Pseudoscience

I recently finished reading a curious book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character. It’s a collection of memories and funny stories by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who tells about all kinds of things: from fixing radios as a child, over his involvement in developing the atomic bomb, to his many adventures with beautiful blondes – the typical life of the average academic, quoi. (Not.)

Now if there was one thing Feynman couldn’t stand, it’s pseudoscience. In his last chapter of the book, he explains why:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

On the one hand, it’s really quite fascinating to see that Feynman reacted so heavily against pseudoscience because of his unshakable belief in science itself. On the other hand, it’s quite tragic that what Feynman complained about decades ago (the above was written in 1974), still applies today.

Indeed, it’s tragic how much pseudoscience is still around these days. One very clear example of this is what is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Confusing an event that preceded another event with one the cause of the latter event. Indeed, only today there was a very clear example of this kind of mistaken logic in the papers.

Four hours of sport a week reduces your chances of having a burn-out by half the article in question said. An Israeli study had studied workers for nine years and observed that the more people did sports, the less their chances were of getting a burn-out. Ergo: doing sports prevents a burn-out.

But this is faulty logic. It’s not because event A is followed by (post hoc) event B, that event B is caused by event A (propter hoc). It’s not because you do sports, that you don’t get a burn-out; just like it’s not because you don’t do sports that you do get a burn-out. Think about it. Isn’t it much more logical that people who exercise for four hours a week have energetic personalities and are therefore (either genetically or psychologically) less prone to get a burn-out anyway? At the very least the Israeli experiment does not prove that exercise is the cause of the lack of the burn-out.

The same is true for all the alcohol versus life expectancy research. Every so often there is a study that proves that one or two glasses of beer or wine a day supposedly makes you live longer. Indeed, when you observe a bunch of people, those who drink moderately tend to live longer than those who don’t drink at all. But that doesn’t prove that moderate drinking is the cause of living longer. Isn’t it more likely that most people who drink moderately probably live an easier, a funner, in short a happier life than those who never touch a drop of alcohol? And happy equals less stress equals less cardiovascular disease. But if you’re happy because of another reason, like through having a rewarding job, a good family life, etcetera, I’m sure it’s just as beneficial for your life expectancy. So it’s happiness that makes you live longer, not alcohol.

After all, Feynman stopped drinking very early on in his life and he lived to be 70, which was exactly the life expectancy of a male at the time.

Aha!

Quotes from the book (10)

I guess that people working in academia are on the official list of "People who are not allowed to envy other people traveling for their job". Apart from the cleaners, obviously. So there goes the introduction I had in mind, when I decided to blog about one of the funniest books I read in a while: The travel diaries of Karl Pilkington. For those of you who are not familiar with Karl: he is a jack-of-all-trades in the media landscape (podcaster, author, television producer), best known for the travel series "An idiot abroad" and his appearances in the Ricky Gervais Show (the world's most downloaded podcast, unless Adam Carolla succeeded in setting a new record), mostly as the butt of Gervais' practical jokes. 

The aforementioned book, spun off the travel documentary television series, describes the adventures of Karl, traveling in Egypt, Brazil, Jordan, China, India, Mexico and Peru. It is written as a diary, including his telephone conversations with the people who sent him abroad in the first place (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant), and it is downright funny. His one-liners are hilarious, and some entries could have been scripted for a stand-up comedy show. A few examples: 

I had some toast and a bit of papaya. This was the first time I've ever eaten papaya. It was okay, but if someone told me I'd never eat papaya ever again, I wouldn't be bothered. I feel like this about most fruit. There is too much fruit in the world, and I don't like buying a lot of fruit, as it goes off so quickly. Maybe that's why we are told to eat five portions a day, just to get through the stuff before it gets mouldy. 

The odd thing with China is, they like to go out of their way to do things differently. Even something simple like reading a book they mess with. They read books from top to bottom and then back to the top again. It looks like they're agreeing with everything they're reading. 

The thing with announcing funny stuff is that you may end up with people staring at their screen, finding it all but hilarious. In that case, grab the book yourself and read it from top to bottom. You can agree with me afterwards: funny stuff...

Quotes from the book (9)

… or rather: ‘Quotes from the books’, double plural.

Indeed, it seems I have grossly neglected, dear reader, to keep you posted about my reading habits. Instead, for a long time I let on (in the box on the right) that I had been reading Dave Eggers’ complex novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but that was far from the truth.

So while I may have given the impression that I was knee-deep in a bulky book of high-brow literature, I was in fact reading some pretty pulpy stuff. Common cultural practice dictates that I should now start to justify this, by saying, for instance, that I’m doing this as a kind of experiment, in order to ‘contextualize my reading praxis through an explicit anti-canonism’ or some academic mumbo-jumbo. However, the truth is that I just like reading pulp too, plain and simple. In my case, that means things like glossy magazines (OK magazine! Dag allemaal!), gossip websites about Hollywood celebrities (TMZ! Perez Hilton!), autobiographies of sports’ or TV personalities, adventure tales, vulgarizing history, and of course fantasy literature. Aside from anything else it also makes me quite good at knowing all types of strange stuff at quizzes!

So, instead of offering you quotes from a Dutch classic like Lijmen / Het Been, or an impressionistic English novel like Eclipse, as I did in the past, today I’ll offer you some citations from stuff I’ve read in the past year with just as much lip-licking pleasure as the other high-faluting books. Enjoy (I certainly did!)

1) Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears:

(or how the adage ‘know thyself’ is important even for hosts of TV survival shows)

Climbing. Hanging. Escaping. I loved them all.
Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist and an assasin. I took it as a great compliment.*

           (* not sure that was really wise, Bear)

2) Dave Eddings, The Redemption of Althalus

(or how 900 pages of previous story can prepare you for even the worst of melodrama)

‘Are you serious?’ he exclaimed.

She stroked her tummy again. ‘If I’m not, this is. We’re going to have a baby, Althalus’.

He stared at her in absolute astonishment. Then he suddenly felt his eyes fill with tears.

‘Are you crying, Althalus? I didn’t think you knew how.’

He took her in his arms then and held her with tears of joy streaming down his face. ‘Oh, I do love you, Em!’*, was all he could say.

(* When the story starts, Em or Emmy or Emerald is a cat. No kidding.)

3) Sean Michael Wilson, Hagakure. The Code of the Samurai

           

            (or how I know that even samurai can be pussies)

It’s good to carry some powdered rouge in one’s sleeve. It may happen that when one is sobering up or waking from sleep, his complexion may be poor. At such a time it is good to take out and apply some powdered rouge.*

(* Bought this one together with Fred at Narita airport with our last 1000 yen. Money well spent.)

Quantum of doubt

When I was a teenager, I hated physics. And I sucked at it too. I remember one time having to calculate the amount of air pressure within a sealed water bottle. Triumphantly I quickly wrote down: 0. Because, I reckoned, since there is a cap on the bottle, that prevents the pressure from the outside air getting into the bottle. Of course, I was wrong. But I remember sharply - yes, with all the sharpness you can expect from a 14-year-old boy who was publicly laughed at by his alcoholic physics teacher for that answer - that no one bothered to explain why I was wrong. I just sucked at physics (like I sucked at geography or musical education) and that was that.

Today I know that I didn’t hate physics because I sucked at it, but because nothing we were ever taught in high school physics was interesting enough for me to want to try and be better at it. Indeed, for our class (that got only one hour of physics a week) the most interesting chapters were dropped with the message ‘You guys won’t understand this anyway’. And so physics became a kind of applied mathematics. All I remember us doing was calculating things like how quickly a drop of water falling from a cloud would hit the ground (remember F_z?). For someone like me, who was basically only interested in stories and therefore forever looking for the why behind everything, it was torture. Because no one ever talked about the whys. Physics, from the Greek word for ‘the things of nature’, should be about explaining how and why our physical world behaves the way it does. But we never heard anything about that. I guess if you asked our teachers they would have said that that was way too difficult for us.

Yet one year ago, probably almost to the day in fact, I was waiting with Fred for a Japanese train to arrive (Japanese trains are never late, so we must have been early) and I was listening to him explaining Einstein’s relativity theory and I realised that, when properly explained, even the most fundamental physics are not difficult at all. With ever growing eyes and ears and even brain, it seemed, I suddenly understood why distance and time are ultimately relative. I still rank that very moment firmly within the top five of interesting insights I’ve ever had. For one, because Einstein’s discovery is mind-blowing, but also because I realised then and there that physics can be interesting. In fact, it’s probably the most interesting thing there is.

Now yesterday evening I had another ‘physical’ experience, so to say, while watching the BBC documentary ‘A Night with the Stars’ (watch it here on YouTube). In the program, Manchester University physics professor Brian Cox explained the rudimentary elements of quantum theory which accounts for just about everything, so it seems. It answers questions like why it is that even though atoms consist of more than 99,9% empty space, you don’t fall through your chair while reading this. Or why it is when I rub my hands, every atom in the universe instantly changes ever so slightly (something to do with energy levels of electrons). Or why you can put something in a box, preferably a rather small one, wait a while (okay, a rather long while) and have a reasonable chance that whatever you put in the box will not be there anymore when you open it. Fascinating stuff, really, discovered by mostly young researchers who must have had a brain running on kerosene.

In fact, the longer I watched the documentary, the more I started thinking about these geniuses of quantum theory, people like Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli or Werner Heisenberg, and the amazing discoveries they made. And I must confess that suddenly I was insanely jealous of them.

Indeed, being in academic research myself (but about literature for God’s sake!) I suddenly felt like an imposter. Really, I asked myself, has any scholar in the humanities ever produced anything as staggeringly true as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (pun not intended)?

I mean, just look at it. Even if you don’t understand it (like me), you have to realise one thing. This is a mathematical formula, which means that it is universally true: always and everywhere, for every fucking particle in the whole Goddamn universe!

Indeed, nothing we scholars in the humanities will ever put down about anything, no matter how hard we research it and how much we think about it, will be able to boast a fraction of the value Heisenberg’s discovery. And that’s a bit of a blow. Especially since no one in humanities and particularly in my small field seems to care very much about this.

Sure, we can’t all be Nobel Prize winners and research in the humanities is fundamentally different to physics, but what annoys me is that lately it seems no one around me is truly trying to push the boundaries of what we know anymore. Academic research should be about formulating, testing and refining hypotheses in an open, but ever critical environment. Yet lately, it seems that a lot of what I see in my small field boils down to formulating clichés, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, refining the art of looking smart in a self-important, but ever empty environment.

After all, we might have been the people who invented the names ‘alpha’ and ‘beta sciences’, but after yesterday, I’m having real doubts about the value judgement seemingly implied in this alphabetical order. Because I seriously ask myself: is what I’m doing as good (for lack of a better term) as what a physicist does?

Truth be told: I’m not so sure anymore…

Mrs. Robinson

Research is a fascinating thing. Only today I read on The New Scientist that after additional observations our beloved neutrinos seem to continue their quarky behaviour and might after all be able to travel faster than the speed of light (story here). If it were true (and I still think we need to be careful), it would be a jaw-dropping finding.

Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!

And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.

Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.

Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.

Lost

When I was about 12, I picked up a book in my father’s library and read its blurb (you know, the text on the back). It simply said: ‘There are only two kinds of people in this world: those that have read this book and those who are meaning to read it’. That book was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. As my father only had an English copy of it and I was still too young to understand Tolkien’s stately English, he summarised the story for me and gave me the old I guess you’ll just have to wait until you grow up… However, being a rather curious little fellow (both in the sense of curiosity and curiousness), little Fred didn’t wait to grow up. The year after I managed to put my hands on The Hobbit - that rather dull prequel to The Lord of the Rings, but originally meant as a children’s story, so a little easier - and when I turned 15 I bravely started the 1,000 odd pages of TLOR. And I absolutely loved it.

For me it was the beginning of a true obsession with English fantasy literature. I'm talking about those fist thick books with shiny covers with relief lettering about magicians, dragons, ancient tales and heroic quests, that sort of thing. You've seen them. Besides Tolkien’s other work (his philosophical The Silmarillion and his collection of Unfinished Tales), I also devoured the American author Raymond Feist, who wrote (and is still writing) complete sagas, such as The Rift War Saga, including books with ringing names like Silverthorn or A Darkness at Sethanon. I must have read over 5,000 pages of fantasy literature I realise just now, but then, probably somewhere around 2000, just like that, I gave up on it. Until last Saturday that is…

Last Saturday I woke up and realised it wasn’t going to be my day. It had been a somewhat shitty week and it promised to be a similarly shitty weekend. So I had to come up with a plan to make things better. So I went into town, just to get out more that anything else, and sure enough, pretty quickly I ended up at a big bookstore. As I walked through the aisles stacked with the mental offspring of TV chefs, books with athletes’ stories and guides to rearranging your chakras, my attention was suddenly drawn towards the fantasy corner. Indeed, the week before I had happened to talk about fantasy literature with someone who was absolutely in love with the books by Dave and Leigh Eggers, and sure enough, there it was: The Redemption of Althalus. Shiny cover, drawing of a guy carrying an ornate bronze dagger, and close to a thousand pages of that new book smell. I couldn’t resist the temptation.

What happened next was nothing more than a frightful fantasy binge. Since 4 p.m. on Saturday I have already read close to 800 pages of The Redemption of Althalus. It spins a crazed tale of a thief meeting a talking cat who teaches him to read and use a magical book written by Deiwos the God of Creation. Utterly stupid, of course, with its clichéd archaism and pseudo-philosophical narrative, but ah the guilty pleasure of turning page after page after page, and the endless escapism! If you’ve never tried fantasy, I strongly recommend you do at least once. If it works on you, it’s sheer bliss.

Because, you see, fantasy is like the inverse of other literature. Unlike much reading, fantasy literature is not about making sense of the world and your place in it, it’s about losing yourself and the world.

And tell me, don’t you want to get rid of you once in a while?

Quotes from the book (8)

I’m glad to see that Fred finally added a Dutch book to our currently reading section, because I was beginning to think I was the only one still reading Dutch books! True, I’m fonder of English fiction too, but I definitely enjoy reading in my mother tongue as well. Especially if it’s a book like Lijmen / Het Been, written by arguably Flanders’ most ill known writer, Willem Elsschot (1882-1960).

In fact, Lijmen (1924) and Het Been (1938) are two novellas that together make one novel (hence the strange / in the title) about the entrepreneur Boorman who employs Frans Laarmans (a name you might know as the protagonist of Elsschot’s most famous book Kaas) to help him sell copies of a magazine that doesn’t really exist.

One of the things I enjoyed immensely in this book that dates back to the interbellum, is it’s highly archaic language. It coats the work in a grandiloquent style, which then contrasts acutely with the dry cynicism of the story. Or what else do you make of a sentence like this one?

Zij hadden een hoed op en een boordje aan, maar ze stonken naar drank en voerden een taaltje om van te ijzen. Toen ik zei wat die kerel zich vermeten had mij toe te voegen, toen lachten zij en beweerden dat zoiets in een werkmansmond niets te betekenen had.

English translation, anyone? (ijzen = ‘to shiver’, zich vermeten = ‘to dare’, toevoegen = ‘to say’)

Or, for a more substantial specimen:

Het was een smokerige loods met glazen dak. In een hoek stonden een paar smeden, die een leven maakten als een laatste oordeel; in ’t midden lag een voorraad hoek- en plaatijzer op de vloer, terwijl zes of zeven bankwerkers, draaiers en monteurs zich tegen de muren een plaats hadden uitgekozen. Toen wij plechtig aantraden en Boorman aanstalten maakte om de centrale stapel te beklimmen, verstomde plotseling het geraas en tien gezichten keerden zich naar ons toe.
Wij werkten onszelf behoedzaam over het ijzer heen en stonden nu voor een houten schot, met een deur en twee kleine vensters, waardoor een schrijftafel met kopieerpers zichtbaar was, en diverse andere voorwerpen die op kantoren in gebruik zijn.
Terwijl mijn patroon even naar binnen loerde, kwam een oudachtig man achter zijn werkbank uit, stapte op Boorman toe, nam zijn pet af en zei gemoedelijk, “dat ze dadelijk zou komen”.
Het was een vervallen mannetje, enigszins gekromd en met vermoeide ogen. Zijn ouderdom kon ik niet schatten, want zijn gezicht zag te zwart.
“Vriend,” zei Boorman, “ik zou meester Lauwereyssen willen spreken. Geef hem dit kaartje en zorg hij eens dat hij dadelijk hier komt.” En hij stopte de man een naamkaartje en een royale fooi in de hand.
De monteur stak beide dingen aarzelend in zijn zak en keek door zijn Bril tegen Boorman op, als had hij gaarne nog iets gezegd. De beschroomdheid snoerde hem echter de mond, want hij draaide zijn pet om, vertrok zijn gezicht en bewoog de lippen, doch bracht generlei geluid uit.
“Piet!” riep van op een afstand een basstem, “zou ik er geen U-ijzertje tegenaan klinken, liever dan die slappe bulb-hoek?”
“Ik kom direct,” antwoordde de man met de bril.
“Jawel,” zei Boorman, “maar roep eerst meester Lauwereyssen, alsjeblieft.”
“Mijnheer,” zei het mannetje verontschuldigend, “ik ben Lauwereyssen. Gaat u maar in ’t kantoor en wacht even. Mijn zuster zal zo meteen beneden komen.”
“Aangename kennismaking,” was alles wat Boorman kon uitbrengen.

I highly recommend Lijmen / Het Been. It’s one of those books you’ll remember. While reading it, three people on the train spontaneously made comments to me about how much they enjoyed it, even though it was compulsory school reading in their time.

Can you blame them?

Ik ben mij gaan afvragen of al onze daden en gedachten niet achter ons aan wandelen, of zij niet een deel van ons zijn, ons gevolg, onze hovelingen, waarvan de stoet aangroeit naargelang wij zelf slinken, die wij evenmin negeren kunnen als onze vleselijke kinderen en die misschien fluisterend nablijven, lang nadat wij zelf tot stilte zijn gebracht…

Gym poetics

You may recall that a while ago I talked about the tendency in literary theory to ‘be difficult’. Today’s topic is something related: the ubiquitous use of the word poetics. Bear with me for a moment, if you will.

We all know poetics as ‘the rules of poetry’. However, nowadays it has become bon ton to use it in all sorts of contexts. Poetics of ageing, poetics of resistance, poetics of transactivated space, you name it. People who do so, were probably inspired by American critic Stephen Greenblatt (° 1943), whose theory of cultural poetics of Renaissance society is very famous. However, Greenblatt’s cultural poetics is more than mere jargon. By using this expression instead of just culture, Greenblatt wants to recuperate the double meaning of poetics. I mean: in poetry, we can say that its system of rules (its poetics) not only influences the way people write, but is itself also influenced by the way people write. And the same is true for culture. Culture is both shaped by people’s behaviour and shapes their behaviour. Hence cultural poetics.

But why am I telling you this?

Well, I was thinking about all this yesterday when I was in the gym on the treadmill (yes, I am a strange man). And while I was running along at exactly 10.5 km/h for exactly 15:00 min. (the machine is very clear about such things), it dawned on me that actually the gym is a pretty good illustration of the aforementioned concept of poetics. Indeed, in every gym there is a certain set of unpronounced, but very real rules, which determine your behaviour, but were also created by the users of the gym. A gym poetics, if you want.

Let me explain.

A first rule that seems in place, but is only there because of people’s behaviour, is the following. In general, there are only three kinds of people visit the gym: those who look like they need it (59,5%), those who look like they don’t need it (39,5%) and those who are in-between (1%). Just to be clear, I’m part of the one percent. In fact, in my gym, I am the one percent, running on the treadmill with a fat dude on one side and an aspiring supermodel on the other.

Secondly, gym visitors seem to have created a rule concerning one’s workout kit, ‘What (not) to wear’ for the gym. Apart from oddities, such as ‘extremely short and tight shorts are allowed’, the main rule concerns men’s T-shirts. Apparently, you can only wear sleeveless T-shirts or a wife beater if your arms look like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. If you do wear such an item of clothing without the proper guns to show off, you will be stared at by the rightful wearers. An additional rule is that only the sleeveless people may enter the Pure Strength part of the gym, you know, the one with the dumbbells and the mirror to look into while you lift weights.

Thirdly, it seems to be taboo in the gym which setting you use on the workout machines. It took me a while before figuring this one out, but eventually I got it. When I first started going to the gym, I was always surprised to sit down at a machine and find its setting to be way too hard for me. A biceps machine would have settings ranging from 5 to 50 kgs, and I found the setting it was on, usually 40 or 45 kgs, far too heavy. After a while, however, I noticed that it is apparently a part of the gym poetics to put the setting to 40 or 45 kgs after you’ve finished, no matter what weight you yourself pull. As to the reason for this, one can only guess.

Yet perhaps most puzzlingly, gym poetics involve a certain degree bisexuality, which apparently only applies to the male members of the gym. Indeed, on the one hand it is very accepted to marvel at each other’s bulky biceps, tough triceps or quivering quadriceps. Hell, yesterday I even saw two guys feeling each other’s biceps and making what appeared to be laudatory comments about it. Still, I had no choice but to interpret this as a curious form of bisexuality, because not a moment later, when the aforementioned supermodel walked in, the very same guys all of a sudden had some business on a machine closeby and began walking towards her as if they had a vuvuzela between their legs.

Perhaps I should go over to them one day and applaud them for their openness regarding their sexuality?

Assholes.

Quotes from the book (7)

When buying CD's, I adopt certain techniques which are completely different from the ones I adopt when buying books. The former (almost) never happens at random. Either I know the artist, the label or the genre, or I have been reading reviews online or in specialized magazines.

The latter, however, almost always happens at random: most members of my readable collection are the result of brief browsing sessions, in which my attention always ends up being captured by one book or another - for reasons I can't really explain. Could be the title, the words of international acclaim on the first few pages, the picture on the cover or even the first sentence. I seldom deliberately buy a book, unless someone really suggested me giving it a try.

The last book I read, 'Me talk pretty one day' (David Sedaris), drew my attention because of the title. That, and the fact that the London Times described Sedaris as 'possibly the sharpest and funniest observer of human weakness at work today...'.

And yes, it is a funny book. Judge yourself!

Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds, I've started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying 'a melon', you need to use the masculine article. In saying 'melons', you use the plural article which does not reflect gender and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine. Ask for two or ten or three hundred melons and the number lets you off the hook by replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes. I've started using the plural while shopping and Hugh has started using it in our cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner, shouting: "What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?"

I answer I am sure we can use them for something. The only hard part is finding someplace to put them. They won't fit in the refrigerator, as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I bought from the butcher the night before, forgetting that we were still working our way through a pair of pork roasts the size of Duraflame logs. "We could put them next to the radios," I say, "or grind them for sauce in one of the blenders. Don't get so mad. Having four pounds of tomatoes is better than having no tomatoes at all, isn't it?"

Hugh tells me the market is off-limits until my French improves. He's pretty steamed, but I think he'll get over it when he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.

The Ig Nobel Prizes

You might have read about them in the paper today, but obviously there is only one source that you can trust on a topic like this: your faithful Fred and Fred. If ever something was right up our alley, it’s the Ig Nobel Prizes.

In case you missed it: the Ig Nobel Prizes (a pun on ignoble and Nobel) are awarded each year in October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’.

Yesterday the 21st award ceremony took place at Harvard University, and a Leuven professor was on the receiving end. Indeed, Luk Warlop, together with a number of colleagues, received the prize for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate.

Funny, innit? And it gets even better if you remember that the Ig Nobel Prizes are almost always presented (by genuine Nobel laureates, by the way!) to actual researchers who have been labouring for years on extraordinarily difficult, but seemingly trivial or absurd topics. Just imagine what some academics apply themselves to. Here’s a small sample of the prizes over the years:

• Literature (1995): David B. Busch and James R. Starling, for their research report, ‘Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature’. The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweller’s saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.
• Chemistry (1998): Jacques Benveniste, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.
• Physics (2000): Andre Geim and Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog. Geim later shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on graphene, the first time anyone has been awarded both the Ig Nobel and (real) Nobel Prizes.
• Physics (2001): David Schmidt, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
• Biology (2003): C.W. Moeliker, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
• Economics (2005): Gauri Nanda, for inventing Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
• Mathematics (2006): Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
• Medicine (2010): Simon Rietveld, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride.

Now say for yourself: surely it’s any academics dream to receive an Ig Nobel Prize one day? Therefore we from Fred and Fred are already hard at work for next year’s edition. Just imagine the possibilities…

• Cosmology (2012): Fred and Fred, for proving the possibility that parallel universes exist in which even numbers cannot be divided by 2.
• Linguistics (2012): Fred and Fred, for their study ‘Fly, Feel and Fall’, a list of 1,000 words which become very funny when pronounced with a Japanese accent (which turns every f into an h and every l into an r).
• Marketing (2012): Fred and Fred, for definitively disproving that cleaning products which feature animals (ducks, frogs, bears, etcetera) clean better than those which do not.
• Philosophy (2012): Fred and Fred, for (the title of) their paper ‘Does Existentialism Really Exist?’.
• Sports Science (2012): Fred and Fred, for discovering the constant h, representing the relation between the size of the ball and the size of the hole (basketball, snooker, golf, …).
• Medicine (2012): Fred and Fred, for their decennia-long research ‘Is it really impossible to lick your own elbow?’.
• Communication (2012): Fred and Fred, for talking for a whole night about the infinite monkey theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Fingers crossed!

Nuts

Imagine a piece of literature. A poem perhaps. For instance:

Roses are red, violets are blue
Sugar is sweet, and so are you.

This is literature. You might not think it is very good literature, but it’s literature nonetheless. So far so good. Now for the tricky part: can you tell me why this is literature?

(the sound of a rusty rattling brain)

Some say that literature consists of texts that employ certain poetic functions of language, like alliterations, rhyme and a metre in the case of a poem. Like in Róses are réd, viólets are blúe / Súgar is swéét, and só are yoú. However, if you read in a manual of pharmacy that The main tranquilizers are benzocaine, lidocaine and novocaine, is that poetry or even literature?

Others say that literature consists of texts that tell certain stories. They’re often a story about a hero, faced with a difficulty which (s)he needs to overcome, helped by certain people and hindered by others. Think about it: if you don’t take this literally, you’ll probably be able to fit just about any book you’ve ever read into this scheme. However, can you fit Roses are red into it? And even if you think you can, what about Lewis Caroll’s famous nonsense poem Jabberwocky (1872)?

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
(…)

Still others would say that literature consists of texts that are the product of literary acts. In other words: whenever someone declares ‘This is literature!’, it is. Indeed, Roses are red… was published by someone who definitely would have called it literature. That seems to solve a lot of problems, doesn’t it, as it can account for even the most absurd forms of literature around? However, if I stand on a chair shouting ‘This is literature!’ while holding up a cell phone manual, what does that mean? I might be a performance artist (or out of my mind), but has this text, this cell phone manual, now become literature?

(the sound of people thinking "Where the hell is this going?")

Congratulations! You have just been introduced into formalist, structuralist and functionalist literary theory. Why? Well, I thought I should prove Fred wrong and show you there are even stranger people than mathematicians.

Indeed, ever since people devised an alphabet to write down literature, they have been thinking about the question What is literature? Of course this has to do with the fact that literature and the way we look at it, changes all the time. Most of you wouldn’t consider an anatomic book about the eye to be literature, but two hundred years ago people did. Most of you wouldn’t consider a song to be literature either, but two thousand years ago people did.

Literary theorists.

Will we ever solve the problem of what literature is? Absolutely not. On the other hand, I’m sure someone (perhaps it will be Fred?) will eventually know how hyperfloors in 7 dimensions behave. So you see, we’re definitely stranger, looking for answers that do not even exist…

Perhaps you’ll say this is insane, or you’re more practical and think: ‘Thanks a lot, then, Mr. Academic Asshole, for squandering my tax money!’. But ask yourself this question. Will the squirrel in Ice Age ever get the acorn? Absolutely not. But will he ever stop trying?

So you see: we might be strange, we’re not nuts!

Quotes from the book (6)

I guess I have several strange habits. Like enjoying beans in tomato sauce straight from the tin at any hour of the day, or the need to pace around and talk to myself whenever I need to think really hard about something. Another one which continues to surprise people (and hopefully is not a sign of my culinary cruelty or imminent insanity), is this: every year I re-read a book.

The fact that I already know what’s going to happen, doesn’t bother me one bit. On the contrary, I find there’s a kind of quiet solace in the safety of such an enterprise. Besides, I happen to particularly like books without a real story. I really do. Preferably bulky novels that speak about … well, nothing much at all, actually. Like Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which takes 607 pages to tell how an unemployed man discovers a strange well in his garden. I’m sure that to many people this might seem an exquisite form of torture, but not to me. Truth be told: I’ve always liked words better than stories. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never really managed to write one myself?

This year I re-read a book that can be considered the epitome of a book without a story: John Banville’s Eclipse. Two hundred and twenty four pages about a man going back to live in the house he grew up in and reflecting on his life. Nothing of real importance happens in the meanwhile, but to quote Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian: ‘With prose like this, who needs a plot?’.

Indeed, Eclipse is an exercise in language and style. Which doesn’t mean if feels artificial. Banville writes a thick, rich and silky smooth English. Sweet to the tongue and velvety on the palate. Like dark chocolate sauce. But beware, like chocolate sauce Banville can be a bit bitter too, for his pages abound in an almost unspeakable melancholy. Indeed, Eclipse has a tragic beauty that will crush your soul. But then again, I think we need to get our soul crushed once in a while. Don’t you think?

It is late, the light is going. My mind aches from so much futile remembering. What is it I hope to retrieve? What is it I am trying to avoid? I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance, like a city on an ice floe caught in a current, its twinkling lights, its palaces and spires and slums, all miraculously intact, all hopelessly beyond reach. Was it I who took an axe to the ice? What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles? When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.

Just being difficult?

Lately I have been engaged in studying Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics, a fascinating survey of the potential and problems of structuralist literary criticism. Structurawhat? Well, literary research conducted from the structuralist perspective aims to be, as Culler explains, ‘a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning’ (p. xiv), so that ‘the study of literature (…) would become an attempt to understand the conventions which make literature possible’ (p. xv).

See what I have to deal with to earn a living? Poor Fred…

Actually, it’s really not that bad. While Culler’s definitions of structuralism are not meant for a four year old, they’re not exactly inscrutable gobbledygook either. In fact, the man is a champion at explaining difficult thinking in simple words. Quite unlike many of his colleagues in literary theory who excel in using obscure language, sometimes malignantly to conceal poor thinking. Indeed, Culler even devoted a book to the subject, under the title Just being difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, where he deals with branches of the academe which tend to indulge in an academic style that has once been described as ‘terrorist obscurantism’. Wikipedia mentions a famous example from the work of the feminist author Judith Butler, who in 1998 got a prize in a Bad Writing Competition for this sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Yaiks. That’s bad.

So bad, it can even get funny; which is exactly what inspired the boys from this site http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/. They decided to develop a software program called The Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates complete essays on postmodern issues, complete with quotations and footnotes. Each time you visit the site a different essay pops up. Five minutes ago, its title was ‘Debordist situation and postcapitalist cultural theory’ and the first paragraph read:

If one examines precultural narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcapitalist cultural theory or conclude that art may be used to entrench capitalism. Derrida promotes the use of Debordist situation to challenge class divisions. Thus, an abundance of desituationisms concerning the modernist paradigm of reality may be discovered.

So for all you students out there, next time you need an essay quickly, you know where to look. And I’m very curious to find out whether your teacher will see through the hoax…

Quotes from the book (5)

In preparation for the Book Swishing Event, which - if I may add - was a great success, I noticed that my bookshelf contains different types of books. And I don't mean fiction versus non-fiction, but the label that comes with your bond with the book under consideration.

I suppose we all have at least one book we would like to take with us into the grave, right? Which is a stupid idea, by the way, since it's too dark to read in there. These are obviously unswishable.

On the other kind of the spectrum, you have the books which are deliberately kept out of display. Hidden in the basement, gathering dust and mould in the anonymous cardboard moving boxes, or behind other books, like the least popular kid on the class picture, if your bookcase allows a double row of books. Strangely enough these species are unswishable too, as they are very likely to jeopardize your street credibility. Insofar as you frequent circles in which 'books' and 'street credibility' can be used in the same sentence. Avoiding any verb expressing an act of destruction, that is.

A third kind of books, which I am particularly fond of, is the unexpected discovery. It's the paperback version of having a memorable conversation with a random person, or dancing the night away on a band you had never heard of. This is usually the kind of books I prefer to keep as a birthday present back-up plan. The book which I just finished falls under this category: The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe.

Most of us would have difficulties using the words 'toothbrush', 'SatNav' and 'Chinese cardgames' in one sentence - not me, of course, I just did - but Coe brew them into an enjoyable story. Containing the following passage:

In days gone by, before motor-ways, before by-passes, traveling through England must actually have involved visiting places. You would drive along high streets (or ride your horse along them, if we're going to go way back) and stop at pubs in the town centre (or staging posts or coaching inns or whatever they used to be called). Now, the entire road network seemed to be set up to prevent this from happening. The roads were there to stop you from meeting people, to ensure that you passed nowhere near any of the places where humanity congregates. A phrase came to me, then - a phrase that Caroline was fond of repeating. 'Only connect'. I think it was from one of the fancy writers she was always trying to get me to read. It occurred to me now that whoever designed England's roads had precisely the opposite idea in mind: 'Only disconnect'.

Sadly enough, there's also the category of books which were recommended to you but turned out to be quite a disappointment. In that case, keep in mind that this is definitely a swishable book...

How to talk about books you haven’t read

How to talk about books you haven’t read is the somewhat provocative title of an amusing booklet by the French author and professor of literature Pierre Bayard (°1954). It offers certain strategies and behaviours for those wishing to talk about books they haven’t actually read or haven’t read in full - a pose frequently adopted by scholars of literature. In general, many of us who enjoy a good book, have used the names Shakespeare or Tolstoy in a sentence. But who can honestly say they’ve read a complete book by them? Still, Bayard argues, that needn’t be a problem. It’s perfectly alright to talk about books you haven’t read. As long as what you’re saying is interesting…

So let’s put the theory to the test, shall we? For some time now, I have been planning to write something in our section Quotes from the book about Herman Koch’s Het diner, which for over a month figured in the ‘Fred and Fred are currently reading…’-category. Before today, however, I was reluctant to put anything down on the topic, because I hadn’t actually finished the book yet. In fact, I have to confess that I lost interest in it a couple of weeks ago already, but only today did I muster the courage to put it away, unfinished. To me, there is something ambiguous about not finishing a book. In a way, there’s always a feeling of defeat, of having given up, accompanied with a certain amount of shame. You have failed the author; quite possibly because you did not understand what the book was about, or because you are such a brute you couldn’t appreciate the artistry. Besides, there are friends or eminent critics who highly recommended this very book you never could bare for more than a couple of pages. ‘Surely, it’s me, not you’, you think while looking at the cover… On the other hand, not finishing a book rouses a feeling of victory, of courageous decisiveness, not unlike when a politician leaves the room in a heated debate to express utter disagreement. Anyhow, it’s just a funny thing, when you do decide to physically put the book back on the shelf, destined never to be read or to be swished at the earliest convenience. Many books I haven’t finished I remember vividly, many others I have read, I retain no memory of…

However, as I was reminded of Bayard, I lost my apprehensiveness to talk about this particular book I haven’t (really) read. Indeed, why wouldn’t I quote that funny passage about Dutch tourists in France, which reminded me so much of my holiday experiences? Truth be told, although I find Koch’s narrative rhythm too slow and his tableau vivant of the diners too awkward to watch (for the same reason, I never liked Het eiland, for instance), this passage is brilliant, and I would not want to keep it from you:

Ik liet mij blik over het grasveld glijden. Iemand had ondertussen een cd van Edith Piaf opgezet. Babette had voor het feest een wijde, zwartdoorschijnende jurk aangetrokken en nu deed ze een paar onvaste, aangeschoten danspassen op de tonen van ‘Non, je ne regrette rien…’ Wanneer ruiten ingooien en brandstichting niet het gewenste resultaat opleverden, moest je de strijd naar een hoger plan tillen, dacht ik bij mezelf. Je zou zo’n Nederlands watje van huis kunnen weglokken met het voorwendsel dat je ergens een nóg goedkoper wijnboertje wist te zitten, om hem daarna ergens in een maïsveld af te tuigen - geen slap pak rammel, nee, iets stevigers, met honkbalknuppels en dorsvlegels.
Of als je er eentje los zag lopen, in een bocht van de weg, met een boodschappentas vol stokbroden en rode wijn op de terugweg van de supermarché, dan kon je je auto een kleine uitwijkingsmanoeuvre laten maken. Bijna per ongeluk. ‘Hij dook zomaar ineens voor de motorkap op,’ kon je later altijd zeggen - of je zei helemaal niets, je liet de Nederlander als een aangereden haas voor dood in de berm achter en waste bij thuiskomst eventuele sporen van bumper en spatbord. Zolang de boodschap maar overkwam was alles geoorloofd: jullie horen hier niet! Rot op naar je eigen land! Ga in je eigen land maar Frankrijk spelen met stokbrood en kaasjes en rode wijn, maar niet hier, bij ons!

Marvellous, isn’t it? So, to conclude, it seems we can talk about books we haven’t read. Indeed, it’s great fun. After all, I haven’t read Bayard either, but do you really feel tricked by this blog?

Lol.

Swishing!

We all have too much stuff. If you’ve ever moved house, you know what I mean. Once a year we all should go through the experiment of putting all our stuff in cardboard boxes and carry it down and up a few flights of stairs. I doubt we would keep half of what we do now!

Some of this stuff is completely useless (e.g., since 2009 I have had a Hello Kitty bubble blowing pipe in one of my drawers and cannot for the life of me say why I keep it), but other stuff you have paid good money for and are reluctant to throw away. You look at that ill-fitting sweater and think: ‘There’s nothing wrong with this sweater. I bet many people would be glad to have it. Just not me…’

Maybe this is how the concept of ‘swishing’ came about, which Wikipedia describes as follows:

• Swishing refers to swapping an item or items of clothing or shoes or an accessory with friends or acquaintances. Parties must willingly give an item to participate in the transaction, once they have given an item they are free to choose something of interest from what others have offered. Value does not come into the equation, swappers do not necessarily get an item of equal value and are free to choose anything that the other person if offering (without having to pay).

I got to know about the phenomenon from a funny description of an evening of swishing organised by my friends E. and B., who told the tale of the occasion in one of their blog posts on Schoenen en andere kwesties. ‘Fifteen women, as many bottles of sparkling wine, and a huge pile of clothes’, to quote the post… Oh how I would have loved to be a fly on that wall! The adrenaline! The excitement! The ecstasy! Indeed, I must confess that I feel in fact a bit jealous of this women-only, but obviously thrilling entertainment…

Yet, I think you won’t quarrel when I say that neither I nor the other Fred are very much inclined to spend the evening trying on someone else’s shoes or jeans. We need something else, something slightly more ‘Fred-ish’, so to speak. That is: a bit nerdy, but with a twist. So we came up with this.

We are proud to announce the FRED AND FRED’S BOOK SWISHING!

For sure, it needn’t be clothes or shoes, books will do just fine for swishing. So here’s the concept. On Friday 19 August Fred and Fred will host a very swishy party, where our readers are invited to come along with their swishable books. Please keep in mind, though, that no one will likely be interested in outdated yellow pages, in books that have been partly eaten by your dog, or in your school copy of the Children’s Bible. To stay in religious context: ‘Do not swish unto another what you would not have him swish unto you!’. What I am thinking of is that novel you excitedly bought in a cute bookshop, only to discover a forgotten copy of it on your top shelf. Or that historical novel your aunt bought you for Christmas, while you absolutely detest that genre. Or that book you have started reading five times, but somehow never managed to finish.

You get the idea…

The exact rules of the swishing and the exact proceeding of the evening will be decided on at a later point in time. Perhaps you could entertain us with some stories about the acquiring of certain books (How did you get that copy of “Dagboek van een herdershond”?). Or perhaps we could read a passage from the swishees (How about a small extract on doing the Heimlich Maneuver on yourself from “The SAS Survival Handbook”?). But rest assured, we won’t let the evening turn stuffy or aloof. There will be plenty of booze (incidentally one of the Freds celebrates a birthday sometime in August) and if it all ends in a drunken second-hand book market, that’s just fine with us!

So please reply through the comment box or at fredcumfred@gmail.com, if you’re interested and we’ll get back to you personally with the details of the event!

PS: In case you didn’t notice, Fred and Fred are back from their summer break! So keep your eyes and browsers peeled for new posts which will be appearing regularly on weekdays!

Quotes from the book (4)

I just love laughing out loud on the train, hunched over a book, secretly enjoying my fellow travelers trying to find out what it is that makes me smile. The following passage, from Paul Murray's "Skippy Dies" really cracked me up...

'Mario -' Dennis sits up '- what makes you think any girl is going to get anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different girls.'

Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, 'I have a secret weapon.'

'You do?'

'You bet, mister.' He flips open his wallet. 'Read it and weep, boys. It's my lucky condom, which never fails.'

A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, 'Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?'

'Never fails,' Mario repeats, a little defensively.

'But -' Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed '- I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn't you have used it by now?'

'How long have you had it in there, Mario?' Geoff says.

'Three years,' Mario says.

'Three years?'

'Without using it?'

'Doesn't that sound more like an unlucky condom?'

Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.

'It was definitely pretty lucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!'

'Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.'

'It's like the condom Bermuda Triangle!'

'Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, "Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi's wallet, and he was never seen again."'

'Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer -'

Quotes from the book (3)

As I spent a lot of time on trains the last few days, I had a chance to finish Roland Barthes' Mythologies which describes itself in the introduction as 'a corrosive, insolent, strange, cold, and yet witty book'. Having read it, I guess this description is accurate (if a little negative), but still it lacks one very important qualification, in my opinion, which is 'wildly interesting'.

What Roland Barthes - a French cultural critic (1915-1980) - meant to do in this book is make a semiological analysis of contemporary cultural myths. Now before you stop reading this, let me rephrase that in normal language. Barthes' approach is simple. He investigates elements of French culture, like soap-powder and detergents, toys, wrestling matches, news pieces and other, apparently ordinary cultural trivia and reads them like myths, i.e. he explores how they represent a deeper cultural disposition. In doing so, he is able to make some extraordinary analyses of how French culture (mind you, it's French culture from the 1950s!) represents its values.

If all this still sounds too hoity-toity for your taste, let me give an example. Barthes takes Jules Verne's story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) about a man exploring the deep sea in a submarine (science fiction at the time!), and uses it to analyse a very common cultural idea which we all share: the enjoyment of being enclosed. It's true, we all love being in a small space where we are the supreme master. It's why children love huts and tents, why adults like driving a car: you may be shut up in a small place, but within it you have everything under control. Yet there is one extra element: it's the combination of inwardness (being closed in) with the outside that we like. Indeed, you might be stuck in wooden (hut) or a steel (car) box, but from it, you can see the whole world. And that's what appeals to us.

If you think about it, this 'myth' returns in many elements of our culture. Watching TV when it's raining outside, surfing the internet, riding glass elevators in tall buildings, having an apartment with a terrace, sunbathing on a towel on a beach, and perhaps the best example of all: reading on the toilet. They're all examples of combining unbroken inwardness with the vagueness of the outside, to use Barthes' words. And all of these situations give us a hugely pleasant sensation. It makes us feel safe and in command at the same time.

And that's why Barthes' Mythologies is a wildly interesting book. It takes very familiar things and situations and explains what the cultural motivations behind them are. Like no other book it takes the ordinary out of the ordinary. And to be frank, humbly trying to piece together a piece of cultural criticism myself once in a while, I'm insanely jealous of Barthes' talent for doing just this.

To finish it off, just one quote which struck me as very relevant even today. Something Vic Van Aelst should keep in mind next time he criticizes Di Rupo's or Milquet's Dutch:

Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there is also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends us. (...) To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders

Compact message

Often, which – as a temporal adverb – doesn't say that much because it gives no real clue about the frequency of what is about to follow, people who have been reading my writings, and I guess this applies to most of my blogs and (triggered by the clinical ping announcing the arrival of an unread message in my inbox) even some of my emails, complain about the length and downright complexity of some of the sentences I produce to convey my messages (or even the message itself, although this obviously depends on the kind of books you are used to read – since I would think, for example, that anyone who has enjoyed Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics has wrestled himself through more than one sentence consisting of at least half a page), as they frequently contain long enumerations, references to certain websites and nested structures – using either brackets, quotation marks or, as I just learned from the Wikipedia page covering this particular punctuation mark, one of the many dashes in our language, varying in both their appearance and function – which apparently cover the point I intend to make under a thick layer of irrelevant data (although I deliberately think about any word I put on – the sometimes proverbial – paper), like the crust of our Earth covering important lessons about the history of mankind and its origin (think about fossil sediments or human artifacts from ancient, extinct societies) under a collection of rock strata and volcanic residue, and therefore confuse my readers – sometimes even the most stubborn ones, willing to understand every single thought – ending up in complete despair, lost in transcription, desperately trying to make sense of what they just read by jumping to the beginning and rereading the whole blurb.

I don't know where they get this...

Quotes from the book (2)

You might have noticed that Fred and I are quite alike. It seems our mental clocks run remarkably similar. Just yesterday Fred finished his book Our tragic universe, and today I finished mine, by Cees Nooteboom: 's Nachts komen de vossen.

It's a great book; it skifully weaves together wafer-thin but intense stories about Dutch expats, death and love. I once read about someone who had the habit of skimming the first and the last sentence of a book as a rule before buying it, which makes sense as a lot can be gauged from those two (the hardest) sentences. So, in the spirit of 'Quotes from the book', here are a few of the opening and closing lines of the short-stories in Nooteboom's booklet, hoping that they might give you a taste of the sublime prose Nootemboom writes. From the majestic, almost baroque rhetoric in the quote from Gondels to the staccato prose-poetry in Paula II. This man is a master of the Dutch language and his fragile stories are deceptively gripping...

(from Gondels): "Gondels zijn atavistisch, hij wist niet meer waar hij dat gelezen had, en wilde daar nu ook niet over nadenken omdat er dan, dacht hij, iets van het pathos van het ogenblik zou vervliegen (...) Hij antwoordde niet en keek naar de wiegende witte papiertjes die langzaam in het assige, avondkleurige water wegdreven, tot er een gondel voorbijkwam en hij ze niet meer zag".

(from Heinz): "Eerst een ronde bedrog. Ik kijk naar een foto van een groep mensen, waar ik zelf tussen sta. (...) Wij zijn onze geheimen, en als het goed is nemen we ze mee naar waar niemand erbij kan".

(from Paula II): "Je hebt me opgeroepen, je krijgt antwoord. Of je het hoort weet ik niet (...) Afscheid, het echte, het laatste. Je hebt je raam opengezet. Windvlaag. Dat was ik. Geritsel, gefluister. Het geluid van vossen, een nacht in de woestijn. Gedachte vossen. Geen echte. Alles heel vluchtig. Zoals wij zijn. Weg".

I love a good book.