Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Reloaded with non-fiction

I have officially abandoned my earlier initiative to finish all my pending books before purchasing more. Mostly, that is because I finished all the non-fiction on my list and all of the fiction I have read recently has been depressing. While much of the non-fiction can also be dispiriting, it feels less like emotional self-flagellation to read it.

My new crop of non-fiction:

  • Bodanis, David. Passionate Minds. 2006
  • Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. 2007
  • Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. 2006.
  • Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. 1995.

The Easterly book was endorsed by Emily Paddon during one of our pre-seminar conversations in Oxford. It is also one of those books that I have heard mentioned in conversation often enough to feel concerned about not having read. The Collier book is clearly on a related theme. I saw Paul Collier speak many times at Oxford and always found him candid and informative. Richard Overy’s book was one of the best I read in the course of two history seminars at Oxford; I look forward to having the chance to take my time in reading it, rather than having it as one of several urgent items in an essay’s source list. Finally, I got the Bodanis book because I have heard it well recommended and know little about Voltaire and even less about Emilie du Chatelet.

I will certainly finish the fiction eventually, but I will do so interspersed with meatier stuff.

Gladwell on criminal profiling

Walking boy graffiti

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, has an interesting article in the most recent New Yorker debunking police profiling of violent offenders. He basically argues that their methods are unsound, but that this is concealed by the same kind of cheap psychological tricks used by telephone psychics. In particular, the article discusses a set of tactics described by Ian Rowland: a magician and the author of a book on cold reading.

The tactics included focus on calculated vagueness, exploitation of known or highly probable information, and mechanisms for reducing the chances of being decisively proved wrong. The last of those is particularly crucial, as it can allow you to retain your reputation despite the inevitability of making some incorrect guesses.

Be advised that the article has graphic content.

Index of climate posts

Fruit bar

For the last while, my aim on this blog has been both to entertain readers and to provide some discussion of all important aspects of the climate change problem. To facilitate the latter aim, I have established an index of posts on major climate change issues. Registered users of my blog can help to update it. Alternatively, people can use comments here to suggest sections that should be added or other changes.

The index currently contains all posts since I arrived in Ottawa. I should soon expand it to cover the entire span for which this blog has existed.

Fugitive Pieces

Grief Grafitti

Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is too overwhelming a book for me: overwhelming with sadness, with detail, with history, and with language evocative of inescapable grief. As such, it took me many weeks to read. One passage does a particularly good job of succinctly encapsulated the inescapable historical anguish that makes this small book so heavy:

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.

That kind of curse extends to all the characters in the book. None find any comprehensive solace; none manage to lift their feet above the boggy terrain of the past and make their way to a firmer present shore. The book presents a number of brief illuminations, but each has the ultimate character of being palliative rather than redemptive:

But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it’s not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it’s the world’s brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

These people are swept along like houses carried by hurricane waters – whether floating towards tragedies or temporary reprieves from grief. The point is hammered home with talk of tornadoes transporting people or ripping them apart; lightning providing unexpectedly cooked geese, straight from the sky, or simply flattening people. Michaels’ people do not possess agency of the kind that we perceive ourselves to have, and which is essential to optimism.

The author’s approach to thought is almost completely unlike my own. Rather than focusing on patterns, both the author and the protagonists focus on details. Rather than drawing comprehensible conclusions from extrapolated data, they draw opaque, personal, emotional conclusions – as veiled as modern poems. The book is beautiful and powerful, but also soul-sapping and exhausting. It is a book with depths to reward you for your struggle.

In a way, this book is the antithesis of Nabokov’s Lolita. There, inherent ugliness is flawlessly concealed by language that has the power to immerse your whole mind in the succession of sounds and syllables. In Fugitive Pieces, your mind can never quite get to the language because it is hampered at all times by the heaviness of grief.

…in order categorical

All of the entries on this site have been sorted into one or more categories. Just for the sake of experimentation, I will use the next 21 daily posts (the ones with photos are generally the ‘official’ daily posts) to go through my whole list of categories one by one. This will occur in no particular order. Some posts are likely to fall into multiple categories, but they will only count as the most relevant one for the purposes of the tally:

The numbers beside each category indicate the number of posts so far.

Unlettered society

National Archives of Canada

My ongoing fruitless search for lined correspondence paper has hammered home the degree to which letters have faded from our society. Not even specialized paper stores have ordinary letter paper for sale, it seems. This is no surprise, really, given how much more immediate and immersive other forms of communication are. The societal forces at work lead me to wonder whether we are even capable of writing letters anymore.

There was a long span of time during which letters were the only low-cost means of maintaining personal relationships at a distance. This began in the ancient world (though only because popular with the rise of mass literacy) and persisted until the rise of affordable long-distance telephone calls and the internet. Now, there are a myriad of more rapid and personal ways through which to exchange all manner of personal thoughts and information. Email was the dirt on top of the well-nailed coffin: allowing people the permanence and clarity of written language in a much quicker and more versatile way. Now, every office tower is stuffed with BlackBerried workers.

Yet the letter persists as an aesthetic ideal. People value them because of the time they take to construct and their enduring quality. I still have letters that Kate wrote me a decade ago. Still, I wonder whether people who are utterly acquainted with rapid communication are generally capable of writing things in a style suited to this slow and permanent route. Our communication styles have simply become too dynamic – we expect things to change quickly and for responses to be fluid. At the same time, all but a tiny minority of people have become utterly unpracticed in letter writing. Just as poetry and public speaking are no longer taught as a skill in schools, so too has letter writing been marginalized due to a lack of need and a lack of practice.

Overall, I cannot help but think this is a change for the better. People can remain in contact more vividly and extensively, despite how they tend to have groups of friends who are ever more spread out. Letter writing is destined to become an occasional curiosity – like the ‘paper making’ workshops that sometimes happen in elementary schools or craft stores (usually just re-assembling cut up bits of previously made paper). Hopefully, people who are engaging in the kind of correspondence that will eventually be published in books (if those do not vanish as well) have been keeping accessible and reliable paper copies. Digital media are fickle, and it would be rather tragic to lose such a historical record to failed hard drive bearings and changed file formats.

Voice echoing off cave walls

Posting two entries a day with little or no personal content is: (a) time consuming and (b) seemingly uninteresting to the long-suffering readers of this blog. As such, I am declaring one post a day to be the standard, with unlimited allowance for additional posts if I feel inspired.

Sometimes, it is hard to know if anyone is even reading. If you have been, but you never leave comments, I would really appreciate if you did so here.

Oryx and Crake

Fire truck valves

Margaret Atwood‘s novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, portrays a future characterized by the massive expansion of human capabilities in genetic engineering and biotechnology. As such, it bears some resemblance to Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age, which ponders what massive advances in material science could do, and posits similar stratification by class. Of course, biotechnology is an area more likely to raise ethical hackles and engage with the intuitions people have about what constitutes the ethical use of science.

Atwood does her best to provoke many such thoughts: bringing up food ethics, that of corporations, reproductive ethics, and survivor ethics (the last time period depicted is essentially post-apocalyptic). The degree to which this is brought about by a combination of simple greed, logic limited by one’s own circumstances, and unintended consequences certainly has a plausible feel to it.

The book is well constructed and compelling, obviously the work of someone who is an experienced storyteller. From a technical angle, it is also more plausible than most science fiction. It is difficult to identify any element that is highly likely to be impossible for humanity to ever do, if desired. That, of course, contributes to the chilling effect, as the consequences for some such actions unfold.

All in all, I don’t think the book has a straightforwardly anti-technological bent. It is more a cautionary tale about what can occur in the absence of moral consideration and concomitant regulation. Given how the regulation of biotechnology is such a contemporary issue (stem cells, hybrid embryos, genetic discrimination, etc), Atwood has written something that speaks to some of the more important ethical discussions occurring today.

I recommend the book without reservation, with the warning that readers may find themselves disturbed by how possible it all seems.

The grammar of data and datum

Sticklers for proper grammar are fond of pointing out how frequently people misuse the word ‘data.’ A ‘datum’ is singular; data are plural. The Economist Style Guide (a companion on my desk) explains:

Data and media are plural. So are whereabouts. Teams that take the name of a town, country or university are plural, even when they look singular: England were bowled out for 56.

Law and order defies the rules of grammar and is singular.

While this may be technically accurate, it has always clashed with my intuition – and not only because those who supposedly use the term incorrectly far outnumber whose who follow grammarian cant.

The question for me is whether ‘data’ is more like cats or more like water. The cats are increasingly annoyed about all this talk of grammar, but they remain distinct, countable, independent entities. The water, by contrast, is salty, ever-present, and part of an amalgamated mass. I may have seen Ghost in the Shell a few too many times, but the data-water equivalency long since became firmly entrenched for me.