Category Archives: Reading

Sam Harris is opposed to lying — go read his free ebook about it

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I find that Sam Harris is always interesting, even when I disagree with him (and lots of people disagree with him about lots of things).  He has a post up on his site about Jonah Lehrer. In response to the Lehrer scandal, he has made his short ebook Lying available for free as a PDF for the rest of the week.  You’ll find a link to it in the Lehrer post.  I have started reading it, and his position on lying is pretty clear — he’s agin it.  My sense is that Harris is not an especially deep thinker, but he is a clear and graceful writer, so you may want to check out his book — it’s only about 60 pages.

I also have Harris’s book Free Will on my e-queue. He’s not necessarily agin free will, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think it exists.

 

Self-plagiarism is one thing; making stuff up is something else entirely

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The last time we encountered Jonah Lehrer, he had been caught committing the odd crime of self-plagiarism.  Things have now taken a turn for the worse. In fact, his meteoric career has crashed and burned, as meteors tend to do, with the revelation that he fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works.  This time he ran afoul of the relentless reporting of a journalist and Dylan freak named Michael Moynihan, writing for Tablet magazine.  (Tablet‘s website has apparently also crashed and burned, and I can’t link to the article.)  Here is a report that quotes Moynihan:

I’m something of the Dylan obsessive — piles of live bootlegs, outtakes, books — and I read the first chapter of Imagine with keen interest. But when I looked for sources to a handful of Dylan quotations offered by Lehrer — the chapter is sparsely and erratically footnoted — I came up empty, and in one case found two fragments of quotes, from different years and on different topics, welded together to create something that happily complimented Lehrer’s argument. Other quotes I couldn’t locate at all.

He finally got Lehrer to confess.  The result: his book has been recalled, and he has had to resign from the New Yorker.

I imagine that Lehrer thought he could get away with his fabrications because book publishers don’t do the kind of obsessive fact-checking that the New Yorker is famous for.  But it’s a terrible risk to take, especially when you’re fabricating Bob Dylan quotes for a public with any number of Dylan obsessives in it.  As with the self-plagiarism, it seems to be a case of cutting corners.  At least he came up with what sounds like a sincere apology:

The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed.

That’s pretty classy in a world of mealy-mouthed passive-voice pseudo-apologies. The classic in this genre is Newt Gingrich blaming his love of country for his adulteries:

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

Things happened–lovely.  Anyway, this blog is primarily about fiction, and in fiction you don’t have to apologize for making stuff up.  On the other hand, you do have to apologize for stealing stuff.  Don’t steal stuff. It’s not worth the risk of getting caught, and the more successful you are, the more likely you are to get caught.  Here is the sad story of an overachieving Harvard student who plagiarized passages in a big-time young-adult chick-lit novel she wrote.  Wikipedia tells you much more than you want to know, comparing passages from her novel with similar passages from half a dozen others.  The really sad part of the story is that a few years after the plagiarism controversy her parents died in a plane crash.

I hope she gets over it.  I hope Lehrer gets over it, although I doubt he will.  From the New Yorker blog posts I read, I’d say the guy knows how to write.  He just lost sight of the rules.

Great Expectations and sad endings

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Here we saw how Hemingway struggled with the ending to A Farewell to Arms. You need to get the ending right.

For some novels, the most important decision will be whether the ending is sad or happy.  You’d think this decision would flow inevitably from the story you’re telling.  In some cases, that’s true.  In a genre private eye novel, the private eye will crack the case.  In a genre romance, girl will get boy.  In mainstream Hollywood movies nowadays, you’re pretty much guaranteed a happy ending; otherwise the movie wouldn’t have gotten made.  But for lots of novels, the ending balances on a knife edge between life and death, marriage and loneliness, joy and despair.  That, in fact, is what keeps the reader reading.  The author gets to make the call.

The ending to Pontiff caused me the most problems in this regard.  Should girl get boy, when boy is a priest?  If so, does that qualify as a happy ending?  In any case, did the ending work–was it true to the story?  Lemme know! (There is another sad aspect of the story that involves the death of a character at the climax, and I really didn’t want to do it.  But my plot gave me no choice.)

King Lear‘s ending is so damn sad that even critics like Samuel Johnson thought it was unbearable. For 300 years, from the Restoration to the mid-nineteenth century, the only version performed was a revision by Nahum Tate in which Cordelia survived and married Edgar. We have seen evidence that Shakespeare revised the play, but the revisions, if anything, made the play’s ending sadder.

The most celebrated case of revising an ending to make it happier was Great Expectations.

Dickens’ original ending was bleak. The narrator, Pip, who has been in love with the unattainable Estella since he first laid eyes on her, meets her on the street many years later:

It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.

I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

I was in England again — in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip — when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

Too sad! One of his friends–maybe Wilkie Collins–complained.  So Dickens tried again.  He has Pip and Estella meet on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s ruined house, where they had first met many years ago:

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. “And will continue friends apart”. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Too happy!  That’s what lots of critics have complained.  Shaw said: The novel “is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it.”

Well, I dunno.  A novel can be unhappy throughout, yet achieve its happiness at the end.  Characters grow; characters change.  And there’s no question that the revised ending is better written than the original, which is awfully flat.  Most modern editions include both endings, I think, like a DVD where you can choose the author’s cut.

Dickens himself seemed happy with the revision.  He said: “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”

You be the judge.  Also, see the David Lean movie, with John Mills as Pip and Jean Simmons as the ethereally beautiful young Estella.

Stumbling on “Stumbling on Happiness”

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I seem to be stuck in a rut, reading mostly books written by Harvard professors.  The latest is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology there.  It’s not about how to be happy, but about why we have difficulty figuring out what will make us happy.  As he says about books about how to be happy:

Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.

The problem we face, he says, is that our imaginations are faulty in systematic, predictable ways.  He points to the case of conjoined twins who spend every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face, but who can’t imagine undergoing surgical separation.  “Why would you want to do that?” one of them asks.  “For all the tea in China, why?  You’d be ruining two lives in the process.”  A medical historian says this isn’t unique–in fact, he found the “desire to remain together  to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal.”  And yet conventional medical wisdom is that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both.  This, Gilbert points out, is a failure of imagination.  When we imagine how others feel, or how our future selves might feel, we focus on ourselves in the present.  If we think we don’t have enough money, we imagine that having more money will make us happier; we can see now, so we can’t imagine that we could still be happy if we were to go blind.  But in fact, over a certain level of income, money doesn’t make people any happier, and blind people are as happy as sighted people.

Everything he says seems insightful and perfectly reasonable, but I have to say that every time I encounter findings from social psychology, behavioral economics, and related fields, I wonder about how reproducible they are.  This is pretty basic concern in these fields, and it’s referred to as the WEIRD problem. Most research of the sort Gilbert talks about is carried out on American undergraduates or people like them; the samples are overwhelmingly from drawn from societies that are Wealthy Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. And there is a good bit of evidence that we have little basis on which to extend the findings of the research to the rest of humanity.  I suppose this may not be much of a issue for Stumbling on Happiness, which is aimed at people who are probably not terribly different from American undergraduates.  But I can never shake the feeling that grand statements about human behavior are being made on the basis on relatively flimsy evidence.

But mostly I don’t care when it comes to Gilbert, because he is a spectacularly good writer.  Wikipedia tells me that he started out wanting to be a science fiction writer, but the creative writing class was full at his local community college, so he took the only course that was open, which was Introduction to Psychology.  This was science fiction’s loss (although he has published stories in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, where I have also appeared).  He has a way with sentences that Lisa Randall should attempt to emulate.  Here is a paragraph taken at random:

By muddling causes and consequences, philosophers have been forced to construct tortured defenses of some truly astonishing claims–for example, that a Nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is. “Happiness will not tremble,” Cicero wrote in the first century BC, “however much it is tortured.” That statement may be admired for its moxie, but it probably doesn’t capture the sentiments of the missionary who was drafted to play the role of the entrée.

This is good stuff.  I’d love to take a course from the guy.

Which is the better title: “Bride of the Slime Monster” or “Locksley Hall”?

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Previously we looked at the titles Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies and Dover Beach and decided that Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies won hands-down. In fact, in my opinion Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies might be the most awesomest title ever.

Let’s consider Bride of the Slime Monster.  There’s no question that this is also an excellent title.  Short, funny, gives you a clear sense of what the book is all about.  Is it as good as Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies?  I think not, but I recognize that others may feel differently.  The cover is also pretty good.

Now, what are we to make of Locksley Hall?  I think it’s pretty clearly an awful title, except maybe for a Regency romance, with a cover showing an auburn-tressed young maiden running from an English country estate, her half-uncovered bosoms heaving with strong emotion.  While “Dover Beach” has the benefit of being the title of a somewhat familiar poem, nobody nowadays reads the 1842 poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred Tennyson.  It’s too long, too hard to follow, and it’s got just this one memorable line: “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  So memorable, in fact, that it has been totally decoupled from the poem in which it occurs.

So what kind of an idiot would title a science fiction novel Locksley Hall?  That kind of idiot would be me!  That’s what I named the long-unawaited sequel to Dover Beach.  If you think you have read this sequel, you are quite probably deluded.  But before too terribly long it will be an ebook you can put on your eshelf next to your dog-eared ecopy of the original novel.  Yay!

My original error, it seems, was in buying into my editor’s idea that naming a post-nuclear-war private-eye novel after a nineteenth-century poem was a good one.  So I decided that I should do the same thing for the sequel.  But when Bantam examined the box office receipts for Dover Beach, it decided that the market for post-nuclear-war private-eye novels named after a nineteenth-century poem wasn’t as strong at they had imagined it to be and, in spite of great reviews, they didn’t want to publish its already-completed sequel.  Boo!

Which isn’t to say that Locksley Hall is a bad title, in the sense that it is tightly integrated with the novel’s themes, in just the way that Dover Beach is. The poem “Locksley Hall” (that’s its author over there on the right) is all over the map.  In outline it is a standard romantic poem about lost love.  But it takes weird digressions into sexism, racism, and weirdest of all, science fiction.

Here is the SF-y passage, which seems to come out of nowhere:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

My novel, it turns out, is about the attempt to form a better government as New England is recovers from the “ghastly dew” that rained upon it.  Some people are still dreaming of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, and other are thinking: You’ve got to be shitting me.  Look how well the old government worked out for us!

And in the middle of it all, Walter Sands stumbles onto his second case, and he has to figure out which side a private eye should be on.

Fire in a crowded theater: The Dark Knight, Plato, and censorship

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Oddly, on the day of the Aurora tragedy I listened to a lecture about censorship, as advocated by Plato in The Republic.  (Here‘s the Open Yale course I’ve been listening to.  It’s good!)  It’s interesting that one of the foundational documents of Western civilization advocates strict government censorship of poetry and drama, for the good of the person and the benefit of the state.  Here is Plato (in the voice of Socrates) in Book X:

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things–they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

In earlier books he raises the issue in the context of educating the young who will be rulers of the state.

As a nation, we have free speech built into our DNA. As a writer, I have no wish for my work to be censored (or, worse, forbidden).  As a parent, though, I’m awfully glad that I’m past the time when I had to worry about whether my kids would be allowed to watch R-rated movies or play M-rated games or listen to songs with explicit lyrics.  It was exhausting!

There aren’t any good answers here — it’s easy enough to see the flaws in Plato’s strategy, especially in a state with 300 million citizens.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep thinking about it.  And we need to recognize the downside of the choices we have made as a society.

I’m obviously not the target for the Batman movies.  I saw The Dark Knight at home on my little TV, and to me the violence just seemed over the top and stupid.  But I could imagine the impact of the experience on the big screen.  And once upon a time I was young enough to spend my time fantasizing about living in the worlds I experienced in movies and novels.  We know nothing about the shooter’s motives (or even if he had any), but it looks like the world of The Dark Knight was the one he chose to inhabit.  And that’s pretty scary.

Hemingway tries to get the words right

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Apropos of these post about revising and rewriting, it turns out the Simon & Schuster has released a new edition of A Farewell to Arms that includes all Hemingway’s alternate endings.  He claimed that he wrote the ending 39 times before he was satisfied.  The basic issue, he famously said, was “getting the words right.” Turns out that the actual number of endings was probably more like 47.

Here’s the first page of the manuscript, which is stored, with the rest of Hemingway’s papers, at the JFK Library in Dorchester, MA, about ten miles away from where I am sitting.

Endings are hard because they are so important. They don’t need to sum up what the novel was all about, but they control what readers are going to be feeling when they put the book down.

For close readers of Hemingway the endings are a fascinating glimpse into how the novel could have concluded on a different note, sometimes more blunt and sometimes more optimistic. And since modern authors tend to produce their work on computers, the new edition also serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author’s process.

One of the endings was suggested by Fitzgerald.  Speaking of Fitzgerald, has anyone written a better ending than the one he wrote for The Great Gatsby?

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Self-plagiarism: mortal sin, venial sin, or huh?–who cares?

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Jonah Lehrer of the New Yorker has been caught recycling old material for his new blog Frontal Cortex. The New Yorker has had to add editor’s notes to all the blog entries in which they “regret the duplication of material.”

I haven’t read Lehrer’s books, but his blog shows him to be a fine writer working the Malcolm Gladwell vein — giving an entertaining layman’s spin on findings from social psychology, neuroscience, and the like.  Good stuff!

The Slate writer seems to have put his finger on at least part of Lehrer’s problem: it’s just to hard to keep coming up with new material.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and The New Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.

That sounds about right.  Between June 5 (when the blog apparently started) and June 13, Lehrer put up five blog posts — each of which was the equivalent of a nicely crafted magazine-quality column.  It’s not surprising that he cut some corners.

Part of the problem has to be that Lehrer is trying to make a living from his blog (among other things).  Blogs have no deadlines (unless the New Yorker imposes them), but there are expectations associated with them.  There are plenty of blogs that I don’t frequent any more because the author updates them too infrequently.  If you want traffic, you need content.  Lehrer was trying to feed the beast and decided he needed to use leftovers.

And what kind of sin has Lehrer committed?  Mostly a sin of stupidity, I’d say.  You can’t expect to get away with self-plagiarism on the Internet, and you can’t expect some people not to gloat at a misstep from a young hotshot.  A little note at the end of each post saying what the editor’s note now says at the top of the post would have sufficed, I think.

But wait!  This blog is about me, not Jonah Lehrer!  Please note that today is my six-month blogging anniversary, and I haven’t been caught self-plagiarizing once! (I’ve quoted extensively from my novels, but I believe blogging etiquette allows this.)  I’ve tried to follow my own writerly advice and make blogging a habit, so I’ve averaged about a post a day — although, granted, some of them consisted mainly of YouTube videos.  I guess I cut corners, too.

Anyway, advice about how to improve the blog would be gratefully received.

In which the All’s Well That Ends Well brouhaha continues

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I’m thinking that no one but me cares about this brouhaha, but as the sole proprietor of this very fine blog, I’m the only one that matters.

When last we checked in, two Oxford professors had written an article published in the Times Literary Supplement proposing that Thomas Middleton had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.  In response, Brian Vickers and Marcus Dahl produced a scathing rebuttal.  (By the way, it is the official position of this blog that, no matter who wrote it, the play kinda sucks.  But it doesn’t come within miles of the badness of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.)

Now the two Oxford professors, Emma Smith and Laurie Maguire, have responded in the TLS.  I can’t find the response online, but here is a taste of what they have to say:

Vickers and Dahl are flat-earthers.  They cling to an old date for AWEW (1604 rather than 1607) or later); they do not endorse revision in Measure for Measure or Macbeth; their appeal is to “lovers of Shakespeare”.  It is these ideological idées fixes that underlie their article.  Unlike us, however, they do not make their subjective positions clear.  We accept this new scholarship and build on it; these Canutes try to stem the incoming tide.

Ouch!  But wait!  Online we find a response from Vickers to the response by Smith and Maguire to the response by Vickers and Dahl to the article by Smith and Maguire.  Here is their concluding paragraph:

Smith and Maguire, abreast of ‘new scholarship’, claim that we ‘cling to an old date’ for All’s Well. It may well be that Gary Taylor in 2001 was ‘inclined to put it’ in 1607, and that others have been inclined to follow him. But contrary evidence cannot be dismissed. In Taylor’s own Textual Companion (1988) to the Oxford Shakespeare seven pages of tables listing various types of linguistic evidence place All’s Well after Measure for Measure and Othello, and before Timon and King Lear, thus in the period 1604-5. If Taylor now flirts with the idea of placing it after Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pericles then he will have to disown the data collected in these tables. Writing from a literary critic’s standpoint, Barbara Everett has given some strong reasons for not lumping All’s Well with Shakespeare’s late plays, and these can be supplemented with Marina Tarlinskaya’s prosodic studies, which place All’s Well before King Lear. In the humanities, as in the sciences, the truth or falsity of a proposition can only be established by a consensus among those qualified to judge. Time will tell.

Both sides have a good bit to say about “anal fistulas,” which has its own Wikipedia article, but I’m going to advise you not to go there.  The discussion of fistulas (anal or otherwise) in All’s Well That Ends Well is one more reason to avoid the play.

I am incompetent to judge between these adversaries.  But I’d be disinclined to mess with Brian Vickers on matters Shakespearean.

Happy Bloomsday

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…celebrating the travels of Leopold Bloom through Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Bloomsday.  I didn’t know that the manuscript of Ulysses resided in Philadelphia. Here is a page from the Circe episode:

Speaking of revisions, Joyce did his share.  I remember seeing a page from the manuscript of Finnegan’s Wake at the British Library, and every single word on it was crossed out.

Here is a great reading of the final lines of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.  In it, Joyce probably breaks every rule of good writing.  And it doesn’t matter; fiction doesn’t get any better than this: