Category Archives: Reading

Knock-knock-knockin’ on the Large Hadron Collider’s door

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I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath (or baited breath, which Google Ngram Viewer tells me is skyrocketing in popularity) for my final thoughts on Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.  Here are previous thoughts.

First, Lisa Randall is obviously a supremely brilliant and accomplished person.  This really makes me want to hate her, but I can’t quite.  She’s obviously doing her best to explain this hard quantum stuff to the likes of me, and it only kind of leaks out along the edges that she received word that LHC had finally been turned on (or something) while she was in Barcelona for the world premiere of an opera for which she had written the libretto.  Just shoot me now.

When I have difficulty understanding a science book like this, I naturally assume it’s me, not the writer. Undoubtedly that’s true here.  But even with that I think the book is a bit of a slog, because Randall doesn’t have an interesting point of view on her material, or at least an engaging style with which to simply tell the story.  Everything just kind of sits there.  It felt like a long term paper, and I’m being forced to give it an A because I can’t really find anything wrong with it.  I wonder if Randall ever got anything besides A’s.

Second, the book has a somewhat short shelf life, and it’s already apparently out of date.  The main part of the book is a description of the Large Hadron Collider and what we might discover from it.  The book came out last year, when the results were just starting to come out.  Here we are a year or so later, and one of the major theories she describes, Supersymmetry (SUSY for short), has apparently fallen by the wayside based on analysis of the 2011 results.  (I don’t know why I frequent the blog Not Even Wrong, since I understand virtually nothing the guy says — but, unlike Randall, he says it very engagingly!  The vision of the LHC results taking down the life’s work of thousands of theorists is terrifying–and, I’m sure, true.)

Finally, why does she have to add the “g” to the end of Knockin‘?  If Knockin’ was good enough for Dylan, why isn’t it good enough for her?  Anyway, here is Dylan, unplugged, with the original:

In which I read Thomas Middleton so you don’t have to

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The controversy over the authorship of All’s Well That Ends Well prompted me to give the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton a try.  This turns out to have been a mistake.

A friend lent me A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Wikipedia says: “Unpublished until 1630 and long-neglected afterwards, it is now considered among the best and most characteristic Jacobean comedies.”  The Internet is littered with other encomia.  Sheesh.

Here’s what I have to say: The plot is incomprehensible, the characters are uninteresting, and the language is devoid of poetry or wit.  The play is supposed to be dirty, and that sounds promising, but it turns out to be the kind of vulgarity that a modern reader can only understand by reading the footnotes.  The word “confusion,” the editor informs us, means “incest.”  Oh, of course, shoulda figured that out myself.  The play is supposed to be funny, but it’s the humor of stereotypes that were probably banal 400 hundred years ago.  The prim Puritan ladies get drunk at a party — what a riot!  The son comes home from college and he’s full of himself with all his new-fangled learning — I didn’t see that one coming!

Even in the dreariest parts of Shakespeare you’ll come across a startling image, a beautiful couplet, a character who does something unexpected.  There’s none of that in A Chaste Maid.  The only thing that seemed even quasi-Shakespearean is a happy ending that features a rebirth of sorts — the two lovers, supposedly dead, arise from their coffins, and the funeral turns into a wedding.  But there was no particular setup for the scene, so it felt entirely arbitrary.  And the characters could have stayed dead, for all I cared about them.

There, I feel better now.  Time to re-read As You Like It.

The greatest writer of English prose?

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Shakespeare?  I dunno, the prose sections of his plays aren’t as good as his poetry.  Dickens?  Pretty darn good in spots, but he also perpetrated lots of mawkish drek.  Joyce?  Hemingway?  Yeah, OK, sure.

I think a case could be made for P. G. Wodehouse.  Andrew Sullivan points us to a site that generates random Wodehouse quotes. What a wonderful idea!  Here is the first one that came up when I went there:

Rodney Spelvin was in for another attack of poetry. He had once been a poet, and a very virulent one too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

I really don’t see how you can write anything better than that.

Here is a sampling of his dialog:

“Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?”
“No.”
“Revolting. It alters one’s whole conception of Man as Nature’s last word.”

Here he is in person:

Yet another brouhaha: Did Shakespeare have a co-author on All’s Well That Ends Well?

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Our previous brouhaha was over how the universe began.  But who cares about that?  This latest brouhaha is serious.

The venerable Times Literary Supplement recently ran an article proposing that the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton had a hand in writing the latest Shakespearean play All’s Well That Ends Well.  Here is Mr. Middleton:

The TLS version of the article isn’t online, but it’s available from the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford.  Based on various kinds of evidence like stage directions and stylistic quirks, the authors state:

A broad-brush summary might look like this. One author knew that the two French lords had names, the other did not. One preferred personal names over types, and drew for many of them on his earlier plays. One used different speech prefixes from his collaborator. One wrote narrative stage directions as explanation to his partner at point of handover. One was more inclined to rhyming couplets and to hypermetric verse. One wrote like William Shakespeare and one wrote like Thomas Middleton.

Publishing a scholarly piece like this in the TLS is a big deal, and the authors’ identification of Middleton as Shakespeare’s co-author made news around the world, from the Huffington Post to the Times of India.

Enter Brian Vickers — not the NASCAR driver, you idiot, but the eminent Elizabethan scholar. Professor Sir Brian Vickers to you, bub.  He and a colleague have published a refutation in the TLS, also available separately, that refutes the claim.  They come out swinging:

Towards the end of their article claiming to have identified Thomas Middleton as the co-author of All’s Well that Ends Well,1 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith record that only one previous critic had anticipated them, John Dover Wilson.2 That ought to have given them pause, for to follow the path of the Grand Disintegrator eighty years after his methods have been discredited is to risk a similar fate. When faced with some aspects of a Shakespeare play that he didn’t like or understand Wilson was always ready to postulate some “inferior dramatist” or the relic of “an old play” as the explanation. For All’s Well he suggested a dramatist who also worked on Measure for Measure and “had a passion for sententious couplets and a mind running on sexual disease”, a fiction that conveniently excused Shakespeare of both “faults”. It is rather shocking to find such antiquated attitudes taken seriously, after four decades of scholarship has established authorship attribution as a serious discipline.

They battle the Oxford authors statistic for statistic, and then conclude:

We could extend this rebuttal, but suffice to say that there is absolutely no evidence of another hand in this play. The world media get excited by any attempt, however weak, to take something away from Shakespeare. We hope that they will pay equal attention to this restitution. The Roman definition of justice was “suum cuique tribuere”, render to everyone his due. Whether or not you like the play, All’s Well is all Shakespeare’s.

Great stuff!

Before reading the original TLS article I listened to the Arkangel recording ofAll’s Well on my endless commute.  These recordings are great, by the way.  The only thing I noticed that might have been slightly anomalous was that there seemed to be a lot of rhyming couplets (an issue that the Oxford authors in fact raised and Vickers refutes).  The main thing I noticed was that the play continued to be every bit as unlikeable as I remembered it. (You’ll note that Vickers implies that this is not an uncommon reaction to the play.)  The lead male character, Bertram, is an arrogant prick; the lead female, Helena, is a dope because she has fallen for the arrogant prick.  It’s not funny, it’s not thought-provoking, it has no memorable lines . . .

But it sure did seem to be by Shakespeare.  It has the fairy-tale quality and gnarled syntax of his late romances.  It has the bed trick he used in Measure for Measure.  It has the long, and somewhat distasteful, gulling of the comic villain he used in Twelfth Night.  It has the concluding rebirth tableau he used in A Winter’s Tale.

But that doesn’t mean the play is any good.

Once I finish slogging through Lisa Randall on the Large Hadron Collider I’m going to give Middleton a try.  A friend has lent me the pleasant conceited comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which sounds not bad:

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (also, the cutest kitten photos ever!!)

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OK, I’m lying about the kitten photos.  It’s just that the title of the post seemed a wee bit abstruse without throwing in some kittens.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes was a bestseller when it was published in 1976.  Its thesis, briefly, is that consciousness as we know it arose very recently in human history — around 3000 years ago.  Before that, human beings were more like zombies, lacking introspection, and responding to auditory hallucinations coming from the right side of their brains — hallucinations that they typically interpreted as being the voices of gods.  This “bicameral mind” started to break down during the second millennium BCE in the face of the stresses of migrations, natural disasters, the development of writing, and so on.

Julian Jaynes

When I read the book, the evidence I found most interesting was Jaynes’s comparison between the Iliad and the Odyssey.  None of the characters in the Iliad show any introspection — they are the playthings of the gods.  In the Odyssey, on the other hand, Odysseus is supremely introspective; the gods are still integral to the story, but Odysseus is his own master.  (Of course, the dating of both epics is pretty conjectural, since they had they origins in oral performance, probably hundreds of years before they were written down.)

Anyway, the book disappeared from my consciousness after I read it, and I never noticed any other books by Jaynes.  Was he just another scientific crank like Velikovsky?

The answer, it seems, is (pretty much) no.  The first time I encountered a reference to Jaynes in recent years was in a footnote to Dawkins’s The God Delusion, where he says, “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.”  That sounds about right to me.  The book does, of course, offer an intriguing explanation of sorts for the origin of religion, but Dawkins just mentions it in passing.

I was more surprised last week when Jaynes came up in a UC Berkeley course I was listening to called “Scientific Approaches to Consciousness.”  The professor devoted his final lecture to Jaynes’s theory, without offering any criticism of it — apparently it is worthy of being taught, more or less uncritically, to Berkeley undergrads.

The Wikipedia articles suggest that Jaynes’s theory is not quite in the scientific mainstream, but lots of interesting people (like Daniel Dennett) continue to have good things to say about it.  There is a Julian Jaynes Society, the existence of which strikes me as rather culty.  Here is a recent critique of the theory.  Time to reread the book itself, I guess.

And OK, here is a cute kitten:

Pulitzer for The Swerve

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The Swerve has won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. The citation says it’s “a provocative book arguing that an obscure work of philosophy, discovered nearly 600 years ago, changed the course of history by anticipating the science and sensibilities of today.”

I think that overstates the book’s argument; it makes the case that the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura was emblematic of and contributed to the changes that were happening, not that it was solely responsible for the changes. Furthermore, the book is anything but provocative. The Renaissance was about rediscovering works by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and these rediscoveries helped usher in the modern world.  I learned that in grade school.  The Swerve just provides an entertaining example of how this happened.  Apparently that was enough.

At any rate, in my opinion The Swerve wasn’t even the best nonfiction book of 2011 written by a professor at the World’s Greatest University.  I was far more impressed with, and learned far more from, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I read just before starting my blogging career.

So how do you get a Pulitzer?  The description of the process on the Pulitzer site is vague to the point of incomprehensibility.  It says: “While the journalism process goes forward, shipments of books totaling some 1,000 titles are being sent to five letters juries for their judging …”  Apparently anyone with a book and $50 can apply.  Here is the form.  It’s easier than applying to college, and about as cheap.

But what do the judges do with all the submissions?  They obviously can’t read more than a fraction of them.  Was Pinker’s book at a disadvantage because it was 800+ pages, and the judges didn’t have time to get through it all?  Or was its somewhat controversial thesis a problem? The Swerve was short and entertaining and sufficiently highbrow.  Maybe that was enough.

I wonder when the Pulitzers will start accepting ebooks….

Blogs worth reading: Envisioning Future

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One of the unexpected advantages of starting a blog is that interesting people stop by.  How they find me, I have no idea.  I thought I’d point them out once in a while.

Here is a blog written by a young woman in Pakistan.  This is from a post on “The Bride-Hunt”:

Attention all ladies! The matrimonial aunties are on their way! If you’re from the subcontinent you would be well aware of those “aunties” who are on a mission to find their “Ideal daughter-in-law”. Let’s take a look at the scene here. The hunting starts with tea parties and neighbourhood weddings when all the gorgeous girls are dressed-up in desi clothes and aunties with their hawk eyesight stalk their potential daughter-in-laws. It is then followed by a tea party hosted by the girl’s parents and it ends with a bunch of broken hearts (mostly of girls) and one satisfied “saasu-maa”!

There is a lot of confusion among the bride-to-be, the groom-to-be and the future mother-in-law. The groom thinks that the girl he is marrying is either Angelina Jolie or Katerina Kaif. The girls think that the guy they are marrying is either Edward Cullen or Fawad Khan (ya, the Humsafar guy). The mother-in-law thinks that the girl has some sort of special super powers to be great in… well, everything!
Reality: Disaster.

Which got me to look up Fawad Khan (a Pakistani actor)

And Katerina Kaif (a British Indian actress):

It’s a big world!

Easter, 1916

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Yeats:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The Easter Rising began in Dublin on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. Note that the poem has four stanzas, alternating 16 and 24 lines.

Here’s an interactive tour of a Yeats exhibit at the National Library of Ireland, including a manuscript of “Easter, 1916”.

Here is Yeats:

And here is Patrick Pearse, one of those whom “excess of love bewildered” till he died. He was executed by firing squad on May 3, 1916.

Wikipedia says: “Sir John Maxwell, the General Officer commanding the British forces in Ireland, sent a telegram to H.H. Asquith, then Prime Minister, advising him not to return the bodies of Pádraig and Willie Pearse to their family, saying: ‘Irish sentimentality will turn these graves into martyrs’ shrines to which annual processions will be made which would cause constant irritation in this country.'”

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.