Nov

21

Word Of The Week: November 21st, 2009

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 21, 2009 | 1 Comment

When I was younger I wore vests all the time. You could say I had a vested interest in them, but that’s the kind of pun that makes people laugh politely then stab you. What we in North America typically call a vest, though, is, in Britain, more commonly known as a waistcoat, even though any self-respecting coat should have sleeves, and vests also cover the upper torso. Not that calling a vest a vest makes much more sense. The word vest comes from the Latin vestis, which means “covering or garment , clothing; a blanket, carpet, tapestry”. That’s a lot of meanings to cram into a single word. It doesn’t surprise me that Rome fell if they weren’t able to tell clothes from tapestries–but that’s another story.

Supposedly vest as a verb, which becomes the suffix for words like divest and invest, comes from the Latin vestio, vestire, which means “to dress” or “to clothe”. I’m not so sure about that. There’s also the Latin word vester, which means “your” or “yours”. I wonder if the word vestis came from vester, or vice versa, because there’s clothing is so personal. And then there’s also the goddess Vesta, goddess of the home–also something extremely personal.

Getting back to waistcoats, though, the first use of the word vest in the American sense comes from Britain–at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has this definition of vest:

A sleeveless garment of some length worn by men beneath the coat…A short garment worn beneath the coat or jacket as a usual part of male attire; a waistcoat.

And the first recorded use in print is from Samuel Pepys’s diary, in which he says,

The King hath yesterday, in Council, declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes… It will be a vest, I know not well how; but it is to teach the nobility thrift.

While I was never a trend setter like King Charles II, I did buy most of the vests I wore in thrift stores.

Nov

20

The League Of Extraordinary Librarians.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Because public libraries cater to both adults and children they have to walk a fine line between access and censorship, purchasing certain materials that aren’t appropriate for all ages but also restricting access to them. And if there’s a question about whether something should be available to any patrons regardless of age or whether it should only be available to adults or with a guardian’s permission then libraries usually have ways of dealing with that, but it usually requires consulting staff and coming to a group decision.

Two Lexington, Kentucky public library workers, though, decided to sidestep all that and took it upon themselves to remove The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier from the shelves. And they didn’t just remove it. The Beat explains how they

colluded to keep the book out of circulation — Cook, who had become disturbed by the book’s imagery, checked it out for a year, meaning no one else could check it out. However, when an 11-year-old girl put it on hold, Cook was unable to continue her delaying tactic — and Boisvert stepped in, removing the hold, and keeping the book out of circulation.

I have to admit checking a book out for any length of time is a clever way of keeping it out of someone else’s hands. That’s one of the disadvantages of print books. From the article, though, it sounds like Cook has succeeded in keeping the book out of the hands of any other patrons. She has not returned it and is “still carrying it around in her knapsack, the dirty parts marked with post-its.”

Both library workers have been fired, by the way. And click here if you want to see one of the pictures that was so disturbing.

Nov

19

Survival of The Facts.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Yesterday as I was about to cross the street a guy with a big cardboard box asked me, “Would you like a free book?” I hesitated because I wasn’t sure what it would be, then said, “Sure.” And he handed me a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. I looked at it and said, “Hey, thanks!” This being Tennessee–home of the Scopes Trial–it’s nice to see Darwin’s book being handed out. And close to a college campus too.

Then I looked more closely and realized the edition is edited by Ray Comfort. Comfort has published this book to be distributed free around the United States, and claims “Nothing has been removed from Darwin’s original work.” Nothing, that is, except for Darwin’s introduction and at least four chapters.

In reviewing the book, Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, says, “there’s no reason for students to refuse Comfort’s free—albeit suspiciously abridged—copy of the Origin.” She adds, though, that the introduction is,

a hopeless mess of long-ago-refuted creationist arguments, teeming with misinformation about the science of evolution, populated by legions of strawmen, and exhibiting what can be charitably described as muddled thinking.

Of course Comfort and his ilk seem content to use misinformation and even outright dishonesty to promote their opposition to science, and they’re certainly free to do so. In the world of ideas, unfortunately, natural selection doesn’t always work. While facts can’t be driven to extinction, it seems that neither can some lies, because people like Comfort keep resurrecting them no matter how many times they’re knocked down. And yet I think there might be value in this book. Comfort’s work does stand as a reminder of the kind of dishonesty and anti-intellectualism that constantly tries to pollute our thinking.

Nov

17

Fantastic Mr. Dahl.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

It’s surprising that it’s taken Hollywood this long to adapt Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox into a movie, although Hollywood seems to have waited for Dahl’s death in 1990 to turn several of his books–Matilda, James And The Giant Peach, The Witches–into movies, and that’s not including the even more recent remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is also unusual among Dahl’s works in that its principal characters are talking animals. Technically there are talking animals in James And The Giant Peach too, but there’s a supernatural explanation for that. The animals in Mr. Fox are even more anthropomorphic, having language and their own society which mirrors the human society above them–although without nearly so much meanness. Its hero–Mr. Fox–is also an adult, another unusual quality in a Dahl book. And yet when I went back and reread it I realized how, talking animals aside, it’s not that different thematically from most of his other books. The most interesting thing is how often his characters are outsiders–usually excluded from the privileges of the upper classes. While he’s never openly critical of the class system, Dahl does seem to enjoy poking fun at the upper class. Charlie’s family is almost at the lowest possible end of the economic scale, as are James’s aunts–but they take their frustrations out on James. While Matilda’s father is a successful car salesman, he’s stupid and conniving and ultimately undone by his own greed. Matilda also faces Miss Trunchbull, who’s definitely upper class. All of the children in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory–with the exception of Charlie–come from wealthy families. And then there’s Danny Champion Of The World, in which Danny and his father live in a gypsy van and are threatened by the wealthy Mr. Hazell. Like Dahl’s other heroes Mr. Fox is kept out of “society”, here represented by the three evil farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. Mr. Fox has to get by on his wits, and the harder Boggis, Bunce, and Bean push the easier it becomes for Mr. Fox to slip in and take advantage of them. Not that it’s always that hard. None of the farmers are smart, and Dahl has this typically gross explanation for why Bean is deaf:

Bean never took a bath. He never even washed. As a result his earholes were clogged with all kinds of muck and wax and bits of chewing-gum and dead flies and stuff like that.

I’ve wondered whether Dahl’s tendency to prod the upper classes has anything to do with his upbringing. He was born to Norwegian parents who emigrated to Britain, and most summers they returned to Norway. While he doesn’t say he felt like an outsider as a child, or even as an adult, his autobiography is called Going Solo. Both his father and older sister died when he was just four, which must have come as an enormous shock and no matter how much his mother and other adults tried to compensate, it must have left him feeling very alone and uncertain.

It may actually be more complicated than needling the upper classes. Dahl has a distinct dislike of bullies. In both his book Boy and his story Lucky Break he describes the awful system in English boarding schools where he and other boys would be servants to the older boys, and how he’d get beaten with a cane for burning an older boy’s toast. Interestingly he doesn’t say whether he was just as brutal when he became an older student.

What Dahl’s books provide young readers, though, is moral ambiguity. Ideally children’s books are supposed to teach kids right from wrong–or so we’d like to believe. Dahl, though, isn’t always interested in punishing the bad and rewarding the good because most of his characters aren’t all good or all bad. His description of wealthy men in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar seems to capture his view of the world. Henry Sugar is wealthy enough that he doesn’t have to work, and Dahl says,

Men like Henry Sugar are to be found drifting like seaweed all over the world…They are not particularly bad men. But they are not good men either. They are of no real importance. They are simply a part of the decoration.

Henry Sugar eventually redeems himself, creating a whole series of well-funded orphanages, but he does it by robbing casinos.

Matilda has a devious side, playing some brilliant pranks on her parents, including gluing her father’s hat to his head. James and his friends rejoice when his two aunts are crushed by the giant peach. And then there’s Danny, whose father is a petty thief. The fact that the whole village, with the exception of Mr. Hazell, participates in the crime doesn’t make it any better. Even Charlie Bucket–sweet, innocent, downtrodden Charlie Bucket–only succeeds because he does something he shouldn’t. When he finds some money he should take it straight home but he instead gambles part of it, a purely selfish act.

And then there’s Mr. Fox. Like Danny’s father he starts out a petty thief, but, thanks to the efforts by “Messrs. Boggis, Bunce, and Bean” to destroy him he becomes even more successful than any of them could imagine.

Without realizing it, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean become Mr. Fox’s servants. By trying to kill him they end up giving him access to everything they own, and he never has to work again. Is this right or wrong? Dahl never treats the world so simplistically, and I think that’s why his books continue to be so successful. Young readers understand that the world’s not a simple place.

Nov

16

Book ‘Em: Into The Wilderness.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The thinness of what we call “civilization” is a recurring theme of Margaret Atwood’s work, and Wilderness Tips is a collection of short stories exploring this theme from several different perspectives.  A woman mails her removed tumor to her ex-lover’s wife, going against what would be the civilized thing to do, while in another story a young camper disappears on a canoeing trip, forcing the camp’s administrators to place blame as a way of maintaining order. Perhaps the most thought-provoking story, though, is the one placed literally at the book’s center, Uncles. Superficially this seems to be a story about how women’s liberation has threatened the old order established by men–and feminism is also a recurring theme of Atwood’s work. In fact Atwood is up to something more complicated in the story of Susanna, whose father died in World War II so that she never knew him. Instead she’s raised by her single mother and fostered by three uncles–over the objections of her aunts. Then, taking a career in journalism, she’s mentored by an older man named Percy. But then she passes him, getting first a radio show then a television show. Stuck at the same small local paper, Percy gets a small amount of national notoriety–and revenge–by writing an article attacking her as the “dragon lady”. She survives the attack, but her mentor’s resentment stings and takes her back to her feelings about her father. She has to deal with her own Oedipal conflict, confronting the fact that, while the younger generation must eventually supplant the older, the older generation will hate the younger generation for it. In fact the real problem is that Percy has never grown up, but Susanna doesn’t see it this way. She takes Percy’s betrayal personally, and dreams of her father “staring at her with hate.”

Stylistically Atwood’s stories are simple and straightforward, but philosophically they’re anything but simple. She often compresses whole lives, or several decades of a life into a few pages, allowing her to focus on the circumstances that led her characters to where they are. It’s very revealing of something at work in the lives of most of us. We may wonder how we ended up where we are, but it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Nov

14

Word Of The Week: November 14th, 2009.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 14, 2009 | 2 Comments

Recently I was between two groups of co-workers who were discussing a major procedural shift. While no one in the department had the deciding vote (it had to go to people much higher up) there was a group of us who honestly felt both sides had good, reasonable positions. We thought that, whichever way the final decision went, it would be fine. I was in that group in the middle. I wasn’t waffling, I wasn’t trying to appease anyone. Unfortunately, this was a decision in which there was no compromise that would–like most compromises–make both sides equally unhappy, but it seemed to me and to some others that both sides had equal merit.

There’s actually a word for this. It’s called utrality. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as, “Tendency to favour both sides; inclination towards either party.” This is not, strictly speaking neutrality. A minister named William Price coined the word in a sermon in 1642, distinguishing it from neutrality, even though utrality was, sort of, derived from that word. Utrality and neutrality both come from Latin. Utrality specifically derives from the word uter, which means “which of the two?”

The reason I’m so keen to specify a difference between utrality and neutrality is neutrality–to me, at least, implies not caring one way or the other. Utrality is something that I think all of us might feel at times–caring about two different sides of an issue and wanting to be part of both. Lacking a word for it can make the feeling difficult to describe. Price’s coining, interestingly, is the only recorded usage the OED has. On the one hand I’m not surprised–it’s a pretty obscure term. On the other hand, though, I’m surprised, because the word can be so useful.

Nov

13

The Problem’s Been Licked.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 13, 2009 | 1 Comment

One of the last items of Halloween candy to go (before you get to those horrible peanut-butter things in the orange and black wrappers) is the Tootsie Roll Pop. So I’m taking that as an excuse to share this old commercial for Tootsie Roll Pops which I’m sure brings back memories for many of us. And here’s a true story: a friend of mine made a serious effort to find out how many licks it really does take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. His count was four-hundred and thirty-seven.

Nov

11

An Uninformed Case.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Since one of the responsibilities of librarians is assisting patrons with research, they’re supposed to be trained to use research materials–everything from print bibliographies to electronic databases. That’s part of what makes Professor Bert Chapman’s “case against homosexuality” so surprising. Chapman is a librarian at Purdue University, and yet in writing his “case” he seems to have completely avoided doing any actual research of his own. He does cite one study by name which he claims is available at the web site of the Corporate Resource Center, but fails to provide a link to it. In fact there are several Corporate Resource Centers, none of which seem to have any such study available. I don’t doubt that such a study exists, but why doesn’t Professor Chapman–who is, after all, a librarian–make any effort to make it easier to find? He doesn’t even quote from it. We are, instead, expected to take his word that the report backs up his opinion.

What’s most appalling is Professor Chapman’s dishonesty. He claims his case is an economic one, and he makes the point that money spent on AIDS research is “wasted”. He says,

The money invested on AIDS research could be returned to taxpayers or transferred to more worthwhile areas of public health research such as cancer, heart disease, combating pandemic conditions like H1N1 flu, and promoting responsible sexual behavior such as monogamy within heterosexual marriage.

As one blogger has pointed out, perhaps money spent on librarians is being wasted as well. Professor Chapman doesn’t say so, but they money saved on AIDS research could also, in part, be used to fund the police state he envisions.

There have been serious responses to Professor Chapman’s “case”, but he refuses to acknowledge them. For one thing AIDS is not limited to homosexuals. Neither does the fact that allowing AIDS to go untreated would have even more serious economic consequences. Then there is the matter of same-sex marriage which Chapman claims to oppose on economic grounds, even though he makes it clear from the outset that his whole argument is based on his religious belief. One person has–unlike Professor Chapman–cited several actual studies and provided a link to one, a study which finds that

Extending marriage to same-sex couples will boost Vermont‟s economy by over $30.6 million over three years, which would generate increases in state and local government tax and fee revenues by $3.3 million and create approximately 700 new jobs.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, by blogger Timothy Kincaid, “Chapman suggests that gay people getting married would lead to increased rather than decreased sexual disease transmission.”

Professor Chapman dismisses these responses as “infantile ad hominem attacks”. He’s made up his mind and  isn’t interested in facts. He dismisses homosexuality as “sexually deviant”, proving he’s as ignorant of psychology as he is of economics. There have been those who have come to Chapman’s defense, claiming that he is being censored or that criticism of him represents intolerance. These defenders, like Chapman, have trouble distinguishing fact from opinion, and don’t understand the meaning of “censorship”. No one is preventing Chapman from voicing his opinions. Criticism does not equal censorship. As for “intolerance”, it’s Chapman himself who is actually promoting that by suggesting that anyone with AIDS should be allowed to die, and by refusing to engage in any discussion with those who disagree with him. This is also not a criticism of his faith. He doesn’t say, “I believe this solely because of my faith”, even though this is the case. Instead he tries to legitimize his argument with economic numbers that don’t add up and opinions passed off as facts. The irony, though, of those who call for Chapman to be treated with tolerance is that tolerance is an act of compassion, and compassion is one thing Professor Chapman clearly does not believe in.

Update: At least one academic librarian, Wayne Bivens-Tatum, of Princeton, has written a very thoughtful, intelligent critique of Professor Chapman’s “case”. While he considers several points of Chapman’s argument, he sums it up quite well in saying,

The only economic issue specifically regarding homosexuality in the entire post is the claim that businesses expanding coverage makes it difficult for them. That’s the case for any benefits at all, though. If companies dropped all their health benefits, they’d be more profitable. Tens of millions of people would suffer horribly, but economic arguments don’t address that.

Nov

10

Try This At Home.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 10, 2009 | 2 Comments

As a kid I had a chemistry set. I started out with it doing some of the more “educational” experiments, trying to learn serious stuff about chemistry, but then I realized I was only interested in making cool looking crystals or colors or blowing stuff up–which is why I added potassium permanganate and glycerin to my collection of chemicals. By the way, if you don’t know what potassium permanganate and glycerin do when mixed together and you have young children, go to the drugstore and buy some of each. Then take some modeling clay and form it into a volcano and put about a tablespoon of potassium permanganate crystals in it. Pour some glycerin on top of that, then stand back. It’s best if you do this experiment outside since there will be plenty of smoke.

In addition to attempting to burn down my parents’ house I also tried collecting as many elements in their pure (or almost pure) state as I could. I remember having samples of sulfur, lead, a small bottle of mercury I tried to freeze (unfortunately the freezer wouldn’t go down to -40), some zinc, and maybe a few others. I never did my hands on the ones I really wanted–selenium, bismuth, bromine, thorium, or arsenic. I didn’t want these elements because they were dangerous–I just wanted them because they were unusual and interesting.

For the ones I’ll never see in their real state, though, there’s Theodore Gray’s Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements. And it is so cool. They’re not just photos–many of the pictures also have a “spin” option so you can see a video of them, or of various compounds made with them, from multiple angles. It is just amazing. Check out the video of a large and incredibly beautiful bismuth crystal. Gray has just published a new book, The Elements, which also includes his photos, but I think his earlier book Mad Science is worth checking out too. It’s full of “don’t try this at home” stuff. But you know you want to.

Nov

9

Animals of Egypt.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The November 2009 issue of National Geographic has a cover article on animal mummies of Egypt. I think anyone who’s even a little familiar with Egypt knows that cats were often mummified, getting the same reverential treatment as humans because of their importance to the goddess Bast. The diversity of animals preserved as mummies, though, is really amazing:

Behind glass panels lie cats wrapped in strips of linen that form diamonds, stripes, squares, and crisscrosses. Shrews in boxes of carved limestone. Rams covered with gilded and beaded casings. A gazelle wrapped in a tattered mat of papyrus, so thoroughly flattened by mummification that Ikram named it Roadkill. A 17-foot, knobby-backed crocodile, buried with baby croc mummies in its mouth. Ibises in bundles with intricate appliqués. Hawks. Fish. Even tiny scarab beetles and the dung balls they ate.

Amazing diversity, but not surprising. Crocodiles were sacred to the god Sobek, scarab beetles were symbols of eternal life (because they were believed to come from dung), and many gods are pictured either as animals or with animal heads–Thoth with the head of an ibis, Horus with the head of a falcon, Hathor the cow, and so on.

What’s really surprising, given the Egyptian love of animals, is how little role animals seem to play in mythology and literature. There is an old dialogue between a cat and a jackal, but these are apparently metaphorical, with the cat taking the position that everything has a divine design and the jackal arguing that the universe is random and chaotic.

In Egyptian mythology too the animal forms of gods seems to be symbolic, or incidental. Anubis guides to the dead because jackals are associated with carrion, and in the battle between Horus and Set, Set takes the form of both a scorpion and a black boar. The only Egyptian god I know of who’s really animalistic is Sekhmet, who takes the form of a giant lioness. In one story Sekhmet is created to punish humanity for not respecting the gods, but the gods lose control of her and she goes on a rampage. Humanity is only saved when the people get Sekhmet drunk by offering her a large amount of red-colored beer which she drinks thinking it’s blood. Snakes, which were revered but also feared, weren’t mummified, but they play a pretty prominent role in mythology. When Amun-Ra refuses to give up the throne Isis makes a poisonous snake which bites him. She holds the cure but only gives it to him on the condition that Horus is allowed to become pharaoh. And in some stories Osiris and Set are allies in the afterlife and travel with Amun-Ra in his boat at night and defend him against a giant snake.

In another Egyptian story, the Tale of Two Brothers, two brothers are driven apart by the unfaithful wife of one of them. The unmarried brother is killed and eventually his ka or soul goes into a bull and he gets his revenge against the wife. Bulls were revered–and mummified–but this is the only story I know in which an animal gets a really prominent part.

Then again maybe there were Egyptian animal tales that were strictly oral and never written down. It should be noted too that a lot of the animal parts that were mummified were food for the dead, with the “best cuts of beef, succulent ducks, geese, and pigeons” being “salted, dried, and wrapped in linen.” This gets to what most people think of as the Egyptian obsession with death, since they went to such great lengths to prepare and store their dead and give them a proper send-off into the afterlife.

I think the idea that the Egyptians were obsessed with death is a misinterpretation. It’s true that life wasn’t easy. The Egyptians depended on the Nile’s annual floods, and if it flooded too much or not enough their crops would be ruined and they’d be in danger of famine. And yet their intense preparations for the afterlife reveal a deep love of life because they wanted to carry over everything they enjoyed in this life–and that included pets. Preserving the memory of the dead was a way of keeping them alive–although there was a dark side to that too. The names of Hatshepsut and Akhenaton were scratched out after their deaths in an attempt to wipe out their existence. And the preservation techniques of the Egyptians worked, too. We’re still talking about them. We still remember them. We keep them alive.


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