Bread (Comment)

     Bread
     13-02-2013
     Bread is called the staff of life. When I was a kid, I thought of a staff as made of wood. A staff made of bread made no sense. That was before I understood metaphors of function: just as a staff supports a man, so bread supports life.
But in fact through most of human existence, there was no bread. The earliest archeological evidence for bread of a sort is about 30,000 years old. By that time homo sapiens had existed for at least 200,000 years. That bread was a cooked or semi-roasted porridge made of grains; I don’t think anyone nowadays would recognise it as bread. Flatbread baked on hot stones or a griddle are the modern equivalent. The archeology shows that these first bread makers relied on hunting and gathering for most of their food. Cereal grains were one among several types of seeds gathered for food. It took several thousand years to develop cultivation of grains; perhaps someone noticed that spilled grain would provide a crop the following year, and decided to experiment. However it began, that invention or discovery began the constantly accelerating development of technology that has made our species the dominant life form on this planet.
     Bread as staple food and agriculture go together, in fact agriculture makes no sense without bread. The earliest agricultural settlements were villages, some fortified, some not, surrounded by fields and pastures. The last users of stone tools built them about 10,000 years ago. When metallurgy was invented around 3500BCE, that technology developed swiftly, and within a few hundred years we find cities dominating the farming villages in their vicinity. These complex polities require writing, an armed force, and centrally administered law to survive.
     I think it’s no accident that the invention of bread and the earliest forms of writing, mnemonic symbols, are nearly contemporary. These symbols were used to help the reader recall everything from lists of trade goods to signs of future events to myths, those stories in which the sacred and secular histories of the tribe were mingled. Surprisingly quickly, these early mnemonic systems developed into scripts.
     Bread as staple requires agriculture, which requires a hierarchical social structure to ensure that the backbreaking (and boring) work of plowing, seeding, and harvest was done. A hierarchical society needs an agreed body of rules and customs. Law, in other words, enforced as much by common beliefs as by physical force. Customs, religious and otherwise, express the common understanding of how the world does and should work. Written law codifies those beliefs; the law describes what is to be done and what is not to be done. Writing is also handy for keeping accounts, so much so that writing numbers may have predated writing words.
     Bread is not only the staff of life, it’s the driver of those changes in human society that we are pleased to label progress.

Spike Milligan. Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974)

     Spike Milligan. Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974) Part two of Milligan’s memoir of his service in the Royal Artillery, covers the campaign that ended in the taking of Tunis. I haven’t found the other parts of what eventually became a seven part “trilogy”. He passes briefly over the horrors, quotes a good deal of banter, much of which was in the style made famous by The Goon Show. I doubt the quotations are verbatim, but am pretty sure their represent the style. Milligan punctuates his narrative with pictures (almost all of them of colonial armies), and “telegrams” from Hitler, etc.
     I get the impression that Milligan wrote the memoirs for his comrades. War marked him forever, as it did all those of his generation. Maintaining contact with comrades was for many of them the only anchor in a world made surreal in contrast to what they endured. Kurt Vonnegut’s books have the same kind of surreality as this and other  Milligan writing. All in all, a book worth reading, both by Milligan fans and by students of military history. ***

Margaret Atwood. Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)

Margaret Atwood. Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) A nicely made little book of some of Atwood’s shards and fragments: Variations on fairy tales, meditations, dialogues between unnamed characters, micro-tales, and so on. Atwood is very clever, every one of these bits succeeds. A pleasure to read. I liked The Little Red Hen Tells All, for example, which gives us a reversal of the usual plot. These items are clearly experiments of one kind or another, playful rewritings, games played with current themes and topics, but each shows us a powerful imagination, a clear-eyed wit, and, despite what that wit observes, a merry heart. ***

Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940)

     Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940) Windisch pronounces on the right way to take photographs, develop film, and print enlargements. There is an immense amount of technical data here. Windisch suffers from the German awe of the “Fachmann”, the person with special, expert knowledge, and exhibits a corresponding disdain for the layman, who, he says, is merely a “Roboter” when he follows rules and guidelines without knowing the technical basis for them. In other words, the tone of this book is offensive, however much useful data it contains. And much of the data was even more useful back then, when a good deal of the chemistry of film photography was still being explored, and manufacturing techniques weren’t capable of the consistent high quality that became available after the war.
     Windisch is a born teacher; his explications of the theory underlying the technology are models of clarity. It’s a pity his tone is that of the superior expert deigning to share his knowledge with the humble bumbling amateur. He is also quite vain. Over half of the photos he offers as examples are his, and he is, at best, merely capable. He has good technique but no art. This may be related to his belief that the art of photography were merely a matter of sound understanding of some underlying science.
     A series of pictures with text is offered as an example of how to tell a story through pictures. It’s quite good, except for its subject and tone. It consists of a number of head shots taken of the man who is rowing the photographer and his wife across Lake Chiem to an island. The man is talking about his former girlfriend, who gave him some troubles. “But not to worry – there are plenty of others where she came from”. This is told in Windisch’s version of the Bavarian dialect. I suppose he thought it was humorous, and such, but it comes across as condescending to the man and nastily indifferent to his wife, who is listening to the story, too.
     An interesting and curious book, not least because of the high quality of printing and paper. The war-induced shortages had not yet hit German life in 1940. *** for the technical content, 0 for everything else. (2006)

E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967)

     E. W. Buxton, ed. Points of View (1967) A collection of essays intended for senior high school. It’s clear that 40 years ago senior high school was still seen as serious education, and not merely the accumulation of credits for admission to the post-secondary training grounds. Buxton and his collaborator start with Montaigne and Bacon, and continue with a well done survey of the essay in English from the 1700s to the 1960s. Almost all the selections are worth reading still; only the most recent ones, from the mid-20th century, show that when it comes to recognising classics, it’s not an advantage to be a contemporary of the writer. I read almost all the essays, though, and enjoyed them. ** to *** (2006)

Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun

     Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun. Seven crystal balls explode and put seven explorers into deep comas. Tintin and Capt. Haddock set out to solve the mystery, and find it in a remnant group of ancient Incas in Peru, who jealously guard the ancient religion and customs. The explorers had desecrated holy sites in the pursuit of archeological knowledge.
     Well, I didn’t like Tintin much when I was a kid, and I don’t like him much better now. Hergé allows himself the most awful errors, such as a brown bear in the middle of a Peruvian jungle. The errors show the more because Hergé otherwise includes accurate depictions of local artefacts and clothing, and flora and fauna. His characterisation is of the most primitive kind, consisting mostly of caricaturing draughtsmanship and tics of speech whose first mild charm soon begins to grate. His crude humour contrasts with his subtle wit, to the credit of neither. I think he hasn’t made up his mind whether he’s writing fantasy or adventure stories, nor is he clear about his intended audience: children (mostly boys), or adults?. He does move the story right along, so that one keeps reading just to find out what will happen next; but that sense of narrative is his only virtue. A collaborator might have helped him develop his ideas into well structured and characterised tales. But when he was writing, the graphic novel was still seen as a merely a longer comic strip. Very few people took it seriously, perhaps not even Hergé himself. *½ (2006)

Fay Weldon. Polaris and Other Stories (1985)

     Fay Weldon. Polaris and Other Stories (1985) Weldon’s stories are generally depressing slices of suburban women’s lives. Chick lit in the 70s and 80s focussed on how men messed up marriage and in general done women wrong. Weldon’s observation of human weaknesses, those so-called minor vices that too often cause major damage, is sharp and accurate. But the gloomy tone wears after a while, and counters the pleasures of reading a skillful writer. ** (2006)