Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993)

     Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993) A collection of “alternate history” stories, which I began in August, and mostly read in September, and finished on October 1, so I’m counting it as a September book. The eras range from ancient history to the far future. As with all such speculative sociology, the theories underlying the stories tend to be simplistic, but that doesn’t often detract from them as stories. After all, contemporary fiction suffers from the same deficiency. Plausibility does not depend on factual truth.
     Turtledove’s vision tends to be dark: history is driven by greed, hate, prejudice and sheer ignorance. Occasional glimmers of honour, truth and justice flicker fitfully here and there, but they are strictly personal virtues, not systemic attributes of a society. A couple of his stories are pure fantasy; the rest hew pretty closely to reality as we know it. One of his repeated notions is that Muhammad became a Christian monk, so that the Muslim world never came into being. The contrary vision, that Islam became the dominant culture of Europe, also informs several of his stories. An alternate worlds story takes us to a North America whose Revolutionary War was incomplete, and hence no unified polity ever emerged: a mish-mash of independent former colonies and states still tied to England, as well as aboriginal fiefdoms, has led to a state of perpetual warfare, and a very delayed Industrial Revolution.
     Like many pre-perestroika writers, Turtledove carefully use ethnic names to denote an “international” space culture. However, he does not assume that the Soviets will endure in their present form; his alternate future Russia breaks up into a re-established Czarist empire and a federation of reformed Soviet states.
     Not that it matters. Closer reflection shows that Turtledove uses the alternate history settings in otherwise very traditional ways. There are adventure romances, fantastic fables, hard-science mysteries, tall tales, and so on. Two stories comment on the role of the Jews in our world (Turtledove is a Jew) and both stories work very well, both as stories and as lessons. An amusing collection; I omitted one story that was getting tedious, but enjoyed the rest. ** to ***. (2002)

Coronet Magazine, August 1960

     Coronet Magazine, August 1960. Reading old magazines reminds us how much popular culture can change. The assumptions which we use in our daily lives, in our interpretation of everything from advertising to political news, change far more thoroughly in some respects than we like to admit.
     Consider the cover story: “Can Catholics Ever Accept Birth Control?” The author, William Clancy, says no, on the grounds that birth control violates objective natural law, which the Catholic Church has always accepted as God-given. He means objective moral law, of course, not natural law as we generally understand it. His argument was published as a serious contribution to the debate. It would probably not be published in a general interest magazine nowadays, based as it is on the arrogant assumption that his moral law is the only objectively true one. But it does explain why the hierarchy still opposes all conception control, while it accepts conception avoidance, on the grounds that the latter is more natural than the former. Why taking advantage of the fertility cycle of a woman to prevent conception is natural while taking advantage of mechanical or chemical processes to achieve the same end is not, is a question that I have long puzzled over. [Note 2013: even in 1960, many Catholics had already "accepted" birth control, and now a majority have done so. The hierarchy still uses Clancy's arguments to condemn it.]
     The general tone of articles on technical and scientific topics is very positive. Science and technology will improve our lives; side effects can be fixed easily with more science and technology. Even though Carson’s Silent Spring had been published some years earlier, and was still a best seller in 1960, its effects on general attitudes to the environment were still small. In particular, there seems to have been no sense of the inter-connectedness of things: That a solution over here will cause a problem over there. It took a few real disasters, such as Bhopal in India, repeated oil spills, and real effects on people’s health from pollution, to make her message real to most of us. The optimistic and hopeful attitudes toward science have been replaced by suspicion and hostility, an equally irrational response to what is after all the only means we have of knowing how the world really works, and figuring out ways to protect ourselves from its dangers. But I suppose I should keep in mind the rah-rah hyping of genetic engineering: it eerily echoes the happy acceptance of the wonders of the plastics and chemical industries in the 1950s and 60s. Think of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character is told to get into plastics if he wants a great future.
     The feminist revolution had as yet no effect in August 1960, if this magazine is evidence. There are a couple of articles about how to be a good wife. They were presumably amusing then, but they don’t strike me as amusing now. But they do explain Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. The implicit and sometimes explicit patronising of tone towards “the little woman” in these articles (and in a photo story about Zsa Zsa Gabor), and even more obviously shown in the ads, must have offended many women even back then, and certainly offended any woman who thought about her status.
     The political articles don’t come close to the kind of stuff people published a mere three or four years later. 1960 was really still the 50s, and there is a respect shown towards politicos that no one feels any of them deserve nowadays. On the other hand, the kind of journalism that exposed the Watergate scandals isn’t possible anymore either, not since the media have been “consolidated” into ever greater conglomerates, and “convergence” has blurred the lines not only between the media, but also between advertising, information, and entertainment.
     The ads are the most telling. They are straightforward, and the longer ones, with lots of text, take a sensible tone, as of one man speaking to another. I was charmed by the ad for The Empire Builder, a streamlined train, which depicted a senior executive who is taking the train from Chicago to Seattle so as to have time for reflection about a big deal that his underlings have been negotiating, underlings who have flown to Seattle in order to have everything ready for the great man when he arrives
     All in all, what strikes me about this (and other magazines from the same time) is the naivete and hopefulness. Most of the articles are puff-pieces of one kind or another, or are designed to create an image of America the Good and Beautiful and Fun To Live In. People had not yet become as utterly cynical and almost hopeless as they have nowadays. Looking back, we can see the mistakes we made back then; but our reaction to those mistakes will certainly lead us to make equally bad or even worse ones. ** (2002)

Cohen and Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos. (1994)

      Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos (1994) Cohen and Stewart attempt a meta-story here: that of how the chaotic, messy events on one level of reality (or perhaps merely analysis) produce regular and orderly features at a higher. An excellent book, often heavy going for anyone without at least a smattering of a variety of disciplines, but also often offering high spirits and sly irony.
I read it when it first appeared, but had forgotten almost all of it. Only a few marginal notes (typo-corrections, mostly) testify to my former reading.
     But I realise that many of its ideas have become commonplace for me. Chief of these are four. The first is that theories or models may or may not represent reality as it is. They are certainly work-alikes. That is, their observable external relations are the same as what they model, but there is no guarantee that their internal workings are the same. Nor is it ever possible to discover whether models are more than work-alikes, since attempts to get inside the black boxes merely produce more models with the same ontological deficiency.
     The second idea is that of emergent features: that it is impossible to predict, and often impossible in practice to explain, how the behaviour of one set of entities gives rise to features observable at a larger scale (or “higher level.”) Related to this is the idea that to explain how something happens is not the same as predicting what will happen. Science’s attempt to combine explicability and predictability, indeed most people’s belief that they are the same, has kept us from noting and investigating many things, or has misdirected our investigations. Ironically, it was just such a misdirected investigation (that of trying to derive a model of the weather from statistical data) that led to the discovery of chaotic systems, and prompted the development of chaos theory. Mandelbrot, also, testifies to this irony: according to Stewart, he said he had studied fractals a long time before he realised that he was looking at a new class of mathematical objects.
     The third idea is that the genome does not describe the organism, but merely the production the proteins that interact with each other and the environment to produce the organism. Understanding this puts a huge question mark over all genetic engineering. We simply cannot predict all the effects of transferring a gene from one organism to another. The fact that at present a very small minority of such transfers actually work to produce any result, let alone the desired one, shows that genetic engineering is still the crudest form of trial and error. But the genome-as-blueprint metaphor has great power, probably because of its simplicity, and because people do not understand blueprints, but think they do. Everyone has seen blueprints, for example in the weekly home-plans feature carried by many newspapers. The fact that such plans are really directions to the builder, and do not contain enough information to describe the final building, is lost on most people. That is why the metaphor misleads. People do not consider the blueprint as a recipe, which is really what it is. It might be better to make the metaphor explicit, and think of the genome as a program or recipe. A recipe for a cheese omelette does not describe the omelette, it describes how to make one. It takes ingredients and a cook and a stove to make an omelette. Just so, a genome does not describe an organism, it describes how to make one. It takes a zygote and a womb and an organism to make one.
     The description of the process of development is indirect, too, and consists mostly of instructions to make or stop making proteins. The proteins themselves react with each other and other chemicals, under the influence of temperature, pH, etc, and the result is a developing organism. What’s more, the proteins affect the genome’s functions: the products made under process A trigger instruction X, which stops process A and starts process B. B triggers instruction Y, which starts process C, which triggers instruction Z, which stops process B; and so, in all sorts of interlaced and intertwining instructions and processes.
     Finally, Stewart and Cohen have a healthy respect for the limits of scientific explanation. More than most popular science writers, they emphasise the fuzziness and tentativeness of science. This is a good thing, if only to remind us all that knowledge, even the most strongly supported, is never certain. If only religious folk understood this and accepted it, they might have more faith. **** (2002)
     Update 2013: It now appears that genetics is even more complicated than Cohen and Stewart knew. The environment (i.e, other cells, the chemical bath surrounding the cell, the organ of which it a part, the organism embedded the external environment, ...) turns genes on and off, which in turn affect the cells interaction with neighbouring cells, the chemical bath that surrounds it, and so on a wonderfully recursive dance. And just within the last year or so it's been discovered that genes can be transferred "horizontally" between species,probably via the microorganisms that inhabit it). See this National geographic article. The problem is that we don't have a language to describe the dynamic web of reactions that constitute an organism. In ordinary language, an organism is at best a gearbox. In fact it's something much more difficult to describe. we are thrown on the mercy of our metaphors. Her's one: an organism is shape created by its substrate, in the same that a fountain is a shape created by its substrate: water for the decorative fountain in your garden; plasma on the surface of the Sun.

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals

 

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals (Ed. Alan Downer, 1953) Reading this reminded me once again how much a play depends on performance, especially if it is written in a style we do not expect in a play. Nowadays, we expect dialogue that’s close to the way people actually speak; we even expect sentence fragments and jumbles. Shakespeare’s style is closer to our expectations, so that he is easy to read once one has learned the early modern English in which he wrote. Sheridan’s language is much closer to our own, yet his eighteenth century formalities interfere with comprehension in way Shakespeare does not. Even Mrs Malaprop, who mangles the language, does so only at the level of vocabulary. All Sheridan’s characters speak in the same formal periods; a few minor differences in oaths don’t amount to enough of a distinction to enable us to read the play easily.
      Two years ago, Marie and I saw a performance in Stratford, England. It was wonderful, because the actors could make these stilted sentences sound natural and expressive. That performance struck a fine and beautiful balance between hamming and exaggeration, between the artificialities of theatre and the realities of life. The result was a play that drew you into its preposterous premises and made you believe, even while you knew you were watching a carefully crafted illusion, one that emphasised its illusory qualities in the set design and staging. Actors are a great gift to a playwright, especially one who has been dead for couple hundred years.
     The plot is pure soap opera: girl wants unsuitable boy, Father wants boy to marry suitable girl, a rival wants the girl’s money, servants are loyal to whoever pays them the most, and the older folk discover that the cooling coals of passion can be blown into hot flame. In the end, the right people marry each other, as they should, or else what’s the point of a comedy. Along the way there’s a lot of good clean and not-so-clean fun. Staged by a competent crew, one enjoys both a preposterous story made believable, and the realisation that one is seeing pure theatre. *** (2002)

Eating Horses: some history (link)

     Scientific American of  September 1886 ran an article about eating horses. Here's the link: SciAm 1886 Eating Horses
     Comments: The religious prohibition is very odd, considering that St Peter had a dream about "unclean" animals, which is usually interpreted as an attack on the the notion of "unclean" food.
     Real salami (not the imitation sold as such in our supermarkets) is made from donkey meat. The best french fries are said to be those fried in horse fat.
      During WW2, horse meat was offered in many parts of Europe when other meats became scarce. The objections to eating horses are clearly cultural and psychological: we just don't like eating friends. We think of horses, like dogs and cats, as friends. Family, even.

Moonstruck (1987)

   

    Moonstruck (1987) [D: Norman Jewison. Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis] 39-year-old widow Loretta Castorini (Cher) agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello) even though she doesn’t love him. At his request, she finds his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to invite him to the wedding. They fall in love, and the rest of the movie unravels the complications caused by this accident of fate. Loretta’s father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) is having an affair. Her mother Rose (Dukakis) has a brief conversational encounter with Perry, a philandering professor. Johnny’s mother recovers from her deathbed, which will delay the wedding. All in all, a lovely mess, which Jewison directs with flair. The actors are convincing, the editing supports their exquisite timing, the narrative pace is always just fast enough that we ignore improbabilities, and slow enough that we savour the Great Moments.
     Almost exactly in the middle we attend a performance of La Bohème (Ronny loves opera), which reminds us that this movie is itself an opera: larger than life, moving the story forward through emotion not reason, and ultimately satisfying because it feels right. Logic has nothing to do with it. Logically, we should all give up and die, since that’s what will happen to us all anyhow. This movie says, No, we should live, and risk heartbreak. As someone else said somewhere: Pain is good, it reminds us we are alive. So is joy, and for the same reason. ****

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

      In the Heat of the Night (1967) [D: Norman Jewison. Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger] Watching this movie, I realised that I hadn’t seen it since its release 46 years ago. I did see many of the TV series episodes, and my vague memories of both made for a melange of misleading impressions. I’m glad we decided to watch it on TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies. The story is simple: Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), waiting for a train in Sparta, Mississippi, is arrested as a suspect in the murder of Colbert. a Northerner planning to build a factory in Sparta. When Chief Gillespie (Steiger) learns that Tibbs is Philadelphia’s number one homicide expert, he wants Tibbs to help him. Tibbs and Gillespie solve the crime, but not before personal weaknesses, and social and racial tensions create events that intersect with and delay the solution of the puzzle.
     The movie is tough, considering its time it’s very tough. It’s difficult to recall the state of race relations in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was top of news and mind. We all knew that people had been murdered in the South. We knew that a mild mistake or social solecism could still be lethal for blacks in Mississippi and Alabama. In Canada the racism wasn’t as overt, but it was real enough. We were at the beginning of decades of self-congratulation for “achievements” that should have been unremarkable: black MPs, black Lt Governors, black writers, and so on. This movie arrived on our screens carrying a heavy load of baggage.
     Still, the movie works simply as a movie. It’s quite likely that under-30s won’t get the full import of some of its plot points, for example, a Philadelphia police chief telling his black subordinate to help out the cops in a Mississippi town, or Endicott and Tibbs conversation about orchids in Endicott’s green house, or the fact that a Northerner was planning to build a factory in the town.
     Chief Gillespie’s slow, grudging acceptance of  Virgil Tibbs as a colleague is nicely done. Gillespie first fingers Tibbs as the perpetrator, then a poor white boy, then one of his own officers. The unquestioned assumptions of the old Southern social order prevent clear thinking. Tibbs also suffers from prejudices: he wants to bring down Endicott, a man who tries to maintain the ante-bellum social order, and, absent slavery, succeeds. Endicott is not the murderer, or even behind the murder, but the values he represents mess up the investigation. The turning point comes when Tibbs admits his hatred of Endicott. Gillespie says, “You’re like the rest of us.” This is a turning point for Gillespie, too. Both men are now able to see each other's strengths and weaknesses as men as well as cops, and the case unravels pretty quickly from that point on.
     The movie works on many levels. The acting is very, very good. It’s difficult to portray a change in character; both Poitier and Steiger succeed. The secondary characters are given enough of a backstory that we understand why they act as they do. Their racism may be a reflex, but it’s a reflex they can on occasion transcend. The pacing of the movie is just right. It starts slowly, and most of the time we see the action contrasted with the slow rural ambience of the town, so that even a drive across town is imbued with menace. The overall feel is of reactions barely suppressed, of rage and fear seething below the Southern politeness, a politeness that cracks from time to time.
      Daylight, nighttime, interior and exterior shots are so subtly alternated that we don’t realise how seamlessly they tell the story until we reflect on that story. The story itself is entirely plausible, both the crime, and the personal and social conflicts that intersect with it. Tibbs occasionally seems a little to good to be true, but in the next shot he’s vain enough of his superior policing skills that this impression dissipates. Unlike the stereotypical detective, he has to be rescued from physical danger. The ending, when Gillespie takes leave of Tibbs with the affectionate “You take care, y’hear?”, is perhaps too Hollywood feel-good, but that’s a very minor cavil. ****