It occurs to me to say a couple of other things about this talk – it makes sense to keep things brief, because I don’t know much about Educational policy. I have (strong) opinions, but as Sir Ken’s opening section reminds us, so does everyone. Nothing distinguishes mine. However, it occurs to me to make these two points based on personal experience: firstly, that if public education is geared towards the production of university professors, it’s interesting that becoming (and remaining) one is so extraordinarily difficult financially (at least within the humanities sector). Perhaps this points to an interesting gap between education and economics? Secondly, a lot of Sir Ken’s arguments have some resonances with my own work – this idea of diverse specialism, of a polymathic society, of the section connecting the two halves of the brain. This is to put my spin on things egregiously, but it seems to me like a lot of the subtext of this discussion is to do with connection across boundaries – with celebrating those connections rather than restricting ourselves to the narrower view.

There’s more here, and its a fundamentally interesting and important issue which hopefully I can return to ‘officially’ at some point. ‘Officially’. Now isn’t that interesting?

I had a vague knowledge of Galton when Natasha McEnroe at the Grant Museum, UCL threw me in his general direction following a discussion at the last LitSciMed event. I’m glad she did, because I’m now writing pretty much an entire chapter of my thesis on the guy. He’s incredibly interesting and provides a crucible in which many of the issues I want to discuss can be examined. About which, perhaps, more anon.

I knew he was from Birmingham when I started, and as a Brummie myself I was naturally drawn to that. In the Galton Archive recently I discovered that had actually attended the same secondary school as me. That was interesting, but it didn’t get unnerving until I found out that he went to KCL as well. Then I learned that he not only went to my school, he also lived in the same area of Birmingham as I used to – Five Ways – and recalls in his autobiography the walk to school down about a mile of roads: the route I cycled every day for seven years. All of this would be fine if I had chosen the coincidence as the reason for looking into Galton in the first place, but it seems to have happened accidentally. Either that, or the good people running UCL special collections are inserting new documents into the Galton archive to mess with my head..!

As well as inventing eugenics, the weather map, fingerprinting and a primitive kind of bicycle odometer, Galton is famous for being one of the subjects treated of in A. S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (2001), in which a scholar is overtaken by the lives of the people he sets out to document. The mind boils.

This is an honesty bookshop in a castle, and it’s sort of by the way – but I did think it was interesting that the Hay festival, which takes place in a series of marquees just outside the famous ‘town of books’, is not really a site for bibliomania at all. There, apart from the Oxfam tent and a stall selling those (academically very interesting) ‘classic penguin’ mugs and deckchairs, the cult of the author reigns supreme. It’s very much a show for people interested in the personalities behind books – and, because this is the twenty-first century, the personalities behind TV, journalism, film, illustration, politics, music. The ‘literaryness’ can often fade into the background, for all the bookish props and slogans.

Would it be better if this wasn’t so? Certainly, ‘loving books’ feels more like an aesthetic choice than anything else at this event, but I’m not sure how good a festival it would be if we were trying to prioritise literary culture all the time. Living authors are a great resource (that ‘living’ is important – we don’t always see ‘life’ in our field, and perhaps its at the heart of what a festival is), and I went to some really interesting, and moving, talks.

On the other hand, I think a ‘Festival of Literature and the Arts’ could usefully stop to think, if only for a moment, about the extent to which it represents those things, and the extent to which it simply represents the people who create and consume them. I think this is a more serious distinction than it sounds, because there’s an opportunity here to really foreground some of the things that are great about books, and writing, and literature. These things, and the study of them, are increasingly being viewed with some scepticism by culture at large, as I noted in my previous post. Consider the public image of the literary arts which Hay brings – the trope of the Guardian reader – and consider the kinds of arguments which you could make for them, given that platform. Books aren’t (just) intrinsically wonderful – nor are they (just) the status accessories we litter our shelves with. Nor, indeed, are they (just) access points into the interesting lives of the famous people we want to know more about. They have a greater power, and a greater relevance, and some of that is being lost at Hay right now.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the festival. I saw Quentin Blake live, and he drew the Enormous Crocodile, and I’m really never going to deny that I got a lot out of that. But I think there’s room for a deeper kind of public engagement here, and I think that at the moment there’s still lots to be said for popping back to Hay when the festival isn’t in season and poking around the many fabulous bookshops by yourself.

I have absolute confidence that far better minds than mine will soon offer a far more entertaining dissection of this nasty piece of writing (with a dash of sexism, if you look closely) than I could provide. I won’t therefore waste my valuable (and, by the way, unfunded) study time on such a dissection – for me it is enough to know that it can be done, and will be. Several of the comments beneath it offer an excellent start.

I encourage you to spread the word about this. The fact that people are thinking like this is extremely significant – and also quite interesting. Like many irrelevancies, the issue warrants serious study.

I staggered my way through a few minutes on a young plesiosaurus which I found in the Grant museum at UCL (by the by, I strongly urge you to visit this place if you haven’t already) during a wine reception there. It seemed a shame, the staggering, because I really had a lot to say about this little creature, its life cut so tragically short somewhere between 199.6 and 175.6 million years ago.

To give you a sense of scale, this is an object about six foot in height, mounted as the end of a bookcase. You turn around, holding your glass of dry white with unbelievable panache, and there it is. Your Mary Anning moment.

There are numerous reasons that my encounter with this fossil stirred something in me. Its immediacy was the one I made the most reference to in my three minute spew – there’s no glass, and there’s no warning. There’s just this thing – a thing that was once alive, which once frolicked in a world we can but imagine, a token of an era that people devote their lives to guessing at. All these things are sufficiently brain-blowing when considered abstractly, but when you have the object right there, suddenly real, in front of you, it can be pretty powerful.

There’s another layer to this. The fossil is labelled ‘Owen’, presumably to identify it as part of the work of Richard Owen, an incredibly awesome man (he invented the word “dinosaur”) (not that plesiosaurus is a dinosaur, of course) (I want to be eight again). So the feeling of encountering something alien, mentioned above, comes up against almost celebrity-like recognition and familiarity (”he touched this..!”). This only increases the intensity of the experience.

It’s the kind of feeling a ‘text’ (if we’re using that word) supposedly never brings. The convenors of this course want us to use objects more in our research, since they can tell their own stories and bring new perspectives. I think that this is only very ambiguously true, and I would like to cite my experience with the plesiosaurus as an example of why.

Because powerful though it was, I’d been getting ready for that encounter since I first read about dinosaurs in my early childhood; and I’d been getting ready for Richard Owen since I first read about him, too. The object being unlabelled didn’t help it speak to me unfettered by the constraints of text – it simply allowed wiggle-room for my own mental text to assert itself. We are narrativeised, narrativising creatures, and if a narrative isn’t given to us, we furnish one ourselves – either from our memories or our imaginations.

Here’s another thing – I’m not a palaeontologist. I have no idea whether that was a real fossil or not. It does seem slightly crazy to put something so incredibly awesome where just anyone can touch it. But then, the Grant museum is completely brilliant, and I could easily believe it of them. As long as I could believe it, there’s no reason I wouldn’t until I had sure knowledge, because I’m the sort of person who wants to be taken to poetic places by encounters with ancient sea creatures. Would my experience have been any different if this was a model, a fake? Of course not. The point I’m trying to make is that without expert knowledge, trust in the establishment – the implicit text, if you like, behind any encounter with a museum artefact – is always going to inform your object-experience. It informs it to the extent that parameters such as authenticity become almost an irrelevance – surely, then, objects can’t intrinsically speak to you?

That said, I can’t entirely side with those who rejected the idea of objects outright. One can’t assume we live in a text-only world, and this is where I think book history makes an important point. Books (texts) are objects – even the ones on screens – and the form in which you encounter them can be every bit as prejudicial as with a relic in a museum. It can also be as moving – I once got to see the original Frankenstein notebooks, with Percy Shelley’s alterations and marginalia, and found it moving in exactly the same way I found the plesiosaur moving. The object-ness of Shelley’s book was informed by my prior knowledge of the impact of its contents – on me, on everyone – and of the lives of its creators. And just as books can be (and are) objects, even in examples far less extreme than this, objects are seldom totally devoid of text: whether it’s something as apparently innocuous as a catalogue number, or as comprehensive as a nearby placard with the artist’s entire life history on it.

The problem, for me, is that the object-text distinction simply doesn’t hold. It isn’t that I believe – as some did, on the course – that objects can never be useful, it’s just that I’m certain they won’t become more so if set up in opposition to the things we traditionally study. In other words, I think objects could definitely play a larger and useful role in some of the more text-oriented disciplines, but I don’t think that new ‘Theories and Methods’ would necessarily be required in order to accommodate that change. In the case of English, at any rate, I’m pretty sure you could get much further by coming to the museum-object in much the same way as the book-object.

And as with the book, there should always be a secret space for romance, when all the theory has died down. One of the other participants in LitSciMed chose Darwin’s cane for his talk. His two reasons for that choice, if my memory holds, were (1) its aesthetic properties relate to what we know of Darwin’s character in an interesting way, and (2) it gives us a physical reference point for the stories of Darwin loudly tapping it as he walked along. Both diverting points (and both contingent on outside text, you’ll notice), but I don’t believe for one second that these are the reasons the cane got chosen. This is justification after the fact. The cane got chosen because it was Darwin’s cane, and That Is Cool.

I study late-Victorian Science Fiction stories. I can make all kinds of arguments about why that’s a profitable use of my time. But in the end – in the beginning, too – there is no getting away from the fact that they’re pretty cool as well.

Absolutely splendid.

For all that he’s gazing off into the distance inspirationally in his byline pic, Monbiot just authored an extremely interesting article in the Guardian which I recommend you read here. If you can stomach the comments which follow it – and I should warn you before you try that one of the people in them is denying the existence of “anthropological global warming” – you do find some little gems. The one I’ve pasted above points towards an issue absolutely central to my research: ‘experts’ have to a greater or lesser extent in the public mind become a cohesive, coherent and (most importantly) discrete body. It never occurs to stesimbrotos that ‘experts’ could disagree; that different groups of them could predict different things or produce different data. Indeed, the joke in his question turns on the assumption that all experts speak with one voice, and the point behind the joke is that that voice makes no sense.

This is deeper than merely the commenter being an idiot (although they are). We conceive of institutions, peoples and nations as having individual identities (America wants nothing but oil, the English are bad at dancing, Tesco want to ruin a nice bit of Bristol) as a matter of necessary convenience. As long as part of us understands that these generalisations aren’t universally applicable, the system works. But whenever any of us do it – and we all need to do it – there’s a risk of solidifying these generalisations into tropes, which are much more dangerous. Take it away, George:

Popular mythology – from Faust through Frankenstein to Dr No – casts scientists as sinister schemers, harnessing the dark arts to further their diabolical powers. Sometimes this isn’t far from the truth. Some use their genius to weaponise anthrax for the US and Russian governments. Some isolate terminator genes for biotech companies, to prevent farmers from saving their own seed. Some lend their names to articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies, which mislead doctors about the drugs they sell. Until there is a global code of practice or a Hippocratic oath binding scientists to do no harm, the reputation of science will be dragged through the dirt by researchers who devise new means of hurting us.

The media’s constant willingness to use science as a shorthand authority figure – when the whole point of science is to refute the notion of the authority figure – is at the heart of what has created the ‘expert’ trope, the “Scientists say…” article. Monbiot writes about this unfortunate contradiction much better than I can, but from my perspective this passage also underlines the fact that the really dangerous thing about tropes is that a lot of them are right a lot of the time. There really are bad scientists out there – the media insistence on conflating all scientists into one authority figure has tarred reputable practitioners with the same brush.

Seen in this light, it becomes possible to read stesimbrotos’s comment as a confused cry for help (”Was this study done by the same experts?”) rather than as the triumphant cackle it was probably intended to be – it’s understandably confusing when the stereotypes you rely on to understand your world start to crack around the edges. For readers of a media dominated by, as Monbiot notes, humanities graduates with no understanding of (or inclination to understand) science, ‘experts’ simply means a group of bespectacled, labcoat-wearing nutters whose most important (and only final) defining characteristic is that they are not you. Division – the laying down of boundaries and the assumption of opposition accross them – is, as ever, at the bottom of all this.

But what has this got to do with Science Fiction? Well, you probably noticed Monbiot’s glancing reference to Frankenstein et. al. in my quotation above. He doesn’t dwell on it, because they are tropes too now, or ‘myths’ as he calls them. But of course the media doesn’t invent its own myths, however inadvisedly it may apply them – they are constructed across the breadth of culture, and turn up in fiction as often as they do in your newspaper. The difference is that the material conditions of your newspaper make long-term resonance virtually impossible, whilst fiction, locked in the secure vessel of the book, can hang around long enough to really get into people’s heads. Sci-fi stories have played a crucial role in manufacturing the various different images of scientists which persist today. The question which inevitably occurs, somewhat troublingly to a fan, is this: are they, then, part-responsible for the tropes which are causing such problems to the understanding of global warming today?

The answer to that question will be out in about three years and will be roughly 90,000 words long. But at the risk of jumping the gun, I suspect that it may be that it’s more complicated than that. One only has to look at how poorly understood Frankenstein or, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four are outside the sphere of literary criticism to come to two other conclusions – that science isn’t the only academic institution which has a bad relationship with public perception, and that literature might not be the only academic institution to benefit if it looked to improve its own.

Don’t worry, though – a large number of publishers over the years either haven’t read the book, or have been happy to disregard the trivial ‘fact’ that a seminal science fiction text doesn’t conform to one of science fiction’s seminal stereotypes. That’s why you can enjoy this image with me:

Some excellent soul or other has put an extraordinary number of the different covers of this book online for all to see. It’s a splendid idea, especially once you start using them to crunch stats. I can’t see any cylinders at all, for instance, whilst the tripods (the vehicles used by the martians once they reach the earth’s surface) form by far the largest subcategory of illustrations. The fourth largest category is “Screaming Humans Running at You“, which I particularly enjoy.

What’s interesting, though, is simply to look at the list in chronological order and see how each generation have attempted to market this extremely popular work in different (and similar) ways. I did a project on book covers as a master’s student – it’s a line of inquiry that I’ve more or less had to dispense with in this project. Most of the short stories I’m dealing with don’t have covers of their own, appearing as they do in periodicals. But it’s a fascinating way of thinking about books – how a cover frames your perceptions of a text – and I’d love to do something on it again one day.

I leave you with two more favourites from the collection. One is a favourite because it makes no sense whatsoever, the other because it makes a little too much sense… please enjoy.

I’ll blog more about my own project on here in the near future, but I just wanted to mention to any LitSciMedders who are active in the London area and interested in genre literature that the event happens fortnightly from now on and that all are welcome! Follow the action on our Seminar Blog!

There’s only one problem – I’m not very good at blitzing. How do I know this? This morning I spent some time with one of Mark’s books, only to realise – and, by the by, this is after a fairly significant amount of time – that it wasn’t one of Mark’s books. There’s another man called Mark Turner!

But here’s the thing. The other Mark Turner writes interdisciplinary stuff on literature, metaphor and cognitive science. It’s fabulously interesting, and very applicable to my work – in a more abstract way than ‘real’ Mark Turner’s stuff, but nevertheless there’s absolutely no way I can’t use him. My bibliography is going to be so confusing.

The only thought more disturbing than “I’m just not cut out for research” at this point is “maybe this is how all research is done”. It’s certainly the best way I’ve ever found new material, and as a personal failure it’s up there with Living For Three Days With The Guy Who Wrote One Of The Books Which Gave You The Idea For Your Project In The First Place And Not Noticing, which I have also done (Hi Martin).

So, Hawarden folk, here’s another book recommendation for you – Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1996). I also recommend Mark Turner’s ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’ (Media History, 8:2, 2002).

I have a friend here in Oxford called Mark Taylor. I spend my evenings sitting in darkened rooms, shivering.

If the possibilities to be realized are such and such, then a certain phrasing will be best. But note well the if here. Linguistic science can and will help us to see which phrasings will do what, but it cannot, as science, settle which possibilities are to be realized. As students of the humanities, we know this to be a deeper matter than any science, as yet, has explored; a matter of what man is and should be, of what his world is and should be, of what the God he should worship and obey is and should be. All this, the Scientist – linguistic or other – will admit to be beyond his purview as a Scientist. What is done and what can be done he can inquire into, but what should be done is not within his province. [all emphases original]

I pass on without any comment at all except to say that the last sentence of this same chapter is “[b]ut there is already in these Notes more than Literary Criticism itself may be expected to agree upon, let alone other Studies”. Oh, it’s endless.