William Blake

From William Blake's Proverbs from Hell.

What is now proved was once only imagin'd.

See Joan Aiken's comment

"Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. Therefore, if you write about something, hopefully you write about something that's better or more interesting than circumstances as they now are, and that way you hope to make a step towards it."

Jan Morris A Writer's House in Wales

A collection of Welsh tidbits from Jan Morris' A Writer's House in Wales.

Wherever Welsh people have gone in the world, the image of the cup of tea has gone with them. Even now, in the days of universal junk food, Welsh women like to live up to their reputation. The Olde Welsh Tea Shoppe may have petered out but the old Welsh cup of tea, sweet and strong, is still universally on offer. When Wittgenstein the philosopher stayed in the house of a Welsh preacher the minister's wife urged her hospitality upon him with some diffidence - "Would you like a cup of tea, now, Dr. Wittgenstein? Would you like bread? Would you care for a nice piece of cake? Sonorously from the next room came the voice of the clergyman himself: "Don't ask the gentleman! Give!"

Mad as the Mist and Snow by W.B. Yeats

One of the pleasures of reading Yeats, at least for me, is that I don't have a huge capacity to read much of his work at a sitting. I much prefer to savour a poem or two for a while and then come back to the bar for some more. Consequently, there is always more Yeats to discover and enjoy. A lifelong treat.

Mad as the Mist and Snow
by W.B. Yeats

Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.

Horace there by Homer stands,
Plato stands below,
And here is Tully's open page.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend,
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

Dave Barry on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

From Ronald Shwartz's For the Love of Books which includes an essay by humorist and author Dave Barry about his favorite readings.

Another book, which everyone was reading in the seventies, was Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I remember reading it and thinking "This explains everything, the whole universe, or at least where human beings fit in and how you should live your life." But I could only remember it for about two days. I remember thinking "Boy, I could go take apart a transmission and put it back together and it would work." But I never did it. So, I'm not sure sometimes whether books change your life so much as, every now and then, one comes along that perfectly reinforces the way you already think. That was an example of a book that I thought was going to change my life, and I still think it was a wonderfully written book, but I can't for the life of me remember what the point of it was. I don't really retain what I read, I just love the process of reading.

The First Heroes by Craig Nelson

A thrilling, moving story and well written. It has been a while since I had a story that caused me to reprioritize my work so that I could go ahead and finish the book.

The shock of Pearl Harbor and the unexpected condition of being at war is still fresh. The Japanese Empire has racked up victory after victory without pause. The Philippines have fallen, along with Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, et al. Australia is threatened. Two mighty British warships, the battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse have both been sunk, eviscerating Britain's naval presence in the Pacific.

With the US shocked by the unremitting success of the enemy, a plan is hatched at the highest levels of government to strike back, even if it is simply a gesture. Morale needs boosting. The public need to be shown that the enemy is not invincible. The airforce asks for volunteers to undertake a mission to an unnamed location, under unidentified circumstances, with a high probability of not returning. The only thing promised was a chance to strike back. With that proposition, the ranks were more than filled.

The plan is to launch sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers from an aircraft carrier the USS Hornet. Such large planes have never been launched from a carrier before. All the practice take-offs and landings are done on land. The planes are to launch some five hundred miles from Tokyo from the carriers, drop their bombs (without their Norden bombsights which are too sophisticated and secret to risk losing over Tokyo) and then fly on several hundred miles to allied held bases in mainland China. The distance is so great that the planes are stripped of anything disposable (including some of their defensive machine guns) in order to add extra fuel tanks.

Murphy was sailing with the Task Group. As the Task Group approaches Japan they sail into a massive storm. They are then spotted by Japanese fishing boats some seven hundred miles from shore and in the early hours of the morning and Tokyo is alerted. The planes, already operating at the extremities of their range, will now have to fly an extra two hundred miles. Their arrival over Tokyo will now be in the middle of the day, optimizing Japan's defenses. All planes are launched, to the amazement of everyone, but the storm precludes them from flying in formation. They encounter a head-wind for part of the journey and which consumes yet more fuel. The extra fuel tanks turn out to be leaking, some badly.

Despite all this, all planes make it to their targets and drop their bombs. All planes, despite being fired at and damaged by anti-aircraft guns as well as being attacked by Japanese fighters, are able to head towards China. Because of the continuing storm, the navigators are unable to take any celestial readings and so they fly by dead reckoning with a high margin of error. It is night by the time the planes arrive over what they estimate to be China. Some planes can't quite make it and ditch in the ocean in the dark. Others fly until they are on fumes, desperately trying to make out where they might be. Most bail out into the dark as their planes gasp out a few last miles.

And then the real tribulations begin as the crewmen seek to make contact with the Chinese, avoid the Japanese and make it back to allied lines. Amazingly, eighty-three of the crewmen sooner or later make it home, most early enough in the war to continue serving in the Pacific or in Europe. Eight are captured, of whom three are executed and one is starved to death. Five land their plane in the Soviet Union and are interned for most the war. Two members of the raid are killed when their planes crash land in the water. Another is killed when his parachute fails to open.

A small handful are dreadfully injured in their crashes or parachute jumps but most suffer only minor injuries. They receive enormous support from the local Chinese who have suffered several years of Japanese occupation and brutal repression. Indeed, the Chinese are to suffer yet further as the Japanese launch a campaign to recover the allied airmen, a campaign in which a further 250,000 Chinese are killed.

Nelson does a magnificent job of weaving many strands of the story together and yet keeps it moving and doesn't let the narrative get bogged down in detail. He makes many connections that might be less than obvious. For example, how the head of the Japanese Navy (and original opponent of the war) Yamamoto, was so incensed by the raid and the danger that it posed to the Emperor that it became part of his motivation for bringing about the clash at Midway with the US Navy, intended to be the decisive engagement in which the five Japanese carriers would destroy the three remaining American carriers in the Pacific and effectively bring the war to a close. Midway was decisive, but not in the fashion Yamamoto sought. The American victory was the decisive turning point of the war with the Japanese on the defensive for the remaining three years.

Nelson also has a wealth of obscure facts and insights that also add to the interest of the book. One of the pilots, Davey Jones, escapes and eventually ends up in the European Theater. There he flies numerous missions before being shot down and captured by the Germans, taken to Stalag III where he is one of the participants in the Great Escape, helping digging the tunnels. At the last minute, before the escape, he is moved to a different camp. A move that likely saved his life as fifty of the seventy-three who were recaptured were executed. The Great Escape is another magnificent World War II story suitable for 12 to 18 year olds.

Other tidbits - The fatality rate of allied prisoners of war in Germany and Italy was 4%, that of allied POWs held by the Japanese, 27%. Jake DeShazer found religion while being held captive by the Japanese and returned to Japan after the war as a Christian missionary. Mitsuo Fuchida, the leader of the naval air planes in the attack on Pearl Harbor also found religion, became a Christian, a conversion in which DeShazer was instrumental through his missionary work and his pamphlet accounts of his imprisonment. Fuchida eventually migrated to the US and became a US citizen.

Ultimately, though, Nelson's story is not about war, though he does do a good job of setting the context and the history. It is instead the story of eighty brave young men, serving their country as best they knew how, under remarkable circumstances and with astonishing repercussions. This is explicitly a tribute to these men whose accomplishments might otherwise easily disappear into the recesses of our collective memory. This book will keep their tale shining bright for that much longer.

This is a good complement to Ted Lawson's (one of the pilots who was severely injured) book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was written during the war and was a huge hit. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a tremendous read and is excellent for good independent readers, say 8-12 years old, whereas The First Heroes would really be for YA or adults.

I would give The First Heroes a Recommended rating.

Humanity in war

From Craig Nelson's The First Heroes.

The story of the selection, training, flight and escape of the eighty American volunteers in Jimmy Doolittle's famous raid on Tokyo, April 18, 1942, just four and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Review to follow but these three passages caught my eye and I found touching. As you read of the flyers' escapes through rural and occupied China, you begin to recall just how recently, how remote much of the world was.

Page 200, the escape of pilot Davey Jones. The mission had been conducted in complete secrecy, they landed in remote rural China (elsewhere in the book it is described how lacking in basic infrastructure the area was). No electricty, no real roads, just railroads to connect the people into the modern world. And yet . . .

"At first light it wasn't raining, just misty. I started west," remembered plane five pilot Davey Jones. "I had the musette bag I had held onto, with cigarettes and a pistol and a pint of whiskey. It was Old Overholt, I'll never forget that, and by golly I still have the label.

"By noon I heard bells, and saw cattle and some people. The first group I saw just smiled at me and at each other. I very cleverly got out my little notebook and drew a map of China. They obviously hadn't the vaguest idea what I meant. And then I got very smart and I drew a little locomotive and then I went choo-choo-choo, and I got a good response; I got lots of smiles. I offered them cigarettes. They all took cigarettes. So I just left and went down the trail until I found a railroad. And after a quarter of a mile, I found a small stationhouse.

"There was one young man there, and he could print a little English, and I could print in our language 'Yushan,' the name of the town we were supposed to go to. My copilot Hoss Wilder walked in about that time. This young Chinese man had a handcar, and he pumped us up the road about three miles to another station, where there was a locomotive and a boxcar, with about twenty or thirty soldiers in khaki-type uniforms. We ascertained they were Chinese, not Japanese, thankfully. So Hoss and I got on the boxcar and we went up the road about fifteen miles, and came to this town, Yushan, and pulled into the railroad yard.

"The doors of the boxcar were opened, and we were standing there, facing this huge crowd. There must have been ten thousand people if there was one. The streets were hung in banners which said: WELCOME BRAVE HEROES! YOU'VE STRUCK A BLOW FOR US. A gentleman in Western clothes came up to the car and said, "Hi. I'm Dani-Yang. I'm the mayor of Yushan, and these people are going to welcome you.'

"This is five o'clock in the afternoon on the nineteenth in the middle of nowhere in China, a little over twenty-four hours after we'd bombed Tokyo, and they knew all about it! Isn't that something?"

Other bomber crews had similar receptions. From page 206:

They arrived on the outskirts of town late in the afternoon. Again, Wong told them to wait, and for more than an hour, they just sat there without any explanation. Then, from far off in the distance, came a noise, which grew louder, and closer, until the Americans found themselves in the middle of a glorious and enthusiastic parade, led by an eight-piece marching band. "There was this Chinese band who'd stayed up all night long, learning to play 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'" said Bob Bourgeois. "There was an American flag, and I tell you, there were five guys from crew thirteen, listening to them play "The Star-Spangled Banner,' well we had tears running down our faces."

And on page 211 there is this touching testament to the Chinese peasants, who in primitive and dangerous circumstances, set a high bar for simple humanity. The experience of the crew from plane fifteen:

They arrived at a small house, with a covered pen for goats. As they approached, the light was extinguished. The men knocked on the door, yelling the Chinese phrases they'd been taught on Hornet, but there was no answer. Finally giving up, they decided to spend the night with the goats. It was shelter from the rain, even though the floor was covered in dung.

As they were trying to figure out how to get some sleep, the light came back on, the door opened, and the man of the house stepped out. He peered at them, swinging a lantern, ignored their attempts at Chinese, and ushered them inside. The family had started a smoky fire, from straw. The men dried themselves and tried to keep from suffocating as the farmer's wife and mother gave them hot rice, with bits of vegetable and some kind of meat. Doc White: "I'm sure he had never seen a white man before. I'd like to think that if I were called out in the middle of the night and met four giants (we were two feet taller than he was) in strange uniforms, speaking a strange language, and obviously in trouble, I'd like to think I would have the courage to ask them into my house. That's what that little man did."

The Greenland Fishery

I have known this ballad for many years as a folksong but this is the first time I have come across it in a poetry anthology, in this case in Arthur Quiller-Couch's The Oxford Book of Ballads.

The Greenland Fishery

In seventeen hundred and ninety-four,
On March the twentieth day;
We hoist our colours to the mast,
And for Greenland bore away, brave boys
And for Greenland bore away.

We were twelve gallant men aboard,
And to the North did steer:
Old England left we in our wake-
We sailors knew no fear, brave boys!
We sailors knew no fear.

Our boatswain to the mast-head went,
Wi' a spy glass in his hand;
He cries, 'A whale! a whale doth blow,
She blows at every span, brave boys!
She blows at every span.'

Our Captain on the master deck
(A very good man was he),
'Overhaul! overhaul! let the boat tackle fall,
And launch your boat to sea, brave boys!
And launch your boat to sea.'

Our boat being launch'd, and all hands in,
The whale was full in view;
Resolved was then each seaman bold
To steer where the whale-fish blew, brave boys!
To steer where the whale-fish blew.

The whale was struck, and the line paid out,
She gave a flash with her tail;
The boat capsized, and we lost four men,
And we never caught that whale, brave boys!
And we never caught that whale.

Bad news we to the Captain brought,
The loss of four men true.
A sorrowful man was our Captain then,
And the colours down he drew, brave boys!
And the colours down he drew.

'The losing of this whale,' said he,
'Doth grieve my heart full sore;
But the losing of four gallant men
Doth hurt me ten times more, brave boys!
Doth hurt me ten times more.

'The winter star doth now appear,
So, boys, the anchor weigh;
'Tis time to leave this cold country,
And for England bear away, brave boys!
And for England bear away.

'For Greenland is a barren place,
A land where grows no green,
But ice and snow, and the whale-fish blow,
And the daylight 's seldom seen, brave boys!
And the daylight 's seldom seen!'

Ultima Thule by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ultima Thule: Dedication to G. W. G.
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

Mapping Human History

Mapping Human History by Steve Olson

I finished Steve Olson's Mapping Human History a couple of weeks ago and have spent that time figuring out my reaction to the book. I am very interested in the whole field of archaeogenetics: using DNA to reconstruct macro aspects of human history: when did we emerge from Africa, what was the pathway to populating the continents, who got where when, etc. I commented on this in my review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn.

I guess it is best just said that I would recommend Before the Dawn over Mapping Human History.

Mapping Human History is fine in terms of interesting information. The more I read though, the more irritated I became with the author. The root of the issue is that Olson is mortally afraid that someone will read his book and come away with a strong sense that there are material genetic differences between the races and ethnicities across the globe. His belief, and which I share, is that differences in material prosperity between ethnic groups are much a function of individual variance and cultural values and that there is no basis to believe that the genetic differences between groups accounts for any perceived differences in history or prosperity.

Despite agreeing with him, I found it irritating to constantly being protected from coming to the wrong conclusion. Olson works so hard to hide differences that he undermines his own position and disrespects his reader at the same time. Overall, an informative book on an interesting topic but with a flaw in the writing style that subverts its overall narrative.

Books and their readers

Which way does causation flow - do books make the reader or does the reader make the book?

I think most of us instinctively feel that a book is a causative event. We can remember how specific books affected us at some critical point in our lives or changed how we thought of something. And I think that is true - specific books can be transformative for individuals at specific times under particular circumstances.

But the lurking book-banner siezes on this position to then justify banning or discouraging certain books from being read because they are deemed to be pejorative or insensitive to some group based on race or religion or ethnicity or class or some other attribute. The guise is always partly about protecting feelings and partly about how it might influence a reader. These latent totalitarians feel justified in turning the proposition that books are important and transformative into the proposition that books are dangerous.

One list serv to which I belong, and which is heavily populated by librarians and academicians, routinely (and to me astonishingly) has a running spat about which books ought to be sanctioned and they usually include long time favorites that most reading Americans have at one time enjoyed such as Little House on the Prairie, Caddie Woodlawn, and of course that long reviled classic, Little Black Sambo featuring a clever, self-reliant and resilient Indian boy from the sub-continent.

I think what gets lost is that it is the particularity of the experience that makes the difference. Not all books affect all people in anything remotely the same way. The reader does bring as much to the table as the author. The context in which a book is read and the contribution of the reader is a counterforce to whatever the author has penned. What is nominally judged pejorative by some narrow segment of academia is properly seen by most people as a non-issue. Terms once used that are no longer appropriate are glossed over. Prejudices of former years can be discussed and set in context. The simple act of reading does not irredeemably stain a young mind as seems to be the implication by the banners.

What brings this to mind is the recent publication of Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback. Peter Lewis reviewed the book in the July issue of the UK's Oldie magazine. Hitler was a bibliophile with an extensive personal library, some portion of which survived the war. Ryback has gone back to see what Hitler read and observed his personal marginalia in the books to try and capture some of his thinking. Lewis has a couple of interesting observations on Hitler the reader.

What is interesting is the breadth of his reading. He listed Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and Uncle Tom's Cabin as great classics of literature, and prized Shakespeare above Goethe and Schiller. . . .

Does this study of his favorites help us understand Hitler better? Perhaps as much as a session with Parsifal or Gotterdammerung. You may conclude that Hitler read mainly to confirm his prejudices.

As so often happens, the observer sees what they want to see. There is prejudice and stereotype of some nature and to some degree in any one of these books but it is always some minor element to the larger themes and message. These elements are only important to the degree that you make them important. It is the reader that creates the context and the interpretation. It is the reader that is potentially dangerous and not the book.

Lewis has a further comment which I find interesting.

But Ryback's whole picture makes him (Hitler) seem more like a human being than the usual monster. You could have talked books with Hitler. And the nicely-observed snapshots of his private life in which books played so big a part make this biblio-biography far more interesting than it looked when I picked it up.

I think this is important. As the gulf of time widens between ourselves and the events of World War II, there seems to be a greater and greater tendency to dismiss Hitler as a phenomenon of evil, something unique and apart from us. A freak of nature. I think this is a mistake. The degree to which we distance ourselves from Hitler and his actions, the more we relieve ourselves of the obligation of eternal vigilance against totalitarians in whatever guise. Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan tell us that the spirit of Hitler lives today, that we all, as human beings, and under the right circumstances, have the capacity of great evil and that it remains our obligation to master our own natures and to stand alert to evil wherever it might manifest itself. Hitler was a human being, not some caricature. He was one of us, a book reader. We may not like it but it should keep us alert.