Category Archives: Reading List – Books

Review of THE TWO CULTURES – C. P. Snow (introduction by Stefan Collini)

1993, Cambridge UP, 180 pages

Most thought-provoking read this year. Novelist and chemist C.P. Snow’s 1959 THE TWO CULTURES. He talks about the divide between the sciences and humanities. What he found was that his humanities friends would roll their eyes when they found out his science friends hadn’t read Dickens or Shakespeare. But his science friends would roll their eyes when they found out that his humanities friends didn’t know about the second law or couldn’t explain “mass” or “momentum” (as a novelist and chemist, he moved between both crowds).
So far, the humanities/science divide isn’t too controversial. But then when he starts talking about the industrial revolution, that really changed how I think. I had always thought bad of the industrial revolution, from reading Blake (“dark Satanic Mills”), Thoreau (Walden), Dickens (Hard Times), Hardy (Far from Madding Crowd), and Austen (Sense). They all idealized the countryside, the old agrarian life.
Snow’s take is that factories were taking people in hand over fist because life in the fields was much more horrible than life in the factories. That idea blew up my mind. Then he blew up my mind some more with how he tied the Industrial Revolution into his two cultures thesis: the scientists and engineers at the time never thought of the Industrial Revolution as a bad thing, they were busy inventing things for it. But the humanists portrayed it as the worse thing in the world by combatting it with the image of the pastoral idyll. I thought: “Damn! It IS two cultures!”
His take is controversial. But I haven’t thought this hard in a long time. And since these are transcripts from the 1959 Rede lecture series, it is quite readable.
I wonder now if E. O. Wilson’s CONSILIENCE (where he advocates bridging together humanities and sciences in a great jump fowards) was a reaction to Snow’s THE TWO CULTURES. One of the great things about reading is discovering the archaeology of ideas. Today is a good day.

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of Cataract – John Berger (illustrated by Selçuk Demirel)

2012, Counterpoint, 64 pages

Cataract by John Berger (illustrated Selçuk Demirel)

I’m fine. Really. Never better, as I like to say. But here’s a story that led me to this small but tall book. It begins several years ago. I kept wiping my glasses, the right lens. Under some conditions, it seemed like they were a little bit dirty, ever so slightly hazy. The vision was still fine for reading and for distance. I never thought much of it, and ascribed it to the glasses, which, from the wiping, had been scratched up slightly. At the last eye exam, I mentioned it to the optometrist, who said it was due to a “floaty” which would likely melt away. What is more, the vision in my right eye was actually testing better, which was surprising. It turns out that improved vision is one of the warning signs of a cataract, something I would learn later. Oh, to give you a frame of reference this all started happening in my 40s. The immediate events that led up to this story took place a month or so ago, just after turning 48.

I’m a cycling commuter. Last month, I was out on a ride going through town. It was a clear and dry day, but cold. It was winter. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, but it had snowed recently. The roads, as usual, were beaten up from all the snow plows. As I was riding along, I hit a huge gash on the road that chattered my teeth, made my heart skip a beat, and blew out my front tire. By using one of my nine lives, I managed to stay upright (whew!). My first thought was “What the hell?!” I looked back, and saw the huge gash in the road, the one that I had failed to see. Then I knew it was time to make an appointment to see the eye doctor.

I practise a lot of psychological warfare with myself. Everything is always good. When it is not, I delude myself. For instance, over the last decade, I’ve been riding over more rocks and gashes in the road. Instead of blaming my eyesight, I’ve been blaming the lack of upkeep on the roads (although in the back of my mind, part of me knows that it might not be the roads but that I’m just not seeing, and hence, avoiding, all the hubcaps and screws and rocks and crap on the road). But after that scare last month, the Jedi mind tricks just weren’t going to do it anymore. It was time to make an appointment to see an optometrist.

Optometrist

In the province of British Columbia, Canada, regular optometrist visits aren’t covered by provincial healthcare. Visits are over $100. But if you have a referral from your family doctor, the price goes down. So it was a multistep process. First a phone appointment to my doctor. Then the doctor faxes a referral to the optometrist. The cost goes down to $60. Bingo!

At the optometrist, they do a bunch of tests with fancy machines, each of which must be $30k+. In one machine, you stare at a dot straight ahead of you. When you see flashes of light in your peripheral vision, you hit a button. It is like a video game. Another machine blows out a puff of air into your eye which causes you to recoil. A third machine scans and takes photos of your eyes. The detail of these 3d photos is really amazing. One wonders how optometrists used to do it just a few decades ago without all this technology.

At the end of the appointment, the optometrist says: “Your eyes are good but you have the beginnings of a cataract. I’ll refer you to a really good cataract surgeon to see if surgery is the right solution for you.” He can get me an appointment in five months. I’d like to think if cataract surgery is required, this would be covered by BC Medicare. I’ll find out soon.

Books, Books, Books

When dealing with the unknown, books are always a good resource. The local library had three books specifically dealing with cataracts:

  1. Cataract Surgery: A Guide to Treatment (2015 by two optometrists, Paul E. Garland and Bret L. Fisher)
  2. Cataract Surgery: A Patient’s Guide to Treatment (2020 by two optometrists, Robert K. Maloney and Neda Shamie)
  3. Cataract: Some Notes after Having a Cataract Removed (by John Berger)

It was sort of surprising there were only three books on cataracts at the Greater Victoria Public Library (which serves a population of 400,000). But it turns out, three is pretty good. The two books by the eye surgeons are short (under 100 pages), filled with diagrams, and give lots of information about the options available. Seeing that people reading them may be suffering from cataracts, that is good that they are short and printed in a decently large font!

From the two professional books, one learns about how the cataract is an opaque spot in the lens, and all the different methods for chipping or lasering out the existing lens and putting in a new synthetic lens. The cool thing is the new lens can also be formed to compensate for near- or far-sightedness. Many people, after having cataract surgery, find they have to wear glasses less often, or not at all.

Another reassuring thing is that the rate of success is 99%, or close to. A decade ago, I considered getting Lasik surgery to get vision up to 20-20 without glasses. But when the literature claimed a 95% satisfaction rate (which sounds quite good), I was like … hey, that means that 1 out of 20 people were not satisfied (dry eyes, lack of night vision, etc.,). With vision being so critical, I declined. Good thing I did. It turns out that when you get cataract surgery, the surgeon has to perform some kind of calculated calculation on how strong to make the synthetic lens. There are many variables and fudge factors in the critical calculation. If one has had Lasik, it makes the calculation that much more difficult. But it can be done, and often successfully.

The John Berger Book

From the science books, I learned much. But then there was this book by essayist John Berger. He talks about his personal experience. His fears. How his eyes dimmed. How, after the surgery, he recovered and whites became white again. The crispness of the colours came back. The Berger book is VERY short. On each of the facing pages, there’s a bit of text and an accompanying line illustration.

Berger can write. He has an imaginative voice that makes the process of losing and rediscovering vision a work of art. The book took all of ten minutes to read and left me wanting more. Many of the pages contained mostly blank space. There are two or so pages of beautiful, inspired writing.

If you have cataracts, or are wondering what it is like to have cataracts, this book conveys the psychological impression better than the science books by eye doctors (which are also excellent and written with passion in their own right). But this book is also too short. It left me wanting more. But those two or so inspired pages of writing make it worthwhile to check out. And the line drawings giving life and personality to the eye and the faculty of vision are both utterly profound and exquisitely simple.

A beautiful clothbound book. My feeling is that it is too short. If you’re going to make something called a “book”–even a short one–it has to be at least an hour read. It’s like a blog. Blogs at 1000 words are pretty good. But, even if you are a genius blogger, a blog with 10 words doesn’t cut it. But hey, maybe this isn’t a “book,” but a work of art. In that case, it is fine.

Author Bio:

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and he lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Selçuk Demirel was born in Artvin, Turkey, in 1954. He trained as an architect and moved to Paris in 1978, where he still lives. His illustrations and books have appeared in many prominent European and American publications.

Cataract by John Berger (illustrated Selçuk Demirel)

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Edwin Wong has been dubbed “an Aristotle for the 21st century” (David Konstan, NYU) and “independent and provocative” (Robert C. Evans, AUM) for exploring the intersection between risk and theatre. He has published two books (The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy and When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre) and over a dozen essays on this topic. In 2022, he was one of three international academics to receive the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for his work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2018, he founded the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy (risktheatre.com). Wong has talked at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra to conferences hosted by the National New Play Network, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Society of Classical Studies, and Classical Association of the Middle West and South. He was educated at Brown University and is on Twitter @TheoryOfTragedy.

Review of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen – Edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster

2011 (2nd edition), Cambridge UP, 297 pages

This isn’t a review of the entire volume but rather my reactions to two passages from the Companion, the first from the first essay “The Professional Woman Writer” by Jan Fergus and the second from the penultimate essay “Austen Cults and Cultures” by Claudia L. Johnson. In general, I enjoy the Cambridge Companion series. It’s a trustworthy place to turn for a synoptic view of what’s going on in the field. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen is no different, and the central trio of essays “Class” (by Juliet McMaster), “Money” (by Edward Copeland), and “Making a Living” (by David Selwyn) were illuminating and enjoyable. Unfortunately, I seem to have gotten an allergic reactions the first and penultimate essays. Here’s why.

“The Professional Woman Writer” by Jan Fergus

Fergus’ essay starts off well enough. Then this train-wreck passage happens:

All writers, known or unknown, who wished to obtain payment for a novel had four options for publishing: (a) by subscription; (b) by profit-sharing; (c) by selling copyright; and (d) on ‘commission’, a system whereby the author was responsible for paying all the expenses of publication while the publisher distributed the copies and took a commission on all sold. Austen most frequently employed this last form, also known as publishing for oneself. The closest equivalent we have to this method is to employ a ‘vanity press’–that is, to pay for printing one’s own works–or to self-publish on the Internet. Such ‘published’ works are neither reviewed by the media nor sold in shops. By contrast, in Austen’s lifetime a book published on commission was perfectly respectable, as likely as any other book to be reviewed and sold.

Jane Austen is a hero in today’s self-publishing community: she dared to get it done, and became one of the greats. There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing. Austen did it. Nietzsche did it. Today, novelist Brandon Sanderson’s doing it. He’s sold over 20 million books. He could publish with any publisher. During the pandemic of 2020, however, he decided to self-publish. He launched a Kickstarter campaign promising four novels through 2023. $33 million poured into his self-publishing project, breaking the Kickstarter record. His books are reviewed. His books are loved. His books are sold in shops. He wins awards. Like Jan Fergus–who used to teach as Lehigh University–Sanderson teaches at Brigham Young University. But, according to Fergus, Sanderson isn’t a respectable writer because he self-publishes. You’ve got to be kidding.

Today we think of Austen as a classic. Same way as we think of Shakespeare as a classic. But, truth of the matter is, the nineteenth-century novel and Renaissance theatre were both, in their heydays, considered low art. Shakespeare’s theatres were located in destitute and desperate areas of town. And the novel, in Austen’s own day, wasn’t a classic. Instead, it was the opposite of classic: it was low art. Just check out Michel Foucault’s historical account of the novel in his Madness and Civilization to get a better idea of how the novel was historically perceived. But low art is great. It’s real. High art is difficult. For example, I seldom listen to Schoenberg or Cage or other practitioners of the intellectual classical music. But I enjoy the “low” modern classical style employed by composers such as Hans Zimmer in movie soundtracks. Nothing wrong with low. Low will become tomorrow’s high. Who know, maybe Sanderson will be the Austen of the 23rd century. To Fergus, Austen seems always to have been high art. From day one. I wonder if this is strictly true or whether, like Shakespeare, Austen became a classic over the long course of time. It almost seems like Fergus is justifying why Austen belongs to the scholars.

What I don’t appreciate is the shade Fergus throws on self-published authors. It was really unnecessary.  It would have been easy enough for her to say Austen self-published. Period. But she goes on to say that Austen’s self-publishing is different than today’s self-publishing. She goes on to put publishing by self-publishers in quotes to indicate that it is not real publishing. She goes on to say that self-published works aren’t reviewed or sold in stores. But that’s not true. Consider these reviews of a self-published academic title. One is by an international media outlet and the other four by peer-reviewed academic journals:

https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/Book-Review-THE-RISK-THEATRE-MODEL-OF-TRAGEDY-Edwin-Wong-20190626

https://jadtjournal.org/2021/12/10/the-risk-theatre-model-of-tragedy-gambling-drama-and-the-unexpected/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14452294.2019.1705178

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/181/article/777166

Click to access 2022.09.03%20Kohn%20on%20Wong.pdf

If Broadway World, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Classical Journal, and NJ: Drama Australia don’t cut it, then what does? Self-publishing has many advantages over traditional publishing. The self-published author can keep their books in print indefinitely; with traditional presses, once a book is out of print, it is done. The self-published author controls the cover art; with traditional presses, many an author has fallen into a state of shock seeming the cover art assigned to their book. The self-published author is free from the politics of academia; with traditional presses, although no one says it, everyone knows you can only say certain things.

Why is self-publishing in Austen’s day great and self-publishing in this day and age so bad? That’s the question I’d like to ask Fergus. And if self-publishing was so respectable in Austen’s day, why didn’t Austen put her own name on her book, whose author credit simply appears as “By a Lady”? I really don’t appreciate the great ones in academia talking down like they’re so high and mighty to the common writer. Academics talk about how bad the class struggle was in 18th century England, yet they repeat the same thing with their notions of “aristocratic writers” (published by Cambridge University Press) and self-published “peasant-writers.” They say academia is transparent, without an agenda except pure learning. Essays like this suggest otherwise. No one like to be talked down to. They talk much about power and the abuse of power and authority in academic writing. Is this legitimate use of academic authority? An essay that takes away the common person’s hero (Austen is a hero in the self-publishing community)? No thanks. This is so much like the conservatory musician that turns up a nose at the streetcorner musician. There’s lots of talent out there in unlikely places. For years, Loreena McKennitt played on the streets before CBC invited her up to their studio, more for a story than anything (i.e. “how do you lug around that huge harp?”). But when she played in the studio, the phones lit up with people asking who that self-published artist was.

It’s disappointing when academics use their authority to say that when our heroes self-publish, it really isn’t self-publishing in the same sense that we do it. Not only disappointing, but unacceptable.

“Austen Cults and Cultures” by Claudia L. Johnson

I was still reeling from Fergus’ comments against self-published writers and then this from the essay on “Austen Cults and Cultures”:

Even though lectures by academic Austenian scholars are featured at Jane Austen Society and Jane Austen Society of North America conferences, and even though JAS’s Collected Reports and JASNA’s Persuasions often publish a tremendous amount in the way of sheer information, most academics I know take a rather dim view of these galas, where enjoyment rather than hermeneutic mastery is assumed to be the reward of reading, where reading is sociable rather than solitary, and where the stuff of erudition itself seems so different [. . .] The process by which academic critics deprecate Austenian admirers outside the academy is very similar to the way, as Henry Jenkins has shown, Trekkies, fans and mass media enthusiasts are derided and marginalized by dominant cultural institutions bent on legitimizing their own objects and protocols of expertise. But there is an important difference: unlike Star Trek, Austen’s novels hold a secure place in the canon of high as well as popular culture.

Geez. Star Trek’s been big enough and around for long enough and enough big names have participated in it that it will become a classic in a hundred years. It doesn’t take a big stretch to imagine that, to understand the 20th century properly in a hundred years, knowledge of Star Trek will be useful, not only to remember our fascination with space, but to remember how progressive low culture could be: Captain Kirk’s crew consisted of people from all sorts of different cultures and nations (and species!) working together. Why elevate Austen by bashing down Star Trek? It was really an unnecessary move that alienated rather than inspired me.

And what’s up with this bashing of the Jane Austen societies? I read a few articles in Persuasions (the JASNA journal) and they seemed okay. The articles appear to be from a combination of independent scholars and academics. For example, Jackie Mijares’ essay on jointure in Sense and Sensibility was informative and well-researched (https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol38no1/mijares/). Sure, it is not ground-breaking hoity toity like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s scholarly masterpiece “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” that JSTOR says has been cited 299 times by eminent scholars. But when I read the Sedgwick essay, I found that her Austen is definitely not my Austen. It was just weird, like from outer space. And even some other works by proper Austen scholars (e.g. not in the Jane Austen society or self-published) are just plain bad. For example, everyone quotes John Dashwood’s income in Sense and Sensibility as £10,000 per year. When I started adding up the numbers, I was getting to £5,000 to £6,000 tops. The scholars were quoting Gene W. Ruoff, a proper academic scholar. I began second-guessing myself. So I finally got Ruoff’s book to see how he was doing the calculation. Well, it turns out he interprets a slight turn of phrase to imply that John has a grand monumental unstated income stream that is greater than all of Norland Park! And it’s quite clear why he does this: to make John into more of a bad guy. So hey, maybe it’s not just the stuff from JASNA that doesn’t meet the highest hermeneutical standards: much of the proper academic writing on Austen is just as lacking. When I dug further, I was relieved that at least one scholar, Alistair Duckworth, calculated John’s income at the £5-6,000 range.

I would say that there is a lot of good (and bad) articles in the JASNA journals and also a lot of good (and bad) articles in proper peer-reviewed highbrow proper academic journals, the sort that Johnson publishes in. The view of academia I get from these essays is that it is a member-only club that owns its objects of study, which it does better than anyone else due to its superior hermeneutic techniques. But is that true? Take psychoanalytic or Freudian approaches to interpreting literature. These approaches are still prevalent in the academic literary community. In the psychiatry and the sciences, however, they’ve long abandoned and moved beyond Freud. In other fields, they’re using bronze and iron tools. But, in literary theory, stone tools are still the norm. And this is superior hermeneutics? You have got to be kidding. I don’t think English departments “own” Austen more than any other group.

I don’t know. I think I’d rather go to a JASNA convention than a serious supercilious conventions that the contributors to the Cambridge companion go to. At least the JASNA convention would be fun and inclusive rather than this egalitarian vibe I’m getting from the high and mighty scholars of Cloud-cuckoo-land.

Cambridge University Press: it’s time for a third edition, one with some humility, please. All this stuff brings to mind an old song, maybe you’ve heard of it. It goes something like this:

Ah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been though all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well-read, it’s well known
But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Edwin Wong has been dubbed “an Aristotle for the 21st century” (David Konstan, NYU) and “independent and provocative” (Robert C. Evans, AUM) for exploring the intersection between risk and theatre. He has published two books (The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy and When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre) and over a dozen essays on this topic. In 2022, he was one of three international academics to receive the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for his work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2018, he founded the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy (risktheatre.com). Wong has talked at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra to conferences hosted by the National New Play Network, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Society of Classical Studies, and Classical Association of the Middle West and South. He was educated at Brown University and is on Twitter @TheoryOfTragedy.

 

Review of Aristophanes’ Men and Their Horses (Knights) – Mike Lippman and Wilfred E. Major

2022, Theran Press, 124 pages
Preface by Jeffrey Henderson and Introduction by Robert Holschuh Simmons

Knights, or Men and Their Horses

Knights is a comedy written by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. It’s a political satire lambasting the Athenian general Cleon. Translations are hard to come by. It’s not in the Meridian edition (which contains Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, and Frogs). It’s not in the Penguin edition (which contains Lysistrata, Acharnians, and Clouds). It’s not in either of the Oxford editions (which contain Birds, Lysistrata, Assembly-Women, Wealth, Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Frogs). A new Oxford edition translated by Stephen Halliwell, however, came out this year and it does contain Knights. At the time of writing, only the hardcover is available, and Oxford would like USD $115. So it is more or less unavailable to mere mortals. I’ll check it out later when it’s available in paperback. In Aristophanes’ back catalog, Knights, perhaps along with Wasps–another play attacking Cleon–seems to get the least love. Knights is available in the Loeb edition (translated by Jeffrey Henderson, who writes the preface for the Lippman-Major translation). But the Loeb editions are geared towards scholars rather than performers (they are parallel texts with the Greek original and an English translation on facing pages). Lippman and Major’s translation is one of the few available, and the best one to stage a production around. That this was a translation made with performance in mind is made clear in the acknowledgements, where the translators thank the team that performed a staged reading at a classics conference in 2020.

To give you an idea, here’s a passage from the Henderson translation (1998) followed by the Lippman-Major:

Second Slave. Well then, our best option is to make for some god’s image and kowtow.
First Slave. What do you mean, “immmage?” Say, do you really believe in the gods?
Second Slave. Sure.
First Slave. What’s your evidence?
Second Slave. Because I’m godforsaken. Isn’t that enough?

compared with,

Nicias. Then given the situation, best option for the two of us
Is to go and get ourselves some y’olde tyme religion.
Demosthenes. Like ancient Greek religion? Do you really believe any of it?
Nicias. I surely do.
Demosthenes. What proof do you have?
Nicias. Well, the gods hate my guts. Isn’t that proof enough?

The Henderson translation preserves the repetition of “gods,” e.g. “do you really believe in the gods? (theoús)” and “Because I’m godforsaken” (hotiē theoīsin echthrós eim’, literally “Because I’m an object of hatred to the gods”). The Lippman-Major translation goes for a more direct attack. The reference to “olde tyme religion” is to Bob Seger’s 1979 song “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The reference connects the audience to the comedy in the same way as so many references in Aristophanes would have connected the comedy with the original audience. “The gods hate my guts” also carries a visceral punch. The Lippman-Major translation strives for a lively, visceral, punchy quality that is alive.

Choice of Title

As to the choice of calling Aristophanes’ play Men and Their Horses, Simmons, who writes the introduction, says:

The original play was titled Hippeis in Greek, which translates literally to Knights. The title of this translation, Men and Their Horses, is a way for the play’s translators to make the more literal translation of the play’s name more accessible to a contemporary audience, which–if it thinks of knights at all–thinks of them as wearing shining armor and jousting at Renaissance faires. The Greek word hippeis, like the English word “knights,” means, at its root, someone who operates from a horse, and typically a horse that the operator owns.

This is all well. I wonder, however, how easy it would be for someone looking for the play to find it? The easiest way of searching for something is to type the words into a Google search. But how many people looking for Aristophanes’ Knights know to type into Google “Men and Their Horses”? And would a Google search of Knights bring up Men and Their Horses? I tried and it doesn’t show up in any of the eleven pages of results that Google found. Googling “men and their horses” directly brought up many pages about horses, but wasn’t able to find the book. Perhaps this is due to the newness of the book, which came out earlier this year. The distribution appears limited, again, perhaps due to its newness. I found it on B&N, but couldn’t find it on Amazon. As I’m in Canada, it’s easier to order from Amazon (which ships domestically) than B&N (where it’s coming from the States). If B&N stocks it, why not Amazon?

The Comedy Wordmill

In line with giving the audience a taste of what it was like to have experienced an Aristophanes play, the language and characters have been updated. Paphlagon, the barbaric tanner from Paphlagonia, who is the comic representation of the real-life Athenian politician Cleon, is called “The Drumpf,” who, in turn, stands in for American politician Donald Trump. The Sausage Seller, in turn, has been updated into Hot Dog Man.

The songs sung by the chorus are also updated to be sung along to modern songs such as “The Halls of Montezuma,” “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Beer for My Horses,” and others. For example, one of the choral songs can be sung to Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” It runs:

The Muses know when to tell you,
Know when to scold you,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to pun.
You never count on Muses
When you’re writing for the scholars,
Only some who write are funny,
When the scripts are done.

The playful and inventive language is truly one of the gems in this translation. To me, one of the great things about comedy is how, in laughter, comic poets play with language in unexpected ways. This translation has fun with the language with Drumpf, for example, saying: “It should make all those haters shut up for good. As long as we remember my unpresidented election win.” This is comic gold.

The Evolution of Comedy

Reading Men and Their Horses got me reflecting on comedy, and the evolution of comedy. In Aristophanes’ time, the dramatic art form of comedy was still developing. I would argue that comedy didn’t achieve what it was meant to be until the times of Plautus. For example, Shakespeare and other writers can emulate Plautine comedy with great fanfare (e.g. The Comedy of Errors). Emulators of Aristophanes are less common. And, even Aristophanes, after Knights and Wasps, seems to have moved away from these biting and brutal satires for other types of comedy. I wonder why that is?

I also wonder if Cleon was personally in attendance. And I wonder if Men and Their Horses were staged, how Donald Trump would react, if he were in the audience. I guess it is one thing to be roasted, but another to be viciously lampooned. Reading this play brings to mind Molière’s Those Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes). Like Knights, it is a work by a comic genius. In Those Learned Ladies, Molière savagely attacks preciosity (an affected manner of speaking popular at that time) and satirizes pedantry. But, unlike, say The Would-Be Gentleman, another play he wrote where he pokes fun at human nature, I always thought Molière was too strong in his attacks in Those Learned Ladies. While the “villain” in The Would-Be Gentleman is a likeable doofus, there is the sense that the “villains” in Those Learned Ladies are idiots, plain and simple. What is more, it is quite apparent that Molière really does not like the antagonists in Those Learned Ladies. I think the degree of animosity detracts from the humour. In the same way, because it is so clear that Aristophanes really doesn’t like Cleon (who is the butt of the jokes), it takes away from what the play might have been, if the anger did not seem so personal. Perhaps it is for this reason that Aristophanes shifted gears shortly after Knights.

There seems to be a line between being mean-spirited and being funny. Perhaps I didn’t put that right. One can be mean-spirited and be funny. Or one can be funny without being mean-spirited. Think of live, stand-up comedy. A stand-up comic can say hurtful things to the person in the front row, and this could be funny to the audience. Or a stand-up comic can say funny things, but with a kind-hearted approach. Both are funny. But I think some audiences would prefer the comic who is funny and kind-hearted at the same time. Perhaps for this reason Aristophanes changed gears shortly after Knights. But this remains a conjecture, if an interesting one.

The Hot Dog Stand is Open for Business

In Men and Their Horses, Lippman and Major have translated the experience of what the original audience felt into contemporary English. To recapture the verve of the original is a fantastic achievement,  a new benchmark in the translation of comedy. After 2,500 years, the hot dog stand is back in business. This is the type of translation that will make comedy great again.

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Edwin Wong has been dubbed “an Aristotle for the 21st century” (David Konstan, NYU) and “independent and provocative” (Robert C. Evans, AUM) for exploring the intersection between risk and theatre. He has published two books (The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy and When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre) and over a dozen essays on this topic. In 2022, he was one of three international academics to receive the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for his work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2018, he founded the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy (risktheatre.com). Wong has talked at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra to conferences hosted by the National New Play Network, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Society of Classical Studies, and Classical Association of the Middle West and South. He was educated at Brown University and is on Twitter @TheoryOfTragedy.

Review of “Tragedy in Performance” – Michael R. Halleran

pages 198-214 in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell, Blackwell 2009

For everyone who’s wondered how the stage and physical spaces of the ancient Greek theatre were set up, Halleran’s essay is a great place to start. His essay in the Blackwell Companion to Tragedy is divided into five sections: “Theatrical Space,” “Actors and Chorus,” “Conventions,” “Stage Properties,” and “Gestures and Silence.” Here is a summary of the main points from each of the sections.

Theatrical Space

Moderns are used to reading ancient Greek tragedies. Texts of tragedies, in the ancient world, however, were rare: ancient were more used to watching drama in performance. Drama itself means “something done.” To understand ancient tragedy, it follows that we should understand how and when it was staged.

Ancient tragedy was performed at the City Dionysia, a springtime festival that honoured Dionysus. Each year, three dramatists would be selected to stage four plays: a tragic trilogy connected by mythological elements or three separate, unconnected tragedies followed by a boisterous satyr play. Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, for example, was followed by a satyr play called Proteus that dramatized Menelaus’ homecoming after the Trojan War and spoofed his brother Agamemnon’s tragic return.

Plays were staged at the Theatre of Dionysus, an outdoor theatre that sat between 15-20,000 on seats carved into the south face of the Athenian acropolis. The semicircular “theatron” or seating area carved into the Acropolis encompassed another space, the “orchestra,” a circular space in front of the seating 70′ in diameter where the chorus would sing and dance. Behind the orchestra was the “skene” or stage building. Since most tragedies revolved around royal families, the skene would often represent a palace. The stage building was a rectangular structure elevated 3′ from the ground and rising 12′ high. It was 35′ in length and 15′ deep.

Two long ramps on either side of the skene called “eisodoi” led to the stage building. Here, actors could make their way to the stage by walking on the ramp between the stage and the theatron. Since the eisodoi were close to 60′ long, grandiose entrances from stage left or stage right were possible.

Finally, there were two additional stage devices for special effects: the “ekkyklema” and the “mechane.” “The ekkyklema,” writes Halleran, “was a wheeled platform that could be brought forth from the opened doors of the skene to reveal an interior scene.” The mechane was a crane that carried characters aloft. Plays employing deus ex machina ending would use the mechane to stage the sudden arrival of the god.

Actors and Chorus

Greek tragedy employed three actors who would (primarily) speak their lines on the skene. The actors would wear a full-length robe (chiton), an outer garment (himation), a linen mask, and flat-soled shoes or boots. Doubling, or the use of one actor to play multiple parts, was common, and could lead to intriguing possibilities: for example, in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, the male actor who plays Deianira (Heracles’ wife) could poison Heracles, and then come back in the next scene as the poisoned and dying Heracles.

In counterpoint to the actors on the skene, Greek tragedy also employed a chorus, who would sing their lines in the orchestra. Halleran disagrees with those who see the chorus as a superdramatic entity commenting on the action, citing plays such as Aeschylus’ Suppliants where the chorus of suppliants takes part in the action. For Halleran, the distinction between actor and chorus is that actors used the language of “declamation, explanation, debate and argument, while the sung verse of the chorus was the language of evocation, imagination, fractured narrative, and highly charged images.” In the interplay and tension between the actors on the skene and the chorus in the orchestra Greek tragedy generates its particular excitement.

Conventions

Enjoying the show involves a willing suspension of disbelief. Many elements of theatre are highly artificial, from men playing womens’ roles to characters speaking in verse. While comedy likes to poke fun at its artifices, tragedy prefers to maintain the “fourth wall” of drama. When tragedy does break the fourth wall, however, the affect can be profound. At line 896 of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, when it seems as though the oracles of the gods were failing, the chorus asks “Why should I dance?” This metatheatrical line breaking the fourth wall is astounding, as the chorus at the moment is, in real life, performing a dance in a religious festival. Their threat to quit the dance unless the oracles of the gods ring true reminds the audience that they are watching a chorus who are both actors and fellow citizens. If Dionysus is not real in real life, there is no reason to dance, either on stage or in life.

Stage Properties

The stage of Greek tragedy–by today’s standards–has an uncluttered, sparse, and open aesthetic. The simple qualities of the ancient stage allowed ancient playwrights to powerfully focus the audience’s attention on whatever happened to be on the stage. Common stage properties were: corpses (Ajax in Sophocles’ Ajax, Alcestis in Euripides’ Alcestis, and Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus), a weapon (Heracles’ bow in Sophocles’ Philoctetes), altars (the various suppliant plays), and buildings (a palace in Aeschylus’ Oresteia or a house in Euripides’ Alcestis).

The ancient stage gave an incredible concentrated power to the drama. Halleran, for example, discusses how Ajax’ corpse (Ajax impales himself on his sword midway through the play) stays on stage the whole play. Thus, while the other characters argue over the good and bad qualities of Ajax, his corpse is in plain view. In the end of the play, it is predicted that the death of Ajax will lead to the creation of a hero cult. But, seeing that Tecmessa and Eurysaces, during the play, already take refuge at his corpse, the play intimates powerfully that the hero cult of Ajax is already begun. There is power in the archaic simplicity of the stage properties of Greek tragedy.

Gestures and Silence

Halleran concludes his study of tragedy in performance by examining two extra-textual elements of performance: gestures and silence. The gesture of supplication–touching the supplicated’s knee and chin from an inferior position–often provided an impetus for a dramatic turn of events. Euripides writes memorable supplication scenes in both Medea (when Medea supplicates Creon to delay exile a day) and Hippolytus (when the Nurse supplicates Phaedra to reveal her secret).

“Characters on the stage but not speaking,” says Halleran, “can be lost on the page but not in the theater.” Aeschylus was so fond of this technique that he was satirized for it: Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy, is plainly visible but silent as Agamemnon comes home to Clytemnestra. Cassandra’s presence is a foreboding presence, since she knows (being a prophetess) the tragedy that will shortly unfold. Sophocles too uses this technique to great effect in Oedipus rex: Jocasta is silent while the Shepherd and the Messenger unravel Oedipus’ identity. While they uncover the truth, Jocasta figures is out as well, and her silence testifies to just how bad the situation has become.

Thoughts

Sometimes, with all the talk of the connections between ancient Greece and modernity, it’s easy to forget about how much has changed in the two-and-a-half millennia between then and now. Halleran’s essay on tragedy in performance is a good reminder that those were different times. Yesterday: open-air theatre, masks, choruses dancing in the orchestra, theatre as a religious service, simple sets, limited special effects, dying (usually) not dramatized on stage, concentrated focus on singular stage properties, theatre for all citizens, frequent doubling of actors, maximum three actors on stage. Today: indoor theatre, theatre as entertainment, elaborate sets, many special effects and lighting, dramatic dying scenes, theatre for elites, many characters on stage, busy stages, (usually) no chorus.

Halleran mentions a peculiar convention of Greek tragedy: death is usually not dramatized on stage. It usually takes place offstage. I wonder if this convention arose because Greek tragedy, as part of the ancient liturgy, was conceived of as a show that is put on for the gods? That is to say, they imagined that they gods would also be watching (Halleran notes that the Temple of Dionysus would have been in plain view beyond the skene) and, since the gods (at least the Olympian gods) distanced themselves from death, they, as a gesture of goodwill to the gods, spared them the sight of death? I’ll leave you with this conjecture. It is an interesting conjecture since the dying scene, as we know from modern drama, is quite dramatic. There must have been a reason why they did not take advantage of it.

Author Blurb

Michael R. Halleran is Professor of Classics and Divisional Dean of Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Washington. He is the author of Stagecraft in Euripides (1985), Euripides: Hippolytus, with Translation and Commentary (1995), and numerous articles and reviews on ancient Greek literature and culture.

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of “Tragedy and Epic” – Ruth Scodel

pages 181-179 in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell, Blackwell 2009

This insightful essay in the Blackwell Companion to Tragedy is divided into five sections: “Epic Stories and Allusions,” “Epic Thematics,” “Epic Style and Decorum,” “Epic Narrative,” and “Tragedy and Epic.”  The essay explores the long relationship the dramatic art form of tragedy shared with epic. Here is a summary of the main points from each of its sections.

Epic Stories and Allusions

Although epic and tragedy arose from different political and social backgrounds (epic from a monarchical and fragmented world and tragedy from a democratic world of city-states), tragedy borrowed much from the older art of epic. From the epic recitations of the legends of Thebes, Heracles, and the creation of the cosmos, the tragic poets got many of their stories. From the technique of Homer–who favoured more dialogue and more developed plots than the simple narration of the other epicists and rhapsodes–the tragic poets got their chops.

Epic Thematics

Tragedy got two of its major themes from epic. The first theme is that of fate, free will, human causality, and divine meddling. The second theme is related to the first: the recognition scene when the human recognizes that there is a higher power at play, whether it is fate or the will of the gods. Chance and fate, for example, come together in the Odyssey when, just as Odysseus happens to return, Penelope challenges the suitors to string Odysseus’ bow. This gives Odysseus the opportunity to fulfil the fated ending of killing the suitors: disguised as a beggar, he strings his bow and starts firing. So too, in tragedy, fate seems to happen by chance. In Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, although all the attackers and defenders are assigned their gate assignations by chance, it just so happens that the two brothers are assigned the seventh gate where they will kill each other as fate wills.

The tragic recognition scene is also borrowed from epic. In epic, the best characters are often given an insight into the grand workings of the cosmos. Achilles recognizes in the Iliad that his time will come when Hector, unexpectedly, kills his friend Patroclus. So, too, in tragedy, a hero such as Oedipus in Sophocles’ play has a moment of recognition where he realizes that all is not what it seems.

The difference between epic and tragedy, notes Scodel, is that tragedy is much more concentrated in its presentation of fate, free will, and recognition. The reason is that tragedy is much shorter than epic, which is recited over many days.

Epic Style and Decorum

Tragedy also gets its style and decorum from epic. Early tragedy modelled its speech in the ornamental dactylic rhythms commonplace in epic. Tragedy’s sense of decorum is borrowed from and perhaps even more stringent than epic: weeping and bleeding are permitted, farting not; horses are preferred to mules; heroes may forget to pray to the right god, but they never forget their helmet when arming; epic infrequently allows joking amidst discussions of gods and war but tragedy allows for even less ribaldry.

Epic Narrative

In a memorable phrase, Scodel says that tragedians used the epic as a “repertory of the possible.” In epic, prophecy is always correct (if sometimes misleading); so too in tragedy prophecy is ultimately correct, if initially misleading. In epic, messengers enjoy quasi-omniscience; so too, in tragedy, messengers can oversee the entire battlefield and yet hear individual conversations. Epic draws together two adversaries (think Achilles and Hector in the Iliad); so, too, tragedy often draws together two adversaries (think the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes).

Tragedy and Epic

Scodel closes her essay by reminding readers that tragedy’s debt to epic was not all one way. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and other fifth century tragedians who took Homer as their model became in turn the model for future writers of epic such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, and Ovid. “Epic, having created tragedy,” says Scodel, “recreated itself on the model of its creation.” Art is alive, constantly making and remaking itself anew in all the images of the human imagination.

Thoughts

This has been a fascinating essay because I can now see plainly how tragedy must have arisen from epic. In Homer’s epics, Homer, or the voice of the rhapsode, would sing the tale of the anger of Achilles or the return of Odysseus. In singing the tale, the singer would give life to all the different characters within the tale. But there were so many characters that we would only learn a little bit about each character–the minimum that was required to keep the story going. In a way, the better the singer is at drawing out the characters, the more the characters grow larger to demand a voice of their own, and not simply be recited by the rhapsode-singer. The transition from epic to tragedy is the tension of the characters wanting their own voice by a dedicated actor instead of one Homer telling the whole tale. The transition from epic to tragedy is the path of going from one Homer-rhapsode who narrates the tale to many Homer-actors who act out the tale. In epic there is one Homer, in tragedy there are many Homers, who are now playing individual roles. For this insight I have Scodel to thank. It is reverberating in my head and someday I will do something with it. The idea is quite powerful. The path from epic to tragedy is the path from one Homer to many Homers. Each character in Homer was seeking to break free of the oral tradition, to become themselves a Homer. When tragedy arose, this happened.

Another point Scodel touches upon–and one that can’t be stressed enough–is that fate in epic and tragedy is, in a way, synonymous with “what has to happen.” Since epic and tragedy drew from the same myths the audiences learned as toddlers, the outcome from beginning to end was well known. The audience’s knowledge could have been a spoiler. But what the rhapsodes reciting epic and the tragedians did was amazing: instead of myth being a detriment to the suspense, they used myth to augment the suspense by turning the known story into a “fate” that hung over all the characters. Two decades ago, I wrote an article for Antichthon that explored how “fate” is nothing more than a dramatic device which guides the narrative towards resolution. You can read the article here. That was a fun piece to write.

You know what I’d be interested in seeing?–that would be so cool if someone did a genealogy of fate. I think fate is ultimately an example of art shaping life. Could it have been that, prior to the rhapsodes–the singers of tales–and the tragedians inventing fate as a narrative device to make the narrative end where everyone knew the stories ended, there was no conception of fate in real life? For example, it was only after watching an Achilles or an Oedipus struggle with fate in epic and drama that people in real life started wondering if some majestic fate stood watch over them. Then, these people in real life, their imaginations fired from the magic of tragedy and epic and always on the lookout for fate, when some low-probability, high-consequence event happened in their life by chance, they would ascribe what chance had wrought as evidence of fate in actual life? It is an interesting hypothesis: that what people call fate in real life is actually just chance misunderstood. And chance is misunderstood because there is a fundamental difference between narrative (where nothing happens by chance since everything happens by the design of the writer) and real life (where chance is quite active). They talk of mimesis, of how art imitates life. But when it comes to chance, art imitates life very poorly, since for a narrative to make sense, what was really chance in real life has to be “explained” to have taken place for a reason, even if that reason ends up being fate.

This essay has also been fascinating as, many years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Ruth. It was a lifetime ago, years before she even wrote this essay. Back in those days, I was being courted by different grad schools, the University of Michigan Classics program being one of them. In preparation for meeting her, I had read her book Credible Impossibilities. If you are interested in how ancient writers generate credibility, this book would be an excellent read. To this day, I remember some of her colourful examples. One rule of creating credible impossibilities is to go into great detail. I think in Polyphemus’ cave in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus escapes by clinging under one of the Cyclops’ rams. This is impossible for a grown man. What Homer does to make it believable, writes Scodel, is that he goes into great detail over how Odysseus does this. Voila: the impossible becomes, in the unsuspecting reader’s mind, possible.

It’s funny what I remember. I don’t recall that much of the trip. But I do remember where all the offices were of the profs I chatted with. Richard Janko had his office slightly across the hall from Scodel’s. Of all things, I remembered that he wore his wool socks over his pant cuffs. And James Porter’s office was at the end of the hall. It was fascinating to meet him as well–one of his research interests is Nietzsche and the reception of Classical studies, that is to say, how each generation of classicists is remembered by future classicists. The tiles on the floor were those old square ones, an off-white hue. The university itself was majestic, on a hill overlooking the city, which was in bad shape. But the university was gated, and had security. The air was crisp, and the people walked with a fierce determination. Those were the days.

Author Blurb

Ruth Scodel was educated at Berkeley and Harvard, and has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1984. She is the author of The Trojan Trilogy of Euripides (1980), Sophocles (1984), Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy (1999), Listening to Homer (2002), and articles on Greek Literature.

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of “Tragedy and Myth” – Alan H. Sommerstein

pages 163-180 in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell, Blackwell 2009

This well-organized essay in the Blackwell Companion to Tragedy is divided into six sections: “Myth, History, and Poetry,” “How to Make a New Myth,” “Innovation within Existing Myths,” “Mythical Innovation and Audience Expectation,” “Etiology,” and “Secondary Mythical Allusions.”  The essay explores the long relationship the dramatic art form of tragedy shared with myth. Here is a summary of its main points.

Myth, History, and Poetry

Athenian tragedy–with a few exceptions–dramatized myth. Myth to the ancients, however, overlapped with actual history. As well, myth itself was fluid, malleable, and alive. As a result, although Athenian tragedy is based on myth, many different reconstructions and interpretations were available to the tragedians. To draw on myth is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Myth is far from a straitjacket.

How to Make a New Myth

There are interstitial spaces between the received events of myth in which the poet-tragedian may create new stories. Myth has a start point and end point that is set; the space in between is free. Take the myth of the Seven against Thebes. In the start point of the myth, Polyneices attacks his hometown of Thebes. In the end point of the myth, Polyneices kills and is killed by his brother. Creon, whose son is dead, rules Thebes as regent. Antigone, Polyneices’ sister is also dead. In the space between the start point and end points Sophocles’ creates his play Antigone: Antigone’s defiance of Creon, her love interest with Creon’s son, and the suicide of Antigone and Haemon are all Sophoclean innovations, a “new myth” that fills up the interstitial spaces between the canonical beginning and end points. These interstitial spaces are fertile grounds for the poetic imagination.

Another way to rewrite myth is by using the deus ex machina device: here, the plot can turn whichever way, even in defiance of myth, and the god appears at the last second to set the record straight. Euripides was especially fond of the deus ex machina device.

Innovation within Existing Myths

Sommerstein lays down a law that dictates how far poets could go in reshaping myths: “In a telling of any given story, any element may be altered, so long as the alteration does not impact severely on other stories which are not, on that occasion, being told.” Thus, in retellings of the myth of the Danaids, Hypermestra must always marry Lynceus because they give birth to descendants who will produce Perseus, Heracles, and many other heroes. Beyond this, however, much innovation is possible and Sommerstein provides many examples.

Mythical Innovation and Audience Expectation

This is the longest section and the most far-reaching. In it, Sommerstein talks about how ancient audiences must have understood and watched tragedies differently than modern audiences. In Euripides’ tragedy Medea, ancient audiences will have known that Jason is playing with fire in crossing Medea, a powerful magic-user. They will have known that their children die, though not by Medea’s hand–their death by their mother’s hand was, according to Sommerstein, Euripides’ innovation. Ancient audiences would have been expecting Medea to harm Jason–or his new girlfriend. Modern audiences, on the other hand, know, most of the time, that Medea is the play in which the mother kills her children: the fame of the play precedes the play. This is a powerful, and little known distinction between ancient and modern viewings of the play: we know what happens; ancients, even though better-versed in myth, did not.

Myth, far from being a straitjacket, gave ancient playwrights a valuable tool that is underappreciated today: the ability to mislead and misdirect audience expectations. When they bring about the unanticipated outcome, the ancient audience is shocked, and amused.

Etiology

In this short section, Sommerstein talks about how Athenian poet-dramatists dramatized the creation of real-world rites, customs, and institutions through myth. Euripides was quite fond of drama as etiology: in Suppliants, for example, Euripides “explains” the real-world friendship between Athens and Argos through the action. Aeschylus, too, in the Oresteia, dramatizes the creation of homicide court at the Areopagus.

Secondary Mythical Allusions

Secondary mythical allusions occur, says Sommerstein, when characters (or the chorus) in a drama refer to other myths that are not being dramatized. By comparing their own situations to other well-known myths, characters are able to shine a different light, as it were, on the action of the play they are in. Of Sommerstein’s many examples, one from Aeschylus’ Oresteia stands out. In the Oresteia, Orestes has killed his mother at Apollo’s behest. The Furies, ancient spirits who punish blood crimes, pursue him to the Areopagus, where Orestes is being tried. He is defended by Apollo and persecuted by the Furies. Apollo suggests to the Furies that, just as Zeus had pardoned Ixion, they should pardon Orestes. But his argument is lame: the audience would have known from the Ixion myth that Ixion was a very bad person and Zeus was, in fact, wrong to pardon him (because after his pardon Ixion tries to seduce Zeus’ wife Hera!). These secondary mythical allusions, writes Sommerstein, enrich the textual density of the play. While in the Oresteia, Orestes is innocent, the remark from Apollo would suggests otherwise. By connecting different myths through secondary allusions, dramatists challenged their audiences.

Thoughts

I enjoyed this well-organized and concise essay. Sommerstein’s arguments fit together perfectly: after reading a few sentences, I could see where he was going, and his examples were spot on. This was very welcome after finishing a rambling book yesterday that, even after reading many pages, I was never sure where the author was going, if anywhere. The straightforwardness of Sommerstein’s essay is a sign that he has been thinking about myth and tragedy for a long time. The lack of direction in that other book I finished yesterday, I think, is a sign that the author–who is a famous world-expert–and the editors were working under too tight a timeline.

The thing that I am most grateful to learn from Sommerstein’s essay is that modern audiences do not watch Greek tragedies in the same way that the ancients did. Modern audiences, in most cases, already know the endings. Ancient audiences, while they knew the myths, would not know how the dramatist would write or rewrite the myth: a great amount of freedom is possible. Sommerstein’s example of this was from Euripides’ Medea, where he argued that Medea’s killing of her children would have caught the ancient audience off-guard. I can see from his examples how Euripides has, indeed, crafted his play to make the audience think what happens is not going to happen until the last second. There is more of a gulf between the ancients and the moderns than what we like to believe. A musical analogy would be moderns listening to J.S. Bach. Bach wrote a contrapuntal style of music where different voices would play off each other. Listeners in Bach’s time would have followed the distinct voices or lines. Many listeners today hear the harmonies generated by the voices rather than the voices themselves. The experience is different than what the composer was trying to achieve. But still enjoyable. It is a difference we should be aware of.

This got me thinking: today’s famous plays will be understood very, very differently two hundred, five hundred, and two thousand years from now. Hard to believe, but, if Sommerstein’s arguments are correct, it will be inevitable that, as audiences, cultures, and education changes, so too the thrill we get out of watching theatre. One way, I think, that playwrights can ensure that their plays will be “correctly” understood, is to adhere to a theory or model of drama. A model serves as an anchor of interpretation. There are many options. Today one can be an Aristotelian, a Hegelian, a Nietzschean, or one can try Brecht’s epic theatre or Miller’s Tragedy of the Common Man. There too is my burgeoning theory of tragedy called risk theatre, where risk is become the dramatic fulcrum of the action.

Though Sommerstein’s comments are directed to myths and plays in ancient Athens, the myths did not stop with ancient Athens. The old Attic myths are still alive today. I curate an international theatre competition called the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, now in its fourth year. Last year’s winner, Madison Wetzell’s The Lost Ballad of Our Mechanical Ancestor, was a retelling of the Prometheus legend. I wrote a review of this fantastic play here. Even today, the myths are alive, changing, expanding, growing, being retold. Imagine that.

Author Blurb

Allan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Aeschylean Tragedy (1996), Greek Drama and Dramatists (2002), and editions of the plays and fragments of Aeschylus (2008) and of Aristophanes’ eleven comedies (1980-2002). In a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, he is preparing, with five collaborators, a two-volume study of The Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece.

– – –

Don’t forget me. I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of ON RISK – Mark Kingwell

2020, Biblioasis, 154 pages

In May 2021, Canadian Cycling magazine interviewed University of Toronto philosophy professor and cyclist Mark Kingwell. Kingwell’s book On Risk, Or, If You Play You Pay: The Politics of Chance in a Plague Year had recently come out. In the book, Kingwell draws on popular culture and personal anecdotes–including a close call where his bicycle was struck by a car and crushed–to illuminate the hidden workings of risk and chance. As a cyclist who also writes on risk, I was intrigued. In fact, I read the article at a newsstand during a break on my 122-kilometre cycling trek that day–my longest day in the saddle so far. I resolved to remember the title and read it at the first opportunity. Risk was in the news daily. Covid was in the air. A new book by a philosopher-cyclist explaining what risk means to us today: what could be a more fascinating read? Or so I thought.

On Risk is a small book. Fast readers can finish it in one sitting. The book is divided into four chapters: “The Game of Risk,” “Luck,” “Politics,” “Death and Taxes.” They can be read individually as discrete essays, but, read together, they build up to Kingwell’s progressive vision of government stepping in to equalize risk and reward for the haves and the have-nots. The slender volume has no index. Here is my summary, beginning with the preface.

Preface: The Plague Years

The coronavirus distributes risks across North American societies asymmetrically, with greater risks to Indigenous, Black, Latino, aged, and poor populations. This asymmetrical distribution of risk is further exacerbated by the poor choices of conservatives and conservative politicians who downplay the dangers of the pandemic. Risk is political because risk is the expression of who lives, who dies, and who decides.

Chapter 1: The Game of Risk

The board game Risk, card games, dicing, roulette, betting, poker, and other games of chance illustrate how difficult it is for people to understand risk: many bets are simply illogical. Risk is hard to understand because risk is for all time, eternal, and hardly possible for short-lived mortals to model. In fact, our reality may be part of a multiverse where many types of risk exist which we may not even be aware of: if the nuclear force (one of the fundamental forces of nature) were stronger, life would not exist. But even though risk is so multi-faceted and our knowledge so limited, it is good to try to understand the odds and play the game of life.

Chapter 2: Luck

Kingwell uses luck as a springboard to talk about gambling and risk. That conversation shifts into Einstein’s comment that “God does not play dice” which leads into a conversation about fate and free will with some obligatory comments on Oedipus. A discussion of how poorly people evaluate and understand risk follows (this is a recurring theme). For society as a whole to benefit, the “greed is good” mantra of capitalism must be overcome; in an egalitarian society risk and reward must be shared. Many examples of how people misunderstand risk (or chance). A discussion of insurance, individual, and communal risks with the conclusion that risk, in the final examination, is societal and political.

Chapter 3: Politics

Risk is always political. Three examples of political risk: order-one risk, order-two risk, and order-three risk. Order-one risk is living in impoverished areas without access to clean water and food. Order-two risk is also known as birthright risk, or the idea that some win the lottery in terms of whether they are born in a rich or poor country to rich or poor parents (this seems to me to also be true of order-one risk, not sure why Kingwell classifies them in separate categories). Order-three risk is one’s penchant for taking risks, which may be biological rather than due to free will. Society tends to reward (or bail out) risk takers, so this is unfair to those who do not take risks. Government should get involved to even out the “bonuses” that big risk takers get from making big bets. This involves increasing the inheritance tax and making loans available to poor people.

Chapter 4: Death and Taxes

In the universe, or even in all the multiverses, “The horizon of all risk is death,” says Kingwell. Death is the final risk event. There is personal death. Then, there may be death for whole peoples. At the far end, there is the possibility of an extinction event for the sapiens. Risks that happen are metaphysically different than near misses that almost happened. Statistics, sadly, do not incorporate the data from near misses, skewing our perception of risk. But despite all the existential and collective risks, we still must play the game. In playing the game, we benefit as a species by balancing the possibility of risk and reward for all the players: many players in the game are disadvantaged. We can balance the game by reforming the tax system to make the rich pay more, introducing a guaranteed basic income, and ending corporate bailouts.

A More Concentrated Focus, Please

I wish this book were more concentrated. It is diffuse. In two paragraphs, Kingwell covers the question of suffering. Then, in a few pages, he blazes through fate, free will, and risk. Another couple of paragraphs, and his critique of neoliberal economics is concluded. Each of these topics, by itself, could have been a book. I almost fell out of my chair at one point when I read: “Marketing and advertising follow in wake of these [e.g. actuarial science and economics], but I lack the space to address them.” Really? If you could cover Foucault in one paragraph, couldn’t you cover marketing and advertising in a few sentences?

I felt that Kingwell attempted to cram too much into this slender volume. I had a hard time following his train of thought as he jumped from Homer Simpson to the question of suffering to theodicy to Covid to politics and so on. The Kirkus review speaks kindly when it says that On Risk is “sometimes meandering.”

Who is the Audience?

The back cover (quoted below) presents this book as a primer for all the people who want to learn more about risk because the pandemic has made risk the “it” word. While much of the book is conversational, parts of it I found hard to follow. Take this explanation of consciousness in the multiverse:

To be precise [Daniel] Dennett holds to a “multiple drafts” model of consciousness, without a central homuncular observer in the “Cartesian theatre” notion of singular consciousness. This view makes room, therefore, for modular distribution of mindedness.

I felt that, for me to have a chance of understanding any of this, these three sentences would have needed to be expanded into three pages (or more!) of concise writing. It is the same with the Kolmogorov zero-or-one law of probability theory. Kingwell mentions the law that seems to imply there are no odds in between zero (impossible) and one (absolute certainty) but before he explains how it works, he is already onto the next topic. I would have been fascinated to learn more about the Kolmogorov law.

Chance or Risk?

I was confused about how he uses the term risk. Much of the time, when Kingwell refers to risk, I thought he ought to be talking about chance. Take this example. At one point he says that “Risk is theoretically neutral and indifferent.” Is risk neutral and indifferent? If you take a risk, say, by taking a corner at 100kph instead of 40kph or by standing up to a bully, it is not going to be “neutral and indifferent”–something will happen, either in your favour or not. If he had said “Chance is theoretically neutral and indifferent” I would have understood better. Many of his anecdotes I’ve found in books on chance and probability, where they’re classified under chance. Certainly chance and risk overlap, but I found myself thinking “chance” many times when he wrote “risk.” Despite several pages on etymology, I found myself wishing that Kingwell would have clearly defined what he meant by “risk,” a word that can mean many things including danger, the exposure to danger, fate, destiny, and more.

I Learned More About Kingwell than I did on Risk

Reading this book, I learned more about Kingwell’s likes and dislikes than I did on risk. Kingwell likes: Gillian Anderson, liberal thought, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Paul Krugman, and Stanley Kubrick. Kingwell does not like: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, Kenny Rogers, Napoleon, neo-liberal capitalism, and Midwestern voters. If your tastes line up with his, you may find this book enjoyable. Some of his vitriolic struck me as unnecessary sidetracks that detracted from the points he was making. Take this comment on one of his colleagues at the University of Toronto: “This [e.g. that the university is a privileged environment] is one of the few points on which I agree with the world view of my polemical and lately deranged University of Toronto colleague, Jordan Peterson, who made this very point during a panel discussion on student mental health on which we both appeared.” Kingwell, I thought, could have made his point quite equally well without bringing up Peterson. Elsewhere, Kingwell celebrates “four hundred-plus years of liberal thought” that “has been about creating community through the inclusion of the Other.” In word he celebrates the inclusion of the Other but, in deed, he calls out his colleague for being “deranged” at a symposium on mental health?

If you’re looking for a primer of risk, there are others out there. One of my favourites is Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Bernstein goes into depth and he is a great storyteller. A lighter read on risk would be Chances Are… Adventures in Probability by Michael and Ellen Kaplan. On risk and catastrophe, there is Mark Buchanan’s enjoyable Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen. On simulating risk on the stage of theatre, there is my own The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Kingwell’s book, despite its title, really isn’t a primer on risk. It could have been more usefully called On Risk and Social Justice or something along those lines.

Finally, there was, to me, a contradiction within the book. One of Kingwell’s strategies to equalize opportunity in society is by implementing higher taxes, in particular, the estate or inheritance tax. That position itself is not controversial. But on every other page of his book, he lambasts the government. The response of the American government, for example, to the Covid crisis was like flying an airliner straight into the side of a mountain face in plain sight. Presidents of the United States are corrupt, lying, war-mongers. The electorate cannot tell up from down, voting for policies that harm everyone. Government relief programs are inefficient and nepotistic. The question I asked myself as I read his book was: if government is as bad as he claims, how could giving them more money help society?

Book Blurb

“Risk is theoretically neutral and indifferent,” writes Mark Kingwell, “an exercise of pure randomness. But as the 2020 pandemic has shown us, when natural forces meet social and cultural conditions, risk can get redistributed very fast.” With the new Covid-era focus on the risks of even leaving the safety of our homes, now is the time for deeper consideration. How should a society manage and distribute risk? If it can never be eliminated, can it be controlled? At the heart of these questions–which govern everything from waking up each day to the abstract mathematics of actuarial science–lie philosophical issues of life, death, and personal safety. Mortality is the event-horizon of daily risk. How should we conceive of it?

Arthur Blurb

Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and has written for publications ranging from Adbusters and the New York Times to the Journal of Philosophy and Auto Racing Digest. Among his twenty books of political and cultural theory are the national best-sellers Better Living, The World We Want, and Glenn Gould. In order to secure financing for their continued indulgence he has written about his various hobbies, including fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art. His most recent book is Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Erving Goffman Award for scholarship in media ecology.

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Don’t forget me, I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of THINKING, FAST AND SLOW – Daniel Kahneman

2011, Anchor, 499 pages

I predict time will be unkind to psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking, important, and misguided book. Having heard so many positive reviews of Thinking, Fast and Slow, I had expected to enjoy reading it. But it turns out I am quite allergic this book. Not since reviewing Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values has a book frustrated me to this degree. Do you remember doing math quizzes in grade school? Sometimes you would have some diabolical teacher that would put trick questions on the exams. Invariably, you would get some of these wrong. Then, when reviewing the error, at first you would wonder whether the marker was incorrect. Then, looking closer, you would see that it was a trick question, designed to fool. In many cases, you could have done the math. But you were fooled by a diabolical question designed to trip up your brain in the heat of the moment. Well, Kahneman’s book is filled up with trick questions him and fellow accomplice Amos Tversky dreamt up over the years. He presents leading questions that point you towards the incorrect answer. When you get the answer wrong, then he tells you your brain is not reacting rationally.

That the brain is irrational is an argument I accept. E. O. Wilson makes that claim in On Human Nature, a most excellent book. But the way Kahneman demonstrates the fallibility of the brain I absolutely disagree with in the same way as I disagreed with math teachers who set snares for students with trick questions. Who likes being fooled?

Less is More

Take this example that asks volunteers to price out two dinnerware sets. Set A has:

8 plates, good condition
8 soup bowls, good condition
8 desert plates, good condition
8 cups (6 in good condition and 2 broken)
8 saucers (1 in good condition and 7 broken)

Set B has:

8 plates, good condition
8 soup bowls, good condition
8 desert plates, good condition

When participants could see both sets, they valued, on average, Set A at $32 and Set B at $30. When participants were only shown one set–either Set A or Set B–they priced Set A, on average at $33 and Set B at $23. Kahneman (and Christopher Hsee, who came up with this experiment) call this the less is more effect, and, to them, it shows how the brain fails to handle probability. Their explanation is that, when participants could see both sets, they could see that Set A contains more good condition pieces than Set B. Therefore, they made the correct call and valued Set A at $32 and Set B at $30. However, when participants could only see one set, they would determine the price of the set by what the average price of the pieces. The set with intact pieces, therefore nets $33 while the set with the broken pieces nets $23, because the average value of the dishes, some of which are broken, is perceived to be lower.

To Kahneman and Hsee, the less is more effect illustrates the fallibility of the brain: if the eight cups and saucers (which include 7 pieces that are in good condition) are removed from Set A, Set A becomes worth more. To me, however, if I were shown Set A only, I would have also valued it at around $23 and if I were shown Set B only, I would have also valued it at around $33, and not because my brain is fallible (which it is), but because if I am shown in isolation a set of dinnerware with broken pieces, it makes me doubt the quality of the intact pieces! If, however, I can examine both sets, I can quickly see what the researchers are asking, which, to me, is: how much extra would I pay for 6 cups and 1 saucer. So, to me, this is not a case of the less is more effect, but rather the effect of the purchaser having less confidence in the quality of Set A because, out of 40 pieces, 9 are broken! This to me is a rather rational way of looking at Set A.

The Linda Problem

Imagine you are told this description of Linda:

Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

After hearing the description, you are then asked:

Which alternative is more likely?
a) Linda is a bank teller, or
b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

When asked this question, 90% of undergraduates chose “b,” although by the laws of probability, it is more likely that Linda is a bank teller rather than a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement. The reason for this is that there are more bank tellers than bank tellers who are also feminists. Kahneman takes this as conclusive evidence of “of the role of heuristics in judgment and of their incompatibility with logic. I have a problem with this.

I get that there must be more bank tellers than bank tellers who are active in the feminist movement: bank tellers who are active in the feminist movement are a subset of the total number of bank tellers, which must be greater. But if, in the description of Linda, you tell me that she is “deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice,” I am–if I were a participant in this study–going to try to cooperate with the questioners in anticipating what answer they want me to give. In this case, I would, even though I know that there are more bank tellers than feminist bank tellers, answer “a.” That I answered “a” is not, to me, conclusive evidence that my heuristics are incompatible with logic, as Kahneman argues. I was merely trying to be “helpful” by anticipating how the questioner wanted me to respond. And I was right: the questioner was trying to get me to say, “a.” Only, the questioner was not on my side and was deliberately trying to deceive me. No fair.

As Kahneman himself writes, without the questioner’s diabolical deception, participants could get this question right. Take this question:

Which alternative is more probable?
a) Mark has hair
b) Mark has blond hair

Participants have no problem getting the answer right. The answer is “a.” What I find insulting about the Linda Problem is that “no good deed goes unpunished.” The participant is trying to be helpful, not knowing the diabolical intentions of the questioner. And when the questioner deceives the participant, the questioner takes this to be proof of an impaired logical system in the brain. This adds insult to injury.

Consider also this scenario. Let’s say I am the questioner and that I am twenty-five pounds overweight. I go up to the questioner and ask: “Do you think I should lose some weight?” Let’s say the participant says: “You look great. No need for diet.” Would a smarty-pants psychologist look at this answer as proof that there is something wrong with the participant’s eyesight? I think, if the psychologist thought along the lines of Kahneman, the psychologist would say say yes, clearly there is an issue with the participant’s eyesight. But what I would say is that the participant is trying to be a nice person by anticipating the socially correct answer. There is something rational about saying the socially correct rather than the objectively correct answer as well, and I think Kahneman gives this point less consideration than I would have had.

The Hot Hand in Sports

On basketball, Kahneman debunks the idea of the hot hand:

Some years later, Amos and his students Tom Gilovich and Robert Vallone caused a stir with their study of misperceptions of randomness in basketball. The “fact” that players occasionally acquire a hot hand is generally accepted by players, coaches, and fans. The inference is irresistible: a player sinks three or four baskets in a row and you cannot help forming the causal judgment that this player is now hot, with a temporarily increased propensity to score. Players on both teams adapt to this judgment–teammates are more likely to pass to the hot scorer and the defense is more likely to double-team. Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball.

Kahneman explains the fallacy of the hot hand by a belief in what he calls the “law of small numbers,” the error that ascribes the law of large numbers to small numbers as well.” What that means is that three or four shots is too small a sampling size to demonstrate the presence of the hot hand.

Famed Boston Celtics coach, when he heard of the study, said: “Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I could care less.” I agree with him. Suppose you are coach of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. You are down two points with ten seconds on the clock. Michael Jordan has been on fire. Or at least he seems like he has the hot hand, having sunk his last five shots (some of which are high-percentage dunks). Dennis Rodman, on the other hand, is ice cold, having bricked his last five shots. Let’s say, to make this though experiment work, that Jordan and Rodman have the same field goal percentage. Who would you pass the ball to? Maybe “Team Psychology” would pass the ball to Rodman: he does not have the cold hand because such a thing does not exist. But the real-world team would pass the ball to Jordan. I think any coach who does not want to be fired or have the players revolt would pass the ball to Jordan. As they say, in theory there is nothing different between theory and practise, but in practise, there is.

Again, I understand what Kahneman is saying about small sample sizes. Small sample sizes can lead you awry. But what I have to say is this: in the absence of further data or more samples, you have to go with the data you have. That is the real world. In sports, you don’t have the luxury of looking at the player’s ten next shots to see if the player really has a hot hand. If the player seems to have a hot hand, you go with it.

Another objection I have to Kahneman’s debunking of the hot hand is that basketball players do, in real life, increase their field goal percentage. In his fourth year in the NBA, Shawne Williams, a player for the New York Knicks improved his 3-point field goal shooting percentage from 6 percent to 51 percent. If you knew him as a 6 percent shooter, and he hit three or four three-pointers in a row, and you dismissed his hot hand, well, you would be wrong: his field goal shooting percentage did actually move up from 6 percent to 51 percent! That year, he will seem to have had the hot hand and that hot hand is, statistically, real! As players hire shooting coaches and sports psychologists and move their shooting percentages higher, their hot hand will have been a real phenomenon. I don’t see how Kahneman and his friends could argue from a probabilistic and mathematical basis that sometimes players improve and, in the process of improvement, will have the hot hand.

Regression to the Mean

Air force cadets who do well one day will generally do worse the next day and cadets who do poorly one day will generally do better the next day. It is the same with golfers, claims Kahneman. This phenomenon is called the reversion or regression to the mean. Good performances will be balanced by poor performances so that, in the long term, the average is maintained.

Kahneman extends the phenomenon of the regression to the mean to companies: a business which did poorly last year, he claims, because of the regression to the mean, can be expected to do better the next year by the action of probability. Now, this idea can be tested in the stock market. There is a strategy called the “Dogs of the Dow” that works by arbitraging the regression to the mean. Each year, an investor buys the ten “dogs” or poorest performers in the thirty stock Dow Jones Industrials Index. At the beginning of each year, the investor sells the previous dogs and buys the dogs from the previous calendar year. If, as Kahneman claims, businesses obey the regression to the mean, by buying the poor performers, an investor should be able to do better than a buy-and-hold investor who holds all the stocks in the index.

This is not the case. With dividends reinvested, the twenty-year return in 2020 of the Dogs of the Dow strategy has returned 10.8%. Buying and holding all the Dow stocks for the same twenty year period would have also returned 10.8%. If Kahneman is correct about the regression to the mean, one would expect the Dogs of the Dow strategy to have produced a return in excess of 10.8%. It did not. There may be momentum effects at play where winners continue, despite probability, in producing outsized returns and losers, despite probability, produce diminished returns.

The regression to the mean is a real phenomenon. That I don’t doubt. But if Kahneman says it applies to businesses, it must be investable in real life. If it isn’t, then it’s just a fancy sounding term. You know, Kahneman might be right, that businesses revert to the mean. But he talks as though he is sure of the phenomenon without giving a real-world proof. Take the entire Japanese stock market, the Nikkei 225. It had a bad year in 1990. A very bad year. If I had listened to Kahneman, I would have backed up the truck to buy Japanese stocks in 1991. Now, almost thirty years later, the Nikkei is still below its 1991 levels. Regression to the mean?

Regression to the mean may be real, but not as easy as Kahneman puts it. There is a certain momentum in businesses and countries that defy regression to the mean for years, decades, and centuries. It strikes me that regression to the man works if you are looking backwards at the data. Say, after a century, you already know what the average is. You already have the data. Of course regression to the mean will work. But if you are looking forwards and do not have the data already, things change, trends emerge, industries fail: for example, when digital photography came into style, a company like Kodak is not going to revert to the mean! It will go bankrupt.

Prospect Theory

Prospect Theory is Kahneman’s feather in the cap. He won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for Prospect Theory. Prospect Theory looks at how behaviour changes under the psychological loads of loss or gain. For example:

-In mixed gambles, where both a gain and a loss are possible, loss aversion causes extremely risk-averse choices.
-In bad choices, where a sure loss is compared to a larger loss that is merely probable, diminishing sensitivity causes risk seeking.

Prospect Theory explains why people buy insurance (even though it is an irrational practise that is money losing, in aggregate and in the long run), why people buy lottery tickets, why people pay lawyers too much to settle instead of fight it out in court (the large “structured settlements” industry), and the psychology that drove a con man like Bernie Madoff to seek more and more risk to avoid loss. To draw its conclusions, Kahneman would ask test participants questions such as:

Problem 1: Which do you choose?
Get $900 for sure OR 90% chance to get $1,000

Problem 2: Which do you choose?
Lose $900 for sure OR 90% chance to lose $1,000

His questions are designed to “tell us about the limits of human rationality. For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is–a hopeless mirage.” I agree with Kahneman that human rationality is severely limited. Even free will, in my view, could be an illusion. E. O. Wilson, in a series of books including On Human Nature, has laid out an argument that convinces me of the limitations of the mind, which, Wilson argues, is a product of evolution conditioned to Stone Age rather than Space Age environments. Kahneman’s arguments fail to persuade me because his arguments presuppose that, should the participant confront the question in real life the participant would react in the same way as the participant answered the question, which, in the experiment, the participant knows is not real, is only a question in a study. That is a big jump that has been demonstrated conclusively to be false. There are, for example, ongoing litigations involving the “Know Your Client” (KYC) form that investment banks use. Financial advisors gauge their clients’ appetite or aversion to risk by asking them questions such as the ones Kahneman asks the participants in his studies. As it turns out, some clients said, on paper, that they had great appetite for risk. But when loss happened, they found that, in real life, this was not true. So they sued. Others said, on paper, that they had little risk tolerance. When, however, in real life, they saw how they missed the boat on outsized investment returns, they found out that they actually have a propensity for risk. And they sued. The Achilles’ heel of Prospect Theory is that Kahneman asks participants questions on paper and draws far-reaching conclusions on the assumption that this transfers over to real life. People do not behave the same way in real life as they do on paper. You cannot ask people paper questions and construct a real-world theory from their paper responses. No, no, no!

His method, in my eyes, would be like an anthropologist who polls different tribes. So, instead of observing what a tribe actually does, this anthropologist would give the tribespeople a poll. For example, the anthropologist would ask:

Problem 1: One year, your crop yield goes down 25% Would you:
a) attack the neighbouring tribe or
b) increase hunting activities

Then, if the participants answer “a,” this anthropologist would conclude that “the tribe is aggressive” or some other far reaching conclusion. But if the participants answer “b,” the anthropologist would conclude that the tribe is pacifist. This would be ludicrous. But this seems to be what Prospect Theory is based upon.

As they say, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practise but in practise, there is.

Government Spending

During the year that we spent working together in Vancouver, Richard Thaler, Jack Knetsch, and I were drawn into a study of fairness in economic transactions, partly because we were interested in the topic but also because we had an opportunity as well as an obligation to make up a new questionnaire every week. The Canadian government’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans had a program for unemployed professionals in Toronto, who were paid to administer telephone surveys. The large team of interviewers worked every night and new questions were constantly needed to keep operations going. Though Jack Knetsch, we agreed to generate a questionnaire every week, in four color-labeled versions. We could ask about anything; the only constraint was that the questionnaire should include at least one mention of fish, to make it pertinent to the mission of the department. This went on for many months, and we treated ourselves to an orgy of data collection.

That Kahneman mentions this I find disturbing. From what I gather, times are tough. There are many unemployed. So then the Canadian government hires three top-gun economists (because purse strings must be tight), two of which are American (because Canadian economists do not need the work) to conduct surveys which are meaningless to the participants, the government, and Canadian citizens. The government, however, markets this program as being relevant to Canada’s fishing industry: after all, each question must involve the mention of a fish. Of course, after the brilliant economists get the data they want for their pet experiments, they publish this in a book and throw the Canadian government under the bus: the survey, they say, really helped them and had nothing to do with fisheries and oceans. They had gamed the taxpayer money for their own benefit. This so smacks of elitism. It also strikes me as being deeply ironic: the study they were working on was “fairness in economic transactions.” Yikes.

That he printed this makes me wonder if he understands the real world. He talks of Davos, the party place of the billionaires. He goes through his book like some hero-psychologist, looking at everyone else’s blind spots. He talk about how he mentions one story at Davos, and someone overhearing says “it was worth the whole trip to Davos just to hear that,” and that this person who said this “was a major CEO.” Wow. It would have been good if someone in another book had said that about Kahneman. But for him to say this about himself in his own book?

Spider-sense Tingles “Danger”

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a book I had wanted very much to like. I had hoped to learn more about mental biases that would have been of use in the new book I’m writing on a theory of comedy. The more I read Thinking, Fast and Slow, however, the more my spider-sense was tingling “danger.” I voiced my disapproval of the book to friends and to my book club. People said: “You don’t like the book because you probably weren’t smart enough to answer his questions.” Other people said: “But he has won a Nobel Prize. Who are you to disagree?” It makes me laugh a little bit that people will say that I am irrational while themselves using ad hominem attacks, the rationality of which itself is doubtful.

I remember a story about two other Nobel Prize winners, also, like Kahneman, in the economics category. In 1997, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A few years prior, they had started up one of the largest hedge funds in the world, Long-Term Capital Management. While they were winning the Nobel Prize, a journalist looked into the workings of their hedge fund. He called them out for being overleveraged: with 4 billion in their own and investors’ capital, they had borrowed in excess of 120 billion. The journalist called them out for “picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer.” Scholes and Merton shot back: “Who are you to question us, lowly journalist? We are Nobel Prize winners.” A year later, Long-Term Capital Management collapsed, taking the global economic system itself to the brink of collapse. How the mighty are fallen.

Kahneman comes across as the hero-psychologist pointing out others’ errors. But I wonder if he ever looked at the beam in his own eyes? I did a quick search on Google for the robustness of psychological experiments, the sort that are published in respected peer-reviewed journals. I found that less than half of such studies can be replicated. What sort of “science” is this? It’s like if you had a theory of gravitation that was published in a leading journal such as Science that predicted the moon would be at this place on this time. You “proved” it once and published it. But no one else can replicate it. And your theory is still accepted as canon, not to be questioned? I wonder, down the road, how robust many of Kahneman’s findings will be. Time will tell.

2015 Reproducibility Project study finds only 39 out of 100 psychology experiments able to be replicated, even after extensive consultation with original authors:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html

2018 Reproducibility Project study finds that only 14 out of 28 classic psychology experiments are able to be replicated, even under ideal condition:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07474-y

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Don’t forget me, I’m Edwin Wong, and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil

Review of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT – Erich Maria Remarque

1928, 2013, Random House, translated by A. W. Wheen, 222 pages

One of the duties of Nobel Prize winners is to write a Nobel Lecture. When singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel in literature, he was on the road, on the “Never Ending Tour,” as he calls it. Musician and friend Patti Smith accepted the prize on his behalf in Stockholm where she also and sang his “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” It was not until June 2017 that Dylan had a chance to record his Nobel Lecture in a LA Studio accompanied by a piano in the distance. The recording is available on YouTube.

In his lecture, he talks about his songs and their relation to literature. He specifically brings up three pieces of literature: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Homer’s Odyssey, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I’ve read Moby Dick and the Odyssey. I had heard of All Quiet on the Western Front, but had never read it. Dylan’s endorsement piqued my curiosity. There is so much to read, however, and sometimes decades pass before books on the reading list get attended to. A few months ago, however, it was my turn for book club suggestions. I presented three choices, one of which was All Quiet on the Western Front. Book club went for Remarque’s book. Now was my chance to read it. I’m glad I did.

Remarque’s book stands out for its directness. A bunch of kids are in a war where the world they love is getting blown apart. The strange thing, to them, is that they are doing the blowing up. Now, in between things and people getting blown up, you see human nature at work. Officers may abuse soldiers in training, but on the front lines, the jungle rules. The soldiers and officers who have the most miserable jobs in civilian life are the most power hungry in military life. Childhood friend Kemmerich is dying: who will get his boots? The poplar trees and the butterflies are always beautiful, especially when viewed from the trenches. Nature seems to keep going without any sense of loss from all the mounting casualties in the trenches. War is very body oriented: the dead make gurgling sounds, soldiers learn to go to the washroom together, bombs blow body parts everywhere. In today’s saccharine world, this book stands out. The veil of hope has been lifted. While reading this book, I thought I could understand, for a moment, why a soldier would want leave to end so that he could go back to the front, go into the trenches, and dive on that grenade to save his friends. The book gives you flashes of another way of living, flashes of how adaptable the will is. It is eye opening. Remarque himself fought in WWI and spent a year in a military hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds.

Dylan mentions All Quiet on the Western Front because it has influenced his writing, and the writings of others. He finds a link between the world of Remarque’s novel and some of the songs of Charlie Poole (1892-1931), one of which has this refrain:

I saw a sign in a window walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to me.

On the novel itself, Dylan has this to say. To him, All Quiet on the Western Front has worked his way into many of his songs because:

All Quiet on the Western Front is a horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.

To Dylan, it was not so much the message of All Quiet on the Western Front–he doesn’t believe that literature, or his songs, for that matter have a “message”–but the vernacular and the language that appeals to him. In other words, Remarque has put together the story and the words in a convincing way. It sounds good. And because it sounds, good, it has influenced Dylan and made its way into his songs.

Dylan concludes that art is alive. Books were meant to be read. Plays were meant to be seen. His songs were meant to be heard. Though good books, plays, and songs sound good, they don’t mean anything, not in the sense that a psychoanalytic or structuralist critic would have them mean. There is a rift between the naive power of the artist and the analytic power of the interpreter. The artist is not looking for meaning, the interpreter is. The artist, to Dylan, hears, reads, and sees artistic stimuli everywhere. Without knowing why, the artist incorporates these stimuli into art, not for the sake of meaning, but for the sake that it has a good jingle, is a good story, provokes a memorable impression. Like Plato’s investigation of art (through his character Socrates), artists find it hard to explain their works because, in great art, there’s nothing to explain.

While there’s nothing to explain, there is something to experience in art. Art tells a story that impacts us in powerful ways. How All Quiet on the Western Front impacted Dylan was that it made him never again want to pick up another war novel. And he hasn’t. Art must be experienced, otherwise it loses its vigour. Art studied and analyzed isn’t real art anymore, according to Dylan. It’s like that violin that sits in a glass case in a museum. Sad. Or, in another analogy that comes to mind, art interpreted rather than experienced is like a martial arts form that is no longer used for combat. Tai Chi used to be a system of self-defence. But nowadays, it’s an exercise or meditation. It cannot be used for self-defence anymore because it has separated from its roots. Theatre read or lyrics spoken outside of the bars, concert halls, and live venues becomes to audiences what Tai Chi has become to its practitioners: form divorced from practise. To Dylan, that would be a shame.

Don’t forget me, I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.
sine memoria nihil