A sin of omission: a brilliant historical novel set in 19th-century South Africa

A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A historical novel that gives one a real insight into the history, with a vivid sense of time and place. The characters are detailed and believable, and this is a classic of South African literature.

An Anglican deacon, Stephen Malusi Mzamane, is on his way to tell his mother, whom he has not seen since he was a small child, of the death of his elder brother. The story of his life, and how he came to this point, is told in a series of flashbacks. He was based at Trinity Mission at Nodyoba, near Fort Beaufort, in the 1870s, where he had to serve alone, without a resident priest.

The flashbacks tell the story of his life -- how he and his elder brother were found starving after the cattle-killing of 1858, rescued by an Anglican priest and sent to school. There he was called to the ordained minister of the Anglican Church, and sent to St Augustine's Missionary College in Canterbury, England, for training. At the college his best friend is Albert Newnham, who is also destined to serve in the eastern Cape Colony. They dream of working together, but this dream is never realised, and circumstances conspire to keep them apart for most of the time.

It is those circumstances, the setting and the people, that put obstacles in their way. One of the themes of the story is their friendship, which should have supported both of them in their ministry, but did not.

One of the themes of the story is the tension between the call to Christian ministry, and the ties of family and cultural background that undermine it. Stephen feels the tension initially with his elder brother; Albert with his wife. But it is part of a wider social setting, and it comes out quite strongly in the book -- the Xhosa-speaking clergy are painfully aware of the tensions between their Christian faith and secular Xhosa culture; the English-speaking clergy, whether colonial or from overseas, are, with one or two exceptions, not aware of the tension between their Christian faith and their own British secular culture.

Of course this is fiction, and the author chooses how to portray such things and write them into the story, but I believe, from my own study of history and experience of church life in South Africa, that her portrayal is spot on. She tells it like it was, and in some ways still is.

Poland portrays the relationship between the Xhosa-speaking clergy and the English-speaking clergy very well indeed, and at times I get the feeling that this could me, because it could be describing my experience, as a South African Orthodox Christian vis-à-vis Greek clergy. 

As a missiologist, I also think that this is the kind of book I would like to have prescribed to my students. Occasionally one finds novels that help to make a missiological point -- another one is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, but I think this one is even better. 

One interesting, and perhaps telling sldelight is that in its submission guidelines Penguin South Africa says it will not usually accept fiction manuscripts dealing with religion, so this one must have been pretty unusual to jump over that hurdle and be accepted.

It is a sad story, but well told, and well worth reading.

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The Magic Cottage

The Magic Cottage by James Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book that started off in a fairly promising way, but seemed to lose the plot towards the end.

Mike Stringer, a musician, and his girlfriend Midge Gudgeon, a musician, buy a cottage in the New Forest in Hampshire. The cottage, called Gramarye, was part of a deceased estate, and they had to undergo some kind of test by the executors of the will.

Not far away is an old manor house that is home to a community of selfstyled Synergists, led by a man called Mycroft. Members of the community are initially friendly and welcoming, but when Mycroft promises to enable Midge to make contact with her dead parents, a nasty side appears. The local vicar warns them to have nothing to do with the Synergists, and appears to think they are evil Mike is sceptical, both of the Synergists' beliefs and the vicar's fears.

The cottage initially seems to have mysterious healing properties but when the Synergists visit the healing properties seem to be corrupted.

After an interesting build-up the story seemed to fall apart in the end, and seemed designed for a B-movie with spectacular special effects. There was a growing atmosphere of evil, but the bits that were supposed to be really scary at the end weren't scary at all, and were just boring. My mind kept wandering off, or I kept dropping off to sleep.

And one rather curious thing I noticed about it was that it has a surprising number of Americanisms for a book written by an Englishman, and published in England: flashlight where I would have expected torch; sneakers where I would have expected plimsolls or trainers; and braids where I would have expected plaits or pigtails. On the other hand, it had presently meaning shortly afterwards, which I don't think is the way an American would use the word. 

In a way, it had some echoes of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis: a couple whose relationship is deteriorating, and the Synergists had echoes of the N.I.C.E. but the characteristics of their group were largely New Age/Theosophist cliches. There wasn't a contrasting "good" community. It might have been That Hideous Strength as reimagined by Dennis Wheatley, except that I think Dennis Wheatley might have made a better job of it.

Searching for icons in Russia

THE KATERINA ICON by Robert Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amateur versus professional crooks.

A couple of Australian tourists in Russia rescue an old man from drowning, and in gratitude he tells them of an ancestor of his who, during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, attacked a train and stole some icons that had been stolen by the Bolsheviks from the Russian royal family. One of the Australians is of Russian ancestry, and the old man tells him that if he can find the hidden icons, he can keep them, and gives him one of his own family icons, which is said to hold the key to the secret location of the icons.

The tourists, an accountant and a dentist, return to Australia and when they believe they may have found a clue to the location of the icons, decide, after many arguments, to return to Russia and look for them. Their arguments continue throughout the book. First one is keen on the project, and the other is lukewarm, and then the one who was lukewarm becomes keen and the other is sceptical.

Their enterprise is of dubious legality and morality, and thus they need to keep it secret, but they take it in turns to boast about it and to warn against doing so. First one says too much, and the other warns him not to, and then they exchange roles. As a result of this, several others, including professional criminals, become aware of the treasure hunt, and the two amateurs find themselves in serious trouble and great danger again and again, usually because one has done something foolish that the other has warned him against.

The battle between the amateurs and the professionals goes right through the book, and I thought the theme was a little overplayed. The protagonists never seemed to learn from their mistakes, and went on making the same mistakes over and over again, and getting into similar trouble over and over again. One would take precautions that the other would get angry about, or one would neglect precautions that the other would get angry about.

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So much for the review of this particular book, but I have more comments on the theme, since I myself have written a book on a similar theme, or at least with a similar trope -- ikons that went missing in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (I prefer the spelling ikon with a k for the holy images. Icons with a c belong on computer screens). You can see reviews of my book The Year of the Dragon here on GoodReads.There are other and more comprehensive reviews on the Smashwords page, where you can also get a copy of the book. 

Apart from the icon/ikon trope, there are other superficial similarities. In The Katerina Icon the protagonists are two middle-aged men, a dentist and an accountant; in The Year of the Dragon the protagonists are two young men, a lawyer and an auctioneer. In both a woman dies because of the icons/ikons, though the circumstances are different.

But the differences are perhaps more more significant, and it is these that struck me most strongly. In The Katerina Icon, the protagonists are driven purely by greed. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their only interest in the icons is the price they will fetch, nothing else counts. In the story, they are the "good" guys, the characters the reader is supposed to root for, but their values are identical with those of the "bad" guys, who are likewise motivated purely by greed. And one cannot help thinking that these are the values that triumphed at the end of the Cold War. 

The young protagonists in The Year of the Dragon start off in much the same way. The young lawyer has to wind up the estate of a murdered woman, and takes his auctioneer friend along to inspect the property and help him assess its monetary value. But as the story proceeds they gradually discover that there is more at stake, and that the value of the ikons, in particular, cannot be calculated only on the price they will fetch on the market. They come to see that there is more, and that the "more" is actually more important.

So with The Katerina Ikon I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, and put the 4 stars there to compensate for my prejudice in having written a comparable novel, which I thought went deeper than the rather superficial greed displayed by the characters in The Katerina Icon, in which there were really no good guys or bad guys, only winners and losers, and it wouldn't have mattered in the end which lot won or lost. The Neoliberal Revolution at the end of the Cold War ended up much the same as the Bolshevik Revolution as portrayed in George Orwell's Animal Farm -- the other animals looked from man to pig, and from pig to man, and could no longer tell the difference.

Telmarines: the ultimate Whenwes

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've just finished reading Prince Caspian for the fourth time, and this time I read it chapter for chapter with Inside Prince Caspian by Devin Brown, and most of my comments on it will be found in my review of Inside Prince Caspian.

I will add one thing here, though -- that on this reading I was struck even more by how C.S. Lewis got it absolutely right about the notion of white supremacy -- which in Prince Caspian appears as Telmarine supremacy.

Back in the 1960s, when I first read it, Kenya had just become independent, and there was a flood of disgruntled white immigrants from Kenya into apartheid South Africa. They soon became known as "Whenwes" because of their habit of prefacing most things they said with the phrase "When we were in Keen-yah...".

They were also given much air time on South African radio (no TV in those days), especially by current affairs host Ivor Benson, who seemed to have a Whenwe from Kenya every week on his prime-time propaganda show, where they spread the message that the white man should rule, and black people were incompetent and unfit to govern.

One of the things we wondered about was why, if they wanted to get away from black people, white Kenyan immigrants didn't go to a country where there were no or few black people. Why did they come to South Africa, where the majority of the population were black?

It soon became apparent, however, from what they said on the radio, that they could not do without black people, because there would be no one to "clean my carpets, scrub the floors, and polish up the hearth". They needed black people, but only if they were subservient to white rule -- and that is exactly how C.S. Lewis portrays the Telmarines in Prince Caspian -- as the ultimate Whenwes. They were unwilling to stay in Narnia if they were no longer the ruling race, with all others subservient to them.

And C.S. Lewis nails it. He nails it absolutely. The Telmarines are the Platonic ideal Whenwes, white supremacists to the core.

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C.S. Lewis on Christian Nationalism

Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back.

Christian Nationalism was the philosophical underpinning for the apartheid ideology of the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. During that period Christian Nationalism was dominant and all-pervasive. Student teachers at universities were taught that they had to teach subjects like Geology in a "Christian National way". All children in schools were to be taught to be nationalist in their thinking, and nationalism was defined as "love of one's own".

But what is "one's own"?

Many Christian groups in South Africa at that time questioned the Christian Nationalist ideology, and some explicitly and outright rejected it. Christian Nationalism grew out of an attempt to give a Christian flavour to a romantic secular nationalism that had grown up in Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For more on that, see my article on Nationalism, Violence and Reconciliation.

Now Christian Nationalism seems to be making a come-back in certain circles in North America,  in Russia, and in some other places. Many Christians find this disturbing. Those of us who were involved in the struggle against apartheid from the 1950s to the 1980s are aware that Christian Nationalism was not merely a heresy, it was a pseudo-gospel, a false offer of salvation by race, not grace.

It was not merely South Africans who were aware of that, however. C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), a professor of English literature, author, and Christian apologist, was also acutely aware of the dangers of nationalism, and two of the villains of his fiction, Professor Weston of his space trilogy, and the dwarf Nikabrik in his children's book Prince Caspian exemplify the dangers.

Devin Brown, in his book Inside Prince Caspian, makes this clear in the following passage:

The only virtue remaining in Nikabrik at the time of his death was a concern -- it would be hard to call it a love -- for his own kind. Nikabrik allowed this virtue to expand until it became the greatest virtue, erasing all others. In this way he became like another of Lewis's villains: Professor Weston from the space trilogy. Near the end of Out of the Silent Planet, the great Oyarsa, or ruler, of Mars has a long conversation with Weston, trying to understand the reasoning behind the scientist's depraved actions. The Oyarsa maintains that there are laws that all sentient beings know, "pity and straight dealing and shame and the like". He points out that Weston is willing to break all of these laws except "the love of kindred," which he notes "is not one of the greatest laws." As this law became the only law and principle for both Weston and Nikabrik, it became bent and distorted and, in the end, led to evil, not good.

The "love of kindred" that Lewis talks about there is the "love of one's own" that the Afrikaner nationalists of South Africa's National Party gave as the definition of nationalism. And "own kind" was a nationalist mantra. It was the rationale for apartheid. People must live among their "own kind". They must go to school and church with their "own kind". They could only play games and sports with their "own kind". There were government departments and legislative bodies arranged according to "own affairs". And there were laws against "improper interference" in affairs that might concern everyone, and were not regarded by the government as "own affairs".

The "own kinds" were defined by law: White, Black, Coloured and Asian. And those took precedence over everything else. Christians could not see their fellow Christians as their "own kind". Own-kindedness was determined not by faith, but by race. So, under "Christian" nationalism, Christians were expected to sell their heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world (cf Genesis 25:29-34). 

For those who may be concerned about the viral spread of Christian Nationalism in the 2020s, therefore, there are remedies. Perhaps you can inoculate your children against the virus of Christian Nationalism by reading C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories to them, and noting the lessons to be learned from the failings of Nikabrik.

When they get older and become interested in "Young Adult" stories, encourage them to read Out of the Silent Planet and note the failings of Professor Weston.

And don't forget the words of Balthazar Johannes Vorster (1915-1983), who became South African Minister of Justice in 1961 (when he turned South Africa into a police state), Prime Minister in 1966, State President in 1978. But back in 1942 he said (when his country was at war with Germany, Italy and Japan):

We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa, Christian Nationalism.

11.22.63 by Stephen King

11.22.63 by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stephen King's books are a mixed bag -- some very good, some very bad, and some mediocre. This one, I think, is one of his best. It's also difficult to classify. It involves time travel, so perhaps it is science fiction, but the time travel is not the result of any scientific discovery, and its mechanism is never explained. Fantasy then? But no, everything else in the story, apart from the time travel, is pretty mundane In that respect, it most resembles The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's also, to some extent, a love story, so one could perhaps add "romance" to the list of genres covered.

In the story Jake Epping, a school teacher in Maine, USA, is told by his friend Al Templeton about a time gateway, and Al tries to persuade him to go back in time from 2011 to prevent the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. The gateway, however, will only take him back to 1958, so if he accepts the task it will take five years of his life.

It has an interesting plot, and I had a great deal of sympathy for the main characters, and even for several of the minor ones.

The story has a great deal of historical information about the assassination of President Kennedy, and to some extent that part of the story was familiar to me. The names Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby were familiar, as were references to the "grassy knoll" and the Texas Book Depository, not from reading history, but from contemporary news reports.

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What's your lifestyle?

The word "lifestyle" has been around for more than a century, but was only popularised a little over 50 years ago, and now seems to have been hijacked by the advertising industry. An article in BusinessTech informs us that Lifestyle Estates are Booming in South Africa:

Giovanni Gaggia, CEO of Real Estate Services, said that lifestyle estates offer a unique blend of luxury living and community engagement.

The estates typically offer several amenities, including golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, which cater to various interests and promote an active lifestyle.

They also offer a secure environment and well-maintained infrastructure to add to their appeal.

But the shanty-town lifestyle estates of informal settlements not only don't offer such "typical" features as golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, they also do not typically have indoor plumbing, sewerage, proper roads or electricity.

The advertising hype suggests that only an affluent lifestyle of conspicuous consumption qualifies as a lifestyle at all.

The earliest reference to "lifestyle" in the Oxford English Dictionary was 1915, and it is defined as

A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life.

It only became popular in the late 1960s, however, when it was used mainly to contrast the lifestyles of the "hip" and the "straight". The hippie counterculture espoused different values from those of "straight" society, and expressed these values through different lifestyles.

One of the values that hippies eschewed was the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was practised or aspired to by straight society.

The advertising industry, which was dedicated to promoting conspicuous consumption, fought back, and one of the ways it did so was by adopting hip jargon to promote products and services and sell them to the changing youth culture. "Lifestyle banking" was one of the earlier ones, illustrated with yachts and luxury cars.

Part of the countercultural lifestyle is, however, still reflected by my Collins Millennium Dictionary (does that make it a dictionary for "Millennials"?) which gives

lifestyle business a small business in which the owners are more anxious to pursue interests that reflect their lifestyle than to make more than a comfortable living.

Advertising hype has not taken over completely. We still talk about the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as compared with the lifestyle of peasant farmers, neither of which would be found in the so-called "lifestyle estates".

When the term first became popular it was variously spelt as "life style", "life-style" or "lifestyle", depending on the house style (house-style, housestyle)  of the publication concerned, but now the "lifestyle" spelling predominates.

The point to remember here is that a lifestyle of poverty is  just as much a lifestyle as a lifestyle of affluence, no matter how much the advertising agencies would like us to believe otherwise. 

Another point to remember is found in the OED definition: the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life

A lifestyle may be voluntary or involuntary.

The lifestyle of a prisoner is involuntary.

The lifestyle of a person living in an affluent "lifestyle estate" is voluntary. If you can afford to live in one, you can also afford not to live in one. And if you can afford not to live in one, you can also choose to avoid an affluent lifestyle, and choose rather to live an abstemious one.

For most people, lifestyle is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary. Inmates of institutions like boarding schools, hostels, communes, monasteries, old-age homes, etc may have varying degrees of choice whether to enter such institutions, but, once within them, they need to adopt features of the prescribed lifestyle or leave. 

To some extent, this might be true of "lifestyle estates" as well. The lifestyle is prescribed and circumscribed, sometimes even more than the lifestyle of informal settlements. If you live in a "lifestyle estate" and start erecting shacks in your backyard to sub-let to others, you would soon discover the limits of freedom in a "lifestyle estate".

There are many ways in which lifestyle is determined by circumstances, such as wealth or poverty, ones upbringing, one's education or the lack of it. But some, like monks, choose voluntary poverty, and this was also the case with some in the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s.

Lifestyle is also linked to values. An authentic lifestyle reflects your values; an inauthentic lifestyle probably conflicts with your values, or perhaps reflects the values you actually hold rather than the values you profess. 

Before the hippies came the beats, who didn't speak of lifestyle, though they knew what it was. Their term for what the hippies called "straight" society was "square", and as Lawrence Lipton put it in his book The Holy Barbarians (Lipton 1959:150):

The New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: ‘I’ll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.’ It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.

But for more on that see here: It's Cool to be Hip, but not Hip to be Cool.

Interestingly enough, though advertisers frequently misuse "lifestyle", the original meaning still lives and it has not been completely skunked. If you look here, you can see that when "lifestyle" is used as a modifier, the most common usage is "lifestyle changes", followed by "lifestyle choices" and "lifestyle factors".

 

A Gentleman in Moscow -- the mind and face of Bolshevism

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The best book I've read so far this year.

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by the Bolsheviks to indefinite house arrest in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow's theatre district. He becomes head waiter of the hotel, with friends among the staff and some of the regular guests, including an actress and a nine-year-old girl who has acquired a master key to all the hotel rooms, and shows him all the secret places. His life is so bound up with the hotel that it almost becomes a character in the story.

Through the life of the hotel Count Rostov (and the reader) learn of the changes of Soviet society. Once, many years ago, I read a book called The Mind and Face of Bolshevism and this book reminded me of that one at several points, in that it actually gives one a fairly good picture of Soviet life during that period. The Mind and Face of Bolshevism must be a fairly rare book. The copy I read was at the library of the KwaNzimela Centre in Zululand, but when we visited it in 2012 about three-quarters of the books had disappeared from the library, including that one.

It is also a book to savour, like a good wine. I found I only wanted to read a chapter, or sometimes a scene or two, and think about them before reading on, so I interspersed my reading of it with several other books. One needs to pause after each scene to think about it.

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The Dictionary of Lost Words -- and lost printing technology

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Esmé Nicoll's widowed father was an assistant to James Murray, the editor of the first Oxford Dictionary, and because her mother was dead, she accompanied her father to the Scriptorium, the shed in the Murrays' garden, where the work of compiling the dictionary was carried on. While they sorted the slips of paper with the entries, many sent in by volunteers, five-year-old Esmé sat quietly under the table, noting the shoes and socks worn by the editorial assistants.

One day one of the slips falls from the table, and when no one bends down to retrieve it, Esmé puts it in her pocket, and later hides it away in an old trunk belonging to Lizzie Lester, the Murrays' housemaid, who is only a few years older than Esmé herself. So Esmé becomes a collector of lost words, words that are discarded from the dictionary, words that are lost inadvertently, and a few that she pilfers from the sorting table. When her pilfering ways are discovered, she is banished for a while from the Scriptorium, but her interest in words continues and as she grows older she begins collect them on her own account.

She also becomes aware that the all-male lexicographers are not aware of, or not interested in words that are used only by women, or words that are spoken by the common people rather than by the educated classes, and so becomes aware of social inequalities in late-Victorian and Edwardian England.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is only semi-fictional. Not for Pip Williams the usual disclaimer that none of the characters bear any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead. James Murray and most of the other editorial assistants, including members of Murray's family, are the real people, and they appear in a photograph at the end of the book. Of course their conversations are imagined, but some of the things they say are taken from their own writings, or contemporary reports and memoranda. One can learn quite a lot of the way in which the Oxford Dictionary was compiled from the book.

I really enjoyed reading it, not just because, having worked as a proof reader and editor at various times, I have an interest in words and how they are used, but also because Esmé and the other characters, fictional or otherwise, come across as real people, so that one shares their joys and sorrows, and cares about what happens to them.

The book also sparked lots of memories for me, which don't belong in a GoodReads review, as they go beyond the merits of the book itself, but I'll share some of them here. 

Esmé visits the Bodleian Library, and the Oxford University Press, where she becomes friendly with one of the compositors, and describes the work of the compositor in setting up the page for printing. And that recalled to me my time as a proof reader on the Windhoek Advertiser in the early 1970s, which was the end of the hot-metal type printing era.

When I began working as a proof reader I sat at a table in the works near the typesetters, who were mostly German-speaking, and worked on Intertype machines which set each line of type in hot lead. The lines were collected in "galleys", and once they had finished the story they would bring me a galley proof, which I would correct, not merely as a proof reader, following copy, but also as a line editor, checking for errors of fact, grammar and spelling. These would go back to the typesetters, who would set the corrections, often with much swearing.

The galleys would then go to the sub-editor and the compositor, who fitted them into the page, sometimes shortening the story to fit, and added the headlines. Once the page was set up, the page proof would come back to me for final corrections -- the most common mistake being transposed or missing lines. Then paper maché clichés or stereotypes would be made from the set page, from which the moulded lead plates would be made for the rotary press. All this was a much longer process than the book printing described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, where the compositor appears to have done the typesetting as well.

While I was at the Windhoek Advertiser however, electronic typesetting was introduced. A typist in the newsroom would type the story on a machine that produced a punched paper tape, which was then fed into an attachment on the Intertype machines, and the skilled typesetters became mere machine minders. They fed the paper tape into the machine and watched it work. The only time they touched the keyboard was to set the corrections.

Then I moved to Durban, and my wife Val had a cousin who married a compositor on The Daily News. He had just completed a five-year apprenticeship, and was almost immediately made redundant when the newspaper switched from hot-metal printing to offset litho. The job of compositor, as described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, had ceased to exist.

I read an article in the same Daily News about the journalist's experience with the new Atex computerised typesetting system. The journalist would compose the article on the machine, polishing and correcting it as it went. The sub-editor would read it on the same machine, edit, cut it and write the headline, and it would then go to the people who did page makeup, all marked by codes on the same machine. I wanted one. That was in about 1974, fifty years ago. I dreamed of having a machine that could store whatever text I wrote, and could correct and change without retyping.

Twelve years later I got my wish. I went to work in the Editorial Department of the University of South Africa in 1986, editing academic texts on their Atex system. It was not as exciting as I thought it would be, though, because by then I already had an Osborne portable (well, luggable) microcomputer and could use the Wordstar word processor. The Atex system was clunky by comparison. If you wanted to save a document you were working on, you could walk to the canteen and have a cup of coffee and a chat while waiting for it to return to the screen.

The following year, however, we got microcomputers, where the Atex system had been ported in a new word processing program called XyWrite, which was much faster, and, for sheer word-processing power, has still not been surpassed 35 years later. It may lack the bells and whistles of the latest word processors, but still has more pistons and cylinders, and the whole thing fitted on a 360K floppy disk.

All these memories, and many others, came back while reading The Dictionary of Lost Words. I thought the book was very good indeed, but perhaps that's just me, because of my experience with words and meanings and putting them into books. But I still think it's worth five stars.

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The Drunken Silenus

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality by Morgan Meis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an extended personal meditation on Peter Paul Rubens's painting of the drunken Silenus.

Silenus was the tutor of Dionysus (whom the Romans called Bacchus), the dying and rising Graeco-Roman god of wine. Silenus was also the leader of the Satyrs, the half-human, half-goat companions of Dionysus. Silenus is shown as a fat old man, and, in contrast to his companions, his drunkenness is not the drunkenness of frenzied excess; in Rubens's painting it is the semi-conscious stumbling drunkenness of one who drinks to forget.

What made me want to read this book in the first place was the appearance of Silenus, Dionysus and their retinue in C.S. Lewis's children's novel Prince Caspian. And while this book doesn't explain it, it certainly gives more of the background.

Morgan Meis takes us on a journey, starting with the life and times of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), going back to ancient Greece, when the cult of Dionysus flourished, and forward to the time of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who had his own view of Silenus, whom he regarded as the father of Greek tragedy.

Meis examines the significance of Silenus against the historical background of each of these periods with an intertwining of history, biography, art history, philosophy and religion, with a great deal of personal speculation thrown in. None of these is treated in a formal academic way; there are no footnotes or other references, though there is a short bibliography at the end. But this broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach does present Silenus, and Rubens himself, in a more holistic way than, say, a purely art-historical approach would do. The only fault I could find with this approach is that at times Meis tends to become too verbose and repetitious.

I found the book stimulating. It stimulates an interest in all these topics. One does not necessarily have to accept all Meis's speculations, but one can treat them as a starting point for one's own. Rubens painted the drunken Silenus at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, and the book would be interesting to anyone interested in that period, or art of that period.

One regret is that I could not find a decent reproduction of the painting online, and none is included in the book. The ones I could find online lacked the detail that is described in the book, and a full-colour reproduction would have been a useful additions.

In addition to being tutor to Dionysus, Silenus was a philosopher and a prophet, and when the legendary King Midas asked him what was the best thing for man, Silenus answered that the best thing for man was never to have been born, and the next best thing, having been born, was to die.

That's a pretty pessimistic outlook on life, and makes me wonder, even more, why C.S. Lewis would include him in a book written for children, even though he doesn't mention that side of Silenus. According to Meis, however, Nietzsche liked it:

The Greeks, Nietzsche thinks, the ancient Greeks— the Greeks of the satyr plays and the music in the forest, the Greeks who came before the classical period of Plato and the brilliant days of Greek rationalism, the Greeks before that, the ones who danced the Sicinnis dance and celebrated their secret rites—those Greeks were bold enough to make a health of their pessimism. They were strong, thought Nietzsche, tremendous in their ability to think that pessimism all the way through. Nay, to live that pessimism all the way through. That’s the way Nietzsche thought about it.

For Meis, the tragedy of Silenus is that he is immortal without being fully divine; he cannot die although at times he longs to do so. This is reminiscent of Tolkien's elves, for whom death is "the gift of Illuvatar", for which they envy men.

Faced with such a fate, it is perhaps unsurprising that Silenus should seek refuge in liquor. Again, as Meis puts it:

Silenus is, after all, somewhere between dying and not dying. He is not fully immortal like Dionysus, he isn’t a true god, nor is he fully mortal like King Midas, since he must always exist in order to be the attendant of Dionysus as Dionysus is perennially born and then torn apart and then reborn and then torn apart again. And Silenus is also, we should mention again, extremely drunk in the painting. And one of the key aspects of being very drunk, as everyone knows, is that you are conscious without being all the way conscious. You are there without being all the way there. You are present while at the same being absent. You are moving around without going anywhere.

For C.S. Lewis, however, even Dionysus, though a god, is not the True God. He is a creature, created, not begotten, and it is only in Christ that both Dionysus and Silenus find true fulfilment. In Prince Caspian Silenus is still tipsy, and still falls off his donkey, but it is the tipsiness of revelling rather than the drunkenness of oblivion.

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The Color Purple (Book Review)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An epistolary novel.

It's set in the southern USA in the 1930s & 1940s. and is about the life of a poor black family there.

Celie is raped by her stepfather and has a couple of children who disappear. She is then more or less forced to marry a man, Albert ____, who doesn't love her and treats her badly. Celie is gay and doesn't love him. Initially the story is told in a series of letters she writes to God.

Celie's sister Nettie goes to Africa as an au pair with a couple of missionaries and their adopted children, and writes to Celie, with descriptions of what is happening in the place where they live. This, for me was the best part of the book, reminiscent, in a way, of The Poisonwood Bible. It describes how an overseas rubber plantation company dispossesses the local people, forcing them to move off their land, and destroys their way of life -- "expropriation without compensation" is the latest political buzz-phrase for that kind of thing. Though the book is set in the 1930s and 1940s, it is the kind of thing that could still happen in South Africa 80 years on.

Celie, however, doesn't at first receive her sister's letter, because her husband hides them, but nevertheless switches from writing to God to writing to her sister. Celie eventually leaves her husband, finds someone who loves her, and starts a business, but things go wrong again.

In many ways it is a very sad book, all about people's messed up relationships, and how they manage to cope with them. I also found it quite a complex book, and had to read the first few chapters again when I was halfway through, just to keep track of the characters' relationships.

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Travelling through southern Africa in the 19th & 21st Centuries

Footing with Sir Richard's Ghost by Patricia Glyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Patricia Glyn, having heard about the travels of her great grand uncle Sir Richard Glyn, decides to walk the trail of his 19th-century journey from Durban to the Victoria Falls. This is the diary of her journey, with excerpts from his diary, and notes on the places they passed through, and historical events that had taken place there.

Sir Richard Glyn and his English companion were that comparatively rare species of traveller, the British "sportsman", who came to Africa primarily to hunt animals for sport, and left with their trophies. Though comparatively rare, however, unlike most other travellers they kept comparatively good written records in the form of diaries, and so their travels are better documented than most.

The book was a toss-out from the Alkantrant Library, probably a donation from a deceased estate. I hope the reason that the library tossed it out was that they already had a copy, and not just that they didn't think they needed one because it would be a pity if this book were not available. Just as her relative's diary is a valuable account of how people travelled and lived in the 1860s, so hers is a record of how people travelled and lived in the same parts of the world in the early 21st century.

In the 1860s the travellers relied of paid local guides, accounts of other travellers, or local advice or knowledge. In the 21st century this was supplemented by cell- and satellite phones and more accurate maps.

One of the reasons I found it interesting was that in 2013 my wife Val and I went on a similar journey, following in the footsteps of her great-great-grandfather Fred Green, who travelled through much of the same region, and also that to the west, from the 1850s until his death in 1870. Unlike the Glyns, he was not a sportsman, but a professional hunter, trader and explorers, his main source of income being ivory for which he hunted and traded. Unlike Patricia Glyn, however, we did not walk, but drove by car, taking three weeks instead of five months.

The book is illustrated with photos and maps, and has side panels with historical and geographical notes drawn from a variety of sources, which are all listed in the copious bibliography.

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Rites of Spring

Rites of Spring by Anders de la Motte
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Scandinavian whodunit with a difference -- the protagonist isn't a boozy detective drinking himself to divorce and death.

Instead the protagonist is a doctor, Thea Lind, who goes to the small town in southern Sweden where her husband David had grown up. He goes back to start a restaurant, while Thea starts working at the local clinic. She soon discovers that there is a secret in the village that affects her husband David, something that happened on Walpurgis Night several years before. She gradually learns that the events back then had affected her husband when he was a child, and a young girl had been killed in a ceremony to mark the night.

The story moves back and forth between past and present, in a manner reminiscent of the books of Robert Goddard, and the past events are written in the past tense, which those in the story present are written in the present tense.

St Walpurgis Night (strictly St Walburga's Eve) is celebrated in Sweden and several other northern European countries to celebrate the canonisation of St Walburga, an 8th-century English missionary nun who worked in Germany. It took place on the night of 30 April, and her feast day was 1 May, which also marked the beginning of summer in Sweden. 

In the story some elements of English folklore have also been incorporated into the celebration, including the Green Man. The "green man" folklore has grown up around the foliate heads that appear in the decoration of churches in various parts of Europe, and in the story the Green Man is treated as a person who appeared on St Walpurgis Night, and the girl who was killed was enacting a rite of sacrifice to the Green Man.

The more Thea discovers about those past events, the more opposition she encounters from those who want to keep the secret, but Thea has secrets in her own past as well.

It's a gripping story and well written.

It also interested me in ways that go beyond this particular story, and that is the incorporation of motifs from folklore into the story, even quite recent folklore, such as that of the Green Man. I like writing such stories myself, and so I find it interesting to see how other writers do it.

The "Green Man" legend goes back about 85 years or so, and was originally applied to the names of pubs, which was then linked to the foliate heads found in churches, and a quite extensive folklore has developed around the linked symbols. 

The legend has been used and developed in several novels. I recently reviewed another novel, Wildwood, that also incorporated it. That was a so-called "young adult" (teenage) story, and each such story adds to the legend. A Facebook friend, who was a fellow student at university with me, recently posted an interesting article on Facebook linking it to the Arthurian story of the Green Knight and the Green Chapel.

While I haven't used this particular story in books I've written, one of my children's stories, The Enchanted Grove, incorporates creatures from Zulu folklore, while another, Cross Purposes has them from Russian and Mongolian folklore.

Rites of Spring doesn't incorporate anything from the life of St Walburga, but I looked it up anyway, and found that German Christians asked her to protect them from various diseases and witchcraft. That didn't seem to form any part of the Swedish celebrations, but then neither, apart from in this story, did the Green Man.

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Inside the Worm by Robert Swindells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A small town is celebrating the millennium of the martyrdom of their patron saint, St Ceridwen (is there a real St Ceridwen?), and so a weeklong festival is planned, culminating in a play on the life of the saint, who, in addition to dying as a martyr, had defeated a dragon that plagued the small village, not my killing it, but by banishing it to a fen.

The Year 8 pupils of the BottomTop Middle School are given the responsibility of producing the play, and Felicity "Fliss" Morgan is chosen to play the part of St Ceridwen, while her best friend Lisa Watmough is one of four children playing the dragon, whose costume they create out of whatever materials they can find.

Lisa is at first reluctant to take part, as she has a strange feeling that something bad will happen, but once she gets started she participates enthusiastically, and it's Fliss's turn to get worried as Lisa seems to change, and not in a nice way, and those who are acting the dragon's part seem to become too enthusiastic. The tension increases, until the day of the festival itself. 

I found this book particularly interesting because it is in more or less the same genre as children's books I have written -- intrusive fantasy, some have called it. So I was interested to see how the author handled dialogue and the relationships between the characters. It was comparable in that way to my published book The Enchanted Grove, and even more to one I'm still putting the finishing touches to, provisionally titled The Venn Conspiracy. I rather hope that one day soon the page for The Enchanted Grove on GoodReads will have books like Inside the Worm listed under "Readers also enjoyed...", but that wont happen until more people have reviewed it.

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How social networks undermine community and promote extremism

I don't know who coined the term "social media", but in its narrower sense of commercial web sites whose main purpose is to link people with "friends" and "followers", they are becoming increasingly contradictory. 

As Tano Santos and Luigi Zingales point out in their article How Big Tech Undermines Democracy

...social-media platforms purposely seek to undo local communities to maximize profits. The reason is that social-media companies profit from our digital relationships, but not from our “physical” relationships, those that take place in parks, coffee shops, book clubs, and the like. As a result, social media platforms see the physical relationships between people as competing with the digital relations they offer.

The advantage of social media, what makes them "social", is that they have the potential to facilitate communication between people who are separated by physical distance, either through geography or through such things as the Covid19 quarantine. But this potential is often not realised because of the very commercial interests cited in the article. This is like the effect of alcoholic liquor on sex; as Shakespeare notes in Macbeth, in stimulates the desire but takes away the performance.

As for how commercial social network platforms promote extremism, Santos and Zingales explain it thus:

The local nature of physical relationships forces us to compromise. When the pool of potential friends is limited, we can’t be too picky; we must accept what we can find. Being stuck with the locals, our only option is to improve the quality of our relationships. In a digital sphere, where we can instantaneously connect with the entire world, why should we invest energy in making the current match work? By searching a bit longer, we can find a better match. The quality of any specific relationship becomes less important when there is a large pool of readily available alternatives. It is quantity over quality. As a result, digital platforms create shallower relationships among like-minded individuals that are easy to make and easy to drop.

The emphasis on quantity over quality is exacerbated by the gamification embedded in the platform’s design, carefully curated to maximize engagement and the platform’s profits. The number of followers and likes is prominently featured. Thus, users end up maximizing the number of relationships, not their quality. As many others have noted, in a boundless virtual community, the best way to get attention is to be extreme, to radicalize your position, and even to attack others. In a physical community where people constantly interact face-to-face, it is difficult to dehumanize adversaries. Not so in virtual communities. Online people are just avatars like the ones we are used to shooting in video games. Online, we don’t live with the consequences of our actions when we offend others because we do not observe the pain we inflict on them. We only live with the benefits: more retweets, likes, and followers. This is why otherwise calm and lovely people transform into aggressive beasts online.

Commercial social media are also curated to exacerbate the silo effect. Like the concrete grain silos used for holding corn for loading on to trains or ships, users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now confusingly called X, so I'll continue to refer to it as Twitter), Instagram and TikTok are funnelled into silos insulated from those in other silos. 

One of the things that social media were initially good at was linking people to information. Twitter, for example, started off as a microblogging platform. One could not say much in a microblog, but it was very good for linking to longer articles that said more. A blog, after all, was a web log, a log and commentary on web sites visited that one thought might interest others. So many web sites made it easy to post links to them on social media platforms. If you think others will be interested in this, share it on your Twitter feed, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But what do the people who run those platforms do? They adjust their algorithms to ensure that such posts are shown to fewer people. They stimulate the desire, but take away the performance. They destroy the very thing that attracted people to their site in the first place. They don't want people clicking on links to other sites because they fear it will mean fewer eyeballs on ads. But the links are what keep people coming back to their site.

There are, however, some anomalous hangovers from the past, when the social media platforms were more user-oriented than they are now. Sometimes I retweet a link to an article I see on Twitter, and it asks "Do you want to read the article first?" That is a hangover from a time when they were trying to give the impression of being "socially responsible" and at least make it appear that they were trying to discourage users from retweeting clickbait articles that might be fake news. I quite often retweet articles I haven't read, however, because I don't have time to read them now, and want to read them later. 

One effect of this that I have noticed is that fewer and fewer people respond  to things I post on social media, so they aren't social at all. I have something over 1100 "followers" on Twitter, but if I post something only 10-30 people see it. The more important it is to me, the fewer the people who see it. And in most cases the people who do see it never respond. A post may occasionally get a "like" or two, but at least half these "likes" are from bots with fake names, no profile information, and no followers. If Twitter were a real social medium, then there would be social interaction, but there isn't. It is antisocial.

I'll put links to this article on Facebook and Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how many people see it at all, and, of those, how many interact with it in any way, by "liking", sharing, commenting etc. 

Again, Santos and Zingales explain this thus:

...digital [networks] are designed and regulated by the platform owner: They are centralized. The reason is that digital relationships are built and maintained in a space that is controlled by a platform, and this control confers the platform with the ownership of the relationship. We can’t take our X (formerly Twitter) followers with us to a different platform, nor can we access our followers without X’s permission, which can be withdrawn at any time without cause. In contrast, X can advertise to our followers and connect them with other followers. We don’t own our followers—X does.

Not only are most digital networks centralized, but they also have another motive to create and maintain the network: to monetize it. Their economic motives fuel their interest in undermining physical networks. All else being equal, customers are indifferent between a digital relationship and a physical one, but platforms aren’t. They profit from digital relationships but not physical ones. In their effort to subsidize digital relationships and undermine physical ones, these platforms are even willing to pay us to remain glued a little longer to the smartphone and not go to the bar with our friends.

Facebook is much the same. It is forever offering me new "people you may know", but there is very little interaction with people I already know. It doesn't show me what they post, and it doesn't show my stuff to them. Or perhaps it does, but they don't like it, and they don't like me, and if I knew what they really thought and they acted on what they really thought we would unfriend each other. So far from being a "social" medium, it promotes the feeling of:

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm.
First you bite their heads off, then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

I recently had a look at some of my Facebook "friends" that I hadn't heard from for a long time. Some had died, and their last posts were usually from other people saying that they had died, but Facebook never showed me those, so I didn't even know they had died. But if they had posted some trivia just before they died, Facebook would probably have been more likely to have shown me that. But posts with news of their death weren't monetised enough. 

Other friends had probably just dropped out because they found that having their relationships and friendships manipulated by the platform socially unrewarding. It increased the desire but took away the performance, and eventually they found the lack of performance unrewarding and left.

Back to the danger to democracy...

Once again, Santos and Zingales indicate that

Without information, political participation dwindles, and vested interests have an easy time capturing local administrations because most people don’t vote or don’t vote in an informed way. A captured democracy functions poorly, reducing incentives to participate and the trust in the democratic process. If, as Tocqueville hypothesized, local communities are the gymnasium of democracy, then these trends do not affect just local administrations but also national ones.

State capture is not something peculiar to South Africa, though the Gupta affair was a good example of how vested interests can manipulate social media to undermine democracy. 

But it can also work the other way, as we have recently seen when the Western "mainstream" media were captured to channel Israeli government agitprop after 7 October 2023 (and probably before that as well), social media platforms were used to keep alternative viewpoints alive. Even though social media platforms are manipulated, it is possible to some extent to find workarounds, though that requires a great deal of time and energy.

And back in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a lot of non-commercial social media platforms like BBS (Bulletin Board Service) networks, Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists that were not captured by vested interests. BBS networks, in particular, were run as a kind of private-enterprise socialism, email mailing lists still exist. If any of my friends would like to communicate online without the commercial manipulation, contact me through the OffTopic forum here.