Saturday Morning Musings - cleaning out my library

It is almost two months since my last report (Writing preoccupations - Vikings, History awards, Native Title, Roman villas and New England architecture) on my current reading and writing preoccupations. I thought that I should provide you with an update, recognising that my blogging continues to be a little irregular. I also thought that it might be a break from some of the current political preoccupations.

I have been cleaning out my books. Those books are the joy of my life as well as a key professional resource, but I am probably moving and cannot take them all with me. While my library is well down from its peak, I had the best part of 10,000 books, it is still very substantial in multiple bookcases and book boxes. Many of those books have been badly damaged in multiple moves, but they are still precious.

Have I read all those books? No, but that's also been part of the fun. Many of the books are older, some quite old, because they come from my father's and grandfather's libraries. There is a lot of fiction, but the collection is mainly non-fiction, a melange of authors and topics spread over two hundred years. Both topics and writing styles vary enormously, reflecting the interests and cultures at the time of publication. In some cases, I can take a single topic and compare attitudes and writing at multiple points in time over time.

My train reading series of posts began because I was picking books from my shelves at random that I had not read and then making myself finish them, The finishing part was important. I had to do that even when I disagreed with the ideas or found the writing boring because it was part of the game. The result was something of an education, an increase in tolerance, an understanding of difference.

In my current book sort, I have been putting books in piles for possible throw-out. One was Wing Commander Asher Lee's Blitz on Britain, a second Oluf Reed-Olsen's Two Eggs on My Plate.

Blitz on Britain (Four Square paperback, 1960) was published to coincide with the telemovie of the same name. The photo shows pilots running to their plans.

I almost put this book into the bin without re-reading, but then thought that I should read it. I am glad I did. Asher Lee know his stuff!

 The tone of the book is reasonably unsentimental. The writer's sentiments are clear, but the dedication shows that he could stand aside from some of the emotion that surrounds the events of the time.

This book is dedicated to the pilots of both air forces, those of the German Air Force and those of the Royal Air Force. On different days and in different ways they fought against odds with skill, courage and devotion.  

I found the book interesting Lee is able to show events in context on both sides of the Channel. He includes statistical data on things like relative aircraft production. Perhaps the most unexpected message is that the Battle of Britain was by no means the uneven fight, a triumph against overwhelming odds, as conventionally presented.

On the German side, the Germans had to bring their air force up to newly created bases in occupied territory to allow sustained attacks on Britain. This took time. The Luftwaffe was also involved on several fronts, making it more difficult to concentrate resources, a difficulty compounded by strategic confusions. The total number of German planes was substantial, but these were spread across multiple types meaning that the number of a particular type was limited.

The feared Stuka Dive bomber with its iconic siren was used to effect early in the war but suffered from a major weakness, its slow speed compared to fighters. It was used over Britain, but high losses meant that it had to be defended by fighters. This lead to its withdrawal from service in that theatre, reducing the number of available German planes.

On the British side, British military aircraft production had been increasing to the point that it was matching German production. The British also developed air defence systems that allowed them to track in-coming German planes. The big initial problem was shortage of trained pilots. Planes could be replaced, experienced pilots were in short supply.

Here Lee makes a very interesting point about the German experience. The Luftwaffe began with a larger solid cadre of experienced pilots. As the war proceeded, accumulating pilot losses began to degrade the Luftwaffe's offensive capacity quite quickly.

I put Lee's book in the bin.  I was glad that I had read it, but could always borrow it.            

Oluf Reed-Olsen's Two Eggs on My Plate is a more personal story, a story of a Norwegian resistance fighter during the Second World War. The title comes from the habit of giving people who where about to go on mission from England into occupied Europe two eggs on their plate at the final meal. Eggs were in short supply, so this was seen as a signal and reward.

I had read this book many times, but many years before. I read it again with enjoyment (it's a boys own style yarn) and then put it in the bin.

Reading both books reminded me of two things in particular. The first was the passage of time.

I grew up in an era when the Second World War was very close. War stories were common and popular. Now the war has receded into history and become the subject of nostalgia pieces such as ITV's Home Fires, Foyle's War and The Halcyon. Perhaps nostalgia is the wrong word, but you know what I mean,

There is something a little odd in the way that so many of the decades from the forties on have progressively become the subject of nostalgia. Nostalgia for particular periods is not new, but we do seem to make a welter of it today. Is it just because populations are aging in many countries, creating a desire to reach back?

The second thing thing was the extent and nature of changing sensibilities. I chose that now old fashioned word quite deliberately. It has two almost contrasted meanings. One is the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity. The second encapsulated in that Jane Austen title Sense and Sensibility is a quality of delicate sensitivity that makes one liable to be offended or shocked..

Each generation has its own sensibilities using both meanings.Each generation assumes that its sensibilities are correct, an assumption challenged by subsequent social and cultural changes. The current age is one of high and complex sensibilities with an especial focus on the second meaning. There are just so many things that offend or shock us. .
       
My type of reading forces me to confront differing sensibilities. The sensibilities displayed by Asher Lee or Oluf Reed-Olsen are familiar, if different from today's. J L Myres' The Dawn of History is a little different.

The book was first published in 1911 and proved very popular. My copy, a Home University Library edition from 1933, is the tenth reprint. The first page shows it was a second hand book originally owned by M Broadhurst  and sold for 1/6. The writing on the first page in my father's hand says J Belshaw, NEUC (New England University College), Armidale NSW Sept 38.  So it was purchased by my father in his first year in Armidale and just one year before the Second World War broke out.

I had not heard of J L Myres and therefore had to look him up.

Wikipedia records that Sir John Linton Myres (1969-1954) was a British archaeologist who conducted excavations in Cyprus in 1904. In 1910 he became the first Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, having been Gladstone Professor of Greek and Lecturer in Ancient Geography, University of Liverpool from 1907. At Oxford, he highly influenced the British-Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe.  In addition to his academic writings, he contributed to the British Naval Intelligence Division Geographical Handbook Series that was published during the Second World War.

I almost gave this book up in Chapter One. "We have only to glance at a globe or a general map", Myres wrote, "to realise that as matter of fact almost all historians have confined their attention to a few quite small regions of the world "  Very large areas have little or not historical literature. The reason for this, Myres suggests, "is obvious; there is little or nothing there in the way of human achievement for the historian to write about." Myres then presents a stylised version of cultural types - hunter gatherer, pastoral and agricultural/industrial; civilisation begins, history dawns, with the last beginning in the Middle East. Myres is a geographical determinism and a believer in the big man school of history. He also uses racial descriptors.    

Most current readers would have put the book aside at this point as I was tempted to do. I still use the now old fashioned term prehistory to distinguish between history based primarily on written records and that based primarily on other sources where written records are not available, but this is a methodological distinction.

In my own writing on the history of New England, the first part of the draft book deals with Aboriginal New England up to 1788. In evidence terms, this relies particularly on archaeological evidence supplemented by the ethnographic record. In my mind, this is just as much history as later sections. However,  in writing, I do use the term prehistory at spots where it has particular relevance to the previous study of New England history.    

I digress. I think that part of the reason I objected so strongly to some of Professor Myres' early remarks is that simplistic models of human society are still around and deeply embedded, including especially ideas about the "primitive' nature of hunter gather societies  Like Childe and indeed me, Myres is a synthesizer and model builder. This aids interpretation and the asking of new questions, but in the end new evidence makes fools of us all.

Take this review by  Kambiz Kamrani in Anthropology,net, Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.  In 2009 the first DNA was extracted from the bone of a Neanderthal, In the eight years since, everything we thought we knew about the human past has been turned on ts head. A line has been drawn in fire though multiple compendiums of human thought and belief.

I kept reading because I had to, my rules required it, and in the end was glad that I did. This was partly because my reactions reflected my own sensibilities. Take the racial categorisations. So far at least, they appear to be used as descriptors that reflect prevailing views, but without any overlays of superiority or inferiority. More importantly, Myles' focus on geography and on relationships between groups is in some ways quite modern and creates clear pictures that I found interesting and helpful.

I will reread earlier sections of the book because I am interested in changing thought patterns. However, I want to look again at the way he approaches geography  I am not a geographic or environmental determinist. However, geography is important, and I have been wrestling with the question of the best way of bringing it alive, of integrating it into the narrative in a way that makes it part of the story for readers who know nothing about the area I am writing about. Given all this, I have added the book to the keep pile, at least for the moment.  .  
    

Train Reading - Introducing C R Fay's Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century

Traditionally, my train reading has focused on books that I haven't read before selected almost at random from my shelves. It's a way of breaking out of immediate thought patterns, forcing me to look at something old (many of my books are quite old) but still new to me.

In recent months, my focus has narrowed to immediate preoccupations. One morning, dissatisfied, I grabbed C R Fay's Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century Life, being the substance of lectures delivered at Cambridge University in the year 1919 to students of economics, among whom were officers of the Royal Navy and students from the Army of the United States, (Cambridge University Press, 1920).

The book is, as the title suggests, based on a series of lectures. It reads that way. It's more a series of essays. Its also a somewhat pedantic, even fussy, book. Or perhaps its Professor Fay who was a little fussy and pedantic. Certainly he seems to have had a somewhat difficult personality.

You get a good feel for this from Professor Doug Munro's well written review of Hugh Gault's 2011 biography of Fay, The Quirky Dr Fay: A Remarkable Life. The photo of Fay comes from the much later period when he was invited to give a series of lectures by the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Munro's review begins:

Old historians, like old soldiers, don’t die; they simply fade away. A paradox of the historical profession is the widespread disregard shown towards ancestors. We all aspire to write groundbreaking work that will pass the test of time, but the sad truth is a given monograph will have a short shelf life and quickly join what G. M. Trevelyan called ‘the great unread’

To support this view, one that I agree with, he quotes Neil Jumonville::

History is really, ironically, the least grateful of disciplines … it’s difficult for a historian to be remembered for his history. Historians tend to after 20 or 30 years, after a book is published, to throw it on the proverbial dust bin. And we don’t read our old historians like those in literature read their old greats. I mean in the field of history, we’re far more embarrassed by our past than we should be. You know, we don’t look back to our Melvilles or to our Emersons like those in literature do. And so really ironically, history is one of the least historical of the humanities in that respect.

I think that there is a simple reason for this great forgetting. History is written in and of the present.The topics we select and the questions we ask are determined by present concerns and attitudes. Old things are put aside, rejected as no longer relevant, outdated, even embarrassing.  In that way, history is indeed the most a-historical of the disciplines.  

In a way, I struggle with this every day as I try to break free from the bounds set by current thought patterns. Of course, this is not true just of history. It holds equally true for public policy, for example, something I often rail about. The present acts as a deep drag on new thought. However, it is especially true of the writing of history.

In researching and writing, I often find myself saying I don't want to write about that. People expect me to do so because the topic or question is seen as relevant, important, to current concerns, whereas my reaction is that its just not important to what I want to say. If  don't mention it I will be criticised, my views may simply be rejected out of hand. But if I do focus on it, my story will be distorted.

I didn't start reading the older histories such as Fay's with conscious intent. I just decided that I had a lot of older unread books that had belonged to my father or grandfather. Many I had thrown out or lost in multiple moves, something I now deeply regret. With those remaining, I decided to train read them to force myself to look at something new (old).

This proved to be one of the better decisions of my life. From history books through memoirs to polemical and biased travel books, I have found myself wending my way along paths that I would never have found. I accept that this is very much a minority sport; you have to have a strange mind to go this path, to read and try to understand something that now seems so dated.

In all, its been remarkably liberating. Fay's book is a case in point. The questions he asked, the views he took for granted as self-evident at the time, are different from those holding now. However, they proved to be still relevant today, perhaps more relevant because so much has been dropped out. 

Consider a very small point. Today we talk about the importance of evidence based public policy. It is, it seems, a very new thing, something that we have recently learned to do, if not always very well. Well, blow me down, Fay talks specifically about the importance of evidence based public policy. Indeed, his whole book is, in a way, focused on just that topic. An economic historian, he looks at change over the nineteenth century through a lens set in part by the interaction between trends in thought and official inquiries. 

Well, time to move on. I haven't finished with C R Fay, but that's all I have time for this morning.   

  

   

Mind sailing, curiosity and the curious case of Canterbury

Continuing from yesterday's mind sailing theme (Mind Sailing), one of the interesting things about the human brain lies in its patterning ability. To understand and remember things, we have to impose order, to create links. The more links there are, the easier to understand and to remember. Further, once we have created a pattern, we look for things to slot in that will reinforce that pattern. Things that don't fit in are ignored.

This can have odd results. Conspiracy theories are a case in point. I have known a good many conspiracy theorists. Once the theory - the pattern - is established, the holder goes in search of things that will support the theory, leading to some weird and wonderful results. Sometimes, just often enough to make me cautious of all rejection without checking, the theory proves to be correct in whole or part.

All societies have explorers, people who feel restless and want to learn or experience new things. The young warrior In Aboriginal Australia who, restless at the daily routine, goes travelling is an example.

European society in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was full of explorers driven by insatiable curiosity to find new things, to extend the bounds. I am not talking just about those who actually travelled in physical terms. Behind them lay hundreds of thousands, millions, of people who shared the thirst for discovery in one way or another. They bought the books and magazines, they created or laboured in the new factories, they emigrated to find a better life. The results were not always good, but the end result was one of the transformational points in human history.

All human exploration begins in the mind, begins by wondering. That is where mind sailing comes in. We wonder, then we plan or just write. 

A remarkable thing occurred on New Zealand's Canterbury Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The population was very small, measured in the hundred's of thousands. Yet, somehow, that place became the centre of an intellectual endeavour that influences the world to this day.

Physicist Lord Rutherford of Nelson, to give him his official title, is an example, but he is not the only one. By nature, I am insatiably curious. I wonder why Canterbury should have been such an intellectual centre? Was it something in the water? Remember, pound for pound, Canterbury greatly out weighed Australia in the same period.

As with all these things, it was probably a combination of factors. looking at the people and the history of the period, there seems to have been a complicated interlock between intellectual freedom, curiosity, a desire to achieve and the availability of competitive channels that allowed people to advance.

The last was critical. We are dealing with a world where only a small proportion of people had access to university education, but those who did had relatively greater opportunities than exist in today's mass competitive world. 

Lewis on the Indo-European controversy

From time to time I have mentioned GeoCurrents. Subtitled the people, places and languages shaping current events, it really is a very good blog. 

Lead author Martin Lewis has been working on a book on the Indo-European controversy.  Having now finished the chapter on the history of the debates, he is putting it on line in a series of posts. The first post begins:

Debates about Indo-European origins and dispersion have played a surprisingly central role in modern intellectual history. At first glance, the ancient source of a group of languages whose very relatedness is invisible to non-specialists would seem to be an obscure issue, of interest only to a few academics. Yet it is difficult to locate a topic of historical debate over the past two centuries that has been more intellectually provocative, ideologically fraught, and politically laden than that of Indo-European origins and expansion. Although the controversies have diminished in the Western public imagination since the middle of the 20^th century, they still rage in India, and elsewhere their reverberations persist. As a result, the Indo-European question is anything but trivial or recondite. To understand the significance of the current controversy, it is therefore necessary to examine the historical development of Indo-European studies in detail, paying particular attention to the ideological ramifications of the theories advanced to account for the success of this particular language family.

Reading the first three posts, I will give the links at the end, created a feeling of discomfort.

I am no stranger to the way that intellectual analysis draws from current views and then feeds back into those views. I am also well aware of the importance of myth and of the creation of myth, of the way in which myths come to dominate debate, to even determine what can be said and how. Current Australian Aboriginal studies is a classic example, one in which present needs and views can control and distort discussion to the point that it destroys the pleasure of discovery.

I was also aware of at least some of the things that Lewis covers in his history of the Indo-European controversy and have indeed written on aspects of them, including attitudes to race and the importance of social Darwinism in refining those attitudes. These can be uncomfortable topics in their own right. However, this was not the cause of my discomfort this time. That came from a rather more direct personal connection, the significance of Lewis' analysis to some of the academic disciplines that I have studied or been interested in including history, prehistory and anthropology. 

Lewis's central focus in this chapter is on linguistics and the way that linguistic analysis has influenced and been influenced by other debates. His time period extends to the present day. This is where the discomfort came in, for I studied some of the things he talks about at school and university. I used those atlases. I looked at some of the concepts in my studies. Now I wonder a little about the possible distortions created in my own thinking.

Anatomical analysis, the differentiation between peoples based on physical appearance and especially on skeletons, has always been problematic. It continues to be used because in many cases skeletal remains are the only evidence we have, despite the advances in DNA technology.  Yet the classifications used actually derive from and in turn influenced the debate that Lewis is talking about. You see my problem?

I haven't formed a final view on Professor Lewis'  analysis, although I found it very interesting, including the way that the controversy has apparently affected modern feminist mythology. That was a surprise. For the moment, I leave it to you to browse the posts. They are:

• The Vexatious History of Indo-European Studies, Part I
• The Vexatious History of Indo-European Studies, Part II
• The Vexatious History of Indo-European Studies, Part III