A Fishy Mystery

John Moss. Still Waters (2008) “A Quin and Morgan Mystery”, it says on the cover. The first of a five-book (so far) series, a moody mystery, heavy on ambience and history, with minimal sketches of police procedures.
     The victim, found in one of his fish ponds, turns out to be a psychopath. There’s a tangled back-story which eventually accounts for the death. But Quin and Morgan’s interior lives interest Moss more than their detecting. Minor characters are also well conceived. Koi fish figure in creating ambience and character, a lot of by-the-way fish lore is scattered throughout. There’s almost no gore, a refreshing change from the current fashion of splashing blood about.
     Moss can write, his story draws you in. Until the last act, it moves in plausible grooves. But the last act felt contrived and over-drawn. More of a Ruth Rendell than a P D James crime novel. Nevertheless recommended. ***

Difficult Essays by George Steiner.

George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays (1972-78) Steiner is one of my heroes: his insights into how we use language have I think not been surpassed. They have certainly helped stimulate modern linguistics, which has widened its focus from the comparison of available texts to include the study of actual speech. Herewith some stray thoughts responding to and prompted by these essays.
     The study of spoken pre-literate languages has produced some unexpected results, such as that not only the lexicon but the grammar of a dialect can change radically within a speaker’s lifetime. (McWhorter, The Power of Babel). Writing slows down the rate of language change. It also, eventually, spawns two forms of the language, written and spoken, each with its own conventions and usages missing from the other.
     Steiner’s critiques of Whorf’s and Chomsky’s stances on the nature of language (Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature) feed into experiments by Pinker and others that have shown that grammatical gender, for example, affects how people feel about the world around them. That supports Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes our experience. But Bickerton’s researches into pidgins and creoles suggest that pidgins reveal the essential features of all human languages, and the creoles show how languages acquire first the regularities that we label “grammar”, and then the idiosyncrasies that differentiate them, and eventually make them new languages. Those findings support Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate.

     Steiner’s stance is that neither Whorfian nor Chomskyian hypotheses can account for actual language. This reminds me of the surprising success of computerised translation, which depends not only on dictionaries, but also on statistical features such as the most likely adjective-noun combinations. “Style” also can be statistically defined, and so can some genres. Combine these ideas with AI pattern-matching systems, and an AI algorithm can write a credible sports news report when given a handful of facts about the game.
     Steiner wrote these essays before ubiquitous personal computers, which limited his speculations and predictions about the future of reading and books (After the Book?). He correctly predicted that audio-books (cassettes) would gain market share, and that hard-cover books would lose out to other formats. What would he make of e-books and texts preserved in the electronic web? I think his judgement would stand. What he calls “deep reading” would continue to decline. The kind of awareness of other texts, past and present, which characterises serious literature, would become the preserve of a literate elite. The rest of us would be semi-literate: able to decode text, but unable (and increasingly unwilling) to take the time to relate texts to each other and to the present moment. Which is exactly what has happened. Since serious literature is historical in its very essence, the awareness of history, especially of its messiness, its ethical ambiguities and contradictions, has also declined. I haven’t read more recent essays by him, so I don’t know whether my speculations about his opinions are accurate.
     I think semi-literacy tends to simplistic literalness, a resistance to and intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to recognise irony or handle metaphor, and a suspicion of any text that assumes familiarity with allusions to the past. The digital world is an eternal present, with yesterday already receding into the mist-obscured ancient past.
     I read several of these essays twice. A book that’s difficult in Steiner’s sense, but well worth the effort. His language is ornate, laced with Latinisms, but so appositely that even unfamiliar words yield their meaning(s) transparently, and enrich the reader's understanding. ****

George Steiner 1929-2020

[British Council]

A Loony Hero: Spike Milligan's The Looney (1997)

Spike Milligan. The Looney (1997). Milligan was one of the script-writers for the Goon Show, which changed sketch-comedy forever. His writings have the same crazy mix of puns, riffs, dead-pan literalism, absurdly valid logic, and unexpected but somehow fitting plot twists as the shows. They also contain occasional bits of painful self-revelation. Milligan’s humour was his armour, his shield against despair. His rage at the hypocrisy and selfishness of the human race, at indifference to suffering, at the despoliation of nature, is barely contained. The combination makes his books hard reading at times.
     Dick Looney believes his father’s claim that the family is not only descended from Irish royalty, but are the rightful rulers of the Isle. The story, such as it is, follows Looney’s attempts to confirm the rumour and claim his throne. The short chapters read like Goon-show sketches, but as in the Goon Show, they coalesce into a sufficiently coherent narrative that the ending satisfies. ****

The Dougnut: A sustainable economy is one that doesn't "grow".

Kate Raworth proposes a new economic model based on the ecological limits of the Earth. Sensible. Realistic. Humane. Therefore certain to be opposed by the pathetic "entrepreneurs" who believe that profit will somehow insulate them from the facts of biology and physics. Or the "libertarians" who believe that economic freedom mean being free to make as much money as possible.

Find a brief video here: The Doughnut Economy.

Wiki has an article, too: Doughnut (economic model).

Great photos

Great photos here.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-53819803
One sample:

Doing Science

John Brockman, ed. Doing Science (1991) Brockman founded “The Reality Club”, an invitation-only assembly of scientists and other thinkers, whose apparent purpose was to think big-picture thoughts about science. Etc
      Each of the essays in this collection is worth reading. A couple that impressed me:
     Big Trouble in Biology, Lynn Margulis’s attack on Neo-Darwinism, which she characterises as a religion, and which she opposes mostly because it’s reductive, and fails to account for the dynamics of ecosystems. In the 30 years since her essay, biology has begun to shift its focus to ecology. Increasingly, the governing stance is that organisms exist not only as individuals, and as members of genetically defined breeding groups, but also (and I think primarily) as members of a network of interlaced feedback loops.
     “A network of interlaced feedback loops” is one way of describing chaotic systems, the subject of an essay by Ralph H. Abraham, Chaos in Myth. and Science. Abraham posits that science is informed by the same myths that inform and regulate all other aspects of our social systems. In Western mythologies, “chaos” is bad. The recent discovery of chaos mathematics and its applicability to ecosystems, the weather, human societies, etc, as well as a  still incompletely catalogued slew of physical systems, requires a restructuring of the mythologies in which Chaos figures a source of disorder, strife, and evil. Chaos must be seen as the partner of order.
     How to Tell What Is Science and What Isn’t, by Richard Morris, concludes that pseudoscience is crazy in the sense that its truth would require denying large swaths of what we know to be true. However, Morris hasn’t noted the difference between science as knowledge of what’s real (an ontological enterprise), and science as way of acquiring reliable, if limited, knowledge (an epistemological enterprise). Thus, “what we know to be true” is always tentative, which guarantees that pseudoscience will sometimes include notions that will eventually turn out to be true enough to count as science.
     A keeper. ****

Setting the Stage: Scenery for Model Railroads

Carl Swanson, ed. Model Railroader: Best of Scenery. (2020) Collection of articles, some revised, all well done, most brief and to the point. Model Railroader staff and the contributors have perfected the art of combining pictures with text to help the reader learn. Three stories show layouts with impressively plausible scenery. Throughout, there is the explicit and implicit advice to observe the world around you. Recommended. ****