Sueños y Encuentros is a new exhibit that’s just opened at the Long Beach Museum of Art; it’s a celebration of 20th-century Latin American artists. I’m no expert in Latin American art; I was there because Mexican art is an interest of my father’s. It was not a big exhibit–it’s not a big museum–but they had some interesting stuff, including a sketch by Orozco, a rather cartoonish watercolor of a Mexican peasant by Diego Rivera, several Tamayos, only of which I liked much, a Cuevas I thought was interesting, and a Wilfredo Lam I’d gladly take home. There were also quite a few ceramics, which uniformly left me cold. I dunno; I can appreciate the amount of work that went into them, but they don’t grab me at all.

The exhibit was paired with two others, one of Staffordshire pottery figures (no, I didn’t go for them, either–too cutesy) and one of turned wood and wood sculptures that had some dynamite pieces.

I took the video camera, and if I have a few minutes later on I’ll capture some stills and add them to this post.

Update: Here’s the Wilfredo Lam I spoke of. I apologize for the quality of the image; it doesn’t do the picture justice.

And here’s a Rufino Tamayo (that’s my dad’s hand, pointing at it). Once you’ve seen a Tamayo, his style is unmistakeable.

Finally, here’s a piece from an unrelated exhibit that I rather like. The frog is made of poppy-seed bread, specially baked; and it has a ceramic bake sale on its back.

It’s when afternoon naps start sounding like a good idea.

During one of my regular weekly exchange of emails with my daughter’s
special ed teacher, she asked me to recommend books for boys who are
reluctant readers. Specifically, one she could read aloud to them that was
part of a series. She was thinking of Lemony Snickett and after gacking all
over my keyboard–don’t these teachers actually read kids books?– I
suggested this one as one that might interest boys who like video games or
who feel different because of the way their brain works. I just read it on
the strong recommendation of my son who, though he has never been reluctant
to read anything, fits all the other criteria.

Essentially, the plot revolves around a 6 year old boy and intellectual
prodigy named Andrew Wiggin, nicknamed Ender, who is taken from his parents
and family and put into a military training academy in space for future
commanders of warships. Earth had been invaded a generation ago by aliens
resembling wasps or bees, nicknamed Buggers, and a global effort is on to
find the best military minds early and train them from childhood to defend
the planet from the expected upcoming invasion. The school curricula is
completely dedicated to train them as military strategists and training in
command is supplied by team sports in The Battle Room. Those who fail are
sent back to Earth in disgrace; those who succeed are promoted up the
militaristic school hierarchy. Ender is a perfect candidate because he
displays both a ruthless determination to survive when confronted by danger
and a real sense of empathy for those around him, enabling him to predict
how others will think and act.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book. The writing is good and the character
of Ender is well drawn and complete. The plot moves along fast enough that I
had a hard time putting it down at times. There is plenty of cool techie
stuff and world building going on to keep me interested. And The Battle Room
and the games the kids play in it are fascinating, often the best part of
the whole story. That could have been a book all by itself.

However, some things did bother me. One is that Ender is a 6 year old. He
doesn’t act or talk or think like any 6 year old I know. He’s too
emotionally mature even for a kid with a huge intellect. He is making
decisions based on adult reasoning and experience which, as a 6 year old, he
is too young to have.

And then the whole thing about using children in this way bugged me. I
couldn’t leave behind my own principles on how children should be treated
while reading. I didn’t like what they were doing to Ender and the rest of
the kids at the school.

I didn’t like how it ended either. I think Scott Card wimped out. It should
have followed the harshness of the rest of the book and ended just as
brutally. However, he is writing for young adults and children. I told my
son that and he totally disagreed with me on that point. We actually had
quite a good discussion about the book and why certain things happen as they
do. As a device to get kids reading and actually thinking about what they
are reading, I can see this book as an effective tool, especially if read
aloud and talked about as you go. What I saw as problems with the book would
make great topics to chat about with a young reader.

This is the book that turned Deb English back on to
Ngaio Marsh after reading one or two that she didn’t much
care for. Unlike her previous two books it’s set in London, but like
them she spends a great deal of time developing the characters before
the murder occurs. Usually she adopts a relatively omniscient point of
view when she does this, but in this case she gives us a delightful
viewpoint character, a young woman named Roberta Grey.

Roberta is a native of New Zealand. Her parents die, and as she’s not
quite old enough to live on her own she comes to England to live with a
maiden aunt. First on the agenda, though, when she arrives is a blissful
month with old friends, the Lampreys. The Lampreys are an amazing crowd
of popinjays who bought a farm in New Zealand on a whim; Roberta became
acquainted with them through Frid Lamprey with whom she was in school, and
soon became close friends with the entire family. The Lampreys are
eternally having money trouble–it flows through their fingers like sand–
and yet are equally unable to give up their ritzy life-style. Something
always happens, and they are saved for another day.

I didn’t warm up to the Lampreys quite as much as Debbie did–this is
far from my favorite Marsh–but it’s a good ‘un none the less.

Like Overture to Death, this murder mystery is set in a small
village–in this case, a seaside village in Devon. And also like
Overture to Death, it has a very long lead-in before the
murder is even committed. But instead of being about the tensions that
naturally arise in a small village, it’s about the tension between the
locals and visitors: in this case, three friends–a barrister, an actor,
and a painter–who have come to stay at the local inn for a few weeks for
the second year in a row.

One of them is killed in the inn’s common room, and Alleyn (helped, most
unusually, solely by the stalwart Inspector Fox) must determine not only
who killed him, but also how. It’s rather like a locked-room mystery–we
know he was poisoned, but except for the evidence of poison in his blood,
it seems impossible that he could have been.

I didn’t like this one much when I first read it–other than Alleyn and
Fox I found few of the characters to be particularly sympathetic–but it
began to grow on me this time.

Posting might be light over the next few days; Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest book, Paladin of Souls, has just come out, which means I’ll be spending my free time reading to Jane.

Paladin of Souls is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, and so far (we read two chapters last night) we’re enjoying it immensely.

(Many thanks to Dave Jaffe for letting me know that the book was available; I went out almost immediately and snagged a copy.)

This is Marsh’s first use of a device that later becomes one of her
trademarks–the novel in which she spends many chapters introducing her
characters before the murder actually takes place. Alleyn is not called
in until page 94, by which time Marsh has given us an excellent portrait
of the village of Chipping and its denizens, including two poisonous old
spinsters, a pair of young lovers, an aging squire, a handsome but timid
vicar, a doctor with an invalid wife, and a Scarlet Woman. These folks
gather together to put on an amateur play; it will be a local charity
event, with the proceeds going toward a new piano for the parish hall.
There are considerable undercurrents of tension among the group. The
spinsters disapprove of the Scarlet Woman, though the squire and the
doctor rather like her; the squire is against his son marrying his
beloved, the vicar’s daughter; both spinsters are in love with the vicar,
who does his best to discourage them without losing charity. It’s an
interesting soup, and the two spinsters are especially well drawn. This is one of Marsh’s better outings to date.

Published late in 1910, this is one of Wodehouse’ earliest novels. Prior
to this he had published seven books of school stories, to which I’ll add
an eighth, Psmith in the City, as it involves two characters
from his school stories, a children’s novel, a book of newspaper columns,
a book about journalism, an Ukridge novel, and one other novel about
which I know nothing. As such, it’s in a transitional position between
his school stories and his first Blandings novel,
Something Fresh, published in 1915.
By 1915, Wodehouse had gotten his comedic style down pat. There’s little
difference in tone or skill between Something Fresh and its
1929 sequel, Summer Lightning.

But A Gentleman of Leisure is something else again.

The plot leaves nothing to be desired; it’s pure Wodehouse, with all the
elements we’ve come to know and love. It’s got thwarted lovers,
upperclass twits, imposters, jewel thieves, private detectives, a country
house, curmudgeonly aunts and uncles, and all the usual trappings.

What it doesn’t have is the easy, effortless tone of Wodehouse’s later
work. Bertie, Jeeves, the Earl of Blandings, and all the rest seem to
inhabit a timeless world of their own. This book, on the other hand,
seems too firmly grounded in the real world. The characters are too
real, and their reality demands that we take them seriously, despite all
of the ludicrous events going on around them.

The results are often painful. One doesn’t mind if Bertie Wooster is
caught stealing a silver cow creamer; it’s just the sort of thing that
would happen to him, and we know he’ll get out of it somehow. Bertie’s
world operates according to its own absurd rules–for example, if any
woman of any age decides that she wants to marry Bertie, then Bertie is
bound to go through with it unless she changes her mind. It doesn’t
matter whether he wants to marry her or not, or whether she’s entirely
mistaken about the nature of his regard for her. He’s not allowed to
tell her directly that he doesn’t want to marry her; although the phrase
seldom arises, this is the reduction to absurdity of the whole “breach of
promise” thing so common in Victorian novels. Instead, he must work
behind the scenes, with the help of Jeeves and his friends, to persuade
her that she’d really rather marry someone else. And, as one of the
other rules is that Bertie must remain a bachelor, he naturally and
inevitably succeeds. We know this; the dramatic tension is all about how
he’ll get out of it this time, not whether he will or not.

But in this book, it’s different. It seems mostly to follow the rules of
the real world. Consider Lord Dreever, a young, improvident Lordling
kept on a short leash by his wealthy capitalistic uncle. In a normal
Wodehouse novel, we’d feel sorry for him, and applaud his attempts to
squeeze a little money out of the old man. In Dreever’s case, I tended
to agree with the uncle. Dreever’s an idiot and a wastrel who’d clearly
run through any amount of money provided to him in a matter of months.
He’s not a scoundrel, there’s no harm in him, but there’s not much good
either.

The love interest is young Molly McEachern. Molly’s father wants his
daughter to marry a title; Dreever’s uncle wants his nephew to marry
money. To these two old men it seems a match made in heaven.
But it would clearly be a catastrophe for sweet young Molly to marry
Lord Dreever. And because of Wodehouse’ tone and the way the detail
grounds it in the real world, it matters. And consequently,
comic situations that I find hilarious in his latter books are positively
painful in this one.

So.

As a Wodehouse fan and would-be novelist, I found it fascinating–a
wonderful example of how not to build a comic soufflé. As a
reader, though, I wasn’t as pleased.

Chapter 40 and Chapter 41 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! are now available for your delectation at Once-Told Tales

This concludes the novel! If you’ve been waiting until it’s all there to give it a read, now’s your chance.

Belles On Their Toes, by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

This is the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, which I reviewed
some years ago.
If you aren’t familiar with that wonderful book, go read the review now.
I’ll wait.

Cheaper by the Dozen ends with the death of Frank Gilbreth,
motion studies expert and patriarch of a large family. His wife
Lillian, an equal partner in her husband’s motion studies work, must
decide whether to take the family to California, where the children can
be parceled out to various relatives, or to stay in New Jersey and try to
make her own way as a motion studies expert. She (with encouragement from
her children) chooses the latter. And just as the prior novel is the
story of Frank Gilbreth, Belles on their Toes is the story of
Lillian Gilbreth.

It’s as funny and heartwarming as its predecessor–I
enjoyed it thoroughly–though possibly a bit lighter weight, especially
toward the end. The two authors are the oldest boy and the
next-to-oldest girl, and both went off to college within a few years of
their father’s death. Consequently we cover just a few years in the
first half of the book, and a couple of decades in the second half.

Anyway, you should read it; it’s a classic.