Lady Susan: Busted!

Facts are such horrid things!

—Jane Austen, Lady Susan

I just finished reading Jane Austen’s early epistolary novel, Lady Susan. It could almost be called an unfinished novel because of its precipitate ending. Just when the truth about Lady Susan’s scheming comes fully to light, the letters stop and all matters are concluded in scarcely three pages of prose. Did Austen not know how to proceed or did she simply tire of the project? It does seem as though she was following a form from the waning 18th century—correspondence around a scheming female—but that was simply not her style, to judge from her later novels. Lady Susan is not a nice person, and the only one who seems like a typical Austen heroine, her daughter Frederica, is only allowed a single, desperate letter (though we are assured she marries well in the end).

To me, Frederica seems to be the direct forerunner of Fanny Price. She is young, mild, bookish, affectionate, sensitive, neglected, and subject to the schemes of powerful adults. Her aunt writes:

“Though totally without accomplishment, she is by no means so ignorant as one might expect to find her, being fond of books and spending the chief of her time in reading.”

Books are clearly her saving grace, having lost her (presumably superior) father early in life and being neglected by her mother, both emotionally and educationally, though in the latter case that was perhaps for the best. I wonder if Austen was acquainted with any girls in similar circumstances? She evidently thought enough of the plight of such girls to create Fanny Price twenty years later. Obviously the public sympathized with the shy, overlooked, friendless girl because Mansfield Park ended up being Austen’s best-selling book in her lifetime. Today we may prefer the beautiful, talkative, swash-buckling female, but I’m glad Austen paid some attention to those who do not naturally attract it.

“Jane’s Fame” by Claire Harman

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Claire Harman
Henry Holt and Co.
2010
304 pp.

While I was tidying up the list of books I read in 2011 I noticed that I began the year with a short biography of Jane Austen, read the wonderful A Jane Austen Education in the summer, and finished the year with Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. Add to that a re-reading of Persuasion (my favourite) and much munching of popcorn in front of various film adaptations and the enjoyable Lost in Austen spinoff. This all happened without even trying, which just goes to show how ubiquitous Jane Austen has become. Jane’s Fame traces the development of Jane Austen’s popularity, which was by no means a sure thing in the beginning. She was nearly forgotten after her death in 1817, but a biography published by her nephew in 1869 revived interest in her, which prompted the reprinting of her books, and her renown steadily grew from there to today’s all-Austen-all-the-time proportions.

I found it interesting that for a long time the most ardent Janeites were male scholars. No doubt it only seems that way because they had the floor, but in any case her books were certainly not considered to be particularly for women until recently. She was also much-loved by soldiers in World War I, who read and discussed her books in the trenches to escape the hell they were going through. Austen was also prescribed to wounded and shell-shocked soldiers for comfort and solace in their convalescence or their last days.

Claire Harman points out that one of the reasons Austen is so easily appropriated by generation after generation of readers is that her books lack details of time and place that would make it seem dated or foreign to future readers. Apparently she did this quite deliberately and mentions it in her letters. Though some criticized her books for failing to mention the great events of the time, such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, in retrospect she made the right choice if she wanted her works to be enduringly accessible. Two centuries later, references to contemporary issues and obsolete facts of life would only get in the way of the stories. Today’s writers might do well to question the conventional wisdom about describing the setting of a novel in vivid detail. People are people, whether they communicate by text message or penny post.

Jane’s Fame is quite a thorough examination of the reception of Austen’s books, and even describes the huge success of the recent film adaptations (including a discussion of the wet shirt), and mentions the most popular Austen blogs and web communities. Nothing is left out, as far as I can tell, though it is understandably UK-centric. If you want to know what people have thought about Jane Austen and her books over the last 200 years, this book will tell you. The tone is scholarly but with enough Austen-like wry humour to make it enjoyable.

After reading this book I realize that I have been remiss in not reading Austen’s unfinished novels, now called Sanditon and The Watsons, as well as the story Lady Susan. I even have a Penguin edition of them sitting on my bookshelf so I have no excuse. I believe that will be my first new book of 2012!

“Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Wrangham

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Richard Wrangham
Basic Books
2009
320 pp.
9780465013623
When we think about what makes us human, we usually think about our upright stance, our large brains, and our ability to use tools and language. Those aspects of humanity are easy to see and leave durable traces, such as million-year-old stone hand axes from Africa and ten thousand year old cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. Yet it may be something more humble and difficult to spot that really set us on the evolutionary path to where we are now. According to anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham, cooking is likely the one thing above all others that made us human.

It is possible to envision how it got started. Modern primates are known to throw rocks around, perhaps in conflict or play, and perhaps one of our tree-dwelling ancestors noticed that crashing certain types of rocks together would send off sparks that could catch grass on fire. Tending such a fire would certainly have been within the capability of our distant ancestors, as it is for primates today. Some can even start a fire if given matches. Fire would have been an excellent deterrent against predators, and would have made living on the ground and out of the trees safer. This would have been important during times of climate change when forest was replaced with savannah. It was probably not long before someone noticed that food dropped in the fire for a while tasted better, was easier to eat, and felt more satisfying. The rest is evolutionary history.

These days there a lot of theories going around about what humans are supposed to eat. Two of the most popular (and extreme) are the raw food movement and the (supposedly) paleolithic diet. Wrangham easily demolishes the former by pointing out that cooked food is far more digestible than raw food, and that our digestive systems are clearly adapted to easily digestible food. Compared to other primates, our teeth are small, our jaws are weak, and our intestines are small. We are simply not physically capable of chewing and digesting wild raw foods as other primates do. The proof of this comes from studies of raw food enthusiasts, which show that about half of the women stop menstruating, even on a diet much richer than you would actually find in the wild. No species can survive with half of its females infertile.

The other diet fad Wrangham addresses is the “paleolithic” diet, which emphasizes meat, meat, and more meat, and avoids carbs as much as possible. People on this sort of diet (as on the raw food diet) find that they are always hungry. This is something the native peoples of North America could have told them about. They call it “rabbit hunger” and scientists call it “ketosis.” A diet heavy in lean meat causes protein poisoning that damages the kidneys and liver, causes intense hunger, and eventually leads to death, as many early explorers discovered the hard way. In fact we know that the maximum safe level of protein intake is half of all calories, so at least half our diet must consist of carbohydrates and fat. Fat, whether animal or vegetable, is a rare commodity in the tropics where we evolved, so that means our ancestors ate at least half of their diet as carbohydrates. So much for that theory.

Although cooking can seem like a chore to some of us, it actually liberated us from the much more onerous chore of chewing and digesting raw food. Primates spend a good deal of their day just chewing tough raw foods like leaves and wild fruits (which are not as soft and plump as agricultural fruits). Furthermore, because their food was so low in digestible calories, they had to eat almost constantly throughout the day. Chimpanzees only get about 20 minutes off between meals, which doesn’t leave much time for doing anything constructive. Our ancestors, on the other hand, could get far more calories from cooked food, and so had hours of free time to go gather choice foods, such as carbohydrate-rich roots, honey, and of course, animals. All that travelling, hunting, digging, and carrying would have encouraged our bipedal stance and our ability to walk and run with our hands free. (See more on that here.) The more rich cooked food we ate, the less energy was devoted to chewing and digestion and the more could be devoted to our growing brains. And so, here we are.

I posted before about the downside of all this: due to the size difference between males and females, a male can force a female to cook for him in exchange for occasional meat and, more importantly, protection from other males who would take the cooked food by force. Wrangham calls it a protection racket, which sounds about right. This is the system that prevails in every culture ever studied, past or present, rich or poor, pastoral or agricultural, “primitive” or “civilized,” patriarchal or (otherwise) egalitarian. It may be dressed up with romance and marriage rituals, but the cooking compact is at its foundation an unequal bargain. What really impresses me is that women still know it. Our sense of equal worth has not been blunted by two million years of involuntary servitude. Anthropologists have recorded the complaints of women from diverse cultures saying exactly the same thing: “Here I am, slaving over the fire/stove while my husband sits around doing nothing.” The ability to cook has done wonderful things for our species, but perhaps it is the utterly unquenchable desire for equality and freedom that is the best human characteristic.

“The Whole Five Feet” by Christopher Beha

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
Christopher R. Beha
Grove Press
2009-05-06
256 pp.
9780802118844

The only reason I read this book is because I was assured that it actually took the great books seriously, unlike some other tome-conquering tales I’ve read. The author initially intended to write a comedy—“a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world … the young man might learn a few easy lessons, and we could all share some laughs along the way." However real life intruded—birth, death, and serious illness—to remind him that neither life nor books are to be taken lightly.

The lost young man part was more or less right. Not clear on what to do next, he moved back home to his parents’ luxurious New York apartment and decided to spend a year doing nothing other than read the Harvard Classics, a five-foot long set of books intended by its editor, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, “to provide the literary materials from which a careful and persistent reader might gain a fair view of the progress of man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” You may notice right away that gorging on 22,000 pages of serious text in one year does not sound very “careful.” There were works, particularly in the poetry volumes, that Beha would have liked to linger over, but in the end he realized that he had the rest of his life to get better acquainted with the books and poems that spoke to him.

I was hardly done with some of these books when I knew that I would never return to them, whereas other will probably remain touchstones throughout my life. But again, it was the books themselves that taught me this. Before I read these two superficially similar books, I couldn’t have known that Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ would mean little to me while Pascal’s Pensées would mean so much. Many of my favourite works in the Classics, such as Dana’s Two Years before the Mast or Haskell’s letter from Gettysburg, had been entirely unfamiliar to me when I started. While reading these books, I needed to judge their worth for myself. But first I needed that outdated body—the clerisy, the intellectual elite—to tell me which books to read.

There is a definite sense of passing and loss in this book, and a desire to reclaim something for the future.

I wanted to establish a connection with those who came before me… I wanted to believe that for all the things lost, there might be abundant recompense somewhere.

Beha had personal reasons to read the Harvard Classics. His grandmother had had a set, and he was intrigued as to what a devoutly Catholic wife and mother with an 8th grade education would want with the great books. He also wondered how much of what she had absorbed from those books had filtered down through to family into himself. But of course reading the classics made them his own. He relates what he read to his own experiences of loss (including loss of faith) and illness, but he also feels the loss of the literary culture that the Harvard Classics (and the Great Books of the Western World) tried to popularize. He knows he cannot re-enter that culture without becoming an anachronism in his own time, but still he feels that we have lost something valuable and beautiful.

His poems, Wordsworth tells us, “were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” He warns that readers who are used to the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” may find his work strange or awkward: “they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.”

It would surprise most readers now to hear Wordsworth’s description of his own language after reading about “that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” It’s not just the relative elegance of his supposed “awkwardness” that is so striking, but the complexity of this “language of conversation.”

One could be charitable and say that colloquial language evolves over time, and what seems conversational in one era is destined to sound strange more than a century later. But this won’t quite do. Wordsworth’s conversational language isn’t just different from ours; it’s richer and more beautiful. Simply put, something has been lost. When I came to this conclusion, I thought back to my grandfather. It seemed to me that our decline in self-expression rested somewhere in the fact that he had grown up memorizing lines from Longfellow whereas I had grown up memorizing lines from Caddyshack.

But what has been lost can be regained. Our predecessors were not born reciting poetry, they learned it by reading, which we can also do. We may lack the tweedy taskmasters of the past, but the task has never been easier. Culture has never been more accessible, even to elites, as it is now. Libraries and the Internet have made just about every significant work of art or thought available for little effort and expense. You can do the Grand Tour from your living room and read the classics for price of a library card. You can watch Shakespeare’s plays and listen to symphonies on YouTube. We don’t need a Harvard Classics any more, we only need people to remind us why we should keep reading (and watching and listening to and looking at) the classics.

In many ways, this is how I feel about having finished the Classics: I shall go on in the same way. Nothing in my life is going to change in any visible fashion. But these books have helped me to find meaning in events—illness and loss as well as moments of great joy—that didn’t make any sense to me. At the same time, life helped me make sense of these books. And so it will continue to go, for although I have read through the whole five feet, I’ll never be finished with them.

“A Jane Austen Education” by William Deresiewicz

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter
William Deresiewicz
Penguin Press
2011-04-28
272 pp.
9781594202889

I knew I was going to like this book when it began with chapter 1 on page 1. No introduction, preface, foreword, not even acknowledgements (they are at the end). William Deresiewicz just gets right down to business, which I very much appreciate. His business, in this case, is to tell the story of how he came to appreciate Jane Austen’s novels while working on his doctoral dissertation. He admits to being prejudiced against her, having been educated to believe modernist literature was the only literature that mattered. However, after reading Austen’s novels carefully and reflecting on his own life, he began to realize that her vision of human social life was not only relevant but sorely needed, as much today as in her time.

The cover art for this book is brilliant because he describes how, by reading Austen’s novels, he learned to put on the behaviour of mature, well-mannered, and socially functional man. Each novel had particular lessons for him, and the parallels with his personal life are quite striking. Perhaps some artistic license has been applied, but the point is that the challenges of modern life bear a striking resemblance to the dramas of Meryton, Hartfield, Bath, and Austen’s other locales.

From Emma he learned that it’s the small details of daily like that hold people and communities together (I posted a related quote here). With some chagrin he recognized himself in Emma, who felt herself to be above the humble concerns of the likes of Miss Bates.

Emma, who had it all, was forever discontented with the world around her—just like me, in my perpetual fog of resentful gloom. Instead it was Miss Bates—scraping by, facing a lonely old age, dependent on everybody else’s good will—who was the happy one. If her speech bubbled and flowed in an endless stream of little matters, that was only because, like Austen herself, she found everything around her so very interesting.

Things went no better for him with Pride and Prejudice. I have never been able to understand why so many readers admire (to put it mildly) Eliza Benet. It never seemed quite right to me, though I could not say why. Deresiewicz puts words to what I only felt instinctively: Elizabeth Benet is wrong for almost the entire book, and it nearly results in disaster for herself and her entire family. It is only through total humiliation that she learns to question herself, which to Deresiewicz amounts to growing up. For him, the lesson of Pride and Prejudice is that growing up requires humiliation, for that is the only way we can learn to temper our feelings and opinions with reason.

Northanger Abbey is not the most entertaining of Austen’s works, for me, but for Deresiewicz it came as a profound revelation. At the time he was struggling with his new role as teacher. The more he tried to cram his brilliant insights into his students, the more they slouched and sighed and stayed silent in class. He then began to look at Northanger Abbey as a story about different kinds of teaching and the effects they have.  Catherine Morland was taught by lurid novels and fashionable friends to view the world in a certain way, and she willingly complied. Then Henry Tilney comes along and tries to lead her to think about things for herself.

…students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired … and they can’t wait to project them on to everything they read. If you’re in college you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way you end up like Catherine, with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. Henry challenged Catherine; my professor challenged his students; Austen challenged all of us. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions or fill them with your own. They job is to free them from both.

Sometimes I regret that I have no formal education in English literature, but a passage like this makes me think that it might actually be an advantage!

Now, about Mansfield Park… I can sense the eyes rolling already, but hold on. Fanny Price has to be Austen’s most disdained heroine, even though she is one of the few who is not in fact a disaster. Everyone around her, except for her cousin Edmund and brother William, are most certainly disasters. Both wealth and poverty have corrupted the people in her life, turning them into selfish beings who see others more as objects than as people. We see this especially at Mansfield Park itself, but it is no less true in Fanny’s own family, where only one brother and sister among many have developed a real sense of affection for her. Her own parents are barely aware of her existence. The Crawfords are even worse, swooping in from the big city and charming everyone with their witty banter, while they desperately try to fill their inner emptiness with intrigue and constant amusement, usually at someone else’s expense.

Deresiewicz saw the same dynamic exactly in the upper class New York clique he had been mysteriously admitted to. He soon learned that he was mainly there as a play thing and if he wanted to stay he had to provide a constant stream of funny stories about his disastrous love life. He was not human to them, no one was; they weren’t even human to themselves. One of them quipped that they are doing well if they haven’t committed suicide by 30, which gives a sense of the inner terrors of these purposeless heirs and heiresses. The author admits being bewitched by the glamour of the high fashion lifestyle, but Austen helped him see it for what it was so he could free himself from it. It also showed him that Fanny, far from being a bland doormat, was in fact the most richly human of them all. She had strong feelings, but had the self-control and dignity not to impose them on others. She could entertain herself, with books and her imagination, while the only entertainment the other young people could come up with was to stage a scandalous play as an excuse to flirt with people they shouldn’t be flirting with. Most importantly, she had a sense of her social duty to others, and made herself useful to everyone around her. This is the antithesis of the likes of the Crawfords, who assumed that everyone else was placed on earth to be of use to them. Though Fanny suffered much abuse and lack of appreciation, she still had infinitely more peace of mind than someone like Tom Bertram, who had all the money and freedom in the world and destroyed himself with it. Austen’s message is simple and timeless: the way of self-will and self-indulgence leads to despair and destruction. Only selflessness and attending to others can bring happiness and the affection of other good people.

Persuasion’s Anne Elliot is another Plain Jane character, taken for granted by everyone, but still making herself useful and helping where she can. For Deresiewicz, Persuasion is as much about finding friends as about finding love. Anne’s family haven’t the slightest interest in her, as she won’t join their game of social climbing, and so she has to look in unconventional places for friendship, namely the navy and her old school friend, the now destitute and disabled Mrs. Smith. People that her father sneers at turn out to be full of warmth and welcome and appreciation for herself rather than for her status. Deresiewicz also points out that Anne makes friends with men, showing that where there is a true meeting of the minds, neither class nor sex is relevant. Mrs. Smith is perhaps the most selfless model of friendship. Had she kept her mouth shut and allowed Anne to marry the rascal Mr. Elliot, she could have benefited greatly from Anne’s generosity. But as a friend she had to tell her the truth about Mr. Elliot. This relates to one of the key lessons that Deresiewicz takes away from Persuasion: being a true friend sometimes means having uncomfortable conversations and even challenging your friends when you think they are on the wrong track. Deresiewicz began to put this into practice by confronting a friend with a drinking problem. Not surprisingly his friend stopped talking to him, but eventually his friend saw the truth of the matter and thanked him for having spoken up. Sometimes being a good friend means disagreeing with your friend, no matter what it costs you.

Austen is often seen as a romantic writer, since her novels tend to end with weddings, but it’s really only Sense and Sensibility that Deresiewicz sees as being principally about love. It contrasts two approaches to love, personified by hyper-romantic Marianne and sensible Elinor. In Austen’s time, as in our own, there was a general belief in the romantic ideal—love at first sight, soul mates, violins and fireworks. However, the folly of this approach is brought home to Marianne in the most humiliating way. She did not take the time to ascertain who this young man really was, and so she was easily deceived. Elinor, on the other hand, when she met Edward Ferrars, proceeded slowly, carefully, and got to know his ideas on all subjects and became acquainted with his true character. To Marianne this seems cold and lifeless, but as Deresiewicz points out, “Elinor’s way … is every bit as intuitive as Marianne’s, and, if anything, takes place at a deeper level.” Elinor does not “fall” in love suddenly (and literally!) as Marianne does, her love grows organically as she learns more about Edward’s fine character. Deresiewicz again: “Austen believed that if a person’s character is good, love increases with simple familiarity.” So Austen is not against love, she is against the false fantasy of romance that is so often mistaken for love.

…making a mature decision, patiently feeling and thinking your way toward mutual respect and regard and esteem, accepting the responsibility of challenging and being challenged, refusing both the comforts of fantasy and the cynicism of calculation—that is the really radical, the really original, the really heroic move. That is the true freedom; that is the way you lift yourself above the bondage of impulse and cliché.

If you are wondering what effect this had on Deresiewicz, it did no less than convert him from confirmed bachelor to the marrying kind. He ends the book with an allusion to another literary Jane by writing, “Reader, I married her.” The irony is that Austen herself never chose marriage, despite having had plenty of admirers and at least one offer. She knew that marriage entailed many duties and many pregnancies, any one of which could kill her. It is a chilling fact that all of her brothers’ wives died in childbirth. She chose to remain single and revelled in her freedom to live and to write. Unfortunately for her and for us, that freedom did not last long and she died of a mysterious disease at only 41 years of age.

Despite the slightly corny ending I greatly enjoyed A Jane Austen Education. It made me see new aspects of all of Austen’s books, which I will dutifully try to unsee the next time I read them. I wouldn’t want to be like Catherine Morland! I will instead try to pay attention to the small details, keep my opinions in check, avoid being charmed by vivacity, look for connections in unexpected places, and, little by little, gradually deepen my knowledge and love for these wonderful books.

“The Warden” by Anthony Trollope

The Warden [ebook] [audiobook]
Anthony Trollope
Oxford University Press, USA
2009-06-01
336 pp.
9780199537785

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.

Of all such reformers Mr Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our friends a rattling, lively life; yes, live, and will live till the names of their calling shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and Mrs Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify a detective police officer or a monthly nurse.

This swipe at Dickens in chapter 15 of The Warden was my first serious hint that Mr. Trollope and I were not going to see eye to eye. All seemed well at first: it was discovered that a charitable foundation (a home for retired wool-carders) had increased its value and income dramatically, but the increase had gone to the warden of the establishment, rather than to its occupants, so that he (a clergyman) was living in ease and luxury while they ate soup. An earnest young man took up the cause, and the church establishment naturally opposed him. So far so good. The church obviously had no leg to stand on, so I expected the situation to be rectified, one way or another. I could not have been more wrong. Not only was the situation not rectified, the elderly wool-carders were punished for having the temerity to demand a fair distribution of the income intended for them. Their ingratitude was their downfall, and they ended up with less than they had before and no warden to be their friend.

"Some gentleman will probably take my place here very soon, and I strongly advise you to be prepared to receive him in a kindly spirit and to raise no further question among yourselves as to the amount of his income. Were you to succeed in lessening what he has to receive, you would not increase your own allowance. The surplus would not go to you; your wants are adequately provided for, and your position could hardly be improved."

"God bless your reverence, we knows it," said Spriggs.

"It's all true, your reverence," said Skulpit. "We sees it all now."

"Yes, Mr Harding," said Bunce, opening his mouth for the first time; "I believe they do understand it now, now that they've driven from under the same roof with them such a master as not one of them will ever know again,—now that they're like to be in sore want of a friend."

…

Poor old men! how could they be cordial with their sore consciences and shamed faces? how could they bid God bless him with hearty voices and a true benison, knowing, as they did, that their vile cabal had driven him from his happy home, and sent him in his old age to seek shelter under a strange roof-tree?

As you can see the wool-carders are suitably repentant, not least for losing the extra twopence a day they received from the “open-handed” warden (who got £800 a year). Trollope follows this up with a pathetic diptych in which cupidity pollutes a pensioner’s deathbed and the only loyal inmate attempts to forgive his brethren for their sins:

The poor old bed-ridden creature still kept Mr Harding's hand in his own, and the warden thought that he had met with something like warmth of feeling in the one of all his subjects from whom it was the least likely to be expected; for poor old Bell had nearly outlived all human feelings. "And your reverence," said he, and then he paused, while his old palsied head shook horribly, and his shrivelled cheeks sank lower within his jaws, and his glazy eye gleamed with a momentary light; "and your reverence, shall we get the hundred a year, then?"

How gently did Mr Harding try to extinguish the false hope of money which had been so wretchedly raised to disturb the quiet of the dying man! One other week and his mortal coil would be shuffled off; in one short week would God resume his soul, and set it apart for its irrevocable doom; seven more tedious days and nights of senseless inactivity, and all would be over for poor Bell in this world; and yet, with his last audible words, he was demanding his moneyed rights, and asserting himself to be the proper heir of John Hiram's bounty! Not on him, poor sinner as he was, be the load of such sin!

Mr Harding returned to his parlour, meditating with a sick heart on what he had seen, and Bunce with him. We will not describe the parting of these two good men, for good men they were. It was in vain that the late warden endeavoured to comfort the heart of the old bedesman; poor old Bunce felt that his days of comfort were gone. The hospital had to him been a happy home, but it could be so no longer. He had had honour there, and friendship; he had recognised his master, and been recognised; all his wants, both of soul and body, had been supplied, and he had been a happy man. He wept grievously as he parted from his friend, and the tears of an old man are bitter. "It is all over for me in this world," said he, as he gave the last squeeze to Mr Harding's hand; "I have now to forgive those who have injured me;—and to die."

In the end, the warden leaves without being replaced, and the sinful wool-carders drop off one by one, “with no kind friend to solace their last moments, with no wealthy neighbour to administer comforts and ease the stings of death.” Even their places are not filled by other retired workers, so the rents just accumulate in the bank, benefiting no one. This, we are led to believe, is the natural consequence of trying to upset the natural order of things, that is, the system whereby the poor must be eternally grateful for the crumbs that fall from the tables of the wealthy. To raise workers out of poverty would be anathema, laughable, but to receive great wealth unearned is an honour and a right. Suffice it to say that Trollope was a champion of the status quo, and I am more than glad that it is his kind who were made to reform and repent.

“Party of One” by Anneli Rufus

Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
Anneli Rufus
Da Capo Press
2003
320 pp.
9781569245132

This book is for all the non-social-butterflies out there. If you are reading this blog, you are probably one of them. Bookish types are the quintessential loners, though as Anneli Rufus (or anneli rufus) points out, loners defy description almost by definition. Rufus defines loners as people who simply like being alone, and a side effect of spending time alone following our own internal promptings is that we tend to develop very individual personalities and habits. Unlike most people we have no desire to fit in with the crowd and so we quite naturally veer off in our own directions, that is, in all directions.

The book celebrates many of the lonerish manifestations—artists, writers, heroes, adventurers, geeks—and does a good job of defending the loner by showing how much society benefits from all the creative projects we give birth to in our secret lairs. Rufus also spends some time taking down the most negative and unjustified loner stereotypes, the serial killer and the crazy person. She points out that while the media robotically portray every psychopath as a loner, it turns out that most of them had plenty of friends and family, at least before they got caught. There is a hardly a loner in the bunch. A few kept visitors away for the obvious reason that they had something (bodies, bombs, etc.) to hide. Some desperately craved human companionship but ended up alone because of an offensive personality. Social rejection prompts them to kill, not some inborn misanthropy that supposedly led them to shun society in the first place. Real loners don’t much care whether people accept us, so we don’t kill them when they don’t. It seems logical, but criminologists persist in profiling suspects as loners and so the friendly, smiling psychopaths get away.

The mentally ill are another class of what Rufus calls “pseudoloners.” Very often, like most people, they crave friendship and love but their distorted personalities turn people off and they end up alone against their will. The unfortunate consequence is that people tend to see solitude as a symptom of mental illness and this causes no end of trouble for the happy loner, especially for children. No parent wants their child to end up a maladjusted freak, or worse, and so they fling their little daydreamers into group activities, not realizing they may be torturing their own children and perhaps even stunting their internal growth. Rufus speaks from experience here, and relates how her mother kept trying to make her play with other children, basically at random. Research on how hard-wired our personalities are shows how futile this sort of remediation is. Making a loner social is as possible as making gay straight. You can make people miserable, but you can’t make them something they’re not.

My least favourite chapter was on religion. The basic premise is that religion, being inherently collective, is not of any interest to a true loner. This is then followed by some garden-variety Christianity-bashing (Crusades, check; Inquisition, check; witch-burning, check), as well as a freak-show tour of the ancient desert ascetics and medieval anchorites. Apparently bias against Christianity trumps the defense of loners because these spiritual seekers are portrayed as crazy people living completely useless lives. A few pages on and hermits of other traditions are treated with great respect. It’s an all too typical double-standard and shows a lack of research because there is a great tradition in Christianity of appreciating solitude and valuing solitary seekers. Rufus does bring up Thomas Merton, America’s famous hermit-monk, but then questions his loner cred by pointing to his fame and wide circle of correspondents. It seems the only good hermit is a non-Christian hermit.

I think the strongest part of the book is the emphasis on the creativity of the loner. Using time alone constructively is what separates the true loner from the outcast and the mentally ill. The arts and popular culture are dominated by the products of loners. We entertain the masses, even if we do not wish to be with them at the time. Loners are also responsible for a great deal of our scientific and technical achievements. It cannot be otherwise—creativity and invention come from within and cannot happen if there is distraction from without, therefore solitude is required. It’s an affirming realization, and one that I wish all young loners in today’s hyper-connected world could hear to counter all the voices telling them to join the crowd and stop being “anti-social.” It’s possible that nonloners will never be able to understand loners, but at least loners can come to understand themselves and let themselves be who they are.

“Script and Scribble” by Kitty Burns Florey

Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting
Kitty Burns Florey
Melville House
2008-11-01
225 pp.
9781933633671

I’ve been wanting to read Script and Scribble since reading Stefanie’s review of the book at So Many Books. Although I was very interested in handwriting in my teen years and developed my own distinct script, the quality of my handwriting has deteriorated in proportion to my use of the computer for communication. I do still write in a journal by hand, but in that case illegibility is a virtue in that it shields my innermost thoughts from prying eyes (and sometimes even my own!). I have been dissatisfied with the state of my handwriting for some time, and so I was glad to hear of a book dealing with the issue.

Lest I give the impression that the book is some dry instruction manual, let me say that Script and Scribble is so much fun that I devoured it in a day and a half. Its unabashed curmudgeonliness is delivered with such abundant wit that even a die-hard keyboarding purist would enjoy it. The book traipses through the history of handwriting from antiquity to the latest pedagogical trends, with a sprinkling of anecdotes from the author’s own graphological joys and sorrows.

I must admit I did skip the chapter on “graphology” (handwriting analysis), a subject so ludicrous it doesn’t even merit the effort of mockery. Otherwise the book was thoroughly entertaining. I was (temporarily) wooed by the graceful beauty of the florid (to us) Spencerian script, which was

…based on natural forms. To Spencer, the stones washed smooth by the lake became the ovals that are the foundation of his letters; arching tree branches and smooth-flowing streams led him to his graceful connecting lines. Remembering the joys of nature—the wild flowers, the smooth pebbles, the beams of sunlight, the flight of birds across a sky traced with wispy clouds—he mingled round and angular, light and dark, trailing vines and curling stems, slender upstrokes and shaded downstrokes, swooping capitals and judicious flourishes.

But I soon came to my senses when I considered the practicality of such handwriting in my life. It’s difficult to write (though by no means the most difficult hand available), and for those not used to it, difficult to read, which makes it a poor medium for communication. When I glanced back over the examples of past writing and calligraphy styles, I came to the same conclusion as the author does in the last chapter: Renaissance Italic stands out as the most legible, beautiful, and practical hand we have come up with yet. Indeed there is a movement (which has its epicentre in Oregon) to teach children (and adults) a single, semi-cursive Italic-based writing hand to replace both “ball and stick” printing and the loopy Palmer-esque cursive that is sprung on children just as they are getting the hang of printing.

We can only hope this is the beginning of the end of Puritanical (literally—Puritans disliked calligraphy) domination of handwriting. I wonder if the pointed arches of Italic reminded the Puritans too much of “Papist” cathedrals? In any case, the roundhand (a.k.a. copperplate) writing they invented replaced the earthiness of a broad nib with the ethereal swooping of a pointed pen, and it obviously caught on among a growing literate population. I don’t imagine they would have approved of the excessive flourishes their style of writing gave rise to, but without it we might not have the humble ballpoint pen, which might have been more to their liking.

While the author does not hold any illusions about the status of handwriting in this digital age (i.e. it’s on life-support, with the family divided on whether to pull the plug), she does point out that there are areas where handwriting is still essential. Our competence may still be judged through hand-written job applications, notes of love, thanks, or condolence are only acceptable when written by hand, and in the case of medical records and prescriptions, good handwriting can save lives. There is also the fact that a full quarter of the children in the USA do not have access to a computer at home, and so handwriting is still an essential skill for students. If this is the case, then a quick, simple, good-looking Italic-based writing style might fulfill all of these needs, as well as solve more mundane problems like deciphering the shopping list or post-it note.

Alas, the book the Florey recommends for learning the new cursive Italic, Write Now, is out of print [Edit: is now available here], but there are plenty of websites and even YouTube videos showing how it’s done. But for me the most exciting thing about rethinking handwriting is the opportunity to come up with one’s own style. Technology may have handwriting on the ropes, but it also makes the entire history of handwriting available to us. We can take what we like from history and adapt it to our needs. Perhaps in the end technology will help us improve our handwriting and make it more open, accessible, streamlined, and customized—like technology itself.

A true source of human happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life and elevating them by art.

–William Morris

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Postscript: One of the many amusing sidenotes in the book includes this gem from the writers’ guidelines for Verbatim magazine:

Under no circumstances will a handwritten MS be read. Instead, it will be roundly ridiculed, unless it is written using the Palmer method, in which case it will be stared at in amazement.

“The Overflowing Brain” by Torkel Klingberg

The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory
Torkel Klingberg
Oxford University Press, USA
2008-11-07
224 pp.
9780195372885

I can’t remember where I heard about this book (see subtitle) but it sounded like it might have some answers on how to deal with the torrent of information that washes over me each day. As it turns out, this is not a self-help book for information addicts, nor is it an appeal for society to return to simpler times. No, its argument is that information overload is good for us.

Most of the book is a fascinating trip through recent brain science as it relates to working memory. Working memory is the function in the brain that allows us to hold several pieces of information or thoughts in our head simultaneously so that we can do something with them. Things like repeating a phone number until we can find a pen, doing some quick mental math to compare prices in the grocery store, or holding on to the meaning of each clause in a long sentence until you get to the end, are possible thanks to working memory. Like the RAM in our computers, the capacity of our working memory is a major determiner of our overall cognitive abilities.

Working memory is intimately linked with concentration. Concentration and working memory use overlapping parts of the brain, and they seem to work together—the better we can concentrate, the better our working memory, and vice versa. One of the author’s own experiments involved creating a video game that exercised working memory and giving it to children with ADD to play with. Not only did the children’s working memories improve in a matter of weeks, their ability to concentrate and sit still was also improved.

Working memory is also the best predictor of general intelligence and IQ. The higher a person’s working memory, the higher their intelligence. It stands to reason that the better you can concentrate and the more complexity in thought you can handle, the more intelligent you are and the higher you can score on IQ tests.

The experiment with the children with ADD and the connection between working memory and IQ would seem to suggest that we can actually increase our intelligence by improving our working memory. Indeed this seems to be happening naturally. Average IQ has been steadily increasing, decade by decade, and even seems to be accelerating. This has been known for some time but psychologists couldn’t account for it. Klingberg suggests that the reason is that our societies have been getting more complex, forcing us to master more information in order to participate, and this overloads our working memory, which responds by getting stronger.

Klingberg counters the usual argument that mainstream culture is being “dumbed down” by observing that television and movies are far more complex and intellectually challenging than they used to be. In the past stories would be told in a straightforward, chronological manner and in simple, familiar terms, while today the viewer is presented with mysteries to unravel, blanks to fill in, flashbacks and flash-forwards to keep track of, exotic elements, and all kind of surprise twists.

This last fact suggests something that the author mentions but unfortunately doesn’t elaborate on, which is that our brains enjoy challenge. We hunger for novelty, for puzzles, and for information about our world. I’ve read elsewhere that our brain actually has an insatiable appetite for new information. Unlike the rest of the brain’s feedback loops, getting new information does not satisfy the craving, it increases it. So it’s no wonder that we have created cultural complexity, and that we keep upping the ante as our brain’s capacity to cope with complexity increases.

For those who would like to get ahead of the curve, there isn’t a whole lot in the book, or in the research literature, on how to effectively increase one’s working memory or IQ (though that doesn’t stop marketers from making claims about brain-building products). Researchers have found that strenuous daily challenges are required—just doing the Sunday crossword won’t cut it. In fact crossword puzzles don’t cut it at all. According to one prominent study, chess is the best activity for training the brain, with reading also being helpful. Doing crosswords has almost no effect.

There is also the controversial issue of using drugs to increase cognitive ability. Ritalin, the drug most prescribed for ADD, does in fact improve working memory whether you have ADD or not. So should we be taking it if we want to get ahead? Some students already do. But this obviously raises a number of ethical and medical issues. Pharmaceutical companies are already developing drugs specifically for improving cognitive function, so we will be dealing with this issue soon. As a person whose brain has been impaired by disease, I have to say that I would be very tempted to take that pill, depending on the side-effects. Until then, I’ll just continue to self-medicate with chess and books and information overload.

“Focus” by Arthur Miller

Focus
Arthur Miller
Penguin 
2001 (1945)
240 pp.
9780142000427

Lawrence Newman was an anti-Semite. It was his job to be an anti-Semite. As personnel manager for a prominent New York corporation near the end of the Second World War, it was his duty to make sure that no Jews or other undesirables were hired by the company. He prided himself on his ability to pinpoint a person’s ethnicity with a mere glance.

When his discriminating eyes began to fail him in his 40s, and it was both his downfall and the making of him. He resisted getting glasses for the simple reason that they made him look Jewish, something completely intolerable for him. But after noticing his difficulties at work, his boss forced him to get glasses, and then promptly demoted him to a back office where he would not be seen. The corporation had an image to keep up, after all.

As much as Newman revelled in the status he got from working for “The Corporation,” his natural dignity would not accept the demotion, so he quit. But before he left, the long-time bachelor had a bewildering encounter with an attractive young applicant. He thought she was a Jewess, but he fell in love with her anyway. She thought he was a Jew, and resented his desire. They met again later, cleared up the confusion, and eventually married, but the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman he had seen as a Jew, troubled and ultimately changed him.

He was also changed by his only Jewish neighbour, Finkelstein, who ran the corner candy store and news stand. His neighbours, even more anti-Semitic than Mr. Newman, were organizing a gang to force the Finkelsteins out of the neighbourhood, and after Newman got his glasses and married a Jewish-looking girl, he was put on their list too. In one pivotal conversation, Finkelstein, thinking Newman is part of the group trying to drive him out, wondered:

You look at me and you don’t see me. You see something else. What do you see? That’s what I don’t understand…. What do you see that makes you so mad when you look at me?

Newman had no answer for that because he was beginning to realize that prejudices have no reason. He also began to see that the white supremacists in his midst were ignorant hoodlums, not least because they took him and his wife for Jews. He begins to question both judging by appearances and not judging by appearances. Because Finkelstein was a Jew, Newman had never before seen that he was neat, clean, honest, self-respecting—all the things a Jew was never supposed to be. He had been seeing what wasn’t there and not seeing what was there.

In the end, both he and Finkelstein are attacked across the street from each other, and in his indignant defensive fury he finally resolves his inner conflict between not wanting to be perceived as a Jew but also not wanting to participate in anti-Semitism any more. Determined not to be driven away and refusing his wife’s entreaties to simply go to the organization and prove that he’s not a Jew, he goes to the police station to make a report. When the policeman takes him for a Jew along with Finkelstein, Newman does not correct him, and he feels a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

That is the essence of Focus, a short but powerful book about this man’s journey from one side of prejudice to the other, and the freedom that comes from standing with the oppressed. In the beginning of the book, Newman is a portrait of neurosis, desperate to prove his solid middle-class credentials—job, home, good grooming, good manners, and a perfectly maintained car. It is hard to imagine him ever waking up from his nervous stupor, but by the end of the story he is a new man, standing back to back with a Jew against the mob, and proud to finally be fighting the narrowness that kept him afraid his whole life. Alas his wife does not undergo a similar transformation—she is not concerned with truth, she simply wants to be “at the right end of the broom” when the neighbourhood is “cleaned up.” It seems clear that, as much as he treasures his lately-won wife, when Newman sides with Finkelstein against his neighbours he is breaking with her too.

It’s a moving book, and the device of the glasses is the perfect metaphor for Newman’s “corrected” vision. You can trace Newman’s progress through his glasses: when he wears them and when he takes them off, when they get damaged by ruffians, and when they get jammed into the flesh of his nose, almost becoming a permanent part of him. The message of the book is unmistakable and challenges all of us, for we all harbour prejudices of some kind, but it does not come across as a polemic. There is no sense of the author in the book. It is a tense and gripping story in which it is never certain whether the protagonist will meet injustice with defiance or fear. I greatly enjoyed it and now look forward to seeing the film version.

UPDATE: Lest we think Focus is a historical piece, the same thing is happening right now in Malmö, Sweden, and other European cities, where Muslim immigrants are driving Jews, including Holocaust survivors, out of their communities. We are still in need of Lawrence Newmans to stand back to back with Jews and fight the hatred. So far Europeans are just letting it happen. Have we learned nothing?

“Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction” by Peter Coles

Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction
Peter Coles
Oxford University Press
2001
9780192854162

This was the third and best of the astronomy-related Very Short Introductions I have read for my International Year of Astronomy Reading Challenge. Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction is well written and organized, and treats extremely difficult subjects in a very down to earth and sometimes humorous way. Relativity, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang are all presented in a way anyone can understand and see how they relate to cosmology, without getting into all the nasty mathematics.  But Peter Coles does more than explain the science of cosmology—the search to understand the nature, origins, and fate of the universe—he also shares some of the journeys science has taken towards understanding the universe. He shows how discoveries are built, one upon the other, how work in disparate fields can be brought together to find answers, and how the work of some scientists can be lost and forgotten, or recovered and brought forward. When he reaches the limits of knowledge, he doesn’t stop but describes some of the theories competing to make the next step forward.  That makes this an excellent book not just for teaching some basics of cosmology, but also teaching how science works.

There is just one little problem with this otherwise excellent book: it is out of date. In the mere 8 years since it was published, cosmologists have made phenomenal progress in substantiating some of the theories that Coles presents as mere possible alternatives. For instance we now know what the Universe is made of: 4% “baryonic” matter, of which we are made; 23% cold dark matter, which doesn’t do much other than gravitate; and 73% dark energy, which seems to gravitate in reverse. This adds up to a Universe that is geometrically “flat,” a concept that is difficult to explain but absolutely fundamental to cosmology. Most people have also heard by now that the Universe is expanding, and at an ever-increasing rate—thanks to dark energy. That answers another major question in cosmology, and has reduced the age of the Universe from an estimate of 15 billion years when this book was written to about 13.7 billion years.

The reason I know all this is because I had already read Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction, which describes these great discoveries at some length. At the time I criticized the book for straying off topic, but now I am glad of it because I might not have known about them otherwise. I don’t think I can overstate the importance of these discoveries—it is a privilege to be alive at a time when a picture of the whole universe, from beginning to end, is starting to come together. There is still the problem of the initial state of the Big Bang—as far as our theories can tell, it was a time (if time even existed then) of infinite density and infinite temperature, which is impossible—not to mention trying to figure out what the heck cold dark matter and dark energy are. But knowing the fundamental properties of the Universe—the “ΛCDM” or “standard” model—is, as the author of Galaxies puts it, “one of the great triumphs of science.” Hurrah for humans!

I would still recommend reading this book, but I would read it with, and before, Galaxies. The two books complement each other well, and by reading Cosmology first you set up a delicious mystery that gets solved, at least partially, in Galaxies. The two books together are a wild ride through all that is. I can only hope that both of them will soon be obsolete as we discover more about this amazing Universe of ours.

The “Pinwheel Galaxy” (M101/NGC 5457) as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction” by John Gribbin

Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction
John Gribbin
Oxford University Press
978-0199234349

Galaxies was my second Very Short Introduction on astronomy, and I found it to be more of a challenge than the first. In fact I had to read it twice in order to get my head around some of the concepts. The book was rather inconsistent when it came to explaining astronomical terms and concepts—some are explained in the text, some are defined in the glossary, but others are not explained at all—and this made it hard to follow some of the discussion. I’ve filled some of the gaps serendipitously in the course of listening to the very entertaining 365 Days of Astronomy podcast daily, but it shouldn’t have to come to that with a book that purports to be an introduction for the average reader.

I did learn quite a lot from the book in spite of the occasional difficulties. The first section covers the history of the study of galaxies which is very recent, since it takes a powerful telescope to distinguish the individual stars in a galaxy. It was not until the 1920s that Edwin Hubble, working with the largest telescope yet built, established that previously observed nebulae are not clouds of gas but clouds of stars, and that our galaxy is not the only one in the Universe. Indeed astronomers now estimate that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, each of which can contain hundreds of billions of stars.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment…

OK. Although the book does cover the development, structure, distribution, and dynamics of galaxies, most of it is really about what we have learned about the Universe from studying galaxies. I won’t go into detail here (and I’m not sure I could explain it anyway), but the study of galaxies has led to profound discoveries about the nature of the Universe. It’s a perfect example of how studying one thing in detail can contribute greatly to a better understanding of something much greater. However, I think the book dwelt on the subject too long, at the expense of describing galaxies themselves in more detail, and perhaps straying into the territory of Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction, my next astronomy book. I look forward to that book filling in more of the gaps in my understanding of what we know about this astounding Universe of ours.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field: This is what they saw when they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at an “empty” patch of sky: over 10,000 galaxies never seen before.

“Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and
the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Christopher McDougall
Knopf
2009
978-0307266309

I can’t remember how I first heard about this book, but I’m glad I did because it has been a revelation. As the author has acknowledged in an interview, it is really three books in one. It is partly about the Rarámuri (“Tarahumara”) Indians of Mexico, a shy, peaceful tribe that has survived by running and hiding in the most rugged terrain on earth, the Copper Canyon. “Rarámuri” means “running people,” and indeed running is the foundation of their culture. It is not just a means of escape, it is something they find great joy in, and they have learned how to run great distances, for days on end, through impossible terrain. McDougall, a runner himself, became fascinated with them after struggling with running injuries that threatened to take away his favourite sport. He wanted to know how they ran so much without difficulty, and that is how the book started.

Born to Run is also about a group of crazy “ultrarunners,” long distance runners who regularly compete in 50 to 100 mile races up and down mountains, and who run even longer distances just for fun. This is not a sport with a lot of glory and sponsorships, they just love running, and so when they were brought to the Copper Canyon to race the Rarámuri, it was like the meeting of twins separated at birth.

However the part of the book that blew my mind was about running itself, and how we really are born to run, built to run, evolved to run. This may seem hard to believe for those of us who learned to run in great, galumphing, heel-first strides. The way we normally run is just about least efficient, most punishing way to do it. We’ve taken something completely natural and made it so difficult that only those with the highest pain thresholds can get much enjoyment out of it. The problem is the running shoe. The running shoe practically forces us run in the worst way possible, by slamming down on our heel with a straight leg. The shoe’s cushioning prevents us from feeling the pain of hitting the ground in this way, so we keep doing it despite the damage it does to our bodies. If that wasn’t enough, the much-lauded arch support in these shoes actually weakens our feet, making them even more vulnerable to injury and less able to carry us. Think of an architectural stone arch—put a heavy weight on it and the stones lock together more strongly; but push up from below and the arch falls apart easily. That’s what arch support does to our feet.

So what is the alternative? Run like the Rarámuri, and like every other barefoot or sandaled runner in the world, on the balls of our feet. It’s how children naturally run, before they are taught the wrong way, and it is how animals run, whose heels never even touch the ground. It’s the only possible way to run without shoes, because the other way just hurts too much. Pain is the best running coach—the bottoms of our feet are among the most sensitive parts of our bodies and when they aren’t cocooned by an inch of foam rubber they can tell us quite clearly when we’re running wrong.

The way the Rarámuri run is to land softly on the balls of their feet, making first contact with the outside of the foot, rolling in, and gently coming down on the whole foot while stroking the ground backwards. Steps are light and quick, and much shorter than we run in running shoes. It is more efficient to run with smaller strides, and landing on the ball of the foot takes advantage of the springy tendons and ligaments in our feet and legs. We have far more connective tissue in our legs than most animals, so running for us is a bit like riding a pogo stick—we only need to use enough muscle to keep the bounce going and our tendons and ligaments do the rest.

For me as a biologist the most fascinating part of Born to Run was about how running is the key to our evolution. Until recently, no one has been able to account for our bizarre morphology, the form of our bodies. Compared to other animals, we are slow, weak, and defenceless. We really have no business being on this planet. People sometimes say that making tools evened the odds, but we didn’t start making tools until long after we assumed our present shape. So why are we the way we are? The only theory that explains us is “persistence hunting.” Persistence hunting is tracking and running down a prey animal until it collapses. Animals are obviously faster on the sprint, but they cannot run long distances. Their fur traps heat so they can only run for so long before they must stop to cool down. Also the way their bodies scrunch up and extend with every galloping stride limits how much they can breathe. We, on the other hand, have no fur and can sweat, so we shed heat as we run, and being upright means we can breath as much as we need to while running. Add to that our efficient, springy legs and you have a long distance running machine.

Running may be the key to our evolution in another way. If we didn’t evolve by making tools, what caused us to develop our supersized brains? The answer may be tracking. Tracking is partly a matter of perception—being able to see the slightest signs left by an animal—but it is also a matter of thinking. To track an animal efficiently you have to be able to put together the story of what the tracks mean, what the animal was doing when it left a track, and where it might be going. This employs quite a number of different mental skills—learning, memory, extrapolation, inference, deduction, visualization. Throw in the need to teach these complex skills to the next generation and you may have the basis for speech as well.

This is the best, and frankly the only, theory I’ve ever heard that explains human evolution. It’s not just a theory either, because persistence hunting has been observed. It only takes a few hours to run down an animal like an antelope, which is well within our capability. Then there’s the fact that running, punishing as it is in running shoes, is the most popular sport on Earth, not to mention the preferred mode of locomotion among children. Kids know what we grownups have forgotten—running is easy and running is fun.

Chris McDougall has become a convert to barefoot running since writing this book. His injuries have cleared up, and he can run farther and faster than he ever did before. But it’s not about distance and time, it’s about joy. Over and over McDougall talks about the pure joy he saw on the faces of the Rarámuri and the crazy ultrarunners, even at the end of a long, gruelling race. Running simply feels good, when you do it right.

If you’re tempted to give it a try, check out RunningBarefoot.org. The site has an extensive section on getting started, as well as plenty of other advice and discussion on barefoot and minimalist running. I particularly love the site’s motto: “Shoes? We don’t need no stinkin’ shoes!” You might also enjoy the blog of Barefoot Ted, one of the racers in Born to Run, and the site of Caballo Blanco, who organized the Copper Canyon race featured in the book.

I’ll leave you with this video by Christopher McDougall. When I first saw this I was struck by how much his form looked like the pottery paintings of Olympic athletes from ancient Greece. This is how they ran. It’s how we’ve always run. Thanks to Chris McDougall for showing us how to get our birthright back.

“say everything” by Scott Rosenberg

say everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s
Becoming, and Why it Matters
Scott Rosenberg
Crown Publishers, NY
9780307451361

When I discovered blogging some five and a half years ago, I finally found my niche in cyberspace. At the time I had been sick with M.E. for a few years and was looking for ways to interact with the outside world using a minimum of energy. The other online options at the time were either too flighty and flammable (listservs and bbs) or too disconnected (the personal home page) for my liking. In the blogosphere I found the best of both worlds: my own home base where I could say what I wanted to say and also be connected to a whole world of other bloggers doing the same thing.

That’s exactly the kind of blogging that is celebrated in Scott Rosenberg’s say everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming, and Why it Matters.  Rosenberg painstakingly charts the growth of blogs, from the very first custom-coded online diaries, right up to the election of President Obama, using the stories of notable blogs and bloggers to illustrate the many faces of blogging. Don’t get the impression that the book is mostly concerned with the “big” blogs, though. This is a social history, and the author makes it clear that what is so wonderful about the blogosphere is the totality and diversity of the human voices it contains.

Rosenberg spends some time dealing with the anti-blogger backlash, making short work of just about every criticism you’ve ever heard about blogging. The chapter “Journalists vs. Bloggers” is particularly good, and when he compares the recent record of investigative bloggers to that of the mainstream media (WMDs anyone?), the journalists come off looking pretty incompetent. Unfettered by editors and the news cycle, bloggers can and do dig much deeper than journalists could ever hope to. Before I read the book I would have said that bloggers could never replace reporters; now I am not so sure.

At its heart, though, this book is about the “small” blogger, the one who just wants to say something and hear what others have to say. The critics who say blogs lacks quality miss the point entirely, according to Rosenberg. He uses a quote from blog pioneer Dave Winer to illustrate:

It was a mistake to believe that creativity was something you could delegate, no matter how much better they were than you, because it’s an important human activity, like breathing, eating, walking, laughing, loving.

Just as it is a mistake to stop creating because you are not a Picasso or Vivaldi or Austen, it is a mistake for established artists and media creatives to think that we are after their jobs. It is only journalists who ask whether bloggers are journalists; most bloggers couldn’t care less. The same question gets thrown at the litblogosphere. Professional book reviewers periodically get out of their chairs to thump their chests and declare their vast superiority over book bloggers, and we happily go on talking about books with each other.

The last section on the future and legacy of blogging was the weakest part of the book, but who can predict the future? “Now that we have begun, it’s impossible to imagine stopping” says Rosenberg in an earlier chapter, but given the rapid rate of change of internet technologies, I would hesitate to declare blogging immortal. Some have already said blogging is dead, replaced by less-demanding social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (though these are also notorious revolving doors). They point to the millions of inactive blogs as proof that the fad has passed. That only tells me that many who tried it found it was not for them. Writing is not everyone’s thing, and as Rosenberg says, “the act of blogging is fundamentally literary.” Those who are left behind are the ones who genuinely enjoy writing and reading the writing of others, and I don’t see that impulse ever changing, whatever technological platform is used to accomplish it.

I definitely recommend this book to any blogger interested in the broader context of what they do. This is your story. The book is very well written, and I think it will stand the test of time as a chronicle of the first 15 years of blogging. For a taste, see the book’s website for links to the many blogs mentioned in the book. Perusing them will give you at least a glimpse into blogging’s past. It’s up to us to create blogging’s future, one blog at a time.

UPDATE: I just discovered that the chapter on journalists and bloggers can be read at the say everything site. It's worth reading if you are interested in media issues. Click the "print" link if you don't want to read it with an orange background!

“Reading the OED” by Ammon Shea

I’ve always considered myself something of a dictionary-lover. I have half a dozen English dictionaries, ranging in size from pocketbook to tombstone, all strategically located for specific applications. The smallest ones, both from the 50’s to capture older literary words, are next to my bed for novel-reading. A chunky little Concise Oxford from 1964 does duty in my lectory, and a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate stands by my study desk. Finally, by my computer desk I have a Canadian Oxford and my big guns, the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (all words used since 1700 plus Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and the KJV).

As it turns out, my regard for and collection of dictionaries is minuscule compared to those of Ammon Shea. He has about a thousand dictionaries (and related books) stuffed in his New York apartment, and has actually read a number of his dictionaries, cover to cover. Dictionaries are simply the love of his life. Obviously, an obsession like that could only lead to one place: the Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, he spent a year reading the entire 20-volume OED, and has recounted his journey in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.

The book consists of one chapter for each letter of the English alphabet, with a short section of prose and a selection of his favourite words from that letter. Shea writes about the OED, his love of dictionaries, and the trials of reading the OED. It takes until G to find a quiet-enough place to read (basement of a college library), and he gets such regular headaches that he comes to regard them as pleasantly familiar reading companions. The headaches abate somewhat after he breaks down and gets glasses, but his task is no less gruelling thereafter. Fuelled by gallons of coffee, he reads for something like 10 hours a day. I don’t think I could read the most engaging novels for that length of time, let alone a dictionary. The best I’ve done is read the Bible for three hours a day one Lent. Pretty paltry compared to Shea’s year-long odyssey.

I must admit I was rather disappointed with the lexicon he collected for this book. For one thing, the only information you get about each word is a short definition. There is no etymology, unless he mentions it in his annotations, and apparently copyright concerns prevented him from including any text from the actual OED, including the literary references that are its hallmark. It seems pretty short-sighted of Oxford not to allow quotations from the OED in what is more or less a book-length advertisement for it. Have you ever heard of a book about another book without any quotations? That is what we have here, and it means that the reader doesn’t really get any of the OED experience. It’s an opportunity lost, I think.

My other disappointment with the word lists is that like A.J. Jacobs, who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Shea devotes altogether too much attention to the things that make teenage boys giggle. He has already co-authored a book on obscure naughty words, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Not a letter went by without references to various bodily functions, and drunkenness and raunch were much in evidence also. I could have done without it.

Overall the book is light and breezy (if New York misanthropy can be light and breezy) and a very quick read. In a way it is not really for the established dictionary enthusiast. There is almost no discussion of the kind of technical work that goes into a dictionary, or indeed on the specific content of the OED. He touches on the subject when he discusses “set,” the word with the longest entry in the OED, but that’s about it. This is not a book that will tell you much about dictionaries or the OED, though Shea does provide a short bibliography with books that will.

For Shea it seems the journey is the destination. He simply enjoys reading dictionaries. No sooner had he finished reading the OED than he decided to read it again, this time without a deadline, allowing himself to look up intriguing cross-references or literary quotations. I think he might have produced a more substantial book if he had done that the first time around, but that is probably not what publishers are looking for. Feats of strength sell better than thoughtful sauntering. I guess it is up to us to do our own thoughtful sauntering.

“Decoding the Heavens” by Jo Marchant

Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—And the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets (phew! long title!) is a very well-written and well-researched account of the discovery and study of the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism (which I’ve posted about before) is a complex geared device made in Greece in the second century B.C. and recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. Put simply, it displays the positions of heavenly bodies over time. By turning a knob on the side, pointers on three dials mark the passage of time on various scales—solar months, lunar months, Olympiads, etc.—and predicts the positions of the sun, moon (with its phases), important zodiacal stars and possibly the known planets as well. It represents not only the state of the art of astronomy at the time, but also the most advanced mechanical engineering known from the ancient world. However it was probably not a scientific instrument. Why turn a knob around and around when you can easily look things up in a table or do a quick calculation? It is thought that this was actually a luxury item, a personal planetarium for some rich and powerful individual who wanted to have the universe at his fingertips.

We know all this now, but it took a long time and a tremendous amount of painstaking work to get to this point. The mechanism itself is in pieces and badly corroded by sea water. Early archaeologists paid little attention to it. Attempts were made to study it visually, but it was not until it was x-rayed that it started to reveal its true functions. Jo Marchant tells the story of the individuals who caught the Antikythera bug and studied it obsessively for years, sometimes at great personal risk and cost, sometimes without giving due credit to their predecessors and colleagues. They all wanted to be known as the one who discovered what the Antikythera Mechanism did.

This made me think about how science works. The macro view is that knowledge is built up, brick by brick, on the foundation of those that came before—a sort of grand collaboration over time. But the micro view is individuals striving to make major discoveries all by themselves and not being too particular about how they cut out the competition. Would cooperation achieve greater results, or does the lure of glory accelerate scientific progress?

In any case, the lure of glory has led us to understand the Antikythera Mechanism, though some details remain murky. It is likely that it showed the position of the 5 planets then known to the Greeks but those parts of the mechanism are missing except for one gear. Some of the inscriptions on the faces of the device—instructions for its use—have also been lost to corrosion. We still don’t know for sure who made it, where it was made, or who it was made for. But I think what we do know about it is more important that what we don’t. It tells us that the ancient Greeks were far more sophisticated engineers than we though, and more importantly, it tells us to be more careful about making assumptions about the past. So many artefacts have been lost to time and accident, and genius can be so fleeting, that we shouldn’t assume we’ve already seen it all. Though it is possible to trace some legacy of this technology through time to modern clock-builders, the Antikythera Mechanism really represents a geographically-isolated tradition that was snuffed out by the Roman conquest of Greece. There are contemporary accounts of similar geared instruments but, in the absence of hard evidence, scholars dismissed them as fables. If it were not for the accidental discovery of the shipwreck of the island of Antikythera, we would, in our hubris, have continued to underestimate ancient Greek technology. Two thousand years later and the Greeks still have much to teach us.

"The History of Astronomy"—A Very Short Review

I recently finished the first book on my list for the Astronomy Reading Challenge. The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Hoskin is part of a series of “very short introductions” covering a dazzling variety of topics, published by Oxford. This very slender but dense volume covers the history of astronomy from prehistory to the mid-19th century, just before the birth of modern astrophysics. It tells the story of how humans gradually grew to understand the true nature of the solar system and started exploring the cosmos with the help of telescopes.

Astronomy began as astrology, an attempt to understand and predict events by the movement of the stars and planets. The Babylonians were particularly eager astrologers, and their meticulous records were very valuable to later researchers trying to create accurate calendars and navigational aids, and ultimately for those trying to study the physical nature of the planets and stars.

While I was reading the book I was also perusing my new Peterson Field Guide to Stars and Planets and was struck by the fact that though we know so much more about the universe than the ancients, we still talk about what we see in the sky in much the same way. Stars are still mapped on the “celestial sphere,” very much like the sphere studded with stars that early astronomers conceived, complete with north and south poles. Star charts are bisected by the “ecliptic,” the path the sun takes across the sky, even though we know it is the Earth that is moving. Astronomers talk about stars and planets rising and setting, and we still locate everything in the cosmos as we always have, relative to our position on the Earth. As much as we can turn the solar system, galaxy and universe around in our minds and view them from any angle, we only ever actually view them from the same place the ancient Greeks did, right here on our wobbly little planet, or just above it in the case of space telescopes. If a medieval astronomer used to using an astrolabe was brought here in a time machine, he would probably have a much easier time finding his way around the sky than I do, no matter how much I might know about galaxies and black holes. I actually find it quite confusing to consider the stars and planets from an Earth-centered perspective, but since I’m on Earth I had probably better get used to it!

I have two other very short introductions waiting to be tackled next, on Galaxies and Cosmology. I look forward to more enjoyable astronomical confusion!