Why there is no point in my going to literary festivals

Michael Hayworth, a publisher, complains in a column in The Age today that Australian "classic"novels are forgotten all too quickly by both academia and the public, and many are out of print.  But he starts with this observation:

We live in the world of the home-grown literary bestseller, the world of The Slap and The Secret River. We love our new stars, and celebrate the success of Favel Parrett or Toni Jordan or Craig Silvey. Our writers have careers both at home and abroad. We no longer expect our life-changing books to be written in isolation and despair, against the odds, fulfilling what Henry Lawson came to believe was the destiny of the Australian writer.

OK, well, I've heard of The Slap because it became a TV series last year that didn't sound all that interesting, and I therefore didn't watch.  I have heard the title "The Secret River".  I think.  

But, sorry, call me completely out of touch with Australia literature if you want, I have not heard of Favel, Toni or Craig.  And I even watch First Tuesday Book Club about half the time its on.  [Now that I think of it, I can't remember the name of any Australian author who I saw on it last year, except for potboiler thriller writer Matthew O'Reilly (who I also haven't read.)  Maybe I only watch the show because I like it when they strongly disagree on the merits of something I'm never going to read anyway.]

Back to Hayworth:

Our universities have failed for more than a century to create any kind of enduring tradition for the teaching of Australian literature. We are so familiar with this failure we hardly notice. And our publishing has always been dominated by British houses, which have not always felt the need, simply because a book is part of our national heritage, to keep it available.

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France.

There you go:  another Australian author and book, this one a "classic" apparently, which I haven't heard of.

But hang on a minute:  "failed for more than a century to create any ...enduring tradition..." is a bit rich isn't it?   By 1900, the country had only been around in any substantial form for a few decades.  (Have a look at this chart, which indicates the white population in 1843 was barely 250,000.)  Sure, Sydney University was founded in 1850 (presumably with very small class sizes,) but people coming here were hardly motivated by the weather making it a nice place in which to write books, and it's hard to imagine University courses of the early 20th century being designed around the works of Henry Lawson (or some such.)

In any event, I'm not entirely sure why Universities need to "teach" modern literature at all, but that's just me a being a not-very-arty philistine, I suppose; even though readers of this blog may think I am more "arts" inclined that I really am due to my reports on the latest weird installations at Brisbane's GOMA.   I can see the value in studying (as opposed to merely experiencing) literature from the point of view of what it tells us about societies'  and individual's attitudes in the past, and the arc of their development over time; this applies especially to really old literature.   But the study of modern literature when there is plenty of other material around about the society it was written in; well, after the first 5 years of analysis of a particularly complex book, I am not entirely sure what more there is to be said or taught, and you could probably now find most of that analysis for free on the net instead of going to university.

Anyhow, Hayworth's complaint about good Australian books being out of print would, one expects, be answered by the increasing use of e-readers.   Surely it can't be very expensive to put them out in electronic  format, and even develop a specialised field of advertising for formerly acclaimed books which have been out of print for some years.

If the publishing industry can't work out how to do that, Andrew, I'd say it's pretty much their own fault, and I wouldn't blame it on Universities at all. 

Tourism and politics

Egyptian frustration as tourists stay away | World news | The Guardian

The dramatic drop in tourism to Egypt (at least 32%, possibly 50%) raises an interesting question: can the need for Western tourism be a moderating force on State enforced religious conservatism?

Not for the first time, I will again suggest: much of the Middle East should be managed by Disney. They may have to give up their "gay days," though.

A bit embarrassing (OK, very embarrassing)

The anti-fornication, anti-abortion wife of Rick Santorum lived very differently in her 20s.

I know very little about Rick Santorum, so was this already known in the States? In any event, I was surprised to read about the very less than ideal Catholic life his wife led in her 20's.

About that fridge...

George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits - NYTimes.com

This New York Times article is largely about a new George Lucas produced film "Red Tails," which (to his chagrin) he had to finance personally. It sounds potentially good - an old fashioned patriotic film about the (black) Tuskegee Airmen, featuring a lot of aerial footage. And, importantly, it's not actually directed or written by Lucas.

The article also spends a lot of time reviewing Lucas' career, and the enemies he has made with fanboys who hate him fiddling with his Star Wars films gets much coverage.

But the other great controversy of his movie making career - the much derided "nuking the fridge" segment from the much derided Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - is what I want to note.

I cannot believe how much venom is directed at that film. It was mentioned in at least half of the Tintin reviews I read, usually reading something like "this is a much better Spielberg action film than that last embarrassment of an Indiana Jones film." Well, I beg to differ.

I didn't think IJKCS was wonderful: I thought the script could have been much better, and, yes, OK, it was the silliest Indiana Jones film with some of the fake stunts, but there were enough well done sequences and images that I still ranked it as being enjoyable enough.

So, how did "nuking the fridge" manage to not offend me? I mean, sometimes really stupid science puts me off an entire movie. (The villain needing a satellite dish the size of Arecibo radio observatory to get a message to an orbiting satellite weapon in Golden Eye is the example I remember most frequently.) So what about the fridge? My reaction was that it was extremely unlikely and therefore a bit silly, but not fundamentally impossible. I now have information to back up that view.

The NYT notes (and I had heard this before) that Steven Spielberg claimed in one interview that it was his "silly idea". However, Lucas tells the paper that this was just Spielberg trying to be nice:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

I wonder who those scientists are?

Anyway, that's enough for me. My gut reaction was about right, and Crystal Skull haters will just have to concentrate on the vine swinging scene instead. (Hey, that wasn't fundamentally impossible, either.)

The big computer in the sky

I haven't been spending much time checking new paper on arXiv lately, but here's a new one that talks about the idea of the Universe as a program being run on a giant quantum computer. 

I liked these parts:

And this part near the end:

Whatever happened to Spielbergian aliens?

The two big science fiction-ish hits of Steven Spielberg's early career, Close Encouters and ET, were notable for the niceness of the aliens:  little squishy botanist ET wouldn't harm a fly; and although the CE3K aliens appeared to have no concept of how disorientating it may be for humans to be sucked up into a mother ship and returned to their families 60 years later, they were touchy feely nice guys in the end.  No alien's perfect, I guess:  ET may well have turned rapidly into an alcoholic if he could have tolerated family absence better.

So, while watching Cowboys and Aliens on DVD last night, which Spielberg executive produced, I wondered why he now only seems to be involved with films showing aliens that want to squash humans like so many bugs.

His own War of the Worlds showed physically weak looking aliens who nonetheless thought humans were the most convenient source of blood and bone fertiliser for the lawn; last year's exec produced Super 8  had an alien that was (if I recall correctly) being treated unfairly, but nonetheless was ultra violent in response;  and now Cowboys and Aliens had another set of grotesque designed aliens who, despite having the technology to come to Earth in a pretty cool looking spaceship, thought the best way to dispose of interfering mammals is to bite their neck out or stab and slash them with their built in dagger fingers.

Doesn't anyone write science fiction with nice aliens any more?

As for Cowboys and Aliens as a movie:  the critical response was about right - not great, not horrendous, but had a bit of a feel of a lost opportunity to do a cool genre mash up better.

Now they tell us...

According to this article, people with a shipping industry background have been getting worried for a number of years about the safety of mega cruise ships.

Great mistranslations in history

Actually, the post is about Original Sin again.

Now, it is quite possible that I have read about this particular translation issue before, but have forgotten it.   Nonetheless, this translation issue was noted in a book I picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday (yes, Brisbane people - you have until next weekend to load up on books you probably won't finish before the next one comes around), but a simpler explanation is to be found via Google books, which turned up this extract from Hans Kung book "Great Christian Thinkers":

One other thing occurred to me about this - and I presume this is not an original thought - until Catholic scientist priest Spallanzani, who I mentioned here several posts back - did his 18th century work, mammalian reproduction as requiring both ovum and sperm was not well understood, and the idea that semen alone contained a tiny human just waiting to be planted and grow up was one way of understanding it.  Logically, then, there was a sense in which one man's seed also contained all the future babies as well as his own.

Would such thinking contribute to the way in which Augustine might have thought all humans were "in" Adam, and (in a sense) were quasi-participants in the original sin?

Update:  Another book (Augustine of Hippo - a life" by Henry Chadwick ) notes the following, which seems relevant to my speculation:
 

Update 2:  It may not have been Augustine's idea, but we do find in the Wikipedia entry for homunculus that some later thinkers thought that "preformationism" was relevant to original sin:

It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with a chain of homunculi "all the way down". This was not necessarily considered by spermists a fatal objection however, as it neatly explained how it was that "in Adam" all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.

Actually, the Wiki entry on preformationism is worth looking at too, for a more detailed look at its development in philosophy and its lasting influence.  It all starts with Pythagoras, apparently.  When microscopes came along, the dutch inventors gave preformationism a boost by claiming to see (in a fashion which reminds me of how, much later, Martian canals would be imagined via telescopes) things in semen that simply aren't there:

Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to observe spermatozoa. He described the spermatozoa of about 30 species, and thought he saw in semen, "all manner of great and small vessels, so various and so numerous that I do not doubt that they be nerves, arteries and veins...And when I saw them, I felt convinced that, in no full grown body, are there any vessels which may not be found likewise in semen." (Friedman 76-7)^[7]

But, going back to Augustine, it would seem that he does not really count as a preformationist:

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both held that hominization, or the coming into being of the human, occurs only gradually. Quickening was thought to occur around 40 days, and to be the point at which the merely animal mix of material fluids was ensouled. Until 1859, when Pope Pius IX decreed that life begins at “conception,” the Church was epigenetic along with the Aristotelians [see Maienschein 2003].

Put down the can

Study finds caffeine poisoning on the rise

I suppose it's no surprise that the highly caffeinated soft drink market should cause a spike in the number of cases of apparent caffeine poisoning. Is this part of the report right, though?:

Caffeine toxicity can mimic amphetamine poisoning, cause seizures, psychosis, cardiac arrhythmias and rarely even death, but the most common symptoms reported include irregular heart rate, tremors, stomach upsets and dizziness.

Well, Google knows everything, and links me to this blog post, containing the following extract from a toxicologist's book:

“Caffeine-induced psychosis, whether it be delirium, manic depression, schizophrenia, or merely an anxiety syndrome, in most cases will be hard to differentiate from organic or non-organic psychoses….

The treatment for caffeine-induced psychosis is to withhold further caffeine.”

In fact, the entire website ("The Caffeine Web") describes itself as having the following purpose:

At CaffeineWeb.com, psychiatrists, allergists and toxicologists address caffeine's potential to induce symptoms of mental illness in healthy people.

But it appears to have been a short lived affair. Maybe the author had a relapse after a particularly hard night on the Starbucks.

The lucky tilt

Here's an interesting story from Physorg about the possible importance of planetary tilt for the emergence of life:

But take away the Earth's axial slant, and the place might become a lot less inviting.

With an obliquity of less than five degrees or so, an Earth-like planet's broader equatorial regions bear the full brunt of a sun's radiance. The polar regions also receive far less sunlight than they do with seasonal ebbs and flows. The result: extreme temperature gradients based on latitude. "Your equator is heated enormously while the poles freeze," said Heller.

In theory, bands of habitability in temperate, mid-latitude zones could persist. In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south.

Life, had it ever emerged, would be stopped dead in its tracks.

And the problem is, for life on other planets, that red dwarf stars may well erase planetary tilt relatively quickly.

It sounds like it may be an important reason as to why you can have billions of planets, but not many suitable for life.

Back to Pelagius?

I saw a link to an article in The Tablet about evolution and religion by Jack Mahoney, but it was behind the paywall and couldn't get to it.  (The Tablet offers very little for free.)

Anyway, a bit of Googling shows that Jack Mahoney is a Jesuit and has recently published a book "Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration".

It sounds very interesting.  As the review in The Independent notes:

Mainstream Christianity long ago dropped overt hostility to Darwin, and even manages to speak of him fondly on occasion, but it has held back from the next logical step, bringing theology and evolution into meaningful dialogue. Christianity, Mahoney argues, "has been strangely silent about the doctrine of evolution" because to accept it wholeheartedly would then involve a redrawing of the theological map. Yet that is precisely what he wants it to do.

It's true: there's an unresolved tension in the modern Catholic Church between the scientific understanding of evolution and the traditional understanding of the role of Christ; it is being ignored rather than dealt with adequately.  The fundamental problem is that evolution erodes the concept of Original Sin.   It certainly can't be understood in the previous sense of being the reason why death and suffering came to the Earth.

Thus, it is not surprising that Mahoney follows the path previously trod by another Jesuit interested in evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, in throwing doubt on the traditional understanding of Original Sin.  Of course, once you start questioning one traditional theological understanding, it can have a bit of a domino effect. From another review from a Jesuit website:

 Mahoney suggests that more traditional understandings of Original Sin, the Fall, Atonement, Justification and similar concepts no longer sit comfortably in an evolutionary context. His own position on sin in this context is very helpful: ‘Sin emerges as humanity’s yielding to evolutionary selfishness and declining to accept the invitation to self-transcendence: it is a refusal to transcend oneself in the interests of others.’ (p.43) Put like that, it makes sense of Paul VI’s claim that ‘the world is sick’ (Populorum Progressio, §66) and his diagnosis of its sickness as ‘the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples’. I also liked Mahoney’s comment: ‘What people in today’s culture need most is not the recovery of a sense of sin but the acquiring of a sense of purpose in their lives.’ (p.66)

I don't know:  I kind of miss the emphasis on personal sin in the Church these days.  But anyway, the review also notes:

He carries this approach to the Incarnation through to offer an interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, too, suggesting that evolutionary theology:

proposes that the motive for the Word becoming flesh was not to save humanity from any inherited congenital sinfulness; it was for Christ to lead and conduct the human species through the common evolutionary fate of individual extinction to a new level of living with God. Nor was this done by the offering of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice to placate an injured God; it was achieved by Christ’s freely confronting death and winning through to a new phase of existence to be imparted to his fellow humans in their evolutionary destiny to share fully in the life of God. (pp.14-15)

Such suggestions will, one would think, not endear Mahoney to Pope Benedict; but then again, some people took the latter's mention of Teilhard de Chardin with brief approval in 2009 as indicating a softening of the previous Vatican warnings against his theological thoughts.

The problem, of course, is that Original Sin in its traditional form has been solidly maintained by the Church virtually since its inception.  Pelagius' views on the topic (that Adam merely set a bad example to humanity), which presumably can be more easily accommodated within modern understanding of evolution, lost out in the ideological battle with St Augustine.  (I see from Wikipedia that there was also Semipelangianism, which was an attempt to find a compromise between Augustinian and Pelagian views, but it was also promptly condemned as heresy.)

I would expect that Pelagianism gets covered in Mahoney's book, as it certainly seems he is effectively arguing that the modern understanding of evolution forces us to return to something resembling it.

Finally, while Googling around on the topic, I found this chapter of an online book * which deals with the theological response in the Catholic Church to evolution.   It is very detailed, but rather good.  Amongst other points if makes, it seems that it may have been well into the 20 th century before a majority of theologians really started believing that evolution was completely true.   This does not surprise me.  My own father, for example, never fully accepted evolution, and as it was a topic that the Church chose not to preach about, I expect many Catholics born in the first (say) third of the last century found evolution a topic easy to ignore, and a little hard to believe, and as such it did not represent much of a challenge their faith.

* the website it is from is said to be "Where Christian mysticism, theology and metaphysics meet Eastern religions, Jungian psychology and a new sense of the earth", and appears to be mostly the work of James Arraj, a psychologist who died a year or two ago.  I don't know about the quality of everything he has written, but the chapter I have linked to here seems pretty good.

Respect needed

BBC News - Eve teasing in India: Assault or harassment by another name

I didn't realise India could be such an unpleasant place for female tourists. Not just the article, but many of the comments following, indicate that it can be quite aggravating for them.

Terry Eagleton dissents

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review | Books | The Guardian

Terry Eagleton is always an interesting commentator, even if his Marxist take on Christianity is not for everyone. Here, he reviews Alain de Botton's book that argues in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who (explains Eagleton):

....feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe.

The key criticism of this approach is in these paragraphs:

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

A bigfoot-like creature

Did Bigfoot Really Exist? How Gigantopithecus Became Extinct | Hominid Hunting

Interesting blog entry from Smithsonian.com. I don't think they went extinct - they invented a time machine and just wander the Earth at whim.

TB back

Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India : Nature News & Comment

You don't hear too much about TB as an international disease these days, hence I didn't know this:

Tuberculosis trails behind only HIV as the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease. But in spite of its impact on human health and economic growth, it has not ranked among the pharmaceutical industry's priorities.

“The pharmaceutical industry had scant interest in TB for decades,” says Richard Chaisson, director of the Center for TB Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “The industry pretty much concluded it wasn’t an attractive market, there was not enough potential profit.”

The article goes on to say that there has been an increase in development of TB drugs in the last 10 years or so, and none too soon, by the sounds:

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease¹. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007² and Iran in 2009³.

A minor rat tale

Watching War Horse the other night, which I thought generally created a very realistic look to trench warfare in World War I, there was one quick shot in which there were a quite a few rats out in the middle of a trench while the last soldier was waiting there after all of his comrades had gone up over the wall and into battle.  Hmm, I thought, I know there were a lot of rats around the trenches, but did they really make such a sudden large scale appearance in bright daylight as soon as everyone had left? 

Then, this morning, in full sunlight, while idly staring out of the kitchen window, I noticed a rat boldly eating the left over bird seed sitting on the spa cover where we normally put the seed trays.

Time for some rat warfare action again at my house.

Comedy, science and religion

Today's reading:

*  the New York Times magazine has a long article on Stephen Colbert, and focusing more on his recent complicated toying with the Presidential race.  All pretty interesting.   Unfortunately, Comedy Central now blocks his website videos here, and his show is not shown on any free network, leaving him only accessible to those who get the Comedy Channel on cable TV.   This is a terrible outcome, as we recently gave up Foxtel at our house, to no discernible loss of quality of life except for my not being to watch Colbert Report. 

*  the Christian Science Monitor reports on Nicholas Steno, with the headline "The saint who undermined creationism".   Well, he's not quite a saint yet, but I don't recall reading about him before.  (He is apparently credited as the first to work out - in the 17th century - that different geological layers are laid down over time and contain a record of life in the very distant past.)  He went on to become a bishop.   As the article notes, the Catholic church has other clerics who have made big scientific contributions:

Steno was by no means the only Catholic cleric whose observations created models that counter literal Biblical accounts of creation. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, developed a model of inheritance that made Darwin's theory of evolution intelligible. In the 20th century, it was a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory.

Oddly enough, there is also the case of Lazzaro Spallanzani, who amongst other things:

...discovered and described animal (mammal) reproduction, showing that it requires both semen and an ovum. He was the first to perform in vitro fertilization, with frogs, and an artificial insemination, using a dog. Spallanzani showed that some animals, especially newts, can regenerate some parts of their body if injured or surgically removed.

Given the Church's current teaching, with its overly detailed theologising about the one and only legitimate place for semen to ever be, it's a tad ironic that it was one of their priests who was making discoveries about it.

Reich review

The man who started the sexual revolution | TLS

Here's an interesting review of a new book about all round loon Wilhelm Reich, whose core idea of the e-vil of sexual repression made him quite popular with middle aged Western men for much, much longer than he deserved.

In Australia, the aging Jim Cairns made it clear that he was very enamoured of Reich's theories, and on checking this I see that it was his she's-not-my-mistress mistress Junie Morosi who was largely responsible for introducing him to the books.

Fear of Horse conquered

I am happy to report that my not-so-happy Spielbergian experience with Tintin was not repeated with last night's viewing of War Horse.

It's a very impressive movie, and all the good reviews referring to it being in a grand, "classic" Hollywood style of movie making which petered out sometime in the 1960's are right.  I agree wholeheartedly with Stephanie Zacharek's comment the other day in Slate:

 I love the pure movieness of War Horse—I don’t see it as corny or overcooked.

It is, even by Spielberg standards, an exceptionally lush and beautiful film, and I don't recall a World War I movie which has ever evoked the look of the period in such an authentic feeling way.   The John Williams score is not over-powering, the actors are all fine, and the script works well too. 

But the largest praise must go to Spielberg himself.   The film does not (unlike Tintin) contain motifs repeated from his earlier work in any calculated way;  it references classic directors' works but (for the most part) with the added benefit of the graceful camera movement and careful regard to the composition of every single shot that is the hallmark of an extraordinary natural talent. 

You should see it at a cinema.

A bit of a surprise?

Marijuana use associated with cyclic vomiting syndrome in young males

Researchers have found clear associations between marijuana use in young males and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS), where patients experience episodes of vomiting separated by symptom free intervals.

Since marijuana is well known as a help for some people with nausea and vomiting from things like chemotherapy, this would seem like a bit of a surprising finding.