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The pleasures of the once and future king

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, medievalism, Personal, T. H. White, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 25, 2007| 1 Comment »

Learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
–T. H. White, “The Sword in the Stone.”

After Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the book that most affected me as a child was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. The book is best-known through the and for the Camelot! musical and later movie of the same name in which Robert Goulet and Richard Harris played the title roles, and perhaps through the Disney animation of The Sword in the Stone, the first part of the book. However, in each of these cases, that’s like knowing a sunny day through a tanning clinic. What White accomplished was not just an entertainment – although it’s all of that – but, rather, the main retelling of the Arthurian legend for the twentieth century.

White was rather unfortunate in his personal life. He seems to have been throughly dominated by his mother in his early life, and an accusation – apparently of homosexuality and possibly true – made him unable to continue working as a public school teacher. He turned to his love of naturalism and medievalism for solace as well as a living, but remained largely solitary and introspective.

Every great re-telling of the Arthurian legend reshapes the story for its times, and White is no exception. In White’s version, Arthur is a well-meaning and earnest man who has the luck or misfortune to be afflicted by a visionary tutor. For Merlin, Arthur is a tool to attempt nothing less than a major change in human psychology, away from the “Might is Right” philosophy that seems to rule international politics to a more moral, humanistic way of life. The Round Table and the Grail Quest are both efforts to steer life in this direction. At the end of the book, Arthur is even experimenting with the rule of law, although he finds it suddenly used against him.

The tragedy is that human nature seems to pre-doom this endeavor from the start. But the problem is not just the natural selfishness of people, but the fact that they are not.

The romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere that dooms Arthur’s efforts is not simply a matter of selfishness or uncontrollable passion. After all, White says, if Lancelot had been a normal person, he simply would have eloped with Guinevere, and nothing else would have happened. Instead, the tragedy happens because Lancelot is genuinely torn between his love for Guinevere and his whole-hearted support of Arthur’s ideals. Similarly, Guinevere is a young woman married to an older husband whose ideals she can’t really share, and lacking any outlet for her energies. As for Arthur, he is warned from the start about the love affair, but turns a blind eye to it out of guilt and out of his own sense of fairness.

For White, the other element that dooms Camelot are the five sons of Queen Morgause of Orkney, including Mordred, whose father is Arthur. White devotes a rather chilling, if somewhat racist section to the sons in early childhood, showing them totally obsessed with gaining their aloof mother’s approval. Of the five, only Gareth has the imaginative sympathy to support Arthur’s ideals wholeheartedly. Gaheris is slow, Agravaine and Mordred downright vicious. Gawaine, the head of the clan, is at least good-natured, but even he has trouble thinking beyond the tribalism on which he grew up.

In short, what White manages to do is create a psychologically convincing portrait of the main people in the Arthurian cycle, making them credible to twentieth-century readers, and winning through to a pathos in several scenes as effective as anything else you can name in English literature.

But, although that alone would be enough to make The Once and Future King an extraordinary book, it contains far more. The first part, which depicts Arthur’s childhood, is broadly comical as Arthur – or Wart, as his foster family calls him – is transformed into a variety of animals to broaden his mind, a conceit that gives White a chance to put his naturalist’s rambles to good use. At the same time, Wart receives the usual education of a country squire, learning to joust and work with hawks. In fact, the whole book is crammed with medieval lore that gives the book a ring of authenticity.

Tragically, as adult affairs absorb his mind, Arthur quickly forgets his idyllic childhood, retaining only the ideas that Merlin has given him. After he establishes his rule, the whole concept of rooting out the idea that Might is Right slowly goes wrong in a series of descents that last over several decades. At the end of the book, in a scene whose imaginative power is only faintly captured in the movie, Arthur sits awake in his tent, waiting for the battle with Mordred that he knows will end in his death. Abruptly, he remembers his childhood, and wonders if his life effort was futile. The anarchistic geese, who see no borders in their flights, have the right attitude he concludes, but he despairs of humanity ever following their example. In the end, he finds a small consolation in sending a young page – evidently Thomas Malory, who will grow up write La Morte D’Arthur — out of the battle zone, so that somebody can remember the example of Camelot for future generations, then prepares to go out and die.

Having read the Arthurian legend for years, I was ripe for White’s version when I discovered it in Grade Six. I not only devoured the book, but lived and breathed it for months in my mind, even going so far as to ask a local artist down the lane to bring the description of the mews on Sir Ector’s estate to life (she refused, polite and more than a little puzzled).

Unlike Arthur, I’ve never forgot the story of his early years, or his effort to realize Merlin’s vision. Looking back, I conclude that the book seems to have played a large role in establishing my social and political leanings, and every few years I like to return to it. Each time, I find new pieces to appreciate, and I’m reminded yet again that the literary canon is not the only source of artistic excellence.

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Discovering Tolkien

Posted in book stores, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »

In the summer between grades five and six, I discovered the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. The encounter inspired a love of fantasy and science fiction that endures to this day.

I was always precocious reader. By the end of Grade 1, I was devouring the Hardy Boy books. by Grade 2, I had discovered Alexander Dumas and historical fiction, and I first read Moby Dick in Grade 3. This precociousness alarmed my mother, who had at least one conference with my teacher, and eventually decided that, if I came across anything remotely racy, I would probably just skip over it. It also meant that I was so busy reading works like Mutiny on the Bounty that I missed a number of children’s classics until in the early years of high school, including Harriet the Spy, The Wind in the Willows, and, of course, Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

I was a first generation book addict, with nothing except the occasional suggestion from the school librarian to indicate that I was missing a wealth of treasures. I wouldn’t even have known The Wizard of Oz except for the movie and the fact that I played the Cowardly Lion in the class play (a most moving performance, I thought, in which I had a mane that made me look like a dandelion, and developed the business of wiping my eyes with the tip of my tail when I pretended to cry),

I do remember hearing my brother talk about his teacher reading The Hobbit to his class. And in grade five, I saw a black and white sketch in a school book club catalog showing Frodo and Sam on Mount Doom, and was intrigued. What were the Hobbits mentioned in the caption? They didn’t seem much different than humans to me. But, at the same time, stripped to a couple of sentences, the plot seemed ludicrous.

That summer, I came across a paperback three volume set of The Lord of the Rings with the abstract cover full of banners and snake-like heads. But the price was high for my allowance, and I put it aside. That was at The Bookstall, where I lived during many long summer afternoons of my childhood.

The owner seemed to appreciate my enthusiasm, and tolerated my horde of unbought treasures. Yet, every once and a while, his patience thinned, and I had to make at least an effort to buy what I had reserved. Cunningly, I said that I would take the first volume, figuring to satisfy the owner’s strange insistence on making sales without too much financial damage to myself.

As I rode home on my bicycle, I stopped every few blocks to read a page or two. By the time I got home, I was thoroughly hooked, and descended to the downstairs basement that I was using that summer to read stretched out on my bed.

That was on Friday afternoon. I must have had dinner and other meals on Saturday, but what I mostly remember is constantly shifting position on the bed, physically restless yet so unable to put the book down that I might been a fool of a Took snared by Sauron’s glance in the Palantir.

The experience remains vivid now, and is the main source of my contempt for those who dismiss Tolkien as an archaic or mediocre writer. Those terms might apply to all but the best of his poetry, but, for me, Tolkien remains the universal standard for atmosphere and building tension. Opening with the forced cheeriness of a children’s tale, Tolkien slowly drops those tones, until suddenly, without realizing quite how you got there, you are in a middle of an altogether more dangerous story, and are afraid to go to the washroom without turning on the lights in the hopes of warding off the Black Riders. And that night, I heard a cat’s yowl a few yards over that left me lying awake, half-expecting to hear the sound of horses’ hooves coming down the street. The Black Riders might be looking for hobbits, I was thinking, but they would probably be just as happy with children.

Twenty-six hours after I bought the first volume, I had finished it, and was ready for more. I spent a sleepless night in anticipation, and cycled down to The Bookstall only to find that it was closed on Sundays. I’m not sure how I lasted the day, let alone the night, with my tormented thoughts that somehow the other volumes might have been sold in my absence, but on Monday morning I was on the doorstep at opening time. This time, I bought both the remaining volumes, having learned my lesson. Two days later, I had finished both, and was seriously debating starting again – something I have almost never done at any age.

For the rest of the summer, I was wild about Tolkien. I read his other works, including The Hobbit, but most of them were like methadone to a serious addict – satisfying, but missing something. I drew my own maps of the areas beyond the edges of Tolkien’s maps, and searched the story and the appendices for hooks to hang a story on. I fantasized about one day backpacking to Oxford and meeting Tolkien in his study. But none of it was enough. In desperation, I started branching out into other fantasy and science fiction writers like Fritz Leiber and Robert Heinlein, and so a lifelong taste was born.

My appreciation of literature has broadened since then to include the classics, foreign literature, graphic novels and selected mysteries. Yet for all the discoveries that have delighted me, none quite compared to those four days in which I read Tolkien for the first time.

When, shortly after, I began to have my first crushes on the girls in my class, the feeling wasn’t strange at all. I’d already experienced that intensity of emotions in the pages of three paperback books.

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The bookstore grind

Posted in book stores, Books, Bruce Byfield, employment, English, jobs, minimum wage, Personal, retail, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I spent several years as a part time clerk in a mall bookstore. I had been reduced to a state where I was fit for little else: Not only had I gone straight through from high school with the exception of one or two summers off, but I had taken a double major and married in the same period. I needed time to coast while I considered the next step, and to earn enough money to pay my share of the expenses in the mean time.

In my naivety, I thought an enthusiasm for books was a natural qualification for such a job. Add a good memory for books and titles glimpsed, and I seemed a natural. Probably the fact that the job was minimum wage should have tipped me off to reality, but I was as green with inexperience as a new branch in spring.

Looking back, I have to say that disillusion took a surprisingly long time to set in. Yet, gradually, and with growing horror, I realized that other employees were far more interested in their shreds of status than books, and that my affinity for books was dismissed at the same time that I fielded all sorts of questions from them. I was unworldly, they decided, and they were right, although not in the way they thought.

All the other employees and managers, I realized, considered books commodities, not as exciting diversions and intellectual stimulation. Their lack of university degrees might have tipped me off, I suppose, but show me the twentysomething man who doesn’t believe he knows how the world works.

But I endured as I recuperated, experiencing the change in my life as Sunday store openings became the norm, and the embarrassment of having the older sister of a school acquaintance arrive as manager. She never said anything, but I grew increasingly afraid that she would mention my lowly status, and whispers would start to circulate that I was a failure.

However, despite this background of discontent, what I mainly recall were the surreal moments of comedy that went with the job. Some of these were corporate, such as the constantly shipping of reduced items back and forth for sales until long after any profit could be recouped from them.

One book I remembered was entitled Les Femmes aux Cigarettes, a reprint of a French photo study from the 1920s by a photographer who found the then-novelty of women smoking irresistible; it started at forty-eight dollars soon after I took the job, and had been reduced to twenty-five cent by the time I left.

I remember, too, the buzz of cleaning and drill that surrounded the visit of the owner – an event that lasted perhaps two minutes as he strode to the back of the store, shook the district manager’s hand, and went out to lunch with him.

Then there was the time I considered applying for a full-time position. The manager took me aside and talked to me solemnly of the duties and responsibilities of working full-time – as though I hadn’t been doing everything the full-timers were doing anyway. Asked point blank if she was implying that I wasn’t responsible, she back-pedaled furiously, but, with such events in my past, no wonder my view of the corporate world is ironic and bemused at best.

But what I remember most vividly are the customers. Many would enter the store in early afternoon, wanting the book they had seen on Oprah that morning, and could not understand that I had been at the store since 9AM, let alone that I’m not an Oprah sort of person. My favorite in this category is the woman who came up to me and said, “I can’t remember the name or the title of the book, and it’s hard to explain what it’s about, but it was on some television show this morning, and had a green cover.” What I wanted to do was direct her to the green book section, but, wisely, I refrained.

Another time, one of the many mothers who used the children’s section as a cheaper version of mall daycare berated us because her son had wandered. We should have kept an eye on him, she kept saying.

Then there was the time I chased a young shoplifter out the door, through the mall, and halfway across the parking lot. I didn’t catch him – which was probably good, since I might have got into trouble with the law – and, to tell the truth, I didn’t much care if I did. For me, the incident was an unexpected moment of excitement in an otherwise monotonous day. But from the terrorized look on the shoplifter’s face as he looked over his shoulder, I doubt he felt the same way – although perhaps he went on to tell his own boasting version of the story.

And who can forget the hordes who arrived in the last few hours of Christmas Eve, overheated in their winter coats, furious about everything that had sold out, and about as full of Christmas cheer as a tax collector? One Christmas, I had just slumped against the door lock when a young male executive came bounding at the door.

“I have to get a gift for my wife,” he kept saying. “I have to!” His tie was askew, and he was more than a little drunk, and all I wanted was to go home and start my own Christmas. Safe on the other side of the glass, I muttered, “Keep this up, and you won’t have to worry about buying for your wife much longer,” and let a staffer take pity on him.

I think that these random encounters helped shaped the basis of my worldview: Things don’t make sense, I decided, and I would only get a headache if I insisted in looking for the logic.

But I had outgrown the job by the end of my first shift. I enjoy people, but not constantly, and I’m not a naturally servile or patient person. After two and a half years, I was looking for a way out. I started applying for any job remotely suitable, then hit on grad school. That fall, I applied for both the Communications and English Department at Simon Fraser University. The Communications Department would only take grad students in September, and I wasn’t waiting another eight months, so I became an English master’s candidate, sinking gratefully into the familiar world where ideas mattered and books were viewed as precious.

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Promoting your free software project

Posted in Bruce Byfield, computers, Free Software, freesoftware, gnu/linux, linux, opensource, Personal, technology, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 16, 2007| 4 Comments »

Today, I received the following e-mail. At the sender’s request, I have removed any personal details:

I was wondering if you had any advice for me about how to perform some marketing/pr for my Linux [project]. I’ve started doing interviews with developers and I have created a community news site.

But is there anyway I could possibly get [my project] mentioned in a
magazine like Linux Journal? Is there any free advertising I could take advantage of on certain web sites? I thought you may have some ideas for me because you have experience with this kind of thing. Any help you
could provide me would be appreciated.

I generally receive about 3-4 requests of this sort a year, so I decided to post my reply here, so I can refer others to it:

You’re not likely to find free advertising on sites that will do you any good, so your best bet is to try to get on the various sites as a contributor. Linux.com only takes original material for its main features, but it does have the NewsVac items, the three or four line link summaries on the right of the page that are very popular. And, of course, sites like Slashdot, Digg, and Linux Today are all about links to already published material.

If you have a solid piece of news — which for a piece of free software usually means new releases and unique features — at Linux.com you can pitch a story and write it yourself. However, you’ll be asked to include a disclaimer
that explains your connection with your subject matter, and the article will be rejected if you are being a fanboy. That means you can’t review your own distro, but you might be able to do a tutorial on a distribution’s packaging system, for instance.

Alternatively, you can send news releases in the hopes of convincing either an editor or a writer to cover your news. However, don’t be pushy. Submitting a news release once is enough, and popping back several times to ask if it was received or whether anyone is interested will probably only guarantee that you’ll annoy people so that they won’t cover your news no matter how big it is.

The ideal is to build up an ongoing relation with a few writers, in which you give them stories to write about — we’re always looking — and they give you the coverage you want when you have news that readers might want to hear.

Of course, you open yourself up to negative comments if the software deserves them, but that’s the chance you have to take. However, for the most part, both commercial companies and large community projects find the
risk well worth taking. It’s not as though any of the regular writers deliberately sit down to review with a determination to be negative (although, conversely, they don’t set out to praise, either: We’re not just fans, either).

This process doesn’t happen overnight, so be patient. But, in the long run, you should get some of the publicity you seek.

I don’t know whether this information is useful to others. To me, it seems that I’m saying the obvious, but part of that reaction is undoubtedly due to the fact that I deal with these things daily. Perhaps to others, these thoughts aren’t obvious, so I’m hoping that someone will find them useful

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Fear and loathing at the command line

Posted in Bruce Byfield, computers, Free Software, freesoftware, gnu/linux, hightech, opensource, Personal, software, technology, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2007| 23 Comments »

Long ago, I lost any queasiness about the command line. I’m not one of those who think it’s the only way to interact with their computers, but it’s a rare day that I don’t use it three or four times on my GNU/Linux system. No big deal – it’s just the easiest way to do some administration tasks. Yet I’m very much aware that my nonchalance is a minority reaction. To average users, the suggestion that they use the command line – or the shell, or the terminal, or whatever else you want to call it — is only slightly less welcome than the suggestion that they go out and deliberately contract AIDS. It’s a reaction that seems compounded of equal parts fear of the unknown, poor previous experiences, a terror of the arcane, and a wish for instant gratification.

Those of us who regularly try two or three operating systems every month can easily forget how habit-bound most computer users are. The early days of the personal computers, when users were explorers of new territory, are long gone. Now, the permanent settlers have moved in. The average computer user is no longer interested in exploration, but in getting their daily tasks done with as little effort as possible. For many, changing word processors is a large step, let alone changing interfaces. And both Windows and OS X encourage this over-cautious clinging to the familiar by hiding the command line away and promoting the idea that everything you need to do you can do from the desktop. The truth, of course, is that you can almost always do less from a desktop application than its command line equivalent, but the average user has no experience that would help them understand that.

Moreover, those who have taken the step of entering cmd into the Run command on the Windows menu have not found the experience a pleasant one. DOS, which remains the command line that is most familiar to people, is an extremely poor example of its kind. Unlike BASH, the most common GNU/Linux command line, DOS has only a limited set of commands and options. It has no history that lasts between sessions. Even the act of navigating from one directory to the next is complicated by the fact that it views each partition and drive as a separate entity, rather than as part of a general structure. Add such shortcomings to the ugly, mostly unconfigurable window allotted to DOS in recent versions of windows, and it’s no wonder that DOS causes something close to post-traumatic stress syndrome in average users. And, not having seen a better command line interface, most people naturally assume that BASH or any other alternative is just as stressful.

Yet I sometimes wonder if the main reason for nervousness about the command line isn’t that it’s seen as the area of the expert. In recent years, many people’s experience of the command line is of a sysadmin coming to their workstation, opening a previously unsuspected window, and solving problems by typing something too fast for them to see from the corner into which they’ve edged. From these encounters, many people seem to have taken away the idea that the command line is powerful and efficient. That, to their minds, makes it dangerous – certainly far too dangerous for them to dare trying it (assuming they could find the icon for it by themselves).

And in a sense, of course, they’re right. In GNU/Linux, a command line remains the only interface that gives complete access to a system. Nor are the man or info pages much help; they are often cryptically concise, and some of the man pages must have come down to us almost unchanged from the 1960s.

The fact that they are also wrong is beside the point. Many users aren’t clear on the concept of root accounts, file permissions, or any of the other safeguards that help to minimize the trouble uninformed users can blunder into.

The trouble is, understanding these safeguards takes time, and investing time in learning is something that fits poorly with our demand for instant gratification. By contrast, using a mouse to select from menus and dialogs is something that people can pick up in a matter of minutes. Just as importantly, the eye-candy provided by desktops makes them look sophisticated and advanced. Surely these signs of modishness must be preferable to the starkness of the command line? From this attitude, insisting on the usefulness of the command line is an anachronism, like insisting on driving a Model T when you could have a Lexus.

The truth is, learning the command line is like learning to touch-type: in return for enduring the slowness and repetitiousness of learning, you gain expertise and efficiency. By contrast, using a graphical desktop is like two-fingered typing: you can learn it quickly, but you don’t progress very fast or far. To someone interested in results, the superiority of the command line seems obvious, but, when instant gratification and fashion is your priority, the desktop’s superiority seems equally obvious.

And guess which one our culture (to say nothing of proprietary software) teaches us to value? As a colleague used to say, people like to view computers as an appliance, not as something they have to sit down and learn about. And, what’s more the distinction only becomes apparent to most people after they start to know their way around the command line.

Whatever the reasons, fear and loathing of the command line is so strong that the claim that GNU/Linux still requires its frequent use is enough to convince many people to stick with their current operating system. The claim is no longer true, but you can’t expect people to understand that when the claim plays on so many of their basic fears about computing.

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Eternal and lowdown

Posted in blues, Bruce Byfield, folk music, music, Personal, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Texas, Uncategorized, vancouverfolkfestival, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After several years of online journalism, I thought I was inured to comments about my work. When you’re praised as an unsung genius and as pond scum for the same article a few times, you start to get cynical. But I admit that I was a little overwhelmed when my use of a quote by Ray Wylie Hubbard in my entry entitled “Sweat and grace” brought a friendly comment from Hubbard himself.

Somehow, when I quote somebody, I never consider the possibility that they might reply. The fact that the comment popped up in my inbox while I was listening to Hubbard’s “The Way of the Fallen” made the event all the synchronicitiously spooky.

Depending on your musical taste, that may not mean too much to you. But there are exactly three musical acts I’ve fallen for after hearing less than a single song. The first two were Stan Rogers and OysterBand. Ever since I first heard Hubbard at the Vancouver Folk Festival a few years ago, Hubbard has been the third. His CDs get a lot of play time around our house.

You want to know how much I like Hubbard’s music? Completely inappropriately, Hubbard’s music is filed under Country and Western in most stores. Around Vancouver, C&W still carries overtones of ignorant rednecks. Yet I have been known to search the C&W racks, without even a paperbag on my head to hide my shame, on the off chance of finding another Hubbard album.

That’s how much I like his music.

Hubbard is best known for “Up Against the Wall, You Redneck Mothers,” a humorous work he wrote in the early 1970s. It’s a song that he has since had the occasional regret about, although, as he says on a live album, when he wanders down to the mail box and gets a cheque for it, he feels pretty good about being responsible for the piece. And he has since written songs in much the same vein, such as “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”

But such songs represent only a small part of his range. Even his humor tends to be wryer and dryer these days, as in “Preacher,” when a sinner dumbfounds a minister who has called seeking his repentance points out his woman hanging clothes in the yard and tells him, “I ain’t missing nothing / When she stoop down low,” or in “Mississippi Flush,” a song named for the ultimate hand in poker: “A small revolver and any five cards.”

In a more serious vein, Hubbard is a storyteller, telling gritty stories of the American south with a strong strain of legend and the lore of the blues throughout. It’s no wonder that at least one of his songs, “This River Runs Red,” was partly inspired by a Flannery O’Connor story – there’s more than a little of the Southern Gothic in his work. In “Younger Son,” the narrator is a man with an unwelcome supernatural power; and, in more than one song, he refers to the crossroads where bluesmen like Robert Johnson struck a deal with the devil. And, even when the story is more mundane, there’s often a hint of desperation and long-endured pain in Hubbard’s songs.

If this atmosphere and collection of metaphors was all there was to Hubbard’s work, he would still be one of the great original song writers. But, within these confines, Hubbard manages to slip in a surprising amount of intellectual content and spirituality. In many other songwriters, these elements would seem self-conscious or trite, but Hubbard talks about the Aztec deities in “The Wild Gods of Mexico” or reincarnation in “Stolen Horses,” or the role of the writer in “Knives of Spain” and “The Ballad of the Crimson Kings,” or Rilke in “The Pilgrim” with such naturalness that it’s only afterwards that you do a double-take. Did Hubbard really write about those things in the genre of a popular song? But look at the liner notes, and you’ll see that he did. What’s more, he does so with such casualness that you know that they’ve become part of his thinking.

There’s also a note of what I can only call maturity in his work of the last ten years or so, which is all that is available from his career. I know nothing of Hubbard’s life, and I would hesitate to take references to cocaine and Alcoholics’ Anonymous as based on his personal experience without more details – after all, just because Hubbard writes about such things doesn’t mean they form a major part of his biography.

But unless all powers of observation fail me, I suspect that, somewhere along the line, Hubbard has been through some traumatic times. I also suspect that he has lived through them and developed an existential or stoic philosophy. Listening to Hubbard’s recent songs, you soon realize that they aren’t a young man’s songs – and how rare such perspectives are in popular music, and how much is lost when such voices are banished from one of our culture’s most popular art forms.

So far, I haven’t said much about Hubbard’s music. That’s partly because I’m a writer and tend to respond to words first, and partly because Hubbard is such a strong lyricist.

But I’d be only telling half the story if I didn’t at least mention that Hubbard’s music is as versatile as his words. It’s a little bit country, although far less than you might expect. What’s even more obvious are the strong shots of rock and roll and blues in his work. Some of the blues might be the influence of Gurf Morlix, Hubbard’s producer and sometimes collaborator, but, having listen to both of them working apart, I suspect that their alliance is more a meeting of like minds than a question of influence. And, wherever it comes from, Hubbard’s music is a carefully crafted fusion that is both consistent with its roots and something different than the sum of its parts.

In a just world, a singer-songwriter like Hubbard would have the reputation of a Woodie Guthrie or a Bob Dylan. But perhaps it’s a small consolation for those of us who dislike such unfairness that a corollary of the fact that Hubbard is currently only comfortably successful is that we can still hear him in relatively small settings, where we can properly appreciate his music.

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Why I’ve never joined MENSA

Posted in Bruce Byfield, intelligence, mensa, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 8, 2007| 88 Comments »

Last spring, a friend suggested that I consider joining MENSA, the group for highly intelligent people. Without any false humility, I’m reasonably sure that I’d qualify, but I don’t think I’ll bother, even though joining might extend my circle of acquaintances. Groucho Marx’s comment about not wanting to belong to a club that would invite him to join aside, I dislike the thought of being evaluated before I can join. I also suspect that a club based on intelligence is a false sort of elitism, with misplaced criteria for membership.

Part of my reluctance is a deep-seated dislike of being evaluated. When I was in Grade One, I needed speech therapy to pronounce a hard “c” properly, and was shunted into the slow readers’ group solely on that basis. The appropriateness of that assessment is indicated by the fact that, by the end of the year, I was reading at a Grade 7 level, but the unfairness has left me with a lifelong detestation of tests and evaluations. Report cards, job performances – anything of the sort sets off an alarm and a sense of injustice in me. So, right from the start, the idea of writing an intelligence test in order to belong to a group unsettles me. Although I usually do well on tests, I don’t exactly seek them out.

At any rate, I don’t approve of self-appointed elitism. I’ve always believed that, if you have any talents, you should be self-deprecating about them, and people will appreciate them without you having to trumpet them (how I actually worked in marketing for a couple of years with that attitude escapes me now). In fact, if you have to trumpet your abilities, then either you over-rate them or you need to work on your insecurities (don’t we all). And if you don’t have them — well, better to stay silent in that case, too.

Besides, the elitism of MENSA has always seem misplaced to me. The first MENSA member I ever knew usually found a way to mention his membership within ten minutes of meeting a new person, and I don’t remember a single conversation in which he didn’t boast about his affiliation. He was fond of hiking solo, and despite repeated warnings and having been lost on several occasions, insisted on continuing the practice. He died in his early twenties because he fell off a cliff while taking a short cut on a trail. I don’t know, but I’ve always imagined him thinking that he knew better than the posted warnings because he was supposed to be intelligent. That would have been just like him.

To be fair, other MENSA members I’ve met since haven’t been so conceited. Yet, at the same time, most of them haven’t been extraordinary people, either, although they all had something of the same sense that they were special that the young hiker had. So, with all respect, I suspect that intelligence alone is an insufficient criteria for being an interesting or accomplished person.

Personally, I’d rather hang out with people who have done something. I’m really far less interested in people who are quick with a pun or able to cite knowingly the latest geeky reference than in people who are experts in their chosen fields. When I hear a writer talk about her latest work, a free software developer enthusing about the new features in his upcoming release or executives talking about expanding their business, I don’t care about their intelligence. What I respond to is their obvious love of what they’re doing. Imagination and enthusiasm are what make these people worth spending time with; their intelligence is interesting only so far as it supports these traits.

Nor, in my experience, do you find many such impassioned people who are fixtures in their local MENSA chapter. The reason, I suspect, is that they don’t need the validation of hanging around a self-proclaimed elite. They’re too busy with what they love – and they’re all the more interesting for their preoccupation.

I could mention, too, the shortcomings of all existing measures of intelligence, but that’s a topic for another day. The real point is, by demeanor, temperament, and preferences, I’m just not likely to fit in an organization like MENSA. I’m sure that, for some people, especially when young, MENSA can be a much-needed refuge, but, for me, belonging to the group would be looking for companionship in the wrong place. I simply don’t value intelligence as an isolated quality – or myself – as much as most MENSA members apparently do.

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A Chinese Chariots of the Gods

Posted in 1421, Bruce Byfield, China, history, Neopaganism, Personal, Uncategorized on October 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I’m about halfway through 1421: The Year that China Discovered the World, and finding it heavy going. The problem isn’t the writing so much as the way that author Gavin Menzies develops his argument, piling speculation on speculation, leaping to conclusions and drawing everything into his main theory until alarms sound in my head and I become irritated by the obsessional nature of his ideas.

Menzies starts with the known facts that a massive fleet set off from China in 1421, and that, while it was away, a reaction against exploration and trade occured in China, putting an end to such voyages and suppressing all their discoveries. From there, however, he quickly expands into conjecture, imagining a giant flotilla of ships that, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, divided into three separate fleets.

One of these fleets, he suggests, sailed into Antarctica to take sightings to aid navigation in the southern hemisphere, then returned home via the west side of Australia. Another travelled up South America, crossed the Pacific, returned to travel down the west coast of North and Central America, then explored New Zealand and Australia’s east coast. The third headed north to the Atlantic, circumnavigated Greenland, and returned home around the northern coast of Asia. On the way, these fleets supposedly mapped the coastlines they were passing, and left traces in the form of observation platforms, wrecks, animals, and small colonies.

The only trouble is, absolutely no record of these journeys exist. We know that the fleet sailed, and was charged with exploration, but that is all. At best, Menzies is forced to argue from such second or third hand evidence as European maps that show coastlines before any European had reached them. At worst, he argues from currents and winds that the ships must have taken the courses he suggests. Never mind that some elements, such as the circumnaviations of Greenland and Asia are wildly implausible, or that none of these voyages ever steered towards Europe, which was at least vaguely known to the Chinese of the time.

Moreover, all this travelling is supposed to have occurred in two or three years. Given that Magellan and Drake’s circumnavigations took about three or four years, it is just barely possible that the Chinese fleets could have managed their own in the time alloted, but, when you consider the difficulty of keeping hundreds of vessels together and the slowness of charting coastlines, the time scale becomes unworkable – even for a straightforward circumnavigation, let alone the endless criss-crossings and detours that Menzies suggests. These are all difficulties that Menzies, for all his repeated claims of unique expertise because of his service in the British navy, utterly fails to take into account.

Yet, despite these difficulties, Menzie plows on. His method is to suggest a movement, then to find evidence that might suggest a Chinese presence in the place he suggests. An old map, a burial marker, an account of a strange wreck – it doesn’t matter. Anything that can be made to support his ideas, sometimes with a little twisting, is pressed into service. Alternative explanations don’t matter, not even the possibility that the signs of Chinese influence might have come at some other time. He never argues from the evidence; rather, he finds the evidence to fit his theory, then shoehorns it into place without any regard for other possibilities.

Very quickly, the tone becomes reminiscent of books like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, in which everything everywhere is explained in terms of a single all-embracing, far-fetched theory. Menzies’ theory may be more reasonable than von Däniken’s, but only barely. It still has the same stink of monomania lingering about it – unsurprisingly, since Menzies has apparently spent over fifteen years on it.

Menzies’ theory may have the benefit of introducing North Americans and Europeans to the glories of Chinese culture. One of the few things that he is right about is that, in the fifteenth century, the Chinese were probably the most advanced civilization in the world, and that’s a fact that few people seem to realize today.

Yet I find myself wishing that he would have cast his book in the form of a novel rather than as an apparently serious attempt at speculation. If he had, then he might have performed the same service without leaving the unhealthy air of obsession about his work.

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The courage of the early morning

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, health, Personal, running, sports, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Courage of the Early Morning is the name of the biography of World War I flying ace Billy Bishop that was written by his son. It refers to the characteristics needed to get up in the dark and cold and risk your life after too little sleep. It’s also a phrase that I like to apply to going out for a morning run in the damp and darkness of fall and winter.

Admittedly, I am not facing planes that are waiting with machine guns to knock me down, although in the dark, cars and half-awake drivers aren’t a bad substitute sometimes. Still, I like to think there’s the same sense of going against the inclinations of comfort in order to do something difficult. And, if I’m honest, there’s also a sense of perverse satisfaction in believing that I’m the sort of person who wouldn’t make a completely hedonistic choice.

This bit of self-dramatization (because that’s what it is) dates back to my days of playing soccer and rugby when I was growing up. When going to practice or play and hearing someone voice a variation of “Sooner you than me,” I used to like to think that I was tough enough not to let bad weather discourage me. Of course, in reality, I had all the toughness of boiled spinach, but adolescents do need some shred of self-assurance to cling to. And, rather than admit myself a hypocrite, after the first tackle that left me sliding through the mud, I soon found myself taking a grim satisfaction in my ability to adapt to a condition that others still shied away from. It was a good way to score, too, because those who weren’t muddy themselves would often avoid me as someone who was slightly crazed.

Something of that same insanity persists in me to this day. When I leave the warmth of the bed and stumble outside into the wet and cold of autumn, I reflect that hundreds of people around me wouldn’t consider doing what I am, and then I don’t feel so miserable. Except on the coldest days of the year, the satisfaction lingers enough for me to fall into a rhythm and to warm myself with the exertion, so that the misery I’ve walled away disappears.

I suppose that something of the same train of thought drives people who take up dangerous sports or take chances. By comparision, my courage of the early morning is a very minor strain of the attitude at best. But middle-age, I find, needs its illusions as much as adolescence, and if it gets me out the door each morning, this is one to which I’ll cling.

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An unexpected compliment

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“It was a compliment,’ said Merry Brandybuck,’and so, of course, not true.”
– J. R. R. Tokien, The Lord of the Rings

When I use the exercise bike at the rec center, I mostly keep to myself. After years of running by myself, I just don’t think of exercising as a social occasion. So, I was surprised yesterday when a man in his early twenties approached me as I staggered off the bike and said, “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure,” I said warily, supposing he was about to criticize my technique. In my experience, everyone in the weight room is an expert, and few are reluctant to give you the benefit of their advice.

“You’re a warrior, man!” Then, as I was wondering whether I had heard him right, he said, “I see you running when I go to work. Then, at the end of the day, I see you here on the bike, working your guts out. You’re a warrior, a real warrior!”

I muttered something about just trying to get away from the computer after twelve hours, and sat down at a weight machine, bemused and – if I’m going to be honest – slightly pleased.

When I’m praised (or abused, for that matter), it’s usually for my writing. Most people don’t notice me physically, because I’m heavy-set for my height. I don’t look fit even when I am, and regardless of the fact that I’ve exercised daily since I was in elementary school. So, to be praised for my endurance (which I suppose was what he was saying) is unexpected. Yet, because I’m proud of my endurance, my vanity is tickled to have it acknowledged.

At the same time, I feel uneasy that it was noticed at all. Like many people who are observers, I’m mildly disconcerted to realize that someone has been observing me. I’m not altogether sure that I like it. It’s a bit of role-reversal that I didn’t expect.

Moreover, so far as a warrior-like appearance goes, I’m not exactly a rival to Ghengis Khan, or even someone civilized like Xenophon. Years of reading and keyboard work have taken their toll, and, if random people were asked to describe my face, chances are that many of them would use the word “mild.” Don’t get me wrong – I feel passionately about many causes and people, and I probably have more than my share of self-righteousness. But most of that doesn’t show on my face.

Finding a minute part of me inclined to preen at the compliment, I told myself that I wasn’t one of those middle-aged business executives that need to imagine themselves a samurai warrior to find some meaning in their lives.

Later, it would occur to me both how rare compliments are between hetrosexual men, and how I still don’t know how to receive a compliment from anyone with any dignity or grace.

But, at the time, I could only think:

A warrior?

Me?

Yeah, right.

Shaking my head, I bent to my repetitions with the weight machine.

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