It's Alive at the ROM!

I recently took a friend to "It's Alive", the Royal Ontario Museum exhibition of science fiction and horror art from the collection of Kirk Hammett. In this case, "art" is mostly movie posters but also includes statues/sculptures and memorabilia. Hammett is best known for being the lead guitarist of Metallica, but like many artists from metal's golden era, is also heavily into science fiction and horror. Besides, science fiction and horror are so metal.

Hammett's movie-branded guitars:

I hope he's used the White Zombie (1932) guitar to play "Black Sunshine"!

Posters of classic silent movies The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) and Metropolis (1927):

Poster of the 1953 edition of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds:

There are many more, but surely I can't show you the whole exhibit. Some have a dash of comedy - be sure to see the poster of 1935's The Invisible Ray so you can learn about the Luminous Man!

The collection spans from the 1920s to approximately 1980. Non-poster highlights include the suit Boris Karloff wore for Black Cat (1934) and a life-sized statute of a saucer man from Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957). (Whether an outlandishly unrealistic saucer man can be truly "life-sized" is a debate you're welcome to have during your next board game night.)

According to the caption beside the Saucer-Man poster, film companies would pitch interesting-sounding titles to advertisers. If the advertisers liked a title, the company would write, film and distribute the movie as fast as they could, based only on the title. Yet the younger generation wonders why some of those old movies weren't that great... the modern equivalent is SyFy's Book of Blood or Rock Monster.

All photos taken by me, with implicit permission from the ROM (they never told me to stop), and all items property of Kirk Hammett. The exhibit is on until January, so go!

My Photos on Google Maps Now Have over 300,000 Views!

Today, I reached over 300,000 views on my photos posted to Google Maps. As a result of my unpaid but enthusiastic submission of pictures to Google Maps, I was greeted with this cheerful screen this morning:

Here are some of my most celebrated photos from London, England this past summer (ignore the dates):

Here are a couple of my greatest hits, from Toronto, with location and (accurate) date:

This may be my one chance to simultaneously recommend a restaurant and a dog park, so yes, I recommend them both.

I assure you, many of my photos have more views than some of the meagre amounts posted here. I took a photo on Sunday in Hogg's Hollow that is now featured on Google Maps:

It's been fun. Google prompts me every chance it gets, which is often, because I enjoy taking photos. 

May we all discover a few more places than we would have before.

November's Book: The War That Ended Peace

The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan

History (2013 - 645 pp.)

The War That Ended Peace is Margaret MacMillan's fourth book I've read (Paris 1919, The Uses and Abuses of History, History's People). This is Margaret MacMillan's second appearance on this blog (History's People). Whereas Paris 1919 is understandably clumped within an approximately 18-month span, The Uses and Abuses of History is about historiography, and History's People is a set of interconnected biographies, The War That Ended Peace takes the veteran MacMillan reader to an unfamiliar place: the geopolitical strategy rooms of the two decades preceding World War I. In the setting, The War That Ended Peace brings James Joll's seminal Origins of the First World War to mind more than MacMillan's other works.

Like any holistic take on when, how and why World War I began, there can be no true thesis. Attempts to identify singular causes of World War I are sometimes extremely slanted: for example, following the French narrative of "German aggression", or following German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg's acidic remark that the British started the war through their neglect to rein in France and Russia. Similarly, narratives like "nationalism", "the alliance system" or "the cult of the offensive" are too vague to be accurate: as MacMillan reiterates over the course of the book, if these concepts were to blame, why did a general European war not erupt over Morocco or Bosnia? Stating that there were a multitude of factors is true, yet so unsatisfying and so uninsightful it scarcely needs to be said. The trigger events - the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,* the responding Austro-Hungarian ultimatum toward Serbia, the Russian general mobilization order, Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality - are all well-known. What led to those trigger events, though, and why was it in the summer of 1914 that the guns, mortars and cannon were finally fired? That is the question MacMillan valiantly tries to answer.

Like Mary McAuliffe's Twilight of the Belle Epoque, which I reviewed back in June/July, The War That Ended Peace opens at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. MacMillan deals with some of McAuliffe's characters in her chapter "What Were They Thinking?" (247), but the Exposition Universelle portion showcases MacMillan's own characters perfectly: each nation has its own pavillion, replete with artifacts of national pride. (3-5) The year 1900 was twenty-nine years since the close of the last major European war (the Franco-Prussian War), but the Great Powers would become increasingly violent as the 20th century wore on.

The commonly cited, and not entirely accurate, World War I alliance map commonly shown in high school history classrooms was far from a certainty, especially where the United Kingdom was concerned. Early in the twentieth century, Germany and the United Kingdom had frequent alliance discussions. Shocking as it might seem today, the largest obstacle to an Anglo-German alliance was frequently Germany's desire to build its strength while the United Kingdom went to war against Russia: "Much better for Germany, [German Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow] felt, to remain neutral between Britain and Russia in their continuing conflict." (86) In 1905, two radical peers in the British Parliament formed the Anglo-German Friendship Committee. (298) Over a decade later, when William II would step down at the end of World War I, he suggested becoming a British-style constitutional monarch. It is fitting, then, that so much of the first quarter of the book discusses the background behind the Entente Cordiale. Although the United Kingdom and France were allies during the Crimean War, British public opinion had backed Prussia in 1870, and the Fashoda Crisis in 1898 nearly put the United Kingdom and France at war. Although Fashoda was temporally detached from World War I,** MacMillan's account is hilarious, including Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand's futile trek across a substantial portion of Africa, map included. (144)

That the United Kingdom and France would sign the Entente Cordiale in 1904 was a miracle. Even then, British politicians (especially Edward Grey) waffled on how far they would honour it, right up until the start of the war, intent on maintaining a "free hand" in European affairs. The only scenario that seemed assured was that France and Germany would not end up on the same side of a general European war. Britain, cognizant of this, knew that in siding with France, it was rejecting Germany. The ongoing Anglo-German naval race, which bled into the political sphere as German Admiral von Tirpitz and British Admiral Jacky Fisher constantly lobbied for naval spending increases,^ further pushed the United Kingdom toward France. Austria-Hungary was a useful partner for the naval status quo in the Mediterranean, but the French navy easily inherited that role as World War I drew nearer.

So much of the pre-World War I world is locked in a time capsule, unable to ever be recovered, at once romantic and barbaric. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires have no clear modern equivalents, and what once was the German Empire is vastly different now. MacMillan's best comparison between the world of then and the world of today is in how major countries compared failed states: "Where today the international community sees failed or failing states as a problem, in the age of imperialism the powers saw them as an opportunity." (165) These were the days of Fotochrom, of Ruritanian romances and of the invention of Fry's Turkish delight.

Although the Ottoman Empire was targeted in Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia in 1908, and again in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), Austria-Hungary and Russia would fail sooner. During the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Navy accidentally set off the Dogger Bank incident, in which Russian ships sunk British merchant ships and the British almost declared war in response. France, by then Russia's ally and the United Kingdom's friend, had to mediate the dispute. (173) This was all the more embarrassing when considering the Russian ships' ultimate destination: they belonged to the fleet that would be massacred by the Japanese at Tsushima. For years afterward, the Russians would call any foreign policy blunder "a diplomatic Tsushima". Outmuscled by Japan in the Far East, and then outmaneuvered by Austria-Hungary over the Bosnian Crisis, Russia's foreign policy was in tatters. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which guaranteed nothing except peace in Persia and Afghanistan, was cold comfort. Russia's domestic politics were even worse: "Between 1905 and 1909 nearly 1,500 provincial governors and officials were assassinated." (177)

Austria-Hungary lacked such military or diplomatic defeats, and was nowhere near as politically violent, but its nationalist stirrings and lack of a succession pipeline would prove fatal during the war. MacMillan presents a thoughtful mini-biography of Franz Josef von Habsburg, the last great Austrian emperor (219-223), capped by her poetic summary of his life view: "Franz Joseph soldiered on, working methodically through his piles of papers as though, through sheer hard work and attention to detail, he could stave off chaos and hold his empire together." (223) As voting rights expanded and nationalist groups formed in what would become Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and (an expanded) Romania, the image of an emperor holding up his empire became less realistic. When Franz Josef died in 1916, an astonishing sixty-eight years into his reign, his most likely successors had all predeceased him.

Some of the landmark plans of the early 20th century were made by men who would not survive to see the outbreak of war. Alois von Aehrenthal, Austria-Hungary's foreign minister during the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, died in 1912. One of his more infamous legacies was a charged meeting at Buchlau castle, now in the Czech Republic, with Alexander Izvolsky, the Russian foreign minister. As has always been common in diplomatic meetings, each man walked away from the castle with a vastly different story to tell his respective emperor. (423) The Schlieffen plan's creator, Alfred von Schlieffen, died in 1913, although the German army insisted on relying on that plan to the exclusion of ever discussing its implications with civilian leaders: "Germany's war plan, the most controversial to this day, was locked in an iron safe to which the chief of staff held the key, and only a small circle knew its strategic goals." (336) Joseph Chamberlain, who held almost every major British political position except Prime Minister, died a month before the war began. Jean Jaures, the French socialist leader, was assassinated on July 30, 1914, less than a week before German troops set foot in his home country. (618) Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination takes up most of a chapter, was known before the war for being perhaps the one man who could have brokered long-term peace with Austria-Hungary's South Slav populations. Franz Ferdinand's train ride from Vienna to Trieste was so spooky, leading up to the inexplicably disregarded reports of terrorist activity in Sarajevo, that his death almost seemed foreordained. (550)

MacMillan's discussions of the declarations of war is the book's highlight. In those crucial weeks from the June 28 assassination until August Madness, the Great Powers were locked in tension. The Russian general mobilization order came after Nicholas II seriously considered a mobilization on only the Austrian border, which could have contained the war but would have opened the long German-Russian border to a German preemptive attack. Ironically, Sergei Sazonov was able to convince the Tsar that a general war might be the only way to save his throne.^^ After Nicholas II authorized Sazonov to enact the order, Sazonov phoned General Nicholas Yanushkevich; Sazonov then said, dramatically, "Smash your phone." (603) Germany declared war on Russia in response to this order. Friedrich von Pourtales, the German ambassador to Russia, pled with Sazonov to stop the Russian mobilization, but Sazonov refused, leading Pourtales to hand him Germany's declaration of war: "In that case, sir, I am instructed by my Government to hand you this note." (616) Finally, the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Germany in response to Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality shattered Karl von Lichnowsky, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, who tirelessly worked to keep those two countries at peace. (624)

My only qualm with The War That Ended Peace is the use of modern political terms to refer to now-antiquated events and precepts, including erroneous comparisons to modern times. This is repeated, and I have to assume deliberate. To call certain factions "conservative" or "liberal" in now-defunct countries with political systems that make no sense to a 21st-century North American is heavily misleading. While the Conservative and Liberal parties in the United Kingdom can rightly be referred to by their party names, and the Social Democratic Party in Germany was quite obviously socialist, going much further falls into the dreaded trap of tunnel-visioning history. People in the Russian Empire or the Ottoman Empire saw their worlds so drastically differently from modern English-language readers, few words can describe peoples' political predilections in all those places.

MacMillan's epilogue is a blisteringly fast twelve-page outtake on World War I. After everything from Queen Victoria's jubilee to the tales of "Foxy" Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the war finally arrives just in time for the end. After the war, Harry Kessler, a German diplomat, revisits a house of his that he had not visited since 1913. Kessler's diary entry on the experience is among the most nostalgic passages I have ever read. (640)

Finally, as exciting as the diplomatic intrigue leading up to World War I was, there is so much more to commemorate. That is why this review is being posted on Remembrance Day (Armistice Day or Veterans Day). Last year, I visited the World War I monuments in Prospect Cemetery in Toronto, and then visited the Toronto Archives collection of newspapers from the date of the armistice in 1918 in anticipation of the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The more we read, the less we forget.

Ease of Reading: 4
Educational Content: 10





*In the interest of theming my experiences, as I often do in regard to this blog, I am listening to Franz Ferdinand (2004) while writing this review.

**The Fashoda Crisis happened sixteen years before World War I. A good comparison is considering the armistice in 1918 in assessing motives for the extremely ill-fated German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934.

^MacMillan spends far more time with the Anglo-German naval race than I have here. The topic demands its own book, and is already the subject of many.

^^For all the book, and many other sources, mentions the eerily accurate predictions regarding World War I, this has to be the worst World War I prediction I have ever seen.

Strange NFL Stats, Factual and Fictional

One of the core mandates of Matthew Gordon Books is the analytical approach to fiction and non-fiction, which I try to read in roughly equal amounts, such as when I read 26 of each for the venerable Book a Week. One of the more peripheral mandates is my lifelong interest in the National Football League. Sometimes, that even devolves into statistics.

Here are two extraordinary NFL statistics, one from non-fiction, one NFL.com accidentally made up:

Fact: Andy Reid has the same NFL head coaching record as Marty Schottenheimer

Right before the 2019 season, I noted on Quora that if the Chiefs started the season 5-2, Andy Reid would have the same lifetime NFL head coaching record as Marty Schottenheimer (200-126-1). (Even the same number of ties!) Moreover, Reid would achieve that record as head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, which Schottenheimer famously took to multiple first-round byes back in the 1990s.

Thanks to Thursday night's 30-6 victory over the hapless Broncos, the Reid/Schottenheimer prophecy is fulfilled.

Fiction: The Lions led the Vikings 7-1

When the Vikings scored their first touchdown of today's game, the NFL.com Gamecenter of the game recorded the extra point but, through some glitch or human error, failed to record the touchdown. The result was this:

Depending on who you listen to, it is either impossible for a team to have a score of 1 in an NFL game, or so unlikely it's never happened. Today was not an exception.

High Shelf Press Issue XI: containing my satirical short story The Aviary

High Shelf Press has just released Issue XI today!

Available for sale in print for $15 from High Shelf Press (bundled discounts available) or from Amazon.

Cover art by Monica Wiesblott straight out of a classic horror movie. Image from the link to Issue XI above. Not my image, I just thought you'd like it.

Among other great artists, Issue XI features my short story "The Aviary", in which predators and scavengers engage in a war of words (war of birds?) over who gets to eat the big catch. The birds within are markedly more majestic than this guy I snapped, I assure you.

You can find a full table of contents here.

You can read the issue online in journal format here.

High Shelf Press is a Portland, Oregon-based independent literary publisher, featuring authors, poets and visual artists from the United States, Canada and more. High Shelf Press works in conjunction with Cathexis Northwest Press. In keeping with October, Issue XI is High Shelf Press's "spookiest issue yet".

Panthers in Hotspur!

The NFL stadium in Tottenham Hotspur is the first NFL-designed stadium outside of North America, as per Melissa Stark. Today, it hosts the Carolina Panthers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which is the first division rivalry game in that stadium. (Last week's Chicago/Oakland tilt was a game between two vintage NFL franchises, but two that have never played in the same conference, let alone division.)

I went to London for the first time this past summer. I took over 900 pictures in eight days, including Westminster Abbey (just the outside!), the iconic statue of Richard I in front of the House of Lords, and the original 1854 dinosaur models at Crystal Palace.

I've been cheering on the Panthers since their inaugural season in 1995. Now I get to cheer them on in the shadow of this:

As someone who is such a big Panthers fan I wear my Panthers hoodie to a Guns 'N' Roses concert, I couldn't be happier.

October's Book: Galveston

Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto

Thriller (2010 - 258 pp.)

A doctor took pictures of my lungs. They were full of snow flurries. (3)

From Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of HBO's True Detective comes his first novel Galveston. The story is told from the voice of Roy "Big Country"* Cady, a mercenary/assassin diagnosed with lung cancer in the book's first two sentences (referenced above). With what he thinks is a short time left to live, and with his old colleague Stan Ptitko determined to make that time even shorter, Roy embarks on a journey that is part-escape, part-revenge. He is accompanied by Rocky, a teenaged prostitute he rescues after the book's opening conflagration, and eventually Rocky's little sister Tiffany. Ironically, Galveston takes place in some of the hottest parts of the Continental United States, yet Roy compares his cancer to snow.

No character in Galveston is particularly lovable, although it's difficult to dislike toddler Tiffany. Roy earns the reader's sympathy through his sardonic humour, extreme levels of pragmatism, lack of regard toward any traditional obligations, and the fact that he isn't any of the other characters. Roy is a cross between the Punisher and someone engaged on a long road trip in the South with unlimited drinks, especially Jack Daniel's, Jim Beam and J&B. When Roy murders people, he always finds a way to paint it either as self-defence (19) or as something that happened so quickly it was the only logical course of action. (234) Roy cares about Rocky and especially Tiffany, and seems genuinely willing to help people in trouble, but is otherwise emotionless about his surroundings, including rejecting Rocky's sexual advances even before he learns Tiffany exists. (44)

The book's main events occur in the late '80s, with the future "present" when Roy tells the story being 2008.** Conveniently, the story occurring in the pre-smartphone era makes characters evade each other more easily. When a character is not physically in front of Roy, the reader has no idea where that character is, or whether he or she is even alive. This sense of disappearance adds to Galveston's mystery; much like in the original Warcraft computer game, when you haven't discovered a piece of land yet, it may as well not exist. Feeling that way in a fantasy world is understandable, but when the hidden place is somewhere as obviously existent^ as the Southern United States, a fog hangs over the entire setting. When Roy leaves his motel room after rejecting a prostitute's advances, continuing his tradition of apathy toward sex, he reflects on how literally in the dark he is about his future: "You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key." (155) The future Roy finds is as a sixty-two-year-old ex-convict with one eye and a dog, who lives a quieter life than he could have imagined in the '80s.

My one qualm with Galveston is the use of the "knocked unconscious with no lasting damage" trope, which is disproven by science once every few seconds. Any unconsciousness lasting longer than a few seconds has disastrous effects on the neural system,^^ yet Roy's head is treated like a pinata, only for his brain to function normally a couple pages later. (226-228) 

Unlike many of the other books I discuss here, Galveston is a blisteringly fast read with a simple story Pizzolatto conveys well. There is very little subtext, obscurity, theorizing, or questioning of what reality means; what you read is what you get.

A personal note: when I lived in Houston briefly on a work assignment, my parents visited me for a weekend. During that weekend, we went to Galveston. It was 2011, the year after Galveston was published. When Roy drives Rocky and Tiffany to the Gulf Coast, lending the reader an idea of how Pizzolatto picked the book's title, he notes the wide-open possibilities envisioned by the drive down the I-45 to Galveston: "Clear of the cities, Texas turned into a green desert meant to hammer you with vastness, a mortar filled with sky. The girls treated it like a fireworks show." (79) While we certainly had a better time there than Roy did, Pizzolatto's descriptions of the Gulf and the beaches took me back there. I might not have picked this book to read if the title didn't bring back those memories.

Ease of Reading: 10

Educational Content: 1

*No resemblance to Bryant "Big Country" Reeves, retired centre for the (as they were then) Vancouver Grizzlies.

**Although I suppose this fact spoils that Roy survives the story, it's impossible to discuss the book's 2008 scenes otherwise.

^The word "existent" is used not nearly as often as its antonym "non-existent". Why, I've never learned. Perhaps things are assumed to be existent unless we hear otherwise.

^^A similar error is made in Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time, also told from the perspective of someone with terminal cancer.