Monthly Bookpost, July 2015
The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
The earth glowed with a dim red light like a piece of charcoal just retrieved from a furnace. For a brief moment, Wang saw the stars, but soon steam and smoke hid the sky and covered everything on the red-glowing earth. The World sank into a dark chaos. A red line of text appeared:
Civilization Number 141 fell into ruin in flames. This civilization had advanced to the Eastern Han period. The seed of civilization remains. It will germinate and again progress through the unpredictable world of THREE BODY. We invite you to log on in the future.
Three Body Problem is the fifth and last of the Hugo-nominated novels I have read. See Bookposts from April, May and June for the others. The grapevine says it's the favorite to win, and it's not hard to see why.
Some detractors and supporters will tell you it's the favorite because it is one of the first important speculative fiction genre books NOT from the English-speaking countries--certainly one of the first from China-- to gain major recognition, and the sci-fi geek community should be more inclusive and celebrate this Chinese work as an essential and neglected part of the spectrum of the imagination---or alternatively, that the Hugos are broken because the "politically correct SJWs" are going all affirmative action and giving the book awards because it is Chinese as opposed to because it's any good.
It seems to me, The Three Body Problem deserves recognition both for diversity and for quality. Seems to me, there's nothing wrong with giving some weight to a book's merit because it speaks with a voice somewhat different from the ones we hear more often. It also seems to me, one reason The Three Body Problem made it into the English-speaking world's consciousness is that it kicks ass. This is not Cixin Liu's first book. It is not the first sci-fi book written in China. But it's the only one a lot of us geeks know about.
And it's a new and different book that begins in 1967 under the Maoist cultural revolution, with a message sent into space, and continues in the present, when the ramifications of that message become apparent. Physicists are going mad, having concluded that everything they know about physics is wrong. A strange virtual reality game in which civilization ends again and again is raising questions and may have a hidden meaning. And...perhaps the Earth is under attack.
It has an exciting plot and it requires intelligence to read.
So...here's how I rank the Hugo-nominated novels. Your mileage may vary.
1. The Goblin Emperor
2. The Three Body Problem
3. Ancillary Sword
4. No Award
5. Skin Game
6. The Dark Between the Stars
Areopagitica, by John Milton
I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
This brief tract is included in both the Great Books of the Western World and Harvard Classics, because Milton, and because liberal education, from Plato's Apology, to Locke's Letter Concerning toleration to Mill's On Liberty is necessarily big on the free exchange of ideas and discussion of great issues. All of these are still staples in Humanities courses. Then again, so is The Republic, which advocated censorship, and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which actually urged book-burning. Guess we'll just have to teach "the controversy".
Milton wrote this in response to an act of the post-Cromwell Parliament that (understandably jumpy after a long, violent revolution and regicide) was trying to calm inflammatory rhetoric by requiring all books to be licensed by the government or subject to destruction (and fines and jail for the writer and/or publisher. Milton explained to Parliament that it was wrong, and that the remedy for disapproved-of speech should be equal and opposite speech.
I'd like to think that, free speech being a staple of the founding of America, we'd be past the need for this--I was a little bored by the tract, mostly because the argument seemed so self-evident to me. But then, here we are in the 21st century, and a whole lot of people still want to punish by law any ideas they consider harmful, from racism to accurate teaching of the uglier parts of American history to Darwin to criticism of Presidents from one's own political party. An overlapping lot of people also can't seem to tell the difference between the criminalizing of speech by government action and social condemnation from citizens for speaking like an asshole. So I guess Areopagitica is still needed.
Also included in my edition was Treatise on Education, which was a letter Milton wrote in reply to fan mail asking him what things should be taught to the young. Not surprisingly, milton recommended the study of great books, in the original Hebrew, Greek and Latin (because they weren't published much in the vernacular back then; the elite wanted to hoard knowledge for themselves so that they could look down their snoots at the masses for being illiterate. So yes, know these works, and be accounted a gentleman); war games and drills as Phys. Ed., and a decent diet.
Lives, by Izaak Walton
I have now brought him to the parsonage of Bemerton, and to the thirty-sixth year of his age, and must stop here, and bespeak the reader to prepare for an almost incredible story, of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life; a life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it: a life, that if it were related by a pen like his, there would then be no need for this age to look back into times past for the examples of primitive piety; for they might be all found in the life of George Herbert. But now, alas! who is fit to undertake it? I confess I am not; and am not pleased with myself that I must; and profess myself amazed when I consider how few of the clergy lived like him then, and how many live so unlike him now. But it becomes not me to censure: my design is rather to assure the reader that I have used very great diligence to inform myself, that I might inform him of the truth of what follows; and though I cannot adorn it with eloquence, yet I will do it with sincerity.
Walton is mostly remembered for The Compleat Angler, a snoozer of a book that turned out to use fishing as a metaphor for sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, and which I don't intend to read. The Lives consists of five short biographies of 17th century poets, minor statesmen and clergy (Sir Henry Wotton, Robert Hooker, John Donne, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson), of whom Donne is the one most people will have even heard of, and which I read because the Donne and Herbert bios were included in the Harvard Classics (and not mentioned anywhere else, to my knowledge).
Dr. Elliott says that the Lives are models of short biography. they are not. He says that the characters of the subjects are vividly brought to life. They are not. He says that Walton's own irrepressible personality shines forth on every page. It does not. These are some of the driest, dullest chronicles of people who I've ever failed to know any better after reading accounts of how terribly, terribly virtuous they were.
The typical bio goes into unnecessary detail about the subject's family tree, about the youthful subject's decision at an early age to delve into the law or the clergy, about places he lived and illnesses he had. When he dies, we are dutifully told about how bereaved everyone was at his service and how long his inconsolable widow survived him. Sometimes there are examples of poetry he wrote, or an instructive anecdote. Often there are assertions that so-and-so had particular admirable qualities. I rejoice to hear it.
The edition I read included an introductory bio of Walton that is as long as the bios in the book, and maybe a little more entertaining. It is supposedly a fascinating and great tribute to Walton that he, the son of a nobody, was able to move in decent society and have notable friends in an age where everybody who was nobody was eagerly snubbed all round by the very people Walton admires for their numerous virtues. Walton went to a great many dinners and was seen in convivial company, but Samuel Johnson's roundtable it weren't.
Knaves Templar; Witness of Bones; Time's Fool, by Leonard Tourney; The Perfumed Sleeve, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Fair Maid of Bohemia, by Edward Marston; A Conspiracy of Violence, by Susanna Gregory
"Don't try calling out," Flynch added, his mocking voice floating down from above them. "For none shall hear but the rats. This cellar is as old as Abraham's uncle and long forgotten. You're as safe from discovery and rescue here as you would be in Newgate or the Tower itself."
Hodge used the torch to relight the nub of the candle. He handed it to Joan. "When this night is over, you'll wish mt friend Flynch had finished you in the street, Mistress Stock."
--from Knaves Templar
Torn between his chamberlain and cousin, loath to offend either, the shogun flung up his hands and turned to Sano. "You decide who will supervise you!"
Sano was appalled that the shogun had passed the decision to him. Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira wore expressions of displeasure that they had failed to coax the shogun and he'd put their fate in the hands of an inferior. They fixed ominous glares upon Sano.
Once more, Sano sensed their antagonism rising to the danger point. He pictured armies poised to charge. Again he saw the moment depending on himself.
He said, "Your Excellency, I would be honored to have both Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira supervise my investigation."
--from The Perfumed Sleeve
"Very good. The weapon, Stock's presence and the implausible story circumstances shall force him to relate will make him a most credible murderer. You have done well, Stearforth. You exceed my expectation of you by several leagues. Now Cecil and his minion are where I would have them. Stock shall himself be entangled in such a web that the spider will eat out his heart before he is half aware of his peril."
--from Witness of Bones
The man smiled, then chuckled, then laughed at his own folly. He had been completely taken in by the ruse. Nicholas won a new respect from him. In the resourceful book-holder, the man had a worthy adversary. It would add more spice to his assignment. Westfield's Men would need to be trailed in a very different way from now on. Nicholas would be more wary than ever and the rest of the company would be alerted.
As he thought about the sturdy figure who had washed himself in the stableyard, the man's laughter took on a darker note. Instead of jeering at his own folly, he was savouring the pleasure of a duel with an able opponent. There would be no swift dagger-work in an empty stable this time. He wanted the utmost enjoyment from the death of Nicholas Bracewell.
---from The Fair Maid of Bohemia
Chaloner swung around when he heard the rustle of leaves behind him. A sharp hiss cut through the air, and instinct and training were responsible for his abrupt dive off the moss-encrusted path. A moment later, the servant joined him on the ground, a blade embedded in his chest and his single eye already beginning to glaze with encroaching death. Blood gushed from his mouth in a way that indicated a lung had been pierced. He turned his head slightly and looked at Chaloner.
"Praise God's one son," he whispered.
--from A Conspiracy of Violence
My pen scratched. Silence else. My eyes strained in the flickering light. My work, my life, my passion. I saw myself as another might see me who, passing by, looked in the window to glimpse this paunchy, balding, middle-aged clerk at his labor. Solitary, pre-occupied--a figure provoking as much pity and scorn as admiration for his dubious art. I stopped thinking about my interview with Cecil. Stopped thinking about the evil angel of my sonnets. Stopped thinking about myself. The play was the thing. There was nothing else.
---from Time's Fool
Last month I finished Fiona Buckley. This month I finish off Leonard Tourney, the next chronologically in the mysteries that begin with Elizabeth and end with the Restoration, and the least favorite series I'm reading this year. Tourney's stories have a habit of beginning promisingly, having a fair share of suspense, and ending with a dull anticlimactic thud, neither plausible nor satisfying. Knaves Templar begins as a nice revenge story, with a nasty stillbirth and a woman killing law students at the Temple Bar, and devolves into a mushel of nonsense. Witness of Bones is more coherent. It's a straightforward adventure with the villains identified upfront and the suspense being how will the Stocks defeat a plot to frame Matthew for murder.
Time's Fool turns out to not be about the usual detectives at all, but features William Shakespeare in the first person, investigating the death of his "dark lady" and another death for which he is framed. Edward Marston has spoiled me for London theatre company murders--this one just doesn't compare, bard or no bard.
The Perfumed Sleeve is the next Sano Ichiro novel, and it is a game-changer that really did keep me guessing about how the two deaths in the story happened. In addition to a houseful of suspects, Sano must cope with rival political factions supervising his investigation and each planting evidence that would implicate the other in the crime. Very high recommendations.
The Fair Maid of Bohemia is a tad darker than the usual rompish Westfield's Men theatrical murders, but it still has plenty of comic relief. This one takes the players outside of England for the first time, to perform in (where else?) Bohemia, and foil some international plots without flubbing their lines.
With the Buckley and Tourney serieses finished, at last I come to the only Restoration-era series I know about. Susanna Gregory is apparently best known for a medieval mystery series I missed in 2013 when I was reading books set in that era, but this series will do just as well. Thomas Chaloner, the protagonist, is a former spy for Cromwell who, like his former spymaster, has changed coats when the wind has changed, returned to an unfamiliar London from a long mission in Holland and, in 1660, landed in a snakepit of plots and counterplots. The expository first novel, A Conspiracy of Violence is delightful for character and atmosphere; the plot is ridiculous. Gregory has woven a tale out of a few entries in Pepys' diary and many historical characters, and made a London quite different from the one described by Pepys--one in which a dozen or so men, either Royalists seeking revenge against Cromwellists, or Cromwellists fighting to bring down the new king, are involved in various conspiracies with each other, betraying allies, all ultimately acting alone and planting more red herrings against one another than would fill a koi pond. There is a horde of ill gotten gold, a mysterious "seven", an odd password, and many attempts on the life of Chaloner. The solution is almost by process of elimination, as few suspects are left standing by the end of the story, but Gregory has read her Umberto Eco, and just because someone is dead doesn't mean he's out.
London Orbital (a walk around the M25), by Iain Sinclair
Did we qualify--as customers? Drummond, Atkins and Sinclair? Unlikely. Elective leisure was the condition of our lives, endured through a puritanical work ethic. Drummond scribbling away, anonymously, in the cafeteria of a provincial department store. Atkins hunched in his dark room. Sinclair zigzagging around the fringes in a frantic attempt to avoid all versions of the circuit, the smooth walk that carries you back to the point of departure. We were spurners of Best Value. Drummond burnt money and gave away self-published booklets. Atkins printed more photographs than he could sell in ten lifetimes. I wrote the same book, the same life, over and over again. We wanted Worst Value. We refused cashback. We solicited bad deals, ripoffs, tat. If you explained something to us, we wouldn't touch it. We knew what Best Value meant: soap bubbles, scented bullshit. That's why our walk began at the most tainted spot on the map of London. Exorcism, the only game worth the candle.
The "most tainted spot on the map of London" is the Lee Valley Leisure Complex, an apparently tacky bourgeoisie development for which Sinclair has heaps of scorn.
Iain Sinclair is one of those insane, highly literate forces of nature whose chief pleasure in life is to find fault with everything in hilarious ways, and whose second chiefest pleasure is to delight in quirky trivia. My dad would have loved him, and I found his account of a year-long walk around the busy highway surrounding outer London to be hilarious and well worth accompanying him---at a distance. His observations and running commentary seemed to be equal parts Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Hillingdon?), Gordon Ramsey on an angry day, and Major Winchester from M*A*S*H. The neighborhoods they visit range from Heathrow Airport to techno-tacky bedroom communities and the shopping centers that love them, and places between highways where the down and out land when they fall through the cracks.
Sinclair's journey begins and ends with rants about the turn of the Millennium, and his trip seems to bring to his mind at least one anecdote from each of the previous ten centuries. Serendipitously, I came to this book fresh from reading dusty material by Isaak Walton and John Milton, and lo, Sinclair managed to reference both, as well as Dracula, a series of gruesome 20th Century murders, the quest for palatable curry, sites where assorted movies and TV serieses were filmed, and a good more besides.
The book suffers badly for lack of a map. I do not know the geography of Waltham Abbey, Waltham Forest, Harrow, Richmond-on-Thames, etc., or how they interact with the remains of the green belt and places being currently developed. The only illustrations were a set of color glossies in the middle, that Sinclair chose to morph into post-modern art collages without identifying text. Still, with Sinclair and the odd friends who accompany him, you have to take them or leave them as they are. Fun, but not for everybody.
The Progress of Love, by Alice Munro
Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. There is a flattened out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide--smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it's really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark, silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.
Alice Munro's name pops up in my circles from time to time as a modern literary giant. Until now, I was completely unfamiliar with her. Time to rectify that.
If The Progress of Love is a representative sample, Munro is damn good indeed. This is a collection of short fiction that stands out for its capacity to get the reader completely involved in the lives of characters in a brief time, and for the ability to make small incidents vitally important.
I wanted to say that nothing really happens in these stories--but then, that's a ridiculous assessment. Plenty of things happen. There is sex, and death, and near-death, and betrayal, and prejudice and all the other things that make a plot gripping. But those things aren't the important part. The important part happens psychologically, as something inside the protagonist breaks or is mended or realizes something in reaction to the plot device.
Each of the short stories takes place partly in "the present" and partly in the past, as the main character remembers something. Sometimes it's a thing that foreshadowed something epic that happens now, as someone realizes that the situation she's in today all began back then, on the day when X happened. Sometimes it's a small thing in the present that brings on the realization that the thing in the past was epic. Or sometimes the remembrance of things past is the final element that inspires someone to make a choice today. In all cases, the story is a good one. Very high recommendations.
Leviathan and the Air Pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer
Boyle's air-pump experiments have a canonical character in science texts, in science pedagogy, and in the academic discipline of the history of science. Of all subjects in the history of science it might be thought that this would be the one about which least new could be said. It is an oft-told tale, and in the main, a well-told tale. Indeed, there are many aspects of Boyle's experimental work and the setting in which it occurred that have been sufficiently documented and about which we shall have little novel to say: our debt to previous historical writing is too extensive to acknowledge adequately.
See this January's Bookpost for Boyle, and February and June for Hobbes. In February, I looked at De Corpore and concluded that it was no wonder Hobbes was mostly remembered for Leviathan these days. Now, in Leviathan and the Air Pump, Shapin and Schaffer take a look at Hobbes's ponderous theory of natural philosophy (what they used to call it instead of "science"), and an epic battle of ideas that took place in the 17th century over the very IDEA of the scientific method as a way to prove theories.
It's a little awkward, in part because the book is written in academic jargon, and in part because the scientific method is so widely accepted today that watching Hobbes turn up his nose at all those silly "experiments" makes him look foolish by today's standards. What Shapin and Schaffer do is to make their best efforts to put aside modern biases and to look at the conflict as it seemed at the time. What they do partly works, and partly fails due to the inevitable tendency of most readers, or at least people like me, to facepalm and eyeroll.
As a matter of getting back to basics, the book is too complicated to attempt explaining the importance of experiments to young students. Its main value is as historical analysis of how ideas evolve. Recommended for specialists.
Out of My Mind, by Sharon M. Draper
I didn't want the blocks. I wanted to tell her they were dangerous. I wanted to tell somebody to get rid of them before a child got sick. But all I could do was scream and point and kick. So I did. I got louder.
Mom rushed out of the toy section, pushing the cart real fast. "Stop it!" she cried out at me.
I couldn't. It made me so angry that I couldn't tell her. The tornado took over. My arms became fighting sticks, my legs became weapons. I kicked at her with my feet. I screamed. I kept pointing in the direction of those blocks.
People stared. Some pointed. Others looked away.
Mom got to the door of the store, yanked me out of the cart and left it with all her selections sitting there. She was almost in tears when she got to the car. As she buckled me in my seat, she almost screamed at me, "What is WRONG with you?"
Well, she knew the answer to that one, but she knew that was not my usual behavior. I gulped, sniffed, and finally calmed down. I hoped the people at the store watched the news.
When we got home, she called the doctor and told him about my crazy behavior. He sent a prescription for a sedative, but Mom didn't give it to me. The crisis was over by then.
I don't think Mom ever figured out what I was trying to say that day.
This is the first-person story of Melody, who has a photographic memory, an advanced vocabulary, and a genius IQ, but who cannot speak, or sign, or write, or walk, and has been classed as "retarded" and treated with condescension and pity by the doctors and the school system that continues to thrust pre-school education lessons at her, over and over. Her loving parents have had to fight like hell to get her even this much. No one knows who she is on the inside. Treasures of human potential, wasted and put in existential Hell.
The breakthrough comes when she gets a computer that enables her to talk, similar to the one used by Stephen Hawking (who is mentioned several times in the story). Parents, teachers and other elementary school children react with varying degrees of grace and class to the news that Melody is not only fully functional on the inside but surpasses most of them.
Some might dismiss this as a glurgey "very special episode"; I found it gut-wrenching, as I am the parent of a special needs child with a clear intelligence beneath her limited communication abilities. Who knows what would have happened to her had she been born in one of the earlier centuries I've been studying. Today we have an ipad that helps her learn, and the possibilities that the internet offers for occupational and social participation are real.
Pensees, by Blaise Pascal
It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him.
Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal, either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.
See this February, April and June for more Pascal. He wrote some innovative and (unlike Newton) readable science, and a brilliant series of satires, but is best known for the Pensees, which were a bunch of fragments, some of them not even complete sentences, that were collected and published by others after his death.
Nothing wrong with a collection of fragments. They're easy to read in short bits at a time (this was, for a long time, the book I carried around to whip out and graze in when I had to wait on line). Marcus Aurelius wrote a book of fragments (see December 2012 Bookpost) that is in my opinion one of the greatest books in history. In fact, the comparison made me wistful. Marcus Aurelius was where Pascal's Pensees might well have been, had he not been tainted by Christianity. The religious poison makes more than half of the Pensees philosophically soft, with little to say to an atheist except by way of smugness and taunting and pitying and calling us stupid by the same kind of pseudo-"proofs", citing the Bible as if it were historical and scientific fact, that we see on the internet posted by people with a tenth of the intellect Pascal had before the Jansenists sucked it all out of him.
In fact, Pascal comes across as a bit of an asshole. Take, for example, "Pascal's Wager", probably the best known "pensee", where Pascal asserts that it's a no-brainer to bet everything you've got on the existence of (the Christian, of course) God, since the stakes are infinite. Infinite happiness if you bet on God and win; infinite misery if you bet against, and lose. Pascal, who studied and even helped to invent probability theory, and who should have known better, asserts that if you bet on his kind of Christianity and waste your whole life denying yourself pleasure, mortifying the flesh and being physically and sexually abused by clergy, and then you die and there's no God, you have lost nothing. Seems to me, we have but one precious life, and what we do with it COUNTS. Better to live the best way you can, without regard to the hobbles of superstition.
Elsewhere, he comes to more reasonable conclusions--always articulate and readable, even when wrong--such as the repeated observation that human beings have a bit of greatness in them, and a bit of primitive beast (also called "part god and part animal", or "Id and superego", or what you will). Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius said those things too. If only Pascal hadn't felt compelled to throw so much in-yo-face Jesus at the idea every time!
Again, people should probably read it once. But it's not as wise as it's cracked up to be.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
The earth glowed with a dim red light like a piece of charcoal just retrieved from a furnace. For a brief moment, Wang saw the stars, but soon steam and smoke hid the sky and covered everything on the red-glowing earth. The World sank into a dark chaos. A red line of text appeared:
Civilization Number 141 fell into ruin in flames. This civilization had advanced to the Eastern Han period. The seed of civilization remains. It will germinate and again progress through the unpredictable world of THREE BODY. We invite you to log on in the future.
Three Body Problem is the fifth and last of the Hugo-nominated novels I have read. See Bookposts from April, May and June for the others. The grapevine says it's the favorite to win, and it's not hard to see why.
Some detractors and supporters will tell you it's the favorite because it is one of the first important speculative fiction genre books NOT from the English-speaking countries--certainly one of the first from China-- to gain major recognition, and the sci-fi geek community should be more inclusive and celebrate this Chinese work as an essential and neglected part of the spectrum of the imagination---or alternatively, that the Hugos are broken because the "politically correct SJWs" are going all affirmative action and giving the book awards because it is Chinese as opposed to because it's any good.
It seems to me, The Three Body Problem deserves recognition both for diversity and for quality. Seems to me, there's nothing wrong with giving some weight to a book's merit because it speaks with a voice somewhat different from the ones we hear more often. It also seems to me, one reason The Three Body Problem made it into the English-speaking world's consciousness is that it kicks ass. This is not Cixin Liu's first book. It is not the first sci-fi book written in China. But it's the only one a lot of us geeks know about.
And it's a new and different book that begins in 1967 under the Maoist cultural revolution, with a message sent into space, and continues in the present, when the ramifications of that message become apparent. Physicists are going mad, having concluded that everything they know about physics is wrong. A strange virtual reality game in which civilization ends again and again is raising questions and may have a hidden meaning. And...perhaps the Earth is under attack.
It has an exciting plot and it requires intelligence to read.
So...here's how I rank the Hugo-nominated novels. Your mileage may vary.
1. The Goblin Emperor
2. The Three Body Problem
3. Ancillary Sword
4. No Award
5. Skin Game
6. The Dark Between the Stars
Areopagitica, by John Milton
I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
This brief tract is included in both the Great Books of the Western World and Harvard Classics, because Milton, and because liberal education, from Plato's Apology, to Locke's Letter Concerning toleration to Mill's On Liberty is necessarily big on the free exchange of ideas and discussion of great issues. All of these are still staples in Humanities courses. Then again, so is The Republic, which advocated censorship, and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which actually urged book-burning. Guess we'll just have to teach "the controversy".
Milton wrote this in response to an act of the post-Cromwell Parliament that (understandably jumpy after a long, violent revolution and regicide) was trying to calm inflammatory rhetoric by requiring all books to be licensed by the government or subject to destruction (and fines and jail for the writer and/or publisher. Milton explained to Parliament that it was wrong, and that the remedy for disapproved-of speech should be equal and opposite speech.
I'd like to think that, free speech being a staple of the founding of America, we'd be past the need for this--I was a little bored by the tract, mostly because the argument seemed so self-evident to me. But then, here we are in the 21st century, and a whole lot of people still want to punish by law any ideas they consider harmful, from racism to accurate teaching of the uglier parts of American history to Darwin to criticism of Presidents from one's own political party. An overlapping lot of people also can't seem to tell the difference between the criminalizing of speech by government action and social condemnation from citizens for speaking like an asshole. So I guess Areopagitica is still needed.
Also included in my edition was Treatise on Education, which was a letter Milton wrote in reply to fan mail asking him what things should be taught to the young. Not surprisingly, milton recommended the study of great books, in the original Hebrew, Greek and Latin (because they weren't published much in the vernacular back then; the elite wanted to hoard knowledge for themselves so that they could look down their snoots at the masses for being illiterate. So yes, know these works, and be accounted a gentleman); war games and drills as Phys. Ed., and a decent diet.
Lives, by Izaak Walton
I have now brought him to the parsonage of Bemerton, and to the thirty-sixth year of his age, and must stop here, and bespeak the reader to prepare for an almost incredible story, of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life; a life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it: a life, that if it were related by a pen like his, there would then be no need for this age to look back into times past for the examples of primitive piety; for they might be all found in the life of George Herbert. But now, alas! who is fit to undertake it? I confess I am not; and am not pleased with myself that I must; and profess myself amazed when I consider how few of the clergy lived like him then, and how many live so unlike him now. But it becomes not me to censure: my design is rather to assure the reader that I have used very great diligence to inform myself, that I might inform him of the truth of what follows; and though I cannot adorn it with eloquence, yet I will do it with sincerity.
Walton is mostly remembered for The Compleat Angler, a snoozer of a book that turned out to use fishing as a metaphor for sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, and which I don't intend to read. The Lives consists of five short biographies of 17th century poets, minor statesmen and clergy (Sir Henry Wotton, Robert Hooker, John Donne, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson), of whom Donne is the one most people will have even heard of, and which I read because the Donne and Herbert bios were included in the Harvard Classics (and not mentioned anywhere else, to my knowledge).
Dr. Elliott says that the Lives are models of short biography. they are not. He says that the characters of the subjects are vividly brought to life. They are not. He says that Walton's own irrepressible personality shines forth on every page. It does not. These are some of the driest, dullest chronicles of people who I've ever failed to know any better after reading accounts of how terribly, terribly virtuous they were.
The typical bio goes into unnecessary detail about the subject's family tree, about the youthful subject's decision at an early age to delve into the law or the clergy, about places he lived and illnesses he had. When he dies, we are dutifully told about how bereaved everyone was at his service and how long his inconsolable widow survived him. Sometimes there are examples of poetry he wrote, or an instructive anecdote. Often there are assertions that so-and-so had particular admirable qualities. I rejoice to hear it.
The edition I read included an introductory bio of Walton that is as long as the bios in the book, and maybe a little more entertaining. It is supposedly a fascinating and great tribute to Walton that he, the son of a nobody, was able to move in decent society and have notable friends in an age where everybody who was nobody was eagerly snubbed all round by the very people Walton admires for their numerous virtues. Walton went to a great many dinners and was seen in convivial company, but Samuel Johnson's roundtable it weren't.
Knaves Templar; Witness of Bones; Time's Fool, by Leonard Tourney; The Perfumed Sleeve, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Fair Maid of Bohemia, by Edward Marston; A Conspiracy of Violence, by Susanna Gregory
"Don't try calling out," Flynch added, his mocking voice floating down from above them. "For none shall hear but the rats. This cellar is as old as Abraham's uncle and long forgotten. You're as safe from discovery and rescue here as you would be in Newgate or the Tower itself."
Hodge used the torch to relight the nub of the candle. He handed it to Joan. "When this night is over, you'll wish mt friend Flynch had finished you in the street, Mistress Stock."
--from Knaves Templar
Torn between his chamberlain and cousin, loath to offend either, the shogun flung up his hands and turned to Sano. "You decide who will supervise you!"
Sano was appalled that the shogun had passed the decision to him. Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira wore expressions of displeasure that they had failed to coax the shogun and he'd put their fate in the hands of an inferior. They fixed ominous glares upon Sano.
Once more, Sano sensed their antagonism rising to the danger point. He pictured armies poised to charge. Again he saw the moment depending on himself.
He said, "Your Excellency, I would be honored to have both Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira supervise my investigation."
--from The Perfumed Sleeve
"Very good. The weapon, Stock's presence and the implausible story circumstances shall force him to relate will make him a most credible murderer. You have done well, Stearforth. You exceed my expectation of you by several leagues. Now Cecil and his minion are where I would have them. Stock shall himself be entangled in such a web that the spider will eat out his heart before he is half aware of his peril."
--from Witness of Bones
The man smiled, then chuckled, then laughed at his own folly. He had been completely taken in by the ruse. Nicholas won a new respect from him. In the resourceful book-holder, the man had a worthy adversary. It would add more spice to his assignment. Westfield's Men would need to be trailed in a very different way from now on. Nicholas would be more wary than ever and the rest of the company would be alerted.
As he thought about the sturdy figure who had washed himself in the stableyard, the man's laughter took on a darker note. Instead of jeering at his own folly, he was savouring the pleasure of a duel with an able opponent. There would be no swift dagger-work in an empty stable this time. He wanted the utmost enjoyment from the death of Nicholas Bracewell.
---from The Fair Maid of Bohemia
Chaloner swung around when he heard the rustle of leaves behind him. A sharp hiss cut through the air, and instinct and training were responsible for his abrupt dive off the moss-encrusted path. A moment later, the servant joined him on the ground, a blade embedded in his chest and his single eye already beginning to glaze with encroaching death. Blood gushed from his mouth in a way that indicated a lung had been pierced. He turned his head slightly and looked at Chaloner.
"Praise God's one son," he whispered.
--from A Conspiracy of Violence
My pen scratched. Silence else. My eyes strained in the flickering light. My work, my life, my passion. I saw myself as another might see me who, passing by, looked in the window to glimpse this paunchy, balding, middle-aged clerk at his labor. Solitary, pre-occupied--a figure provoking as much pity and scorn as admiration for his dubious art. I stopped thinking about my interview with Cecil. Stopped thinking about the evil angel of my sonnets. Stopped thinking about myself. The play was the thing. There was nothing else.
---from Time's Fool
Last month I finished Fiona Buckley. This month I finish off Leonard Tourney, the next chronologically in the mysteries that begin with Elizabeth and end with the Restoration, and the least favorite series I'm reading this year. Tourney's stories have a habit of beginning promisingly, having a fair share of suspense, and ending with a dull anticlimactic thud, neither plausible nor satisfying. Knaves Templar begins as a nice revenge story, with a nasty stillbirth and a woman killing law students at the Temple Bar, and devolves into a mushel of nonsense. Witness of Bones is more coherent. It's a straightforward adventure with the villains identified upfront and the suspense being how will the Stocks defeat a plot to frame Matthew for murder.
Time's Fool turns out to not be about the usual detectives at all, but features William Shakespeare in the first person, investigating the death of his "dark lady" and another death for which he is framed. Edward Marston has spoiled me for London theatre company murders--this one just doesn't compare, bard or no bard.
The Perfumed Sleeve is the next Sano Ichiro novel, and it is a game-changer that really did keep me guessing about how the two deaths in the story happened. In addition to a houseful of suspects, Sano must cope with rival political factions supervising his investigation and each planting evidence that would implicate the other in the crime. Very high recommendations.
The Fair Maid of Bohemia is a tad darker than the usual rompish Westfield's Men theatrical murders, but it still has plenty of comic relief. This one takes the players outside of England for the first time, to perform in (where else?) Bohemia, and foil some international plots without flubbing their lines.
With the Buckley and Tourney serieses finished, at last I come to the only Restoration-era series I know about. Susanna Gregory is apparently best known for a medieval mystery series I missed in 2013 when I was reading books set in that era, but this series will do just as well. Thomas Chaloner, the protagonist, is a former spy for Cromwell who, like his former spymaster, has changed coats when the wind has changed, returned to an unfamiliar London from a long mission in Holland and, in 1660, landed in a snakepit of plots and counterplots. The expository first novel, A Conspiracy of Violence is delightful for character and atmosphere; the plot is ridiculous. Gregory has woven a tale out of a few entries in Pepys' diary and many historical characters, and made a London quite different from the one described by Pepys--one in which a dozen or so men, either Royalists seeking revenge against Cromwellists, or Cromwellists fighting to bring down the new king, are involved in various conspiracies with each other, betraying allies, all ultimately acting alone and planting more red herrings against one another than would fill a koi pond. There is a horde of ill gotten gold, a mysterious "seven", an odd password, and many attempts on the life of Chaloner. The solution is almost by process of elimination, as few suspects are left standing by the end of the story, but Gregory has read her Umberto Eco, and just because someone is dead doesn't mean he's out.
London Orbital (a walk around the M25), by Iain Sinclair
Did we qualify--as customers? Drummond, Atkins and Sinclair? Unlikely. Elective leisure was the condition of our lives, endured through a puritanical work ethic. Drummond scribbling away, anonymously, in the cafeteria of a provincial department store. Atkins hunched in his dark room. Sinclair zigzagging around the fringes in a frantic attempt to avoid all versions of the circuit, the smooth walk that carries you back to the point of departure. We were spurners of Best Value. Drummond burnt money and gave away self-published booklets. Atkins printed more photographs than he could sell in ten lifetimes. I wrote the same book, the same life, over and over again. We wanted Worst Value. We refused cashback. We solicited bad deals, ripoffs, tat. If you explained something to us, we wouldn't touch it. We knew what Best Value meant: soap bubbles, scented bullshit. That's why our walk began at the most tainted spot on the map of London. Exorcism, the only game worth the candle.
The "most tainted spot on the map of London" is the Lee Valley Leisure Complex, an apparently tacky bourgeoisie development for which Sinclair has heaps of scorn.
Iain Sinclair is one of those insane, highly literate forces of nature whose chief pleasure in life is to find fault with everything in hilarious ways, and whose second chiefest pleasure is to delight in quirky trivia. My dad would have loved him, and I found his account of a year-long walk around the busy highway surrounding outer London to be hilarious and well worth accompanying him---at a distance. His observations and running commentary seemed to be equal parts Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Hillingdon?), Gordon Ramsey on an angry day, and Major Winchester from M*A*S*H. The neighborhoods they visit range from Heathrow Airport to techno-tacky bedroom communities and the shopping centers that love them, and places between highways where the down and out land when they fall through the cracks.
Sinclair's journey begins and ends with rants about the turn of the Millennium, and his trip seems to bring to his mind at least one anecdote from each of the previous ten centuries. Serendipitously, I came to this book fresh from reading dusty material by Isaak Walton and John Milton, and lo, Sinclair managed to reference both, as well as Dracula, a series of gruesome 20th Century murders, the quest for palatable curry, sites where assorted movies and TV serieses were filmed, and a good more besides.
The book suffers badly for lack of a map. I do not know the geography of Waltham Abbey, Waltham Forest, Harrow, Richmond-on-Thames, etc., or how they interact with the remains of the green belt and places being currently developed. The only illustrations were a set of color glossies in the middle, that Sinclair chose to morph into post-modern art collages without identifying text. Still, with Sinclair and the odd friends who accompany him, you have to take them or leave them as they are. Fun, but not for everybody.
The Progress of Love, by Alice Munro
Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. There is a flattened out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide--smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it's really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark, silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.
Alice Munro's name pops up in my circles from time to time as a modern literary giant. Until now, I was completely unfamiliar with her. Time to rectify that.
If The Progress of Love is a representative sample, Munro is damn good indeed. This is a collection of short fiction that stands out for its capacity to get the reader completely involved in the lives of characters in a brief time, and for the ability to make small incidents vitally important.
I wanted to say that nothing really happens in these stories--but then, that's a ridiculous assessment. Plenty of things happen. There is sex, and death, and near-death, and betrayal, and prejudice and all the other things that make a plot gripping. But those things aren't the important part. The important part happens psychologically, as something inside the protagonist breaks or is mended or realizes something in reaction to the plot device.
Each of the short stories takes place partly in "the present" and partly in the past, as the main character remembers something. Sometimes it's a thing that foreshadowed something epic that happens now, as someone realizes that the situation she's in today all began back then, on the day when X happened. Sometimes it's a small thing in the present that brings on the realization that the thing in the past was epic. Or sometimes the remembrance of things past is the final element that inspires someone to make a choice today. In all cases, the story is a good one. Very high recommendations.
Leviathan and the Air Pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer
Boyle's air-pump experiments have a canonical character in science texts, in science pedagogy, and in the academic discipline of the history of science. Of all subjects in the history of science it might be thought that this would be the one about which least new could be said. It is an oft-told tale, and in the main, a well-told tale. Indeed, there are many aspects of Boyle's experimental work and the setting in which it occurred that have been sufficiently documented and about which we shall have little novel to say: our debt to previous historical writing is too extensive to acknowledge adequately.
See this January's Bookpost for Boyle, and February and June for Hobbes. In February, I looked at De Corpore and concluded that it was no wonder Hobbes was mostly remembered for Leviathan these days. Now, in Leviathan and the Air Pump, Shapin and Schaffer take a look at Hobbes's ponderous theory of natural philosophy (what they used to call it instead of "science"), and an epic battle of ideas that took place in the 17th century over the very IDEA of the scientific method as a way to prove theories.
It's a little awkward, in part because the book is written in academic jargon, and in part because the scientific method is so widely accepted today that watching Hobbes turn up his nose at all those silly "experiments" makes him look foolish by today's standards. What Shapin and Schaffer do is to make their best efforts to put aside modern biases and to look at the conflict as it seemed at the time. What they do partly works, and partly fails due to the inevitable tendency of most readers, or at least people like me, to facepalm and eyeroll.
As a matter of getting back to basics, the book is too complicated to attempt explaining the importance of experiments to young students. Its main value is as historical analysis of how ideas evolve. Recommended for specialists.
Out of My Mind, by Sharon M. Draper
I didn't want the blocks. I wanted to tell her they were dangerous. I wanted to tell somebody to get rid of them before a child got sick. But all I could do was scream and point and kick. So I did. I got louder.
Mom rushed out of the toy section, pushing the cart real fast. "Stop it!" she cried out at me.
I couldn't. It made me so angry that I couldn't tell her. The tornado took over. My arms became fighting sticks, my legs became weapons. I kicked at her with my feet. I screamed. I kept pointing in the direction of those blocks.
People stared. Some pointed. Others looked away.
Mom got to the door of the store, yanked me out of the cart and left it with all her selections sitting there. She was almost in tears when she got to the car. As she buckled me in my seat, she almost screamed at me, "What is WRONG with you?"
Well, she knew the answer to that one, but she knew that was not my usual behavior. I gulped, sniffed, and finally calmed down. I hoped the people at the store watched the news.
When we got home, she called the doctor and told him about my crazy behavior. He sent a prescription for a sedative, but Mom didn't give it to me. The crisis was over by then.
I don't think Mom ever figured out what I was trying to say that day.
This is the first-person story of Melody, who has a photographic memory, an advanced vocabulary, and a genius IQ, but who cannot speak, or sign, or write, or walk, and has been classed as "retarded" and treated with condescension and pity by the doctors and the school system that continues to thrust pre-school education lessons at her, over and over. Her loving parents have had to fight like hell to get her even this much. No one knows who she is on the inside. Treasures of human potential, wasted and put in existential Hell.
The breakthrough comes when she gets a computer that enables her to talk, similar to the one used by Stephen Hawking (who is mentioned several times in the story). Parents, teachers and other elementary school children react with varying degrees of grace and class to the news that Melody is not only fully functional on the inside but surpasses most of them.
Some might dismiss this as a glurgey "very special episode"; I found it gut-wrenching, as I am the parent of a special needs child with a clear intelligence beneath her limited communication abilities. Who knows what would have happened to her had she been born in one of the earlier centuries I've been studying. Today we have an ipad that helps her learn, and the possibilities that the internet offers for occupational and social participation are real.
Pensees, by Blaise Pascal
It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him.
Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal, either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.
See this February, April and June for more Pascal. He wrote some innovative and (unlike Newton) readable science, and a brilliant series of satires, but is best known for the Pensees, which were a bunch of fragments, some of them not even complete sentences, that were collected and published by others after his death.
Nothing wrong with a collection of fragments. They're easy to read in short bits at a time (this was, for a long time, the book I carried around to whip out and graze in when I had to wait on line). Marcus Aurelius wrote a book of fragments (see December 2012 Bookpost) that is in my opinion one of the greatest books in history. In fact, the comparison made me wistful. Marcus Aurelius was where Pascal's Pensees might well have been, had he not been tainted by Christianity. The religious poison makes more than half of the Pensees philosophically soft, with little to say to an atheist except by way of smugness and taunting and pitying and calling us stupid by the same kind of pseudo-"proofs", citing the Bible as if it were historical and scientific fact, that we see on the internet posted by people with a tenth of the intellect Pascal had before the Jansenists sucked it all out of him.
In fact, Pascal comes across as a bit of an asshole. Take, for example, "Pascal's Wager", probably the best known "pensee", where Pascal asserts that it's a no-brainer to bet everything you've got on the existence of (the Christian, of course) God, since the stakes are infinite. Infinite happiness if you bet on God and win; infinite misery if you bet against, and lose. Pascal, who studied and even helped to invent probability theory, and who should have known better, asserts that if you bet on his kind of Christianity and waste your whole life denying yourself pleasure, mortifying the flesh and being physically and sexually abused by clergy, and then you die and there's no God, you have lost nothing. Seems to me, we have but one precious life, and what we do with it COUNTS. Better to live the best way you can, without regard to the hobbles of superstition.
Elsewhere, he comes to more reasonable conclusions--always articulate and readable, even when wrong--such as the repeated observation that human beings have a bit of greatness in them, and a bit of primitive beast (also called "part god and part animal", or "Id and superego", or what you will). Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius said those things too. If only Pascal hadn't felt compelled to throw so much in-yo-face Jesus at the idea every time!
Again, people should probably read it once. But it's not as wise as it's cracked up to be.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts