Reasons to write novels #34

You learn more profoundly if you have to work it out.

Here's St Augustine:

no one disputes that is is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty.
(On Christian Teaching.)

(You could say much more about this quote. For example, Augustine also thought that a 'helpful and healthy obscurity' was a characteristic of the scriptures, and shouldn't be a characteristic of Christian teachers; those questions could be argued; but leave that aside for a moment, or imagine he is just talking about parables.)


Boccaccio in his Life of Dante (1374) made a similar remark about poetry:

It is obvious that everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it than that which comes without trouble. The plain truth, because it is so quickly understood with little effort, delights us, and is forgotten. So, in order that truth acquired by toil should be more pleasing and that it should be better preserved, the poets concealed it under matters that appeared to be wholly contrary to it. They chose fables, rather than any other form of concealment, because their beauty attracts those whom neither philosophic demonstrations nor persuasions could have touched ... [poets] are profoundly intelligent in their methods, as regards the hidden fruit, and of an excellent and beautiful eloquence as regards the bark and visible leaves.

Both these quotations are lifted directly from the discussion on storytelling in Jules Lubbock's art history book, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello.

The cannabis factories of Cambridgeshire

Here's how it works:

1. It's run as a business by Vietnamese organized crime syndicates. Chased out of Canada by aggressive policing, they've arrived here.

2. They find a nice detached house for rent in the kind of new-build neighbourhood where everyone has two jobs and is out all day; there are no neighbours looking out for each other.

3. They pay cash.

4. They invite in the first of the contractors, electricians who divert electricity from before the meter, feed it upstairs and set up transformers, timers, fans, and 600W lights. Each house uses £19,000 of electicity each year.

5. Next the whole upstairs is lined with polythene

6. Finally the cannabis plants arrive as little cuttings in rockwool, with plenty of compost.

7. They supply the needs for the gardener: a freezer full of meat, herbs and vegetables, a wok, a rice cooker, a TV.

8. In comes the gardener, often someone who has been trafficked. He lives in the bottom of the house. He isn't allowed to leave. Police often find instructions on how to raise the plants in easy Vietnamese steps. The people who trafficked him claim they will send money to his family.

9. The gardener never leaves the house. The downstairs looks normal; the upstairs, curtained off, with plenty of condensation, and a huge fire risk.

10. Cannabis plants are tender and not unlike tomatoes in their general cultivation. Normally they take a season to grow, coming into bud as the days shorten. However in the intensive, carefully planned care of the specialists, a crop can be ready in 10 weeks. Each room will produce about £32K's worth of cannabis (per year? per crop? I can't remember).

11. The cannabis is taken away for processing.

Cambridgeshire police are shutting down approximately one of these factories every week. The gardener gets 1-2 years in jail and is deported; the landlord gets a bill of perhapd £12,000 to rebuild his house. (£1000 for the door the police kicked in; several hundreds or more to be reconnected safely to the grid...)

How to solve the problem?

1. Police forces should talk to each other. Each force is only arresting the 'gardeners'. No-one is going after the serious professionals who run the operation.

2. Cannabis seed, though not seedlings, is legal to buy in the EU. You can apparently download seed catalogues that list the different qualities of each seed. The sees are genetically modified to produce female plants only, the ones that bud.

3. A national strategy could move the organized criminals on, just as happened in Canada. But it isn't happening.

Another one bites the dust

Telegraph chatters
A vote of no confidence
The Speaker, unplugged?

Tracking the sun, the old fashioned way

Solar panels don't move when the sun does, which is a drawback. Ideally you need some technology that moves them around automatically, so that they stay in the sun all day. The answer, as my daughter pointed out, is already to hand. Tie them to a dog:




There is an issue with rolling over, but otherwise, it's promising.

Political haikus

Was musing on uses for twitter and noticed that someone had mentioned how twitter's 140 characters is the perfect medium for the 5-7-5 format of a haiku. Clearly, we need a new breed of columnists, such as the political Haiku writer who brightens our days:

Home Secretary
Smith is In hot water but
has her own bath-plug

or

Boom and bust no more!
(according to Gordon); just
The wrong kind of bust

Too true

'Any fool can write a novel, but it takes real genius to sell it.' (the now late) J G Ballard

Persepolis -- the best book on Iran I've ever read

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is a insider story of:

• the Iranian revolution,
• the Gulf (Iran-Iraq) War (about which we in the West were so cruelly complacent),
• how fugitives to the West are mostly welcomed by the alternative cultures, not the mainstream ones
• Teenagerhood
• Freedom and its contradictions
  

and with a walk on part by

• God.

It's all told in cartoon form. It's the best thing I've ever read on Iran and one of the best books I've read about living under an Islamist regime.

(I also just finishedThe Reluctant Fundamentalist.
This novella also a lot of fun and well worth reading, but compared with Persepolis is a bit pompous and self-important.)

I found it the sort of book you have to put down while you walk around and try to think about it. Things like:

• Why don't we understand Iranians as victims of totalitarianism, quite as much as people in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia?
• How much teenagers need surrogate parents and grandparents;
• How people can end up on the streets; and get off them again.

What a gem of a book.

In praise of TED

TED is a series of conferences in which a stellar array of speakers are given 18 minutes to give 'the talk of their lives'.

Everything is available freely as downloadable video or audio. Everyone's there: Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Martin Rees (whom I nearly bumped into on King's Parade in Cambridge on Christmas Day), Bill Gates. There's Hans Rosling, the man who makes statistics dance, and scores of others.

Dare I say, the breadth of lectures available, it's even better than living in Cambridge.

The whole thing is the brainchild of someone called Chris Anderson who founded a series of computer magazines in the UK and then moved to the States, but is a different Chris Anderson from his good friend Chris Anderson who is also UK born and also moved to the states and edits Wired magazine and has already appeared in this blog. So good, God made two of them evidently.

Spotify

Legal access to all the world's music. Downloaded on the fly, not stored on your hard disk. Ad-funded, or you can buy a subscription. Build playlists. Only recently opened to non-invitees. I'm totally sold. Even a complete musical puddinghead like me. It's the utter business.

Some other Updike quotes

The little flourishing of John Updike quotes that has occurred in the press now he's died are worth filing somewhere:

On religion:

I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and women spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say: 'This is it: carpe diem, and tough luck.'


On writing:

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Reasons to write novels #17

'The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion' (John Updike)

The meaning of life

Easily found in Sebastian Faulks' book Human Traces, which I've just finished with my reading group. The book, by the way, is beautifully done, its characters rich, its historical scenes and ideas vivid as it explores what it is to be human through the lives of two head-doctors. Such a fine writer.

(Digression: The jacket warns you that this book is 'ambitious' which means in this case that two extensive chapters are given over to psychological lectures, and is thus a publisher's aide memoire to give the author smaller advances in future, so that he doesn't spend quite so much time in the library for his next book.)

The main protagonist, Sonia (wife to one shrink and sister to the other), reflects on her life and losses and still concludes:

'Was it worth it? Was it worth the agony of loss? ...

'... it was enough, because nothing in any other world that might by chance have existed could have surpassed in majesty what she had felt; and she was transfigured by that joy, always, and even beyond death.'

Love is the meaning of life; simple really.

Parenting classes and social mobility

'There's an urgent need to improve parenting.

'The evidence base is now very strong indeed ... you can make mums (and it is almost invariably mums on their own) who want to be better parents. You can make them better parents but you need to train them.'

Martin Narey, Head of Barnados, and former head of the Prison Service, in a radio discussion on improving social mobility. (BBC Week in Westminster 1/17/09)

My books of the year

Easy choice:

Brian Mclaren: a generous orthdoxy
Lesslie Newbiggin: The open secret
Lesslie Newbiggin: The gospel in a pluralist society

Evangelicalism can easily decay into Phariseeism: all about personal conversion, nothing about the world at large and as a whole. These books are the remedy.

Fiction?
That would be the Librivox recording of
William Makepeace Thackery: Vanity Fair

which I listened to by a swimming pool in Nice, during rainstorms in the Soul Survivor Christian festival (which was mostly rainstorms) and through many long insomniac nights.

Sinclair C5 spotted!

I spotted a Sinclair C5 on the road today -- that Cambridge-designed battery-powered personal transportation device that flopped in the 1980s. Like many of Sir Clive Sinclair's ideas, it was both way ahead of its time and of a slightly dodgy build quality.

It looked as vulnerable on the open road as it ever did in the 1980s. But it also looked absolutely perfect for a cycle path. I think the last 20 years in the UK has seen a huge expansion of cycle paths, and I couldn't help thinking of the parallel with the Internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (whom I heard speak two days ago, incidentally), built a wonderful open infrastructure and a whole exotic ecosystem of products developed to run on it -- google and amazon and ebay and all the rest. Surely if we really systematically built a network of cycle paths in this country, that linked everything up, a similar exotic ecosystem would also arise: electric bikes and Segways and those wierd things Honda are making. And maybe some veteran C5s, rescued from garages, chugging along with their lead-acid batteries to the railway station, just as Sir Clive originally dreamt.

A chinese Christian analyses the West

Technological optimism and literary pessimism' is the conclusion of Carver T Yu.




The guy's Amazon sales rank is 2 million and something, even below that of Gordon's Brown's latest book, so rally round.

Not that I read him, of course: he was quoted in Lesslie Newbiggin

I'm really sorry, but I liked 'the Shack'. Eventually.

OK:

Robotic dialogue
Minimal characterization
Really a work of theology, not fiction (though the same could be said for Pilgrim's Progress)
'Like the sort of Christian leaflet I get shoved through my letterbox', said one shocked and unimpressed member of our book club. (None of the self-professed non-Christians in our group liked it at all. They hated it. One looked at the Amazon reviews and couldn't believe them.)

Worst, a cloying schlockiness that keeps trying to suck you in and swallow you forever.

This book is as easy to criticise as George W Bush.

But then you get to this artful picture of God and redemption, and the way sets off all kinds of chords in your heart. You note its nice pace, its filmic quality. You feel its freshness. You find yourself thinking about what it said long after you put the book down. You love the way the sheer volume of its sales has forced it into Borders and onto the bestseller lists. And it deserved to, not by being a literary masterpiece but by that insight and power that makes people choose it above better-written books and spend time with it. And you conclude ... OK, I liked it too. Eventually and partially.

Patient revolutionaries

Newbiggin calls Christians 'patient revolutionaries'.

Darcy, Lizzie, two ways of knowing, and the meaning of life

This is complicated but worth it.

I've been reading that theological polymath Leslie Newbiggin who reads so widely himself that you get an instant, distilled education into all sorts of hard books that you aren't brainy enough to pick up yourself.

He talks about two ways of knowing: 'I-it' and 'I-thou'. I-it is about knowing things; I-thou is about knowing persons.

You learn I-it stuff by reading, research, analyzing.

You learn I-thou stuff by humbling yourself, listening, being vulnerable.

What a deep principle this is, running right through the world and the heavenlies.

So (for example) in Pride and Prejudice Mr Darcy is a master of I-it. Rich, educated, powerful. He knows everything. But none of it works with Lizzie. She's only interested in I-thou. And of course, so, deep down, is Darcy. She meets a deep need of his heart, a need that no amount of I-it can satisfy. And so the story is about how he has to humble himself, listen, be vulnerable, and get launched into the exotic, tender world of I-thou knowing.

Here (to take a second example) is where the materialist comes unstuck. I have not read all of Richard Dawkins but I have read enough to know that his whole approach is I-it. Brilliantly argued, wonderfully convincing, construe it how you like, it's still I-it. But the God of the Christians is I-thou. All I-it pathways will bypass him.

Look (to take a third example) at how it splits up the world's religions:

Mainstream Islam? It's the straight path, the rules: I-it
Sufism? That's I-thou, but it's a counter-trend in Islam.

Christianity: where it's I-thou it lives, even if it's very deficient. Where it's I-it, 'even what you have will be taken from you'

If you want to know about truth, ask a quantum physicist

Physicists are, of course, rarely asked for sensible comments about anything. They make cameo appearances in the media where they are asked silly questions by journos who spend the time boasting about how little they understand science.

A pity. Here's the world according to the very quotable Neils Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

You will note (this is an aside) how many of these quotes are actually statements of faith -- you need a lot of faith to get anywhere in quantum physics.

'Prediction is very difficult, especially concerning the future.'

'How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. '

'The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. '

'You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. '

I borrowed these quotes from here.