Pop-sci tripe

I've just finished yet another popular sience (pop-sci) and I feel nauseauted by how bad it is. As a practising scientist but also an avid reader, I feel obliged to read my fair share of pop-sci. Apart from D'Arcy Thompson's sublime "On Growth And Form", recently, I've read a slew of terribly-written pop-sci books. There was: Robert Laughlin "A Different Universe", Steve Rose "Lifelines", Andrew Parker "In the Blink of an Eye", Martin Brooks "Fly". All horrible. None of these writers can write concisely, stay on topic, structure an argument, or even tell a godamn story. The prose is graceless, studded with prickly pieces of jargon, drier than the Gobi desert, and smeared with a holier-than-thou attitude. But most of all, these writers can't write a decent metaphor even if someone stuck a gun to their head and threatened them with a game of russian roulette. They use half-baked metaphors and wax lyrical without a trace of poetry. Poke my eye out with a stick. Please.

What do readers want?

So I am writing Jonathen Franzen's essay "Why Bother" again. It's a briliant essay on why we, readers of fiction, even bother to read. He gives a pithy answer.

Franzen's answer channels the sociologist Shirley Heath, who has spent much of her career studying people who read, the one thing that pops up over-and-over in her study is that readers are drawn to unpredictability. The difficulty in "difficult" novels is the unpredictability of how a life turns out.

Shirley Heath found that the type of person who is a serious reader is not limited to white over-educated college graduates, but is rather diverse. The one thing that unites them is that readers are people who have faced serious up-heavels in their lives. Is it then a surprise that the bulk of book buyers, according to national book-seller statistics, are middle-aged white women? The sexual revolution created a fundamental schism in the expectations of women that separated their dreams of their own mother's simple future, to that of their own, vastly more complicated and more-fulfilling one.

Unpredictability is also about the contradictions that life throws up. Great fiction doesn't avoid the comforting fictions that we often tell ourselves about life. It doesn't hide the sudden heart-attack, the betrayal of a 50 year marriage, the back-stab in the time of war. Dilemnas are dilemnas precisely because conventional wisdoms cannot tell us which way we should go. Moral contradictions and ethical dilemnas are the deep well-springs of unpredictability.

However, great fiction, according to Franzen, is predictable in a certain way. It is predictable in the sense that the great mysteries of life have always been there. They have never been solved and they will never be solved. Ever since the first ape asked, "why me?", such questions have been asked over-and-over again. The question has not changed but the form of the question has. And they form it takes, has manifested in every age, in every decade, in every life-time in every possible, surprising and unpredictable way.

Transcendent Moments in Film

I stumbled onto this list of 100 greatest moments in film that was put together by the Guardian. As someone who believes that specificity is key in good artistic criticism, I find that reading about single moments in a film sure beats reading prose expounding on entire films, such prose is usually so waffly that a severe case of critical indigestion normally follows. Anyway, I've started you on 91-100, as voted by the Guardian readers. And just in case you're wondering, moment number 1 is one of my all-time favourites as well.

I Can See Clearly Now, the Pain is Gone

So I bumped into H the other day, and asked a casual, "What's up?"

"Not much", she anwsered. "Well, actually, I got laser surgery on my eyes yesterday."

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Well no. It's remarkable, there was hardly any recovery time. I can see clearly right now."

"Wow, you must have had general anesthetic", I said.

"No. I had local."

"You were conscious through the operation?", I asked.

"Yes. Although there was no physical pain, it was gross. It's amazing, millions of years of evolution has wired us to flinch at objects that come near the eye. In the operation, I had to hold my head still, conscious, and watch someone clamp something over my iris to hold it still."

"Then the doctor brought up an electric knife up to carve open the lens. It was an electric knife but, even though I couldn't feel anything, the sound of the electric knife, which resembled a dentist's drill, was horrible. After he cut open the lens, I could feel the lid flapping in the air." [helpful image from Luis Bunuel's Le chien d'Andalou]

"What was worst was that I had been wearing my old contacts incorrectly. I would often leave them on whilst sleeping. Having the contacts in the eye for so long prevents oxygen from entering the eye. As a result my eye had grown more than its fair share of blood vessels inside the eye. My eye was engorged with blood. So when the laser started cutting open my eye, the blood vessels burst. My vision started to color red, and I could feel the blood pouring out of my eye-balls."

"You can still see the bruising," she said as she pulled away her eye-lid to show me the large splotches of bruise over the top of her eyeball.

"The operation lasted maybe 15 minutes and I felt no pain but it was one of the worst experiences of my life."

The Ressurection of Angie Hart

I still remember many years ago in Australia when I first heard the voice of Angie Hart. I can't remember exactly what I was doing, but I do remember that I stopped what I was doing. The song was "Ordinary Angels", 2 minutes and 26 seconds of perfect acoustic pop. The ethereal voice of Angie Hart floated over a shuffling slightly-left-of-center chordal progression. The voice had a vulnerable, breathy quality but there was something else. Now, many years later, I realise that part of the charm of the voice is a Australian cadence, a slight flattening of the vowels and roundening of the consonants.

The song was from the band, Frente, and the song was written by the guitarist Simon Austin, still one of my favourite acoustic guitarists. They released two fantastic e.p.'s, which contained a bevy of great songs, including t"Labour of Love" (20 MB avi). The future boded well for the band, as they started to make headway into the Australian music scence. They even played at the university where I studied.

The first album, Marvin the Album, included most of the good songs from the ep's with a few new ones. Unfortunately, the first single from the album was the garish "Accidentally Kelly Street", a song with a very catchy melody but terrible lyrics (Here's the door / And here's the window / Here's the ceiling / and here's the floor), contrasting painfully with the other songs. And to pile misery onto misfortune, they made a terribly gauche music-video for the song, where Angie is dressed up in a house-wife costume cleaning a card-board cut-out house with oversized brooms and dustpans. It was a frightening possibly inspired by a session with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. The second album, "Shape", was where I lost interest. The problem was that Simon Austin, whilst a brilliant acoustic guitarist, couldn't really handle the electric guitar. Frente mutated from a lively acoustic band to a languid electic prog-rock guitar band. Of course, there was a relationship within the band and not long after Austin and Hart broke up, the band ended.

I lost track of them for a while but a few years later, Angie Hart popped up again with her new band, Splendid. Well it was not so much a band, but a love child. Touring with Frente, Angie met former Chilli-peppers guitarist, Jesse Tobias, and they got married, formed the band Splendid, and released an album, "Have you got a name for this."

After Frente ended, Angie moved to L.A. and Simon moved to New York. Apparently, Splendid got jerked around by the record company where they didn't even bother releasing their first album in the States. And if you crawl through the splendid web-site, you'll find that Angie spent several years trying to write music, live in l.a., maintain a relationship, whilst working a 9-to-5 job in retail. But it seems that phase is over. Although Splendid has released their second album, Angie is now back in Australia. And Frente, well, recognizing the spark that made them great, Angie and Simon recently started playing again, and recognizing the error of their ways (mp3) , they have now reformed Frente. Long live Frente.

The Nature of Rock and Roll

Stephen Metcalf, in his review of Nick Hornby's new book, penned this remarkable insight:

Nick Hornby has built his admirable career, as comedian of manners for the album rock era, out of a single, hedgehoglike insight: The majority of people touched by rock music weren't makers of rock music. In fact, they weren't even remotely like the makers of rock music. They were consumers of rock music, or dorky suburban boys in poster-filled bedrooms.

People who love rock music are people who see refracted in the rock idols, the sublimation of their desires, which for the briefest of moments, lifts them out of their (typically) middle-class homogenity. Or, as Stephen Metcalf puts it:

Sublime banality and self-centered mediocrity and a pitiful moonlit pining: Hornby captured perfectly the voice of the Baby Boomer more or less permanently fixed to the emotional vocabulary of his own pubescence.

The Power of Wikipedia

It is 10:17am Western Pacific US time, Wednesday, July 7th. Already, there is a detailed entry on wikipedia on the London Bombings that happened yesterday. Reading some of the forum responses, it seems that people are inching to undestand what it may be like to have a brutal occupying power run by soldiers with frighteningly powerful guns and bombs who speak another language, and who have slaughtered over 100,000 of your countrymen.