Quotulatiousness

December 6, 2024

Victoria’s Canada through the eyes of British visitors

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Michael Ledger-Lomas considers what earlier British visitors to Canada after Confederation wrote about their experiences:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

… The re-election of Donald Trump, who has already daydreamed about turning Canada into his 51st state, might even rekindle Tory patriotism. After all, their Victorian ancestors created the dominion of Canada in 1867 to keep British North America from the clutches of the United States.

A longer view shows that Canada has allured but also vexed British observers ever since its creation. The Edwardian era produced an especially rich crop of writings on Canada. In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the first train from Montreal pulled into Vancouver. This completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had persuaded the Crown colony of British Columbia to join in the new federation. In expanding Canada, the CPR also made it easier for British people to see the country. Having crossed from Liverpool to Montreal on a fast liner, they could visit most of its major cities, which were found on or near the railway.

Literary celebrities did so in enviable conditions. The CPR’s bosses loaned the poet Rudyard Kipling his own carriage in 1907, so he could travel in comfort and at his own speed. His impressions, which appeared in newspapers and then as Letters to the Family (1908), make for particularly resonant reading today. Although a man of strong prejudices, he had seen the country up close, rather than merely retweeting allegations about it, and was prepared to be surprised as well as disappointed by it.

Kipling’s contemporaries travelled with heavier and very different ideological baggage than we carry today. It was not wokery that worried them, but irreligion and greed, two poisons that had crept north from America. When the clergyman Hensley Henson steamed into Vancouver, in July 1909, he was horrified to see its beaches plastered with “vulgar advertisements”. The further [East] he travelled, the worse things became. The Anglican clergy were “weaklings” who made no dent on a materialistic society. Winnipeg was given over to “graft”. Young people in Ontario spoke like gum-chewing Yankees. Quebeckers were despoiling their province by setting up hydroelectric dams on its waterfalls.

Kipling did not share Henson’s churchy desire to scold his Canadian hosts. He was a cheerful freethinker who considered materialism a necessary part of nation-building. Canada had “big skies, and the big chances”: he admired its railway workers and lumberjacks for their insouciant and sometimes drunken swagger. Boom towns like Winnipeg excited him: he loved to see office blocks rise and streets flare with natural gas lamps; he lost considerable sums speculating on Vancouver real estate.

What worried him was rather Canada’s fading strategic commitment to the Empire. The modern Right understands Canada as a battleground for the values of “the West”. Kipling, who had married an American and lived for some years in Vermont, naturally believed in and did much to formulate the fervent if vague sense that English-speaking peoples share a civilisation. Yet this did not weaken his overriding concern for the political cohesion of the British Empire. Canada’s failure to join as enthusiastically in Britain’s recent war against the rebellious Dutch Boers of South Africa as he would have liked weighed on him — so much so that he kept calling the prairie the “veldt”. Kipling regarded the scepticism of Liberals and Socialists at home about whether the Empire offered value for money as a “blight”: now this “rot” seemed to be spreading like Bubonic plague, “with every steamer” to Canada.

The way to draw the dominion back to the motherland was to fill it with English settlers who shared his distaste for domestic Socialism. The dilution of English Canada worried Kipling. He allowed the Francophone Catholics of Quebec their differences — he found their basilicas romantic — but the policy of settling the prairies with hardy Slavs from the Habsburg and Russian Empires appalled him. These “beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands” could never assimilate to English Canada. Nor did he care that many were fleeing oppression: people who renounce their country have “broken the rules of the game”.

November 26, 2024

Orwell is more relevant now than at any time since his death

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m delighted to find that Andrew Doyle shares my preference for Orwell the essayist over Orwell the novelist:

It is not without justification that Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become the keystones of George Orwell’s legacy. Personally, I’ve always favoured his essays, more often quoted than read in full. I recently wrote an article about his essays for the Washington Post, focusing on their relevance to today’s febrile political climate. You can read the article here. I would draw particular attention to the multitude of comments from left-wing readers who are apparently outraged at my argument (actually, Orwell’s argument) that authoritarianism is not specific to any one political tribe. They seem oddly determined to prove the point.

Orwell is unrivalled on the topic of the human instinct for oppressive behaviour, but his essays are far more wide-ranging than that. In these little masterworks, one senses a great thinker testing his own theses, forever fluctuating, refining his views in the very act of writing. The essays span the last two decades of his life, offering us the most direct possible insight into this unique mind.

[…]

I find Orwell’s disquisitions on literature to be among his most rewarding. “All art is propaganda”, he declares in his extended piece on Charles Dickens (1940) [link]. This conviction, flawed as is it, accounts for his determination to focus less on Dickens’s literary merits and more on his class consciousness, which is found wanting. Even better is Orwell’s rebuttal to Tolstoy’s strangely literal-minded reading of Shakespeare (1947’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” [link]), which is so rhetorically deft that it seems to settle the matter for good.

Another impressive essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940) [link], opens with a glowing assessment of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1935) but soon broadens its range to cover many contemporary novelists and their approach to social commentary. The title is a reference to Miller’s remarks on the Biblical tale of Jonah, suggesting that life inside the whale has much to recommend it. Orwell puts it this way:

    There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.

Orwell invites us to imagine that the whale is transparent, and so writers of Miller’s ilk may snuggle contentedly within, observing without interacting, recording snapshots of the world as it bounces by. This kind of inaction is anathema to Orwell, whose every written word seems to be driving towards the enactment of social change.

Orwell’s essays often serve as a cudgel to batter his detractors. He dislikes homosexuals, or those “fashionable pansies” who lack the masculine vigour to take up arms in defence of their country. He displays a similar lack of patience for the imperialistic middle-class “Blimps” and the anti-patriotic left-wing intelligentsia, or indeed anyone who adheres slavishly to any given political ideology. His work bears much of the stamp of the old left; that mix of social conservatism and economic leftism that we see most powerfully expressed in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” [link]. Bad writing is also a recurring bugbear; Orwell’s loathing of cliché and “ready-made metaphors” is one of the reasons his own prose style is so effervescent.

[…]

When Orwell pessimistically refers to “the remaining years of free speech”, one cannot help but be reminded of the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of today’s British government. He expresses irritation that more writers are not wielding their pens in the service of improving society. His own work, by contrast, is what he would term “constructive”, profoundly moral, and purposefully crafted in the hope of actuating real-world change. While other writers resigned themselves to a life inside the whale, Orwell was determined to cut his way out.

November 12, 2024

“Nice business ya got there, Patreon. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it …”

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Above the paywall, Ted Gioia discusses Apple’s latest attempt to cut itself a nice big middleman’s slice of the indy creator market by putting the thumbscrews to Patreon:

Can Apple really charge a 30% tax on indie creators?

What Apple is now doing to indie creators is pure evil — but this story has received very little coverage. Journalists should pay attention, because they are under threat themselves.

Apple is now putting the squeeze on Patreon, a platform that supports more than a quarter of a million creators — artists, writers, musicians, podcasters, videographers, etc.

These freelancers rely on the support of more than 8 million patrons through Patreon, which charges a small 8-12% fee. Many of these supporters pay via Patreon’s iPhone app.

Earlier this year, Apple insisted that Patreon must pay them a 30% commission on all new subscriptions made with the app. In other words, Apple wants to take away close to a third of the income for indie creators — almost quadrupling their transaction fees.

This is the new business model from Cupertino, and it feels like a Mafia shakedown. Apple will make more from Patreon than Patreon does itself.

The only way for indies to avoid this surcharge is by convincing supporters to pay in some other way, and not use an iPhone or Apple tablet.

This is what happens when Apple decides to treat a transaction as an “in app payment” — as if an artist’s entire vocation is no different than a make-believe token in a fantasy video game.

But you can easily imagine how almost anything you do with your phone could be subject to similar demands.

I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.

September 13, 2024

Fiction should have heroes, not merely the morally ambivalent “heroes” modern writers prefer

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton is nostalgic for some of the books and movies of his youth, which often had an actual hero you could root for:

Somewhere along the way, fiction started changing.

In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.

Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.

And that’s a problem. Why?

Well, let’s start with this bit from C.S. Lewis:

Now, I grew up in the era of Rambo and John McClain. I had tough-guy heroes and I also had those that were just regular folks thrust into bad situations.

But there were always good guys and there were always dark forces at work.

The world is more muddied than that, sure, but entertainment doesn’t have to reflect reality perfectly. I mean if that were true, how did Lord of the Rings do so well? Elves and orcs and uruk-hai aren’t exactly real, now are they? Neither are hobbits, Jedi, terminators, or any of a million other fictional creations.

Yet what existed in all of those stories were good guys fighting to put down the evil that arose.

As Lewis argues, it taught my generation and those before and right after mine that cruel enemies can be defeated.

Today, though, we see all too many stories where the enemies prevail, where good fails to triumph over evil, and evil is allowed to remain.

For a while, there was a certain amount of shock value to that. This was when this was the exception rather than a normal thing you would see. It was that moment at the end when you realize the good guy lost despite their best efforts, that revealed at the end that the hero who sacrificed himself to kill the bad guy failed to actually kill him.

August 29, 2024

QotD: The Price of Speed

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Recently, over lunch, Mrs. Muros regaled me with tales of authors who treat their readers to several new novels a year. As she waxed rhapsodic on the subject of the people who put the “p” in “prolific”, I scribbled notes on a credit card receipt. “Why is it”, I wrote, “that these ink-strained Atalantas can fill several pages with reasonably readable prose in the time it takes me to assemble a simple Substack post?”

The answer, I mused, might have something to do with sex. All of the authors mentioned by My Yankee Sweetheart, after all, were fully paid-up members of the distaff half of humanity. Could it be that my words fail to flow like summertime honey because my brain has been pickled in androgens? Or, to be somewhat less of a bio-Calvinist, could it be that my refusal to engage in the formal study of literature — a policy which owed much to my belief that the subject was “for girls” — left me bereft of some of the most useful tools of the writer’s trade?

Later that day, as I ransacked back issues of obscure journals in the hope of finding an uncooperative fact, a warm yellow bulb of incandescent understanding appeared above my head. ‘Twas not the writing that slowed me down, I realized, but the research. Indeed, were it not for the pesky puzzle piece I was trying to find, my article would have been done and dusted well before The Love of My Life and I sat down to our midday meal.

Before it faded, my wee epiphany bore two sprogs. The elder of these reminded me that, like other forms of mass production, the prodigious productivity of the quill-drivers in question owed much to the avoidance of novelty. That is, they were able to write so much because, in effect, they made repeated use of familiar formulae, tried-and-true tropes, and recurring turns-of-phrase. The younger of my mind-sparks added that, in addition to taking up time that an writer might otherwise spend at the keyboard, the discovery of a new fact will often lead to a quest for fresh forms of expression.

So, to quote the immortal words of David Crowther, you pays your money and you takes your choice. You can write quickly, or you can say something new, but you can’t do both.

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “The Price of Speed”, Extra Muros, 2024-05-21.

August 26, 2024

The craft of the historian, then and now

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Extra Muros, Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson contrasts the way historians used to research and write their books with the much more convenient, yet still imperfect methods of modern historians:

Another difference between ancient historians and their modern counterparts.

In days of yore, when visiting an archive required long journeys by sea, or, at the very least, a tiring trek o’er moor and mountain, considerate historians stuffed their works, with extensive excerpts from primary sources.1 Later, when trains, planes, and automobiles made it easier for people to visit the places where original documents could be found, these quotations shrank, eventually to the point where the word “citation”, which had once described the products of scholarly stenography, came to designate the label that enabled readers to locate the one-of-a-kind text in question.

No doubt, this development saved many trees from the woodman’s axe. At the same time, however, it changed the role played by historians. Rather than showcasing selections from the correspondence of old-timey movers and shakers, Clio’s children devoted most of the ink that they spilled to the explanation of texts that, despite the blessings bestowed by coal and petroleum, most readers would not be able to read.

Many a noble soul resisted the temptation to sacrifice verbatim reproduction on the altar of erudite interpretation. Realizing that readers might prefer a faithful facsimile of the real McCoy to a ponderous paraphrase, these saints of the scriptorium prepared primary sources for the press. However, rather rewarding these benefactors of the historically curious with condign praise, the denizens of the faculty lounge often dismissed them as “editors” and, in moments of especial cruelty, “antiquarians”.

In the fullness of time, the convenience provided by recent interpretations led many historians to prefer them to the relics of bygone bureaucracies. After all, reading a fresh-smelling, neatly-bound, clearly-printed, recently-written book asks less of a scholar than the deciphering of unfamiliar turns-of-phrase scribbled on the dusty, mite-bitten contents of cardboard boxes. Moreover, while the reader of a scholarly monograph often enjoys a wide choice of restaurants and coffee shops, and, at the very least, the delights of his own kitchen, the archival archaeologist must often make do with the decidedly institutional offerings of a ground-floor cafeteria.

Ostentatious reliance on recent interpretations also enables a scholar to exhibit his collegiality. “See”, the favorable footnote screams, “someone noticed your work and, marvelous to say, made use of it”. Conversely, failure to cite the work of a peer, let alone a scholar of superior standing, signals a degree of nonchalance bordering on contempt. “I am fully aware”, it says to the author of the unreferenced work, “that you poured your heart and soul, as well as a dozen years of your life, into your study, but I could not be bothered to type out its title, let alone turn a page to discover its date of publication”.

Finally, the making of new monographs out of the pieces of slightly older ones honors the founding fable of the research university, the myth of scholarly progress. The monograph still warm from the press, we presume, offers more in the way of insight and understanding than one that has been sitting on the shelf for decades. (If you wish to drive a dagger into the heart of an older academic, describe one of his earlier works, especially one that once made a splash in the kiddie-pool of his subfield, as “somewhat dated”.)2

Prejudice in favor of up-to-date interpretations creates a paradox. Historians, who exist to bring the past to life, favor interpretations created on the eve of now. The speakers for the dead (hat tip to Orson Scott Card) limit themselves to the thoughts of the living.

    1. For a brief, and delightfully documented, description of the work of the paragon of this approach to the writing of history, Angelo Fabroni (1732-1803), see Anthony Grafton The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) pages 82 and 83.

    2. Ask me how I know!

July 17, 2024

QotD: “Orwellian”

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All writers enjoying respect and popularity in their lifetimes entertain the hope that their work will outlive them. The true mark of a writer’s enduring influence is the adjectification of his (sorry, but it usually is “his”) name. An especially jolly Christmas scene is said to be “Dickensian”. A cryptically written story is “Hemingwayesque”. A corrupted legal process gives rise to a “Kafkaesque” nightmare for the falsely accused. A ruthless politician takes a “Machiavellian” approach to besting his rival.

But the greatest of these is “Orwellian”. This is a modifier that The New York Times has declared “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer … It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.”

Orwell changed the way we think about the world. For most of us, the word Orwellian is synonymous with either totalitarianism itself or the mindset that is eager to employ totalitarian methods — notably the bowdlerization or suppression of speech and freedoms — as a hedge against popular challenge to a politically correct vision of society dictated by a small cadre of elites.

Indeed, it was thanks to Orwell’s books — forbidden, acquired by stealth and owned at peril — that many freedom fighters suffering under repressive regimes, found the inspiration to carry on their struggle. In his memoir, Adiós Havana, for example, Cuban dissident Andrew J. Memoir wrote, “Books such as … George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 became clandestine bestsellers, for they depicted in minute detail the communist methodology of taking over a nation. These […] books did more to open the eyes of the blind, including mine, than any other form of expression.”

Barbara Kay, “The way they teach Orwell in Canada is Orwellian”, The Post Millennial, 2019-11-29.

July 13, 2024

“Canada has disclosure issues”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The recent revelations about Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s family have certainly roiled the turgid waters of Canada’s tiny literati community, but was the scandal actually all that well hidden beforehand?

Alice Munro accepting the 2006 Edward MacDowell Medal, 13 August 2006.
Screenshot from a video of the event via Wikimedia Commons.

The Toronto Star ran two articles last weekend revealing that Andrea Skinner, third and youngest daughter of Nobel-prize-winning author Alice Munro, was sexually assaulted as a nine-year-old by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, Alice’s second husband.

The assaults occurred in the 1970s. Alice learned of them in 1992 when Andrea, then twenty-five, wrote her a letter detailing the abuse. After briefly leaving Fremlin, Alice returned to him. Andrea, feeling her mother had chosen her abuser over her, eventually cut ties with Alice and went to the police. Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault in 2005.

I’m not going to dwell on the abuse. It’s all here, and it’s distressing to read. One can only hope that recognition of what she suffered as a child and the pain she’s carried throughout her life brings some solace to Andrea.

I wish that had been my first reaction to the stories, but I was too long a journalist. My first thought was sordid. Good on the Star for getting the scoop.

My second thought was, how was this not reported earlier? It’s obviously a big story, and it all played out in open court. It’s surprising that it didn’t make headlines.

In yesterday’s Star, the always interesting Stephen Marche put the blame on “a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence” amounting to “a national pathology”. He recalls that CBC radio star Peter Gzowski’s dirty laundry wasn’t aired until he’d passed; that CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi’s outrageous behavior was not immediately called out; that author Joseph Boyden and singer Buffy Sainte-Marie both passed as Indigenous for a long time (Boyden does, in fact, have Indigenous blood). “Everybody knew but nobody knew,” Marche writes of each of these cases, adding that the Canadian arts and entertainment community “has been a breeding ground for monsters”.

I think Stephen has a low bar for monstrosity, but I am susceptible to his broader argument. Part of the reason I was happy that the Star got the scoop (and sincere congratulations to editor Deborah Dundas and reporter Betsy Powell on landing it) was that we sometimes first read of our biggest scandals in the international press. Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s crack scandal was revealed by Gawker, Justin Trudeau’s blackface habit by Time. Canada has disclosure issues.

The more I think about those issues, however, the less it seems we’re alone with them. How long did it take Harvey Weinstein’s crimes to make headlines? Bill Cosby’s? The US has had its share of long-running identity hoaxes: Elizabeth Warren, Hilaria Baldwin, Rachel Dolezal, and Jessica Krug. We didn’t learn that Kerouac was a thug and Salinger a creep until after they were gone. And it’s especially hard to sustain Marche’s argument that Canada is an outlier when the White House has been playing Weekend at Bernie’s for the last couple of years.

Certain stories are just slow to break. People keep secrets. Others abet them. Not many journalists frequent courtrooms way out there in Goderich, Ontario, and Fremlin’s name on the docket would not have sent off flares. Most people I’ve spoken to this week couldn’t have named Mr. Alice Munro last week.

There was no conspiracy, or at least not a broad one. I’m confident that any newsroom I was a part of would have run with the Munro story had we caught a whiff of Fremlin’s conviction. It’s not impossible to imagine other newsrooms making different editorial choices, perhaps arguing that Fremlin’s assaults didn’t merit coverage: he was a nobody apart from his association with Alice Munro; the offence was minor in a criminal sense (he served no time); Alice was not a party to the assaults; publishing the story would only serve to smear her by association. But I’ve not seen any evidence that any news outlet had a whiff of this story.

Only a small circle of people knew of Fremlin’s crime, most of them in the Munro family, and they weren’t talking. I contacted a few of the best Canadian literary gossips I know and they had heard nothing until last weekend. It’s not true that “everybody knew”.

Two who did know were Alice’s publisher, Douglas Gibson, and her biographer, Robert Thacker.

June 4, 2024

J.K. Rowling’s most convincing and true-to-life villain in the Harry Potter stories

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m with Jon Miltimore on this — J.K. Rowling’s most disturbing and best-written villain isn’t “He Who Must Not Be Named” or any of the other (frankly cardboard-y) magical villains … it’s Dolores Umbridge, a career bureaucrat who could have been drawn from any western civil service senior management position:

Umbridge, portrayed in the films by English actress Imelda Staunton, isn’t some apparition of the underworld or a creature of the Dark Forest. She’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, the man who runs the government (the Ministry of Magic) in Rowling’s fictional world.

Umbridge wears pink, preaches about “decorum” in a saccharine voice, smiles constantly, and resembles a sweet but stern grandmother. Her intense, unblinking eyes, however, suggest something malevolent lurks beneath. And boy, does it.

“The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” horror author Stephen King wrote in a review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Umbridge is introduced.

Umbridge’s “Desire to Control, to Punish”

What makes Umbridge so evil that King would compare her to Hannibal Lecter, the man widely considered the greatest villain of all time?

I asked myself this question, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that Dolores Umbridge is so real — and in more ways than one.

First, it’s noteworthy that Rowling based Umbridge on an actual person from her past, a teacher she once had “whom I disliked intensely on sight”.

In a blog post written years ago, Rowling explained that her dislike of the woman was almost irrational (and apparently mutual). Though the woman had a “pronounced taste for twee accessories” — including “a tiny little plastic bow slide” and a fondness for “pale lemon” colors which Rowling said was more “appropriate to a girl of three” — Rowling said “a lack of real warmth or charity” lurked below her sugary exterior.

The description reminded me of another detestable literary villain: Nurse Ratched, the despicable antagonist of Randle Murphy in Ken Kesey’s magnificent 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kesey’s description of Nurse Ratched conjures to mind a character much like Umbridge.

“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils — everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails …”

While there are similarities in the appearances of Dolores Umbridge and Nurse Ratched, their true commonality is what’s underneath their saccharine exteriors.

April 3, 2024

Man of his era, indeed – “we think too much of Thomas Jefferson, because we don’t see his cultural context”

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray on the sudden discovery of his dissertation topic in a quite unexpected venue:

Thomas Jefferson, 1800.
Oil portrait by Rembrandt Peale via Wikimedia Commons.

Fifteen years ago, more or less, I stumbled into a topic for a dissertation when I got frustrated and took a walk. I was in Worcester, Massachusetts, working in the archives at the American Antiquarian Society and finding just absolutely nothing at all that answered my question. So I wandered, and passed a decommissioned armory with a sign over the door that said MASSACHUSETTS MILITARY ARCHIVES. They let me poke around, and by the end of the day I was running around with my hair on fire and shouting at everybody that my dissertation was about something else, now.

State militia courts-martial in the opening decades of a new republic recorded every word, in transcripts that could run to hundreds of pages — frequently interspersed with a line that said something like, “Clerk again reminded witnesses to speak slowly.” The dozen officers who made up a militia court weren’t military professionals, but were instead the prominent farmers and craftsmen who were elected to militia office by their townsmen. So transcripts of state military trials were verbatim discussions among something like the most respected farmers of a county, or of this county and the next one over. They were not recorded debates between the great statesmen of the era. And they needed a big room where a dozen men could sit at a long table in front of the parties and the spectators, so state courts-martial tended to convene in taverns.

One more important thing: The formalization of military courts was way in the future, and there wasn’t a professional JAG Corps in the militia to run trials. State courts-martial were a lawyer-free forum. The accuser was expected to “prosecute” his case — to show up and prove the wrongdoing he had claimed to know about. And defendants were expected to personally defend themselves, questioning witnesses and presenting arguments to the court. At the end of testimony, the “prosecutor” and the defendant personally went home to write their own closing statements, and we still have these documents, tied into the back of the trial transcripts with a ribbon. Courts would stop in the evening and resume in the morning, and men accused of military offenses would show up with twenty-page closing statements in their own handwriting, with holes in the page where the pen poked through.

So: a panel of farmers, serving as local militia officers, listening to an argument between farmers who served as local militia officers, in a tavern, and we have a detailed record of every word they said.

They were magnificent. They were clear, thoughtful, fair, and logical. They had no patience at all for dithering or innuendo; they expected a man who accused another man of wrongdoing to get to it, in an ordered and serious way. Witnesses who fudged or evaded ran into a buzzsaw. The officers on the courts would interject with their own questions: Look, captain, did he say it or didn’t he? And then they wanted a serious summary of the evidence, with a consistent argument. Their thinking was structured, and they expected the same of others.

We distinguish between talking and doing, and between talkers and doers. But these men were doers in the hardest sense. Their families starved or thrived because of their work with tools and the skill in their hands. Their food came from their dirt, outside their front door. They mostly weren’t formally educated; they didn’t spend their young lives going to school. They worked, from childhood. And yet they could talk, meaningfully and carefully. They could address a controversy with measured discourse, gathering as a community to assess an institutional failure and organize a logical response. Their talking was another way of doing.

The historian Pauline Maier has written that we think too much of Thomas Jefferson, because we don’t see his cultural context. The Declaration of Independence looks to us like a startling act of political creativity, systematically describing a set of grievances and proposing an ordered response based on a clear philosophy of action. But Jefferson showed up after years of disciplined and thoughtful local proclamations on the crisis, Maier says. He was the national version of a hundred skillful town conventions, standing on the foundation of an ordered society that knew what it believed and what it meant to do about it.

April 2, 2024

Publishing and the AI menace

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte fiddles around a bit with some of the current AI large language models and tries to decide how much he and other publishers should be worried about it:

The literary world, and authors in particular, have been freaking out about artificial intelligence since ChatGPT burst on the scene sixteen months ago. Hands have been wrung and class-action lawsuits filed, none of them off to auspicious starts.

The principal concern, according to the Authors Guild, is that AI technologies have been “built using vast amounts of copyrighted works without the permission of or compensation to authors and creators,” and that they have the potential to “cheaply and easily produce works that compete with — and displace — human-authored books, journalism, and other works”.

Some of my own work was among the tens of thousands of volumes in the Books3 data set used without permission to train the large language models that generate artificial intelligence. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or disturbed. In fact, I’ve not been able to make up my mind about anything AI. I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other models to see how they might be useful to our business. I’ve found them interesting, impressive in some respects, underwhelming in others.

Unable to generate a newsletter out of my indecision, I called up my friend Thad McIlroy — author, publishing consultant, and all-around smart guy — to get his perspective. Thad has been tightly focused on artificial intelligence for the last couple of years. In fact, he’s probably the world’s leading authority on AI as it pertains to book publishing. As expected, he had a lot of interesting things to say. Here are some of the highlights, loosely categorized.

THE TOOLS

I described to Thad my efforts to use AI to edit copy, proofread, typeset, design covers, do research, write promotional copy, marketing briefs, and grant applications, etc. Some of it has been a waste of time. Here’s what I got when I asked DALL-E for a cartoon on the future of book publishing:

In fairness, I didn’t give the machine enough prompts to produce anything decent. Like everything else, you get out of AI what you put into it. Prompts are crucial.

For the most part, I’ve found the tools to be useful, whether for coughing up information or generating ideas or suggesting language, although everything I tried required a good deal of human intervention to bring it up to scratch.

I had hoped, at minimum, that AI would be able to proofread copy. Proofreading is a fairly technical activity, based on rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. AI is supposed to be good at following rules. Yet it is far from competent as a proofreader. It misses a lot. The more nuanced the copy, the more it struggles.

March 16, 2024

Orwell – The New Life (DJ Taylor in discussion with Les Hurst)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Orwell Society
Published Jun 9, 2023

DJ Taylor discusses his new biography of Orwell with Les Hurst

Part 2:

The Orwell Society
Published Jun 26, 2023

DJ Taylor answers questions and discusses issues raised by Orwell Society members.

December 9, 2023

QotD: A secret of effective writing

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m in the process of editing a document for a technical project that is intended to be an introduction for newbies to certain fairly complex issues. While requesting feedback on the project mailing list, I realized that I had accidentally revealed a major secret of really top-grade writing, exactly the sort of thing that put The Cathedral and the Bazaar on the New York Times best-seller list.

I see no reason not to share it with my readers. So here is the relevant part of my request for feedback:

    Please fix typos and outright grammatical errors. If you think you have spotted a higher-level usage problem or awkwardness, check with me before changing it. What you think is technically erroneous may be expressive voice.

Explanation: Style is the contrast between expectation and surprise. Poets writing metric poetry learn to introduce small breaks in scansion in order to induce tension-and-release cycles at a higher level that will hold the reader’s interest. The corresponding prose trick is to bend usage rules or change the register of the writing slightly away from what the reader unconsciously expects. If you try to “fix” these you will probably be stepping on an intended effect. So check first.

(I will also observe that unless you are already an unusually skilled writer, you should not try to replicate this technique; the risk of sounding affected or just teeth-jarringly bad is high. As Penn & Teller puts it, “These stunts are being performed by trained, professional idiots.”)

Eric S. Raymond, “A major secret of effective writing”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-05.

November 3, 2023

QotD: The use of Epigraphy and Papyrology in interpreting and understanding the ancient and classical world

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… let’s say you still have a research question that the ancient sources don’t answer, or only answer very incompletely. Where can you go next? There are a few categories, listed in no particular order.

Let’s start with the most text-like subcategories, beginning with epigraphy. Epigraphy is the study of words carved into durable materials like stone or metal. For cultures that do this (so, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans: Yes! Gauls, pre-Roman Iberians, ancient Steppe nomads: No!), epigraphy provides new texts to read and unlike the literary texts, we are discovering new epigraphic texts all the time. The downside is that the types of texts we recover epigraphically are generally very limited; mostly what we see are laws, decrees and lists. Narrative accounts of events are very rare, as is the epigraphic preservation of literature (though this does happen, particularly in Mesopotamia with texts written on clay tablets). That makes epigraphy really valuable as a source of legal texts (especially in Greece and Rome), but because the texts in question tend to be very narrowly written (again, we’re talking about a single law or a single decree; imagine trying to understand an act of Congress renaming a post office if you didn’t [know] what Congress was or what a post office was) without a lot of additional context, you often need literary texts to give you the context for the new inscription you are looking at.

The other issue with epigraphy is that it is very difficult to read and use, both because of wear and damage and also because these inscriptions were not always designed with readability in mind (most inscriptions are heavily abbreviated, written INALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONATALL). Consequently, getting from “stone with some writing on it” to an edited, usable Greek or Latin text generally requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text, reconstructing missing words (based on the grammar and context around them) and making sense of what is there. Frankly, skilled epigraphers are practically magicians in terms of being able figure out, for instance, the word that needs to fit in a crack on a stone based on the words around it and the space available. Fortunately, epigraphic texts are published in a fairly complex notation system which clearly delineates the letters that are on the stone itself and those which have been guessed at (which we then all have to learn).

Related to this is papyrology and other related forms of paleography, which is to say the interpretation of bits of writing on other kinds of texts, though for the ancient Mediterranean this mostly means papyrus. The good news is that there is a fairly large corpus of this stuff, which includes a lot of every day documents (tax receipts! personal letters! census returns! literary fragments!). The bad news is that it is almost entirely restricted to Egypt, because while papyrus paper was used far beyond Egypt, it only survives in ultra-dry conditions like the Egyptian desert. Moreover, you have all of these little documents – how do you know if they are typical? Well, you need a very large sample of them. And then we’re back to preservation because the only place you have a very large sample is Egypt, which is strange. Unfortunately, Egypt is quite possibly the strangest place in the Ancient Mediterranean world and so papyrological evidence is frequently plagued by questions of applicability: sure we have good evidence on average household size in Roman Egypt, but how representative is that of the Roman Empire as a whole, given that Egypt is such an unusual place?

Outside of Egypt and a handful of sites (I can think of two) in England? Almost nothing. To top it all off, papyrology shares epigraphy’s problem that these texts are difficult and often require specialists to read and reconstruct them due to damage, old scripts and so on. The major problem is that the quantity of recovered papyrus has vastly outstripped the number of trained papyrologists, bottle-necking this source of evidence (also a lot of ancient papyri get traded on the antiquities black market, potentially destroying their provenance, and there is a special level in hell for people who buy black market antiquities).

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.

October 31, 2023

QotD: Orwell’s “hero” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Like virtually all utopian or anti-utopian satires, Nineteen Eighty-Four presents drab, flat characters living in a grim world. Their journeys are predictable because their freedoms are narrow, often nonexistent and merely imagined. You cannot judge this book by the conventional criteria signaling a “good” novel. Even the main characters are not three-dimensional figures.

That is how it should be. What would you expect? In a world like this, it would be inconsistent, if not contradictory, to portray human beings who are not stunted and who live exciting lives with unexpected plot twists and turns.

Yet there is a hero in this anti-utopia, and Orwell’s magnificent portrait exemplifies its consummate artistry. The multidimensional, richly drawn “hero” is none other than the setting — that is, the empire of Oceania itself. Its history, its corrupt and tyrannical ruling Party, its oppressive and terrifying technology, its ingenious propagandistic language (“Newspeak”), its hatred of the body and sexuality (Julia belongs to — and pretends to support — the Junior Anti-Sex League): all this makes it a rounded, fascinating, creatively elaborated “character”. And there is no room for any other. Because Oceania is omnipotent and omniscient, it determines that its citizenry — whether prole or Party leader — is a cipher. The setting is, as it were, the (pseudo-Marxist) substructure; the superstructure of character and plot are determined by and beholden to it, utterly secondary and “superfluous” by comparison.

Orwell created an unforgettable, terrifying character — Oceania — and showed its “development” (in the spheres of technology, language, warfare, geopolitics, state torture, social relations, and family and sexuality) with astonishing inventive prowess. That development is manifested above all in Oceania’s range of technological gadgets, Newspeak neologisms, and Party slogans and catchwords.

And that is why Nineteen Eighty-Four is a gripping “novel”. That is, moreover, why it not only became a runaway bestseller in the early Cold War era, but also why it has exerted a cultural impact greater than any work of fiction in the 20th century.

John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.

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