and every time the bird started to sing, I teared up. I loved the play and the performances.

The evening's entertainment was The Tempest, in the Elizabethan Theater. This is a beautiful and complex play, superbly done. Derrick Lee Weeden makes a powerful Prospero. He speaks so clearly and acts so smoothly that new layers of the text become available. The theme of slavery was strongly and expertly developed, with Calaban (played by Dan Donohue, in a welcome return to the OSF) brutally constrained and tormented, as befits the greater fear Prospero has of the earth and the solid. Ariel, though more gently constrained and motivated also by love for her master, still chafes at her bondage, though her master values her gifts more highly, matching as they do his own predilections.

Our restaurant theme this year is to eat in new places this time. For Thursday night, the night we arrived, that was Pasta Piatti, a "new world Italian" place on the main drag. We'd walked by it many times, so this time we went in. We had a very nice meal with friendly, professional, informal service. Recommended.

Friday, between plays, we had dinner at the Peerless Restaurant. It's more expensive, but with the garden table on a nice evening, very friendly greetings, excellent service, and wonderful food (with espresso to finish!). Literally peerless? I’m not sure, but I'd have to put it near the top of the list for meals we've had in this town.

Bruce Cockburn is a Treasure

My wife and I attended a great Bruce Cockburn concert at the Washington Center last Tuesday. It was a near thing – we almost missed it – and I’d have to say that it was poorly promoted. Perhaps the change from the Capital Theater, where I saw him perform to a packed house a couple of years ago, interfered. The audience that was there certainly seemed to enjoy and appreciate him. I know I did. His band of a drummer and keyboard player-and-singer were very good, as well. He played a pleasing mix of old and new songs, though many in the audience knew them all (I was behind on the new ones, though I think it’s time to pick up another CD).

For those that don’t know, Bruce is a Canadian songwriter and guitar player and singer from Canada. I’ve followed his work for decades and have seen him in concert eight or ten times, in Seattle, Olympia, and most recently, aside from this week, at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

He’s a superb songwriter, an amazing guitar player, and an inventive singer. He is also a person – and a musician – of uncommon integrity. He’s not much for the clever banter and never appears comfortable with the crowds, but he his very comfortable with his music.

Our host at our second agriturismo on our recent trip to Italy was a guitar player and fan of popular music. I was surprised and pleased that one of the names that he rattled off as influences was Bruce Cockburn (pronounced phonetically). He even played one of his songs for us (forgotten which, but one I knew). I see Bruce whenever I get a chance. You should consider it.

Wicked

I’ve been very busy with work the last two weeks, but it’s calmed down a bit, so I have a few processor cycles to spare for writing. Thursday night was a good start putting work back into its place, because my wife and I and a set of friends traveled up to Seattle for dinner and a show.

We had a fun dinner at the Dragonfish Asian restaurant. They have an interesting menu, great food, and the company was sparkling.

The show was Wicked and played at the Paramount, one of my favorite venues in Seattle. I’ve been to many shows there, over decades, and it’s good to see it looking so good. The show was great. I knew the outlines, but I was impressed by the story – how it played off of our knowledge of the Wizard of Oz and then twisted our preconceptions, until we began to see the events that we’re so familiar with in a totally different light. I understand, however, that the happy ending we saw Thursday night differs from that in the book. It is a musical, after all, and it succeeded on that measure, too, with great performances, interesting sets and costumes, and wonderful songs.

Little Miss Sunshine

We went to a late afternoon matinee of this movie today and thoroughly enjoyed it. Pack a marvelous mess of dysfunction into a grinding, beeping VW van and take it on a road trip, desperately seeking success in a creepy, even-more-dysfunctional children’s beauty pageant, and you’ve got a heck of a good time. It was the best comedy I’ve seen all year.

Theater in Ashland, Oregon

My wife and I made our annual journey to the small town of Ashland, in southern Oregon, for a weekend of theater, good food, and relaxation. It works every time. The pattern is to drive down (about 400 miles straight down I-5) on a Thursday, see two plays a day on Friday through Sunday, and then drive back home on Monday. Every now and then we through in a visit to friends along the way or a Rogue River float trip or something, but that’s the basic plan.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been operating there in Ashland for over 70 years. Their season runs from February to October and includes eleven plays in that time. The organization has three theaters: a large indoor theater, a small, flexible, indoor theater, and an outdoor, Elizabethan-style (well, except for the comfortable seats on the floor) stage. The company is permanent and quite stable, so you can see some of the same actors from year to year, which is quite a treat. I haven’t seen a bad performance in ten years.

On Friday afternoon, we saw the history, King John, which was played on a simple, but effective stage, so our focus was on the characters, nearly all of whom were embedded in an environment of greed, ambition, deceit, and violence. It was a marvelously cynical world, in which the echoes of our own time were too apparent. (There was a line bemoaning the poor intelligence that allowed the French army to land on English soil without warning that brought a hiss of recognition from the audience. Nothing but Shakespeare's words.)

At dinner after the show, there was a discussion at the next table about who was the “moral center” of the play. I'm not sure what their idea of what that concept means, but I couldn't see any of their candidates as the “moral center.” Every character was motivated by some ambition for power or money or both. The Bastard was willing to abandon anyone or anything for gain and served as a constant voice for violence. Toward the end he even began to horrify the other, equally venal characters. The only human-seeming character (other than the pawn, Arthur), was the simpler man, Hubert, who struggled to keep his head and his heart above the fray, as others sought to use him for their purposes.

Friday evening’s play was The Merry Wives of Windsor, staged on a very tarted-up Elizabethan stage with extravagantly bizarre costumes. This company knows how to pull the comedy out of the Bard's words, no doubt about it. There was slapstick, shameless mugging, and hilarious malapropisms. Quite a romp.

Saturday’s plays were a couple of my favorites: The Importance of Being Earnest in the Angus Bowmer Theater and Cyrano De Bergerac in the Elizabethan Theater. The company puts so much into their comedies. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed comedy more anywhere else. As expected, they did a wonderful job with the Earnest.

I was a little disappointed with the Cyrano. I’ve loved the play since I read it in school and I was very much looking forward to a fine, robust performance on the Elizabethan stage. Unfortunately, the understudy was in the title role and, while we’ve seen this actor do marvelous things in other performances and he knew his lines, he wasn’t able to bring the necessary panache to the role. Neither in physical presence nor in his voice was he the dominant figure that the role requires.

On Sunday afternoon, we saw a very interesting David Edgar play, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As I watched it, I realized that, although I knew the outlines of the story (who doesn’t), I didn’t know how it ended. I don’t think I’ve read the original. Anyway, the play is an adaptation of the original, and the several other adaptations made along the way, and it is a psychologically complex and insightful work. The set was a marvel of complexity made simple and the actor playing the lead did a terrific job with the dual role: a shrinking, diffident, troubled Jekyll and a brutal, aggressive – trouble – Hyde.

The closing play was Two Gentlemen of Verona, in the Elizabethan Theater. The play involves the conflicts and opportunities that arise from leaving the place in which one has grown up and formed one’s values and going to another place, where those values are put to the test. In this presentation, they set “Verona” in a conservative, collective kind of community modeled something after the Amish and the like, while the other place is rich, hedonistic, and looked something like the Hamptons (not that I’ve ever been there). It was an interesting way to make the environments in which the conflicts occur clear.

This performance was interesting in another way, which was a first for us in Ashland. As we were eating dinner before the performance, I looked out the window and noticed that the street trees were swaying vigorously and wondered if that meant rain. Sure enough, within a couple of seconds, someone walked by under an umbrella. It was raining and the theater was wet when we arrived, being open to the sky. The heavy rain had quit by then, but showers still threatened, so we bought a couple of plastic ponchos, which the concessionaires were selling like, well, umbrellas. If one likes, in the event of rain, one may get a refund, as long as one asks for it early enough. I saw only one couple leave. It really didn’t rain enough to worry about, once the play began.

I’m ready to go again next year, already. There’s an interesting line-up, including Checkov’s The Cherry Orchard, On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard (a favorite of mine), August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Human Cargo

I recently read Caroline Moorehead’s book Human Cargo, A Journey Among Refugees. I still haven’t absorbed all that there is in the book, I think because she writes it as the journalist that she is. She just tells the stories. And, since these stories are about human beings, they don’t lend themselves to easy answers or quick solutions. She begins with a brisk history of the modern human rights movement, starting with the founding of the Red Cross in the nineteenth century, and traces its development through the crisis created by the tens of millions of displaced people in Europe after the Second World War to the present structures of asylum policies, refugee camps, and human smuggling.

The core of the book is a survey of the issues and situations suffered by refugees throughout the world. One describes a group of African asylum seekers, whose boat crashed on the coast of Sicily. At first, the local people, full of sympathy for the refugees, many of whom died in the crash, embraced them and helped them get settled and even found them a little work and support. Over time, though, the situation got more complex, for a whole set of reasons: the refugees’ ambiguous legal status, the limited opportunities for them in this poor section of Italy, the barrier of language difference, and post-traumatic stress.

Another describes the draconian measures taken in Australia to control the influx of refugees, many fleeing the wars Afghanistan and Iraq. These included turning ships away along the coast, even if they were in danger of sinking, locking people up in prisons under deplorable conditions, and arbitrary acceptance policies that, in practice, amount to psychological torture. She also describes the plight of asylum seekers who make it to Great Britain and then find themselves dispersed across the country, isolated from others who share their situation and almost totally without support.

The most harrowing chapters deal with the long-term refugee camps in Guinea and the Palestinian camps in Lebanon. Guinea, a neighbor to Ivory Coast and Liberia, has received waves of refugees from those countries over decades. The squalor and hopelessness and rock-bottom poverty of these camps is heart-breaking. Equally so, the plight of the Palestinians, dispossessed during the Naqba, or “disaster” of 1948, and repeatedly brutalized, attacked, moved, and discriminated against in the years since.

The last stories that she tells are some relief, though they are not without their poignancy and pain. With the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and the renewal of hope that the decades of civil war could end, the country experienced a dramatic influx of its citizens from refuges around the world, though mostly from Iran and Pakistan. The hope and energy that these returning refugees bring to the country, still suffering and struggling, offer some evidence that dispossession can be reversed. The final story is about a cohort of Dinka, from the Sudan, who have settled in north of Finland. They, obviously, have had struggles with adjustment, not the least with the cold and the long nights in winter. But the Finns have worked hard to support their new citizens, have made adjustments, and achieved some success. This offers some additional evidence that, if people can’t go home again, it is possible, with the right policies and resources and neighbors and attitude, for them to make a new life, in a new land.

It was nothing but an accident that this latest immigration fuss erupted while I was reading it. It was timely, however, as an antidote to the simplistic and inhumane terms of the discussion. By contrast, this account is a humane, layered, complex, and clear-eyed look at what happens to people when, for any number of reasons, they are unable to stay in their homes.

Peter Matthiessen

We drove up to Seattle yesterday evening to hear Peter Matthiessen speak at Benaroya Hall. Both my wife and I have been readers of his work for years. For those not familiar with him, he writes beautiful, thoughtful stories and accounts of the natural world, as well as complex and engrossing fiction. I’ve read At Play in the Fields of the Lord, The Snow Leopard, and Tigers in the Snow. Hearing him talk about the process of writing made me want to read more.

He started with an impassioned appeal for support for continued protection of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge from oil exploitation. In it, he made an interesting point, one I’d not heard anyone make before: that this is the last place in the world with the full Pleistocene fauna (that which is still in existence) – all three North American bears, wolves, wolverines, caribou, musk ox, and birds, millions of birds from all over the world.

The core of his talk was about his career in writing. I found it interesting that a man who has written twice as many non-fiction works as fiction primarily thinks of himself as a fiction writer. He talked about some of the people he’d worked with – his first agent, his editor at the New Yorker – and some of the journeys he’d undertaken to research his stories. A good bit of the time he talked about his three volume novel about a Florida planter and murderer, Edgar Watson, and the process of researching the story over twenty years. It was interesting and entertaining evening. He came across as modest and thoughtful and funny.

He closed with a series of questions from the audience that brought the discussion around to the situation of humans on the planet, in which he described humans as a beautiful and terrible animal. That this life on this earth is a wonderful thing, but he didn’t consider himself optimistic, given our continuing destruction of each other and our shared home.

Afterlands

I just finished Afterlands, a wonderful novel by Steven Heighton, a poet and novelist. It’s a beautifully-written account of a disastrous expedition to the Arctic and the aftermath of those struggles in the lives of three of the participants. It weaves an incredible and true story of survival, adrift on a chunk of ice through an Arctic winter, into a brilliant imagining of those events and what they created for the survivors. The author tells the events while pulling them through a mesh of conflicts between cultures, languages, nationalisms, class, and more personal commitments.

The first half of the book is the story of the group of nineteen, a mix of whites and Inuit, left adrift on an ice flow in Baffin Bay, while their ship leaves them, never to return. For the next six months, they survive on a slowly shrinking flow of ice, through the Arctic winter, while a slow madness overtakes the entire party. Tyson, the ranking officer of the group, struggles with his doubts and weakness while the party spins apart, rising to the challenge only at the end of the drift, when the flow becomes uninhabitable as it falls apart. Tukulito, the Inuit interpreter, finds her careful separation of her “native” and “white” identities coming apart as starvation and madness pull at the party. And Kruger, one of the several German immigrant seamen on this American expedition, is marooned once again, within the group, as it splits along national and racial lines.

The second half follows mostly the story of Kruger, as he heads south into Mexico, hoping to escape the notoriety that follows the publication of Tyson’s book, in which he is branded a spy and a thief. And, he’s also trying to escape the rationalizations that people use to allow themselves to kill and oppress others. Tukulito finishes her trajectory early, succumbing to tuberculosis a few years after returning, while her husband was away on another Arctic expedition. Tyson finds that acclaim is a poor salve for self-doubt and returns to the Arctic, as well, hoping for a less compromised result.

The Game of Love and Chance

Last night, my wife and I and a couple of friends went to Harlequin Productions’ current show, The Game of Love and Chance. I enjoyed it; I laughed a great deal. It had good writing, interesting costumes, and effective performances.

The translation by Stephen Wadsworth was interesting. Much of the feeling of the mid-eighteenth century language was preserved, but every now and then, he plugged in a very contemporary, colloquialism, like “Really?” or some other informality. I think it worked, but it clinked a little in my ear, especially at first.

It wasn’t as powerful as their last production, Frozen, but I really appreciate Harlequin’s commitment to doing new things and different things. They’ve matured from a few years ago, when it seemed that the same group of actors was in every production. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t. They seem now to have expanded their circle of actors and, so, have a wider selection of skills to choose from.

If you’re interested in supporting local theater, you could do worse than Harlequin.

Winter, but no Christmas

J and I attended "The Chronicles of Narnia" yesterday. I'm at a disadvantage in reviewing it, because I never read the books. I thought it was pretty good. There were good performances and the effects were effective. The interaction of the kids was realistic and provided a solid emotional engine to the story. I loved the variety of the creatures, especially the minotaurs and the centaurs. I was some disappointed in the general ugliness in the "bad guys." And, Santa? I'm sure it was in the story, but the chase that turns out to be not the witch, but the big, jolly guy felt more than a little manipulative.

At this point, I can't resist a comparison to "Fellowship of the Ring." In that movie, the pursuit by the Nazgul was real and frightening. No manipulation needed. I should resist these comparisons further, as I read the Tolkien books twice and have seen the movies two or three times. Still, I think that Peter Jackson's vision for his movies, both in story and the cinematography, was much bigger than "Narnia." Good movie, but not really a thrill.

New Year's Party Music Selections

The first five on the shuffle:

Leo Kottke - "Peculiaroso"
K.D.Lang - "Hymns of the 49th Parallel"
Beatles - "Abbey Road"
Laio - "Como Corre O Tempo"
Buena Vista Social Club

The second five:

Beach Boys - "Pet Sounds"
Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, jean-Luc Ponty - "The Rite of Strings"
Bourne, Quitsau, Madagascar Slim - "Tri-Continental"
Bob Dylan - "Blood on the Tracks"
Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelly - "The Quintet of the Hot Club of France"

A good time was had by all. Everyone made it to at least Mountain time.

Holidays Begin

The week ends with a whimper inside the building and plenty of moisture outside. We're a little behind on the rain for this month, but we're on the way to catching up.

Tomorrow, we'll head up I-5 to my folks' house for the day. Sunday will be at our house with H and M. And that followed by a glorious Monday off. Ahh...