Month: September 2017

Umberto Eco


Sean Connery and Christian Slater in “The Name of the Rose”

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980. English translation 1983.

What? I’m reviewing a book that was first published 37 years ago? Oh well. No one ever accused me of being au courant.

I have tried several times in the past to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of Rose, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum. I have always been driven back by the dry wordiness of Eco’s prose. This time I resolved to finish The Name of the Rose no matter how big a chore it might be, partly as an exercise in better understanding why some writers earn far more generous reputations than they deserve.

First, let’s talk about the film, from 1986. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and with a superb cast including Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham and the young Christian Slater, the film — I thought, at least — was one of the best and most memorable films of the 1980s. But the film didn’t make much money in the United States, though people in more intelligent parts of the world loved it. Roger Ebert wrote, “What we have here is the setup for a wonderful movie. What we get is a very confused story.”

I don’t agree with Ebert. The screenwriters actually did a brilliant job of stripping out most of Eco’s confusion, endless declamation and disquisition, and sticking to the plot — your basic murder mystery. It was said that Eco didn’t much like the screenplay, precisely because all that erudition got cut (as it had to be).

Eco was a scholar — no doubt a good one — with a wide range of interests. The Name of the Rose drew on his background as a medievalist. Obviously Eco was fascinated by the theological debates of the late medieval period. Also obviously, the setting and the plot for The Name of the Rose were chosen because they provided a basis for page after page of theological hairsplitting by monks of different orders. To Eco’s credit, these endless orations on Christian theology can be funny in their absurdity, and Eco leaves it to the reader to discern what fools his monks are. William of Baskerville, however, is at least a nice fool. And his teenage novice Adso (Christian Slater), with his naiveté and surging hormones, is a very fine foil for so much useless learnedness.

(Incidentally, the chief subject of Eco’s theological debate is whether Christ was poor. The Franciscan order certainly believed in the poverty of Christ, and they got crossways with some popes and with the Inquisition. If you’re interested in the details of all that, I’ll leave you to read The Name of the Rose. But it is worth pointing out, I think, how the church is still divided by the question of poverty, with a few Christians remaining who actually care about the poor, and with other Christians giving their money to birdbrain preachers who live in multimillion-dollar mansions like little popes and fly around on the Lord’s business in private jets. If this history repeated itself, then Christians who care today about the poor would be burned at the stake.)

But what I conclude about Umberto Eco is in many ways similar to what I conclude about Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer. Both, I would guess, are somewhere well along on the autism spectrum. Both are fine thinkers — but without the least trace of feeling. Stephenson, like Eco, set one of his novels in a monastery (Anathem) and for the same reason — so that their characters can talk, talk, talk about abstractions that they find interesting. But their characters, like the authors, totally lack feeling. I also would argue that the best moments in fiction occur when a character is so driven to despair or ecstasy that the character is compelled to sing. When an author sings, that’s when you learn what motivates the author to write in the first place. For a fine discussion on moments in fiction that sing, see E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.

In any case, with writers like Eco and Stephenson, one of the most powerful and meaningful ingredients of good fiction is totally missing. Both Eco and Stephenson are so blind to the feeling element of fiction that they seem unaware of the flatness of their characters and make no attempt to simulate the missing ingredient. Adso knows how to suffer some where sex is involved, but Adso cannot sing.

That said, I love brainy fiction — Isaac Asimov, for example. I have great respect for (and considerable interest in) the erudition to be found in Neal Stephenson’s and Umberto Eco’s novels. But it’s not enough, and that’s a shame.

Crickets. What’s going on?


This photo was in Google images and was sourced to Twitter. The photo was marked as having been taken at 11:43 a.m. on Sept. 16. The “Mother of all rallies” started at 11 a.m.

Have you noticed how dull and unfocused the media have been of late? At first I thought that hurricanes Harvey and Irma were crowding out other agendas. But now that the hurricanes have aged out of the news, the media are still drifting and befuddled about what story to lead with. What’s going on?

Normally there is a keen competition for setting the agenda, and someone somewhere is staging a big show to direct the media’s attention to where they want it. That’s what we saw when the Congress was mucking around with health care bills a few weeks ago. And there was Charlottesville. But for most of September, it’s been crickets. Back in August, we were told that September would feature mighty battles in Congress over the debt ceiling and tax “reform.” I believe that warfare in Congress was scheduled to lead the media agenda this month. But it fell apart.

At the moment, there’s just nothing going on keep us peasants angry and at each other’s throats. That’s pretty strange, given that whipping up political rage has been at the top of the agenda for more than a year now. We’re told that Trump invited the congressional Democratic leadership to the table. What’s that about?

Yesterday, some of the leadership of Trump’s so-called base scheduled “the mother of all rallies” (MOAR) on the Mall in Washington. They hoped for a million people. They wrote on the rally’s web site: “MOAR will send a message to the world that the voices of mainstream Americans must be heard. We are coming together to send a direct message to Congress, the media and the world that we stand united not divided to protect and preserve American Culture.”

Barely a thousand people came. A clown group outnumbered the MOAR attendees. The right-wing media seem to be as becalmed and befuddled as the mainstream media. At this moment, Drudge Report is leading with an acid attack in France.

Trump is said to be holed up at one of his resorts in New Jersey, and the White House wasn’t releasing any information about what Trump was doing. The media were isolated in a media container 18 miles away with nothing to do.

All this makes me nervous. To a dot-connector like me, it appears that something has disrupted the agenda and media scripts of the powerful, as though there is some kind of stalemate. It’s as though something new — and big — has derailed the September schedule for agenda-setting and media management.

Obviously I know nothing. All I can do is speculate and try to connect dots. Wishful thinking is always a trap to be avoided. But it’s almost as though Donald Trump has been fatally nailed by Mueller, and the lords of Washington are in retreat to write the script on how it will all play out. We know from a little Associated Press piece, mostly ignored by the media, that Mueller had a bipartisan meeting on Thursday with the leaders of the House judiciary committee. That’s the committee that is responsible for initiating impeachment proceedings.

Have I fallen into the trap of wishful thinking? Sure, I want Trump and his entire criminal syndicate gone and in prison, the sooner the better. Trump is clearly mentally ill, and in a dangerous way. But I also know that, when impeachment happens, the collateral damage to this country is going to be a terrible thing. When it happens, whether soon or next year, we the peasants won’t know about it until the powers that be have gone into hiding and worked out a reasonably responsible plan for managing the American people as the trauma unfolds.

Darn you, Apple

Normally, Apple product rollouts don’t phase me. I take note of Apple’s new stuff and carry on without the slightest trace of lust to buy. My old iPad works just fine, my iPhone 5 works great, my 27-inch iMac will last for many years, the Apple TV is old but still useful, and I have not perceived any need for a watch that tracks my heart rate or that nags me about my calendar.

But Apple’s new watch, announced today, actually does something new and useful. It’s a cell phone and texting device, and it uses the same phone number as your iPhone. That’s progress. Dick Tracy’s dream of a two-way wrist radio — a dream that is almost 70 years old, seems to be a reality now.

Not since my working days have I regularly worn a watch. But I do like watches, as long as they’re absolutely accurate. I have an “atomic” watch that I wear sometimes if I’m traveling or otherwise have to keep to a schedule. The “atomic” feature, which sets the time using a radio signal from WWV, is always accurate to the second.

When Ken’s not here, I’m here alone. Though I’ve by no means reached the age at which I’m afraid of falling and not being able to get up, accidents can happen. When I’m mowing, for example, I always keep my cell phone in my pocket. Many older people pay for a device that they can carry, or wear around the neck, that’s always with them and that can summon help.

Plus, my iPhone 5 is a pocketfull. I’ve never lost it, but I’ve been known to leave it places. Then I have to run back and get it when I realize it’s missing. Just a couple of weeks ago, I left my iPhone on the counter at Whole Foods and had to dash back in from the parking lot to retrieve it.

So you see the justification for the new Apple watch that is taking shape in my mind — always there, not cumbersome, hard to lose, and available in emergencies.

Unfortunately, I’d have to upgrade my iPhone to use the new Apple watch, because my iPhone is a year or so too old to work with the cellular feature of the new Apple watch.

I’m not going to rush into this. But I’m very tempted. And I’d have to say that I’ve never regretted buying stuff from Apple.

The Equifax cyberattack: Odds are, you were affected

Update: According to the Washington Post, some security experts think there may be something fishy about Equifax requesting six, rather than four, digits of Social Security numbers. Also, Equifax may have whipped up a “terms of service” agreement that tricks you into forfeiting your right to participate in a class-action lawsuit. For now, it might be best to avoid Equifax’s EquifaxSecurity2017.com web site, though a credit freeze would still be appropriate, as far as I know, for those who want to do that.

Here’s a link to the Washington Post story: Equifax asks consumers for personal info, even after massive data breach

It would appear that Equifax is bungling their response to this.

You probably know by now about the huge data breach at Equifax, one of the three American credit-reporting agencies. According to the New York Times, since data for 143 million people was stolen, the odds are greater than 50 percent that you were affected.

Equifax set up a web page where you can enter your last name and six digits of your Social Security number to see whether you were affected. I was.

I can testify that even a minor case of identity theft is a pain in the neck that is very difficult to straighten out. When I lived in San Francisco, someone used my name and Social Security number to get a telephone in San Jose. They didn’t pay the bill, of course, and Pacific Bell came after me. I was shocked to learn that, under California law, it was up to me to prove that I did not open the account, rather than for Pacific Bell to prove that I did. Can that be constitutional? The burden to undo the damage was entirely on me. It took several months to resolve the whole thing, following an irritating process defined by the California Public Utilities Commission.

After the California problem, I put a fraud alert on my records. A fraud alert lasts for seven years. That has now expired, of course.

After some Googling, it seemed that the smartest thing for me to do after the Equifax cyberattack was to freeze my credit. This is a pain in the neck. You have to set up a freeze at all three credit-reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. However, this can be done on line. It’s very rare for me to open new accounts, so dealing with the freeze process won’t be too great a burden. But a total credit freeze (which can be overridden by a PIN number you’re assigned when the freeze becomes active) might be too inconvenient for some people.

[Update: Avoid this link until more is known about how Equifax is handling this.] Here’s the Equifax link with which you can determine whether you were effected: Equifax2017

This article includes links on how to set up a credit freeze online: How to do a credit freeze

Here is a credit freeze FAQ from the Federal Trade Commission: FAQ

It’s really pretty terrifying how dangerous a place the Internet is. My guess is that the fallout from this data breach will go on for a long time. Whoever stole the data probably will break it into chunks and retail it all over the world.

Why is linguistics so rarefied?

I think a lot about language. I often have questions about language that are very difficult to find answers to. That’s not true of most sciences. If I have a question about physics (insofar as there are answers to questions about physics), I can find an answer in no time. (As a science fiction writer, I often have questions about physics.) In Oratorio in Ursa Major, I have a character who is a linguist. The research for her character, and for some of the things she needed to say, was damnably difficult.

For an example of a pretty trivial linguistics question, I had been wondering why so many personal pronouns and possessive adjectives rhyme, at least in the three languages that I know something about:

English: Me, thee, he, she, we • mine, thine

French: Me, te, se • nous, vous • mon, ton, son • ma, ta, sa • notre, votre

Spanish: Nosotros, vosotros • nuestra, vuestra • tu, su

My first question would be, is this accidental? It doesn’t seem to be accidental. If it’s not accidental, why should this be?

In this particular case, I was able to find a pretty good answer by Googling. Googling led me to a book that contains a collection of papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Vancouver in 1999. Google Books, as usual, provides only part of the book. The complete book can be bought for $156 (!). But a paper by Johanna Nichols from the University of California at Berkeley titled “Why ‘Me’ and ‘Thee’?” provided a pretty good answer. The answer is that, no, it’s not accidental. It’s also a feature of 152 languages that she compared.

The paper refers to these kinds of words as “lexical sets.” In lexical sets, rhyming, alliteration, and other sorts of vocal patterns (collectively called phonosymbolism) are repeated: Mama, papa.

As I understand her academic explanation for why this might be, it boils down to this: Lexical sets that rhyme or that are otherwise phonosymbolic appeal to people of all languages. Because it’s appealing, it spreads and becomes entrenched.

That makes sense to me, and I’ll consider the question answered.

But it’s also interesting to note that, compared with other fields (such as, say, anthropology) far fewer people get Ph.D.’s in linguistics. In my life, I have met only one Ph.D. in linguistics. That was someone in New York, the friend of a friend who is an anthropologist. (Do they all know each other so they can ask either other questions?) Also, most smaller liberal arts schools don’t even have linguistics programs. The list of universities with stellar linguistics programs is very short.

The downside of this for us lay folks and non-scholars is that linguistics is very nearly out of our reach. You’ll find almost nothing in your public library. Googling won’t get you very far. And though the books are out there, they are very, very expensive. One book I’d like to have, for example, is The English Language: A Linguistic History, from the Oxford University Press. It costs $110, and it takes Amazon two to four weeks to get it, which probably means that it has to be shipped from the U.K.

I’d kill for a friend who is a linguist. Unless I move to Amherst or Oxford or Palo Alto, that probably is not going to happen.