To her let us garlands bring

Tonight was music night in Balliol's Middle Common Room, which is Oxford's way of saying graduate students' lounge (though the Room can also be metaphorical, at which point it's the student union, sorta). Oxford only likes to say things in ways that are confusing to anyone unindoctrinated. 
I arrived a few minutes late and could hear a loud tenor voice from outside the door. So as not to do that thing where you make a lot of noise and walk right into the stage (there are two doors to the MCR and I wasn't sure where they'd set up), I waited till the end of the song, and snuck in on the clapping. All the seats were taken. As I took up a post standing near the side wall, a guy (who I know but not well) stood up and started reciting, "Who is Silvia, what is she?". It was slightly disorienting. Several people turned to look at me, knowing exactly where I was since I had just walked in late. Anyhow, I suppose it was good timing, would have been sad to miss the poem about me. Then the singing struck up again, a German song to the translated words of the Shakespeare poem.

Proust's letters

Despite a cold and general lousy feeling, I went out into the dark, dark 5:15 last Wednesday to walk a half hour to Wolfson College in order to hear Michael Wood speak on Proust's letters to his mother. It was the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson. I was pretty neutral on the introduction until after it had passed when I figured out that it must have been Hermione Lee giving it. Then I was really excited -- I've read her wonderful biography of Virginia Woolf and a book on doing biography that I wrote about somewhere in this blog. The talk itself was about ways of reading, looking at letters in general and Proust's letters more specifically. There wasn't too much on Proust, at least there wasn't much I didn't know already, though some of it was funny: Proust's mum used to send him a questionnaire to fill in about how many hours he'd slept, what time he'd gotten up, whether he'd had headaches the day before, etc. Wood's thesis was that there are three modes of reading: just reading (little interpretation, straight absorption of face-value textual meaning), letting the reading sink in (the kind of interpretation that we do when for instance we have an unreliable narrator) and overreading -- where only a considerable stretch beyond our ordinary idiom will allow us to feel we're getting what is written. Psychoanalysis does a lot of this. Maybe (this isn't what Wood said, I'm interpreting) it's that in this overreading what we're doing is bringing separate knowledge of our own (beyond the very general) to interpret what is going on -- that's what psychoanalysis does, it uses its own theories to bring extra meaning to a dream or a story, fleshing it out beyond what a reader could extrapolate from the text itself.
Wood says that Barthes has a similar theory, of three levels of seeing -- communication (straight face-value understanding of the image), signification (bringing in understanding of whatever symbolism is at hand), and the third he calls signifying, though only out of alack of a better term. It's when you feel that there's some meaning beyond the first two, and it's sort of intangible. Maybe my eye is just wandering or maybe there really is something there. I am put in mind of Rembrandt, whose portraits always look curious and alive, and apparently it's because the eyes are always pointing in slightly different directions, giving our brains an impression of movement (I guess there's cognitive dissonance in which the brain assumes movement rather than dealing with the unlikeliness of eyes looking two places at once [speaking of which, it would be cool if someone could train themselves to use their eyes separately -- but I guess there's reasons why that's not possible, but the fact that some people can cross their eyes makes me feel like there's some willful control over eye coordination]).
After the talk there was a reception. I was alone, which made it more awkward to stay, but I went in and had a glass of champagne and ate a few hors d'oeuvres before taking off. After the man next to me and I both waived off a waiter carrying a tray of smoked salmon on circles of brown bread, the man said to me, "It helps when you like the canapes." Unfortunately, I didn't engage him in conversation. Instead I walked home.
But the next day, my friend Jane told me that she's just been elected (if that's the word) to be a fellow at Wolfson, and she invited me to a guest-night dinner there next week. So maybe I'll meet Hermione Lee (turns out she's the president of the college). But I would probably be too shy to go up and talk to her even if she was at the dinner.

A Thursday: Mary Warnock; jurisprudence discussion group; turf tavern

On Thursday, Balliol's weekly lunch seminar, called Doug's lunches for Dean Doug Dupree who nominally hosts, though two second-year undergrads organize it, brought in Baroness Mary Warnock, philosopher and member of the House of Lords (the Baroness is non-hereditary, it's for achievements). I first heard of her two weeks ago when I went to a panel discussion on moral issues surrounding human embryos in research. Her name was used a lot because of a committee she chaired in the early 1980s which set government policy on embryo use for in-vitro fertilization.

I fairly regularly go to these talks as part of my generalized quest for free sandwiches. Usually they are held in Doug's fairly tiny sitting room, which is quite hilarious: it consists of a couch, a chaise longue, three sofa chairs and one or two straight-backed chairs brought in from the other room, a coffee table and a side table with sandwiches. In the first week, they brought in Julian Barbour, a physicist who's just written a book called The End of Time, in which he argues that time does not exist, based on some trying to make sense of the numbers, as physicists do. The room was packed, with people fitting into tiny little corners on the floor right up to the tips of the man's shoes. I had arrived five minutes early and so had one of the comfy sofa chairs. Usually, the talks attract undergrads; even Barbour had maybe one or two other graduate students.

But Mary Warnock's talk was held in the Old Common Room. About 55 students showed up, a little less than half of them grad students. The OCR also doesn't have a lot of tables, so people again sat on the floor, but at least 20 people would have had to leave if it had been held in Doug's rooms.

She's 87 years old and very small with a cap of wispy white hair, and totally charming. She spoke to us about existentialism and its cultural role in 1960s France, and about reading Sartre on a windy beach after having been asked to include him in a book on moral philosophy she was commissioned to write. She then explained that she completely disagrees with the existentialist position that all that matters is authenticity, and stated her view that without morality, society would disintegrate. Her interest is in disentangling morality from religion (which aren't entangled in the first place as far as I'm concerned but I guess for a great many people they are, and people get stressed out about the impossibility of maintaining moral fabric if religion is left behind), and she argued that rather than coming from religion, morality in fact comes first, and informs later religious tenets. The students gave her a pretty hard time, some of them apparently being quite up on Sartre, and others seemingly religious. I was a little worried, which is silly, that they were giving her an old time, because she is fantastically elderly and couldn't really hear some of the questions, and didn't have that quickness that I'm sure she had twenty years ago. Anyhow, she didn't necessarily fully answer all the questions as vociferously as someone else might have, but she didn't duck them either, responding instead with, yes, that's a difficult question right at the centre of the problem, and then speaking around it a little bit.

In the afternoon, the jurisprudence discussion group met to discuss a paper by a youngish member of faculty named Noam G (I'm using the initial to avoid him finding this post if he googles his name; Warnock would have to wade through a lot of sites before she ever found this blog). His paper was on whether legal rules are content-independent reasons, which sounds complicated and technical, and involved diagrams and lots of abstraction, but which sort of boils down to whether people obey rules just because they are the law, rather than because it's a good idea based on the content of the rule (that's in the case of them being content-independent reasons for action). I go to the JDG most weeks because I like the general idea of it, but this paper didn't interest me much. He got a lot of very hard questions afterwards, the hardest of which came from Leslie Green (who grew up five blocks from where I grew up, on Fairmount). Noam mostly had no answers for the hard questions, and said thanks for that, I'll have to think about it, which I thought was good on the level of composure but maybe not great on the level of having command of the subject, though it is a hard subject and one which probably admits many views.

Between these two summaries it's starting to look like I should be writing an analysis of question-answering in special seminars. After the talk, a bunch of the JDG-goers went out for drinks to the Turf Tavern, which is a bar that's only accessible through a winding alley and has coal fires out on its patio, where we talked of many things including the blindness of members of majoritarian cultural groups, corporate moral agency and Wittgenstein (these were not all part of one conversation). Tom, another law dphil and a convenor of the JDG, recommended that I ask the professor of the seminar on Wittgenstein to sit in on his classes, which Tom has done himself. I somehow decided this was a good idea and the next morning, perfectly sober, actually went through with it. I got back a friendly reply and a syllabus. Now I am contemplating the massive reading list they have for each week, and wondering at the wisdom of my choices. I'm also reading Machiavelli for a seminar this week on classics of political thought (which meets once or twice a term). Still, I'm excited about getting back into Wittgenstein, even though it (and all these endless interesting talks) cut into the time I spend working out sentencing principles for corporations.

What I did yesterday (October 26 2011)

I have these strange and eventful days since arriving at Oxford.

I woke up a little late (9 AM) because I hadn’t slept well in the night, after drinking some champagne and wine the night before. My first activity of the day was to attend a sentencing seminar that I audit, which is co-taught by Professor Andrew Ashworth, who seems to have written or co-written almost all of the really influential texts in sentencing law in Britain; and by Professor Julian Roberts, also an eminent sentencing expert who’s written a bunch of books and sits on the Sentencing Commission, and incidentally is my D.Phil supervisor. Each professor brought a friend along to class — Prof. Ashworth brought Andrew von Hirsch, who is an emeritus honorary professor at Cambridge and at Goethe-University Frankfurt and who co-wrote a bunch of books with Ashworth, Julian brought Allan Manson, a professor from Queen’s University, in Ontario, who is also a criminal lawyer and sometime judge. The four of them asked the master’s students (and me) questions about the relative merits of sentencing guidelines (which allow for greater consistency of results and also ensure that a more unified and therefore fairer philosophy of sentencing is in place) or judicial discretion (which give the process more flexibility to respond to individual circumstances and which also — this is just me speaking — have the advantage of giving us some room from scary evil governments; but then you’re in the hands of judges, some of whom will also be scary and into harsh punishment). And they listened attentively to the students’ answers, and then asked them follow-up questions.

From there, I went to the year’s first meeting of the Criminal Law Discussion Group. The meetings are held in the charming Hovenden Room of All Souls College, which has an ornately carved wooden fireplace and we had tea in china cups and saucers. All Souls is the place that originally prompted the coining of the term “ivory tower.” It’s this college where there are no students — as far as I know this basically means that for anybody whose appointment comes straight from All Souls and not from a university department, they have no actual obligation to teach, and could spend their whole lives reading and writing and eating good food. Of course they don’t — Professor Ashworth is at All Souls but he still teaches the sentencing seminar, as well as other stuff. This year’s convenor of the criminal law group, Nicola Lacey, is also at All Souls. Professor Lacey, who is possibly the most charming academic I’ve ever met (she’s really warm, friendly and funny and seems genuine but also commanding), had us go around the room and introduce ourselves. The talk, by two youngish academics, was about addiction and its effect on a possible defence of intoxication, and looked at sources like the AA manual to try and formulate a notion of responsibility for an addict’s behaviour while intoxicated that might be in line with how addicts themselves understand their level of moral responsibility (the answer was, they see it as very high, but we still think there should be some partial defence; it was in retrospect a little unfortunate that their conclusion didn’t have all that much to do with the bulk of the paper). A long discussion followed, and the two seemed really happy after to have had so much criticism, and said they would use it to improve the paper.

It was a few minutes too late to run back to the Centre for Criminology and go to a D.Phil student’s lunchtime seminar on the death penalty in China, so I ran some errands and ate lunch on my own. Overheard cell-phone conversation on High Street: "But my friends are, like, all secret geniuses, and, like, when I ask them if they've read a book...."

Then I went to my desk and finally did about two hours’ worth of work, mainly finding articles on police abuse and the effects that might have on sentencing for the person abused (and then convicted of a crime during the investigation of which they were abused). This isn’t my main D.Phil topic, I’m writing a separate article.

In the afternoon, I met up with two friends and went to the experimental psychology building to participate in a group study on hypnosis. There was no reason for this, we all just thought it might be fun. I wasn’t sure whether I would be more interested in being hypnotized or being someone who wasn’t subject to hypnotic suggestion, but either way I was interested. The experiment was in an auditorium, and there were about 20 of us there and the post-doc psychologist hypnotized all of us in a group. Anyhow, it seems like I’m fairly prone to hypnosis, though I felt like I was in control and could have snapped out of it at any time. Afterwards I felt intensely intensely drowsy, and the guy rehypnotized me and got me to feel more awake. That actually worked, and is probably the clearest effect where I didn’t feel like it was kind of me making it happen. In any case, I really enjoyed it. Hard to say why. Also, before the experiment I was not so impressed with the post-doc, but by the time the hypnosis was over I felt like I trusted him a lot. Weird.  

More of the same, somewhere else

I'm cross-blogging!: http://www.indyish.com/fringe-review-acte/

Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005)

There's such a focus on anxiety in contemporary novels. The Corrections comes to mind, and Infinite Jest - which is about a lot of other things too, but man, is there some anxiety in that book, especially in the first chapter. Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk is pretty anxious. Another common theme of recent novels is satire of a caricaturish kind: The Russian Debutante's Handbook comes to mind, The Corrections again, Zadie Smith's On Beauty or White Teeth and lots and lots of New Yorker short stories (some of them by the authors of the books just mentioned, which might seem like it doesn't count, but it adds to the subjective feeling of the pervasiveness of this kind of writing, which I grow tired of). None of these are among my favourite books (actually I haven't finished The Corrections and don't want to pre-judge, but so far it's given me a similar feeling to the others: interesting enough to go on with, but not moving). For the first hundred or two pages of Infinite Jest, I was feeling emotionally connected, but in the subsequent 800 pages flagged a little.

Transmission shares both of these contemporary preoccupations, and, as with the others, I thought at first that it might be great, then thought good. It is good, and readable, and interesting. It's about computer hacking and virus creation, ramifications of the economics of globalization, adult virgins and Bollywood.

From the first, it put me on guard that the anxiety might be coming. We meet Arjun Mehta, an innocent whose glasses are "blurred with fingerprints." He is going for a job interview, and is brought to "a waiting room filled with nervous young people sitting on orange plastic chairs with the peculiar, self-isolating stiffness interview candidates share with criminal defendants and people in STD-clinic reception areas." I was slightly hopeful that he might turn out to be an agent, and not a painful victim of circumstance, by this detail:

Above [the receptionist] a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away.

And he is a bit of an agent, but not generally enough to get out of the clutches of the big bad world (is that saying too much? I try not to reveal anything, but that's a bit difficult). But at the same time, it's nice writing. I think it gets a bit rushed and slightly less artful later on, but no, it's technically pretty good throughout -- all those other aforementioned books also show good technique, resolving for me a question I had as a teenager about whether great craft was enough to make great literature.

This is an example of the slightly overdone satire that makes me wince:

Guy had known even before he moved in that this was a living space that would require something extraordinary. Feeling both time- and knowledge-challenged, he had (at the suggestion of the attractive brunette property consultant) employed an agency to help him buy furniture. That way, he reasoned, he could be certain everything about his personal environment was in the best possible taste. And so the white-leather table with the cut-out airport city code motif [...] and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony; all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all--every sandlblasted bathroom faucet of it--him.

It's predictable. Mostly the plot is not so predictable and is nicely paced. It disappointed me a little though, I was expecting more from the twin storylines of Arjun and Guy, based on some clues dropped in middle chapters.

Midnight in Paris, Montreal

Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, is a super fun dream of a film, reminded me of some of his older movies even though Allen's character played by Owen Wilson rather than himself. Wilson is a successful Hollywood screen writer who wants to give it up to be a novelist and live in Paris. Most of the movie is his time travel back to 1920s Paris where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso and various others (I'd mention Dali and Bunuel, but I never figured out how to get keyboard accents on a mac). It's pure fantasy but funnily scripted and well acted and it transported me, I let myself think I was talking to Hemingway and listening to Cole Porter sing at the piano in the bar. What could be better, really? I liked that it's a fantasy that doesn't revolve around male ideals, and even the women (some of them) are allowed personalities and individual desires, and even the fulfillment of those desires. After the movie, to keep the feeling going, we went to L'Express on St. Denis, which was packed at 10 PM, and which perfectly rounded out a lovely francophile evening. I don't go there often enough, so I don't know whether it's always so full of stylish people or if it's because this is Grand Prix weekend. I'm staying in Little Italy this week, and there are sports cars (and cinquecentas) everywhere.

Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech

Tonight at Place des Arts, saw a Japanese play by author/director/choreographer Toshiki Okada, with English and French subtitles. Rare to see plays in foreign languages, but they do it for opera and movies all the time, so why not plays. And the six-hour Dutch Shakespeare last year was so great, and was put on as part of the same festival as this play, the Festival TransAmeriques (neither of them has any connection to the americas, so I'm a bit confused about what the festival is really about, but still very impressed with the acts it's brought over). The play is actually three short interconnected plays, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, which is a bit disappointing since I thought the title was pretty awesome if it was one title, but maybe it still is one title even though the pieces were written at different times, since they interlock extremely well, and are obviously meant to be performed together. Very movement-based, they are almost dance pieces. The setting is an office break room. In the first act, three temps plan a farewell party for a temp who's just been fired. The first man stands up and, with some very awkward gestures, tells his two co-workers they should all pick a restaurant, since they are in charge of organizing the party, and that although the best would be a suggestion, he has brought in a magazine called Hot Pepper that has restaurant listings (the screen behind him informs us, quoting wikipedia, that Hot Pepper is a free monthly magazine). He repeats himself, the best would be a suggestion but otherwise he has this magazine, and his gestures get bigger and more awkward, and the two women sitting down completely ignore him. The second one gets up, she says, as far as restaurant recommendations go, she thinks that Erika, the one who has been fired, once said she really liked motsu hot pot and though this is old information and might not be current, if no one has any other ideas maybe they should choose a motsu hot pot place (she later divulges that this was a lie, but she has a craving for motsu hot pot since she saw it on tv two nights ago). She is also making some really painfully awkward gestures, swinging her arms around and generally being ignored. The third one gets up and addresses the issue of it being the temps who are organizing this party. She has the most awkward gestures to date, involving pelvic rotation, and she also seems extremely shy, which makes it more embarrassing. She feels it's a task for full-time workers, but that they were given the job because they are temps too. Later, the first man says he thinks that they should organize the dinner so that the full-time people pay more. He keeps actually looking at the other two, which in some ways makes him seem like he's the most pathetic, since they do at times have some response to what he says, but they never look at him. The third woman has a later speech wondering why Erika was fired, since she had really good Excel skills, and wonders when they will be fired. She says, when it's her turn, she wants them to pick Chinese for the restaurant, and suggests they all state their preferences now.

Act two, the air coditioner, has two people, full-time workers. First, a man talks about a political talk show he likes, then a woman talks at length about how damn cold it is in the office. Someone keeps resetting the air conditioner. In response, repeatedly, the man suggests they should call the police, if the AC is such a problem. It's hard to tell if he's making fun of her or not. But he seems pretty into her, so you kind of think not. They also have the awkward motions and weirdly, by now, I'm getting very used to them, they almost seem like normal gestures.  The other thing about the crazy motions is that they feel very much like they are the expression of inner feelings, where the words are so banal. They are not wild or rageful, but angular and uncomfortable, slightly sad, maybe like the movements you would make after sitting in one spot for eight hours. They are also kind of beautiful.

One distracting thing, the English and French translations sometimes really didn't match up. For instance, at some point the French says, "Mais oui" and the English says, "No, maybe not, not really." I had to first spend some time wondering whether the disconnect was intentional, then spend time pondering whether they translated the two separately from Japanese, and if so, should I be reading both languages and amalgamating them into a better composite rendering of the original? Better to have made them more similar with such a bilingual audience (but then that brings me back to the first wondering).

The third piece is back to Erika (incidentally the others all had japanese names; Erika's is the only really prominent name), who comes in and makes her farewell speech. She is dancing through a lot of it, doing an extremely endearing little bop with her knees while she shakes her balled-up fists in a circular motion near her head. She says the last almost two years, this job, have been a great time in her life, she's not sure she'll ever be this happy again. She also says she bought these shoes a long time ago, they're just plain black pumps, really, but she's grown fond of them. They kind of remind her of two penguins. Sometimes, when she is bored, she has them talk to each other. At first they didn't like each other. He would say, hey, why you following me? But then they developed a relationship and then she was pregnant, and Erika couldn't believe it, since the shoe had so recently been a little girl, now she was a mother. Then, the shoe goes into labour while Erika is at her desk, and she's worried that someone will come ask her to send a fax, but no-one does. At this point in the play, her awkward motions incorporate the stillness of just one foot, which cannot be disturbed as the shoe-penguin lays her egg. Does any of this sound like the matter of a great play (or triptych)? After having seen it, I can't go back and judge. It was awesome.

Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)

There's a special joy in finding a really good book by a new novelist. I mean, not new to me, but new to the world. It's especially joyful when I haven't heard anything about the book, but picked it up more or less at random (actually, it was a gift but the person who chose it, my mum, also hadn't heard anything about it beforehand). It did win the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Europe and South Asia category, which is certainly something, but I am increasingly of the opinion that even prizes like the Booker don't predict much, quality wise. So, I wasn't expecting much when I opened it, because I'm getting awfully used to disappointing novels and this one didn't come with a recommendation. And I disliked (and still dislike) the title. A Case of Exploding Mangoes gave me a feeling that maybe the book was playing on some kind of facile exoticism. But it is not facile in any way. It is sensitive and poetic and also tough and violent and grapples with grand political historical narrative. It nestles itself within the events of final days of Pakistan's sixth president, General Zia-ul-Haq, who died in 1988 in a plane crash. Apparently the circumstances of the plane crash were never fully discovered, so the book has a lot of room to play with.

I say it nestles itself, it lives in that narrative, but it is both about the historical events and not about them. The main character is the son of a famous Pakistani general who committed suicide, and who is now a young man in the army himself. He becomes friends with a young man quite different from himself, one not at all used to military customs. Every scene leads you one step further along into the logic of the conclusion, in which the plane comes down, but it's always clear that the protagonist's inner (fictional) life is more important, for these pages, than is the fate of the government.

The literary establishment seems, at best, suspicious about historical novels, I guess because they seem conceptually so close to genre writing, what with their interest in plot and events and capitalizing on names and fascinations already present in the reader's consciousness. I think I like historical fiction about as often as I like non-historical fiction. I really enjoyed reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009; winner of the Man Booker prize) but that was more fast-paced and plot driven. It showed an amazing amount of imagination, but the imaginative bits were interstitial, inventions about what Thomas Cromwell might have been thinking the day before he arrested Thomas More, or some other historically verifiable event. Here, the connection to plot is less central. The events, though they are capital-H History and recent, to boot, are only a small part of the life of a novel. I'm not advocating for one type or the other, and I loved reading both of them, but they are very different. Wolf Hall is more of a page turner, and A Case of Exploding Mangoes is more emotionally affecting.

Quote of the Day

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

From The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot

I love the lady of situations. I'm memorizing The Waste Land and am delighted at how memorization improves understanding and appreciation. I've never been a big poetry memorizer before, at least not since I was seven and my best friend Naomi convinced me to join in memorizing Shakespeare soliloquies on the verandah of the Far Cottage at Petawawa Lake.

Poem of the day

Love Is Not All
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.



Troublingly, I've looked at five different versions of this poem online and cannot find a consensus on the correct version (Pinned down by pain or need? well may or may well? also, two "can not"s instead of "cannot"s, which seemed v unlikely). Until I consult a paper copy, this is my best guess.

What is so strong here, for me, is the duality of the acceptance of the terrible realities of torture and want and at the same time the rejection of the human condition as struggle for basic survival. It's not taking some ridiculous position that, of course, we can all follow our passions all the time and those who don't like bread can eat cake. But it is saying there is a way, without judging others, without putting our heads in the sand, to say that we hope to adhere to a way of living that does prioritize the non-material, the truly beautiful aspects of humanity.

Quote of the Day

I felt fear, tininess and hunger. I decided the only way to become as big as the Big People was to begin eating.

In the infinite coffee shop, my eyes struggled to take in the polyptych menu and its thousand offerings. Eggs with legs, friendly forks and spoons marched across it. GOOD MORNING! Barnyard Suggestions . . . What! I thought. Wanna meet this chicken in the hayloft in half an hour, fella? But these were not that kind of barnyard suggestion. Here in Big People Land, land-o-lotsa wholesomeness, they were suggesting I eat the following: (1) 3 strips of bacon, 2 pancakes, 2 eggs (any style), 2 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; (2) 6 strips of bacon, 5 pancakes, 4 eggs (any style), 3 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; or (3) 12 strips of bacon, 9 pancakes, 7 eggs (any style), 1 1/2 gallons of juice, 3 lbs of toast and a 'Bottomless Pit' (which I took to be a typographical error for 'Pot') of coffee. Thus emptying any barnyard I could imagine of all life. Again I was lost. I felt I was visiting Karnak. I pleaded for half an order of toast, eight pieces.

Todd McEwen, "They Tell Me You Are Big" in The Best of Granta Travel (1991).
I'm not always a fan of this kind of verbal equivalent of slapstick, but this is hilarious.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

The following is a rant about Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005) by by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,  which I found extremely irritating and offensive though it does report a couple of interesting facts (like that the crime rate in the US dropped dramatically about eighteen years after they legalized abortion). But man, it thinks that it's all about defying the conventional wisdom and instead it's just full of that.

And often just stupid:

The economist Isaac Ehrlich, in an oft-cited 1975 paper, put forth an estimate that is generally considered optimistic: executing 1 criminal translates into 7 fewer homicides that the criminal might have committed. Now do the math. In 1991, there were 14 executions in the United States; in 2001, there were 66. According to Ehrlich's calculations, those 52 additional executions would have accounted for 364 fewer homicides in 2001 -- not a small drop, to be sure, but less than 4 percent of the actual decrease in homicides that year. (my bolding)

While I'm opposed to capital punishment and don't want to dispute this conclusion, the reasoning seems absurd: this guy said this, other people think he was being optimistic, therefore the truth couldn't be greater than what he said it was. Because his estimate is considered optimistic, they use it as the top limit of what could possibly be. I mean, give me at least some reason why it's considered optimistic. The "generally considered" argument is exactly the kind of reasoning this book purports to be against.

Also, comment from my brother, who is a statistician (added to this post on April 27):

52 executions in 1991 don't result in 364 fewer homicides in 2001.  They didn't say that the reduction was 7 per criminal PER YEAR, just 7 per criminal (over the course the the criminal's remaining life, maybe?).  I can't believe that each of these criminals commits 7 homicides per year on average.  Without wanting to use a "the actual figure is more like..." argument, I'm pretty sure the actual number for a single year is much much lower. To know by how much the actual number would have been reduced in 2001, you need to know something about the age distribution of the criminals that were not executed (were they the oldest, the youngest? would they even still be alive in 2001?), the amount of time remaining on their jail sentences (would they still be in jail in 2001?) and the ages of criminals when the commit homocides (maybe the ones they decided not to execute would have been past their killing 'prime' 10 years later).

So, my brother points out, the statistic isn't so much optimistic as unrealistic.

Another, more offensive, badly supported passage:

Women's rights advocates ... have hyped the incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in her lifetime be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more like one in eight -- but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute those claims.)

Leaving aside the lameness of the self-congratulation there for being so tough as to stand up to women's rights advocates, something no man has ever been brave enough to do before, apparently, umm, the "actual" figure -- how could you possibly know? You maybe could say something like, 'most serious studies have estimated' or 'a better statistical model would lead us to think' or ... but just randomly stating that you are in possession of an actual -- even if approximate -- number of rapes and attempted rapes in a woman's lifetime. Who knows? maybe their statistics are so damn sophisticated that I would be amazed by how precise they can get with these things -- but they're certainly not giving me information to assess that. And nothing in this book gives me confidence in this duo's ability to be objective and rigorous. Maybe the economist guy is rigorous in his economics work, but here -- in this book that's been rightly criticized for not being economics at all, which wouldn't bother me except don't lay claim to expertise as a basis for believing your story if you don't have any expertise in what you're actually writing about -- they're playing fast and loose with the numbers.

I won't go through all of the examples of offensiveness, since there were many. One of them, in which they are apparently not being racist (unlike in other parts of the book, in my opinion), is about job interviews. It's a proven fact that, in the U.S., people with non-whitey names don't get called for interviews as much even if their CVs are as good. They don't argue with that. But, they say, maybe it's not racism but a reasonable analysis on the part of employers that people with these non-whitey names are disproportionately from poor, uneducated parents and children of poor, uneducated parents succeed less in life, and therefore that these candidates are a bad bet. They're saying, it would be wrong to discriminate against candidates because they're black, but it's okay to discriminate against them because they are also from less privileged backgrounds. That's just good statistics on the part of the employers, not hiring poor people, since poor people are dumber, statistically. There's so much wrong with the auxiliary assumptions that go into this statement (like, maybe the reason these people do less well is BECAUSE no-one employs them rather than it being the case that an employer wouldn't hire them because they're likely to be dumb and lazy), but it also totally ignores the fact that the CVs used in the studies are just as good as those of the whitey counterparts who do get called back, strongly indicating that at least these candidates with forsaken names have not fallen into their statistical pit of failure.

There is so much more to complain about but I will stop here -- okay, one last thing: it bothers me so much when they seem to think that they've come up with an amazing question, like, "What do maximum-security prisoners have to do with Dutch tulip farmers?" (that's not one of their questions, but they're all like that). They have one of these questions at the beginning of each chapter, and in one chapter they have a section on how to come up with clever questions like these. The trouble is, they didn't come up with those questions. They came up with facts and then formed a question afterwards, based on what they'd looked at. That's not questioning, that's just using rhetoric to introduce your topic.

The basic problem all over with this book is that it makes conclusions based on small bits of information without properly situating those bits of information in a larger social or historical context. Also that it's self satisfied and not as clever, and certainly not as revolutionary, as it thinks it is.

good online writing

I imagine I'm getting into this excellent columnist a bit late, still I wanted to tell you, my three readers, that  I'm really into Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/04/hokum/237410/

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001)

I have not been doing much book-type reading this month. I did just finish Life of Pi, the Booker-prize-winning book about the boy and the tiger who on a lifeboat in the Pacific. Not my cup of tea, really. I kept thinking there was something missing. The story is reasonably entertaining but not a page turner. The descriptions of life at sea are sometimes interesting, but never fully believable, by which I don't mean that I want to literally believe, but I was never wrapped up in them, never lost the feeling that behind this writing was a guy doing some good old-fashioned library research. For instance, this is a line right at the beginning of the book that bugged me like crazy:

I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada.

Now, I am quite sure -- or at least very willing to believe, without having any personal knowledge of the fact -- that Mr. Martel has been to India, either to research this book or previously for unrelated reasons. Maybe he lived half his life there, for all I know. What I do know: I have never been to India or its surrounding nations and I could have written that passage. In fact, I think it's quite close to what I would write if I were asked to imagine an Indian person, and tell me what he would miss about India, given your own completely superficial knowledge of the area. Well gee, it's hotter there than here, Indian food is awesome, Hindus worship cows and let them roam the streets, and don't they have that inexplicable love of Bollywood musicals and cricket? Yeah, those are things an Indian guy would like that are not so available here in Canada. There's no detail, absolutely nothing personal. The only thing that comes close is the crows cawing, and that's not much.

Really, though, the central weakness is a lack of internality. Pi is a very reflective, and hyper religious, little boy, but his internal reflections are all incredibly flat. He tells you he prays. He tells you he misses his (presumed dead) mother, father and brother. But these facts don't do anything to him, or to us. They're just there. There's a funny scene before the shipwreck where Pi's Hindu, Christian and Muslim mentors converge on him and his parents. The parents are shocked that he's religious at all. The three wise men fight over who Pi really belongs to. But, on the boat, it doesn't change anything, except that in addition to fishing and catching water, he prays. And sometimes thinks of God's greatness when, for instance, he sees lightning. But it all felt so surface. I imagine others feel differently, since it appears to be a pretty popular book.

Where it's best is in the descriptions of the tiger, Richard Parker, like so:

Richard Parker was tougher than I was in the face of these fish, and far more efficient. He raised himself and went about blocking, swiping and biting all the fish he could. Many were eaten live and whole, struggling wings beating in his mouth. It was a dazzling display of might and speed. Actually, it was not so much the speed that was impressive as the pure animal confidence, the total absorption in the moment. Such a mix of ease and concentration, such a being-in-the-present, would be the envy of the highest yogis.

There are also many plays on words: when he was 'tougher than I was in the face of these fish' he's using the idiomatic expression to echo the moment half a page earlier where Pi was hit in the face by a flying fish, and freaked out rather than eating it (he thought the fish was actually Richard Parker's giant paw smacking him and cried out something to the effect of, 'take me now'). I can often enjoy a play on words, so a few points for that.

Overall, I didn't enjoy reading it. I didn't feel happy while I was reading, I felt I was getting through with it. The ending was a bit stronger than the rest, though. It caused me to briefly reflect on what had come before. That's always a good thing in a book.

Science stories

It strikes me as particularly wonderful fun to be a writer with a solid enough reputation for a publisher to enable him to travel the world interviewing scientists and visiting museums and parks of interest over the course of several years, as Bill Bryson must have been when he set off to write A Short History of Nearly Everything (2006). It doesn't seem to have been based on any particular aptitude or knowledge of the field, either. By his own proud account, Bryson knew almost nothing at all about any field of science, let alone all of them, before he started this book about nearly all of what he thought was most interesting of the history of science in a few different fields: astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology, mostly. 

It's a bit of a traveling freak show approach to scientific exposition: come see the amazing, the horrifying, the terrifying 'world of science' shack. This way has its pluses. I was greatly disturbed but also titillated to read about ancient eight-foot-long millipedes, raccoons the sizes of cars and rhinoceroses the size of suburban mansions. Apparently, were so big because in the days when mammals were just beginning their reign of the earth, our atmosphere was more highly oxygenated than it is now, and more oxygen means things grow bigger). I especially like -- in a frightened sort of way -- thinking about these raccoons etc because it lends a new aura of plausibility to some fantasy movie animals (I won't get into the specific television show that I had in mind; my excessive consumption of bad tv can wait for another day). Bryson also spends a lot of time informing the uninformed of all the many ways in which we might (all) die, and the many ways in which the universe is a more disquieting if not more downright terrifying surrounding than we'd imagined. This makes the book quite fun. But there's a lot of it that is silly: as an intro to cellular activity, Bryson takes you into the cell only to tell you that it is a "nightmareish" place because things move around so fast that if a human being were shrunk and put inside the cell, it would get pushed around a lot. Is that really relevant to anything?

Bryson declares very happily in the introduction that five or six years before the publication of this book, he knew almost nothing about the physical sciences: "I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar..." and so on, which he seems to think is actually a reason for him to be the writer of this book. Indeed, his profession of ignorance is reproduced, in large letters, on the back of the book. But why should knowing nothing make you the person for the job? He seems to imply that it's because the books by scientists that he encountered when he was a kid were boring, though he does acknowledge that once he started looking into it, he found several wonderful popularizers of science already out there. Bryson doesn't inspire confidence as a purveyor of information. How can a man who knew nothing two years earlier suddenly have become an expert on what he describes as "nearly everything"?

One habit in particular that I find annoying is how complacent he is about current scientific facts. He has a very enjoyable way of showing how stupid and mistaken about nearly everything scientists of various orders were in the past, and he'll tell you when something is still "unknown", but if the scientists say it's so, then Bryson is glad to agree with them. So, you get a frequent recurrence of phrases such as "we now know." It feels very strange to hear someone talking expansively about all the absolutely ridiculous false consensuses scientists arrived at in the past, before reverting to a happy, facile view of "the facts." In addition to the "we now knows"s, there are quite a number of "it will be some time before we understand"s. It would have been helpful to this book if Bryson had read some Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, along with his geneticists and geologists, to stop some of his delusions about the onward march of science.

Am I just harping on the lack of rigorousness for something that was never meant to be rigorous? But some of it really annoys me. Bryson at some point calls Stephen Jay Gould "ever scrupulous" as though this were an insult -- something to the effect of, one whose over-cautiousness leads to the dashing of cute but apocryphal anecdotes.

And even though it is impressive that he managed, in so short a time, to get enough of an understanding of such a variety of subjects as to be able to write about them, every so often he makes statements that, to be blunt, seem idiotic. For example:

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events -- frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals -- that are mostly impossible now. It was a period, in other words, when frigidity was much on people's minds. So we may perhaps excuse nineteenth-century geologists for being slow to realize that the world they lived in was in fact balmy compared with former epochs, and that much of the land around them had been shaped by crushing glaciers and cold that would wreck even a frost fair.

Why, Bill, would the fact of the temperature being colder than it would be a hundred years later make it harder for someone to imagine that at some point in the past, things had been colder still? I could as easily imagine a journalist a hundred years from now hypothesizing that because the 20th century was comparatively cold, it was easy for scientists to imagine ancient Ice Ages. It's a bit of a throwaway and it isn't central to his explanations, but it and its many brothers in this book irk me.

Bryson's cutesy style is sometimes enjoyable: I liked the description of my head as "one big oil bon-bon" for the thousands of mites living in my pillow. And he finds useful ways of describing things such as the fact that for the average pillow, which is apparently six years old (if this is a nation- or culture-specific average, it is not told to us), about one-tenth of its weight is from dead skin, mites living and dead, and mite dung. But when I say finds I mean finds, not creates -- this was someone else's example first. And despite my many irritations, it is a pleasant, if superficial, read about a bunch of different branches of science.

To invent or not to invent

The mixed collection of short stories and essays Barrel Fever (1994) is David Sedaris's first published book, which may explain why he hadn't settled yet on a genre. The unevenness of the material may explain why he subsequently settled on the essay as his form, rather than fiction -- though I guess that five volumes later, in 2010, he felt it was safe to return to fiction with Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which is described as a collection of animal-related humorous short stories, not a description that entices me. The short stories in Barrel Fever almost all revolve around characters who are angry, stupid, violent, delusional and/or grotesque. Especially violent. No reason why these characteristics should make for less good fiction, but the stories are very repetitive; it's a lot about the revenge fantasies and so on of these grotesque morons, whose emotions are unsubtly drawn and whose actions don't tend to go anywhere much beyond just being ugly and mean. After the twelve stories come four essays, which are incredibly funny and interesting. SantaLand Diaries, in which Sedaris describes working as a holiday elf in a department store, is both fucking hilarious and actually revelatory about what people get up to when they work as seasonal in-store entertainment. These essays, in fact, appeal to me a lot more than the other full book of essays that I read of his, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In Barrel Fever Sedaris is a guy living in weird circumstances and taking weird odd jobs. In When You Are Engulfed he's this well-to-do guy who travels the world first-class and tells you about it.

V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

This is a fabulous book but not necessarily one I'd recommend to other people. Because it has no plot, very little by way of character, no moral dilemmas. Mostly, it has scenery. Scenery, and a few reflections on the humans that emerge from the scenery. To read it requires a certain diligence, and an appreciation for tininess of detail. That tininess of detail should be a problem may strike you as the idea of a fool and a lover of bad books, but the thing here is that tiny details are almost all you get. Tiny details and big insights: in that way it reminded me of A la recherche. I would guess that smarter & more well-read people have made this comparison, but I'm not going to bother finding out. Other than the scenery and lack of identifiable substance, one thing that reminded me of Proust was the love of linguistic misunderstanding on the part of the little people: one old man tells him something is an "old wise tale," and he loves that; another is a local habit of calling the place where you put dead leaves the refuge instead of refuse (they call all refuse refuge, but it has its most poetic echo when it's the garden refuge). Incidentally, in addition to the lack of plot there is paucity of character -- leaving you with what, you might want to know; as I said, it leaves you with foliage and dirt roads.

In the beginning, there is nothing but the foliage and the roads and the flowers and a garden belonging to someone named Jack, who we are told almost nothing about except that at some point he dies after which his wife moves away and the garden is paved over. After reading about a hundred pages, I wrote the following:

It slows your heartbeat. Or it makes me feel that i must exert control and slow my heart because otherwise I will never be able to keep pace with the writing, will run on ahead and lose the book entirely. And that happens a lot, even though it's not a difficult book, or -- not a book of difficult sentences, but in the description following description of country landscape for forty pages almost nonstop, my eyes glaze over. That makes it sound like a bad book but by some weird trick it manages to avoid being one. I'm not a huge fan of lengthy description ever, and of natural scenery least of all, but here I am drawn in by it, for several reasons: firstly, the heartbeat thing. I can't think of another book that's made me thoughtful of my heartrate and in addition, reading it allows me to calm everything down, almost like a meditation. Secondly, it's completely unlike anything I've read before and might be significantly different than anything ever written. Who the hell writes about scenery for seventy pages? Thirdly, I do feel like he's quite extraordinarily sensitive, our narator. Sometimes it takes him awhile to clue into things and he tells us all about that -- mostly as it relates to farm landscapes and gardens, for instance which flowers grow in which seasons, he only learned that after several years (who cares? and yet!) but he's alive to every detail of his surroundings, including human ones, and reads much significance into a man driving a certain car or a woman tying her shirt into a knot. 

(disliking the aesthetics of block quoting myself, but finding this otherwise to be visually confusing).

In the first section, I thought, it's like he's describing the writer's life with the writing cut out of it. What's left? Long walks in which the village is observed. Then, in the second of the five sections, he introduces the writer as a young man setting off from Trinidad for England, and explains how his character became fractured -- too influenced by colonialist writerly ideals to allow for his own experience to be important, his life and his idea of himself as a writer were at odds, and so he had two parts of himself: his life and his ideas, off in separate directions. So, that seemed like a pretty great novelistic play to me -- first get me to wonder, where is the rest of this man, this writer who seems empty, and then talk about how he became empty. One thing I was uncertain about is that he goes on to say that he became whole again, seemingly prior to the period of his life in which he's walking on these country roads looking at these flowers and trees. Anyhow, I was very taken by the idea and manifestation of this fracture.

The main character exists but almost doesn't exist. He lives somewhere but for the first fifty pages we have no idea why or how he came to be there. Then he reveals that he is a writer, which explains partly, by inference, how his life seems to consist entirely of going for long solitary walks near Stonehenge. We still don't know why he's living there, but given how lost we were before, it feels like a big advance. Also, characters who we know are important from the way he stresses them, get sick and die before the narrator's done more than said a friendly hello when they drive past him on his long solitary walks. So how are they important? This is the suspense born of the strange writing style, which sounds unsuspenseful but hooked me.

With some books it's hard not to think of them as somewhat autobiographical, and I always try to refrain from that. Here, it's almost impossible not to think of this as writing from the author's life. It's another way in which it resembles A la recherche. Partly it is the lack of character exploration -- creating the character appears not to have interested the author, allowing the inference that he doesn't feel interested because he already knows himself so well. In any case, as this unfocused entry must make apparent, the book caused me to reflect at length on many large themes. If you can do that without character or plot, then why employ either of those tired old narrative stratagems? But I hope I've also explained why I would be careful about who I recommend the book to: it's a slow read and nothing happens and the wondrous insight will be missed if the reader doesn't very carefully sift through all the details of garden fences and rose bushes. However, I will read more Naipaul in the near future.