Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames By Lara Maiklem

Have you ever gone looking for things on a beach? You, like me, probably found shells and sand dollars, smooth pebbles, or perhaps some sea glass. Did you ever find a doubloon, a piece of Roman roofing tile or a human tooth? No? Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames by Lara Maiklem puts us both to shame, then.

A "mudlark", as a derogatory term for a rubbish picker who combs the shores of tidal rivers like the Thames in England, is an old occupation.  Mudlarks these days in London must be registered and are expected to notify authorities if they find objects of historical importance or human remains.  Lara Maiklem tells her tales of mudlarking (now it's a verb) all along the tidal Thames, as far west as Teddington, or the Tidal Head, all the way east to the Estuary near the coast where the river meets the North Sea.

There is always much to discover, since the tides are constantly revealing--and burying--the history in the River. Maiklem is interested mostly in human history, and there are thousands of years of it along this stretch. You never know what will be uncovered at the next low tide. The mud hides World War I medals beside wherry tokens from Shakespeare's time, along with a button from a naval uniform from the Napoleonic Wars.  There's no stratification showing the layers of years; it's all revealed in a jumble as the tides decide, much of it crushed, twisted, rusted.

It's a bumpy ride, following Maiklem. She is very knowledgeable and is a good guide, but only up to a point. She is cagey about the "best spots" while talking about royal residences and bits of Roman evidence, as if she doesn't quite want us in her confidence. She wanders geographically as well as historically, in her own life and in London's timeline, which is a challenge for a Canadian not fully versed in British landscapes as well as a reader trying to find context. Like the objects she finds, it can be hard to comprehend how all this fits together.

Maiklem is a poetic writer and she fills her days with the imagined lives of those who lost this belt buckle, that shawl pin, that leather shoe, but tunes out her workplace, her relationships, and her young family. Her life seems as chaotic as her house filled with river bits and bobs that tell only tiny stories but not her own.

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North Korea Journal

I took an exceptional interest in North Korea Journal, Michael Palin's personal travelogue of his thirteen-day trip in April and May 2018. As I have been to the DPRK myself, I am always interested in reading others' travel diaries. I certainly did my research in advance of my nineteen-day trip in 2011, when I read as many travel blogs as I could find. 

I used the same travel company as Palin (Koryo Tours) and recognized the personnel in the photos. North Korea Journal was fortunately packed with bright colour photos on almost every one of its 170 pages. I took three days to savour this book--when it could easily be read in one--because I pored over all the photos, reliving my own time there. When I was in the DPRK, I knew well enough from all that I had read that it was important to obey the rules. Once you established that you could be trusted by the guides who accompany you throughout the entire trip, you may be allowed more freedoms. That certainly happened to me during my trip. I was a model tourist who even impressed some professors with my knowledge of the works of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. However, since Palin travelled with a camera crew, I sense that he was more restricted than me or my own travel group. 

Tourists do not go to the DPRK without knowing what they're getting into. There are metres of red tape to be cut and tunnels of hoops to jump through before you're allowed into the country. That said, I found that Palin broke protocol by asking the Koreans questions that no respectful visitor would have. He broached topics--such as the fallibility of all leaders--which no Korean could ever answer, and put them in awkward positions of needing to save face. I suppose the journalist in him obligated some sort of gentle consciousness raising but not with a camera crew, notepad out and other colleagues and officials milling around. I have the feeling that some of the restrictions imposed on his team, including the trip to Mt. Paektu, may not have been cancelled "because of the weather" but rather for overstepping his limited boundaries. 

Palin had a sense that he was being played. So did I (and often). An educated traveller to the DPRK knows this, or should be prepared for it. I was able to opt out of one specific event when I was over there because I couldn't stomach the phoniness. My approach ensured everyone saved face, and thus I was enabled--having by then earned the privilege of being a trusted traveller--to spend some time on my own among Pyongyang park visitors. Palin wrote at the end of his journal:

"So why should I feel something's missing? I think it's because I sense that, for all the access we've had here, for all the increasingly warm relations between us and our minders, they've been playing a game with us. We have been indulged, but never fully informed. We have been allowed more sustained access to this cagey country than most broadcasters, but I still feel that we have been subtly manipulated for some greater end."  

In spite of Palin's background, this was not a funny book (for which I am thankful, because I can imagine how such an approach could backfire) yet there was one part at the beginning of the book that had me in stitches. He was looking for a place to sit at the Beijing railway station just prior to leaving for the DPRK. With no place to be found, he and his team had to settle for the massage chairs, that you pay to use:

"Cautiously, I pay my twenty minutes' worth and sit back. It's a weird sensation. Everyone tries to look as if they're simply relaxing, whereas in fact they know and I know that it's like being strapped to a sackful of live badgers."

I noticed one error at the very end, not by Palin but by Neil Ferguson, the director of Palin's travel series. Ferguson wrote that KITC stood for the Korea International Tourism Company, when in fact the abbreviation stands for the Korea International Travel Company. 

Palin ended the book with the same wondrous admission that I had--and that I told everyone, to mouths agape--when I came back from my trip:

"As Pyongyang recedes into the distance, we turn and exchange smiles. Of relief, but also of regret. One thing we all agreed on at our farewell meal last night is that none of us would mind coming back."

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Word Nerd: Dispatches from the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground

Word Nerd: Dispatches from the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground by John D. Williams, Jr. is a Scrabble book which was published in 2015. My library system has had it in its collection for four years yet I never thought of reading it until now. I have a personal library of Scrabble books yet all of them had been read before I started writing and posting book reviews in early 2010. Thus 2020 marks my tenth anniversary of sharing my reading list with the cyberworld.

Williams was the former executive director of the National Scrabble Association, and I would always see him at the large Scrabble tournaments, such as the Nationals or Worlds. Thus I came to his book already knowing who he is and all about Hasbro's decision to pull out of the National Scrabble Association. I am part of the community he is writing about, and recognize all of the player names in the book. I have even played most of them. So my background as a reader is that of an insider who did not need to read this book to learn anything new. That said, I did nonetheless find that its presentation relied on knowing a considerable degree of backstory. I wonder if Williams wrote this for the audience of hundreds of Scrabble tournament and club players who may have felt abandoned by the corporate pullout. When Hasbro stopped promoting and funding tournaments, Williams lost his contact with us and maybe this book was his effort to have the last word.

It was a short book--about 195 pages when you eliminate the end-of-book word lists and the reproduction of a New York Times article--which read like a long resumé of Williams's career with the NSA. He was instrumental in starting the English-language World Scrabble Championship and in developing the School Scrabble program. I enjoyed reading about the times Scrabble champions appeared on TV, whether on "Martha Stewart Living" or "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" as I saw those episodes (and still have them on VHS). Williams sometimes had hard times wrangling Scrabble champions for morning shows especially if they were appearing the day after a celebratory victory party.

One chapter focussed on men's domination of the uppermost Scrabble ranks, and Williams interviewed three of the leading women players to learn their opinions. I was happy to read that none of these players, all of whom I have played, felt as if their male opponents were holding back or deferring to them in any way. "She's just another expert", according to Williams. We treat our opponents as equals. The late expert player Leah Katz said that Scrabble was the "great unifier", and I have met my closest friends--as well as my life partner--across a Scrabble board.

Those who write Scrabble books have to be particularly careful about their spelling. For the most part, Williams's book was error-free. However, perhaps by the next printing he can correct the player's name to Lynn Cushman (p. 41; not Lynne) and fix qwwali (p. 210) to qawwali. His #1 tip to "instantly get better at Scrabble" erroneously states "Learn the 101 acceptable two- and three-letter words". Umm, there are a lot more than 101 two- and three-letter words. What Williams might have meant is that there were (at the time of publication) 101 two-letter words alone. Regrettably the book ended with a disappointing transposition of words. When Williams found a Z and E tile in a corner of his attic, he wrote:

"I knelt down and switched around them on the floor." (p. 199)

If only he had written (and he likely did) "I knelt down and switched them around on the floor" I would not have had a quizzical look and obligatory reread at the very end of the book.

Perhaps the most enlightening moment occurred while I was reading the chapter entitled "Are Men Really Better than Women?" when the author wrote:

"Men do have an affinity for trivia, collecting, and focusing on one thing to the exclusion of others. In my experience, women, not so much. Scott and I talked about how it's boys and men who early on memorize baseball statistics, car features, and other arguably useless facts. It's an easy transition from that dubious pastime to studying and learning thousands of esoteric words that no one else knows or uses."

I had been keeping a running total of how many times Williams had used esoteric or esoterica so far in the book. The above passage made it four times between the two. I felt that using esoteric/esoterica twice was too many times--once would suffice for such a small book--yet when I realized the surrounding context wherein the word was used I could only roll my eyes and think of myself as a typical male Scrabble expert.

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Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder is the latest book by John Waters. I love his writing and definitely needed a good read after my last book, a dismal one-star review. I knew I would be laughing out in public when I read this book on the bus and subway. It was a riot of a read, and I imagined listening to Waters's voice as I read it. His "tarnished wisdom" covered topics ranging from breaking out with the movie "Hairspray" and its transformation into a hit musical and another movie version; the worst (or best, knowing Waters) of brutalist architecture; his lifelike infant doll named Bill; collectible art painted by primates; exploitative car-crash hit records; no-holidaying in Provincetown and so many others. Every chapter was a hit except for his attempt to copy Andy Warhol's novel a by writing it in a run-on stream-of-consciousness format. It made for awkward and slow reading (and rereading)--which I suppose was Waters's point.

I took notes constantly, so that I could research ghastly records or unmentionable cuisine cookbooks later. It would have been helpful though if Waters had included some photos such as his favourite singers--many unknown, as he accurately asserted--and those horrid buildings so I could know immediately what he was talking about, although since most people have cell phones they could look up whatever Waters was writing about on the spot.

I have read many of Waters's books (even before I started publishing reviews on-line in 2010), and in Mr. Know-It-All he covered two topics that he had not heretofore addressed, at least not in as much detail. Waters wrote about how he coped after the death of his dear friend Divine in 1988. One might not expect such sensitivity from the Pope of Trash but you will feel his grief and mourn the loss of a brilliant drag queen and actor. The other topic Waters addressed is his sex life. He has never been in the closet, yet in this book he referred to boyfriends and the various places he has had sex. Throughout this book is the general admission that Waters is still sexually active.

Breaking news is that the 2020 North American Scrabble Championship will take place in Baltimore. Baltimore! I will explore the city that Waters loves so much and pay my respects to Divine at Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Mr. Know-It-All was quote-heavy and the funniest passages I have cited below. I burst out laughing every time I reread them:   

"There's no such thing as good plastic surgery if you notice it."

"And of course a toupee is the ultimate violation. Every single person who sees you instantly spots your rug, knows it's fake, and laughs at you behind your back."

How true. There's a guy at the library who also goes to the Y who wears a two-tone toup. I even saw him on his bike without a helmet. Guess that toup was shellacked on so tight it could serve as an ersatz bike helmet. The rug does not fool me--I knew it was a toup the first time I saw him. Listen to Filth Elder John Waters!

"You never make much money on the projects you think up when you're young--the ones that are the most original, the ones that get you noticed. No. You cash in later, once you've made a name for yourself and begin to fail."

"I realized right away that the real problem with these odorous ideas of showmanship was not the technology itself. The problem was that all the smells were good. I had a hunch that bad smells were the road to an olfactional hit. I would reinvent the smellploitation picture and get the whole world to pay me money to smell dirty tennis shoes."

"After yet another test screening of Cry-Baby, the head of National Research Group asked me honestly, 'What is the norm we test you against?'--admitting the futility of his company's entire purpose. As soon as you cut out the extremes of my film (always picked as 'least' or 'most' favorite by test audiences), then nobody likes it, not even the dumb ones too cowardly to have an opinion of their own."

"...I once saw graffiti written on a blackboard over the urinal that said BLOW ME, ASSHOLE. I ran home, got my camera, came back, took a photo of it, and later sold it in a New York art gallery for $5,000. Art is everywhere. You just have to notice."

"And no, the hit records of your generation are not better than today's. As soon as you stop listening to new music, your life is over. You are a fart."

"I always felt bad for my mom because she claimed to 'hate jazz.' When she was very ill near the end of her life and they gave her a morphine drip in the hospital, I thought, 'Finally! She can appreciate Coltrane.'"

"I amuse myself, as all gay men do, by watching other males remove their coats and sweaters, which always offers a glimpse of stomach or ass as they struggle to disrobe. I am appalled every time I fly by the hideous way many travelers dress. No, you can't wear shorts. Do you think others want to sit next to your hairy, scaly legs? Workout clothes? P.U.! Who wants to smell your sweaty armpits? Bare feet! How disgusting! And pajamas? You have to be kidding me! Are you a baby? Does Daddy need to hold you? Get the fuck dressed! The only thing worse is traveling with a companion animal. If you are so mentally fragile that you can't leave home without some poor creature you've condemned to a lifetime of cuddling, then you shouldn't be allowed to mix freely in society. Don't go to the airport; check yourself into a mental institution."

I agree with Elder Waters on all the points above. I wish people would get dressed up when they flew. Bring back the days of deafening daylong flights across the country!

"'Thank you for your patience,' the agents at the gate always say when a flight is delayed, but even though I feel sorry for these employees, I let them know in no uncertain terms that 'I don't have any, so please do not thank me for something I cannot offer.' They look at me blankly but not with so much hostility as they do when I roll my eyes in derision at the other fliers who 'need extra time to board,' who get to go on in front of me even though I'm in first class. I know that sounds heartless but so many of these passengers are faking! Especially on Southwest, which has open seating once you get on board. 'What's the matter with her?!' I always want to ask the flight attendant. 'Can I see a doctor's note?' I'm not being coldhearted here; most of those 'disabled' passengers are liars! I see them once they get on the Jetway--it's like Lourdes! They throw down their crutches and sprint toward the airline door, laughing and singing, 'Yippee, aisle seats in the front of the plane!' Bastards."

"I never watch the movies on board because they're usually the worst Hollywood fare made even more unwatchable because of airline censorship. I want to see airplane-crash movies while flying. I love them! Just think how exciting the flight would be if the original Final Destination, Fearless, Alive, Sully, even United 93 suddenly suddenly came on-screen? I always secretly wondered what films were playing on the flights that crashed on 9/11. It took me years of sleuthing, but I finally found out that on all the United flights that day two films were scheduled to be shown, A Knight's Tale and Dr. Dolittle 2. What a chilling thought. Being on those hijacked planes was a terrible tragedy, but one good thing did happen to the passengers--the planes crashed before the movies could be seen. Just think how horrible it would have been to smash into the World Trade Center while watching Dr. Dolittle 2."

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Viola Desmond: Her Life and Times

Viola Desmond: Her Life and Times by Graham Reynolds and Wanda Robson chronicles and life and legacy of the woman who is now featured on the Canadian ten dollar bill. In 1946 Desmond was removed from the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, for refusing to move from the whites-only seating section. Blacks at that time were relegated to the balcony. Desmond however believed she had paid for a seat on the lower level. She returned to the box office to clarify what kind of ticket she had purchased, at which point it became clear to her that she was not welcome on the lower level. The theatre would not sell her such a ticket, even if she was willing to pay for it. Desmond realized that this was racial discrimination in action and returned to her seat at the lower level. The police were called and when an officer arrived he and the theatre manager each grabbed one of Desmond's arms, lifted her up and dragged her out of the theatre. Desmond spent that night in jail.

At her trial, for which Desmond was never offered counsel [1] she was not charged with sitting in the whites-only section or even with resisting arrest. At this time in Canadian history, racism may well have existed but it was kept off the books. Establishments like the Roseland Theatre could set their own rules if they wanted to be integrated or segregated. Thus with no violation of a provincial segregation law to charge her with, Desmond was instead charged with the incredulous crime of failing to pay the one-cent entertainment tax on the whites-only ticket she had bought.
 
Desmond eventually lost her appeal to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. Desmond did not transform herself into an activist after this incident. Far from wanting to be the centre of attention, even when faced with such injustice personally, Desmond let the matter slip quietly into history as she resumed her successful career. At the time of the Roseland Theatre incident Desmond was already a familiar name as a beauty expert with a specialty in black aesthetics. She had her own salon and beauty school and was an entrepreneur with her own line of skin and hair care products. In the mid-forties if you were a professional black woman, you were probably working as a domestic. Desmond was a pioneer in transforming herself into a pillar of her community, where women flocked to her salon and later to her beauty classes. Desmond had empirical aspirations: she wanted women to take the Desmond techniques with them and spread her legacy. One cannot know the intimate thoughts in Desmond's mind but perhaps it is this legacy she wanted to foster--one that she was already in the process of building--as opposed to taking on the reluctant mantle of activist. 

This short biography was cowritten with Desmond's younger sister, Wanda Robson, who provided family anecdotes through countless interviews with Graham Reynolds. It was most sad to read about Desmond's life and suddenly be met with the tragic line "...she died suddenly in her Harlem apartment in 1965 of an intestinal bleed." Fifty-four years after her death, and 73 years after the humiliating way she was treated in the movie theatre, the name Viola Desmond is now known from coast to coast. She has been honoured for her bravery in standing up against racism.
 
[1] Throughout this book the authors mistakenly use the homophone, council, for this context. 

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Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster

Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster by Bex Lewis is a small book of eighty pages, chosen because I was interested in the subject matter of course but also because I wanted to make sure I finished reading and reviewing it before I went on holiday earlier this month. This microbiography was also fittingly printed in microscopic print; this is so typical of British books. I wonder if the entire population of the British Isles either has eagle-eye vision or is otherwise now blind. Keep Calm had endnotes yet the superscript digits were so small I wasn't aware that they were even there. 

Lewis spent the first half of the book looking at British poster history, focussing at first on the Great War and the role of propaganda in making posters effective. I realize that she needed to establish a background for the WWII title subject but I didn't find it all too interesting. 

Lewis traced the origin of the modern "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster meme, where variations and parodies of its simple slogan pop up everywhere. "Keep Calm and Carry On" was a slogan chosen because it conveyed "a determination not to give in, it created a sense of resilience and resistance, to continue as normal, whatever happens." The posters were "held in reserve for immediate posting should the necessity arrive, e.g. immediately following a severe air-raid". What I found most revealing in this short book was that these posters were never officially used. When the anticipated air raids never happened, the posters were taken to the various dumps across Britain. By the time Britain was bombed during the blitz, the Ministry of Information realized "that this kind of message was inappropriate in a war in which the nation was constituted through shared suffering." The posters' ubiquity in the twenty-first century is doubly ironic in that they were being displayed during peacetime as well as for the first time. Why then did this poster (re)appear decades after the end of WWII?

Twenty years ago Stuart and Mary Manley of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland found a folded poster in the bottom of a box of books they had purchased at auction. They liked it so much they framed it and put it up in their store. Customers were always asking about it so the Manleys had five hundred copies printed. They were safe to do so since the poster and slogan were not under copyright. From 2001 on, the poster took on a life of its own. Freed from the dump, it caught people's eyes with its simple message. Nostalgic as well as promoting a spirit of stability during a time of chaos, the message resonated with audiences all over the world. You cannot go anyplace today without finding some humorous variation of the wartime message.

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The Chinese Typewriter: A History

The Chinese Typewriter: A History by Thomas S. Mullaney was perhaps the most exhaustive research of its kind. An academic book of 321 pages printed in a tiny typeface with 64 pages of endnotes, The Chinese Typewriter was a slow read at first, given that Mullaney populated the first chapter with so much jargon. Academic reads tend to be repetitive--and this one was no different--yet so many new terms referred to again and again made a tiring read. Fortunately Mullaney elaborated on these terms--in painstaking detail--so by the end of the book I did not feel as if any of the material was beyond my comprehension or was addressed insufficiently. If he mentioned it, he covered it. 

Mullaney started off with the myth of the football-field-size Chinese typewriter. Imagine a contraption with a keyboard so huge that you would need stairs to climb to the highest row. Chinese keyboards were never this big, in spite of the cartoonists who drew them to be as high as pyramids. The author described the earliest typewriter models and the methods each inventor used to input the language of ideograms onto paper. Mullaney gets into keyboards, of course, and we soon learn that some models of Chinese typewriters didn't even have keys. 

The mechanics and muscle memory of typing as we know it on an English keyboard--or any keyboard with letters on individual keys--is lost when compared with typing in Chinese. Mullaney covers these differences and you are left with "Oh yeah!" moments when you realize that you can't do that in Chinese. For one, there is no blind typing in Chinese. When I learned typing in high school on a manual typewriter, we eventually grew to trust ourselves to type without looking at the keyboard or the typed page. By keeping our eyes solely on the manuscript that we were copying from, we discovered our typing speed would increase. This technique, blind typing, cannot be done in Chinese. The Chinese tray bed was too vast and required extreme precision in key selection. Even the fastest Chinese typist could never do this blindfolded. 

Tray beds were customized by each typist. Chinese typists soon realized that in their jobs they would encounter certain words or phrases over and over. In PR China [1] official documents might refer repeatedly to "Chairman Mao" and "agricultural quotas", for example. These two concepts would be composed of multiple ideograms, and it was convenient for the typist to arrange his or her own tray bed so that these ideograms were side-by-side. Mullaney revealed techniques for predictive text tray bed arrangement that cut down on ideogram search time. If one character was often used in combination with others to make multiple words, it helped to surround this character with the eight most common characters to ease the combination process. The author included tray bed organization maps provided with typewriter manuals which aided the typist to personalize his or her own machine. 

Typists had to learn when to apply extra pressure to certain keys. Some ideograms--like the one designating "one", as a perfect example--could not be struck with force for fear of causing damage:

"Each time the typist depressed the selection lever, the force of each type act had to be finely attuned to the weight of each character, a measurement that corresponded directly to the character's stroke count. Should one type the single-stroke (and thus lighter) characteryi (一 "one") with the same force as the sixteen-stroke (and thus heavier) character long (龍 "dragon"), one would quite likely puncture the typing or carbon paper and have to begin the document anew. To type long with the same force as yi, however, would result in a faint, illegible registration (also making it ill-suited for carbon-paper copying)." 

In North America and Europe, typists and office jobs were often the domain of women. In China, gender disparity still put women in the majority but at a smaller percentage. About a third of the typing workforce in China were men. 

Just when the pièce de résistance typewriter model, the MingKwai, appeared in the late forties, its moment in the spotlight faded. Once the People's Republic was established--and when PR China decided to send its soldiers to Korea to battle the UN forces in the south--then American and western European support in manufacturing evaporated. During the time Mao was in power, the typewriter became an instrument of disseminating propaganda. 

My praise to Mullaney for never stooping to use the ghastly they, themor their when referring to singular persons. He always used his or her, etc., and did so with style to make the text flow smoothly. It was a pleasure to read singular pronouns when referring to singular people. 

Mullaney had opened his book with cartoons and jokes about the colossal size of Chinese typewriters, and as typewriters evolved into computers, the jokes moved into the information age. In spite of the limitless world of virtual automation where even keyboards can be projected onto a flat surface by beams of light, people are still stuck on the idea of a clunky, clumsy, burdensome mechanical Chinese keyboard--even for computers. He ended his book with this observation, which I believe can also apply to the present:

"As we continue our examination of Chinese and global information technology in the age of computing and new media, then, one of our biggest challenges remains: to liberate our imaginations from a past that never actually existed."

[1] Before the Communist Revolution I refer to both mainland China and the island of Taiwan collectively as China. After 1949 I make a distinction between mainland China, the People's Republic of China or PR China, which is not the same as China, or the Republic of China, which occupies the island of Taiwan. 

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