Autumn Chill

At a time when hurricanes lash to the south and north, it is trivial to note that autumn arrived on the 22^nd last week accompanied by an abrupt change of local weather in NJ from balmy late summery to crispy fall-like. Nonetheless it did. A cold wind chilled in the morning. We may yet get toasty days (maybe even weeks) before frost settles in, but they will be short-lived checks on the general decline of the number displayed by the thermometer that hangs outside my back door.
 
Though a plurality of Americans tell pollsters that autumn is their favorite season, it is not mine. (I admit that Halloween and Thanksgiving are fun holidays, but they would be just as fun were they celebrated at any other time of year.) As I grow older I cling to summer longer. I ignore the “unofficial end of summer” on Labor Day (for non-American readers, that is the first Monday in September) as artificial. If temperatures permit the self-deception I ignore the equinox itself. I can’t ignore the closing of the pool. That happened today, so summer is over, even for me. I’ll soon be raking leaves. Then comes the solstice, but I hardly want to think of that now.

Poet and novelist (he preferred to be called a poet) Robert Graves asserted that all true poetry is about the seasons as a metaphor for the cycle of life from birth to love to aging to death (or vice versa). It may not be obvious at first glance but at least some element of that has to be in a poem for it to speak to us at a primal level. You can write verse about other things (motorcycle parts, for instance), he argued forcefully, but not poetry. I’m not sure he was right, but I understand (and feel) what he was getting at. My sister (1950-95) was the poet of the family, so perhaps I’ll let her finish this welcome (if such it is) to autumn.
 
Lakeside Campsite in September by Sharon Bellush
 
I have
An abominable awareness
Of the soles of my feet. They
Are sand-stung, unused
To pebbly lake bottoms, pine needle
Beds –
My feet sting and my breath
Draws deeply, nostrils
Flared to absorb
The air that forces
Coolness into well-heated lungs –
The twilight turns the
Sun from bright to
Smoldering metallic rose and
Seething wavelets draw the
Fury down
To the level of docks, and lake and sand –
And me –
I stick a toe into the pinkness
And it numbs –
The ruggedness of all I feel
Intrigues me; I am a match
For the brittle dusk
 
The campsite is calm, the wind
Is dying, a burnt-wood smell
Drifts into the sun – I watch
It sink, impaled for a time
On a mountaintop –
Waves of purple, vermilion
And green shoot up
To the clouds
In a symphony of
Lonely light –
I turn to replenish the fire.
 
-- 100 of Sharon’s poems are posted at my Richard’s Novel Ideas blogsite: https://richardbellushjr.blogspot.com/.
 

Buck 69 – Cold Wind

Elusive Allusions

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 Saying Goodbye, 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 Saying Goodbye (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 Rowdy Ways 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.
 

Bob Dylan - False Prophet

The Duck Test

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 metaphysics it 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.
 

Cold Blood (Lydia Pense) – 

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

 

Do Not Curse the Cursive

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 8^th 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 18^th century literature.
 
In Britain and the US throughout the 19^th 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.

 

Liberace – Typewriter Song