Category Archives: books

More’s Speech to the Mob

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Shakespeare's handwriting?The scene is a riot, on the first day of May, 1517. It would later be known as Evil May Day,or Ill May Day.

An angry mob, mostly comprised of apprentices, marched through the streets of London, their passion inflamed by a xenophobic speech made the past Easter by Dr. Bell (or Beal) at St. Paul’s Cross. Bell railed against the foreigners living in London, especially the wealthy foreign merchants and bankers. He called on all “Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.”

His words spread and festered, as racism is wont to do, among the poor, the jealous, the petty, the uneducated, the unthinking and the gullible.

Within the next two weeks, mobs attacked foreigners across the city. Rumours swirled that a mass riot would occur on 1 May, during which the city would rise up and collectively “slay all aliens.” The city politicians, fearing the worst, imposed a 9 p.m. curfew the night before. That just made matters worse. Around 1,000 men gathered that night, and stormed a lockup to free several men who had been imprisoned for attacking foreigners previously. Together, they marched into the area of London where many foreigners lived.

Thomas More, at that time the under-sheriff of London, met the mob and tried to persuade them to return to their homes. But although his words calmed them for a short while, others reacted against them, and soon the mob mentality was back. The crowd raced through the city, looting foreigners’ houses. The authorities reacted slowly, but with force.

By 3 a.m. the riot ran out of steam. But the authorities had not. They arrested more than 300 of the rioters, perhaps as many as 400, and while most were later pardoned, 13 were convicted of treason and executed. John Lincoln, who had instigated Bell’s fiery speech and was the mob’s ringleader, was also executed.

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What the Future Holds

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BBC FutureIn researching my latest book, I’ve been reading about predictions for the future: what will happen in technology, science, politics, government and medicine. It’s pretty fascinating what some see coming at us for the next 10 to 100 years. There are some ideas that had never occurred to me. And many predictions which never came true.

(The image at the left is from the BBC Future website. Click the image to go to the site or here for a larger version.)

I’ve always been fascinated by “futurology.” Especially what our past thought of the future, and whether or not any of it came true. Back in 2006, I wrote about a book I had in my library:

In 1936, an MIT professor name Dr. Clifton Furnas wrote a book called “The Next 100 Years.” Among his predictions for the distant future were hydro corridors, synthetic vitamins and antibiotics. Within a decade, all of those things were already commonplace. He dismissed the fledgling television as a fad with no practical application. Within two decades it would become the most popular form of entertainment in the world.

I look at “here’s what the future will bring” books on the shelf today and think each one is a product of hubris more than insight.

Who could have predicted the Internet and its importance to our daily lives more than 10 years ago, aside from a few prescient science fiction writers like John Brunner (The Shockwave Rider)?

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Notes for a Spring Evening

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Collingwood sunsetLate spring, Saturday night, sitting here surrounded by the trees and garden in full bloom, everything lush and full of life, my view from the front porch of verdant trees and garden, everything so very green. Peaceful. Relaxing. Would that this evening could go on forever.

Glass of Sledgehammer Zinfandel to round off the evening, a couple of books to read on the table beside me, the dog and two cats outside with us. Doesn’t get much better than this. Well maybe if we had opened a bottle of Cardinal Zin… which we both think is a better wine. But we’ll make do.

Books beside me include Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, and The History of Hell by Alice Turner. The former for entertainment (after seeing the BBC series, I had to read the book, which is equally entertaining but richer), the latter to complement my studies of the mythologies of the afterlife. This is research for a novel I’ve been working on the past year or so. Well, longer, but seriously for only a year. It’s about… well, that’s another post. When I’m closer to completion. Only about 30,000 words so far.

Fiction isn’t my forte, but I am trying. I’ve tinkered with a couple of pieces, including a few chapters of a humorous novel about small town politics (chapter one was published on this blog some time ago – I’ll get around to posting chapter 2 soon…)

Writing fiction is as much a learning experience as anything else. But even in that it’s worth doing. Learn every day or you die, as my friend Stan used to say.

I had two books of nonfiction published last year, a third submitted to the publisher earlier this year, and a fourth in the works for later this summer. And I produced a rewrite of Machiavelli’s classic, The Prince, but no publisher found. Yet.

My real passion is to be able to write good fiction. I have tinkered with it – even written whole novels of 100,000 or more words. Scifi and fantasy mostly, and some mysteries. But they’re not very good. It’s a craft I need to work at, more. But not tonight.

Tonight is for enjoying a beautiful mid-spring evening with my wife, who happens to be my best friend. And contemplating how good it is to be alive and in Collingwood on such a night.

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Midway in our Life’s Journey…

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Too many books!So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions.

My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw.

But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.

I was reading that opening again, this week, as I collected books from my shelves to donate to the local library. Powerful words. Don’t we all feel that doubt at some time in our lives, that nagging question whether we had made all the right choices, followed the right path? Don’t we all wonder what life would have been like if we made the other choice, took the other road, chose the other person?

And here I am with a book in my hand wondering what life would be like had I never opened it, never read it, never followed it down the path it led me to. What less would I have understood, what less would I have felt, what less would I have explored without it?

I can’t imagine a life without Dante. Without Shakespeare, Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, Shunryu Suzuki, Frank Herbert, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dickens, Carl Sagan, Casanova, Dante, Machiavelli, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bill Bryson… so many authors whose works have helped build my world view. Wouldn’t life be poorer without them?

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Musing on Melville’s Poetry

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Herman MelvilleI came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life.

Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found at the University of Virginia.

Here’s the poem that pleasantly surprised me by its complexity and modernity, given its 1888 publication. It’s called The Maldive Shark:

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat –
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

It’s hard, reading that, to remember Melville was a contemporary of Walt Whitman and that both of them published rather morally-laden socially instructive books of poetry about the Civil War almost simultaneously (Whitman’s Drum Taps in 1865, Melville’s Battle Pieces in 1866).

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Little Dorrit: BBC Drama

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Little Dorrit BBCWe just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere 30 minutes, and almost every one of them ended in a cliffhanger fashion that made you want to watch just one more.

You might not think of Charles Dickens that way, but much of what he wrote was for serial publication: in weekly or monthly magazines. To keep his audience hooked – and buying the magazines – he wrote cliffhangers. Not perhaps as gripping as, say, episodes of TV’s show 24, but his audience kept coming back for more.

Little Dorrit ran in 19 monthly issues, between December, 1855 and June, 1857.

Watching the series also made me want to read the book – I have read other of Dickens’ works, but not this one. Now, after watching, I can’t imagine why not. It’s a great story. I pulled it off my shelf and stared it this week.

Little Dorrit is both a social commentary and a complicated story. It has – as other Dickens’ novels have – a large cast of characters, often eccentric to the point of caricature. Mr. Barnacle of the Circumlocution Office, for example. His readers loved the characters, loved the caricatures, and understood the reality they thinly veiled.

Modern novels – your James Patterson, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy or Patricia Cornwell for example – are structured differently. The basic idea of a lot of popular fiction is to hit the readers over the head with a strong first page and drag them into the novel and the action right from the earliest lines.

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10,000 or 20,000 hours?

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10,000-hour ruleMalcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.”*

Gladwell does not specifically say that 10,000 hours of practice or apprenticeship will make you an expert. Like most things on the internet, it has been altered in the transmission; dumbed down for the simplistic misquotes we love to pair with pictures of kittens or puppies on Facebook.

Rather what he said was that it will make you damned good. Way above the rest. A phenom, as Eric Dekkers said:

…he’s talking about those surprising success stories who stand head and shoulders above the elite performers in their industry. That one guy who is way better than the 31 other “best quarterbacks in the country.” That one woman who fearsomely dominates all other female tennis players in the world.

Still, the concept and the generalization behind it have not gone unchallenged. As science writer David Bradley wrote for the BBC,

Scientifically speaking, 10,000 hours is not a precise figure but shorthand for “lots and lots of dedicated practice”. Even 10,000 hours of dedicated practice may not be enough to give you the skills of a virtuoso. But whether you dream of playing at the concert hall, wielding the guitar, or taking part on the running track, 10,000 hours is a good starting point. Double that and you may even be winning international competitions.

Bradley also notes that 10,000 is a lot of time doing repetitive practice:

To notch up 10,000 hours would require about 90 minutes of practice every day for 20 years. This might explain why the typical child learning the piano will never make it to concert level. Three hours a day gets you to that stage within a decade, so start at the age of ten and you’re done before you’re out of your teens.

Imagine you’re a 10-year old starting violin lessons. Your parents make you practice an hour every school day, but give you weekends and holidays off. You might be able to get in 195 days or practice a year. At that rate, it would take more than 51 years to reach Gladwell’s 10,000-hour “expert” level.

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