Never mind the label, feel the wonder

Jim Putnam, towards the end of his second Let's try again post a couple of days ago, commented that “People don't have to be religious to be inspiring.” From my own, atheist point of view, the reverse is also true; being religious doesn't stop people being inspiring. As I commented to Jim, it's a pity that religious and nonreligious people so often find each others' existence an affront rather than a cause for celebration.

I differ from many people on my side of the fence (including the admirable and inspiring Dr C) in finding Richard Dawkins an embarrassing millstone around the neck of not just atheism but also humanism and secularism (about both of which I am passionate) ... though he can be brilliant in many ways, his arguments against religion are too often straw man fallacies. Nevertheless, I have just quoted in a lecture the following (from the opening paragraphs of The God delusion, about which I otherwise have little good to say). It is a wonderful statement of the human capacity for wonder which all of us, religious or otherwise, theist or otherwise, secular or otherwise, share.

“The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time – of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.

In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer.”

[Correction, four days later: Oops ... thanks to Ray Girvan for a proof reading correction. Dawkins does refer to Ursa Major (as now corrected) and not, as my inadequately OCR had it, “that most incontinent star” (Ray's words) Urea Major.]

Not directly connected to my starting point, but thematically related (in a steam of consciousness sort of way) and also quoted in the same lecture, here is another favourite passage – lifted, this time, from Vincent van Gogh.

“Study Japanese art and you find an unquestionably wise, philosophic and intelligent man who spends his time how? In study of the distance from earth to moon – no. In study of Bismarck's policy – no. He studies a single blade of grass.

But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and all the seasons, the broads aspects of the countryside, then animals, and the human figure. Thus he passes his life, and life is too short to do it all.”

---

• Richard Dawkins, The God delusion. 2007, London: Black Swan, 2007. 9780552773317 or 055277331X (pbk) [first publication 2006, London: Bantam Press. 9780593055489 or 0593055489 (hbk.)]
• Vincent Van Gogh [but my own dodgy translation], in a letter to his brother Theo, from Aries, 23 September 1888. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, inventory numbers b586 a-b V/1962. Original language:
  “Si on etudie l’art japonais alors on voit un homme incontestablement sage et philosophe et intelligent qui passe son temps – à quoi – à étudier la distance de la terre à la lune – non, à étudier la politique de Bismarck – non, il etudie un seul brin d’herbe.
  Mais ce brin d’herbe lui porte à dessiner toutes les plantes – ensuite les saisons, les grands aspects des paysages, enfin les animaux, puis la figure humaine. Il passe ainsi sa vie, et la vie est trop courte, à faire le tout.”

In two minds

I've just spent some time jointly preparing a history of art lecture. The other person involved chose the subject, decided the direction and thrust of the message to be carried, and will be doing the delivery, but is new to teaching. My responsibility, therefore, was to provide nuts and bolts experience in the construction and management of somebody else's vision, without getting in its way.

It was a richly, surprisingly, and thought provokingly educational experience for me. The approach and material selection differed, in several respects, from those which I would myself have followed. Both from this difference in itself and from my own necessary introspection in ensuring that I didn't pollute it, came a continuous and multidimensional process of self examination. Some of my own views changed, some were reaffirmed, others broadened or refined.

Immensely valuable.

A line back to my enemy

Chance connections...

Just over a year ago, I enthused over N D Wilson's fantasy novel 100 Cupboards. I then read the sequel, Dandelion fire, and was disappointed; it was well told, but somehow more ordinary than the first novel. Why do fantasy novels so often default to epic battles? I left it until now to read the third and final book, The chestnut king – which was better, though still less than the first. But, to get back to point: in this novel, a frequent image was the child protagonist following a grey fibre (invisible to others) which connected a wound in his cheek to the villainous witch who had caused it.

Now (this minute) I listen to Jesca Hoop (thank you, David) singing Enemy:

Beautiful
alone with my enemy
and share a bitter cup
of poisoning
my countenance
to see his face in mine
and follow every line
back to my enemy

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, as Jim Putnam posted on the day, has just passed. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I received an email from an Arab friend (which Jim, always perceptive and thoughtful, disseminated) reminding me that 9/11 itself was part of a violent cycle of tit for tat ... that there is always a “line back to my enemy”.

A shame that while we keep lines of that kind always alive (the child hero of The chestnut king, by the way, used his grey sickness line back to his enemy first to spy upon her and then to kill her ... she used hers in much the same way), we put much less time and effort into establishing lines of communication back to the same enemies.

---

• N D Wilson,
  • 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
  • Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842.(pbk)
  • The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk)
• Jesca Hoop, Kismet, "Enemy". 2007, New York: Red Int/Red Ink.

Chocolate and moral philosophy in Stone Lane

A general guiding rule, for me, is "never go back". If the place (or person, on context) holds bad memories, why revisit them; if good memories, why risk spoiling them? It's a good rule, on the whole ...when I forget to follow it, I usually wish I hadn't. However ... I'm human and I do, sometimes, forget. So, finding myself not far from a seaside town on the south coast of England, where I spent many happy fragments of my childhood, I have allowed myself to be tempted into a wander down memory lane ... or, more accurately, Stone Lane: a long rural road running out from the town's margins into open countryside.

The seven or eight kilometres of Stone Lane held only six houses, then, all in one cluster. There are eight now; still in one cluster, several carrying the same names as half a century ago though most of them are modern rebuilds on the sites of those I remember.

This one, for instance. It bears the same name, "Stonevale Cottage", as did the house where my maternal grandfather lived ... but it's a completely different building, perhaps twenty years old at most. And that builder's merchant (part of a large national chain) behind it: that occupies the quarter hectare of what was his garden and my adventure playground.

Next door to my grandfather, on his right, lived the Goldman family. Mrs Goldman was round faced and jolly; so was her husband, though he was crippled by some degenerative illness and moved slowly, painfully on crutches. Their daughter Julie, six or seven years older than I, good naturedly took me under her wing whenever we visited. Julie didn't even disown me when Simon, her first boyfriend, with motorcycle, leathers and Teddyboy haircut, hinted strongly that three was a crowd. Mr Goldman welcomed me into his shed; I watched as, leaning on his crutches, he worked a miniature lathe to produce tiny, working steam locomotives or aeroplanes. Mrs Goldman fed me scones, home made lemonade and raspberry jam, clotted cream.

Beyond the Goldmans were Mr and Mrs Villiers. I saw Mr Villiers rarely; he worked in London, leaving early and returning late. On rare occasions when I did meet him, he was tall, balding, and seemed ill at ease with me. He would frown, hop from foot to foot, say “well... hello ... old chap ... well...”, hop some more, say “well...” a few more times, then disappear. Mrs Villiers was a different matter; though quite severely arthritic, she moved continually if slowly about her house and her half hectare of garden, chatting with me the whole time about what she was doing. The Villiers, like the Goldmans, had a daughter; unlike Julie Goldman, though, Angela Villiers was probably twenty years older than I, lived elsewhere and visited only occasionally. I probably met Angela only three or four times in my life. On one of those occasions, though, she took me into her bedroom and showed me her complete childhood collection of Biggles books - the aviation adventure stories of W E Johns. So long as I took only one at a time, took great care of it, and returned it as soon as I finished it, I could borrow them whenever I liked. Over subsequent visits, through the years, I worked my way through them all.

Beyond the Villiers were the Kitsons. I sometimes played or went swimming with their son, Simon, if he wasn't at school. Mr Kitson drove a taxi, and was rarely seen unless he offered us a lift to the swimming pool. Mrs Kitson was simply a person who smiled and waved at Simon as we disappeared to play.

There was nobody beyond the Kitsons.

Opposite the front of my grandfather's house, on the other side of the lane, was the Birds' House. The birds were not a family; this was my grandfather's name for a strip of woodland, about fifty metres wide, which stretched the length of Stone Lane. To the right, southward past the Kitsons', it extended a couple of kilometres to the Top Road which I was not allowed to cross. Northward on the left it ran about five kilometres or so until stopped by the village of Five Elms, pausing only briefly after a few hundred metres to enfold a derelict brick works which could, according to an imaginative child's need, be anything from the Alamo through the lost city of the Incas to a Mars colony.

On the other side of my grandfather's house, to the left, were the Cotters. Mr Cotter was the archetypical caricature of a countryman: weatherbeaten, all brown leathery skin and sinew, grey hair, eyes that squinted into the sun, wind and rain even when he was indoors. He was retired (from what, I don't know) but still managed to work a full seven day week as part time game warden for several local farmers, jobbing gardener, repairer of bridges, stiles, culverts, fences and dry stone walls. He too, like Julie Goldman, good naturedly allowed me to trail around after him; from him I acquired portions of a lifetime's landcraft, learned how to track wildlife, discovered how to tickle a trout, saw fox cubs in their lair. Mrs Cotter was bed ridden (again, with what I do not know); the house was home to at least twenty cats, of which a dozen or so were always to be found on or around her bed. As a child I was afraid of her illness but enjoyed her company in the small snug bedroom. Mr Cotter would bring up a tray with a pot of tea or mugs of cocoa, a barrel of biscuits or a plate piled high with thick sliced dense grained home baked bread, toasted on the open fire and topped with fresh churned butter; Mrs Cotter called him Tom, and he called her Alice, and the three of us ate and talked surrounded by cats.

And beyond the Cotters to the left, the last dwelling to disturb the timeless arboreal solitude of Stone Lane, was the house of Miss Baines.

I am ashamed to say that, for no reason that I can now identify, I didn't like Miss Baines. So far as I can remember, she was never anything but kind and friendly to me; yet I maintained my dislike over the dozen years of our visits to Stone Lane. This thoroughly unjust feeling was so strong that, when I wanted to go down the lane beyond the Cotters' front gate, I crossed over and entered the Birds' House to a depth of ten metres or so, went left through the trees for a hundred metres until out of Miss Baines' line of sight, and only then emerge onto the road again.

When I was about seven years old, Miss Baines presented me with the first moral dilemma I consciously remember having to confront. She gave me a packet of chocolate buttons.

What should I do with these chocolate buttons? Of course, I wanted to eat them. Of course, I felt distrust of them. But, beyond those selfish considerations, I also felt the prickings of conscience and guilt. Was it hypocritical (not that I knew that word; was it wrong) to eat a gift knowing that I felt so much dislike for the giver? Was it ungrateful (I knew that word) not to eat them? Was it wrong to not eat, and thereby waste, food when some people had none? On a practical note: if I didn’t eat them, what was I to do with them? The best solution seemed to be to give them to someone else, who would want to eat them; but who, in the small world of Stone Lane, would accept and eat them without asking questions and (despite my feelings, I had no wish to hurt hers) without risk of Miss Baines hearing about it?

Eventually, I went down to the bottom of my grandfather's long, sloping garden, beyond the shed, beyond the tall lines of runner beans and sweet peas, below the deep bank held up by old railway sleepers, out of view of the house and its neighbours. I burrowed deep into the thick privet hedge which separated the garden from a grazing dairy herd. There I dug a deep hole. Into the hole I counted out exactly half of the chocolate buttons, put back the displaced earth, then concealed the spot with scattered leaves and twigs. The other half of the packet I ate. Back in the house, I placed the empty wrapper in the kitchen rubbish bin.

In 1959 Miss Baines was, I estimate, somewhere in her sixties. She must, by now, be long past caring about the ungenerous spirit of a child to whom she caused no harm and tried to be friendly; but I shamefacedly apologise for it, anyway, to her memory.

Connections

“What has to be faced is that there is little international political motivation to effect any fundamental changes in the workings of the world economy, even in the aftermath of an extreme financial crisis in 2008-9, and in the context of current problems in the United States and Western Europe that could escalate rapidly in the coming months. Much of the street protest in the Middle East and North Africa has stemmed indirectly from the anger of the marginalised, and this has now spread to Western Europe. The violent street actions in Greece have attracted much attention, but the sustained, if less reported protests in Spain, may turn out to be much more important. They may even be the start of an awakening in western countries that turns out to be as significant as that in the Arab world.”

---

• Paul Rogers, Awakening and famine in the global context. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-07).

Grieve for the dead, but remember the living

Whenever there is news coverage of a mass shooting such as Hungerford, Dunblane, Beslan, Columbine or, yesterday and today, the Utøya summer camp, I am struck by the way that everything focuses on number of deaths.

For those who were killed, it was dreadful – in the literal sense of that too easily used word. I cannot begin to imagine the terror they experienced. For those close to them it continues to be dreadful and will stay so for the rest of their lives.

But my thoughts go to those who are described as "lucky to be alive" – the survivors.

By what earthly measure does anyone imagine them to be "lucky"? Those who survive will have to live their lives with memory of that same terror which, for their dead peers, ended. And not just the terror either; there is survivor guilt. One survivor of Utøya spoke of being trapped in a toilet cubicle while one a boy was shot outside the door. Another of playing dead and feeling the heat of the barrel close to his face; yet another of watching class mates who had tried the same ploy being shot in the head. And on, and on... They will be traumatised for life. Use of the word "lucky" is disgustingly facile.

And I'm not forgetting that there are plenty of places where this sort of thing is so commonplace that it's never reported. What happens on such occasions is not a change in the world; simply that a brutal reality which is usually elsewhere has come to a venue near me.

Caughtship

In her "Courtship" post, two days ago, Julie Heywood quoted the following from Michael Podro:

“What is required, someone might answer today, for the alien spectator to have a serious involvement with the art of a culture which he did not share, is a preparedness to learn — a preparedness to exercise a sensitivity which his own immediate culture did not demand or make possible, so that he felt his own beliefs and imagination under pressure. Other people’s beliefs do not have to be genuine alternatives for us, that is, they do not have to be part of a way of life or belief system that we may really adopt, for us to be exercised and involved by them or by the art embedded in them.”

I said at the time that I was going to steal that paragraph for use in a lecture today. I duly did so: it was printed on a postcard (with, of course, full attribution) which I gave to each person in the audience they entered, before I began.

One woman, as she left, paused before me with shining eyes and intellectual excitement written across her face. “I don't know what your lecture was about”, she said, “but this... [waving the postcard] ... I thought: oh, yes!”

Nasties under the bed

Just found, in Games and culture...

“This paper explores the characterizations of enemies in military-themed video games, with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America's Army. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America's Army is one not confined to any nationality, ethnicity, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. I argue that the production of this abstract enemy--what I call the unreal enemy''--is significantly shaped by a biopolitical system that intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries. This arrangement delocalizes power, distributing it through a network of institutions and subjects. Throughout, I use ethnographic examples that explore how this abstract enemy has been constructed and juxtaposed against more concrete and personal figures, such as the America's Army Real Heroes, individuals upheld as the embodiment of personal achievement in the U.S. Army. I conclude by asserting that the unreal enemy of America's Army is, ultimately, an enemy that is not exclusive to a video game, but one that exists as an anonymous specter, ever present in the militarized American cultural imaginary.”

---

Late addition, 2011-07-19. The following is a comment to this post, by Dr.C, but seems worth promotion to full visibility here.

“I am not sure I completely agree with this. At the present time the generic "enemy" seems to be more of mid-Eastern extract. There are examples where people will refuse to fly in an airplane next to anyone who is swarthy. The irony is, of course, that we invaded "them" and not the opposite.”

---

• Robertson Allen, "The Unreal Enemy of America's Army". in Games and Culture, 2011. 6(1): p. 38-60. DOI 10.1177/1555412010377321
  

Bizarrest, bizarrer, and merely bizarre...

Within an interesting, as always, post yesterday (Bizarre notes, bizarre cheers), JSBlog commented that...

“... the more I read of US school/college traditions ... the gladder I am I went to British ones, where you can just attend, get your education, and leave. Ritual chants are just the tip of the iceberg of a set of effectively compulsory tribal systems...”

When I read it, I simply thought "hear, hear" (my limited observation of US academic life confirming my agreement) and read on. Having thought about it over the hours since, I still agree and just as strongly – but have also realised that British education is not itself free of bizarre undergrowth. While post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom (and more widely in western Europe) is certainly refreshingly different in that way from its US equivalents, there are oddities (I would personally say unhealthy oddities) further down the chain.

As a thirteen year old I moved from a coeducational Australian school where you sank or swam amongst your contemporaries according to the usual vagaries of children everywhere to a British single sex school. Here I had to be thrown into the fishpond. Teachers who would later send me home because I had forgotten my school cap showed no sign of noticing that green water running from my sodden uniform was forming a malodorous pool around my desk. The following day, I had to be stripped behind the fives court and then retrieve my clothes from the branches of various trees. Passing teachers again showed no surprise at seeing a slightly podgy boy climbing a tree in the nude to retrieve his underwear. I thought at first that this was dislike of me, personally; but as time and a half went by, I observed that it happened to all newcomers and staff even made jokes about it – except when a boy complained, in which case they made pompous remarks about the communal value of initiation ceremonies. Then there was the French teacher (reputedly an infantry colonel in the 1939 to 1945 war) who made us run around the grounds in our underwear, shooting each other with water pistols containing red ink ... and refused to teach us unless we took part. Let's not get into the strange behaviour (not, I hasten to add, paedophilic ... just ritualistically odd) of the games master during pre and post sports changing times.

Things have improved immeasurably in the decades since 1965 ... but I have heard of both the ducking and the stripping ceremonies in different schools within the past year, and while games masters are generally respected professionals, the occasional exception is not unknown.

Moving back in time, at ten years old I briefly attended a primary school on the Sussex coast. Daily assembly contained a number of mystifying rituals, including the singing (every day) of Sussex by the sea, then British grenadiers and finally Men of Harlech. (Each of these is available in different versions; the links are to the closest I can find to those we sang.) That sequence is interesting because, while all of them are of a martial cast, they become progressively more so. By the time we started the day's lessons we had imbibed enough blood and guts for a schlock movie. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from we who sang them daily. Sussex, I concede, was relevant; but the clearly male voice, culminating in “the girls so kind that we left behind”, was odd for a school whose students were 50% girls. British grenadiers had no obvious relevance to anything at all. Harlech was the other side of the British isles and several centuries; not to mention the other side of the Saxon/Celt divide.

No ... I still prefer the British model to the US one; it has more flexibility, more freedom to choose ideas, less pressure to rigid conformity; the US system is at the "bizarrest" end of the spectrum, the British equivalents "merely bizarre" ... but we are not ideally housed for unlimited stone throwing.

My dear, I was literally metaphorical...

We all have our private irritations and exasperations, which may not be reasonable but are nonetheless real. Many of mine lie in the use of words, and telling which are reasonable and which are not can be a grey area.

Language is, I passionately believe, an evolving thing and we cannot tie it down with rules. Words change their meanings ... get used to it. On the other hand, its richness and complexity rely on the existence of rules ... the rules can (indeed, must) change with time, they can be broken with magnificent effect, but like (to borrow Robert Frost's analogy) a tennis net, we do need them. If they break down entirely, or even change too fast, the glorious moderated anarchy which is language falls apart and becomes a puddle on the floor.

My reason for wittering on like this is, of course, a particular exasperation which has just happened by ... though in this case it's amused me rather than irritating. Over a long period, now, I've noticed (and generally restrained my irritation over) misuse of the word "literally", for example “I was so embarrassed, I literally died!” Today I've heard the converse: “I was so frightened, I was almost metaphorically looking over my shoulder!”

---

• "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." Robert Frost, in an address to students. 1935, Milton, Massachusetts: Milton Academy.
• "I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." In an interview with Edward C Lathem, 1966. (Manuscript, part of the boxed Papers of Edward C. Lathem, 1913 - 2009, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College)

Picking over half a trillion words

Following JSBlog's enthusiasm, yesterday, (“Google just blew my bibliographic socks off”) for Google's new Ngram viewer, I've been busily catching up.

First stop was the viewer itself. Then a start on downloading the raw data sets which lie behind it, for more detailed analysis than the online viewer can deliver. Finally, while the data downloaded in the background (almost two gigabytes of it just for single words in English, even in ZIP form ... nearer to ten when expanded), reading the associated Science article by Michel et al.

It's going to be a good while before anything significant comes of the downloads, but I've done a couple of test drives. They can be intuitively checked with a quick visit to the viewer.

First experiment, resulting from a recent off the cuff discussion amongst a group of students: correlating uses of the words "twat", "twit" and "twerp". It's interesting to find positive correlation between the first and last from 1935 to 1980, but negative between them and "twerp" over the same period – which then reverses so that all three positively correlate over the past thirty years.

Second: the tendency to concatenate "bigrams" into single words. This train of thought was started by Google's example comparison of "child care" with "nursery school" and "kindergarten" ... I tried it out, and then added "childcare" to see if it made a difference. As examples to cut a long story short, "child care" declines markedly as "childcare" slightly increases (a negative correlation) from 1996 to 2008; "brood mare" and "broodmare" show a similar negative correlation from 1960 to 2000 but then "brood mare" recovers and the correlation becomes positive through to the present.

Those are, of course, trivial investigations and show nothing ... I mention them only to show the sort of five finger exercises that I've been playing with since yesterday. Much more interesting is some of the investigation mentioned by the authors of the Science article.

For example:

“Suppression – of a person, or an idea – leaves quantifiable fingerprints... ... ... Such examples are found in many countries, including Russia (e.g. Trotsky), China (Tiananmen Square) and the US (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947)...

We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned... We plotted median usage in German for five such lists ... ... ... The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party members [a 500% increase...].

Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” s for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 – 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925-1933 and in 1955-1965... In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly centered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes... In German, the distribution in much wider, and skewed leftward: suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule... At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression... This population is highly enriched for documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso..., the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and Hermann Maas... ... ... At the other extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dramatic rise... This subpopulation is highly enriched for Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who benefited immensely from government propaganda...

These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlights how culturomic methods might complement existing historical approaches.”

---

• Jean-Baptiste Michel, et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" in Science, 2010. DOI 10.1126/science.1199644
  

Marine observations

I've just read (on Unreal Nature's recommendation, from which I have copied the post title and for which thanks) a guest post at Foreign policy magazine's site.

It is written by a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan “and above all someone trying to find a healthy balance as a civilian once more”. There's a very great deal, including but by no means limited to the author's headline position, with which I profoundly disagree. There's also a great deal with which I can agree. But neither agreement nor disagreement have anything to do with why I, too, recommend reading it.

Everyone in the western liberal democracies should read it as an honourable example of an intelligent individual speaking unwanted blunt truths as he sees them not only to power but to a fellow citizenry who (as citizenries always do ... and that includes you and me, if we're honest) prefer hazily warm and comfortable myths.

USAmericans should read it in particular because it tells them things they don't want to know about their own society. Europeans (and perhaps also Australasians) should read it because it holds up a clear mirror in which to examine our own myths. Britons in particular should read it because it shows both how radically different are British and American outlooks in areas where we are often assumed to be similar ... and, at the same time, how very similar we are in things which we often like to imagine that we are different.

I'd like to make dozens of points based on, or in contention with, the content of the post ... but that would undermine my hope that you will go there and make up your own mind. And please, don't just read until you feel agreement or disagreement: read the whole thing, or you will have missed the point of going there at all.

I am Google ... sort of (continued)

An interesting response to yesterday's "I am Google ... sort of" comes in a comment from AcerOne which has had me thinking further about the implications of copying a text for my own use. He compares my scanning of a printed text into digital form to [illegal] downloading from a file sharing site of music already purchased on physical media. I'm not sure that this is a true analogy in every way, although I do agree that the immediate (not extended) moral issue is the same.

I've just spent a while discussing this with a lawyer. Not professionally, I hasten to add: just chewing the fat with a friend who happens to be a lawyer (and not one with any specific experience of copyright law), as a way of trying out thoughts.

To some extent, what I say now in response to AcerOne is playing devil's advocate. Other parts I think I probably believe. I won't try to sort out the two at this point; I'm just having an exploratory dialogue with myself, using his words as a sounding board. In no way am I implying any judgment of AcerOne, for whom (and for whose moral sense) I have the greatest respect. What you are reading here is an internal monologue on my own outlook.

AcerOne: What difference does it make to anyone, the author included, if you also own a copy of the text in a digital format?

Well ... in practice, I think that depends upon circumstances. In the case of Appleton (the text I am currently digitising), perhaps none. If the text stays out of print, then my digitisation cannot cause any loss to Jay Appleton or his estate. Even if the text is reprinted, that remains true as long as I keep my digitised copy entirely for my own use. If, on the other hand, the text is later digitised and offered for sale in that form, I have arguably deprived the author or his estate of income from the digital copy which I might have purchased.

This becomes more acute, though not different in principle, if I digitise Spirin who is still very much in print but not available in electronic form. It becomes a very live issue if I digitise a book which is available as a purchasable electronic copy.

An analogy might be this. AcerOne is, amongst other things, a visual artist who currently has on show an exhibition of his paintings. He offers for sale both those paintings and prints of them. If I go to his show, photograph them, then make prints of the resulting photographs to hang on my wall, I very definitely feel that I have behaved shabbily. I should have bought his own prints – I have deprived him of the income which he would thus have made. If I take the same photographs and use them as illustrations in a lecture, on the other hand, I feel comfortable with that provided that I give details of source: I have not replaced his work, and may through publicising it contribute indirectly to his sales income. Whether it is legal or not is a different matter; I think it comes safely within "fair use", and my friendly lawyer (without wanting to be pinned down or quoted, of course) agrees.

AcerOne goes on...

“...i have on occasions used file-sharing websites to find music (both moral and copyright issues definitely breached). But [... ... ...] to download music i have already purchased and legitimately own; but on vinyl. [... ... ...] The thought of transferring it to my computer so that it can be played through my home system or on my iPod seems like a long and laborious task [...]So i have on occasions sourced and downloaded a digital version from file-sharing websites... Legally i have broken the law. But all i have done is chosen to take a simpler and far easier route to gaining the same outcome - a digital version of music i already own.”

There are several issues which occur to me here. The first is a technical one: the true analogy for my digitisation of a print text is, I think, not downloading a new copy^[1] but the transfer from vinyl to computer file. And that prompts me to consider the fact that I routinely buy a CD which I then do not play: I immediately "rip" it to digital form and play it from an MP3 player because most of my musical listening is done on the move. I have done the same with such vinyl or tape as I cannot replace with CD. So, I realise, my concern of digitisation of a book is somewhat hypocritical when I have done the same with in excess of two thousand albums. (Ripping is, of course, so endemic and so universally enabled by mainstream software providers as to be an unstoppable fait accompli . That's not, on the other hand, the same thing as being morally right. Nevertheless, I personally feel morally comfortable with both my and AcerOne's digital duplication of our music sources. There are other philosophically problematic issues around use of a file sharing site ... but I'll not go there as I've already bitten off more that I can chew with this topic.)

The second issue is also technical, but in an important legal sense. AcerOne does not, in fact, own the music on his vinyl; nor I the music on my CDs. We own only the physical media upon which it is recorded, and have a licence to play the music (only for our own enjoyment at that; playing it for other people is, strictly speaking, breach of the licence). Similarly, when I buy a copy of Appleton's book I do not buy the content: only the physical paper and board construct within which my single copy is encoded. Calling again on the analogy of AcerOne's paintings: if I purchase one of his prints, I do not thereby own the image itself and have no right to reproduce it – the image remains the property of AcerOne.

On the other hand ... the legal copyright breach seems to lie not in reproduction but in "publishing". Going back to the technical breach of license when I play my CD to others (previous para), the issue is that legally I thereby "publish" the work to others. Software licences work on much the same basis, but make allowance for back up; my word processor, for instance, comes with a specific proviso that it can be copied for security back up purposes, and can be installed on more than one computer provided that it is only ever in use on one of them at the same time. By analogy, it would seem that photocopying^[2] or digitising a book stays within the fence so long as nobody else then sees the copy. But then again ... flipping open the nearest book to hand at this moment, I find inside the following unambiguous words: “no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher" ... which seems pretty unambiguous.

I could go on ... but enough, already. My feeling remains that I am staying within "fair use" so far, but it's not a subject which I can afford to regard as cut and dried. For my own peace of mind it needs revisiting at intervals, and in particular every time I consider digitising a new text.

---

1. In my impecunious teens and student years, I regularly did deals with friends whereby one of us bought a vinyl album and the others made a tape cassette copy. Later, when my wife and I divorced amicably in our thirties, we solved the music problem by copying everything to tape cassette so that we each kept the whole collection. Both of these, it seems to me, are the true equivalents of file sharing. I wouldn't do it now, but it would be hypocritical of me to righteously condemn young people now who do it in the new ways which new technology makes available to them.

2. I do, in fact, have some photocopied texts. They were made in the days before digitisation. They were not made by me, but by the owners of print copies, as helpful gestures when I couldn't obtain a physical print copy of something to which I needed long term access. Who actually made them, however, is irrelevant here; my acceptance and retention of them is another blurring hypocrisy in the debate which I am having with myself over selfdigitisation.

---

I am Google ... sort of

I am preparing a series of lectures on landscape imagery for next year, and find myself making frequent return to several books. Appleton's Experience of Landscape, for instance. Nash's Wilderness and the American mind. Spirin's The language of landscape.

As I go, I extract fragments for reference and/or quotation. Time was, I'd have hand written these on index cards; now I stick the book into a scanner and let OCR take the strain.

I'm also, of course, referring at the same time to numerous electronic sources – which is so much more convenient since, quite apart from instant searching, I just have to highlight, copy and paste ... or even "save page as" ... or, better still, just store a link to the page. I have, in my notes for this lecture, for example, links to recent posts by Ray Girvan (Old Park) and Julie Heyward (Instrumentality).

If only the printed texts were as instantly accessible in their entirety as the electronic sources.

Sometimes, of course, a printed text is also available in digital form. It's well worth my well, for something often used, to buy both forms: paper as definitive version, digital for flexible reference and quoting. But that's not possible for the above three examples.

As I scanned a paragraph today, it dawned on me that I am gradually and unintentionally compiling a fragmentary but increasingly complete digital copy of a book in this way.

How do I feel about this?

I take copyright very seriously. I would not knowingly do anything which in might in any perceivable way tend to undermine the author's income from the text. But it seems to me that as long as I keep the material solely for my on use, and no purchasable electronic version exists, I am not going beyond my own moral view of "fair use".

There is one difference between Appleton on one hand, Nash and Spirin on the other: Appleton is out of print. That is probably not a significant difference for any practical purpose ... but it feels different as a starting point. So, as of today, I have started deliberately scanning the whole chapter containing a section I need from Appleton, rather than just the section itself. When I have the whole lot, I'll combine it into one PDF file and bingo ... I will be my own miniature Google Books.

When I've done that, I'll consider what to do about the others.

---

• Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape. 1986, Hull: Hull University Press. 0859584615. [Originally 1975, London: Wiley. 0471032565.] [Most recent edition 1996, Chichester: Wiley. 0471962333 (hbk) or 047196235X (pbk).] [Now out of print.]
• Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American mind. 1982, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. 0300029101 (pbk.). [originally 1967]
• Anne Whiston Spirin, The language of landscape. 1998, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. 0300077459, 9780300082944 (pbk).

Wikileaks

I don't have anything original to say on the subject, and certainly nothing worth stopping to listen to, but it's necessary (in however small and insignificant way) to stand and be counted ... so ... I applaud what Wikileaks has done today.

There is never any such thing as an unmitigated good but, despite all freely acknowledged reservations and messy grey moral fogs, I do believe that releasing of truth is, in this case at least, the best available route through ambient evils.

Wikileaks

ORG: Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict

Iraq Body Count

...and, while I'm about it...

SIPRI

CCR

Any which way but ... up

Well, well, well ... (three holes in the ground, as the old joke goes)...

The light hearted title of my last post ("And, best of all, the right way up") has been coincidentally taken up by Dr C (here and, in much greater detail, here), in response to an Unreal Nature post ... and Ray Girvan has (in the comments) tied it back to habitat theory, for which I have great affection and about which I have always intended to write (but never actually done so) here.

A Barthesian shoe-in

I am a devout disciple of Barthes' tenet that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Not that I am always, necessarily, uninterested in either the author or her/his intent; but neither can have any connection with the text being read. Or with the image being viewed.

Faced with those who are not so convinced, however, I am often at a loss to find a demonstration of the principle which doesn't immediately skitter away off their disagreement like water off a duck's back. I don't kid myself that this is about to change, but I do have a nice graphic reminder that I should practice what I preach and not expect my own intentionality to be any sort of exception to the Barthesian rule.

At the time of writing, I have had 143 responses to the Today 100602 image ... every one of which focusses on the shoes. Clearly, most viewers "read" the image as one in which footwear dominates. The semisillhouetted figure makes no appearance whatsoever. in any of these responses.

I (author) wouldn't actually go so far as to admit that I had an intention when I clicked the shutter button; but my instinctive response was to the figure, contextualised by the objects (that they are shoes hardly occurred to me at the time) surrounding him.

Insofar as I can reconstruct it, my own "reading" of the image involves:

1. The (apparently) thoughtful pose.
2. The (apparent) incongruity of an (apparently) unaccompanied male figure (apparently) contemplating with such (apparent) attention what is (as I understand it) commercially intended to be a feminine space.
3. The way the visual structure of that space (apparently) orients to emphasise his presence at its hollow centre.
4. The illusion that his left foot rests supported by a displayed object.

There is nothing "correct" about my reading. It is of no greater value (arguably, on democratic grounds, less) than that of my 144 (another has come in since I started typing this) correspondents. In fact, since I already had my reading whereas the other 144 come as gifts, I place little value on mine while the others delight me. The Barthesian lesson, however, is simple: my view of what I saw is utterly irrelevant to anyone else's reading of the result..

---

Note: "Shoe-in" (before a blizzard of correspondents write in to correct me) is here a deliberately punning use of what is, as I learned recently from Ray Girvan at JSBlog, called an "eggcorn".

---

• Roland Barthes, "The death of the author". Originally Aspen, 5-6, 1967. Anthologised in Image, music, text, 1977, London: Fontana, 0006348807 (pbk) and subsequently. Web copy available at the Athenaeum library of philosophy (accessed 2010/06/09)

Only (dis)connect

In comment on the article to which my "Only connect" post links, Dr C says:

“I have been wondering lately some things, reflected in what you say in your article, whether someone who has been carried along by the flood (e.g. texting, Facebook, iPhone, GPS location, implantable chip) can't voluntarily turn the other way. Do a sort of Thoreau maneuver and walk away from it all. I feel actually chained to my cell phone and I am expected to be there, one heartbeat away from an anxious parent. I don't really mind it but I can't imagine all of society barreling down the road with our every action, every movement, analyzed by someone in Washington, London or Paris (actually in Bangladesh).”

Removing my scientist's hat (UFO shaped, in a padded fluorescent orange synthetic satin, carrying the words "Kiss me quick, Igor") and replacing it with my vigilant citizen headgear (a frayed and sunbleached beanie, with floral hippy insert) ... this is something that concerns me, too.

The answer, I think, is that (as with almost any aspect of social organisation) one cannot easily walk away from the ICT revolution as a whole and still remain connected to the main of society as a whole ... but one can pick and choose amongst its manifestations to a considerable extent.

I have indicated before my lack of personal enthusiasm for sites of the FaceBook variety (and an alternative approach to the same requirements). On the other hand, here I am making use of another online strand – the blog – and I am an enthusiastic exponent of wikis for many particular purposes. The thing is, in my view, to decide what serves your needs and what makes you serve it ... embrace the first, shun the second, and be aware that the distinction will be different for each person who asks the question.

In his third sentence (“...cell phone ... one heartbeat away from an anxious parent”) Dr C says, in my opinion, more about himself than about the technology. A warm and compassionate person, with a strong professional conscience, he feels that a device which makes him more available to a concerned parent must be used to do just that. My own cell phone, by contrast, is a vital component of my life but spends most of its time "on silent", taking messages which I check regularly but to which I respond when convenient (hmmm ... it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps I have painted myself into a corner here ... perhaps I am, also by contrast with Dr C, a cold and unfeeling...)

About a decade and a half ago, commenting on exactly this, I used the metaphor of “a free fall parachutist, compelled to fall downward but riding tiny variations to a choice of the available landing points”. It still seems to me, after all this time, a reasonable description of what needs to be done.

Beating the bounds

One of my students recently told me that everything I choose to do (photographically, mathematically, physically...) “is driven by a fascination with the nature of boundaries”. I don't know whether or not that's true. I do know that it has at least enough superficial evidence in its favour to provide hours of exploratory fun.

As I was first turning the idea over in my mind, Julie Heyward of Unreal Nature commented on a Today image that “the brick pattern forces you to be aware of the over/under in the puddle”. This almost certainly connects with Julie's own visual and philosophical interest in inside/outside, and (dis)unified perspectives, but to me on that particular day, primed as I was, it drew my attention to the puddle surface as a boundary surface. A boundary surface between air and water, of course; between over and under, too; but also between real and imagined, an Alice's looking glass. Then again, even in two dimensional terms the image is divided into five regions (asphalt, water, three types of paving material) and those are held apart by linear boundaries. In network terms (which are in my mind for reasons which don't matter here), the visible plane contains five regions, four arcs (ignoring the image frame) but only one node.

Which led me to call up and riffle through other recent Today pages and interrogate them in similar terms. T100404 has two obvious visible boundary surfaces, two more implied, all four separated by a single boundary line where water meets reeds. Others, either side, can be analysed in similar ways.

A red brick alley wall has recently been calling me back again and again (see, for example, T100406, T100412, T100417) to share in its love affair with the low angled spring sun. I've visited it in previous years, too, from time to time, but now it seems inclined to take me fully into its confidence. All of those clearly fit the boundaries view of things.

When it comes to images of people, though, the model seems to break down. The conversation at T100407, for instance: I struggle to find any boundaries interpretation there, beyond weak and general ideas that would fit any image at all.

Whether there is anything in it or not, I've found it invigorating to be given a novel external framework against which to reinvestigate my own vision. I recommend it to everyone as an exercise well worth trying.

Interrogate your hi-heel sneakers...*

Unreal Nature and TTMF recently had an exchange about Ursula K Le Guin's take on high heeled shoes; TTMF also posted on the subject

I have, as I briefly noted in that run of comments, strong views on high heels which I have learned to keep to myself. I am not, personally, convinced by Le Guin's speculation that the fetishistic appeal of high heels is congruent with the eroticism of pain. High heels relate to Chinese foot binding only in the fact that both involve feet in sacrifice of well being to a local idea of beauty. The sacrifice in both cases is, however, real.

Unreal Nature points out that “women love their shoes” ... and I don't dispute it. But human beings are eternally capable of loving that which (or those who) will damage or even destroy them. Women love their shoes, I would suggest, because they have grown up in a society where they learnt that this was what they should do.

The usual explanation for the appeal of high heels is a biosocial one: they throw the weight of the body forward, resulting in muscle tensions which in turn produce visual signals interpreted by the male instinctive subconscious as indicative of sexual readiness. That may be true; I am not qualified to either endorse or dispute it, though it makes superficial sense. I suspect that there is an uglier instinct, too: a woman o high heels is completely unable to run effectively and, therefore, advertises vulnerability.

But there is another aspect: high heels are (in the semiotic sense) a sign. Watch a group of men whose inhibitions have been removed by alcohol, and you will see that there are a numbr of signs which will trigger whistles and suggestive remarks. They include long hair, fur coats, and high heels amongst many others. The woman inside the fur coat, bneah the long hair, perched on the high heels, is to a large extent irrelevant to the initial knee jerk response.

Though I differ from Le Guin's analysis of their fetishistic appeal, I personally believe that high heels are unpleasant and dangerous just on the vulnerability issue alone. It is not my place to decide what others wear; but I cannot ever approve of a social convention which places an individual at deliberate risk.

There is nothing wrong with fetishism, nor with social persistence of convention; but there can be very much wrong with the impact of either on individuals and their well being. In the case of high heeled shoes, the harm is both physical and psychosocial. If individuals wish to accept harm as a price for something else, they should be aware that they are doing so − and should not do so under social duress.

On a broader stage, much of this can be generalised to fashion in general. As Le Guin says in the same essay:

“And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it.”

...or, to quote myself in somewhat more melodramatic mode,“...in my opinion ‘fashion’ is a terrible, terrible thing for the freedom of the individual ... a dead hand on the control levers of the individual psyche of which dictators with huge propaganda machines can only dream ... another word for constant, universal, low level mob behaviour.”

---

• *Tommy Tucker, Put on your hi-heel sneakers. 1964.
• Ursula K Le Guin, The wave in the mind : talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination., "Discussions and opinions: About feet". 2004, Boston: Shambhala. 1590300068 or 9781590300060 (pbk.).