She mentions that he “employs classic Singaporean comedic devices (the fake phone call, the “I told you so” disclaimers, stating the obvious to the camera, and swearing in Mandarin in-between the English dialogue).” Be sure to look for those–I would have otherwise totally missed them as, you know, narrative and comedic devices.
I’ve known a number of Singaporean-Canadians in my life, so his accent and speaking cadence feels very familiar. And very Vancouver.
How bad is it? It’s the Lada of shredders. It’s the Gigli of shredders. The Italian army was better at invading other countries in World War II than this thing is at slicing paper.
We’d built up a bunch of stuff to shred, so we went to town. We read the instructions, and were very careful to only feed it the recommended 8 or 10 sheets (and we often did less). What’s the result? The thing is entirely gummed up. It no longer carries out its only function. It shreds no more.
The above photo shows the state of the blades and gears after I spent an uncomfortable half-hour pulling paper out of the thing.
I’m a firm believer in caveat emptor. We should have taken some time to do a bit of research. Still, if your customers unilaterally tell you that a product doesn’t work, it behooves you to stop selling it.
As you might imagine, the next time I need something for our office, I’m going to Staples.
The Film Club by David Gilmour is a true memoir of three years in the life of the author and his son Jesse. In the introductory pages, Gilmour explains how his sixteen-year-old son was having serious difficulties with school. He was failing courses, cutting classes and was generally (though not unusually) frustrated by the process.
Gilmour and his ex-wife, Jesse’s mother, decide to take their son out of school. Gilmour makes a deal with his son. Jesse can live at home and doesn’t have to get a job as long as he’ll watch three movies a week that his father selects. Hence, the film club of the book’s title.
The rest of the book is one part film criticism and one part parenthood memoir with a pinch of home-schooling. Gilmour tells us about their pre- and post-film conversations, and we get little tidbits and trivia about famous movies. Meanwhile, we learn about Jesse’s girl troubles, his aspirations to be a rapper, and his dubious (thought not unusual) teenage habits of sleeping late and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Gilmour is also struggling a bit–he’s can’t find work.
An Irksome Read
I found The Film Club a particularly irksome read. I wanted to, but I couldn’t get interested in or sympathize with either of the main characters.
First off, Gilmour comes off as a pretty irresponsible parent. He devises this film club strategy on page four of the book. What are the alternatives he considers before letting his son quit high school? Private school. That’s it. There’s no mention of other alternatives, of which I’m sure there are dozens (private tutors and work-study programs spring immediately to mind). After all ‘kid frustrated by high school’ is hardly an unusual problem.
And once Gilmour decides to home-school his kid, what curriculum does his choose? Movies. His only pedagogical tool is Some Like it Hot and Full Metal Jacket? It’s no coincidence that Gilmour is a former film critic. The author seems to say “heck, this is the thing I know about, so I’ll just teach my son about that”.
To his credit, Gilmour frets over his own shortcomings as an instructor. Halfway through the book a sixteen or seventeen-year-old Jesse asks his father where Florida is. Florida! That’s one of the easy states. And yet, Gilmour doesn’t change his approach.
Jesse, for his part, seems to be your typical unmotivated, self-absorbed teenager. While he’s obviously special to Gilmour, he comes off as flat and ordinary. He mopes, he sleeps late, he gets his heart broken. He does seem to be quite a sensitive lad, but this did little to endear me.
My Dad (who read and liked the book with reservations) pointed out that despite never having a job, Jesse always seems to have money. This, like many aspects of their lives (where is Gilmour’s wife in all those? why do we see so little of Jesse’s mother?), goes unexplained or recognized by the narrator.
Gilmour spends a lot of time in the second half of the book describing Jesse’s love affairs with a couple of women. They are, again, the usual drama-filled teenage romances. And we only ever get second-hand accounts, which makes them all the less interesting. Gilmour has a kind of creepy disdain for Jesse’s girlfriends. His jealousy is pretty unflattering.
Jesse seems to mostly exist as a foil for Gilmour to hold forth on the things he cares about: parenthood, movies, his own ex-girlfriends, and so forth.
Two Guys Who Made Dumb Choices
I don’t have to like the characters to enjoy a book. But it helps to care about them, particularly when the book in question is a factual memoir. To me, they seemed like two guys who made some dumb choices and couldn’t (at least for most of the book) see their own mistakes. I’d sum it up as “teenager has ordinary crisis. Father devises ill-informed alternative solution and puts all his eggs in his only basket”.
To top things off, the film criticism was uninteresting. That’s not surprising. We receive the film discussions through the lens of teaching a reluctant teenage learner about famous movies. Even if you’re Pauline Kael, you’re going to simplify your rhetoric, and lace it with enticements that might appeal to a high schooler. I’m not accusing Gilmour of being a bad film critic–I just think his hands are tied by the circumstances he creates.
From a technical perspective, I admire Gilmour’s writing. The book is well-constructed, very cogently written and feels well-edited. Despite my feelings for the characters, I could see it being included on the syllabus of a creative non-fiction writing class.
The Film Club is, at its heart, a book about parenthood. I know three people who have read the book, and they all liked it. As it happens, they’re all parents. I am not. Maybe I’m just not in the target market for this book. It even feels a little risky criticizing Gilmour’s parenting decisions–that seems like sacrosanct territory in our culture. Even if you do have progeny, though, I can’t recommend it.
This is totally unrelated, but I went searching for an image to accompany this review. I searched Flickr for ‘film club david gilmour’. I got all of three photos in the results. It’s fascinating to me that there are more than two billion photos in Flickr, yet I see results like this all the time. What are all those photos of? Vacations? Endless loops of self portrait projects (“085 of 365: Me With No Pants”)? Or are the photos just under-described?
One of my favourite writers, Nicholson Baker, recently wrote an essay on Wikipedia for The New York Review of Books:
Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all outâ€â€and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flatâ€â€a little genericâ€â€fair-mindedâ€â€compressedâ€â€unpromotionalâ€â€neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences mutedâ€â€to some extentâ€â€natural antagonisms.
I’ve always admired Baker’s awesome vocabulary. To pick a random example, he just slides the word ‘panjandrum‘ into a concluding paragraph, as casual as a drop pass.
The essay is ostensibly a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. However, like almost all literary book reviews that I read, the book itself seems an afterthought. This tradition of literary review seems like it’s centuries old–I wonder how it started? It’s unique among the art forms in mainstream media. Movies, plays, dance, visual art–they all only get the same standard treatment, entirely focussed on the artwork itself. Why did books turn out differently?
I was just catching up on some podcasts, and listened to a fascinating episode of White Coat, Black Art about identifying under-performing medical professionals. From the show’s blog:
What do you call the person who graduates last in med school? It’s a set-up to a joke that is anything but. Of course, you call that person ‘doctor.’ There are incompetent people in every job, and doctors are no exception. We don’t have any good statistics on how many incompetent doctors are currently in practice…
Only two provinces — Nova Scotia and Alberta — have mandatory checks on doctors. Ontario will soon follow, once the province passes enabling regulations.
Coming from an industry that has semi-annual reviews for everybody, this is a bit shocking. Surely we ought to be extra-rigorous in evaluating the people who keep us alive?
On a related note, I think, in terms of subject matter, White Coat is one of the more original CBC programs I’ve heard in a while.
UPDATE: I got an answer back from the College of Physicians & Surgeons of British Columbia. They say that there is some kind of mandatory oversight for physicians registered with the college, though the details were a bit fuzzy.
Having not seen a new movie in two months, I downloaded Juno and we watched it last night. As anybody who’s seen it knows, it’s terrific–charming, witty and moving.
It actually has a really ordinary story (see also “Degrassi Junior High” and Saved, for starters), but it’s elevated to greatness by a superb ensemble, witty writing and great direction. I’m a big Ellen Page booster, but director Jason Reitman has made his job much easier by gathering a really terrific, empathetic cast. Everybody else has earned deserved acclaim, but I often think that Jennifer Garner is a better actor than she’s given credit for. Her looks and her history on Alias kind of gets in the way, I think. There’s a scene in which she and her husband discuss preparing the baby’s room which is beautifully acted with a lovely subtlety.
Combine the cast with great dialogue like this:
Leah: Yo Yo Yiggady Yo.
Juno MacGuff: I’m pregnant.
Leah: What? Honest to blog? Are you sure it’s not a food baby? Did you eat a big lunch?
Juno MacGuff: This is not a food baby all right? I’ve taken like three pregnancy tests, and I’m forshizz up the spout.
Leah: How did you even generate enough pee for three pregnancy tests?
Juno MacGuff: T don’t know, I drank like, ten gallons of Sunny D… I’m telling you I’m pregnant and you’re acting shockingly caviler.
Leah: Is this for real?
Juno MacGuff: Unfortunately, yes.
Leah: Oh my GOD. Shit! Phuket, Thailand!
I really enjoyed Reitman’s previous effort, Thank You for Smoking, and this was a very worthwhile follow-up. My only complaints: Jason Bateman’s character was kind of a modern cinematic cliche, Kinya Dawson’s music was too present and I didn’t think the finally scene struck the right note. These are minor quibbles, though. I’d recommend this movie to anybody with a pulse and a command of English.
I vaguely know the spouse of somebody involved in this film, so I feel a little guilty about downloading it. I’m going to make a donation to the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health to assuage my guilt.
I found some time to read some books over the holidays, and here are some very brief reviews:
Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje is the most elegant contemporary writer I know. With the exception of Anil’s Ghost, I’ve read all of his books (I took a class on him in university) and I’m a huge admirer of his craftsmanship. The Collected Work of Billy the Kid remains my favourite book of poetry (though I, admittedly, don’t read much poetry). The plot of Divisadero isn’t as compelling as, say, The English Patient, but reading Ondaatje is a bit like watching Gretzky. They’re a joy because they do so many things right.
The 4-Hour Workweek: This book’s subtitle is “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”. He’s preaching to the choir in my case, but it’s still a fairly inspirational read. He’s got quite a bit of wisdom to deliver on streamlining your work, generating passive income and so forth. That said, the author Tim Ferriss comes off as a bit of a self-important douche bag. Some of the strategies he recommends are ethically dubious, and though he’s living an exotic life, it seems strangely unexamined. To put it another way, The 4-Hour Workweek is one of the least mindful books I’ve ever read. That said, I did finally join Amazon’s Associates affiliate program, to try and make some extra cash off Amazon sales. Wanted: a WP plugin that scans my blog for links to Amazon and replaces them with appropriate affiliate links.
Wintersmith: I grabbed this young adult novel off the shelf for a quick read at the resort in Marrakech. I’d never read a Terry Pratchett (he’s sadly got Alzheimer’s, at 59!) book before, and I enjoyed this one. Much like the Harry Potter books, Wintersmith derives from and builds upon a bunch of existing myths and fairy tales. However Pratchett seems to have a much better sense of humour than J. K. Rowling, for Wintersmith was a more enjoyable (and not to mention concise) read. Judging by this reading order chart, I started on Pratchett’s Discworld books in the wrong spot.
The folks at Penguin sent me a review copy of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. It’s a provocative primer on the newish science of evolutionary psychology, and a direct attack on the central notions of more traditional sociology. I gather that evolutionary psychology is fairly hot at the moment, given all the attention that Steven Pinker has been generating lately (here’s a dry but informative interview with Pinker on evolutionary psychology).
The book’s premise is pretty straight-forward. We have one goal in life: reproduction. It’s all about sex. The authors look at many aspects of human culture–from dating to war–through this lens.
I was immediately hooked when I read a section in the introduction about stereotypes:
But we suggest that you cannot dismiss an observation by calling it a stereotype, as if that suddenly makes it untrue and thus unworthy of discussion and explanation. In fact, the opposite is the case. Many stereotypes are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true.“
They point out that stereotypes have a bad name because they are, in many cases, unkind or offensive to a particular group. “Women are shorter than men” and “women are fatter than men” are both accurate empirical generalizations, but the second becomes a stereotype because no one wants to be regarded as fat. I, too, have always felt that stereotypes have an unnecessarily bad name.
Blondes, Breasts and Suicide Bombers
After an introduction to evolutionary psychology and what’s wrong with traditional sociology, Miller and Kanazawa spend the rest of the book rigorously applying their approach to the practicalities of our lives. These were just a few of the more controversial ideas that have stuck with me:
There’s only one human culture. We think of cultures are highly divergent, but in fact they are far more the same than different.
Men prefer large breasts and blonde hair because (compared to small breasts and dark hair), they change dramatically with age. Therefore, it’s easier to identify the youngest and therefore most fecund potential mates.
In every culture around the world, women prefer to mate with older men, and men prefer to mate with younger women. This is because older men will, in general, be better providers for their offspring, and younger women are healthier, more reliable baby-makers.
Attaining high political office is just a means to have access to a large pool of potential mates. See also President Clinton.
So controversial, I’ll quote it (based on research described in this book, apparently): “The sex gap in earnings and the so-called glass ceiling are caused not by employer discrimination or any other external factors, but by the sex differences in internal preferences, values, desires, dispositions and temperaments…more careful statistical comparisons of men and women who are equally motivated to earn money show that women now earn 98 cents for every dollar men make, and sex has no statistically significant effect on workers’ earnings.”
Most suicide bombers are young, single Muslim men because they are ‘losers’ in the evolutionary game. This is particularly true because Muslim societies are somewhat polygynous, and some men don’t get a chance to pass on their genes. On the other hand, they can look forward to 72 guaranteed mates in the afterlife.
In her 1998 book, Judith Rich Harris “methodically demolishes the universally held assumption that how parents raise their children is a major determining factor in how they turn out…widely condemned by politicians and the media alike, it is in fact corroborated by behaviour genetic research.”
Smart Guys and Plenty of Studies
In terms of approach, this book belongs on the same shelf with Stumbling on Happiness, The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. You know, books where smart guys do some original thinking, cite a bunch of studies and present it to us Normal Humans in terms we can understand.
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters feels more scientific than these other books. Miller and Kanazawa present their work carefully, with plenty of skepticism and disclaimers. There’s even a section at the end of the book called “Stump the Evolutionary Psychologists”, for phenomenon (such as homosexuality) which their approach can’t satisfactorily explain. Because of this more academic approach, their theories should be more compelling than Galdwell’s or Levy’s.
However, Miller and Kanazawa aren’t particularly strong writers, and have little interest in the storytelling that makes boks like The Tipping Point so readable. The authors never use a contraction, and often repeat themselves, to the point of irritating the reader. The book is certainly readable–it’s not overly dry or academic–but it lacks the lyricism that, to my mind, makes these other books such mainstream successes.
: Michael Ondaatje is the most elegant contemporary writer I know. With the exception of Anil’s Ghost, I’ve read all of his books (I took a class on him in university) and I’m a huge admirer of his craftsmanship. The Collected Work of Billy the Kid remains my favourite book of poetry (though I, admittedly, don’t read much poetry). The plot of Divisadero isn’t as compelling as, say, The English Patient, but reading Ondaatje is a bit like watching Gretzky. They’re a joy because they do so many things right.
