Good Reads meta-data is 203 pages, rated 4.22 by 2403 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Holmes.
DNA: Edwardian England.
Verdict: Poof!
Tagline: Now you see him, now you don’t.
Erik Weisz (1874-1926) of Appleton Wisconsin is wrongly accused of murder, melée, and mayhem but Sherlock comes to the rescue as only he can, his Boswell at hand. You know Erik, that is, Harry Houdini stunt performer, illusionist, and escapologist extraordinaire.
With a few of the tricks of his trade, Houdini assists Sherlock in identifying and apprehending the villain. Most amusing is Watson’s first airplane ride. Indeed. Of course there is no end to Sherlock’s wiles and the conclusion is foregone, though there are some nice and neat twists and turns along the way that confirm his nostrum: when all possibilities have been eliminated the impossible remains, or something like that.
No trade secrets are revealed and I never did find out how Harry got through that wall.
***
The lengthy entry on Erik in Wikipedia makes for good reading. There I note that after World War I he devoted a great deal of his time, effort, and reputation to debunking fraudulent spiritualists. He became a member of the editorial board of the Scientific American as a result.
This is a title in the series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which books, mostly reprints, are by a different authors. In this one there are several typos, e.g., ‘wanned’ for ‘warmed’ and some formatting errors. I expect the text was converted to digital for the Kindle by an A.I. that couldn’t read.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 44m, rated 5.4 by 36,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Dystopia; Subspecies: Post Apocalyptic.
DNA: Comic book.
Verdict: Smaller doses, please.
Tagline: Shazam!
The title character injects energy, colour, and confusion into every scene she is in and she is in nearly every scene. On the few occasions when she takes a break, Malcolm McDowell plays… Malcolm McDowell. That sneer hasn’t changed since Clockwork Orange (1971).
While the story and characters are derived from a comic book series, the film lacks the subtlety and finesse of that original! It is all ‘Slam! Bam! Wham!’ and repeat for its runtime.
There is no story just action and reaction. There are no characters just a blur of movement. But there is plenty of that. I watched it with one eye while doing crossword puzzles. It didn’t distract me. Although I admit I enjoyed some of Tank Girl’s antics.
Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 4.08 by 695 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Holmes.
Verdict: Stilted.
Tagline: Bully!
What chance do villains have when a young Sherlock Holmes is on the case? Even less when he is abetted and assisted by a young Theodore Roosevelt.
Holmes is in a company of British actors touring the USA so he can learn the tricks of the thespian trade: make-up, disguise, voice changes, posture, accents, and costumery. A brash Roosevelt had written him a fan letter after reading one of his early monographs on ash or something and they meet in New York City. No sooner than they do, than a man is shot and off they go in pursuit, this dynamic duo.
To the police this is a mugging gone wrong, but in it Holmes sees an ocean or more exactly a political assassination in the making.
Thanks to the intervention of Holmes, President Rutherford Hayes is not assassinated. His one-time Democratic rival Samuel Tilden figures in the investigation, as does a later Vice-President, Chester Arthur, and an elusive Charles Guiteau. A student of US presidential history will see in this list a connect the dots picture. In a corrupt election Hayes defeated Tilden, who, to his credit, accepted the result for the sake and peace and quiet. Later, Guiteau shot President Garfield, while proclaiming he was a Stalwart, the name of a political sect. The result was that Arthur, likewise a Stalwart, became president. Hmmm. The rug of history has been pulled over this for centuries.
Until the current incumbent caused the question of corruption to be reopened, historians had regarded Arthur to be the most venal president. He will now have to cede that title to the Felon-in-Chief.
Footnote: Guiteau had a brush with utopianism in that he joined Noyes’s Oneida Community for several years, but was banished. The details are salacious. The brief biography of his miserable specimen reminded me of many holders of high office in the news today.
I said ‘stilted’ above because it is written as if it were from Roosevelt’s diary and so imitates his laboured styled. And I guess it is successful in that imitation because it certainly is laboured.
***
Stimulated by this reading I once again sought a biography of Tilden. No recent one exists, as I discovered the last time I tried to find one about ten years ago. There is a gap in the literature then, but this time I did find one published in 1939 and will acquire and read that as the world turns.
I formed a very high opinion of Theodore Roosevelt in reading Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of the man some years ago. Highly recommend to biographistas.
This book is a volume in the series of more than thirty reprints as ‘The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ I have read several others, each by a different author.
Good Reads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 4.16 by 6029 cinematizens.
Genre: SciFi; Species: Hard.
DNA: NASA.
Verdict: SETI, indeed.
Tagline: Less can be more.
Dr Bored missed a place among the astronauts and now monitors satellite data from distant and demoted Pluto, when…. Something happens that makes no sense. The titular object appears and does not behave according to the laws of physics legislated by the Solar System. Are the Plutocrats up to something? Someone is going to have pull it over and give it a traffic citation. Who better than the first to see it.
That narrative is interrupted, deflected, and slowed by backstories, sidestories, understories, and overstories, which all too often crowd out the front story. On the plus side, there are no cardboard villains gumming up the works as plot devices. Those who are unenthusiastic about Dr Bored’s mission have reasons which are fully explored.
There is a lot of trip and then the Arrival. Remember Encounter at Farpoint?
Joshua Calvert
P.S. ‘Hard’ means lots of STEM-speak. Lots. None of it contributes to plot or character and all of it was lost on me. One has been warned.
Good Reads meta-data is 30 pages, rated 3.61 by 324 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: A.I.
Verdict: Singular indeed.
Tagline: Take that, Electoral College!
In distant 2008 political campaigns remain, but…the electorate is different. The omnipotent computer HAL in each presidential election identifies THE representative voter and that is the only one who votes on the day. In this story that is one Mr Norman Muller whose mundane work and home life is disrupted by having this responsibility thrust upon him, but, well, he answers the call of this civic duty, or rather the questions about the price of eggs, how often he mows the lawn, what his favourite colour is, how much he spends on gasoline, and a battery of other questions for three hours, and HAL then decides which of the two candidates best fits Muller’s answers to these questions.
Oops, that is a spoiler I guess.
THE elector does not vote for a candidate but answers a host of questions about anything and everything, and then A.I. does the rest.
***
If ye search you will find the text online. I did.
Good Reads meta-data is 262 pages, rated 3.89 by 815 litizens.
Genre: Krimi, Species: Sherlock.
DNA: Holmes.
Verdict: More please.
Tagline: The impossible takes a little longer.
By hook and crook, Holmes and Watson find themselves in Egypt pursuing a wayward Duke at the behest of Mrs Duke. Much colourful to’ing and fro’ing in 1904 Egypt in company of Howard Carter follows. Yes, that Howard Carter.
No adventure in Egypt is completed without a sandstorm and so…. Then there is the Valley of the Kings…. Oops don’t forget the bent pyramid. We also have the relief of the Nile, and a luxury hotel.
Good Reads meta-data is 290 pages, rated 3.75 by 921 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Sherlock.
DNA: Holmes.
Verdict: I ate it with a spoon.
Tagline: ‘He’s back!’
There is a subtitle: Sherlock Holmes 1942 because this is a tribute to Basil Rathbone’s embodiment of Sherlock in the 1942 film The Voice of Terror. For those whose first Holmes was Rathbone, he remains the standard against whom all others are measured.
During London wartime blackouts, four disconnected women have been murdered and mutilated. Baffled, as usual, the plod calls in the ageless Sherlock with his Boswell, this Watson is not the avuncular buffoon of Nigel Bruce’s portrayal, but still none too bright. While the war explains the blackout it does not figure in the story in any other way. Except…well, it turns out to be the key to the plot. Nicely done that.
There are many red herrings and blue cods, while the least likely is per genre the villain.
***
I bought a paper copy of this book at Abbey’s while we were on a staycation at that art deco palace, the Grace Hotel. I read it in a single rainy day there, and a rainy night, to be sure. Very diverting.
Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages rated 4.03 by 3930 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction. Species: musings.
DNA: Teutonic.
Verdict: Mad, bad, and brilliant.
Tagline: ‘Nietzsche will teach’ya.’
Nietzsche (1844-1900) has two reputations: First, as a harbinger of Naziism with his Übermensch, and this book folds into that. It is sometime erroneously supposed that he meant by the title that the Übermensch need not be bound by any morality. As is often the case with popular interpretations, he means the opposite. That the ordinary moralism of churchmen, editorialist, school teachers who label things ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is superficial, failing to plumb the depth and complexity of the lifeworld. In reality evil can come from good and good from evil, rather than being opposites these two intersect, interact, and sometimes one nurtures the other: yin and yang. If we accept and stop with the simple labels of these everyday moralists without question, we will never understand the deeper and disturbing reality.
His second reputation is as an obscurantist. It is certainly true that he makes demands on readers. Mainly because he so categorically rejects conventional wisdom, but also because he is not a systematic thinker (like Kant, Hegel, or Marx). He rejects and reviles such an approach. He contradicts himself, is inconsistent, and is incomplete and admits it, because life is like that.
But, if a reader relaxes and lets him flow there are rewards to be had without subscribing to his weltanschauung.
Part of his message is that a lived morality must be self-consciously chosen by the individual, akin to the message in the book of Matthew of the New Testament: Don’t do things because Christ tells you to do so, do them because they are right. It is a message as old as Aristotle: do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason (because it is right). Nietzsche thought only a few people could accept this responsibility and do it. They who can do so should be, in fact, are the leaders of society. This kind of selection is only possible in authoritarian, aristocratic societies, so like Tocqueville, he preferred that social structure, in contrast to Matthew who thought everyone could and should do this or Tocqueville who did not assert his preference onto others. Nietzsche has no such restraints.
(By the by, this same message can be found in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, but Nietzsche reviled Kant so much he would not admit it. Nietzsche often refers to the Chinaman, and that is his racist contempt for the man from Königsberg. That is, Kant was so determined to maintain the consistency of his elaborate system that it became detached from reality, like the European stereotype of a Chinese emperor.)
There is no doubt that Nietzsche was not a man of our time and the pygmies have made careers out of proving that obvious fact. For him race, class, gender all had decisive meaning. He justified slavery. Smelled the herd in democracy or socialism. He regarded women as barely human. He drank deeply of Richard Wagner’s music, imbibing a heady Teutonic mysticism, which he denied while wallowing in it. Some of this is shaded by contemporary translators who elide, soften, gloss, mute these declamations.
All that said, still his prose burns bright. Here are a few illustrative passages with my comments beneath, after the dash.
Preface. ’all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.’
– it takes time for new ideas to be accepted, but once they are accepted, they wander further all around the world.
’22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but ‘Nature’s conformity to law’…exists only owing to your interpretation…. Scientific findings are not matter merely matters of fact, but a human interpretation and invention.
– truth consists of concepts not naturally occurring facts, e.g., an average, the atom, gravity, ….all are concepts.
28. ‘But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his ‘ll Principe’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of contrast he ventures to present – long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, most wanton humour.’
– Machiavelli’s prose has a cadence, true, but the air of Florence was seldom fine along the sewer the Arno often was.
42. ‘as far they allow themselves to be understood – for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle – these philosophers of the future’
– did he anticipate the wizard Martin Heidegger who do not want to be understood because that would reveal that there is nothing behind the curtain to reveal.
44. ‘Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future – as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken?’
– ditto above.
46. religion represents a suicide of reason
– compare to H. L. Mencken on the body count of religions.
’63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously and even himself – only in relation to his pupils.’
– few meet this requirement.
144. ‘When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is “the barren animal”.’
– sounds like a contemporary US Republican which party will soon ban women from higher education.
146. ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’
– you become what preoccupies you.
169. ‘To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.’
– talk can be a way of not communicating.
206. ‘The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man….’
– ever more about ever less.
‘the objective man’
‘the lulling poppy of scepticism’
‘the conceited ape’
‘a kind of safety police’
214. ‘we firstlings of the twentieth century’
‘good conscience is the respectable pigtail of an idea.
– loved all the above bons mots.
219. ‘The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow and it is an opportunity for disguised malice.’
– the mediocre scholar delights in deprecating great achievers.
228. virtue has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than anything else.
– ditto
English happiness [utilitarians]
footsteps to self-knowledge
239. unlearns to fear
– this one reminds me of a passage in Machiavelli.
252 ‘They are not a philosophical race – the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom Schelling rightly said, “Je méprise [I despise] Locke”; in the struggle against the English mechanical stultification of the world…’
253. ‘There are truths – which are best recognised by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits.’
– intellectuals can’t see the obvious. Instead all too often offer elaborate explanations of the dead obvious.
260. master-morality; slave-morality
‘According to slave-morality, therefore, the “evil” man arouses fear, according, to master-morality, it is precisely the ‘good’ man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.’
what rouses the mediocre scholar is not an evil man but a good one, whose example is an embarrassment to his small mind, so he endeavours to bring the great low.
273. ‘A man who strives after great things, looks upon everyone whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance – or as a temporary resting-place.’
users all.
274. ‘He who does not wish to see the height of a man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground – and thereby betrays himself.’
– the valets of the world, pace Hegel. The 3rd reader!
***
While browsing in the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn I came across this cantankerous old frenemy. Idly, I picked it up and flipped a few pages and started to read, and kept reading, so I decided to buy. I once had a copy of it in a collection of his works that I shed when I downsized from the university office, thinking I would not get back to it.
P.S. Nietzsche did warn us in the Genealogy of Morals about the blond beast of prey that pounces on a population with terrible claws driven by insatiable egoism. If any of that sounds familiar go the head of the class.
P.S. The opening quotation is from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), Bruce’s song.
DNA: 108-stitches. (If you know, then you know; and if you don’t, then you don’t.)
Verdict: Incomparable.
Tagline: If you quit, then the bastards win.
An hour spent in the singular company of Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige from hungry poverty in Mobile Alabama to international celebrity on the strength of a fastball that no one, including Joe DiMaggio, could hit. He become the Major League’s Baseball’s Rookie of the Year at age 42. The Jolter was one of many who said Paige was the most difficult pitcher he ever faced, and even a windbag like Dizzy Dean said Paige was from another planet.
Know a man by his enemies: Taylor Sphinx (the tyrannical owner of the Sporting News) despised Paige. That is one for Satchel. Know a man by his friends. Bill Veeck was his best friend. Add another credit for Satchel. Here’s another for him: Teddy ‘Baseball’ Williams used his own induction speech at the Valhalla of Cooperstown to advocate the inclusion of historic black players and he named Satchel Paige as the best pitcher he had ever faced, and he saw a 42-year-old Satch.
All things considered in long hindsight the most remarkable thing about Paige was that he never complained about the constraints that racism put on him. He just got on with what he did best – pitching. He was no civil rights campaigner like Jack Robinson. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from that comparison but perhaps a reader does.
I saw him pitch an inning once in an exhibition game when he must have been sixty, and he struck out the side on nine pitches. I lined up for his autography later which he kindly provided but that artefact is now lost, perhaps it was kept by a buddy who lined up with me.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 18m, rated 6.5 by 754 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Cheapo.
DNA: Jordan.
Verdict: As static and wordy as a Mamet play.
Tagline: I knew it! She’s a machine.
Two people talk in a tatty Thistle hotel room during Black September civil war of 1970 in Amman Jordan while conflict rages outside (boom, crack, wham). The man is a cynical Scots journalist who, in the best tradition of the profession, makes up reports without leaving his room. The woman claims to be an ambassador from an alien civilisation whose astro-limo misfired and dropped her in there instead of the USA. A miss is as good as 10,000 miles. Her code name is ‘Friendship.’ No Gort in sight.
They talk and talk and talk, and talk some more. The talk is full of learned references without any momentum. It just goes around in circles. Off camera each does leave the room.
But mostly, they talk and talk…zzzzz….
At least she does not lecture the viewer, as is the preferred method of exposition by a considerable number of contemporary film makers, who in an earlier age would have gone to the priesthood to denounce our sins numerous: ecological, climatic, racial, social, technological, inequitable, venal, mortal, and more.
By the way, this alien did not travel light, sporting new clothes in nearly every scene with perfect makeup.
When Tilda says something like, ’I appear to be a human, but that’s a veneer; inside I am a machine.’ I said: ‘I knew it all along, Tilda, you are a machine!’
