Modern Society Archives - Page 11 of 21

Infinitely Weird

Remember math class? You instantly had either a flash of great joy or your soul just died. This is a story about math for the latter group. Trust me on this one.

First, why does the latter group exist? Why are there so many people, and let’s be honest, it is a very great number of people, whose experience learning mathematics was pure misery?

Over the years, I cannot tell you how many students have been in my office and said, “I can’t do math.” I invariably say the same thing: “Of course you can do math. What is 5+3? Sometime in your life you had a really awful math teacher who sucked all the joy out of the subject.” Invariably the student’s face instantly lights up with recognition, remembering that math teacher.

The fundamental problem is that mathematics is taught all wrong. Other subjects often start with amazing things that inspire, arousing wonder and curiosity. Mathematics starts with equations and lots and lots of repetitive tasks. Don’t get me wrong. The only way to truly learn mathematics is with lots and lots of repetitive tasks. But, in order for all that work to seem worth the time, isn’t it first necessary to arouse a sense of wonder? Why doesn’t math education start with weird and amazing things and then work backward to learn the mathematics behind all this weirdness?

It is amazing that something we can understand so instinctively can be so difficult to turn into rigorous mathematics. This can make mathematics seem frustrating to some people, impotent to others, and pointless to yet others. To me it is simply fascinating that our gut instincts can be so strong, and so difficult to understand with our brains. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try…

Eugenia Cheng wrote that in Beyond Infinity, an exploration of one of those incredibly weird and curious mathematical things. Infinity is an idea everyone learns about fairly early in life as the answer to the question “What is the biggest number?” Remember the moment you learned the answer to that was a number so big it couldn’t get any bigger? Remember when you learned you can’t even count to infinity because it is so big? Even a computer can’t count to infinity. Even Hermione Granger can’t count to infinity.

Then you learned that infinity is so big that if I have an infinite number of marbles and you have one plus an infinite number of marbles, well, you don’t have more marbles than me. In fact, if you have twice as many marbles as me, you have the same number of marbles as me. In fact, if you had infinitely more marbles than me, you have the same number of marbles as me. Honestly, you were amazed about this when you learned about it. Infinity is not just the biggest number possible, it is weird.

But then instead of capitalizing on all that weirdness and keeping you fascinated with numbers, tedium came along. If you made it to calculus, you learned that an infinite series of infinitely smaller things can add up to a finite number. That should be weird and amazing, but it was probably just a thing you had to figure out in order to pass your test. You learned you can calculate the slope of a curvy line by looking at infinitely smaller distances between the point on the line and the point next to it, which is also really weird, but again, you just memorized how to take a derivative. Math wasn’t weird anymore. It was just exam questions.

Unless you had a really amazing teacher, you never learned this in school: that first thing you learned about infinity, that it is the biggest possible number and you can’t get a bigger number, is wrong. There is a number bigger than infinity. The bigger number is also called infinity. Some infinities are bigger than other infinites.

How can that be? Well, imagine you had an infinite series of infinitely long numbers less than one. For example, start with

0.274539754312667532….
0.375631948857323456….
0.984452387503486328….
0.556633995846321885….
0.412386593658235702….
…..

Imagine that each one of those numbers is infinitely long. Imagine that instead of five numbers like that you have a list of infinitely many numbers like that. So, you have infinitely many numbers which are infinitely long. Right? (Make sure you understand that this is an infinite set of infinitely long numbers—ready to have your mind blown?)

There is a number less than one that is not in that infinite set of infinitely long numbers less than one. How is that possible? How do we know?

Take the first number in your list. Look at the first digit in the first number and add one. We now create the number 0.3. Now take the second digit of the second number and add one. 0.38. Now the third digit of the third number and so on. Using the five numbers above this is 0.38579…. Keep doing this. That new number you just created is different than every single number in your infinitely long series! Think about it—pick any number in your infinitely long series and compare it to the number you just created. Consider the 5789^th number in your series; the 5789^th digit in the 5789^th number is, say, 4; in the number you are creating, make the 5789^th digit 5. So, the number you are creating is not the same number as the 5789^th number in your infinitely long series. Or any other number you choose. There is no way that number you just created is in the original infinitely long series.

So, the series of numbers with the new number you just created and the series you started with must be larger than the series with which you started. Some infinities are larger than other infinites.

I took a lot of math classes in my life, but I only learned this fact about 15 years ago from a colleague of mine in philosophy. When I think back to my calculus class, endless tedium, it is amazing to think how much more excited I would have been about thinking about all those infinitely small distances if I had understood how truly weird infinity actually is.

Another example. Imagine the number 0.999999… where the nines just keep repeating forever. If you subtract that number from 1, what do you get? You get 0. That number 0.99999 and the number 1 are exactly the same number. How can that be? It’s weird. Take the number 1. Say that a number is smaller than 1 if there is some distance between 1 and that number. So 0.9 is smaller than 1 because it is 0.1 smaller than 1. Similarly, 0.99 is .01 smaller than 1. But now imagine the smallest possible distance between 1 and a smaller number. The distance between 1 and 0.99999… is smaller than the distance you just imagined. So imagine an even smaller distance than the smallest possible difference you just imagined. Same thing. In fact no matter how close to 1 you imagine a number has to be in order to equal 1, 0.9999….. is a smaller distance away than that distance. So if there is no distance between 1 and 0.9999…., then 1 must equal 0.9999…. Right? But that can’t be true. Right? Infinity is weird.

Another example. If you have 5 things and you add infinitely many things to it, then you have (5 + infinity) which equals infinity. You know that. But what if you have an infinite number of things and you add five more things? Well, you can’t really do that. In order to add five more things, you would have to add them to the end to your infinite series, but there is no end to your infinite series. So, while (5 + infinity) is a perfectly reasonable thought experiment, (infinity + 5) is meaningless. Which means (5 + infinity) does not equal (infinity + 5). Yeah.

Cheng’s book is an introduction to these sorts of weird things about infinity. Who is the audience? It is those people who really hated math class or those people who took calculus and thought it was boring. Infinity is many things, but it is not boring.

I would love to highly recommend the book to anyone who thinks math is boring. But, alas, while the book has a great many weird and fascinating things about infinity which you will surely enjoy learning if you don’t know them, you have to take the good with the bad. The bad: you have to put up with a lot of corny stores and examples. I was ready to murder the “evil smarty-pants” by the second mention, but he kept coming back for more.

Is infinity an infinitely interesting subject? Probably not. But it does have enough odd and intriguing features that pondering it will give you a finite amount of amusement. Added bonus: from now on when someone tells you something is infinite or forever or whatever, you can ask: Is that the normal infinity or an infinity that is bigger than the normal infinity?

Suicide Chic

“The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

Thus ends The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s vastly overrated foray into the novel.

I tried to find some redeeming feature of this novel. I really did. I even waited to write this review until a clever former student of mine who likes this novel had the chance to convince me the novel was not atrocious. She failed. But, I don’t real blame her. This is a really bad book.

Start here: the story ends as Esther, our narrator, boldly and hopefully steps into the room. The future awaits! How did she get to this magical place? Well, seventy pages earlier, Esther killed herself. She buried herself in her basement and swallowed enough pills to end her painful life. The message of this book: If you want to find happiness and hope in your life, first you must commit suicide.

Now I know you are thinking we shouldn’t laugh about Esther committing suicide. You are right. It is awful that Esther killed herself, truly awful. Indeed it is so awful that one might think that a book which argues that suicide is the way to make your problems go away would be a mean, nasty bit of work that we probably might not want to be celebrating.

Esther didn’t die, obviously. And therein lies the biggest cheat in the whole story. Esther gets to boldly kill herself and then she also gets to live. In the story, this is a win-win. In the real world, of course, this is a loss. Esther just dies in the real world.

To be fair, it is not the suicide that my former student pointed to as the redeeming feature of the book. Instead, she pointed to the fig tree.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

As my former student noted, the fig tree captures much of the angst of every student who has ever sat in my office. This is true. To be in college and faced with a world of opportunities is indeed terrifying. It forces one to wonder about the Big Questions. Who are you? Why are you here? What is the source of happiness? The fact that college students are perpetually faced with these questions, that these questions are real and important, is one of the greatest joys of being a college professor. I always get to have yet another conversation about things which are truly important.

If The Bell Jar had been a story about the difficulties of making choices when you are young and at an elite liberal arts college and the world is before you, then maybe it would have been a novel worth reading.

But, Plath’s solution to this problem is: Kill Yourself. FOMO-induced suicide.

Anyone want to argue that the next time I have a student in my office with that fig tree problem, that crippling anxiety arising from uncertainty about what to do with her life, then I should merrily hand her a copy of The Bell Jar and say, “Here is a book which will help you solve the problems you are having”? Anyone?

If the novel had ended with Esther’s suicide then maybe the book would have been worth reading. We could have seen the tragedy that Esther killed herself; we could have felt the pain she must have endured because of being unwilling to make a choice. Probably still a lousy book, but at least an intellectually honest one.

But, when Esther survives suicide and the suicide becomes the pivot point of her whole life, then how can anyone take this book seriously? It trivializes both the problems Esther faced and the solution she finds. Let’s make it very clear: the main function of this novel is to glamorize suicide.

It is entirely possible to write a serious substantive book arguing for the virtues of suicide. Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism is an excellent example. The Romans also believed suicide had its place. Hume wrote an essay about it too. Goethe has a famous novel about it. But in all of these cases, suicide is treated as a serious matter. In Plath, it is all just glam, like a flashy advertising spread in a magazine.

Moreover, the publication history of this novel is well worth noting. The American publisher to whom she sent the manuscript passed, thinking (correctly) that the novel was not good at all. A British publisher agreed to publish it under a pseudonym. When it came out, the reviews were bad. It turns out that nobody liked this novel.

Then Plath committed suicide. Eight years after her death, a publisher discovered that the book was not covered by American copyright, and could thus be published by anyone in America. The reason that anyone could publish it was because nobody had bothered to publish the book in America when it came out in 1963, because it was, you see, such a lousy novel. In the early 1970s, coming out when Love Story was the tale du jour, The Bell Jar hit the bestseller list. What could be better in the early 1970s than a book glamorizing depression and suicide written by a young poet who had actually killed herself?

You want a sign of cultural degradation? I give you The Bell Jar.

A Funeral Pyre for Books

“When people ask me what I do, I usually say I’m an essayist or a critic. More honorable terms, both, and they mostly fit. They almost conceal the fact that the greater part of what I do is read and write about books.”

In writing that, Sven Birkerts expanded his repertoire into writing about reading and writing about books.

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. A title like that tips the conclusion; Birkerts is not optimistic. This collection of essays circles around the image of Birkerts standing with a hand-written sign saying, “The End is Nigh.”

The book isn’t much of a Whodunit, though. What killed Reading? The internet with its insidious allure. Even more remarkable, the book was published in 1994, so this is before Netflix. Even back in those days, however, Birkerts described talking with his students about reading:

And what emerged was this: that they were not, with a few exceptions, readers—never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed “pretentious”; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something. The list is partial.

Yeah, Birkerts despairs. (Interestingly, he later did a stint at Mount Holyoke; alas, I never met him.)

What is the problem? It is not that students are illiterate or not interested in learning things. With a student that enjoys talking, it really isn’t hard to find some set of topics for a mutually pleasurable conversation. Students have opinions, strong ones. They have a wide assortment of factoids at their disposal. And they carry around a pocket encyclopedia.

But, by and large, they don’t read books. Then again, many of my colleagues also don’t read books. Sure, they read journal articles and suchlike, but they are not what you would call Readers. Indeed, most of my acquaintances are not Readers, and I suspect I have an unusually high number of readers as acquaintances. Birkerts think we have collectively lost the habit of reading.

What is true of art is true of serious reading as well. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake it. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitement of film.

And, note, we no longer need big screens for the excitement of film. Your tablet and wireless headphones are a portable surround sound movie theater.

At this level, Birkerts is joining the choir, often composed of people who write books complaining that other people don’t read books anymore. Of course some people still read books…just not that many books. Only a quarter of Americans report not reading any books in the last year. The median American reads about 4 books a year. About a third of Americans read at least a book a month. Around 5% read at least book a week. So, it is not the case that people never read books; they just don’t read enough books to make people like Birkerts happy.

However, the lack of a broad reading public has a couple of rather important effects. In a discussion of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—itself a collection of essays about reading books—Birkerts is intrigued by something other than Trilling’s remarks about books.

We may be surprised by the realization that he is writing not for his fellow academic but for the intelligent layman; that there was once a small but active and influential population of such readers, enough for publishers to count on, enough to support a literary culture outside the university radius. These readers were assumed to have a broad general acquaintance with literary classics—James, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert—as well as modern works by writers like Hemingway, Forster, Mann, and Sartre. They would have the rudiments of Freudian psychology, Marxist science, philosophy (certainly a smattering of Descartes, Kant, Bergson, and Nietzsche), classical history (Tacitus, Polybius, Thucydides), and so on. Not a great deal to ask, but how many readers like that are out there now? Some, of course. But do we ever think of them as forming a constituency, as representing a cultural power, as representing anything besides a quirky exception to the norm?

A fascinating observation, that. Of the Americans reading four books a year, how many of those books are Shakespeare’s plays? Even among the book a week or more types, is it Austen, Dickens and Hemingway, let alone Trilling? What happens when people stop reading Descartes and Thucydides for pleasure? What can a writer assume the audience has read? Is asking about whether people read Thucydides or Dickens an interesting question or a pretentious question?

Of course people read all those important books in school…or at least they read important sections from important books in school…or at the very least they read a summary of the important sections of the important books in school…or at a minimum they were supposed to read a summary of the important bits of the important books in school. This, though, leads to another aspect of the decline of reading. Who controls the syllabus of books which will be read in schools? In the last few decades, this has been an enormous battle ground. Why? Birkerts notes:

As Katha Pollitt argued so shrewdly in her much cited article in The Nation: if we were a nation of readers, there would be no issue. No one would be arguing about whether to put Toni Morrison on the syllabus because her work would be a staple of the reader’s regular diet anyway. These lists are suddenly so important because they represent, very often, the only serious works that the student is ever likely to be exposed to. Whoever controls the list comes out ahead in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the young.

For those of us who think the Great Books are important, this is a massive problem. If the average person is only going to read 4 books a year for the rest of their life, then the books assigned in school will make up a noticeable percentage of one’s reading material. It suddenly makes a big difference how many Shakespeare plays you read in high school because this will be for very many people the last time they ever read Shakespeare. If you don’t read Toni Morrison or Ernest Hemingway in high school, you may never see either one.

Does it really matter if people read books? That is a tricky question to answer. It is manifestly true that a person can lead a very meaningful life, full of purpose and love, and never read a book. People led productive and wonderful lives for thousands of years before Gutenberg came along. Even after the printing press, books were not cheap, so you would have to be enormously wealthy to have a moderately sized library of your own. Public libraries are remarkably recent historical inventions. A life without books used to be the norm.

So, if reading books is not crucial to leading a Good Life, why does it matter? After 220 pages of angst, Birkerts arrives here:

My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth—from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery—and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days?

Reading books promotes depth. Yes, you can get the facts from a breezy article on the web. Yes you can imagine yourself walking in another’s shoes in a 2 hour movie or a one hour TV show. But, the book forces you to slow down, to set your mind wandering in vaster plains, swimming in deeper waters, climbing greater heights than your daily life will offer. The book always moves at the pace of your mind, allowing the words to work their magic at exactly the tempo you desire. Books are neither necessary nor sufficient to a life well lived. But, books, Great Books, will make whatever life you are living even better.

The Decline of Leisure and the Academy

May latest essay at Law and Liberty, reflecting on Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture:

The idea of the liberal arts college has been under assault for some time now, not just from without the walls of the Academy. Liberal arts colleges made a Faustian bargain: in exchange for ever increasing tuition payments, we provide students with hypothetically valuable job training in a posh resort.

The result is that there are two forces competing for control of the colleges right now. On the one side, we have the careerism wing, which needs to offer enough practical things to convince parents to part with $70,000 a year in the hopes that the children will get employment paying multiples of that number per year. On the other side, we have the ideologues, who view students as a captive audience for all manner of indoctrination through propaganda. At most institutions, faculty who ask, “What about the liberal arts?” and mean it in Pieper’s sense of the term, survive on life support, and almost nowhere do they thrive.

The point of no return is getting closer.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

Jack the Ripper

“As with much of the evidence surrounding these murders, the data is ambiguous, a shifting cloud of facts and factoids onto which we project the fictions that seem most appropriate to our times and our inclinations.”

Alan Moore wrote that in the appendix to From Hell, his macabre tale of Jack the Ripper. (Technically Eddie Campbell shares the credit since he drew the pictures, but, we all know this is really Moore’s book.)

Jack the Ripper surely benefits from having a memorable nickname, but his hold on the imagination of people for a century and a half is remarkable. The guy (or maybe girl—there actually is a theory that the murderer was a woman!) murdered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel section of London in 1888, and people are still writing books about him in 2020. I must admit, I have never quite understood the fascination, but that is undoubtedly in part due to the odd way I first learned about him.

I was in high school, spending my lunch hour browsing in the school library, when I pulled a book off the shelf. It was a Sherlock Holmes story. I had heard of Holmes, never read him, so I figured it was a good time to start. There I am merrily reading away about Holmes and his battle with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. Troubling stuff. And then Watson makes a remarkable discovery. Holmes and Moriarty are the same person! Even more amazing: Holmes is Jack the Ripper.

As the Perceptive Reader has noted, this was not a story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My high school self did not know about canonical and non-canonical Holmes stories. The book was such a surreal mess, it was decades before I ever read another Holmes story, and I have steadfastly refused to read another Holmes story written by anyone other than Doyle. I have also never discovered an interest in Jack the Ripper; every time I hear the name, I think about Sherlock Holmes.

(I had never again seen or heard of the novel I read in high school. But, thanks to writing this post and the amazing internet, I discovered what it was. Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. I thought about buying a copy, but ten bucks exceeded the benefit I thought I might derive from rereading a bad novel for nostalgic purposes. Oddly, the Mount Holyoke Library does not own a copy of this book.)

About a decade ago, I finally read another book about Jack the Ripper. Moore’s book. It bored me. Four women, all prostitutes, decide to blackmail the Royal family for a trifling sum needed to pay off some local gang. The secret is that the Prince had an illegitimate child. Queen Victoria summons the court doctor, William Gull, and orders him to dispose of the women. Jack the Ripper is born. (The fifth women was murdered by Gull in a case of mistaken identity.)

Yep, the Queen of England was behind the murders. Suddenly Sherlock Homes seems like a relatively plausible candidate to be Jack the Ripper.

Moore, being Moore, of course doesn’t stop there. The murders are bizarre and gruesome because Gull is a Mason, and Moore thoroughly enjoys wild conspiracy theories. What starts out seeming like a straightforward tale of a serial murderer turns into a wild mystical journey into the chthonic forces operating along axes of power running beneath the surface of London. Hawksmore’s cathedrals play a role in tapping into these forces. The real meaning of Jack the Ripper can only be seen by stepping into the Fourth Dimension and looking at the pattern of violence in these locations through time. Moore is having a merry time.

On top of all that, there is a veritable Who’s Who of surprise appearances. Blake. Yeats. Wilde. Merrick (The Elephant Man). Crowley, whose inclusion prompted Moore to include this note: “The opportunity to include a fairly spurious cameo by one of the foremost occultists of all time seemed too good to pass up.”

The first time I read the book, I had no idea what was going on beyond the fact that the Queen of England was ordering murders and the fact that the victims were prostitutes gave Moore license to work in all sorts of lascivious bits. Yawn. The book has been collecting dust.

Then along comes a former student who tells me about a new book she is reading. The Five by Rubenhold. It is an archival journey into the stories of the victims. Lots and lots of archival work. The conclusion: only one of the five victims was actually a prostitute. Jack the Ripper just found the women sleeping on the ground and killed them, but the press decided to sensationalize matters by saying the victims were all prostitutes. Insert obvious moralizing by the author.

Now, when I was hearing this tale, I got to wondering about Moore’s book. I reread it, but this time, I read the appendix along with the story. Moore provides a page by page description of his sources for all the assorted scenes in the book. Reading the notes along with the story made sense of the story itself.

Moore seems to have read just about every Jack the Ripper book out there, and then freely wandered through the clues to craft a story. He acknowledges throughout which parts of his story are based on fact and which parts were purely his creations in order to weave the facts into a tale. (Spoiler alert: there is zero evidence the Queen of England ordered the murders. Whew.)

The history of Jack the Ripper theories turns out to be more interesting than Jack the Ripper. Moore plays fair with the facts (well, assuming his appendix is reliable). But, the facts are a hodgepodge of random details. We know five women were murdered, their throats were slashed, and they were disemboweled. Grisly stuff. There are conflicting and unreliable eyewitnesses to the activities of the women in the hours before the murders, but no witnesses to the murders themselves. The relative lack of blood at a couple of the locations suggests the women might have been strangled first or that they were killed elsewhere and their bodies were dumped where they were found. Now, amateur sleuth: Whodunit?

The police and newspapers also received quite a few notes from Jack the Ripper himself. Jack’s name comes from one of these notes. So, does the title of Moore’s book; one of these notes claims to have been written “From Hell.” To help you solve the murder, you can also try to figure out which, if any, of these notes were actually written by the murderer.

Surrounding the details of the case was an impressive amount of sensationalization. The Newspapers had a field day. An entire cottage industry arose, making profits off the deaths. The sites of the deaths became instant tourist attractions, and vendors popped up to sell merchandise. Moore again: “I include the scene to give an indication of just how long the public’s ghoulish fascination for the Whitechapel murders (from which the present author cannot in all conscience exclude himself) has been an established fact.”

If all these scraps and details are fascinating to you, you can easily join the band of Ripperologists. Yes, Ripperologist is a real term. My first foray into Ripperology came when I reread Moore’s book and thought about the book my former student read. If Moore is accurate about the known facts, then Rubenhold’s book is wrong. A quick glance through some of the Ripperologist forums reveals my amateur sleuthing is backed up by the less amateur sleuths. It simply is not true that nobody has ever examined the lives of the victims, and the story that they were all just sleeping on the street when the murderer found them is ludicrous.

This is the fun of being a Ripperologist, by the way. You get to make up your own theories. After all, we can’t prove that the Queen of England did not order the murders or that the Masons were not involved. What is the answer? In the second appendix to his book, Moore tells the tale of how he came to write From Hell: “Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory’s obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn’t like books.”

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the reason Jack the Ripper lives so large in the public imagination is that his crimes were ghoulish and yet he was never caught. He killed five people. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, killing five people barely gets you onto the serial killer list. There are over 225 serial killers with more than five victims. I have only heard of a handful of names on that list, and none of them have the name recognition or cachet of Jack the Ripper.

I’d like to think there is an uplifting message here, but I am afraid there is not. Looking at Jack the Ripper, both the person and the fascination with him, is staring into the abyss. Sometimes, it is good to stare into that abyss just to remind ourselves of how far there is to fall if we get too close to the edge.

The Great Movies?

Terry Pratchett had an uncanny ability to isolate an aspect of the world, turn it inside out and drop it into the fantastical world of his creation. The result is inevitably an amusing tale, littered with enough slightly more than thinly veiled references to keep your brain locked in looking for the jokes. Underneath the narrative is a substantive point. It really is a rare talent.

Moving Pictures takes on Cinema. An old man guarding a secret dies, and the next thing you know, people are flocking for reasons they do not understand to Holy Wood in order to follow a dream they never knew they had of creating and starring in the clicks, a sort of moving picture which will be shown on large screens to people eating Banged Grains. Seems innocent enough, right?

Ah, but it is not. It is dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

Supposing there was somewhere reality was a little thinner than usual? And supposing you did something there that weakened reality even more. Books wouldn’t do it. Even ordinary theater wouldn’t do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real. The clicks would do it.
That was what was under Holy Wood Hill. The people of the old city had used the hole in reality for entertainment. And then the Things had found them.

Movies are not like books. That is a trite observation. But, people who write books have long been warning that the advent of this new type of entertainment is going to kill the book, and when the book dies, Civilization dies. Pratchett is offering an explanation about why movies are so dangerous. (Unrelated note: Pratchett writes books.)

As even semi-regular readers of this space know, I am a fierce advocate for reading the Great Books. You don’t need to only read Great Books, but your life will be fuller, richer and more enjoyable if you regularly read them. A question which often comes up is why Books? What if one were listening to Great Music or viewing Great Paintings? Is that the same? As good? This question is difficult, but seems answerable. Yes, listening to Bach or standing before a Michelangelo sculpture has merits akin to reading Shakespeare or Dante. The experience is different, and it provides an interesting twist to the parlor game of ranking Great Books authors. Is Dickens or Austen the superior novelist? Is Dostoevsky or Stravinsky the superior artist? Enjoy.

But, whenever I have had this discussion with students, the conversation inevitably turns to movies. Is there such a thing as The Great Movies? I don’t mean are there movies which are better than others (obviously there are) or movies which are philosophical (again, yes). The question is whether there are movies that can make a claim to being as Great as the Great Books. Is The Godfather a Great Movie in the same way that The Aeneid or Canterbury Tales or The Prince are Great Books?

There is no doubt that great (small-g) movies can be analyzed for their artistry and themes. It is easy to imagine a fascinating discussion, even a good college level course, on the movies of Hitchcock or Coppola. The question is not whether there are things in Vertigo or Apocalypse Now worth discussing. There are things worth discussing everywhere you look. Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour have amazing bodies of work, but I have never heard anyone make the claim either one wrote Great Books.

Why do movies feel different than books? That is what Pratchett is getting at in the passage above. A book must be filtered through the mind. At a minimum, the squiggly lines on the page must be interpreted by the brain to conjure up words and then sentences and then ideas. Even the most passive reading requires the mind to be working at interpretation and analysis. But, a movie? Can a movie bypass the entire cognitive realm and enter straight into the heart? Are movies so immersive that they can be absorbed unconsciously? And if so, what does that do?

To get at this question, consider three movies which I have recently seen, each of which can stand in for a type of movie

1. Killer Bean Forever. You have probably never heard of this movie. (If you have, I pity you.) A former student told me about it after her boyfriend told her she needed to watch it because it is the best movie ever made. (As I told my former student, it is time to upgrade her boyfriend.) The movie is unwatchable. It has a curious history. Jeff Lew, a name you have never heard, made this film all by himself. It took five years. It is an animated tale about a coffee bean who, like James Bond, scurries around fighting evil coffee beans.

What is curious about this movie is that it is not just my former student’s boyfriend who loves it. It is a cult classic, complete with the modern sign of cultural relevance, a zillion memes. It is a trivial matter to mock this movie, but the more interesting question is wondering why anyone would watch it, let alone love it, let alone, at great risk to his relationship, convince his significant other to watch it. It is 90 minutes which could be spent reading a book. If you want the whole James Bond vibe, Ian Fleming is right there on the shelf. It you want corny jokes, there is Terry Pratchett, whose worst joke is better than anything this movie offers.

Yet, people watch Killer Bean Forever. A perfect example of truly Mindless Entertainment. It is hard not to despair thinking about movies like this.

2. Les Miserables. Another former student has spent years trying to convince me that Broadway Musicals are the highest form of art imaginable. Now theater is not the same as movies (as Pratchett notes). But there is a movie of Les Miserables. I finally watched it. Unlike Killer Beans Forever, this movie was a Hollywood spectacular with a cast of movie stars. It was nominated for Awards, Big Awards, and even won a few.

The summary: watching it is an endurance test. I can see how someone obsessed with Broadway Musicals would be glad that Hollywood took notice and made a Big Budget Production. A person like that might be able to see through the movie for a sort of second-hand enjoyment of the beloved Broadway show. But, for someone just watching the movie, with no particular fascination for the original musical, there is nothing here worth seeing.

The plot is like watching a Spark Notes version of Hugo’s massive, sprawling novel. The novel is a Great Book (if you get past the fact that it really needed an editor to cut the length down by at least a quarter). The movie strips out most everything, leaving bare bones. The cast looks good on the screen; these are stars. The problem: most of the cast cannot sing. For a movie in which all the dialogue is sung, this is a real problem.

Why do people watch this movie? The movie could remind you of a Great Book. It could remind you of a magical night you spent seeing the production on Broadway. Maybe you just like seeing movie stars in elaborate costumes. The movie is, in other words, Spectacle. You could watch Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine or Jean Valjean, and your choice is primarily going to be driven by whether you would rather see him with Steel Claws or wearing a Top Hat. There is nothing Great about this movie. Spectacle is simply a way to pass a couple of hours which will be enjoyed by people who enjoy this sort of thing.

3. Citizen Kane. If any movies are going to make a claim to be Great, surely this one would make the cut. When the American Film Institute made its list of the 100 Best Films, Citizen Kane topped the list. It is thus as close to Officially the best movie ever made as a movie could be.

I watched it for the first time years ago. It bored me to tears. I rewatched it recently. It is not as boring as I thought. To enjoy it, however, you have to sit back and absorb the artistry. It is wonderfully crafted. Orson Welles is clever, both as a director and an actor.

The movie can be enjoyed and it can be analyzed. A conversation about Citizen Kane could sound similar a conversation about a Great Novella, but not a Great Novel. Thinking about Citizen Kane makes it obvious that movies are simply too short to be compared to David Copperfield or Middlemarch.

Even making the comparison to a shorter book, however, there is still the very real difference in the experience. It is, as Pratchett noted, true that the movie just bypasses the critical facilities on its way into the memory. You watch a movie. After it is done, you could take apart the movie and analyze what you have seen, but the experience of watching a movie, even an extremely well-crafted movie, is more passive than reading even the most generic genre fiction story you could find.

Is Citizen Kane a Great Movie? The longer I think about this, the more skeptical I become. Most movies are either the Mindless, truly Mindless, productions like Killer Bean Forever or Big Budget Spectacles like Les Miserables. But, even films which might rise above Mindless or Spectacle are viewed in the same manner. I think Pratchett may be onto something is asserting that movies are not like books at all, that movies weaken reality by going straight from the screen into the brain. You sit back and absorb a movie. You can’t sit back and absorb The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace.

If true, the implications of this for the future of Western Civilization are, to put it mildly, troubling. What happens if a generation rises up that spends so much time watching Hollywood productions that it loses the ability to read?