It's Always More Complicated

(This is all being a bit of a theme at the moment.)

The Business Case for Reading Novels - just the title made me wince. And someone in the comments mentions a professor who 'teaches a leadership course using - instead of the traditional HBS case method - classic fiction as "cases.".... [he] explores the leadership lessons for anyone wanting "fresh" perspectives on the fundamental dilemmas facing managers today.'

I dunno, this is beginning to sound like The History of the Fairchild Family and Papa teaching his offspring the importance of controlling anger by taking them to the local gibbet where a murderer has recently been hanged. It's all about the lessons.

And then I thought, on the topic of Fings Wot Can B Lernt from Fykshun, about Mary McCarthy's remark that "You can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina".

DR RDRZ - what Really Useful Bit of Knowledge have you learnt from fiction? I mean, really practical things, not the 'Ignore the instruction to tell no-one about your midnight rendezvous with a nameless person' or 'Go down to the cellar in pairs in the haunted house'.

Me, I remember the intelligence in some long forgotten children's book concerning avoiding those bright green patches when crossing the moors, because they were bogs that would swallow you up..

Yestreen, since I am at the house of family who have digital tv and replay facilities, I watched a programme in which I played a Nexpert, which I had not previously had the chance to see.

I was actually talking about something on which I am not a Real Expert but do know a fair amount more than the average person on the Clapham omnibus, which is pretty much all you need for the average TV history programme, in my experience. Also, noticed that one of the production team was someone I had worked with on a radio programme in which I was demonstrating my knowingz in the same sort of area, which may have factored in.

So for all I know people who are real experts were beating their heads on the wall and going 'how come they asked her?'

Because I was doing pretty much that when they had someone talking about something on which I think I do count as SRS expert, as they demonstrated their chronological misconceptions, general lack of understanding, and got one fact dead wrong that both partner and my elderly father knew better than.

I can see that it might confuse the viewer to have the same Nexpert being Knowledgeable about different things? or is it just that only the presenter is allowed to do that?(wot, me, cynical?)

I'm not really surprised (shocked, but not surprised) that anyone who sounds reasonably plausible to the junior research assistant who makes the first contact, and has some kind of credibility (and I'm not that certain about that), probably ends up being on the programme, particularly if they can fit around the production schedules.

And this week's conferral of the It's Always More Complicated Award I think probably goes to David Aaronovitch for what sounds here (and in the other review I read in something probably not yet accessible online) like an excellent book about conspiracy theories in history, Voodoo History.

A S Byatt suggests that Ibsen's Nora is far from an admirable character, but isn't that the point? that she undergoes a maturational process about the world outside her head comparable to that of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda?

Okay, it's only a picture-book, but I'm still a bit 'Huh?' about a book featuring naked mole-rats which appears egregiously to ignore the fact that they are a matriarchal species and makes 'their oldest and wisest' Grand-Pah. Pah, I say, and also Pshaw.

Jeremy Paxman on reference works and the differences between the ODNB online and in physical format: 'a reference book's capacity for serendipity will score over the web every time': but on the other hand if you want just quickly to check someone's dates and career details, the online version scores. He's a bit snotty about what counts as Truly Historically Important in the selection. He also doesn't mention the sometimes extremely bizarre matching of biographer to subject: I was horrified yesterday to see that Alice Stewart was 'done' by her longtime antagonist Sir Richard Doll, a mean feat achieved by outliving her.

Epidemic dance: this is surely not the first book on this, but it sounds interesting nonetheless.

Lucy Mangan's children's bookshelf: this week, for the rather younger reader, Joan Robinson's Teddy Robinson, whom I remember vaguely - possibly being read to my sister or brother rather than myself. Presumably a different Joan Robinson from the eminent Cambridge school economist...

Ben Goldacre: current flu drugs not miracle cure, but still better than nothing (runner-up for IAMC award of the week, perhaps). On a related subject, James Randerson fulminates about the continuing consequences of the MMR canard.

Ian Jack reminds us that many famous writers of the past did not make a living at it and had day-jobs.

A C Grayling on the difference between knowledge and intelligence and how testable the latter is.

Our new Poet Laureate: Carol Ann Duffy herself on her appointment, news report, Mark Lawson on the possible benefit to the 'cultural health of the nation'.

And in associated women poet news, I am unable to find the link to the obituary of U A Fanthorpe: another late-blooming career.

Crocuses and daffodils in the narrow verge beside the local playing field!

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The gratifying sensation of having turned a job around extremely expeditiously: though, NB, when people say that they are holding back 'a few' items which will eventually end up in the archive while they prepare a publication, I don't really expect 'a few' to mean, nearly two-thirds as much again as they transferred last summer. But in spite of having to slot stuff in around an already catalogued collection (substantial parts of which were not catalogued by us, hem-hem), I have catalogued over a dozen standard boxes worth of archives in just under three weeks. Sing hey and give a merry twirl for having adequate cataloguing space!

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How lovely to have lunch with another Maude Royden fangirl! (Other topics of mutual scholarly interest were touched on...)

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Okay, a niggle which has been rather to the fore this week. People, if you're going to tell your students that they ought or even must contact me or speak to me, could you be a bit more forthcoming about why? And whether they need to actually speak to actual me at all, because we have lots of lovely helpful information on our website, not to mention bevies of helpful and knowledgeable archivists and librarians. And are you telling them because they need my archival expertise, or my historian's knowledge? And if they do need to speak to me, do they really need to set up an f2f meeting, or could I possibly answer their questions on the phone or in email? (or does the radiant light of my countenance transmit vibrant waves of good research karma?)

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Five words from tree_and_leaf
( 1 It's Always More Complicated  2 Urgent, phallic, sculpture  3 Hedgehogs  4 Erudition on unexpected subjects  5 Archives )

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.

Realise one of my problems with article mentioned in previous post is that it's all about cloistered experts discussing a phenomenon, the discussion to be kept among themselves, the laity not to be informed and certainly those more intimate with the phenomenon not considered as potential informants rather than objects to be observed. Yeah, and so what? The jury is still out as to whether it's true of poetry, but this sort of thing makes nothing happen.

What I'm interested in is what happens when discussions and ideas get out into the wild beyond such closed circles. Because that's when things happen.

It is, of course, much harder to establish, because there usually aren't the formal mechanisms of record and recognition.

I know it's in the poorest of ton to quote compliments that people have made one, but this, from callunav was very thought-provoking and I don't think I can go into the thoughts that riffed off it without citing:

You demonstrate - habitually, maybe even casually - that it's entirely possible and useful to explore at least a part of a complicated issue, and that those explorations are not less meaningful for being necessarily incomplete.

Which led me to think of intellectual styles, and knowledge as painstakingly put-together jigsaw (or maybe a better metaphor would be reconstructing a mosaic of which you may not even have all the pieces) versus knowledge as aerial photograph.

I have the greatest respect for people who can do Big Picture really well, but too often (especially perhaps in the Grand History of Everything type of popular study) there is some 'key to all mythologies' theory that shapes and focuses the Big Picture.

Which is helpful when doing that sort of thing, but very prone to creating distortion.

There's a poem by Robert Graves, In Broken Images, which is so relevant I think I have to cite here in full:

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

I'm just so very doubtful that there's a Key to All Wisdom available, even if, once we have enough information on particular things, we might be able to discern patterns that might possibly be useful and productive.

On another hand, maybe 'just getting this corner of the mosaic/jigsaw sorted out' lacks ambition? It's certainly a strategy against being deterred by the immensity of the project. Rather like deliberately choosing to write something that is not e.g. The Great American Novel.

Knowing about other bits of the mosaic/jigsaw, rather than just one's own small corner, is undoubtedly helpful in the task. (At the very least, if you're writing on sewage reform in Bradford, 1830-1845, it might be useful to know what was happening in Leeds or Wakefield, and the content of contemporary parliamentary debates.)

So I realise I'm coming round here to the notion that Big Picture stuff is fine if it also has the sense that if you zoom in on a corner there would be complex stuff going on (George Eliot's metaphor of the drop of water and the microscope) and that the corner of the mosaic approach is best when it has that sense that one can zoom out and see where it fits in a bigger context.

One thing I do know: it's always more complicated.

Zoe William answers the question: Why do so few women enter Mastermind?:

Maybe the intricate hoarding of facts, necessary for all quiz shows but particularly so for Mastermind, strikes women as pointless and indicative of mental disorder. Maybe women have a thinner membrane between their two active brain cortices, which facilitates the big-picture analyses known as multitasking but leaves them unable to concentrate on the novels of Len Deighton enough that they would know what Bernard Samson's best friend is called (although I'm a woman, and I know that).

Maybe they have no sense of the purity of knowledge, for its own sake, and see the collection of facts as a faintly grabby, ungenerous business. Maybe they think that if you are going to grabbily hoard information, you may as well spin some proper cash out of it, and go on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

There is no explanation for this phenomenon that doesn't reflect badly on women in some way, if only by lumping them together as one psychic mulch. The responsible feminist, therefore, ignores this new information. Or applies to go on Mastermind.

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And yay for Victoria Coren's insight:

A woman called Sam Deakin has made the papers after hacking into her ex-boyfriend's MySpace page and typing up his infidelity. His comment: 'I admit I cheated. I'm a man.'

Meanwhile, Chris Tarrant tells an interviewer he was unfaithful to his wife because 'it's something boys do'.

I would respect this helpless biological argument if men also used it while wetting themselves, or biting into a passing cow. But no; somehow self-control only becomes an evolutionary impossibility when it comes to shagging other women. Funny that.

An interesting, though at points also maddening, article by Ben Goldacre, who has been doing the 'Bad Science' columns in the Guardian for quite some while, 'Don't dumb me down: We laughed, we cried, we learned about statistics ... why writing Bad Science has increased his suspicion of the media by, ooh, a lot of per cents'. I agree with his main points, about the way in which science gets simplistically reported in the media - 'Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories

But: I'm a bit ruffled by his ire against 'humanities graduates'. Hello? over here? history was among the humanities last time I looked (and today I have been looking quite a bit, trying to find postal addresses on university websites). What Goldacre says about the reporting of the processes of scientific discovery

these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data. Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases.

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Julian Baggini, in today's 'Wisdom's Folly', on the text 'Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers':

Wisdom is frail, and nothing shatters it more violently than the belief that it has been permanently acquired. This, more than anything else, has been the raison d'etre of Wisdom's Folly. We gather insights, but over time we stop thinking about them and they degenerate into empty cliches. We take them for granted, oversimplify them or miss their key point and their insight is lost, replaced by foolish misunderstandings.

To be wise is not to achieve a state of maturity from which one never regresses, but to keep one's understanding sharp by persisting in a habit of constant questioning. This is not the serenity of the mythical sage but the gruelling vigilance of the mind that rejects received certainties.