It was a beautiful day and I spent most of it in our garden, cleaning up the jungle. I won’t bore you with what every gardener knows about the benefits of gardening. But I also profited from my labours by listening to the radio and hence to a fascinating debate, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from the Aspen Festival of Ideas in the USA. What effect does digital technology have on how we think, live and learn? Should we worry about creating virtual echo chambers where we only hear what we want? Or should we celebrate the increased interconnectivity the internet brings? The BBC’s Bridget Kendall chaired a panel composed of the following. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT media lab and a leading writer on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways. He argued that the internet enables decentralized innovation, a type of openness which in turn is shaping approaches in science and education. Mike Gallagher, president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the trade association representing U.S. computer and video game publishers. He argued that we can achieve connectedness and empathy through game play and that playing digital games are another way of forming communities. Lastly, Julie Taymor, a filmmaker and innovative theatre director who turned the animated film The Lion King into a big theatrical hit. She cautioned about the limiting power of two dimensional screens and argued for the irreplaceable immediacy of the real. The panel was agreed that the genie is out of the bottle and impossible to put back in. Joi Ito’s upbeat optimism about the capacity for society to master the internet’s downsides without undemocratic measures was interesting. He gave the example of spam, which is now, it is true, far less of a problem than it ever used to be – a reduction achieved without legislation, he pointed out. Also striking, to somebody working on a daily basis with many languages, was Mike Gallagher’s confident belief that in the very near future simultaneous electronic interpretation will open the world up in ways we haven’t even begun to think about yet. Well worth a listen.

Clint Eastwood’s soliloquy yesterday in Tampa demonstrated what a loss he has been to American Shakespearian theatre. This evening, in his honour, we watched the 1975 thriller, The Eiger Sanction, directed by and starring… Clint Eastwood. Actually, we watched it because, like Stagecoach, it is another film with a Monument Valley connection (a good quarter of it was filmed there). The film, a sort of James Bond-type spy thriller with Eastwood improbably cast as an art-loving government-hired assassin, is largely forgettable but it is worth watching for its authentic depiction of a climb up the north face of the Eiger. I quote from the Wiki entry: ‘Filming in Grindelwald, Switzerland began on August 12, 1974 with a team of climbing experts and advisers from America, England, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. The climbers were based at the Hotel Bellevue des Alpes at Kleine Scheidegg. The Eiger at 13,041 feet is not as tall as other mountains in the Swiss Alps, but it is treacherous climbing. Eastwood’s decision to brave the mountain was disapproved by Dougal Haston, director of the International School of Mountaineering, who had lost climbers on the Eiger, and by cameraman Frank Stanley, who thought that to climb a perilous mountain to shoot a film was unnecessary. According to cameraman Rexford Metz, it was a boyhood fantasy of Eastwood’s to climb such a mountain, and he enjoyed displaying heroic machismo. A number of accidents occurred during the filming of The Eiger Sanction. A twenty-seven-year old English climber, David Knowles, who was a body double and photographer, was killed during a rock fall, with Hoover narrowly escaping with his life. Eastwood almost abandoned the project but proceeded because he did not want Knowles to have died in vain. Eastwood insisted on doing all his own climbing and stunts.’  The climbing passages are also worth watching for the period mountaineering clothing and equipment – punily twee by modern-day standards. Curiosity piqued, I read about the mountain itself, and its treacherous north face. The account of the failed 1936 attempt, resulting in the agonisingly slow death of poor Toni Kurz, just an ice-axe’s distance away from help, is worth a film in its own right.

I realise that, in covering our summer US trip I somehow failed to mention two unavoidable phenomena in American society; obesity and loneliness. The former was particularly apparent in the stations. The redcaps ferried three sorts of passengers around: the old, those with a lot of luggage, and the obese. The images reminded me of the portrayal of the fat people in the film Wall-E (picture) and I realised that the film must have struck much closer to home in the States. A bigger bang for your bucks is what all Americans expect but, when it comes to food, such a bigger bang means that, well, you get bigger. Soft drinks are sold by the litre in many restaurants (I understand New York’s mayor is trying to put a stop to those outsize portions). There is reverse social stigma in finishing everything and, when you can’t, taking the rest home in the so-called ‘doggy bag’. There is plenty of salad on offer in most ‘eateries’ but also plenty to go with it. There is, more generally, plenty in the land of plenty. The resulting obesity rings false with a country that regularly tops the Olympics medal table. I wonder if this phenomenon has something to do with the loneliness that is also so apparent; food as comfort, especially at home in front of the TV or PC. The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once wrote ‘America’s a very lonely society, because it’s so mobile and because it’s a nation of immigrants who don’t have extended families, so there are all these people that, no matter what their trouble is, can only call the police department or the fire department. There’s nobody else to ask for help.’

Another piece of summer reading arising out of the Nevius book about New York has been Jacob A Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives, a reformist study and indictment of the crushing poverty that then existed in New York and, above all, a trenchant critique of tenement housing. Himself a Danish immigrant, Riis gradually established a career as a police reporter, work that brought him into direct contact with the horrors of the Lower East Side slum district. Riis turned his journalistic skills to good effect, aided by the new medium of flash photography. The result, a powerful combination of campaigning journalism and photography, led to a more enlightened form of architecture that would gradually do away with the cramped and impoverished living conditions that, in Riis’s account, were like a pressure cooker about to explode. This work inspired Jack London’s 1902 The People of the Abyss, a journalistic first-hand account of poverty and living conditions in London’s East End which, in turn, inspired George Orwell’s 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London. Riis clearly found the conditions he described morally abhorrent but in a concluding chapter he cleverly stressed enlightened self interest: the people were a resource (labour); more decent housing conditions would enhance productivity and prevent rioting;  rebuilding the slums would thus be a worthwhile investment; ‘the tenement has come to stay, and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts us.’ The book included designs of a new-style tenement building, with air, light and proper sanitation. It was the beginning of the end of the slum.

This evening I finished a collection of Martin Amis short stories (thanks to John B. for the tip), published in 1998 under the title Heavy Water. Something of a mixed bag, the stories themselves were, variously, published in1976, 1978, 1981, 1986, 1992, 1995 and 1998 in the likes of Encounter, Granta, Esquire, the New Statesman and the New Yorker. There are also two previously unpublished stories from 1997. The collection thus covers several Amis periods. The State of England (1985), with its pre-London Fields cockney villain, Big Mal, is a Sopranos-like conceit about the way even gangsters, mobsters and bouncers have ambitions for their children, including putting them in top schools and expecting them to win prizes and be good at sports. Denton’s Death (1976) is a Kafka-esque tale about paranoia. Let Me Count the Times (1981) is a cautionary tale about a combination of obsessive narcissim and onanism. For my money, two inversion tales are both the cleverest and the wittiest. The first, Career Move (1992), has poets feted by Hollywood studio moguls, whilst screenplay writers struggle to get their work published in obscure low-circulation journals. It has what I think is the best comic line in the whole collection, a description of an angry Hollywood mogul; ‘…for a few seconds he looked like a dark-age warlord in mid-campaign, taking a glazed breather before moving on to the women and children.’ The choice of the adjective ‘glazed’ is Amis on top form. The second, Straight Fiction (1995), paints a society where to be gay is ‘straight’ and heterosexuals are a small but vocal protest group. Both are very funny but also clever ways of confronting our subliminal prejudices. Which reminds me that I learned from the Nevius book (see this post) that until as recently as 1967 it was a criminal offence in New York to sell alcohol to a known homosexual (see here, for example). The Janitor on Mars (1998) is Amis showing off some erudite science fiction but it sums up in one line what Olaf Stapledon took a book to explain about human beings: we ‘…are very talented adorers.’

Dinosaurs that we are, about three million light years after everybody else and then thanks to a kind loan from PP and M (to whom grateful thanks), this evening we finished watching the first season of The Sopranos. The series began to air in 1999 and holds up remarkably well. Its initial conceit is remarkably simple; (New Jersey) Mob bosses have families and problems and related tensions and mental and physical illnesses just like everybody else. Inevitably, we found ourselves comparing it with The Wire (which has had added poignancy for us since we gazed out last month from an Amtrak train at some of the broken-down Baltimore estates and housing that feature in the series). For us, on balance, The Wire (which came a few years later) wins because it is so raw and uncompromising and so frequently makes the viewer work at understanding the plot. The script of The Sopranos is less knowing, with far fewer memorable quotations and oblique philosophical and cultural references. (That said, The Sopranos first series has one clearly knowing winning memorable quotation: ‘cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this’ – the ‘this’ in question being Mob warfare.) However, all critics seem to agree that The Wire wouldn’t have been possible without the ground-breaking work of The Sopranos. What is clear is that both cleverly and entertainingly portray the combination of dispassionate amorality and passionate sentimentality that, if we are honest with ourselves, has never been limited to organised crime.

Another constant companion on my American trip was Olaf Stapeldon’s 1937 ‘science fiction classic’, Star Maker which I have, at long last, finished reading. I mentioned it in passing here. The narrator, who has rowed with his wife, stomps off up a hillside at night, gazing at the stars and reflecting on the greater futility of mankind. In a dream (the reader assumes), he leaves his body and travels through space and time, with gradual advances in his intelligence, telepathic abilities and awareness of other forms of intelligence. The narrator explores worlds and other human, or human-like, races before being absorbed into successively more powerful collective intelligences which enable him/them to witness both the beginning and the end of the universe. Mankind in all of this is of no more importance than ‘rats in a cathedral’. This is a scintilatingly brilliant work of the imagination, and Stapledon deserves to be up there in lights with the likes of H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Painting on a vast canvas (what could be greater than the entire universe?), Stapledon’s many inventions include such concepts as swarm intelligence, Dyson spheres and the detachment of planets as space vehicles. But the book is, perhaps inevitably, flawed. For a start, it is a very heavy read. There are no characters and there is no real dramatic development. Rather, Stapledon sets out a scientific discourse. This would be all right, but there are two deeper flaws. The first is that Stapledon falls into a trap that Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris brilliantly avoids: the worlds and societies Stapledon describes evolve basically in Darwinian and Marxist ways, whereas Lem’s alien intelligence is beyond human understanding and hence simply beyond human descriptive powers. Worse, second, Stapledon warns against the risk of anthropomorphism (‘To describe the mentality of stars is of course to describe the unintelligible by means of intelligible but falsifying human metaphors.’) and then jumps feet-first into the trap. Before we know it he is writing about nebulae gifted with ‘primitive but intense religious consciousness’ and about the love stars feel for one another. In a sense, Stapledon was positing a Gaia-like theory of the cosmos but, unlike Lovelock, felt the need to attribute intelligence (and, beyond that, sentiment, morality and religiosity). I put ‘science fiction’ in inverted commas because Stapledon did not think that was what he was writing. He was a philosopher who turned to fiction as a way better to explore his ideas. Like the trek up to Lago di Darengo, this was a tough read but well worthwhile.

Today we got up at dawn, parked our car at Livo, and then set off up the Livo River Valley. Our destination was a beautiful natural cirque of mountains surrounding a small lake, the Lago di Darengo. We set off from Livo at 7.35 and reached the lake at 11.35 – not bad for a climb of over a thousand metres in roasting heat (the last steep stretch, on an exposed mountainside, was tough). Our reward was the beauty of this remote spot (the Swiss border is just on the other side of the cirque) and the cool waters of the lake itself, in which we swam before eating our lunch. We also had the satisfaction of knowing that we had got to the end of a trail up which we had trekked previously, but without having the time to go all the way. A few hardy walkers were on the same path, since the rifugio, Capanno Como, at +/-1,800 metres, is a good base camp for attacking the surrounding mountain peaks. What I particularly like about these mule paths is that they feel so ancient (a Roman bridge halfway up the valley attested to this). They are also prodigious human works, consisting of huge, heavy cap stones transported (how, I always wonder?) across the mountainsides. Trekking along them, I have the sense that man has been coming this way for a very long time.

One of the many interesting things we learnt from Francis (Jacobs) was about the very different fates meted out to Protestants in the seventeenth century in the neighbouring valleys of the Valchiavenna and the Valtellina. In the latter, they were massacred (there is an account of the bloody affair here), whereas in the Valchiavenna not one was killed. Francis recounted a theory for this very different treatment. The Valtellina, it is said, is an East-to-West valley, leading nowhere. As such, its societies were pretty much self-contained and inward-looking. The Valchiavenna, on the other hand, is a North-to-South valley, connecting Italy with the north and therefore mercantile and outward-looking in spirit. A terrible fate awaited many of the Valchiavenna’s Protestants all the same. In 1618 a mountain collapsed suddenly onto the predominantly Protestant town of Piuro, killing over 900 of its inhabitants (shades of Vajon!). Only a few Protestant tradesmen abroad at the time survived the disaster. (By chance, surfing on the internet, I discovered that Nevil Shute’s very first short story was written about the Piuro disaster.)

On a sun-roasted hillside we passed two old men making hay, turning the cut grass with long rakes. We stopped to talk with one of the men, Ugo, who was in his late sixties. The other man was his older brother. Ugo had cows. Each cow consumed 13 kilos of hay a day. Each bale of hay weighed 18 kilos. The hillside they were working probably produced about 50 bales. The rest of the animal feed was bought. Ugo went on to explain that they harvested hay four times a year from the field. There was even a harvest in early November, around the feast day of San Martino, when a dry wind blew down from the Valtellina and across the lake. It was hard work under that roasting sun. I imagined that this was work that had been done for centuries. It was clear that nobody would take on the task once Ugo decided to hang up his rake which, in turn, meant sadly that the landscape would change. Ugo pointed out, though, that twenty years ago the field had been covered in vines. They had been grubbed up and the field given over to grass because viticulture was too labour intensive. So the landscape had in fact changed in the recent past. It was the same up in the forests in the valleys. Francis (Jacobs) pointed to the terraces, hidden by undergrowth, that had once been cultivated, the unruly ash trees that had once been regularly pollarded to manufacture charcoal, and the ancient chestnut trees, their trunks strangled by undergrowth, that had not so long ago been tended and harvested to manufacture flour.