Ntuple Indemnity

Among the many things I passed through upon my arrival in Cambridge was a symposium on Euclidean Geometry in Nineteenth-Century Culture, organized by Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and CRASSH. I may say a few things about it later, but for now, let us limit ourselves to this tidbit.

I briefly spoke to Robin Wilson, the author of Lewis Carroll in Numberland (reviewed here), from whom I learned that Lewis Carroll once corresponded with Arthur Sullivan to propose an operatic adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sullivan declined.

Or, as I like to tell it: Sullivan declined, and English comic opera has never recovered since.

This week’s selection: Master and Commander (1970) by Patrick O’Brian.

In brief: The first of the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels is more of an opening salvo than a completely satisfying story unto itself, but immerse yourself in the music of its naval jargon and you will find it a rich, endearing overture of neo-Romantic escape.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Master and Commander, keep reading below.)

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People with Apple Macintosh computers occasionally ask me to recommend third-party software (preferably free) for the odd tasks where solutions do not come bundled with Mac OS X. As I am finally cleaning up some of the permanent pages on the site to replace the filler copy and revise outdated information, I thought to post an OS X software guide listing some of the applications, utilities, and plug-ins I like to keep installed. This is more for my convenience than anybody else’s, but other Mac users may find it of some worth.

I refuse to watch films on planes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a three-hour flight or a ten-hour flight—I will not watch films on planes. On principle I am willing to make an exception for films made before the early 1950s and television programmes, but the quality of the selection has never been great enough for the exception to arise.

Never mind the censorship and bowdlerization that goes on among distributors to make every film suitable for the consumption of the airborne public. (I remember how the airline edition of Almost Famous—one of the finest works of American cinema in the past decade, by the way—eliminated the entire airplane sequence that is the critical moment of the film.) My real objection is to the pervasive butchering of films to fit a 4:3 aspect ratio. If a film is made in widescreen, I see it in widescreen. The pan-and-scan cropping that eliminates up to 45% of every frame is both generally criminal and personally distracting.

People who don’t know or care about cinema will never complain, which is why airlines can foist these travesties on us unpunished. I am fully aware that I am in an extreme minority of filmgoers—the informed minority—that appreciates the composition of images as essential to the cinematic experience. I know it is as uncommon as listening to melody and harmony in music. I am also willing to concede that when it was standard for airplanes to have small 4:3 television screens to serve several rows of passengers at once, widescreen presentation would have rendered the images too small.

There is no longer any excuse.

For a number of years now, Air Canada has installed personal entertainment systems for every seat. The clunky white hourglass cursors on the touchscreen interface tell you they run Windows, which should by itself condemn their choice of software development contractors. But that is beside the point, which is that Air Canada’s personal entertainment systems have widescreen monitors. Yet they continue to order widescreen films in the full-frame format. They are far from the only airline overhauling its entertainment devices to adapt to a digital world, and I am certain they are far from the only airline committing this offense.

Is this a failure on the airlines’ side, or the distributors’ side? I am guessing it’s the latter—that distributors produce a uniform airline edition that carriers around the world can order. But why do they continue to insist on slicing their films to pieces?

Is ordering films in the original aspect ratio more costly? No. But there is a substantial overhead cost to the production and distribution of these abominations in the first place. With the advent of digital formats that support anamorphic widescreen (i.e. the “black bars” adjust depending on your screen, and are not part of the image data as they are in letterboxing), the increasing awareness of original aspect ratios, and the widespread adoption of high-definition TVs, and there is no longer any reason for pan-and-scan to exist. The damage it has done to the public awareness of cinematic arts is considerable as it is, and digital formats ought to have redressed most of its harms. The DVD format went a long way toward doing this before ignorant customers pushed rental chains like Blockbuster to demand the production of pan-and-scan DVDs.

As an airline passenger, I am content to use my entertainment device for the only thing it does well—flight information and maps—but that doesn’t mean we should not push for change.

This week’s selection: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) by Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.

In brief: Murakami’s surrealist epic is a colourful story full of unique interactions between minds and the outside world. Its defiance of storytelling conventions of cause and effect is so extreme as to deny entry to typical reading habits, but it approximates the sense of faded memory better than perhaps any other novel I have read.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, keep reading below.)

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