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(Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond
. . . . 14545. (Don­ald Cameron) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 14546. (Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond, A Mod­ern Prob­lem Play [arti­cle]
. . . . 14547. (Stephen Lea­cock) With the Pho­tog­ra­ph­er [arti­cle]
. . . . 14548. (Stephen Lea­cock) The Den­tist and the Gas [arti­cle]
. . . . 14549. (Stephen Lea­cock) My Lost Oppor­tu­ni­ties [arti­cle] Read more »

This is Far­ley Mowat’s odd book about a pos­si­ble pre-viking Euro­pean pres­ence in the Cana­di­an Arctic.

Mowat is very care­ful to warn the read­er that he is engag­ing in a kind of spec­u­la­tive archae­ol­o­gy. He even inter­spers­es the text with lit­tle pas­sages of adven­ture fic­tion. But it is also clear that he has con­vinced him­self pret­ty thor­ough­ly that his spec­u­la­tions cor­re­spond to what actu­al­ly hap­pened. And the result is, of course, one of those books where a chap­ter begins with the asser­tion that some­thing might have hap­pened , which by the end of the chap­ter has been grad­u­al­ly trans­formed into what cer­tain­ly did hap­pen , and then becomes the premise for the next chap­ter, which begins with if that hap­pened, then this might have hap­pened , and so on. Grad­u­al­ly, a huge sequence of sup­po­si­tions begins to have the appear­ance of a frame­work of sol­id evi­dence, when it is most clear­ly not.

What he begins with is some­thing which is ver­i­fi­ably true. The east­ern Arc­tic of Cana­da is lit­tered with odd ruins and mega­lith­ic struc­tures that can not be eas­i­ly attrib­uted to the Inu­it, or to the ear­li­er Dorset or Thule cul­tures. Nor do they appear to be built by the Norse. They are def­i­nite­ly very old. The most inter­est­ing con­cen­tra­tions are on the west­ern shore of Unga­va bay, and in a bay imme­di­ate­ly south of the spec­tac­u­lar Torn­gat range, in Labrador. Read more »

This is a rea­son­ably inter­est­ing nov­el, though not eco­nom­i­cally writ­ten. It’s a sprawl­ing omnibus of digres­sions, com­bin­ing fan­tasy, mys­ti­cism, pol­i­tics and a kind of Jules et Jim tri­an­gle romance. Mulisch is intel­li­gent, learned, and absolute­ly sat­u­rated with con­ven­tional sys­tems and intel­lec­tual ortho­doxy. There is a lot of thought in this book, but not a par­ti­cle of orig­i­nal thought. This is, unfor­tu­nately, sup­posed to be the great mas­ter­piece of mod­ern Dutch lit­er­a­ture. Well, the Dutch have blessed the world with won­der­ful paint­ing and archi­tec­ture, and their trance djs are superb, but lit­er­a­ture just doesn’t seem to be their strong point. Nev­er­the­less, I might rec­om­mend it for a lazy afternoon’s read­ing. The inter­ac­tion of the char­ac­ters is some­times interesting.

An inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal nov­el set in the peri­od of Romu­lus Augus­tus, the last Roman Emper­or in the West­ern Empire. The book is trans­lated from Ital­ian. It is fast-paced adven­ture fic­tion, writ­ten in the spir­it of Alexan­dre Dumas. There is a “sur­prise” end­ing, which the read­er will prob­a­bly see com­ing fair­ly ear­ly in the game. Though most of the action takes place in Italy, it is suf­fused with the “Mat­ter of Britain”. Doesn’t any­one ever write about late Roman Spain, or Nor­ica, or Africa?

Donne is best when he writes of love or death, dullest when build­ing “meta­phys­i­cal” struc­tures or play­ing games with theology.

Where, like a pil­low on a bed,
A preg­nant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclin­ing head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.
Our hands were firm­ly cement­ed
With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twist­ed, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one dou­ble-string;
So to inter­graft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pic­tures in our eyes to get
Was all our prop­a­ga­tion.

Vlad the Impaler rep­re­sent­ed as Pon­tius Pilate judg­ing Jesus Christ, 1463 (artist unknown)

This seems to be the best book on Vlad III of Wal­lachia, the his­tor­i­cal “Drac­ula”. It at least explodes the sil­li­est inter­pre­ta­tions, put for­ward by Marx­ists under the Ceauces­cu regime, that seem to have found their way into many sec­ondary sources. Vlad seems to have been a per­fectly ordi­nary lit­tle gang­ster, com­mit­ting plen­ty of atroc­i­ties, but not much dif­fer­ent in style and moti­va­tion from those of oth­er thugs rul­ing prin­ci­pal­i­ties. Com­pared to the colos­sal out­rages of the reli­gious wars that tore Ger­many apart, soon after, it was all small potatoes.

While Vlad enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple and impal­ing them, he was no more vicious than, say, the Ref­or­ma­tion the­olo­gian John Calvin, who enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple by slow­ly roast­ing them on a spit while their heads were soaked with cold water to pro­long the agony .… a tor­ture that he once con­demned two chil­dren to. And he isn’t any more of a mon­ster than Guata­mala’s dic­ta­tor José Ríos Montt, whom Ronald Rea­gan admired and called “a man of great per­sonal integri­ty and commitment.”

A stat­ue of René Descartes in Den Haag, Nether­lands. I once sat below it, eat­ing a lunch of Patat­je Jop­pie (fries with Jop­piesaus) and pick­led herring.

Descarte’s chief impor­tance to us now lies in his men­tal atti­tude, and his approach to solv­ing prob­lems. He did not always come to con­clu­sions that I can accept, and some­times did not live up to his own meth­ods, but the sig­nif­i­cant thing is that he tried to look at the world in a way that would be famil­iar to a sci­en­tist in our time, or to any schol­ar, lawyer, doc­tor, or tech­ni­cian try­ing to main­tain an objec­tive, ratio­nal discipline.

For­mally, the Med­i­ta­tions are writ­ten in the “dialec­tic” style that was the her­itage of medieval and renais­sance phi­los­o­phy. But Descartes was not inter­ested in the medieval tech­nique of com­par­ing author­i­ties and mak­ing an “argu­ment”. He was more inter­ested in the ques­tions: “What can I claim to know?” “How shall I dis­tin­guish between what I believe, and what I can claim as proven?”

Every sci­en­tist and lawyer is now famil­iar with the impor­tance of these ques­tions. I can step out­side and see a man rob­bing anoth­er man at gun­point. After the event, I can give tes­ti­mony to this, but oth­er peo­ple need not believe me if I can­not cor­rob­o­rate it. I myself might not be cer­tain, for instance, that it was not a vivid dream, which I mis­took for expe­ri­ence. A chemist might see a sig­nif­i­cant reac­tion in a test-tube. Yet, he expects oth­er sci­en­tists to sus­pend judg­ment on his report until it can be dupli­cated. The phras­ing of his report will be care­fully thought out to reflect the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and judi­cial con­sid­er­a­tions that sci­ence depends on. There are hints and pre­mo­ni­tions of this atti­tude in ear­lier thinkers, like Aris­to­tle, Euclid, Ibn Sin­na, and Aquinas, but it is Descartes who brings them to the fore­front, and con­cen­trates on them. Read more »

Nurs­ing Sis­ter at Fort Churchill, Man­i­to­ba, prepar­ing to board an RCAF De Hav­il­land Otter. Cana­di­an-made bush planes such as the Otter and Beaver were the “cov­ered wag­ons” of the Cana­di­an North (Library and Archives Cana­da Pho­to, MIKAN No. 4234435)

This book was pub­lished in 1956, and it reflects a time when Cana­di­ans had very dif­fer­ent things to think about. This was the peri­od when a num­ber of peo­ple became inspired by visions of the North­ern Fron­tier. French-speak­ing Cana­di­ans seem to have been more caught up in it than Eng­lish-speak­ing Cana­di­ans, who seem to have been more attract­ed to the mag­ic of the bloom­ing sub­urbs, but there were books like this pub­lished in both lan­guages. The North was bristling with poten­tial min­eral wealth. The 1940s had already seen a Pio­neer Move­ment, which was espe­cially encour­aged by influ­en­tial peo­ple in Que­bec, who want­ed to divert the leak­age of French Cana­di­ans migrat­ing to New Eng­land (where they would cer­tainly lose their lan­guage) into the North­ern and West­ern Cana­da, where they would be able to keep it. This meant mov­ing into the last remain­ing untouched patch­es of pos­si­ble agri­cul­tural land in North Amer­ica, and home­steading under the most extreme con­di­tions. Some set­tle­ments failed, some­times home­steads would be aban­doned in moment of despair, the cof­fee pot left boil­ing on the stove. (It’s iron­ic that my moth­er, from an ancient Que­bec fam­ily along the St. Lawrence, expe­ri­enced both. Her fam­ily moved to Mass­a­chu­setts to get work in the mills, but when she fin­ished school, she returned to Cana­da and wound up in a sub­arc­tic Ontario min­ing town.)

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