Dogfights

Saturday, October 28th was the second consecutive day of high winds, rain, and heavy cloud, dreadful weather that grounded much of the RFC on the Somme. Undaunted, 24 attempted two patrols that day. Returning from a solo OP that morning, Saundby, whose engine was giving him trouble, fought a west wind so strong he could barely make headway against it. Low on fuel, he landed at Morlancourt, home to No. 9 Squadron. After refueling and some repairs, he clawed his way the remaining twenty miles west to Bertangles, arriving late but intact, no doubt much to relief of his squadron mates.  The weather had hardly improved by 3 PM, when McKay and Knight alighted in the rain on a defensive patrol. High winds, dense cloud cover and what Knight described as intermittent “gales and storms” led another pilot to think them “impertinent” for flying at all. Worse still, McKay’s engine was acting up, and he had already returned to the aerodrome once with a dud engine to switch machines. Buffeted by wind, rain, and sleet, he had a horrid flight through frigid grey skies over a devastated grey landscape, nursing his engine, sputtering along at 7000 feet, 1500 below and behind Knight, unable to climb higher. Beneath them, the armies hunkered down in their waterlogged trenches, wearily and grimly bracing themselves for the denouement of the Somme battle. 

By 3:40 PM, McKay and Knight reached the town of Pozieres. In July and August twenty-three thousand Australians had been killed or wounded wresting the town and its adjacent ridge from the Germans in a series of violently contest assaults. Now it lay in shell-pocked ruins.  On the two Canadians pressed, flying through cloud and rain. Then, peering into the distance, McKay spotted a single German machine, well below them to the north. It was a tempting target, but experienced pilots knew that this sort of thing was often a trap, designed to lure reckless newcomers into formations of scouts lurking at high altitudes. Scanning the sky above, McKay saw them between the clouds: nearly an entire squadron at 10,000 feet. “Halberstadter and brown scouts,” he called them in the squadron record book, but they were in fact the new Albatros fighters, faster than the DH.2 and mounting twice its firepower. Knight had seen them, too. Probably both men had guessed their identity. This was 24’s arch-nemesis, Jagdstaffel Zwei, and after five minutes of pursuit, half a dozen of them, led by Oswald Boelcke himself, slipped to the side and came screaming down upon them. 

From Eddie: The Life and Times of A.E. McKay, Royal Flying Corps (in process)

Excerpts

On the 14th of March 1917, Eddie McKay departed 24 Squadron for the last time. The squadron’s aerodromes had been his home and its pilots his family for nine months. Now he was the last — the very last — of that ‘fellowship of famous knights’ who had stormed the skies above the Somme when the great battle began in July. He still languished as 2nd lieutenant, undecorated, with a solid but undistinguished four victories to his name, and the Boelcke story probably starting to become a bit threadbare in the mess. But he was alive. ‘Lithe’ Eddie McKay, ‘cool headed’ Eddie McKay, ‘quick and scrappy’ Eddie McKay, never happier than on the rugby pitch, boring in with heart alone against bigger men and bringing them down. He was alive. Gray, Wigglesworth, Evans, Mansfield, Gooderich, Langan Byrne, Crawford, Begg, Glew, Wilson, Holtom, Knight, and Lewis were not. And Hawker was not. McKay left. England and the Home Establishment beckoned.
    The next day, his replacement, nineteen year old 2nd lieutenant James Kenneth Ross of Crouch End, a comfortable middle class suburb in the north of London, arrived fresh from No. 6 Reserve Training Squadron to take his place in the roster of “A” Flight. He was dead in twenty days.

from The Life and Times of Eddie McKay, Royal Flying Corps (in process)

Sequels

Invariably are a disappointment, the last refuge of the creatively dead. Some are worse than that even – more like forms of vandalism against our hopes and dreams. Lucky for me that Measure of Doubt never embodied anyone’s hopes and dreams, so there’s no chance of that.

But I do take a certain sense of pride in the first one hundred. I work in a profession where writing badly on obscure topics published in journals that nobody reads is considered the gold standard of excellence (if you don’t believe me, try making your way through an issue of the Canadian Historical Review some time – seriously, I dare you) so the blog served as an important outlet for me, and I look back on the one hundred with some satisfaction. I worry about sullying it with another fourteen or so, spread out over two-and-a-half years, gradually petering out.  On the other hand, I have a great deal to complain about, not least of all because Christmas is just over six months away...

Another hundred, shall we? Look for the first one tomorrow.

Horror

Bad news. For some reason, the dead have risen. All of them. They are now shambling about in search of human flesh and their bite turns their victims into more zombies. They can only be killed by destroying their brain. Brains do their thing because they’re part of a nervous system and fed by a circulatory system, but massive bodily trauma doesn’t stop zombies. Pretty much any poke to the noggin will, though. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, bash ‘em in the head, they go down like bowling pins. The trouble is that there’s too many of them. So, the few survivors of this zombie plague are now huddled together in boarded up buildings, fighting to survive as their food and supplies run low and as internal dissent rises – there’s always one asshole ready to screw things up, isn’t there?

This was the premise of a grim, grimy, grisly and really rather seedy 1968 horror film called Night of the Living Dead, and one think that that would be it, really. What else is there to say? The sequel, where the zombies shamble amok in a shopping mall, nearly indistinguishable from Christmas shoppers, provokes, I will admit, a slight crack at the corner of one’s mouth, but this supposed “social commentary” is just a veneer to conceal the real plot of the film, which is running from zombies. And the exact premise has been retold in literally dozens of films now, including quite pointless remakes of both Night of the Living Dead and its sequel, and in a small avalanche books (including at least one best-seller, World War Z, by Max Brooks), and, of course, in video games, where zombies have become the necrotic analogue to Space Invaders. You keep shooting them. They keep coming. Repeat.

Recently some students commended to my attention a new TV series entitled The Walking Dead. Reading up on it a bit I heard it hailed as as being the very zenith of the zombie drama. This is not the highest accolade, of course, but I did take note of the fact that the show is airing on AMC, the network that brought us two masterpieces of modern television: Mad Men, about 1950s-era advertising agents on the cusp of becoming dinosaurs amidst the social turmoil of the 1960s; and Breaking Bad, about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer in order to provide for his family after he’s gone. I watched some of it and thought that, as zombie television shows go, it was eminently satisfactory, and will be loved by people who love that sort of thing. The producers might want to be careful how they promote their program, though.

The alleged “source material” — as if it needs any — for The Walking Dead is an utterly depraved “graphic novel” (that’s a comic book with sex and swearing) of the same name. I dipped my toe long enough into those waters to wish I hadn’t. A few selective readings revealed, among the usual zombie mayhem, decapitated children, vividly portrayed gang-rapes, and a woman shot through the chest with a shotgun while clutching her baby. They die in a spray of blood and body bits. If you meet people who like this sort of thing, I recommend that you take a step in the opposite direction. The comic's creators offer up the defense that this sort of thing goes on in reality anyway. Okay, granted. The horror genre is about the fear of death. But this isn’t about fearing death - it’s about making pornography out of it.

Zombies seem to be the next big thing in horror, perhaps because nearly all of the vampires have forsaken evil in favour of bedding teenage girls instead. You need only visit the “teen” section of the bookstore to see what I mean. Publishers have apparently given up on trying to get boys to read at all (well, somebody has to vote for the Tea Party) while for girls the teenage girl-meets-vampire-classmate genre has resulted in an avalanche of titles on the bookshelves. I’ve complained elsewhere that I invented this genre in 1986 and won’t renew this complaint here.

Anyway, in any other context, the efforts of a very elderly man to have sex with borderline or flat-out underage females would be called statutory rape or worse. (Edward is 98, Bella is 17; Angel is 240, Buffy is 16; Bill is 140, Sooki is, about 20, I guess.) Now add to it the fact that he is not merely elderly but, according to the genre’s own lore, deceased, and moreover almost invariably trembles on the brink of ripping her apart and eating her, and we have something else entirely. Let’s call it sadocanabalistic necro-adolescent-philia shall we? Something for the DSM V, as apparently millions of teenage girls have it.

Is there nothing new under the horror-genre sun? I am tired of vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves, ghosts, science-experiment run-amok monsters, and, above all, the slasher film, where people, usually teenagers, get butchered by a mask-wearing psycho because they act as if the live in a world where they don't have slasher movies. So I admit that I am curious about this, Rubber. It's a movie about a tire that comes to life and starts killing people. And I hereby claim copyright to the genre of teenagers falling in love with tires that come to life and start killing people.

Spartacus

Many readers, no doubt, are familiar with the hit TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, about the famous Roman-era gladiator. This is the greatest show ever made in the history of the world. It has no need for such bourgeois banalities as “plot” or “scripts.” Instead, it has full-frontal nudity, graphic sex, decapitations, and nonstop virtuoso swearing that would make a Marine Corps drill sergeant blush like a home-schooled teenager given her first valentine. And abs.

Spartacus is set at a time when Western Civilization was in its infancy, and made as if it died there in the cradle. The first six episodes consisted of Spartacus chopping heads off while bellowing, “I must find my wife!” When he found his wife, and she was dead, he spent the next six episodes chopping heads off and bellowing, “I miss my wife!” I realize that readers who have not seen the show may be baffled by the byzantine nature of its storyline, but try to keep up nonetheless.

Longtime friends can confirm that my real talents, such as they are, lie in the realm of fiction rather than non-fiction writing. As proof, I offer my own script for a new episode of Spartacus, which I humbly submit for consideration to the producers of series. As this is a family blog, I have omitted all swearing, though you should feel free to imagine certain four and twelve-letter swearwords sprinkled liberally throughout.

--------------

Exterior, Gladiator training school. Enter SPARTACUS and his six-pack abs. The sun reflects off them, blinding several stage hands.

SPARTACUS

“I need a new wife!”

Enter BATIATUS, his master, having sex with a slave.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring DISHONOR on the House of Batiatus!”

Enter CRIXUS, another gladiator, preceded by his abs.

CRIXUS

“I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA!”

SPARTACUS

“No, I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA! Still, you think maybe a Gaul like you and a guy like me..."

CRIXUS attacks. They fight, making a point to hit each others’ swords. A tidal wave of blood knocks everyone off their feet. They are about to resume fighting when DOCTORE, the gladiator trainer, appears and cracks his whip.

DOCTORE

“You can’t fight in here! This is the gladiator school! Ah...Ah...get it? Get it? Plus it’s a Kubrick reference, from Dr. Strangelove. But he also directed the movie version of Spartacus. You see, what I’m doing is subverting your expectations by inserting a metafictional reference, and...er...ah...come on, people. Work with me. You can win independent film awards for this sort of thing.”

Enter XENA, naked, with an entourage of NAKED SLAVES in tow.

XENA

“My husband, could you have Crixus brought naked to my room? Make sure he’s spritzed with a thin but glistening sheen of oil.”

BATIATUS

“Certainly, my dear wife. My goodness, how you two seem to be getting on well these days. No doubt you’ll have an enjoyable conversation or something. Anyhoo, I’m off to the market for precisely the amount of time it would take for you to have sex with a gladiator, if you were doing that behind my back, which you’re not, of course. Ciao.”

SPARTACUS (from below)

“While you’re at the market, can you find me a wife? I really need one. Seriously.You have no idea.”

Commercial.

Interior of BATIATUS’S digs. BATIATUS sits at his desk, writing a love poem for his wife, XENA. XENA and CRIXUS can be heard GRUNTING and MOANING and SIGHING and POUNDING THE WALLS in the next room. This goes on for twenty minutes. Enter SPARTACUS, with little frowney faces drawn on each of his abs. When he flexes, they become smiley faces.

BATIATUS (shouting over the noise coming from the bedroom)

“Ah, Spartacus. Your presence brings GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Now pack your things. You’re fighting a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS in the arena this afternoon. I must warn you. No ONE has EVER defeated the TEN FOOT NINJA with FOUR ARMS. There’s nothing I can do. I owe the man a dollar fifty.”

SPARTACUS

“Is he looking for a good husband?”

Commercial.

Exterior of arena. By which I mean interior of arena. The part of the arena that’s interior to the physical structure but actually is open to the air. You know what I mean. Thousands of HALF NAKED ROMANS await the arrival of SPARTACUS. They pass the time by the doing the wave. BATIATUS watches from his private booth. An IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN is there. XENA and CRIXUS are making out in the back row.

IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN

“Oooo how I totally hate that Spartacus. And why do all Romans have British accents?”

BATIATUS

“Spartacus may yet bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Or GREAT DISHONOUR. Or, his effect might be more-or-less neutral in terms of its impact on the relative honour standing of the House of Batiatus. There’s no way of knowing without an objective consideration of his win-loss record over the course of the gladiatorial season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, entering the arena. He is BUCK NAKED except that he is carrying a sword in each hand and is also holding a shield. Don’t ask how. The CROWD begins to chant his name.

SPARTACUS

“I am SPARTACUS! Are any of you ladies single?”’

ENTER a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS. He is carrying a sword, an axe, a spear, and an atom bomb. He and SPARTACUS fight. They make sounds such as “ARAAGH” and “OOOGHA” and “BLAGH” and say such things as “Hey! Careful there!” SPARTACUS is slashed across the chest, arms, legs, and nearly gets his shield-holder taken off. His hair is ripped out. His teeth are smashed in. He loses both eyes and has to put them back in to see, but he puts them in BACKWARDS and sees everything upside down. One of his six abs gets removed with a cake-lifter. He is finished off with a horrendous noogie. Spartacus collapses all dirty and sweaty. Four men throw buckets of blood on the camera. The NINJA pauses for a few hours to GLOAT.

Cut to: SPARTACUS, having a vision of his WIFE, who is named MILDRED.

MILDRED

“Is that the best you can do? Typical. You never could keep it up. What will the neighbours think? And you never help around the house. I should have listened to my mother and married a doctor.”

SPARTACUS

“I want my wife!”

MILDRED

“Not now. I have a headache. And If you think I’m washing your loin-cloths later, you’ve got another thing coming, mister. Anyway, get up and kill this Ninja. Get that promotion you’re always bragging about.”

SPARTACUS

“But why?”

MILDRED

“Because everyone wants to see you have sex with Xena next season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, raising both his swords and his shield. The NINJA goes to finish him off but stubs his toe. While he’s hopping around on one leg, saying “Ow! Ow! Ow!”, SPARTACUS cuts it off. Then his other leg, his ears, and each one of his fingers in turn. Then his arms, which SPARTACUS uses to wail on the NINJA for about half an hour. A thousand-gallon drum of blood is thrown at the camera. Finally, SPARTACUS chops off the NINJA’S head and punts it for twenty-five yard field goal. The CROWD goes WILD.

SPARTACUS

“That one’s for the ladies!”

Cut to BATIATUS, who is being jostled by XENA and CRIXUS who are rolling about the booth naked in a sweaty embrace.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus!”

SPARTACUS

“So you’re saying you find me attractive?”

Fin.

Next week on Spartacus: SPARTACUS searches a mail-order tablet for a wife. BATIATUS accuses him of dishonouring the House of Batiatus, and condemns him to fight a BRONTOSAURUS. The IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN tries to frame SPARTACUS for tax evasion. Everyone has sex while DOCTORE throws buckets of blood around. XENA and CRIXUS continue their secret affair.

Poetry

Things were getting a bit serious here on Measure of Doubt, so I thought I'd inject a measure of levity with a blast-from-the-past, a peek into the mind of your author at age 15 (nearly 16), by posting my winning entry in the 1986 A.B. Lucas Secondary School Bad Poetry Contest. (A portrait of the artist as a young man is on the left.) All hail Mr. Watson, our enormously creative and patient Grade 11 Enriched English teacher.

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Rabid Rabbits, Or How Cam the Cannibal Learned to Make Rabbit Stew of Squirrels

Pretty soon there will be lots of rabbits around
Due to their natural multiplicative predilections
(That's how much they screw around
When showing their affections.)

Like a small furry floppy-eared herbivore
Rabbits boldly go where no man has gone before
Except other small furry floppy-eared herbivores
Which aren't really men anyway come to think of it

Clubbing a rabbit to death
Mercilessly with a carrot
The hunter shows his true colours
The way grapes do when you peel off the skin

Fortunately a hunting warden
Arrives to save the day
And clubs the hunter to death
With a baby seal
And eats him up, like breaded veal

It's not so bad being a cannibal
A pound of flesh
Provides more essential vitamins
Than good old fashioned oatmeal

Suddenly – from the door
Comes a loud banging noise
Rabbits lined up four by four
Like great big soldiers, only small like toys

Armed with guns and bombs and tanks and thermonuclear fusion weapons
The rabbits charge
Like a bull at the sight of a red flag
Like a football player at the sound of "hut"
Like a hell of a lot of rabbits trying to get inside a house

The warden makes a run for it
A brook is in his way
It's one small step for a man
But one hell of a leap for a bunny rabbit
This was his chance to get away!

Though he runs faster than a speeding bullet
With the agility of a Chinese acrobat
With the stealth of a real quiet person
Soon the rabbits are upon him

But here's a blessing in disguise!
These rabbits are really squirrels inside!
"Why go after me anyway? I saved you from
that hunter, just today!"

"True," at last, the squirrels confess
"But what's up, doc? With this puzzling mess:
How many roads must a man walk down?
Until he feels the thrill of victory?
Or the agony of the feet?"
-------------------

Postscript:

Alas, so much high school writing was lost when my Commodore 64 and all its floppy disks went the way of yesterday's newspaper — literally into the garbage — when my parents moved in 1995. Whole volumes of poetry, short stories, a radio play, "movie" screenplays, scraps of unfinished novels, countless essays...my own personal Library of Alexandria, hauled to the curb with empty bottles of Cheez Whiz and old copies of National Geographic. A little part of me dies to think of it.

Longtime friends can confirm that, for the same course for which I composed the Award Winning Bad Poem above, I wrote a full-length novel as some sort of project. I have no idea why I went to such extremes, though I should note that I was not the only one: my friend Dave Seguin wrote a longer and much better novel the same year. Looking back, it was fun, and certainly a more imaginative use of a teenage brain than the average 15 hour-per-week foray into hyper-violent video gaming that is the norm for male teenagers today. (And they wonder why boys are falling behind in school.)

Anyway, last week, I happened across the novel while searching for this poem. Having spent an hour or so with it, I can confirm the following: 1) It is so very bad that no power on this earth can compel me to show so much as a single sentence of it ever again. 2) It is slightly better than Twilight. 3) I received a mark of 85. Can I say that again? I received a mark of 85. For a freaking novel I wrote in grade 11. Today parents call to complain if their kids get below 90 for successfully completing a text message while driving. 4) The teacher’s comments were brief but, I recall, filled me with joy. “A Michael J. Fox screenplay for sure.”

Well, it was the Eighties.

Twilight

People who make a living by writing fiction are as rare as rock stars. One study found that the average novelist in the United States makes less than $10,000 per year from his or her writing - and that’s before taxes, the cut his or her agent takes, the cost of doing business, etc. So kudos to Stephanie Meyer for selling cargo ships full of books and for making a fortune from the sweat of her creative brow. It’s not for me to begrudge her, personally, for writing something that millions and millions of people adore. I hope that, before it’s all over, she makes a hundred trillion dollars. I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity if I could. That’s right, faithful readers of Measure of Doubt, your noble author would sell out in a second, if he could. The trouble is that nobody wants him to.

It might have been different. Longtime friends can confirm the following facts. Aged 16, in the 11th grade, I wrote a full-blown novel: 120 single-spaced pages. A sequel followed that summer (90 single-spaced pages). I have retained a hard copy of them but have not looked at them in years. The first novel concerned a high school girl who discovers that she’s a wizard. Or whatever a female wizard is called. The geekiest guy in school turns out to be a great warrior (ahem) and the two of them set off to foil the plans of an evil Dark Lord who killed the girl’s ancestors and who has now returned for her. I kid you not. And there was a giant named Hagrid. Okay, now I’m kidding you. Anyway, the sequel involves the girl falling in love with a boy at school who turns out to be a vampire. I also kid you not. His name was Edward. I am still not kidding you. The main difference is that my Edward was evil, whereas Meyer’s is merely boring. In fact, you could have a more interesting time having a conversation with his plastic doppelganger, pictured above.

Yes, I actually read Twilight. I did. There it was, staring at me in the used bookstore and I decided that it was time. Bearing in mind, once again, that I would never begrudge Stephanie Meyer for her success, allow me to say the following: Twilight is a piece of crap. It is not so much a work of literature as it is a work of typing. The plot is unoriginal; the writing is banal; the dialogue never rises above cliche; the characters, even the vampires, are entirely uninteresting; and nothing happens. The book goes on and on and nothing happens. Chapter One: nothing. Chapter Two: nothing. Chapter Three: nothing. (I think you see where I'm going with this.) Even the climactic fight scene doesn’t happen, because the central character mercifully loses consciousness (I was tempted to myself, at that point), thus sparing everyone the agony of reading Meyer, who has probably never even hit a golf ball, trying to write action. And the most preposterous thing about the book is not that there are teenage vampires, but that these teenage vampires spend decade after decade in high school without ever once deciding that, that’s it, I can’t take this crap anymore, I’m sucking this place dry.

Why is it popular with certain audiences? Why have millions and millions of young people fallen in love with it? I’ve heard all kinds of psychological gobbledygook about this (e.g. “At this point in their lives blah blah blah when they are exploring their blah blah blah teenage girls especially need blah blah blah and to vicariously resolve the tension that blah blah blah” - thanks, doc, where did you mail order your PhD from?) but the bottom line is this: if you’ve only ever eaten at McDonald’s, you’ll hate the first real food you eat. In short, teens eat it up because they don’t know any better.

And this, in turn, leads me to the point that I want to make. Schooling is only part of a young person’s education, and is not, in the overall scheme of things, the most significant one. University professors argue about students today – whether the student body as a whole is getting better or getting worse and others arguing you can't compare apples to oranges. Whatever the case may be, it is demonstrably true that many university students in arts and social science programs today read less than they did in past generations. Nothing is more detrimental to their education than this, and, in all likelihood, it’s too late to do much about it once they’ve reached second or third year university. We create lifelong readers — and hence lifelong learners — from a young age or probably not at all.

I count myself as fortunate (and I know that at least one of my readers was similarly blessed), to have had parents who took the time to read to me, and later to encourage me to read by furnishing me with books by the likes of Roald Dahl and C.S. Forrester and Jules Verne. Some people say that Stephanie Meyer and her ilk are “at least getting kids to read” as if Twlight were some sort of gateway drug. Today, teenage vampires; tomorrow, Anna Karenina. Maybe. Or it might be that the opposite is true: that people raised on salt and grease and Coca Cola will just seek out more of the same and get fatter and lazier as life goes on.

Any professor will confirm that the most common criticism we receive from students is this one: “It’s boring.” The readings, the lectures, the discussions, the professor him or herself. Boring. No wonder. If Stephanie Meyer is the extent of your literary horizon; if your idea of a great film is anything starring Adam Sandler; if your musical tastes extend no further than Susan Boyle; if your most significant artistic experience to date was winning Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it will be difficult to understand that many of the cultural experiences worth having in life are not always or immediately gratifying. On the contrary: they are supposed to difficult, they are supposed to demand something of us, and they are supposed to change us by destabilizing our worldview.

Oh, we all need diverting entertainment, of course. It helps, though, if the entertainment is actually diverting, as opposed to time-wasting. And my comparison between Twilight and McDonald’s was not entirely fair. McDonald’s serves reliable french-fries. Twilight has nothing to recommend it except to serve as a rare example of a case where the movie, dreadful though it was, was actually far better than the book.

Blogging

I like to claim that I live without bigotry, but in fact I harbour a secret prejudice. I loathe opinion columnists, those hacks who get paid to spew at the mouth two or three times a month on issues about which they have no expertise. As a professor of history, I consider it my very great responsibility to get my facts straight before lecturing to my thirty or so students every week, but there are opinion columnists who make a living by pontificating to tens of thousands without, as near as I can tell, giving a moment’s consideration to what they’re saying. Indeed, there are certain well-known columnists who I read with great devotion - not because I like them, but because it has the same appeal as a horrific and bloody roadside car wreck: can’t look at it, can’t look away. They are everything good scholars should not be: certain, smug, self-righteous and, worst of all, consciously contrarian — making arguments that they know to be false because it amuses them to do so.

Looking back over this blog’s fifty columns, I have begun to see that coming off as certain, smug, and self-righteous probably is an inevitable consequence of regularly writing about one’s views. I admit that, in person, I can exhibit these traits, too, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to do better (it would help if others would at least try to act smarter than they are). Here, on this blog, however, matters are different: when sharing one’s opinions without rebuttal it’s hard to avoid coming off as very sure of oneself. And the very curious thing is this: I am not - hence the title of the blog itself. I can, however, claim with good conscience that I have never, at least not on Measure of Doubt, argued a position that I do not believe for the sake of doing so.

At any rate, the whole thing has been immensely therapeutic, and it has lasted much longer than I had anticipated. Much to my own amazement, I have fifty posts — some 41,000 words — under my belt. As I said in one of the earliest posts, I’m doing this for my own sake, not in anticipation of anyone reading it. However, while I don’t keep tracking statistics, gradually I have discovered that people actually are reading this thing: friends, colleagues, enemies, students, and even random passers-by.

So, up for another fifty? I am if you are.

PS

I would like to announce the creation of a second blog: Suspended Judgment, which will be devoted solely to the discussion of teaching-related issues. Already reading Measure of Doubt? Never fear - for now, at least, nothing will appear there that won’t also be here. The point is to cleave off a small part of cyberspace strictly for my professional work.

Addresses

What follows is the preliminary text of an address I will deliver to incoming undergraduates during their orientation the week after next. I believe that the most important quality a teacher can have is empathy. As time passes, however, I wonder more and more if I’m able to empathize with teenagers. How would I, at age 18, have received this talk? I’m honestly not sure. Let me know what you think. I borrowed the bit about students today and when they’re going to be retiring from Ken Robinson’s talk at TED, and I’ll say so in the speech itself when I deliver it. GB.



My Address to the Undergraduates
September 2009

Probably you’ve heard people say that a BA means absolutely nothing - that everyone has one. It’s not true. Only about one-in-five Canadians have a BA. In your age group only one person in three is in university. Those numbers are going up but it will be a long time before it reaches one-in-two. It’s also not true that a BA doesn’t count for anything in the job market. The job market is tough for everybody. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like for PhDs. A friend of mine with a PhD just spent the summer working in a bookstore. I kid you not. It’s rather frightening, isn’t it? But the statistical fact - and we have study after study to prove this - is that, on average, the higher your education the higher your lifetime earnings. It isn’t always true, but it’s true on average. A person with a BA will, on average, make more money than a person who has only a college diploma, and that person will tend to make more money than someone just high school.

But what I want to suggest today is that there’s a lot more to it than that. It has to do with the real value of an education in the liberal arts and social sciences, and it’s a value that is constantly under attack and that we have to do more to defend. And I want you to think of it this way. The purpose of an education isn’t just to help you get you a job in three or four years. It’s to help you lead a good life - which means that your education has to serve you over the course of your life, not just in the years immediately after graduation. But the problem is this. Most of you are going to be retiring sometime around 2060. I’ll say that again. Most of you will be retiring sometime around 2060. No one in 1910 could have predicted what the world would be like in 1960, and no one in 2010 can make that prediction about 2060. One thing I can promise you, though: most of the information that you accumulate over the next four years will be forgotten by then. If you take my Canadian history class next year you won’t remember much of it by 2060, and the same goes for most of your other classes. I took a class in medieval literature. It was wonderful. I’d take it again in a second if I could. And I’d need to, because I’ve forgotten every word of it.

So you might ask, then, what’s the point? Some people would say - and you’re going to hear a lot of this sort of thing - that all you learn in university is a lot of useless nonsense that gets you a useless degree. But they’re wrong. We need to stop thinking of an education as merely the accumulation of more facts that will help you get a job. We teach history and philosophy and literature and all of the other subjects not just because they’re rewarding in their own right, but because studying them teaches us how to think, and learning to think well is one of the keys to the good life. This isn’t a new idea: it’s one of the oldest ideas in our tradition: it goes back to the one of the very first institutions of learning in the Western world, the Academy, in ancient Athens, where the motto was “know thyself.”

But it seems like an odd idea, doesn’t it? Teaching someone how to think. Because you’re sitting there saying, “Well, I know how to do that already.” But consider it like this: nearly everyone can move their arms and legs. But that doesn’t mean that they can play professional sports. Playing professional sports takes long and arduous training. It’s the same with thinking. Everyone can do it, but not everyone does it well, and you can learn to be better at it.

If we do our job right - and if you do yours - over the next four years, through the study of the arts and social sciences, you’ll learn to think better and more creatively, to reflect, to ask questions, and to find answers on your own. Because, whatever else happens, those are skills that are needed in the job market, and those are qualities that that will serve you over the course of your life, and it’s one thing we can say for certain that the world will need in 2060, and that the world needs more of today.

Well, you may be asking, how do I do that? How do I become a better thinker? Going to a good school helps - and you’ve done that. There are professors here who can stand alongside any teachers and scholars anywhere in the world. Second, you have to take advantage of what the school has to offer. The main difference between high school and university is this: here, you are joining a community of scholarship. Your professors aren’t just teachers - they’re scholars who are actively engaged in research and publication in their field. You are being invited to join that community, and that means your education is for the most part self-directed. We try to point our students in the right direction - whether or not they go there is up to them. And that means that you’re going to have to work hard, and that means putting in a lot of time.

But, fortunately, because you’re young people, time is something you have a lot of. Time is the greatest asset you possess; it is also the one asset you have less of with every passing minute. And so let me leave you today by encouraging you to use your time here as well as you possibly can.

Thank You.

Friendship

Well, it's Christmas, devoted readers, and, yes, like all great writers (I'll pause while you clean the coffee you just coughed up), I write every day, including Christmas Day. And I thought that, being as it's Christmas, I'd write about the subject of friendship and what my three closest friends mean to me.

Aristotle likened a friend to "another soul", and he believed that friendships stood as proof that altruism rather than egoism was the norm in human affairs. For my part, I prefer the old adage that there are two kinds of friends: the ones who will help you move, and the ones who will help you move bodies. I am very fortunate to count three such people in the latter category: Geoff, Shirley, and Alison, and while it's unlikely that I'll ever be phoning them from some seedy roadside motel in the middle of the night and explaining that the whole thing was a terrible accident, it's comforting to know they'd be there in a flash, with shovels, bleach, and plastic bags, if I did.

More than two decades ago, Shirley was my first real girlfriend (take note, young people, it is possible to successfully make the transition to "just friends") and has been unstinting in her friendship over the years, even in proportion to my (unintended) neglectfulness. Alison is like the sister I never had, and I derive immense solace from knowing that I am never more than a phone-call from her insight into the vagaries of life on topics ranging from B-class 80s horror movies to educational pedagogy. As for Geoff, well, he is the only blonde I've really loved and, I mean this quite sincerely, one of the smartest people I've ever met. They are, all of them, better friends to me than I have been to them; they would be worthy companions for anyone, so I feel blessed — in the secular sense of the word, of course — to count them among my own. A curious thing: I met Geoff in elementary school and Shirley and Alison in high school. Our friendships now span not years, but decades, and it is in such fires that real friendships are forged.

I admit that I botched the opportunity to make several solid friends in graduate school. I blame myself, but, then, I've always believed that real friendship requires that all measure of pretense be dropped, and, in my experience, at least, graduate school was all about maintaining pretensions. Only once and with only one person did I successfully manage to jettison that baggage while in school, but I went on to marry her, so her case is the exception to the rule. Amanda's is a lifelong companionship that transcends friendship in its ordinary meaning.

In the years since then, I've managed to settle down, become more-or-less comfortable in my own skin, and I am very glad to have made some new friends. They look like a promising bunch, and, who knows? If they play their cards right, they might just find me calling them at midnight from a Motel 6 some day.

Oh, and to all my friends, comrades, colleagues, acquaintances, and unknown readers of this blog, a very sincere Merry Christmas to you.

Bilge

Last year I finished reading C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels for the second time, and my feelings were ones of joy mingled with regret. The regret came from knowing that no more of these splendid stories exist to be read. Then I learned that a writer named David Weber had written a series of science fiction novels that have been described as "Horatio Hornblower in space." Intrigued, I found the first in the series at a local used bookshop and sure enough, the author had dedicated it to Forester's memory.

This was a bad sign, and I should have taken it as such. Writers who are out of their moral and intellectual depth have a bad habit of referencing their betters, hoping perhaps to imbue themselves with some sort of respectability by association. At any rate I bought the first four novels and read the first three and half over the course of two weeks. I think that I had by then satisfied my duty to immerse myself in those particular waters. Any less, and I could be accused of not having read enough to make a judgment; any more, and people could reasonably ask why I read so much.

I know something of the world of publishing and understand that very few writers earn a living by writing alone. My collective earnings from all my published works, received at once, would sustain me in a very modest living for about a year. So I sympathise with Weber's evident desire to do well for himself and for his family - and this perhaps explains his prodigious output. Counted in sheer number of pages, he long ago exceeded the career output of his hero Forester, himself a prolific writer, but one whose taut little novels seldom exceeded 250 pages.

But it is entirely wrong to talk of these books as "Hornblower in space". They bear only the most superficial resemblance to Forester's masterpieces. Weber's literary moorings are not found in Forester - he is instead tethered firmly to Tom Clancy. He is more interested in technology, albeit sometimes cleverly imagined technology, than human beings - the foremost vice of science fiction writers. His characters have no personality. One villain is pretty much the same as the next; the subsidiary protagonists are interchangeable. Strangely the worst offender is his central character, Honor Harrington. Unlike the manic-depressive, tone-deaf, abstemious Hornblower, she has no internal life. She is a cardboard construct Weber uses to get ships to the point where they can hurl missiles at one another, and when the ships aren't doing that, Weber hasn't the slightest idea what to do. Forester could make a game of cards or a salvage operation or a funeral procession positively nail-biting. Weber can't do anything when the guns aren't blazing. The politics are dull, the romance is unmoving, such personal and professional tribulations as the central characters face are utterly uninteresting. In the first three novels I encountered not one memorable line of dialogue, not one time when I laughed out loud, not one time when I felt genuine sadness over the loss of a life.

Compare, by contrast, this passage from Forester's A Ship of the Line:

'Little Longley was at his side now, white-faced, miraculously alive after the fall of the mizzen topmast.
"I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened," the boy said; his jacket was torn clear across the breast and he was trying to hold it together as he denied the evidence of the tears in his eyes.
"No, sonny, of course you're not," said Hornblower.
Then Longley was dead, hands and breast smashed into a pulp.'

Now, there's nothing in any of Weber's battles to capture even a tenth of the horror and sorrow of that scene. Weber would have described Longley's death in five times the detail, told us where every last drop of blood flew, would have given us the technical specifications of the weapon that killed the boy, would have written the firing of that gun from the perspective of its crew, perhaps even written a little scene where the captain of the other vessel gives the order to fire. He would have taken perhaps three pages to write what Forester did in half of a paragraph, and he would have diminished it tenfold.

But the real roof of a hack is in the dialogue. Another novelist to whom Weber owes an unacknowledged debt is Forester's worthy successor, Patrick O'Brian. In the twenty novels of the extraordinary Aubrey-Maturin series (people who have read these are never the same again), O'Brian employs precisely two verbs to describe dialogue: "said" and "cried", and these are never modified. Nothing more is necessary, for the characters' speech carries its own weight. We know who is talking and how because O'Brian writes dialogue that we can hear. Weber, by contrast, has no ear for dialogue. The words spoken by one character are indistinguishable from those spoken by another. Engaging in conversation, Weber's characters suffer the most extreme physical reactions: their nostrils flare, they half rise from their chairs, their jaws drop, they glare moodily, they smile happily, they expostulate angrily, and, above all, they "snort". ("The massive Gryphon highlander snorted like a particularly irate boar and shook his head" reads a typical passage.) This vulgar little verb is one of Weber's favourite words, and his characters go about their snorting every other page or so. The decks of their ships must be positively green with goo.

Readers of this review might object that Harrington isn't supposed to be Hornblower and that Weber need not be Forester. As to the first point, I am compelled to observe that it was Weber himself who invited the comparisons — the central characters even have the same initials — and who consciously utilizes many of the conventions of the Napoleonic era seafaring genre. As to the second, the point is quite correct. Weber does not need to be Forester. What he does need to do is provide a literary experience that does something other than engage the imagination of his readers on the crudest possible level. I sensed, when reading On Basilisk Station, the first and best of the quartet that I read - that Weber might be capable of doing so. For some reason, he chooses not to.

Such is the price one pays for writing novels at a rate exceeding the ability of most people to read them. I have no doubt that Weber is crying all the way to the bank, and I have no doubt that he really does admire Forester. But he has learned none of the lessons about writing that his idol had to offer.

Surveillance

I began my first blog four years ago but aborted it after three weeks. I had some notion that my class — it was the first class I ever taught, actually — might start blogging about American history. I abandoned the idea in favour of an on-line discussion board to supplement classroom discussion, which we had depressingly little time for. My other reason for abandoning the blog was my impression that most blogs are not merely trivial but banal and badly written, and of no conceivable interest to anyone other than their authors, and I didn't want to jump on the latest digital bandwagon just because I could. I learned my lesson about tech-junk when I rushed out and bought a Commodore 128 in 1986.

A great deal has happened in the blogosphere since 2004, and it's no exaggeration to say that some of best journalism — and most useful muckraking — in the world today is being produced by bloggers. But the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of blogs are time wasters for readers, and time is the one resource we have less of with every passing second. And it feels good to say, once more, and with feeling: that information does not equal knowledge. I have absolutely no interest in the mundane musings of the typical blogging suburbanite — nor indeed those of otherwise decent journalists who blog because they're forced to — and this goes doubly for the legions of semiliterate bloggers whose only encounters with books seem to be in the form of Facebook. Add the huge numbers of blogs by the denizens of the lunatic fringe and I find little that can justify keeping me from Northanger Abbey for much longer.

I always suspected that blogging often serves as an outlet for some of the worst qualities of the exhibitionist mentality, but I never suspected that it could be a form of voyeurism, too. How wrong I was. When I wondered aloud one day how many people might actually read my blog, I was informed that it was possible to know - and in fact to know a great deal more than that. Programs such as Statcounter make it possible, in effect, for the writer to surveil the reader. By the simple expedient of cutting and pasting a line of code, bloggers can learn their readers' IP addresses, the time and length of their visits, the keyword searches they used to find the page, and — I don't exaggerate when I say that my heart skipped a beat upon this discovery — in some cases the name of the person to whom the connecting computer belongs.

So this gives me one further reason to like books and used books in particular. The moral and ethical implications of Internet monitoring are the subject of serious study in certain fields, but in the case of most bloggers I've talked to, their defense of the practice amounts to nothing more sophisticated than arguing that their curiosity is more important than my privacy, which seems both shady and seedy to me. I don't wish to sound naive: I know it's the same almost everywhere on the Internet, and I understand that gathering such data can be useful for commercial purposes, where ethics is usually a secondary consideration.

But I fail to see how surveiling the reader serves a useful purpose for serious writers - by which I mean people who write for themselves and for the sake of their craft and not to pander to a known constituency. Last night I finished Doris Lessing's extraordinary short story The Temptation of Jack Orkney and — this is the crucial point — Lessing had no idea. I hate to think of the story being different than it was, but I can't quite see past the fact that it might have been had Lessing been checking up on her potential readership on a daily basis while writing it.

I always tell my students that if they want to write, that if they feel that they must write, then they should never, never, never give it up, even if their work goes unpublished. I have a friend who keeps half-finished plays and short stories tucked away in drawers, where they await a better day, and this has always struck me as being immensely admirable. This blog is my digital drawer for tucking things away: whether or not it is being read is of no consequence to me. I write because I must, because I wouldn't be me if I didn't.

So, gentle reader, you can take your anonymity for granted. I know not who you are or from whence you came. But elsewhere you must contend with the rather frightening possibility that Big Blogger is watching you.

Writing

Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-nine, once said that writing a book is like sitting up with a dying friend. George Orwell internalized the process a further degree when he likened it to a long, painful illness – something with which he had actual experience. I have never quite grasped the existential agonies that some writers put themselves through but, then, I'm not much of a writer – at least as writers go. I will grant them this, though – writing is hard. It is not as hard as teaching (readers don't interrupt while you're writing, asking you to go over that again) but it is hard enough.

Difficult things (e.g. cooking, dieting, exercising, travelling, lovemaking, learning German, deciding what to read next, dying) spawn books that promise to make them easier, and so it's not surprising that there is a whole industry producing books on how to write. Stephen King wrote one, and so did Margaret Atwood, and even, in an uncharacteristically helpful mood, did Norman Mailer. After the classics — Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and William Zinnser's On Writing Well — the best such work, in my estimation, is Richard Rhodes's How to Write. An unbeatable title, you must agree. At least it was an unbeatable title until Paul J. Silva came up with How to Write a Lot. Imagine two books, side by side in the bookstore: How to Lose Weight and How to Lose A Lot of Weight. Which would you chose?

But my enthusiasm for the book ends there. How do you write a lot? According to Silva — and brace yourself, here — the key is to write a lot. It does not, I'm afraid, amount to much more than that. (How could it? The book is 126 pages.) Schedule time, every day, to write. Make it as much a part of the daily routine as daily routines are, and it will become habitual. Word counts will mount, and these must be meticulously recorded, preferably on a spreadsheet. Don't worry too much about style, because academic peer reviewers certainly don't. By this expedient, articles and reviews will get finished and get submitted, and so will a book every couple of years or so. Silva himself claims to average something over 700 words per day.

And there you have it: the distinction between writing and typing not just blurred but erased; the ancient, honoured, and indeed sacred craft of composition played out statistically on spreadsheets, with daily mounting tolls, like victories (or perhaps losses) in a U-boat campaign.

Silva is a psychologist with an impressive slate of publications, especially for someone so young. You can't argue with results: the method works for him. Perhaps it will, too, for other social scientists who don't regard their discipline as a literary one. I prefer to chart a middle course. I don't much like the idea of bleeding myself to write, but I can see the point in devoting some care to one's craft. And there are evenings when, after a tiring day's work that has yielded just one good paragraph, I feel slightly glad to sit back, exhale, and thank goodness for small miseries