Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

It is starting to look as though one of the basic elements of functional internet literacy is awareness of power law distributions.

These show up frequently in social patterns involving either markets with immiscible goods or social networks of any significant size, and the Internet frequently involves the intersection of both. (The "Long Tail" of Chris Anderson's book title refers to the low end of a power law distribution, for example.)

People who point to a few highly successful self-published authors on Amazon as evidence that self-publishing is a gateway to success are ignoring the realities of a power-law distribution, much as people who pointed to weblogs as a way to get a voice out were a decade ago when blogging was new.

What caught my attention this morning regarding this was a segment on Metro Morning regarding a study involving teens and their use of social media. The study itself was done by a group at Centennial College and I have no doubt that certain aspects of it -- pointing out a relatively widespread willingness to ignore privacy concerns when posting to social networks, for example, or identifying hashtags related to self-promotion on twitter -- are at least grounded in real research. (On the other hand, their methodology page does not fill me with a great deal of confidence in their rigor, relating at least three "exploratory" (I assume = "focus") groups and "hundreds – possibly thousands - of hours combing social media sites, watching GIFs, decoding hashtags and generally documenting the trajectories of young people’s social identity exploration". I see no signs of mathematical rigor.)

But when I heard the author -- Debbie Gordon -- talk about some teens having hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, my immediate reaction was: "that has to be a power-law effect" -- popularity figures in a network environment are always power laws unless there's some significant constraint on them. Tails drop off rapidly in a power law distribution, and citing a few high figures does not provide a representative study.

(Even citing averages is misleading. I took the most-recently added ninety books on my LibraryThing account and then graphed them by number of members listing them. These formed a classic power curve, with a maximum value of 12,553, a minimum of 1, and an arithmetic mean of 822.833. However, 72 of the 90 books fell below the arithmetic mean, 54 were below half the mean (411), and the median was 199.5. 30 fell below 100.)

The numeric citations moved the interview from a "vaguely interesting" category into a "this is another one of those alarmist stories about how youth are going to hell in a handbasket that I've been hearing ever since I was young (when the stories bore no relation to anyone I knew)".

There have been a number of interesting discussions about how the young are adjusting to living in a panopticon society and how their values on privacy are not those of older generations. (Well, older living generations; the thegns of an Anglo-Saxon hall also had different privacy expectations, as did the inhabitants of a 16th century village.) This does not sound like a serious contribution to that discussion.

(I was going to post something about Robert A. Heinlein generally, but then I realized that I had nothing to say that had not been said, one way or another, multiple times on Usenet and in the blogosphere.  I'm not sure there is anything left to say that hasn't been said.  So here's this, instead.)

In recent fannish discussions, the idea that (say, or for example) Heinlein's work has shifted from being accessible to being of "historical interest" only, at least for new or younger readers.  There's been some argument about it, but I think there's a general consensus in some quarters that (in particular) the Heinlein juveniles do not now consitute an accesible gateway into SF in the way that they used to.  Some people take the view of "after all, they're sixty years old by now" as a simple explanation.

As a completely separate datapoint, I have occasionally seen people writing about their reading experiences saying that (at least in general) works with what would have been a typical level of gender or racial inequality taken for granted make them "bounce off" -- in effect, that with a few exceptions, they don't enjoy reading anything older than the 1980s.

For other readers, older-style omniscient narratorial voices seem to be a barrier.

Some books which had held on as cultural standards for a very long time indeed have dropped off the map in the past generation or so.  John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Walter Scott were omnipresent (and actually read) up to the time of my childhood; I don't think that this is true any longer.

In the preface to The Anathemata, David Jones refers to "the Break", a perceived gap between the culture post-WWI (not necessarily identifying the war itself as the (only) cause of the Break) visible as early as the 1920s.  In that case, this seems not to have consituted a barrier to reading works from the earlier civilization, but more a sense of being deracinated from the preceding age.

I wonder whether we have passed over, or are in the process of passing over, a slightly different kind of break.

In general, historically, literary works do not simply "age".  Better (and sometimes second-rank) works tend to hang around and remain accessible, although fashions in taste may vary.  (I was happily reading John Buchan novels in the 1970s, when they were about as far away in time as Heinlein's Juveniles are now.) Sometimes, however, whole blocks of read experience drop out in a relatively quick period of time.

It has happened before.

Consider the mediaeval prose romance.[1] These were tremendously popular for centuries: and then, quite suddenly, they go "poof".  Major examples include the Prose Lancelot (13th century), Amadis of Gaul (early 14th century), Palmerin of England (16th century), and the Sidneys' Arcadia (late 16th century).

A typical English-speaking reader who is not a mediaevalist will encounter only works which are spin-offs or parodies of the form.  Malory (late 15th century) uses the prose romances -- he relies heavily on the Prose Lancelot, for example -- but he modifies and simplifies the form of the narratives so that Le Morte d'Arthur is really a cousin, or maybe a child, of the prose Romance rather than an example of it.  Don Quixote and (in a different mode) The Knight of the Burning Pestle are both parodies / critiques of the form.

There's very little continuity between these works and the narratives that follow.  The picaresque narrative (beginning in the 16th century with Lazarillo de Tormes) plays off the romance form in its origins.  The form itself just vanishes; people stopped being interested. (Even Malory is not reprinted between 1634 and 1816.)

The prose romance did not die out simply as a result of changing literary fashion; it was sandbagged by a general cultural shift which included a revolt against anything viewed as "gothic" (a term of disdain until the Romantics and Victorians came along) and in fvaour of classicism. The Seventeenth Century in England produces no major romance, verse or prose; it does produce an epic.

We have clearly not crossed over any general line involving the eclipse of a formal type: the novel, literary and popular, is still going strong.  (Insofar as there was a formal gap, it lies between about 1900 and 1925 and involves narratorial technique.)  We have seen the relative eclipse of the Western as a form post-Louis L'Amour.

If we have crossed over a significant gap, then it's arguable that instead of being a separate discontinuity it's "merely" a second stage of the Break that Jones refers to -- that we're at another step of a single century-long shift in values which is now making even the relatively recent past a very distant country, at least to those who were born after a certain point in time.

There's a ton of non-literary markers; the biggest and most obvious one has been the shift in accepted gender roles since the mid-60's. The role of the classics as a reference point has been eclipesd: when my father graduated from High School, Latin was required to get into university in any non-science stream; I and both my siblings have some classical language background, but it was not mandatory at the end of high school; none of my nephews and nieces have any Latin or Greek. The social changes following on (in succession) the introduction of television, home computers, the general availability of the Internet, and portable computing have a role to play, and are by no means anywhere near final yet. An increasing awareness of the concerns of indigenous peoples has to be one of the reasons for the decline of the conventional Western.  A general rise in affluence during the 20th Century (even if that rise has slowed or stalled in the very recent past) has meant a radical change in living conditions for most people in the Western world (and the developing world has changed as well, although not in quite the same way or at the same pace).  Better medical and public health factors have lengthened life expectancies.

So maybe its not a surprise that people born in, say, the past twenty-five years (it's been about that long since the collapse of the Soviet Union) lie in a different enough world that their reading responses will reflect it in a broad-based way. There will still be outliers, of course, (and even a reasonable number of them) who will happily read golden age SF or Scott/Stevenson/Haggard, and those authors will stay in print (Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles is still in print, but I don't think it has a wide readership).[2]

[1]As distinct from the equally popular verse romance.  These also went out of style, but earlier: their arc runs from the Roman d'Eneas (12th century), through Sir Orfeo (13th-14th century), to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century).  If you are willing to follow the arc that (covering the Matter of France) runs from middle French romances through Boiardo and Ariosto to  Spenser, you can make an argument that The Faerie Queene is a late example, but you would have to push it.  Ariosto really represents its last flourishing as a tour-de-force.

[2]To be fair, Scott, at least, is important and good enough to be in a more permanent category in any case, at worst like Sterne, who has "lasted", pace Dr. Johnson, for more than two centuries.  But he's no longer the popular author he was a relatively short time ago.

Everything that can be said has probably been said about OSC's butchered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H retold version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.  However, the discussion reminded me of something: the Hamlet story goes back a long way and has some odd extensions (consider non-fiction works like Hamlet's Mill).  One of its tendrils was a retelling by James Branch Cabell which went back far more closely to the original: Hamlet Had An Uncle. (The link goes to a Google Books partial preview of the print-only Wildside Press edition.)

It is very Cabellian in style: "Hamlet was that son whom the loving endeavors of Geruth and Fengon had begotten in the bed of Horvendile[1][2] They tell of yellow-haired big Hamlet how inexpressibly was his conduct adapted to distress his parents". It is also very much more, um, early Germanic in plot and structure: the obvious parallel to draw as a modern retelling is Tolkien's The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrun (although that is verse and this is prose).

[1] In this story Hamlet's father regains his traditional name of Horvendile (Danish) == Earendel (A/S) == the evening star. Yes, it's where Cabell got the name of the Poictesme character.

[2] Note that in this older variant of the story Hamlet is Fengon's (=Claudius') son, although he believes himself to be Horvendile's.

The rules: Grab the closest book to you. Go to page 56. Copy the 5th sentence as your status.

The first book I had to hand had the entire 56th page taken up by a map, with no sentences (or indeed phrases) at all.

From the second:

"The cart would arrive in Rouen, bearing his marble or his clay, his new furnace or his fuel; and in the false bottom lay the quires, ready to drop by grille and chute straight into the cellars while the cart stood, innocently unloading, in the inner courtyard."

I spent much of the long weekend seeing the PLS production of the Chester Cycle at Victoria College.

It's not the first time I've seen it -- I also attended the 1983 performance of the cycle (just after I finished graduate school -- it was the weekend after I got back up to Toronto).  (I think I've seen all of the major productions with the exception of Castle of Perseveraunce and the 1977 York Cycle; I've also been in two of the cycles since -- the Towneley Cycle in 1985 and the second York performance in 1998).

It was a pleasant experience; I managed to get in all of the plays.  I did find that sometimes the modernizaed texts were a little grating -- for example, frequent line-ending use of "everyone" which dropped a syllable from "everichon", or rhymes which have drifted out of kilter -- but it would have been too difficult to have the authentic texts done.

From Chester Cycle

This is the Adam and Eve, showing the balcony model which reflects the use of the building balconies on the route in mediaeval Chester.

I also picked up a copy of Le Mystère d'Adam from a mini-Vic Book Sale which seems to have belonged to David Parry.

I was irritated into this by a bit of slow news which has been replicated across various outlets: a typical example is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6680422/Traditional-carols-are-nonsense-says-bishop.html .

This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.

Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.

First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.

Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.

Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.

For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.

Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.

When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.

There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.

It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even their most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a variety of perspectives on our own understanding.

This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.

We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin), the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.

I went to see this at the COC last night.  A few scattered thoughts, as opposed to a full review:

The way in which Britten restructures the play for the opera removes the Athenian frame from the forest; so that instead of the "green world" being a departure from the norm, it is an implicit norm with the Athenian bit - reduced to the play and the fairies' blessing - as a coda.  There's odd references to the Athenian laws and one reference by Theseus to the father, but basically the opera depends on the viewer knowing the play to make sense of the plot involving the couples.

Similarly, the parallels between the actors and the fairies (shadows both) is downplayed. In many ways MSD is an extended meditation in a comic mode on Romeo and Juliet as a play - an expansion of the Queen Mab speech, a parody play of Pyramus and Thisbe, a different sort of family feud, made up more amicably, a continual framing of actions as acted or staged; an arbitrary reversibility of falling in love.  This aspect is largely lost in the opera, except in the play-within-a-play which does meta-parody of Italian opera.

As a rule my tastes in opera are nonstandard - baroque opera, and Mozart, with a jump over the 19th century and then various bits of 20th century opera (Dialogues des Carmelites, Ricard Strauss, Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love). I liked the Britten, with its resolute avoidance of show-stopping arias and its use of music to provide a continuous texture for the action.

It is also interesting to note how Britten's use of Puck as an acrobat -- inspired, I gather, by some Swedish acrobats -- anticipates the Peter Brook staging of the play.

This Geoffrey Simpson article notes that a family possessing a dictionary (or not) is a better indicator of whether children will go to University than income level.  Wouldn't possessing a copy of Fowler be a better indicator still?

(Disclaimer: I have both The King's English and (the second edition of) Modern English Usage, as well as the original Fowler-edited Concise Oxford Dictionary.)