Boris Akunin is among my three favorite contemporary mystery writers. (Deon Meyer and Harlan Coben are the
other two, though my all-time favorites are deceased.) Based on global book
sales in multiple languages, many from the reading public agree. Years ago the
Amazon algorithm ("you might also like") recommended to me Akunin's The Winter Queen (set in 1876 with a
20-y.o. detective named Fandorin), probably because I had earlier purchased one
of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park
sequels. I took the recommendation and have followed Fandorin’s career over
more than a dozen books since then. Not
SayingGoodbye, apparently the
final book in the series, is set 1918-21. Even though we know how history
turned out and therefore know the limits of what the aging Fandorin can
accomplish at the key tipping points at which he finds himself, the book is
still suspenseful – and not just at the personal level of the characters. The
outcome of the Russian Civil War was by no means a sure thing, and there are a
lot of “if only this one thing were done differently” moments in the book.
Despite appearances, this is not a review of Not SayingGoodbye (though for the record I did like it). A characteristic of
Akunin’s style just happened to catch my attention this time and raised
thoughts about a shared culture. Fandorin is an erudite man, so it is no
surprise that Akunin puts in his mouth quotes from and allusions to Russian
literature. I picked up on my own only a few of the most obvious ones, such as the
“Happy families are all alike” line from Tolstoy. But even though the translator
(I’m pretty sure it’s the translator) helpfully identifies the sources of some others,
I’m sure I missed far more than I caught. Yet this is a great way to
economically but effectively portray some person or event. Referencing a
character from Chekhov or situation from Dostoevsky can reveal more than pages
of expositional prose. But it only works if the reader/listener shares enough
of the same culture to get the reference. In the US and several other Western nations that shared
culture is fracturing into subcultures for which allusions are likely to be
mutually unintelligible. There are some pop culture references that are nearly
universal. If you say your Spidey sense is tingling you’ll likely be
understood, but referencing King Lear
when speaking of some foolish family patriarch is more likely to annoy than to
add to the conversation. One no longer can take for granted that a particular
core of books will be widely read and form the basis of commonalities. It’s not
just a matter of literature. Take the (no more than) middle-brow 20-y.o. TV
show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At one
point Buffy tells Giles not to get all Willy Loman and at another threatens to act
William S. Burroughs. Does 1 viewer in 5 get those references anymore? How many
notice how often episode titles of the show are song titles: "Bewitched
Bothered and Bewildered," "Killed by Death," "Hush,"
"This Year's Girl," "Bring on the Night," et al.? But then, perhaps, like slang, cultural references are
sometimes intended to be exclusionary – to give a conspiratorial nod to others
of the same subgroup. Consider the Bob Dylan song “False Prophet” (attached
below) from the Rough and RowdyWays album. Does one have to be a Boomer
to catch references to (among others) artists including Ricky Nelson (hello
Mary Lou), Roy Orbison (only the lonely), Barbara Lewis (hello stranger), and
Janis Joplin (ball and chain)? Maybe not, but it helps. Those lyrics are seared
into our memories, and obviously into Bob’s. To be technical, Dylan is not a
Boomer but Silent Generation, b.1928-1945, but he knows his audience. That, I suppose is the key. Allude away, but know your
audience. The rest can just scratch their heads as we are destined so often to
scratch ours.
Sabine
Hossenfelder is best known for her popular youtube physics channel,
which has over half a million subscribers. She is noted for being strongly
opinionated on questions of physics and cosmology, which adds to the appeal of her
channel. She regards a lot of speculative hypotheses by other physicists to be
ascientific since they are not provable or disprovable even in principle. Many
are just “modern creation myths written in the language of mathematics.”
Regarding the multiverse she says “such copies are both unobservable and
unnecessary to explain what we can observe.” This is not to say the idea is
wrong, she adds, just that it has more in common with faith than science. In
her book Existential Physics on
metaphysicsit is no surprise that
her style is much the same. It’s an interesting book although, strangely, not
much help with the existential questions it addresses, since mostly she writes
about the limits of science rather than what science reveals. Her anecdotes of
discussions with other physicists (she is not the least bit intimidated by
Nobel Prizes) are by themselves worth the read however. She does take a firm stand
on a few things. To the question of whether the past still exists in some sense
for example she answers yes. Since special relativity tells us that observers
in different reference frames cannot agree on a “now” moment, then past,
present, and future are just coordinates – your present can be someone else’s
past and both moments are equally real. She has no patience for free will regardless
of whether the universe is ultimately deterministic or probabilistic: “according
to the currently established laws of nature, the future is determined by the
past, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.” (As did
Einstein, she suspects the universe is deterministic by the way – that the
probabilistic nature of quantum physics means the theory is incomplete – but merely
suspects it rather than believes it.) All in all, Existential Physics is a good read though I recommend first
sampling some of her videos to get a sense of who she is.
I
do have a comment on free will however. Whether it “really” exists or not has
been debated by greater minds than mine for literally thousands of years. I’m
not the one who will craft the definitive answer. A surprising number of
physicists are compatibilists, to
the annoyance of Hossenfelder, but I’m not going to debate the merits of compatibilism
either. I’m simply going to argue that it doesn’t matter. I’m
a fan of the simple Duck Test. (Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto
Workers 1946-70: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a
duck, it probably is a duck.") As a practical
matter, free will is a duck. It feels like we have it and as a pragmatic matter
we do. We not only can make choices, we cannot avoid making them since refusal
to choose is a choice, too. Making choices is a condition of existence. This is
the whole point of existentialism: humans are terrifyingly inescapably free.
(Sometimes all of our available options are bad ones in terms of consequences,
but they are still options.) We do not escape moral responsibility for our
actions by saying, “Hey, it’s not my fault: my actions were baked into the
structure of the universe from the moment of the big bang.” No oppressor (who
after all is just as much under the whip of fate as the oppressed), no thief,
no cheat could be held accountable by that argument. Liberation movements would
be meaningless. Liberation to what? The dead hand of fate? As
a practical matter our wills are free, and we will not thrive if we behave
otherwise. We cherish our freedom of choice with good reason. But is there some
sense in which this freedom is an illusion? At some subatomic level is the fix
in (as hard determinists would say) or are events purely random (as the probabilists would
say)? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. But we don’t live at the subatomic scale.
We live up here. Up here, it doesn’t matter. We make our choices and we live
with them.
My oldest typewriter (stashed on a storage shelf) is an
Underwood dating to the 1920s. It works though the keys require a heavy touch
and the machine itself weighs more than a stack of bricks of equal dimensions.
In high school (I graduated 1970) I mostly used an RC Allen from the 1950s that
was marginally lighter than the Underwood and much smoother to operate – that
is, when I used a typewriter at all. In nearly all my classes, assignments –
from essays to full-length term papers – could be handwritten in cursive. Most
were. My first portable typewriter was a 1970 Royal that I used through the
next four years of college, where everything needed to be typed.
Today, only 21 of the 50 states require teaching cursive
handwriting in primary schools. Most do anyway, but, required or not, the
instruction is likely to be cursory – basically enough so kids can sign their
own names and little more. The majority of primary school students even by 8th
grade have serious trouble reading a full page of cursive text. Many educators
shrug at this, pointing out that we don’t teach the abacus either in an age
when complex calculators are cheap and basic calculators are on every phone.
There is some truth to this. Typing skills are similarly far more important
than handwriting skills in an age of laptops and personal computers. Still,
there is value in being able to read handwritten text. I, for one, more often
than not write my checks in cursive just out of habit. Perhaps this annoys
younger tellers at the bank. The first patent for a typewriter was issued to Henry Mill
by Queen Anne in 1714: "An artificial machine or method for the impressing or
transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in
writing, whereby all writings whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment
so that the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and
publick records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other
writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest
discovery." No example of this machine survives. It is not known if a
prototype was ever built at all. If so, it didn’t impress any contemporary
authors of note: no other mention of it has been found in 18th century
literature. In Britain and the US throughout the 19th century
patents were issued and prototypes built for various typewriters, but all the
machines for the first seven decades were clumsy to use: in no way faster than
a fountain pen in the hand of even a lackadaisical scrivener. The first really
practical “Type-writer” was designed by Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and
Samuel Soule. In 1873 they presented their design to Remington, manufacturer of
firearms and sewing machines. Remington took a chance on it. The influence of
the sewing division was strong: the Model 1 machine was fixed to a table and
the movable carriage was operated by a foot pedal, just like a sewing machine.
It was weird but it worked, and it was faster than handwriting. In only a few
years the product was refined for more efficient office use: it was detached
from furniture and pedal, the movable carriage was redesigned to be hand
operated, and lower case letters (the original machine was all caps) were
added. Mark Twain was an early adopter. Life on the Mississippi (1883) is believed to have been the first
typed manuscript for a book ever delivered to a major publisher. Typed
manuscripts quickly became standard (double spaced Courier 12 point please). The next major advance was the word processor (WP) in the
1970s. (I’m ignoring ‘60s electric typewriters since they were an evolutionary step
rather than a revolutionary change.) My first word processor was in 1988 or
thereabouts. They were still pretty expensive off the shelf (though less than ‘80s
computers) but I found a discounted refurbished Brother that some previous
customer had returned. The refurbishing must have been done right since the
machine worked fine for me. For the first time I could write, edit, and re-edit
100 draft pages stored in memory before
printing it out. It changed the way I write. Previously, re-editing meant
retyping whole pages – maybe entire documents – so there were a lot of “never
mind, that’s good enough” editing decisions. The word processor memory made it
easier to say “no that is not good enough” since this usually just meant
changing a few words or perhaps a paragraph. The WP also primed me for my first PC in 1993 running
Windows 3.1. (I still have a Prodigy address.) This makes me more laggard than
early adopter. Even so, as of next year I’ll have been writing on some version
of Microsoft Word for 30 years. I’ve been typing (at least occasionally) for
60. Elder Millennials (now nudging into their 40s) in the First
World may still remember a time when they did without WPs, PCs, or Macs. Anyone
younger does not. Perhaps it is not so surprising if many of them look at
penned longhand writing with puzzlement. Perhaps cursive will make a comeback
though when kids realize that their (younger Millennial) parents can’t read it.
They can leave diaries and incriminating notes out in the open with no fear
that the secrets in them will be discovered.
Due to limited space I try to keep my home library to its
current size of about 2500 books. Since there are constantly new acquisitions
(a box from Hamilton discount books arrived just yesterday), I have to remove
books from the shelves at the same rate I add them. Shakespeare and Plutarch
are safe. So are Heinlein and Herbert. But lesser known scifi or mystery
authors are likely to get the boot if I deem some new purchases more shelfworthy.
At a minimum, a book is shelfworthy if in principle I might read it again.
(Since time also is limited, in practice I might not – in fact, probably will
not – reread it, but the principle is that I wouldn’t mind doing so.) On a
couple of occasions I’ve tested my choices by randomly picking one book from
each of the 50 or so shelves for a reread. So far it has worked out. Similar space constraints apply to the single set of shelves
for my CDs and vinyl. Since the space is tighter so is the standard of
shelfworthiness. It’s not enough that I might in principle listen to a CD
again. To keep it, I have to be pretty darn certain I will listen to it again.
Music is supposed to heard time and again. There are CDs on my shelves that I
haven’t played in more than a year, but I’m suspicious of them. After two years
without being replayed they should go, and most of them do. And yes, most of my music is on CD or vinyl. I’m not a
Millennial or Zoomer: my music library is not on my phone. There is not any
tune on my phone. Since my most common location for listening to music is in my
car, the fact that neither my car nor my truck (both 2021s) has a CD player (nor do
most vehicles built in the past decade) is an annoyance. Fortunately, portable
CD players that use an auxiliary port to access a car’s stereo are not
expensive. Mine gets put to good use – or perhaps bad use from the perspective
of a passenger with different tastes in music.
Anyway, it is hard not to notice a pattern in the winnowing
of my CDs based on the replay standard mentioned above. Although sometimes I deliberately
step outside the box with a music purchase (my box, that is: it might be
squarely inside another listener’s box, such as recent pop music, most of which
is painful to my ears), these outside-the-box CDs after the initial
listen-through tend not to get replayed. So, they eventually get selected off
the shelf. What remains on my shelves overwhelmingly is blues-based rock-and-roll
of the type that dominated the charts in my teens and 20s (the usual suspects: Little Richard, Joplin, Hendrix, Clapton, et al.). Not entirely: there
is a pretty good 1940s selection and a smattering of non-rock genres including
(a little) classical, but mostly there is rock. The majority is vintage from
the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Again, not all: there are contemporary bands such as
Rival Sons, Dorothy, and the Pretty Reckless that are secure in their places on
the shelf, but most of them (including all three named) have vintage sounds.
Dorothy even strays into psychedelia (as in Medicine
Man or Woman) occasionally. My pattern, for well or ill, is stereotypical. Most people’s
musical tastes are set in their youth. We’ve all observed this, but data
scientist and op-ed writer for The New
York Times Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
decided to quantify the effect. Spotify
information on downloads and users’ ages proved to be a valuable source. Stephens-Davidowitz
determined that women form basic lifelong musical tastes between ages 11 and 14. Men
lag a couple years, forming their tastes between 13 and 16. Both tend to evolve
a bit and to take new popular music seriously until around 24, after which they
typically don’t change much. (There are always outliers, of course, who don’t
fit the general stereotype.) These youthful ages are when we form out adult
identities and experience key “firsts” in our lives. The music we hear is the
soundtrack for that era, and is inevitably tangled with it in our memories.
Perhaps the surprising thing is that our attachment to the music of our youth
isn’t even stronger. This doesn’t mean we’ll never like anything new and
different. We probably will. But odds are it won’t dominate our shelves. Friedrich Nietzsche: “Without music life would be a mistake.”
Freddy had a point. So, whatever your preferred genre and whatever your life
soundtrack might be, enjoy it. I’m happy with mine being mostly vintage rock. Some other
generations (IMO) have done worse.
My house, like myself, is aging. Built in 1978, it is
considerably younger than I am but is nonetheless solidly in middle age. It
calls for significant repairs about as often as I do. You never know what will
go next but something will. Sometimes I can handle the issues myself, which
keeps the cost down to the materials (and some aches for me). I have rebuilt
exterior wooden stairs, repaired retaining walls (both RR tie and masonry),
reroofed the barn and shed, and so on. We all have our limitations however. I
don’t do mechanicals: for plumbing, electrical, furnace repair, AC maintenance,
and the like, I call professionals. This week the problem is a shower leaking through the floor
into the ceiling of the finished basement below. Word of advice to anyone who
rates functionality over esthetics: don’t build a fancy expensive tile shower.
Be cheap and install a fiberglass shower. It is seamless; it doesn’t leak; when
it’s installed you’re done. Regrettably, my parents (whose house this was
before it became mine) had different views. They chose tile laid over a lead pan. In
fairness, this old-fashioned construction technique lasted their lifetimes, but
it hasn’t lasted mine. No tile is actually 100% waterproof. Water will get
through the grout. This is why there is a lead pan (or other water resistant
materials) below the floor tile. But water eventually can defeat this too
through corrosion or deformation. My shower has problems with the pipes,
faucets, and the pan. A contractor has examined the shower and will get back to
me with a cost estimate this coming week. His number, whatever it may be, definitely
will be followed by three zeroes. Despite my current trouble and upcoming expense, I like
showers in principle. I rarely opt for a bath instead and on those rare
occasions wonder why I did. Besides, I typically have to shower off the soap
film afterward anyway. Who invented the shower depends on your definition of a
shower. If you count waterfalls it wasn’t invented at all, but I think most of
us mean something artificial by the term. Some ancient Egyptian art shows
wealthy folk having pitchers of water poured on them by their servants, but I
don’t think this counts either. The first recorded legitimate showers – with
running water piped to outlets overhead – were in ancient Greece as adjuncts to
the public baths. The Romans picked up on the idea; many of their public baths had
them. Showers disappeared in the Middle Ages, however, primarily because of the
lack of running water; aqueducts and other Roman-era water works had fallen
into disrepair and disuse by then.
Showers despicted on ancient Greek pottery. I like the literal shower heads.
The modern shower – like so much of the modern world – was
invented in the 18th century. Englishman William Feetham designed
and patented a mechanical shower in 1767 that was operated by means of a hand
pump. The water source could be either a tank (as in the patent) or a well. It
was clever, but the device didn’t really catch on. Most people don’t want to
work that hard when washing off. Running water, whether public or private, was
what was missing. This became more common over the next century, however. By
the 1880s the day of the “rain shower” in upscale homes had arrived – no hand
pump needed. It was usually combined with a tub though dedicated showers did
exist. The final key ingredient was hot water. Heating a tank of water and tying
it into home plumbing is an obvious idea, but early 19th century
designs (some of them coal or wood fired) were dangerous and messy. The first
practical and (reasonably) safe home water heater was designed by Philadelphian
(originally Norwegian) engineer Edwin Ruud in 1889. It was a gas-fired water
heater not much different from many gas heaters in use today. Electric heaters
came along in the 20th century including tankless ones that don’t
store water but heat it as needed. Today, hot showers are a luxury we tend to take for granted
– until we don’t have them. Due to current house guests and bathroom locations,
the only shower available to me at the moment (other than the leaky one) is in
the summer bathroom, which is primarily a changing room located off the porch; this
bathroom doesn’t have hot water, which makes using its shower a perky
experience. I’m not looking forward to writing the check for the shower repair,
but I am looking forward to a less startling temperature when it is again ready
for morning duty.
Several months ago I finally got around
to getting my family/personal photo albums in reasonable order. Four ring
binders comprise the physical version. There are four digital files, too, saved
as Word documents since these are easy to edit by adding and deleting scanned
photos, adding or amending commentary, and so forth. The four digital files parallel
but don’t quite match the corresponding ring binders. A lot of repetitive
photos are excluded from the Word albums while a lot of commentary, including
anecdotes and family lore, is added to them. There is less commentary than I
initially contemplated though. I seriously considered creating a set of photo-illustrated
tell-all biographies that in spots would be unflattering. In the end I decided
against it. That’s not really what albums are for. They serve more anodyne
purposes: evoking nostalgia in family members who look at them and boredom in
others. They are not for revealing dark secrets. Besides, as friends and family
members pass (most of the folks in my photos are gone), we survivors tend to get
protective of their secrets as well as of our own. In a strange way they become
ours to keep. Everyone has secrets. Most of them are
selective, which is to say we hide them from some people but reveal them to
others whom we trust. There are always limits to trust, however, so there are
some secrets we take to the grave. According to David Ludden, Ph.D., writing in
Psychology Today, studies show the
typical person carries about a dozen of these latter type. Not all of them
would seem important to an outsider, but it’s enough that they seem important
to the secret-holder. There were obvious obstacles to conducting the studies
(the subjects were no more likely to reveal deep secrets to researchers than to
anyone else) so most researchers opted for asking the subjects what types of
secrets had been revealed to them by confidantes. These likely are the same as (or
at least akin to) the secrets folks never reveal. The most common: Infidelity Having been physically abused or
assaulted Having engaged in physical abuse or
assault Mental illness (anything from minor anxiety
to psychosis) Alcoholism (whether active or not) Drug abuse Unacknowledged offspring Abortion STDs Kinky sexual proclivities Severe financial distress Orientation Cheating at work or in academics Criminal record Having gotten away with a crime
(anything from petty theft to murder) and (somewhat oddly since I rarely meet
people who are reticent about them) Religious beliefs This is far from a comprehensive list.
Some past thoughts or deeds that don’t fit those categories are regarded by the
secret-holders as simply too embarrassing to share with others. Conversely they
may take pride in some act (say, covert revenge) that would seem sociopathic to
others. They may not wish to endanger a marriage by admitting an emotional
attachment to someone else. The types of secrets are endless. The motive for
keeping a secret might be practical (e.g. avoiding breakup or arrest), but most
often it is a matter of either self-image or public image. For this reason I always have taken
autobiographies with a shaker of salt – especially ones by politicians but by
all others as well. I still read them sometimes since they do offer useful
stories and insights, but they also certainly leave key secrets out of the
narratives. Even Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), whose memoirs run to 12 volumes
(!), and whose tales of deceit and seduction are often unflattering to himself,
tells us with honesty rare in a memoirist that he left out some of his most
depraved adventures due to conscience. (The memoirs are a fun read, by the
way; they are available for free at gutenberg.org.)
Casanova
I haven’t led as exciting a life as
Casanova. I’d have trouble filling one volume. I might try it one day anyway. In
it I might even reveal some of those secrets I left out of the albums – except for
maybe a dozen.
The Millennials have aged to the level that
Boomers (my group) reached in the 1980s. Perhaps it’s time to reboot the TV
show Thirtysomething for them. They
are by no means old but already are disconcerted by having been displaced as
the representatives of youth culture by Zoomers and Alphas, generations to
which they do not entirely relate. [Definitions: Boomers were born between
and including 1946 and 1964, GenX 1965-1980, Millennials 1981-1996, GenZ (aka
Zoomers) 1997-2010, and Alphas 2011 -present.] A Millennial friend of mine the other
day, feeling the changing of the guard, commented to me about how advanced kids
are compared to when she was the same age. “They grew up with all this
information at their fingertips. There are articles and YouTube videos on
everything, so they just know so much more and are so much more sophisticated.”
I disagreed and remarked that my admittedly limited experience with them was
nothing so encouraging. She again pointed out the vast knowledge available to
them. I didn’t wish to argue the matter so I let it go. Besides, it is true
that answers (more or less correct ones generally) to almost any question are a
few taps on a phone away, but there is a difference between virtual knowledge
and knowledge. Being able to google something is not the same as internalizing
the information. As far as sophistication goes, it is also true that kids
(Alphas as well as Zoomers) are likely to be aware of the edgier cultural
issues of the moment. But these are so much in the air as to be essentially pop
culture – like knowing the names of the members of a popular band. (I was aware
of the cultural issues of the ‘60s, too.) It’s a stretch to call this
sophistication. Every generation tends to underestimate
previous ones, which is another way of saying they overestimate themselves. My
generation was as guilty as any of that arrogance. I recall watching Casablanca years ago with a younger
Boomer (b. 1961) who had never seen it because it was an “old movie” and
therefore by definition boring. He liked it but then asked in all seriousness if
I thought audiences back then “got” all the allusions, double entendres, and
irony in the script, as though they couldn’t possibly be as sophisticated as
ourselves given the primitive era in which they lived. “They got it,” was all I
could say. Zoomers have much the same sort of reservations about Boomers given
that by comparison we often remain a bit clunky with electronic devices. I like having answers so readily
available thanks to modern technology. I’m no Luddite. Yet there are drawbacks
to everything, and the drawbacks to tech affect Zoomers and Alphas the most
given their immersion in it and reliance on it. Henry Kissinger in his latest
book (my review is a couple of posts ago) worried about this: “While the
internet and its attendant innovations are unquestionably technical marvels,
close attention must be paid to the balance between the constructive and
corrosive habits of mind encouraged by new technology.” He noted the decline of
“deep literacy” amid visual culture and quick clicks from link to link:
“reading a complex book carefully, and engaging with it critically, has become
as counter-cultural an act as was memorizing an epic poem in the earlier
print-based age.” I do not know, since Henry doesn’t
mention it, but because he uses some of the same terminology I suspect that he
is familiar with a book from around a decade ago by Nicolas Carr called The Shallows. Carr examined the question
of whether relying on virtual knowledge and virtual memory was making us
weak-minded. The answer was a qualified “yes.” Referencing numerous
psychological studies, he reported that the internet diminished the time spent “deep
reading.” We skim. We follow links, flitting about and often losing track of
our initial question. The more hyperlinks an online text contains, the lower is
our comprehension of it when we are tested afterwards. Carr quotes T.S. Eliot about being “distracted from distraction by distraction,” which is precisely
the kind of quote likely to be used by someone who has done deep reading.
Creativity and insight largely involve connecting one piece of knowledge with
another in a new way, something quite difficult when the pieces of knowledge
aren’t in our own heads. Carr concludes, “What
we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to
engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation,
reflection and introspection.” We become
shallower.
None of this is inevitable. Nothing prevents a YouTube junkie
from reading Nietzsche or Camus cover-to-cover on the side. But it’s not a
habit I commonly see in Alphas and Zoomers, though it’s possible I simply meet
the wrong ones. On the upside, I suppose virtual knowledge is better than none
at all.
