Author Archives: Richard Bowker

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About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

House Plots

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House, M.D. is going off the air after eight seasons.

It’s one of the few shows I watch consistently.  Like most network shows, it has a very formulaic structure:

  1. Someone has some interesting medical event happen to him before the opening credits.
  2. House’s team makes their initial diagnoses, which are invariably wrong.
  3. Some kind of workplace or personal subplot starts taking place in conjunction with the main save-the-patient plot. We also delve into the patient’s life–and generally we discover that the patient is lying about something, and his personal life is much more complicated than we expected.
  4. An exciting medical event happens about mid-way through the show–a seizure, blood leaking out of the eyeballs, etc.  Can this patient be saved?
  5. The patient keeps getting worse.  Finally, House makes some connection between the workplace subplot and the patient’s disease and comes up with the correct diagnosis in the nick of time.

Here’s what I find interesting: The plot is structured as a standard mystery story, but it’s missing a key element of standard mysteries–namely, the viewer has no way of guessing the outcome, because we’re not doctors.  Furthermore, we couldn’t care less whether the patient actually has typhus or lupus or a brain tumor or some rare genetic disease that only affects people who have been to Ethiopia in the past decade.  We’re just along for the ride.  It’s a tribute to the acting and the writing that House works as well as it does.

Two more points about House:

  • House is portrayed as a jerk, and part of his jerkness is that he’s a thoroughgoing atheist.  But throughout the entire series his skepticism always turns out to be justified: there are no miracles; there are no sentimental endings where someone’s prayers are answered.
  • Anyone who can portray both House and Bertie Wooster has got to be some kind of great actor.  Let’s hope Hugh Laurie gets more great roles.  After the money he made on House, he can afford to be choosy.

 

Prejudice and Conservatism

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John Derbyshire, a conservative writer, has kicked up a fuss with an article that apparently is his version of “the talk” that Black parents have with their kids.  I couldn’t get to the original, which may have been taken down at this point. These quotes are from a piece about the article in the New York Daily News:

  •  Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
  •  Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
  • If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
  • Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
  • If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
  • Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.
  • Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character
  • Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
  • If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

Possibly there is some kind of conservative attempt at humor going on here; without seeing the original it’s hard to judge (and I generally find it difficult to figure out when conservatives are trying to be funny).

The Daily News writer says of Derbyshire: “An editor at the supposedly esteemed National Review, he is a perfect poster boy for what conservatism has degenerated into. This is not the courtly philosophy of Edmund Burke, but the delusional ideology of Glenn Beck.”  But, ya know, I have Mr. Burke right here behind this sign, and this is his paean to prejudice:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of men and ages…. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engaged the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.  Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.  Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

One of the successes of modern liberalism has been to give a fully negative connotation to the word “prejudice,” such that conservatives feel compelled to deny that they are in any sense prejudiced about anything (in the same way that liberal politicians feel compelled to deny that they have anything but the highest regard for “free enterprise”).  But it seems to me you can make the case that prejudice is an essential feature of conservatism–prejudice represents the hard-won wisdom of the past, which we discard at our peril.  Derbyshire makes explicit how this philosophy works in practice.

Here, by the way, is an article from today’s Boston Globe about the black version of “the talk.”

Jibe talkin’ with honing pigeons

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I may not be the world’s best grammarian, but some things just bother me.  Here are two.

“This doesn’t jive with the facts.”  Should be jibe, right?  Jibe is pretty much only used in this idiom, and I suppose people don’t really know the word, mishear it, and end up thinking it’s jive. People also tend to misspell gibe (meaning a taunt) as jibe.

“He honed in on the central problem.”  Should be homed instead of honed, right?  Like homing pigeons.  In this case, honed makes a bit of sense, since to hone something is to sharpen it, and maybe you could think of the idiom as one of sharpening something to a point, rather than aiming for a target.

Anyway, language is always changing.  And the nice folks at Google have given us a way of tracking these changes via the Ngram Viewer, which is simply the most awesome time-waster ever.  Here we see the history of “doesn’t jibe with” vs. “doesn’t jive with” in American books from 1800 to 2000 (click the link to see a bigger version):

The data shows that “doesn’t jibe with” starts taking off around 1900, and “doesn’t jive with” doesn’t show up until the 1970s.  My guess is that the slope of “doesn’t jive with” has gone up considerably since 2000, when the Google data ends.

Here we see what’s going on with “home in on” vs. “hone in on”, again in a couple of centuries’ worth of American books:

In this case, nothing much was happening with “home in on” until the late 50s, and “hone in on” followed about 20 years later.  Both have exploded in popularity since then.

You can also change the corpus.  If we look at British English instead of American English, we  see that both phrases started up about 20 years after the American version, and “home in on” is still much more popular:

I wonder why.  Was Britain picking up the American idiom?

Anyway, I could keep doing this all night!  But instead, let’s listen to the Bee Gees.  Can anyone tell me what the time signature is here?  It’s a pretty complicated rhythm for a pop song.

Bad Reviews

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A Universe from Nothing got a scathing review in the New York Times.  Jerry Coyne finds the courage to pile on, although he disagrees with the reviewer’s remarks about religion (rightly, I think — I really couldn’t make much sense of those remarks).  Krauss responds in the comments.  Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong (no supporter of Krauss, apparently) points out that the reviewer is the recipient of a huge grant from the Templeton Foundation, widely despised in some circles for throwing vast amounts of money at people for trying to reconcile religion and science.  Does the reviewer have a hidden agenda?  How could we possibly know?

This got me thinking about reviews.  The older I get, the less attention I pay to reviewers I’m not familiar with; life is too short to care about the opinions of strangers.  I trust Jerry Coyne, because I’ve been reading his blog for a while (and I read his book and enjoyed it a lot), but I’ve never heard of the Times reviewer.  Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, of course, and I have no way of judging arguments over cosmology or quantum mechanics.

I have sympathy for writers (like Krauss) who have clearly put a lot of effort into their work, only to have it savaged.  Writing is about as solitary an occupation as you can imagine, but sooner or later most of us try to inflict the results upon the world.  And then we face rejection and criticism and (most depressing of all, perhaps) indifference.  It ain’t easy!

Oddly, my books have never received any really bad reviews–at least, not any I remember.  It’s entirely possible I blotted out the memory.  Lots of rejection, on the other hand…

Another Assassin, Another Victim

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Following up on The Destiny of the Republic, I’ve just read The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller, the story of William McKinley’s assassination by the anarchist Leon Czoglosz.  (Like The Destiny of the Republic, this book’s Kindle price is $14.99, putting it within a couple of dollars of the hardcover’s discounted price.)

Miller decides he needs to use the standard flashback narrative structure for his book: Start with the act of assassination, then back up and use alternating chapters to show how each man ended up in Buffalo for the fateful act.  This works OK, but it turns out that neither McKinley nor Czoglosz is sufficiently interesting to carry each one’s part of the narrative, so we end up with a detailed history of the Spanish-American war and America’s involvement in China and the Boxer Rebellion, contrasting with a detailed history of the Anarchist movement. This was fine with me, since I didn’t know much about any of that stuff.  Here are some other random thoughts:

  • Wars went a lot faster in those days.  The Spanish-American war was over in a matter of months.
  • The criminal justice system was also a lot faster.  McKinley died on September 14, 1901.  Czoglosz’s trial began on September 23 and was over on September 24.  The jury spent 33 minutes to reach a verdict (although it didn’t take them that long–they decided to kill time in case it looked like they weren’t taking the thing seriously).  Czoglosz was executed on October 29.
  • Deaths, on the other hand, were slower.  Like Garfield, McKinley lingered for quite a while: he was shot on September 6 and lingered for more than a week.
  • Czoglosz is more interesting than Charles Guiteau because he was clearly sane.  Still, he was pretty much a cipher–he had almost nothing to do with the actual Anarchist movement, and his motives for killing McKinley were obscure at best.  He seems closer to Lee Harvey Oswald than John Wilkes Booth in the assassins’ hall of shame.
  • McKinley had a 56-inch waist.  Sheesh.
  • Here’s another reason why I don’t really understand conservatism.  Conservatism is about preserving the best of the past, our traditions, the wisdom of our ancestors.  But how do you decide what’s wisdom, what traditions to preserve?  The America described in this book was just awful–who would want to return to a world without child labor laws, where strikes could be destroyed by government violence, where industrialists ruthlessly cut wages to increase their profits….?  Ayn Rand, maybe?  Anarchists had a point–if this was the best that governments could do for the people, maybe we’d be better off without government.

Anonymous

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I have only myself to blame for attempting to watch this movie.  My most trusted advisors warned against it; if I had bothered to consult my healthcare professionals, they would have warned against it, too.  But still, I thought: it’s in my Netflix queue, so it’s sort of free.  What harm could it do?  I was wrong.

Anonymous is a historical thriller based on the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship–the idea the Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare.  This theory is universally dismissed by Shakespearean scholars, which of course Oxfordians claim is evidence that they must be onto something–otherwise, why would those scholars be so defensive?  Yeesh.

My idiotic theory for watching the movie was that fiction doesn’t have to be historically accurate to be entertaining.  I thought Inglourious Basterds was entertaining, in a dopey sort of way, even though, er, that’s not the way World War II actually played out.  And Shakespeare in Love was utterly delightful, despite taking its share of liberties with the Shakespeare story.  ButAnonymous is so bad on so many different levels that I only made it through 59 minutes and 40 seconds of it, according to my DVD player.  Here are a few of its problems:

  • The screenwriter decided he wanted the central plot to be a thriller about the Essex rebellion, with the conceit that Essex was Queen Elizabeth’s son and Oxford was his father.  This means the script has to fit in endless amounts of exposition to explain the political situation.
  • Maybe in a fruitless attempt to counteract all that dull exposition, the script scrambles the time sequence till you have no idea what’s supposed to be happening when.  It doesn’t help that the movie blithely ignores actual historical chronology, so that Christopher Marlowe shows up when he’s dead, and Henry V is played as if no one had heard of Henry IV Part One or Two.  (Also, according to the movie, de Vere wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he was about fourteen.  I didn’t get to the part where apparently Shakespeare’s company is hired to put on Richard III to coincide with Essex’s rebellion, instead of Richard II, which is what actually happened.  Why did the movie bother to make that change? Richard IIIis about an evil usurper–how would that help rally the public to support a usurpation?)
  • None of the characters has the slightest depth or significance, including de Vere, who doesn’t do or say anything to suggest that he could have written the plays.  He mostly just sits around looking aristocratic.

Anyway, let me commend to you James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? if you want to clear your head and actually learn something about this odd little corner of the world.  Shapiro makes the interesting point that the authorship question started up in earnest when an eighteenth-century editor made the mistake of examining Shakespeare’s works for clues to Shakespeare’s biography.  Once you start down that path, anyone can follow, and before too long you’ve got people looking for coded messages in the text, and you’ve got Freud saying, hey, Hamlet has an Oedipal complex so the guy who wrote it must have had an Oedipal complex, too.  This sort of approach says more about the theorist than it does about Shakespeare.

Mistrust of science

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Kevin Drum provides us with this chart showing the trust in science by political stance since the 1970s:

I haven’t read the study from which this is derived, but the decline in conservative support for science seems accurate to me.  I would have liked to see data going back to the sixties, because my sense is that the liberal support might have been lower than conservative support back then.  Those were the days of questioning authority, of good intentions mattering more than clear thinking.  But those days are long gone, and liberal support seems pretty stable.

The obvious explanation is that conservatives have gotten stupider over the years (or is appealing to stupider people, but that ain’t it.  Trust in science has dropped more precipitously among educated conservatives than among uneducated ones.  Drum says:

This is presumably part of the wider conservative turn against knowledge-disseminating institutions whose output is perceived as too liberal (academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood) in favor of institutions that produce more reliably conservative narratives (churches, business-oriented think tanks, Fox News). More and more, liberals and conservatives are almost literally living in different worlds with different versions of consensus reality.

This seems plausible. And, as Shermer notes in The Believing Brain, smart people are good at coming up with reasons to support what they already believe.

How do smart people decide not to trust science?  One way is to fasten on perceived scientific misconduct like “Climategate” to prove that science nowadays is just politics and careerism.  Another is to assert that it’s all relative, like Rick Perry’s characterization of evolution as “a theory that’s out there.”

Here is Stanley Fish in the New York Times saying the same thing in a more sophisticated fashion:

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description. They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures (tests, experiments, the compilation of databases, etc.) that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that. And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point.

Vary the assumptions (and it is impossible to not have any), begin by assuming a creating and sustaining God, and the force of quite other reasons will seem obvious and inescapable. As John Locke said in his Letter on Toleration, “Every church is orthodox to itself,” and every orthodoxy brings with it reasons, honored authorities, sacred texts and unassailable methods of verification.

It is at bottom a question of original authority: with what conviction — basic orthodoxy — about where truth and illumination are to be found do you begin? Once that question is answered satisfactorily for you (by revelation, education or conversion), you cannot test the answer by bringing it before the bar of some independent arbiter, for your answer now is the arbiter (and measure) of everything that comes before you. Your answer delivers the world to you and delivers with it mechanisms for distinguishing good evidence from bad or beside-the-point evidence and good reasons from reasons that just don’t cut it.

So here is a very smart guy saying that there is no way of choosing among multiple approaches to the truth.  So really Joseph Smith, say,  is as worthy of belief as Einstein and Newton, as Dawkins and Pinker.

The standard answer to this (made repeatedly in the comments to his article) is that science, you know, works.  The earth does in fact move around the sun.  Germs do in fact cause diseases.  If Fish got sick, would he rather be treated by a witch doctor or a medical doctor?

Somehow this gets lost in the Fish’s equivalence argument.  And I suppose conservative elites will use the argument to buttress their suspicions of science.  After all, even the New York Times has its doubts.

In which I harmonize with NCIS Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs

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People are always coming up to me and saying, “Rich, you are a moderately successful writer of genre fiction–what’s the secret of your moderate success?”

OK, that sentence is pretty much entirely a lie.  But my post on Chekhov’s gun reminds me that there are rules for writing that it would behoove writers and would-be writers to follow.  And I know some of them!  I may have made up some of them myself!  So maybe I should devote an occasional post to elucidating those rules.

Which in turn reminds me of NCIS Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs.  Gibbs is of course the platonic ideal of an NCIS Special Agent (he may in fact be the platonic ideal of American guy-ness).  Men want to be Gibbs, especially when he strides into headquarters and sneaks up on the other special agents as they are exchanging some mildly inappropriate office banter and says, “Grab your gear — dead Marine in that park where there is a dead Marine almost every week.”  Women want to be with Gibbs; especially if they can be like Abby, when he brings her a cup of Caf-Pow and then pecks her on the cheek after she tells him that the knife wound that killed the Marine could only have been made by a knife manufactured in some obscure knife factory in Sarajevo, which means the Marine’s killer was that minor Bosnian character none of us had suspected was the killer until that instant.

Anyway, Gibbs has rules, which are explained in hilarious detail on the NCIS wiki. If you want to be like Gibbs (as an agent and as an American guy), follow his rules (like Rule 8: Never take anything for granted).

Now of course, as the wiki makes clear, Gibbs is allowed to break his own rules, because he is Gibbs.  If you are Shakespeare or Dickens (or, I suppose, Hideki Murakami), you don’t need no stinkin’ rules for writing.  Or, if you have them, you can break them when it suits you.  But you and I are not Gibbs or Dickens; we are Tony DiNozzo or Timothy McGee, just regular ol’ special agents trying to learn from the master.  (By the way, just because I know some rules doesn’t mean that I always follow them.  I’m more like Agent McGee trying to pass the rules along to a new probie so that he can avoid the mistakes that McGee has made and the inevitable headslaps from an exasperated Gibbs.)

So, since this is a C-based blog rather than a Fortran-based blog, let’s start with Rule 0: Write.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

“Writing” doesn’t mean writing blog posts about what you’re going to write about.  It doesn’t mean writing notes to yourself about what you’re going to write about.  It means, you know, writing.

I think I may need to expand on Rule 0, but I’ll do that in another post.