Knowing What We Know

Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
Simon Winchester
Harper (April 25, 2023), 431 pages
Kindle edition $16.99, Amazon hardcover $28.43

In Knowing What We Know author Simon Winchester covers human knowledge across history in a fascinating and highly readable volume. In the preface he describes how his own experience of knowledge began when as a toddler he put on a shoe in which a wasp had lodged itself. He describes the pain and his mother’s quick actions to relieve it. In Chapter One he writes about a woman who set up a free school for poor children in her neighborhood of Bangalore, India, youngsters who would otherwise have had no chance for an education. From there Winchester discusses the Rosetta Stone and cuneiform tablets from the Fertile Crescent in the ancient Near East. In particular he focuses on tablets that were the ancient equivalent of a twentieth century student workbook. Throughout the book Winchester provides a wide and sweeping survey of human knowledge right up to the present day (or as close as possible, given the time it takes to get a book to market) and the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT.

Winchester writes about the evolution of written works from the scroll to the codex, the precursor of the modern book. He discusses the care that monks took to preserve manuscripts, and how modern technicians are installing scanners in monasteries to digitize and electronically store those manuscripts.

The author has a long discussion of libraries, writing with admiration about the main reading room at the New York City public library, and mourning the loss of the old reading room at the British Library “with its twenty-five miles of shelves, the place where Karl Marx, Lenin (under the name Jacob Richter), and Bram Stoker all worked, creating their various nightmares for the world.” He writes about how Andrew Carnegie “salved his own plutocratic conscience by financing hundreds of libraries around the world.” (I certainly loved the Carnegie Library of my childhood. The modern building that replaced it was not at all the same.) Winchester tells us that Alexa from Amazon (with whom I speak several times a day) was named for the great library at Alexandria. (And he notes the library was not destroyed in a sudden conflagration but was in decline for many years before a fire in the time of Caesar.) He points out that open stacks are a fairly recent innovation, librarians once thinking that the average person did not have the skills to handle a book.

Winchester writes that when Encyclopædia Britannica was sold to an American buyer it became a strictly commercial venture, not a noble attempt to spread knowledge more widely. In his discussion of AI Winchester discusses HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and implies that HAL had the last word. HAL did not, of course, as Dave was able to revert it to its factory default state before himself transforming into some kind of superbeing on a mission to save the planet. (I trust I’m not delivering any spoilers here, since the movie came out in 1968.) Winchester writes about spell checkers and grammar checkers, and then refers to autocomplete and predictive text technology as a “somewhat diabolical and wholly unnecessary nuisance, the bane of the writer’s life.”

Over the span of several dozen pages the author segues from museums to the human brain to computers and hypertext (reminding me of my own foray in developing a computer hypertext help system for a pre-Windows software product). You can see how his writing incorporates dry British humor. And although British, Winchester lives in the United States and the book uses American spelling. He expects us, however, to understand British terms. Winchester uses the phrase “medium wave” when in the United States we would say “AM radio.” He uses words like “quiddity,” something I had to look up. (Oddly, Merriam-Webster does not note this as “chiefly British,” though I wouldn’t expect to see it from an author writing in American English.)

Fascinating stuff indeed, and well worth reading.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
Claire Dederer
Knopf (April 25, 2023), 286 pages
Kindle edition $14.99, Amazon hardcover $25.20

In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma Claire Dederer writes about creative people who do bad things. From the title alone one might assume that she has some strong judgments on the topic, but the subtitle makes clear that the discussion is much more nuanced.

Dederer opens the book writing about movie director Roman Polanski. She recalls the highly publicized incident of Polanski’s drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl. She then sits down and does a Polanski marathon in her living room. Her conclusion: with movies such as Chinatown, Polanski is a talented director, whatever his personal behavior.

The author devotes a long section of the book to Woody Allen. There are, of course, parallels between Allen’s real-life relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and the plot of his movie Manhattan several decades earlier. Dederer seems less inclined to give Allen a pass, at least in the context of Manhattan, and is irked at a male colleague who chastises her for not appreciating the cinematic skill Allen brought to the movie.

Dederer writes about J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and how countless youngsters who saw themselves as misfits found solace in the world of Hogwarts, and who felt betrayed when she started making comments that seemed to look down on the transgender community. The author reflects on how the death of David Bowie caused the story to resurface regarding Bowie’s being responsible for the loss of a fifteen-year-old girl’s virginity. Interestingly, the victim had no animosity toward Bowie.

Dederer discusses a rock duo, popular with gay and trans young people, and how one member was allegedly guilty of an act of sexual violence. She describes how that did not diminish the duo’s popularity. She quotes one young fan, a friend of her daughter’s: “I still listen to them. I still love them. Even after everything.”

I had been looking forward to the publication of Monsters ever since I read a couple of months ago about its upcoming release. That’s because I have had my own fan dilemmas. Around Woody Allen, certainly. But even more so regarding Marion Zimmer Bradley and the tension between her known acts of child abuse and my desire to read her retelling of the Arthurian myth in her novel The Mists of Avalon. I wrote about that after watching Maureen Corrigan discuss the topic of separating the artist from the art (or not) in her Great Courses video series on banned books.

After writing about others, Dederer turns to herself and asks if she is a monster. In particular she asks if her desire to be productive as a writer and carving out time to do so made her a monster to her family. Near the end of the book, she admits to her alcoholism and how that might have brought out monster-like tendencies in her. She describes how she simply decided one day to stop drinking.

In the end Dederer gives us no definitive solution. She writes:

There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth…. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson.

Dederer tells us, “The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.”

No clear answers, for sure. I still don’t know what to do about The Mists of Avalon. That doesn’t mean Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is not worth reading. For me it was worth every minute I spent with it.

Conversations with Birds

Conversations with Birds
Priyanka Kumar
Milkweed Editions (November 8, 2022), 293 pages
Kindle edition $9.99, Amazon paperback $18.00

Priyanka Kumar is a writer and filmmaker. She also knows her birds.

Conversations with Birds is a collection of essays set in (almost) chronological order that describes her encounters with birds in the various places in which she has lived. The first essays in the book recount her time in Santa Cruz, where she was a visiting professor at the University of California. She then describes her time living near the Cal Tech campus in Pasadena where her husband had a temporary position. From there she and her husband move to New Mexico.

In New Mexico the couple first rents a house, but then found a house that they fell in love with, the deal for which almost fell through. The book concludes with her time enjoying a five-week residency in the cabin that Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, built and lived in.

Much of the book is memoir in its style. In Santa Cruz Kumar writes about her feeling of isolation from her film community, but that she was there to fill in for a professor of film who was on sabbatical. During her Pasadena time she describes a trip south to shoot a documentary about Ravi Shankar, who lived in Encinitas, on the California coast north of San Diego. She also recounts walking with her husband in the tree-lined streets of neighboring San Marino amongst the ostentatious mansions. In New Mexico she describes the downside to buying an old house and the fragility of the picture window, facing the back yard, that she loved so much.

Birds, however, dominate the book. Kumar writes about the tiny snowy plovers on the beaches of Santa Cruz (birds Terry and I loved to watch when we lived just an hour’s drive from there), about the bald eagle in New Mexico, and birds of all kinds in between. She sometimes delves into myth and folklore, as she does in her discussion of the owl, which is a symbol of death in some cultures (as it was in the case of her grandmother in India), but an auspicious sign in other cultures. Kumar is serious enough about birds that she provides the scientific name of every bird she mentions.

Nor is Kumar’s description of the natural world limited to birds. She describes encounters with cougars and mountain lions. She even describes coming across a herd of javelinas.

Kumar’s timeline is not wholly reliable. In one essay she mentions her two children playing near the Rio Grande, while in a later essay she recounts becoming pregnant for the first time. Nor am I entirely comfortable with the free pass she gives to Aldo Leopold. As much as I admire the early work he did in ecology, and as much as I enjoyed A Sand County Almanac when I first read it, I know from other sources that he was quite racist in some respects.

Nonetheless, as an essay collection that offers an appreciation of, and a respect for, the natural world in general and for birds in particular, Conversations with Birds does a superb job.