Review of Prostate Wimp

The following review appeared in Readers' Favourites, and is by Java Davies

Like many people, I'm sure, I thought that all prostate issues were due to cancer. Reading Diary of a Prostate Wimp by Mike Crowl showed me other types of prostate issues. Mike Crowl wasn't kidding about this being a diary. It's a combination of diary entries on his blog, entries from other men suffering from prostate issues, and letters to God, whom Mike refers to as "Dad," in the style of Jesus referring to God as Dad in Aramaic. While the title of this compilation is Diary of a Prostate Wimp, these men carried themselves with strength and humor for the most part, with some fear and doubt thrown in the mix on occasion.

At the very beginning, Mike Crowl warns people that the squeamish shouldn't attempt this book, and the warning is well advised. Mike doesn't flinch when discussing the pain of catheterization and its side effects of peeing on himself in public when the catheter dislodged, having irritation at the penis tip where the catheter can rub, discomforts along the sexual front, exhaustion, leaving home for a vacation, and even weight gain from the inability to exercise regularly. Mike also talks about different levels in the quality of medical care, and the lack of information from the doctors when you don't know what to ask. Frequent visits to doctors and clinics made me wonder what the healthcare system is like in New Zealand. According to Wikipedia, it's a combination of private and public provision, depending upon the illness or injury.

I was intrigued by the frequent references to Celia, Mrs. Crowl. She and the rest of the family seemed to be very supportive during the long months of catheterization, the prostate scraping surgery, and the slow recovery. Throughout, the author talks about the things he misses and can't wait to get back to. I was rooting for his eventual, successful recovery. If the reader, or someone the reader knows, is suffering from prostate issues, I recommend this book.

A footnote to this review: Davies is correct in that the NZ Health system is a combination of public and private. Due to increasing delays in getting treatment through the public system, many people now opt to pay for health insurance, in order to be able to be treated more speedily in the private sector. Ironically the doctors often work in both areas. Still, for all its failings, the health system in New Zealand is still better than in many places in the world. 

Something's screwy somewhere....

"Stadium Profit Forecast" proclaims a headline in today's ODT.  I thought initially - it isn't April the first is it? - sadly, it's not. When you read the whole article you discover that the 'profit' comes, yet again, at the expense of the ratepayers of Dunedin. In fact, in real terms there's absolutely no profit at all.

'We're all about delivering economic benefits', says Terry Davies. Well yes, 'economic benefits' to shareholders, maybe, when they get dividends, but the economic benefits for Dunedin citizens are as always nil. 

It's all playing around with accounts: in order to turn Stadium losses into profits, the
1. Rent was halved by $2 million.
2. $30 million of Stadium debt was transferred to the Council's books.

The result is that the Ratepayers' Stadium bill will increase by $1.81 a year, to a total of $11.65 per year.

The supposed profits might reach $600,000, Davies enthuses. Well, they might, if the ratepayers of Dunedin don't get sick to death of the whole farce and demand their money back. 

Someone who understands accounting better might be able to explain how there are actual profits. In my amateur bookkeeping understanding (I did get 100% in a bookkeeping exam, many years ago) all I can see if this: if you remove debts from a company and you cut their rent in half then of course that will allow to make money more easily. Meanwhile, the company that's taken on the debts will have to pay them at some point, presumably with interest. I couldn't see a Bank ever offering to do this.

Something's screwy somewhere...
.

More on Robertson Davies

Finished reading Robertson Davies' Murther and Walking Spirits last night. It's a late book in his career, and I suspect that if he hadn't been such an established author when it was published, it wouldn't have seen a single bookshop shelf.

It's really two books in one: the first, which provides bookends for the other, begins with the murder of the narrator, goes on to discuss his subsequent interaction with his wife and her lover and other characters (all without them knowing) and then is literally dumped for some 200 plus pages before resurfacing so that things can be resolved in some degree.

The second book is the meat in the sandwich - very substantial meat, in fact. Its only connection to the other story is that the narrator continues to inform us what's going on, and his murderer is also mentioned spasmodically - they're 'sitting' together in a cinema watching old rediscovered movies. However what the narrator sees on the screen (for no explained reason) is different to what the murderer sees. It turns out that he sees several 'movies' about his ancestors, each movie gradually coming closer to the time of the book. In this section there are dozens of characters, some of them receiving little more than a line or two to delineate them. Supposedly the narrator is telling us what's happening in the movies, but Davies goes way beyond that and adds in authorial comment and much more. It's a puzzle of a story, since there's no structure to it, merely the detailing of some of the ancestors' lives and how they interacted with those around them. Often there's no dialogue for page after page (though things come vastly more alive when there is dialogue). Instead the narrator will tell us what the supposed director of the movies is showing him, and somehow this superb director can make the inner thoughts of the people on screen known to the narrator as well. It makes for interesting historical reading, but isn't the material for a novel, in my opinion - at least not as it stands.

As one of the reviews on Amazon says about this book: If you haven't read Davies, "please, please don't start here because this is awful and just not indicative of what a great writer he is." Here's a more detailed review from the New York Times, written when the book first came out.

I read a much earlier Davies book (1951) before this - Tempest Tost - in which a bunch of amateur actors put on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Again there are heaps of characters, some of them only turning up in the last thirty pages or so. There's a lack of any sort of structure (which is interesting, because Davies was a playwright before he began writing novels), and it's hard to figure out who the main characters are: people who start out seeming to play an important part in the action often fall by the wayside; others come into their own for a while and then are dropped into the background. A man who plays a major part in the story takes quite some time to get a head of steam, and even then can vanish for lengthy periods.

The novel basically moves forward in time, but there's no sense of plot, and very little of things known early in the piece coming into their own at a later point. It's enjoyable, and often very funny (more in the writing about the characters than from what the characters themselves say), and Davies has a nice line in aphorisms; the book is littered with them. He likes to play the author as a wise old man...but it's a bit of a puzzle how he's regarded as the Grand Old Man of Canadian Letters.

The 39 Steps

I watched Hitchcock's The 39 Steps again a couple of nights ago. It was even better than I remembered, full of typical Hitchcock moments - comedy in the midst of suspense - and beautifully cast.

I watched it in part to check it against the play, The 39 Steps, which the Fortune Theatre here in Dunedin has just presented. Supposedly this stage version uses every bit of dialogue in the movie's script. Perhaps the Wikipedia description is closer to the truth:

The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film The 39 Steps to be performed nearly verbatim onstage, but with a cast of four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress plays the three women whom he has romantic entanglements with, and two other actors play every other character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lighting fast quick changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including Rear Window, Psycho and North by Northwest.

Note the use of the words, 'nearly verbatim.' The movie has more dialogue overall, mainly because there are several crowd scenes. What the play does is take the scenes where there are fewer characters, for the most part, and hang its 'played mainly for laughs' production on this. It also adds occasional lines. Furthermore it takes the lines from the original script and overdoes them to such a degree that every line is milked for any possibility of a laugh. You have to see the thing to understand how this can be done, but, in general, it is done. Furthermore lines are elasticated hugely in order to fill them with all manner of business. The result is a two-hour play extended out from a ninety-minute movie.

It wasn't just the Fortune production that was done like this; this is the norm for all productions - UK, Broadway, wherever.

Now don't get me wrong - for the most part I enjoyed the play, but (there's always a 'but' with me) many of the laughs are the result of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach. In other words, the audience is constantly pushed to see the humour, however weak it may be. And by the second act I was beginning to tire of this overdone approach to comedy. Comedy doesn't need to be drummed up; is something is funny the audience will laugh. There was plenty of rapid change stuff that was funny in itself; there were lots of daft ideas that were visually funny, and there were even some subtle moments.

Hitchcock set out to make a comedy thriller - it's typical of the British thrillers, for the most part, made at a time when Hitch was in his prime. And it's a precurser to the likes of North by Northwest, made during Hitch's American period. Hence the movie has Robert Donat (as Richard Hannay) and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to each other for a chunk of the movie; this creates all manner of humorous moments. And there are several excellent characters who are simply funny in themselves (compared to John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft, who have the most tense scene in the movie, and play it straight). Even Lucie Mannheim, as the spy who appears early in the story, has several charmingly funny lines.

So there was plenty of humour in the story to start with. The stage version is never content with any of this; it dredges humour out of everything, which leaves the piece with no breathing space, and nothing in the way of a suspense.

However, on top of all this, the Fortune theatre production had Patrick Davies as one of the two actors who play nearly every part between them (except the three main women's roles). Davies is a brilliantly physical actor. There's one moment where he does something straight out of the ministry of silly walks - a movement that would cripple most people in two minutes. But as the play goes on, Davies almost seems to take over. His Scots hotelkeeper's wife was a shrill noise, like someone in need of a colon cleanse - the lines were invariably lost under the shrieking. His softly spoken political speaker mouthed absolutely nothing for about two solid minutes - some people, including a couple of my friends, found this hysterically funny. I just wanted him to get on with the play and stop hogging the limelight. And when he's playing the Professor at the end of the play, and is shot, he becomes a marionette, quite unable to lie down and die. I found this embarrassing, to be honest. It unbalanced the play.

All this griping aside, the play had huge energy, the cast likewise, and again and again it showed how it's possible on a stage with almost no scenery, to conjure up all manner of places, rooms and situations. (Incidentally, the Fortune production actually had a cast of six: two women doubled as stage crew and played a few tiny roles. Yet Wikipedia says the cast consists of just four actors.)