The Pequod

The Act of Reading

2008-05-06T12:27:00.006Z

The act of reading has to be one of the most uncomfortable activities devised in the name of leisure. Consider what is asked of the reader, when presented with a book. Here we have a device that dictates its own position with absolute authority. It is to be held not more than fifty centimetres from the face, else it will truculently dissolve its meanings to an inky smudge. The arms must therefore lock themselves at right angles to the body, neither moving forwards nor wavering, lest the print give up its contract with the eyes that are desperately trained on a sliver of word at a time.

Of course, one can rest the book at a table, or upon a desk, in which case all manner of props come into play, all with the sole purpose of keeping this object static. For it will insist on moving. Should you dare turn your back for an instant, pages will spontaneously leaf themselves backwards. Thus are pens, scraps of paper, food, tissues all recruited to mark the spot, such that the book over time becomes marked with an indelible debris of tomato ketchup, tea stains, snot. If you do keep attention for long enough, though, the book will become restless, transferring its weight from its right half to its left, necessitating subtle shifts in whatever tower - usually constructed from other books - you had devised to prop it at a forty-five degree angle.

Worst, though, is the trial of reading in bed. One's vision of the bedtime reader is the hairnetted housewife, herself propped by mounds of downy pillows, her dog-eared romantic novel supported by a mound of goose-feather duvet. Here she half-lies, half-sits, in perfect readerly comfort, until her husband's foot is heard on the bottom stair, from which point a scurry of activity ensures that, by the time he reaches the top, lights are off, she has been asleep for hours, and it is not only the novel's romance that has been tidily closed for this evening. But this warm vision of domestic ritual is impossible to enact in any house other than the snug double-glazed mansions of middle England. Dare to live (as does this reader) in a damp, stone cottage, for example, and night brings with it a tyranny of cold, that taunts the innocent reader with a Catch-22. For in this environment, one must choose whether to sacrifice the body to the mind, or vice versa. If one chooses to snuggle deep into the blankets and preserve the body's warmth, the arms alone can be allowed to protrude, but must do so vertically, holding the book directly above the peeking head; arms thus soon tire, and the book is cast in shadow from the anglepoise above. The alternative is to turn to the side, contorting the spine and using creased elbows as support for the rapidly leadening neck. Finally, one can satisfy the body's craving for warmth, and simply sleep, leaving the book dead on the bedside table. It is wrong to suppose that intellectuals are dedicated to the life of mind rather than body; witness the goose bumps, the back ache, the dry eye, all sustained in refusing dreams in favour of the imagination invested within this small cuboid.

Of course, all these exertions and stresses are worth it, for the worlds to which the good novel will remove the reader can dull the ache of limbs better than any pharmaceutical. The keen reader lives for those moments of total immersion, when he or she forgets that this physical world exists at all. But such moments are made more ideal by the sudden discovery - the sudden happening upon - a reading position of infinite comfort which, having been found, allows the activity to be sustained for hours. Such positions are not signposted; they are not marked in a library or known in the ergonomics of a favourite chair. They are hidden, like secrets, around the everyday house. They come upon one who, having stood to put the kettle on, finds himself standing at the kitchen window with the light cast just perfectly on the page. They are lurking on the bottom step of the stair, when one meant to go and fetch something but has suddenly thought to sit and reopen the book which distracted him from the job in the first place. There is one on that particularly mossy patch in the garden, which, when hit by the warming sun at the right moment of the day, accommodates your posterior like a King's silk cushion.

And there! There is one in Peter Vilhelm's masterful painting "Girl Reading in an Interior." She is leaning against the sharp edge of a hard-looking chair reading an open book, or perhaps a thick letter. It should be uncomfortable, but is instead the picture of comfort happened upon fortuitously. Diagonally from upper left to the floor in the centre, is cast a sunbeam. From right to left, her weight is pressed on a delicate outstretched leg, and she has found herself as featherweight as the cast of incorporeal light that her stance mirrors. She did not mean to be here. She had been en route from the imagined front of the picture - the position of the viewer - through that closed door on the left, through which surely awaited some vital task or arduous chore. But something diverted her, and she found herself suddenly in this unfurnished, anonymous corridor - far removed from her designated "reading" chair in the stately drawing room of this comfortable suburban house - totally exorcised from her body, living completely through those other consciousnesses nested deep in the words on the page.

Shell Pull Out of Renewables Project

2008-05-02T11:17:00.004Z

By any standard, Shell's recent decision to sell their 33% stake in the London Array offshore windfarm is a disastrous turn of policy, which has rightly been lambasted. Shell this week announced profits of £4 billion, and it is hard to see how they can justify withdrawing their investment of £0.6 billion from the £2 billion renewables project, in which they were the major partner along with Eon. Their press release explained that their decision was taken on the basis that "We constantly review our projects and investment choices in all of our businesses, focusing on capital discipline and efficiency." So not much need to read between the lines there: with oil currently running at $120 a barrel, there is more money to be made elsewhere, possibly lurking beneath melting icecaps.

But whilst Shell's retreat exposes their much-trumpeted environmental policies as a superficial marketing gimmick hiding a hard core of greed, it also indicates something inherently flawed in the government's environmental claims. At a time of credit crunch and inflationary belt-tightening, the government justifies maintaining fuel taxes at their present level on the assumption that lowering them would have a detrimental effect on the environment. In reality, the only groups that win from high fuel prices are the major companies, whose ability to affect the environment for good or ill far outweighs that of the individual consumer, who needs to get to work and the out-of-town supermarket and will almost certainly do so by car, at any cost.

Rather than falsely sustaining the high price of oil, the route to encourage individuals to choose environmentally friendly transportation methods, and to reduce the effect independent oil companies have to undermine any national commitment to renewables, is through radical change in infrastructure at the national level. Increase subsidies for public transport, provide incentives and tax breaks for people to throw out their oil burners in favour of sustainable heating, and suddenly Shell might realise that there is more to be made in serving renewables, than digging for the black gold.

A Doll's House at The Northern Stage

2008-05-01T07:48:00.013Z

Has ever a dramatist better exploited the discrepancy between what an audience - seeing everything - knows and what a character does, than Henrik Ibsen? Has ever a director better understood the political effect of this double vision than Erica Whyman, with her setting of A Doll's House on a semi-transparent stage? On the evidence of last night's performance at the Northern Stage, I would be prepared to make a case for both Wyman and Ibsen.

The play's problem of vision, of failing to see through the eyes of another, is given an appropriate architecture in Soutra Gilmour's set, which locates the play in the 1950s. Framed by a proscenium arch decorated in large patterned wall paper which scales the centre stage as if it is a model, the main house is constructed with semi-transparent perspex walls and - crucially - a clear postbox, and is filled with formica tables, flimsy chairs and sofas. As is Nora, every artefact is liable to replacement, and at risk of seeming dated; this family home is decorated with bought objects rather than family heirlooms to be cherished for their uniqueness, however drab their appearance.

The semi-transparent walls work with brilliant effect. We see bustle in corridors; significant people and letters arrive in the background whilst others talk unknowingly on the main stage; Torvald locks himself in his study and chats with Dr. Rank, perhaps discussing their idealised Nora who is playing a radically different character in our direct gaze. Ibsen effectively exploits the ability of the audience to see everything in a family home, whereas each individual can only see the costume presented by the other; the transparent set provides a visual corollary to this experience, the experience of theatre where life is literally an act, the actor literally the doll, the mechanisms all on show.The house takes on its own dimension of consciousness (or unconsciousness) in Whyman's production.

For an audience, especially a modern one, who knows in advance about Nora's subterfuge and her self-will, it is hard to know whether to laugh or weep with infuriation at a Torvald Helmer who is so intellectually and empathetically impoverished that he simply cannot see his world through the eyes of his wife, even as we can see right through his world on this set.

At the interval, one of my friends commented that Torvald's acting seemed a little wooden. But that is precisely the point - he has to be intellectually immobile, talking in clichés ("my most precious possession"; "I want to be the strong man") to contrast with Nora's independence. But as well as just a dramatic foil, Torval's stasismakes perhaps the most potent political point. Any hope we have that he, too, can change is delayed until after Nora slams the door behind her. That he, not Nora, ask the final question laden with potential - "something glorious?" - leaves the ending ultimately ambiguous rather than hopeful: will Torvald have it in him to strive to find realisation, or will he will have to wait, vainly, for something glorious simply to drop through the letterbox? There are no hints in Torvald's earlier performance to answer either way, which is perhaps - on reflection after the drama of Nora's exit - the most damning statement of the play. At least Nora's gender allows her to know her status as being lesser in society, and thereby provokes her to look inward upon herself as an individual; Torvald's masculinity gives him neither a broad vision of the world outside, nor a focus through which to reflect upon himself. John Kirk as Torvald plays the role with precisely the lack of fluency needed for this social puppet, with a tunnel vision engineered by his times. (Though, it should be noted, it seemed as if Kirk missed his cue a couple of times in the final act, which probably was not intended as part of his representation of this lack of fluency.)

Exemplifying this is the central Tarantella dance scene. Here choreographed with energy on the brink of vehemence, Torvald is captivated, aroused and in control as he conducts Nora's movements, but when Nora stops abruptly as Mrs. Linde enters with news of her vital conversation with Krogstad, Torvald is left bewildered by the sudden change and as he is shooed into his study by Nora. The discrepancy between his singular vision of an erotic doll-wife, and our wider vision of the symbolism behind the movements - of Nora's expression of her inner demons through the "rather too realistic" urgency of her dancing; of Mrs. Linde's return - again makes movement through the house a politicised act.

The Tarantella is a visual premonition of the final scene, when what has been subconsciously known by the audience is made overt in polemic. But even now, explicitly stated rather than implicit in motion, Torvald misreads the situation with horrible ignorance. When Nora's illegal contract is returned, rescuing Torvald from his ruin, he believes he can restore the situation in a moment, dressing his doll back in the clothes of which he has just disrobed her: "I wouldn't be a proper man if I didn't find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless."

But if Torvald is cognitively inert until the very final, preminitory words, Nora starts a Victorian, and ends a modern, even a prototypical feminist. Which is why it makes perfect sense for Wyman to transplant the play to the 1950s; as Peter Lathan observes:

the relationship between Nora and Torvald Helmer could have been patterned on the "happy home-maker" image of women pushed by the media of the '50s. Nora as the "little squirrel" in 1879 is reflected in the "squirrels and bears" of Jimmy Porter and his wife in 1956.

Like the late nineteenth century, the 1950s were a liminal period when the boundaries of politics were becoming stretched, but it was hard to balance its elastic potential against leaving the family home, proscriptive but warm, masculine but safe. When Mrs. Linde comes in from the winter cold to sit beside the fire, she is moving from insecure independence to - temporarily - comfortable conformity. Inversely, Nora leaves this setting to enter a chilly society on the brink of change. Yet because the domestic setting does, in spite of it all, work as a compromised idyll - with happy children, confidente maids, wealth - it is vital that we believe in Nora's individuality, trust that she would still be prepared to relinquish it. In this case, Nora (Tilly Gaunt) is one upon whom realisation dawns in a totally convincing way.

Nora has moments when she herself appears not dissimilar to Torvald. Having discussed Mrs. Linde's loss of her mother and her financial plight, Nora comments that Mrs. Linde is looking unwell: you ought to go to a spa, she suggests, in an naively ugly sort of affection. But if Nora displays the same lack of empathy - the ability to see through others - as Torvald, it is offset by the other dimensions and perspectives she embodies within her own fragile, effeminate frame. Like Walt Whitman revelling in his song of myself, Tilly Gaunt's Nora contains multitudes: she can be of an instant flirtatious, proud, manipulative, helpless, naive, sympathetic, girlish, maternal or gossipy. She is a doll, can wear any clothes, perform any act; her pleading with Torvald when she wants money - elegant arms extended, wrists flicking to his shoulder, skirt flying tantalisingly high as she moves - is hard even for the objective observer to resist, even though we see these actions for what they are, facile manipulations.

The trouble is that with the exception of her business loan, she has not adopted clothes of her choosing, but has had them put upon her by her gender, financial need, and social nicety: "I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy's doll child." It is this sense that Nora has always had the capacity to play any part, but this time will choose her own, that makes us have faith in that her ultimate decision is natural to her, rather than imposed by the dramatist to score a didactic point.

As she drip-feeds Mrs. Linde (and, vicariously, the audience) with information about her loan, she tells her that she dreams of seducing an elderly gentleman who will provide her with lots of money. Though Gaunt adopts a superficially gossipy tone here - it is a clichéd girlhood dream, after all - there is a darker undercurrent here. We fully believe that she could do this if she so wanted, and so when she tells Mrs. Linde that it is not the decrepit Dr. Rank who is her benefactor there is a sense that the audience themselves are not quite understanding Nora emotionally, not reading her correctly, even though we already knew in plot terms that Rank was not Nora's donor. The inevitability of the plot is in tension with the fluidity with which Nora performs and manoeuvres within and against its expectations.

Gradually, at the start of Act One, Nora peels away the layers of her secret: she took out a loan to pay for Torvald's rest cure, something he must not know about for fear of remission; the loan was from a mystery donor; she is herself paying back the loan by working, showing a financial acumen not normally associated with this Macaroon-munching spendthrift; the loan is from Krogstad. Then, from Krogstad, at the close of Act One come the damning revelations that expose her as having not been in control as she has narrated it: Krogstad will tell Helmer (so what, she impetuously replies, "then my husband will see for himself what a bad man you are"); the contract was invalid, having been signed by her father after his death. Don't you understand, he pleads, cajoles and implores, admirably caring about her as he sees in Nora the mirror of his own social downfall, you have broken the law.

When she then comes out that "then they must be very bad laws," we want to sympathise - Nora is right that the ends justified the means - but find it hard, because her rash lack of honesty does justify the trap in which she now finds herself at this, a literal end. Since Krogstad - diminuitive, harrassed - has suffered under the law having defrauded others for similarly sound motives, Nora for all her beautiful, batted eyelashes must be punished too. Society may be rigid, but it is only in representing that rigidity without any double-standards that the play can promote change. As with Torvald's rigidity, but in a different way, Krogstad's performance as a desperate but sympathetic man pleading for Nora to understand the legal nature of her plight lends some weight to Ibsen's assertion that this play is not about women's rights in particular, but human rights in general.

It is certainly not only a problem of gender, which is anyway just another costume, one Mrs. Linde, plainly dressed and fiercely motivated, has been able to cast off. It is not a problem of the errors one makes or the desires one has. It is a problem of individuality. This makes the play so powerful - just as she could have seduced Rank to attain the money, Nora could easily wheedle her way out of this hole, also. Torvald's reaction to Krogstad's first letter plays to a stereotype of the misled husband, and his joyous response to the returned contract is so self-indulgently celebratory, that we understand that, ruined or saved, Nora could adjust to accommodate herself to a new stereotype Torvald could make for himself: the deceived but forgiving husband.

But it is her refusal to do this even as she is at her most seductively potent, dressed in the bright red Capri costume of the tarentalla, that is the real glory. For all that it would resolve a plot and enact change of sorts, conforming to a type again would be to don a costume already made for her. So with Nora, it is not so much that she changes specifically, as that she accumulates potential to change in ways of her choosing. Torvald wants answers: won't she let religion guide her, what morals will she have, how can she leave her children, her sacred duty as a mother? Nora, confidently, admits that she has no answers or explanations. The difference is that when she does have answers, it will be she who supplies them. She is no longer a daddy's plaything - "I thought what Daddy thought" - she is an individual.

There are innate structural problems with Ibsen's play that the striking performances Whyman draws from her actors cannot counter. The final act is too long, and loses much of its dramatic momentum by the time of the infamous door slam. There are chronological flaws, as when Mrs. Linde leaves shortly after Krogstad to encourage him to return his letter, only to arrive at his house and find he has left for the country. Ibsen cannot quite resist the template of the "well made play" tradition with which he is working, with switches in plot being brought about artificially, through the arrival of letters at (un)fortunate moments. Tied to the demands of a plot of revelation, we are still some way from the modern drama of family crisis that we find in Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, where the mere tremor of Mary's hands and encroaching fog (Long Day's Journey Into Night) or the rise and dimming of lights (Death of a Salesman) bring about revelation through an almost purely symbolic drive.

Whilst updating the play to the 1950s makes sense in historical terms as the decade of emergent second-wave feminism and political ferment - both subtexts to O'Neill's and Miller's work around that period - other historically-specific aspects lose out in the translation. The idea that one is biologically infected with the moral sins of the fathers (or mothers) seems too vehemently adhered too for a decade which would see the discovery of DNA and when the effects of social Darwinism were all too familiar through the Holocaust. Rank is hysterical that his decaying spine is suffering for the Epicureanism of his father; Nora reacts with utter horror when Krogstad tells her she is a criminal and she shoos her bewildered children violently away as if they might catch her syndrome with a mere touch; Torvald is conviced that Nora must never be allowed to see her children. These beliefs make some sense - we still implicitly feel that bad parents make for ASBO offspring - but the vehemence of Dr. Rank's, Nora's, and Torvald's reaction requires the scientific endorsement of social Darwinism and degeneration, backgrounds which had been lost by the 1950s, though absolutely intense in the late nineteenth century.

Am I Normal? Spirituality and Psychiatry

2008-04-29T08:27:00.004Z

Until the BBC iPlayer was released, there would have been no point in blogging about programmes which the reader would have no chance of watching again. But the iPlayer is available, and so too is the exemplary documentary I watched last night: Am I Normal? presented by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron.

In the hour-long film - a sensible, grown-up film without patronising background music or silly graphics - she explored the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. Why is it that Pentecostals who speak in tongues are considered blessed, but schizophrenics who hear voices are institutionalised? Why is it that we pass by the street evangelist, thinking him to be slightly weird, but consider the grey-haired Carmelite nun, silently passing time in a convent, to be harmless?

Byron - an atheist herself - was open-minded about the value of religious belief for some people (statistically, patients with a spiritual background are more likely to recover from psychiatric syndromes than are atheists). But she was quite prepared to damn the cult of faith healing, which lacks any substantial evidence base and which may raise false hope for patients with severe medical conditions best treated by mainstream physical interventions. She was respectful in pressing the values and beliefs of atheists (Matthew Parris) and believers (Jeremy Vine) alike. She witnessed an evangelical song meeting, noting the same symptoms of crowd arousal - raised arms, physical proximity - as occur at football matches and rock concerts. She was intrigued by a trained psychiatrist who treated patients by exorcising the dead child spirits by whom they were possessed, seemingly (though no hard data is available) with results akin to those achieved by therapies such as CBT. Byron examined the neuroscience of talking in tongues (neurotheology). This has shown how the neurological system that regulates semantic language does shut down when people are being "possessed" as mediums for the "spirit," proving that they are not deliberate fakes, though it does not (cannot) prove either way the mechanism by which the synaptic action happens in the first place, whether supernaturally Holy or a self-induced behaviour.

This serious and sensitive look at what could have been a greatly divisive issue ought to be well-received by religious believers, atheists and scientists. It did not make grand claims to prove or disprove the existence of God, or to castigate religion as anti-science (though this was implicitly there in the background, in the consistent lack of an evidence base for alternative therapies and faith healing). Rather, it stuck to its remit to expose the conventions by which "normal" is determined, and it concluded with some force that what we classify as psychologically normal - and the normal therapies deployed to treat psychiatric disorders - are generally socially-constructed ideologies.

Because of this, many of the conventions and methods between treatments may be comparable at root. I noted that the psychiatrist-exorcist asked many questions of his patient whilst rhetorically planting ideas; a similar sort of approach is used by mainstream therapy or even by the Eliza chatbot (the latter, a simple artificial intelligence programme, is peculiarly effective at helping interlocutors to express their anxieties). It seems that treating patients with psychological problems may be done effectively through talking with God, inner demons, keyboards, doctors or priests. The challenge science and religion must meet now is to confront the evidence: even if normal and mad are arbitrary categories, there must be one form of treatment that is most effective, for most people, most of the time. One suspects the scientists may be very prepared to explore this. The priests, less so. But with the likes of Tanya Byron moderating, there may be hopes for a start.

Back to Kubrick's Future: Revisiting 2001: A Space Odyssey

2008-04-29T08:00:00.000Z

Because the broad remit of my research allows such things, since Christmas I have gone beyond the infinite universe of books to write on science fiction film, with my current focus being Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watching this in 2008, and reading about its reception at the time, is a slightly bemusing experience.

As Jerome Agel's contemporary edited collection, The Making of Kubrick's 2001 reports, critics at the time were less than complementary about Kubrick's ten million dollar baby (the contrast with the universal acclaim for Grand Theft Auto IV released today could not be more striking). Some excerpts from the more damning reviews:

You could see it a dozen times and still not understand it. But then, you didn't really expect to understand a movie that took $10.5 million and four years to make, did you?

The guesses of Messrs. Kubrick and Clarke must be as good as ours.

Were 2001 cut in half it would be a pithy and potent film, with an impact that might resolve the "enigma" of its point and preclude our wondering why exactly Mr. Kubrick has brought us to outer space in the year 2001...We hope he sticks to his cameras and stays down to earth - for that is where his triumph remains.

Granted: 2001 is the head flick of all time. Note the faintly resinous spoor of the audience, the people fighting at intermission to get those 50-cent chocolate bars, the spaced-out few who contemplate the curtain for long minutes after the movie ends.

The tedium is the message.

That last piece of pithy genius is from Joseph Gelmis, but in a second review, having watched the film again, he acknowledges one of the problems reviewers of the film at the time faced:

When a film of such extraordinary originality as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey comes along it upsets the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies. They are threatened. Their most polished puns and witticisms are useless because the conventional standards don't apply. They need an innocent eye, an inconditioned reflex and a flexible vocabulary. With one exception (The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt), the daily and weekly reviewers offhandedly dismissed the film as a disappointment or found it an ambitious failure.

Gelmis's first review in Newsday (April 4, 1968) classified it precisely in these terms. However, his second review admired the fact that it "uncompromisingly demands acceptance on its own unique terms." Unfortunately, as Gelmis noted, such a refusal to buckle to the audience's demands for simple plot and exegesis meant that its stark originality did not make sense except on a second or third viewing.

But this is precisely why I am so surprised by all the negative reviews from 1968. Because, in 2008, one can only ever watch 2001 for the first time having already seen it many times before. This is to say that anyone who has ever played Frontier Elite to the soundtrack of the Blue Danube Waltz, or seen adverts for the Apple Macintosh, or watched Star Wars or Star Trek or last year's science fiction hit Sunshine has already experienced Kubrick's vision. It is hard to overemphasise how odd seeing 2001 retrospectively is; its visual coinage has been in the cinematic economy for four decades now, and numerous shots first witnessed in 1968 set off echoes in the head today. It is therefore impossible to read the contemporary reviews objectively, without a sense of historical irony: unless, like Gelmis, they were prepared to watch it a second time, they would all be proved wrong.

However, before one gets too heady with schadenfreude, one is brought down to earth with a bump. Kubrick's aesthetics may have survived in the cinematic medium, but the vision of science has not been realised by 2008 in reality. At the time, that famous dissolve in which the spinning bone morphs into a rotating space satellite signified the compression of technological development. A year before man actually did land on the moon, space travel and intelligent computers must have seemed a mere frame in history in the future. Looking back today, we are reminded that 2001 did not see the rise of artificial intelligence nor space exploration.

Indeed, a year earlier we'd all been terrified by millennium bugs infecting cranky dumb machines. That AI has failed to come to fruition as Kubrick and Clarke anticipated can be seen not as endorsing the fact that the human mind is so advanced no machine can match it, but that the human mind is so limited that it never can invent a machine to match it. For the twenty-first-century spectator of 2001, perhaps the most profound message is that Clarke and Kubrick, writing in the heyday of the space race and the Eliza chatbot, wrongly judged the acceleration of scientific development. In the twenty-first century the chronology of history and the future-time of the novel have switched places. Thus HAL becomes not so much the potential nightmare we want to avoid, but more symbolises the dream we may not ever realise, due to our own limited knowledge in comparison with that represented in his omniscient but fictional mind.

A similarly depressing story is told by 2001's vision of space travel. Famously, this is presented as being entirely mundane. It involves talk about freeze dried sandwiches ("What's that? Chicken?" "Something like that. Tastes the same anyway."), inane birthday greetings from mum and dad, lounging on sun beds. However, as we know from the Columbia disaster, space remains a risky and colossally expensive business. It is the specialist enterprise of big government, not space tourists (though Virgin Galactic may be seeking to change that).

Space science today is mundane, but in a significantly different way to that which Kubrick imagined. Until it was taken over by images of galaxies colliding - admittedly a pretty exciting firework, though not of our making - the BBC space section was reporting news of the Galileo satellite launch. Space is going to give us better sat nav so that we don't get stranded down country lanes on the way to the Dog and Duck. In comparison, the grand voyages to Jupiter and beyond the infinite seem - in the finite historical timeframe that separates 1968, 2001 and 2008 - a sorry world away.

Please Help Me Redesign the Pequod

2008-04-28T12:51:00.003Z

The Pequod underwent a serious refurbishment in July 2007, and I am generally pleased with it. However, I spent this weekend doing a bit of spring cleaning, changing the look of the highlights sidebar down the left, and cleaning up the right-hand navigation column. This now bundles all the RSS, save, print and share facilities together above the search box, and includes a direct commenting feature. I have also increased the line spacing and changed the font of the main text, to improve legibility.

The reasons for the slight change were twofold.

Firstly, though hits across the site overall are quite good, there seem to be few people who actually browse across all the sections. Some visit the photoblog, but not the blog or essays. Others read one essay, but do not explore the poetry. I suspect much of the reason is to do with the quality of the content, which is by no means exemplary or captivating. Nevertheless, I hope the rejigged sidebar will draw more visitors to explore content across the site.

Secondly, I know from tracking the "came from" option that many users download the essays to their hard disks, or email them to friends. This suggests that they are being read seriously, and used. However, I get very little feedback on them. By putting a comments box on page in the right sidebar rather than at a central comments page, I hope to facilitate more immediate responses to my work (which is, after all, a key reason for putting it online).

However, I am considering one other change that may be more dramatic. I like the three column layout because it places the text at the centre, improving legibility and making a direct connection between the horizontal navigation bar at the top (allowing me to dispense with individual page titles). But which order should the sidebars be in? There seems to be quite a debate about whether a navigation sidebar should go on the left or right of the page. One theory runs that since the eye scans from left to right, items on which you place the greatest emphasis should go on the left. On the other hand, since the dominant text on each page of a three column layout is clearly in the centre, the eye may skip over the left sidebar and concentrate on everything from the centre to the right margin.

On The Pequod, given my first point above the most important sidebar element is the cross-promoted content i.e. the latest blog and photoblog post, and featured writing. This currently resides in the left sidebar. Should it move to the right, with the navigation switching to the left? Happily, a quick change of the CSS stylesheet allows me to see this in action, though I am not the best judge of the content. So what do you think? Compare the layout of the blog you are reading to the test page, and please let me know your considered comments.

The Terror of Photography

2008-04-22T08:10:00.003Z

Poor Phil Smith. There he was at the turn-on of the Ipswich Christmas lights, wielding his swanky SLR camera, when he was hauled out of the crowd by a police officer. Demanding to see his licence - he neither had nor needed one - the police officer then used stop and search powers, ordered all the pictures to be deleted, and instructed Mr. Smith not to take any more. Perhaps if Mr. Smith, like the rest of the crowd, had been using mobile phones or pocket cameras, he would have been all right. The trouble was, he looked a bit too professional for the policeman's liking. He may even have been a terrorist.

In reality, as the BBC's report explains, it was the policeman - a special constable - who was entirely in the wrong, as the Suffolk Police later admitted. Nevertheless, the incident does indicate the problems of photographing in public, in a general era of paranoia about bombs and paedophiles. Take this advertisement from the Metropolitan Police, which warns "Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd? Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take."

Now I have taken thousands of photos, and I am - hands up - a fanatic...when it comes to photography. But if one of my photos seems odd, it is due to my creative limitations rather than my designs as a terrorist. But I can quite easily imagine a situation in which I take a photo of a public building (which will invariably include CCTV cameras) and then - like any good photographer - keep a record of weather conditions, location and the like, for future reference on my photoblog. Observed to be doing this, everyman is a potential Smith, if he happens to wield his camera at the wrong time or to look a bit weird - and don't we all, squatting and peering with one eye shut through the viewfinder?

Recognising the current state of affairs, MP Austin Mitchell, a keen photographer and chair of the Parliamentary All-Party Photography Group, has now tabled a motion in the House of Commons, calling on the Home Office to educate police about what powers they do have to prevent photographers, and to educate photographers about their rights.

The law, as it stands, says that "you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private" (Solicitor Hanna Basha). Photographers have every right to take photographs in public places, although - quite rightly - there are restrictions around certain public and military buildings, and under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without suspicion if the area is considered a likely target for attack (hardly likely in the case of the Ipswich Christmas lights, unless you consider ex-Eastender Letitia Dean a political target). Nonetheless, this (surely?) does not mean that they have the right to order the deletion of images if they are subsequently found to be entirely appropriate. It certainly does not mean that serious photographers need a licence to work in public places. Nor does it mean that they require the written permission of everyone they photograph (imagine the hassle shooting the London Marathon!).

If you are a keen photographer, or just a concerned citizen of a liberal democracy, I urge you to write to your MP asking them to support the motion, or at the very least to sign the petition on the Downing Street website. I have just done this, although living in the countryside the greatest danger to my photography comes from the cow rather than the policeman.

Teletext Extra (or Teletext Less)

2008-04-16T12:37:00.002Z

Environmental sensitivity is increasingly being deployed as a tool for commercial promotion.

Today, Tesco announce their intention to start adding "carbon labels" to 70 000 of its own-brand products, allowing shoppers to compare carbon costs across similar products, much as they currently do with salt content or price. This is, of course, a commendable plan, although it is one that will work only if low-carbon alternatives (which often means locally grown) are available. Given the regular absence of their Local Choice milk from the shelves in our area, this may not work well in practice; sticking a label on a packet is a little like adding a sticking plaster to the massive carbon wound that is the current food chain system. And it is, of course, a label that shouts as much about Tesco as a family friendly brand as it does about a real committment to the environment. Given Tesco's recent profits hit 2.8 billion, there is always more that can be done at root. Nevertheless, they must get marks for trying.

But if I am somewhat cynical about Tesco's commercial motivations whilst pleased about the plan in environmental principle, I am left utterly angered by the recent service that has stealithly crept up the wires overnight to find its way into my television. I'm talking about Teletext Extra, "a new service for Freeview, combining a sophisticated Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and a new improved Teletext service." New it may be, but improved?

Rather than enhancing the usability of the Freeview TV guide, the updated system is hard to navigate, slow and - on our small screen - virtually unreadable. Its sole purpose seems to be commercial: the bottom third of the screen is now taken over by advertisements for Sky, Virgin and - that's right - sex channels. Worst of all, though, is that the service intended to sell goods has completely failed to realise that environmental sensitivity will inform commercial success.

Every time you turn the digital box on, the new service shouts that it MUST BE ALLOWED TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW GUIDE (or, if you really, really don't want to, you can press menu to exit, and wait for about 30 seconds before the black curtain to television-watching is raised). I am in trouble, it seems, because I turn the box off at the plug once I've finished watching. This was never a problem for the old software on the Freeview box, which happily remembered its previous settings. Teletext Extra, though, tells me in no uncertain terms that I MUST LEAVE THE BOX ON STANDBY OVERNIGHT. DO NOT TURN OFF AT THE WALL.

What utter and absolute ignorance of all the current logic within the electronics industry, which seems - slowly but incessantly - to be switching on to the fact that consumers want (and the planet needs) electronic devices that turn off when not needed, and draw radically reduced power when running. Though a complete ban on standby options may be impractical, the government's 2006 Energy Review is set to pressurise makers from above to be sensible about this (and their 2007 Consultation on the Promotion of Energy End-Use Efficiency recommends that all public procurement of electrical devices draw upon a list of the most energy efficient systems, including those which minimise or eliminate power on standby).

So how, given this climate of public opinion and government consultation, was it determined that the Freeview service - which will be the most popular way to receive television following the 2012 switch off - should now run autocratically on such an energy inefficient piece of software? Whilst the first fault must lie with the makers, the government and OFCOM also should have been monitoring and influencing the development of a service that is nationally widespread.

I am not the only one to have complained to Teletext Extra about this. Others have deluged the service with complaints about software glitches. Happily, though, whether you are concerned about the environmental implications of millions of boxes being left on overnight, or simply do not like the poorly designed system, there is a solution, and it is possible to go back to the old, functional guide.

Riverdance

2008-04-11T14:28:00.005Z

What is it about a beached boat that attracts so much attention? Why do I learn of one man who has spent a week in penitential observance, standing from 9.00 to 3.00 in the bitter cold, before dashing to the nearby petrol station - the shop of which is now doing an incredible trade - for tea and a toilet?

The grounded Riverdance certainly stands out, a wart on the skin of a beach otherwise unblemished for several hundred yards out to sea, and for several miles up and down the coast. It is the incongruity of its 6000 tons just waiting there that fascinates. The tempting metaphor, is, of course, to describe it as a beached whale. And it is a hard image to resist: it is whale-like, with the curved hump of keel presented to the shore giving it, from this angle, a strangely organic quality. There are no radar masts or portholes to mark it as machine, just a bulk of ruddy steel, fringed by green around the Plimsoll line, speckled with tendrils of weed. Indeed, the only thing to break this animal analogy are its propellers and rudder silhouetted against the sky.

Although they are stuck fast now, it is possible to imagine the struggle of rudders, flapping from side to side like aimless fins, to hear screws slapping the air between cresting waves, as the captain battles against grounding; then the engines' roar turning to a churn, and an ominous grind of sand. In fact, it is this, too, that seems out of place: the timing is all wrong. For those who come to watch it now, it is hard to reconcile the immobile hulk of it all with the violence of the night in which it stationed itself there: gales, high seas, a mayday dashed off through static bursts, the relief of floodlights and flares, decisions taken, a boat abandoned, lifeboats and chattering helicopters. Even on a day like this, with knives in the north wind, the boat seems too stolidly resistant to have ever suffered drama, to have carried cargoes of fear rather than to have attracted merely prurient spectators.

Though it is not the ship alone which draws vistors. Prevented from getting closer to the ship than 200 metres, the exclusion zone that rings it paradoxically generates excitement. The round-the-clock presence of security guards and bemused contractors advertises it as loudly as the neon lights on Blackpool's sea front herald the fairground and the arcade. "It's official," they flouresce in their yellow jackets, "it's an event, a danger, a problem, a puzzle. Something could change at any moment. Watch and see!" Nothing will happen, of course, at least not with the drama the officaldom proclaims and the watchers expect. With its own, slow but incessant grace, all that is happening is a...tilt. Having grounded at a five degree list, the vessel has now tipped through over ninety degrees, toppled by the weight of its superstructure, now half-buried beneath the sand.

It is nice to imagine that it could be sucked completely away, a slow-motion magical trick performed by the cape of quicksand. It would then become the mirror to the shipwreck that lies a few yards from it, the Abana, sunk in 1894 in a similar winter storm. Just a few ribs of black wood - charred black by salt water rather than fire - poke the sand at low tide. But whereas the Abana can be left peacefully to rot, the Riverdance cannot be allowed to just vanish. In a fluke of global positioning, it is settling over a major sewage pipe, so as of writing the current plan is to break it up in situ, before this curiosity becomes an environmental catastrophe.

Retrospective Reading: Frankenstein and the Embryology Debate

2008-04-08T16:33:00.005Z

I recently presented a conference paper on science fiction, considering the theoretical problems of reading retrospectively, after its one-time futuristic visions have now been technologically realised. In one of the examples I used, contemporary reviewers of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds were impressed by Wells' evolutionary imaginings of how the Martians might look, and how they might be defeated by bacteria; they enjoyed his novel presentation of heat rays, tripods and flying machines. But they do not seem to have focused much on how the invasion narrative was intended as a critique of Victorian society in his present, showing how quickly the veneer of civilisation would drop away under the stress of war. However, modern readings now emphasise the novel as a social satire, an approach given added plausibility since World War One did indeed bring Victorian civilisation almost to its knees, through the use of poison gas and flying machines.

In a lecture presented to the Royal Institution entitled "The Discovery of the Future," Wells ascribed to creative writers (himself included) the ability to discern the future with a near empirical accuracy. Like a palaeontologist who by piecing together fossil fragments is able to reconstruct prehistory, the creative writer is able to assimilate the ideas of the present and project a reliable scientific vision of the future. Whilst in the postmodern age of textual relativism such a view seems always suspect, Wells is not unique in holding this perspective on science fiction, though he is rare in the objective force of his argument. Wells would, I suspect, have got on with the recently departed Arthur C. Clarke, who similarly argued in his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" that good science fiction should be grounded in extrapolations of present reality, unless it was to become mere fantasy.

However, it seems clear that science fiction does not have any strong claim to predictive validity. Any judgements it makes are given empirical weight only with the benefit of hindsight. In order to seem predictive, science fiction only needs to be lucky once. Star Trek's communicator device seems not unlike a contemporary mobile phone, and so Star Trek is taken as a good predictor of the future. But where are the holodecks, warp drives, and voice-activated computers? Certainly, all these sorts of things will come to pass eventually - virtual reality, space travel, intelligent-type machines. But in reality they will come about not because Star Trek made them so, and not primarily because science has been inspired by the series, but because when they come to be we will recollect the fiction and structure the contemporary technologies according to its earlier, fictional versions. If science fiction seems to present an accurate picture of the future, it is principally because fiction is always going to be reframed in terms of the present.

The reason for this excursion into literary theory of science fiction is that the recent debate about the embryology bill currently being legislated in Parliament has also employed a science fiction text in considering the ethics of the present. The bill would allow scientists to create human-animal embryos for research purposes. Cytoplasmic embryos containing 99.9% human DNA, and the remainder animal, would be grown in the lab for a few days, and then be harvested for stem cells to be used in research into cognitive degeneration diseases: Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Motor Neurone Disease.

However, whilst the scientific research that would be allowed by the legislation is specific and with particular medical benefits, the reaction to the bill - orchestrated by the Catholic church - has been anything but subtle. Particularly grabbing the headlines was the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Edinburgh, Cardinal Keith O'Brian. He polemicised:

This bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.
In some other European countries one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal.
I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.
The opposite has indeed taken place - the time allowed for debate in parliament and indeed in the country at large has been shockingly short.
One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on.
Many excuses are being made for this present legislation, particularly that cures will soon be found for various diseases which afflict mankind through this legislation.

My objection to the Cardinal's squeals of objection lies in his use of the terms "monstrous" and "Frankenstein" as a catch-all phrase designed to prevent engagement with his argument on any logical grounds, instead invoking the spirit of innate disgust. Given my introductory discussion about the retrospectivity of science fiction, what happens when Frankenstein is introduced into a debate like this (as it has previously been in relation to Genetic Modification, in the form of "Frankenfoods")?

The use of the "Frankenstein" metaphor disrupts logic. It prevents readers and listeners from considering what the science's future really is - immediate and specialised, to grow cells for a few days in a petri dish - and expands it in a limitless bubble of blind ambition. As we inevitably reconstruct the present science in terms of the past text, it seems as if Mary Shelley definitively predicted this would happen, that scientists in a laboratory in Newcastle would try to tamper with life in a grand way (they are, objectively, not doing this - simply manipulating a few cells not whole human bodies). Therefore, any other such claims made in the fiction take on empirical weight as the definition of where science will inevitably, with absolute predictive truth as envisaged by Wells, want to travel morally in its discovery of the future.

Like a giant and unilateral weight, the fiction text is dropped on the science to make a number of associative predictions. The Cardinal invokes sexual deviancy: "The norm has always been that children have been born as the result of the love of man and woman in the unity of a marriage." Frankenstein indeed insinuates a slightly incestuous relationship between Victor and Elizabeth; because Frankenstein was right about scientists tampering with life, it must also be right about the horror of a society in which heterosexual monogamy is no longer an automatic given. The Cardinal challenges us to allow life "to triumph over these deathly proposals"; given the connection with Frankenstein, the implication is that if we fail to prevent the legislation we are performing the moral equivalent to Frankenstein's graveyard robberies. Because one aspect of Frankenstein's legacy appears to have come true, so must all the other aspects of the text.

Rereading Frankenstein, though, as I currently am, I am struck by how much more nuanced it is. Frankenstein is far from pure evil, which is why he is such a compelling and interesting figure. His ambition is directed to the best of purposes, to "renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption." This is a reading which would also apply to the scientists, but the focus in the Cardinal's argument is not on them personally, but on the hideous objects - hybrids of life and technology - which they create. Does the Cardinal not think that scientists doing the work have themselves weighed carefully and personally the ethics of doing this research against the ethics of failing to pursue research which will almost certain provide great medical benefits? In the novel there are numerous cases of ambition and intent for far less admirable and transient ends than those of Frankenstein - financial gain, sexual desire - even if Victor's methods are the most distasteful. Victor Frankenstein may confront the reader with a moral case, but he is far from simply morally corrupt. Frankenstein is a dialogue in the life sciences, not a diagram against it. It is also a science - in the broadest sense - of human life, human nature, human passion and desire, and where the limits of the desire that drives civilisation should be curtailed.

Frankenstein is a wholly appropriate text to bring to the debate about embryological research, and the biosciences generally. Its nuances make it an ideal philosophical abstraction by which we can think through the ethics of science in a general sense, outside of the frantic contexts of our current time. However, it needs to be done in a way that treats the narrative with the complexity it deserves, not just extracting those elements which seem to mesh, with absolute predictive force, with where science is in the present. Constructing the present in terms of the past is a dangerous business, because we are doomed to carry out only the lessons from it which stand out most starkly. Those who oppose embryological research need to read carefully the fictional texts that they choose to use as empirical evidence; they should not unreflexively extract those moments that seem to suit their singular ends so well in the present.

Reading Lists

2008-04-07T11:29:00.002Z

Recently reading Aldous Huxley's little-known The Devils of Loudun, and wanting to know what others might have made of it, I stumbled across a website called Portico. Maintained by "R. J. Keefe, gent," its writer admirably keeps a daily blog of his reading of books and reviews, and other cultural activities.

As you will have realised by the sporadic nature of my postings on The Pequod, life as an academic reader and writer keeps me so busy that I do not have time to update the blog as often as I would like (some would say, given the babbling stream of my consciousness, that this is a good thing). However, the Portico example did get me thinking I could do a little more to track my reading habits.

I was aware that there are a number of online "reading list" websites - coming under the rubric of "social cataloguing" - through which you can chart your reading and share it with others of a like mind. Having trialled the best-known of these, LibraryThing, and discovering that its free version allows you to upload only 200 books, I finally opted for Goodreads. I am not sure quite what intellectual purpose cataloguing one's reading habits can serve, other than bloated self-satisfaction at the volume of books devoured. Nevertheless, I quite like being able to track all my past, present and future reads in one place, and am happy to be able to share it with you - the world! - through the gadget now in the left sidebar of all pages on The Pequod.

The Cost of War

2008-03-10T22:38:00.005Z

I remember during the run up to war on Iraq watching a Question Time special, in which Tony Blair fielded (or evaded) questions from a live audience. Having by this point moved his justificatory position away from the suspect "45 minute" claim, towards the humanitarian one, I fumed at the television. Admitting that the war would cost around £4 billion (around $8 billion), but proclaiming that it would liberate the 30 million population of Iraq, I wanted to play Blair at his own game of numbers, trading off financial costs with humanitarian benefits.

For my bargaining chips I chose HIV. According to the later UN 2004 report on AIDS, 5 million people are in need of AIDs treatment worldwide, with the annual cost of treatment in the Third World around $300. For $8 billion you could have treated 26 million AIDs victims; that is, for the UK's involvement in Iraq, we could have treated every current sufferer in the world for the next five years. So pretty much the same as the number of Iraqis who would be liberated from authoritarianism, but without the inestimable risk, inestimable moral cost and inestimable future impact of fighting in this field of the War on Terror.

But if I was angered by Blair's refusal to take his moral relativism to the obvious conclusion that the war was relatively (and now objectively) bad value, at least I cannot grumble too much now about his financial estimates: the current cost of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan has been a mere four times the estimates, £8 billion ($16 billion). Compare this to the case in the US, as exemplified on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week of a couple of weeks ago. This includes an interview with Joseph Stiglitz about his controversial new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the War in Iraq. Unwittingly, the discussion is hilarious, because the ultimate stakes are so serious.

At the outset, the US contribution to the War in Iraq was supposed to cost $50-$60 billion (one economist at the time dared to claim it would cost $100-200 billion...but he was fired). The cost today is estimated in Stiglitz's new book to exceed $2 trillion.

Marr then asks, "so that's a mistake of around 20 times as much?" to which Stieglitz replies, "Probably more than that. it's of that order of mistake. It's huge." Marr continues for a moment, before Stieglitz interjects, "No, no, it's actually 200, because remember 60...10 times would be $600 billion, and, er so" - remember, this is a Nobel prize-winning economist - "we're talking about, er...more than that." Masterfully, Marr concludes, "Well I can't even get the order of the mistake right!"

But this is paradoxically hilarious, because of course the stakes, financial (not to mention those less easy to quantify), are so enormous; one simply cannot do other than laugh at the whole, elephantine error of it all. It has its own bleak humour, because one can only imagine that it is the result of a sleepily casual theorising conducted over coffee and croissants in the White House a few weeks before the invasion:

So, Dick [Cheney], how much is this expedition gonna cost?
Well, Mr. President, I'm pleased to say that we have a special offer on all our Middle East invasion range, yours for just - well, sir, for you, just $60 billion. No, $50 billion (what's $1 000 000 000 between friends?)
Oh, mmm [mouth full of buttery pastry] I'll take one of those, and throw in a couple of insurgencies while you're at it.

One could, of course, contest Stiglitz's estimates, which rely on extrapolating the indirect costs such as increased oil prices and future health care. But the government's own facts about the direct costs in the present speak for themselves: they are investing $12 billion per month on the war. Compare that to $5 billion given in aid to Africa each year. That budget represents just ten days fighting in Iraq. Or, to use my original comparison, for one month in Iraq the world's AIDS victims could have been treated for the next decade. Stiglitz's hesitancy was apt: the whole thing does not add up.

Literature That Speaks, Characters Who Live

2008-03-10T08:57:00.006Z

Any university teacher will grumble about the bad grammar and stylistic infelicities of first-year university students (see The Kids Aren't All Write from the Time's Higher). As I have noted before, since these are in many respects capable and intelligent students, and grammar as a technical procedure is not particularly demanding to learn, the blame for their mistakes must lie neither with them, nor with their previous teachers, but with an education system that does not reward the ability to write accurately. I gather that marks for spelling, grammar and presentation in language-based A-levels now comprise a maximum of just 3 percent of total marks, down from 5 percent when I was in their shoes a decade ago.

But if my students' linguistic errors reflect the bias of the amorphous system in which they have been raised, there is perhaps something altogether more sinister in the grammatical error I have noticed recurring in my most recent batch of marking essays on drama. This is the tendency to talk of "people that." People or characters that occupy the stage; people that suffer tragedy; dramatists that critique society. In the semantic shift from "who" to "that," people are deprived of agency, mutated from whole subjects into objects, from individuals who live, breathe and die into things that simply are. Whenever I correct a "that" which should read "who," I get a chill as there seems something cold, steely - even scientific - in the slip, as if the students presume characters to have been presented for the sole, didactic benefit of their analysis, rather than existing as rounded beings viewable in many dimensions and with many significances.

There is something of the surveillance society about this, as if we can view drama only through a grainy lens as a prurient snippet of Big Brother gossip that happens to pass the time. But we should experience drama not top-down, but live it through the characters, the fully-rounded embodiments of complex ideas that - if we sympathise correctly - we suddenly apprehend clearly, and in the instant of the drama's movements. It is to the idea that passes through the character, not to the character or person directly, that we should respond with the epiphany (as expressed by Fay Weldon), "yes, yes, that is exactly how it is. Life is like that." Only once we appreciate that characters are beings like ourselves, have lives of their own rather than existing solely for the purposes of polemic or entertainment, can we legitimately move from "characters who" to "characters that": characters that show in their realism that this is how life is.

Or, if not surveillance, in talking of "characters that," it is as if my students are playing a computer game, the first-person shooter, in which the actors are mere sprites (echoes of E.M. Forster's flat characters here), things presented to which we can do things - usually violent - to score points. But the drama is not like that. It does not demand we do anything other than gently hear the play; and if we listen hard enough, we will realise with a start that the thing being objectified is not the tragic hero or comic fool, but our own comfortable systems of beliefs.

Or, if not the computer game, the "character that" is a translation from contemporary media reporting of the War on Terror. The depersonalising effect by which the language of Western anti-terrorism turns subjects into objects was explored recently in an exemplary essay by Yonatan Mendel:

An Israeli journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them, or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but murder is out of the question.

The Palestinians are passive objects, recipients that have things done to them; the Israeli IDF are the agents who are swift, purposive, judicial. Is it really a leap too far of my sinister imagination, if I suggest that the move in the drama from "characters who" do things to "characters that" exemplify the view of the dramatist is the reflection of the journalism of terror?

Of course, the consequences of reading literature with the wrong sort of perspective are not directly as great as those of reading the Muslim Other as an objective incarnation of an absolutely Evil ideology. But there is something of a parallel, for if we cannot know literature as being inhabited by other lives that are in their own way as purposive as our own - lives presented to us in the best possible, because artificial, framework in which our sympathy can be encouraged - what hope for the real world in all its interwoven web of moral meanings through which it is always difficult to cut, more so done with the bent knife of Western reportage?

George Eliot is perhaps the exemplary novelist, for she is not - at least not directly - a moralist, presenting characters as analogues for criticism. She instead allows her characters to inhabit the stage of the novel as fully and from as many different perspectives as possible. Most famous is the moment in Middlemarch when, having spent so long representing the world through the eyes of the young heroine Dorothea, she suddenly turns to the reader and demands:

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.

Eliot's contemporary, Arthur Sedgwick, observed that the consequence of the web of relationships between the rounded characters who Eliot presents in her novels, is that:

If George Eliot has real dramatic power, and has imagined real characters, there is no doubt that it is folly to say that she is primarily a critic. But we think she has not. What she has done has been to describe, with such wonderful minuteness and ironical force, the thoughts and feelings which, under given circumstances, a certain kind of person might have, that we are forced to admit the possibility of the picture, or, to speak more accurately, the reality of the report.

Or, as A.S. Byatt notes of Eliot, she "saw her work as making incarnate certain ideas that she apprehended in the flesh, i.e., sensuously, materially, through feeling." It is this view of ideas "apprehended in the flesh," emerging through characters and their emotions rather than layered upon them like a simple costume, that is shown as having been lost by the the thought of "characters that." But if we are to avoid becoming morally autistic in drama and in life, we must be capable of occupying the world as if through the eyes of another, even those who seem (as Casaubon, or as the terrorist) unlikeable, or who seem (as dramatic figures are) exemplars of some moral position we could get at through objective rather than subjective means (for example, through placing Chekhov in the context of Russian history, or through a misreading of what the Koran definitively says).

The Credit Crunch

2008-02-15T08:33:00.000Z

Question: Which literary character is a Collatorised Debt Obligation (CDO)? Obvious answer: Faustus. Listening to a recent Radio 4 documentary on the crisis in the international banking markets, the Mephistopheles of the recent Credit Crunch is the financier who has concocted clever ways of wrapping up essentially bad or high risk debts into attractive packages, and selling them to a banking system lusting not for anything so beautiful as Helen of Troy, more that end of year bonus and swanky basement conversion to their house in the suburbs. Whispering in the ear of bankers in the bars of the city, the economist has proposed:

But now thou must bequeath it solemnly,
And write a deed of gift with thine own blood;
For that security craves Lucifer.

Unfortunately, that "security," or CDO seems to have been not so safe after all. As several bankers in the programme rued, we have been here several times before since the 1930s, and failed to learn from each crash, always believing "this time, we're cleverer than the previous lot. Except, of course, we're not." The burning of books (or the run on the bank) ensues.

Our Chorus for the complexities of the money market is John Lanchester, who in a brilliant explanation of "Cityphilia" in the London Review of Books allows us "to wonder at unlawful" (well, almost) "things":

A well run bank is a machine for making money...Imagine, for the purpose of keeping things simple, a country with only one bank. A customer goes into the bank and deposits £200. Now the bank has £200 to invest, so it goes out and buys some shares with the money: not the full £200, but the amount minus the percentage which it deems prudent to keep in cash, just in case any depositors come and make a withdrawal. That amount, called the ‘cash ratio’, is set by government: in this example let’s say it’s 20 per cent. So our bank goes out and buys £160 of shares from, say, LRB Ltd. Then LRB goes and deposits its £160 in the bank; the bank now has £360 of deposits, of which it needs to keep only 20 per cent – £72 – in cash. So now it can go out and buy another £128 of shares in LRB, raising its total holding in LRB Ltd to £288. Once again, LRB Ltd goes and deposits the money in the bank, which goes out again and buys more shares, and so on the process goes. The only thing imposing a limit is the need to keep 20 per cent in cash, so the depositing-and-buying cycle ends when the bank has £200 in cash – all the cash there is – and £800 in LRB shares; it also has £1000 of customer deposits, the initial £200 plus all the money from the share transactions. The initial £200 has generated a balance sheet of £1000 in assets and £1000 in liabilities. Magic! In real life, it’s even better: the UK cash ratio is 0.15 per cent, so that initial £200 would generate £133,333 on both sides of the balance sheet.

I though I had a handle on the way the stock markets work, but it appears not. Enter, yours truly, the clown. Having recently acquired some inheritance, I decide to invest rather than paying off my student loan, and trot into the Co-Operative bank, they being the most ethical of a pretty bad bunch. The happy consultant grasps my hand, and thrusts in my face a series of graphs and charts that flow inevitably upwards towards monetary heaven, promising a 10 - nay 20 percent - return on my investment, staggered to receive greatest tax benefits, risk spread - like a low fat version - across different environmental and ethical funds. I turn to leave with a guide tucked under my arm, and swear as I do that the consultant is secretly congratulating himself on another sale:

when thou took'st the book
To view the Scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves,
And led thine eye.

Luckily, I am not so blind as to fail to read the small print. Wherein I discover how banks, even the nicer ones like the Co-Operative, make so much money. Thank you for your deposit, Mr. Faustus. Now, we'd just like to chip off 1.5% here (a management fee, you understand); oh, and we'll take 3% of whatever you gain; and how about 0.1% (just for the hell of it). So if I invest £3000, by the end of the first year I will have lost about £285, and over five years for every pound of my money I risk, and assuming I do gain with an upturn in the markets, the bank will get themselves the same amount again.

Count me out of this opportunity (yes, that's right, the markets being so low and volatile at the moment, this is a great time to invest, Sir!). This scholar wags his philosophical finger, and heads over to National Savings and Investments.

Fredric Brown's "Answer": A Short Story of the Internet (from 1964)

2008-01-31T22:42:00.000Z

Dinah Birch's Times Literary Supplement review of Brian Aldiss's latest Science Fiction Omnibus cites a "piercingly brief story" by Fredric Brown, called "Answer." It is brief. But if it is piercing, this is not wholly to do with its succinctness, but has much to do with its prescience. Written in 1964, there's something very disturbing, sublime and aweful, about this description of the internet, as it was then not known. The story is probably still in copyright, but - what the heck - I loved it so much, and it's so brief, that I invoke the interests of "fair use" (and wider dissemination) to reproduce it here:

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
"Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

The large part of my current research involves looking for the ancestors of the concept of the cyborg, or posthuman (see N. Katharine Hayles or Donna Haraway). It's academic, dense, and theoretical - a quest for the roots of an idea that is ideologically very old, though the shiny technological manifestations of it are superficially, shinily novel (think The Terminator, The Matrix, the human genome project). But my circuitous (forgive the pun!) philosophy is brightened by anecdotal moments which connect past - an age before the internet - to present, in a way that reminds in an instant that the human imagination has long transcended the limits of its environment, without the need for virtual reality helmets or the hyperlink. Which leads me to one other prescient factoid I recently discovered: the idea of the hyperlink, the structuring of information by association of content rather than alphabetical order, is almost unanimously traced back to Vannevar Bush, with his Memory Extender. The date he first raised the idea: 1933 - before even Alan Turing, let alone Tim Berners-Lee.

Where is the University?

2008-01-21T15:38:00.000Z

This week's (stylishly revamped) Times Higher has an extended article by Matthew Reisz on what a university is for. Is it for pursuing knowledge for the sake of it? For engaging with business and the demands of the economy? For promoting social mobility? My own impression, and the implication of Reisz's survey of opinions, is that universities are blank slates upon which, although (or because) relatively free from state control, the government can impress its broader ideological and social abstractions. In the current climate, this is the use of private finance for the improvement of public services. In part, then, universities are simultaneously where the state of the culture is writ large, as well as where that culture can be modified by new research and technologies. This is why the question "What is a university?" is also a question about "What is society?" and so far from being a peripheral issue to be discussed behind closed doors at university senates, it should be of concern to all, whether readers of the Times Higher or not.

One aspect of Reisz's article struck me in particular, which is that one of Cardinal Newman's original principles in The Idea of a University was that a university should bring academics and students into proximity, not necessarily in terms of their ideas but physically, as a community living over an extended period under one (or several) roofs. However, with the expansion of higher education, halls of residence have become distributed (where they still exist at all), and the commendable open-access policies that inform institutions like the Open University suggest that geographical centredness is not itself central to the idea of a modern university.

Two anecdotes occur here to suggest that, in this particular aspect of his argument, Newman may have been short sighted (as Reisz shows, it is surprising how many other aspects remain pertinent today). According to these two, universities are really functions of action rather than place.

The first is from Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind. He imagines a prospective student touring a university. He or she sees the library, the labs, the sports arena, but then asks the tour guide, "But where is the university?" According to Ryle, the mistake made by the student is a failure to realize that "university" and "library" are terms that belong to different logical categories. (The analogy signifies Descartes' mistaken assumption that there is a ghost inside us that works a merely mechanical body, without understanding that mind labels a behaviour, which - like the university building - is a different category to things, including the brain that may give rise to mind). In the advertisements section of the same issue of the Times Higher, a university campus in Croatia is listed as being for sale or rent. The buildings may exist, but this particular university is no more; likewise, just because we have the infrastructure of universities in the UK does not mean that - whether in Russell red brick or Million+ concrete - they exist unchanging and for all time. Much of New Labour's secondary education policy seems to have been directed at changing the architecture and nomenclature of schools, building glassy new academies - and they may be right that in this case changing the physical form of education for the better will also improve its chances of success with those who are involved in it. But, though that new physics lab or supercomputer may provide for a glossy photo opportunity, this rule does not hold true of a university in general.

The second anecdote comes from the U.S. When Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia University in the 1950s, he was introduced to senior faculty. He remarked how pleased he was to meet with the employees of the university. He was interrupted by the physicist I.I. Rabi: "Mr. President. We are not the employees of the university. We are the university!" (Thanks to Heinz R. Pagel's The Dreams of Reason for this).

A Medical Pioneer: Double Red Donation

2008-01-17T12:08:00.000Z

Long reading for research about scientific revolutions, I have myself become a modest pioneer in the field of medicine. Attending my regular blood donation session, a nurse at the welcome desk looked me up and down - all 6 foot 2 inches of me - and called over a colleague, and asked me if I would like to do a special donation and jump the queue. "Ha, going to take two pints of blood off me," I joked. "Well actually..." came the serious reply.

And so it was that I found myself hooked up to a £100 000 blood separation machine, the first person in the whole North East region to donate in this way. The device separates red blood cells, white cells, and plasma as you donate, and then returns the latter components (plus a saline solution) to the donor, who is thus able to give double the amount of red blood cells than at a single, regular donation.

The benefits are many. As a double donor, I am requested to give blood every eight months instead of every four (and, I checked, this does count as double on your donation record, meaning you accumulate the same number of points to get the pin badges). Although I'm a regular donor, the double system is excellent if it can capture from one-off, casual drop-in donors. The patient - particularly those with anemia or haemoglobin deficiencies, which demand red blood - receives a double dose of red blood cells from one donor, reducing their risk of reacting to antibodies. And, the blood being separated "live" on site, it can be directed straight to hospitals rather than via blood banks.

The donation itself lasts longer than normal (about 30 minutes), and there is quite an administrative rigmarole to go through, as the machine requires data about your height and weight (you have to be above 70kg.); because you need high iron levels to compensate for the loss of the red blood in which it is contained, you also need to do a separate iron test which involves drawing blood through a needle, rather than the simple thumb prick. However, the needles used in the donation are smaller, and therefore less uncomfortable. Indeed, there is (for me at least) a pleasant diversion in seeing your own blood separated before your eyes, with the data about my insides projected onto the machine's screen. The only disconcerting aspect is when the fluids are returned to you, which induces a slightly cold tingle in the arm. But, at the end, I felt as fine as after a regular donation. Then again, with six nurses surrounding the bed monitoring my progress and training on the machine, who wouldn't!

Double red donation has been established in the US, though it is only recently being deployed here, as my pioneer work attests. The UK Blood Service has some information about it in their recent leaflet, as does the US Blood Service.