Adventures in Eng. Lit.

As regular readers to my blog will know I used to say that I don’t do literature. It all goes back to a traumatic experience with my English literature A-level, which has left me marked for life. But since I bought my Sony Reader I have once again ventured into the world of literature. It And now I have begun listening to a course at Open Yale on literary theory. I will try to keep an open mind but I am sceptical about it. I will be getting my dose of Semiotics, Deconstruction, Lacan, Derida, Postmodernism etc. To be honest, this may be more for its comic value. I guess what I said about having an open mind… Literary theory has become something of a laughing stock in the last few years and really does bring academics into disrepute. Frederick Crews, and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, had a book called Postmodern Pooh, where he laid into the kind of meaningless pretentious drivel these people come out with. Some of the fake essays in it include:

Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which? by Felicia Marronnez

The Courage to Squeal  by Dolores Malatesta.

The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh) by Carla Gulag

You Don’t Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You, and Even If You Did, Do You Think Anybody Would Be Impressed? by N. Mack

In another of the essays Sisera Catheter provides a ‘gynocritical approach (The term gynocritical was coined by Elaine Showalter and refers to the branch of modern feminist literary studies that focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male authors.):

Seeing himself castrated and thus ineluctably “female”, Eeyore bends his head between and behind his forepaws, evidently attempting an acrobatic autoerotic feat that, if successful, will not only restore his depleted narcissistic libido and give him something to chew on that’s nicer than thistles but also exchange his former adult self for a polymorphous perversity whereby the oral, anal, and genital stages can merge in an endless preoedipal, nonphallic loop. In short, he is so unsure of his maleness that he now hopes to transform himself into an unborn baby woman.’

I have also been working my through the Western canon. So far, I have read four – The Picture of Dorian Gray, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Pride and Prejudice, and Moby Dick. The canon itself has been part of the culture wars, getting a lot of flak with critics attacking the dominance of dead, white male Europeans. I am critical of a lot of literary theory but it has shown some of the limitations of the traditional ways of seeing literature. We do need to know the role of class, race and gender. How can these not have influenced literary output? My problem is that most of the theory comes from one particular ideological perspective. Add the pretentious language, meaningless jargon and it’s enough to put you off literature for life. Compare this to Richard Dawkins describing evolution or Steven Pinker setting out the mechanics of human language. I know which one I think gives you a better understanding of our world.

The problem I face when reading is that reading the Steig Larsson Millennium series is easier    than the classics. The problem is how to find the balance between enjoyment and enlightenment. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive. I am a bit out of practice with literature but I think it is going to be worth the effort. You should at least give the book fifty pages to get into it, after that you can be excused. What I love about reading is the way your tastes evolve. I have no idea what I will be reading in ten years’ time

I think the canon is a positive thing but that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly adhere to it. I like to be an omnivore trying to look for variety. It’s nice to have the canon as a source of ideas but there is no way I’m going to do anything but scratch the surface of that august list. In Changing Places David Lodge invented a wicked literary game he called ‘Humiliation‘, in which participants have to own up to their most horrendous literary lacuna. All the participants have to come up with the name of a classic book which they haven’t read and which they assume their rivals will have read. You score one point for every person in the group who has read the book that you haven’t touched. In Lodge’s novel American academic, Howard Ringbaum, admits that he has never read Hamlet – winning the game but losing his job.  My humiliation would be War and Peace or Wuthering Heights. However I don’t think I could outdo Hamlet. I would be most interested in your choices for the game. I’ll let you know how I get on with the Open Yale course and with the classics.

Here is the syllabus for the Introduction to Theory of Literature course you can download at Open Yale:

1. Introduction

2. Introduction (cont.)

3. Ways In and Out of the Hermeneutic Circle

4. Configurative Reading

5. The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork

6. The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms

7. Russian Formalism

8. Semiotics and Structuralism

9. Linguistics and Literature

10. Deconstruction I

11. Deconstruction II

12. Freud and Fiction

13. Jacques Lacan in Theory

14. Influence

15. The Postmodern Psyche

16. The Social Permeability of Reader and Text

17. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory

18. The Political Unconscious

19. The New Historicism

20. The Classical Feminist Tradition

21. African-American Criticism

22. Post-Colonial Criticism

23. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity

24. The Institutional Construction of Literary Study

25. The End of Theory?; Neo-Pragmatism

26. Reflections; Who Doesn’t Hate Theory Now?

But he built some beautiful autobahns

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany there has been a massive overkill on this subject. I wasn’t going to add to all of this but then I saw an article by Seumas Milne in this week’s Guardian, which gave an interpretation of events which had me shaking my head. I do think that Germany is a fascinating case – it’s not often in political economy that you can observe an experiment in laboratory conditions but the division of Germany after WWII is the closest we are going to get to this. Germany in 1945 was a country destroyed by six years of war. Two political and economic models were tried and the results surely leave no room for doubt.

Well for Mr. Milne they do. He chastises his opponents their refusal to acknowledge that the communist system had benefits as well as obvious costs:

The German Democratic Republic was home to the Stasi, shortages and the wall, but it was also a country of full employment, social equality, cheap housing, transport and culture, one of the best childcare systems in the world, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany.

 What an idiotic argument! No government or system does everything bad. Of course, this defence of totalitarianism is asymmetric. I don’t here anyone saying about Hitler: “Well he had the gas chambers but boy did he build some beautiful autobahns.” This hypocrisy is typical. You only have to compare the insignificant number of documentaries and films about communist atrocities compared to those about Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust. In the article which I featured last week Murderous Idealism Paul Hollander points out a possible origin of these double standards:

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as by-products of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

 

Milne also makes reference to ostalgie, the German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. The citizens had such a warm feeling about the place that the government built a wall to keep them in. Well I realise that it was really an anti-fascist defence barrier. Anywhere between 40,000 and 200,000 fled the DDR. Perhaps Mr Milne has access to a list of West Germans who risked their lives trying to get into this workers’ paradise. The genius of capitalism has actually found a way of exploiting this nostalgic feeling and there is a thriving trade in ersatz products from the communist years. There is so much hypocrisy about ideological symbols. We have Soviet Chic but we don’t have Pinochet T-shirts. The Hammer and Sickle is acceptable but wearing a swastika is roundly condemned – this is asymmetric outrage.

The Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago but this has not ushered in the end of history. Conflict is all around us – that is the nature of human affairs. There are no definitive answers to how society should be organised. Given human predilection for folly I wouldn’t even rule out a return of communism. Unfortunately I fear the results will be similar. Capitalism has its own problems and we will never be able to abolish crises. What will be the result of the downfall of communism? As Zhou Enlai said of the long-term consequences of the French Revolution – it’s too early to tell. I believe in the chaotic random nature of history. Events now can have unforeseen consequences. Having said that, I think you could rewind and replay the video of world history over and over again and you would still get similar disastrous results with communism. Now it seems that the great hope of communists is Hugo Chavez. Maybe the results will be different in the developing world but I won’t be holding my breath.

Just-so stories?

Surely one of the most pressing social questions of our time is why kids wear their baseball caps the wrong way around. Dr Kipling has the following explanation:

…First, you need to ask yourself what signals a male needs to transmit to a potential mate in order to advertise his suitability as a source of strong genetic material, more likely to survive than that of his competitor males. One answer is brute physical strength. Now, consider the baseball cap. Worn in the traditional style it offers protection against the sun and also the gaze of aggressive competitors. By turning the cap around, the male is signalling that he doesn’t need this protection: he is tough enough to face elements and the gaze of any who might threaten him. Second, inverting the cap is the gesture of non-conformity. Primates live in highly ordered social structures. Playing by the rules is considered essential. Turning the cap around shows that the male is above the rules that constrain his competitors and again signals that he has superior strength. I hope you will have guessed that this was a parody – it comes from Julian Baggini’s book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten. Dr Kipling is an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s Just-so stories and Baggini is taking aim at evolutionary psychology, which applies Darwin’s theories to gain an insight into human behaviour. For its critics EP is retrofitting an explanation with the benefit of hindsight. Chomsky put it like this:

“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.“

I can see the point but I feel that EP is a powerful tool. Maybe I’m just seeking a justification for my political opinions – I have a pragmatic view of human nature. I remember when I was at university I didn’t really buy into a lot of the theories that I heard.  It just seems obvious to me that we have to be heavily influenced by our evolutionary background. This has proved unpopular with many academics who had their vision of human beings challenged; there have been heated debates about the claims of EP. Evolutionary psychology posits that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adaptations to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. (The Pleistocene goes from two million to 11 thousand years ago, the vast majority of our existence.) It is not controversial to assert that animal behaviour is influenced by their genes but when it comes to humans it becomes very divisive. Let’s take mating as an example. In the Pleistocene environment men wanted to spread their genes as widely as possible, whereas for women it was important to be fussier when choosing a partner. This still has an influence on our behaviour. Obviously a lot of other factors interact but I feel it is impossible to ignore our biological heritage.

One especially contentious area is rape. The traditional academic view was that rape had nothing to do with sex – it was a question of violence and that our culture socialised men into it. I find the argument that rape has nothing to with sex rather unconvincing. It is clear that rape takes place in the animal kingdom, including chimpanzees. Evolutionary psychologist Randy Thornhill has argued that in humans it could be the vestige of a reproductive strategy, with the violence employed to get what you want. This is not a defence or a justification of rape. Medical scientists who study who study cancer do not favour cancer. The genes can never be an excuse-; if there is no consent, it is a crime. But it is always helpful to gain insights into what the causes are.

Evolutionary Psychology opens up that whole nature v nature debate. Obviously these questions are complex and it is incredibly difficult to tease out the different factors. Perhaps the best example to illustrate this came from the popular science writer Matt Ridley: In every culture in the world men are more violent than men; But American women are more homicidal than Japanese men. We need to know about to what predispositions nature has given us. What motivates us to act the way we do is always going to invite controversy.  Some of these explanations will turn out to be wrong but we should not eliminate avenues of enquiry because they offend sensibilities.

In defence of trivia

I have just finished reading The Importance of Being Trivial by Mark Mason. This delightful book, which deals with the author’s quest to find the perfect piece of trivia, has interviews with aficionados, and scientists as the author seeks to explain the appeal of trivia and what it tells us about being human. The book is peppered with titbits and here is a selection of my favourites:

• Pete Conrad was the first man to fall over on the moon.

• George Foreman’s sons are all called George.

• Gordon Brown, who is blind in one eye, decreed that the font for Number Ten emails change from Times New Roman 12 to Arial when he became PM

• Oasis’s Liam Gallagher has an IQ of over 160.

• The only female in Lawrence is Arabia is Gladys the camel.

• The first government ban on smoking was instituted by the Nazis.

• Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

• In 1977, when Elvis Presley died, there were 170 Elvis impersonators in the world. By the turn of the millennium that had grown to 85,000. At that rate of growth, by 2019 one third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.

• The leg in the famous poster for The Graduate was not Anne Bancroft’s it belonged to Linda Gray, who would go on to play Sue Ellen in the hit TV series Dallas.

I want to have a look at what trivia is. The word comes from the Latin for three ways. It referred to the arte triviale the trivium the three liberal arts (the education appropriate for a free man) taught at university namely grammar, rhetoric and logic. The other four liberal arts were the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were considered more intellectually demanding and thus trivia came to mean “of interest only to an undergraduate”. Its modern incarnation is, rather surprisingly for me, is from the USA; two Columbia University students, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, ran quizzes at  their university with questions about culturally significant but ultimately useless information, which they called trivia contests.

There is no doubt that trivia has its detractors. It is considered shallow and its practitioners are considered anal In English we have that rather despective word, coined by Norman Mailer, factoid, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper. I remember a teacher at school calling participants on the quiz programme Mastermind as human dustbins. It does seem to be a particularly masculine activity drawing on the male brain that is dedicated to systemising.

One thing that is clear is the incomplete nature of knowledge. There are so many things we think we know but that turn out to have no basis in truth. Facts once they get out seem to have a life of their own. Sometimes we do it ourselves when we fill in the gaps in our memory by unconsciously inventing something. The programme QI has a section called General Ignorance where they debunk myths that have gained acceptance: Marco Polo was in fact Croatian and his name means Mark Chicken. Nelson’s last words were not “Kiss me, Hardy” or “Kismet, Hardy” but “Drink, drink. Fan, fan Rub, rub.” The steam engine was actually invented in ancient Greece. I guess that in the Internet age we have learnt that the truth is complicated.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that I don’t agree with the critics of trivia. If you look on the right hand side I have a category dedicated to it. I am an intellectual dilettante a knowledge junkie. I love finding out about theories and ideas but I do enjoy that special feeling when I discover a magical piece of trivia. I do agree that facts without theory is trivia and theory without facts is bullshit. But trivia is a way of making knowledge attractive and is just great fun. And that’s more than enough for me.

Is language a straight-jacket for thought?

To have another language is to possess a second soul.  Charlemagne

 

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. Benjamin Lee Whorf

 

Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects. These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later. Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard

 

 

As we can see from the Charlemagne quote above, the notion that the language we speak somehow channels our thoughts goes back a long way. It clearly informed George Orwell when he created his fictional language Newspeak, the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. The rationale of Newspeak is if something can’t be said, it can’t be thought. Thus you can remove ideas such as freedom, rights and rebellion.

 

Newspeak seems to have been influenced by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which Wikipedia is “the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.” This is a tantalising thought but is it really true? I am very sceptical; it seems to have causation in the wrong way. I am more convinced by the argument that concepts precede vocabulary.

 

What is clear is that different languages express things differently. But does that mean some thoughts can only be expressed in one language? Is it possible to have thoughts in one language that can’t be translated into another? I am a big fan of the quirks of language. A while back I did a piece on untranslatable words and they are a lot of fun. The Japanese have one word, kyoikumama: for a mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement and the Germans have backpfeifengesicht: for a face that cries out for a fist in it. Does the lack of one-word English equivalents mean that English speakers are incapable of recognising these concepts? In Spanish you haves conocer and saber where in English you only have know. Does this mean that Spanish speakers are somehow more attuned to the difference between knowing a person and knowing a fact than English speakers are.

 

A lot of the evidence in this debate comes from analysis of tribal languages such as Hopi, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in north-eastern Arizona, USA. I am not a professional linguist so it can be a bit difficult to analyse the conclusions that the opposing sides come to. A lot of the motivation behind Whorf’s studies was to demonstrate that indigenous peoples were not “primitive.” And studies of tribal languages have shown that they are incredibly complex. But Whorf wanted to overcompensate. His description of Hopi seems to be trying to show that the Hopi language existed on a higher plane of thinking. Whorf also appear to have got the grammar wrong when he claimed that the Hopi had no words or grammar that refer to past or future time. But it appears that Hopi does have time markers.

 

Another tribal language that has come under the spotlight is Pirahã, an Amazonian language. This language has no words for numbers. They are incapable of performing even the most basic mathematical operation. This is said to be because their language has no words for number, they are prevented from doing maths. A more logical explanation is that it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

 

Some people say that they feel like a different person when they speak another language. I can’t say I have ever had that feeling. I wouldn’t want to say that language has no influence on our thinking but it is greatly exaggerated.

Rights: a pragmatic perspective

The Oxford Dictionary has a very pithy definition of a right: moral or legal entitlement to have or do something. Unfortunately in the real world actually defining what should be included as a right is more problematic. In the last 800 years we have seen The Magna Carta, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France, The United States Bill of Rights, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and more recently The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union The Universal Declaration of 1948 declares that the “…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

But humans are more complex than that and there are wildly differing interpretations of where rights come from and what they should include. There are some interesting ways of approaching the subject. In 1979 Czech jurist Karel Vasak came up with the division of human rights into three generations:

• First-generation: liberty and participation in political life – freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and voting rights.
• Second-generation: social, economic, and cultural in nature – a right to be employed, rights to housing and health care, as well as social security and unemployment benefits.
• Third-generation: the softest set of rights and have proved hard to enact – group and collective rights, self-determination, economic and social development, a healthy environment and even intergenerational equity and sustainability. Critics would argue that this is an attempt to dress up a political agenda as rights

I have forgotten the fourth generation – the right to see football on free-to-air terrestrial television.

The exponential growth of claimed rights over the last few years has led to a complicated situation of conflicting rights. In his book Shouting Fire, lawyer Alan Dershowitz has a list of rights and counter-rights:

Right to free speech – Right not to be offended
Right to life of foetus – Right to choose abortion
Rights of criminal defendants –Rights of victims
Right to keep one’s money – Right to equitable distribution of wealth
Right of gay couple to adopt right of child to be adopted by a heterosexual family
Right to know of sex offenders in neighbourhood – Right of privacy after serving sentence

This is just a sample of a list that goes on for three pages and makes fascinating reading. How can we possibly sort out all these contradictory claims?

Dershowitz takes a pragmatic view; rights come from wrongs. It is a practical viewpoint based on human experience. As we have seen what constitutes perfect justice is very controversial and will probably never be resolved definitively. Intelligent people can and do disagree about economic justice. There is however much more consensus as to what is perfect injustice. The inquisition, slavery, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust and the massacres in Rwanda show us what can happen when there is an absence of basic rights. I tend to favour a negative conception of rights. Negative liberty means that there are certain things that states and others cannot do to you. Just a few negative rules go a long way. Such things as freedom of speech, property rights, due process of law freedom of association are absolutely fundamental. Positive liberty, the right and frequently the obligation to do certain things, has often produced overblown bureaucracies and sometimes even tyranny.

Monopoly is a terrible thing

Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it. Rupert Murdoch

 

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly. Steven Wright

 

We [Microsoft] don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference. Steve Ballmer

 

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers. Frederic Bastiat

 

 

The Economist’s A to Z glossary of economic terms defines monopoly thus:

When the production of a good or service with no close substitutes is carried out by a single firm with the market power to decide the price of its output. Contrast with perfect competition, in which no single firm can affect the price of what it produces. Typically, a monopoly will produce less, at a higher price, than would be the case for the entire market under perfect competition. It decides its price by calculating the quantity of output at which its marginal revenue would equal its marginal cost, and then sets whatever price would enable it to sell exactly that quantity.

 

When we think of monopoly we are worried about the monopolists’ ability to charge higher prices. From an economic point of view if some Monet is transferred from one group to another. This may be deemed socially unacceptable but it is an equal transfer of wealth from one group to another and doesn’t reduce aggregate welfare. What economists object to is that as the monopolist raises prices above the competitive level in order to make extra profits, customers buy less of the product, therefore less is produced, and society as a whole is worse off.

 

Monopolies go back a long way. Traditionally it has been state power, which has been used to restrict access to particular sectors and industries. In the past kings would grant or sell monopoly rights. More recently it has been governments who have played this role. One way to keep out potential competitors is to have the government make it illegal for others to operate in particular industries. An extreme example was India at the end of the last century which would licence companies and decide what and how much these companies could produce. There are always political justifications for these interventions.

 

As monopoly has come to be seen as harmful to economic growth, over the last century or so we have seen a rise in the number of antitrust cases. They are called like this because cartels used to be known as trusts. There is more to these cases than meets the eye. There are often underlying political motivations and it would be unwise to assume that protection of consumers is the rationale. We often think of the robber barons of late nineteenth century USA, companies such as Standard Oil. They were growing but they were in fact reducing prices. That is hardly typical behaviour for a monopolist Often pressure comes not from consumers but competitors who resent losing their market share. The Microsoft case is a prime example. I don’t think that consumers were clamouring for the prosecution. Microsoft would quickly discover what would happen if they tried to abuse their customers.  There are alternatives to the Windows – Linux, Apple, unauthorised copying and more alternatives would undoubtedly spring up. The latest panic is about Google but who knows how they will be doing in 2030?

 

We also lack an historical perspective. Just because a company is dominant now doesn’t mean that it will hold that position in twenty years time. History is littered with the cases of megaliths that have seen their position eroded by more agile competitors. Bigger is not always better. Natural history teaches us that – Where are the dinosaurs now?

Smoke and mirrors

As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless that one swears to uphold the Magician’s Oath in turn. I promise never to perform any illusion for any non-magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic.  The Magician’s Oath.

 

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”. From the film The Prestige.

 

I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That’s what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly’ who scales the walls of the same building. Harry Houdini‎

 

We’re starting to realize that magicians have a lot of implicit know-ledge about how we perceive the world around us because they have to deceive us in terms of controlling attention, exploiting the assumptions we make when we do and don’t notice a change in our environment. There is an enormous amount of really detailed instruction on how to perform magic. People are always blown away by how detailed a description you’ll have.  Richard Wiseman

 

 

The world of prestidigitators, conjurors, mentalists, escape artists, and ventriloquists has long intrigued me. I love reading about the golden age of magic – from 1890 to 1930. In particular, as a sceptic, I am fascinated by the relationship between scepticism and magic. Magicians are engaged in deception and come into contact with the dark side of human nature and how easily we can be manipulated. This enables them to shine a light on the paranormal world I will be looking at three magicians to illustrate what I mean.

 

The first is Harry Houdini. Houdini is of course a household name. We have all heard of his famous stunts – escaping from straitjackets, making an elephant disappear, being lowered into water tanks and being buried alive. A lesser known part of his life was as a debunker of mediums and psychics. He began doing this in the 1920s after the death of his mother. It was his background in magic that enabled him to spot things that had escaped many scientists and academics. Later he would have to attend sessions in disguise. He was also able to show how photographers could produce fraudulent “spirit photographs”. I have read on some websites that Houdini was merely exposing the bad apples. But the whole enterprise of talking to spirits is a farce.

 

My second figure, James Randi, is less well-known, although he was described by Arthur C, Clarke as “a national treasure, and perhaps one of the remaining antidotes that may prevent the rotting of the American mind.” Randi is fully fledged magician who has escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls However the facet I am interested in is his sceptical persona. Randi certainly takes no prisoners in his exposure of psychics, mediums, faith healers etc. His definition of New Age is spot on: The New Age? It’s just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds. 

 

Randi became of a public figure in the 1970s for exposing Uri Geller as a fraud. When Randi replicated Geller’s cutlery bending exploits he was accused of secretly using psychic powers. This echoed an accusation made by Arthur Conan-Doyle about Houdini many years earlier Randi has instituted a prize of one million dollars for anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls; nobody has claimed the prize yet.

 

My final choice is illusionist Derren Brown. He recently came into the public eye by predicting the winners of the national lottery. He then gave an explanation of how he was able to do it that was pure tosh. but that’s what’s so compelling about Brown – the way he mixes magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. He is perfectly open about his dishonesty. It’s part of the spectacle. You’re never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. When the person doing this is an entertainer that’s fine. It becomes fraudulent when somebody claims special powers.

Now that’s what I call history

I first heard about Big History around a year ago and it really caught my imagination. Big History is a new way of looking at the subject, which attempts to examine history on a large scale across long time frames through a multi-disciplinary approach. The starting point is the origins of the Universe some 13.5 billion years ago. And it continues with the creation of stars, planets, including our own Earth. Finally it charts the evolution of life on Earth and the appearance of humans, which is nearly halfway through the course. In fact really humans should appear much later in the course but it would probably be too much of a blow to our egos.

 I really like the multi-disciplinary approach. It draws on such fields as anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, climatology, cosmology, geology natural history. You may find this too broad but I really enjoy this big sweep. Too often we compartmentalise things and we fail to see the interconnectedness of events. To limit history to the written word is a mistake; Big History makes use of all possible time scales – not just those used in traditional history. The biological, geological and cosmological time frames give us a much deeper understanding our place within the Universe and enable us to see the underlying unity of modern knowledge

As an academic discipline Big History began in the late 1980s. One of the pioneers was David Christian, who started an experimental course with help from scientific colleagues. He rather frivolously coined the term Big History but it stuck. Christian now teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The discipline was helped by some important breakthroughs that enabled scientists to date the origins of the universe. By using Radiometric dating techniques, scientists can construct a coherent and rigorous scientific explanation going right back to the Big Bang.

 

In order to explain Professor Christian uses eight thresholds, events which were real turning points:

 

Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology

Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies

Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements

Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System

Threshold 5—Life

Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?

Threshold 7—Agriculture

Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution

 

This gives you a good idea of the vast time scale of the course – events like The French Revolution hardly get a look in.  Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything touches on many of the themes in Big History. If you want to a more academic approach into the subject, Professor David Christian has a book called Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. There is a problem with this material – it can overwhelm you. I have big problems getting a handle on quantum mechanics or superstring theory; I was one of those people who hated science at school. But like the aforementioned Bryson I have now developed a keen interest in science. I know it’s not always possible to understand everything but you can still get some appreciation of the forces that brought us here.

My new toy

About a year ago I did a post called Some Thoughts on Books. In it I mentioned The Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book. I expressed some scepticism about this kind of device. However I now have availed myself of an electronic reading device – but not the Kindle. I plumped instead for the Sony PRS 505, which cost me £159 at WH Smith I’ve had it for just over a month now and so far I have read nine books and the experience is very satisfactory.

           

            My one is silver. It weighs around 260 grams and its size is a very convenient 175mm by 122mm by 8mm. The great thing is that it is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational. The internal memory of 200MB holds around 160 e-books, although this depends on the size of the book and also the format. PDF files can take up a lot of space. For example, a 250-page book on PDF could use up a lot more space than War and Peace. SD and Memory Stick slots can be used to expand the memory but surely 100 books is enough? I prefer to keep the rest of the books on my computer. The e-book comes with a CD featuring 100 classic works – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde to name but a few authors. It’s incredibly easy to use – its navigation very intuitive. The page turning does take a split second to refresh the page. Some people find this slow but when you are reading a normal book, it also takes a time to turn a page. This page turning is what uses up the battery. You can do some 7,500 turns before you need to recharge the battery, which for me is about two weeks. The recharging can be done with the USB port of the PC. It is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational.

 

 

            What are the pros and cons? For me the biggest advantage is space. My house is already overflowing with books. I love being able to have my books stored on my computer just like with music. There is so much stuff available for free on the Internet. The reading experience is also excellent; e-ink is nothing to like reading on a computer screen – it’s very easy on the eyes. With the option of three font sizes, it is actually more comfortable for me.

 

        For me the con is still the price. In the future I hope there will be a models costing under  100. What  I would like is a simple model without too many bells and whistles. The Kindle has a lot of gee-whiz technology; you can order a book and have it on the device in one minute. You don’t even need a computer. This is all great but I feel that the cost of e-books doesn’t reflect the savings in materials and transport. As a person who would always wait for the paperback, $9.99 is a bit steep for a book.

         What is the future of these machines. I really don’t know because these gadgets are constantly changing. They say that dedicated devices are on the way out and we will have multipurpose machines are the future. I have noticed that when I show it to people they don’t say I must buy that. I also never see commuters on the underground reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on an e-book . Maybe it is just going to be a niche market. What I don’t know is how I’m going to find time to do my blog with the thousands of books I have to read.