Balancing Frogs

Reading the OED

2012-02-02T12:14:00.000+08:00

Reading the OED

by Ammon Shea

Published in 2008

Published by Perigee

ISBN: 978-0-399-53505-5

When he set out to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a year, start to finish, Ammon Shea faced a certain set of problems. The task gave him headaches, and he needed to get a new prescription for his eyeglasses. And there was the matter of finding a suitable place for his reading outside of the house, as he tried out libraries and secluded outdoor spots. But none of these difficulties turned out to be impossible to overcome, and Shea was serious about his love of dictionaries and the English language.

Reading the OED is a wonderful celebration of the love of books -- and the love of words -- taken to the furthest extreme it's possible to reach in our contemporary culture. Shea fills most of the pages of his book with the words that particularly struck his fancy, accompanied by his own witty commentary.

For example, just in the As, we have agathokakological, 'made up of both good and evil' (Shea writes, 'You don't have to use it in casual conversation; sometimes it's enough to merely know a word exists in order to enjoy it'); all-overish, 'feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body' (Shea writes that 'It is rare that we are presented with a word simultaneously so vague and so useful'); anonymuncule, 'an anonymous, small-time writer' (Shea proclaims this word 'delightful'); and aspectabund, a word not used since 1708 and meaning 'having an expressive face'. (Shea comments, 'As a word it is almost entirely forgotten, and perhaps soon, as cosmetic procedures continue to work their magic, the very notion of having an expressive face will be forgotten as well.')

An interview with Ammon Shea in which he discusses the book can be found here.

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused

2012-01-17T13:29:00.004+08:00

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused is a translated anthology of short fiction that came out of China roughly between the years 1985 and 1995. In other words, this is the China of Deng Xiaoping: authors are shaking off the trauma and restrictions of the Cultural Revolution and living through the beginning of today's modern capitalist China. The events of June 1989 are never directly alluded to, although it should be noted that roughly half the stories were published before Tiananmen Square, and roughly half were published after.

The twenty-one stories vary widely in style and subject matter. Some strike me as more traditionally told short stories, while others seem quite avant-garde and experimental (Shi Tiesheng's 'First Person' and Yu Hua's 'The Past and the Punishments'). But I do have to admit that I haven't actually read very much Chinese fiction, and what seems to me to be a novel and interesting way of telling a story might be standard in another culture's literary tradition.

Despite the title of the anthology, there's no direct criticism or mockery of the Chinese central government within these pages. After all, Deng-era China may have been more open than what came before, but it was hardly a paradise of free speech. There is certainly satire aimed at local politics -- Li Xiao's 'Grass on the Rooftop', for instance. I've read just enough Chinese fiction that mocking local officials stands out as a theme when Chinese authors get satirical -- for example, in Xiaolu Guo's UFO in Her Eyes, which I read last year. There are also satirical barbs aimed at Chinese society of the 1980s -- see Wang Meng's 'A String of Choices' and Bi Feiyu's disturbing 'The Ancestor'.

The stories in Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused are disturbing, bloody, and occasionally perplexing. As such, I recommend them highly.

A Moral Politician

2012-01-16T10:34:00.000+08:00

Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, has cultivated a certain public image. Whatever else you may say about him, the thinking goes, he's sincere and he's moral. Plenty of people who disapprove of his politics nevertheless subscribe to this view.

I have my own opinion, but explaining it is a rather delicate issue. The sad and awkward fact is, it has to do with Santorum's dead son. I'm just going to barrel forward and explain, hoping I don't sound like a complete jerk.

Santorum's family suffered a personal tragedy in 1996, when their son Gabriel died at birth. The grieving parents brought their dead son home for a ritual of saying goodbye as a family. This act caused some tittering and shaking-of-heads among people in Pennsylvania not predisposed to supporting Santorum.

I believe there is nothing 'weird' about this, and people who would criticize Santorum over it are being narrow-minded and culturally provincial, not to mention insensitive jerks. Humans process grief in different ways, and the Santorums' actions don't strike me as especially bizarre, or outside the realm of empathy.

We as a culture are not good at dealing with death. We nervously titter when a grieving person's displays of emotion go beyond what we are comfortable with. We lack the mental and emotional facility to handle it.

It's a fairly well-known bit of historical trivia that in Victorian times, families would have formal photographic portraits taken of their dead children. (A Google search will turn up some examples.) What's less well-known is that there's still an industry for that in American today. This recent Dear Prudence column on Slate contains a letter from someone whose sister had such a photo taken.

Yes, some of us will mock these practices. But we shouldn't. We're talking about grieving families here. Let's leave them alone.

There's nothing strange about how Santorum handled the death of his son in 1996.

How he handled it in 2012 is another matter. The following comes from a New York magazine story on the Republican race:

Then, at his penultimate event, at a Pizza Ranch in Newton the night before the caucuses, Santorum was asked about some criticism leveled at him over how he and his wife, Karen, handled the death in 1996 of their infant son, Gabriel, after she miscarried: They brought the dead child home so their “children could see him,” as Santorum put it; so they could “know they had a brother.” Choking back tears—as Karen, standing beside him, let hers flow—Santorum told the story and then chastised those who would attack them for it. “To some who don’t recognize the dignity of all human life, who see it as a blob of tissue that should be discarded and disposed of, [what we did] is somehow weird,” he said. “Recognizing the humanity of your son is somehow weird, somehow odd, and should be subject to ridicule.”

Wow, Mr. Santorum.

I was going to address the rest of this post directly to the former Senator, but then, owing to the sensitivity of the matter, I decided to be charitable. I'm going to address Mr. Virtual Santorum, the impression of the candidate that is created through the mass media. After all, there is always the possibility that New York magazine misrepresented what Mr. Flesh-and-Blood Santorum said. That is the only possible defense.

Like I said, Virtual Santorum, I don't doubt that small-minded people would attack you for what is nobody's business but your family's. In fact, it's probably true that most of the people who attacked you are culturally liberal, although that's because people who are culturally liberal are more likely to dislike you, and thus more predisposed to attack you generally.

But look at what you said in that quote. I'm going to mercilessly unpack it.

Your language makes me think you are trying to make a point about the abortion issue. People who are pro-choice, people who think a 'blob of tissue' should be discarded and disposed of, are unable to understand why a person like you would want to bring a dead baby home from the hospital, so your children could know 'they had a brother'. Am I right?

Never mind that every day staunchly pro-choice people suffer miscarriages.

Never mind that for the most part it is a terribly traumatic experience.

Never mind that they grieve over their lost children afterwards.

Never mind that they certainly don't feel like they've merely lost a 'blob of tissue'.

No, what's more important is that you make people think pro-choicers want to mock you for treating your dead child as anything other than a 'blob of tissue'.

But what am I doing, dragging reality into this? The overriding fact of American political discourse is that people on the other side of the culture war are to be vilified and caricatured. They don't have inner lives. Their feelings aren't real. They don't really exist in the same way that we do.

You're a victim. People who feel sad at stillborn babies are victims. And once you feel like a poor old put-upon victim, you get defensive and become less willing to listen to the other side's point of view. I hate victim-making in politics. I know everyone does it. But I hate it.

Mr. Virtual Santorum, when you brought up your son it was genuinely touching. I may not care for your politics, but you can't criticize a man over his dead son. People who attack you over it are jerks.

And then you blew it big-time. The whole reason you mentioned him was to use him as a tool to vilify the Other Side.

I know you're far from the first politician in history to use a dead relative to make a point. No need to remind me of others. This doesn't mean you're the worst human being in politics today. It just means you're no better.

Look at the very next paragraph in that New York article. The one immediately following the 'blob of tissue' paragraph.

Say what you will about Santorum and his wife’s ardent pro-life views and how they chose to process their grief over losing their son. The sincerity and depth of the candidate’s feelings on the subject are indisputable, and the moment at the Newton Pizza Ranch was a moving display of his humanity. This is no small part of the attraction that some voters feel for Santorum: There is scarcely a shred of slickness or phoniness about him—something that cannot be said of his rivals, and, indeed, a quality that is the opposite of the perceived plasticity that disturbs many Republicans about Romney.

No. No no no.

To me, Mr. Virtual Santorum, that quote showed exactly the opposite.

In fact, your soulless bit of rhetoric, where you mentioned your dead son in order to use him as a tool to make vague smears is precisely why I find your ilk -- no matter where on the political spectrum -- to be facsimiles of human beings. You have no more of a soul than your rivals do.

Of No Fixed Address

2012-01-15T11:56:00.004+08:00

Before he became a well-known comic author and movie director in India, Kaizad Gustad traveled the world for three years, doing odd jobs and living, generally, with no fixed address.

He published this collection of (tenuously) linked short stories, each associated with a different prominent world city. They (mostly) share the same central character, a young writer traveling the world, with no place to call home. Whether some of the stories are autobiographical is never fully made clear.

The writing style varies from story to story, keeping the reading experience fresh and new. I didn't care so much for the stories that focused on romance and sex in faraway places; it wasn't so much that the fault of the stories themselves as that I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd read it all before, despite Gustad's experimentation with narrative.

Somehow the two stories I enjoyed the most were homages to more traditional forms of narrative: "Phaedrus and the Funny Papers", the London story, in which our narrator rooms with a dull and stodgy proper English couple; and "Apprenticeship of an Author", the Toronto story, in which a fictional Indian character dreamed up by a Canadian-based Booker-winning author goes off to confront his creator.

The Gold Coast

2012-01-09T21:05:00.005+08:00

It's hard to know what it is about Kim Stanley Robinson's novels. They're page-turners in the sense that once I'm already reading one I feel compelled to continue reading, but somehow once I put the book down I do not look forward to picking it up again. His characters and situations are memorable, but I can't escape the feeling that I read him because he's somehow good for me.

This, combined with the fact that his books tend to be rather long, means he takes a while to read. I've accumulated something of a Robinson backlog on my shelf, and I pledge to work my way through it by keeping one Robinson book going at all times while I'm also reading something else.

Have I just warned everybody not to read him? I hope not. His books are worthwhile... they're just long-term projects.

The Gold Coast is not about Australia, it's about Orange County, California in what seems to be approximately the 2030s. Jim is a marginally employed writer in his twenties who spends much of his time hanging out with friends getting high. The other chief protagonist is his father Dennis, a cog in the military-industrial complex desperately trying to find meaning in his work as he deals with the frustrations of bureaucracy and corruption within the Defense Department.

Jim falls in with a group of quasi-anarchic peaceniks who sabotage local defense contractors, fully recognizing the obvious moral dilemmas this will most surely cause for him. Meanwhile, as a local history buff, Jim writes of the history and the transformation of Orange County, and the loss of the orange groves which once gave it its name.

The Gold Coast, published in 1988, takes place in a 21st Century in which the Soviet Union never fell. I can accept this; there are plenty of USSR-laden 21st Centuries in science fiction. The USA and the USSR have put off the Cold War's apocalyptic nuclear finale, which some people are convinced is inevitable but which Dennis convinces himself his work is helping to make impossible. Instead, the superpowers are fighting proxy wars on several continents simultaneously. As hypothetical futures which are no longer within the realm of potentiality go, this is a believable one. What strained my credulity was the fact that nobody in this 21st Century owns a cell phone.

You'll never know this from the novel itself, but The Gold Coast is the middle entry in a trilogy called 'Three Californias'. Apparently the first book, The Wild Shore, is about a post-nuclear war California; the last book, Pacific Edge, is a positive look at an ecologically sane future. I have yet to read these futures. The middle child of a book that I just finished reading got a hyper-capitalistic ultra-developed California as its setting, and you know, despite the whole USSR-still-existing thing, somehow I suspect this future is still the most likely to come true of the three.

I have never been to Orange County. In fact, if you don't count changing planes, I have never been to California. All I know of Southern California geography is what I've managed to piece together from movies and TV. And that's OK. Readers of SF know how to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar fictional environment, and the Orange County of the 2030s is no different.

Questions for the Explainer, 2011

2012-01-04T11:01:00.002+08:00

Slate's 'The Explainer' column has posted the greatest unanswered questions left over from 2011. Great fun.

Long ago I posted my own attempts at responses to some of the 2008 questions for The Explainer. I'm going to try that again. (My mind is pure. I have not read the comments.)

2. It's not really topical, but it's been bugging me for a while: Why do comedy clubs have such unfunny names? Not just boring—it's hard to tell a joke in a three-word business name—but it's usually something inane like “The Laugh Factory” or “The Chuckle Hut.” Why don't they just name comedy clubs after comedians?

I've never been to a comedy club, but this bothers me too. I think it bothers me because of the implication that comedy clubs think the public is a bunch of morons who won't understand if they give themselves even remotely original or creative names. Surely that can't be true?

7. Why do furniture stores rely so heavily on the advertising gimmick of “going out of business” sales? It seems obvious that they aren’t actually going out of business, but are just trying to drive traffic to their store. I can understand why they might do this, but the real question is, why is this so prevalent among furniture stores and no other industries? It seems the same principles that apply for furniture could apply elsewhere, but I only see these with furniture stores. I’m guessing the answer has to do with some furniture industry pioneer and his lasting legacy.

I always figured it was an industry-wide in-joke. When you see a commercial for a furniture store that's having its 2nd annual going out of business sale, surely someone along the line's got their tongue firmly in cheek. Right?

8. Why don't roaches live in cars more often? There seems to be plenty of food in many cars to support them. Do they get motion-sickness?

My guess is that roaches only start to infest a place after it's remained stationary for a while. So a perpetually parked car full of delicious organic foodstuffs is eventually going to attract roaches.

10. Odd to say the least, but why do so many of our states end with the letter a? Way too many to be happenstance—there must be a reason.

Because in the linguistic mindset of our European and particularly Anglo-Saxon predecessors, that '-a' ending is the sort of ending the name of a geographical area ought to have. It's an English language thing. Note that all the continents (except Europe) end in the letter 'A' as well. Sure, plenty of American states have names that at least nominally came from Native American languages, but they all those names got chewed up and spit out by the rules of English phonetics before they became state names.

12. When you cut open a pumpkin, there is no whoosh so there must be a gas inside the pumpkin filling the "empty" space. What is it and how does it get inside.

I'm going to admit that I never took Physics of Naturally Occurring Spongy Substances back in school.

13. When parking in a nearly full parking lot, is it quicker to a) park in the first open space you see and walk, or b) drive a few laps around the lot and grab the closest possible spot? In my experience the two ways are about even, since the extra time spent driving for "b)" means a quicker exit when you leave. Please settle this using statistics as my wife has refused to argue anymore regarding this issue.

Gotta smile at the story implied by that last sentence.

14. Let's say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today. What would they be like? Would they have a society? A language? iPods?

Clearly this person has never seen the Star Trek: Voyager episode 'Distant Origins', which aired back in 1997 and was about a race of civilized dinosaurs living on the other side of the galaxy.

More seriously, any answer to this question would have to be pure speculation; it's the paleontological equivalent of asking a historian what modern geopolitics would be like if the Roman Empire never collapsed, the Mongols conquered Europe, or the Chinese industrialized first. As a kid I poured over Dougal Dixon's book The New Dinosaurs, a lavishly illustrated zoological survey of a contemporary Earth where dinosaurs never died out. But none of Dixon's neo-dinosaurs had developed civilization. No dino-iPods.

17. Why don't they ever use “presents” in advertisements? It’s always about “gift”-giving, and “gift” ideas, never a “they'll love these as presents.”

I bet some advertising consultants did some linguistic research and determined that 'gift' is a much punchier-sounding word than 'present'. I'm not even sure I'm joking.

18. Why is it wrong to say things like, "I'm not a ___ (e.g. anti-Semite, racist, whatever); half my friends are ___ (e.g. Jewish, black, whatever)." It seems logical, if not said after an offensive remark, but it seems we learn quickly in life not to make that statement because it's quickly laughed at and discredited. No, it hasn't happened to me in 25 years, but I'm not sure I understand why it's taboo.

I don't think it's taboo, so much as it's become a pop culture cliche that this construction is used solely by bigots who want to deny their bigotry. My guess is that it goes back to old-timey Southern gentility, when a white person could be on perfectly polite and civil terms with numerous black people, yet be appalled if one of his or her kids dated one.

And it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I've got the idea that the only people who say 'I don't hate X. Some of my best friends are X' are people who hate X, and I don't want to come across as hating X, then I won't say it.

These days it's become an ironic joke. Hipsters say it to be funny. TV and movies use it to signal that a character is an unconscious bigot.

Related is the observation that when a person begins a sentence with 'I'm not racist, but...', what follows is almost invariably racist.

26. We are taking my daughter to Disney World. I remember as a kid being a little scared and intimidated by the huge characters. Why are they so big? Is there a psychological study that finds this to be the appropriate size for fantasy characters; does it make them more fantastical? I think quite the opposite. It almost breaks the illusion and calls out the fakery.

The final sentence is absolutely true; there's nothing less lifelike than a seven-foot-tall Goofy walking around forever frozen on that one facial expression. I suspect there's no reason why you couldn't create character costumes that were more life-size; the problem is in finding enough four-foot-tall people to wear them. (And truly life-size renditions of Chip and Dale and other small, not-as-anthropomorphic-as-Mickey rodents will have to wait for advances in robotics.)

30. Why aren’t there any topless casinos in Las Vegas? There are plenty of casinos and plenty of strip clubs in Vegas but there aren’t any combinations of the two. It seems like someone would create a casino where the dealers were topless.

I've never been inside either a topless bar or a casino, but I know a money-making idea when I see it. I predict this person will be a successful entrepreneur in 5 years. Who else wants to invest?

A New Year Dawns

2012-01-01T18:25:00.007+08:00

2011 ended, for us, with a burst of fireworks from Taipei 101. Our new apartment is within easy walking distance of plenty of decent places to watch the 101 fireworks from, so we and a couple of friends departed at roughly 11:45pm to join the droves of people walking north along Daan Rd, to the intersection with Xinyi Rd which offered a clear line of sight to Taipei 101.

The crowds were happy and boisterous. Plenty of people of all ages watched the fireworks display, and there seemed to be a marriage proposal taking place just a few feet from us.

But nobody seemed surprised, or too disappointed, when half the fireworks were obscured by huge clouds of smoke that were generated.

From the direction the smoke clouds appeared to be drifting, I would guess that people watching from Keelung Rd, where Jenna and I watched the show a few years ago, found themselves engulfed by the smoke fairly quickly. It's probably nothing that a Taiwanese person who has attended temple fairs with firecrackers hasn't experienced.

By the time we reached our apartment near Daan Rd's southern terminus, the air had grown noticeably smoky as the effects of the 101 fireworks dispersed. We continued to hear assorted random fireworks being set off into the night. Happy 2012!

One year ago, I made a New Year's Resolution that, in 2011, I would work my way through 40 novels and 40 non-fiction books, and write about them here. I wrote,

I have no plan, no set reading list. My 40 nonfiction books and 40 novels will consist, in part, of my working my way through the dozens of books on our shelves that I haven't read yet. They're sitting there now, waiting for that as-yet-undetermined future date when we move, when I find myself wondering which unread books I want to ship overseas and which I want to sell or donate, unused. And every time I visit a used bookstore, my impulse buys exacerbate the problem.

When I say 40 nonfiction books and 40 novels, I mean 80 physical, bound paper, full-length books. I'm a big fan of long-form journalism, and lately my iPod Touch has made it pretty easy for me to polish off several newspaper or magazine articles while I'm riding the bus or on the subway. (Here is where I rave again about InstaPaper, and web sites like Longform.org and Give Me Something To Read.) I'm also a big fan of short stories, particularly SF/Fantasy/Horror, and I follow several podcasts that feed my addiction. They don't count. I plan to keep consuming shorter content alongside my 80 full-length books.

Now, let's be blunt about it. I didn't make it to 40 for either fiction or non-fiction. I made it to 34 novels, and I probably would have hit 40 if not for the four-week ultra-intensive course I took in September and October, and the experience of moving house in December which turned out to be far more stressful and time-consuming than I could have predicted.

I think the goal of 40 novels was an admirable one, and it got me reading at a somewhat faster clip than I would have managed otherwise. So I'm going to repeat it. But I'm going to modify it a little.

I'm going to aim for at least 25 novels. Any genre. A collection of short stories counts as a novel, if all the stories are by one author.

In addition to that, I'm going to read at least 10 older novels. Classics, if you will. My definition is one whose author died before 1950. I read zero of those in 2010.

And in addition to that, I'm going to read at least 5 short story anthologies. I plan to get plenty of short stories in podcast form, but there are some collections on our bookshelves I'd like to read through.

25 + 10 + 5 = 40.

As for nonfiction books, I honestly believe my original goal was just plain somewhat screwed up. I read a lot of nonfiction, largely in the form of longform journalism that mobile apps like The Browser and Instapaper make easy to read. 40 additional full books is not a worthwhile goal for me to set for myself. Especially since I seem to have the bad habit of reading trendy contemporary nonfiction books that are basically just padded magazine articles.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I definitely aspire to read more full-length nonfiction. I''ve become an avid reader of The Browser's Five Books series, in which various experts recommend five books to become better acquainted with a particular topic. I intend to start following some of their recommendations, probably as soon as I get an e-reader.

But for now, setting the goal of 40 nonfiction books is silly and unproductive. I still want to give myself a goal, so I'm lowering it to 20 nonfictions. I'll probably easily read more than that, but I want to make sure I don't let myself get lazy.

The Angel of Darkness

2011-12-28T15:19:00.012+08:00

I first encountered author Caleb Carr's work through his best-known novel, The Alienist. A police procedural, The Alienist centers on a group of modern-minded sleuths, from both inside and outside the formal police department, who combine their skills and talents to solve a series of grisly murders in 1896 New York City. The book is thickly populated with actual historical figures (Theodore Roosevelt is practically a first-tier major character) and lovingly described locations.

More than that, the book struck me as an ingenious piece of work: it was essentially a technothriller that happened to be set a century in the past. The core group of investigators are at the forefront of crime-fighting technology, and are ready and willing to try out cutting-edge methods.

At one point they attempt to employ the new science of 'fingerprinting', the idea that each person's fingerprints are unique, and that a person's presence at a scene could be established by the prints he had left behind. And at another point, they attempt a different unproven science: they remove a murder victim's eyes and process them back in the lab, in the hope that the last images the victim saw before his death can be extracted from the eyeballs like pictures can be developed from film in a camera.

Fingerprinting and eyeball-image-developing are presented as similarly unproven, barely tested technologies, and our heroes have no way of knowing ahead of time which will yield fruitful results and which is a dead end. I liked that. It made The Alienist feel like science fiction, even though the narrative stayed firmly grounded in the 1890s. It made me wonder if Carr had ever written a novel that was actually science fiction.

I'm not going to name names. I'm not going to go into any detail about my next Carr-ian reading experience. But let's all just agree to agree that Caleb Carr has never written a book in the science fiction genre. And, if any of you happen to be in a bookstore or library and you think you see a science fiction novel by Caleb Carr, just leave it on the shelf and walk away. Trust me on this. You really don't want to investigate any further.

It's too bad Caleb Carr never wrote any novels that were explicitly science fiction. It's too bad they never made any sequels to The Matrix.

My confidence in Carr badly shaken by the reading experience I will not discuss, I bought The Angel of Darkness a while later. It is a sequel, reuniting most of the main characters of The Alienist and presenting an adventure that unfolds along similar lines. A baby is kidnapped from the wife of a Spanish diplomat in New York City, in the tense period that preceded the Spanish-American War, and the investigation spearheaded by chief protagonist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler turns up a gruesome trail of dead children connected to the suspected baby-snatcher.

The narrator from the first book (and Watson figure to Dr. Kreizler's Holmes), New York Times journalist John Moore, is demoted to comic relief status. The new narrator is Stevie, the rescued street urchin who was a supporting character in the first book.

The Angel of Darkness is not a bad book. It's a fairly exciting page-turner (it had better be, at over 600 pages) and is intelligently written. But I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as The Alienist. And I think a lot of the reason why has to do with my attitude towards sequels.

I like sequels that break new ground. Or, I like sequels that stand on their own just as much as the original story. I do not care for 'The whole gang is back to go on another adventure!' stories. And unfortunately, The Angel of Darkness is very much that kind of book.

Part of it is the perhaps unavoidable fact that, with The Alienist, I felt like old tropes had been assembled into a new and exciting form. But with The Angel of Darkness, the form was a familiar one. Also, in The Alienist, it felt like anything could happen. Obviously Teddy Roosevelt was going to survive, as were the characters who appeared in the 1919 frame story. But the other fictional named characters really seemed in mortal danger, and there was one death that genuinely shocked and surprised me. Contrast with The Angel of Darkness. I'm going to spoil it for you: even though The Angel of Darkness is a fairly bloody book, every 'good guy' who returns from the first book will survive the second. But that's not even much of a spoiler, since I never felt like any of the 'old friends' were ever in any danger.

Finally, it would be interesting to discuss the portrayal of certain non-white characters in the novel. I'm not certain if one character in particular really crossed the line into offensive territory, but I'm going to go with 'probably yes'.

Spring Fun

2011-12-28T14:58:00.003+08:00

Spring Fun is about a young Taiwanese woman who has just committed suicide. The novel traces her life and the influences upon her thinking, that have led her to this final step.

The novel focuses both on the protagonist, who spent much of her childhood in Amsterdam, and several of her friends, who show different sides of being female and Taiwanese.

Lynn-Yuling Tzeng's novel (purchased here in Taiwan, although I can't recall exactly where) is an interesting, locally-published creation. For the first time I can remember, I have a book with no publishing information to be found anywhere on it, and Internet searches come up with very scanty results. Even tiny publishing houses generally put their brands on books they publish, so Tzeng's novel is something of an interesting anomaly. I wish I could remember how it came into our possession.

This is going to sound unkinder than I mean it, but here goes: This book clearly never saw a professional editor. It's not just that the prose makes me think it was written by a non-native English speaker and then proofread by a native speaker who didn't feel at liberty to edit on a large scale. It's also the odd and inconsistent use of footnotes, and a generally not-quite-polished style.

And that's not meant as negativity -- I rather liked the slight clunkiness. It brought me feeling a bit closer to the author, as if I was reading a manuscript. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to the style, and then I felt perfectly at ease with it.

I just have one negative thing to say about the novel. I know it's explicitly a feminist work. I'm not even going to say there's nothing wrong with that -- that would just sound condescending -- but rather, I like that; I like reading books written by people who are not coming from my own viewpoint. That said, I wish there had been male characters in this universe who weren't jerks. That's all.

The busy part's over

2011-12-28T14:55:00.003+08:00

I haven't updated this thing since December 2. That's largely for two reasons:

1. Moving. We've moved from our old place in Jingmei to a much nicer apartment in central Taipei. As it turns out, even when nothing goes wrong (and nothing did go too horribly wrong for us), moving is a hugely time-consuming and stressful process, one which has made me appreciate the idea of making do with less stuff.

2. Christmas, which was ultimately a smaller deal for us than moving, but which did involve a lot of scurrying about busying ourselves with various errands.

Now I pledge to update at least a few more times before the end of the month/year.

Usurper of the Sun

2011-12-02T12:53:00.003+08:00

My first Japanese SF novel, Housuke Nojiri's Usurper of the Sun starts off with high school astronomy buff Aki becoming one of the first to view an astonishing new phenomenon: someone or something is disassembling the planet Mercury in order to create a gigantic ring around the Sun.

Over the next few years, Aki goes on to become one of the world's most well-respected experts on the Ring, as the situation on Earth goes from bad to worse. The Ring grows so thick it drastically reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. The resulting climate change causes crop failures and famines that kill a billion people.

So when a crewed spaceship is prepared to visit the Ring to find out what humans can do about the situation, Aki is of course one of the four chosen to make the journey. I found the novel at this point readable but not exceptionally compelling. The first third of the novel reads like your standard Big Dumb Object story, the kind of hard SF that I respect but don't consider to be my favorite subset of science fiction.

My interest perked up considerably when, with 2/3 of the book left to go, the Earth people's mission to the Ring turns out to be unexpectedly productive. The Ring is destroyed, and Earth is saved. For the time being, that is. Aki and crew return to an Earth which now needs to prepare itself, logistically and psychologically, for the possible arrival of possibly very angry aliens.

This is where Usurper of the Sun becomes the sort of speculative fiction I like. Glimpses of an Earth simultaneously giddy with accomplishment and very apprehensive about the future struck me as fairly realistically done.

What really intrigued me, though, were the philosophical questions raised by the utter inscrutability of the aliens. This was some of the best speculation I've seen yet about aliens who really might not think like human beings. Rather than aliens who merely don't appear to come from an Anglo-Saxon-derived culture, which is what we get all too often in science fiction.

(Note to future SF writers: The mindset of an actual alien from another star system is likely to be less comprehensible to the average human, than the mindset of a human with autism. Autistic people are human too. Space aliens aren't. Housuke Nojiri gets this.)

I wasn't terribly happy when, at novel's end, the aliens turned from incomprehensible to comprehensible far too easily. I know it wrapped up the novel nicely, and to his credit, the author did justify it pretty well in-universe. It's just... after so much talk devoted to how alien the aliens were, I felt like they shouldn't have been rendered knowable so quickly.

That said, the philosophical musings of the final two thirds were enough for me to enjoy Usurper of the Sun. I'm well aware this recommendation probably won't get people rushing in droves to buy the book. (Unlike certain extraterrestrial civilizations, I'm not mind-blind.) But hey, it's what I enjoyed.

Jeeves Takes Charge

2011-11-23T12:54:00.000+08:00

I've never seen the 1990s TV show based on P.G. Wodehouse's stories, Jeeves and Wooster. But I know of its existence, and I have two things to say about it.

First, of course Jeeves and Wooster were played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I mean, that's pretty obvious. Read the stories and you'll notice that Wodehouse clearly had Fry and Laurie in mind as he was writing. The fact that neither man had been born yet is just testament to Wodehouse's genius: he wasn't stuck within a one-way arrow of time, remembering only the past.

Second, even though I haven't seen the TV show, when I read Wodehouse's prose I hear Hugh Laurie's voice in my head, as if he's narrating the audiobook. I haven't seen Laurie play Bertie Wooster, but I have seen him on the latter two seasons of Black Adder, and I assume the mannerisms and voice he used were pretty similar.

(All this probably sounds quite peculiar if you know Hugh Laurie primarily as Dr. House.)

Jeeves Takes Charge is not so much a novel as it is a series of short stories strung together, but there is enough continuity that I don't feel too uncomfortable foisting the title of 'novel' on it.

Reading Wodehouse, I am struck with a bit of cognitive dissonance:

1. Wodehouse is supposed to be one of the foundations of modern British comedy. He's the guy who influenced Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and countless others.

2. But his plots remind me of low-brow American sitcoms, complete with tropes and cliches that would not be out of place on Gilligan's Island.

Solution:

I'm a snob. I'm making the mistake of thinking, If it reminds me of American sitcoms, it can't be good. Because I think sitcoms are Not Sufficiently Cool.

Wodehouse scoured the history of comedy for his plots, some of which are based on Ancient Greek comedies. The same plots and tropes get re-used again and again, to the point that many modern-day American sitcoms employ plot developments that had their origins over two thousand years ago. There's nothing new under the sun.

Or, another way of looking at it is, we don't read Wodehouse today so much for his plotting as his dialogue and his use of language, particularly that which comes from the fictional mouth of Bertie Wooster, possibly my new favorite first-person narrator.

Various Ways to Serve Food

2011-11-23T10:05:00.013+08:00

Lately UC Davis has been in the news rather a lot, in conjunction with recent news stories involving students being sprayed with pepper spray.

Many watchers of cable TV news know what FOX News hosts clarified today: pepper spray is a form of food. Remember, if you're the sort of person who would willingly eat a pepper, you shouldn't complain when you're hit in the face by a burst of pepper spray. In essence, these students were just being given free snacks.

Sure, pepper spray might burn your eyes. But people eat peppers because they like the burning, right?

Unless some of those kids don't like spicy food. Then it was just assault.

When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of Nick at Nite. One show in their rotation was Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of AHP's most famous episodes was 'Lamb to the Slaughter', which I realize now was based on a Roald Dahl short story.

'Lamb to the Slaughter' is about a woman who kills her husband by cracking his skull with a frozen leg of lamb. She calls the police and reports that she came home to find her husband lying dead on the floor.

Detectives come by to inspect the crime scene. However, they remark to each other that the man's death will probably remain unsolved as long as they lack a murder weapon... as they eat the leg of lamb the woman has prepared for them.

Let's look at this plot from a modern, FOX News-informed sensibility. From our perspective, what's happened here is that the woman served her husband food in an unorthodox manner. His system couldn't take it, and he died. But remember, all the woman was doing was giving him a form of food. Just like getting hit with pepper spray.

Unless the man was a vegetarian. Then it was murder.

The Seven Per Cent Solution

2011-11-22T09:52:00.004+08:00

Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is an odd beast of a novel. Essentially a feature-length bit of Sherlock Holmes fanfic (I use the word with none of its pejorative associations), Meyer's book played with my expectations.

I can't really say how without including massive spoilers. So, spoilers aplenty from this point forth.

We think of Professor Moriarty as Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis. The first well-known supervillain in world literature. The funny thing is, Moriarty is much more prominent outside of Conan Doyle's stories than within them.

Moriarty only shows up at all in two of Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories. (That's the same number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that center around the Trek universe's version ofMoriarty. But nobody thinks of Moriarty as a Star Trek villain.)

What's more, for Moriarty's introduction, in 'The Final Problem', Conan Doyle performs a narrative trick that would have people rolling their eyes if someone tried it today. He doesn't bother to establish Moriarty as a supervillain at all; instead he just has Holmes show up and state that Moriarty's this evil genius. Moriarty's the greatest bad guy in England because Conan Doyle tells us so, not because of anything that we see him do.

Moriarty is famous, but when you go back to the source material you see that he is quite probably the most overrated supervillain in the history of fictional bad guys.

Nicholas Meyer probably wrote The Seven-Per-Cent Solution thinking much the same thing.

Moriarty is indeed very much in evidence in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. He seeks out Dr. Watson and complains that Sherlock Holmes is hallucinating that he's this fabulous criminal mastermind, when in reality he's just a meek mathematics teacher.

Now, every reader is probably thinking at this point, Aha! Dr. Watson will of course fall for Moriarty's ruse -- but Holmes will see right through it and foil his plans in the end!

And every reader would be wrong. Within the universe of this novel, Moriarty really is a mild-mannered math teacher, and Sherlock Holmes is a crazed cocaine addict who's imagining things. (Told you there'd be spoilers.)

Nicholas Meyer spends the first half of the novel subverting and defusing Holmes' most famous antagonist. He has Holmes visit Sigmund Freud in Vienna, in order to receive treatment for his cocaine addition. Then he gives Holmes and Freud a case to solve together.

Now, if you define the 'plot' of a Holmes story to be the actual case that Holmes and Watson solve, then the plot of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution actually begins when the novel is more than half over. This may frustrate and annoy some readers.

On the other hand, Nicholas Meyer intends for the main plot to be character-based: Sherlock Holmes' journey from cocaine-induced paranoid fantasy to clear and sober thinking. In that respect, the book works much better.

I'm satisfied with what Meyer has done here, even if my expectations got a bad case of whiplash.

VALIS

2011-11-21T09:50:00.006+08:00

It's rather astonishing that, almost thirty years after his death, Philip K. Dick's short stories and novels have inspired so many Hollywood movies. Compared to other prominent American science fiction authors, Dick wasn't exactly mainstream. He was often bizarre. A let's-explore-the-labyrinthine-workings-of-the-inside-of-Dick's-own-head kind of bizarre.

I once read a collection of short stories from across Dick's entire career. His early stories were pleasingly quirky, but as the Sixties and Seventies wore on, the tone of his writing just became more and more out-there.

It's easy to say that Dick slowly went insane. Indeed, looking at his biography, that does appear to be the case. But if he went insane, he was well aware of the fact as it was happening.

What sort of novel would a highly intelligent, well-read person whose mind is turning inside out write? Well, he would write VALIS.

I actually started VALIS last year, but put it down again because I was in the mood for something more akin to a traditional novel. VALIS reads more like a couple of characters discussing difficult, abstruse philosophy, in the context of 1970s California.

There was one bit that I gleaned from my first attempt, that I absolutely loved. I learned about the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. In layman's terms, this is an argument of the form 'A. Also, B.' where B looks like it reinforces A, but in fact it negates it.

For example:

1. God does not exist.

2. And what's more, he's stupid.

Everybody go have fun looking for real-life examples of this structure.

The plot, to the extent that there is one, concerns main character Horselover Fat's attempts to build a valid philosophy based on Gnosticism after a friend of his commits suicide. Gnosticism is an ancient philosophy I have a hard time getting my head around, even though I know it's got elements in common with Hinduism and Buddhism and also resembles many quite modern ways of looking at the universe. I still can't say I retained very much of Horselover Fat's philosophy.

VALIS is narrated in the first person by Phil. Phil is Philip K. Dick. Within the narrative Phil even mentions real-life books he's written in the past. Horselover Fat, the main protagonist, is also Philip K. Dick. This is made very clear at several points in the narrative. Phil and Horselover Fat share many conversations about philosophy. There's one point where Horselover Fat travels the world and sends letters back to Phil back in California. Go ponder that and report back to me when you're finished.

The Good Old Days

2011-11-19T09:45:00.011+08:00

I've been thinking lately about something I read earlier this year in Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation, and a conversation inspired by it. It concerns how wars were fought in Zhou Dynasty China, and how later (but still ancient, from our perspective) Chinese generations looked back on them.

(The Zhou Dynasty is not what it sounds like to Westerners. It wasn't really a time when China was ruled by a series of emperors of the family Zhou. In fact, the Zhou Dynasty was a time when the land we call China was not and never had been ruled by a single government. It was a time when continental East Asia was composed of a patchwork quilt of kingdoms that were not unified, and more often than not were at war with each other.)

In the early part of the 295-year-long time in ancient history we call the Spring and Autumn period (771 BC - 476 BC), the land was ruled by local nobles who used their armed forces to vie for power with each other. No surprise here. But apparently, they conducted their military campaigns in an astonishingly civilized fashion. As Armstrong says, 'Warfare became an elaborate pageant, governed by courtesy and restraint'. (p. 175)

The [proprieties] demanded an external attitude of 'yielding' to the enemy, but they were generally performed in a spirit of pride and bravado. In this chivalric game, the sport was to bully the enemy with acts of kindness. . . . If its driver paid a ransom on the spot, a true [gentleman] would always let an enemy chariot escape. During a battle between Chu and Jin, a Chu archer used his last arrow to shoot a stag that was blocking the path of his chariot, and his lancer immediately presented it to the team in the Jin chariot bearing down upon them. The Jin at once conceded defeat, crying in admiration: 'Here is a worthy archer and well-spoken warrior! These are gentlemen!'

A nobleman lost status if he killed too many people. A prince once rebuked a warrior who was boasting that he had slain six enemy soldiers: 'You will bring great dishonour on your country. Tomorrow you will die -- victim of your proficiency!' . . . On one occasion, when two chariots were locked in combat, one of them turned aside and seemed about to retreat. The archer in the winning chariot shot, missed, and was about to take aim again, when the enemy archer cried, 'You must let me exchange my arrow for yours, or it will be an evil deed!' So without more ado, the first archer took the arrow from his bow and calmly waited for death. . . .

In 638 [BC], the duke of the principality of Song was waiting for the arrival of the Chu army, which greatly outnumbered his own. When they heard that the Chu were crossing a nearby river, the duke's vassals urged him to attack at once, but he refused. He also rejected the suggestion that he should attack the Chu while they were drawing up their battle lines. When finally the fighting began, Song was defeated and the duke badly wounded, but he was unrepentant. 'A [gentleman] worthy of the name does not seek to overcome the enemy in misfortune.' (p. 177-178)

It's no surprise this eventually broke down completely. By the final stage of what we retroactively call the Zhou Dynasty, the Warring States period (475 BC - 221 BC), there were no more rules and all of what we retroactively call Chinese states were savagely fighting each other, double-crossing each other, allying themselves with and then betraying each other, and generally behaving the way we would expect a bunch of kingdoms that share a continent to act. A battle became an occasion to try to kill as many of the enemy army as you could before they could kill you.

The great thinkers of this time, of whom Confucius was the first to emerge and is the best-known, thought this was a terrible state of affairs. (Technically Confucius came at the very end of the Spring and Autumn Period, but he lived in a violent world in disarray without the chivalric code described above, and he grieved for its loss.)

To be well-read meant you had a powerful sense of history. In the East Asian tradition, citing ancient precedent and telling parables about ancient rulers was how you made your point. It was thought that Mankind had declined, by this time, from the more civilized state it had been in before.

In other words, they were pining for the good old days. Which they had never actually witnessed, only read about.

While reading Karen Armstrong's book, I remarked to my wife that I was surprised that the 'most civilized warfare' period of the early Spring and Autumn period had existed at all. Of course it was going to break down at some point; what was shocking was that it lasted for as long as it did.

My wife, however, had a very different idea. She thinks it's far more likely that the scribes and the keepers of the records of the old Zhou-era kingdoms only wrote down in their Annals what they considered Right and Proper.

So after a bloody, chaotic battle, the official record-keepers would describe it for posterity as this elegant military engagement that followed all the rules. In a society where few people apart from royal scribes were literate, who was going to tell future generations any different?

In other words, the good old days that the social critics of the Warring States period were pining for, very likely never existed.

Take from that what you will.

Qingshan Wang 2011!

2011-11-18T14:50:00.004+08:00

For your education and edification about Taiwan folk religion, please enjoy my wife's videos from yesterday's Qingshan Wang celebrations at Qingshan Temple in Taipei:

I was there. I don't think I appear on-camera, but I ended up covered with ash and glittery bits, smelling like smoke, and with a ringing in my ears from all the firecrackers. As is proper in the Taiwanese religious tradition.

See Jenna's write-up (with more pictures!) at Lao Ren Cha.

My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare

2011-11-17T12:42:00.006+08:00

Will Shakespeare Greenberg is a pot-smoking slacker grad student in Santa Cruz in 1986 whose primary passion, apart from getting high and having sex, is Shakespeare. Despite knowing quite a bit of Shakespeare's work by heart, Will is having a difficult time getting his Master's thesis finished (or started, to tell the truth), in large part due to his pot-and-psychedelic-mushroom-addled lifestyle.

Will Shakespeare is a young Latin teacher in Stratford in 1582 whose primary passion, apart from bedding local women, is composing witty satirical verse. His family's deep Catholic roots will land him in hot water.

Jess Winfield's novel, which recounts turning points in the parallel lives of the two protagonists, is something of an odd beast. The target audience would appear to be fans of Shakespeare who are knowledgable enough to get most of the references (many of which I think went right over my head), but who also don't mind reading a stoner comedy with extremely explicit sex scenes written largely for laughs. If you were to compose a Venn diagram of the two very different groups of readers Winfield's trying to attract, it's not clear how much overlap you'd get.

But while Winfield's novel is a weird hybrid beast, it's a beast that's extremely well crafted. Winfield knows his stuff. He's one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. (The novel's 1980s narrative may contain a fictionalized version of the RSC's beginning, although Winfield has said Will Greenberg isn't supposed to be himself.) He's clearly done a tremendous amount of research into Elizabethan England and what little is known of Shakespeare's early life.

In the end, I have to say this is as good as any pothead sex comedy set in 1980s California and starring William Shakespeare you care to name. Winfield has tried something very strange here, and he's largely succeeded.

And thus ends my duo of Shakespeare books for November. I may try to polish off some of his actual plays next year. Cultural literacy and all that.

You adorable dirty hippies!

2011-11-16T11:17:00.005+08:00

Here's a tidbit that came out of the Occupy protests a while ago: in Chicago, some Board of Trade member decided to treat the protestors to a few more pieces of litter:

Someone at the Chicago Board of Trade issued another message to the Occupy Chicago protesters by blanketing them with these McDonald's job applications. The protesters are understandably offended by both the message and by the hundreds of pieces of new litter around them.

Now, let's try to get inside that person's head. What did they think they were accomplishing?

a) The protestors, upon receiving applications to work at McDonald's, would realize that there actually were ways for them to make money and get ahead in life. They would then get up off their asses and go work at McDonald's and make money. Value: Something.

Or:

b) The application-dumper found it enjoyable, and perhaps a bit reassuring, to think that the Occupy protestors were a bunch of slackers who just didn't have the gumption to get up off their lazy asses and make something of themselves. So this person dumped McDonald's job applications on the Occupiers' heads, hoping that this would be slightly wittier than just standing outside and shouting, 'Get a job, you dirty hippies!' As a result, the application-dumper felt some self-satisfaction and the Occupiers felt even more alienated from the people they were protesting. Value: Nothing. Less than nothing, in fact.

Are there other ways to interpret this action? If you think I'm misunderstanding something, go ahead and post a comment. Me, I think option b) sounds slightly more believable.

I don't live in the United States, and I don't regularly watch American TV news. I'm watching this all from Taiwan. Therefore, it is theoretically possible that I am the victim of a massive misinformation campaign regarding the content of what the American mass media is delivering to people's homes. If so, I apologize for what I'm about to say.

But from what I gather, the journalists of the mass media have been pretending from the start that they don't understand what the Occupy protestors want, and are generally trying to paint them as aimless, dirty hippie types.

I've gone through several stages of thinking about this.

At first, I thought, 'HOLY CRAP! The paranoid conspiracy theorists were right all along about the Mainstream Media being in the pocket of Big Business! I was wrong to mock them!'

Then, I thought, 'Wow. The corporate media must be really scared of Occupy Wall Street if they're not going to report on them fairly. In their minds, even the great prudent cautious silent majority of American society will go out on the streets and start protesting if they get news that is even remotely accurate. America must be more screwed than I thought.'

Then my thoughts settled into, 'No, it's not as bad as all that. It's just that TV news wants to create a family and community atmosphere among its viewers, and what brings people together as a community more than thinking that next door lives a bunch of crazies who may seem threatening at first, but are really just a bit silly and harmless and let's all mock them together?'

That's what I think now. The Occupy Wall Street group are that bunch of silly people that TV news wants Americans to good-naturedly mock, the better to come together to feel like a large nation-wide community who gathers 'round the TV in the evenings to watch what's happening elsewhere in the world.

I don't think this is as conspiracy-theoryish as it sounds, because I don't think it's the result of conscious decision-making. I think it's the aggregate intuition of thousands of people in the media, about what they think viewers want to see. It's unconscious.

But it violates one of my rules for dealing with people who are different from you: It's wrong to misunderstand them in order to make yourself and others feel better.

There are fine, nebulous lines that separate:

a) misunderstanding someone deliberately and consciously,

b) misunderstanding someone unconsciously, because you've primed yourself to see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear, and

c) misunderstanding someone totally innocently.

A) and b) are wrong. It's wrong to call someone at an Occupy protest a lazy slacker who doesn't want to work for a living when you've got no evidence that is the case for that particular person. It's wrong because while it may make you feel satisfied in the short term, it makes the other person hate you and feel alienated. And what's more, that's very bad strategy in the long term. You're not going to get what you want by mindlessly insulting other people.

It's wrong when people do it to the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

And in all fairness, it was wrong to do it to Tea Partiers too, with 'racist ignorant moron' replacing 'unshowered hippie slacker'.

Way back in September of 2009, back when Tea Partiers were the fresh new thing in the USA, I was astonished when the Taipei Times ran a story on a Tea Party protest back in the States, which quoted possibly the least intelligent person attending that protest.

"[US President Barack Obama] is a traitor. He's either a Marxist or a Communist ... I think Saudi Arabia is behind him."

And then the Taipei Times -- read by plenty of non-Americans, mind you -- made that quote their Quote of the Day. At the time, my astonishment took the form of, how does that moron deserve to be featured prominently in a newspaper across the world in Taiwan?!

But now, in light of what's been thrown into sharp focus by media coverage of Occupy protests, I'm angry about that quote for a different reason.

My point is not to compare the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, or imply if one is legitimate the other must be too, or draw any kind of equivalency between them. Except for this:

They're both composed of human beings with human psychology.

When news organizations took a singularly moronic comment at a Tea Party rally and made it seem like it represented the beliefs and motivations of everyone there, it accomplished two things. It made people think, 'Hah! I thought the Tea Partiers were people we had to take seriously, but really they're a bunch of morons.'

And it also made Tea Partiers look at the media with even more suspicion. It gave them a grievance that they could nurse for a good long time. It made them feel condescended to.

In the end, no one wins.

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

2011-11-10T15:03:00.010+08:00

I like this kind of history. James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare puts Shakespeare in context, describing the political issues that most concerned the English in 1599, which Shapiro believes to be the most consequential of Shakespeare's writing career.

I like putting things in context. I've never warmed to the school of literary criticism that states that you should focus solely on the text itself, and all else is irrelevant. I like to know why an author wrote something the way he did, particularly if the reason is something he expected his readers to know because it was common knowledge at the time. I love annotated editions of classics, even when they end up diminishing the work somewhat. (I'm thinking of the heavily annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories I read, where the annotation dutifully pointed out every instance where an obscure fact at Holmes' disposal turned out to be something Conan Doyle just made up.)

I should point out that I'm not a Shakespearean scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I've read three of his plays in their entirety (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and Othello), in each case because it was assigned for school. As for the rest, I've picked up bits and pieces of cultural knowledge through the years.

So anyway, what sorts of issues were the English talking and fretting about in 1599?

- Queen Elizabeth was getting old and there was no official heir. It was widely expected that when the Queen died, James, King of Scots, would come down and take over in London. This is indeed what eventually happened. But while we, in retrospect, know that the transition of power was accomplished smoothly and without bloodshed, nervous English of the latter part of Elizabeth's reign were not so sure. It didn't help matters much that the Palace and its network of spies were not happy when people openly discussed Elizabeth's anticipated death.

- There was a rebellion in Ireland. Catholic rebels had bested all English attempts to rule Ireland with an iron fist. In the early part of 1599, Robert Devereux, the mighty and powerful Earl of Essex, went to Ireland with a huge army to crush the rebellion once and for all. It was widely expected that he would return to England a conquering hero and reap the benefits of fame and fortune. He would be the greatest man in England, a symbol of English national might. As the Queen was old and there was no official heir to the throne, the implications of this are obvious.

- But what actually happened was that the Earl's forces got bogged down and were unable to secure a decisive victory. Scores of English soliders died on the battlefield and nothing much was gained. The Earl of Essex returned to England, against the Queen's wishes, his reputation in tatters. Two years later, he would attempt a coup d'etat, fail, and become the last man ever beheaded in the Tower of London.

- Meanwhile, all of England braced for a massive Spanish invasion. The best English intelligence said that Philip III had assembled a mighty armada, to try to succeed where his father had failed in 1588. London spent a panicked summer waiting for an invasion fleet that never materialized.

What Shapiro does is examine the four plays he believes Shakespeare wrote in 1599 (Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet) in light of contemporary events, Elizabethan culture, and Shakespeare's own life and career.

There's a lot of conjecture in Shapiro's book. Exact details on aspects of Shakespeare's life and career are notoriously hard to come by. (If Wikipedia is accurate, there's no good reason to think Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in 1599 -- scholars have been unable to ascertain in what year it was first performed, much less written. But there's no reason he couldn't have written it in 1599.) That's fine. As I made clear in a recent post, I don't want to read a list of proven facts about history. I want to read a narrative.

Henry V has an interesting context. Elizabethans had far different expectations for their historical dramas than we do. They expected Henry V to be full of clowning around and merry-making and romantic comedy with Henry romancing the French queen. They wanted, in other words, a sequel to the two Henry IV plays.

Shakespeare didn't give that to them. He wanted to write something grittier. This may or may not have caused a rift among his theatre company.

As most Shakespeare fans know, Shakespeare wrote most of his famous roles with specific actors in mind. Throughout the 1590s, Shakespeare worked with a famous comedian named Will Kemp. Kemp was probably a far bigger celebrity in his day than Shakespeare was. He specialized in a sort of rustic, bawdy, countryside clowning-about, and if you saw a Shakespeare play in the 1590s it probably would have ended with a Kemp comedy performance which may or may not have been related to the plot of the play.

Shakespeare wrote comic characters such as Dogberry and Bottom and Falstaff specifically for Kemp. Around the beginning of 1599, Kemp and Shakespeare's company had a falling-out and Kemp left to do his own thing. Shakespeare's next play was Henry V, in which Falstaff fails to appear; instead, a character reports that he died off-stage.

It's easy to read a causal connection there, although scholars will probably never determine what occurred first, Kemp's departure or Falstaff's 'death'.

Henry V is the story of an English king making war in France. When it premiered in London, the powerful and kingly Earl of Essex had just departed to make war in Ireland. Contemporary politics and references are easy to find in Henry V. Shakespeare didn't have the liberty of full freedom of speech (his plays would have been vetted by censors), and modern scholars have never been able to determine his own political views, but his plays are certainly better understood in the context of the issues of the day.

Given the political situation of the time, I'm somewhat surprised that Shakespeare dared have his next play be about the assassination of a successful general who (it was feared) wanted to make himself king. Julius Caesar is also analyzed in Shapiro's book terms of the political situation, as well as in light of fascinating aspects of Elizabethan culture.

Shakespeare's next play (if we believe Shapiro's chronology) was, by contrast, remarkably apolitical. As You Like It is a romantic comedy in which nothing much happens, if we go by old-timey traditional standards for what constitutes plot developments, such as murders, kidnappings, betrayals, etc. What action there is, is only there to set up the play's premise. This is pure character-based plotting, and Shapiro represents it as something new in the world of 1599.

Finally, there's Hamlet. What I didn't realize before is that there are two full-length versions of Hamlet out there, both of them far too long to be performed: the version published in 1604, nowadays called Q2 (for 2nd Quarto; Q1 was a far shorter version published in 1603 either as a stage-friendly version or a knockoff assembled from an actor's recollections), and the version in the First Folio of 1623, called F1. Shapiro believes Q2 was Shakespeare's first complete version, and F1 was the result of heavy editing and re-writing in subsequent years. Many latter-day published versions of Hamlet blend the two together, which Shapiro is opposed to; he thinks that muddles the development of Hamlet's motivations. The two plays are fairly different, and opinions vary among Shakespeare scholars which is preferred.

And that's all that I'll say about that, because I'm out of my depth, never having read the original Hamlet in any form. I keep meaning to, and I probably will at some point, but for now I'm just smiling and nodding my head.

The 2012 Republican Veep, Revisited

2011-11-08T14:19:00.005+08:00

Back in January I made my prediction regarding the Republican nomination: there would be a titanic battle over the nomination, full of sound and fury and interesting moments for the cable TV news shows, but none of it would matter because the Republicans would end up nominating Mitt Romney, which was what they were going to do all along.

So far I think my prediction has held up excellently. Like I predicted, we've seen a tremendous amount of drama and noise which has provided cable TV news with plenty of material. And despite it all, the Republicans seem if anything more likely to nominate Romney than they did ten months ago.

Perry and Bachmann have both thoroughly marginalized themselves. Cain's strategy is to signal that he has no intention of actually being president. That's enough to drive up his poll numbers due to the large size of the career politician-hating, contrarian segment of the Republican populace, but it won't get him the nomination. And the latest news is that many erstwhile Cain supporters are now transferring their allegiance to Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is if anything a less likely nominee than Perry or Bachmann or Cain; to me this shows that the anti-Romney Republicans are spreading themselves quite thin.

So I'm still fairly confident that Romney is going to be the nominee. I haven't got a clue if he'll lock up the nomination in February or March or June, but it'll be him at some point.

What I'd like to amend is my post from June, in which I speculate who the VP nominee is likely to be. I figured the GOP wouldn't want to nominate two generic-looking white men in suits, largely for image reasons. And they would be wary of nominating a woman for VP, for fear of reminding voters of Sarah Palin.

This is all fairly offensive thinking, but I suspect it's how political bosses think behind closed doors. It's not so much that they think, We want an ethnic guy as VP! It's more like, We think having an ethnic guy as VP will play well to voters!

That's why I figured the GOP would nominate either Florida senator Marco Rubio, or Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. They're both conservative politicians who don't seem to frighten moderate and independent voters. And they're both non-threateningly ethnic, representing groups the Democrats have not yet nominated to national office.

Well, I've reconsidered, and I've decided I was wrong. Neither Rubio nor Jindal will be nominated to fill out a national ticket headed by Mitt Romney. And if you've found my thinking offensive so far, just wait until you hear this.

Rubio and Jindal are both Roman Catholics. That wouldn't be a negative, in fact it might even be a plus, if the guy at the top of the ticket were a regular old vanilla Protestant like Reagan or Bush.

But I do not believe that the Republican Party will nominate a Mormon for President and a Catholic for VP. If they go with Romney, they're going to want a safe Protestant serving in the #2 spot.

For the record, I believe the Democratic Party would employ similar thinking. In either case, you've got a bunch of political bosses behind closed doors trying to put themselves in the mindset of hazily defined Middle Americans that they've had little personal contact with. Doesn't matter if the bosses are Democrats or Republicans.

I stand by my prediction that the Republicans will not nominate two generic-looking white men in suits for President and Vice President. But assuming they nominate Mitt Romney, I'm no longer so sure who the VP will be.

Total Oblivion, More or Less

2011-11-07T10:14:00.002+08:00

Macy Palmer is a contemporary sixteen-year-old living in suburban Minnesota, whose life is turned upside down when...

wait for it...

...the United States crumbles as waves of Scythian warriors on horseback start rampaging out of the frozen North, looting and pillaging and burning as they go. In the south the Empire musters its forces to repel the Scythian threat.

Macy and her family become refugees, traveling south along the Mississippi on a riverboat. The Plague breaks out. Dogs can talk -- at least, there's one dog who can talk, but he has a good reason.

Macy's old life is gone forever. The future, no one can predict.

Yeah. Alan DeNiro's Total Oblivion, More or Less is like that.

So how did we get from Point A (the world of today) to Point B (mounted Scythian warriors pillage suburbia)? I'm going to spoil the end for you, just a little: there's never any explanation for the world being turned upside down.

So what gives?

You can read the author's thoughts on what it all means here.

Here's my interpretation. This isn't why I think all this stuff happened in-universe. Speculating on that would be besides the point. Rather, this is how I choose to interpret the novel as a whole.

Throughout history, people thought they lived in stable communities. If your family has lived in the village for generations, and you haven't witnessed dramatic change and upheaval in your own lifetime, then you'll naturally expect that while people will come and go, local businesses will change hands, and bits and pieces of everyday minutiae will undergo a slow turnover, the big picture will never change.

Especially in premodern societies, people thought like that. And they were often right. A village might stay in more or less the same state for several generations. People would live and die without ever venturing far from their homes. You would have no reason to doubt that things would continue on the way 'they always had'.

And then everything would fall apart. No matter where in the pre-modern world you were situated, the dislocation would eventually come, as waves of Mongol or Germanic or Bantu or Hunnish or Spanish or Arab or Turkic warriors would come tearing into your ancestral lands and turn your life upside down. Then they would recede (or become the new distant imperial overlords) and a new normal would be established. Except you might be dead. Or a refugee in a distant land where things don't make sense.

We 'modern people' think we're past all that. True, we worry about our civilization collapsing around us, but there are certain ways in which we think it's likely to happen (meteor strike, plague, nuclear war, etc).

We don't think our civilization is going to undergo catastrophic change that we're unable to wrap our minds around even while it's happening.

Macy and her family and her suburban American civilization thought they had a handle on what their future was going to be like. Turns out they were no better off than anyone else in human history.

Original Zinn by Howard Zinn

2011-11-03T16:27:00.000+08:00

Original Zinn is a collection of interviews with Howard Zinn from approximately the years 2002-2005, in which the historian holds forth on his opinions on the United States, the state of the world, and the political Left.

I read it in a couple of hours while in Patara, Turkey. That was about two months ago. I don't think I can remember much that is specific to this book, especially as it's already thoroughly blended together in my mind with other opinion-esque pieces I've read, by Zinn and by other like-minded people.

So, sorry everyone. I'm not going to talk about Howard Zinn in this post.

Instead, I'm going to rant a bit on a related topic. I'm going to create a fictitious commenter, pretend he's left a comment, and then reply to that comment.

Strawman2011 says:
LOL don't you know zinn wasn't a real historian? he was just a hippie lefty activist who twisted history to fit his ideological biases. why don't you read a real historian sometime hahahahaha

Thank you, Strawman2011. In response, let me tell you about an episode of The Daily Show I saw earlier this year.

The guest was Mike Huckabee. My politics differs from Huckabee's quite a bit, but I will admit he was gregarious and charming on Jon Stewart's show.

(This can be attributed to the fact that he was not, at the moment, running for president. A few months ago I watched Tim Pawlenty on The Daily Show. Pawlenty was indeed running for president at the time, and as a result he was stiff and delivered only preprogrammed responses. He was Politico-Bot and at that time I believe he would have failed the Turing Test.)

Stewart brought up the historian David Barton. Barton is a figure whom Huckabee has praised in highly complimentary terms. People who like to think the USA was founded as a Christian nation generally tend to like Barton's work. In contrast, proponents of the separation of church and state have tended to dismiss him as an ideological crank. In all fairness I should mention that I've never read a thing he wrote.

I haven't seen the interview since it first aired -- apologies if I'm about to get some details wrong. Huckabee's defense basically boiled down to, 'Look, Barton's telling the truth -- he's not just making stuff up. Look at the primary sources for yourself if you don't believe me.'

This bothered me, and I was disappointed that Stewart didn't pursue the matter further.

It bothered me because not making stuff up, and convincingly demonstrating that what you claim happened, really happened, is not the mark of a first-class historian.

It's more like the absolute minimum that's expected of you.

The role of the historian is not just to say, 'Here's a bunch of stuff that happened in the past.' True, saying that is indeed part of the job of being a historian. I'm sure there are plenty of incompetent history teachers who do that part, clock out, and go home.

But the truth, as touchy-feely and unscientific as it may sound, is that being a historian is largely about storytelling. It's about constructing a narrative.

When there's a great deal of material, a historian must choose what to focus on. That's especially true when a historian is writing for a popular audience and needs to create a compelling narrative. I read Her Little Majesty, Carolly Erickson's 267-page biography of Queen Victoria, and when I finished I was quite unsure of just how much I had really learned about the old queen. Erickson's a wonderful writer, but in order to fit a readable narrative of a person's life into 267 pages, an author must choose what to emphasize, what to spin into a narrative, and what to leave out. Her Little Majesty is nonfiction, but it could be read as an unusually fact-based novel. I'm not criticizing Erickson -- she couldn't have done any differently, given the format she was working in.

And sometimes there isn't a lot of material. Many prominent people's lives are astonishingly poorly documented. It's amazing how little firsthand information we have on the life of Alexander the Great, for instance; most of our information comes from historians who lived long after his death. Any historian who tackles that period of history is going to have to pull together separate sources and conjecture a lot.

And of course, no historian can truly know what any given person was thinking at any given time. No historian can know what a person's subjective experience was like, no matter how well documented the person was.

That's why I was disappointed with Mike Huckabee's defense of David Barton. It's not enough to say a historian is factually correct. What you really need to defend is his interpretation. The narrative he strings together. His spin, if you will. Huckabee defended Barton by saying he got the basic building blocks right, when he should have defended his interpretation.

Huckabee pretended that the job of a historian is to tell us a bunch of stuff that happened. That's just not true.

Everyone who writes or talks about history creates a narrative. Good historians are honest about it. I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin's history podcast, Hardcore History. In the first installment of his series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, he straightforwardly says that this is a period of history that's been written about and analyzed many times before, but now his listeners are going to get the Dan Carlin version of what happened. I respect that.

Let's bring this back around to Howard Zinn. You might respect Zinn's politics and his take on history, or you might not. Fair enough.

But to attack Zinn (or David Barton, for that matter) for delivering his own version of history? Sorry, but that's just what historians do. Unless you want to wait until after the Singularity, when posthuman HistoryBots will presumably create narratives based solely on a probabilistic calculation of how things must have progressed given certain parameters in order to create the world that they exist in.

Granted, there are historians whose biases shape their work to the point that the narrative is more about themselves than objective reality. And that's a problem. But there's a continuum between a historian blinded by his own biases, and HistoryBot 4000. Every person trying to construct honest narratives about the past falls somewhere on that continuum.

If you think your favorite historian tells history 100% objectively, I'd have to say that a) you're not familiar enough with that period of history to know the whole story, b) the historian's personal biases happen to match yours, or most likely c) both.

I'm not offended by historians who wear their politics on their sleeve, as long as they honestly and sincerely try to work within the real world as it is (and was). We should all just remember that the issue isn't whether their interpretations are factually correct, because that's the absolute minimum standard that they should be achieving anyway. The issue is whether their interpretations, their narratives, are actually useful in understanding the past. And the present.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

2011-10-31T16:32:00.003+08:00

Every scene in this book has the feel of an Edward Gorey illustration.

Anyway.

After King, Queen, Knave, I continued the theme of novels mocking the upper classes of pre-World War II Europe with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, knowing nothing of the novel or the plot beyond the fact that a well-known Alfred Hitchcock film had been based on it.

As it turns out, Rebecca is the story of a naive young nameless heroine, who marries a much older English landed aristocrat and goes off to live at his immense estate. She is never able to escape the disapproving looks of the estate's staff, led by Mrs. Danvers, who can't help comparing her unfavorably to Rebecca, her husband's dead first wife and the novel's title character.

Unfortunately, the protagonist suffers from what TV Tropes, with its talent for description, calls Wrong Genre Savvy. She thinks she's the lead character in a fairly standard romantic story, and believes that her husband is still pining after his dead wife. She thinks her role is to convince her husband that he should let Rebecca go and he should live for the future, and to find a way to make peace with mean old Mrs. Danvers.

The, when the novel's half finished, some fundamentally game-changing bits of information come to light.

I was able to read Rebecca totally unspoiled, so I got to spend the first half of the novel raging at the heroine for being such a spineless wilting nonentity who let Mrs. Danvers bully her to her heart's content, and the second half fascinated to find out how the suddenly much more compelling plot would play itself out.

Never having seen the Hitchcock film, I imagined Mrs. Danvers as looking like a malevolent version of Professor McGonagall as played by Maggie Smith in the last Harry Potter movie -- basically, a strong, imperious old lady. Apparently in the film version her character's interpreted quite differently, by Dame Judith Anderson. She's quite younger (Anderson was in her 40s), and rather than coming across as a vengeful mother figure who has lost her child (as in the novel), her relationship with Rebecca has lesbian undertones instead. Either interpretation works, I suppose, but they're mutually exclusive (one would hope).

If I do see the movie version, I'm sure the alternative Mrs. Danvers will find an equal home in my imagination.

King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

2011-10-29T16:30:00.003+08:00

King, Queen, Knave was originally published in 1928, when Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian emigre living in Germany. It was not translated into English until the 1960s, when Nabokov and his son Dmitri translated it together as a father-son team.

Because the Nabokovs made it clear that they altered the novel to a significant degree, I'm not sure how much of what I read really dated to the 1920s. I assumed the English version was faithful in the small details to the original, and I enjoyed the little everyday details of life in what would retroactively be called Weimar Germany.

The plot, in broad strokes, is as follows. A country boy comes to Berlin, to work in his uncle's department store. The nephew and the uncle's wife really hit it off, to the point that they begin a steamy love affair, which the uncle remains cheerfully oblivious to.

Queen and Knave conspire to murder the King, despite both being quite inexperienced at planning and carrying out a crime of this magnitude. Psychological tension and fatal complications ensue.

The plot, as the author readily admits, is not terribly innovative. It's the prose (even if the reader is never quite sure if any given snippet of English prose came from the elder or younger Nabokov) and the macabre atmosphere that make the novel worth reading.

I never trained myself to intelligently discuss prose the way a literature professor might, so I feel somewhat hobbled when talking about modern literary writers like Nabokov.

To me, King Queen, Knave provides a look at life in 1920s Germany. It lets me play at deducing what was the same in the original 1928 Russian-language edition, and what was changed in the 1960s. But it's been two months since I actually read the thing (while traveling in southern Turkey in late August), so I can't quite recall the prose enough to discuss it at any length.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

2011-10-28T10:30:00.006+08:00

It took me a long time to get into Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe, a fact I attribute to my aversion to long series, particularly in the fantasy / SF genres. Generally I approach a series in one of two ways: either I read the first book and end it there, pretending the sequels never existed (and savoring any unanswered questions I've got as proof of the mysterious vastness of the universe). Or I read the entire series all at once as one long novel. That's what I did with Harry Potter the summer the last book came out. It only works when you've got a finished series, though.

So I was a bit apprehensive about the Discworld books, even as they approached massive popularity with more and more fans, including several of my friends. In the USA, Pratchett has fully caught up with Douglas Adams as the face of modern British fantastical drollery. Finally I gave in and started buying his books as they appeared at used bookstores.

My first Discworld book was Jingo, which probably was not the best choice for a beginner, as it focuses on a group of characters it assumes you're already familiar with (Sam Vimes and his cohort).

My second Discworld book was Monstrous Regiment, which was published later but is probably a better choice for a beginner. It's firmly set within the Discworld universe but it's more of a standalone, as it introduces a brand-new group of protagonists.

Both of these books were written after Pratchett had been writing Discworld books for a while. He'd settled into a comfortable groove, in which he parodies the tropes of several different genres within a single novel.

That said, I think it's a mistake to consider the mature Discworld novels to be parodies first and foremost. To me, a parody isn't just any humorous work that can be slotted comfortably into a particular genre. A parody is a humorous work that derives most of its humor from mocking the tropes of a particular genre. But most of the humor of the later Discworld books is character-based.

So, for example, while Monstrous Regiment does indeed parody (verb) many military fiction tropes (and thoroughly deconstructs the hoary 'brave young girl disguises herself as a man so she can enlist in the army' trope), you can't just label the novel as a whole a parody (noun). That's so limiting.

Anyway. My third Discworld book was the very first Discworld book: The Colour of Magic. As one can expect from the very first installment of a long-running series, The Colour of Magic features loads and loads of what TVTropes calls 'Early Installment Weirdness'. The novel is divided into chapters (each subsequent Discworld book would be one continuous undivided story), the story is much more episodic and disjointed than later books, stupid jokes and cheap humor are much more in evidence, and everything's a parody! Every segment of the episodic plot is a parody of a different sub-genre of fantasy.

That said, The Colour of Magic isn't a bad book. It's well-written, and Rincewind and Twoflower are both very nicely done comic characters. But it's not typical Discworld.

Which brings me to The Light Fantastic, #2 in the Discworld series. The Light Fantastic has much in common with its predecessor. Later Discworld novels would each be self-contained stories set in a well-established universe with recurring characters, but The Light Fantastic is a direct sequel to The Colour of Magic, beginning seconds after the first book ended with Rincewind and Twoflower launched off the edge of the world. The two books are one episodic novel split in half.

It's interesting to view the book as a snapshot of Discworld evolution. #2 continues the plot from #1, and like #1 it contains its share of painful jokes. (Upon hearing that the civil unrest has resulted in a mob ransacking the city's music stores, Rincewind shakes his head. 'Luters', he mutters.) It's also not all that great with its female characters; every woman in the book is a parody of a particular fantasy trope, and gets little character development beyond that. (Pratchett would get much, much better at writing women in his later books -- see Monstrous Regiment as proof of that.)

And while there's plenty of character-based humor, in The Light Fantastic it seems like Pratchett is more likely to, say, describe some aspect of Twoflower's personality in a humorous way, rather than have Twoflower actually do something humorous that fits his personality.

But there are also signs in #2 that Pratchett is settling into the groove he would ride so successfully (and profitably) in the years ahead. The Light Fantastic comes much closer to giving its readers a single cohesive story than its predecessor. It's not divided into chapters. And people who are far more serious Pratchett fans than I am claim that many of the long-running elements of the Discworld series get their start in The Light Fantastic.

I'll take their word for it -- after all, so far I've only read four novels out of -- let me check Wikipedia -- wow, 39 in total so far. Ever since I read Jingo in 2008, I've read the Discworld books at a rate of one a year. I find Pratchett to be a pleasant enough read, but I'm not sure if I'll increase my Discworld novel consumption speed.

Istanbul Musings

2011-10-27T14:27:00.005+08:00

Istanbul is hilly. There's a story that Constantinople was founded where it was because Rome has seven hills, and the site of Constantinople also has seven hills. Well, I can say that there are hilly streets in Ortakoy, several kilometers outside of the city as it existed in Byzantine times, that are at a grade I didn't know existed outside of San Francisco. We got vertigo riding a taxi down one of those streets.

Istanbul is full of cats. And often they're the fattest, healthiest street cats that I've ever seen. We've speculated that maybe some Ottoman sultan really liked cats and declared that no cat in the empire was ever to come to harm. There does seem to be a continuum between cats who are a specific person's pet who happen to spend a lot of time outdoors, to cats who don't belong to anyone in particular but seem to be collectively cared for by a neighborhood, to cats who are genuine strays but at least they're lucky enough to be strays in Istanbul.

Istanbul has street food. It varies in quality. The corn on the cob you can buy from street stalls turned out to be astonishingly mediocre. But anything bread-based was generally quite good. I had simit (a ring-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds) for breakfast almost every day, always bought from the same guy in Taksim. Our personal favorites were the mussels, sold with a clump of flavored rice and a squirt of lemon. They were cheap and didn't make us sick even once.

Istanbul has its traffic problems, but things are getting better. We chose an apartment that was only a short subway ride to our school in Levent (thus giving us an easier experience than some of our classmates, who lived over on the Asian side and endured far more difficult commutes). Public transit is really not sufficient, but where it exists it does its job well, and the city is in the process of expanding and building more rail lines.

(All photos by Jenna.)

The Hagia Sophia

2011-10-26T13:40:00.000+08:00

On September 7, we arrived in Istanbul. The CELTA course ran from Sept. 12 to Oct. 7, so we had four days of sightseeing first before getting down to study.

Istanbul's divided into European and Asian sides by the Bosphorus. The European side is further divided by the Golden Horn, with the bulk of the old city to the south and the center of modern Istanbul to the north. Although we'd traveled widely in Asian Turkey, we never set foot in Asian Istanbul the whole time we were there. Our apartment and school were in Europe, as are most of the places tourists are encouraged to visit; we never felt the need (or had the time) to cross the Bosphorus.

The Hagia Sophia had been closed during our day in Istanbul in August, so of course it was our first priority on our return. It's one of those famed tourist attractions that fully live up to their hype. It's always full of tourists, but with its vast size it can easily hold them all without getting cramped (unlike, say, some of the old churches in Cappadocia).

The Hagia Sophia is no longer a mosque, so visitors can wander throughout it without worrying about propriety. However, that also means that unlike a mosque, you have to pay to get in.

It's worth it, for the chance to wander about, admire the architecture, and get in plenty of your fellow tourists' photographs.

The Hagia Sophia is old. It predates any of the European nation-states. When it was built there was no England; there were only a handful of squabbling Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. There were no French or Italians or Russians as we know them today, only assorted tribes. There were no Muslims anywhere; Islam would be introduced a century later. China hadn't been a unified country since the collapse of the Han centuries earlier; there was no particular reason to expect a Chinese empire would ever rise again.

The Hagia Sophia is old, and it still stands. Its Wikipedia article reveals that it has been severely damaged on several occasions, and its dome has collapsed more than once, but it was always promptly rebuilt. I can't think of another building, anywhere in the world outside Istanbul, that is as old as the Hagia Sophia and still so well-preserved. (The Pyramids don't count -- they're not buildings in the sense of something that must be continuously maintained.)

I know of one building in Istanbul that rivals the Hagia Sophia in age: the Little Hagia Sophia, the still-functioning mosque on the city's southern edge that was slightly pre-dates its larger, more famous architectural cousin.

I'm curious. Is there a building (in the sense of a structure that people could work and live in) anywhere in the world that pre-dates the Little Hagia Sophia, and hasn't collapsed into ruins?

Selçuk, Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis

2011-10-12T21:39:00.005+08:00

Selçuk is a town in eastern Turkey whose proximity to lots of fascinating ancient ruins has enabled it to develop quite a thriving tourist industry.

The main attraction is Ephesus, a very well-preserved Roman city that is on everyone's tourist itinerary. No matter when you go, you can be assured you'll get to share Ephesus with hundreds of fellow ancient ruin buffs. Lonely Planet looks on the bright side, pointing out that having so many people around makes it easier to imagine as a living city.

I'm not convinced - at no point did I ever feel I was anywhere but Ruin Park - but at least there's ample space for all the tourists, and we never felt embarrassed to pull out and check our guidebook in front of everybody.

Ephesus is about 3km from downtown Selçuk. We didn't have much desire to walk there, opting for a taxicab instead, but we walked back to town, stopping on our way for a surprisingly acceptable meal at a buffet restaurant clearly meant to feed large tour groups.

And on the way back, the Temple of Artemis.

Reference books that list the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World usually tell us that the Pyramids are the only original Wonder that still survives mostly intact. This is true.

The second best-preserved Wonder is probably the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which judging from its Wikipedia entry, is now a great big pile of rubble near Bodrum, Turkey. We did not go to Bodrum on our trip.

But the third best-preserved Wonder is the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which you pass on the walk back to Selçuk. Bear in mind that when I say it's the third best-preserved Wonder, what I mean is that we know where it is and someone's taken the liberty of stacking up a bunch of fragments of various columns to make one new column.

The Temple of Artemis today. As I told Jenna, 'This must have been really cool back when it existed.' In the far background you can see the Kale (castle), still really old but of far more recent construction, currently closed for renovations.

Selçuk itself is a pleasant touristy town. The ruins of the Basilica of St John are fascinating to wander through and are right in the town proper.

And be sure to visit one of the many cafes and restaurants in town with outdoor seating, so that as you enjoy your meal you may be beset upon by pleasantly rotund street cats, who will come waddling up to you hoping that you will take pity on them and share your dinner. Turkey in general is known for its street cats who appear suspiciously well-fed, but one street kitty in Selçuk is about the same size as two strays in a town where cats are less fortunate.

Patara and Kalkan

2011-10-11T22:27:00.006+08:00

Patara is a town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey which has made itself completely into a backpacker haven. I mean that in the nicest possible way. It's a very pleasant place, although slightly inconveniently located -- it's not quite walking distance either from the main road or the deservedly popular Patara beach.

We stayed at Rose Pension, which I am mentioning by name because, after a good review in the 11th edition of Lonely Planet, it inexplicably disappeared from the 12th edition, causing much grumbling among our hosts. It's a shame -- Rose Pension had some of the best food of any pension we stayed at in Turkey.

Patara Beach fills to the brim with Turks and Europeans in the summer months. The good news is that it's big enough to contain all of them, and it's mostly clean and pleasant. There's a cafe serving passable food. Big beaches aren't everyone's thing (I tend to sit under an umbrella and read) but if they're what you like, Patara is an excellent choice.

The ruins start a short walk inland. Patara used to be a prosperous fishing community, probably best known as the birthplace of St. Nicholas. Yes, that's St. Nicholas as in Santa Claus -- imagine the potential tackiness if the local tourism promoters ever decide to build campaigns around the Santa connection.

The ruins are not as spectacular as some ruins in Turkey, but they're worth a look if you're already in Patara, and you can enjoy the novelty of exploring a ruined city with goats and cattle wandering around. (I suspect even Patara at its height had goats and cattle . The notion that a city center shouldn't have livestock wandering about is probably a very recent one in historical terms, which still hasn't spread to all parts of the globe.)

We took a day trip to the nearby town of Kalkan.

The difference between Patara and Kalkan:

Patara: Backpackers

Kalkan: Wealthy tourists

And that about sums it up. We weren't really the correct demographic to properly enjoy Kalkan, but we got a good meal of meze there, and we were amused by the number of well-fed cats and dogs lazing about town.

The beach, though, is somewhat lackluster compared with Patara's, and transportation is somewhat awkward - shuttles run to the town center infrequently, and to get back to the bus terminal, you either have to trudge uphill quite a ways, or you pay a cabdriver to take you.

Overall we quite enjoyed our time along the Turkish Riviera - relaxing and with enough to maintain our interest. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary in Patara, with white wine (from an unlabeled bottle!) and nargile. Very pleasant.

Hatay

2011-10-11T19:15:00.006+08:00

From Şanlıurfa, we headed southwest to Hatay. The city of Antakya is known to history buffs as Antioch.

Antakya continues the grand Turkish tradition of being home to very old and historically significant places. Here, it's the rock-cut church of St. Peter, the oldest place where Christians congregated in secret and arguably the oldest Christian church of them all.

Most of what you see there now isn't nearly that old; the facade was built by Crusaders, and there was restoration work done in the 19th century. But it's still a place of great historical significance, and there are very old details that survive, such as the escape tunnel that worshippers would take if approaching authorities were spotted.

The guidebook claims that the church is a fairly easy walk from central Antakya. The reality is that while the church is indeed walkable, much of that is past a strip of small-industrial and mechanical shops -- not a terribly inspiring walk, in other words, and downright unpleasant on a hot day.

The Antakya Archeology Museum on the main traffic circle doesn't look like much from the outside. Looks are deceiving, however -- on the inside it's a spacious and fascinating look at a collection of Roman mosaics and sculpture, well worth the eight lira.

Hatay is of special importance to my wife because her grandfather's family comes from here -- they're Armenians from Musa Dagh who fled persecution in the early part of the 20th Century. We made a special trip to the one Armenian village remaining in the area, which she wrote up on her own blog.

Armenian and Arab influences are strong in Hatay, which was part of Syria until the late 1930s. Before we went I worried that the unrest in Syria would adversely affect our trip, as I'd been reading reports of Syrian refugees crossing into Hatay. As it turned out, while in Hatay I saw or heard nothing of the nearby problems (which may be due more to our obliviousness than to anything else).

Hatay cuisine is much more Arab-influenced than in the rest of Turkey. For instance, hummus is for some reason not widely eaten elsewhere in the country, but it's common in Hatay. There was a small eatery near our hotel that served excellent hummus. We only learned on our last visit there that the guy who ran the place was ethnic Armenian, and what we'd been eating was Armenian hummus, cousin to what J. had been raised on.

The CELTA

2011-10-10T19:09:00.001+08:00

I'm back in the United States, after a month of living in Istanbul and not blogging. Blame the CELTA: the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, which my wife and I earned in a four-week intensive course that left us little time to do anything else.

Now it's done, we're both significantly poorer but with much stronger resumes, and I have time to write much more. Excellent.

Everything blurs together and I get an odd bit of writer's block when I try to describe what the experience was like, so please see Jenna's account of how she took the course and earned a (provisional) Pass A. (Our classmate Pinar also published a good write-up of her experience.)

I myself did not earn a Pass A, but I am fairly satisfied to be included in the group which encompasses the bottom 70% of all accepted students.

Jan Wong's China

2011-10-02T16:28:00.005+08:00

My first book on China by Canadian journalist Jan Wong was her Red China Blues, a look back on the author's complicated relationship with China. As a student during the Cultural Revolution, Wong swallowed the Communist Party line unquestioningly and traveled to Beijing to become one of the few capitalist bloc residents to study there.

Her faith in the Communist Party managed to continue for a couple of years, but it didn't last forever. Wong ended up quite disillusioned with the whole Communist experiment.

Years passed. In the second part of the book, Wong describes her return to China in the 1980s as a journalist, now cynical and no longer willing to accept the Chinese government's viewpoint uncritically. Red China Blues' climax comes when Wong describes the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which she witnessed, in graphic detail.

Not quite so autobiographical is Wong's later book, Jan Wong's China, a collection of stories of Wong's experiences working as a journalist in China in the 1990s. The book was published at the end of that decade, so the impression I got of China was already a decade out of date. One should hope that impression is somewhat divorced from present-day reality, because the picture Wong paints is a grim one.

My total experience inside China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) amounts to five days in Beijing in 2003, so I have little personal experience to draw on. My own thoughts on China are somewhat ambivalent; as I wrote earlier this year, China lurks on a great barely-known entity on the edge of my consciousness. (Living in Taiwan, I can hardly help it.)

I read books about China fairly often, and they tend to paint a rather alarming picture in terms of life within China's borders, particularly in the less wealthy areas. Jan Wong's stories of China in the 1990s, which I read two months ago (which is why I'm a bit hazy on details), do a good job humanizing the the individuals who live in China, while not shying away from the grittier details of life there.

After the generally grim view of China presented elsewhere in the book, the chapter on Tibet presented a remarkably - and unexpectedly - balanced picture. The Chinese authorities are not depicted as the benevolent liberators they would like foreigners to think they are. But neither are they depicted as evil overlords determined to stamp out Tibetan culture. I'm no expert on Tibet so I can't judge where the truth lies (it's probably really complicated) but Wong's treatment of Tibet, a land with half-Han, half-Tibetan citizens who voluntarily choose to remain officially Tibetan in the state records because they find it advantageous under Chinese law, hits a plausible note of fairness.

Cultural Clash of the day

2011-09-03T04:42:00.002+08:00

The Scene.

We were in Şanlıurfa. We had just finished feeding the sacred carp and taking pictures of the shrine at Gölbaşı, in the courtyard of the mosque of Halil-ur-Rahman. We retired to one of the courtyard tea gardens. It was shaded and secluded, a place where we could drink tea and eat a snack without feeling awkward and weird on a Ramadan day.

So we did so, and an older man who spoke no English did his best to be friendly and chat with us, and we speculated about the probable power dynamic among the three cats who kept asking for food. A fairly normal Turkish tea garden experience for us, all told.

After an hour or two, we felt refreshed enough to go back out into the sunny heat to explore the bazaar nearby. We asked for the bill and we paid, giving a tip, as is custom here.

On our way out, we examined the posted menu and determined we had been overcharged. The amount was embarrassingly small by any absolute measure, but insultingly large relative to what the bill should have been. We decided to head back to contest the bill. The tea garden managers protested that our own tabulation was incomplete; we'd ordered more water than we were taking into account.

It is true that when walking around Şanlıurfa in August one tends to consume a lot of water. But the discrepancy in our bill would have corresponded to half a dozen bottles of water we would have consumed while sitting in the shade, which surely would have sent both of us in search of a bathroom at least once or twice.

With our negotiations at an impasse, a customer who spoke decent English who had witnessed the whole scene inserted himself into the situation. Trying to smooth over the situation, he said it was all due to a linguistic misunderstanding.

But, I said, they'd written '20' on a sheet of paper after they'd tabulated everything, and we'd given them 20 lira, and they hadn't given change, and we gave a tip on top of that.

So the guy changed his story. They'd assumed the extra money was a tip, he said.

I made it clear that I doubted that this just happened to be the most informal establishment we'd ever visited - a place that was really little more than a fridge, a tea stand, and a little hot plate for snacks - that automatically added a service charge to the bill. And then accepted tips on top of that.

The guy didn't like my attitude. 'Don't be rude,' he told me.

The whole encounter ended a few fruitless minutes after that, with the tea garden staff having relinquished the amount they'd overcharged us and the tip, and me feeling so angry I could scream. Not just at the audacity and chutzpah of the tea garden staff, but also at the English-speaking fellow customer. But for different reasons.

The Westerner's Perspective.

The English-speaking customer who took it upon himself to mediate obviously never had any intention of handling the disagreement fairly. He was Turkish. The tea garden staff was Turkish. We were foreigners. Of course he was going to side with them against us.

And it's not even as if maybe he really thought the staff was right. His explanation of the staff's side of the story was too obviously false. Only a weak-minded fool would have believed him.

It's sad, really. Locals ripping off foreigners are a phenomenon that everyone agrees exists. You're just helping to hurt your country's international image by insulting the foreigners and defending those louts for no apparent reason beyond blind patriotic loyalty.

I mean, that's got to be what happened, right? There can't be any other way of viewing the situation, right?

Oh yes there can.

The Other Perspective, I Suspect.

You know what I hate, as a fine upstanding Turkish citizen? Loud oafs who see only black and white, and can't distinguish shades of gray.

Like those two self-righteous foreigners who caught the tea garden staff overcharging them. Okay, small deal, it happens all the time. So once I see what's going on, I do what my duties as a human being require me to do: I try to smooth over the situation, let the staff save face, and placate the angry people. It's just a misunderstanding, I tell the foreigners. A mistake was made because the tea sellers don't speak good English. It's okay, nobody tried to overcharge you.

So what does the male foreigner do? He hears my attempt to smooth over the situation and takes it literally. He actually tells me that what I told him can not be what really happened, and he explains why. Is he five years old? Does he think I am five years old? Has he lived his entire life explaining to various people why things they tell him cannot be literally true? He must be deeply unpleasant to sit next to in a movie theater.

He forces me to think of another explanation to smooth things over, and then he tells me that isn't literally true either. Well, perhaps if I go away overnight so that I can think about it, maybe then I'll be able to come up with a story that he won't be able to nitpick. But what kind of creativity does he expect me to exercise on the spot?

And now his voice is rising, as if he is angry at me for some reason. What a rude man.

Clash of Attitudes.

This is what's really unfortunate about this sort of encounter between a culture where directness is valued, and one where maintaining harmony is more important. It would have taken a rare sort of Westerner, possessing saintlike detachment, to not have gotten angry, and I say that having spent a couple of years living in East Asia. It would have taken a rare sort of Westerner not to be provoked further by the Turkish man's admonishment to me, 'Don't be rude'. From his point of view, I was being rude, for not following the societal script. But I am a product of my own culture, and I would have felt like a weak non-confrontational fool if I'd accepted the man's obviously false explanations.

Normally I'm just about the least confrontational person you'd ever meet. I shy away from arguing with people. Yet that man's attempt to peacefully smooth things over made me so angry I wanted to hit him.

Comparing Turkey and Taiwan seems rooted in foolishness and doomed to failure. The two countries are literally at opposite ends of Asia. Yet they're both places where saving face, and maintaining interpersonal harmony, are valued at the expense of being direct and frank.

I'm going to say something about the company I work for in Taiwan here. They don't read this, and no names shall be used. The office unfortunately has a habit of making mistakes that end up inconveniencing us instructors, and of letting small problems snowball into big problems.

I remember one time I confronted office employee J after the company had made a mistake that had moderately inconvenienced me. She told me why it wasn't the office's fault, and I responded by telling her why her explanation logically could not possibly be true.

J's response? She seemed to shrink a little, saying, 'I don't know what to say,' before mumbling some other excuse which didn't make sense either.

I actually felt kind of guilty after that, as if I'd been bullying her and I realized it only after the fact. Then I regained my senses and told myself that, no, I had nothing to feel bad about. And I had the bulk of Western culture to back me up.

Still, from J's point of view I should have just accepted the transparently false explanation and dropped the issue, for the sake of interpersonal harmony.

This cultural difference isn't going to start any wars (we're not talking Samuel Huntington-level stuff here), but I do think it keeps escalating minor differences into major ones. And while I can't speak for anyone else, I am never able to spot it while it's happening. Only in retrospect, once it's too late to alter my behavior.

Incidentally, I don't intend people to read this and take away from it something as simple and insulting as 'Westerners are straight-talking, Easterners employ social lying'. We in the West employ all sorts of white lies and statements of doubtful literal veracity, many of which we're not even consciously aware of because we're too deeply immersed in the culture.

Turkey's still great.

The incident that inspired this post got sparked because the staff at a Turkish tea garden though they could overcharge us without us noticing, but I don't want to harp on them too much. Unscrupulous people are everywhere. They're not especially common here.

This was the only instance of people in Turkey being anything other than friendly and honest with us. Make no mistake, in touristy areas we've been charged touristy prices. My wife's haggled gloriously on occasion (she's much better at that than I am). But this is a culture of haggling, and you're expected to do it with a smile on your face. And there was the enterprising youngster at a remote roadside stand in Cappadocia who sold us thirsty hikers cans of low-quality iced tea at preposterous prices. But that was our fault for not asking how much before we drank the stuff. Lesson learned. All we can do is laugh at his audacity. (More seriously, we've been hit by theft, but that's impersonal, it happens all over the world and it isn't something to dwell on here.)

But most Turks we've met have been friendly and honest, even when linguistic difficulties made the encounter less efficient than it would have been otherwise. The unscrupulous tea garden in Şanlıurfa inspired this post because of the cultural differences highlighted, not because I wanted to rant about them.

Göbekli Tepe

2011-08-30T02:38:00.009+08:00

Göbekli Tepe sits among low rolling hills a couple of kilometers outside of Şanlıurfa. You can see a village in the distance, but the site feels remote and desolate. You park your car in a small lot near a pair of resting camels. Despite a couple of Turkish-German-English explanatory signs, there is little real tourist infrastructure and no one to charge admission.

Fifteen years ago, Göbekli Tepe was unknown. Fifteen years from now, it may well be more famous than Stonehenge. If only we'd come before National Geographic's June 2011 cover story, we could've said we'd come before it was cool.

Göbekli Tepe is the achievement of nobody-knows-how-many Neolithic people who built, tore down, and rebuilt the site over centuries, until the whole area was deliberately buried in sand and forgotten 10,000 years ago.

Perspective note: nearby Şanlıurfa is believed by the faithful to have been the hometown of the biblical Abraham. Going by the oldest estimates for Abraham's year of birth, at that time well over half as much time had passed since Göbekli Tepe's abandonment as now. And that's since the site's abandonment, not its original construction.

Göbekli Tepe is over twice as old as some religious scholars maintain the world is.

Not being an expert, I can't say much about the site's significance. I recommend you read the National Geographic article, or Newsweek's article, or the shorter but to-the-point The First Post FAQ. But I do know that archeologists believe they've just begun to scratch the surface of the site, and there is much more hidden underground.

To be honest, there isn't a huge amount to see at the site right now. We thought it was well worth the trip, but mostly for the historical significance and the desolate otherworldly atmosphere. But this is a site to watch.

Şanlıurfa

2011-08-28T22:00:00.006+08:00

We were told Şanlıurfa would be a religious, buttoned-down city. Jenna expected to be made to feel uncomfortable if she didn't cover her head and arms.

As it happens, Urfa's true face is much mellower. Plenty of women are dressed modestly and wear headscarves, but plenty of women go about with their hair uncovered, and we never felt uncomfortable. The one sign of religious piety we noted was that we never saw an establishment openly selling alcohol.

Urfa is, as might be expected in southern Turkey, a very old city. It's heavily associated with the biblical Abraham, although the sites there are chiefly associated with aspects of his life story that won't be found in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis.

The highlight for travelers is the pool of sacred fish in the courtyard of the Mosque of Halil-ur-Rahman. According to legend an ancient king tried to burn Abraham alive, but God intervened, transformed the fire into water, and the coals into fish. You can buy plates of fish food for one lira each. A popular place to bring families.

The cave where Job lived while undergoing his tribulations is on the outskirts of town (to be honest, it's surrounded by Turkish suburban sprawl). There's a complex of religious buildings built at the site now, set up to receive busloads of religious pilgrims. After taking off your shoes, you descend into the small room where Job is said to have lived; it is courteous to leave a small donation.

Like Gaziantep which we visited before it, and Hatay after it, Urfa has a large, bustling bazaar. Somehow the bazaar seems less touristy than Antep's does (in places), despite the fact that more tourists, domestic and foreign, visit Urfa. Urfa's bazaar is more compact than Antep's, but that doesn't mean it's small. It's a maze of narrow streets and covered passageways, quite easy to lose yourself in. (By contrast, Antep's bazaar seems much more delineated by major roads, although it too has narrow streets.) The bazaar we would find in Hatay would follow a similar pattern.

The oldest thing near Urfa is older than the Bible, older than Job, older even than Abraham. But I'll devote a separate post to Göbekli Tepe.

Gaziantep

2011-08-26T03:09:00.007+08:00

Gaziantep's an old city, a very old city. It's got a huge historic bazaar and a castle on a hill and plenty of picturesque old mosques.

It's also a new and growing city. As tourists, in town for only two days, we only saw the occasional hint that old Antep, the city that our Lonely Planet told us about, is not the complete picture. One hint was the modern, crowded tram line that we crossed paths with once or twice. We didn't take it, because it didn't take us anywhere we wanted to go. It was of no use to us. We're tourists, you see, and the tram was built for people who live there.

(Aside: Gaziantep was historically known just as Antep, which is still how most people refer to the city. During the Turkish War of Independence, in 1920-21, Antep was besieged by French forces and held out nearly a year before surrendering. In commemoration, in the 1970s Antep's name was officially expanded to Gaziantep, or 'Brave Antep'.)

So, while I acknowledge that we never saw the bulk of the city that over a million people live and work in, the parts of Antep that we did see are bustling and fascinating.

First, the food.

Turks acknowledge Antep as the local baklava capital. You can hardly walk for five minutes in the city center without passing a couple of baklava stores, and what they sell is incredibly sweet and contains perhaps twice the pistachio content of baklava elsewhere. Don't be put off by the amount of green in your baklava; it's supposed to look like that and it's delicious.

Now that you've got yourself a sugar high, what's next?

The bazaar has its touristy sections, it is true, but it goes on for blocks and blocks and on the whole is geared more towards locals than tourists. The spice shops that you walk past smell wonderful. They're the real thing, not just something put out to impress travelers.

You know you're visiting the real deal when a bit later you walk past a creepy array of torsos.

Our pre-arrival trawl for information told us that the archeology museum in Antep was a must-see for the Roman mosaics, but they were soon to move all mosaics to a new museum located in Parts Unspecified. We arrived at the old museum to find that this was indeed the case, and all the mosaics had been moved to a new location several kilometers away.

We stuck around the old museum for a time, just to see what was left of the collection. To be sure, it was certainly in a transitional phase, and the guy at the front desk seemed almost apologetic that we'd paid admission to see a dimly lit half-empty hall undergoing renovation. That said, it still houses an impressive display of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine artifacts. What especially interested me by the exhibit of ancient coins were displays showing exactly what the coins were worth; I don't remember exactly but it was along the lines of 'In 200 BC ten drachma could buy one head of cattle OR a slave's wages for three months OR forty jugs of wine'.

You also learned the interesting fact that, at one point in Anatolian history, it took three years of a schoolteacher's wages to buy a house. Assuming that schoolteacher then owned the house free and clear, I suspect that's more than three years of a schoolteacher's wages would buy nowadays.

Afterwards, we took public transit to see the new museum, located well outside of the tourist center of town, near the train station. The museum is somewhat inconvenient to get to, but it is big and beautiful and gorgeous. It is entirely given over to mosaics, most of them from the nearby ruins of the Roman city of Zeugma, now largely underwater due to hydroelectric dam construction.

The mosaics are beautiful, generally following such common Roman themes as Oceanus and Tethys. Then there's the Gypsy Girl.

The Gypsy Girl is famous. Unearthed only in the late 1990s, she's become a symbol of Antep and she's kept in her own room at the museum.

As you can see, she is a fragment of a much larger mosaic. I think that has worked in her favor. I suspect she wouldn't be half as beguiling if her entire face were still intact. Her fragmentation has effectively shrouded her in veils, making her all the more intriguing.

That said, there's a theory that she is actually Alexander the Great, which would presumably be more clearly seen if her/his full form and original context were intact. Whether that makes her/him more or less intriguing is for you to decide.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

2011-08-25T04:00:00.005+08:00

As he explains in the Afterword, Michael Chabon originally intended to call this novel Jews With Swords. That would have been a perfectly accurate title, although he is perhaps correct that readers would then have jumped to the conclusion that it was a broad ethnic comedy. Rather, it is... a somewhat more sophisticated ethnic comedy, perhaps?

It's the tenth century A.D. and we're in that part of the world that would, over a thousand years later, become modern-day Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia. Our story focuses on two street-smart bandits and swindlers, the Jews With Swords of the almost-title (although to be precise, one prefers to wield an enormous Viking battleaxe instead), who fall in with a hunted fugitive from the Khazar royal family. The throne of an empire is decided.

This is practically the very definition of 'swashbuckling'. It was originally a 15-part serial running in the New York Times Magazine. It also comes with illustrations by Gary Gianni, who also does the Prince Valiant comic. The overall effect is of a nineteenth-century swashbuckler. But the language is modern, if the prose densely purple.

I brought it as it seemed appropriate, as we're traveling in the old heart of the Byzantine Empire, if not on the frontier where the action is set. The novel is short, although Chabon's prose isn't as quick a read as some authors. I enjoyed it while it lasted, although it might have been better drawn out in serial form.

Turkey: First Observations

2011-08-23T02:23:00.003+08:00

My wife and I are now in Turkey, where we came to receive training in the form of the four-week intensive CELTA course. In the weeks before the CELTA starts next month, we are traveling around Turkey as tourists.

For my wife this country has special significance; her ancestors on her mother’s side were Armenians who were forced to leave Mousa Dagh, in southern Turkey, in extremely dire circumstances. She is the first member of her family to return to Turkey, and we will be visiting the Mousa Dagh area shortly (with a watchful eye on the Syrian political situation, of course).

Istanbul.

We spent Monday stumbling sleep-deprived around the sights of old Istanbul. The Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, and the exterior of the Haghia Sophia (the interior is closed on Mondays, the day we were there).

Of course I’d obviously known before that Istanbul / Constantinople has one heck of a high density of historic sights, but I didn’t really feel it until we were just outside a tram station on Divan Yolu Cad, saw a large and beautiful mosque, used the guidebook to identify it as Nuruosmaniye Camii, and realized that the guidebook said nothing else about it, because this beautiful historic building near the old city center just wasn’t quite beautiful and historic enough to make the cut. Gorgeous old mosques are a dime a dozen in Istanbul.

A Broad Generalization.

I will now run the risk of making an extremely broad generalization about Islam, now that I am in my third Islamic country.

Cats.

There are a lot of cats in Muslim countries, and the street cats appear to have somewhat better lives than stray cats elsewhere. My wife and I were immediately greeted by a friendly little cat as we entered Sultanahmet Square in historic Istanbul, and we continued to see cats, often surprisingly clean, well-fed, and approachable, throughout Sultanahmet and the grounds of Topkapi Palace. The touristy town of Goreme in Cappadocia is full of cats. Sometimes we saw ones that looked genuinely hungry. More common were cats like the little guy who meowed for food and love at the tea garden in Goreme. He appeared uncommonly well-groomed for a street cat, despite the manager’s insistence that we shouldn’t hold him because he had fleas (at least we think he said this; neither of us is good at understanding Turkish).

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to hold for Gaziantep, as every cat we’ve seen here has been a rather pathetic looking stray.

Food.

If I may make another sweeping generalization, East Asia is not so great at coming up with decent sweets. Korea’s got a traditional sweet cookie called yaggwa that I rather like, and Taiwanese shaved ice is excellent, and some southeast Asian nations do some very interesting things with coconut milk, but on the whole nobody’s claiming that any East Asian country is leading the world when it comes to sweet snacks and desserts. In fact, the region is pretty lackluster.

Contrast with West Asia. Actually, the whole cultural area that stretches from Greece on its western end to India on its east is awash in higher-quality sweet desserts than any other part of the world. And Turkey has given me uncomfortable sugar rushes every day I've been here. Baklava is the worst offender; even the cheap shop in the otogar (bus terminal) in Istanbul was unfairly good, and now we are in Gaziantep, known throughout Turkey as the home of baklava, where you pass baklava shops on practically every street. (Edit: OK, the same is true in Sanliurfa.) The most mediocre baklava I've had in Turkey is better than the best baklava I've had outside of Turkey.

It's not just the baklava. Turks are better at tasty sweet things than people of any other country I've visited. We stopped at a roadside cafe on our way back from hiking outside of Goreme in Cappadocia, and we got these ordinary-looking ice cream treats from a freezer (not traditional gooey Turkish ice cream, but simple 'convenience store' fare), and despite trying different things we both agreed that they were far better than shabby factory-made ice cream treats had any right to be.

I'm convinced that we Westerners learned the art of sweet things from Near Eastern people. They're still better at it than we are.

100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know by John D. Barrow

2011-08-07T15:05:00.005+08:00

Note to all Monty Hall Problem fanatics who found this page through a search engine: My interpretation of the problem begins several paragraphs down. Please do not get bored and wander elsewhere while I'm going on about virtual monkeys.

John D. Barrow, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, has presented us laypeople with 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World.

This book is, happily, not dumbed down. He doesn’t presuppose you know calculus, but some of the 100 chapters are heavy with equations. If equations cause your eyes to fog over, you can skip past them; if they really and truly bug you, the chapters are short and you can always move on to the next one, but bear in mind that equations encode objective reality and becoming comfortable with them is one way to show respect to the universe.

I will admit my eyes fog over at the sight of long equations. This may be a factor in the unhappy fact that, despite having something of a natural aptitude for math, I crashed and burned in college calculus. I am not proud of this and I hope to overcome my foggy-mindedness.

Chapter 3 was a particular favorite of mine. We’ve all heard that with a million monkeys typing away at a million typewriters, eventually we’d get the works of Shakespeare. Only with the advent of modern supercomputers and the virtual monkeys contained therein could we actually put this to the test.

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator Project eventually produced 10^35 pages of random typing. If you don’t have a good sense of how many pages 10^35 is, don’t worry; that only means you’re human. Human brains didn’t evolve to easily conceive of such numbers.

They checked the output against the collected works of Shakespeare, and the most substantive match was a 24-character string from Henry IV, Part 2: “RUMOUR. Open your ears;”

Then it quickly descends back into gibberish.

It’s not something that Babbage’s book deals with, but I couldn’t help but wonder what if they hadn’t limited themselves to Shakespeare (and in a case-sensitive fashion, at that). There must have been longer strings of legible English (or Spanish, French, pinyin Mandarin, etc.) in that 10^35 pages, particularly if you’re willing to overlook the occasional misspelling. What nuggets of wisdom are in there? I know the answer: none, because it’s just random typing. But if you can dredge a sufficiently auspicious longer string from the nonsense, think of the cult you could found around it.

But that's not what I want to write about today. I want to write about the topic of chapter 30, which Barrow titled "I Do Not Believe It!".

The chapter is about one of the most contentious and controversial word problems in mathematics. Although Barrow doesn't use the name, there's a good chance you know it as the "Monty Hall Problem". It's controversial because (apparently) most people find the correct answer to be so counter-intuitive and so obviously wrong that they can not accept it. Some of these people are highly educated in mathematics and consider themselves experts on probability, and they have carried on heated arguments online to argue against what is actually the correct answer.

But not me. Ever since I came across the Monty Hall Problem, I have never understood why the incorrect answer is meant to be the intuitive one. The right answer seems correct to me. It feels correct, all the way down to my bones.

I appear to be in a minority of one. Everybody else, including Barrow, thinks the wrong answer seems more correct.

I see two possibilities here:

a). I am mentally bizarre.

b). Something about the way I was originally introduced to the problem makes the right answer seem intuitive, and I have subconsciously been approaching the problem in that same way ever since.

I choose to believe b). Before I explain why, let me describe the infamous problem for everyone's edification. Since I slapped John D. Barrow's name at the top of this post, this will sound more like his representation of the problem than the most common representation, but it's in my own words.

THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM

A game show host has presented me with three identical closed boxes. There is a prize inside one of the boxes. The game show host knows which box it's in. The other two are empty. I randomly choose one of the boxes. Possibility that I am correct: 1/3.

Now the game show host opens up one of the two boxes I didn't pick. It's empty. Now there are only two boxes. I have a choice: I can stay with my original pick, or I can switch to the other remaining box.

Is it to my advantage to switch boxes?

Plausible Wrong Answer #1: No, it is not to your advantage. The prize could have been in any of the three boxes, so no matter which box you pick the probability is still 1/3.

Plausible Wrong Answer #2: No, it is not to your advantage. There is a 50/50 chance of the prize being in either of the two remaining boxes, so the odds are the same either way.

Plausible Wrong Answer #3: No, it is not to your advantage. Word problems are useless, simplified caricatures of reality and you won't get any benefit from working them out.

Actual Correct Answer: Yes, you should switch to the other unopened box. There is a 2/3 chance that the prize is in there.

At this point the audience explodes in an uproar, and Dr. Theodore Q. Figglebottom, Professor of Mathematics, proceeds to spend the next couple of hours ranting on the Internet about how everybody who thinks I should switch boxes is an uneducated fool who doesn't understand probability.

From my point of view, the Professor Figglebottoms of the world (and there are many of them) are so intent on proving themselves correct that they're missing two very important points:

1. The game show host knows which box has the prize.

2. The game show host was always going to open an empty box.

If the game show host had the same limited knowledge as me, and there was a 1 in 3 chance that he was going to wreck the whole game by opening the prize box himself, then the answer would be much different. Then there would indeed be a 50/50 chance my box had the prize, and a 50/50 chance the other box had the prize.

But he knew.

Had I chosen correctly at the beginning, then I'm just unlucky and making the best choice of action is going to lose me the game. But in the more likely event that I chose wrongly at the beginning, switching boxes now will guarantee my victory.

The game show host consolidated both of my "roads not taken" into one and gave me a guarantee against the bad outcome that would have awaited me at the end of one of those roads. Of course, I'll still lose if I chose right at the beginning, but that's why it's a game show and not a "free money" show.

And that seems intuitively obvious to me. I don't recall exactly under what circumstances I first came across the Monty Hall Problem, but I do know that the above interpretation has always been central to my understanding of it, so it was probably part of how it was originally presented to me. It's not that I'm weird; it's that in this particular problem I was innoculated early on from emphasizing the wrong part.

The Logic of Life by Tim Harford

2011-07-29T18:17:00.005+08:00

Tim Harford published The Logic of Life, his defense of human rationality, in 2008. This was after he made his name and his reputation with The Undercover Economist, but before he wrote his brilliant Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

I read it after the both of them, so it is perhaps unfair of me to be slightly disappointed that it doesn't show the same freshness of The Undercover Economist or the same unity of purpose as Adapt. If The Logic of Life has a common thread linking its anecdotes and explanations, it is that human beings apply rationality and logic in making decisions, even if they don't generally appear to be doing so.

Whether human beings are truly as rational as economists say has been a topic of debate, and it is a debate that I am not interested in pursuing, because I feel it hinges more on semantics than philosophy and psychology. Take the classic example of a person who buys a pair of brand-name jeans that are three times as expensive as generic jeans of comparable quality, because he feels there's something intangible about the brand-name jeans that makes them better. Is that rational? I don't know, but I bet any discussion will boil down to how, precisely, one defines 'rational', and I don't care enough to suffer through that discussion.

So what we've got is a collection of anecdotes and studies. Make no mistake, it's a well-written and interesting collection of anecdotes and studies. I was midway through when I decided it was the perfect book for the kind of person who likes to bond with you at cocktail parties by spouting fascinatingly unconventional and contrarian points of view that, upon a moment's reflection, make more sense than the conventional wisdom. In fact, reading Tim Harford's prose here is like finding yourself talking to an outgoing example of that sort of person. I wonder what he's like at cocktail parties.

I perked up at the latter chapters as Harford delves into politics, where he explains how it is that in many industrial countries, particularly the U.S. and Western Europe, rural areas are able to essentially siphon money and resources from urban areas using agricultural subsidies.

The basic reason is that because a subsidy benefits a small group of people in a big way, they have no trouble mobilizing their political resources to make sure they get what they think they deserve. And as for the vast majority who derive no benefit from the subsidy (or negative benefit - take sugar subsidies, which Harford feels are harming the overall U.S. economy), the cost is dispersed over too many people for anyone to really get up in arms over it.

The dynamic doesn't necessarily have to be rural vs. urban. It was the exact reverse in some developing countries in the '60s and '70s that had recently achieved independence, where most people lived in rural areas (and tended to be ill-informed) and the national government was a direct successor to the old colonial authorities who had milked the countryside for all they could get.

Anyway, can I recommend The Logic of Life, Harford's awkward middle child of a book? Sure, why not. At the very least, it'll supply you with food for thought, not to mention material for your next cocktail party.

Competitive Advantage

2011-07-28T19:32:00.005+08:00

Dwarf Fortress is an insanely complex computer game that two brothers have spent the last couple of years designing and updating. The fan base is tiny and extremely loyal. The premise is to manage a fortress of heroic dwarves in a hostile environment. There is no way to win; the only questions are how long you can hold out before being obliterated by enemy forces, and how glorious and awesome your eventual demise will be. Says NYT Magazine:

Though its medieval milieu of besieged castles and mutant enemies may be familiar, Dwarf Fortress appeals mainly to a substratum of hard-core gamers. The game’s unofficial slogan, recited on message boards, is “Losing is fun!” Dwarf Fortress’s unique difficulty begins with its most striking feature: The way it looks. In an industry obsessed with pushing the frontiers of visual awe, Dwarf Fortress is a defiant throwback, its interface a dense tapestry of letters, numbers and crude glyphs you might have seen in a computer game around 1980. A normal person looks at ♠§dg and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin.

I've been through pretty strong game-playing phases in my life, but Dwarf Fortress is not really my cup of tea. Still, I respect the heck out of its creators. I could never bring myself to mock Dwarf Fortress or the people who play it, except good-naturedly.

There was a time when Tarn Adams, the programmer half of the Dwarf Fortress team, thought he might be headed for a career in academia. But he decided it just wasn't for him. I'm sure some people will decry this waste of talent. I disagree. Tarn and his brother have put a tremendous amount of work into a project that represents exactly what they want to do with their time. And if Dwarf Fortress - this detailed, intricate world engine that seems to work, to a surprising degree, and which counts among its fans many designers of much more commercially-oriented games - turns out down the road to spawn actual benefits to fields of computer science outside of gaming, I won't be even a little surprised.

To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

VR and holodeck worlds of the future may well be based on the pioneering work done on Dwarf Fortress.

If you think Tarn Adams is wasting his genius, then I can only say that you should make sure everyone has a chance to find what they're good at and do it. Including poor kids working in Third World sweatshops who would make brilliant programmers (or medical researchers) if only they had a chance. I want a world where people are allowed to specialize and realize their competitive advantage.

Also, I'm heartened that Tarn's able to make a living off of the Long Tail. Jaron Lanier and other pessimists have had me worried. That said, Tarn's not exactly rolling in money; it helps that he apparently never developed expensive tastes and doesn't live in Palo Alto. But he's managing to achieve some modicum of income doing what he loves, and I respect that.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

2011-07-27T18:22:00.005+08:00

Jaron Lanier, famed pioneer of virtual reality and virtuoso of exotic musical instruments, has become known in recent years as an skeptic - on deep philosophical grounds - of what many in Silicon Valley say is the future, particularly the open source movement, free culture, and 'Web 2.0'.

In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, the dreadlocked one lays out his philosophy and the reasons why he takes a dim view of what the Internet is becoming. He calls his book a 'manifesto', although I think you'd have to look at it sideways and squint a little to really see the resemblance. What it is, is a collection of ideas that made me stop and think. Even if you disagree, if you read his book with an open mind, you may stop and think too.

So what is his argument?

Basically, that the prevailing ideology driving much of contemporary online culture devalues human individuality in favor of a vast anonymous collective. Social networks encourage us to present simplified versions of ourselves, the better to fit ourselves to the existing options the sites give us. The free culture movement is devaluing individual creativity; despite the claims of free culture advocates, it is still difficult to find evidence of a diverse and solid middle class of musical artists using online tools to make a living directly from their fans. And although the open-source movement may have done some good, promoting incremental progress across a wide spectrum of disciplines, it has also probably hindered major innovation.

The Internet didn't have to develop this way, Lanier says. It still doesn't have to develop this way. Our future is still open, but because of the phenomenon of 'lock-in', in which design decisions that seem minor and temporary today become more and more difficult to change as technology progresses, the direction we're headed in is getting entrenched. But we can't let contemporary prevailing ideology blind us to the full range of choices that we have.

Specifics? Well, people often cite him as a Wikipedia skeptic. He doesn't hate Wikipedia, but he thinks it's has been given an exalted respect that it does not deserve, and indeed would not deserve even if its myriad trivial imperfections were all addressed and fixed.

The fact that it is such a common go-to for information, and is more often than not the first result a search engine gives you, means it has marginalized other, more idiosyncratic online sources of information -- ones which weren't 'just transferring material that already existed into a more regularized, anonymous form'.

Wikipedia regularizes and anonymizes individual effort on a massive scale and turns it into a product that millions of people find convenient to use. It's a triumph of the open-source movement. Lanier doesn't outright condemn the open-source movement (aside from flashes of rhetoric, he doesn't actually issue many blanket condemnations) but he finds it overrated and thinks its adoption as an ideology is stifling creativity.

The two great triumphs of open-source are Wikipedia and Linux, and neither is an entirely new thing -- he calls Linux a 'superbly polished copy of an antique' (UNIX). The open-source movement has not shown itself to be capable of true innovation.

Lanier is a musician, and he writes unhappily that the past decade has been the least innovative in the history of recorded pop music. Even the biggest music geek, he contends, upon hearing an unfamiliar song, is unable to discern whether it was recorded in 2008 or 1998. He's not denigrating the individual creativity of musical artists working today; they're being failed by their cultural environment.

It's not just music. If you look at artistic expression as posted on big cultural blogs such as BoingBoing, 'it's as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump'.

I dearly love BoingBoing, and Lanier's criticism deeply hurt. It hurt because I can't deny he has a point. It just so happens, by luck, that the day I read that sentence for the first time, this work of art was at the very top of BoingBoing.

It's a gorgeous picture, as I think even Lanier would have to admit. And I can't think of any bit of modern artistic achievement that would help his argument more. Thank you, Mr. Lanier, for helping ruin BoingBoing for me a bit.

Lanier is not an ideologue. (One theme he keeps returning to is how he hates ideology.) Unfortunately, this isn't always obvious.

I suspect he's done himself a disservice with his propensity for saying things that make him sound like a fuddy-duddy conservative reactionary. Then, in the next few sentences, he either softens his tone considerably, or he explains that despite the way he makes it sound, he actually doesn't mind what these kids today are doing.

This is fine if his reader is receptive to his ideas, but given that there are people reading him looking for things to criticize, he hasn't done himself any favors.

Also, I really wish he hadn't invented the term 'Digital Maoism'. I understand the logic behind it, but I think it's tone-deaf and teases the edges of Godwin's Law. But then, I've got an interest in Chinese history, and the words Maoism and Maoist to me evoke the horrific realities of 20th century Chinese existence more than an abstract ideology being debated in a coffee shop in the West. So my sensibilities are not everybody's.

Lanier knows full well he is inviting criticism. I've already read a couple of commentaries on his opinions, many of them written by people who seemingly intended to cut him to ribbons even before they read a word he wrote. More reasonably, Michael Agger wrote a review for Slate that is not unfair, although he is unconvinced. He writes in the penultimate paragraph:

But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it's Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

I know snobbery's supposed to be a bad thing and all, but I honestly can't figure out what's supposed to be so horrible about the attitude Agger's describing as snobbish.

I'm not qualified to comment critically on many aspects of Lanier's argument. Don't ask me what I really think of free culture or the open source movement; I tend to be most persuaded by whoever I read most recently.

So my frustratingly vague verdict is that one may certainly quibble with many of Lanier's statements, but his arguments have value and if we don't hear them from him, we're sure to hear something similar from someone else. Lanier may well be the best possible person to raise these points. He's not dissing Web 2.0 in order to advance some objectionable ideology, and although some of his rhetorical flourishes make it seem otherwise, he doesn't think in intolerant absolutes. He's friends with many of the Silicon Valley thinkers he criticizes.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine, who said things Lanier criticized in his book, gets thanked non-ironically in the acknowledgements, which I hope has confused the hell out of many single-minded online commenter types.

You don't have to agree with everything a person says to take their arguments seriously. Lanier is someone who we need to take seriously.

Why do people marry?

2011-07-14T12:48:00.016+08:00

A couple of weeks ago a friend (one who, likes me, strongly supports legalizing gay marriage) linked to a Tim Cannon column. Cannon makes an "I have nothing against gay people but I think marriage should be purely a heterosexual institution for X, Y, and Z reasons" argument that doesn't break any new ground. Only heterosexual couples can conceive and bear children, we should enshrine heterosexual marriage for that reason, etc, etc.

But there was one bit that really lodged in my head; one troubling bit that doesn't make me rethink gay marriage, but does make me go back and wonder about some arguments against gay marriage.

It's the funny feeling I get from the following:

Activists like Raj want to use marriage law to achieve the social and cultural objective of increasing respect and visibility for men and women who identify as homosexual.
As far as the objective goes, Raj is unlikely to court much opposition. He certainly won’t get any from me: I too believe that respect and visibility must be accorded to all members of society, without regard to gender, race, religion, sexual preference, etc.
What concerns me is the means that Raj and others are advocating for achieving this outcome, namely, the radical modification of the institution of marriage.

I get the feeling that Cannon is mixing up the struggle for legalization of gay marriage, with gay marriage itself. I feel like he is under the impression that if two people of the same sex want to get married, it is to increase respect and visibility for gay people. And not because, you know, they just want to marry each other.

But in an alternate universe in which I'm not already married, if I wanted to marry a woman and she was African-American, I'm reasonably certain the reason would not be to belatedly validate the civil rights struggle of 40 years ago. Rather, it would be because I loved her and wanted to marry her.

It certainly may be the case that there are gay couples marrying each other simply because they can, and they want the whole world to see that they can. I can see how that might demean the institution of marriage in some peoples' eyes. What I don't see is how that would apply in a world where same-sex marriage has been legal for decades and is largely accepted by society. That will be a society where homosexual marriage is no less (and no more) mundane than heterosexual marriage. I didn't marry my wife just to make the world show us straight people the proper respect.

So I wondered, is this a widespread belief? Do some straights really think gay people just want marriage rights for validation, a way of accruing respect and making their presence known?

And then I decided I was just being silly. Just because Tim Cannon puts something in a column doesn't mean he thinks it's true. I know how opinion columns work. You start out with the conclusion you want (i.e., it's a good idea to oppose gay marriage even if you're not bigoted against gay people), and then you assemble an argument to get you there. That's why op-ed writers can employ logic that directly contradicts the logic they employed last week, and there's no shame in it or sense that they're being slippery.

But then that thought got overtaken by other thoughts.

I can denigrate the art form of the op-ed column all I want, but nevertheless it's hard to deny that a column comes from the columnist's brain, and as such reflects some of the columnist's assumptions about reality, just as a novel that is fiction will nevertheless reflect the novelist's worldview. Maybe Tim Cannon really does believe he lives in a world where gay people want marriage equality primarily as a means of increasing respect and visibility for gay people. And if he believes it, maybe other gay marriage opponents do too.

This matters to me because I've long heard from marriage equality opponents that gay marriage somehow diminishes the institution of heterosexual marriage. People who say this generally act as if the logic behind it does not need explaining (though I need it explained to me), so I gave up and decided it was just meaningless talk of the sort you hear on both sides of every emotionally charged controversy.

But I'd like to better understand what makes these people tick. If they actually believe that gay people want marriage equality as a way of increasing respect and visibility, then suddenly the claim that it diminishes marriage makes a lot more sense. I believe that stereotyping gay marriage opponents as 'God Hates Fags' troglodytes is not just morally wrong, but strategically counter-productive. I'd genuinely like to know how they see the world.

I still don't have much respect for the typical op-ed columnist, though.

Empress by Shan Sa

2011-07-12T15:57:00.010+08:00

Heavenlight, our protagonist, is the daughter of a relatively well-off merchant and government official who had personal ties to the Emperor of China. When the (now overthrown) emperor dies, Heavenlight's father collapses of grief and dies as well. When Heavenlight is thirteen, she is invited to become a concubine of the new Emperor, after impressing a senior official she'd met during her father's funeral ceremonies. In her career as a concubine, the Emperor never notices her. However, she and the Emperor's youngest legitimate son, Little Phoenix, become lovers.

When Heavenlight is twenty-five, the Emperor dies and Little Phoenix succeeds him, the imperial succession generally being decided by politics rather than birth order. Heavenlight is sent to a nunnery, as is usual for concubines of dead emperors. She is brought back, however, on orders of the Empress. The imperial marriage between Little Phoenix and the Empress is an unhappy and childless one, and Little Phoenix much prefers his chief concubine, the Resplendent Wife, Xiao. Heavenlight is meant to distract the sovereign away from Xiao. The scheme backfires, Little Phoenix prefers Heavenlight, and Xiao and the Empress are both deposed and eventually executed. At age thirty-one, Heavenlight becomes Empress Consort of China.

As Empress Consort, Heavenlight is an effective administrator, much more so than her husband. She produces four sons and one daughter that live to maturity. The first son, Splendor, dies before his father. The second son, Wisdom, plots to overthrow his parents, and so he is exiled.

When Heavenlight is fifty-nine, Little Phoenix dies and the third son, Future, succeeds to the throne. Heavenlight is dissatisfied with Future's conduct as Emperor. After just a few weeks she removes him and installs her youngest son, Miracle. The new Emperor has no desire to run a country, and everyone knows that Heavenlight is the real ruler. When Heavenlight is sixty-six, she does away with all pretense and, her son gracefully abdicating, she becomes the only reigning Empress in all of Chinese history.

Heavenlight reigns as sole ruler for fifteen years, managing both the Empire and quarrels within her own family, notably between her own direct descendants and her father's grandchildren over succession rights. At age eighty-one, when she is overthrown in a coup (and her young lovers slaughtered), she loses the will to live; she dies later that same year.

I've left out Western calendar dates in this account of the life of Empress Wu Zetian, not only because they would have been anachronistic in this context, but because they would cause eyes to glaze over in all but a few history buffs. During the period the novel Empress covers, Western Europe was a cultural and political backwater and the most powerful Christian state was the Byzantine Empire, itself much weaker than it had been a century earlier. Heavenlight's lifetime occurred as Western Civilization was at its most globally inconsequential, its absolute nadir. In contrast, Shan Sa has shown us the world of the political and cultural rulers of China, at that time indisputably the world's most powerful civilization.

Shan Sa and translator Adriana Hunter (Empress was written in French) have Anglicized most of the Chinese names, leading to some entertaining hunts as I compared the goings-on in the book with the historical record as interpreted by Wikipedia. The two matched quite closely; everybody in the novel is a major historical figure, and it is fun to identify Heavenlight, Little Phoenix, Splendor, Wisdom, Future, Miracle, and so on.

It was fascinating to see the very alien conceptions of morality in the imperial Chinese court, both sexual and otherwise. Starting with sex: Of course there was a double standard, and the Emperor could bed as many concubines as he pleased while the Empress couldn't fool around with men. But it wasn't perceived this way. Heavenlight did not have to stifle jealousy when Little Phoenix bedded other women. It wouldn't have occurred to her to feel jealous; there was never any expectation of male monogamy. It's worth noting that for Heavenlight to take female lovers was never frowned upon, and once she was no longer capable of conceiving a child, taking sturdy young men into her bedchamber was practically encouraged by the Court, the better to keep her strong and youthful.

As for other sorts of morality, let me just say that to succeed in the environment in which Heavenlight thrived, you have to be, to use highly anachronistic language, extremely badass. Several times in the book Heavenlight commits acts that, in another time, another context, would be considered evil. Was she an evil person? That's probably for others to decide. But you don't become the only Empress Regnant in all of Chinese history by being a nice old lady.

Of Languages and Expats

2011-07-09T20:00:00.006+08:00

Based on conversations I've taken part in and seen online among expats, I predict this will be the most controversial thing I've ever written. So be it.

This is sparked mainly by Laowiseass's post:

When a Chinese person asks 10 or 20 how-could-it-be questions about a foreigner's Mandarin skills, one of two reasons lurks under the veneer or omigod-you're-so-amazing fawnery.
Incidentally, I've never met an established foreigner in Taiwan who didn't speak some degree of Mandarin. Most speak it well.
Reason No. 1 (insult): Foreigners are presumed to have severe brain problems. The poor fools study Chinese for years at universities in China or Taiwan. A lot of local people know that's going on. But somehow after the foreigners walk off with the language course completion certificate, nothing sticks in their heads.
Reason No. 2 (sense of superiority): The dumbfounded Chinese believe their language to be so complex that despite any amount of study or use over a long stay in a greater China, foreigners still can't grasp it well enough for real communication. Similarly, foreigners aren't supposed to get the social or cultural subtleties around them, meaning they're easy to cheat or at least get snickered at when they follow the posted rules while everyone else is going to the bank by breaking them.
For some people, a simple lack of exposure to foreigners explains the incredulity. But why assume can'trather than can, or simply reserve judgment with an open mind?

My wife, whose spoken Chinese is better than mine, has already written her response. Here's mine. It's not so much in response to Laowiseass, as it is a response to what I hear from the expat community in general.

The Language We Speak

I am entirely of Western European ethnic heritage. Taiwanese people generally do not automatically assume my Chinese-language skills are nonexistent. In fact, if anything they routinely overestimate my Chinese level. I find this surprising because my ability to understand Mandarin is much better than my ability to speak it. (When I lived in Korea, I spoke the language better than I understood it, so it seemed natural when locals thought my fluency was better than it was.)

My Chinese is not very good. In fact, it is shamefully bad for the amount of time I've lived in Taiwan. My wife, who if anything is even whiter than I am, is a much better conversationalist. From what I have seen, Taiwanese people do not generally react with shocked amazement that she is able to speak coherently. She does get an awful lot of 'Ooh, you speak Chinese really well!' She hears that constantly, in fact. But I don't think that's shocked amazement. I think, from a Taiwanese culture point of view, they're being polite.

I didn't say 'they think they're being polite', or worse, as I've actually seen on an expat online forum, 'they don't know they're being rude'. That's just demeaning. As if Asians aren't ready to be as cultured and urbane as us Westerners yet, but as long as they're making an effort, we should give them a big, patronizing Good Job! and a thumbs up!

The Language They Speak

You often hear Westerners complain about Taiwanese people speaking English to them for no apparent reason beyond their visible racial features. Many Westerners, even many Westerners who aren't bothered by it, believe Taiwanese people do this because they assume the Westerner doesn't know Chinese. The logic is clear. It is blindingly obvious.

Here's the contrary view.

You're a Taiwanese person in Taiwan and you speak decent English. You have reason to initiate verbal communication with a Westerner. You are perfectly aware that there are Western-looking people in your country who speak decent Chinese. You may even be aware that some Westerners act a bit insulted if a local initiates conversation in English.

But let's talk probabilities. What is the probability that the Westerner would rather be approached in English, versus the probability they'd rather be approached in Chinese? Based on a sampling of all Westerners in Taiwan (not just you and your friends), speaking English will almost certainly be the most rational choice. Assumptions like 'they couldn't possibly understand Chinese' don't have to enter into it.

You could counter that it's not right to let a person's visible ethnic features affect the way you treat them at all. I'm of two minds about this. The correct response in many people's minds is that willful race blindness is very much a Western innovation, one which we ourselves usually don't live up to. Imposing it onto expectations of what people in other cultures should do is silly. That said, I'm not such a cultural relativist that I'd necessarily think there is anything wrong with saying 'Wouldn't it be nicer if people in other cultures did XYZ?'

There's also the fact that some 'I shall speak English with this foreigner' conversations probably come out of a desire to grab this opportunity to practice English. I am not sure how often this happens in Taiwan. It happened all the time when I lived in Korea, and it was usually perfectly obvious what was going on. It doesn't happen to me much in Taiwan, although that might be partly due to my habit here of going about in public with headphones in my ears.

Humans Have a Right to Be Batty

Lurking within the psyches of Western expats in Asia is the dark figure of the local who has absolutely no clue how to deal with the fact that there are foreigners living in their country. Most often this takes the form of a local who is absolutely determined not to understand anything a foreigner says, even if the foreigner does an excellent job speaking the local's native language. Rather like the running gag in the movie Anchorman, where Will Ferrell's character can't understand Hispanic people speaking English, because he 'doesn't speak Spanish'.

I don't deny that such people exist, although I do suspect they are rather less common in real life than they are in expats' imaginations.

Here is my plea:

Let those people be batty, illogical individuals. Don't smear their individuality all over the culture they came from. Don't use some variation on 'Oh well. People in this country haven't had much contact with foreigners.' Everybody has a right to have foibles.

Thank you.

NOTE: I live in Taiwan and I have lived in Korea, but as far as I'm concerned the above also goes for China and Japan and probably all of East Asia, although areas that are very multilingual or have a colonial history of English will almost certainly have their own situations and contexts that I'm not familiar with. Even here in Taiwan, a foreigner speaking Chinese will be perceived very differently from a foreigner speaking Taiwanese, but that's a whole 'nother story.

UFO In Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo

2011-07-07T10:54:00.004+08:00

Silver Hill Village is an isolated backwater in Hunan where, on September 11, 2012, a flying saucer zips over the head of illiterate peasant woman Kwok Yun. Soon afterwards, she comes across an injured Westerner in the fields. She takes him home and treats his wound, but he disappears before the authorities arrive.

The UFO and the Westerner have vanished, but village chief Chang is not going to let this opportunity pass by. As an investigator from Beijing arrives to interview the townspeople, Chang lays out her extremely ambitious plans to use the incident to fulfill her dreams for Silver Hill. Meanwhile, Kwok Yun remains baffled by developments.

Xiaolu Guo's UFO In Her Eyes is an effective satire of China's reckless leaps into what certain people consider to be modernity. As I've mentioned before, I've barely been to the People's Republic, but what I've read about the manner of its development suggest that the events of UFO are barely exaggerated. The flying saucer and the near-future setting give the book a veneer of speculative fiction, but I suspect China's got plenty of real-life Silver Hills, towns that due to luck and happenstance have had the opportunity to plunge head-first into disconcertingly fast changes according to what local elites thought was desirable.

On a totally different note, I love buying used books; they often carry their histories with them. I bought UFO at a used bookstore in Taipei. Stuck between its pages was the movie ticket stub the previous owner had been using as a bookmark. The ticket stub was for Monga (a Taiwanese movie) and was from a cinema in Berlin, Germany. Something about that pleases me immensely.

The Brave Pointer-Outer of the Ridiculous

2011-07-06T09:48:00.013+08:00

Tim Harford’s thoughts on science funding (I strongly recommend his Slate article 'Positive Black Swans') reminded me of this blog post at Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, in which he shows how the office of U.S. Senator Tom Coburn blatantly misrepresented serious research as frivolous.

Coburn's public persona is of an opponent of wasteful government spending and pork-barrel projects, and the context was an attempt to expose $3 billion in mismanagement at the National Science Foundation.

Three of the most egregious sounding items in Coburn’s report are described as a study in which a “scientist put shrimp on a tiny treadmill to determine if sickness impaired the mobility of the crustaceans,” an effort to design robots capable of folding laundry, and an outbreak of “jello (sic) wrestling in Antarctica at the NSF research station McMurdo station.” The Senator and his team of fiscal watchdogs helpfully included a grotesque snapshot of the Jell-O incident, which looks like it was cut and pasted from some other Congressional report on the menace of online pornography.

Silberman also blasts similar statements by John McCain and Sarah Palin during the 2008 election. He fears that this political show might greatly harm the careers of scientists who are doing worthwhile work that will benefit people of all political colors.

Highlights of the 2008 version of the same partisan show included John McCain and Sarah Palin — then running for the highest offices in the land — fulminating about earmarks for “fruit fly research in Paris, France,” with Palin throwing in a plucky “I kid you not!” to express her taxpayer’s righteous indignation.
Never mind that thousands of world-changing breakthroughs in health and basic science have resulted from studying Drosophila, and that the specific research Palin was ridiculing was focused on proteins in the brain called neurexins that may play a role in neural dysfunction in autism.

Although I fully approve of Silberman exposing the antics of politicians who stage this 'outrage' without regard to negative real-world consequences, I’m not convinced when he tries to set this farce within a larger ‘The Republican Party is hostile to science because they’re afraid of dissenting sources of information!’ narrative.

To be honest, I think it’s a lot simpler than that.

Coburn and other politicians who misrepresent legitimate science as a frivolous waste of taxpayer dollars are taking advantage of a very human trait. We like to point and laugh at the ridiculous outsider.

When members of a group we don’t identify with, like scientists, use taxpayer dollars to put shrimp on treadmills, we laugh at them, agree with Senator Coburn that this is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, and then pat ourselves on the back that we've found a little bit of spending we can cut. Maybe we have a firmer sense that Tom Coburn is a wise and just leader of men who deserves our support and votes.

We don’t bother to find out why they put shrimp on treadmills. Not because we’re Americans, and not because science is this weird thing we don’t understand, but because we’re humans and that’s just the way we roll. How many ridiculous things do you see or hear about on the Internet every day? How often do you bother to find out the real story? Probably not very often.

And as for Coburn, he’s found something that looks ridiculous that he can mock to serve his own political ends. What’s the downside from his perspective? A bunch of scientists he knows nothing about might have their funding cut? Hah.

I should point out that this basic human instinct - 'hey, look at the ridiculous person!' - is one that's shared by all groups of people, not just Americans and certainly not just Republicans. Politicians everywhere do this when they appeal directly to the people, because it's effective at getting people to rally around them. Commentators do it too, and so do bloggers, and I guess I'm doing it right now with respect to Senator Coburn. Except I'm pretty sure Coburn deserves it.

Anyway, back to the main point. Even if I disagree with Silberman about the dark scope and majesty of Coburn's motivations, I agree that this is a problem. Harford argues that we ideally ought to be funding both sane and promising avenues of research, and far riskier, more off-the-wall ideas that seem like long shots -- 'lottery tickets', he calls them. If a Senator Coburn can make even sane research look dumb so that he can get other people to point and laugh along with him, how are the lottery tickets ever going to stand a chance?

(Now, I could see someone reasonably arguing that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be funding lottery tickets in the first place. Letting private money fund them is not implausible: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is an example Harford uses as an organization that does fund the lottery tickets, to great effect.)

I see this as an example of why humanity shouldn’t have so many of its eggs in one basket when it comes to scientific research. The United States leads the world in scientific research, not because we are so much brighter than other nationalities but because we’ve got the infrastructure and the universities to attract smart people from around the world. It’s dangerous to put the work these smart people do in the path of narrow-minded politicians.

(That said, I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is a uniquely American anti-intellectualism at work here. Tom Coburns can appear in any country.)

I’d like to see scientific research internationalized to the point that a politician looking for a quick boost doesn't have the influence to do any real damage.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

2011-07-05T17:11:00.001+08:00

I’ve been a Tim Harford fan ever since I read The Undercover Economist several years ago. He’s quite good at that elusive, valuable art:

He has the ability to articulate insights into how the world works that you intuitively recognize as true immediately. You only needed someone to come along and put them into words.

A few weeks ago he did an interview for The Browser in which he recommended five books for people to better understand the practical side of economics. I’ve already pledged to read all five by the end of this year, and the fact that he includes a Cory Doctorow novel and a book written in cartoon format only makes me more confident in his choices.

His book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure is full of wisdom. Harford explores the lives and careers of several people, but the one figure he keeps coming back to, the chief protagonist of the book if it has one, is Russian economist Peter Palchinsky. Palchinsky was an advisor to many of the gigantic Soviet public works projects in the 1920s. If a project was not going well, or even worse, judged ill-conceived from the beginning and doomed to be an expensive failure, he told his superiors this in no uncertain terms. This turned out to be an unhealthy habit. In 1928, he was taken away by the secret police and executed.

Palchinsky’s three principles, distilled by Harford and referenced repeatedly throughout the book, are as follows: First, seek out new ideas and try new things. Second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable. Third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

The Soviet Union’s institutional inability to follow these three principles, Harford argues, was the main reason why it was never able to catch up to the Western economies. Yes, there were other flaws, moral flaws, but it was the country's inability to innovate effectively that led to its economic downfall.

Harford has made articles available for free online that offer a taste of what Adapt is about; book trailers, if you will. Slate offers “The Airplane that Saved the World”, all about the RAF’s Spitfire, an experimental aircraft design that nearly got killed in the early 1930s, long before it went on to help win the Battle of Britain. Moral: We should encourage environments where crazy new ideas are fostered and protected from capricious management.

Also see “Positive Black Swans”, about funding scientific research so as to produce maximum good. Moral: Allocating funding to “safe” lines of research that promise incremental advancement is all well and good and necessary for society. But we’ll be even better off if, in addition to safe, highly promising research, we also encourage and fund what Harford calls “lottery tickets”: far riskier avenues of research that may well lead nowhere, but also hold the promise of revolutionizing their fields if they succeed. Harford argues it’s most effective to fund both types.

Eventually, of course, he comes to the financial crisis.

We shouldn't bail out massive companies that are about to go under. Which is not to say we should heap all our blame on the Bush and Obama administrations for doing so; they felt they had no choice because, to use the infamous quote, they were ‘too big to fail’. Maybe they were, but that itself was the problem. No company should be too big to fail. The whole point of a limited liability corporation is that it can collapse without destroying human lives. Companies aren’t people. If a company is going to fail, let it fail. A single tree shouldn’t be so important that its collapse would bring down half the forest with it. (Note: My words, not Harford's.) Creative destruction is a good thing - high rates of failure can presage economic growth.

The second Palchinsky principle says that failure must be survivable; an organization (or a life?) ought to be structured so that a singe catastrophe can't bring down the entire structure. In 1995, an employee making unsupervised trades at Barings Bank managed to singlehandedly destroy his 300-year-old company. He had made wildly speculative trades with the bank's capital without supervision. He had broken the law (and did a stint in prison as a result), but he hadn't really acted maliciously. The whole time he probably thought, "I know what I'm doing." There will always be reckless people. There will always be setbacks and disasters. They should be anticipated and planned for.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

2011-06-30T12:05:00.004+08:00

Changez is a brilliant young Pakistani in America who graduates from Princeton, begins a love affair with an American woman, and finds a well-paying job in the world of finance. But he is already becoming dissatisfied with his work, feeling he is aiding and abetting an American domination of the world that he feels very uneasy about.

Then September 11, 2001 comes. Then relations between Pakistan and India deteriorate and nuclear war on the subcontinent appears likely. Changez grows to hate what he sees as U.S. interference in South Asia (and everywhere else). Meanwhile his girlfriend vanishes into her own difficulties and suicidal thoughts.

Less is more. Mohsin Hamid leaves a lot unsaid.The Reluctant Fundamentalist uses a frame story, in which Changez is relating his story to an American businessman (government agent?) he meets at a Lahore market. The exact nature of the American acquaintance is left up to the reader to decide, as well as whether Changez is an completely reliable narrator, particularly as he tells the latter part of his story, after he has entirely renounced his adoptive country.

I write this blog post having deliberately avoided reading any online reviews or reactions to Hamid's novel. So much is left unsaid, and there is so much room for the individual reader's interpretation, that I feel as if once I read what others had to say my mind will be no longer pristine. (I'll almost certainly succumb to temptation once I finish writing this.)

If I make this novel sound impossibly vague, I don't mean to. It's good exposure for Westerners to the non-Western, perhaps even anti-Western point of view. Just because you try to understand a particular viewpoint doesn't mean you have to agree with it. (And of course, anyone who automatically assumes Changez = Mohsin Hamid is making a grave mistake and needs to go back to Reading Fiction 101.)

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

2011-06-28T17:06:00.004+08:00

Zhuang Xiao Qiao, Z for short, arrives in London from her home in Zhejiang Province, China to spend a year learning English. Naive and with limited language skills, Z soon begins an affair with a much older nameless Englishman who happens to be something of a drifter.

Her English improving by the day, Z and her English lover spend several months together, although they also grow to quarrel quite often. With her nameless lover's blessing, Z takes off to spend a few weeks traveling around Europe alone, during which time she has an affair or two (or three). She and the Englishman are clearly not meant to be together. Z returns to China at the end, with much improved English and with a much broader worldview.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers would have annoyed the hell out of me if the author were a Westerner, even a Westerner of Chinese descent. Z's early thoughts on the English language and what it implies about cultural differences struck me as unconvincing, more likely the product of a Westerner imagining how a Chinese person might think than that of an actual Chinese person. As it happens, though, Xiaolu Guo was born and raised in China, thus rendering my objections on those grounds rather silly.

Guo writes her novel in Z's broken English, with the linguistic proficiency growing more with each passing chapter as Z's linguistic ability grows. The book is modest and relatively short. It's hardly the most consequential book I've read this year, but it's well-done, and Guo has hit what she aimed for.

In which I think too much

2011-06-27T20:06:00.007+08:00

Interesting episode of Planet Money on Friday about efforts to get Americans to start using dollar coins. The gist of it is, the government keeps minting dollar coins, Americans are deeply unenthusiastic about using them, and now the Fed is sitting on a gigantic trove of coins that nobody wants.

I live in Taiwan, where there's a commonly used coin equivalent to US$1.50 and the lowest denomination bill is worth US$3. Up in Japan, the lowest denomination bill is worth about ten US dollars, and they've got a commonly used coin worth half that. It's obvious that Americans are only going to really start using dollar coins once the government stops printing dollar bills, giving people no choice. If that happens, somehow I suspect there will be a great public outcry, fueled by populist rhetoric either impossibly vague ("It's shameful that we let the government take away our dollar bills, because... of reasons we haven't thought of yet") or preposterously insane ("This is just the next step towards A NEW WORLD DICTATORSHIP").

Personally I don't care much if we switch over to dollar coins or not. Then why am I writing this post? Because I'm curious. The fact that they've gone to such great expense to stoke public enthusiasm for dollar coins, and they've failed utterly, makes me wonder if this is something else you can chalk up to the vague old concept of American exceptionalism, along with our not using the metric system (which to be honest I'm also somewhat indifferent about) and our embarrassingly deficient public transportation (which I do care about).

Is there an underlying pattern here? Or should I not try to connect the random dots?

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

2011-06-25T12:07:00.011+08:00

Krakatoa is, of course, a volcano south of Sumatra and west of Java that violently exploded in 1883.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded is a book by Simon Winchester which offers us the following parallel stories, which go far beyond the scope of Krakatoa's mere Wikipedia article:

- The establishment and rise of the Dutch empire in Southeast Asia, and a description of the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta) in the late nineteenth century, on the eve of the eruption;

- The story of European science concerning the Indonesian archipelago, including a great deal on Alfred Russel Wallace, of Wallace Line fame;

- An overview of the science of plate tectonics as it relates to the eruption;

- A history of the science of plate tectonics, from its beginnings in the 1920s when it was espoused primarily by one tireless scientist (Alfred Lothar Wegener) to the 1960s, when it finally won wide acceptance due to overwhelming evidence;

- A brief run-down of events in the Dutch East Indies after the eruption, which included increasing violent rebellion by locals against Dutch rule, and how they may have been helped along substantially by Krakatoa;

- And a history of global telecommunications, as it developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Krakatoa was the first major calamity to be reported worldwide in real time; in addition, the eruption caused disturbances in air pressure that were recorded on scientific instruments throughout the world. This may have contributed to a nascent sense in Westerners' minds that the world was one interconnected village.

This was my fourth Simon Winchester book, and by far the most impressive. Of my previous Winchester books, The Map That Changed the World is an excellent biography and a decent history of 19th-century geology. Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles, on the other hand, is almost embarrassingly first-person. The Professor and the Madman is very well-done. It's not a lesser book than Krakatoa; it's only less awesomely ambitious.

Winchester is one of those pop nonfiction writers, like Malcolm Gladwell, who is well-known and idiosyncratic enough to be easily mocked or spoofed. But a few months ago in Slate, Nathan Heller wrote a pretty fair analysis of why Winchester is so popular. He didn't mention Krakatoa, but his thoughts apply to this book as well.

Here's a final thought: as I mentioned, Krakatoa was the first major natural disaster which got reported around the world in real time. There hasn't been a comparable volcanic eruption since 1883, but utterly massive eruptions probably happen more often than we think. There's pretty good circumstantial evidence (which Winchester delves into) that Krakatoa erupted even more violently in 535. More recently, elsewhere in Indonesia, in 1815, Mt. Tambora erupted and dumped so much ash into the atmosphere that crops failed in Europe and North America and people starved. We human beings are terrible at putting things in historical context. If another titanic eruption happens within the next few years, a disaster on the scale of the Boxing Day tsunami or the Tohoku earthquake but with global effects, how is our news media going to flail about trying to explain it? How are politicians going to react? How are we going to react?

The 2012 Republican Veep

2011-06-23T18:59:00.002+08:00

It's still a year before political pundits come out with their guesses as to who the Republicans will pick for Vice President in 2012, but I am beating them to it. And I'm not analyzing the prospective candidates on their merits. I'm deliberately being as shallow and image-centered as possible. I bet my shallowness is just as accurate as well-paid pundits' more intelligent-sounding prognostications.

I figure Mitt Romney is destined to win the nomination. But most of what I have to say also goes for other Prez candidates.

First of all, I bet the Republicans won't nominate two generic-looking white men in suits. It's an image thing. Generic-looking white men in suits include: Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry. That is not intended to be a complete list of Republicans who are generic-looking white men in suits.

So, I just don't see a Romney-Santorum or Perry-Pawlenty ticket. Not gonna happen.

Second, I suspect there are going to be sexist fears against nominating a VP candidate who would possibly remind voters of Sarah Palin. The chief victim of this will be Michelle Bachmann. I say it's sexist because Bachmann doesn't look much like Palin, nor does she talk like Palin. But she's after the same segment of voters who would vote for Palin, and she's got the same XX chromosomes, so the Republicans will be fearful of nominating someone who they think will be perceived as Palin Mk 2.

I should say that if Bachmann or another woman wins the Presidential nomination, that will be enough of a departure from earlier tickets that all image-based calculations are off and this entire post will be rendered null and void.

So now I've got these two assumptions:

- The Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees will not resemble each other physically.

- If Bachmann is on the ticket, she won't be there as Veep.

If both spots on the ticket are taken by men, the party will aim for two men who look very different from one another. If the top spot is taken by Romney or another generic-looking white man in a suit, the VP slot will go to someone who is not a generic-looking white man in a suit. It might go to a white man who bears an easily caricatured physical characteristic that sets him apart, like being very fat (Chris Christie) or very bald (I'm sure there are potential choices, but I'm blanking).

Or it will go to a person white America considers 'ethnic'. They may figure picking a black person will seem like too-obvious pandering. I think they're most likely to pick someone of an ethnicity that has never seen a national ticket before. They'll make history that way. Ideally they'll find someone adored by the conservative wing of the party, but who they consider charismatic and attractive and won't scare away moderates.

Bobby Jindal. Marco Rubio. It'll be one of those two. That's my super-early prediction, based on shallow logic that I stand by.

Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny

2011-06-15T20:24:00.006+08:00

Francis Sandow is:

1) Enormously, obscenely, filthily rich, and living in preposterous comfort on his own planet in a galaxy filled with aliens;

2) The only homo sapiens alive who actually remembers the 20th century, as he spent most of his early centuries cryogenically frozen on one starship after another, and thus lived long enough to reap the benefits of radical life extension technology once it was invented; and

3) The avatar of a god in an extraterrestrial pantheon. When the book introduces this point you need to PAY ATTENTION because it turns out to be really important later, unlike some of the scenery setting early on which doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond giving some local color to the universe.

Isle of the Dead was my first-ever Roger Zelazny novel, picked up in a used bookstore when I recognized the name and thought, "Zelazny? Sounds familiar. I think I ought to read him".

It's only 190 pages, but it packs more weird ideas than most SF novels three times its length. It could so easily have been padded out, and in today's market it almost certainly would've been. Heck, if I found out that Isle of the Dead had originally been 600 pages and its current length was a result of merciless editing, I would've believed it. As it is, I feel like I've read a delightful artifact from an earlier time when being succinct was nothing to be ashamed of.

The last two used SF paperbacks I read, the Harrison and the Sheckley, were both written as light fluffy comedies, and I'm not dissing that. I like light fluffy comedies. Zelazny, though, delivered a short little novel written with some mighty literary style. That meant I couldn't just breeze through it as quickly as I'd planned, but I'm not complaining. Zelazny has impressed me, and now that I have a better idea of what to expect from him I'm looking forward to reading some more.

The Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman

2011-06-11T12:21:00.009+08:00

Hsun-ching is an orphan, growing up in the care of the elderly monk Wei-ching. Wei-ching has made a lifetime study of Buddhist texts, but there is one that has eluded him: the nearly legendary Laughing Sutra. Only one copy is known to exist, and it is in far away America. Wei-ching is too old to make the trip, so his young apprentice Hsun-ching, after nearly a decade separated from his master due to the unpredictable vagaries of the 20th-century Chinese history they're living through, decides to travel to San Francisco in his place.

Accompanying him on this Journey to the West is the immortal, immensely strong Colonel Sun, who missed most of the 20th Century lurking in his cave behind a waterfall, but who proves himself surprisingly adaptable...

I first encountered author Mark Salzman through his memoir Iron and Silk, his tale of living in Hunan in the early 1980s. I've only made short trips to the People's Republic myself, never venturing beyond Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau, but I have an appetite for historically recent tales of life there. The 1980s were a time when China was just beginning to cast off the insanity of the 1960s and 1970s, and Salzman relates tales of official paranoia and bureaucratic obstructionism as well as anyone who was in China at the time.

Now, The Laughing Sutra is a work of fiction. It is a comedy, often a dark one, and is downright chilling in its early sections when the Cultural Revolution is dealt with unflinchingly. The latter half of the book, set in the United States, is much lighter, crossing almost into sitcom-style comedy territory, but the book works well as an overall unit. Intended for Western readers, The Laughing Sutra has a good deal to teach about late 20th century Chinese history, certain strands of Eastern philosophy, and the pragmatism with which, it seems, Chinese culture can interpret and react to Western culture if official propaganda and existing assumptions are overcome.

And, of course, there's a retelling of the "Journey to the West" (often titled "Monkey" in English translation), one of those literary classics that's as famous as Shakespeare on one side of Eurasia and almost unknown on the other. That story inspired this one.

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

2011-06-09T08:30:00.004+08:00

A group of academics in a sixteenth-century Islamic school discuss the laws of optics. Saint Augustine is at his lectern, in a rough eleventh-century drawing. An ancient Greek woman reads her scroll by unrolling with one hand and simultaneously rolling up the other end with the other. A fifteenth-century illustration shows a stern teacher with a briar, ready to discipline the student who is reciting before him. And there is an edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare in CD-ROM form, from the 1990s.

These are all illustrations from just one short section of Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. These illustrations are not gratuitous. Every one of them is referenced naturally in the text, and is described with Manguel's intelligent and perceptive eye.

Manguel has filled his book with fascinating historical anecdotes and insights. Which is not to say that he has merely slapped together a collection of factoids and tidbits. On the contrary. Manguel, more erudite and better-read than I will ever be, has composed chapters with themes ranging from the evolution of the physical shape of the book, to individuals who have valued books to the extent that they have become compulsive book thieves, to the challenges of translating poetry.

Future generations will be able to precisely date Manguel's book by the references to technology. Mention is made of books being stored on CD-ROM, and there is a short bit on hypertext, but there is no discussion of how the Internet has impacted people's reading habits. One would correctly estimate the year of publication to be around 1996.

One way in which the Internet may have a long-term impact that no one (except perhaps for Marshall McLuhan's ghost) could have predicted in 1996 came to mind when I came across the chapter on reading out loud. Pliny the Younger lived during a time when poets were expected to give readings before flocks of their adoring public; far more people knew these writers' works through having them read to them, in fact, than through reading them on their own. In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens gave hugely popular performances in which he read from his novels. From our vantage point, we see these performances as publicity stunts meant to promote his main product: the novels themselves, in printed book form. But Dickens was by all accounts a masterful public showman, and it's likely that for many of the attendees, his readings were his main product, and if you could buy printed text versions to take home with you, they were primarily expensive souvenirs.

This form of entertainment has largely died out. I can't think of anything quite similar in today's live performances. And with the advent of television in the latter half of the 20th century, it was widely assumed that texts being read aloud was dead as a form of mass entertainment.

Then, in the fifteen years that have passed since Manguel's book was published, the Internet exploded and things changed. I didn't even know the word "podcast" until 2006, but now we're at the point where no individual human being has the time to keep up with every audio fiction podcast that caters to people with an appetite for SF/fantasy/horror/weird fiction, just to name one of several possible genre examples. These exist because there is a demand for them. This isn't a bubble -- I predict the market will continue to grow.

It seems all it took was the smashing of the barriers of distance and geography, and people's instinctive desire to have stories read to them was re-awakened.

Some other assorted tidbits that stuck in my mind, in no particular order:

- In the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote of watching St. Ambrose read, and thought it quite notable that Ambrose read silently -- his eyes took in the text and he understood every word, but he did not make a sound. Reading out loud was the norm in the West, and would remain so for several centuries more.

- Late medieval schools in Europe were horrors that would make a modern critic of rote learning cry out in despair. Memorization was the order of the day, not learning. And while this might be somewhat justified as it was a society where books were rare and precious and an educated person was expected to have accumulated huge amounts of memorized knowledge, one prominent product of the system, Jakob Wimpfeling, said that his former classmates generally "could neither speak Latin nor compose a letter or a poem, nor even explain one of the prayers used at Mass".

The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison

2011-06-03T16:24:00.009+08:00

Barney Hendrickson is a third-rate movie director working at a third-rate studio that's about to go under. Help arrives in the form of a time machine invented by local eccentric scientist Dr. Hewitt. With the help of the time machine - which looks just like how a Hollywood time machine should look, because it was fancied up to serve as a prop in the mad scientist movie the studio was just finishing up on - the studio plans a Viking epic to be filmed on location in the Orkneys and in Vinland in Viking times. Hilarity ensues, but the movie is completed, and Barney Hendrickson inadvertently becomes famous.

Fortunately Harry Harrison wrote the 1967 novel The Technicolor Time Machine as a very broad comedy, and it's clear from the start that the sense of general preposterousness is fully deliberate. Harrison's got a long career writing comic SF; he's probably best known for the Stainless Steel Rat books, of which I've read the first three. They're pretty good examples of the "ludicrously competent interstellar hero thwarts the bad guys and saves the day" genre. He also wrote the book the movie Soylent Green is very, very loosely derived from.

The Technicolor Time Machine is amusing, although much of its humor is a satire of the Hollywood of the 1960s, already somewhat out of date and getting more so all the time. (In fact, I'd wager that with the accelerating evolution of entertainment media, the next 15 years might well alter the business side of how movies are made more than the past 40 years have. Kids these days won't understand the older generation's satires of Ye Olde Hollywoode.) And characters like L. M. Greenspan and Ruf Hawk are comedy tropes you've surely seen a dozen times before.

So what about the science fiction side of things? The book's got some neat moments, but it doesn't really do anything new or mind-blowing with the time travel trope. Yes, I remember it was published in 1967 and Back to the Future was still nearly two decades away, but written science fiction has always been more imaginative and daring than its celluloid cousin, and Robert A. Heinlein's rather more mind-blowing short story "All You Zombies" predates this book by eight years. To sum up: use of time travel trope, competent but not extraordinary.

And what's with this piece of dialogue toward the end of the book?

Barney clutched the paper. "Let me get this straight. Are you telling me that I can make the film after the deadline, then return to a time before the deadline to deliver the film?"

"I am."

"It sounds nuts."

"But Barney's been zipping back and forth in a time machine for the WHOLE DAMN BOOK!" said the reader.

That last line was my addition.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

2011-06-02T14:15:00.005+08:00

There's an old observation that novelists who honed their craft in universities tend to write an awful lot about middle-aged academics contemplating adultery. With that in mind...

At the center of Zadie Smith's On Beauty is Howard Belsey, a middle-aged academic teaching in the humanities at Wellington College, a fictitious liberal arts college on the outskirts of Boston. The nice thing about Boston is that it's got so many well-known academic institutions already that you can give it another whole college without worrying about changing its character. Wellington's got a reputation in this universe as a den of left-leaning academics, and Howard, a British art history professor who married an African-American woman and has three mixed-race children, is everyone's dream caricature of a liberal academician. His archnemesis is Montague Kipps, a Jamaican-born black British academic who is going to be lecturing at Wellington this year. Professor Kipps is a well-known leader in reactionary political circles and a darling of the American right. He has brought his wife Carlene and one of his two children with him. That's where I'll arbitrarily stop, before I get further into the tangled connections between the many major characters.

On Beauty is at its most amusing when accurately (I imagine) satirizing liberal arts academia. It also deals well with issues of cultural identity, particularly circling around Howard's teenage son Levi. Zadie Smith has a great ear for dialogue, particularly characters who are rather less than articulate (Levi) or characters who are ridiculously full of themselves (too many to mention). I also have to applaud Smith's very, very British sense of humor in creating social awkwardness for your dignified characters.

That said, I got a strong impression that the characters, as realistic and entertaining as their dialogue can be, are really just game pieces being moved around the board. You must remember that the universe of On Beauty contains no more than two dozen or so actual people, who bounce off of each other in a slow sort of Brownian motion. Just keep that in mind, and your mind won't be blown by the coincidences that dog this story, particularly the big one in the final section, involving a painting.

Robot Servant

2011-06-01T15:09:00.002+08:00

Tyler Cowen's got a good column up arguing in favor of seeing driverless cars on the road. Taking a wider view, he says that regulations and the way our society works will hinder adoption of this technology in the interests of "safety", even if widespread adoption of driverless cars means many lives spared.

In a related blog post, he adds:

1. I couldn’t fit it in the column, but it is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars. Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people. (Here is Annie Lowery on just how bad commutes can be.) You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives. The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies. (Why? Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?) This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.

Well, bear in mind that 99% of the populace has no idea this technology exists yet. I didn't realize it myself until just three months or so ago, when stories about recent technological advances began appearing online. And if you're still unfamiliar with this technology, this short (4-minute) presentation by Sebastian Thrun at TED is a decent introduction:

Make people aware of these cars first. Then start worrying about why people don't seem to care.

2. In the longer run a lot of driverless cars would be very small. Imagine your little mini-car zipping out and bringing you back some Sichuan braised fish, piping hot.

Excellent. At that point they cross the line in people's consciousness from "driverless car" to "robot servant". I would like to request that by the time I am in my 40s they be widely available and the price of a high-end mp3 player today. Cowen's got a good point that the line between "driverless car" and "robot servant" is entirely arbitrary and invented by humans.

Have some Wikipedia

2011-05-30T20:59:00.008+08:00

From the Washington Post: Wikipedia goes to class:

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.
Many students involved in the project have received humbling lessons about open-source writing as their work was revised, attacked or deleted by anonymous critics with unknown credentials.
In the fall, Rochelle A. Davis, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, told undergraduates in her culture and politics course to create a Wikipedia page about a community they belonged to, then use that research to develop a thesis for an academic paper.

Very, very cool. That's the assignment I wish I'd been given when I was an undergrad (in the Late Pre-Wikipedian Age).

If I taught undergrads, I would have a strict rule: No citing Wikipedia in research papers. Violators would be severely mocked and ridiculed.

But - and this is a key distinction, one that sometimes seems lost on people - I wouldn't prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a research tool. No, I would actively encourage it. Obviously they'd be using it anyway even if I did prohibit it, but there really is no reason to forbid it.

I can hear a time traveler from 2006 complaining that anyone can edit Wikipedia, and so you have no way of knowing the veracity of any information you find. I say, we're talking about college undergrads here. If they're not yet savvy enough to (usually) tell the difference between reliable sources of information and Internet-based nonsense, then they don't need to be sheltered, they need to be made able to distinguish the good from the bad. Quickly.

And having to deal with edit wars, nitpickers, editors who have their own personal agendas, and humorless admins? Hey, that's real life. It's useful experience for those undergrads.

Among the Headhunters of Formosa by Janet B. Montgomery McGovern

2011-05-28T12:45:00.003+08:00

From 1916 to 1918, Western anthropologist Janet B. Montgomery McGovern lived in Taihoku, capital of the Japanese colony of Formosa. She offficially worked as an English teacher in the employ of the Japanese government, but she had come because of a strong anthropological interest in the native peoples of the island's interior and east coast: the "headhunters". (She does use the modern term "aborigines" as well, along with the more dated word "savages", and the German "Naturvölker". Needless to say, this book contains plenty of terms which are now very far out of fashion.)

Among the Headhunters of Formosa, published in 1922, is written with an early 20th-century anthropologist's eye, and even apart from the insights into Aboriginal culture it is chock-full of fascinating historical tidbits on Taiwan as it was a century ago. The author discusses the name "Taiwan" for the island, a Chinese word she expects few Western readers will be familiar with.

1. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern in Formosa

Having lived in Taipei, er, Taihoku for the past several years, I just ate up the first couple of chapters, in which the author records some of her initial impressions of Formosa.

She alights at Keelung - a dirty port city, as she describes it - and is taken by the natural beauty of the countryside, dotted with little villages and tall bamboo trees. She witnesses this on her journey by train from Keelung into Taihoku. (Compare her description to the scenery you get on the modern train ride through Badu, Xizhi, etc.)

I was mildly surprised (perhaps I shouldn't have been) by her observation that most of the Chinese-Formosan women that she sees have bound feet. It was a practice that she had assumed was limited to the upper classes in China, but it turned out most Chinese-Formosan women (Hakkas notably excluded) in 1916 Formosa tottered along on little feet, as bizarre as it is to imagine a working-class woman engaging in hard physical labor in such a state.

(If footbinding was still ubiquitous here in 1916, that raises the question of whether there are creaky old women still living in Taiwan with bound feet. I don't believe I've ever seen one, but I've seen plenty of extremely ancient women here walking with apparent unsteadiness, and I'm not sure I'd recognize a bound-foot gait.)

About Japanese rule of Formosa, the author has nothing good to say. Completely apart from their cruel treatment of the aborigines, she finds that the Japanese cruelly exploit the local population as they harvest Formosa's substantial natural treasures:

During my residence in Formosa I personally saw instances of the most hideous cruelty on the part of the Japanese toward the Chinese-Formosans, and of barbaric torture, officially inflicted, as punishment for the most trivial offences (as later -- in the spring of 1919 -- I saw the same thing in the other Japanese colony, Korea, on the part of the Japanese toward the gentle Koreans). But this is an aspect of Japanese colonization with which in the book I shall not deal. (p. 89)

Japanese rule of Formosa is depicted as paranoid. The fact that she brought a "photographic apparatus" to the heavily fortified port of Keelung was recorded by the police, and on one occasion she is harassed by a Japanese policeman in Keelung who is afraid she is up to no good; upon realizing she is harmless, he mollifies her by explaining that she could easily have been a German spy (which she finds ridiculous).

But, of course, Mrs. Montgomery McGovern is not in Formosa to investigate how the Japanese manage this little corner of their empire, so she looks into venturing inland to meet some Aborigines. The Japanese Director of Schools, quite the blustering buffoon, warns her that unspecified people will "talk" if she travels on her own; when he realizes she is not worried about her reputation as a lady, he suggests she take up tennis if she wants exercise so badly.

Fortunately other Japanese officials were more sympathetic. The author extends particular thanks to two uncommonly helpful examples of Japanese officialdom, explaining further in a disconcertingly worded footnote, "It is due to the efforts of Mr. Hosui and Mr. Marui that the skull of a recently decapitated member of the Taiyal tribe has been presented to the Museum of Oxford University". (p. 70)

2. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern among the Head-hunters

First, let's dispose of one piece of antique rumor. The Aborigines may be head-hunters, but they are not cannibals. In his preface, in fact, Professor R. R. Marett tells us that he heard from a Japanese expert that it is the Chinese of Formosa who will occasionally partake of Aboriginal flesh. I personally choose to take this tidbit of information with some extremely large grains of salt.

While there is some information on the cultures of the Ami, the Paiwan, the Yami, and the Bunun people, it is clearly the Taiyal (nowadays spelled Atayal) people that the author became most familiar with, as they get the most detailed descriptions. Most of this takes the form of anthropological descriptions of their culture, including religious beliefs, festivals, tattooing and body modification, and of course headhunting, the better to tweak the middle-class Western sensibilities of the 1920s.

This is a description of a way of life -- of ways of life, since what went for the Atayal would not necessarily have gone for the Paiwan -- that, while they haven't completely vanished, are certainly not what they once were. Obviously I don't have to say that men don't go on headhunting expeditions in modern Taiwan. The Aboriginal villages the author photographed presumably don't exist anymore (although I have heard of isolated Aboriginal settlements, high in the mountains, that do not welcome outsiders).

In my four years in Taiwan, I have been to some of the excellent museums that showcase Aboriginal life and culture, I have eaten in Aboriginal restaurants, and I have seen the occasional Aborigine in the newspaper showing off their facial tattoos (not that I recall seeing many facially-tattooed individuals in person). That has been about the limits of my own experiences. I feel very unqualified to comment on the author's description of Aboriginal culture, which is frustrating, as it, not railing against the Japanese, is the real heart of the book. I'm equally unqualified to comment on her speculation about the ethnic origins of the Aborigines, or about the possible remnants of extinct pygmy tribes.

An exception to my disengagement from Aboriginal culture is the two consecutive Pasta'ais I attended. The Pasta'ai is a festival held every two years by the Saisiyat tribe, in which they dance, drink copiously, and try to placate the spirits of a tribe of short, dark people (pygmies?) they are said to have massacred centuries ago. The Saisiyat tribe (which she spells "Saisett") gets very little mention from Mrs. Montgomery McGovern, except for when she notes that they are very few in number and not likely to exist for much longer.

You see, Janet B. Montgomery McGovern is very pessimistic about the continued existence of the Formosan Head-hunters. They were despised by the Chinese, she writes, and as for the Japanese:

The Japanese, when questioned about the aborigines, were either curiously uncommunicative, or else launched at once into panegyrics concerning the nobility of the Japanese authorities in Formosa in allowing dirty, head-hunting savages to live, especially as some of the dirty head-hunters had dared to rebel against the Japanese Government of the island. (p. 31)

The only colonial power, the author writes, who showed consistent kindness to the Aborigines were the Dutch, who ruled Formosa for several decades in the 17th century. She found that as a result the Dutch were still fondly remembered in tribal oral histories. They had introduced Romanized writing to the tribes they dealt with, although it had fallen into disuse and she was unable to find any examples, tribal records having been confiscated by the Japanese. (See Wikipedia: Sinckan Manuscripts.)

Overall, writing in 1922, the author feels Aboriginal cultures are probably doomed. No native culture, she writes, could survive the steady marginalization and extermination that the Aborigines have suffered at the hands of the Chinese and then the Japanese.

3. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern as a Person

Now, a word on the author. To my great frustration, even intensive Googling failed to turn up much information on the elusive Janet B. Montgomery McGovern. Among the Headhunters of Formosa appears to be the best-known thing she ever wrote.

I did find, tantalizingly, that a Janet B. Montgomery McGovern was the mother of William Montgomery McGovern. Born in 1897, William Montgomery McGovern was an amazing, Indiana Jones-like university professor. He was said to be the first Westerner to visit Lhasa (disguised as a local coolie), among many other distinctions. He's one of the best-known American experts on East Asia from the first half of the 20th Century.

I can find nothing online that states that the Janet B. Montgomery McGovern who wrote Among the Headhunters of Formosa was indeed William's mother. But although she does not make any mention of family in the body of her book, it opens with the following dedication:

W. M. M.

MY SON AND THE COMPANION

OF MY WANDERINGS

That's about all I can dig up on this woman, although if this gravesite is her, she was born in 1874 and died in 1938. Those are plausible enough dates -- if she is that person.

Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

2011-05-25T11:43:00.010+08:00

Thomas Blaine, junior yacht designer, is killed in a car crash in 1958. In 2110 he's brought back to life by the Rex Corporation, who plan to use him in their marketing campaigns. That plan quickly falls through due to legal worries, so Blaine is turned loose to wander New York City.

Rex Corp. employee (and transparently obvious eventual love interest) Marie Thorne takes pity on him and invites him to view the death and reincarnation of the company CEO. (And from the CEO's point of view, Blaine will have an opportunity to see just how painless death really is. He'd save Rex Corp from any number of legal headaches if he'd just quietly commit suicide.) The reincarnation goes awry and the CEO's soul fails to settle in his new host body, which goes zombie and starts shambling after Blaine. The zombie has unfinished business to settle with him, but can't recall exactly what...

Robert Sheckley was a prolific author, although his influence on other, more well-known writers may be his greatest legacy. Immortality, Inc. is a fast comic read, fairly amusing (if you remember not to lose the 1950s mindset) and a reminder that I ought to be reading more classic SF stories. Not that this is a value judgement, but I could probably read eight or ten of these babies in the time it takes me to read one China Mieville.

In this novel Sheckley creates a classic retro future: flying cars, jetpacks, Venusians and Martians (the latter are largely Chinese), and classic old-fashioned relations between the sexes, which more than anything else marks this novel as a product of its decade.

This particular future's chief distinction is that science has proven the existence of an afterlife, at least for a few dedicated souls who have undergone years of rigorous mental training.

Or for rich people. They can buy their way in. Are you really surprised?

Kudos to the story for keeping me guessing as to where it was going until the very last couple of pages. That said, if you're reading it now, my advice is to just ignore that last chapter. It's just a couple of lines of dialogue. Don't read it. The book is much better off without it.

The "20th Century Man Awakens in the Future!" theme has been done many times, but the most interesting comparison to make is to Frederik Pohl's 1969 comic novel The Age of the Pussyfoot. I think so, anyway, since it's the only other novel in the subgenre I've read. You could put together an entire seminar on comparing and contrasting the two, but it would be more entertaining just to discuss which one reminds you more of Futurama. The Pohl novel is more Futurama-like in its tone, but if the suicide booths in the very first Futurama episode aren't a deliberate Sheckley shout-out, then they're a pretty awesome example of creative convergence.

Streamline Your Arguments

2011-05-23T19:57:00.006+08:00

Today's Taipei Times contains a letter from Arron Beck, who quite rightly criticizes anti-Aboriginal bigotry in Taiwan.

He then goes on to write (the bolding is mine):

One more note, speaking of racism: I have also noticed that sometimes — not always, but sometimes — when a front page or inside photograph depicting Taiwanese Aborigines appears in your newspaper, it is often given a witty yet mocking title and caption, insulting the spiritual beliefs of Aborigines in some instances or gently mocking their clothes, their facial tattoos or their customs.
You would never permit photo headlines or photo captions that mock African Americans or Christians or Muslims, yet for some reason your copy editors (and their supervising editors) sometimes allow photo headlines and photo captions that treat Aborigines in a jocular, mocking and yes, racist way.

A while ago I saw a photo in the Taipei Times. It showed a devotee in a temple in Iran, using a shovel to spread sand or dirt (I forget the details) on the floor in preparation for a festival day.

The caption was headlined, "SHOVELING SHIITE".

I remember this because it did seem rather snarky. That said, it was the Taipei Times, not the New York Times, and so the snarkiness did not seem completely out of place. The caption was not an outlier.

Now, since I'm actually in full agreement with the main point of Beck's letter, I want to step away from this particular instance and talk about writing at large. I often see people using this style of complaint -- they complain that a satirical website or TV show would never portray Democrats in as bad a light as they make Republicans out to be, or they would never mock Muslims the way they mock Jews, to come up with arbitrary examples. Very often this claim turns out to be entirely spurious and easily disprovable by anyone with a good enough memory or Google skills.

I understand that we all have our cognitive biases. I'm quite attached to my own; I bet I cling to them like a child clings to his teddy bear. Naturally I don't know what they are.

But doing this just makes your argument appear extremely brittle. After all, there are people out there who know how to nitpick around the edges of an opponent's argument without engaging their main point, and yet make it look like they've bested their adversary through superior knowledge and wit. Look at your own claims with a more critical eye, and you'll leave these people with nothing to work with.

Chance to Win

2011-05-22T12:32:00.001+08:00

I keep seeing this ad on U.S.-based websites. I've never clicked on it. I assume it doesn't appear if you're in the U.S.

Am I the only one who finds it absolutely funny?

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

2011-05-21T12:25:00.010+08:00

This is a titanic story, taking place across seven hundred years of history. We readers find ourselves focusing on a small group of souls who return to the land of the living again and again, with varying names, ethnic backgrounds, and genders. But they are made coherent characters by the fact that their names begin with the name letter across incarnations:

K (Kyu, Katima, Kheim, etc.) is an strong-willed, occasionally violent revolutionary. Actions include burning down the Chinese emperor's palace. Is strongly feminist when female.

B (Bold, Butterfly, Bahram, etc.)is a brave, compassionate individual. Often acts as assistant to brilliant scientists. On at least one occasion effected great social change while a Japanese samurai.

I (Iwang, Iagogeh, Ibrahim, etc.) is the scientist, the explorer. Laid the groundwork for modern physics; centuries later, was a pioneering nuclear scientist before dying of radiation poisoning.

The novel's seven hundred years of history kick off at about the time when European civilization was wiped out by a massive plague. You remember reading about the lost West in your history classes, don't you? The Western nations, despite (or because of) constant warfare both between themselves and with the nearby Islamic cultures, developed commendable artistic traditions and great thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Okham.

Then, in about the year 1348 by their Christian calendar, a great plague struck Europe -- the Black Death. It killed between one quarter and one third of the European populace. A terrible blow, but Western civilization recovered -- or started to.

Then, a few decades later, as the year 1400 approaches, a second, more devastating plague hits Europe. 99% of those afflicted, die. European civilization has been eliminated. The West has been deleted from the world.

K, B, and I, this is where your history starts. Enjoy the next seven centuries. Let's see what the human race does.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an author that I enjoy, but I'll admit he intimidates me. His books are long and take a long time to read. The Years of Rice and Salt sat on my bookshelf for over a year, unread, as I gathered the mental energy I knew I'd need to tackle it. Fortunately, Robinson has made it easier on the reader by dividing his book into ten sections with widely different formats and writing styles. It's still not an easy book. The early sections will steep you in various Eastern philosophies. The late sections include rather a lot of speechifying and digressions on theories of history. This annoyed more than one reviewer. As I read online reviews after finishing the book, I came across opinions that Robinson would have done better to just leave out the final sections entirely, and I have to say I see the point. I will admit that I kind of skimmed the late speechifying about history, but I intend to go back and read it later, removed from the context of the narrative (which had practically ceased to be a narrative by that point).

And yet, I feel like this book has so much stuff that I can't not recommend it. I'd say, read it so you can argue about it. Argue about whether this world without Europe would really have industrialized at roughly the same time as it would have in the parallel universe where the West survived.

Then you can wonder, given the nature of how reincarnation works, if Robinson had meant for B, K, and I to be entirely fictional characters at all. (I = Isaac Newton? Possibly Einstein too? B and K are... who, exactly, in our world? One of K's incarnations, Khalid, is a pretty close analogue to our Galileo.)

Then you can re-read the speculations on the nature of history in the novel's final section, and start arguing about that.

Heck, I haven't read such a fertile book for really intellectual arguments in a very long time.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

2011-05-15T12:13:00.005+08:00

Jill Bolte Taylor was a well-respected neuroanatomist affiliated with the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. In 1996, she suffered a severe stroke. The stroke quickly robbed her of her ability to speak, understand much language, move normally, or perform basic tasks.

She made a full recovery, although it took her eight years. She still is a well-respected neuroanatomist, currently at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Her knowledge and training as a neurologist, not to mention the fact that she remembers every bit of the process, has given her a unique insight. Her book, My Stroke of Insight, is valuable in two ways. First, it contains advice for stroke patients, as well as for caregivers, family, and friends who interact with people who have recently been disabled by strokes.

Second, it contains fascinating insights into how brains tick, and the differences between the left and right hemispheres. Taylor's stroke knocked her left hemisphere largely out of commission. She slowly recovered its functions over the following months and years. So here we have a trained neurologist who can speak articulately about what it feels like to only have the right side of your brain functioning.

Anybody interested in the neurological underpinnings of spirituality will find a lot to think about here. With her left hemisphere out of service, Taylor experienced a feeling of peace, of oneness with all things, of nirvana. Her brain was no longer capable of differentiating between self and not-self. Was this a brain defect? Or was it something we can try to emulate occasionally? Can it be both? Is it possible?

Even before reading Taylor's book, I knew her story from the talk she gave on TED.com in 2008. Here she is, on her stroke:

The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

2011-05-14T14:12:00.010+08:00

We humans are puny creatures. With our short lifespans we have no innate feel for processes that happen over thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years.

We think a hundred years is a very long time.

Ha.

James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that the biosphere is a single, huge, self-regulating organism (remember the phrase "self-regulating" - it's going to be on the test), has been around since the late 1970s. By the time he wrote The Ages of Gaia in the late 1980s, it had been subjected to the first barrage of controversy already, and Lovelock had had several years in which to develop the idea through exchanging ideas with his fellow scientists and thinkers. Global warming was just beginning to intrude upon the global consciousness as a threat. The hole in the ozone layer and regulation of CFCs grabbed the headlines. That's the cultural climate Lovelock was writing in.

I read the book in the year 2011. The climate change debate has grown, developed, moved in a great many directions. The distinguished sixty-nine year old scientist who wrote The Ages of Gaia is now ninety-one years old, as sharp as ever, and has found himself a reputation as a prophet of doom.

The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.

According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.

The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

But all that was in the future when Lovelock was writing The Ages of Gaia. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and the Soviet Union still existed. Lovelock's book was full of warnings that the human race ought to respect Mother Nature, but there was little sense that DOOM was just around the corner.

So what was the book about? Well, it included a recap of the Gaia hypothesis, including the Daisyworld thought experiment, that gave me a severe childhood flashback. You see, as a kid I played a Maxis computer game called SimEarth, which included a simulation based on Daisyworld and also taught me the word "albedo". SimEarth lets you take charge of an entire planetary biosphere and lets you play with it. You can rain down meteors or make volcanoes erupt, to see what happens. You can try to nudge your planet's indigenous life forms along towards sentience. (You know mollusks have achieved civilization when you see the little octopus carrying a stick.)

Anyway, Daisyworld is an extremely simplified biosphere where the only life forms are daisies of various colors (no octopi with clubs). Light-colored daisies reflect heat, dark-colored daisies absorb heat, and via computer models you can show how this system regulates itself. No religious dogma required.

Lovelock then takes us through the development of Gaia and the history of our planet, from the Archean Age, to the Proterozoic, to the Phanerozoic (a relatively short Age compared to the other three, but contains the entire history of what we would recognize as animals and plants). I'll admit that I zoned out on occasion, and probably couldn't pass a test on the topic now. The specifics of microorganisms and atmospheric gases did not grab my attention. That said, Lovelock admits that he's filled the middle section of the book mostly with informed speculation, owing to a general lack of hard evidence. But he's not wasting anyone's time: he's showing how Gaia plausibly could have evolved, given what we know of the early history of the Earth.

In the book's final sections, he discusses the possibility of terraforming Mars (essentially starting up a second Gaia), as well as the philosophical and religious implications of Gaia.

So how did Lovelock come to be considered such a doomsayer? Remember that Gaia naturally regulates itself. If we tinker too much with the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, we run the risk of triggering a reaction that could be very, very bad for us.

I don't think humanity is really going to destroy all life on Earth. I don't doubt we could, if we set our minds to it, but I don't think it's likely. I do think we have the capability to really muck things up for ourselves, though.

Let's say we trigger slight climate shifts, of the sort that a visiting alien scientist ten million years from now would not even notice in the geological record. Let's say we can sail from Canada to Russia over the pole, and sip our pina coladas at Scottish beach resorts. That doesn't sound bad, does it?

Now think of the large percentage of this planet's poor underclass that lives in parts of the world that are extremely vulnerable to shifts in climate that are pretty minor, by geological standards. (Did someone mention Bangladesh?)

Maybe you don't care about poor people that you can't see. Well, okay then; I'm not trying to spread empathy to empathy-poor parts of the populace.

But I've got two words for you: political unrest. If a land becomes too full to hold its teeming millions, those people are going to spill over into lands that may be only marginally better off. You think eastern India, for instance, is going to be able to easily cope if Bangladesh starts overflowing with refugees?

The Middle Ages are over. There is no place on Earth where you can settle and feel disconnected from political instability elsewhere. You're not going to be able to forget the plight of the displaced masses in the tropics as you're relaxing in your new pleasant summer home in Greenland. Global interconnectedness won't let you.

And as sad as it sounds, Gaia really doesn't care about us as individuals.

What Is the What by Dave Eggers

2011-05-13T13:16:00.004+08:00

The story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Dinka tribesman born in the town of Marial Bai in Southern Sudan. He's healthy and bright. By local standards, his family isn't poor.

Unfortunately, history with its grinding teeth has its sights set on Valentino and his people.

I chose a historically appropriate time to read Dave Eggers' What Is the What. July 9th of this year is set to be Independence Day for Southern Sudan. Like most Americans, I knew practically nothing of Southern Sudan, except for a vague sense of the terrible cultural devastation in Darfur.

As it turns out, Darfur is not even in Southern Sudan, and the genocide in Darfur is largely unrelated to the unrest and the killing in Southern Sudan, except that both regions are victims of exactly the same tyrannical regime in Khartoum. Incidentally, President Omar al-Bashir is still in power, and shortly before he formally loses the southern third of his country, he will pass the 22 year mark as dictator. Just thought you all might like to be reminded.

This is my third Eggers novel -- and Deng himself argues convincingly in the preface that it is indeed a novel, with large portions fictionalized by himself and Eggers, although the major events depicted are, unfortunately, true to what actually happened. Eggers' own writing style shines through especially in the scenes from Deng's childhood. Eggers has a true talent for writing rambunctious young boys realistically.

Eggers has gotten some heat from people who wonder why he would presume to insert his white American self between Deng and his readership. Personally, I have no problem with Eggers channeling Deng's story for a mass audience. Let's think of the vast number of readers - including, let's be honest, myself - who would never have heard of Deng if he hadn't been allied with Eggers' literary celebrity.

Link: The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation.

The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone by Shashi Tharoor

2011-05-08T11:56:00.021+08:00

Shashi Tharoor's The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone is not a coherent single work; it's a collection of short articles and newspaper columns from the last decade (the book was published in 2007). The unifying theme running through the book is the development of India in recent years, as well as the development of the West's perceptions of India.

Tharoor's a writer with a couple of novels under his belt, but I think of him as a politician first and foremost. He retired from a successful career at the U.N. a few years ago, and started a career in Indian politics as an MP. Judging from his Wikipedia bio, he's been enmeshed in a variety of controversies and scandal since. (Probably impossible for a high-profile MP to do otherwise.)

I'd already read his previous nonfiction book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, which laid out his vision of a liberalized, multicultural, cosmopolitan future India (in which his own Congress Party is the least bad political option). The theme is continued in his more recent book.

A believing Hindu himself, Tharoor strongly rejects the notion that India, 83% Hindu by population, ought to be a "Hindu country" (for pretty much the same reasons why the USA is not and should not be a "Christian country"). He makes his outrage at the fundamentalist Hindus who occupy positions of great influence in Indian society very clear.

For Tharoor, Hinduism is an innately tolerant and pluralistic religion: a religion that has no central dogma and does not claim to be the universe's only route to salvation.

If the future of his country is determined by fundamentalists, who elevate Hinduism above all other religions, Tharoor says, the Indian society that he loves will be in great danger.

Many of the chapters read like they started out as the text of speeches. Tharoor's got a love of the anecdote, the hook, the fascinating statistic. He spoke at TED about India's international influence through soft power, a theme he often touches on in his writing. I'll admit that reading Tharoor's books and articles, he sometimes strikes me as the smiling, liberal, optimistic, pro-globalization, pro-free market, pro-inclusiveness figure that every Western investor wishes to believe is the face of India.

I hope his vision of India percolates throughout his country. What very little I saw during the short time I was in India made me hopeful. While we were in Karnataka, a scandal erupted in the city of Mangalore: a gang of Hindu fundamentalist thugs commandeered a pub one night and roughed up the patrons because they'd heard women were drinking and acting shamelessly inside. Afterwards, outrage erupted on English-language TV and in newspapers that such a thing could happen in urban Karnataka. An English-language TV news station shared messages that locals had texted in with their cell phones, every one expressing shock at the thugs' actions.

I admit it's possible my impression is being skewed by my inability to understand any Indian language apart from English. The English-language media might cater to a more broad-minded segment of the population. But still, I was heartened by what I heard and read.

Conspiracy Theories

2011-05-07T09:35:00.011+08:00

I'm not drawn to conspiracy theories.

I'm no naive starry-eyed optimist. I do believe that human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for evil and lying. But really, really huge conspiracies, like the idea that the Apollo Program was faked or that 9/11 was an inside job, aren't plausible to me.

The most effective way to counter people who insist the moon landings were faked is not to answer every niggling little question they raise. It's to step back and point out the great big unlikelihood at the center of their conspiracy theory. Namely: if the moon landings were a hoax, think of all the people who were in on it. Think of all those guys in Mission Control, most of them engineers, most of whom cared passionately about their work and had no obsessive political agenda. Think of the 42 years that have passed since Apollo 11. That's a lot of time for deathbed confessions. That's a lot of time for anonymous whistleblowers.

No doubt that there are a lot of secrets in the world that we will never know about. I bet there are prominent people in history that we only think died of natural causes or accidents, but were actually murdered. But in general, I'm not one for the conspiracy theorist way of thinking.

Anyway. Osama bin Laden.

Until one week ago I thought there was a pretty good chance he was already dead and had been for some time. Not in a "OMG The US Government is LYING to you sheeple" sort of way, but more like a couple of al-Qaeda goons living in mountain caves had seen him die, but figured The Cause would be better off if the world thought he was still alive. Or his severed head was wrapped in a plastic bag shoved way in the back of Pervez Musharraf's freezer. Or something.

Seems I was wrong.

Now, it's pretty obvious that for the next couple of decades we're going to be treated to theories that this is all a ploy to boost American prestige, or get Obama re-elected, or something.

Here's what I say to those theories.

Let's imagine the consequences if bin Laden's death were faked, and knowledge of the deception were to become public. It wouldn't just be the end of Obama's political career. You know that now-famous photo of the White House Situation Room during the raid on bin Laden's compound? If bin Laden's death were faked and we found out, it would mean a career-ending scandal for each and every person in that room.

More than that, it would severely damage the Democratic Party, far more than Watergate damaged the Republicans. It would destroy the credibility of the U.S. military. It would immeasurably hurt the U.S.'s standing abroad, more than anything George W. Bush ever did.

You might think that the U.S. government and military-industrial complex has the capability to pretend to kill bin Laden and then keep the knowledge that it was a hoax secret forever. And maybe they do. There are probably astonishing secret plots from centuries ago that historians will never, ever learn about, although they probably involved fewer people than the raid to kill bin Laden.

But what if they're not able to keep the hoax under wraps? History is also full of secret plots that got exposed, with disastrous consequences for the plotters. How could Obama & Co. know that they would get lucky and their hoax would stay intact forever, or at least for for the remainder of the lives of everyone involved?

To put it another way, if the White House faked Osama bin Laden's death, then much of the Executive Branch and a huge chunk of the upper echelons of the U.S. military are guilty of recklessness so vast it borders on collective madness.

I don't necessarily believe that what comes out of Barack Obama's mouth is always the unvarnished truth. Doesn't matter that I voted for him once and will probably do so again. (It's better not to feel you can trust politicians whom you vote for; that way, you don't have to deal with either the disappointment or the cognitive dissonance that would inevitably follow.)

But what is easier to believe?

That Osama bin Laden was killed by American troops in the early hours of May 2?

Or that a fairly large group of both Democrats and Republicans, not to mention a couple of career soldiers, decided to stake their own credibility and that of the United States on a gamble that they could keep a secret forever and ever, without even a single person screwing it up?

It's a Compliment

2011-05-06T21:48:00.007+08:00

From Page 1 of today's Taipei Times: CNN report about 'gluttonous' Taipei raises some hackles:

An article on the CNN Web site that labels Taipei as a city of “gluttony” has angered some legislators and prompted Government Information Office Minister Philip Yang (楊永明) to say that the government would have to fill CNN in on the nation’s cuisine and culture.
Answering questions yesterday from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers at the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee on concerns over the CNN report, Yang said it had “damaged” the nation’s image.
CNNGo, CNN’s culture and travel Web site, on April 20 used Catholicism’s seven deadly sins to describe the seven best Asian cities for indulgence, with Taipei named as the best city for gluttony.
“We understand the media’s need for interesting and provocative articles, but gluttony, the word … is indecent and it has a negative connotation,” Yang told KMT Legislator Chen Shu-huey (陳淑慧).

Here's the CNNGo.com travel story. To summarize:

Gluttony: Taipei. (All that Taiwanese food.) Sloth: Seoul. (PC gaming addiction.) Pride: Manila. (Narcissistic men.) Greed: Shenzhen. (The Chinese economy.) Lust: Tokyo. (Japanese perverts.) Envy: New Delhi. (Because of all the Indians who want to leave the country.) Wrath: Pyongyang. (Kim Jong Il.)

Okay, I choose to believe that Philip Yang and his crew have their reasons, since I'm used to politicians obeying a calculus beyond my understanding. But for the Taipei Times to put that article on the front page, in the upper right corner above the fold, suggests that the paper is hopelessly thin-skinned when it comes to perceived attacks or slights against Taiwan.

And for what? Granted, the CNN article could have been done far more tactfully, although probably not while keeping the "7 deadly sins" motif. (And why did they focus on individual cities when the descriptions were about the countries as a whole?)

But not only was the article's treatment of Taiwan easily the least insulting of its seven victims, Taiwan arguably wasn't even insulted at all. India: We Want to Live Somewhere Else! South Korea: We Sit Indoors Playing Online Games All Day! Japan: Pervoland! North Korea: We Want to Nuke the World!

Taiwan: We've Got Awesome Food!

And think of it: A bunch of travel writers decided that, out of all the countries of Asia, Taiwan's food was the most worthy of turning to gluttony over.

For this, a fine example of praising with very faint damnation, the Taipei Times runs a prominent story about how the KMT is all aghast and shocked.

Hmm. Maybe I was wrong about the Taipei Times' intent, and the whole point was to portray the KMT as prickly and thin-skinned?

Literature in Translation

2011-05-02T09:11:00.004+08:00

I've read a lot of modern Indian literature over the last few years. It's come in many genres, including magic realism, satire, realistic fiction, and every blend you can think of. Some was written by Indian writers abroad. Some was written by Indian writers in India.

Without exception, every South Asian novel I've ever read - not only Indian, but also Pakistani, Sri Lankan, or Bangladeshi - was originally published in English. I've never read any modern South Asian literature in translation.

That might not seem very significant. After all, South Asia got English bequeathed to it by colonialism. And India is a country where one recent prime minister gave Hindi-language speeches that were written out for him fo-neh-ti-ka-lee because he couldn't read or understand Hindi. More often than not, when Indians from different parts of the country meet, they speak English. Why shouldn't most Indian literature be written in English?

Because, in most areas of the country at least, English isn't the language of the masses. It's true that there are more Indians than Americans who can speak English well enough to have an intelligent conversation, but it's also true that if you subtract the population of the USA from the population of India, you get over seven hundred million.

And even Indians who can speak enough English to easily communicate with someone with no other language in common, may not have enough of a native speaker's sense of the language to write fluently in it.

In other words, every work of fiction I've ever read that originated in India came from the country's English-speaking elite, who have the linguistic talent to write beautifully in English. Of course, there is nothing unusual about a country's well-known authors being gleaned from the most well-educated strata of society.

But what are we English readers missing out on?

Books are everywhere in India. While traveling in Karnataka and Kerala (and Kerala, by the way, with a population more than half that of the UK, has a literacy rate of nearly 100% -- lots of readers there), I saw books all the time. I saw books being sold in roadside stalls. I saw bookshops in the cities. I can't make heads or tails of Kannada or Malayalam, the local languages. What were most of those books about? Fiction or nonfiction? I don't know.

Are books written in Indian languages translated into English? Are their authors known abroad? I don't know.

I can't help feeling that we foreigners are missing out on something.

Novel 11: Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair

2011-05-01T09:11:00.006+08:00

Akhila is a middle-aged government bureaucrat in Bangalore. She's never married, as she's worked to support her family ever since her father's untimely death. Akhila is not only resigned to spinsterhood, she can't even claim the independence of unmarried life because she lives with her sister Padma and her family. Padma simply cannot bear to see her living alone, even as she tells all her friends and neighbors how irritating she is. Fed up with the situation, Akhila goes on a long train ride to think her life over. In the all-ladies railway compartment (the "ladies coupe"), she and five other women share their stories and sort out whether independent life as a woman is possible in modern Indian society.

The final installment in my springtime trilogy of Indian novels. (Although I'm midway through an Indian nonfiction book, and I may well pick up more Indian fiction later this year.) All three of the novels in my self-chosen "trilogy" have been by women, but Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair is the first one that can be called actively feminist. Its six female protagonists provide six varied viewpoints from which to view the Indian experience:

Chief protagonist Akhila, trying to work out how to be her own person after a lifetime being defined by others;

Older woman Janaki, still happily married after decades, but wondering if she's become too dependent on her husband;

Teenager Sheela, affected in complicated ways by the recent death of her grandmother;

Chemistry teacher Margaret, gradually coming to realize she despises her husband, and subsequently molding him into a man she can control;

Wealthy wife Prabha Devi, who re-invents herself in marriage not once but twice;

And finally, fed up with hearing the stories of the previous five women, who despite a sexist society still enjoyed the advantages of middle-class living, domestic helper Marikolanthu tells of her own life devoid of privilege. Mari's treatment at the hands of her own family after being raped is an unmitigated horror for any reader with Western sensibilities, and is worth reading for anyone who genuinely thinks we'd be better off returning to traditional values and family structures. You might say that her family chose to treat her that way, but they did so within cultural expectations that justified and required it in their eyes.

Novel 10: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

2011-04-28T11:21:00.009+08:00

1986. Kalimpong, West Bengal. In the foothills of the Himalayas, rich and poor, Nepali and Bengali, live side by side.

History is happening.

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss is a book about politics.

It's not the he-said-she-said sort of small-scale politics where you're flailing at the other side, and things are deliberately misunderstood so as to create an emotion-driven argument that implies the world must be in much better shape than anyone thought, if we have the luxury of taking all our outrage and reducing it to the language and logic of a sports rivalry.

No, this is a book about BIG POLITICS. The aftermath of colonialism, to be exact. The novel is populated with upper-class Indians enjoying a rustic life in Kalimpong. There are sisters Lola and Noni, who are still eating English food and reading English books. There is an elderly judge, who back in pre-Independence days, went off to England for schooling and witnessed racial discrimination, but upon his return to India he tried to be as English as he possibly could and despised his wife for being traditionally Indian. There is his orphaned granddaughter who recently arrived at his estate from the convent where she was educated; she's only dimly aware that others would see her as living a life of privilege.

These characters start out blissfully unaware that historic happenings are about to flare up and surround them.

Kalimpong is not a fictional town like Kaikurussi or Malgudi. It's a real place, the novel's main narrative is set in the mid-1980s, and the real-life movement by ethnic Nepalis to create their own state is just getting underway.

Meanwhile, the judge employs a cook and the cook has a son, Biju, who found his way to New York where he is working his way illegally through a series of menial jobs. I'm tempted to say the portrayal of Americans and other Westerners in Desai's book is not too flattering. But that would be unfair. The truth is that nobody gets a flattering portrayal. Everybody comes across as at least faintly ridiculous. There's an admirable even-handedness here.

And the ending, while not really a happy one, isn't the soul-crushing Rohinton Mistry ending I was expecting, either.