Sure, learn to breathe better, but it's probably not going to change the world

I'm not big on medical self-help books, that oh-so-popular sub-genre of a popular genre. If someone has to resort to writing a best-seller rather than going down the much less sexy (and lucrative) route of double-blind experiments and the scientific method, if someone tells anecdotal tale after anecdotal tale, however fascinating, then I start to worry, I start to get suspicious, especially where large royalty advances are involved.

And if Product X or life-habit Y really is a panacea and the cure for all known ills, then it would probably be much better-known and already integrated into mainstream medical practice, wouldn't it? If something looks like snake oil and smells like snake oil ... well, you know the rest.

But occasionally something comes along under the radar. This particular something was suggested to me by my daughter, who has a higher degree in biology and is a pretty smart cookie. She's also a fellow skeptic, and I have a lot of respect for her opinions.

Anyway, pre-amble aside, I am currently reading Breath by James Nestor. Mr. Nestor is not a medical practitioner; he's a journalist and someone who has a long history of health issues which he claims to have miraculously cured - red flags straight away for me. But his work does seem to be pretty thoroughly researched, and replete with endless references and sources. His prose is accessible and compelling. And he's not actually selling anything, maybe apart from media appearances, professional speaking engagements, and his hosted retreats and classes... (The book itself was a bestseller.) So actually he is selling something, I guess, but, on the strength of my daughter's recommendation, I have persisted with Breath.

Nestor does indeed present correct breathing as the elixir of life and the single solution to conditions as varied as hypertension, hypotension, asthma, pneumonia, emphysema, insomnia, sleep apnea, headaches, ADHD, scoliosis, obesity, yes even cancer. He, and many of the practitioners and other people he quotes, claim that it can add decades to life spans, and coax significantly improved performances out of athletes and opera singers alike.

He approaches his life-changing revelations in the tried-and-tested journalistic manner, with dramatic "personal story" anecdotes, and his own health issues, his academic study participations, and his apparent Paulian conversion, very much take centre stage. He draws some pretty extreme and far-reaching conclusions from his experiences and his research, though. And hey, who wouldn't like to believe that something as simple as breathing through your nose might be the solution to so many societal ills and life-changing illnesses?

So, am I convinced? Well, the jury is still out. I might try some of his exercises, a little self-experimentation of my own (although my own medical issues are not particularly bad or life-changing at this point). I do remain a bit skeptical, though, particularly about the sheer breadth of Nestor's claims.

Nestor makes some extraordinary claims, so this requires extraordinary evidence, in my view. He does provide some evidence, but some of it dates back to the 1960s or the 1930s or the 1900s (and some of it MUCH older than that). Some evidence is very limited in scope, and some is definitely in the realm of the anecdotal. When he starts to tie in religious prayer and chants, Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, and ocean swells, for example, he definitely veers towards the realm of book-padding, and my eyes start to glaze over. If you ask me, it detracts from his main arguments. 

Then, when Nestor gets into.some of the more extreme, controversial, even dangerous, breathing routines - respiratory acidosis, sympathetic nervous system overload, holotropic breathwork, hypocapnia, extreme apnea, etc - he lost me completely, and I started to skip sections. To be fair, he is up-front about the contentious and risky character of some of these methods. But, in that case, why include them?

Yes, it makes some common and intuitive sense to me that breathing through the nose and slowing down breathing would be beneficial, for a whole host of reasons. But let's not make this all-encompassing and world-changing.

Prophet Song is eerily prophetic

Reading Paul Lynch's Prophet Song is eye-opening and thought-provoking. Written in 2023, the book is a fictional but plausible dystopic account of Ireland sinking into the depths of fascism and totalitarianism. It seems today, just three years later, remarkably prescient, not so much of present-day Ireland, which still enjoys a robust and resolute democracy as far as I know, but of the situation in the USA.

Granted, the fascist state that Lynch describes is much more extreme, in the same way that Margaret Atwood's Gilead portrayed an eerily familiar, but more severe, USA-gone-wrong. But the parallels are arresting, and Lynch's account of the way in which such an unthinkable situation can materialize by stealth, with a heedless population sleepwalking into the unimaginable, is chilling indeed.

The book, which won the 2023 Booker Prize, is written in a distinctive and idiosyncratic style, with very few paragraph breaks, minimal punctuation in general, some interesting vocabulary choices and word orderings, and some unexpected figures of speech. The text lurches giddily from earthy Irish vernacular to blank verse poetry; the juxtapositions are striking.

Here are just a few snippets:

The winter rain falls lush and cold, the passing days held numb within the rain so that it seems to mask time's passing, each day giving to faceless day until the winter is at full bloom.

The head on you, Larry says, I could pass you on the street and hardly know you. Anybody else but Dad want coffee? Mark says.

She turns watching the faces that surround her, faces pained with the vertigo of staring into the sudden abyss, all of these people the very same, every one of them clothed yet naked, sullied and pure, proud and shameful, disloyal and faithful, all of them brought here by love.

She lies in the dark walking blind alleys of thought, she thinks she sleeps then wakes into a dark room watched by whispering faces finding herself judged.

She drives to the supermarket and coins free a trolley, slides her son into the facing seat and walks past two soldiers standing guard by the doors while holding her breath, the dark majesty of automatic weapons in the arms of youths no older than her son, chins that have no need of a blade, their faces aggressively expressionless.

Wow. It takes a little to get into the cadence and the style of Lynch's writing, but once you do, this is a very rewarding book.

Exposing false claims of native heritage is surely counter-productive

The latest Indigenous Canadian to be outed as not being Indigenous at all is successful author Thomas King.

California-born King, who has lived in Camada since the early 1980s, seems to have honestly believed all his life that he was of Cherokee ancestry. But he was recently presented with genealogical evidence to the contrary, a finding that has profoundly shocked and depressed the 82-year old author of popular books like Indians on Vacation and The Inconvenient Indian. He has withdrawn the publication of his next novel, due out in May 2026, and his whole life and legacy is in disarray after the revelations.

He was outed by a "whistle-blowing organization" called the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, based in North Carolina. The organization exists, it seems, to expose false claims of Native heritage in America and Canada. Because - just like with Joseph Boyden, Buffy Sainte Marie and Michelle Latimer, before King - they wouldn't want people thinking that these successful artists and personalities, who have spent most of their lives trying to promote and boost Indigenous peoples, were Indigenous, would they?

I'm sure, where the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds and similar groups are concerned, there is a matter of principle involved here, even if that principle is exclusionary and bigoted and a bit fanatical. But I can't help but think that they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

UPDATE

And here we go: Vancouver School Board is pulling King's books from its school curriculum and libraries because, after all, he doesn't have any American Indian heritage, does he? I'm sure many others will follow. The usual argument is trotted out, that celebrating King/Boyden/ Sainte-Marie/etc is somehow "taking space away" from real Indigenous authors and performers (who are presumably not as good, otherwise they would have made it big anyway, especially given the built-in "authenticity bonus" that Native artists enjoy these days).

So, what's the message here? That the only reason Thomas King's books are so enjoyed and revered is because he is Indigenous? That all those prizes that were bestowed were only for the accident of his birth, not for his literary and story-telling chops? Ridiculous! At this rate, Indigenous people will have no role models left.

Not the Birnam Wood you know

If, like me, you neglected to read the blurb on the back and were expecting Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood to be a reimagining of Macbeth, you will probably have received quite a shock. I try to read anything I can of Eleanor Catton's work, so I didn't really mind at all that it did not involve chopping down forests and soldiers disguised as trees.

Birnam Wood, in this case, refers to a counter-cultural market gardening project, a soi-disant "activist collective", on the South Island of New Zealand, and the story is very much a modern day affair. (I tend to think of Ms. Catton as Canadian but, although she was born in Canada and now lives in the UK, she was in fact brought up in New Zealand and has strong ties to that country - I imagine all three countries claim her.)

Some of the personalities involved in the collective are strong-minded and spiky, and there is some unresolved history behind some of them. Add in a mysterious, shady, tech-bro, American billionaire with a risky and illegal plan to secretly strip a national park area of billions (trillions?) of dollars in rare earth minerals and smuggle them out, and who surprisingly seems to want to invest big money in the collective (leading to some intense discussions on principles), and an ultra-radical freelance journalist and estranged collective member, and the stage is set for an unusual and quite interesting plot. In fact, it turns into quite a thriller.

But for me, the plot is secondary to Ms. Catton's fine prose, her often long and involved sentences, and her delicious turn of phrase. Just a few examples from early in the book:

"But over the course of his twenties, he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge."

"She had feared, in lonely moments, that for her parents she existed merely as a kind of party trick, a dazzling proof of how well she had been parented, a living testament not to her own powers of conviction and discernment, but to theirs."

"Her favoured style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise, to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent, than when she was the only woman in the room."

Always a reliable read, Ms. Catton has triumphed again.

When is progress not really progress?

I'm currently manfully ploughing my way through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind, it's a thick tome of anthropology, evolutionary psychology, history and politics, a tour de force of grand scope that attempts nothing less than a critical summary of the whole of human history (and prehistory).

It's full of fascinating observations and surprising conclusions (and I'm less than a quarter of the way through!) It is written in an engaging, no-nonsense style, albeit with the weight of copious analysis and academic research behind it.

Just to take one example, starting about 10,000-11,000 years ago, humankind across the world started gradually moving away from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled agricultural life, cultivating a much more limited number of crops and animals. This was the so-alled Agricultural Revolution, usually considered one of the most important steps in human progress, and a great leap forward in our development.

Harari, however, calls it "History's Biggest Fraud". He argues that the Agricultural Revolution was not evidence of humanity's increasing intelligence, not was it the renunciation of a gruelling, dangerous hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of a pleasanter, easy-living, bucolic life of farming.

Rather, the new farmers typically had an even harder life than before: backbreaking work clearing fields, weeding, building fences, guarding against pests, watering, collecting animal faeces to nourish the soil, etc, etc. Yes, it allowed for greater food production, albeit of a much more limited and less healthy variety of foods, and the improved food supply and settled homes allowed for more babies to be born. But more babies needed more food, and babies were fed cereals rather than breast-milk to allow the mothers to work more, reducing their immune systems, and leading to many more infant deaths.

It doesn't end there. If the staple crop failed due to an infestation or bad weather, peasants died by the thousands. Tribe-against-tribe violence increased, as the best agricultural land was fought over tooth and nail. Infections and diseases flourished in the busier, closer, more enclosed living quarters. Forests were cleared to make room for mono-culture plantings, a process still going on today. Once free-roaming animals were domesticated, penned, whipped, harnessed, even mutilated and tortured, before being unceremoniously slaughtered at a young age, all in the interests of human food production.

And, once the process was started, and populations were continuously growing, there was just no going back to the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This is what Harari calls the "luxury trap", and he describes a couple of interesting modern analogies. 

College graduates take demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing to work hard, earn lots of money and retire at 35. But, by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children in school, houses in the suburbs, and a taste for the high life. There is no easy way to retire, and they continue to slave away for decades.

Another modern example: when email arrived, people stopped spending so much time writing, addressing and posting physical letters, and then waiting days or weeks for a reply, opting instead for the ease and convenience of firing off a quick email, and expecting an almost immediate reply. But now people dash off emails for the slightest of reasons, not just when there is something important to relate, and we are all tied to our over-full inboxes, stressed and anxious. Progress?

I'm looking forward to the next three quarters of the book.

Coetzee's Jesus trilogy is strange but compelling

I have just finished J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy: The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus. And a very strange beast it is, too.

It is a late-period work (The Death of Jesus was published in 2019, and Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands, came out in 1974, some 45 years earlier), so one could perhaps expect a more philosophical approach, and maybe a more experimental one. And that's exactly what Coetzee gives us. Not content to rest on his laurels - he has the Nobel Prize in Literature and not one, but two, Booker Prizes under his belt, along with a slew of other prizes and commendations - he pushes the envelope a bit further with these spare and slightly off-kilter books.

Coetzee's writing style was always disarmingly simple, elegant but economical. That is to say, he doesn't waste words on unnecessary ornamentation and flights of fancy. The Jesus novels continue this tendency. His prose has been called "stripped-down", "disorienting" and "hypnotic", and that's as good a description as any.

It should perhaps be mentioned that these novels are not about Jesus, and there is no character in them called Jesus. The main characters are a boy known as Davíd (not his real name) and his "parents" Simón and Inés. In fact, Simón found Davíd on a refugee boat and took him under his wing, including finding him a "mother". 

There is some element of analogy, though, as people gravitate toward David, despite his outward aloofness and weirdness, and especially as the overblown mythos around him grows after his death, and reports of miracles, a mysterious "message", and more, circulate.

The three settle in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country, and try to make a life for themselves, even as their relationships gradually fall apart. Davíd - the "Jesus" of the book titles, if anyone is, although it is by no means a straightforward allegory - is fiercely bright but uncompromisingly self-centred, aggressively independent, and generally unpleasant. Inés is sharp and equally uncompromising in her own way, and definitely not natural mother material. Simón is perhaps the only sympathetic character: cerebral, self-deprecating, eminently sensible, devoted and loving, but also keenly aware of how far out of his depth he is in undertaking to bring up a child, especially a child like Davíd.

And out of this, Coetzee builds three linked novels. They do have plots, but most of the writing revolves around relationships, emotions, spirituality and ideas. How to live a good life, how to bring up a child in a changing world, how to navigate life in a new country and a new culture, the wisdom of the law, passion vs. reason, that kind of thing. Each book is that rare thing, a page-turner of a philosophical novel. Together, they have confirmed Coetzee as one of our greatest writers.

To read or not to read

There was a brave and impassioned article by celebrated Canadian author Lawrence Hill in the weekend Globe and Mail about his use of the N-word in his books (no, I'm not going to write it out - do you think I'm stupid?)

Still perhaps the single most loaded word in the English language, Hill explains that he includes it in his novels - as do many other Black authors like Austin Clarke, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, et al - for authenticity. But it does leave schools looking to teach the books in a rather difficult position because the work can apparently be "triggering" for many young Black people, and school boards feel the need to "protect" their young people from such mental strain. Hill, on the other hand, believes that they need to "own" the word, or "reclaim" it, and that readers - Black and White - should face up to the reality of its historical use.

The article was prompted by the many letters Mr. Hill apparently receives about how various school boards have not exactly banned his books - particularly The Book of Negroes, his best known and most-awarded book - but stipulated that they should not be used for mandatory coursework, only made available for voluntary use in the school library.

Mr. Hill, however, maintains that this is tantamount to a ban - an assertion I would probably diasagree with, on balance - and that such policies are depriving students of the opportunity to read some great books by Black authors, and depriving Black authors of a valuable new young audience. 

Again, on balance, I would probably disagree. I didn't read any Black authors during my schooling in 1960s and 1970s England, but I have read and enjoyed many since then. Should students be FORCED to read Black and Indigenous authors for the good of their immortal souls? That would be a radical notion indeed. Should books by Black authors even be allocated study spots in proportion to their demographic numbers? That would also get complicated when you start trying to be inclusive of the various Asian, African, Latino, etc, sub-sets, not to mention women, queer authors, etc, who no doubt also want their share of the market.

There are so many worthy and well-written works of literature out there - most of them written by dead white guys as it happens - it's a real quagmire deciding who should be studied by Canadian students. The bottom line, though, should be that this a study of English literature, not politics, sociology or anthropology. 

My feeling is that there are many great books out there that are relatively uncontentious and inoffensive (including by Black authors). We do not have to push the envelope all the time, and we can still learn about sentence construction, literary styles and grammar without having to go through all this hand-wringing and recrimination. This is not a cop-out, but a pragmatic choice.

George R.R. Martin is never going to finish A Song of Ice and Fire

I hadn't really thought about it for a while, but I was reminded recently that George R.R. Martin has still not finished his A Song of Ice and Fire series of books.

He started the series way back in 1996, with A Game of Thrones. The last published part was A Dance With Dragons in 2011 and, at that time, he was anticipating the next installment, The Winds of Winter, to be out by about 2014. That's now 10 years ago. 

Last we heard - November 2023 - he still had about 1,100 pages of that book written (!), the same number as he had in 2022. So, it seems like he either has writer's block, or just doesn't really care any more. He has published other books in the meantime, including Game of Thrones offshoots and prequels, and much of his time has been taken up with screenplay work for the Game of Thrones TV series (and offshoots like House of Dragons).

So, many fans have just given up on ever seeing The Winds of Winter, let alone the planned series coda A Dream of Spring, and a good number of them just don't really care any more, myself among them. Which is unfortunate, and maybe an indication that Mr. Martin doesn't really care much about his readers. With the great success of the Game of Thrones television franchise (and its offshoots), he's clearly not hurting for money. And maybe that says it all.

Julian Barnes introduces us to his ill-remembered namesake

I have been reading Julian Barnes' 2022 novel Elizabeth Finch. And, while it is a good read, like all of Barnes' books, it is a strange animal, and not at all what I was expecting.

This is largely because a sizeable proportion of it is given over to an extended account of one of the Roman Empire's less-talked-about emperors, Julian the Apostate. I can only think that Mr. Barnes went down a rabbit hole concerning his namesake, and decided to lead us down there too. It's a strange detour in a novel that is ostensibly about a student's long-term unrequited love for an eccentric but brilliant teacher, but in fact it also makes an interesting novelette in itself (and yes, there is a kind of connection to the main story, it's not completely random).

Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus) was Caesar of the declining Roman empire for five short years, from 355 to 360 AD. He inherited the position from his uncle Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor and the founder of the great city of Constantinople.

Julian, though, was a maverick. He was, by all accounts, oafish, hairy unkempt, and poorly-presented in an age when the patrician classes prided themselves on their clean-cut, well-coiffed image. Julian was oblivious to such worldly concerns, and devoted himself to philosophical ruminations, becoming remarkably well-read for a late-Empire emperor. He made some attempts (none too successful) to weed out the corruption and foppery that had taken over the higher echelons of Roman society in his day.

His studies led him to an intellectual rejection of Christianity, preferring the divinity-rich paganism of old and the philosophy of Neoplatonism. He spent much of his time and money on elaborate auguries, animal sacrifices, etc.  However, he did not purge Christianity in a violent manner (in traditional Roman fashion), but preferred to use words and arguments, showing a policy of "ingenious clemency" or blanda persecutio ("persecution by gentleness").

He was reviled by most in his own time, partly for his appearance and methods, and partly for his anti-Christian rhetoric at a time when Christianity had taken strong hold among the general public and particularly among the gentry. He enjoyed a short period of endorsement and validation among the intelligentsia of the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, but in general he has been treated shoddily by history.

Julian was killed trying to extend Roman occupation into the deserts of Persia, which he undertook based on his own positive auguries and in spite of the dire warnings of his advisors. Go figure.

It is, though, an interesting academic exercise to imagine how history might have been changed had Julian lived, and had he succeeded in steering the civilized world away from Christianity. What if? If the great scholarly libraries of ancient times had never been destroyed or lost, there would perhaps have been no need for a European Renaissance or an Enlightenment. Might Christians, Jews, Muslims, pagans and tree-huggers have lived side by side in peace, with no need for the religious wars that racked Europe for centuries, no need for over-zealous missionaries scouring the world for souls to save, decimating their populations in the process? Imagine science progressing unhindered by religious persecution and shortsightedness. People living for the joy to be had in life, rather than cowering before the threats of the priesthood in the forlorn hope of some imaginary life after death.

Probably not. But it's nice to speculate.

John Banville's splendid evocation of Renaissance Europe

I confess to be unexpectedly enjoying John Banville's 1981 book Kepler, a semi-fictional semi-biographical account of the great German mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler. A historical fiction you might call it.

I've read several of Banville's books before, but I don't remember his deft turn of phrase, his nifty way with a metaphors. It is not written in Renaissance language exactly, but the style neatly conjures the rich-but-slightly-squalid quality of the period, reminiscent of some of Hilary Mantel's historical prose. 

Like Mantel too, Banville's turn of descriptive phrase is quite splendid, often slightly off-kilter and unexpected. A few brief exemplars:

• "Jobst Müller let spread like a kind of sickly custard over his face one of his rare smiles."
• "He was today without the wide-brimmed conical hat which he sported most times indoors and out, and he looked as if a part of his head were missing."
• "They went down the stairs, Jobst Müller's buckled shoes producing on the polished boards a dull descending scale of disapproval."
• "She shut the big oak door behind her with elaborate care, as if she were assembling part of the wall. The world was built on too large a scale for her."
• "The pack of hounds with an ululant cheer burst through a low gate from the kennels and surged across the courtyard, avid brutes with stunted legs and lunatic grins and tiny tight puce scrotums."
• "The great noisome burden of things nudged him, life itself tipping his elbow. He smiled, gazing up into the branches. Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?"
• "Cold it had been that morning, the sky like a bruised gland and a taste of metal in the air, and everything holding its breath under an astonishment of fallen snow. Soiled white boulders of ice lolled in the rivers."
• "He had a wide smudged upper lip, a kind of prehensile flap; the drop at the end of his nose glittered in the glare of the brazier."

Part of the Revolutions trilogy of novels on Renaissance European scientists, along with Doctor Copernicus and The Newton Letter, this book is a splendid introduction to Booker Prize-winning Banville's style and his skill at depicting a distant and very foreign period in time, complete with interesting rounded characters and a rollicking good plot.

I do like me a good historical novel from time to time (or even "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral", as Polonius would have it). The past is indeed a foreign country, just as exotic and alluring as a distant geographical location, and for me personally a historical-scientific novel is more more interesting than a historical-romance. And John Banville does a very good line in historical-scientific novels.

Will the real Naomi please stand up?

I have read many of Naomi Klein's books over the years, from No Logo to The Shock Doctrine to This Changes Everything. She is a Canadian left-wing icon, with impeccable feminist, environmental and anti-capitalist credentials. 

I have also read many of Naomi Wolf's books - The Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire, Promiscuities - although much longer ago. As a respected and outspoken American third-wave feminist icon, her credentials too seemed impeccable.

But then Naomi Klein recently published Doppelganger (which, full disclosure, I have NOT yet read), and I find that Naomi Klein is apparently not the Naomi I once thought, but a rabid conspiracy theorist, a persona non grata for whom Ms. Klein is embarrassed to be mistaken, and a favoured guest on Steve Bannon's podcasts. She has been kicked off several social media sites, including Twitter, for her espousal of conspiracy theories about vaccines, geoengineering and other topics, and had a book "unpublished" due to grave errors.

How does such a trajectory occur? Was the old Naomi Wolf actually as right-on and reliable as we once thought? Interestingly, one ex-Wolf proponent has recently re-read The Beauty Myth and found it sorely wanting by today's feminist standards. Even in her prime, Wolf was a product of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and a new reading of even her older books shows that they have not aged well, it is argued. Academic papers on the book have found that as much as two-thirds of the statistics Wolf makes use of are spurious, cherry-picked or poorly-interpreted. 

I'm sure I will get around to reading Doppelganger eventually. Surely, Naomi Klein is still safe to read?

Bias and credibility in media sources

By the way, you should know that I often consult the Media Bias/Fact Check website for data on the political bias, reliability and credibility of the various sources I use for this blog. It's a great resource, and fun to play around with.

For example, it tells me that CNN is "mostly factual" and has a "left-wing" bias. Britain's The Guardian is categorized as "Left-Center", but surprisingly it's credibility is only "medium" or "mixed", mainly because of its tendency to use emotive headlines and to reference some less-than-reliable sources. Axios, on the other hand, has a "Left-Center" political bias, but a "High" credibility rating. 

On the other side of the aisle, Fox News is classified "Extreme Right" as expected, but has a surprisingly good "Mixed" factual reporting rating, as does the Toronto Sun. You have to sink to the level of Rush Limbaugh to find an "Extreme Right" and "Very Low" credibility combination.

The New York Times is centre-left and highly factual, while the New York Post is centre-right and only "Mixed" in the factuality of its reporting, so you have to be careful.

Among my major sources of news (other than the Guardian) are the Globe and Mail (very slightly right of centre and high credibility), CBC (centre-left and high credibility), BBC (centre-left and high credibility), The Atlantic (centre-left and high credibility), The Economist ("Least Biased" politically and high credibility), and CTV News (least biased and high credibility).

All of which makes me feel rather good.

The "absurd censorship" (or sensitive edits) of Roald Dahl

You may have heard that Puffin, the British publisher of Roald Dahl's books, is rewriting parts of the books for more modern sensibilities, taking out some of the language they was considered perfectly acceptable in Dahl's day, but considered offensive by some today.

So, Augustus Gloop is no longer "enormously fat", but just "enormous"; Mrs. Twitter is jo longer "ugly and beastly", just "beastly"; Matilda reads the slightly more politically correct Jane Austen, rather than Rudyard Kipling, and the Oompa-Loompas (which, in Dahl's original version, were "pygmies" from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle" before they became small orange people in a previous edit) are now gender neutral, for some reason.

Puffin maintains these are "small and carefully-considered" edits, designed to ensure that the books can "continue to be enjoyed by all today", even if some of them may seem somewhat random or pointless. Predictably, though, some critics, including some very well known names in the literary firmament, are accusing Puffin of "absurd censorship", "cultural vandalism" and "botched surgery", most of which seems rather over-the-top, but authors and critics get very hot under the collar over this kind of thing. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak weighed in with, "We shouldn't gobblefunk around" with Dahl's words (to use a Dahl neologism).

It should be pointed out that these kinds "sensitive text revisions" are nothing new. A bunch of revisions were made recently to Enid Blyton's beloved but irredeemably racist and sexist Famous Five books, and even the books of the "blatant and admitted anti-Semite" Dahl have been edited previously, as noted above.

Some critics suggest that a better solution would be, rather than carrying out wholesale edits to classic children's books which, over repeated iterations, could change the books substantially, leave the original text as is, and provide an introduction and explanation for parents and teachers, almost like a government health warning. 

Would that really be a better solution. Maybe. Or maybe some older books just deserve to fall out of general circulation, and be consigned to the dusty shelves of academia. It's not like there aren't many modern alternatives available, just as good if not better, and much more politically correct to boot.

UPDATE

And now Ian Flemings James Bond books are to receive the same politically correct treatment. Well, now they're really playing with fire! (Ian Fleming Publications claims that Fleming himself was on board with making changes to some of the more egregious racial epithets prior to his death in 1964.)

Life on the Rocks: all may not be lost for our coral reefs

Reading Julie Berwald's Life on the Rocks, it's a little easier to get some perspective on the plight of our coral reefs. It's well-known that coral reefs throughout the world are in trouble, and that our warming oceans are bleaching and killing them, although it's not easy to get a handle on just how bad things are. Added to that is: the threat to the reefs from agricultural run-off, oil spills and other chemical pollutants; direct destruction from shipping accidents, over-enthusiastic fishermen and clumsy tourists; increasingly frequently and intense hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones; suffocation by a plume of floating sunscreen and plastic; and a whole litany of diseases and viruses that have hit the reefs in recent decades. It's a tough life being a coral.

I'm not going to regurgitate the depressing statistics here - suffice to say, about half of the world's 28 million hectares of coral reefs are damaged or dead, most of that over the last 30 or 40 years - and, interestingly, that is not the point of Ms. Berwald's book (it has been well enough documented elsewhere). Life on the Rocks has a more upbeat message: all is not lost.

For example, Ms. Berwald looks at various schemes to protect or shade corals. She introduces us to a whole sub-culture of coral farmers, collectors and artisanal aquarium traders. She describes, too, the relatively well-known project initiated by the Mars chocolate company to improve the reefs around their cacao plantations in Sulawesi, Indonesia, using networks of steel rebar with coral fragments tied on with zip ties. The Mars initiative in particular has been extremely successful, becoming one of the largest reef restoration projects in the world, and has generated several copy-cat projects in other parts of the world.

But, more interesting to me, she explains how it has become apparent (thanks to extensive experimental work by coral scientists like Dave Vaughan in Florida) that it is actually much easier than was once thought to rebuild coral reefs, through an increasingly effective toolbox of techniques like fragmentation, micro-fragmentation, fusion and reskinning, and how coral has surprised scientists with the speed with which it can regenerate under certain conditions and with certain kinds of help.

Also, it turns out that, when a reef bleaches, or even dies off completely, a few individual corals DON'T die. It's not entirely clear how or why, but the survivors do have certain gene expressions in common. And it also turns out that corals in general, and those with certain genes in particular, are much more adaptable to rising temperatures, acidification and pollution than was once thought, and much more resilient in general. Warm-water corals bred with other warm-water corals are much more resistant to rising temperatures than cool-water temperatures. Some algae symbionts allow corals to become more heat tolerant than others. There are a lot of factors to play with, and the good news is that scientists are finally getting to grips with which factors (characteristics/genes/symbionts/etc) matter most.

It seems we have come a long way since those old Jacques Cousteau videos, important though they were in their own way. Life on the Rocks is a welcome antidote to the doom-and-gloom environmental reporting we so often see. It celebrates little victories in a fight against almost impossible odds, and lauds the brave amd indefatigable scientists who chose not to accept defeat.

In between these descriptions of some of the successes in coral restoration, Ms. Berwald also explains about the fascinating life-cycle of coral, and intersperses factoids like: 

• many corals are sequential hermaphrodites, changing from male to female or vice versa, and some release both egg and sperm packets, but separately so that they don't fertilize themselves; 
• individual corals of the same species spontaneously spawn at the same time each year, despite being separated by many kilometers; 
• some corals are 200 times as venomous as a rattlesnake, and 6,000 times as venomous as a black widow spider; 
• coral polyps have a mutualistic relationship with different species of algae that live actually within their cells, with the algae getting a protected place to live, and the coral getting the food and oxygen it needs to live (as well as those dazzling colours); 
• corals were around at the time of the dinosaurs, and remain almost unchanged; 
• a single polyp is not in itself an animal, even though it looks separate - the animal is the coral as a whole, which is made up of thousands of little polyps;
• corals can produce their own chemical "sunscreen" in day-glo fluorescent colours, with which they try to protect themselves against warming waters and sun-bleaching.

All in all, a book well worth reading, and not half as depressing as you might have thought.

"How to kill your husband" essayist kills ... her husband

In a case of real life mirroring fiction a little too closely, romance and mystery novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy has been convicted of the murder of her husband, several years after publishing an essay entitled "How to kill your husband ".

Crampton Brophy, 71, was found guilty of second degree murder for the 2018 shooting of her husband in Oregon for the life insurance payout. Apparently, the essay was not allowed as evidence in the case.

"The Pull of rhe Stars" shows how far we have come (or not) since the 1918 Spanish flu

I have just finished Emma Donoghue's 2020 book The Pull of the Stars, which paints a vivid (and rather graphic) picture of life in a Dublin maternity ward at the end of the First World War and during the height of the Spanish Flu outbreak.

Many of the flu pandemic measures are eerily reminiscent of today's. (Incidentally, Donoghue wrote the book before the COVID pandemic, so she can't he accused of cashing in.) A quick online look at some of the public health posters of the day, though, show just how different those times were.

I was particularly taken by the "Spitting spreads Spanish Influenza. Don't spit" and "Go home and go to bed until you are well" messages, and the advice that "A gauze mask is 99% proof against influenza".

It's salient to note that there were also anti-mask protests at that time:

In some ways we haven't come that far in the last hundred years.

Perdido Street Station is not your every day fantasy novel

I have read and enjoyed several of China Miéville's books, but never one quite like Perdido Street Station.

It is a 700-page fantasy tour de force. You could call it steampunk, I guess, but not in a recognizable William Gibson/Bruce Sterling kind of way. Some of it seems recognizable some of the time, but then Miéville will throw in bizarro aliens or dimension-shifting or entirely improbable thaumaturgical pseudo-science, just to keep you off-balance. It is, perhaps, alternative reality steampunk.

The book is set in the sprawling city of New Crobuzon, and the city is perhaps the most important character in the book, its protagonist. It bears some passing resemblance to some of the most sordid parts of Dickensian London, but more extreme and more varied: "...this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god". Words like "suffocating", "stinking", "gloomy", "monstrous", "grotesque", "decayed", "wasted", "putrid", "chaotic", "grubby", "noisome" and "gangrenous" abound in descriptions of the city's streets and neighbourhoods.

In the main, science has not progressed past steam power, gas lighting, trains and airships, and horse-drawn carriages are still the norm. But thaumaturgy (low-level supernatural or quasi-magical intervention) has been raised to an almost sciento-religious art, allowing for the incorporation of mechanical intrusions into flesh-and-blood bodies, rudimentary robotic helpers, and the grafting (both voluntary and otherwise) of other body and animal parts onto human bodies. Proto-computers, using punched-card technology, even put in an appearance. There are bits of science and pseudo-science thrown in for good measure (including "crisis mathematics"), but hard science fiction this is most definitely not.

Plus, there are bona fide alien species thrown into the mix: insect people; flying beings; water-based creatures with the power to mould and control water; cultured giant spiders that straddle different dimensions at will; giant moths that feed on the dreams of sentient species; intelligent cactus people, for God's sake! For most of these species, it's a dog-eat-dog-eat-garbage-eat-whatever-they-can-get-their-hands/claws-on world. Mistrust and cynicism are essential life-skills, and quiet desperation is the norm. It's not an edifying vision of civilization.

But, into this mix are thrown some genuinely likeable characters, both human and alien, and the book revolves in large part around the struggle of these lovable, error-prone "good guys" against some of the nastiest and most violent of the others. The most important character, though, is the city itself, in all its lurid and dissolute glory.

And, best of all, it is well-written, something that often gets overlooked in fantasy and science fiction circles. Everything about life in New Crobuzon is excessive, and much of Miéville''s prose is too. But this is a 700-page book, so words like "palimpsest", "scoriatic", "mephitic", "sussurus" and "ossified" are going to find their way in, no? The dialogue reads quite naturally too, not like the usual stilted sci-fi offerings.

For all its ambition, it remains immensely readable. I'm a slow reader, and 700 pages a big ask for me. But this one just flew by.

Pushing back against the mainstream of race politics

I am finding Christine Louis-dit-Sully's latest book Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand By Me both illuminating and thought-provoking.

Ms. Louis-dit-Sully is a black woman brought up in the French West Indies, France and the UK, and has only recently moved from academic biology research to political theory and commentary, since becoming disillusioned with the current state of race politics, identity politics, critical race theory, etc. It's a crowded field, but she brings her own lived experience and her clarity of thought and expression to it.

To give a flavour of the book, here are just a few snippets from the early pages, some of which may seem quite controversial, even shocking, within the current Zeitgeist of anti-racist opinion and the climate of politic correctness:

• "Racism is about denying group members their individuality".
• "The caricature of Serena Williams was racist and used specific well-known cultural tropes, but this does not necessarily mean that the author was or is racist."
• "I am very open about my strong opposition to identity politics and to the anti-white bigotry promoted by some black activists."
• "I do not agree with the notion that white authors writing about black characters in their novels, plays, comics, are necessarily being racist."
• "I do not agree with the view that 'blackface' is always racist. People have blackened and blacken their faces for various reasons including just for the fun of changing their appearance."
• "The prejudices, in the past, toward strangers or people from other communities like African tribes, Slavs or Germanic tribes were not racial prejudices unless one imposes our current view of the world onto people long gone."
• "Self-defined identity groups are based on real or imagined grievances, the members of that group are defined as victims, and the identity is seen as positive."
• "One of the reasons I strongly challenge identity politics is down to my opposition to the belief that emotional exhaustion, skin color, race, ethnicity, culture or personal experiences automatically give one access to the truth, and that that supposed truth cannot be discussed or challenged."
• "Only a single individual would need to feel offended for a claim of cultural appropriation."
• "Activists who describe racism as systemic white privilege or as the original sin have divided people into two immutable categories: the oppressors and the oppressed, showing their underlying mistrust in reason and autonomy."
• "If an individual wants to see himself as black, he is forced to follow the norms and rules of the identity group, otherwise he is seen as 'inauthentic' or 'non-black'. The identity classification denies individual agency."

Strong stuff! Many (not all) of these views are similar to ones I have expressed myself in these blogs. The difference is, though, that I am white, and I walk on eggshells and risk online opprobrium and chastisement for espousing and disseminating such views. How refreshing, then, to read similar fare from a card-carrying black activist.

Will Starling is a wonderful 19th century English Gothic novel by a 21st century Canadian

I've been thoroughly enjoying Ian Weir's book Will Starling (just as I enjoyed his Daniel O'Thunder).

Like Daniel O'Thunder, it is set in 19th century London, although in this case some decades earlier, specifically the year 1816. It is a lurid Gothic adventure tale of grave-robbers, madmen, prostitutes and amoral surgeons/anatomists. It is a tale of ambition, obsession, infatuation, perdition, redemption and, apparently, resurrection. And it reads very much like a Dickens novel - despite its modern, contemporary authorship - both in its colourfully idiomatic language (very much Dickensian rather than the more formal Austen-esque, despite its historical setting), in its larger-than-life characters, and in its painstaking detail and social commentary.

Mr. Weir is also a dab hand with an elliptically descriptive turn of phrase. Here are three sentences from different parts of just one page:

"There was an outer room where a Spavined Clerk worked at a table piled high with papers, the dust of ages rising and settling as he stirred."

"His wig lay strewn and lifeless in the corner, as if it had scuttled into the street at the unluckiest of moments and been run over by a carriage wheel."

"Eyebrows arched at the sight of me, like chalk-dusted caterpillars."

And he throws in some lovely, suitably Georgian-sounding exclamations, like "God's teeth!", "Christ on a biscuit!" and "By God's great swinging bollocks!" Who knows whether they are actually authentic early 19th century London-speak, but who really cares?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing, though, is that Weir is not a Cockney at all, but a Canadian (technically born on North Carolina, but brought up, largely educated and still living in Canada).

Why April is "the cruellest month"

I've lost track of how many times I've seen T.S. Eliot's line "April is the cruellest month" quoted recently. This is partly, I suppose, because it's April and it makes a good opening line for an article, however out-of-context. But it's partly because we are in a pandemic (I'll explain).

It must be the most-quoted line from T.S. Eliot, or indeed from any modern poet, although I doubt many people could continue with the subsequent lines from The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

(By the way, note the double "l" in "cruellest": Eliot may have been born in the US, but he moved to England at the age of 25, and all his major works were written there. He later renounced his US citizenship. Most of the articles I read "translate" it into North American, with a single "l".)

As to why he considered April to be the cruellest month, much of this is to do with the fact that Britain (and Europe and indeed the world) was just emerging from a global pandemic in 1922 when Eliot was writing The Waste Land. The Spanish Flu pandemic killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people from 1918 and 1920, and infected almost a third of the world's population, making today's COVID outbreak look positively tame.

What Eliot is saying, then, is not that April in general is a cruel month. After all, April is traditionally a time of spring and renewal, a time of fecundity, hope and love. What he is suggesting is that, in the Europe of the early 1920s, ravaged by years of first war and then the Spanish flu, there seems to be little in the way of hope and renewal going on, so that the normally hopeful month of April seems doubly cruel, a mockery of unrealizeable possibilities. Don't take my word for it, someone else's blog explains it much better than I could.

So, you can see how that might resonate in April 2021, can't you? Here in Toronto, the daffodils and magnolias are blossoming, but we are still in lockdown, with no apparent end in sight. Cruel indeed.