Brideshead Revisited, 1945, by Evelyn Waugh. Glossy's rating: 3 out of 10.
Years ago I read four of Evelyn Waugh's comic novels: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and Scoop. I loved them for their stunningly dry humor, utter lack of sentimentality, economical prose, reactionary worldview and other qualities.
This book was a great disappointment. Perhaps Waugh was at some point fooled by the notion that an author can't be serious and entertaining at the same time. Or maybe age drained him of the energy and mental flexibility needed to entertain at his former level. The worst thing of all was seeing him do a 180 on the issue of sentimentality.
"We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of small, clear voices in the lime trees; only the waters spoke among their carved stones."...
"How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love."
He tried to explain some of this in the preface, saying that he wrote the novel during WWII, a time of shortages, when he was starved for luxury of every sort. Well, maybe he shouldn't have published it then. There's no excuse for inflicting on readers things that one writes while drunk either. Or while drugged out of one's mind by doctors in the course of dying from an especially sad form of cancer - it's simply not the readers' fault.
At least he remained reactionary. In the following passage the protagonist talks about a lunatic asylum:
"We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease."
While describing the interior of a modern luxury ship he notes that "...wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity." I used to work close to the new Goldman Sachs headquarters and this is absolutely true.
The following reads scarily now:
"The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a party of archaeologists. “The Pollock diggings provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy which succeeded them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate draining system and the construction of permanent highways, over-run by a race of the lowest type.” Thus, I thought, the pundits of the future might write".
And yet I still hated this book. As if sentimentality wasn't enough, Waugh insisted on presenting his most unlikable characters (Charles and Sebastian) as likable, and vice versa. Sebastian is a gay, alcoholic layabout, who sometimes finds time to look down on normal, purposeful, hardworking people. Charles, the narrator, isn't much better. Why do they both hate Mr. Samgrass, a modest, erudite scholar? Because he isn't cool. Why does Charles sever his ties with the scholarly Collins, why does he look down on the geeky Brideshead? Same reason. Even Rex, a nouveau riche politician, comes off better than the people we're supposed to like here - at least he tries to succeed at things.
Usually a writer is able to make his villains unlikeable. In the worst case scenario one thinks "I'd have rooted for that guy if only the author wasn't so biased against him, if he didn't pile so many negative qualities and bastardly deeds on him out of spite against that general type of person in real life." Not in this book. I was able to root for Mr. Samgrass, Collins and Brideshead even as they were written. And while I don't approve of the typical politician, I still thought Rex's scenes were more fun than most in this novel.
Sebastian is depicted as feeling suffocated by his large, very aristocratic family, especially by his mother. The European aristocracies are unusual in combining Germanic genetics with Middle Eastern notions of family life. In the past families that were unwilling to become extended and controlling must have dropped out of the elite. If a victorious chieftain wasn't ready to force his kids to marry advantageously, to work as a team, his legacy was quickly frittered away. It seems that the willingness to control one's relatives is bred more easily than the willingness to be controlled. East Asians may have the latter, but I don't think that most Middle Easterners and Mediterranean Euros do.
Sebastian chafes at his family's control. Being Jewish, I'm used to seeng these sorts of conflicts expressed through wildly emotional melodrama, energetic appeals to shame, tears, shouting. Being northern European, Sebastian starts to quietly drink himself to death instead.
I was bored and creeped out by Charles's love for Sebastian, saddened by the latter's decline, and then bored even more by Charles's love for Julia, Sebastian's sister. Because you see, when the two of them meet by chance after hardly having known one another before, they understand each other completely without speaking. And then they spend long evenings by a fountain, contemplating love, fate and God.
In the preface Waugh wrote that the novel's theme is the operation of divine grace on its characters. If there really is anything to this, it went over my head completely. Charles, initially an agnostic, seems to convert to Catholicism in the end, but why? Because he was moved so much by the scene of Lord Marchmain dying? Because Brideshead's chapel, and religion in general, seem to him a welcome contrast to the vulgarity of modernity? What sort of reason is that for believing in magic?
I would guess that Waugh himself converted because he was depressed by what he saw as life's absurdity and cruelty, by the hopelessly wrong direction in which he knew the world was heading. He probably couldn't take it anymore without imaginary help. Maybe this isn't the best parallel, but in many modern cultures old women make up the majority of believers. Few of them start out religious. Losing the attention that beauty brings must be very depressing.
Speaking of beauty, Waugh mourned the destruction of some of England's great country houses during the period covered by this book. He calls them here "our chief national artistic achievement". Granted, I only know them from pictures, but I disagree. I'd say England's chief artistic achievement is its literature. And that definitely includes some of Waugh's stuff. Just not this novel.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
What Are Smart People Like?
What qualifies me to write on this topic?
1) I once scored 800 on GRE Math and 730 on GRE Verbal. This was around the year 2000. More recently I got a score of 476 on the MAT. The mean (of MAT takers, presumably) is 400, the standard deviation is 25.
2) Like attracts like.
So what are smart folks like?
1) Extremely conflict-prone. And we can't even use the excuse of being surrounded by idiots - smart people feud with each other like crazy. Of course, we don't do it exactly like morons. Physical aggression is very rare. But angry denunciations, finger-trembling hate, humorless spite, frivolous lawsuits - all of that is typical. It seems that the moderately smart - the 100 IQ to 130 IQ brigade - are far less conflict-prone than either idiots or brainiacs.
2) It's typical of very smart people to hold political views that are very far out of the mainstream. Racial supremacism, religious fundamentalism, communism, anarchism, unusual conspiracy theories, extreme liberalism (not the kind of stuff you'd see on MSNBC, much worse), fundamentalist libertarianism, violent environmentalism, other stuff that's so far out that there aren't even any terms in the dictionary to describe it succinctly. The only thing that's rare in these circles is being a moderate Democrat or Republican, or some foreign equivalent.
Unlike the propensity for conflict, this feature of the high IQ world is easy to explain. The range of currently-respectable political positions is determined through violent political struggle. Opposing interests clash, striving to silence and, often, to eliminate each other. Their titanic efforts frequently move the front line of debate. At any particular time the "moderate" position is the one right along this front line. The map can provide an analogy: why does Germany end and France begin at some particular point? Because of how the last war ended. Wait a century (or maybe less) and the line will move. But to a person with limited information and understanding, to a person who has not read much history, the line will seem to have more meaning than that.
The current political front line, the current set of moderate positions, will seem to him not a result of a hastily-hashed-out, self-contradictory, uneasy truce between opposing forces bent on each other's annihilation, but an obvious outcome of the universal principles of common sense and decency. Or, if he is less secular, of divine revelation. Why? Because that's how political actors have to describe their gains to the public (and likely even to themselves) if they don't want to drown in cynicism. The full, sausage-making truth of the thing can be too demoralizing, even to politicians themselves. The motivations behind their activity appear to often be subconscious.
A person with a bit of historical perspective (in other words, a man who reads a fair amount) knows that the "moderate" line has been all over the place many times. All (not even most) of the things that are being used to define morality now were used to define evil not very long ago, and will be used so again. To a curious, informed observer the range of currently acceptable political positions is like the visible light section of the electro-magnetic spectrum - a tiny little thing whose only remarkable feature is that it can be noticed with the naked eye.
So why don't most smart people congregate in some different, but similarly small part of the spectrum, one whose features can be shown to conform to the universal principles of common sense?
Well, first, humans are inherently tribal. Even if some political position could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to make sense for tribe A, it probably wouldn't make sense for tribes B, C and D, for the same reason that no position on interspecies violence could simultaneously make sense for sheep and wolves.
But that doesn't come close to explaining all of the variance. People from identical backgrounds who have very similar and very high levels of intelligence are still likely to differ wildly on politics. Why? Politics is hard. You can't make controlled experiments in it. An uncountably large number of variables affects it. Ceteris is never paribus. It may well be that a rigorous proof of what makes the best political sense for a single man, a family, a tribe or the world, is beyond the capacities of even the smartest man who's ever lived.
What about smart mainstream politicians? Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Chuck Shumer, the senior senator from my state of NY, scored 1600 on the old SAT. Eliot Spitzer, our former governor, got 1590 and a perfect score on the LSAT. There are lots of other certifiably smart people in respectable politics. All of them, by definition, have to hold moderate political positions. Are they all simply lying about that? I doubt it. Their careers depend on them having internalized conventional beliefs. I suspect that conscious Machiavellianism is rare - human beings aren't set up to handle it. Normally we have to deceive ourselves before we can become effective at deceiving others.
But yes, these people's political stances are atypical for high-IQ folks who are not professionally involved with respectable politics. My own views aren't as far out as Ted Kaczynski's or Bobby Fisher's, but neither am I as intelligent as those two. Which brings me to my next point.
3) The IQ spectrum appears to be extremely fine-grained to the naked eye. What do I mean by that? Let's say I'm very sure that person A is smarter than I am. I always feel like a boring, childish mediocrity talking to him or reading what he's written - that's usually a sure sign. Well, in my experience there's almost always a person B who's just as obviously smarter than A. And then there's C who is obviously (not just to me, to everyone who knows them) smarter than B. And on and on. These ladders of ability can be very long. I remember reading about some early 20th century explorer who studied the IQ of a primitive tribe - these may have been Bushmen. The tribesmen told him which members were smarter than others, and then his tests independently confirmed that information. It's amazing when you think about it, but differences between IQ 65 and IQ 70 can be noticed with the naked eye. And so can differences between 150 and 155, between 155 and 160, 160 and 165, etc.
4) Women are largely asymptomatic carriers of high IQ. This is because they're congenitally bored by every topic to which high intelligence can be usefully applied. I've known women who performed better on tests than I do, but whose biggest interests were gossip, shopping, celebrity news and touristy travel. There have been one or two partial exceptions. Sure, a woman can pretend to be interested in topic X if she thinks that's expected of her. Female physics professors typically don't like talking about physics off work - it bores them. Same for female literature professors, female software engineers, etc. Ability minus enthusiasm will rarely equal achievement. It's a bit like macromastia - I'm sure that men are perfectly capable of carrying the genes that lead to buxomness in the next generation. But one can't tell by looking at them which men exactly will do that.
5) The very smart are definitely more honest than idiots (let's define the latter as under-85s), but are we more honest than the 100 IQ - 130 IQ group? I don't think so. Same thing for objectivity. I'm sure there is a large ethno-racial component to both. If we corrected for it, if we made strictly within-ethnicity comparisons of honesty and objectivity, I still doubt that the smart would outscore the average. This has political implications. W.F. Buckley famously said that he'd rather be governed by people randomly selected from a Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. There's wisdom in that. There were political systems, both in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, in which officials were selected by lots.
6) Addiction seems to be the one moral failing that the smart are less likely to display than people of average or moderately-above-average intelligence. Yes, I've heard about very smart addicts, but it's very rare. And I'm not just talking about drugs. Obesity is rare too. There seems to be a greater amount of self-control.
7) Real idiots are, without exception, ugly, but starting with the 90 IQ - 100 IQ group, attractiveness seems to become uncorrelated with intelligence, at least in within-ethnicity comparisons. I don't have any data on this, by the way. But impressions have value.
8) Not all smart people are nerds. This is actually painful for me to admit. I'm a nerd, so in many situations I've wanted to believe that nerdiness is the price of intelligence, that you can't get that particular piece of frosting without the fiber. But it's not true. Nerds are overrepresented among the smart, yes. Yet a lot of very smart people (a quarter? a third?) are even more outgoing than your average person. Obviously, these sorts of smart people are more likely to go into business or politics than into math, hard science or engineering.
1) I once scored 800 on GRE Math and 730 on GRE Verbal. This was around the year 2000. More recently I got a score of 476 on the MAT. The mean (of MAT takers, presumably) is 400, the standard deviation is 25.
2) Like attracts like.
So what are smart folks like?
1) Extremely conflict-prone. And we can't even use the excuse of being surrounded by idiots - smart people feud with each other like crazy. Of course, we don't do it exactly like morons. Physical aggression is very rare. But angry denunciations, finger-trembling hate, humorless spite, frivolous lawsuits - all of that is typical. It seems that the moderately smart - the 100 IQ to 130 IQ brigade - are far less conflict-prone than either idiots or brainiacs.
2) It's typical of very smart people to hold political views that are very far out of the mainstream. Racial supremacism, religious fundamentalism, communism, anarchism, unusual conspiracy theories, extreme liberalism (not the kind of stuff you'd see on MSNBC, much worse), fundamentalist libertarianism, violent environmentalism, other stuff that's so far out that there aren't even any terms in the dictionary to describe it succinctly. The only thing that's rare in these circles is being a moderate Democrat or Republican, or some foreign equivalent.
Unlike the propensity for conflict, this feature of the high IQ world is easy to explain. The range of currently-respectable political positions is determined through violent political struggle. Opposing interests clash, striving to silence and, often, to eliminate each other. Their titanic efforts frequently move the front line of debate. At any particular time the "moderate" position is the one right along this front line. The map can provide an analogy: why does Germany end and France begin at some particular point? Because of how the last war ended. Wait a century (or maybe less) and the line will move. But to a person with limited information and understanding, to a person who has not read much history, the line will seem to have more meaning than that.
The current political front line, the current set of moderate positions, will seem to him not a result of a hastily-hashed-out, self-contradictory, uneasy truce between opposing forces bent on each other's annihilation, but an obvious outcome of the universal principles of common sense and decency. Or, if he is less secular, of divine revelation. Why? Because that's how political actors have to describe their gains to the public (and likely even to themselves) if they don't want to drown in cynicism. The full, sausage-making truth of the thing can be too demoralizing, even to politicians themselves. The motivations behind their activity appear to often be subconscious.
A person with a bit of historical perspective (in other words, a man who reads a fair amount) knows that the "moderate" line has been all over the place many times. All (not even most) of the things that are being used to define morality now were used to define evil not very long ago, and will be used so again. To a curious, informed observer the range of currently acceptable political positions is like the visible light section of the electro-magnetic spectrum - a tiny little thing whose only remarkable feature is that it can be noticed with the naked eye.
So why don't most smart people congregate in some different, but similarly small part of the spectrum, one whose features can be shown to conform to the universal principles of common sense?
Well, first, humans are inherently tribal. Even if some political position could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to make sense for tribe A, it probably wouldn't make sense for tribes B, C and D, for the same reason that no position on interspecies violence could simultaneously make sense for sheep and wolves.
But that doesn't come close to explaining all of the variance. People from identical backgrounds who have very similar and very high levels of intelligence are still likely to differ wildly on politics. Why? Politics is hard. You can't make controlled experiments in it. An uncountably large number of variables affects it. Ceteris is never paribus. It may well be that a rigorous proof of what makes the best political sense for a single man, a family, a tribe or the world, is beyond the capacities of even the smartest man who's ever lived.
What about smart mainstream politicians? Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Chuck Shumer, the senior senator from my state of NY, scored 1600 on the old SAT. Eliot Spitzer, our former governor, got 1590 and a perfect score on the LSAT. There are lots of other certifiably smart people in respectable politics. All of them, by definition, have to hold moderate political positions. Are they all simply lying about that? I doubt it. Their careers depend on them having internalized conventional beliefs. I suspect that conscious Machiavellianism is rare - human beings aren't set up to handle it. Normally we have to deceive ourselves before we can become effective at deceiving others.
But yes, these people's political stances are atypical for high-IQ folks who are not professionally involved with respectable politics. My own views aren't as far out as Ted Kaczynski's or Bobby Fisher's, but neither am I as intelligent as those two. Which brings me to my next point.
3) The IQ spectrum appears to be extremely fine-grained to the naked eye. What do I mean by that? Let's say I'm very sure that person A is smarter than I am. I always feel like a boring, childish mediocrity talking to him or reading what he's written - that's usually a sure sign. Well, in my experience there's almost always a person B who's just as obviously smarter than A. And then there's C who is obviously (not just to me, to everyone who knows them) smarter than B. And on and on. These ladders of ability can be very long. I remember reading about some early 20th century explorer who studied the IQ of a primitive tribe - these may have been Bushmen. The tribesmen told him which members were smarter than others, and then his tests independently confirmed that information. It's amazing when you think about it, but differences between IQ 65 and IQ 70 can be noticed with the naked eye. And so can differences between 150 and 155, between 155 and 160, 160 and 165, etc.
4) Women are largely asymptomatic carriers of high IQ. This is because they're congenitally bored by every topic to which high intelligence can be usefully applied. I've known women who performed better on tests than I do, but whose biggest interests were gossip, shopping, celebrity news and touristy travel. There have been one or two partial exceptions. Sure, a woman can pretend to be interested in topic X if she thinks that's expected of her. Female physics professors typically don't like talking about physics off work - it bores them. Same for female literature professors, female software engineers, etc. Ability minus enthusiasm will rarely equal achievement. It's a bit like macromastia - I'm sure that men are perfectly capable of carrying the genes that lead to buxomness in the next generation. But one can't tell by looking at them which men exactly will do that.
5) The very smart are definitely more honest than idiots (let's define the latter as under-85s), but are we more honest than the 100 IQ - 130 IQ group? I don't think so. Same thing for objectivity. I'm sure there is a large ethno-racial component to both. If we corrected for it, if we made strictly within-ethnicity comparisons of honesty and objectivity, I still doubt that the smart would outscore the average. This has political implications. W.F. Buckley famously said that he'd rather be governed by people randomly selected from a Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. There's wisdom in that. There were political systems, both in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, in which officials were selected by lots.
6) Addiction seems to be the one moral failing that the smart are less likely to display than people of average or moderately-above-average intelligence. Yes, I've heard about very smart addicts, but it's very rare. And I'm not just talking about drugs. Obesity is rare too. There seems to be a greater amount of self-control.
7) Real idiots are, without exception, ugly, but starting with the 90 IQ - 100 IQ group, attractiveness seems to become uncorrelated with intelligence, at least in within-ethnicity comparisons. I don't have any data on this, by the way. But impressions have value.
8) Not all smart people are nerds. This is actually painful for me to admit. I'm a nerd, so in many situations I've wanted to believe that nerdiness is the price of intelligence, that you can't get that particular piece of frosting without the fiber. But it's not true. Nerds are overrepresented among the smart, yes. Yet a lot of very smart people (a quarter? a third?) are even more outgoing than your average person. Obviously, these sorts of smart people are more likely to go into business or politics than into math, hard science or engineering.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Grammar
There are a lot of polyglots posting videos on the Internet. This guy is pretty remarkable, for example. As is this one. Here is a multilingual conversation between two more, Luca Lampariello and Richard Simcott. And here is Mr. Lampariello on his own, talking about grammar. It felt really, really nice to see someone who knows a lot more languages than I do making the same point about grammar that I've made in this blog post 3 years ago. Don't waste any time studying grammar while learning languages! You'll either get it gradually and subconsciously, while trying to make sense of large volumes of spoken and/or written material, or you won't get it at all. From Luca's video:
"I don't think we need to be aware of how it works. We just have to make it work. Once you're able to speak a language, make it flow, and once a language is accurately expressed, you have internalized grammar unconsciously."... "It is not a subject to study, it is an ability to learn."
One of the reasons why the conscious approach to grammar doesn't work is that the grammatical rules one encounters in mass market textbooks are gross simplifications. The system is always many times more complex than they let on. What about specialist linguistic literature then? Some of it may succeed in covering most of the complexity of a natural language, but only by exacerbating a different problem. You don't want to have to think about convoluted sets of rules and long lists of exceptions to them in the middle of conversations. This stuff has to be available to you immediately on the subconscious level, like the fine muscle movements that you'd use to keep your balance on a bike.
Why, then, is grammar taught and written about? Mr. Lampariello mentions one of the reasons in his video: to a scientifically-inclined mind grammar can be an interesting subject. Not because it can help such a mind learn a new language, of course. Complicated systems can be interesting to nerds by themselves, even if there's no hope of doing anything useful with them. And one can actually achieve useful results through the serious study of grammar. For example, it can shed light on the relationships between different languages, and through that, on the history of human migrations.
The second reason why grammar is taught and studied is much more prosaic than the first: there's a sucker born every minute. The most effective way to learn a foreign language is to immerse oneself in it - speak with natives, read with a dictionary, watch a lot of TV. Not much breathing space for teachers or textbook sellers here. But we can't have that. There's always going to be someone offering to teach you language X for a fee. Grammatical rules can help such people claim that they're teaching a proper subject, something akin to chemistry or accounting. They're not.
"I don't think we need to be aware of how it works. We just have to make it work. Once you're able to speak a language, make it flow, and once a language is accurately expressed, you have internalized grammar unconsciously."... "It is not a subject to study, it is an ability to learn."
One of the reasons why the conscious approach to grammar doesn't work is that the grammatical rules one encounters in mass market textbooks are gross simplifications. The system is always many times more complex than they let on. What about specialist linguistic literature then? Some of it may succeed in covering most of the complexity of a natural language, but only by exacerbating a different problem. You don't want to have to think about convoluted sets of rules and long lists of exceptions to them in the middle of conversations. This stuff has to be available to you immediately on the subconscious level, like the fine muscle movements that you'd use to keep your balance on a bike.
Why, then, is grammar taught and written about? Mr. Lampariello mentions one of the reasons in his video: to a scientifically-inclined mind grammar can be an interesting subject. Not because it can help such a mind learn a new language, of course. Complicated systems can be interesting to nerds by themselves, even if there's no hope of doing anything useful with them. And one can actually achieve useful results through the serious study of grammar. For example, it can shed light on the relationships between different languages, and through that, on the history of human migrations.
The second reason why grammar is taught and studied is much more prosaic than the first: there's a sucker born every minute. The most effective way to learn a foreign language is to immerse oneself in it - speak with natives, read with a dictionary, watch a lot of TV. Not much breathing space for teachers or textbook sellers here. But we can't have that. There's always going to be someone offering to teach you language X for a fee. Grammatical rules can help such people claim that they're teaching a proper subject, something akin to chemistry or accounting. They're not.
Spitting Image
The BGI study has been in the news recently.
"These are no ordinary DNA samples. Most come from some of America's brightest people—extreme outliers in the intelligence sweepstakes."
Only about average on the modesty scale, though. One can't have everything. It would be unfair if one could.
The recipient name and address were whited out in the first picture to preserve privacy.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Review of A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces, 1980, by John Kennedy Toole. Glossy's rating: 2 out of 10
This novel's protagonist is a spoiled, arrogant, unbelievably horrible nerd named Ignatius Riley. I happen to be a nerd. Does this have anything to do with me absolutely hating this book? I honestly don't think so.
To me Toole's biggest problem was predictability. You learn early on that in response to any stimulus Ignatius will say something rude, selfish, dishonest, deluded, and touching on one of his several favorite themes. And then you see this repeated about a thousand times. If the reader can quickly guess where conversations and bits of action are heading and then has to sit through his hunches being confirmed at interminable length, then the writer is proven to have been a sad hack.
And yes, it is possible to write inventively about an absurd, limited man who lacks self-awareness - you just need to have P.G. Wodehouse's brains and work ethic to do it.
At first I thought that the repetitiveness of the scenes featuring Ignatius might have gone unnoticed by Toole because he was writing about an exaggerated version of himself, presumably a fascinating topic to him. But the scenes between Gus Levy (Ignatius' one-time employer) and his wife are just as boringly repetitive. We see Mrs. Levy being unpleasant to her husband (and to readers: it's chalk on glass land) again and again, dozens of times in a row. Her topics and tone never change. And the fact that this often happens in real life is not an excuse: Toole was trying to make it as a novelist, not a stenographer.
We're not just told that a character named Ms. Trixie is senile, nor are we just shown a few scenes where she acts that way: we're shown many dozens of them. And there's not enough variety in these scenes to set them apart from each other in a reader's mind, to explain why there needed to be so many of them.
He wrote about everything that way. Other problems:
I wouldn't say that fiction absolutely needs characters you can root for, just that those help. There are no such characters in this book. Even suspense, which is also mostly absent here, isn't always necessary - sometimes style can entertain by itself. But this only reminds me of the fact that, stylistically, the best part of this volume is the foreword written by Walker Percy.
Most of the above was clear to me quite early. Why did I still end up finishing the novel? There's value in the fact that this is a bad book. It's certainly not something I could have learned from the Wikipedia. But how can I share this fact with anyone without having read the whole thing? The mocking ghosts of all the guys with whom I've ever argued over the Internet about Freudianism, libertarianism, Scientology and other idiocies without having read the idiocies' foundational texts first, appeared before me, angrily shaming me into reading A Confederacy of Dunces to its end. I've got to stop listening to ghosts.
The most successful parts of this novel are letters to Ignatius from his "girlfriend" Myrna. She's even more horrible than Riley, but her letters are funny, the only passages here that can be described that way. One of the stories contained in them has acquired new relevance with the passage of time. To spite Ignatius Myrna mentions an apparent hookup with a Kenyan exchange student at NYU:
"Ongah is REAL and vital. He is virile and aggressive. He rips at reality and tears aside concealing veils."
The novel was written in the early 1960s. Myrna is very leftist and very unattractive.
It's clear from this book that homophilia was not yet associated with leftism in 1963. Myrna's worldview was likely built as a catalogue of contemporary liberalism, yet she sees gays as creepy degenerates. And there was a time long before this novel was written when leftists didn't think that blacks were in any way equal to whites. Why wouldn't pedophilia be next?
Other anachronisms: the word mongoloid is used here to mean something like troglodyte. And apparently in early 1960s America one could get arrested for possession of pornography.
The celebrity Ignatius reminded me most of is Newt Gingrich. Newt is more high-functioning of course, but he's also fat, nerdy, socially conservative, very well-read, extremely conflict-prone, a history buff and was spoiled as a child. When he first became speaker I saw an interview with his mother on TV. She gave off the same sort of vibe as Riley's mother, very working class.
Ignatius is shown in a very, very bad light here. Toole depicted him as, among other things, a terrible worker. But of course Ignatius himself thinks that he's just misunderstood by idiots, that his work is actually great. This particular piece of work, this novel, was rejected for publication during its author's lifetime, no doubt at least partly because it is so awful. But tragedy and random chance have since associated the "misunderstood by idiots" excuse with Toole himself. I wouldn't say that this is very funny, but believe me, it's funnier than most of Toole's numerous attempts at humor in this book.
This novel's protagonist is a spoiled, arrogant, unbelievably horrible nerd named Ignatius Riley. I happen to be a nerd. Does this have anything to do with me absolutely hating this book? I honestly don't think so.
To me Toole's biggest problem was predictability. You learn early on that in response to any stimulus Ignatius will say something rude, selfish, dishonest, deluded, and touching on one of his several favorite themes. And then you see this repeated about a thousand times. If the reader can quickly guess where conversations and bits of action are heading and then has to sit through his hunches being confirmed at interminable length, then the writer is proven to have been a sad hack.
And yes, it is possible to write inventively about an absurd, limited man who lacks self-awareness - you just need to have P.G. Wodehouse's brains and work ethic to do it.
At first I thought that the repetitiveness of the scenes featuring Ignatius might have gone unnoticed by Toole because he was writing about an exaggerated version of himself, presumably a fascinating topic to him. But the scenes between Gus Levy (Ignatius' one-time employer) and his wife are just as boringly repetitive. We see Mrs. Levy being unpleasant to her husband (and to readers: it's chalk on glass land) again and again, dozens of times in a row. Her topics and tone never change. And the fact that this often happens in real life is not an excuse: Toole was trying to make it as a novelist, not a stenographer.
We're not just told that a character named Ms. Trixie is senile, nor are we just shown a few scenes where she acts that way: we're shown many dozens of them. And there's not enough variety in these scenes to set them apart from each other in a reader's mind, to explain why there needed to be so many of them.
He wrote about everything that way. Other problems:
I wouldn't say that fiction absolutely needs characters you can root for, just that those help. There are no such characters in this book. Even suspense, which is also mostly absent here, isn't always necessary - sometimes style can entertain by itself. But this only reminds me of the fact that, stylistically, the best part of this volume is the foreword written by Walker Percy.
Most of the above was clear to me quite early. Why did I still end up finishing the novel? There's value in the fact that this is a bad book. It's certainly not something I could have learned from the Wikipedia. But how can I share this fact with anyone without having read the whole thing? The mocking ghosts of all the guys with whom I've ever argued over the Internet about Freudianism, libertarianism, Scientology and other idiocies without having read the idiocies' foundational texts first, appeared before me, angrily shaming me into reading A Confederacy of Dunces to its end. I've got to stop listening to ghosts.
The most successful parts of this novel are letters to Ignatius from his "girlfriend" Myrna. She's even more horrible than Riley, but her letters are funny, the only passages here that can be described that way. One of the stories contained in them has acquired new relevance with the passage of time. To spite Ignatius Myrna mentions an apparent hookup with a Kenyan exchange student at NYU:
"Ongah is REAL and vital. He is virile and aggressive. He rips at reality and tears aside concealing veils."
The novel was written in the early 1960s. Myrna is very leftist and very unattractive.
It's clear from this book that homophilia was not yet associated with leftism in 1963. Myrna's worldview was likely built as a catalogue of contemporary liberalism, yet she sees gays as creepy degenerates. And there was a time long before this novel was written when leftists didn't think that blacks were in any way equal to whites. Why wouldn't pedophilia be next?
Other anachronisms: the word mongoloid is used here to mean something like troglodyte. And apparently in early 1960s America one could get arrested for possession of pornography.
The celebrity Ignatius reminded me most of is Newt Gingrich. Newt is more high-functioning of course, but he's also fat, nerdy, socially conservative, very well-read, extremely conflict-prone, a history buff and was spoiled as a child. When he first became speaker I saw an interview with his mother on TV. She gave off the same sort of vibe as Riley's mother, very working class.
Ignatius is shown in a very, very bad light here. Toole depicted him as, among other things, a terrible worker. But of course Ignatius himself thinks that he's just misunderstood by idiots, that his work is actually great. This particular piece of work, this novel, was rejected for publication during its author's lifetime, no doubt at least partly because it is so awful. But tragedy and random chance have since associated the "misunderstood by idiots" excuse with Toole himself. I wouldn't say that this is very funny, but believe me, it's funnier than most of Toole's numerous attempts at humor in this book.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Review of The Ionian Mission
The Ionian Mission, 1981, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.9 out of 10
At the beginning of this installment the reader is again reminded of Jack Aubrey's fecklessness ashore. Like many captains he is much too gullible for civilian life, and the reason is easy to see. In the Navy most of an officer's social circle consisted of other officers. Most men who volunteered for such dangerous and difficult work must have been overflowing with gentlemanliness. The pay wasn't very good, so the main motivating factors would have been martial spirit and the desire to serve one's country. So they must have been a pretty trustworthy, trusting bunch, an easy mark for shore-based crooks.
Nobility is a topic of conversation in this novel:
"...the common people instinctively recognized blood and accepted its superiority – they knew that a man of ancient lineage was as it were of another essence, and they could distinguish him at once, almost as though he wore a halo."
O'Brian put this speech in the mouth of a negative character, a spoiled, incompetent drunk. He wrote long after such sentiments ceased to be tolerated in cultural circles. Yet when it came time to give Jack - a fearless, honorable natural leader and a born fighter - a background, he made him the scion of an ancient landed military family with a Norman surname. Why? Obviously, it aided plausibility.
How plausible are these novels generally? The number of close escapes in them bothers me. It's not excessive in any one book by itself, but taken cumulatively they've made Jack's and Stephen's continued survival ludicrous some time ago. At first O'Brian didn't plan on writing so many installments, but when the series was extended, he obviously chose not to alter the original close escapes per volume rate.
Stephen's liberalism seems too modern to me, though I could be wrong about this.
The closeness of Jack's and Stephen's friendship seems unusual by today's standards. I have a feeling though that it wouldn't have stood out in the 1810s. I've certainly come across male friendships this close in 19th century literature before: Pierre Bezuhov and Prince Andrey immediately come to mind. If such friendships were an exclusively aristocratic phenomenon, then it would make sense for them to have disappeared together with the rest of aristocratic culture, at about the same time as duels. But were they?
I've always been curious about the fine points, the exact boundaries of pre-modern gentlemanly behavior. Here Stephen talks about these as they relate to naval warfare:
"To the nautical mind some false signals are falser than other false signals. At sea there are clearly-understood degrees of iniquity. An otherwise perfectly honourable sea-officer may state by symbol that he is a Frenchman, but he must not state that his ship has struck upon a rock, nor must he lower his colours and then start to fight again, upon pain of universal reprehension. He would have the hiss of the world against him – of the maritime world."
To what extent did that world include the Ottoman Empire? Was it held to and did it abide by the same standards? There are hints of answers to this throughout this novel, which features Turks prominently. At one point professor Graham, an expert on the Middle East, warns Jack "of the slowness of Oriental negotiation, and of the different standards of acceptable duplicity". During talks with a Turkish potentate "one of Jack’s few certainties was that the Bey’s notion of urgency and even of time itself was quite unlike his own." After a heated argument between Jack and Graham Jack admonishes Stephen for not backing him up. Stephen replies:
"You were both calling names, which is the end of all discourse. Earlier, when you were conversing like Christians, rather than roaring like Turks, I did not intervene because I thought there was substance in Graham's contention."
O'Brian had stated novels ago that Stephen's liberalism did not extend to his view of the Turks. This book made me think that this was actually the author's attitude too. The only Turkish ship described here is half-piratical by nature, but its state is still shocking: the surface of the deck cannot be seen under the accumulated dirt and there are piles of human excrement between the guns.
At the beginning of this installment the reader is again reminded of Jack Aubrey's fecklessness ashore. Like many captains he is much too gullible for civilian life, and the reason is easy to see. In the Navy most of an officer's social circle consisted of other officers. Most men who volunteered for such dangerous and difficult work must have been overflowing with gentlemanliness. The pay wasn't very good, so the main motivating factors would have been martial spirit and the desire to serve one's country. So they must have been a pretty trustworthy, trusting bunch, an easy mark for shore-based crooks.
Nobility is a topic of conversation in this novel:
"...the common people instinctively recognized blood and accepted its superiority – they knew that a man of ancient lineage was as it were of another essence, and they could distinguish him at once, almost as though he wore a halo."
O'Brian put this speech in the mouth of a negative character, a spoiled, incompetent drunk. He wrote long after such sentiments ceased to be tolerated in cultural circles. Yet when it came time to give Jack - a fearless, honorable natural leader and a born fighter - a background, he made him the scion of an ancient landed military family with a Norman surname. Why? Obviously, it aided plausibility.
How plausible are these novels generally? The number of close escapes in them bothers me. It's not excessive in any one book by itself, but taken cumulatively they've made Jack's and Stephen's continued survival ludicrous some time ago. At first O'Brian didn't plan on writing so many installments, but when the series was extended, he obviously chose not to alter the original close escapes per volume rate.
Stephen's liberalism seems too modern to me, though I could be wrong about this.
The closeness of Jack's and Stephen's friendship seems unusual by today's standards. I have a feeling though that it wouldn't have stood out in the 1810s. I've certainly come across male friendships this close in 19th century literature before: Pierre Bezuhov and Prince Andrey immediately come to mind. If such friendships were an exclusively aristocratic phenomenon, then it would make sense for them to have disappeared together with the rest of aristocratic culture, at about the same time as duels. But were they?
I've always been curious about the fine points, the exact boundaries of pre-modern gentlemanly behavior. Here Stephen talks about these as they relate to naval warfare:
"To the nautical mind some false signals are falser than other false signals. At sea there are clearly-understood degrees of iniquity. An otherwise perfectly honourable sea-officer may state by symbol that he is a Frenchman, but he must not state that his ship has struck upon a rock, nor must he lower his colours and then start to fight again, upon pain of universal reprehension. He would have the hiss of the world against him – of the maritime world."
To what extent did that world include the Ottoman Empire? Was it held to and did it abide by the same standards? There are hints of answers to this throughout this novel, which features Turks prominently. At one point professor Graham, an expert on the Middle East, warns Jack "of the slowness of Oriental negotiation, and of the different standards of acceptable duplicity". During talks with a Turkish potentate "one of Jack’s few certainties was that the Bey’s notion of urgency and even of time itself was quite unlike his own." After a heated argument between Jack and Graham Jack admonishes Stephen for not backing him up. Stephen replies:
"You were both calling names, which is the end of all discourse. Earlier, when you were conversing like Christians, rather than roaring like Turks, I did not intervene because I thought there was substance in Graham's contention."
O'Brian had stated novels ago that Stephen's liberalism did not extend to his view of the Turks. This book made me think that this was actually the author's attitude too. The only Turkish ship described here is half-piratical by nature, but its state is still shocking: the surface of the deck cannot be seen under the accumulated dirt and there are piles of human excrement between the guns.
The Royal Navy's almost psychotic concern with cleanliness is a big theme in these books. I first read about the Russian navy's mania for cleaning about a quarter century ago. In The Surgeon's Mate, during his stay at a dirty military prison in France, Stephen muses about the difference between the world's armies and navies:
"...nor, he reflected, would any navy, even the French navy, tolerate the unwashed glass, the fetid smell, the general seediness."
I'm thinking that naval warfare has traditionally required more attention to detail, more fussiness, than either land warfare or most civilian walks of life. An obsession with cleanliness could have just been a side effect of this. However, the extreme nature of this obsession, as described by O'Brian, makes me question this theory without bringing to mind any others.
Continuing with the theme of ethnic generalization, here is Jack musing about how a long hoped-for fleet action against the French might go:
"Yes. The frigates tell us that the enemy is there under our lee"..."preferably straggling over a couple of miles of sea in two or three untidy heaps, as foreigners do"
And here he is commenting on a Lithuanian character loosing his cool:
‘Excitable foreigners,’ said Jack. ‘Jagiello is such a fine fellow that sometimes you almost forget it, but at bottom he is only a foreigner, poor soul.'
Not all of the stereotyping done by the British characters here is self-flattering though. Here is Pullings explaining to Stephen why their ship leaks in bad weather:
"She is British-built, sir, and most of what we have sailed in, you and I, have been Spanish or French. They may not be very clever at fighting or sailing ’em, but God love us, they do know how to build."
This is a recurring topic in the series. I suspect that one of the chief factors influencing the quality of a nation's craftsmanship and manufacturing is the quality of the bottom end of its population. Everyone who can avoid working with his hands does, so it's usually the bottom that ends up making most things. It's sad of course, and one of the functions of truly good government would be to try to steer quality people towards real work. Both pre-immigration Germany and modern Japan are examples of societies with relatively high bottoms. I would think that Britain's lower classes have always been lower than Germany's and that the Celtic fringe isn't really the same thing as the Western Slavic lands. By this logic the difference in ship quality mentioned above may have meant that Britain's bottom was lower than France's and Spain's, at least during the period described in these books.
The books themselves, of course, are a testament to the extremely high quality of the top of the British ability pyramid, since that is what mostly determines the level of a society's artistic output.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Review of Hamlet
The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare, ca. 1604. Glossy's rating: 4.5 out of 10.
When you get so sick of liberal imbecility that you want to flee to an age before the poison had spread, what greets your eye first? A sincere belief in ghosts. Humanity never liked thinking straight, so moralizing fairy tales are probably the best ideology with a chance.
I probably shouldn't have expected to like Shakespeare's stuff. I frequently found his lines elegant, but not elegant enough to deserve one thousandth of the praise they've received. And sure, a lot of the original beauty and wit must have been obscured from me by time. It's not just the archaic vocabulary and allusions, although they certainly tripped me up - the pronunciation must have changed enormously. Most of the verse here is blank, but in the few short passages where it obviously isn't he rhymed words like moon and done, love and move, speak and break, propose and lose, try and enemy. This implies that modern readers are seriously mispronouncing most of his lines. It's a wonder that any of the intended elegance is still discernible.
To me the most surprising feature of his language was the abundance of shortenings that have since disappeared. Do't for do it, saw't for saw it, e'il for evil, 'gins for begins, fay for faith, wi for with, ope for open, hap for happen, 'havior for behavior and many more. Does this mean that the language in which I'm writing this review descended from some sort of a cousin of Shakespeare's English and not from the thing itself? Why would a dialect that was already well on its way to losing the v in evil and the i in it ever willingly pick them up again?
There is a lot of laconic wisdom here - "neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry", etc. All of this wisdom is sound, but that's still not why I read plays or any sort of literature. "Show, not tell" really does work best. When a character announces another's death here he almost invariably adds a few timeless observations on loss, the transience of life and similar topics. Even when I was young and stupid enough to be able to find a lot of such wisdom wrong, encountering it in apothegm form did not help me see the light.
I've always been curious to find what the past knew about its own past. Shakespeare was definitely aware that centuries before his birth England used to pay tribute to the Danes. Yet he also mistakenly thought that there were already cannons and universities in Europe at that time. And why do so many Danes in this play bear Romance names?
The most baffling point for me didn't involve any anachronisms though. It's stated here several times that one of Claudius's motives for killing Hamlet's father was lust for Hamlet's mom. Claudius is now king, he could have anybody he wants, and yet he marries the mother of a 30-year old man? And not for any political or financial reasons, but out of lust?
I was surprised by the amount of sexual innuendo in the play. After one of his double entendres to Ophelia Hamlet describes the bawdier of the two possible interpretations as "country", i.e. countrified. I think that the point when coarseness becomes associated with urbanity instead is as good as any to mark the start of cultural rot. It would be interesting to compile a table listing the dates of earliest literary references to the connection between urbanity and coarseness for different cultures. This doesn't always have do be due to racial change. I would guess that in 1850 Paris was already less wholesome than the French provinces. But when exactly did it become so?
There are long disquisitions on theater in Hamlet. That reminded me of the long critique of contemporary books in Don Quixote, of the critique of great books in Candide. I have a feeling that literature only finally grew up when writers stopped putting that sort of thing in their works.
I'll end by saying that in general I found this play much more interesting as a window onto another time (Shakespeare's of course, not Hamlet's) than as literature.
When you get so sick of liberal imbecility that you want to flee to an age before the poison had spread, what greets your eye first? A sincere belief in ghosts. Humanity never liked thinking straight, so moralizing fairy tales are probably the best ideology with a chance.
I probably shouldn't have expected to like Shakespeare's stuff. I frequently found his lines elegant, but not elegant enough to deserve one thousandth of the praise they've received. And sure, a lot of the original beauty and wit must have been obscured from me by time. It's not just the archaic vocabulary and allusions, although they certainly tripped me up - the pronunciation must have changed enormously. Most of the verse here is blank, but in the few short passages where it obviously isn't he rhymed words like moon and done, love and move, speak and break, propose and lose, try and enemy. This implies that modern readers are seriously mispronouncing most of his lines. It's a wonder that any of the intended elegance is still discernible.
To me the most surprising feature of his language was the abundance of shortenings that have since disappeared. Do't for do it, saw't for saw it, e'il for evil, 'gins for begins, fay for faith, wi for with, ope for open, hap for happen, 'havior for behavior and many more. Does this mean that the language in which I'm writing this review descended from some sort of a cousin of Shakespeare's English and not from the thing itself? Why would a dialect that was already well on its way to losing the v in evil and the i in it ever willingly pick them up again?
There is a lot of laconic wisdom here - "neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry", etc. All of this wisdom is sound, but that's still not why I read plays or any sort of literature. "Show, not tell" really does work best. When a character announces another's death here he almost invariably adds a few timeless observations on loss, the transience of life and similar topics. Even when I was young and stupid enough to be able to find a lot of such wisdom wrong, encountering it in apothegm form did not help me see the light.
I've always been curious to find what the past knew about its own past. Shakespeare was definitely aware that centuries before his birth England used to pay tribute to the Danes. Yet he also mistakenly thought that there were already cannons and universities in Europe at that time. And why do so many Danes in this play bear Romance names?
The most baffling point for me didn't involve any anachronisms though. It's stated here several times that one of Claudius's motives for killing Hamlet's father was lust for Hamlet's mom. Claudius is now king, he could have anybody he wants, and yet he marries the mother of a 30-year old man? And not for any political or financial reasons, but out of lust?
I was surprised by the amount of sexual innuendo in the play. After one of his double entendres to Ophelia Hamlet describes the bawdier of the two possible interpretations as "country", i.e. countrified. I think that the point when coarseness becomes associated with urbanity instead is as good as any to mark the start of cultural rot. It would be interesting to compile a table listing the dates of earliest literary references to the connection between urbanity and coarseness for different cultures. This doesn't always have do be due to racial change. I would guess that in 1850 Paris was already less wholesome than the French provinces. But when exactly did it become so?
There are long disquisitions on theater in Hamlet. That reminded me of the long critique of contemporary books in Don Quixote, of the critique of great books in Candide. I have a feeling that literature only finally grew up when writers stopped putting that sort of thing in their works.
I'll end by saying that in general I found this play much more interesting as a window onto another time (Shakespeare's of course, not Hamlet's) than as literature.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Fancy Food
Steve Sailer's post about Brooklyn hipsters finally made me try Mast Brothers chocolate. I've been seeing it for years at the Whole Foods near my job, but it took the electronic image of the brothers themselves - the beards, the gravitas, the icongrousness of their puritanical earnestness with dessert - for me to finally pay for it.
I'd put it at about the 70th percentile of all the chocolate I've tried up till now. I got two bars for $9 each - hazelnut and black truffle. The first seemed a little too bitter, with a taste that wasn't boring or unpleasant, but not particularly wonderful either. The second was similar, but salty, with a faint medicinal feel. The thing that both of them reminded me of most was cocoa powder. My mom used to make hot liquid cocoa out of it when I was a kid, and I must have licked a spoon of the actual powder once or twice in those years - if I hadn't, how else would I know this taste?
The place of Lindt's Raisin and Nut Bar at the top of my personal preferences wasn't even remotely challenged by this, which is a pity: who doesn't like to be surprised?
I've been shopping regularly at Whole Foods for a while now and have been positively surprised by it many times. Fancy cheeses, for example, really are better than the cheap kind. Many of them have tastes that seem completely unique. And these tastes tend to be far stronger than those of mass-produced cheeses. It's as if the cheap stuff was seriously watered down.
Roquefort is my favorite among the blues, Saint-andré among the Brie-like cheeses. I love Manchego's texture and would eat it more if it didn't make me nauseous the next day. Tomme de Savoie is good, as is real Cheddar.
All of the cereals I've tried at Whole Foods were worse than the Kellog's and Post kind, but the Applegate Smoked Pork Bratwurst sausages I buy there are the best sausages I've ever had. And I've got to do a shoutout for Thursday Cottage Lime Curd - really good stuff.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Review of The Surgeon's Mate
The Surgeon's Mate, 1980, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.8 out of 10.
It seems unfair that most of my reviews of these novels are filled with criticisms. I'm having a lot of fun reading this series and have recommended it to real-life friends. Patrick O'Brian was far better at writing novels than I will ever be at anything in my life, so why all this nitpicking?
I agree with those who say that art is entirely to be found in how things are done, never in what those things happen to be. If you're passionate about political ideas, the honest thing is to write them up in some editorials. The value of novels, paintings, songs, etc. is properly judged by a different metric. But just as it's harder to work on the how than on the what of writing, it's also harder to describe it, to praise or criticize it intelligently. The lazy critic (hi there, folks) inevitably falls back on criticizing the what - mostly politics, morals and technicalities. And having neither been on a sailing ship nor read a thousand volumes of primary materials on the Napoleonic period, I can't even nitpick O'Brian's technicalities.
If I could understand what exactly made O'Brian's writing so entertaining, if I knew how it worked internally, and consequently what exactly I should be praising here, then I could probably write as well as he did. But I know that I can't do that. Plus there's the possibility that even he couldn't have talked about his methods cogently, that his gift worked mostly on the intuitive level. Since I don't want to end up typing "man, that was so cool!" next to thousands of page and line references, I find myself falling back on criticizing the politics and commenting on the sociology.
Today I'll start with Maturin's bastardy. At one point in this novel Stephen pleads with Diana to marry him so that her unborn child (by a real man of course - she would have never let someone like Stephen impregnate her) could have a legal father.
"Reflect, my dear, upon the condition of a bastard. His state is in itself an insult. He is born with heavy disadvantages under all the codes of law I know; he is penalized from birth. He is debarred from many callings; if he is admitted to society at all, he is admitted only on sufferance; he meets the reproach at every turn all through his life – any tenth transmitter of a foolish face, any lawfully begotten blockhead can throw it in his teeth, and he has no reply. I speak with full knowledge when I say that it is a cruel, cruel thing to entail upon a child."
What about the cruelty of misinforming the world, innocent bystanders, about who exactly the hijos de putas in it are? If I've learned anything at all in life, if I could impart any sort of wisdom on the younger generation, it is to avoid bastards.
All the legal sanctions and some of the social stigma that Stephen describes have now been laboriously scrubbed, but bastards are still far more likely to murder, steal, cheat and rape than those who come from real families. This implies that the sanctions and the stigma were not the cause of their awfulness. I'm so sure about the differentials in crime, in all categories of it, in all countries, that I'm not even going to look up the relevant statistics - it would be like going to the Wikipedia to find out if night is still darker than day.
By Stephen's "logic" truth in advertising laws are cruel. If bastards weren't indeed bastards, that word would be an honorific, or at least neutral. They themselves, by their behavior, have given it negative connotations.
The shunning Stephen describes is just a shocked, brutalized world's meekly defensive reaction. Didn't he himself institute a quarantine when the Leopard was beset with gaol-fever in Desolation Island? How selfish of him to deny the need for a quarantine in cases of the maladies from which he suffers himself.
I've read that in centuries past bastards were not permitted to attend many universities. I'm a live-and-let-live sort of person, so if they set up a university of their own that did not admit people born within wedlock as either students or professors, it would never occur to me to object. Having dealt with what I suspect is a representative sample of bastards in my life, I can easily imagine what this university would look like, as well as the quality of education it would offer, but if bastards desired to pretend that it was an equal of real universities, I wouldn't much care either.
No woman from any but the most gloomily uncivilized background ever starts out wanting to become a single mother. And no woman of any background that I am aware of starts out wanting to become a fully-realized slut like Diana or an actual prostitute. Even Diana herself vocally disapproves of other sluts in this book. So single motherhood can normally be seen as an utter failure to achieve one's life goals, almost like homelessness in men. Perhaps having been born to a single mother is an even worse sign than having a criminal father because, let's face it, some guys do start out wanting to become criminals.
O'Brian frequently tells us that Diana is extraordinary, and not just in her looks, but in her "spirit", nobility, etc. The reader can't see her face, but her behavior and conversation seem commonplace, petty, selfish, utterly unremarkable to me. She complains about being called a slut many times, in several novels, all the while continuing to behave like one. She complains about others gossiping maliciously about her at a ball while maliciously gossiping about others at the same ball, and having great fun doing it. It's even worse than "tell, not show" because the things we're repeatedly told about her fail to line up with what we're shown.
A reader may think that I'm just being bitter about women here in a typically nerdy fashion. Perhaps there's some of that, but bear in mind that the people who made a big Hollywood movie out of the Aubrey/Maturin novels did not mention her in it at all, even though up till this point (the 7th volume in a 20.5-volume series) she's been the third most important character in the books. Perhaps the screenwriters agreed with me that hers were the weakest storylines in the series.
Everyone who's both read the books and seen the movie will think that Russell Crowe was a better match for his part than Paul Bettany for his. Heath Ledger could have played the younger Jack, which reminds me of how much I liked Bettany in A Knight's Tale. He's a good actor, just not pitiful enough to play Stephen.
Some NFL quarterbacks possess Aubrey-like qualities. When at the end of a victorious action Jack single-mindedly seeks out the other ship's captain, one can think of a QB wading through the post-game mayhem to shake his counterpart's hand. In both cases the default emotion is the desire to show one's respect to a worthy opponent.
It's made clear throughout the series that the Royal Navy experienced a great oversupply of officers and a dearth of sailors. The admiralty had to turn down captains and lieutenants all the time, and a great number of them were unemployed. Sailors had to be pressed (conscripted), even from jails, yet there was never enough of them. I doubt that officers made more money than men of their class would have made as civilians. I'm assuming that sailors' pay wasn't inadequate by lower class standards either. I'd guess that the two classes' different attitudes to military service had to do with the ancient warrior/peasant split, made biological by millenia of selection.
The English proles of that time couldn't have been all that bad though: when Jack comes home after years of absence he doesn't need a key to enter his rather opulent house. It seems that there is no lock. That reminded me of the scene in Madame Bovary where Emma clearly enters Rodolphe's house without a key. Rodolphe was a country gentleman, a man of means. These are just two data points: England and Normandy in the first half of the 19th century. Were doors being locked in any other parts of Europe at that time? What were those parts? What about China and Japan?
Are there any places left on Earth now where house keys aren't needed? How about North Korea? Of course I can't think about this issue without being reminded of the evil effects of liberalism, of its hatred of exclusivity, which I mentioned in my previous review.
It's sad for me to report that we did lock our apartment when I was growing up in Moscow, as did everyone we knew. Of course bikes did not have to be locked and were never stolen, and one could enter the Kremlin without as much as showing one's ID or stopping at a checkpoint. I can vouch for the latter because I did it many times myself. In the 1980s we spent some of our summers in the countryside right outside Moscow, in a village house owned by friends of our relatives. I definitely remember that we never needed a key to enter it. When I asked my mom about it recently, she said that perhaps the owners locked up for the night, though that's pure conjecture. Neither of us actually remembers them doing so.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Review of The Fortune of War
"The Fortune of War", 1979, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.8 out of 10.
The background of this volume is The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Russia's War of 1812 gets a mention here too when one of O'Brian's characters talks about a subscription for the victims of the fire of Moscow, a disaster prominently featured in War and Peace. One point of agreement between O'Brian and Tolstoy is in their characterization of Napoleon as an ungentlemanly, unscrupulous, dishonorable, base individual. Both thought that during his wars the Emperor of the French had fallen far shorter of the aristocratic ideal than his enemies. In the Aubrey/Maturin novels this attitude is expressed by Stephen, but I've read an interview in which O'Brian confirmed that Stephen indeed spoke for him, the author, on this topic.
There definitely are other opinions on Napoleon. Nietzsche, who attached a great deal of importance to the aristocratic ideal and to its accompanying code of morality, actually said that Napoleon did a lot to revive those two after the drubbing that they took during the French Revolution. I don't know who's closer to the truth on this, but I will say that in my view Stephen Maturin has very little leg to stand on in criticizing a decrease in gentlemanliness in politics. This isn't because Stephen is portrayed as being dishonorable himself, far from it. But his liberalism, when taken to its logical ends, cannot but ensure the death of aristocratic notions of honor everywhere in life.
If every member of a group, let's say the officer corps of an army, or the scholars working in a particular area of what was then called natural philosophy, is able and willing to adhere to a strict code of honor, then the group can be spectacularly successful. If nobody has to worry about cheating, stealing, lying or any other manifestations of selfishness, the group benefits enormously and so do the members.
But if a caste of gentlemen is penetrated by those unable, unwilling, or both, to be gentlemen, then honor becomes a liability. Those who display it are quickly taken for chumps and victimized. The willingness of those who survive this to behave honorably within the group decreases. The group's efficiency falls.
Since liberalism is in theory against all sorts of castes, all kinds of exclusivity, and in practice very much against aristocratic exclusivity, it cannot be anything but harmful to honor.
In this book we see Stephen appalled by the whites-only policy of a Boston tavern-owner - I think that's typical of his general attitude to such things.
By the way, one doesn't even need to be a gentleman to root against liberalism on this. I can't imagine myself ever fighting any duels (if challenged, I'd surely back down), but I still consider it a tragedy that they're gone. I suspect that many fat, frumpy readers of Star magazine would be devastated if all female beauty were to forever vanish, if there were never to be any more Angelina Jolies. And I'm just as sure that many morons would be greatly saddened if humanity's production of geniuses were to suddenly cease. Lefties always assume that everyone is moved by envy 100% of the time, but it's not true. In some circumstances and moods we're capable of wanting our betters to be even better, and not just in such irrelevancies as sports. This is because in some sense the best represent us all.
Back to the book: an American Indian appears in it briefly, and in a very predictable way. A porter at a hospital where Jack and Stephen stay in Boston gives a speech straight out of the Native American Heritage Month (I just looked it up and it's November). The most remarkable thing about that speech to me was that it was delivered in the sort of English usually spoken by naval and intelligence officers and Stephen's scientific colleagues in these novels. Those who work with their hands usually speak very, very differently in O'Brian's fiction. But for 20th century political reasons he wanted the porter to sound especially dignified, and so the suspension of disbelief was violently dropped. That sacrilege makes me think of Stephen's words on p. 181, spoken about something completely different: "...but even honourable, humane men were capable of almost anything for unselfish motives."
A bit more on class: it's mentioned several times in these novels that bosuns (supervisors of the deck crew) often stole ships' supplies. No captain or lieutenant is ever shown stealing or breaking his word for selfish reasons. When O'Brian shows officers in a bad light, it's usually for flogging his sailors too much, which is very different. Simple sailors deserted on occasion, which involved breaking an oath, and in one scene some are even shown attacking their captors after surrendering - utterly unimaginable in Jack or in any of the other officers depicted here. When Jack physically attacks a bosun for stealing in an earlier novel, the bosun doesn't challenge him to a duel, as a gentleman would have.
So how does one become a gent? It seems that most of the officers described here are themselves sons of officers or of other kinds of gentlemen. The ones who are not, like Pullings, were promoted by their captains for, among other things, possessing gentlemanlike qualities.
Since this book is to such a large extent about America, the American Revolution is discussed, and with it the relative merits of monarchy and republicanism.
Stephen's American colleague Evans says 'But surely mere birth without any necessary merit is illogical?’
‘Certainly,' says Stephen, 'and that is its great merit. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. In good utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go crusading, nor does he build cathedrals; still less does he write verse. There are countless pieties without a name that find their focus in a crown. It is as well, I grant you, that the family should have worn it beyond the memory of man; for your recent creations do not answer – they are nothing in comparison of your priest-king, whose merit is irrelevant, whose place cannot be disputed, nor made the subject of a recurring vote.’
If I were to defend monarchy, that wouldn't be my first argument. I'd say that the person at the top should feel like a rightful owner, expecting to pass on to his children what he inherited from his parents, and not like a CEO-type temporary custodian of other people's stuff. Who but an owner will be motivated enough to fight corruption, laziness and indifference of the hired hands? Not another hired hand. In the end someone has to be outraged that they're stealing his stuff. Even public corporations are usually at their most dynamic while still being run by their founders - we can think of early Ford, early Walmart, Apple during Jobs's stints there. Ceteris paribus, a mere founder wouldn't be as effective as an owner, but he'd be certainly better than a stranger.
Of course Stephen can't use this argument to defend George III because in Britain of that time the king was already largely a figurehead.
The background of this volume is The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Russia's War of 1812 gets a mention here too when one of O'Brian's characters talks about a subscription for the victims of the fire of Moscow, a disaster prominently featured in War and Peace. One point of agreement between O'Brian and Tolstoy is in their characterization of Napoleon as an ungentlemanly, unscrupulous, dishonorable, base individual. Both thought that during his wars the Emperor of the French had fallen far shorter of the aristocratic ideal than his enemies. In the Aubrey/Maturin novels this attitude is expressed by Stephen, but I've read an interview in which O'Brian confirmed that Stephen indeed spoke for him, the author, on this topic.
There definitely are other opinions on Napoleon. Nietzsche, who attached a great deal of importance to the aristocratic ideal and to its accompanying code of morality, actually said that Napoleon did a lot to revive those two after the drubbing that they took during the French Revolution. I don't know who's closer to the truth on this, but I will say that in my view Stephen Maturin has very little leg to stand on in criticizing a decrease in gentlemanliness in politics. This isn't because Stephen is portrayed as being dishonorable himself, far from it. But his liberalism, when taken to its logical ends, cannot but ensure the death of aristocratic notions of honor everywhere in life.
If every member of a group, let's say the officer corps of an army, or the scholars working in a particular area of what was then called natural philosophy, is able and willing to adhere to a strict code of honor, then the group can be spectacularly successful. If nobody has to worry about cheating, stealing, lying or any other manifestations of selfishness, the group benefits enormously and so do the members.
But if a caste of gentlemen is penetrated by those unable, unwilling, or both, to be gentlemen, then honor becomes a liability. Those who display it are quickly taken for chumps and victimized. The willingness of those who survive this to behave honorably within the group decreases. The group's efficiency falls.
Since liberalism is in theory against all sorts of castes, all kinds of exclusivity, and in practice very much against aristocratic exclusivity, it cannot be anything but harmful to honor.
In this book we see Stephen appalled by the whites-only policy of a Boston tavern-owner - I think that's typical of his general attitude to such things.
By the way, one doesn't even need to be a gentleman to root against liberalism on this. I can't imagine myself ever fighting any duels (if challenged, I'd surely back down), but I still consider it a tragedy that they're gone. I suspect that many fat, frumpy readers of Star magazine would be devastated if all female beauty were to forever vanish, if there were never to be any more Angelina Jolies. And I'm just as sure that many morons would be greatly saddened if humanity's production of geniuses were to suddenly cease. Lefties always assume that everyone is moved by envy 100% of the time, but it's not true. In some circumstances and moods we're capable of wanting our betters to be even better, and not just in such irrelevancies as sports. This is because in some sense the best represent us all.
Back to the book: an American Indian appears in it briefly, and in a very predictable way. A porter at a hospital where Jack and Stephen stay in Boston gives a speech straight out of the Native American Heritage Month (I just looked it up and it's November). The most remarkable thing about that speech to me was that it was delivered in the sort of English usually spoken by naval and intelligence officers and Stephen's scientific colleagues in these novels. Those who work with their hands usually speak very, very differently in O'Brian's fiction. But for 20th century political reasons he wanted the porter to sound especially dignified, and so the suspension of disbelief was violently dropped. That sacrilege makes me think of Stephen's words on p. 181, spoken about something completely different: "...but even honourable, humane men were capable of almost anything for unselfish motives."
A bit more on class: it's mentioned several times in these novels that bosuns (supervisors of the deck crew) often stole ships' supplies. No captain or lieutenant is ever shown stealing or breaking his word for selfish reasons. When O'Brian shows officers in a bad light, it's usually for flogging his sailors too much, which is very different. Simple sailors deserted on occasion, which involved breaking an oath, and in one scene some are even shown attacking their captors after surrendering - utterly unimaginable in Jack or in any of the other officers depicted here. When Jack physically attacks a bosun for stealing in an earlier novel, the bosun doesn't challenge him to a duel, as a gentleman would have.
So how does one become a gent? It seems that most of the officers described here are themselves sons of officers or of other kinds of gentlemen. The ones who are not, like Pullings, were promoted by their captains for, among other things, possessing gentlemanlike qualities.
Since this book is to such a large extent about America, the American Revolution is discussed, and with it the relative merits of monarchy and republicanism.
Stephen's American colleague Evans says 'But surely mere birth without any necessary merit is illogical?’
‘Certainly,' says Stephen, 'and that is its great merit. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. In good utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go crusading, nor does he build cathedrals; still less does he write verse. There are countless pieties without a name that find their focus in a crown. It is as well, I grant you, that the family should have worn it beyond the memory of man; for your recent creations do not answer – they are nothing in comparison of your priest-king, whose merit is irrelevant, whose place cannot be disputed, nor made the subject of a recurring vote.’
If I were to defend monarchy, that wouldn't be my first argument. I'd say that the person at the top should feel like a rightful owner, expecting to pass on to his children what he inherited from his parents, and not like a CEO-type temporary custodian of other people's stuff. Who but an owner will be motivated enough to fight corruption, laziness and indifference of the hired hands? Not another hired hand. In the end someone has to be outraged that they're stealing his stuff. Even public corporations are usually at their most dynamic while still being run by their founders - we can think of early Ford, early Walmart, Apple during Jobs's stints there. Ceteris paribus, a mere founder wouldn't be as effective as an owner, but he'd be certainly better than a stranger.
Of course Stephen can't use this argument to defend George III because in Britain of that time the king was already largely a figurehead.
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