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Short short story II/2

An Inconvenience (by Jimi Fallows)

'We were wondering, sir, if you would mind helping us with our enquiries?'

Not words anyone looks forward to hearing after opening one's door to find two policemen standing looking very pleased with themselves; words doubly unwelcome with a freshly deceased corpse in one's living-room.

'It's well past midnight, officer,' I said wearily. 'Couldn't this wait until the morning?'

'I'm afraid not, sir. I do beg your pardon for the inconvenience - believe me, we're not here for the overtime,' with which he paused so that he and his thuggish double could share a formal snort of amusement. I surveyed them with the righteous degree of annoyance I found easy to summon. 'I'll get my coat.'

'Oh no, sir, no need to accompany us to the station - ha ha . If we can just step inside?'

I paused and thought about this. 'Very well.' They barged past me into the house and the talkative officer reached for the living-room door. 'Not there, please. I'd rather you didn't disturb my wife. Come through to the kitchen.'

He stood in the bright light of the hall quite motionless for a moment: hand resting on the door handle, paused in thought. His companion continued to regard me with a steely, unpleasant gaze.

'Of course, sir, it's your house. Lead the way.' He flattened himself against the door to let me pass. 'There was a break-in at number 11, maybe an hour ago. Did you hear anything?'

'I'm afraid I was otherwise engaged.'

[The second short short story series is announced and explained here.]

The past and a foreign country

Must you have spent time in a country in order to write a novel - even a good novel - that's set there? No. There are novels written about the more or less distant past, 'a place no author can get to'. That pretty much settles it, I'd say.

WotN at the Bar

I reckon... that writing is a form of acting. Whoever is your point of view character, if you can become that person, you're half way there.

That's my beloved, interviewed at The Book Bar.

Weight of the past

Some great photos here. See number 5, which I used to own as a postcard. I sent it to the young daughters of an old friend, telling them it was a picture of me sitting on his shoulders. (Via Jeff.)

At least they were sincere

This is an interesting one in the way of comparative moral estimation. One Peter Mehlman, as part of a damning assessment of George W. Bush that centres on the belief that 'the Bush administration is the first that doesn't even mean well', offers the following observation:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought [they] were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc.

Mehlman obviously hasn't given much thought to the dictum that no one knowingly does evil. Not true without exception, it nonetheless tells you something important about human motivation, self-understanding and concern for the good opinion of others, if only some others. But that's by the way. More alarming is Mehlman's apparent belief that meaning well is some sort of virtue irrespective of what counts for the person concerned as meaning well, as 'doing good things'. Even if it's racial oppression, why, even if it's genocide... so long as it's meant well, then the meaning well is 'at least' something. Others might find this more doubtful. (Via The New Editor.)

Jane Austen's kick

In the final chapter of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen allows the authorial 'I' to put in an appearance. This is her opening paragraph:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

Quite a postmodern passage you might think, forcing it upon the attention of her readers that she is the creator of these people, Fanny Price, Edmund, Henry and Mary Crawford, and all the others in her cast of characters. She can restore them forthwith (or, at any rate, some of them) to tolerable comfort. Just like that. Shrewd as ever, though, Austen doesn't allow that thought to settle before following up, immediately, with this one:

My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt, or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford...

Fanny must have been happy, she had compelling sources of delight - and this Jane Austen has the satisfaction of (factively) knowing, rather than simply determining. No sooner than it has been put in question, the reality of the world of Mansfield Park is reaffirmed. What is to be made of this swift one-two?

She's reminding us that her story is mere fiction and, the reminder once delivered, returning inside the fiction that Fanny and the others are real people. Alternatively, no - they are real people, those whose story she tells; but, as the teller, she has her rights and so may 'restore' some of them to tolerable comfort by a quicker rather than a slower telling.

A few pages later, look:

I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.

She's done it again! We're all at liberty, seemingly, to decide on our own date for Edmund to be over his attachment to Mary Crawford, as if the whole thing were just made up. But - the author then says (and you better believe it) - his getting over her happened at the time that it 'naturally' would and 'not a week earlier'.

Only one conclusion is possible. Jane Austen anticipated the folly that goes under the name of postmodernism and delivered it a sound kick. She tempts her readers with the suggestion that this is all mere play of the mind, then corrects them by her insistence that there's a reality out there that constrains even the novelist, even the creator of fictions - in its way.

Poland: a ferocious occupation

Adam LeBor thinks that Anne Karpf shouldn't overlook or minimize the record of those Poles who, under Nazi occupation, came to the aid of Jews in danger. He's right. It is one of great bravery. But there's another point that should be made. If there are two sides to that story, the record of Polish anti-Semitism that she highlights and the record of Polish courage and rescue that he does, there is also the fact that the Nazi occupation, brutal everywhere, was in Poland ferociously cruel and unrestrained, and the suffering of non-Jewish Poles is also not to be overlooked or minimized. Anne and Adam both know this, but the emphases flowing from their respective argumentative purposes do not allow it enough space.

Short short story II/1

Grendel (by Lucy Langston)

'Gobble, gobble, munch, munch.'

There's a monster under my bed, and I haven't even a teddy to cling to for comfort. My brown bear Mr Beowulf has long since been relegated to the bookshelf and I'd be far too embarrassed to get him down now.

'Gobble, gobble.'

I clutch my hand tightly around the cricket bat at my bedside, and in one giant swoop make the decision to leap up and out of bed swinging it into the darkness. Nothing stirs. A few boxes shake and clatter as I buffet them out of the way, but the monster is quite still.

Click!

I hear the bedside lamp switch on and look up into the bemused face of my husband.

'What you doing with my bat?'

'Nothing,' I reply guiltily.

He shoots me a quizzical look and I smile back, 'Just being silly again.'

He lets out a deep, tired sigh and pulls back the duvet for me to come back to bed. I put down the bat and climb in looking warily about the room. Everything is very still and quiet. The light clicks off, reintroducing the darkness. The only sound, the tick-tock of the clock and John's heavy rhythmic breathing as he rolls over and drifts off to sleep once again. Slowly I lean back and settle into bed, sinking my head into my lovely soft pillow.

'Gobble, gobble, munch, munch.'

My brow furrows in irritation, 'SHHH!'

[The second short short story series is announced and explained here.]

Moresome boresome

The Liberal Democrats are going to 'rattle the cage of British politics'? It recalls Denis Healy's description of being attacked by Geoffrey Howe: 'like being savaged by a dead sheep'. (Thanks: E.)

The flaws in the laws

I'm out of my depth with some of what Paul Davies is saying in this article, but I won't let that stop me engaging with a part of his argument I think I do understand (see also here.). Davies identifies a problem with the multiverse theory, this being that...

... there has to be a physical mechanism to make all [the] universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from?

Davies then goes on to explain that, in this regard science has the same problem as religion:

The root cause of all the difficulty can be traced to the fact that both religion and science appeal to some agency outside the universe to explain its lawlike order. Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. But appealing to a host of unseen universes and a set of unexplained meta-laws is scarcely any better.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe.

So if that's the problem, what's the solution? From here on in I start to lose track of some of this, the computer software stuff in particular; but in a word the solution is that physical laws are emergent with the universe itself. Davies writes:

I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark.

And there's more, in elaboration of that point. OK, now I get, or think I get, that unlike God and meta-laws on the old conception of them, these emergent laws are not outside, they're inside, the universe; and there's a sort of interactivity between them and it, rather than a relationship of one-way governance. What I don't get is how the notion of a universe so related to its laws avoids the question held by Davies to embarrass both religion and pre-existing science: the question of where they (the laws), or where it (the designer), come or comes from? We now have a universe and we have laws that are inherent in it. But where does this come from? Or stepping up a level, why isn't the same question applicable to the universe itself that Davies says was troubling for laws of physics as previously conceived? And if the answer is that the universe just is, why couldn't the old laws of physics also just be?

I know, I know: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' 'Even if there were nothing you'd still be complaining!'