Category Archives: Culture

Evolutionary Biology and the novel: Additional directions and William Flesch’s Comeuppance

July 10, 2011 By in Books, Culture, status, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Novels are arguably about two subjects: sex and death. This isn’t an original or unorthodox observation; Leslie Fiedler famously propagated it in Love and Death in the American Novel, which was published in 1960. The reasons why we’re drawn to those subjects over and over again are less well-developed, but some good answers come from evolutionary biology. Going back to Darwin and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, we’ve known that organisms need to do two things to propagate themselves: survive and reproduce. Not coincidentally, those two items map neatly onto the fascination in narrative fiction with death (and who should be killed and under what circumstances) and sex (and who it should be had with and under what circumstances).

Novels ceaselessly interrogate and illuminate both fields. I think people are drawn to those subjects because the stakes are inherently high for us, our genes, and our communities. If we die, our genes go with us, and, according to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, we’re the result of a long chain of ancestors who managed to send out genes into the future. Viewed in one light, we’re simply vehicles for propagating those genes successfully. One could argue from there that our communities are platforms—in the sense Steven Berlin Johnson develops in Where Good Ideas Come From—that allow us to survive and reproduce successfully. Communities that are more successful as platforms tend to spread; those that aren’t, whither, or are overtaken by communities that do. Historically speaking, this has often happened in the context of violence, cruelty, slavery, and the like, especially on behalf of the west against peoples of other cultures, as Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

But for my argument regarding the novel, I want to focus on individuals, small groups, and genres. Regarding the latter, one can essentially map tragedies onto stories dealing with death and comedies onto stories dealing with sex and sex mores. The content of those stories change—what tragedy meant to Shakespeare is probably somewhat different than what it means to, say, Cormac McCarthy. And the sex comedies of Jane Austen, with their primness, their refusal to name the act itself, and their distaste for contemplating the act of intercourse outside of marriage (how shocking it is when Lydia absconds in Pride and Prejudice!) are quite different from those in Bridge Jones’ Diary or Alain de Botton’s On Love, both of which assume sex before marriage is normal and that marriage isn’t an essential part of life. The content of the stories change while their overall thrust and the fundamental subjects remain the similar. Unless humanity reaches a technological singularity (which seems unlikely to me; as Tyler Cowen likes to say, it’s 2011 and we still have web browsers that crash), I doubt we’re going to see a shift away from novels that focus on sex and death as the greatest issues that humans face. We’re fascinated by the shifting, dialectical rules surrounding both sex and death and how they may be deployed because they have such profound consequences for us and our genes.

So why don’t more people discuss this explicitly in novels?

Evolutionary biology offers some of the tools we need to analyze what drives humans in terms of sexuality and survival. I’m surprised more literary critics don’t want to or try to cross pollinate with evolutionary biology, since, as stated in the first sentence of this paragraph, evolutionary biology gives us another set of methodological principles with which to interrogate texts. The set of tools literary critics need has started to be developed by William Flesch in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. But fundamental questions remain unanswered—like how individual variation functions within an amorphous system without definite boundaries. As with psychoanalytic criticism, however, we can still take overall ideas (like: “males and females differ in their average mating strategies because women bear the greater cost of childbirth and childrearing”) and work to apply them to literature.

This doesn’t mean that we should automatically assume a one-to-one correlation between any action a character in fiction undertakes, or that characters (or their authors) are even aware of their own motivations; when Emma is trying to set up everyone in Highbury, she’s partially trying to maintain the class structure of her time, but she’s also trying to maximize the reproductive success of the individuals she knows (and herself) through finding “appropriate” matches. Since Freud, the idea that people (or characters) understand their motivations has been a suspect premise anyway. And since Derrida, if not earlier, the idea that one can neatly create separate categories like “death” and “sex” has become suspect. But that both drive characters and intertwine in unusual, fractal, and unpredictable ways is true. We need to track, understand, and evaluate those ways better. Psychoanalytic criticism gives us a set of tools to do so.

Characters’ underlying drives can’t be ignored. Nor can what readers find most rewarding in fiction be ignored. When in doubt, ask what is at stake regarding sex, death, or both. It would be a mistake to create a reductive algorithm that merely says, “everything a character does is related to their biological reproduction or their survival.” It would also be a mistake to think that every character interprets the drive to survive and reproduce in the same way, or that evolutionary biology itself has a single, underlying set of rules: its own rules are under constant interrogation as new evidence emerges to support or refute existing claims. But the answers that emerge from asking questions about why characters are so tuned in to the sexuality of others goes beyond economic exchange, mate value, and culture, and into what a given character thinks a set of rules will do to his or her own chances at reproducing and thriving.

To use Emma again, the characters in that universally or almost universally believe that marriage is in their best interests and therefore the best interests of those around them. They do not question the value of the institution, as later writers will do; by the time we come to George Eliot and Flaubert, novelists have begun to do so in earnest (as Tony Tanner points out Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression). By now, novels are asking questions about what happens to relationships when marriage is an option, not a given, and when virtually any life course is open to people as far as sexuality is concerned. If you write a contemporary novel that deals solely with the momentous decisions around who a woman will marry (as in Jane Austen), you won’t be engaging the world in which contemporary Western characters live. You’re dealing with sex, but not in a way that resonates with the social fabric for most people. The drive (“reproduce successfully”) remains even if the means have changed. Whether you’re analyzing or writing novels, you better pay attention.

We believe what we can see: In the Garden of Beasts edition

June 30, 2011 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

From Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, which is worth getting from the library (this section deals with 1933):

It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner. Here at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith [the Consul General] described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname ‘Forty-Page George.’ He wrote of the widespread violence that had occurred in the several months that immediately followed Hitler’s appointment and of the increasing control the government exerted over all aspects of German society.

People in the 1930s simply couldn’t believe that Germany would act as it did. This might be one reason why cell phones and cell phone cameras are so powerful: it’s very hard to deny video. If cell phone cameras had been widely available in 1930, could the Holocaust have unfolded as it did, in a major Western country? The answer, of course, will always be “maybe,” but I think the shock of seeing footage of Jews and others being beaten and murdered in the streets might have had a powerful effect around the world.

I wonder if we’re on the cusp of seeing cell phone cameras reduce the amount of police brutality in public places, since police will know they’re likely to be taped. Cops don’t like this (see here and here for more).

Although I obviously love reading, it’s relatively easy to deny a written description of an event. It’s much harder to deny a video that shows the people involved. That’s not to say video can’t be manipulated—it obviously can—but sometimes a short video can do what “Forty-Page George” can’t. It’s hard or impossible to “exaggerate” video, even if it can be maliciously edited. We should still read, as “Twilight of the Books” makes clear, but video still changes things (it changes what can happen in fiction, for example; people have been writing about blue movies or explicit pictures for a long time, but the plausibility of something like Anita Shreve’s Testimony depends on widespread access to inexpensive video equipment (see also Caitlin Flanagan’s somewhat misguided but interesting essay on the novel). That’s relatively recent, and we’re still dealing with what it means.)

EDIT: See also this discussion of police and cameras from Crooked Timber.

Routing around network failure: public schools and community colleges

May 7, 2011 By in Culture, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Dean Dad has an interesting post named “Three Flavors of Dual Enrollment,” which deals with high school students taking community college classes. Read the whole thing, but note this comment:

In the “everyone” version, the idea is to replace the last year or two of high school — widely acknowledged to be an academic wasteland — with the first year or two of college. Those who tout this version point out the time and cost savings to the student; some colleges have seemingly bought in, seduced by the promise of a mighty river of tuition.

I agree with the point about the dubiousness of many dual enrollment versions. That being said, the problem as a whole is a superficial one that really points to a larger problem in the way our society itself is structured: people aren’t children at the age of 16. As Paul Graham says in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known,” by the age, “Childhood was getting old.” Virtually everyone is biologically an adult at that age, and, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of them are pretty annoyed at being treated like they’re still 10—which is what schools effectively do. And the problems of public schools mean they’re not really imparting much knowledge by that point—hence the “academic wasteland” comment earlier in his post.

Sixteen year olds are people, but schools don’t treat them as such. This is part of the point of The Case Against Adolescence and, to a lesser extent, of Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry. People can figure out that school is bogus. The smart ones want something better, and they often read essays like “Why Nerds Are Unpopular,” which explain exactly why high school is bogus. Community college is one outlet for these problems. Not an ideal one, as Dean Dad says, but it’s at least a possible one.

The best solution, of course, is the one Dean Dad posits: “If the high schools need fixing, then the high schools need fixing.” But you can’t really change the form of high school save through some form of charter school, voucher system, or moving to suburbs. There are lots of barriers to improving high schools, and you can read about them in this compilation post. Since high schools change with torturously slow speed, smart people try to route around the problem.

I agree with this: “the obvious remedy is to improve the junior and senior years of high school.” There’s no effective way to do this within the current constraints of school systems (local monopolies, nearly impossible to get rid of very bad kids or teachers). So the community college idea is probably a second- or third-best option. The high schools do need fixing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this alternative becomes more popular when high schools can’t be effectively fixed.

I would’ve been a good candidate for dual-enrollment—in Washington State, it’s called Running Start—if I hadn’t been such an idiot and sacrificed eighth – tenth grades on the alter of Starcraft. School seemed very small, and to most moderately smart people it probably still does. Although she’s writing in a different context, I think Megan McArdle points out the problem:

A significant number of teens didn’t know who Osama Bin Laden was until we killed him. I can’t believe it–and yet I do believe it. I didn’t know what Iran Contra was when I was in high school, and I was a sophomore when it happened. Teenagers live in their own little world, only tangentially connected to the one the rest of us occupy.

Teenagers do “live in their own little world”—the world adults put them in. It’s such a commonplace that McArdle can say it, and nobody comments the statement. Why should we expect students to behave otherwise? I wonder if the popularity of world-is-a-lie fiction (1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies) among high school students is in part because the smarter among them are dimly aware of how their own world is constructed. Teachers don’t really tell them, most of the time. I suspect most people don’t figure it out until college or later—by which point they don’t care much anymore.

Why publishers are scared of ebooks — the standard reasons and Amanda Hocking as symbol

March 10, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Amanda Hocking, the now-famous indie writer, has an interesting post where she says, “Here’s another thing I don’t understand: The way people keep throwing my name around and saying publishers are “terrified” of me and that I really showed them.” They aren’t terrified of her, specifically, as an individual (which she notes), but they are scared of her as a symbol and what she represents: a world where you don’t need publishers as much. She just happens to be an early example of how to make it financially via ebooks. At the moment, publishers have one big advantage that no writer, no matter how skills, can replicate: distribution. If you take that advantage away, a lot of the raisons d’état of publishers goes away.

Later, she says: “And just so we’re clear – ebooks make up at best 20% of the market.” But that’s up from virtually nothing in 2006. In 2001, discs sold on shiny platters made up the vast majority of the music business. In 2011, the “music business” as it existed from the days of the first records until about ten years ago is gone. You still need a big record label if you want to be Lady Gaga, but almost no one else does. Music industry profits have never recovered. This is great for people who want to listen to music but not so good for people who want to make money from music, especially if they can’t actually make music themselves. Media executives, including publishers, know this, which is why they’re watching what happens in book-land so carefully.

“Nobody knows what makes one book a bestseller. Publishers and agents like to pretend they do, but if they did, they would only publish best sellers, and they don’t.” That’s the scariest thing of all: no one knows. This has long been a truism in lots of forms of art. William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade came in 1982, if I recall correctly, and he said almost the same thing about movies: “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Or, Scott Adams, if you prefer someone with even less movie experience than Goldman or me:

Evaluating whether an idea is good enough for a movie is a bit like an automobile expert saying a certain brand of car doesn’t taste good. It’s absurd. You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don’t understand what a movie is or what an idea is.

Movies have a slight advantage in that making movies technically pretty (which requires foley artists, on-set locations, lots of actors, careful detail to light, and lots of other stuff) is still pretty expensive. A lot of people also still go to movie theaters, so that advantage hasn’t completely disappeared. With books, all you really have is the book.

There are probably lots of undiscovered bestsellers out there, which, if writers get tired of submitting to agents and all the rest, they can now relatively cheaply and easily put online and let the market sort it out. Again: if enough people succeed at this, publishers go away.

Big publishers might be dying in the way Paul Graham describes Microsoft being dead. Microsoft will continue making lots of money for the foreseeable future, but it’s no longer leading anything in tech. (Enough people misinterpreted him that he wrote the Cliff’s Notes version too.) They’re not dying in the sense that whoever owns Alfred A. Knopf is going to be gone tomorrow, or the day after. But if their relevance starts to slip, they could fail with surprising speed. Look at what happened to Blockbuster: Netflix undermined them, and within a decade of Netflix on the scene all the Blockbusters near me have “going out of business” signs on them.

Back to Hocking: “Traditional publishing and indie publishing aren’t all that different, and I don’t think people realize that.” They might not be as different as some make them out to be, but from the perspective of shareholders they’re very, very different, in that shareholders can make money off publishers in one model and they probably can’t in the same way in the other. From the perspective of the writer, she’s certainly right, as she goes on to say: writers still have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort. As I’m only too aware.

I’m not the only one saying this. Here’s what Kevin Kelly says: “I don’t think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go. It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.” It’s scary because $.99 isn’t going to support cushy Manhattan offices, long lunches, interns, marketing departments, and everything else modern publishers do. It’s not going to support 5–10% growth every year, which most investors assume before they part with their money. As mentioned elsewhere, publishers can see what trend lines are like and they’ve all read The Innovator’s Dilemma, like everyone else who does anything business-related. The upshot of the book is that incumbents often recognize disruptive technologies and products and then fail to respond to them effectively anyway. Think of Microsoft and the Internet, or record labels and the Internet, or newspapers and the Internet. Yeah, I keep using “the Internet” as an example, but you can see this in other areas, like American car companies when the Japanese first entered the U.S. market. Microsoft is probably the best example, since the famous “Cornell is WIRED!” e-mail alerted them to the threat, and they responded with Internet Explorer.

Today, 17 years after that e-mail was sent, I’m typing this on an iMac, Google and Facebook are arguably the dominant Internet players, and Microsoft failed utterly to foresee the importance of search, like a lot of other people. Publishers know that they can’t really compete with $.99 – $2.99 ebooks, and that, in most genres, readers just aren’t that picky. Publishers know the sound of a market shifting underneath them because some of them have been to Harvard Business School or hired people who have been to tell them about the history of companies failing to adapt to new models and environments. That’s scary.

I pay some attention to this stuff because I’m about to take the latest plunge in the crocodile pit that is agent land. If I fail, sometime in the next two years or so I’ll probably say, “Screw it, I’m self-publishing.” Chances are, I’ll be the person who wastes a lot of money and time doing so, but that’s also true of traditional publishing. There’s still that small chance I’ll succeed. Although I’m hardly the best judge of these things, I think I would want to read my own novels, and at some point, I won’t have anything to lose by not self-publishing, if the choice is between that and letting my work sit on my hard drive. There might be other people who want to read my work too. Publishers don’t know. I don’t know. But Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple will make it easier for me to find out than Alfred A. Knopf ever did.

More books I don’t want to read: Theodor Fontane and Teju Cole

March 8, 2011 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The New Yorker has been running a lot of reviews that describe novels I don’t want to read. The latest: Theodor Fontane’s, which Daniel Mendelsohn describes this way:

The topography of his plots is admittedly as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of “Cécile” is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists; there’s some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin.

“Flat and monotonous” plots? The “excursions and the chitchat of [. . .] hapless tourists?” Give me the latest thriller about mindless warfare and assassination. Or about fast-talking urbanites and their tedious sexual lives. Or anything. Elsewhere, Mendelsohn says, “Even Fontane’s characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about.” That’s enough of a problem in real life, thanks: give me escapism!

Or there’s Teju Cole’s novel Open City, as described by James Wood:

So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing).

“A single, unbroken paragraph,” limited conversation (which means we’re stuck in someone’s mind), the lack, again of, “event or contrivance,” as if those are bad things, the mark of a second-rate artist who wants to see how people interact with more than themselves and how they respond to adverse events, like the kinds that sometimes happen in life.

I realize Wood doesn’t like plot: in How Fiction Works, he quotes from Adam Smith writing in the eighteenth century regarding how writers use suspense to keep interest and then says, “But the novel soon showed itself willing to surrender the essential juvenility of plot […]” I don’t think that’s good or that plot is essentially juvenile and tend to like novels in which the proverbial “something happens” and tend to dislike the ones that feel more like philosophy plus characters.

More books I don't want to read: Theodor Fontane and Teju Cole

March 8, 2011 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The New Yorker has been running a lot of reviews that describe novels I don’t want to read. The latest: Theodor Fontane’s work, which Daniel Mendelsohn describes this way:

The topography of his plots is admittedly as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of “Cécile” is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists; there’s some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin.

“Flat and monotonous” plots? The “excursions and the chitchat of [. . .] hapless tourists?” Give me the latest thriller about mindless warfare and assassination. Or about fast-talking urbanites and their tedious sexual lives. Or anything. Elsewhere, Mendelsohn says, “Even Fontane’s characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about.” That’s enough of a problem in real life, thanks: give me escapism!

Or there’s Teju Cole’s novel Open City, as described by James Wood:

So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing).

“A single, unbroken paragraph,” limited conversation (which means we’re stuck in someone’s mind), the lack, again of, “event or contrivance,” as if those are bad things, the mark of a second-rate artist who wants to see how people interact with more than themselves and how they respond to adverse events, like the kinds that sometimes happen in life.

I realize Wood doesn’t like plot: in How Fiction Works, he quotes from Adam Smith writing in the eighteenth century regarding how writers use suspense to keep interest and then says, “But the novel soon showed itself willing to surrender the essential juvenility of plot […]” I don’t think that’s good or that plot is essentially juvenile and tend to like novels in which the proverbial “something happens” and tend to dislike the ones that feel more like philosophy plus characters.

How could Twitter not change how protests happen?: Egypt and the history of the novel

February 3, 2011 By in Culture, Links, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There’s been a lot of talk about the role Twitter, text messaging, and other communication mediums are playing in the unfolding drama in Egypt. Malcolm Gladwell basically says the role isn’t great: “People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”

But I am not convinced this is true: by lowering the friction of communication, thus making it real-time and instantaneous, Twitter and other technological tools are almost certainly changing what is said. Quantity has a quality all its own, and how we speak has a habit of changing what we say.

Gladwell’s post (and others) remind me of the arguments in English literature the field around the development of the novel as a genre (see, for example this post on Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History). Basically, a lot of people want to argue about the development of the novel without taking into account the printing press.

To me this is silly because mass cheap printing was a precondition to the novel as we know it. Without that, we would have fictional prose narratives of some length, but we probably wouldn’t have them alluding to one another, we wouldn’t have large portions of the population reading them, and we wouldn’t have (relatively) large portions of the population with enough disposable income to avoid them. If you look at surviving works that we would now classify as fiction that were written prior to ~1600, almost all of them are religious in nature because only the church had the resources to fund writing, maintain large collections of writing, and bother writing anything down.

After ~1600 (or ~1500, if you prefer, but that’s about it), you have a lot of things written that would previously not have been considered “worth” writing down because writing and copying manuscripts was so expensive and time consuming. Technology did change what was said. How something was said changed what was said. Technology is doing the same thing now. I don’t know how the current drama will play out; if you looked at the printing press around the time it was first created, it was mostly used to print religious stuff (hence the “Gutenberg Bible”). Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change describes some of this. By the nineteenth century, however, writers are grappling with the idea of a world without God, per J. Hillis Miller’s Form of Victorian Fiction, or a world where “God is dead,” to use Nietzsche’s famous and misunderstood proclamation: he wasn’t saying that people would stop believing in God or that would religion would stop being a force society, but rather that religious studies were a dead end and people would cease to attribute everything in their life to God or God’s will.

In 1500, the material published via printing press looked basically continuous with what came about in 1400. By 1850, things are looking pretty different, and the diversity of printed materials has fundamentally changed what people could say. The printing press allowed people with grievances, to use Gladwell’s formulation, to communicate with each other much more efficiently than they previously could, which leads to a lot of political, social, scientific, and philosophical developments that most of us living today approve of. How many of us want to return to being illiterate serfs toiling in fields for distant masters?

Gladwell is right in one sense: the media is probably overstating the importance of Twitter and SMS. But both of those still play an important role in what’s going on. Somehow, people with grievances against monarchs and dictators weren’t all that successful on average in the years prior to ~1600. After that, they got more and more successful, to the point where a fair bit of world’s population now lives without dictators. Part of the reason is because ideas about freedom and good governance could be disseminated cheaply, where before they couldn’t, and everyone spent most waking hours covered in shit, farming, and hoping they’re not going to starve to death in late winter / early spring.

Mark at the computing education blog says, “A particularly interesting anecdote for me is the below: That the Internet was turned off in Egypt, but the protests continued. So what role was Facebook and Twitter playing, really?” Depends on the timeframe. Various technological tools helped people initially organize and helped the conditions for organization come about. They will probably do so again in the future. In the long term, such tools will probably create the conditions for much larger projects that we only dimly perceive now. I would predict what those will be, but things have a habit of turning out much stranger than random prognosticators like me can predict.

Questioning the academic enterprise. . .

February 1, 2011 By in Academia, Culture, Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Here’s Robertson Davies from an interview in Conversations with Robertson Davies:

There are a lot of things in that book [by Elspeth Buitenhuis; the work in question is not named, though it discusses Davies] that I never said and don’t agree with but she must say what she thinks. There’s a lady at McGill who teaches Fifth Business in a course on Canadian literature and she says that the stone which Ramsay carried all his life and which Boy Staunton had in his mouth when he died is the stone of judgment out of the Talmud. I have never read the Talmud. I don’t know anything about the stone of judgment, but when you fall into the hands of academics you’re a gone goose. They will interpret and say what they think and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t really very much matter unless we take it too seriously.

Sometimes I’ve wanted to pull the stunt Woody Allen does in Annie Hall:

If what literary academics are doing “doesn’t really very much matter,” the question becomes, what then are we doing?

Books as civilization

January 24, 2011 By in Culture, Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“Far more than any other medium, books contain civilizations, the ongoing conversation between present and past. Without this conversation we are lost. But books are also a business. . .”

Jason Epstein, “Books: Onward to the Digital Revolution.”

No one can agree on how to make tea

January 3, 2011 By in Culture, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Since reading “A Hacker’s Guide to Tea” (and this worthy discussion) I’ve begun drinking more of the beverage, which I rather like now that I know how to make it: tea isn’t hard to prepare. But I came from the idiotic “more is better” school of thought and figured the longer and hotter that tea is steeped, the better it must be. In reality, this just makes it tremendously bitter and vile.

In actuality, light teas—like green and white—need to be steeped at temperatures well below boiling for about a minute or two. Black teas should be steeped with boiling water for two to three minutes. Tea should be loose leaf and circulate freely with the hot water poured on it; I now use an IngenuiTEA from Adagio for one to two cups. The drink falls from the bottom of the device, rather like it’s peeing, but I find the overall effect quite amusing.

Still, the number of people with very strong and conflicting opinions about how to make tea is astonishing. “Very strong and conflicting opinions” would also have made an excellent title for Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, but today he merely offers bilious tea making instructions—and that’s as strange a construction to write as it is to read—in How To Make a Decent Cup of Tea: Ignore Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and heed George Orwell’s tea-making advice:

It’s quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.

I love the overstated, overstuffed phrasing: “ridiculous business,” “dispiriting tampon surrogate,” “best thrown away.” But his advice is limited to black tea. He goes to to quote Orwell ” ‘[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.’ This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle.” But, in The Story of Tea: A Cultural and Drinking Guide (which is not very good and reads like a travelogue), Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss say:

While millions of avid tea drinkers around the world ‘take the teapot to the kettle’ to use water that is as hot as possible to brew ‘proper English tea,’ we find that even the stoutest black teas prefer to be brewed in water that is slightly off the boil. Any perceived reduction in strength can be made up by steeping the tea a little longer.

Here is my proposition for Hitchens and innumerable others: instead of insisting that one way is better, why not take the Coke-Pepsi challenge? Brew a large number of cups both ways, give them to a large number of people over a large number of occasions, and see which one works better? More likely than not, neither will work out. Based on the large amount of contradictory advice I’ve read regarding tea, I would guess that once one has a reasonably fresh, loose leaf and a reasonable knowledge of approximate brewing temperatures, the rest is superstition.

The analogy to wine is probably appropriate: except for people with very highly developed senses for wine, most of us probably can tell “bad” “better” and “best” but little more. So we decide what wine to drink based on price and innuendo more than anything else. By the same token, I bet that Hitchens can’t really tell the difference between tea brewed off the boil or not, but he probably derives a certain amount of status by having very strong opinions about how tea should be brewed. I leave to the reader who is familiar with Hitchens’ work to decide whether this general principle might apply beyond the realm of caffeinated beverages.

Finally, Hitchens is only writing about black tea, but he doesn’t say as much. Making green or white tea as he recommends will be terrible. Still, even there the advice is contradictory Tony at The Chicago Tea Company—quoted in the first link—says black tea should be steeped for one minute or so. “A guide to tea” by the foppish Chris Cason says that black tea should be steeped no more than five minutes, while white teas are more forgiving and could be steeped as long as seven. I am more inclined to agree with Tony, based on experiment. The issue of making tea should not, however, be one argued with the fervor of someone discussing Middle Eastern politics.

EDIT: I’m now reading Orwell’s “A Nice Cup of Tea,” in which he says:

“If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than 11 outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial” {Orwell “Essays”@990}.

To me, the most interesting part of this is his comment about how only “two” of 11 points “would be in pretty general agreement,” while “four others are acutely controversial.” This indicates that tea-making preferences have been an issue for at least sixty years (the essay was published in 1946) and are likely to continue to be controversial in the near future. So far as I know, “violent disputes” haven’t resulted from tea making, but then perhaps Americans, especially those in overheated Arizona, are not so particular about tea, or there isn’t the critical mass necessary for violent factions to form.

EDIT 2: A redditor pointed me to the ISO 3103 standard on making tea. Even the parody, however, leans toward black tea: “The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water [. . .]” Follow the standard regarding green tea and you’ll find a less-than-optimal cup.

As long as we’re discussing Hitchens, here’s one of the more amusing quotes from Hitch-22: “I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.”