Sign Crimes/Road Kill, From
Mediascope to Landscape, by
Joyce Nelson, Publ. Between
the Lines, pp. 244, softcover

S THE year 2000

looms, cultural

critics warn that we
are experiencing in the West
a cultural and intellectual
breakdown.

Television robs our imagination,
machines dehumanize the
business place and the media at-
tains a cult-like status,
manipulating our world and per-
sonal view.

Victoria writer Joyce Nelson
joins the chorus of doomsayers
and those-who-dare-to-point-out-
the-Emperor’s-clothes with her
new book, Sign Crimes/Road Kill,
From Mediascape to Landscape.

The collection of critical essays
includes an examination of the
hidden agendas of government
and political groups, the vacuity of
television and Disney icons and
the rise of eco-feminism.

It is divided into three sections:
Mediascape: Mindscape; and
Landscape.

Although the author says in the
introduction she tried to ‘‘avoid
overlap” there is much repetition
of themes, the most annoying of
which is her constant harangue on
patriarchy — on which she blames
almost every ill of modern society,
with little acurmen and a great deal
of fligpancy.

Now, flippancy can be great,
highly entertaining.

rian Fawcett, for instance, is a
master at the scathing cultural cri-
tique. :

Umberto Eco in his book, Trav-
els in HyperReality, also has a tal-
ent for exposing the inanities of
modern culture.

Both authors aze able to show us
the evil underpinning of the banal
and argue convincingly for its
Causes or sources.

Nelson succeeds marginally in
this. Some essays sound like mus-
ings over a coffee mug — they
posit a banality and flog it to death
without imparting any insight to
the reader.

In “Imagine,”’ for instance,
Nelson makes this hardly
apocalyptic statement: “What |
think we're seeing ... is the erosion
of the imagination from 30 years of
television.”

If this is a new thought, I’m Eins-
tein’s cousin.

In “Framing Reality, Thoughts
on Soaps,’ she commits a crime of
incongruous analogy, somehow
linking the framework of a photo
(and the picture-taker’s bias), the

signs

Barbara Black

BOOK REVIEW

redefined mental frame of radical
groups, and (stretch your lycra
thinking cap) the narrative
framework of soap operas.

Soap operas, she claims, are
more “feminine” in their serial-
historical nature than most other
(masculine, she implies) TV shows
which are essentially ahistorical
and self-contained. (What about
Channel 9 serials?)

With such fallacious reasoning
Nelson loses the reader’s attention
and simply fulfils her own pet
theories about patriarchal oppres-
sion.

She finishes with the fatuous
claim: ‘‘Daytime soaps provide
us with some useful tools by which
to examine other things in the
dominant society.’’ She fails,
however, to point out what those
tools ave, what other things we
could examine and what exactly is
the dominant society.

Lulled by the chatty, casual tene
of the writing, the reader may be
unaware of the weak argumen-
tative structure.

Nelson’s transitions are
awkward (she writes, ‘Which
leads us back to ..."” when in fact it
does not!), and she indulges in
tangents that could well have been
separate essays or at Jeast could
have been more artfully woven in-
to the essay.

Her humor and flippant style are
sometimes at odds with the serious
subject matter.

Humor does work well, howev-
er, in the catty essay on Space
Dorks (aka patriarchal Peter Pans).

Here, Neison suggests that the
elaborate space program is ‘‘a
tragically literal-minded expres- .
sion” of the puer aeternus (Peter
Pan) archetype.

She believes the whole
aerospace industry is fuelied by a
Space Dork patriarchy where
men-who-would-be-boys dream of
escaping the plodding earthly fife.

A foray into the world of opinion
polls and the career of Decima
wonder-man Allan Gregg in the
Mindscape section proves interest-
ing.

Nelson reveals how corporations
tailor their image to gain public
support without effecting change

Lively writing highlights
volurne on local gardening

Gardening in Vancouver, by
judy Newton, publ. by Lone
Pine Books, 1992, 174 np.

ARDENING IN
Vancouver is an in-
teresting little book
with an attractive format.
The 10 chapters are set out in a
fairly traditional pattern and are
basic to most weekend gardeners.
Between each third of the book
there is a set of very high quality
photographs showing a selection
of plants or landscaping ideas
complete with detailed captions.
Most of the information in the
book would be helpful to begin-
ning gardeners and is presented in
a very readable style.

Layout, diagrams and illustra-
tions are excellent and this makes
the book inviting to browse
through.

However, its usefulness may be
limited because of the fact that
some of the essential technical in-
formation is missing or out of date.

Some of the weaker areas are
composting, organic fertilizers,
drainage, regional climatic dif-
ferences and germination.

Gardening in Vancouver is one
of the few books of its type to be
written by a local author and is
certainly a book that beginning
gardeners should consider for
coltection.

— By Roy Jonsson, a horticultural
consultant and North Vancouver
resident.

from within.

We are taken behind the scenes
to examine the complex workings
of the polling, tracking, targeting
machinery.

In the third section called Land-
scapes, Nelson tackles issues per-
taining to the environment.

Here, the chronicle of “Culture
and Agriculture’’ is quite convinc-
ing.

Nelson traces the transformation
of farming from the self-sufficient
home-based operation of the
1930s to the technologically
dependent machine-driven in-
dustry of post-Second World War.

She imparts the eeriness of a
world in which food is “‘design-
ed” for its compatability with the
machines that reap it rather than
the people who eat it or the land
which nurtures it.

Unfortunately this essay gets
sidetracked by a tirade on Walt
Disney's techno-nature landscapes
(in which she quotes Umberto
Eco...).

At best, Sign Crimes/Road Kill is
an uneven commentary on mod-
ern, sometimes Canadian, life with
many references to the deceptions
of democracy, the dangers of the
media and the suspect concept of
the ‘global village.”

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