Girl spy

Transcription does not make a very interesting title for a book, anymore than the word makes a very interesting job description. Turns out both the book, Kate Atkinson's latest, and the job of her main character, Juliet Armstrong, are much more exciting than they sound.

In 1940 London, Juliet is hired to listen to recordings of conversations with Nazi sympathizers and to put their words into written form. Gradually, however, Juliet's job for M15, the British espionage agency, entails more than just transcription. She is asked to gain the confidence of a prominent London woman whose loyalties lie with Germany. And so begins her life as a spy.

Ten years later, now working for BBC, Juliet still plays the spy game, at least part time. This time it's the Russians, not the Germans, trying to learn British secrets.

Atkinson moves the action back and forth from one decade to the next, gradually revealing how the two situations are alike, yet how they are different. If surprises are few in the early going, they multiply in the final third of the novel, when what started out as a lighthearted, girl spy sort of story turns into a thriller.

Action packed

The latest Hugh Marston mystery by Mark Pryor, The Book Artist, ranks among the best in the series. Just 268 pages long, it is packed with action because Marston, a former FBI agent now security chief for the U.S. embassy in Paris, has three problems to deal with, not just one.

A beautiful American artist, gaining attention for her sculptures created from books, is found murdered at a Paris art gallery, and Marston’s girlfriend is arrested for the crime after her DNA is found at the scene. He is certain she is not guilty of the crime, but how to explain that DNA evidence? This may actually be the most impressive bit of  detective work in the novel.

Then comes the matter of finding the real killer, after first getting the Paris police officer in charge of the case to accept his help.

As for the third problem, this involves a dying man with a grudge against both Marston and his unorthodox buddy, Tom Green. He plans to kill Tom in Amsterdam, then pick off Marston at his friend’s Paris burial.

All this means that once Pryor gets the plot moving, which takes a few chapters, it rolls like a piano going downhill in a Laurel and Hardy movie. Except not that funny.

The profound pun

All men who possess at once active, fancy, imagination, and a philosophical spirit, are prone to punning.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have often thought it odd that puns are usually regarded as one of the lowest forms of humor, on a par with a pie in the face, yet persons with the keenest minds seem to be best at punning. This is what the poet Coleridge concluded. Puns, or at least the best puns, are usually the work of those with "fancy, imagination and a philosophical spirit." Someone like Coleridge himself, in fact.

Coleridge and his friend, essayist Charles Lamb, "shared a passion for punning, not just as a fireside diversion but as a model for the way the imaginative mind works." So writes journalist and author James Geary in his essay in the book This Idea Is Brilliant.

One would not expect to find a discussion of punning in a science book, but the idea Geary proposes as one worth more attention in the world of science is bisociation. Arthur Koestler once describe bisociation as "two strands of thought tied together by an acoustic knot." It is seeing two things that seem to have no connection, then finding a connection between them.

Geary says this is what Issac Newton did in the proverbial story of him in a garden observing an apple fall from a tree and discovering insights into gravity. Writers do this all the time. (I do it myself in some of my best work.) Artists do it. Economists do it. And of course, anyone does who makes an original pun.

Geary concludes his brief essay in this way: "Bisociation is a form of improvised, recombinant intelligence that integrates knowledge and experience, fuses divided worlds, and links the like with the unlike -- a model and a metaphor for the process of discovery itself. The pun is at once the most profound and the most pedestrian example of bisociation at work."

Follow your bliss

"You gotta follow your bliss, man. That's all there is to it."

Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

Professor Chandra has had a successful career as an economist, the Nobel Prize being the only goal that has eluded him. Yet with his own family he feels a failure. His wife left him for another man. His three children are estranged, his eldest daughter even keeping her whereabouts a secret from him. And so when Professor Chandra decides to follow his bliss in Rajeev Balasubramanyam's novel Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, it is his family, not the Nobel Prize, that he pursues.

His pilgrimage takes him around the world, for his family is scattered. He finds himself in a variety of Eastern religion/New Age situations, including one in India where his own son, spouting "wisdom" that seems like nonsense to Chandra, is the featured guru. Yet the novel's conclusion comes during the family's Christmas reunion in Colorado, thus giving Christianity a share in this odd spirituality mixture.

"He was helpless in most places save universities," Balasubramanyam says of Chandra. Certainly that seems true during the course of the story. He knows little about popular culture. His conversations with other people are awkward. He often offends without meaning to. Yet with his own family he is most helpless of all. Gradually he discovers what he has been doing wrong all these years and, most importantly, that his family, including the former wife now married to someone else, loves him still. And there he finds his bliss.

There is much to like about this novel. It is comic without being funny, serious without being tragic, easy reading without being simple.

Rob Bell’s Bible

That Rob Bell speaks so often in theaters rather than in churches may say as much about the controversial nature of his views on Christianity as it does about his popularity. Many churches would hesitate to invite him in. And they might not be large enough to hold the crowds.

Bell views things just a little differently than most Christians, whether of the mainline variety, evangelicals or fundamentalists. That makes him difficult to pin down.

Reading his 2017 book What Is the Bible? makes him no easier to pin down, but it may cause one to realize that pinning him, or anyone else (including God), down may be the wrong objective. One of the last statements he makes in the book is this: “Do your best to read it (the Bible) without any ideas about God entering the picture.” Read it with an open and clear mind. Pay attention to every detail. Discover the real story behind the story and why it is important. Embrace the truth wherever it is found. Bell doesn’t say so, but perhaps we should read people in the same way.

Bell sees the Bible as a library of literature in many forms, written over a period of many centuries, that somebody thought important enough to preserve and combine. Before we can know its importance to us today, the object of most Bible study, we should know why it was so important to those who wrote it down in the first place, he argues.

He views the Bible as a record of the development of a new way of perceiving God. At one time the favor of gods was won through animal sacrifice, even child sacrifice. That’s why Abraham seems so calm when he is about to sacrifice Isaac. Gradually these attitudes change through the Old Testament. Then in the New Testament comes the sacrifice of Jesus. The cross may make little sense to people of today, but it did to the people of that time. Thus Bell suggests trying to get into the minds of those who wrote it all down and were the first to read it.

This is exciting stuff, probably not a phrase often used for a book about the Bible.

Groupthink

When you’re not thinking with your brain, you’re thinking with the brain of your milieu.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Wall Street Journal, April 13-14, 2019

Psychologist/anthropologist John Tooby puts it a little differently in his essay in the book This Idea Is Brilliant: “Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals.” Translated into English, that means we tend to think more rationally as individuals than as members of a group, especially if that group is at odds with some other group.

A mob is an extreme example. Members of that mob may do things they would never think of doing on their own. A much more common example is the one Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. refers to, namely the American political scene. Compromise in Washington seems impossible because members of both parties are entrenched in their positions, always against whatever the other party is for. What may be worse for the country, members of the media have taken sides, as well, and shape their reporting accordingly.

“Our industry needs to grow up by starting to police its reasoning as rigorously as it does its facts,” Jenkins wrote. The major news media — including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post (all mentioned by Jenkins) — tend to interpret Washington news according to how others with the same political mindset interpret it, never mind a rational examination of the facts.

Something similar happens in the scientific world, according to Tooby, at least on topics that are controversial with some members of the public, such as climate change, vaccinations and evolution. Scientists may be hesitant to challenge any findings in these areas for fear of lending support to the “wrong” side.

“Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded,” Tooby writes. “No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who doesn’t make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.”

No translation necessary.

Brilliant, yet humble, ideas

Science begins and ends with humility.

Or at least the 2018 collection of scientific essays called This Idea Is Brilliant does. The book, edited by John Brockman, includes scores of short responses to The Edge Question of 2017: "What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?"

The replies to that question are many and varied, yet the second essay in the book, by psychologist Adam Waytz suggests The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Basically this means the less we know the more we think we know. Waytz concludes, "Only through gaining expertise in a topic do people recognize its complexity and calibrate their confidence accordingly." The IOED, as he calls it, "provides us with much-needed humility."

The book's last essay returns to that theme, and in fact is called Humility. Barnaby Marsh, an evolutionary dynamics scholar, argues that even the most brilliant scientific ideas are usually replaced, or at least amended, at some point in the future by some other brilliant scientific ideas. Brilliant ideas are less conclusions than steps along the way.

Within that framework we read 500 pages full of amazing ideas, most of which pass over the heads of laymen like myself. Take Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics or Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, for example. Yet researcher Peter Norwig argues for Counting as a scientific concept worth greater emphasis. Too many people, both in science and out, simply aren't doing the math, he says.

On the topic of Premature Optimization, writer Kevin Kelly argues that "the greatest source of failure is prior success." You don't need a degree in science to understand that. Once you've reached the top, it's all downhill. Unless you are Tom Brady, of course.

Journalism professor Charles Seife makes a case for The Texas Sharpshooter. This is a reference to the story about the Texan who shot holes in the side of his barn, then drew a bullseye around each one. Similarly, some researchers seem to have a talent for adjusting their objectives to fit their findings.

So there is much to appreciate in Brockman's book. If you don't understand one brief essay, just stay humble, admit it and go on to the next.

Reading usually means fiction

Many words have narrowed under the radar, in certain usages.

John McWhorter, Words on the Move

Reading challenges you to figure out what kind of person you want to be.

Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

John McWhorter

What Will Schwalbe says in that second quotation illustrates what John McWhorter says in the first. McWhorter's point is that some words narrow in meaning. The word music, for example, means only classical music in some usages by some people. A drink may refer only to alcohol, not diet soda or even water. Centuries ago, meat referred to food of all kinds. That word narrowed to mean only, or mostly, animal flesh.

In that line from Books for Living, Schwalbe is referring to fiction when he uses the word reading. "Fiction opens us up," he says later in the same chapter. Reading fiction reveals who we really are, what we really believe.

McWhorter writes, "Today's discussions about the value of 'reading' presuppose that the topic is fiction." When you are asked what good books you have read lately, chances are the other person's interest is in what novel you have enjoyed, not that book you read about butterflies or that excellent biography of Winston Churchill.

Will Schwalbe

The Great American Read, the PBS series last year aimed at discovering Americans' favorite book, focused on fiction.

Similarly the word literature narrowly refers to either fiction or poetry in most instances. When I was in college, though a journalism major, I managed to take one literature course each semester. The only nonfiction I can remember reading for a class was Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and some essays by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then there was that Bible as Literature class I mentioned recently. For the most part, however, literature meant fiction, and for the most part, that's what it usually means today.

Reading Shakespeare with curiosity

To see how dramatically language changes through time, the subject of John McWhorter's Words on the Move (see yesterday's post), we need only look at the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote his plays for the common people. The theater in 16th century England was where ordinary people went for entertainment. One did not need to be an intellectual or a college graduate to understand them. The words he used were the same words people spoke on the street.

Yet today reading Shakespeare's plays or seeing a performance of one of them can be tough sledding. We may feel we need an interpreter, a paraphrase or at least an annotated version. As an example of how English has changed in 400 years, McWhorter gives us these lines from King Lear:

                         Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother?

Huh? Study that text in print long enough and you might get a vague idea of what is being said, just as you may be able to get the gist of a passage in the King James Bible if you read it through a few times. But it's not easy, and your "vague idea" may not even be close to being right. The problem is that so many of the words Shakespeare uses no longer mean what they meant when he used them.

McWhorter explains. Wherefore doesn't mean where, as we might think, but why. Moonshines refers to months, not liquor. As for the word curiosity, McWhorter says that "in Shakespeare's time, curiosity meant 'care' in the sense of close attention."

That helps, but frankly even then the lines are difficult. The author doesn't help us with the phrases "plague of custom" or"lag of a brother." But we get the idea. Shakespeare wasn't writing on a higher plane than his audience. His audience understood him perfectly. But the English language has changed so much in 400 years that today his plays seem so difficult most of us avoid them.

Someday, who knows, the collected works of James Patterson or Mary Higgins Clark, may strike readers as tough going.

Our changing language

One of the hardest notions for a human being to shake is that a language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming. They tell you a word is a thing, when it is actually something going on.

John McWhorter, Words on the Move

Time changes things. The color of your hair and the tautness of your skin. Clothing styles. Moral standards. Even rivers and mountain ranges. Yet one of the most difficult changes to accept is that relating to the language we speak everyday. Whatever our political preferences, we tend to be conservative when it comes to language.

Columbia Professor John McWhorter makes the case in Words on the Move (2016) that such change is inevitable, no matter how valiantly defenders of the language fight against it. Yet even those defenders of the language don’t want to go back to the English spoken by Chaucer. Rather they want to preserve the English they learned in school as children. Never mind that in the years since they have helped change the language by adopting teen slang in their youth, by using new words that came with new technology and by accepting cultural changes, such as using the pronoun they instead of he to refer to a person of either sex.

Language changes in a variety of ways. New words come into the language all the time, while others words drop out from lack of use. The meaning of words change. Pronunciation changes. Grammar changes. The people who make dictionaries will always have a job because their work, like that of a dish washer in a restaurant or a mortician, never ends.

McWhorter writes in an engaging, witty style, which is fortunate for him because much of what he says is bound to irritate some, if not most, readers. He is tolerant, for example, of those who use the word literally when they mean figuratively. Like other words that once represented truth, such as actually and really, literally now means something less than swear-on-the-Bible truth.

Phrases such as you know and and stuff, and even the word like, used by young people as a stand-in for the word said, are all acceptable to McWhorter. To him they are just natural, even sensible, changes in the way English is spoken. He argues that "casual speech full of likes is not, in truth, tentative or messy, but empathic and polite."

The way English is written changes, as well, but much more slowly. The fact that written language changes more slowly than spoken language explains, McWhorter says, why the spelling of English words seems so screwy. "Speech moved on; spelling stayed put," he writes. Often words are spelled the way they were once pronounced, not the way they are pronounced today.

If you are someone who still owns a dictionary in book form, it is out of date. Even if you just bought it new yesterday.

A father remembered

Irene Dunne and William Powell in Life with Father.

Several times over the years I have watched with pleasure the 1947 film Life with Father, which stars William Powell, Irene Dunn and a very young Elizabeth Taylor. The last time I saw it was last October when I led a group discussion of the film. Afterward a participant in that discussion gave me a copy of the book by Clarence Day, on which the film was partly based. It was also partly based on another Day memoir, Life with Mother.

The book, it turns out, is quite as pleasurable as the movie. It tells the story of a successful, opinionated, loud, irritable man who, for all his attempts to dominate his family and everyone else, could be easily manipulated by his loving, somewhat scatterbrained wife and, to a lesser extent, by his sons. The memoir consists of brief chapters, each telling of related incidents in the life of Day's father. It has no plot, so the movie constructs its plot loosely from these incidents, as well as those in Life with Mother. Certainly the movie carries the spirit of the book, if not the details. There's nothing here, for example, about Mrs. Day's efforts to persuade her husband to consent to baptism, the main focus of the film's plot.

Day's best description of his father comes near the end. "Our home life was stormy but spirited," he writes. "It always had tang. When Father was unhappy, he said so. He poured out his grief with such vigor that it soon cleared the aired.

"If he had ever had any meannesses in him, he might have tried to repress them. But he was a thoroughly goodhearted and warmblooded man, and he saw no reason for hiding his feelings. They were too strong to hide anyway.”

Day describes his visits to other homes as a boy, where he witnessed very different kinds of family chemistry. Husbands and wives got angry but stayed angry. Children were shown correction, but not love. It made him realize how lucky he was. His father might yell at him, but he never withheld his affection.

The book was published in 1935, expanded from a long series of popular articles Day wrote for The New Yorker. The incidents described took place late in the 19th century in New York City when that city was thriving and growing rapidly. His father was uncomfortable with change, and that too adds to the subtle comedy in Day's book.

The tyranny of the alphabet

A 2006 study by professors at Stanford and CalTech found that faculty members "with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments. ... a likely reason is that academic papers by economists typically list the authors' names alphabetically."

A.J. Jacobs, quoting a Slate article in It's All Relative

Dr. Edgar Whan

I seem to be thinking about Edgar Whan quite a bit lately. Dr. Whan was a professor of English at Ohio University when I was there in the Sixties. After he died six years ago, his obituary said he had been voted Professor of the Year so many times that in 1982 he was named Professor of the Year in Perpetuity. I guess it fits, for he continues to teach me.

I thought about him when I reviewed Thomas C. Foster's book How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (March 8, 2019). Foster's wit when discussing challenging literary subjects reminded me of my favorite English professor, who made every class so much fun you didn't realize you were learning stuff.

Then I thought of him March 22 when I argued in this blog that teaching the Bible in public schools might actually be a good idea. The class I took with Dr. Whan was called The Bible as Literature, which examined much of the Bible as significant works of literature. He was a devout Christian, and I often noticed him in the local Presbyterian church when I attended there, yet in class his focus was always on literature, not proselytizing.

Now Dr. Whan comes to mind again when I think about what Slate magazine called "the tyranny of the alphabet." On the first day of class Whan seated all his students in reverse alphabetical order, the ZYXW's in the front and the DCBA's in the back. He said that all his life he had been at the end of lists, in the rear of lines and in the back of classrooms. Now he would have his revenge. He was kidding, but not kidding much. I am sure anyone whose surname falls near the end of the alphabet feels much the same way.

My surname starts with M, placing me somewhere near the middle no matter which way names are listed. Yet I have often thought it odd not that names are usually put in alphabetical order but that this way of listing them is widely considered to be the fair way of doing it.  At the beginning of movies, for example, the stars have often been listed in alphabetical order so that nobody gets top billing over anyone else. But this is nonsense, for Woody Allen always gets a higher billing than Christopher Walken, say, or Sigourney Weaver. Had Edgar Whan ever been a Hollywood producer, we know which order the names would be listed in his movies.

In telephone directories, on the fiction shelves of bookstores and libraries, in lists of graduates or club members, in fact almost anywhere names are listed, they are going to be in alphabetical order, meaning the Allens and Abbotts are going to come long before the Walkens, the Weavers and the Whans. And pity the poor Zimmermans. It’s all about convenience. It’s the most sensible way to list names, but it certainly isn’t fair.

First murder, then pirates

Steve Goble gives us a locked room mystery aboard ship in 1723 in The Devil’s Wind, the second installment of his Spider John series of pirate mysteries.

Spider John, a ship’s carpenter, was a reluctant pirate in The Bloody Black Flag. Now on the lam from the British for piracy, he’s aboard the ship Redemption headed for Boston, his wife Em and his son. Or so he hopes, for a British ship is escorting his ship and others, and he recognizes at least one pirate aboard the Redemption. So he expects trouble and soon gets it.

The ship’s captain is found shot to death in his locked cabin, an apparent suicide. Not smelling gunpowder, John is immediately suspicious, And the captain’s daughter, one of two young women aboard the ship, insists her father would have never killed himself. But how could it have been anything but suicide?

It’s a delicious puzzle, but before John can put his mind to it, he makes the mistake of getting drunk. And then the pirates strike.

So Goble gives us both a good pirate adventure and a good mystery, one only Spider John can solve. Or at least the howdunnit part of it. Readers may find themselves a step ahead of John in the whodunnit part.