Apocalypse Then

 Not Now, not Now! Then, as in the past. There is a reason I tend not to read fiction. Facts, science, non-fiction is about the thinking truth; the rational bit, that can be represented in a graph, which even if fuzzy and uncertain, is trying to explain the external world. There are, of course, shelves, libraries, full of non-fiction that has very little to do with science. Wade Davis's history the British assaults on Everest in the 1920s is largely about interpersonal relationships rather than geology. Fiction otoh conveys a visceral truth: rage, hate, betrayal, terror, surprise . . . none of which I handle well. 

But I can obey orders. When Dau.I the Librarian flags a talky book on Borrowbox and says read this you'll like it, then I do; not least because she may know me better than I know myself ["a low bar" do I hear from the wings?]. Emily St.John Mandel is a Canadian writer, her fourth book Station Eleven ["SXI"] came out in 2014. It's all about the Georgia Flu, a coronavirus of devastating infectivity and deadliness which kills 99% of humanity; and what happens afterwards. It was well received and won prizes and an HBO miniseries based on the book was scheduled to start shooting in . . . January 2020. I guess we're still waiting. But I also guess that the current feeble attempt at a real global apocalypse has seen a boost in sales of the book.

Natural disaster kills all the extras matches the description of The Day of the Triffids, a favorite of my 12 y.o. self. So there is that in SXI's favour. But in the intervening 50+ years my autonomic nervous system is much less finely tuned and I found myself a-flutter with a sense of empathic dread from about half-way through the book. There were bad hats and there was death in Triffids; but back then I was going to live forever and I read on through the horrors to relish the next inventory of stuff to be looted from an abandonned warehouse. Early Wednesday morning, I snagged my smartphone, binoculars and a hat and set off for a long walk up the hill behind out house. I was hoping for buzzards, but also hoping to finish the bloody book and lay the ghosts that had been crabbing at my shoulder since the previous weekend. 

Happily [not much of a spoiler] the worst drivers of my anxiety were resolved about an hour from the end and the author had a chunk left to develop a fundamentally optimistic view for/of The Future. You know that thing where you're in a car and you hear a story or a song which is forever associated with that stretch of the road? I'm afraid that the map of our hill is getting pinned with my emotional overloads. A rushy path SE of St Fursey's Altar is bloody with the obstetric disaster which finished Adam Kay's career as a doctor. The road to the North is now marked [more blood indeed] with a key encounter from Station Eleven.

As well as using the same Armageddon trope as Triffids, Station Eleven has a blurb that reads similar to that of The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy: in both, a generous handful of people are revealed by a series of flash-backs to have surprising connexions. YMMV, but for me van Booy's book was artfully contrived but fatally retrospective and self-indulgent. While Mandel, for all the vivid writing and imaginative vision, is trying to say something about the human condition which has meaning beyond the book. 

1. we depend on each other and will rub along to form non-genetic families
• being kind is more fulfilling than being bad
2. success is about luck 
• which is both chance and 'the prepared mind'
3. privilege bleeds down the generations even without money 

Recommended, especially for toxophilists? [deadly]

What it is to be Irish

I was expressing some skept about writing 225,000 words on what it is to be English in the guise of it being an analysis of [social] science and experimentation. Apart from some snarky comments about bluff USAians being baffled by British irony, almost all the data comes from observations of the English in England. It is hard therefore to determine if the conclusions are specifically about English humans or Humans in general. A lot of the findings d♪ng true for Ireland, for example.

El Blobbo has made some meandering comments about whether science has anything at all to say about the human condition acknowledging that the fiction of Jane Austen or Emily St.John Mandel or Claire Keegan has more pointers about how to live well than all the scientific papers I ever wrote.

As it happens, the night before I left for a week of sole-searching in France, I downloaded two e-books from Borrowbox. It would be a sin to take an earbook on pilgrimage: when there are ppl to greet and birbs to list. But maybe some reading matter is handy for trains and planes and before anyone else is up and about.  But a book would be weight in the pack. The MiamMiam DoDo camino-guides print not only the price €18.00 but also the weight 320g on the back cover!

• All in a Doctor's Day by Lucia Gannon about being [a bit more than] half of a GP practice [the surgery R] in Killenaule Co Tipp
• See also A Fortunate Woman about being a rural UK GP.
• The House on an Irish Hillside by Felicity Hayes McCoy about working from home in remotest Kerry as a Dublin-born but London-based media person

Both these women came, as adults, to particular but not too peculiar small rural communities and established themselves with a degree of intimacy and acceptance that enabled them to be among you taking notes. and distill something about What it is to be Irish [kind, generous, non-transactional, funny, ham sandwiches, booze] in a lot fewer words [75,000 for the Doctor book] than 225,000.

Gannon's book gives an insight into the pervasiveness of GAA in rural Ireland: so many county-colour shirts, so many flags. I guess it is A Good Thing if it gets kids out in the fresh air getting fit in all weathers. The shouty local rivalries, not so much?

There's a nice tale in the Hayes-McCoy memoir when they come home to find a huge heap of seaweed dumped on their lawn. Their neighbour above had been hauling algae off the beach as fertilizer for spuds and assumed that of course the in-blows could use a tractor-trailer load. That required English Wilf to help the neighbour to dig the seaweed into his lawn, and later plant potatoes, rather than setting his own adult agenda for the precious hours away from London. 

I guess these memoirs / autobiographies are not Dewey-decimalled as 'fiction', although 'some names have been changed to protect the innocent' doesn't make them fact either. What they definitely are not is Science. There is no attempt to objectively gather and record data, let alone test hypotheses. But they are narratives: picking out the notable bits from the swirling surge of daily, weekly, annual, experiences. They give us clues about how to deal with, react to, similar issues in our own lives. They capture something about what life is like in Ireland in the 21stC.

Fiction

One way I try to keep my life simple is by reducing choice.

In my Borrowbox universe, I'm overwhelmed by all the books that are there for my reading pleasure, so I only browse the non-fiction section - and obvs leaning to science in that bin. That limits things to reality, rather than some infinite universes model of space and time. I confess to feeling a little smug about this adhesion to Truth, if not beauty. But I recognise that science has very little useful to say about the human condition or inter-personal relationships. Nevertheless, someone needs to shake me to insist "Read This Novel!". On foot of such orders, I read with advantage Small Things Like These and Station Eleven. More recently, I took on board that one of my binfo pals is married to a successful YA author AND that one of my MeFi para-pals is Charlie Stross the prolific Britse SF writer.

Trouble with prolific is that it gives me choice-collywobbles. Stross is about 60 years old and sixty books published. In mid-Feb, feeling that I had to put my toe in Strosswater ,I found that only one earbook was immediately available. No choice? Obliged to plunge! Accordingly, I loaded up  Empire Games  which is the first book in the third trilogy of his 9 volume Merchant Princes series. It is rather good: not dissimilar, in its post-Apocalyptic vibe, to Station Eleven. There is also resonance with Iain M. Banks [obitribute from 10 years ago] insofar as they both write loosely connected stories embedded in a coherent Universe which is quite different from ours.

The Merchant Princes new-normal is that the Earth hosts a large number of parallel universes which through accident and happenstance have gorn all two-roads diverged in a yellow wood on us. We/they only know about the para-historical timelines [tech term] because some people develop the ability to shift among them. We may be thankful that these spacetime travellers are able to bring their immediate baggage, including clothes, [Schwarznegger, we're looking-not-looking at you] with them as they jaunt [tech term] to the same place in a different universe. If that can be achieved, then ideas, tech and stuff can be transported in a way analagous to horizontal transfer of genes between species. As with horizontal transfer this can confer a benefit on the recipients - without causing a loss at the donor end. So it's not a zero-sum game - notwithstanding the possibility of unintended consequences and careful what you wish for. 

I liked Empire Games so much that I've put a Borrowbox lien on  Dark State , the next book in the series. I guess that's a recommendation, from me to you. PS sorry late launch today - made a PM/AM rookie error on the scheduler.

Suttee

The interests and obsessions of The Blob include a) end of life issues and b) women of STEM. Fiction, not so much; but I do recognise that Science is the A way of knowing and that the Arts Block can give insights into the human condition and living your best life which are both useful and beyond the scope of science. So I should have been delighted with As We Are Now by May Sarton, which I finished reading last weekend. May Sarton was the only child of George Sarton, who made a stab at writing the first comprehensive history of science. His Introduction to the History of Science started at the beginning and after 3 volumes and 4,000 pages had go as far as 1400. Chunks of this mammoth tome have been scanned in for digital access. Clearly he was a chap who needed a ruthless copy-editor.

May Sarton was better at the distillation process because As We Are Now is only 120 pages but offers a compelling insight into how the old are discarded when they are no longer useful, even before they start to get whiffy. Not all useless mouths you may be sure but enough of them across all classes and communities that it is a recognised trope. I won't get over-analytical but there is a hint that As We Are Now reprises the 1st sentence of LP Hartley's The Go Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The tendency to park the old is rather weak in our immediate neighbourhood where I can think of three homes within about 5km where The Elder occupied a seat in the corner of the kitchen until the very end. In all those cases, the old person was included and continued to make diminishing contributions to family life even if it was reading stories to the kids or knitting another woolly hat [Jakers, enough with the hats, already].

The protagonist of May Sarton's book is Miss Spenser, a retired math teacher in Boondocks, USA who lived a life of culture and discernment; taught generations of teens; travelled to Europe before you could fly there; and continued to read and write after her official retirement. All was grand until she had a heart-attack and was moved to her brother's house in a different part of the State: torn from the familiar and having to learn where the light-switches were in her sister-in-law's home. The two women didn't get on and the brother was (like pretty much all the blokes I know, including self) useless at brokering a deal between the three of them so that they could adapt to the new regime. A little kindness goes a long way in such situations.

All too soon for Miss Spenser she is delivered to a rough and ready nursing home run by a snobbish, over-worked, casually cruel woman and her grown-up daughter. The book was published in 1973, but you may bet that similar places exist wherever regulation and inspection is imperfect. Even after the RTE exposé of bullying and elder-abuse in Aras Attracta in 2014, HIQA receives hundreds of complaints each year including 12 about an unexpected death.
Q. Who is doing the complaining?
A. The family. They are the only ones who have skin in the game . . . and lack the resources (emotional, physical, financial, logistical) to manage elder care in their own homes. It costs a lot to refit your home for wheelchair access: the bathroom rails, draining floor, spring-loaded toilet seat?

In this not so fresh hell, Miss Spenser makes the best fist of it that she can and begins to acknowledge that her contempt for her sister-in-law was a) largely unjustified and b) totally self-destructive. And begins to form new relationships that depend not on common culture and intellectual discourse but on other aspects of empathy and mutual respect. So far so good: quite edgy, insightful, with the ring of truth. But May Sarton was a poet and novelist: this is is a novel. As she puts down each vignette of trial and character development, she realises that there must be an ending as well as a beginning and and middle. There aren't too many options:

1. Miss Spenser dies
2. Her brother and sister-in-law die and she gets to live in their house
3. One of her several external visitors takes pity on her and finds the resources to bring her into the bosom of a different family.
4. Miss Spenser thinks "I'll make an end of this and take them all with me in blazing finale".

The title of the post will give you a clue that the wrap-up chosen by the author was abrupt, lazy and unlikely. The book is nevertheless not without value and won't take you as long to read as George Sarton's heavier contribution to the canon.

Savage Funny

I was at this birthday gig last month and was asked to blow out the candles. That was easy because it was outside, with a stiff summer breeze and t'buggers wouldn't light. Actually, because Dau.II aka Cookie likes to stretch herself, there were two cakes with candles [R]. When I worked in Rotterdam, the custom was that, on your birthday, you'd bring in a kratje bier (Grolsch or Heineken) to share with yer mates. I think that's the right way for the gift traffic - there is nobody as grateful for clocking off another years with continued use of the legs than the birthday boy. Of course the case is altered if birthday boy is 6.50 rather than 65.0. Anyway, a goodly and open-handed number of my friends&relations came bearing gifts, one of which I've just finished reading.
Charlie Savage is the latest book by Roddy Doyle, Dublin's own author of fiction: stories, novels, plays, screenplays. Doyle is a bit younger than me but he started writing full-time in the early 90s just after I started living in [Northside] Dublin. That contemporaneity and the fact that we were both transitioning out of the teaching profession resonated a little with me although the language of working class Dublin was alien and little bit quaint. He must have a better ear than me to catch the slang and the intonation so well.

It could be claimed that science works through attention to detail whereas literature, of it's worth a print-run, looks at universals. It's not so much what happens to Madame Bovary or Cap'n Ahab as how their actions and reactions reflect on the human condition. Charlie Savage stopped me in a few places with the thought I wouldn't be making much of this literature if I had lived in Buenos Aires or Melbourne all my life . . . because the references were so local and so limited to North Dublin culture. Another slightly jarring trope was repeating the same fragment of story several times. Then I thought maybe this is a clever self-referential writely device to indicate that 60-something Charlie is beginning to lose his marbles. Despite all that, I enjoyed the book; it was funny, in an ironic self-deprecating way and showed how working-class Dubs like Charlie had come a long way wrt to civil rights, gay rights, and equal rights all round. His youngest daughter is a single parent who gives him the hairy eye-ball if he lets slip some sexist cliché. Jokes and innuendo about the place of women that would have been stock-in-trade when Charlie was a nipper have gone with the dinosaurs.

These criticisms (the local-ness and the repetition) were clarified when I read the jacket blurb after O finished the book. There it explains that the book is a collection of weekly columns for the Irish Independent - I should have twigged from the fact that there are 52 chapters, all of suspiciously the same length. You know what it reminds me of, in its capture of a time and place in a series of telling vignettes? Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther; which captured 1940s middle-class England. Don't bother with the film, get the book out of the library - especially if you've passed your 100th birthday: it's your time all over again.