Half Moon Street: Thomas Pitt and the Dead Photographer.

 

Anne Perry. Half Moon Street (2000). Superintendent Thomas Pitt is called to the scene of a bizarre murder: A dead man dressed in a green velvet gown, and shackled to a punt in an obscene pose, may be a member of the French Embassy. He isn’t (and that loose end is tied up nicely in the end). The dead man is a photographer of great skill and reputation, some of whose clients have “sophisticated” tastes, and some of whose photos are reprinted as naughty postcards. There is also a link with the theatre, and Pitt’s sister-in-law Caroline. Hidden secrets, dysfunctional families, strong differences of opinion about the changing values of late Victorian England make this a novel of ideas as much as of crime. A good read, despite the somewhat stereotypical characters. **

Beatles I Love You!

Bill Adler, ed. Love Letters to the Beatles (9164) A rather touching selection of the hundreds of thousands of letter sent by American (mostly) girls to the Beatles in 1964, the year they landed in the USA. Data for anyone who wants to understand something of their appeal to the tween and teen female, possibly a nostalgia trip for some. I enjoyed reading it. ***

 

Stories by Asimov (Buy Jupiter!)

 Isaac Asimov. Buy Jupiter (1975) A collection of mostly short-short stories, which range from shaggy-dog jokes to parables. Asimov writes a short note about each story’s genesis and publishing history, which together form a sketchy autobiography of his life from the 1940s to the 1970s. All of the stories raise or suggest deep questions. Asimov’s strengths are dialogue and the character sketch, well suited to the short story.
     The title story imagines aliens who want Jupiter as a billboard to be viewed as their starships pass by our solar system. But they aren’t as canny as Earthlings when it comes to advertising, so they don’t realise they should also ensure they have the rights to Saturn and the other outer planets. One of Asimov's repeated theses is that the outlier, the oddball, the “unsettled mind” are the creative ones that drive what little progress homo sapiens has achieved. (This thesis shapes the Foundation series.) I wouldn’t go that far: These people drive change, and change is just as likely to be regress as progress, when it’s not merely a ineffectual distraction from the orderly flow of the daily round.
     I enjoyed this book, reading most of it one evening, and finishing it the next morning. ** to ****

 Update 2021-08-15: Re-read the whole thing this past week. Discovered that I'd forgotten most of the stories, which shows that Asimov's fiction isn't especially memorable. It was clearer than ever that these short tales are more or less elaborate jokes: a slow misleading build-up, a quick delivery, and a punch-line to underscore the point. They were all funny, albeit several of them  macabre jokes. Still, I enjoyed reading them. Maybe I'll remember them better now. If, that is, I really want to. Same ratings.

Why Do Humans Believe Nonsesnse? (Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science)

 

      Martin Gardner. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) The book that made Gardner’s reputation as a skeptic. In most of his writing, he focussed on mathematics, and for many years wrote a mathematical recreations column for Scientific American.
     This book is a revised and expanded version of his 1952 book In the Name of Science. It deals with then current pseudosciences, cults, medical fads  and quacks, and con-artists of the technical kind. As evidence of the effects of semi-literacy, wishful thinking, and envy of expertise it is as relevant as ever. Mystery-mongers are more plentiful these days, and have a wider reach, with slickly made videos purporting to tell the “suppressed” history of Atlantis, ancient civilizations, alien surveillance of (and interference with) humans, and so on. Political conspiracies are seen everywhere, and all the old pseudo-scientific notions are revised to fit the latest physics, and to signal political virtues to match the current political animosities. Time travel is enjoying a vogue on YouTube, with an astonishing number of videos claiming to show photographic proof.
     The last 60-odd years have yielded insights that a allow some new responses to 1950s foolishness. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics has morphed in the Church of Scientology, which sues anyone who questions its bona fides as a religion or theory of the higher realities. Nutritional science has advanced, and lately the researchers have been edging towards the conclusion that diet is idiosyncratic, and that the only generally valid advice is to eat a large variety of different foods, and to limit caloric intake. Rhine’s investigations into psi have been consigned to a footnote of the history of science even as the belief in ESP etc continues to muddle thinking about statistics.
     On the other hand, the dissemination of relativity and quantum physics has given the quacks an updated vocabulary of nonsense, and medical pseudoscience in particular has become a plague. New Age piffle is still with us, and has begun to claim that all the traditional emanations, levels of consciousness, and mental powers impinge on our universe from the multiverse that surrounds us.
     And so on. The book is well done. This is a reread, and my general impression is that a modern version of it would differ only in the names of some cranks and the dates of their works. ***

Homo Faber: Technology (Lapham's Quarterly XIV/1)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIV/1 Technology (2021) Simon Winchester in his introduction to this collection adduces three phases of “technology proper”: the mechanical, the electronic, and the atomic, and argues that despite the Greek aptitude for mechanical devices, the mechanical age did not begin until an arrangement of mechanisms powered by steam was invented by Watt and his contemporaries. I think this view of technology is limited both conceptually and historically, even though it’s wider than the current most widely used meaning of the word. “Technology” these days usually means electronics, and often (more narrowly) electronic digital devices. More seriously, Winchester ignores spinning and weaving: I wonder who had the wit to put an image of a spinning wheel on the cover.

     I think that technology evolves out of tool making. Homo sapiens and its relatives became the dominant hominids because they went beyond the shaping of natural objects into tools, a process they refined over several hundred thousand years. But then they figured out how to combine shaped pieces of hide, wood, bone, and stone into more complex objects, and how to combine pieces of animal hide into clothing. They discovered a method of invention. Invention is an exponential process. We now have such rapid development that our habits, customs, ethics, and laws all fail to keep up with it.

     I recently came across the thesis that technology as such begins with the invention of spinning and weaving, a far more complex process, which depends on more than the recognition that reshaping a natural object may make it more useful. There is simply no natural analogue to textiles. They may have been inspired by spider webs, but they are a wholly new human invention. Through most of human history textiles were a more precious material than any others. Since the invention of the power loom, textiles have become so cheap that we think nothing of throwing them away. In fact, we make too much of the stuff, and even the poorer countries of the world no longer want our cast-offs.

     The next major phase of technology was the production of new materials, ceramics and metals. Both require exquisite control of fire and raw materials. Both put a premium on the human ability to imagine consequences, to observe and infer effects from causes, to imagine possibilities and find ways of testing them. The industrial revolution that Winchester adumbrates as the beginning of technology began when some European “natural philosophers”, inspired by Arabian examples of extensions of ancient knowledge, devised methods of systematic investigation of the world around them. By so doing, they accelerated that process of the mutual interplay of inquiry and technology that Winchester describes in his introduction. We live with the effects, in a system of constant invention and (occasional) improvement. This collection shows us how we have become more aware of both the process and our inability to escape from it.
     Another well done overview. ****

Government ain't easy: Democracy (Lapham's Quarterly XIII/4)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII/3 Democracy (2020) Though most of recorded history, “democracy” was a word and concept that struck terror into the hearts and minds of the rulers. Forgive the cliche, but when it comes to politics, it’s all cliche. Such as the equation of democracy with mob rule, which will destroy peace, order, and good government as certainly as the most heinous of tyrannies. And despite the example of Athens, that’s what democracy tends toward.
     Athenian political theory is quite clear: Oligarchy will give way to democracy, which will morph into mob rule, which will attract a tyrant or king to restore order. The king may found a dynasty, but the next phase will be an oligarchy, and so the whirligig of politics will bring in its revenges. History doesn’t suggest easy way to escape this cycle.
     This collection does have a few surprises, however. For example, the Haudenosaunee or Five Nations Confederacy, which pre-dated European contact, operated on consensus. (It comprised the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Mohawk.) No decision was made until a consensus had been reached, even if it took days of talk. There is documentary evidence that democracy in the modern sense owes much to this model, for the American Revolution contained two strands, the one urging democracy, the other frankly oligarchic. Oligarchy won, and ever since the USA has been attempting to create the democracy that the Declaration of Independence aspires to describe, and which justified the Revolution.
     I think the inference from the evidence is that democracy is possible, but it requires constant effort, and constant re-invention.
     I’m puzzled that this collection omits what I think is the best comment on the whole business of government, Thoreau’s first two sentences of Civil Disobedience:
 

I heartily accept the motto,— “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,— “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
     

In the meantime, we must make do with whatever governance we are able to tolerate. As usual, an excellent collection of word and image. ****

A Family Holiday: Summer's Lease (John Mortimer)

 

 John Mortimer. Summer’s Lease (1988) Molly Pargeter, who carries the burdens of family life, arranges a Tuscan holiday in a rented villa for a her family. Her husband Hugh will of course take credit for the idea and the planning. Her randy father, a writer of occasional pieces for local newspaper, tags along. What follows is an apparently casual but carefully plotted ramble of a story, in which Molly’s obsessive search for the truth causes a calamity of which she is blissfully unaware. Some rifts are mended, some ambitions frustrated, nostalgia gets its due. Well done. ***