The Clean Body: A Modern History

The Clean Body: A Modern History by Peter Ward covered the habits of personal hygiene, or lack thereof, in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onward. Ward was exhaustive in his coverage, not merely listing the products that were used, whether soap, shampoo, toothpaste and laundry detergent, but the social conditions and daily habits that led to the evolution in cleanliness practices. It would be hard to bathe regularly if your house wasn’t equipped with a private room; likewise those who lived in houses that didn’t even have running water were less likely to have a bath at all. Thus house design was influenced by this change in attitude towards personal hygiene.

Ward exposed the disparity between class and cleanliness, and also how urban and rural living affected one’s tendency to wash. Western society of the past fifty years has bred overall clean body habits, where the majority of people shower or bathe, brush their teeth and wash their hair every single day. This was unheard of two hundred years ago. The bathing habits back then focussed on washing only the skin that was exposed, so people concentrated on their faces and hands. There was a disconnect between hygiene and good health. This changed as scientific discoveries proved the connection between uncleanliness and disease. Early soap advertisements promoted good health as the result of using their products. Now with all people taking a daily shower and washing their hands we do not need to promote health via hygiene. The advertising of today promotes clean bodies as more attractive and desirable than healthy, thus aesthetics is the new goal of hygiene. Yet by the 1800’s:

“Before the end of the nineteenth century, then, the idea of regular bathing had come to be embedded in leading notions of hygiene. The German hygienic reformer Oscar Lassar established it as the defining goal of his crusade during the 1880s, and he was only one of many champions of cleanliness for whom it became a core objective. Public bath promoters like Lasser [sic] wished to imbue the lower classes with bourgeois standards of body care: the new hygiene would improve the habits of the poor, animate their sense of self-control, and uplift their physical and moral condition. Bathing was a discipline that, once accepted, would prompt them to embrace the duty of their own body care and, in turn, their own general welfare. Many proponents wrapped the cause in the rhetoric of advancing social progress.”

Thus cleanliness, a characteristic of only the rich–who after all could afford the time and space to bathe–was promoted among the lower classes. Ward often described how slowly it was for new hygiene habits to become regular, and western Europe lagged behind the squeaky-clean USA. The author supplemented the text with figures and tables that showed washing machine usage, time spent doing laundry work, and soap and detergent consumption to back up these claims.

I needed two weeks to finish this book. Its 66 pages of endnotes–in a book that was only 308 pages long, excluding the index–made for a tiring read at times. As one who always reads notations such as endnotes, footnotes, acknowledgements and the bibliography, facing these 66 pages was daunting. The Clean Body was a slow read though meticulously researched. You might end up shaking your head wondering how people a couple centuries ago managed to stand each other living amongst the literal unwashed. I suppose mutual stink cancelled the others out.

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Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession

Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession by Gavin Francis was a psychological trip into my own island obsession. I read eerie similarities between the author and myself in analyzing our mutual preference for taking holidays to insular destinations. I had a feeling that I would be reading deep into my own mind when I encountered, on the very first page, the author’s earliest memories of visiting libraries and what he enjoyed most about them:

“Thinking of islands often returns me in memory to the municipal library I visited as a child. The library was one of the grandest buildings in town–entered directly from the street through heavy brass doors, each one tessellated in panes of glass thick as lenses. By age eight or nine I’d exhausted the children’s library and been given an adult borrower’s ticket. But as my mother browsed the shelves, often as not I’d sit down on the scratchy carpet tiles and open an immense atlas, running my fingers over distant and unreachable archipelagos as if reading Braille. I hardly dared hope I’d reach any of them; that I have reached a few is something of a relief. And so the love of islands has always, for me, been inextricable from the love of maps.”

Francis and I shared the exact same story, although I was a little older when I discovered the National Geographic Atlas of the World. What draws us to these destinations? Surely there are other places that are just as interesting yet easier to get to. Why spend extra time and expense hightailing it to a dot in the water? Francis elaborates on a possible answer:

“But through adolescence, medical school, and working as a doctor in speciality training, it began to dawn on me that I sought out islands to recalibrate my sense of what matters. Their absence of connection, their isolation, was therapeutic in a way I found difficult to articulate.”

During my travelogue presentations on my trips to Tristan da Cunha, I give a brief history of the island and my particular attraction to it. Knowing that people who attend my shows are there to see photos from my trips and not to sit there listening to some guy talking in front of a blank screen, in my opening monologue I defer to the excuse “I’d have to lie down on a psychiatrist’s couch in order to explain in depth my psychological attraction to islands as vacation destinations”. For Francis is correct: it is difficult to articulate the reasons we find islands so appealing. I find it therapeutic as well, as I use islands as a way to get away from people and the proverbial hustle and bustle of my everyday life. How else to explain my penchant for visiting isolated islands or ones that have low populations? You don’t find me taking trips to Indonesia, Japan or the Philippines, for example. Yet my own travel blog is filled with vacation reports–and often repeated trips–spent in the Åland Islands, Ile de Batz, Bornholm, Christiansø, the Faroe Islands, Grímsey, Iceland, McNabs Island, Nightingale Island, Pelee Island, Tristan da Cunha, Vardø, and Vestmannaeyjar. Last year I had planned a trip to Europe which included a stop in the Isle of Man.

While I have to use vacation time to visit these islands, Francis was a doctor and made his obsession a part of his job by taking temporary medical assignments to remote islands the world over. In Island Dreams, we follow him as he travels the world but his story is not a chronological narrative. In fact, his book is heavy on the maps and low on the text. The book is only 246 pages long but printed on thick paper–perhaps in homage to the exploration maps of centuries ago. Francis gave the reading experience the conscious feeling of containment, as the text was descriptive and informative yet brief, captured on pages with wide margins and headers and footers. Pages therefore resembled islands of text surrounded by moats of margins. The words themselves were contained, as I never saw a hyphenated word split across two pages and with rare exception each page ended with complete sentences, anchored by periods.

Francis wrote some evocative descriptions of his travels, such as this memory of the aurora borealis:

“A wash of swirling luminescence rose and fell, like marbled endpapers spread over the book of the sea.”

While visiting the Andaman Islands, my temples started to throb when Francis wrote:

“On the ground the heat was like a migraine, pounding and shimmering, fracturing the light.”

Francis filled his book with maps, almost all of which were historical in context and thus may not have even referred to the places he was discussing by their current names. Maps flanked the text so the reader never had to flip ahead or back to find out where he was writing about. Some maps weren’t even in English. In spite of these forms of disguise, I found it a pleasure to try to find the islands from these small maps, as it wasn’t always easy and I often used a magnifying glass. It is fitting that he used Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island as the map on the book cover; each antiquated map Francis supplied yielded its own treasure to the reader with the patience to search within it.

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How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island

How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island by Egill Bjarnason was published in 2021. It’s a popular new book about an old subject: history. Iceland has been the hottest spot on the planet to visit for the past ten years. I myself have been there three times between 2013 and 2018 (not counting airline transfers at Keflavík) so it’s a good time to publish a new history book for English readers. I found it to be so much more interesting than History of Iceland: From the Settlement to the Present Day, which, in spite of my fondness for all things Nordic, I found to be so crushingly dull.

The title is an exaggeration, as world events recounted in lengthy detail such as the French Revolution, the foundation of Israel and the moon landing all would have taken place without Iceland’s minuscule role. It is Egill’s charm in making his homeland’s level of involvement seem all the more dramatic on the world stage. Egill wrote this book originally in English, so it was not weighed down by the potential awkwardness of a substandard translation. He wrote a chronological history which was broken down by subject matter, starting with chapters entitled The Discovery of the West, then The Medieval Legacy, moving on to other historical topics such as Nationalism, World War II, The Moon Landing, The Cold War and ending with Gender Equality. What made Egill’s book such a can’t-put-down read was its humour and Egill’s–perhaps his knowing representation of all Icelanders–willingness to laugh at himself.

Egill’s humour was not confined to jokes or snappy punchlines, but rather in his ability to tell a funny story. I found myself quoting him at length, for the laughter he elicited is lost unless I reproduce entire paragraphs. The author shows that ignorant tourists (both real and faux) can be as idiotic as some of the stalwarts of Icelandic history like Vikings and temperamental volcanoes. His humour never deflected from the seriousness at hand, which included the revelation that Eva Braun had visited Iceland in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. Egill even pointed out that colour film footage of her trip is available on YouTube.

This style of writing history wasn’t irreverent and has enough laughs and personal asides to keep you turning the pages. To get an idea of the kind of history book Egill wrote, I include the following passages. They were my favourite parts and I still smile as I reread them:

“Well-meaning tourists asked questions that ranged from baffling to mildly insulting, like whether the country had enough educated people to run a functioning government. Each visitor seemed to have a pre-conceived narrative of what Iceland was. Iceland the alien planet. Iceland the frozen wasteland. Iceland the expensive playground. Iceland the Viking fortress.”

“Iceland’s first history book, The Book of Settlements, tells the story of Ingólfur, and then goes on to detail the names and farm holdings of the thousands of settlers who came after him. This was a kind of Viking VIP list written by the country’s first nerd, Ari the Learned, to highlight the country’s respectable genealogy–to show that it was populated by more than slaves and murderers.”

“Hekla’s two most powerful eruptions, those of 1104 and 1300, brought a cloud of ash flying over northern Europe like a guerrilla marketing campaign for doomsday: Hell is real! So you’d better come to church.”

“Earlier expedition leaders had skimmed the landscape in comparison, and taken a degree of liberty with their recollections, recounting tales of crossing bridges made of whalebone and meeting locals who lived to be 150 years old. Facts did not get in their way. Their goal was to feed a market hungry for historical and geographical publications, the most common category of nonreligious books since the invention of the printing press. Iceland was the exotic North, and there was hardly anyone around to correct false claims. Rarely was there documented proof that an author had ever actually visited the country, and typically each publication was influenced by previously printed books, the myths repeated again and again. Icelanders living in Denmark tried to dispel the rumors, but the most popular ‘facts’ came back like zombies: two books published fifty years apart by Dithmar Blefken (in Dutch) and Olaus Magnus (in Swedish) claim, respectively, that Icelanders live for up to 150 to 300 years–because of the pure climate, of course. Which I’d say is fair reasoning: the human body is organic, and we all know that vegetables and other organic things last longer in the fridge.”

“So in the spring of 1939, when the uptight Dr. Gerlach arrived in the world’s northernmost capital, he struggled to make friends with anyone other than German nationals living in Iceland and a few long-standing German allies. Gerlach was described as one of the best pathologists in Europe, but his devotion to the Nazi Party got him fired from his university in Switzerland. In return, his promotion within the Nazi Party was swift. He was invited to serve the Third Reich in Iceland, a place of ‘high culture.’ What an honor! Imagine the anticipation of a Nazi who’d been promised he could work with ‘pure’ Aryans. His voyage was like that of a kid heading to an actual unicorn ranch, only to be stabbed by a horn.”

“Anyone without a criminal record can run for president, as long as they are above the constitutional age limit of thirty-five, which is (as everyone knows) the age when one finally starts acting more presidential–the age when one can hear the words open bar without waking up hungover behind a dumpster the next morning.”

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Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life

In Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, Joan Moriarity & Jonathan Kay spend as much time writing about tabletop games as they do about the personalities and psychological makeup of their players, and how game theory can affect the world at large. I was more attracted to the chapters by Moriarity, who interacts daily with players at a Toronto gaming café and witnesses the behaviours exhibited by a wide range of customers. By her own admission, she surprises herself by what reactions game players exhibit versus what she believes they should be exhibiting. Case in point: the most politically incorrect game around today, Cards Against Humanity:

“Another curious thing about Cards Against Humanity is the people who choose to play it. I have spent years observing people selecting and playing games so I think I have a better sense than most about which games reach which target audiences. For a long time, I assumed it must be straight, white, cisgender dudes driving the game’s massive success. As the years went by, I began to notice something about the people at the café who came to me looking for help finding a copy of it: roughly nine in ten were women, and about half of those were women of color. Obviously, I do not know and cannot know the exact reasons why people choose to play any particular game but I thought my experience had provided me with ample basis for making educated guesses. What I saw went against who I supposed this game was for and how it was meant to be enjoyed. I wondered who these women could be punching down at. Their queer friends? Their trans friends? That did not seem likely.”

I have played this game many times and only within a group of other gay men. As one of the targeted groups within this nasty deck of cards, we can’t help laughing at the obvious antigay slant some of the cards display. I have attended comedy shows put on by gay and lesbian comedians, and their jokes are full of queer stereotypes that a straight comedian would lose his or her career over. We can laugh at the homophobic biases because we know that they are so totally not true or are surreal exaggerations. On a related note, there are some Jewish comedians who can tell anti-Semitic jokes that gentile comedians could never do (and Joan Rivers had been the bane of the Anti-Defamation League on more than one occasion). So I do not agree with the theory that Cards Against Humanity allows its players to be “horrible people” by being openly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on. The game is not unleashing the closet anti-Semite in all of us. We are not laughing at others, but ridiculing ourselves instead when we play it.

I enjoyed Moriarity’s teaching style and her insight into gamer personalities and I believe that under her tutelage I might become a convert to fantasy or empire-building games. My gaming preference has always been the wordy types: Scrabble, Probe, Balderdash, Hangman or any of the other Scrabble-inspired or -derived tile games like Anagrams and Fry Your Brain. I do play other games, such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, but of all the games Moriarity and Kay talked about in this book, Greenland (a survival game) has piqued my interest the most to want to play it and now I am looking on-line to find out where I might buy it.

Irony alert as chapter five was entitled “Cures for Pandemics and Alpha Players”, where Moriarity dealt with the game called Pandemic (this book was published in September 2019, which leads me to wonder if COVID-19 will inspire anyone to develop a game based on its worldwide spread) as well as how to deal with know-it-all players who ruin everyone’s experience by dominating the game table.

The authors referred to their own essays as well as each other’s, both ones already encountered and ones yet to come, and this must have required a massive editing collaboration to ensure that what they said was later covered, or had been dealt with earlier. Thus although the authors stated at the beginning that each of the game essays could be read independently and that jumping around the book skipping chapters was perfectly all right, there was nonetheless a tight sense of cohesion where chapters flowed well together. I would recommend reading the book from cover to cover.

By far the best chapter was Moriarity’s Scattergories and Sacrilege, where she pummelled the card game as a friendship breaker and family un-maker:

“It is often labeled a ‘party game’ but that implies a party-like atmosphere. Gregarious fun, rollicking hijinks, that sort of thing. Scattergories is more like being stuck in detention with nothing to do but your homework. Players sit quietly with their papers and pens, writing without talking to each other, without interacting or even looking at each other. They might as well be doing their taxes. This part of Scattergories is a silent, joyless chore.”

Kay wrote one of the most poignant lines that introverted social misfits like me can identify with:

“Board gaming in general…is the only thing I do in life that allows me to fuse fully my desire for intellectual stimulation with the inborn human appetite for some form of social connection.”

Some style notes I must comment on: I abhor the lazy suffix -wise, which my local weather forecaster uses excessively with the sentences always beginning “Temperaturewise…” I admit that the beauty of the English language allows its speakers to understand what neologisms like this mean without the excesses of circuitous prepositional phrases. A word like this might go over better in an oral context, but on the printed page, I would prefer to see “As for the temperature…” Kay was guilty of two such -wise monstrosities. I let the first one go without putting it in my notes, but by the time I encountered the second occurrence:

“Hobby-wise, board gaming is more properly described as a confederation of sub-communities…”

I had to note it. The -wise suffix is inelegant on the printed page and should be avoided in neologisms.

Unfortunately the end of the book disappointed me with two errors within its last two paragraphs. These mistakes ruined an otherwise pleasant read with a bang-bang effect of successive erroneous words:

“…those same people are have already shown their willingness to actually get together…”

and:

“So maybe it’s good that there are all those various communities are there, playing among various kinds of people.”

This kind of error, where it seems more likely that the author changed tense or verb placement while the original wording or part thereof was left in, was found elsewhere in the book, but I did not note it. The editor in me felt that I could let those instances pass, but not twice in the final two paragraphs. 

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The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country

I was happy to give my partner The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country by Helen Russell as a requested Christmas gift last year. After he read it I wanted it next. It was originally published in 2015 and I was happy to buy the 2020 edition which included a new chapter. In 2013 the author moved to Billund, Denmark after her husband got a job at the Lego headquarters, located in the town. She left her job as editor of Marie Claire and embarked on a job as a freelancer, endeavouring to find out what made the Danes the happiest people in the world.

In a series of chapters divided by each month of the year and an accompanying theme, Russell discovered the ways of living Danishly. She interviewed Danish lifestyle experts, professionals, neighbours and regular Danes she met on the street. Russell discovered many reasons for overall Danish happiness, but a couple reasons stood out in particular: the Danish devotion to rules and to traditions. Whether discovering the rules about flying the Danish flag (the Dannebrog) or other national flags, the appropriate way to decorate a home, or why you’d kill a giraffe, Russell found humour in learning the Danish way of doing things. The fact that Denmark is a heavily taxed welfare state with a commitment to sexual equality and social progress is another reason for ensuring happiness among its people. As a workaholic magazine editor from London, the rural life of 34-hour workweeks was a culture shock at first. Russell and her husband had to discover the Danish way of leisure in a country where employees are treated as equals from the CEO on down, and the corporate rat race is a foreign concept. Why stay late at work when no one will give a damn (and likely reprimand you for doing so)? The Danes value their time away from work as crucial to their happiness, and extracurricular activities take up a large part of their lives. One of the funniest parts of the book was spent on describing the structured atmosphere of organized clubs. The Danish devotion to rules might rub some members the wrong way, however, resulting in a splintering of groups:

“…there are rival sewing clubs that all hate each other. Like the Sharks and the Jets but with needles. Terrifying.”

I found Russell’s tales of being a fish out of water to be a speedy and overall funny read. I even drew similarities between her experiences and my own when I lived in Finland during the summer of 2000. There were occasions when my inexperience with speaking the Finnish language–while trying to avoid using English–led to some humorous (or frustrating) reactions. I was laughing as I read about her experiences in her first Danish language class. After almost a year in Denmark she still found herself clueless when reading the language. Russell confessed that she would have been lost without Google Translate.

However there were three particular features in her writing that drove me crazy. Russell was a regular abuser of the lazy literary technique of stringing words together in elongated hyphenated descriptive phrases. This excess of hyphens is not only a pain to read but also unsightly to encounter on the printed page. It would be so much more elegant to read restructured sentences without any hyphens at all. I did not find the examples below to be captures of streams of consciousness, but awkward passages requiring multiple rereads:

“The snow has shifted up a gear, from gentle, Richard Curtis film-like flakes into snow-globe-being-shaken-vigorously-by-angry-toddler territory.”

and

“The bubble bursts and I swiftly dismiss the idea of spending the next twelve months cherishing his every wet-towels-on-the-bed and inability-to-locate-the-laundry-basket foible.”

Russell never named her husband and, after he got the job at Lego, referred to him every time as Lego Man, which was visually jarring and annoying as the joke wore off before page ten. Please, just refer to him by his name. Russell used nicknames for the people she encountered (yet named the professionals and experts she interviewed) and didn’t even name her seaside town, calling it Sticksville-on-Sea which was, aside from insulting, doubly annoying since it employed an excess of hyphens, her preferred form of punctuation. She managed to cover all three in one sentence with:

“‘We’re not in Sticksville now…’ I tell Lego Man as I inhale a truffle-dust-and-powdered-mushroom dish in one of the city’s smarter canal-side restaurants.”

Lastly, the editor she is should have caught the overuse in her propensity to refer to controversial or scandalous topics by the suffix -gate. I abhor this Watergate allusion, finding it a sign of a lazy writer. I read it once, then twice, yet by the third time, on page 117 (to “slaughter-gate”) I had had enough of it. And then I read it again on page 148 with a reference to “pole dancing-gate”; page 243 to “pain-reliefgate”; and page 317 to “Lars-Mette-Jens-gate” (italics in the original text). Six times is six times too many. Please, you’re an editor and an accomplished writer. Find some other way to describe scandalous topics.

I passed a few spelling errors–which my typical snobbish self will ignore here [1]–but will not let her get away with “folk-rocker Stephen Sills” (when it should be Stills) and her reference to the Swiss flag as “slightly different to the Dannebrog, with a fatter white cross in the centre of a bright red rectangle”. The Swiss flag is a square.

These literary annoyances preclude me from giving The Year of Living Danishly a five-star review. I enjoy cultural tales such as this and Russell wrote in such a realistic conversational style that I raced through this book. Her quotations seemed genuinely plucked from real life. Credit to Russell for keeping the humour when she quoted local experts and academic reports that backed up her book’s subtitle: Denmark definitely does seem to be the world’s happiest country. As Russell’s first year in Denmark came to an end, she summed up what the experience had meant to her:

“Living Danishly has given me a glimpse of a more meaningful way of being. An understanding of how life should be, or at least, how it could be. And I like it.”

[1] “Any strange typos are because I’m writing at the same time as jogging an eight-week-old over my shoulder while he vomits and defecates simultaneously, occasionally kicking out a few rogue characters on the laptop keyboard.”

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Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer

Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer is a compilation of short essays about the city’s gay history. The book was divided into subjects such as Spaces; Emergence; Resisting, Sharing, Organizing; Sex; Rights and Rites; and Pride, among many others. Essays were indeed short–most of them either two or three pages–which I found on many occasions would abruptly end just as the story became interesting. How disappointed I was to turn the page only to find a few remaining lines. Because of these frequent abrupt hatchet-job endings I got the idea that the contributors must have submitted more than their maximum word count, leaving the editors to make the cuts whenever that quota was reached. While I am not ignorant of local gay history, it still would have been nice to read more about the 1981 bathhouse raids or the obscenity charges brought against Glad Day Bookshop. In spite of the haphazard way the essays were edited I have to consider that this might have been the intent. What better way to entice readers to learn more about gay history than by titillating them with only a snippet of a story?

My favourite essay was by Kate Zieman about a lesbian couple of 47 years, nicknamed Queenie and Ted. I would have loved to learn more about them and seen their bequest to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. These two women lived in the Broadview and Danforth area. I know this part of Toronto and since their past addresses were given, I was able to use Google Maps to plot their moves from apartment to apartment. Queenie and Ted weren’t celebrities but just one of the many lesbian or gay couples that lived under our noses in pre-Stonewall Toronto. Sadly, such were the rigid rules about sex-appropriate clothing in the 1950’s that Ted was “banned from working in the front office with the rest of the women because she refused to wear a dress.”.

As a conservative I have a problem with gays who try to jump through hoops in order to justify their predilection for having sex in public parks. Jake Tobin Garrett tries, and fails, in his essay Desire Lines. It doesn’t help his case that the page layout placed his line “Public sex in parks is illegal” as the first line on a new page. What a way to shoot yourself in the foot when you’re trying to convince others–especially straight people, police and judges–that you have a right to use a public park to engage in illegal activity.

The only essays I found to be lagging–and at three pages, they had to be really boring–were the ones about fringe political causes. As the LGBT+ label grows ever longer (doesn’t anyone else see how patently ludicrous it is to keep adding letters to this dissonant string which is not even a pronounceable acronym), people who are not attached to this string of letters and numbers are going to feel excluded. Fringe politicos with self-given names tend not to be the best writers. They are annoying.

Andrew Zealley wrote one of the most enjoyable essays, Chalking It Up to Experience, about the bathhouse scene. Too bad the editors misspelled his surname as Zeally in the contributors’ profiles. I also liked Fiona MacCool’s essay on the women’s bathhouse scene, The First Rule of Pussy Palace.

Any Other Way excelled with its essays on early Toronto queer history, sharing lesbian and gay bar life and the stories of the social scene. I enjoyed the accompanying photos, mostly in black-and-white, and the diverse scope of history, showing that queer history in Toronto encompassed all ethnicities and religions.

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Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy!

 

Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy! by Claire McNear came out late last year and was a book I did not want to put down. For avid “Jeopardy!” fans like me, this was a speedy read. McNear had access to sit in on auditions and see how the show narrowed down its prospective contestants to find those select few who were TV-calibre. She interviewed the key people working behind the scenes such as the executive producer and contestant coordinator as well as the most familiar face of “Jeopardy!”, host Alex Trebek. In addition to the production staff, the author interviewed many players who had appeared on the show over the past 36 years during the Trebek era and I made notes to check them out on-line. While I may have forgotten some of their names, I didn’t forget their faces or famous appearances.

Some of my friends have appeared on the show and even been in the Tournament of Champions and other special tournaments. Since I have insider knowledge by proxy, many of my questions about the inner workings of the show had long ago been answered. Nevertheless there were some rules I was not aware of, such as wagers of $69 or $666 are prohibited. A tournament player told me that prior to the Final Jeopardy! round, players are given all the time they need in order to calculate their final wagers. In the words of my friend Leslie, “your math skills go out the window” when you’re under time pressure, so the producers do not rush the players’ calculations. What I did not know is that the same kind of time allowance is given for Daily Doubles:

“Contrary to how it appears on TV, contestants are given as long as they want to calculate their Daily Double wagers. But while players theoretically have limitless time to add up the remaining money on the board and riddle out how close their opponents might get–three-time contestant Alan Lin is known for elaborate midair counts as he sorts through his options on his fingers–they still contend with the host, who likes to keep things snappy.”

McNear covered the history of the second incarnation of the game with Trebek as host and included chapter topics such as betting strategy, knowledge acquisition, clue selection, as well as the lighter side of the game such as its influence on popular culture. She listed some of the show’s records, both remarkable as well as infamous. Every time I read more of the book I checked on-line to find clips of some of those historical moments.

When McNear was writing the book, Harry Friedman had just announced his retirement after 21 years as executive producer, and Trebek was battling pancreatic cancer. We have since lost Alex Trebek and have as new executive producer Mike Richards (who has also served as guest host, and is my personal favourite among the guest hosts so far). The inevitable question is whether a new host and EP will change “Jeopardy!”. I believe that the show will continue to be the massive success it has been for close to four decades.

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All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir

 

All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir by Kathy Valentine, the bass player of the Go-Go’s, was published last year. It follows the first Go-Go’s memoir, Lips Unsealed by Belinda Carlisle, which came out eleven years ago, and it was inevitable that I would make comparisons between the two. One contrast that I found striking is how well the Valentine memoir was written. I had no suspicion that it could have been transcribed from interviews and it thus read like a written book. Within the memoir Valentine revealed she had an English degree and is a songwriter after all so she is perfectly capable of writing her own memoir. I did not see any additional author credit so it could very well be that the genuine Valentine herself penned it. She had kept her old journals and calendars so had instant cues to trigger memories. In regards to Lips Unsealed, however, I got the impression that Carlisle’s book was more of a series of transcribed interviews. The only other comparison I wish to make about the two memoirs is that during the Go-Go’s heyday in the early eighties, the five band members were certainly proverbial rock ‘n’ roll party girls who liked to drink and do drugs. Not all of them got deep into drugs, mind, as Jane Wiedlin and Gina Schock never became addicts as Carlisle, Charlotte Caffey and Valentine herself were. Yet both Valentine and Carlisle spent the latter parts of their memoirs documenting their quests towards sobriety.

Valentine wrote a rapid read, which as a fan I naturally lapped up, but seeing that the book was comprised of 44 chapters over 265 pages, it meant that the reader was never far from a new development in her life. In spite of their brevity, the chapters were loaded with reminiscences which were not tainted by the perspective of today–often a flaw in memoirs. By Valentine’s own admission, she retained all band records (“I keep everything!”) so when she wrote about getting high as a 22-year-old, it read like the words of a young woman, and not of the 62-year-old she is now.

We relive the moment when Valentine had her first guitar lesson at her alternative (dare I say “hippie”) school:

“I doubt that I knew my hands on that guitar would forever shape my life. But while I strummed those songs, the diaphanous thread that tugs us down any given path fastened to me like a strand of spider’s silk. It would stay intact and attached forever, with music on the other end pulling me forward.”

Valentine was the last of the Go-Go’s to join the band–in the ensemble that made them world-famous–and described the meeting with Caffey in the washroom of the Whisky a Go Go on Christmas night, 1980, when she asked Valentine to play bass for them for eight upcoming Go-Go’s shows. I learned more of the rough days of early Go-Go’s history from Valentine’s book, yet I acknowledge that Carlisle had more to say before Valentine had even joined the band.

At first, critics looked at the Go-Go’s as a novelty band of cute chicks, and ignored that they played their instruments, wrote all their material, and had hundreds of gigs behind them. Their punk roots gave them an edge that kept them from being branded pure pop, yet it was still hard for them to snag a record deal. As women in such a male-dominated industry, they experienced the sting of sexism, yet, as Valentine would say repeatedly throughout her memoir, never from their fellow male musicians. The men whom she gigged with or otherwise encountered in showbiz always showed her respect as a musician. It was always the industry types such as record executives, radio people and interviewers who acted like sexists. This was reflected in the questions they asked:

“Reporters never asked our opinions on anything of substance. There were no conversations about sexism or feminism. The most common question remained ‘What’s it like to be in an all-girl band?'”

Being part of the Go-Go’s enabled her to meet many of her rock heroes, including Keith Richards. I especially liked Valentine’s use of simile in her account of meeting him:

“I couldn’t take my eyes off Keith, watching how he moved and played. His signature rhythms were like algebra, the reduced essence of each song.”

I consider myself a Go-Go’s fan and own some of their albums and follow the band’s as well as each member’s career, yet I don’t follow the gossip. Valentine wrote about the behind-the-scenes panic that ensued after Wiedlin announced her departure from the band, and the Go-Go’s urgent need to find a replacement. She took us along on the recruitment project that eventually hired Paula Jean Brown as the newest Go-Go. Unfortunately Brown had only two Rock in Rio shows under her belt before the band broke up in 1985.

Valentine did not shy away from the scandals or the low points and wrote openly and maturely about what drove the band members apart and what led them back together again. On more than one occasion she dropped hints of resentment towards the Bangles, who followed the Go-Go’s superstardom while her own group of “big sisters” collapsed. Her alcoholism impeded her attempts to establish herself after the band broke up, and a phone call to sober Caffey saved her life with her introduction to AA.

The memoir ends formally with the band reuniting in 1990 but she summed up the thirty years that followed in a two-page epilogue. Truth be told, I thought the Go-Go’s would never perform again in their famous lineup of five when I heard that Valentine had been fired from the band in 2012. In All I Ever Wanted, Valentine poured her heart out confessing how much she felt most comfortable being part of a band. And in order to remain part of the Go-Go’s, both Valentine and her fellow band members resolved to work things out. Now sober and reunited with her beloved band, Kathy’s happiness bleeds between the lines.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles by Kenneth Womack was published in 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ final recorded album. Womack interviewed people who were at EMI Recording Studios where Abbey Road was recorded and gave a song-by-song recording history of the album. Alan Parsons, who at the age of twenty was the album’s assistant engineer, wrote the foreword and contributed to the story. What I did not know is that Parsons was in attendance for the Beatles’ Apple Records rooftop concert on January 30, 1969 and was pictured in the Get Back book that accompanied the Let It Be box set. Since I own this set I had to thumb through it to find him. Good thing Parsons described himself to the reader:

“…I can be seen sporting a striped jacket, an orange shirt, and a trendy thin black tie.”

because it would have been impossible to find him otherwise. The orange shirt was immediately visible, even in the smaller of the two Parsons photos.

The story begins with the introduction of the eight-track TG console at EMI Studios in late 1968. This piece of equipment gave the Beatles more versatility to layer and enhance their music than ever before. Abbey Road was also enriched by the new invention of the Moog synthesizer, and for Beatles fans like me who are not technologically savvy I was pleased that Womack made these first chapters such captivating reading. The Moog chapter also provided a history of George Harrison’s experimental Zapple album Electronic Sound. Beatles fans are lucky to find more than a single paragraph devoted to this album. Womack to his credit took this album seriously. It was Harrison who introduced the Moog to Abbey Road and Paul McCartney added it to songs such as “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. It was the Quiet Beatle (I was always annoyed when Womack referred to Harrison by this nickname, and spelled with a capital Q) whom the author praised most of all for his blossoming of songwriting genius with “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”.

We were taken into the recording studio and sat in on the multi-hour sessions, which often involved the recording of the same song sometimes dozens of times. Womack gave piece-by-piece accounts of how the songs were put together and all too often new directions for a song would be recorded and then trashed weeks later. Abbey Road‘s side two medley provided the most enthralling reading as we watched the various snippets of songs finally find their set order. Contrary to popular belief, the individual songs were not all spliced together one at a time. For three pairs of them, they were recorded as a single song: “Sun King” and “Mean Mr. Mustard”, “Polythene Pam” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight”.

Womack filled his book with reputable sources and the endnotes and bibliography were filled with works by Beatles intimates and documentarians. I had to continually remind myself that the revelations Womack was presenting were taken from and properly credited to the works of Mark Lewisohn, Geoff Emerick and George Martin. The author could tell the story of the recording process so intimately that it did not read like a series of quoted passages with superscripts. It was a pleasure to read Solid State and sit in with the Beatles as they recorded Abbey Road.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue 

Walmart: Diary of an Associate

 

Walmart: Diary of an Associate by Hugo Meunier (translated by Mary Foster) was a brief (120 pages) account of the author’s infiltration into the Walmart workforce in Saint-Léonard, Quebec. On assignment from La Presse, Meunier worked for three months stocking the warehouses and replenishing shelves. I picked up this book because when I saw it I was expecting a revealing exposé full of corporate dirt and employee shenanigans yet the blurb on the back did not state this. It was simply a diary of Meunier’s experiences working for the billion-dollar American behemoth. And without any dirt or shenanigans, the day-to-day life of a Walmart employee can be a boring job and thus a boring read. Meunier’s superiors and coworkers were depicted as ordinary people who were, to use a well-known expression, “nothing to write home about”. The best chapter was about another Quebec Walmart, the one in Jonquière which corporate headquarters shut down after its employees voted to unionize. Walmart has an active strategy in place to kill any internal movements to unionize, and Meunier spoke to the Jonquière union organizers who recounted their failed efforts which cost them and their colleagues their jobs.

For such a short book I was alarmed by the number of spelling errors: cemetary, Georgia O’Keefe, Celcius, dispell, and connaisseur. There is no excuse for leaving these mistakes yet in the case of the proper nouns–you don’t have to translate those. Some of the phrases used the incorrect preposition and expressions were awkwardly translated, as seen here:

“Well then, my friend, you’ve seen nothing yet.”

No one says this in English. I would suggest “Well then, my friend, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Meunier’s experiences with his managers and customers did give me a few chuckles. Shortly before being hired, he had to listen to corporate pep talks and selling techniques. The moment of truth came over him when:

“Seated on my plastic chair, I wondered what bothered me the most. The totally stupid and infantilizing sales strategies or the certainty that they were effective.”

Each day he had to deal with annoying customers, sucking it up because the corporate slogan by Sam Walton stated that “There is only one boss. The customer.” Meunier had to be subservient, “But still, do they have to treat us like doormats?”

He filled the book with eye-rolling and ludicrous customer demands and complaints, and my favourite of the bunch was:

“‘Your slogan should be, “Walmart, out of everything,” fuck!’ he said, incensed. I must have been tired because I found this very funny.”

And so did I.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue 

Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

In Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani shared her thoughts on some of her favourite titles. These short reviews, either two or three pages long, surprisingly encompassed few of the classics and focussed on contemporary fiction and a high proportion of new nonfiction. Thus in addition to The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick, we read about Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, Tara Westover's Educated and Roz Chast's graphic memoir Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? There is none of the caustic evisceration Kakutani is notorious for here, as she is not pillorying authors but rather celebrating them. Her praise was succinct and expressed as carefully as a Flaubert sentence. I credit her for turning me on to some authors I had never heard of, and added their names and titles to my notes. 

This collection was a treat for the eyes and fingers, as the illustrations by Dana Tanamachi evoked both centuries-old gilt woodcut bookplates as well as summer of love Haight-Ashbury concert posters. I read a pristine new copy and the page edges were uniform and flush and a pleasure to feel when the book was closed. I am a merciless critic of those who are ignorant of the rules of forming the English possessive. I was thrilled to no end to see Kakutani getting it right every time when she wrote Eggers's, Camus's, Borges's, Richards's and so on. Of course she would know this. Would she please have a word with the writers of "Jeopardy!", who belie their intelligence by dropping the S when making nouns ending in X possessive. Thus Max' and Lorax'. It looks hideous. Yet Kakutani did err in the misspelling millenium on page 80, while she did get it right as millennial(s) on pages 91, 144, 247 and 291. 

To supplement the 1001 Books You Must Read series, read some of Kakutani's recommendations too. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue 

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History

 

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History by Daniel Tate & Rob Bowman was light on content but heavy in its mass. Its pages were substantially glossy and thick, rendering its 306 pages as weighty as most books twice its size. 

The title refers to Tate’s vast library of concert flyers which he and music journalist Rob Bowman researched and wrote about. They reproduced these posters in vibrant colour, and found yellowed newspaper ads for some very early Toronto shows. I always had to use a magnifying class to read the fine print on the posters, which are essentially illegible when shrunk to fit the dimensions of even a large paperback. 

Chapters were divided by musical genre and era. The authors deliberately ignored classical music, yet profiled inasmuch as it could genres by chronological history, starting thus with minstrel shows and vaudeville, followed by jubilees, spirituals and gospel tours, then jazz, blues, country and folk, followed by all forms of popular music from post-WWII. 

A book of such length should have taken me merely a couple days to read, but unfortunately I found I could only take in two chapters at a time. The format of showing a poster and then listing the contents and a concert review, if there was one available, made for a sleepy read after an hour. 

Tate and Bowman were competent researchers who often proved the newspapers wrong when concerts were cancelled or rescheduled last-minute, leaving the public record–newspaper ads and public posters–still showing the incorrect dates. Their research proved that even the memories of the performers themselves were wrong at times. I still found some inconsistencies, though, for example in regards to the date of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first concert in Toronto. Was it in July 1983 at the CNE Bandshell (as stated on page 52) or in June 1983 at the Concert Hall (page 53)? The text was otherwise flawless with the exception of the possessive apostrophe error of it’s for its on page 278: “…it certainly had it’s coming out party in Toronto.” I also wondered why they always referred to Patti Smith as a poetess and not simply a poet.

Bowman exposed the sometimes racist reviews left by Toronto newspaper columnists. Open-mindedness was not a trait of some reviewers, who preferred to see and hear exactly what they expected on concert stages. Innovative artists who decided to shake up their performances were often given the thumbs down. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to read Bowman’s favourable review of Yoko Ono’s performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival:

“Yoko Ono contributed an astonishing version of ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),’ which the conservative Toronto media of the time predictably trashed. History would prove their take on Yoko to be both racist and artistically wrong-headed given the influence Yoko would have on numerous new wave and alternative rock bands to come.”

The Flyer Vault is a rich trip down memory lane where clubs and venues of the past come back to life and on more than one occasion I stopped myself and recalled “Oh yeah, I was there!”

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue