More tasty chips from Binchy: Chestnut Street (2014)

Maeve Binchy. Chestnut Street (2014) A posthumous collection, and like all Maeve Binchy works, a potato chip book. Binchy, like Munro and others, shows how people’s character flaws, quirks, ill-considered decisions, and willingness to believe anyone who offers what they wish for, in short, the common human weaknesses, cause the troubles that hurt them. She has the gift of sketching a whole life in a few paragraphs. Unlike Munro and others, she tends to provide happy endings, many enabled by some lucky coincidence, or some necessary but somewhat improbable insight. This comforts the reader, but doesn’t fully satisfy. So one (me, that is) reads the next story, and the next, and the next. The stories are tasty, flavoured with ironies and poetic justice, confirming popular notions about psychology, with enough realism to soothe the critical faculties.

Binchy’s stories take place in the borderland between fantasy and realism. She knows the contours of her talent, and has adapted her vision to her market. I enjoyed reading these stories, and was happy to suspend disbelief. ***

Dylan Thomas as a Young Dog

 Dylan Thomas. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) Thomas was two years old when Joyce published his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’m pretty sure Thomas’s title is an allusion to Joyce’s novel (which to me feels more like a group of linked short stories). Thomas doesn’t attempt a coherent time-line, though some of his characters appear in two or more of the stories.

The stories themselves, like Joyce’s novel, don’t have much of a plot. Both writers tell us about epiphanies, some large, some small, which trace the development of the artist’s awareness of self and place in the world. The difference, I think, is that Thomas takes religion, respectability, and customary morality less seriously than Joyce, who tends to pomposity. For Joyce, the artist must resist and rebel. For Thomas, the artist should observe and enjoy whatever presents itself to them. Joyce resists moral judgements of the artist's life and work, Thomas ignores them. I think I prefer Thomas. ***

Why grades and scores are bad incentives

 

An edited letter to the New York Times in 2019. The paper had run a story about Alfie J Kohn’s campaign against standardised testing.

Alfie Kohn [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/fighting-the-tests/] is right. "People respond to incentives" is true, but when the incentive is a letter or number in a little box on a report card, the incentive is unlikely to produce learners.

Anecdote: Early in my career, one of my students achieved 19/20 on a short-answer test. I saw this student in the hall, and explained the incorrect answer. The student's eyes glazed over, the first time I'd ever seen that cliche operate in real life. The student didn't care about knowing the right answer, they cared only about the score. 19/10 = 95%, that's A+, that's all that mattered. I found out later that too many of my "best" students had exactly the same attitude.

Tests and exams are at best diagnostic. For the student and teacher, they may tell how far the student has come since the last test, and may provide guidance for future learning. For other people, such as college admissions officers, they provide some data (mostly over-rated and misunderstood) about the odds that the student will continue learning.

You might as well grade students on their height. Tall ones worked hard to add an inch or two, the lazy ones just sat around and shrunk. Silly? Sure, but that's how people too often think about students. In a typical class, there's about a one year range in chronological age, and usually much more than that in psychological age, which includes cognition. We humans develop at different rates, and development is never uniform. To expect grades to show that some students are "better" than others is asinine.

The supporters of grading, significantly I think, are mostly academics, whose working life consists of grading students. It's difficult to accept that a tool you've been using all your working life is not fit for purpose.

Unfortunately, people treat grades as rankings. They look on them like scores in a game. Winners score high, losers score low. That is no way to incentivise learning.

The only real regret I have about my teaching career is that I didn’t oppose the misuse of tests and exams.

 

Christopher Smart Loves His Cat Jeoffry

 Martin Leman. Christopher Smart: My Cat Jeoffry (1992) One of the pleasures of a course in 18th century literature was discovering Christopher Smart’s poem about his cat Jeoffry. It’s a hymn, listing all the ways in which Jeoffry shows us the glory and love of the Creator. Smart rejoices in his cat, and anyone who likes cats will share his joy. But Smart’s poem celebrates any and all of God’s creatures, and the joy of loving connection between us. Martin Leman has made a lovely little book illustrating the poem. Recommended. ****

One of many links to the poem: https://interestingliterature.com/2020/08/christopher-smart-my-cat-jeoffry-analysis/

Old Ideas: John Grant on Discarded Science

 John Grant. Discarded Science (2006) A survey of superseded science, some pseudosciences,

and the occasional deliberate scam. Some, such as astrology and homeopathy, have continued to the present day. A few, such as continental drift, turned out to have a kernel of accurate insight which was developed into more or less settled science.
     Grant traces how later scientific inquiry corrected many of these early ideas. However, I don’t think he fully acknowledges the role of the human desire for explanation and understanding. We feel uncomfortable when faced with the inexplicable. So we concoct comforting theories, based on whatever evidence we have, and always informed with whatever assumptions about reality make sense at the time. He does once in a while show how discoveries in one area prompt new ideas in other areas. For example, Mesmer’s notions of “animal magnetism” made sense at a time when magnetism was not well understood, but experiments had begun to reveal how it worked.
     An entertaining survey. I’m keeping it for reference. Recommended. ***

What it's Like To Be Someone Else: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

 Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The title quotes Temple Grandin, one of seven people whose brains function outside the range now labelled “neurotypical”, a term Sacks never used.
     The book begins with “Jonathan I”, an artist whose suffers a high fever, and wakes up unable to see colour. He’s even unable to remember colour. Being achromatic (lovely word, I think) is barely imaginable by anyone who grew up with black-and-white films. But being unable to recall colour, that’s impossible for us to imagine.
     Sacks’s gift is to convey something of the feeling of what it’s like to be the persons he describes. In doing so, he provides evidence that we perceive only what the brain can construct from the inputs of the senses, and that perceptions will vary with differences in the brain. People who are born with unusual brains, or who suffer lesions in the brain, are natural experiments in the range of possible human existence.
     For Sacks also sees that we are what we perceive. Changes in our perceptions are also changes in our selves. Our sense of self, our self-awareness, is part of the totality of perceptions that give us the experience of reality. Sacks’s case histories show that while we cannot fully imagine another person’s experience, we can know where and how our experience differs from that of others.
    Science is the attempt to describe, and the arts are attempts to share, our common experience. Sacks is one of the rare people who can combine these two modes of insight. Any of his books are worth reading. ****

Do you see what I see? (Hallucinations: Oliver Sacks)

     Oliver Sacks. Hallucinations (2012) A posthumous work assembled from Sacks’s notes and drafts. The result is a somewhat gappy discussion and occasionally rough style, but it still adds up to what to me appears a thorough survey of what’s known and unknown about hallucinations.
     Hallucinations are illusions, but they are almost always known to be illusions. Neurological research shows subtle differences between perception, illusion, hallucination, and memory. All involve the brain areas of sensory perception, but the limbic system and the frontal cortex behave differently. While we generally think first of visual hallucinations, hallucinations happen for every sense, as do illusions. Sacks as usual uses case histories to demonstrate the nature of different types of hallucination.
     I learned much. One thing is that the zig-zagged glittering visual aura that precedes most migraines is probably more common as the sole symptom of migraine. (Variations of it also precede epileptic seizures.) Since I experience that aura myself roughly once every other month or so, this information is somewhat reassuring.
     Another interesting fact is that people deprived of sight (even temporarily) experience visual hallucinations. These are oddly similar both in the content and in how the content changes over time.
      But mostly what I learned reinforces the hypothesis that the brain constructs the experience of what we are pleased to call reality. The centre of that experience is the self, the “I”. Sensory deprivation changes the “I”, not merely what the “I” sees or doesn’t see. Many people who lose their sight eventually are no longer able to remember their past visually, for example. But memories are at the core of our sense of self. We are not only our present experience, we are our memories.
     Another very good read. Recommended. ***½

The Best of Herman (Jim Unger)

 Jim Unger. The Best of Herman (1993) A re-read, and as pleasurable as before. Whatever role Herman plays, he’s always the schlemiel that never quite wins, who faces defeat at everything he attempts. But he never gives up. His life skill is endurance, and sometimes wry, sometimes realistic, sometimes grudging acceptance of the losing hands life deals him. Herman is Everyman. The effect is an odd kind of hope. If tomorrow doesn’t appear to shape up as any better than today, at least we can hope that it won’t be much worse. Whatever disaster is heading our way, it will be at least survivable. ****

When People aren't What They Seem To Be: Prayers for the Dead (Faye Kellerman)

Faye Kellerman. Prayers For the Dead (1996) Prominent and much admired heart surgeon Azof Sparks turns up nastily dead in a back alley. He was not what he seemed to be, nor are his family, which misleads Detective Lt Peter Decker. Rena’s long-ago connection with the family complicates the case, as do the usual attempts by family members to protect each other.

     Kellerman’s casual incorporation of the details of practiced Judaism is one of her strengths. But it’s her characters that impress me most. Even the secondary ones have unguessed depths. It’s the (I think deliberately) incomplete backstories that make the characters believable. We never fully understand or know the people that are closest to us, let alone those we know merely as acquaintances or regular figures in our daily rounds. We know most fictional characters better than we know most real people. But not in Kellerman’s books. The mysteries of being human are central to her fictions. I feel that although the criminal has been found, their motives are never fully understood. A satisfying read.***

Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies (Translated by C. F. MacIntyre, 1961) Rilke worked on the Elegies for decades. In German, it’s his skill in using German syntax to compress meaning, to generate subtly variable rhythms, rhyme, and echo. MacIntyre has attempted to give us an English version of Rilke’s syntax and sound play, and for the most part succeeds.
     The book prints German and English on facing pages, so comparison is easy. Rilke ruminates; his declamations pretend to public speech. Hence the label, Elegies.

     A random sample (from the Sixth Elegy):
Wunderlich nah ist der Held doch den jugendlich Toten. Dauern
ficht ihn nicht an. Sein Aufgang ist Dasein; beständig
nimmt er sich fort und tritt ins veränderte Sternbild
seiner steten Gefahr.
 

     MacIntyre’s translation:
Strangely near is the hero to those who died young.
Permanence does not tempt him. His rise is Being.
Steadfastly he goes onward and enters the changed constellation
of his perpetual danger.
 

     My translation:
Curiously close is the hero to the youthfully dead. Persistence
 does not affect him. His rise pure existence; forever
he takes himself off and steps into the altered star sign
of his perpetual peril.
 

    Rilke is difficult, inexhaustible. He repays repeated reading. I’m glad to have MacIntyre’s translation, not least for his giving us a sense of Rilke’s sound. Its play against my own understandings increases both insight and pleasure. The introduction is a good overview of the poems with some glimpses of Rilke's life. Recommended. ***

The Eternal City and eternal human vice: When in Rome (Marsh)

 Ngaio Marsh. When in Rome (1970) Alleyn is in Rome working with the Italian police on international drug-smuggling. Focus of interest is a British citizen, Sebastian Mailer, aka Il Cicerone, his moniker as a tour guide for what we nowadays call “curated” excursions to the more obscure attractions of the city. Alleyn joins the tour. Mailer turns up dead. Alleyn investigates with and in parallel to the Italian cops. The solution is ambiguous: Alleyn knows who killed Mailer, but the snaring of a few important drug-dispensing crooks makes that solution a footnote.
     An above average Marsh. I enjoyed the wry observations on the sleazier aspects of international tourism, and Marsh’s slick use of stereotypes to propel the plot. This novel would make a good TV thriller-cum-travel advertisement. A radio dramatisation is available online. ***

Christmas in the country, a diplomatic incident, and a mistake in a cemetery: Three more by Marsh.

I;m reaching the end of my re-reading of Marsh's books. Here are three n more reviews.

 

Ngaio Marsh. Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) It’s Christmas Season at Halberds Manor. Hilary Bill-Tasman, its proprietor, has collected a troupe of distinguished guests, including Troy. Collection of rarities is his passion. He has hired paroled murderers as his servants. So when his uncle’s manservant ends up dead, they appear to be the prime suspects. Alleyn, Fox & Co. of course prove otherwise,. We’re treated to another of Marsh’s reliably entertaining confections, an once again the comedie humaine is the focus of her narrative. Caste and class cause ructions, family secrets obscure the trail, personal quirks and shame prevent candid testimony. Well-done, with plausible psychology animating both the guilty and the innocent. Average for Marsh, hence **½
 

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh. Black as He’s Painted (1974)
Bartholomew Opala, erstwhile classmate of Alleyn’s, now President of Ng’ombwana, an obscure but important African nation, barely escapes assassination at a lavish entertainment designed to publicise the excellent effects of his politics. Samuel Whipplestone, a retired Foreign Office civil servant with African expertise, helps Alleyn. Lucy Lockett, a small stray black cat, not only captures the heart of Samuel, but leads to the crucial clue that unravels the knot. A well-done puzzle, a handful of characters that break the boundaries of their stereotypes, and a cast of villains that suffer satisfyingly poetic justice, combine to make up a better than average Marsh. Entertaining read, especially if you like cats. ***

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh Grave Mistake (1978) The title alludes to the exhumation that provides the final link in the chain of proof. The setting is an English village of the type that exists only in detective novels, but which nevertheless resonates with the ring of truth. Class and the desire for respectability, enough locally provided services and goods, traditional community organisations shaping and regulating people’s lives, polite refusal to acknowledge the secrets that everybody knows, all these and more create an abstract idealisation of England that no longer exists but still exerts enormous influence. Property is valuable, inheritances matter, old relationships between families have to be respected, and so on. And polite reticence and unwillingness to pry allows people to pretend to be what they are not.
     Like other Golden Age detective novelists, Marsh sketches what was then contemporary life. Her novels have now become historical novels, a kind that any current author could not achieve. I enjoyed this reread. Above average for Marsh. ***