 I'm occupied presently on a piece of work for which I'm being paid. And since I never make a penny from this blog thingy, said piece of work takes precedence over anything I might have considered writing for you two. I'll be back next week. Maybe. Go away. 4 Comments  A recent conversation with an academic has got me thinking about education. Again. Because I often think about education, and seldom fondly. When Tony Blair, on coming to power fifteen years ago, told us that his priorities were “education, education, education”, nobody disagreed with him. Except me. It was so glib, so Blair. Nobody dares knock education. But we already had too much in 1997, and now the British educational system, like many others around the world, is bloated to the point of grotesqueness. How have we allowed ourselves to be seduced into thinking that half of all school leavers should go to university? Back in 1961, Kingsley Amis (Martin’s dad) caused a furore when he said of the expansion of university education at that time that “more will mean worse.” Of course, the wrath of God was visited on him. But he was right. More has meant worse, and now we have reached a sort of apogee of mediocrity. And all because we won’t accept the obvious: an idiot with a degree remains an idiot; a good plumber is something else. Degrees of futility My suspicion of university education is profound. Nearly two centuries ago, University College London was criticised for teaching English Literature – a soft option, you see. Well, no one now doubts the value of an Eng Lit degree, but I'm not sure that the criticism was misplaced. What has the academicisation of English literature given us apart from deconstruction and a few other esoteric notions that serve only to enable the cognoscenti to look down their noses at the rest of us? I’m dubious about a lot that goes on at college. Do you remember this one from an earlier era of high unemployment? –How do you address a Sociology postgraduate? –Big Mac and chips, please. Take nursing. Until recently, we accepted that the best way to train nurses was on the job in a form of apprenticeship. But that’s no longer good enough. Beginning next year, all new nurses will have to be trained “to degree level”. Try suggesting that this is pointless, and you’ll be told that you “don’t understand”, that nursing is different now, requiring all sorts of cognitive skills that nurses never used to need. Well, I don’t doubt that lectures and written tests are a necessary part of nurses’ training, but what in God’s name is the point of insisting that they have degrees? A degree is a piece of paper, useless for medical purposes. It makes no difference to me whether a nurse has a degree or not. I don’t respect him or her any the more for possessing a piece of paper, and I never will. Why should I? Declaration of interest But perhaps I should come clean, and declare an interest. I have a degree – in fact, come to think of it, I have two. I spent four years earning my first (which was not a First, oh God no) at Edinburgh University, and my time there was a waste of time for me and for my teachers, a waste of money for my parents and the taxpayer. My degree served only to persuade me that I should make use of it in finding employment, as a result of which I ended up in teaching, something I had never wanted to do, and always hated. Pathetic, I know, but you’d be surprised how many teachers land in the job almost by accident. I would have been happier doing something else, and I wish I had. At the very least, I should have spent a year or two after school trying a few things and living a little, before deciding whether or not I really wanted to go to college at all. But the idea never occurred to me; I never questioned the universal assumption that if you could go to university, you should. Revolting students What about today’s school leavers? If you accept the sentiments of most politicians – for whom honesty can, admittedly, be dangerous – you would believe that they are without exception the most admirable people, deeply committed to improving their skills the more to benefit society in the future. Like hell. I’d put money on it that what most school leavers want is the university experience. They’ve come to see it as a right. If I could, I’d take perhaps ninety percent of students out of university now, and tell them to bugger off and do something useful with their lives. But of course I couldn’t, because the unemployment figures would go through the roof. University education is at one level a sort of sleight of hand to make idleness look productive. And it doesn’t come free. In my day, British students had their courses funded by a combination of state grant and parental contribution. But today's bloated higher education would make unacceptable demands on the public purse, so students in need of financial support must now take out loans from the state, repaying in instalments once their income has reached a prescribed level. I find no fault with this. If a graduate’s earnings do not reflect the value of her degree, then she pays nothing. But most politicians are terrified of saying that the loans system is fair, and that people should stop moaning about it. Even those who support it feel they have to apologise for it. Facing facts My heart, like that of Vince Cable, Business Secretary in Britain’s coalition government, beats on the left. I believe in equality of opportunity. I think death duties should be high, and that privileged school education is wrong. A democratic society should try at least to level the playing field for the young. But being of the left doesn’t oblige me to pretend to believe things I don’t. I wish that people would stop thinking that, because they define themselves in a particular way, there are certain causes which they must espouse. And this, sadly, is a much more common failing on the left than on the right. Intellectual dishonesty is the besetting sin of the left. The only absolute duty of any educational system is to teach the three Rs. A system which fails in that regard is not, if you’ll pardon the cliché, fit for purpose. And if you read the stuff which some Brits have put on the Web – many comments on YouTube videos, for example – you can’t help but wonder why we are sending huge numbers of school leavers to college when our system is failing at a much more fundamental level. Education. Dontcha just hate it?  I’ve often wondered how to define good writing. I mean, we all know it when we see it – but how do we know it? Good writers write, as good readers read, with their ears. We can tell when writing is good because it sounds good. I always wonder whether speed readers have time to appreciate quality writing. Despite my best efforts, I get through a book much as a constant drip of water gets through a stone. The compensation is that I can at least appreciate the quality of the prose. But I want to define good writing more closely. Given a command of grammar and punctuation, there are, I think, three things in particular which distinguish good prose: there’s clarity, there’s fluency, and there’s avoidance of cliché. I’ll deal with the first two only briefly. One thing demanded by clarity is economy: sense is muddied by unnecessary words. It’s possible for a novelist to write long works that are still economical: Dickens was notoriously prolix, and his lapses into sentimentality could be excruciating. But he always made his words count. One of the few rules of writing that really does apply in all circumstances is that if you can leave a word out, you should. Only today, I read an article recommending the “positive benefits” of a sabbatical. I was relieved to know that the benefits were not negative. Fluency requires little comment, but fluent writing can be a trap both for the unwary writer and for the unwary reader. It’s easily possible to write fluently, yet to leave your reader unsure as to what exactly you are saying. On the love of cliché Journalists tend to be good at clarity and fluency. Read any major newspaper or magazine, and you will find plenty of clear and fluent writing. Unfortunately, you are likely also to find an abundance of cliché, because journalists do cliché like the rest of us do breathing. “A plague on both your houses”, “too little, too late”, “an unholy alliance”, “a roller-coaster ride”. I hate these and many others with a venom which scares me. I wonder sometimes if it’s altogether healthy. But I think on the whole that it is, because clichés make the writer’s work too easy: they enable him to write without thinking. And if human beings have any obligation which distinguishes them from other animals, it’s the obligation to think. We should all hate hackneyed expression. (I don’t suppose either of you has ever noticed, but I occasionally edit a post some time after writing it, because I recall some godawful cliché that slipped through. Just the other day, for example, I scrubbed the first six words of “in the blink of an eye, Galloway and Aaronovitch gave way to blackness and silence” from my post of two weeks ago. What was I thinking of?) Martin Amis’s loathing of cliché is so intense that he often annoys people with his constant striving for freshness of expression. Many readers find him a little too pleased with himself, a little too anxious to spread his peacock’s tail; less interested in what he says than in how he says it. I think they’re mistaken. I’ve just read Koba the Dread, his work on Joseph Stalin, and would commend it to all who gag on Amis’s prose. This is not the work of a writer lacking in moral seriousness. It’s too easy to assume that a polished surface must conceal a lack of depth. Art and craft But let me get back to bad work in general. One thing that the plethora of mediocre work on the Web has taught me is that poor writers are consistently poor. Take an obviously bad piece of writing – something that would set just about anyone’s teeth on edge – and try to find in it a single decent sentence. It’s harder than you would think. The only time that really bad writers get it right is when a very short sentence just doesn’t give them space to screw up. And interestingly, bad writers tend to produce long sentences. Writing for magazines taught me to write in sentences and in paragraphs considerably shorter than most people naturally use. Provided that you take care with what you’re saying, you’ll always say it more clearly in short paragraphs made up of short sentences. (This isn’t to say that these are preferable in all kinds of writing – they’re not – but they are preferable in popular journalism.) Before writing for a particular publication, I would always do a word count, a sentence count and a paragraph count of several articles from a recent issue. There was more to it than that, but these things mattered. Which prompts the reflection that good journalism is the preserve of the artisan rather than the artist. But what about the novel? It’s often said that fiction is art while journalism is craft, but this is too pat. The handling of character and plot certainly demand art, but craft has a huge part to play in fiction. Write badly, and the rest goes for nothing. Once... or twice? Cyril Connolly, author of Enemies of Promise, knew where he stood: “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.” This may be true, but Connolly was surely wrong to look down on journalism – which he did, from a dizzying height. In fact, with the possible exception of advertising copywriting, I doubt that there could be a more useful training for a novelist than a career in journalism. It’s no accident that so many novelists started out on newspapers. Practice in journalism will supply any writer with the toolkit necessary to construct books as well as articles. Thomas Edison’s dictum that genius is ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration seems to me to be about right. I often wonder if there exist great storytellers whose writing is so poor that no one will ever want to read their stories. Seems possible, doesn’t it? Who wants to read work that’s only ten percent great? Those who won’t take the trouble to write well would do better not to write at all.  Today is bad, even for a Sunday. But I have to do this today, because I’ve got a friend coming to stay tomorrow, you see, so I may not have time then. I don’t say I don’t want to see her, but she’s one of these people who notice dust. She can do untidy, she can do shabby – just as well if she wants to stay with me – but she can’t do dust. Now I could say “Too bad, my dear, dust doesn’t bother me. You’ll just have to live with it.” But no, it makes me feel guilty, so I’m going to have to work at getting rid of it before she comes. She’ll still find some – she always does – but I’ll clear most of it. So anyway, I have to write this thing today. And, having slept badly last night, I’m not feeling up to it. It doesn’t help that I had a bash yesterday at my tax return. I don’t usually do it until the last moment, which is October, but this year is different. You see, I cashed in a couple of bonds in April, and should have received the interest tax free. But, having been too lazy to do the work in advance, I now have to make the claim retroactively. This will entail ringing my bank to get some figures, and my suspicion is that, banks being banks, they’ll want to charge me a lot of money for it. So I’m just not happy, and my creativity isn’t high. Let me rephrase that: my creativity isn’t. Not today. Books, porn, etc. I don’t say I haven’t had a few ideas. I discovered this morning, for example, that BigAl of indie review site BigAl’s Books and Pals has finally had to admit defeat, and decide to review only selectively. Well, I could have told him that the sheer volume of submissions to sites such as his would soon be overwhelming. At Amazon.com, Kindle ebook sales rankings now go up to about a million, with hard-copy rankings exceeding five million. We’ve long since – by which I mean a year or two since – reached the stage at which the vast majority of indie ebooks, whatever their quality, will make no impact. There are just too many. Try to imagine what a million ebooks might look like. Don’t even think about five million dead-tree books. Anyway, that was what I thought I’d talk about today. But I’d have had to do a lot of research into statistics, and I wasn’t feeling up to it. Still, the idea sparked another. As I’ve said before, the only genre which, according to more than one source, can sell regardless of quality or of marketing is erotica – the stuff once known as porn. This tells us something that many people don’t want to know, but there’s no point in ignoring it. There’s money in porn, and there always will be. So I thought I might expand on that. But I’ve covered it already (here), and if I did it again, I’d have to go at it from another angle – all to do with sales, I imagine – and again, I just didn’t feel up to doing the homework... Oliver Twist [An unexpected interruption put a stop to my work, and it’s now Monday evening. Hell.] What was I saying? Ah yes, I was telling you I wasn’t happy. And when I’m feeling down, I can sometimes cheer myself up by wallowing in other people’s misery. So I reread the early part of Oliver Twist – the bit set in the workhouse where Oliver was born. And this got me thinking about the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which abolished what was known as outdoor relief, and determined that the destitute must go to the workhouse or starve. In the workhouse, families were split up, the food was mean and the work was wretched. This was how it was meant to be: the avowed intention was to create conditions so bad that only the genuinely needy would seek such assistance. The workhouse, also known as the poorhouse, was feared and hated throughout the century of its existence. It struck me that there are many today who would like to see its return, there being much ill-feeling about “scroungers” who live off state benefits. The workhouse would certainly determine who is truly needy, believe me it would. But the awful thing is, we would find that many truly are needy. Times is hard, but it’s wrong to impose heavy taxes on the rich, you see, because they’re responsible for our prosperity er... Anyway, I thought about this for a bit, and it struck me that it would be worth writing about. But it also struck me that if I were prepared to do some work on it, it might even make an article for History Today, which has carried my work in the past, and which is at least prepared (unlike you two) to pay for it. Short of inches, short of words So I was back to square one. But I wasn’t finished yet. Thoughts of poverty led to reflection on the fact that British people used to be a lot shorter than they are today. All to do with nutrition, you see. And this in turn brought to mind the extraordinary propensity of men to lie about their stature. Vertically challenged men, it seems, like to add two or three inches to their height. Which seems pretty stupid, since it doesn’t make them look any taller, does it? (But I’m sort of guilty myself, because if you ask me how tall I am, I’ll say five foot eight. The truth is that I’m half an inch shorter than that, but it seems a bit daft to give my height to the nearest half inch. So I er... prefer to round up.) But I didn’t think I’d get a worthwhile thousand words out of that. So I had another idea, one I’ve been toying with for some time now: I’d announce my retirement. I’d say that I’ve had enough of this blogging lark, and won’t be doing it no more. But I wouldn’t have got a thousand words out of that either. So I’ve got nothing to write about. Sorry. I’ll have to consider my position. [On the plus side, my guest hasn’t moaned about the dust. Yet.]  The world has become a complex place. Technology really should make life easier for us, but in fact it only makes it more difficult. This was brought forcibly home to me a few weeks ago, when I decided the time had come for the No-Hoper to get a new TV. London’s television signal has just gone digital, you see, rendering my old telly useless without a set-top box. Anyway, there was something wrong with it. The remote control didn’t work, which meant that whenever I wanted to make the damn thing do anything, I had to get up and prod it. Then and now Which took me back to the 1950s, because I am extremely old. For some years, there was only one channel (BBC), which, as I recall it, broadcast every day from around five in the evening for six hours or so. Everything was black and white, and much of the time, all you got on your screen was a sign saying “NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” And even when service was normal, the picture would, with alarming frequency, do something which my father called “going upstairs”. I won’t try to describe it, but you fixed it by twiddling Vertical Hold, one of the three knobs which my sister and I were permitted to touch. In addition, we could use Volume (which also served to turn the thing on and off) and Brightness. The other two, Contrast and Horizontal Hold, were considered dangerous. But I was telling you about my new telly, wasn’t I? I had decided to investigate also the possibility of acquiring some form of recording machine. My old set, which incorporated a VCR, couldn’t be set to record when I wasn’t there because, like I said, the remote didn’t work. If I wanted to tape anything, I had to be there to switch on. To make things worse, the damn thing wouldn’t allow me to watch one programme while recording another. I could in fact perform this feat by using the set which I brought down some years ago from my late parents’ house in Scotland, but I hadn’t realised that in London it would only get BBC1 and ITV1. So if I wanted to do the two-progs trick, it would only work if at least one was BBC1 or ITV1. Are you with me? Home alone Anyway, I established after much research that what I needed was a thing called a PVR, which, I gather, stands for Personal Video Recorder. If I wanted to play DVDs, then I’d also have to acquire a DVD player, a different thing entirely. Well, I thought that a PVR would do me for the time being, so, having consulted consumer magazine Which, I went online and ordered both a TV and a PVR. The latter, which I bought from Amazon, duly arrived. The telly, which I didn’t... didn’t. I was promised delivery between 7.30am and 9.00pm on Friday, 31st March, so I stayed home all day. It didn’t come. I had to wait until Monday, when I was promised delivery between 7.30am and 9.00pm, so I stayed home all day. It didn’t come. I had to wait until Tuesday, when I was promised delivery between 7.30am and 9.00pm, so I stayed home all day. It didn’t come. By this time I was getting annoyed. Several angry telephone calls – to individuals who, I’m sure, were themselves blameless – culminated in my cancelling the deal, and ordering instead from Amazon. As I should have done in the first place. Getting up to speed... or not The arrival of the thing the following day made me so happy that I decided that, for once in my technophobic life, I wouldn’t be content with a few basic functions, but would really find out how my new toys worked. I was going to achieve full mastery of this complex technology. Well, the manual for the TV in question comes in the form of a CD, which made its entry into my life by crashing my computer. Still, game (as I thought) for anything, I booted up again, and managed to make the thing work. And then I started reading... You know the moment in a horror film when something really sickening is about to happen, and the camera cuts away? Well, this is such a moment. All I’m prepared to tell you is that, amid tears of frustration and rage, I decided that... that a few basic functions would be enough. Likewise for the PVR. But such an approach entails risk: your new toy, whatever it might be, will keep in reserve the ability to do an awful lot of things you don’t know about. And, sooner or later, it will do something you couldn’t even imagine. Listen. Backsides and remote controls Last week, as I was watching the discussion programme Question Time on one channel while recording something else on another (I won’t name the programme, because it’s embarrassing), it happened. Question Time was working up a head of steam, with maverick MP George Galloway getting into a fight with Times journalist David Aaronovitch. There was much talk of backsides, and I was enjoying myself hugely. Unfortunately, I had the TV remote in my hand at the time... But before I tell you of the strange and terrible thing it did, I’m going to tell you a bit more about remote controls. You see, both the TV and the PVR have remotes, and they’re not like remotes were in my young day, oh no. My parents once had one with five buttons: one for on/off, two for volume, and two for channel. Between them (admittedly, counting each rocker switch as two), the remotes for my TV and my PVR have... one hundred and five buttons. Is it any wonder that things go wrong? Disaster But I was telling you about Question Time. Just as Galloway and Aaronovitch were doing the backside thing, I accidentally depressed one of the many buttons that I had decided to ignore on the grounds that it might be dangerous. This was, as it turned out, the self-destruct button: Galloway and Aaronovitch gave way to blackness and silence. And this is where the camera has to cut away again. Fifteen minutes of rage, frustration and tears later, I was back on track – furious at having missed the backsides of Galloway and Aaronovitch, but up and running again. Then when the programme was over, I played the other one – the one I’d been recording. And just as it got to the really good bit – because this programme has a terrific money shot – it cut out. My attempts to fix the problem that I’d caused in the first place had buggered up the recording too. Why does life have to be like this?  Back on 1st September, I started a thread at the Kindle Boards Writers’ Café. The title, “Successful Indies Only, Please”, was ironic: as I made clear, I was inviting people to boast about how unsuccessful they are, how pathetically few books they’ve sold. (This, after all, is the fate of the huge majority.) Well, this thread has become something of a Kindle Boards cult, having presently achieved close on 25,000 views and nearly 900 replies. As I had expected, a number of miscreants appeared who, having looked at the title and nothing else, wished to boast about the thousands of books they had sold. The rest of us had fun throwing things at them. Sadly, they will not be back, since moderator Betsy the Quilter decided on 7th April to add “(note, tongue in cheek...)” to the title. She had reason for doing so, but I would have preferred to keep the trap open. And irony loses its bite when made explicit. Never mind. To understand what goes on at the "Successful Indies" thread, you must be aware that contributors are known as Knights of the Beige Bar (this being what you see when you check your monthly sales on Amazon, and there aren’t any), and a number have Arthurian titles. The 40c stamp which illustrates this post, for example, is offered by Ben White, who has become known as Iseult the Sheep, and whose contributions now end with a bleat. (We’ve taken the Tristan legend, and twisted it a bit... a lot.) Here, then, is a selection of posts: [Explaining why Knights of the Beige Bar should not be afraid to promote their work.] [...] Did the infantry in WWI go over once, retreat like bats out of hell and declare failure? No. They hadn't failed until all avenues were thoroughly investigated and nearly everyone was dead. This is the sort of success we really need to strive for. All of us. So ask for reviews – Bambi-eye your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. We need to know just how low we can go. [...] EStoops, January 8 [...] To the individual in this thread who purchased my book on 1/14/12, I wish you nothing but the worst. I hope you sell 60 books this week and every week thereafter with ZERO returns. I hope you get more glowing reviews than you can read. And I hope you get national exposure and Big 6 publishers beating down your door. Mr RAD, January 16 [...] I'm profoundly grateful to all the thousands and thousands of new Kindle owners who looked at my titles and then thought, “Nah, I'll buy a James Patterson instead”... portiadacosta, January 21 [Apologising for high sales figures.] [...] I plan on responding to all reviews with vitriol and personal attacks until these sales disappear. 1 star or 5 star, it doesn't matter. I'll bring their favorite uncles into this. Aunts. Cousins. Children and husbands. Whatever it takes. Because you deserve better than this. I have to make this right. Rex Jameson, February 10 [In response to Rex (above)] I have my foot poised to give you a swift kick off this thread Rex. You better start coming up with degrading comments to those reviewers. Remember, most love being talked to in ALL CAPS. It really gets your point across. Danielle Kazemi, February 11 [In answer to a query as to whether fifty-six sales in six and a half months constitutes success.] It's possible that there is some strange devious world in which two sales a week is considered a success, but I'm afraid that land of unicorns and faeries and double rainbows and tax-deductible pornography, however magical and wonderful, is not the one in which we live. Sell two books a month, and then we'll talk. Until you reach those lofty heights, I'm afraid this thread is, alas, not for you. [...] George Berger, February 22 [In reply to George’s suggestion that he move his copyright page to the end of his books.] Wow. Thanks. I never thought of that. However, I'm loath to move it, as that legalese in the beginning is some of the best writing in the books. Difficult call. I guess I should probably go with whatever contributes most to my failure and humiliation. JacksonJones, February 23 [In response to JacksonJones (above), suggests how readers might react to reading the copyright page last.] [...] "I was mostly ambivalent about this collection, and felt it was pretty much a three-star book, but the beauty and artistry evident in the final story, “In Which I Assert the Authority to Rip the Legs Off Copyright Violators” is sufficient to both ensure a four-star rating and a deep-seated fear of quoting even a single sentence in this review..." George Berger, February 23 [...] As my grandmother always said, "In the game of life, there's always going to be a loser, Jackson. It's probably going to be you." [...] JacksonJones, February 27 You know, I think we should try to get together a list of "Unpleasable, Unlikable, Obnoxious Reviewers" and send them free copies. That should really increase the number of hateful reviews we've got. Bonus points if they spew vitriol without ever reading more than the sample. EStoops, March 2 I changed a cover and immediately got a sale. Help. Baa. Ben White, March 13 [In reply to Ben White (above)] [...] Bad sheep, baad sheep! [...] Lyndawrites, March 14 After six months on the Kindle, I finally got a sale on my book for kids!!! Then it got returned 12 hours later. Man oh man. Better to have loved and lost? TexasGirl, April 10 [...] There is an ancient truth that we should all cling to for solace. It is simply this: even if you reach the very bottom, you can always start digging. JacksonJones, April 10 There’s much more. George Berger, for example (whose signature line claims books entitled Unmarketable Dross Vols VI and IX), reports (February 4) that someone found his website by googling “pathetic sales figures”. He also informs us (February 12) that Google considers The Ballad of Eskimo Nell to be "related" to his own Mendacities. Then there’s Ben White (you know, Iseult the Sheep) who tells us (March 2) that someone found his website by googling “writer with least amount of books sold”. And don’t forget the highly dubious Morgan Gallagher, aka Morgan le Fay, who casts her eyes to the floor, then asks people not to tread on them. Many other Knights of the Beige Bar merit a mention, but time and space are against me. Let it suffice to say that it’s a bad business all round. Or, as Iseult the Sheep might put it, "Baaa!!!"  Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly Today’s post will read in large part like a joke, but there’s a serious point to it, as I’ll explain before I’ve finished. Three weeks ago, I spoke with enthusiasm about Wikipedia. Today, I’m going to leave the heights, and explore the depths instead. Because Conservapedia really is an awfully long way down. I heard about this great conservative online endeavour at the time of its birth in November 2006, and have been unable to resist periodic visits ever since – much as you might prod a sore tooth with your tongue just to see if it still hurts. Its begetter was Andrew Schlafly, a Christian fundamentalist who saw his project as a corrective to the "liberal bias" of Wikipedia. What he in fact created was a kind of monster, a compendium of "knowledge" so wacky that it is hard even to parody. This, however, has not stopped many from trying. In the words of its great foe RationalWiki, "A large proportion of those active [on Conservapedia] at any given time are parodists, people pretending to agree with the site’s ideology for their own and their readers’ amusement." The difficulty lies in distinguishing between the sincere and the parodic. Homosexuality, atheism, and other abominations Mr Schlafly’s interests – because he dominates Conservapedia in a way that no individual can dominate Wikipedia – may be gauged by the length of the entries on different subjects. Homosexuality, for example, receives five times as much attention as the American Civil War, and eight times as much as the Second World War. And what does Mr Schlafly think of it? A clue may be found in the titles of some of his subsections: there is "The Marketing of Evil", there is "Homosexuals March in Madrid Cheering Bestiality" (Conservapedia is big on capital letters, but inconsistent.) No, Conservapedia is not keen on homosexuality. Then there’s atheism, which merits an entry of approximately the same length as that on homosexuality (and is thus accorded twenty times as much attention as Hinduism). Subsections include "Atheism and bestiality" and "Atheism and rape". As you might expect, atheists are big on both. And homosexuality and atheism, it seems, have more in common than just bestiality: Conservapedia finds evidence of a strong link between both and extreme violence; and both ("American Lesbian Women More than Twice as Likely to Be Obese Than [sic] All other Female Sexual Orientation Groups") are also linked with obesity. Yes, homosexuality and atheism make you fat. Obama, Dawkins, and other abominations And it’s not only lifestyles and beliefs that get it in the neck from Conservapedia. It’s people, too. Barack Obama, for example, is "probably the first Muslim President" of the United States. And Conservapedia, despite conclusive proof to the contrary, sticks to the birther agenda, which claims that Obama was not born in the US, and is thus ineligible for the office of president: "Obama claims to have been born in Hawaii to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. – who had married just six months prior – on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. This story is likely a complete fabrication." And the President is, of course, incompetent – guilty of "ruinous fiscal policies and disastrous monetary policies". But compared with Richard Dawkins, Barack Obama is a saint. The entry on Dawkins (an apologist for "evolutionary pseudoscience") is almost twice the length of that on Obama, and is a quite bizarre outpouring of rage and hate. Conservapedia manages to link Dawkins with slavery and with Adolf Hitler, and, with a helpful link to the entry on "Atheism and cowardice", explains that he is as gutless as he is godless. Dawkins is even implicated in the death in 2008 of 22-year-old Jesse Kilgore, who, having told his friends that The God Delusion had contributed to his loss of faith, took his own life. A link to Conservapedia’s entry on "Atheism and suicide" helps the reader to an understanding of the causal relationship between the two. The point But I began by promising that I would explain before I go that there’s a serious point to this post – because you might wonder how it’s even possible to treat such a torrent of bigotry and prejudice as anything other than a joke. Conservapedia's unquestioning devotion to fundamentalist Christianity is universally ridiculed. Even conservatives find it an embarrassment. But change circumstances just a little, and it becomes dangerous as well as nasty. What if the bizarre claims of Conservapedia were treated as revealed truth? What if it were dangerous to question their validity? You don’t have to go back far even in European history to find a time when free enquiry and rational argument entailed real risk. As late as 1749, French philosopher Denis Diderot was imprisoned for daring to commit to print a serious discussion of atheism. And even today, there are places where free thinking can be not just dangerous but fatal. In Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, for example, a man was executed for claiming that the Qur’an was the work of Muhammad. (To Muslims, it is the work of God, and to suggest otherwise is the most terrible of blasphemies.) But while there are battles still to be fought, any insistence on the primacy of revealed truth over rational enquiry is ultimately doomed by the impossibility in today’s digital world of controlling all sources of information and debate. Those régimes which continue to punish free thinking with imprisonment and death cannot survive indefinitely. For all the wretchedness of much of its content, the Internet exposes dogma and superstition to the light. And light is fatal to both. When it comes down to it, we don’t have to worry too much about Mr Schlafly and his kind, because they will never achieve the power and influence they might once have enjoyed. It’s fortunate for us all that we really can treat Conservapedia as a joke.  Stiliyan Petrov Tales of suffering and premature death have always sold newspapers: "If it bleeds, it leads", as they used to say. However vehemently some wonderfully upright people might deny it, we all have a taste for the suffering of others. But some, it seems, see in this taste evidence of nobility of character, something to be celebrated in public. At English soccer matches over the weekend, for example, there was a huge display of sympathy for Aston Villa’s club captain Stiliyan Petrov, who has just been diagnosed with leukaemia. Players and supporters wore shirts emblazoned with his name, some in the crowds unfurled banners, giant screens carried messages of support. Muamba lives, Speed dies Of course I sympathise with Mr Petrov and his family, but it all struck me as embarrassingly self-indulgent. And it was nothing to what had happened two weeks earlier, when Fabrice Muamba, a Bolton Wanderers player, collapsed from a cardiac arrest during a match with Tottenham Hotspur. The game was stopped, and desperate efforts were made to revive him. These were ultimately successful, and, having been effectively dead for well over an hour, he is now recovering. I’m pleased for him. But a tsunami of vicarious grief and concern over his fate swept away all sense of proportion. Sports commentators could talk of little else, professional footballers throughout the land wore shirts bearing such legends as "Pray 4 Muamba". And so on and on. I can’t face going into detail. And less than four months before that, Gary Speed, Wales soccer manager (coach, if you’re American) and former player, touched off an explosion of public mourning by taking his own life. Now this was tragic, as suicide always is. It’s painful to think what it must take to persuade a relatively young man (42) with a career envied by countless thousands, that his life is not worth living. But the outpouring of public emotion went on for weeks. Despite the obvious fact that the searing pain of personal bereavement is not something we can feel for someone we never knew, soccer grounds up and down the land were drowned in tears. Then we had Muamba and now we have Petrov. In the case of Mr Muamba, Bolton’s manager, Owen Coyle, even told his players that they could sit out the club’s next match if they didn’t feel up to it. I trust that New York’s surviving firefighters were not expected to go to work on 9/12. The football family Amid much sentimental talk of the "football family", soccer has become the home of emotional incontinence. Four years ago, Chelsea’s Frank Lampard lost his mother to pneumonia. It was sudden and unexpected, and she was only 58. But why, when Chelsea scored a goal against Manchester United shortly after, did a number of Chelsea players hold up to the crowd a club shirt with the name of Pat Lampard on it? I could sympathise with Mr Lampard in his loss. I seem to recall losing my own mother a year or so earlier. But Mrs Lampard’s demise was really nothing to do with the crowd at Stamford Bridge, whose sympathy could be no more than superficial. They shouldn’t have been asked for it. Most of us, when we are bereaved, expect sympathy from those who know us or who knew the person we have lost, but nothing from anyone else. No one else knows, and the fact is that they wouldn’t much care if they did. It’s not that they’re callous, just that no one can offer more than perfunctory sympathy where there is no personal connection. Little Nell But I have to acknowledge that many perfectly decent people enjoy a good blub now and again – provided, of course, that it’s vicarious. One of the most famous tear-jerking scenes in English literature is the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Now Little N, as I’m sure you both know, makes the average angel look like Adolf Hitler, and I am of Algernon Swinburne’s opinion that she is "a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads." When I read the book, I couldn’t wait for her to pop her clogs. Her death scene is most affecting. As Oscar Wilde put it: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." But most of Dickens’s readers were devastated – as the author had intended. Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, unhinged by grief, is said to have hurled his copy of the book from a train. And yet, even if I’m unmoved myself, I don’t object to the vicarious grief that people enjoy from fiction. That’s at least one of the things that fiction is for: to make us feel. Testament of Youth So that’s it, is it? I don’t mind people blubbing over fiction, but not over fact unless it’s their own. Well, not quite, because it doesn’t necessarily upset me when tears are jerked by true stories. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth records her experiences in the First World War, in which she lost first her fiancé, then two other close male friends, and finally her brother. It’s an achingly sad book, and I have no argument with anyone whose upper lip trembles a bit. So what is it, then? Why do I object to vicarious grief over, say, Princess Di, but not over Roland Leighton, Miss Brittain’s fiancé? It may in part be that, through the words of Vera Brittain, we get to know Roland in a way that we never got to know Diana: she wasn’t a human being, she was an icon. But more importantly, if you’re saddened by Roland’s death, you can snivel happily in your room where you’re not going to bother anyone. If there’s an element of self-indulgence in your borrowed grief, at least you’re not inflicting it on anyone else. It’s different when you join in a public outpouring of sorrow. And when the deceased is not known to you personally, you’re doing something fundamentally dishonest. You don’t in any genuine sense feel the emotion you affect, and you shouldn’t pretend you do. When you muscle in on other people's suffering, you're not really doing anyone any favours.  Scott Turow (Photo by Rama) There are many reporters on the front line of the increasingly bloody battle between the trads and the indies, but I doubt that any can claim to have less influence than the No-Hoper. That’s my unique selling point – or it would be, if you had to pay for my opinions. Anyway, there I was a couple of weeks ago, shivering in my foxhole, when there was a tremendous explosion. I was briefly stunned, and when I came round, it was to the rattle of small-arms fire. Badly frightened – I frighten easily, but this was worse than usual – I straightened my tin hat and risked a look over the parapet. (As you both know, I report from the indie side, and so I have a natural tendency to see things from that point of view, but I’ll try to be even-handed.) Here they come I was horrified to see that the trads were coming over the top. You've seen that familiar film footage of the Battle of the Somme, haven't you? Well, I trust you both know it's fake. If either of you thinks that someone set up a camera in the British trenches and filmed the whole thing, then you’re even more naïve than your presence here would suggest. But those shots of lines of men falling to the machine guns nonetheless give you a pretty good idea of how it was. I know, because I’ve seen it. As I cowered in my foxhole, practically blubbing with terror, I saw the ranks of trads mown down just like the Tommies on the Somme back in 1916. Well, once I realised that they weren’t going to reach our lines, and I wasn’t about to get a bayonet in the guts, I relaxed a bit, and tried to work out what was going on. Fire power The brain-buggering explosion that started the whole murderous affair turned out to have been this shell fired from the biggest gun in the trad armoury, megawriter and President of the Authors Guild Scott Turow. In a (nut)shell, he relates his horror on learning that the US Justice Department is gearing up to sue five major publishers for collusion in fixing the price of ebooks. You see, the trads had got hold of a powerful shield in the form of the so-called agency model of ebook pricing, whereby retailers act only as the publisher’s agent, selling at whatever price the publisher dictates. The trads love it, because it serves to keep prices high, and thus diminish the threat to their vital print-book strongpoint. Now it’s not clear that the agency-model shield actually does indies any harm, but the fact that the trads are for it is enough to persuade the indies that they should be against it. So the machine guns started up. There was Joe Konrath and there was David Gaughran, whose weapons both tore huge gaps in the ranks of the trads. It was horrible to watch. There was also an interesting intervention by Mark Williams, manning Anne R. Allen’s gun. Unable to work out which side he was on, he elected to attack and defend both simultaneously. Since neither was interested in compromise, his action had little effect, but I mention it for the sake of completeness. Anyway, it’s all a bloody mess, and I no longer have the faintest idea who’s winning. (I know I’ve sometimes given the impression that I do, but I tell lies.) Never mind. Now that I’ve brought you up to date with the progress of the battle, let’s have a look back at how it all began. Indies get scary Indies, once known as self-publishers, used to be of no significance. The trads barely even noticed them. But then they got their hands on the most powerful publishing weapon since the printing press: the ebook. Kindles in hand, they charged the centre of the publishers’ line, and hit it like a battering ram. Amanda Hocking, John Locke and others did terrible execution, and a number of trads, deciding the game was up, changed sides – Joe Konrath and Stephen Leather, to name but two. Had the trads not possessed an impregnable fallback position in their print-book strongpoint, they might have been overwhelmed, but as it was, they held on. And when they had recovered from the shock of the initial onslaught, they fought back fiercely: the indie ranks were thinned by savage fire telling them that they were all crap, that’s why they became indies in the first place, and they wouldn’t last. But the indies, despite terrible casualties, just kept on coming, and the fighting was ferocious. "Dinosaurs!" yelled the indies. "Morons!" screamed the trads. It was all very bloody, but with ruthless arms manufacturer Amazon improving the ebook all the time, the indies began to get the upper hand. The trads had to get nuked up, and they did. They got hold of the ebook, too (those bastards at Amazon are happy to sell to both sides), and many more of them emerged from their print-book strongpoint to fight in the open. But they hadn’t yet learned how to use the new weapon effectively, and the indies were still on top. "Wreckers!" yelled the trads. "Snobs!" screamed the indies. What next? The battle still rages. The trads have managed to shore up their line, and some think that the indies have reached their high water-mark. After all, the trads have claimed Amanda Hocking, reclaimed Stephen Leather, and negotiated a truce with John Locke. But if their agency-model shield is indeed taken away, then they’re in trouble again. Most seriously, the print-book strongpoint, which has already lost much of its strategic significance, might yet become altogether irrelevant. Most reporters can’t see this happening, but I think they’re wrong. The ebook is deadly, and print can’t compete. How do you think you’d get on in Afghanistan today with a bow and arrow? New technology always drives out the old, in war as in all else. But it’s not over, not by a long way. Even without their print-book strongpoint, the trads have a weapon which the indies can never match: marketing power. That’s why they’re doing so much better with ebooks now. They may yet win the day. Damned if I know. What I do know is that it’s cold and wet here, and that I’ll get my head blown off if I’m not careful. War reporting is dangerous.  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales Please understand that I'm well aware of the existence of Britannica equivalents such as the Encyclopedia Americana and the Enciclopedia Italiana. Just take it that much of what I'm saying here applies to them also. It has just been announced that the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be published only in digital form. This should surprise no one. For reasons of expense, the hard-copy version always sold mostly to libraries and other institutions, and since these now offer computer access, the unwieldy multi-volume print work has become surplus to requirements. The advantages of consulting the Britannica online are manifold. It's easier to search, images can be enlarged at will, and font size can be altered to suit the reader's requirements; it contains countless invaluable links, and when updates become necessary, there is no need to wait years for the next publication. Inevitably, each print edition was out of date even before it went on sale. The famous 1911 Britannica, for example, believes that Henry James is still alive, the Titanic still afloat, and Barack Obama of insufficient significance to rate a mention. The online version contains no such howlers – not for long, at any rate. Finally, it's much, much cheaper. Small wonder that only eight thousand copies of the 2010 print edition have been sold. But as well as seeing the advantages of electronic publication, the Britannica has had to respond to competition. The first big digital challenger was Microsoft's Encarta, which I still possess on DVD. Many of its entries were also accessible free online, paid for by advertising. It's an admirable work, which I still consult on occasion. Wikipedia lives! Being, however, nowhere near as comprehensive as the Britannica, it did not represent serious competition. Wikipedia is different. Now if either of you is among those snobs who turn their noses up at Wikipedia, then please go away. One reader will do me. Despite its admitted imperfections – for its own website is quite open about these – Wikipedia is one of the glories of the World Wide Web. Its most obvious advantage over the Britannica is of course that it's free. But it is also bigger – much, much bigger. Its coverage of contemporary culture could not be matched by the print Britannica, which necessarily concentrated on issues that had already stood the test of time, or were pretty well guaranteed to do so. But nor does the Britannica Online compete in this regard: that's not what it's about. The latter can, of course, match Wikipedia in all those areas in which digital publication offers advantages – ease of reference, links, and so on. And the overall standard of Britannica contributors, all hand-picked – although some contribution from members of the public at large is now permitted – is way ahead of Wikipedia's. But there's much more to it than that. The concept of Wikipedia is extraordinary. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, somehow got it into his head that people might contribute scholarly articles to an online encyclopaedia without expectation of financial reward, and without even being credited for their work. Insane, of course. But it happened, and it goes on happening. There is something heroic about the whole endeavour. The open door But where Wikipedia really scores is in its openness. With the exception of a very few articles which, being on controversial topics, have been locked to protect them from vandalism, anyone is free to edit any existing entry, or even to create a new one. This, of course, means that any Tom, Dick or Harriet, however illiterate, ignorant or bigoted, can publish anything at will. It also opens the door to practical jokers, to the malicious, and to those with axes to grind. And yet it works. It works because Wikipedians, as contributors are called, are overwhelmingly well-intentioned, and deal with vandalism and other undesirable edits quickly and ruthlessly: it is rare (though admittedly not unknown) for anything really bad to survive for more than a few hours. Most of the problems with Wikipedia are the result of casual editing by people who can't be bothered to check their facts. I would, for example, like to strangle the person who put a misleading link into one of the two pages which I have contributed, and who, when I deleted it (and explained why), put it back in again. Then there was the person who decided that “mastiff” should be “faithful mastiff”, and who, when I deleted the “faithful” (there being no evidence that the canine in question was notable for that quality), decided to get his own back by changing “mastiff” to “dog”. I let it go, simply because I couldn't be bothered fighting over it. Open good, closed bad These things are irritating, but hardly the end of the world of online reference. The advantages of open access to editing outweigh the dangers, simply because the number of informed and literate people in the world far exceeds the money available to pay them. It's surprising – astonishing, even – what people will do out of sheer goodwill, if you just open the doors and let them in. The concept might be applied to all reference works. Richard Ingrams, editor of The Oldie magazine, has told us that he was commissioned to write for the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) an entry on someone of whom he had never even heard. Well, for such a vast work, the editors cannot be expected to be able to identify in every case the person best qualified to do a particular entry, so they go for name writers whose credentials make it unlikely that they will produce anything substandard. But inevitably, things go wrong. I once contacted the DNB in order to put right an inaccuracy in one of their entries. My communication was not acknowledged, and no correction has ever been made. Open editorial access is a game-changer. Wikipedia is not perfect. It is open to carelessness, bias and vandalism in a way that the DNB and the Britannica are not. But it is the greatest compendium of knowledge that the world has yet seen. Those who refuse to consult it are missing out. They are also liars. |  The No-Hoper, aka Iain Manson Books    Email the No-Hoper
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