Work: Love it or hate it, you need it. (Lapham's Quarterly 04-2, Spring 2011)

 LQ 04-2: Lines of Work. (2011) “Work fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.” That’s one of the quotes scattered through this collection. It expresses one end of the range of attitudes to work, adumbrated in the curse laid on Adam after the Fall: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. At the other end we find St Benedict’s Ora et Labora, “Work and pray”, often rendered as Laborare est orare, “To work is to pray.”
     We humans need purpose and structure in our lives, and work provides that. The lucky ones have work that satisfies. Most have work that earns enough to survive, while providing much of the social life without which we cannot thrive. The unlucky ones toil at soul-crushing labour, which as often as not is neither valued nor rewarded as the necessary effort that enables our survival and keeps the rest of us in relative comfort.
     William Morris (not included, an instructive omission, I think) was one of many starry-eyed reformers who recognised the inhumane aspects of industrialised work, and wanted a return to what he believed was the golden age of craft. He thought of craft as work that not only earned a living but engaged the worker’s skill and imagination. Morris failed to see that even craft relies on the toil of labourers that relieves the crafter of the necessity of spending time in the work that sustains their life.
     There are many descriptions of actual work in this collection, most by people who found a way out of the labour that they describe. One is by Orwell. His account of how the workers at the grand hotels of Paris discharged their duties would have convinced me never to stay at anything above a one or two star establishment. Maybe things have changed since the 1930s. I would have included an excerpt from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
     The other pieces describe or discuss the context of work, or of the relations that working with others makes possible. Work makes up the single largest part of our lives. Irksome or satisfying, necessary or optional, we can’t escape it. It’s the necessity that irks. When we choose how to occupy ourselves, that freedom erases the negatives.
     Most of my jobs have been more or less interesting, at least until I mastered the requisite skills. But usually, my co-workers were more important than the work. I worked most of my life as a teacher, work that was sometimes frustrating enough that I wondered whether I could continue. I did, and now I miss the classroom and the staff room.
     As always, recommended. ****

Banks and his Brother: Strange Affair (Robinson, 2005)

 Peter Robinson. Strange Affair (2005) Banks is recovering from nearly dying in the fire that destroyed his cottage. His estranged brother Roy leaves a message asking to speak to him about a matter of life and death. Banks goes off to London to find Roy.
Meanwhile, DI Annie Cabot investigates the murder of a young woman shot at close range in her car. The two threads intertwine, of course. More murders, international sex trafficking, shady business deals, etc, and we have a nicely done puzzle satisfyingly solved. But the story telling is dilatory, the a ambience sometimes pure cliche, and the characterisation too often 2D. The title’s link to the story is obscure, like a bad cryptic crossword clue. Below Robinson’s standard, which still makes it a cut or a half above average. **½

Celebrities: A culural constant (LQ 04-1)

LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a peculiarly 21st century aberration. This collection may cause a revision of that opinion, and perhaps a more sanguine attitude. It had that effect on me, and prompted a number of reflections. Herewith a small sampling.

     True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.

     The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.

     Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.

     There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps. Recommended. ****

Maliick's Pillow Book: Random musings and barbs.

     Heather Mallick. The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick (2004) Mallick was still writing for The Globe and Mail when she published this book. The Globe eventually dismissed her because of her caustic remarks about rich twits who think they’re the Universe’s gift to the rest of us. She titled this collection of notes “Pillow Book” in homage to Sei Shonagon. Like a commonplace book, a pillow book is a collection of quotes. Like a journal, the quotes are written by the collector.
     Mallick is about as open a writer as I’ve ever read. She seems to hold nothing back. I’m sure she’s left out some of her rawest bits, after all, one’s readers’ sensitivities must be respected. What she’s included adds up to a portrait of a person on whom nothing is lost, one who finds nothing human alien to her. But Mallick does show her distaste for the detestable. Fundamentally, she’s a satirist in the Juvenalian tradition, which means she’s a moralist. Her morality is simple: Don’t hurt people. But otherwise, you can do (and say) what you want.
     As you might guess, I enjoyed this book. Even the bits that annoyed me. Mallick’s sharp eye is matched by a clear style. Recommended. ****

Past Reason Hated: Early DI Banks Shows Robinson's Skills

Peter Robinson. Past Reason Hated. (1991) Caroline Hartley, a beautiful childlike woman is found stabbed to death, with a recording of Vivaldi’s Laudate Pueri playing on repeat. Banks believes that the answers he needs will be found in her past. Newly promoted Detective Constable Susan Gay, newly married Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley, the cast of an amateur production of Twelfth Night, (directed by Susan’s former teacher), the dead woman’s lover, a mysterious poet, the dead woman’s dysfunctional family, and other obstacles on the path to enlightenment delay Banks long enough that there’s almost another murder.
      An early Banks, but Robinson’s ability to develop character and ambience make for a satisfyingly long read. My copy was well-used, and will be passed on. Recommended. ***

The City (Lapham's Quarterly 03-1, 2011)

 LQ 03-4: The City (2010) The city is, I think, one of humankind’s great inventions. Through

most of our existence on Earth, there were no towns and cities. They became possible when agriculture improved enough to support a fairly large proportion of non-agricultural workers. Nowadays, in technologically advanced countries, about 5% of the population works directly in agriculture. It’s likely that building towns began when agriculture enabled supporting about 5% of the population as non-agricultural workers. But even so, pretty well every household raised all or most of their food well into the 18th or 19th century. Cities in the modern sense required not only more efficient agriculture but more efficient and cheaper transport. This may be why the first large cities were all on navigable rivers and/or next to good harbours.
     But from the beginning, towns and cities were disliked. Most of the excerpts in this collection attack the moral laxity and material excess of cities. The tension between the city and the country has varied, but it’s always existed. Cities have been targets of robbery, a.k.a. wars of conquest. They concentrate cultural and intellectual resources. That in turn fosters innovation, which raises suspicion and worse in the surrounding rural communities. In the relation between city and hinterland, exploitation and mutual dependence are often hard to distinguish, another reason for rural suspicion of the city. The first states, hierarchically organised societies with large power and economic differences, were cities. Larger States resulted from wars between cities.
     I like cities. I also like the small town in which I live. I doubt I would like it so much if I couldn’t get most of the advantages of city life as easily as I do. Communications technology provides more choice than we can manage; we’ve learned to limit our sources to make choice easier. Materially, pretty well everything I would want from the city is available by mail or special order when not available locally. Still, cities are increasing in size and number. Almost half of humankind now lives in cities. It’s will be more than half within a decade.
     Many comments in this collection indicate express praise not for human cities, but for the City of God. That golden city is not only the expected destination of the faithful, it is a counter example to the human cities that failed to live up to the expectations of their detractors.
     Recommended. ****

Humans at Play (LQ 03-4 Sports & Games)

 

    LQ 03-3: Sports & Games (2010) In 1938, Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, in which he argued that play was necessary for the creation of culture. His insight has become a cliche. This LQ collection demonstrates its truth, albeit indirectly, since it focuses on what we North Americans mean by its title. Huizinga included the arts, politics, etc in his concept. It seems to me that Huizinga’s argument amounts to saying that inventing ways of living that go well beyond finding food and reproducing is species-specific behaviour for humans.
     Play in the narrow sense is widespread among mammals. All young mammals play, and many species of adult mammals play, too. That is, they engage in some behaviour for no apparent reason other than they like doing it.
     Humans of course do more than that. We invent rules and customs around play, and spend an amazing amount of resources on it. Extend the concept to include the arts, and we humans act as if play is the purpose of life. But we find elements of play in all other aspects of human culture. It’s obvious in fashion, for example. The use of science to create useful technologies disguises that it, too, is a form of play. And all technologies eventually become at least adjuncts to play. Huizinga’s relabelling of our species is apt.
     Like other aspects of human culture, the variety of sports and games tends to distract attention from a fundamental unity. Sports and games range from pure pleasure to intense competition. All cultures engage in sports and games for both purposes. This collection shows that while humans have invented an astonishing variety of sports and games, their use is bounded by this range.
     Recommended. ****

Trivia Quizzes: "Quote...Unquote"

Nigel Rees. Quote...Unquote (1980) We like trivia. Maybe because every now and then some trivial fact turns out to matter. It may link some new fact to our store of knowledge, thus reassuring us the universe has a meaningful pattern. Or it may become the significant bit needed to solve a puzzle, or reveal some secret, or lead us to some deeper insight. All this helps explain why collections of trivia sell. Like this one. It’s an amusing selection of semi-esoteric quotations. Most are presented in quizzes, thus flattering the reader in its expectation that they will recognise most of the quotations. Taken as a whole, they make up a pointillist portrait of the 19th and 20th centuries.
     One of the quizzes asks the reader to amend such misquotes such as “Money is the root of all evil”, “ I knew him well, Horatio”, “Play it again, Sam”, etc. Misquotes like these are an example of our tendency to recall meanings but not the words used to express them.
     Cheeky illustrations by ffolkes. Fun, recommended if you can find a copy. **½

Trickster tricks make for a good life

 

    Tomson Highway. Laughing With the Trickster (CBC Massey Lectures, 2022) I learned that what I had learned about First Nations cultures was woefully incomplete. Read this book. It will educate you, and entertain you. Highway shows what he means when he says that Indigenous people laugh a lot. Life’s a blast, even when it isn’t. The Trickster deludes us, but also makes life interesting. The Creator made us for enjoyment.
     Threaded throughout this hugely exuberant romp through life is the dark narrative of the clash of Indigenous and Settler cultures. We Settlers have a lot to learn. A brighter thread, told mostly through Highway’s life story, is that Indigenous peoples are adaptable. Their cultures thrive because they have been able and willing to adapt. They don’t try to preserve their way of life, but to live it. And if that includes telling their stories in Settler languages, well, that’s life. And if that adaptation causes Settlers to adapt, too, well, that’s even better life.
     Highway ends with a brief account of his brother’s death. Rene told him, “Don’t mourn me, be joyful”. The last sentence of the book is, “ I have no time for tears; I’m too busy being joyful.”
     Read this book. ****
Footnote: Another essential book is Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer understand that all insights about the world are provisional. At best, they are merely good enough approximations to the truth. At worst, they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Travelling (Lapham's 02-3, 2009)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 02-3: Travel. (Summer 2009) Migration is forced, travel is chosen. We

succeed at both because humans have survived by keeping on the move, whether within a territory suitable for hunting and gathering, or by removal into a new territory. We share wanderlust with other animals, which suggest that it’s a condition of species survival.
     This collection tells us what we already know: Travel confirms our conviction that there’s no place like home, and prompts wonder and even delight at the variety of human ways of living and making a living. Which effect predominates depends on the traveller. The evidence shows that the self-centred make poor travellers.
     Tourism is the invention of the leisure class, of people who did not depend on trading profit to finance the journey. But apart from that, there’s little difference between tourism trading, and exploration. Travel reveals as much about ourselves as about the places and people we meet. The modern variety of tourism developed from the Grand Tour, paid for by parents anxious that their offspring would acquire experience useful for a successful career in the higher branches of capitalism and government. The educational component still predominates: the tourist industry offers education as the reason and excuse for spending time being carried across water and land while being cosseted by “the staff”.
     Many of the pieces here are firsthand accounts, which satisfy the reader’s wanderlust without requiring the tiresome nuisances of actual travel. The fictions use the differences between the traveller and the strange lands as opportunities for allegory and satire, or demonstrations that growing up entails self-discovery. Hence the many plots strung out along the roads taken, or not taken, by the hero and their companions.
     I enjoyed the collection as much for its reminders of my own travels as for the experiences of the narrators. ****

Canadians Have Had A Lot to Say: Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005)

    

Lisa Wojna Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes (2005) A re-read. Canadians have had a lot to say about themselves and their fellow-citizens, not to mention the inordinate amount of scenery that we live in. Wojna’s collection is a commendable one. The book’s a keeper. A few samples:
     The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by perfection in government. (William Davis, Premier1971-1895).
     There’s an old saying which goes: Once the last tree has been cut, and the last river poisoned, you will find that you cannot eat your money. (Joyce MacLean, the Globe and Mail)
     You have to drop out of school now and then if you want to get and education. (Pamela Peck, PhD, anthropologist)
     The Liberals talk about stable government, but we don’t know how bad the stable is going to smell. (Tommy Douglas, founder of the CCF, which became the NDP).
     If you’re not annoying somebody you’re not really alive. (Margaret Atwood)
Recommended. ****

Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****