Bad Things Come In Threes

So the old superstition goes.  Personally, I don't relax a bit after the third one.  

Shakespeare said it better.:  Claudius, in "Hamlet." When sorrows come they come not single spies, But as battalions.

CANOE

The acronym CANOE is an etymological joke, referring to the Committee to Attribute a Nautical Origin to Everything. Many English words do come from nautical terms, because English spread around the world first on ships, headed for Bermuda, Canada, India, Australia, or Pitcairn Island. But people got completely carried away with this, with "Port Outward, Starboard Home," or "Shipped High In Transit," neither of which is the real origin of those terms*. Acronyms did not come into being until such things as RADAR and SCUBA** in the 1940s. Also, there is no such Committee.

There are romantic notions that seem to be culturally installed, so that phrases are often falsely attributed to "Shakespeare's time," or "gambling slang," or "originally Irish." Those are red flags (which is a nautical term) that the purported explanation may be invented. As for the Irish in particular, I wrote about that almost twenty years ago There's a Sach Ur Born Every Minute.

*Posh is an old term for a dandy, based on a thieves cant word for coins. Shit occurs in other Germanic languages, likely derived from a a verb meaning "to snip." Which makes sense if you are spending a lot of time around sheep, dogs, or other mammals.

**SCUBA means Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. TUBA is also an acronym, meaning Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus. 

Gurwinder

I will be adding Gurwinder to the sidebar. This post of his, and the conversation that follows, is a good example why. It begins 

In a 2022 newsletter, I gave one reason why I think leftists are more likely than rightists to celebrate opponents’ deaths...

Some people try to keep their sidebars thorough, as a friendly nod to the many writers they find stimulating or agreeable.  I have been increasingly weeding mine, limiting it to people I actually go and read. I derived great pleasure from Dwarkesh Podcast for a few months, but seldom find the interviews all that engaging these last few months.  I have learned so much from Manifold and Conversations with Tyler over the years that I am reluctant to remove them, but I click through and listen only about 20% of the time that a new episode drops now, and I don't listen to those all the way through.

Please go and check those two, looking at the recent topics BTW, to see if the interviews attract you. Talk me out of dropping them. I don't know if it is because they have used up their best material* or that my dilettante mind has just tired of their favorite topics. I dropped Maggie's Farm during Covid because of too many annoying people in the comments - too much of a temptation for me. But I go there all the time, so it is went back on.  Just be warned about the comments.  Even the people I agree with I skip in irritation now.  

Even Astral Codex Ten seems less gripping. Yet ironically, because of that I will be adding it on. I have enthused about it so often that I resisted plumping for it further, as I have a couple of issues on which I disagree sharply, and didn't want to fully endorse it.  Now that it is lower down my list, the objections bother me less.

When I go to a site I like I often check out their recommended list as well.  I am far more likely to do this if the list is short. Also, I know your time is short and I want to put my best goods out front. 

*I suspect this is why The Great Books podcast shut down. When you are over 300 books you could do one more Shakespeare,  but the drive is less.

 

Other Morning Links

King Lear, Interpretability, and AI Doom.  In Shakespeare's famous play, Lear attempts to divide his kingdom among his daughters based on their expressions of love. But the king has no reliable way to discern genuine affection from manipulative flattery, leading him to trust his two deceitful daughters—who betray him. I don't know whether I'm a doomer or an optimist. Sorry to remind you that I'm old, I can't do anything about it, and it's your problem. 

Congestion Pricing in NYC is Working I hope this isn't true. It might be.

There are matrilineal societies. When they get large livestock, usually cattle, they become patrilineal. The arrow of causation might have worked the other way.  It doesn't seem to. 

 Your ninth-grade social studies book showed migration as the driver of cultural change, because arrow are easy to draw.  Throughout the 1900s, the anthropologists increasingly scoffed.  It was ideas moving, like technology of pots. Migration was considered overrated as an explanation.  DNA, linguistics, and better archaeology are showing it is both, with migration - often by conquest aided by disease - the big ticket.  Razib interviews Laura Spinney, author of Proto.

Another major part of my career, Borderline Personality Disorder.  I was certain that The Studies Show would get something wrong enough for me to comment on.  They didn't.  Balanced and up-to-date. 

Not a link.  Collectors, especially extreme collectors, are often considered to be OCD.  Looking at my own friends and family, I wonder is Asperger's might be just as likely.  And some of the collectors I know seem to be neither.  The desire to put things in order, put them in their place, have completeness may be more aspie than simple accumulation, which is sometimes an OCD trait.  Though not always.

 

Attribution Errors

There are a lot of false quotes by Albert Einstein and CS Lewis on social media, and there have always been "Bible" quotes or "In the Middle Ages/Shakespeare's Time" explanations. Have fun adding to that list for sayings or phrases.  There is a strong human tendency to associate one's own ideas with someone thought to be smart or good.

I get a lot of Impressionist art popping up in front of me, likely because I have clicked "like" on others. The fake ones, the ones by modern artists that even I can tell are not from the 1800s, are attributed to Van Gogh.  I have not seen anyone try to ride a Monet wave, or Toulouse Lautrec or anyone else, always Van Gogh. I attach no particular significance to this other than people liking VVG and considering him the best piggyback.

On The Off Chance

On the off chance any of you are interested in this conference or its sponsoring group, I pass along what I just received a few minutes ago. I met Joe Ricke at the Montreat Conference I went to a couple of years ago.

Inkling Folk Fellowship

15 September 2024

International Congress on Medieval Studies

Friends, Every year at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, we sponsor two sessions on C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages. This roughly means we look for papers about Lewis's thought and work that show the influence of and respond to medieval sources, ideas, etc. But there is some "wiggle room," as one might expect, about how this is interpreted. Here are proposals due for this year. One is on "chivalry" and the other is on "grief." They have been posted and shared elsewhere, but, because the deadline is Sept 15 (or 3 a.m. Sept 16, EST), I am sending them out through various channels today. Thanks, Joe Ricke   Call for proposals C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages Sessions @ 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University) May 8-10, 2025   Session One: "Lewis and Chivalry" We are looking for 3-4 scholarly papers that consider this aspect of Lewis's work especially in the context of his medieval scholarship and/or his creative medievalism.   Rationale:   In August 1940, just weeks after the beginning of the Battle of Britain, C. S. Lewis published an essay in Time and Tide about the medieval concept of "chivalry." "What," he asked, "is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world?" We propose a session which both analyzes the concept (as Lewis understood it) and its relevance to his life and work, as well as to our understanding and interpretations of his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, biography, and cultural criticism. We seek papers which interpret, apply, and/or criticize Lewisian "chivalry." We expect, as usual, an excellent discussion within the panel and with the larger audience.   Session Two: "The Problem of Grief." We are looking for 3-4 scholarly papers that consider this aspect of Lewis's work in the context of his medieval scholarship or creative medievalism. Rationale:   Recognized and "lionized" for his visions of hope and happy-endings, C. S. Lewis, the medievalist, maintained a tender sensitivity to and robust appreciation for the reality and problem of human grieving. In essays, both personal (like A Grief Observed) or more philosophical (like The Problem of Pain), in literary criticism, science fiction, and in children's fantasy, Lewis does not shy away either from death and suffering itself or from the multi-layered human response we call grief. This session seeks papers linking Lewis's treatment of grief with his medievalist roots, demonstrating not just his own relevance but that of his medieval sources.   Deadline for Submission of Proposals/Abstracts: Sunday, September 15, 2024   To submit, you will need to use and learn to navigate the Congress portal (look for "Sponsored and Special Sessions of Papers," find the title "C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (1): Chivalry" or "C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (1): Grief," and begin your submission. https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/cfp.cgi   If you've attended the ICMS, you know why you should do it in 2025. If you haven't, come and find out why (Lewis, Tolkien, Dante, Aquinas, Francis, performances, Marie de France, Beowulf, Cistercian Studies, Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Chaucer, dramatic readings, medieval music, etc.).  Final afternoon highlight is the Pseudo-Society, a paper session of three outlandish parodies of medieval scholarly presentations/bad powerpoints. If you can't find something to interest you in every time slot, I will buy you a coffee in the Student Union.   For questions, information, or help with the process), contact jsricke@outlook.com   Note: The sessions are live not virtual.

Inkling Folk Fellowship, 412 West Klein St, Seguin, TX

Theory of Mind

Lingthusiasm 59, Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking, looks at Theory of Mind from a more basic perspective, of childhood development and how TOM reflects in language. (Transcript available.) It includes the fun exercise of thinking how one would create a forwardable email to someone who already knows all the info and will distribute it under their own name.  The juggling of which mind is talking to which, a task we complete fairly automatically, is interesting to contemplate.

Or not.  It might be just linguists and researchers who think so.

Anyway, this is long-awaited, and quite disjointed.  I eventually just gave up in order to move the blog forward.

Why is it automatic for some to ask the questions "How would I feel if someone said that to me?" or "Would this be different if it were a boss asking an employee/ a woman suggesting it to a man/ and old friend versus a new one?" while others can do it very well but need to be cued to ask the questions, and others seem unable to do it at all?  WRT that middle category, is initiation sometimes an Asperger's problem?  I don't think I have seen it mentioned, but I can think of some examples in people I know. As this is something that children do not tend to do but some adults do I tend to view its lack as a childishness, or a direct callousness to the needs of others.  But I wince as I say it, because I know very nice people who display exemplary adulthood who find this difficult .

If we divide things into the World of Ideas, the World of Things, the World of People, we usually assign the first two categories to autists, regarding them as weaker in the third, and I can certainly think of a half-dozen examples of those who are rather avoidant of people, just off the top of my head.  Yet I know some hypersocial aspies, and others that are not comfortable in the World of Ideas at all, much preferring the concrete.  Is it the middle category that is the key one, then, as the stereotype used to be?

I have also noticed that some on the spectrum seem unable to resist their tendency to constantly, quietly enforce their worldview on any conversation. I hesitate to generalise, because I know non-Aspies who do that as well.  Yet it is a prominent feature of a few, constantly working their political, religious, or cultural view into every conversation in a rather obsessive fashion.  And these Aspies seem not to notice it, and in my limited experience from a decade ago, deny that is happening and are resentful.  It's like a slow invasion by a series of hobbyhorses.

What should we be socially consequating?  At what point do we stop saying that we have to be understanding and overlook things?  I am asking this more from a Christian and moral POV than a practical one. Let me make up an example:  A high school boy who seems quite aspie asks a girl to a dance. Yet at the end of the night she is humiliated because he has not danced with her. When friends or family try to point out to him that he has gotten this wrong and he gets embarrassed and goes and apologises, everyone is fine with the outcome.  Unless the girl also has issues of some sort and was more than humiliated and an apology isn't enough to make her come around and feel all right about things.  It's easy to be forgiving when there is no harm, but what if there is?

And what if he takes the opposite stance, digging in his heels and saying "But I don't like to dance.  No one has the right to make me dance.  I don't have to if I don't want to."  Efforts to make the distinction that of course he doesn't have to dance, except in situations where he asks someone to a dance, fall on deaf ears. And we know that he doesn't have quite the ability to understand these things as others do, but he's also being unnecessarily difficult.  I am not looking for a set of rules on this, but a set of questions to ask oneself. 

(I originally stated this as Social responsibility, that is something that society can legitimately consequate because it is disruptive, versus moral responsibility. How should a Christian respond to something that looks like the former mostly, but does not quite qualify for the latter if we make allowances for limitations, extenuating circumstances, etc, if that helps explain.)

Related, though it doesn't look it, is the issue of Demand Avoidance. As I err on the side of candor ("Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud," above) I find it hard to fathom the idea of not explaining yourself, or at least explaining why you are not going to explain. There are hundreds of mollifying or polite statements we get used to giving  to each other. "Did you mean to come across as that condescending?...  Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I should have... I see your point Esmeralda, and would ordinarily agree with it, but in this instance..." Even "Sod off, it's none of your business" may sound rude, but it's way better than just not answering.  Politely ignoring something is when you do it for the other person's sake, not mentioning that they are currently unemployed, or have been divorced twice, or embarrassed themselves at this event last year. But when you ignore someone for your own sake it is not politely ignoring, it is merely contemptuous, dismissing them so fully that their voice should not even be heard.

Even at that there are times when it is necessary, when violence is threatened or there is some other safety issue. But in general, the silent treatment is intentionally aggressive, no matter how much it is denied.

Yet that response is common.  It has been made into comedy, by Shakespeare and Moliere, where the audience is aching to say "If she would just tell him that she is the actual princess and not the maid in disguise," or going the other way "if you would just make the accusation that he saw her kissing another man, she could explain that it was her brother..."

(Of course these days it would have to be explaining to her boyfriend that the man she was undressing in front of was her gay cousin who is a fashion designer, but same principle.)

So at first glance it looks as if it should be impossible that we think it wise to just leave so much unsaid - yet it happens so often. Many people just don't want the momentary discomfort of "a scene," and will put themselves - and more importantly put others - through unnecessary pain. Demand avoidance is just running to your room like a schoolgirl, really.

Or am I imposing my emotional preferences on others? I wonder if this activates with aspies more when it is mostly emotional material that they feel unconfident about but is absent when more concret information is being discussed.

Received Pronunciation vs Original Pronunciation

There is a lot of nonsense written about how things were pronounced in Shakespeare's plays, mostly based on people having imprecise ideas of how the pieces fit together in time. If something is "old," then someone is going to announce that it was "in Shakespeare's day" even if it was in 1812 and only halfway back to his time. It is the same vagueness that causes people to imagine that Henry VIII, Robin Hood, and King Arthur were all about the same time, with the thought they might possibly have known each other.* Sometimes times even more recent or more remote than that get shoved in, so that just before WWI or Romans in togas might be considered contemporaneous with one of the characters mentioned above.

Yet we can know Elizabethan pronunciation in London with fair precision. We can tell from what words rhymed when the changes from Middle English to Early Modern English occurred (key item Great Vowel Shift), and what compromises printers made in response to the variations they heard around them.

So from about 13:00 to 17:00 in the above you can hear the prologue from "Romeo and Juliet," first in Received Pronunciation, the newscaster English in Southern England, then in Original Pronunciation, researched with precision by David Crystal, followed by his son Ben Crystal, who reads here.

So now you know. This would be very much the time period of the Authorised Version of the Bible, which we know as the King James Version. 

*Robin Hood would be much closer to Henry II, who would himself be a little more than halfway back from now to King Arthur, when there were no Henry's at all, not even in France or Germany.

British Lefties in 2006

Posts brought forward from March 2006.

I kept seeing parallels between American and British political divisions in those days, though there were some differences as well. I had one about McDonalds supposedly invading everywhere on the planet unasked, which I post in full here. But that was part of a series, and I include links to two of the others.

There was a general overview, which included wombats

The Reduced Shakespeare Company (whose performance of 37 plays in 94 minutes I loved in 1997) gets it annoyingly politically correct a few years later.

Going to the London Zoo and learning about the rights of the bearded pig. 

*******

I was going to do the wombats first, but Lee Harris's article at TCSDaily moved McDonald's into the next slot.

What is it about McDonalds that draws the ire of so many? It is large and visible, which is certainly a great factor. Eurofear of the US always includes a mention of the Golden Arches® as a culturally hegemonous soul-grabber, and Americans often apologize for it when discussing international relations. “You can see why they’d be suspicious of our culture which has to date mostly exported McDonalds and navel rings to them.” There is this enormous European worry that their cultures will be unable to withstand the onslaught. Once fast food becomes available it will inexorably push out all those unique, quaint places to eat. Oh, the horror!

Picture this, then: You and the missus are taking a weekend holiday and have driven several hours from home, and as night closes in and you grow hungry you begin to search for a place to eat. You approach a small seafood restaurant with a tacky name in a bad neighborhood. Well, it might be a really find, eh? Inexpensive little out-of-the-way place with excellent mussels and no one knows about it! But you’re not going to find out, are you? Because you aren’t going to stop there. You’re going to look for Someplace Else. Theoretically, I like searching out interesting little inns and cafes when I travel. But I also like clean restrooms and wiped tables and the aura of quality control. These sets of restaurant values do not always coincide in Europe, where even in Great Britain the loo at the restaurant could be strongly reminiscent of the facilities at American gas stations. Or summer camps.

In the 1960’s my mother would almost weep with relief at seeing a Howard Johnson’s while traveling. She knew there was zero chance of discovering a quaint little out-of-the-way place she would like better.

Eurofear. McDonalds. Where was I? I don’t think McDonalds-hatred stems from anyone’s deep concern for my nutrition (though that is put forward as the reason). And though the vegetable eaters focus on McDonalds as a primary enemy, that’s not a very logically sustainable position, so that’s not it either. Then there are folks who hate it when someone else makes money -- but even that’s only a partial explanation.

There is an arrogant elitism in the disapproval. We who are wise and discerning know how to avoid all this cultural coarsening, but the great unwashed are unable to resist. Worse, McDonalds is not a secret that only those special few know about.

These American imports succeed because Europeans also choose to go there and spend their money, BTW.

A common refrain is “No one was clamoring for a McDonalds before it came. It wasn’t supply and demand.” Oh, but they were and it was. There was already a market for 1) beef sandwiches, chips and coke long before these foods were purveyed at the golden arches. There was already a desire for 2) quick, accurate service, and a preference for 3) clean tables and restrooms. There was already a market for 4) restaurants in high-traffic areas. Did I mention 5) inexpensive? What else could you possibly characterize as demand?

There are still old-style pubs of course, and bully for them. They are offering something that people actually find worth paying for. Money is not the measure of all things, or even most things, but it’s an excellent measure of what we actually do prefer, rather than what we say we prefer.

Bill Bryson gets halfway to the right answer as he bemoans the loss of disappearing Britain. Certain trains no longer run because “They don’t pay for themselves,” and Bryson correctly notes that very few things in life pay for themselves. Public libraries don’t. Parks, zoos, and museums don’t. For unknown reasons he stops his reasoning there, not proceeding to the question “Who does pay for them, and why?” Not only those things that make for local culture, and quaintness, and tradition, but public safety, public health – we agree to pay for some and not for others. We don’t buy all possible good things, so how do we choose?

Alarmists to the contrary it is not true that there are only two types of water, clean and dirty, or only two types of vehicle, safe and unsafe. How clean? How safe? Or would you rather have whatever’s behind curtain #3? If you want a McDonalds-free town there are costs, and ultimately towns find that the hidden costs are much higher than they projected. There are a thousand ways that we wish the world would be instead of the way it is. Here’s the key: you have to find someone willing to pay for it.

History Becomes Lost, But is Found Again by the Beatles

Orinially December 2005.  I have been particularly proud of this observation about the phrase "black and white" and what people draw from it without noticing, Yet I haven't been able to convince many people that it is all that special. 

 

It was a moment of great irony yesterday listening to Paul McCartney and his interviewer claim that the world was black and white in 1963, but had become technicolor by 1968, and he had not only witnessed the change but been part of its cause!  

My humor about the movement of people in old movies and their skin tones in still pictures may fade, as the Peter Jacksons of the world ("They Shall Not Grow Old") clean up the motion and the color and our grandfathers and grandmothers regain some of their lost reality. But I think my observations still largely hold - certainly for those of us who grew up with that photography documenting 20th C history and formed our opinions then. 

********

Black & White Photography Creates The Illusion Of Black & White Morality

 

The years 1880-1960 are the gray, colorless years, lost to history. Events happened, but they were all dark, still, and boring. You’d think two major wars would liven things up in the public imagination, but interesting things apparently happened to boring, colorless people. We know the world was forgettable and not quite real. Soldiers in 1916 marched jerkily and too quickly, and for whole decades people waved a lot but could not speak. If they were lucky, they got captions. We’ve got movies of this, we know how life was then. In 1900 it was even worse, as whole families of sepia shadow-people sat endlessly in parlors in their best clothes. Even beautiful women had an unhealthy grayness to their skin, and a complete lack of fashion sense running entirely to blacks and grays. Winston Churchill might have had some color to him if it hadn’t been for all the stress of the war, but even he succumbed to bloodless pallor.

Yes, I believe Boomers really think this way. We're dumb like that

 

Floridians riding the half-taxis through Madame Tussaud’s in London encounter history as they know it: A series of romantic kings had wars with cool costumes. Next, everyone was poor and disease-ridden (but colorful) until the Great Fire of London. Then all of present-day London was built, including the Underground, and loud machines started doing work. In the 1800’s England conquered the world while wearing more cool costumes. But as Queen Victoria aged she turned gray and wore black, and the whole world followed suit. Our own history jibes with this, we just add a frontier and a colorful revolution[2]. Americans actually had the first colorless war in 1860, but we don’t expect anyone but us to remember that. Colorful peasants all over Europe were transformed into black-and-white slum dwellers in American cities in the late 19^th C; honest and hardworking but poor, finally able to open fruitstands and restaurants, a privilege denied them in Europe, apparently. Eventually the fruit turned gray, but they became prosperous anyhow.

Fortunately, in the 1960’s people regained their color. The lights came on and they became interesting and went to parties and had fun, which their parents and grandparents had been unable to do. Oh they had tried, of course, but they had boring fun. We know this. We have the pictures, and pictures don’t lie. Even the old people came around and agreed with this eventually, because when they looked at the photos they saw clearly how much more alive they were in 1970 than they had been in 1950. We Boomers still congratulate ourselves about this. Scholars now believe the Beatles should get credit for this, as they started out in black-and-white but learned to appear in color (colour, actually) and thus became rich and famous. Other popular musicians followed suit, and professional athletes followed. The Green Bay Packers were the first team to actually wear colors, rather than just say they had colors. Folks, we’ve got the pictures, don’t contradict me on this. The Colts played the Giants in black-and-white, and were black-and-white, in an era of moral (snigger) simplicity.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company – late boomers all – in the "Condensed History of America" openly admitted that they skipped history from 1880 until the war because it was boring. Two world wars got only passing notice. They invested their time in a 1950’s sendup done in stark lighting and black-and-white(!) costuming. Lucille Ball was there, but her hair wasn’t red. How could it have been? The world didn't have that color then. McCarthyism was mentioned, of course, because we love to congratulate ourselves on our moral superiority. How quaint to think of communists as evil and Americans as good.

However much the significance is overlooked, my observation is not original. Bill Waterson references the change in Calvin and Hobbes, capturing exactly the myth of how we perceive earlier generations. When National Geographic photographed Lake Wobegon only black and white film was used. Garrison Keillor himself provides the corrective in his story “Hog Slaughter,” a work of quiet power and one of his finest. “We believe it was a simpler time because we were children then, and our needs were looked after by others.”

A whole generation of Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic based its picture of history, and thus its social and political beliefs on an unrelated development: the improvement of color printing and color photography. We remember Nixon in black-and-white, Kennedy just barely in color. (John, Paul, George, and Ringo were probably influenced by this.) But Milhous never shed this image even after becoming president. He seemed hand-tinted rather than living color, even in 1980. The movie Pleasantville should have given it away, especially to a generation whose shared cultural icon was watching black-and-white Kansas change to colorful Oz. But that heavy-handed symbolism went well with our mental furniture, and we simply fit it in unnoticed. I mean, that's how those benighted people in the 50's were, right? Not like us.

Not to be too deconstructionist about it, but the similar words in the phrases “black and white morality” and “black and white photography” signify a deeper conceptual relationship. Oh man, that’s heavy. It’s like on the cover of Sgt. Pepper…

A social worker I once worked with was fond of saying “Things aren’t black and white.” She often went on to add “It’s not like Ozzie and Harriet where everything is solved in half an hour.” I didn’t note the juxtaposition at the time, but now estimate I’ve been hearing similar things for decades, just under my radar.

Moral relativity was not taught to us intellectually by Kafka, but accidentally by Kodak. Because the moral simplicity of our own childhood is recorded in black and white, we assume all the others in the photos were equally simple. Isn’t it great to live in more advanced times?

---

[2] Several presidents nearly shared this fate by being put on money. James Madison was sort of greenish, but I still can believe Dolly had peachy skin and auburn hair.

Eels

Have any of you had eels? Jellied eels are still a food associated with the East End in London, and smoked eel still shows up. Interestingly, the people who actually like eel as a food tend to dislike this, saying that the flavor is ruined by this preparation for long-term storage. I wouldn't know myself. They are also cold smoked to be kept around for stews and pies. I recall eel pie being mentioned in older literature, but eels are mostly mentioned as well, just eels. They were fried or roasted with some herbs and you ate them. This made them accessible to the poor, but they were not regarded as a poor person's food as they have been for the last century or two.  Everyone ate them. King Henry I, who had been warned repeatedly by his physician that because eels always gave him indigestion and were thus likely dangerous to him, decided he just plain liked them too mauch not to eat lots of them and famously died of eating "a surfeit of eels." They may have actually been lampreys, because the word translates either way, but we are going to be pro-eel for today and give them credit for the regicide.

There were other untimely eel-related deaths among the royalty and nobility, but none so direct as this.

There are eels in North America, in China and Japan, and they are - or were - eaten there in quantity.  But Europe was where eels were part of the culture, and nowhere more than in England. Over a thousand years the english ate more eels than any other fish, saltwater or freshwater. I got this from the Surprised Eel Historian who notes that it is the historian that is surprised, not the eels.  He wonders how he got into this line of work after starting out as a respectable historian.  For the quick eel news, his threadreader is here. Half a million eels a year paid in rent. (Or were they? There may be a translation and reference problem here.) They were used for debts, especially for rent money to landlords. The difficulty is that rents were often due on the same holidays throughout the year, so a large landholder might have thousands of eels arrive in the last few days. You can't keep them alive in water as they deplete the oxygen, but there is some method of putting them in wet moss for shipping.

You flayed them alive, though in London the eel-sellers would do this for you, thank God.

They were shipped everywhere. The English, the eel-eating champions by general acclaim throughout Europe, imported lots of them from the Dutch beginning around 1400, because even though they produced many more eels than anyone else, they just couldn't get enough.  Though this declined, this continued until the 1930s. Though they were declared unclean in Leviticus, they were preferred for Lent, as they seemed to reproduce asexually, and were therefore considered less spiritually dangerous. They actually reproduce by coming to sexual maturity just before migrating to the Sargasso Sea at the end of their lives. This is called their silver stage. Like us, I guess. The eels you see are technically juveniles, even though they can be years old and grow up to 20 feet long. An idea that makes me nervous, frankly.

Eels in Art and Literature, Briefly

Aristotle mentions them, but Aristotle mentions everything, so it nearly doesn't count. Freud had a sexual interpretation of them, and ditto.

The first English mention is by the Venerable Bede (c. 700), who tells us that England is well known for its eels and salmon. He claims that the town of Ely is so named because they have so many eels there. This is the sort of just-so etymology that usually turns out to be laughable, but in this case it is true.

There are eels in the Bayeux Tapestry; many along the borders as part of the decoration, but one symbolising England itself, which King William is grabbing by the tail. This is the wrong way to catch an eel, as one must grab it by the head, and this visually predicted that William would lose England. If it seems odd that an eel would be so readily associated with England, as a bear would represent Russia or an Eagle the USA, it is likely a product of the extreme fondness for them.

Shakespeare mentions eels more than any other fish.

In more modern times they are the stuff of nightmares, as in the shrieking eels in The Princess Bride and the moray eels of "The Little Mermaid." We shall not speak of them further. There is The Book of Eels, that is described by its publisher as about more than just eels, but a reflection on human life as a whole. Well, that's fascinating, but we do that ourselves without eels.

Chronological Narnia, and Again Susan

There is no good reason to read the Narnia Chronicles in chronological order as Harper Collins has ordered.  Lewis was right the first time, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He later told an 11-year old boy that it didn't matter much but he supposed that chronological might be best, as the boy had suggested. The boys sounds a bit OCD, and the editors at Harpers who thought he had a good idea strike me as similar. ("But the events in Magician's Nephew come first. So that book has to come first.") Years later, when Lewis was in his last year Douglas Gresham asked him and Lewis again said that chronological might be best. But Lewis had an odd quirk of memory, one that is surprisingly common in writers.  He did not remember his own work that well once he had finished it.  It seems strange for Jack, who remembered everything else he read.

That is insufficient. Readers of Lewis are nearly universal in agreeing on this. Narnia is not mentioned for 70 pages in The Magician's Nephew, largely because it does not exist at the beginning of the book. There are references throughout MN referring back to other stories. When Lewis began writing The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe he did not know there would be others in the series. By the time he finished the first book he had some ideas of subsequent books, but he does not reference The Magician's Nephew as one of them. 

The Problem of Susan -Again

I accepted the designation that the Narnian Chronicles were children's books when I first read them, and long after. After reading Lewis's essay "On Three Ways of Writing For Children" (it can be found in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories) it was solidified for me.  But in understanding his many references beyond the idea of writing adventurous stories in another world with Biblical themes, all the echoes of Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Greek mythology, and of course Michael Ward's theory that the whole batch of them draws from the Medieval belief in planetary influences, I have decided that they are better thought of as adult books, or adult ideas, in a form children can understand. 

As a fresh example, I encountered a new thought this morning on the Great Books discussion of The Last Battle, WRT the Problem of Susan. It comes from Monika Hilder of Trinity Western University in British Columbia.

We generally think of two types of heroism in our culture, the Greco-Roman and the Biblical.  Lewis - and Tolkien, and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - highly value the former. Physical courage and use of weapons, and even skill when resorting to warfare are admired. But he considers the latter to be superior, and much of the literature he draws from is specifically written to highlight that discussion of which heroism is greater. Even Lewis's Christian and sympathetic readers get caught up in the idea of adventures and courage of that Greco-Roman kind.  We are rather conditioned to it, especially in latter days when Biblical heroism doesn't much make it into movies, or TV, or popular culture.

Susan fails pretty solidly at Biblical heroism, remaining steadfast to the end despite all danger and appearances, like Tirian, like Jewel, like Puddleglum, like Eustace and Jill. (Or Frodo and Sam.) One of the main values Lewis is trying to stress in the entire series requires examples to illustrate. He is careful not to declare her lost forever, only that she has failed thus far, and failed at the only test that is really important. In his later correspondence, he specifically allowed for her repentance and redemption. The specifics of what she was tempted by, which JK Rowling, shooting from the hip as she often does, found so significant and so irritating, are not actually that important. She had the temptations to renounce Narnia common to her age, culture, and predisposition of personality. Digory, Eustace, and Edmond had different temptations, all of whom failed but repented and were redeemed. 

Do we object more to it being Susan because she is female, and we feel Lewis or any modern author shouldn't pick on a girl? (Because after all, they were picked on more in earlier literature and culture and perhaps men show feel an obligation to put something in the other balance pan.)  Perhaps, but I think two other things drive our objection. First, the temptations she succumbs to are common to females and not to males, which seems unfair of Lewis.  I would argue that there are male equivalents of exactly these sins, just not involving "Nylons and lipstick and invitations." Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring" has entirely male examples, after all.

Here is an irony: if Susan were the bad example, the shallow girl in a coming-of-age novel for young adults, disdaining her would go down much better, wouldn't it? If she were the Mean Girl making fun of the others, all the female readers would know that the young heroine was absolutely correct in learning to separate from her.

But there is another reason that drives our objection. It feels final. However much Lewis backs away from it in clear terms, in the story, in the world we have suspended our disbelief to enter, her rejection is final. It may be a purely emotional response on our part, but I think it is at least emotionally correct.

Let It Go Hence

When Lewis's mother died when he was nine years old, his father saved the page from their Shakespeare calendar that said "Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: ripeness is all" It is said by King Lear in Act V and refers to being prepared for death.

In Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of Lewis's sci-fi Ransom Trilogy, when one of the hrossa is killed by an evil human who has come to Malacandra (Mars) from earth, they have a funeral service and they sing "Let it go hence, let it go hence; Let it be no body."

Lewis's epitaph in the churchyard at Headington Quarry reads "Men must endure their going hence."

Oh, THOSE Anglo-Saxons

I don't know how I missed the obvious association between two recent posts: The Woody Allen clip  and the knuckleheaded decision at Cambridge to start declaring that Anglo-Saxons didn't exist.

It was Allen who said "Shakespeare didn't write all those plays.  It was somebody else named Shakespeare." I think we are in the same territory here. However much we fuss that they weren't really Angles, or weren't really Saxons, or weren't all that related and associated, or that they stayed too long or left too soon, or there weren't enough of them, or the ones who came were assimilated (or weren't assimilated. That works too) we come up against the brute facts that something involving a movement of people from NW Europe to the east of England occurred, and a new language took over the east of England.  We could call it English for convenience' sake.

If that wasn't the Anglo-Saxons, then it was somebody else called Anglo-Saxons.

The Taming of the Shrew

Dr. Marilyn Simon over at Quillette has an essay Game, Set, Match about "The Taming of the Shrew." I know about the play, but have never read it.  You know, because it's Shakespeare. She notes that everyone sees it as deeply misogynistic these days - and I always thought from what I could see on the outside that this was likely - but that this is a deep misunderstanding of the play. She sees the interactions as much more fun and high-spirited romantic, competition than would be apparent at first.  In that light, her title for the essay, which I thought just ordinary cleverness, turns out to be absolutely brilliant when taken apart word by word.

She may not convince you, but it was loads of fun. Personal note: looking at the chosen photo for the article, I am reminded that when my wife was in her late teens, an older woman told her that she "looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor." She has held that compliment dear for fifty years.

Update: I wish I had waited to include this right from the start.

Everything in Shakespeare, and especially every strong female character set in any age in his plays, is colored by Queen Elizabeth. Even though it is the Elizabethan Era, we tend to regard that as just a name and disregard its impact. While it is true that not all women attained anything remotely like equal status with men, it is true that she illustrated that a very clever and capable woman could not only succeed, but dominate. Likely, the status of all women, even the poorest, went up a little because of her reign.

Early in her reign there was all sorts of noise that she was not married, as a woman should be, and that offense against the natural order might be costly to the English in the cosmic realm. But the parallel worry was that she might marry, and clearly have a royal husband who was capable of ruling something or another, and that she would be expected to obey him.  They were not fools.  they knew there were queens on the Continent who were more capable and powerful than their husbands, but it would have been a natural disadvantage that she started from.  If she had to obey a husband from another country, at least on the surface or in part, what might that mean for England?

She handled it with breathtaking brilliance. "I shall be married to England, and a more obedient wife you shall not find."

At the time of the Spanish Armada, as the attack was on and going well for England but the issue was still in doubt, Elizabeth went to Tilbury to address the troops and was again breathtaking in her ability to combine unassailable femininity with what would have been called masculine attitudes.

I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

(Whole article here.)

Such things are not necessarily even being consciously intended by the playwright - though they in all likelihood were - but they were part of the air that he breathed. So if you burn with resntment for the plight of poor Kate and all the clever women of her day and ours, you might imagine her lines on the lips of a young Queen Elizabeth and hear them in a different light. 

Changes in Meaning

On his podcast "Lexicon Valley," John McWhorter illustrates language change by using Henry James' The Ambassadors, written in 1903. He kept finding about one word every page that didn't ring true, though it was usually understandable from context.  Yet occasionally a whole flock of words would occur together, causing him to double back to parse it out. It was not always easy, as some meanings come into a language for a few decades and then fade out.

"I'm true, but I'm incredible; I'm fantastic and ridiculous; I don't explain myself even to myself."

Perhaps if I give a translation it will be easier "I am truthful, but I am not to be believed; I am given to fantasy and somewhat silly.*" 

What it all came to had been that  fiction and fable were inevitably in the air and not as a simple term of comparison but as a result of things said.  Also, that they were blinking it all round and yet they needn't so much as that have blinked it. Indeed if they hadn't Strather didn't see what else they might have done.  It's clear that some meaning of blink is going to be key here, and if we can just get that the rest might come into focus, though still with some odd word order, particularly at the beginning. From later contexts, McWhorter concludes that it means "pretend not to see." I note again that this is just a little over a century ago. I knew many people alive when it was written, yet it eludes us. Even with a probable meaning for blink it's tough.

Why then are some things in Middle English, six times as old, understandable with only a little help? (Not the poetry so much. The earlier versions of English seem more distant to us than they should, because poetic forms are more difficult even when written in our own era. Things meant to be simple instructions or letters to a relative go down more easily.) It is likely because even such a formal writer as James is giving us conversation, which is much more vulnerable to change. If we did not have writing, in fact, our language would change much more rapidly, as the idioms would be untethered from some standard meanings. It is still the case that villages a few kilometers distance apart even in Europe have trouble understanding each other, and this was even more the case when few were literate. It is not just slang that changes - the line between slang and idiom is fairly smudgy anyway.

Once we have learned a meaning we retain it and may even use it when it has gone out of fashion. Thus we understand movies from the 70s easily. We use the older meanings unconsciously, or as puns, even after they have passed on. Yet if we were to go back to that time and speak people would think we had had some kind of stroke or were affecting to speak a new language. I recall around 1980 amusing my coworkers with a telephone conversation I had had with a private therapist who used the phrase "I'm getting crunched for time and will have to dialogue with you in another space." We thought that was hysterical.  California out of control. It seems much less strange now.

*"Silly" itself has gone through ridiculous (current sense) changes. I noted that a dozen years ago when writing about the duo "Silly Sisters," a Steeleye Span spinoff.

Silly: Cognate with German selig, meaning happy, and goes back to Proto-Indo-European, of course, or I wouldn't mention it. Related to hilarious in that way.

O.E. gesælig "happy" (related to sæl "happiness"), from W.Gmc. *sæligas (cf. O.N. sæll "happy," Goth. sels "good, kindhearted," O.S. salig, M.Du. salich, O.H.G. salig, Ger. selig "blessed, happy, blissful"), from PIE base *sel- "happy" (cf. Gk. hilaros "gay, cheerful," L. solari "to comfort," salvus "whole, safe"). The word's considerable sense development moved from "blessed" to "pious," to "innocent" (c.1200), to "harmless," to "pitiable" (late 13c.), to "weak" (c.1300), to "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" (1570s).

Shakespeare's sense in "Two Gentleman of Verona" is somewhere between the the innocent and foolish meanings, I think. Do no outrages On silly women or poor passengers.

Elite Institutions

Hollis Robbins, a Newhampshirewoman* who is an academic of a type I ordinarily regard with some suspicion, nonetheless made some remarkably good points in her interview with Tyler Cowan. In particular, she notes that the criticisms of colleges from places like Inside Higher Ed and Minding the Campus focus on the problems in the elite institutions like Yale or Stanford or Antioch. It seems reasonable at first, as these are the colleges of the rich, the powerful, and influential, and their impact in the future will be disproportionate. Yet she feels this is overstated, and noted that because of their prestige, they have a greater need to virtue signal. She has taught at several places and is currently at Sonoma State.

Unrelatedly, she insists to others studying and teaching African-American literature that they cannot understand the early African American writers if they do not understand the texts the older writers grew up on and were writing in response to - and that this is largely the Western Canon. In the 1840s the educated black man who was attempting to write down his ideas and arguments had grown up on Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible, and avidly read newer writers such as Dickens. They cannot be understood without knowing those works as well.

*From what I can figure out, it looks like Madison, NH, near where we camped when the boys were young.

Deception and Self-Deception

Update:  I did not mention that the test of your own courage and the Mean Girl exclusionary nature of your group is to go against its tenets in just one area.  Be down-the-line AOC woke Democrat except expressing some mild sympathy and understanding of the pro-life perspective, or gun rights or something - provided you do not immediately undo it entirely by saying, "But of course I...and of course I..." and the like. There are conservative equivalents but they usually don't have this problem.  They have the opposite problem of being entirely too willing to take an unpopular stand.  Grumbling, irritable bastards who will stay home rather than vote for someone who doesn't meet their standard. 

 But test yourself and your friends that way.  See if you start being disinvited, quietly.

Even single exceptions can be disqualifiers because you are demonstrating that you are willing to look objectively at the Spirit of the Age.  Tom Friedman will go against the tide - and then spend the next six months backtracking with obsequious gesture to get back in good graces. So let's see what you're made of. Make a full-throated defense of strict border control, or (to borrow from other posts) the profound important of marital commitment and vows. Just one thing. I dare ya. No, really I should warn you.  Quillette is loaded with writers who were respectably in one camp until a single incident cast them into the abyss. Then you can begin to fathom the depth of the effect this culture has had on you. Before that you are just dismissing these ideas as something you never heard of and is ridiculous.

*****

"Nothing can deceive unless it bears a plausible resemblance to reality." C S Lewis  An Experiment in Criticism Chapter 6 "The Meaning of Fantasy." Note that this is in one of his secular works, not a Christian one.

Not deceiving oneself is one of the strongest themes in CS Lewis. He regarded his own conversion as resulting from clearing away an accumulation of false beliefs and convenient excuses. This may be why I took to him so readily early in my Christianity, as I was deeply aware of my self-deception and how that spilled over into deceiving others - indeed, all others. These are different from hypocrisy - though we increase our likelihood of being hypocrites before others - these are lies which we tell ourselves, and believe them. I have long been told that if we tell ourselves a lie long enough we will come to believe it, but I am unsure about this. I think self-deception is almost instantaneous, with significantly less awareness that we kid ourselves. She left me because I didn't make enough money for her extravagant lifestyle, rather than She left me because I beat her. We don't have to tell ourselves that a thousand times, though that may strengthen it, because we embrace it so readily straight out of the gate. 

On the other hand, the Scriptures do make reference to a conscience being "seared" because the will ignores it so often that scar tissue is formed.

I tend to the belief that the Unforgivable Sin, the sin "against the Holy Spirit" means something like this, a sin that cannot be confessed and forgiven because we have talked ourselves into believing it is no sin at all. They deserved it. If I don't take it, someone else will. It's only real adultery if, if, if... 

This is the meaning of Polonius's "To thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."  To modern ears we immediately think of an Oprah-like encouragement to "be your true self," because that is a more ambiguous morality by which we can excuse self-indulgence, cooperativeness, and a host of other sins. (It can also be a very good thing. Just not always.) But Shakespeare's meaning is that we should not deceive ourselves.

When we are quite certain what the genuine article is, we also see quickly the inadequacy of the imitations. But mostly, we live in the world of imitations, thinking them real and looking down on those who are not as wise as us.

Old Narratives

One of the early conference presenters provided a quick overview of the relevant history of the period from the Authorised Version and Shakespeare to the Inklings.  He focused on the religious and literary highlights in Europe and especially Britain, which was appropriate given the subject matter.  I don't mind narrowing of focus and excluding many voices when the situation calls for it. So it's dead white Christians and that's fine. Yet his summary was entirely from the perspective of men, and the clerics of the higher classes, and dominated by the Anglican-Reformed-Lutheran perspective. The last being odd when Tolkien is prominent on the bill. It was a history such as I might have heard in 1975 and even then wondered whether it might be a touch shabby.

Conservatives complain about various perspectives being shoved in unnecessarily, like bystanders joining a parade and snatching away a drum or commandeering a float, but it is a measure of how much we did need to change our ways. History could get narrowed to reporting on kings and the focus on succession. That was the focus of the few most powerful people in those times - though even they had illnesses, and farms, and trade to worry about - but that doesn't mean it has to be our focus.  Religion, technology, disease, marriage customs, food, immigration, arts, and trade are not merely ornaments on the kingly Christmas tree. If you poke around looking for summaries of regional or national histories you will always find that a few of these are missing from consideration, and sometimes nearly all of them. They are the real history, and which Edward, Louis, Charles, or Henry is on the throne for a season might be ultimately not very important.  Peasants are important.  You can learn a lot about what was happening in a place by looking at what happened to the peasants. Their lives don't change much from year to year, but it is precisely for this reason that examination is helpful.  If you check back in fifty years and the lives of peasants have changed, it means big things have been happening. Weather, trade, migration...something. Similarly the lives of women were downstream of what the men were doing and they had to scramble for rights and influence. They were left unstudied because in the moment whatever was happening with the barons looked like where things were at. Yet again, if you check between countries and see some difference between the life of Anne and the life of Johanna, it means large things are afoot that bear noticing. For this reason I think the focus by women on powerful women and great accomplishments in history has much the same weakness.  Focusing on a person is an easier narrative to relate to, and especially when writing for the young it does not pay to be too abstract. In that circumstance finding a female scientist, author, or queen to focus on is fine. 

But it is only fine by default, by having little other choice if one wants an audience. Women's history, minority history, peasant history - these are not captured by focus on the exceptions. Their value is in the reminder that an enormous number of people, the bulk of the population,  are left out under the old narrative. The aggregate is the story. We don't fix the limitations of Great Man history by slipping in a few women.

How we tell history has changed, even among those who say they favor the old way of doing history.  And much of it is good.

Update: There will be a reference to the Hajnal Line, and marriage customs influencing genetics on a remarkably short time-scale coming up.  Steve Hsu interviewed Greg Clark and I would like to revisit that just a bit.

Conference

I was worried that the Inklings/Shakespeare/Bible conference at the Presbyterian Heritage Center might be too geared to academics and specialists, leaving me to be always sneaking onto DuckDuckGo to see what their references were, but it was more of the opposite problem at first. It was more like a Road Scholar gathering, of retirees who were fans of Lewis or Tolkien or things Renaissance.  Average age about 70, knowledge base uneven. The first day - what I saw of it when not arguing with a call center in India about swapping out my rental car (it took 8 hours and was almost certainly no more than the battery in the key fob, which I should have just gotten with a ride down to CVS) was a lot of inside jokes about being Presbyterian and grand historical narratives that were already being stripped down when I was an undergrad. I was unhappy. No new facts or ideas, and while my conversations were pleasant, they were not inspiring. The 1632 First Folio and other old books drew a crowd, but I am no longer much interested.

Side Note: My worry about The Inner Ring played out in interesting fashion, which I will write up soon.

The second day went better. There was Hannibal Hamlin of Ohio State talking about Shakespeare and the Bible, with especial reference to King Lear and Hamlet; Sorina Higgins focusing on the Grail Quest*, Charles Williams, and the influential occultists in English Lit starting around 1880 - she is less spooky in real life than she looks online; Sarah Waters of University of Buckingham, who has a book nearly finished on Shakespeare in Narnia and several papers on that out already; and Joe Ricke from Taylor University, who did not present but is known for both presentations and conference-gathering and was present, cheerfully conversing. All of these put out information that set me thinking in new directions, which I will have a go at over the next two weeks.

*This will show up in the next post on Fair Questions