Americans and Irony

I was just reading a series of posts of things about life in the United States that British residents find annoying. This linked to a series of posted lists along the lines of ten things about Britain that Americans don't understand. A couple of the lists repeated the canard that Americans don't get irony (with the implied pat on the back to the British for their appreciation of irony).

It's not that Americans don't get irony--they just think it's rude, and it's considered bad manners in America to notice rudeness and even worse to meet a rudeness with a rudeness. If a person, in their opinion, is so insecure as to need to be make arch comments about others to bolster self-esteem, then the best response is a polite refusal to acknowledge the rudeness. Many Americans I have met have an instant bland face that they assume upon encountering unpleasantness. It's a response that allows them both to refuse to acknowledge another's sad attempt to be insulting and to gain a moral victory by proving themselves the better person.

A Photograph, Part 2

 Tabulae mundi mihi, Time Zones

A Photograph, Part 2

© 2012

(this continues A Photograph [Part 1])

There was one other picture showing my parents together in the first days of their marriage among the photographs Niamh and I discovered in my mother’s house after her death. It was taken just after they were married. The carved ornamental wooden screen behind them gives away the location—it still stands before the door to the sacristy of Saint Columkille’s Church in Drogheda. The photographer posed them next to each other. My mother wears a white gown with a veil on her head covering her hair. She carries a bouquet of white flowers—lilies mostly—in her left hand. My father is dressed in a business suit. It is a formal picture. Both stand very straight and rigid and are smiling in that slightly strained way that appears on our faces when we are asked to hold an emotion for the camera. Someone has arranged the skirt of my mother’s dress to drape symmetrically, far more symmetrically than it would naturally, and her left hand holds the flowers so that the wedding ring is displayed. In a less ceremonial picture, the hand would have been turned so that the ring was invisible. The formality of the picture distinguishes it from the snapshot of the two of them in the back garden of Grant’s Hotel in Wicklow. As is true of many formal photographers, my parents are posed to conform to a type-role: the happy newly married couple.

Neither my father’s nor my mother’s family had the habit of taking ‘snapshots’. My parents obviously took a camera with them on their honeymoon, but I suspect it may have been borrowed for the occasion. There are no other photographs that argue for the existence of a camera. All the other photographs of my parents show each of them separately and are studio portraits. The same is true of the photographs of other relatives. There are not many of those and they reveal little personality. One exception is the photograph of my father’s parents on their wedding day. The photographer captured my grandfather with a worried look on his face, biting his lower lip, as if he were regretting the step he had just taken. All the other surviving pictures of members of my father’s family look like passport photos or are shots against elaborate painted backdrops of classical scenes with the people leaning against pillars or seated on ornate chairs.

There are more pictures of my mother’s family. Their photographic record begins in the late nineteenth century. My grandparents had photos taken of my mother and her two brothers every year or so of their childhoods. My mother was the oldest child. Her two brothers were born two and four years after her. Until my mother is fifteen, the three of them are posed in a gradually aging group. The older of the two brothers died when he was thirteen of the after-effects of a case of scarlet fever when he was a baby. Thereafter my mother and her younger brother are paired in the pictures. The second brother died at age twenty-three of spinal meningitis. My mother seldom spoke of them, other than to mention their deaths. All that remains of them are a few photographs. Any living memory of them died with my mother.

My mother continued this record with Niamh and myself. We made annual visits to Chalmers Studio in Drogheda. As was the style in the 1940s and 1950s, those shots are more casual—the painted backdrops and the ponderous furniture have disappeared in favour of a draped grey cloth. We still dressed up for the occasion and posed stiffly, however.

More candid photographs begin to appear during our childhoods. Someone took pictures of us in the garden of my mother’s house. There is one picture of us playing in the sand at the beach. Both Niamh and I went to schools that commissioned class photos, and my mother had copies of all of these. She also had several photographs of me with the other members of the sports teams. Despite the best efforts of the photographers and the nuns and priests and brothers who ran these schools, there is always one person who is not looking at the camera or whose face was caught in an inappropriate expression. Much later my mother’s cousin Aoife took pictures of my mother during their holidays.

Still, we have never been a family given to taking pictures. We favour formal photographs of ourselves in which personality and individuality has been stripped away, leaving only a commemorative adherence to the photographic conventions of the day, mounted in cardboard frames that have become damp and soft and crumbling with time. We are actors dressed in period costumes auditioning for a part in a play by a forgotten author. Whatever narratives the pictures illustrate have long been lost or never existed in the first place.

For the dust jacket of my first novel, the publisher arranged for a photograph. I wore a business suit and tie. The photographer shot me from the side so that I appear in profile against a black background. It is dramatic and what would have been considered a ‘literary’ portrait of a ‘serious’ author at the time. The American publisher requested a more ‘Irish’-looking picture, a request that prompted much amused speculation at my publishers in Dublin. The photographer sent them three shots. In the first, I am posed on the O’Donovan Rossa Bridge leaning against the parapet with the Four Courts in the background.  This the publisher rejected as too generic and not ‘identifiably Irish’ for an American audience. For the second photograph we ventured into the countryside and found a decrepit stone farmhouse surrounded by a muddy yard. For that occasion I wore a shapeless tweed coat, a cloth cap, and wellies. There is a pipe dangling from my mouth. I don’t smoke. The pipe and the clothes were as much props as the farmhouse.

The third picture was intended as a joke. The editorial staff of my publisher in Dublin were enlisted to help set the scene. We are in a pub. They are arrayed behind me slouching in drunken postures, leaning against the bar or drooped over tables, all of them smoking and wearing cloth caps, including the women. I am seated at a table in the foreground. There is a half-drunk pint glass of beer before me, as well as three empty pint glasses on the table. I hold a lit cigarette in my left hand. My hair twists in wild spirals, my tie is pulled loose from my neck. Before me on the table is a notebook and I am writing in it impatiently as if trying to capture the words before they fade from my soused mind. The very picture of a boozing’ Oirish aut’or. Guess which picture appeared on the dust jacket.

Lewis loves that picture. He has several copies of it, one of which is prominently displayed on his desk at college. ‘Ah yes, Pat in his wild youth,’ he explains. ‘You’d never guess it from his behaviour today, but it’s been my lifelong struggle to save him from the drink.’ He is so in love with the story he tells about that picture that I think he half-believes it himself.

Unlike my family, Lewis and his relatives have over the years documented their lives in great detail with cameras, home movie cameras, video recorders, digital cameras, and now mobile phones. A nearly continuous stream of images of family members circulates by phone and email and is posted on photo-sharing websites and services. Every member of the family has a printer for photographs as well as a scanner for making files of newspaper articles and published pictures. I have no pictures of my family on my desk. Lewis’s various rooms are cluttered with dozens of images, some in frames, others stuck under the edges of frames or propped up on mantelpieces. He even has a picture of me on his dresser in our bedroom. He changes it every few months for a more recent picture so that I do not have to confront younger images of myself.

Lewis’s mother started a photo album for each of her children at birth and assiduously mounted each of the many pictures of them and labelled them fully with date, location, and circumstance. The first summer Lewis and I were together at his family’s holiday home on Cape Ann, he brought five albums of photographs of himself to show me, covering the period from his first days of life up until that year. One rainy morning he sat beside me on the sofa and began showing them to me. The albums were large, longer horizontally than vertically. Lewis was seated on my right, and he opened each album in turn so that the left half fell across my lap. He leaned into me and began showing me each page and talking about the photographs. As he turned each page, he would hand it off to me to put in place on my side of the album, involving me in the action of looking. The albums were bulky, but they were surprisingly light. I suppose because the thick fluffy paper weighed little. I remember the feeling of Lewis pressed against the right side of my body from my shoulder down to my knee, and the stiffness of the album cover on my lap and thighs. The sky was dark outside, and Lewis had turned on the lamps at either end of the sofa, making a sort of island of light around us. The rain beat against the roof of the porch at the front of the cottage.

My feelings about seeing these photographs were mixed. I felt trapped. Lewis hadn’t asked if I wanted to look at them. He simply brought them out and placed them on the table in front of the sofa, sat down beside me, and began showing them to me. It was obvious to me that I was not going to escape this ordeal, and ordeal is how I viewed it. The weather prevented us from going out. The cottage was small. I had nowhere to run.

Then, too, I was not at all sure that I wanted to see proof of Lewis’s earlier life. I knew that Lewis had existed for many years before we met, but I preferred to know that in an intellectual way and not be confronted by evidence that he had survived, indeed prospered, without me. The Lewis he was proposing to show me was a foreigner, a stranger, and I was still too insecure about our relationship to want to be confronted by a Lewis different from the one I knew. There were moments when I resented his thrusting of his previous life into our present one. I wanted his life to begin with me.

There was—is—however, something so touchingly trusting about his action. To show another person pictures of yourself on your second birthday with a silly hat on your head and chocolate cake smeared over your face or splashing about in a plastic wading pool or dressed in clothes you are outgrowing or the Halloween costume you wore at age eight or your role in a school play takes trust. If not a lover, to whom else would you reveal yourself so defencelessly? Lewis was sharing his life with me because he expected to continue to share it with me. He was backdating our relationship to the beginning of his life.

So many of the photographs had stories attached to them, and he told me all of them. I learned about his grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his friends, his pets. I saw him in school, at play, at innumerable dinners with his family, on outings, before scenery, even sleeping. Hundreds of pictures. I was envious and not a little jealous. Other than the bare identities of the sitters, my family’s photographs told no stories.

He turned a page midway through the final album without comment. It was the last page with photographs in the book. His mother had pasted three pictures of Lewis and myself together on that page. It came without warning, and my throat constricted. My eyes began watering and it was only with difficulty that I prevented myself from crying. It was as if I were now officially part of Lewis’s life, the next stage in it. The album suddenly felt heavy on my lap. Lewis closed the back cover and lifted it off my lap and placed it on the table. ‘We will add more later.’ That’s all he said. He picked the albums up and walked away. I sat there stunned and unable to move for several minutes. I felt fragile and on the verge of shattering.

Lewis returned the albums to his mother. She continued to add photographs until the end of her life. Lewis’s sister has the albums now and keeps them up. I know because she occasionally sends me an email asking about the particulars behind a recent photograph Lewis has sent to her.  She wants a story to go with the picture.

There are by now many pictures of Lewis and myself together. Oddly they are all informal rather than studio shots. Perhaps that’s not so odd after all. The occasions when two men are photographed together in formal poses by a professional photographer are few. A father and his son, two brothers, business partners—the list is limited. Lewis and I have no wedding photos. We do not stand proudly behind our children. I think I will propose that we commission a photographer to make a studio portrait of us together. I should at least continue my family’s tradition of bland, characterless photography.

What bothers me most about the photograph of my parents in the hotel garden at Wicklow is the absence of a story, not only the story of what they felt as it was being taken but also the story of how it came to be ripped in half later. That’s what Lewis has taught me to expect from a photograph—stories. I’m sure that there was a story behind this picture, but neither of my parents ever revealed it. They look so happy and content together in the photograph. I never saw them that way. By the time I have memories of them, they had already fallen away from each other. And they were so reticent about their relationship that no one except themselves would ever have known the story behind the destruction of the photograph. Perhaps, since I found the photograph among my mother’s things, she was the one who tore it. She may never have told my father, but she would have had some reason for keeping the pieces. Or perhaps my father ripped it in two and sent the pieces to my mother. He was capable of such acts. If so, why did my mother keep it?

The technology of writing

Today (5/21/2012) Adam Roberts (link) quoted a passage from a 1995 interview with Ted Hughes on the impact of writing a story by hand or typing it with a word-processor. Hughes seems to envision handwriting as somehow more physical than typing, which is, after all, also done manually, and argues that the author who writes by hand carries into the writing his or her entire mental history of struggling to learn to write and hence values brevity. Hughes's conjectures would have to be tested, although the moment may have passed when there was a pool of children, large enough to prove or disprove his hypothesis, who learned to write by hand before learning to use a word-processor.

Handwriting does not necessarily lead to brevity or even conciseness, however. Both Balzac and  Trollope produced millions of words in their lifetimes. Trollope said in his autobiography that he wrote a thousand words each morning before leaving for the office. Balzac must have imposed some similar discipline on himself. Would either of them have accomplished more with a computer rather than a quill pen? (Pace Adams, an obsession with the number of words produced each day began long before twittering. What has changed is the capacity to transmit that information instantly to a large number of people.) Think of the labour involved for them in writing by hand, pausing every few seconds to dip a pen in a pot of ink and then continuing to write, of having to stop occasionally to blot the ink. And at least the nineteenth-century writers had steel nibs. Someone like Montaigne would have used quills and had to prepare them before beginning to write. Writing was a labour-intensive chore.

The comment about the change in Henry James's prose when he began dictating his novels rather than writing them opens up several avenues of speculation about the impact of the means of production on what is produced. Written sentences tend to be longer and grammatically more complex than spoken ones, and it doesn’t much matter if the sentences are produced through handwriting or word-processing (think of Tacitus). Dictation shouldn’t necessarily lead to more complex sentences. If it accurately mirrored speech patterns, it should, if anything, result in the opposite. Twittering and texting haven’t led to more complex sentences—just the opposite in fact. Very few of us naturally speak ‘written’ sentences. The ability to dictate prose that is ‘written’ rather than ‘spoken’ in style is a learned skill and, I would guess, the ‘written’ nature of the output may owe as much or more to the person who eventually types up the dictation than to the person who speaks it. The typist must edit out all the false starts, the grammatical errors, the hemming and hawing.

James is sui generis, however, in the length and complexity of his sentences. His style did change when he began dictating, but his late style grows out of his earlier style. Did his switch to dictation cause these changes or somehow free him to follow his inclinations or would the change in style have happened if he continued to write by hand? We can’t know. There’s no way to make that experiment. His brother’s comments about the unmooring of James’s writing from physical reality are true. His late novels focus far more on his characters’ interior rather than exterior lives, but did the switch to dictation cause that or merely contribute to an already developing tendency? Might not it have happened even absent dictation?

Do the mechanics of producing words affect what is produced? I don’t know. I first used a typewriter at age nineteen in the summer before I started university. All the essays and papers I produced up through the last year of college—and we had to produce several each week—were handwritten. I don’t recall that it was a struggle to learn to write by hand or that I felt a physical resistance to the process. I learned to use a typewriter almost by accident—a cousin of my mother gave me an old typewriter along with an instruction booklet. I spent several weeks dutifully practicing the lessons on ‘touch typing’ and became a fair sort of typist. The machine dated to the 1930s and it was a heavy and sturdy piece of machinery. But it wasn’t fast. Each key had to be depressed for an inch or so before the key struck the paper. I think at best I typed about fifty words a minute, and only then when I had the fifty words prepared. If I had to think them up, I was much slower. In any case, since the typescript could only be amended by retyping, I wrote my essays by hand first, revised them, and typed them up only after I was sure that I had a final version. I rarely composed anything longer than a few sentences at the typewriter.

That machine was too heavy to cart to the United States on a plane. It would have consumed a fair percentage of the 20 kg baggage allowance. I bought a new machine when I reached Cambridge, a ‘portable’ Olivetti that weighed four pounds. I would use it for the next twenty years. It still sits on a shelf in my study in Brighton. In the mid-1970s, I also bought an electric typewriter for use at home. I typed hundreds of articles and essays and several drafts of my first four novels on these typewriters. I did eventually, after much practice, learn to compose while sitting before the typewriter and eventually could produce fairly polished prose on the first attempt. I never became a fast typist, however, mainly because I made too many mistakes when I tried to type quickly. The electric typewriter had a correction tape but one had to realize almost instantly that one had made a typo and then back up and correct it. There was also Liquid Paper and other forms of ‘white-out’ which, within limits, allowed mistakes to be corrected. One couldn’t, however, insert a new sentence or substantially revise what had been written.

For me, the switch to a word-processor was liberating. I could type fast, never mind how mistakes I was making, because I could correct and revise endlessly. My typing could keep up with my thoughts. Sometimes just to keep up with my thoughts I simply leap from key word to key word and then later go back and fill in the missing connectors. Speed, of course, has no impact on quality. But does it make a difference in the nature of the output? I think that when using a computer I am prone to write down more of my thoughts. If I were to write by hand, I would probably edit certain thoughts away and not commit them to paper. But my handwritten first drafts were always filled with crossed-out passages and innumerable marginal insertions. They were visually a mess. The only difference with the computer is that the editing is no longer physically visible.

There is a problem of my ego—once I commit a thought to either paper or the computer’s memory, I tend to think better of it. It is as if the work of giving it a written existence adds value to it in my mind. But revising was more of a chore with handwritten or typed copy. I do remember reading sentences and paragraphs and thinking ‘I could make this better’, but then not doing so because the revision would mean retyping a page. I was more willing to settle for ‘good-enough’ when revision meant a lot more work. Now, it’s almost too easy to revise and I tend to labour endlessly over phrasing.

All in all, I think that word-processing has resulted in better prose from me. Whether I have anything to say is another matter.

Nexis Guide 1

 The Nexis Guide to the Planets of the Milky Way

Cloux. Spatial access number: Ac173DT987 x 98Y, ext. 5550 (Cloux City SpacePort). Class M Planet. Gravity 1.02 Earth normal. Oxygen levels within acceptable limits. Climate moderate except at poles and around the equator. Rotation: 0.96 Earth normal (day = 25 hours). Carbon and water-based life forms. Rated 97% Earth compatible. Standard inoculations recommended. Tourists and business visas available at all Alliance of Five embassies and consulates. Class 3 security checks in place for all visitors. All otherworld access to the planet is through the space port at Cloux City. No restrictions on travel once on the planet. The two moons are heavily fortified for planetary defence and off-limits to otherworlders.

Dominant life form: The Clouxians are an advanced bipedal trisexual humanoid life form. Socialability rankings: L5+ D2 S0 W3 Y2 K9 (access link for an explanation of these codes). There are several major languages but most Clouxians understand Galatic Standard and an estimated 82 percent speak it fluently. The population is highly educated, peacable, and friendly. Clouxians are generally hospitable to otherworlders.

Economy: Advanced Singularity.

Political organization: Founding member of the Alliance of Five. Popularly elected planetary council headed by a president.

Cloux is one of the most Earth-like planets in the Milky Way and considered one of the planets most amenable to visits by human beings. The inhabitants are friendly if somewhat formal in manners. Attempts to discuss personal matters with be politely rebuffed and the subject changed.

Local food is edible but considered bland by most visitors. Eat only food from replicators. Galactic standard replicators capable of producing a wide range of Earth foods are available in all large cities and at most tourist hotels.

Warnings: Public rowdiness is not tolerated—Cloux is not recommended for heavy drinkers or carousers. Sex with otherworlders is considered repugnant and any otherworlder proposing it will be arrested. Never approach a Clouxian whose skin is blue. This condition signals the start of their reproductive cycle, and any approach will be considered a sexual overture and result in arrest. Most Clouxians sequester themselves when they become blue, but occasionally a blue Clouxian may be encountered in public.

Major tourist attractions: At the age of five each Clouxian is given a rough pebble approximately three centimetres in diameter by its parents. For the remainder of its life, it holds the pebble in its left hand, constantly turning it. Over time, the rough edges of the pebble are worn smooth. At death, the pebble is cemented in place in a memorial wall as part of the burial ritual. The largest of these walls begin near the capital city of Cloux on the main continent and radiate in all directions. When completed, each wall is a uniform 1.6 meter wide, 4.6 meters high and extends in a straight line until it reaches the sea or some other natural barrier. The longest extends nearly 350 kilometres. Much care is taken to keep the walls in good repair. The walls have deep religious and cultural meanings for the Clouxians, and visitors should treat them with proper respect. . . .

Childhood punishments

I saw a story about a teacher in the United States who has been punishing miscreants in her classes by making them wear one of those plastic cones that are put around dogs' necks to keep them from tearing surgical stitches out. The teacher evidently feels that this will cause shame. I wonder if the result might not be more like ASBOs. Among certain groups of teenagers in the UK, an ASBO has become a badge of honour rather than the embarrassment and deterrent the creators of ASBOs envisioned. In the boys' college I attended, it was the rare student who wasn't beaten at least once a term by the good fathers who ran the place. The beating hurt, but the camaraderie that greeted one after the event more than made up for the pain. Indeed, any student who escaped an official beating for a long time came under suspicion. He was either considered too dull and unimaginative to get into trouble or suspected of currying favour or, even worse, of being a snitch. He was a traitor to the rest of us.

A happy childhood must be awful--it leaves one without a history. I mentioned these thoughts to Lewis and he was appalled. But, then, he is a man impoverished by a happy childhood.

Forgiveness Poem by Adam Roberts

Forgiveness Poem by Adam Roberts

A small bit of truth.

Random thought about a character in a future fiction

He is one of those people who thinks modesty corrodes the soul.

Wantological proofs

I've been searching for a good name for this phenomenon for a long time. I was just out for my daily walk and halfway through the name occurred to me.

All of us have some proposition X that we want to be true. We end up asserting that X has to be true because the strength of our desire is taken as proof that X is true--hence, a wantological proof.

'Wantological' is itself an illustration of another fallacy--that a well-phrased remark has to be true. A wittylogical proof.

Credentialing

Warning: rant ahead

I have been asked to write an article about six first-time American novelists and 'recent trends in American fiction'.  The book reviews editor of the Sunday supplement in which this article will appear chose the six novelists on the basis of reviews published in leading American newspapers. The books were delivered to me with a strict injunction that I was not to read other reviews of these books. I found the books well written and competent but not in the end exciting. I didn't come away with the feeling that I had encountered major new talents, and I didn't add any of the author's names to my watch list.  (None of the six books has appeared, or will appear, on my reading list 'Books 2012' here.)

All six of these 'serious' novels begin with an acknowledgements section. Five of the six authors list the writing courses or seminars and certificate programmes they have attended. Three of these five authors list one course; two authors list two. The sixth author apparently has not attended a formal course in writing, but she thanks her writing circle as well as an arts organisation that gave her a grant that allowed her to stay at a artists' retreat for several months and finish her book. All six mention feedback from an impressive array of friends, relatives, teachers, and colleagues, as well as the help of agents and editors and other publishing personnel. Three of the authors cite specialists who helped them with points of law, medicine, and psychology. More than any other aspect of these works, these acknowledgements pages attracted my attention. Since that subject is outside my brief for the article I am writing, I decided to discuss it here.

Such acknowledgements are not confined to serious works. As anyone who has glanced at the Books 2012 page here will know, I consume a lot of junk food for the mind, such as mysteries and science fiction. Over the past three decades, writers of such works have come increasingly to include an acknowledgements page listing, among others, the experts who gave them technical help.

Does any of this matter? Without much effort, one could compile lists of competent writers who never had a lesson in writing as well as those who have emerged from writing programmes. It also would take little effort to list many incompetent published writers from both groups. Writing programmes and courses do force an aspiring author to write, and practice in writing is never wasted. Some of these aspiring writers would probably arrive at the same point on their own; the programmes simply provide an environment that forces them to work out their problems with writing. Any participant in these programmes would undoubtedly benefit from the critical eye of a good teacher. Works written for such programmes tend to incorporate the instructors' views, however, especially if getting a good grade in the course and eventually receiving the certificate depends on satisfying the teachers. There is always the danger that rather than helping a writer achieve a personal voice, the programme will teach them to write to a formula or to think of writing in terms espoused by the teacher. (I have found that graduates of such programmes tend, for example, to be obsessed with 'point of view' and to be on continual alert for any violation of a unitary point of view in a work. This seems to be the latest successor to the Three Unities. I think the better advice would be to always be aware of how point of view can be exploited and played with.)

Friends, relatives, teachers, and colleagues can be helpful, but advice per se is not necessarily useful. And more often than not one receives a different opinion from each of them. The writer still has to choose, and it's been my experience that authors (like all of us) are quite capable of dismissing, indeed ready to do so, views that diverge from their own or would require a lot of work. Some of the most injurious advice comes from those who praise an author. The last thing an author needs to be told is how good the work is--the best advice deals with how to make the work better. But when confronted with praise from X and criticism from Y, how many of us are going to think more of Y, especially if it means a major rewrite?

By consulting experts, an author may improve the accuracy of the details in works that touch on specialised subjects or fields, but it does nothing to improve the quality of the writing or of the overall work (there are many of the opinion that the accuracy of details is a major factor in assessing quality; I happen to feel that this ignores the nature of fiction, but that is quite a different subject from the one I am discussing here--this may become the subject of a future posting). The apparent purpose of acknowledging the experts an author has consulted is to lodge a claim of accuracy and to make the story seem plausible. I have consulted an expert in dart throwing and hence the poison-tipped dart that pierced Lord Darlington's heart is a realistic means of murder. These claims are often followed by "Any remaining errors are my own", which is nothing more than a disingenuously modest assertion that the credit really belongs to the author.

Agents' opinions are directed mainly towards what needs to be done in order to improve the works' chances of finding a publisher--their concerns tend to be driven by the market (after all, their income depends on pleasing the market). Editors can be extraordinarily helpful in catching inconsistencies as well as grammatical errors, typos, and misusages, but they, like agents, are ultimately concerned with the market--their livelihoods depend on sales.

As must be apparent, I am doubtful about the benefits of credentialing. For me, the interesting question is not Is this valuable? but Why do authors and the publishers who include these acknowledgements think readers will be impressed? Does a certificate from the University of Iowa Writing Program convince us that the work that follow is worth reading? Does a list of the names of the twenty-five readers who offered the author comments on the work as it was being written guarantee that the work is good?

The purpose of all this credentialing appears to be to reassure the reader that the author is qualified to write and has done the research necessary to make the work accurate. Credentialing as a phenomenon seems to have begun in scientific and technological fields. Should I need an operation, the list of letters after the surgeon's name is at least some assurance of competence. I could dress like a surgeon and wield a scalpel, but it would be unwise of you to let me near you with one in my hand. As skills have become more technical and the acquisition of bodies of knowledge more time-consuming, credentialing has assumed more importance. The perceived need for credentialing in these fields seems to have spilled over into other fields, where a certificate of training is less necessary or even totally unnecessary.

Another reason for the growth of credentialing may be the growth of education. Our higher-education systems now offer degrees in an incredible range of subjects, and along with this growth has come a need to justify the necessity of these degrees. There seems to have been a progression from the view that a degree in, say, history indicates some knowledge of the past to the not unreasonable view that those with degrees in history may have more knowledge of the past than those without such degrees to the somewhat iffy view that they are hence better qualified to speak on the subject. The danger is that this sometimes becomes only those with degrees in history are qualified to speak on the past. The last is certainly an option exercised by many academic historians, who can be quite ruthless in dismissing the opinions of anyone without the proper licenses to have an opinion. Granted training in historical 'science' may help develop the skills historians need, but these are not difficult skills to master. The insistence on the proper acquisition in accredited schools of the skills of 'the science of history' owes much to the desires to limit entrance to the field and to justify the ego-defenses necessary to maintain a feeling of superiority to 'amateurs'.

And now credentialing is spreading to fields that depend primarily on talent, such as writing or painting or music-making. All the training in the world, all the mastery of theory or bodies of knowledge, will not make anyone a good writer or a good painter or a good musician. A course in oil painting may introduce one to the basics of mixing paints--indeed one may become a master in mixing paints as a result of the course--and that knowledge may improve the quality of one's output, but it remains no more than a skill. Properly mixed paints don't create a good painting by themselves. Following the precept that one 'should show and not tell' does not guarantee that what one is being shown is worth reading. A unitary point of view is simply a unitary point of view, not a guarantee of a good story.

It seems to me that many of these courses concentrate on the mastery of techniques. This is understandable--technique can be taught and mastered; talent cannot. A writing instructor may point out to a pupil that his characters are wooden and stereotypical and may even be able to show the writer how he should be thinking about his characters to make them more lifelike. But if the student is tone-deaf psychologically and simply can't understand others, no amount of training will help him overcome this defect. Authors offer stereotypical characters not only because they are lazy and resort to clichés but also because that's how they envision other people.

IMHO, aspiring authors should spend their time reading rather than taking courses.

Character flaws

Adam Roberts, whose website Europrogocontestovision (europrogovision.blogspot.com) contains notes on his reading and his miscellaneous thoughts, published this comment about himself earlier today:

I used to think that of my various character flaws (of which, I’m sorry to say, there are too many) the greatest and most evil was selfishness. Selfishness is indeed something against which I struggle, not always very successfully. But latterly I have begun to wonder whether, even more than ‘selfishness’ broadly conceived, my main character flaw isn’t more specifically self-pity. It flows from selfishness, of course, but is different to it, and in its way more corrosive.

I think my main character flaw is arrogance, which is also a form of selfishness and a strategy of my ego to defend itself against the suspicion that I am no better than others. I would like to blame my father for this, since he had that trait in abundance, but he had so little influence on my life that I can't use him as an excuse. Among the incidents that figure large in my middle of the night mental ramblings are those exhibiting incredible arrogance and concomitant rudeness on my part. I can still feel embarrassed at my behaviour many years after the episode. Unfortunately that does not prevent me from repeating the behaviour and being arrogant again. I feel remorse only after the event. I can even be arrogant in insisting on humility.

Visitors

In May 2009 Google, which runs Blogger, added a 'stats' section to these blogs. Among other things it records the country of origin and the number of pages visited (which is not the same as the number of visitors--if a visitor reads only the entries on the front page, no matter how many there are, that counts as one page visit; if he or she clicks to an entry on another page, that counts as a second page visit). As of today, in the approximately three years since the counter has been in place, this blog has had 16,000 page views--not a lot in comparison to many sites, but apparently about average for non-pornographic blogs by unknowns like this one.

I don't know if this is true of other blogs, but this site gets the fewest visitors on Sundays and Mondays. Also I get a great many visitors come from colder countries like Norway (or I have one very enthusiastic reader in Norway) and Russia, as well as many now independent countries that once were part of the USSR. I seem to appeal to the Slavic mind. As might be expected, I also get a lot of visits from English-speaking countries--although oddly almost none from Ireland.

The stats also record the source site, if any, that led a visitor to the blog--such as a Google or Yahoo search. Lately many of these source sites have been commercial websites. This appears to be a new way of advertising or attracting visitors to a site. The commercial site visits blogs and stays just long enough for its presence to be recorded. A site that sells cigars was a recent example. This leaves a record in the stats section, with a link to the site. It appears that the hope is that the person maintaining the blog will click on the link and then visit the site. I haven't been clicking on the links, but I have Googled some of the site names out of curiosity and found reports from other bloggers about their experiences with these sites. Many of them apparently install a virus or a trojan when opened.

Home and the dying

A friend of ours died last week of a condition called Levy's syndrome. It's one of those awful brain and nerve deterioration diseases. It is described as a cross between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. People who have it lose both motor control and mental abilities. The first apparent symptom, a problem with walking, appeared about two years ago. Within a few months he began forgetting how to do simple tasks, such as how to get water into a drinking glass. The progress of the disease is not constant. Some days he was fine and lucid and relatively in control. Other times he had hallucinations or could barely walk.  Last October, he had to be put in a care home because he needed full-time professional nursing. About two weeks before he died, he lost the ability to swallow and had to be fed through a tube. His white blood cell count was over ten times the normal level, and his kidneys ceased to function.

His wife had to make some terrible decisions. When his kidneys failed, she was given the option of dialysis, which would have meant loading her husband into an ambulance, transporting him for nearly an hour to a dialysis centre, and then returning him to the care home in another ambulance. She was told that dialysis is painful and that it would stave off death only by a few days, a week at most. She decided against that. I suspect that, like most of us who have had to care for someone who is dying, she concluded that further treatment would be cruel and that allowing the person to die is the final kindness one can do. That knowledge doesn't make the decision easier.

The doctors and the nurses can only outline the options and try to present them as factually as possible. The standards of their professions don't allow them to counsel allowing the patient to die. Our priests also cannot condone assisted suicide or murder through neglect. Their standards tell them to offer prayer and hope and to counsel acceptance. These professionals' ability to help one decide is limited but they do acquiesce, silently but efficiently, when they feel the decision is right. Friends and relatives can be a bit more open, but the burden always falls on the spouse or children to make the final decision.

All of us know the rationalisations--'It's what he would have wanted,' etc. In truth, guilt and relief go hand-in-hand. It's difficult to avoid that thought that in ending someone else's suffering, we are also ending ours.

The care home was a torment for our friend. By the end he had forgotten most everything except that fact that he wanted to be at home. That was often the only thought he had. When we visited (which became harder and harder to do), he would repeat over and over, 'Take me home. I want to go home.'  He knew his wife almost until the end and knew that she was the only person who could decide to remove him from the care home. He sometimes became very angry with her that she wouldn't do this for him. When we spoke with her after his death, she focused on the fact that her husband had wanted to go home and that she hadn't been able to grant his wish. She felt guilty about that--unnecessarily. All we could do was to assure her that she had made the right decision.

One of my aunts spent her last weeks in a care home. She, too, was constant in her demands to be taken home. My father chose to die at home rather than in a hospice, even though he knew that it meant a lower standard of care. People with terminal illnesses seem to have this desire to be somewhere they identify as 'home'. Even when the person knows that death is imminent, 'home' seems a refuge. That feeling is understandable when the other choice is a hospital or a care home, which are gruesome at best. I have been inside only one hospice. It attempted to provide a 'homey' environment, but that made its institutional nature all the more evident. One's lair or den seems the best place to die.

All this prompted another discussion between Lewis and myself, assuming that we will have a choice. It's made more complicated in our case because we are not legally spouses in many places and our legal right to make such decisions would not be recognised. We have living wills, but again those are not legally binding in many places. Niamh, I know, would accept Lewis's decision. Lewis's nearest relatives are his two siblings, one of whom lives in California and the other in Boston. Lewis has told them of his wishes. I don't think there will be a problem, should it become necessary. The worst would be to be kept in a twilight state because of a legal problem. I hope we can avoid that.

A related thought: I have read that married people live longer. Of course, these statements take heterosexual couples and marriage as norms. Long-term unwed heterosexual or same-sex couples are not factored in, as far as I know.  We seem to be counted automatically among the lonely unweds. The implication of most of these studies is that marriage makes people satisfied and happy, and that happy and satisfied people live longer. I think there might be another explanation, and that is the power of nagging. A partner (married or unwed) is likely to encourage the other partner to seek medical help if there is a problem.

I had my annual check-up a few weeks back. My doctor's office asks people to turn the mobiles off. I had barely exited the office and turned my phone back on before Lewis rang to ask if I had remembered to show the doctor the dark spot on the skin under my right eye. Had I mentioned the stiffness in my legs and asked about post-polio syndrome? What did the doctor say about the arthritis in my right thumb? Was my high blood pressure improving? A week later, I no sooner walked into our house than Lewis handed me a letter from my doctor with the lab results and ordered me to open it and show it to him. The doctor said that there were no problems except for a slight dip in the 'good' cholesterol reading and that I should get more exercise and to see him if my legs got worse. More nagging. Because of my blood pressure, salt has become a dirty word in our household, and soda bread has been banished. I am sick of hearing about post-polio syndrome and being watched for problems with moving and having my stiffness fussed over. (I'm getting old, Lewis. Some stiffness is normal.) It's great to have someone who cares so much and I hope that Lewis is healthy, but I would like him to have at least one small problem that I could nag him about.

Children's and young adults' fiction

For several days there has been a discussion thread on Andrew Sullivan's blog (here) about the appropriateness of adults' reading children's fiction, such as the Harry Potter, Twilight, or Hunger Games series. My first thought is why is a libertarian worrying about what other people read--surely in the libertarian utopia adults will be free to read whatever they wish.

I haven't read the Twilight or Hunger Games series, and from what I know of them I suspect I will not do so. At the urging of a young friend, I read the Potter series. She was incensed to learn that, as a writer of fiction myself, I had not read them. She was so determined that I read them that she lent me her copies (but only after she had me sign a 57-clause contract promising to treat the books with care and respect). I approached them more with a sociological interest in the question of what literature captivates children and young adults than with any expectation that I would enjoy them as fiction.

I ended up being as captivated as any of the many fans of the series. Perhaps I am over-reading, but I saw it as an extremely imaginative and well-told tale of youngsters' realising that they are acquiring adult powers (here presented as magical powers) and learning that along with those powers comes a choice--to use those powers for good or evil. The range of evil depicted in the books is another strength of the series. Valdemort is evil incarnate. Evil in lesser forms is also present in the bureaucrats and teachers who would use others to further themselves or misuse their powers to harm others, as well as in con men and shady merchants, the rich and powerful, the racists, the bystanders, and even those who are allied with forces of good, such as Dumbledore and occasionally even Harry Potter himself.

I think the mistake people make is to assume that books about children are necessarily books for children or only for children. Lord of the Flies is a book for adults. Adults and children have quite different experiences of Huckleberry Finn and Oliver Twist. As a teenager, I read Jane Austin with great glee; now I find her imprisoned in a girlish worldview and a teenager's self-confident beliefs of complete understanding; Austin never had a chance to grow up and experience, and then write about, the world as an adult. George Eliot and Edith Wharton wrote for adults; Austin for adolescents.

A Photograph, Part 1

 Tabulae mundi mihi, Time Zones

A Photograph (1)

 © 2012

Interview of Ellen Green, Employed at Grant’s Hotel, Wicklow, 1935–84, Head Housekeeper, 1967–84. Interviewed at her home in Rathnew, Co. Wicklow, 17 October 2010.

Mrs Green was 89 years old when I spoke with her. She was a tall, thin woman, still very active and alert. She was minding a neighbour’s child, a girl of about five or six, during the interview. The child sat on the floor playing with a collection of small plush toys in lurid pinks and yellows and purples. The toys were vaguely human in shape—they had stubby legs and arms and fat, oversized heads directly attached to the torsos—and she moved them about, apparently in response to a story in her mind. Initially I worried that she might interrupt us and demand so much of Mrs Green’s attention that I would be unable to conduct the interview. But she was entranced by her game and played contentedly with only an occasional word from Mrs Green when she strayed beyond the space allotted her on the carpet. The boundaries of that space were not apparent to me, but they were rigid in Mrs Green’s mind.

David Alberts, the general manager of Grant’s, arranged the meeting. Mrs Green was the only member of the staff known to him who was still alive and had worked at the hotel in 1935, when my parents stopped two days there following their wedding. 

I had brought printouts of the scans I had made of the photographs taken during my parents’ stay. Several of them are images of the façade of the hotel or the back terrace. An excursion into the Wicklow countryside resulted in seven photographs, a walk on the beach two more. The photograph that particularly interests me shows my parents seated on a stone bench. It is the only one in which both of them appear. My parents must otherwise have divided the task of taking the pictures, since each appears alone in roughly half of them.

I had found the photograph among my mother’s things after she died. It had been ripped in half lengthwise and then taped back together up the back. I scanned it and tried to eliminate evidence of the tear by manipulating the image. My efforts weren’t completely successful.

Mr Alberts quickly identified the bench as one that had stood on the back terrace of the hotel since its founding in 1896. When he showed it to me, it was instantly clear that it was the same bench as the one in the photograph. The bushes behind my parents in the photograph are no longer there. There is a low stone wall behind the bench now. Mr Alberts did not know if it was part of the original construction or had been added later. Beyond the wall, the ground slopes gently down to the sea. The bench faces inward, however, towards the terrace and the back entrance to the hotel, rather than towards the sea.  In the 1930s, the bushes would have blocked the seaward view.

My intent in visiting the hotel was to gather background information for a story based on my parents’ marriage. Grant’s has been modernised. It has always, I gather, been a luxe hotel, although it must now be considered rather small. It has only sixty rooms, but it seems busy as a conference centre and a site for wedding parties. During the three days I was there, the dining room was crowded at lunchtime with business people, as was the lounge bar during the late afternoon and early evening. Luckily Mr Alberts is interested in the history of the hotel. The photos intrigued him so much that he made time to guide me to the various spots from which they had been taken so that we could compare then and now. He asked for copies to post on the Grant’s website, and I later emailed him the files of the scans I had made.

Without any great hope of an affirmative answer, I asked if there were anyone who would remember the hotel in the 1930s. Mr Alberts immediately mentioned Mrs Green. He pulled his mobile from the inside pocket of his coat, turned it on, and, without prompting from me, rang her to arrange a meeting. The warmth of his conversation with her surprised me. Despite what had to be several decades’ difference in age, she was obviously a great favourite. After several minutes of enquiries about her health and her family, he said, ‘Ellen, there’s a gentleman here from Dublin who wants to talk about Grant’s in the old days.’ And then after a pause, ‘The 1930s. His parents honeymooned here. He has several photographs to show you. He’s looking for information on what the hotel was like then.’ They continued talking for several minutes, breaking off only to ask me if 2:00 in the afternoon the next day would be acceptable to me. When Alberts rang off, he said, ‘Ah, she’s a grand woman. You’ll love Ellen. Everyone does.’

Ellen Green lived in a small house in Rathnew that fronted directly on the street. It fell roughly in the middle of a row of attached houses. There was no parking on the narrow street, and I had to leave my car on the second cross-street and back walk to the house. The door from the street opened into a short hallway. To the right a steep staircase led up to the first floor. To the left was the door into the lounge. At the other end of the hallway, perhaps four metres distant, was the kitchen. The lounge held two chairs on either side of a small fireplace with an electric log and a sofa under the window that opened on to the street. All three were upholstered in a dark fabric, with the type of smooth satiny finish that can make it difficult to maintain a good grip on the seat. The sofa faced a television set against the opposite wall. Over the fireplace was a large, brightly coloured print, done in an Impressionistic style, of a Mediterranean hillside of houses with red-tiled roofs and white walls overlooking a blue sea. That was the only decoration in the room. On the low table in front of the sofa was a teapot under a knit cosy, a plate of biscuits covered with a pink cloth napkin, two cups and saucers, three small plates, three more cloth napkins folded into neat rectangles, and bowl with sugar cubes and tongs, and a small pot of cream. The napkins looked (and were) heavily starched and ironed into faultlessly unwrinkled rectitude. The room was not unlike the sitting area of my room at Grant’s. Everything was aligned. There was no dust, no extraneous object.

Ellen Green was much like the lounge of her house. She was wearing a grey twin set and dark blue trousers. She wore no makeup and no jewellery. The trousers had an unwavering knife-edge crease. Her hair was white and cut short in a rather mannish style, parted in the centre and falling in straight lines over the top half of her ears. Mrs Green was as neat and as starched as the napkins on the table. She treated me as if I were a guest enquiring after details of housekeeping procedures.

She indicated that I should take one of the chairs. She sat in the middle of the sofa. Her back was still straight and unbent.

‘May I have a biscuit now, Mrs Green?’

‘In a minute, dear. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Brennan?’

The ritual of pouring the tea and supplying me with a cup and a napkin, and one of the small plates took a minute. ‘Offer Mr Brennan a biscuit, Joan, and then you may take one for yourself.’

The child carefully held out the plate with the biscuits towards me and watched with apprehension while I considered the selection. I felt that I had to take one biscuit but that two would be considered gluttony in this house. When I passed over the chocolate creams in favour of a plain shortbread, Joan approved. She smiled at me for the first time. She set the plate back on the table, took a saucer and a napkin for herself, and then carefully inspected the remaining biscuits before selecting one.

After some chat about the weather and how much I was enjoying Wicklow, I explained the reasons for my visit. ‘What I’m after is background information on the hotel in the 1930s. My parents were married on August 21 in 1935, in Dublin, and they stayed at Grant’s for two days. I suppose now we would call it a honeymoon.’

Mrs Green smiled to herself. ‘We called it a honeymoon in the 1930s too. Although now people in Dublin wouldn’t consider two days at Grant’s in Wicklow much of a honeymoon. But then—well, everyone was poorer and we didn’t have the planes to take us to Spain or Greece.’

I showed Mrs Green the photographs. They triggered her memories of the hotel during the 1930s. As she picked each of them up, she would point out things that had changed, things that had survived into the present. The visual reminders of the past seemed to please her, and she warmed towards the subject of the conversation.

‘When did you start working at Grant’s?’

‘In June 1935, just after school ended. I was fourteen. One of my aunts worked there and she recommended me when there was an opening. I was too young, but I was tall for my age. We told them I was sixteen. There were seven of us at home. I was the oldest. My parents had a farm in County Carlow, near Hacketstown. I sent most of my wages home. We didn’t earn much, at least it wouldn’t seem much now. But it meant one less person to feed, and my aunt was there to watch over me. In those days the maids lived in the hotel. We all slept in a room in the basement, next to the kitchens. There was a row of cots, with a small cupboard for each of us and a box to put under the bed for our things. The hotel gave us our uniforms. Since I was the newest maid, I did all the jobs none of the others wanted to do. I cleaned out the grates and scrubbed the washrooms and washed the dishes.’

‘It must have been hard.’

‘Oh, yes, it was hard. We worked long hours without much rest. There was no Health and Safety Authority back then. If there were labour codes, Mr Grant hadn’t heard of them. Most mornings I was up at 5:30 to start the fire in the kitchen and to heat the water in the boilers for the guests and kept at it until the supper dishes were washed and put away. But I was used to the work, and I thought Grant’s was heaven. I’d never seen such luxury before. And the food—it was what was left over from the buffets and the table d’hôte, but I had never knew food like that before. There was so much meat. I didn’t worry about my weight then, but the work kept me thin. I ate so much that I would have grown fat without the work. And I could go to the cinema on my afternoon off. I had Wednesday afternoons off, and I always saw the new film at the Odeon. I loved that. It’s gone now. They tore it down forty years ago, but it was like a palace inside. The cheapest seats for the afternoon matinée cost ten pence in the old currency. I had never seen a motion picture before I came to Wicklow. I was a country girl, and for me Wicklow was the big city. So I found it exciting.’

‘Who stayed there? What were the guests like?’

‘During the week, most of the clients were businessmen. Weekends and summers we had visitors— sightseers, people taking a holiday at the beach, honeymooners like your parents. Most of them came down from Dublin. It wasn’t far away but it was different. We were always busy. The best people stayed at Grant’s. Well, it’s always been expensive. But the people who stayed at Grant’s in those days looked like they were the best people, not like now when you can’t tell. They dressed up more in those days. The men always wore suits. None of these jeans or shorts and knit shirts and trainers that men wear now. And the women always wore dresses, and most of them changed for tea and the evening meals. They put on hats when they left their room. I wasn’t supposed to stare at the guests, but I watched them when I could.’

‘These are my parents. They stayed at Grant’s in August 1935.’ I handed the picture to her.

‘Oh, I remember them.’

‘You remember them?’

‘Yes, I took this picture. It was the first picture I ever took, and the man—your father, is it?—showed me how to aim the camera and take the picture. So I remember it and them. It took me a long time to take the photograph. I was so nervous that I would do something wrong, and your father was so handsome, like a movie star, I thought. I knew they were on their honeymoon. I wanted it to be right for them. Your mother was wearing a hat made of thin linen gauze. I remember she had dark red hair, and you could see it under the gauze. That’s a cloche hat. That’s what we called them. They were very popular then. We all had one, but I never saw one like the one your mother was wearing.’

‘I’m amazed that you remember them. How did my father come to ask you to take a photograph of them together?’

‘In those days during the summer we served breakfast on the terrace. There were round iron tables and chairs painted white. It was my job to make sure that the terrace was swept clean before the guests came down and to wipe the tables and chairs dry if it had rained or if there had been a heavy dew. I found your parents sitting there one morning when I went out to get the tables ready. It must have been around six o’clock in the morning. Breakfast service started at 7:30, and I was supposed to have everything ready long before that and to disappear before any guests could see me. I was surprised to see them anyone up and out on the terrace. I excused myself for interrupting them, and your mother said that it was all right, that they had awoken early and gone out for a walk along the beach. You can see that your father had taken his coat off. It was already a hot day. He would have put it back on before eating breakfast. Mr Grant was very particular about that. The gentlemen were supposed to be dressed and wearing ties when they ate. Your father asked if I would mind taking a picture of them together. They were so polite. Most guests never spoke to me except to give me orders. Are they still alive?’

‘My mother died earlier this year, in January. She was 100. My father died six weeks later. He was 101.’

‘They couldn’t live without each other. I’ve known couples like that. It’s grand to still be in love after all those years. My husband died twelve years ago.’ Mrs Green’s eyes shifted elsewhere, and her lips quivered, more with anger than regret I think. Her posture relaxed for a moment as she thought about her own marriage. Then she visibly pulled herself together and straightened her back, dismissing the discussion of her own private life with a stranger. ‘So they were Mr and Mrs Brennan. I never knew their names.’

‘Oh, Brennan is the pen name I use when writing. My family name is Ross. My father was Bram Ross. He was in the government in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the minister for international trade and development. I was a reporter for The Irish Times then and I didn’t want people to think I was taking advantage of my father’s reputation.’

Suddenly the child broke in. ‘Bramross, Bramross.’ She held up one of the toys and showed it to both of us. ‘That’s his name now. Bramross. It’s funny.’

Mrs Green looked embarrassed. ‘Joan, that’s not polite.’ And then to me, ‘I’m so sorry.’

Joan flushed and turned away, studiously ignoring both of us. She returned to her play. I noticed that Bramross was given a leading role.

‘It’s all right.’ 

‘I’m afraid I don’t remember him.’

‘The sixties and seventies are ancient history now. No one remembers them.’ We both spared a sad smile for the passing of the days. ‘Well, I have taken too much of your time.’ I rose to go.

She had a final comment. ‘They were so happy. I remember that, too. I hope they had a happy life.’

‘As happy as anyone ever does, I suppose. It’s hard to know with one’s parents, isn’t it? Especially that generation. Parents felt they had to hide things from the children.’

I must have spoken more sharply than I intended. She looked at me speculatively and then almost said something. Instead, she took one final look at the photograph before handing it back to me. ‘There must have been a scratch on the lens. There’s a line through the middle.’

‘No, it was torn when I found it. Someone had taped the pieces back together, but you could still see the tear. I tried to eliminate it on the computer after I had scanned it, but I'm not skilled at that. I couldn't get rid of all the traces.’

Surveys

A friend sent me a link to an EU survey for LGBT people:

EU Survey

It's open only to people residing within the EU community. I don't know if anyone outside the EU can access it, but it makes for interesting reading and speculation. There are a few yes/no questions (live alone; have children under 18 at home, etc.); and questions that should have only one truthful answer (age, country of residence [not so easy to determine in my case since I spend time in both the UK and Ireland, but I said Ireland just to increase the number of Irish respondents and because I happened to be in Ireland last night], income range), but most of the questions require the respondent to make a subjective choice and offer a range of answers along a sliding scale (never, rarely, occasionally, often, frequently, always; or a rating from 1 to  10). The multiple-choice questions also come with 'don't know' and 'not applicable' options.

I found it difficult to answer many of the multiple-choice questions. When does 'rarely' become 'occasionally'--or 'occasionally', 'often'? Where on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being completely unhappy and 10 being completely happy, do I rank myself? In terms of marital satisfaction, how do I rank my relationship? (If you read this, Lewis, the answer is 10--except on those occasions when it isn't). Are you asking about right now or yesterday or in general? I managed to muddle through to the end and upload my answers, but not with any confidence that my answers adequately present myself in the terms the survey is attempting to capture.

The survey deals mainly with discrimination. Near the beginning is a series of questions asking the respondent about sexual orientation and then to rank him- or herself in terms of femininity and masculinity. This is followed by questions trying to elicit estimates of the respondent's personal experience of discrimination and then by questions trying to gauge the respondent's knowledge of,  opinions of, and impressions of the impact of the anti-discrimination laws in his or her country of residence.

I'm speculating, but the survey appears intended to match the respondents' experiences of discrimination against county of residence, age, income, gender, sexual orientation, perceptions of how the respondent sees himself or thinks others see herself, knowledge of anti-discrimination laws, and perceptions of their enforcement.  The important questions elicit subjective answers. Since those analysing the survey will have no means of judging the respondent's personality in relation to the answer given, they can only accept the answers at face value. I have met a few gays who deny the existence of discrimination, as well as those who are so hypersensitive on the subject that they think someone bumping into them on the pavement is insulting them because they are gay. Neither group is likely to answer anywhere near objectively. The analysts can compare the respondents' answers against reported acts of discrimination in the country of residence, but I could name a few EU countries that probably have a low incidence of reported acts of discrimination precisely because discrimination is rampant in them. Most EU countries have anti-discrimination laws, but enforcement varies even within each country. This survey doesn't attempt to capture intra-state variations and map them against the rural-urban continuum. Then there is the matter of self-perception: Is a gay who sees himself as ultra-masculine more or less prone to admit to being on the receiving end of discrimination? It will be interesting to see the statistics when they are published, but there are several problems with this survey.

I think my family background, my education, my profession, and my income have insulated me against a lot of discrimination. I never had to worry much about workplace discrimination since I never spent much time in a workplace. I was either travelling and filing articles from long distance or working at home. I'm not hyper-masculine but I'm not effeminate. I think most people I meet casually assume that I am straight or, if young, don't view me as a sexual being (one of the by-products of aging). Anti-gay remarks have been made in my presence by people who, I think, would hesitate to make them if they realised that I am gay. And other people have expressed surprise (and sometimes doubt) upon discovering that I have had a monogamous relationship with the same man for 41 years now. I came of age in a time when few people were 'out', and that affected the way I behave and hence how people perceive me. I don't fit the stereotypes and that surely has an impact on how I am treated. Then, too, someone like me who has known that he is gay for around fifty years is going to answer these questions differently from someone who is my age and just decided to become 'gay' after his wife died five years ago or from a lad who is fifteen and whose schoolmates have decided he is queer. It has been my experience that sexual orientation and desires can change considerably over a lifetime. None of these factors is captured in the survey.

I suspect the survey will not be as useful as hoped. For me at least, its value lay much more in the opportunity to think about the questions than in its eventual impact on policy, whatever that may be.

Blogs 3

Another favourite blog:

Europrogovision

maintained by the English fiction writer and academic Adam Roberts. Roberts comments on literature, quotes widely from a variety of sources, and indulges in wicked puns and parodies. A recent offering in the last category:

When Adam delft and and the Rotter damned,
Who then was the Netherland?

Blogs 2: Recommended readings

Here's a link to the transcript of a talk given by Mark Schuster, a doctor in Boston and a professor at Harvard, about changes in his life as a gay professional since the 1980s ('Being Gay in Medicine'). It's an informed take on what has happened over the past few decades. Of course, parts of Boston and Massachusetts and Harvard are more tolerant than most places. We can only hope that the rest of the world will follow suit. If I've done the math correctly, I'm fifteen years older than Dr Schuster and my first experience of Harvard occurred when he was ten or eleven, but the attitudes and environment I encountered were much as he describes them as being many years later.

Andrew Sullivan, who was born in England, now lives in the United States and comments on politics and life there in a blog called 'The Dish' (The Dish). Sullivan sees himself as a conservative (in an English sense rather than the version currently dominating American politics) and espouses what he calls libertarian, small-government values. (I would call them classical liberal values, but he would, I fear, take that label as an insult.) Sullivan, like me, happens to be gay and was raised as an Irish Catholic (he in England, me self in Ireland). Unlike me, he tries seriously to be a Christian and has thought deeply about what it might mean to be a Christian and how he can best go about being one. He was asked by an American news magazine to write an article to be published during Holy Week about his views on Christianity and the current state of the church in the United States (see 'Christianity in Crisis'). He responded with a careful and thought-provoking--and what must have been for him personally a lying-awake-in-a-long-dark-night--statement of his views. Many of Sullivan's critics (and he has many) found the article more provoking than thoughtful and were outraged. Sullivan is nothing if not pugnacious, and his blog contains several spirited rejoinders to his critics. There have been favourable responses as well; see, e.g., Frank Schaeffer, 'Someone Finally Said What I Believe', which also reproduces Sullivan's article.

I do in my writings and thinking resort to Christian doctrines and vocabulary because those are part of my personal history. I was trained to frame my thoughts in those terms, but I no longer consider myself a Christian and don't tie my beliefs to Jesus or God or any 'supreme being' in the way that Sullivan does. Although we express the point in different language and for different reasons, I do agree with Sullivan, however, on the need for humility in the face of the limits on oneself and what those limits imply for one's approach to others and the world. Unlike him, I do not find a promise of redemption in the act of humility or feel a need to ground my beliefs in an external force. (I note this simply as a difference, not as a matter of rightness or wrongness. My beliefs are irrelevant to anyone but me.)

We are limited in space and time and knowledge and talents. We live in a chaotic world and we try to make sense of it. Indeed, if neurologists are correct, we are hard-wired to attempt to make sense of it and are predisposed to do so in certain ways. In my view, in the attempt to make sense of the world, we concoct narratives to explain the world and to place ourselves within that explanation. A personal corollary of this is that I must remember always that my narrative owes much to my desires and much to my need for comfortable sureties and that it bears at best a passing resemblance to the world and explains very little of it. Hence the need for humility and for constant self-reminders that my narrative is tentative and that the only truthful statement to be made about it is that it is comfortable and hence suspect and flawed and ultimately of little explanatory value.

Our culture supplies several master narratives--bodies of religious, political-economic, and social doctrines. It's best to be suspicious of all of them. If successful in convincing large numbers of us to adopt one, all of them, apparently inevitably, become entwined with power and are distorted into weapons for buttressing the holders of power. One of the things that emerges in Elaine Pagels's studies of early Christianity is the immediate impact of Constantine's recognition of Christianity on the power and position of church leaders and their great readiness to exploit that recognition to promote themselves and their supporters. They went from being a persecuted sect to being a persecuting orthodoxy within a few years.

It is difficult to avoid the master narratives, since their proponents are so often intent on foisting them on the world. We humans seem uncomfortable with uncertainty and with the toleration that uncertainty might imply--better to silence uncertainty and toleration than to admit that we might be wrong or that the world might be chaotic and senseless. After all, if you can get away unpunished with disobeying my god, how powerful is my god? But, if I can silence you and prevent you from speaking, if necessary even kill you, then I am more powerful than you and my beliefs are right and yours were wrong. I don't know if it is possible to rid oneself of this attitude. The only thing I can do is to try to avoid or lessen or ameliorate its appearances in myself.

I recognise that humility and blogging are contradictory. My excuse is that I began blogging in the hope that I would find others in this worldwide forum to accompany me. I have been lucky in that, and I thank those of you who have found me not unworthy to be your occasional companion and fellow pilgrim.

Blogs: Letters of Note

I follow several blogs, some of them compulsively. One of their common characteristics is the bloggers' willingness to scour other blogs and writings and summarise what catches their eyes. Most of the time they provide a link to the original post. It saves a lot of time to have others do such work. Recently a link in one of them led me to Letters of Note (www.lettersofnote.com), which several times each week presents what its title implies: noteworthy letters ('letters' as in 'correspondence'). Shaun Usher, the person behind this blog, is a young writer living in Manchester who sifts through books of letters and find gems, such as this letter filled with useful advice on writing, from C. S. Lewis to a young American fan.

26 June 1956

Dear Joan–

Thanks for your letter of the 3rd. You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place and the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well — but not the thing itself — the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you're bound to read it about 10 years hence. Don't try it now, or you'll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

About amn't I, aren't I and am I not, of course there are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. "Good English" is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another. Amn't I was good 50 years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren't I would have been hideously bad in Ireland but very good in England. And of course I just don't know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don't take any notice of teachers and textbooks in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say "more than one passenger was hurt," although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was!

What really matters is:–

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

4. In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

. . .

The Sea

This picture is labelled only 'West Coast of Ireland'. What at first glance may appear to be a snow-covered mountain in the background is a wave. Given the label and the orientation, I would guess that this was taken looking north from one of the many promontories that jut westward into the Atlantic.