Watchmen: the movie

Now that the official trailer is out (see above) I'm full of cautious hope about the quality of Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen. As 'Watchmen' Trailer to Comic Comparison at Ropeofsilicon.com shows, the colouring has a darker, metallic, Gotham City flavour compared to the book, but many of the scenes in the trailer have been storyboarded closely on the original, and it looks overall highly atmospheric. (The trailer leads with the nuclear accident that changes Jonathan Osterman into Doc Manhattan, the blue CGI character shown later).

The Hugo-winning Watchmen is, deservedly, a classic of graphic novels, that both celebrates and subverts the superhero genre. At one level, it's a whodunnit: a government operative is murdered by defenestration, and suspicion falls on his past associates, a disbanded alliance of generally dysfunctional costumed crimefighters. The scenario, however, is complex; it's set in an alternate 1985, in a world whose 1950s saw the beginning of two generations of costumed crimefighters using the usual mix of athleticism, martial arts and technology. This status quo has been shaken up by the 1960s creation of a genuinely superhuman hero, Doc Manhattan, whose godlike powers over matter and energy have enabled Nixon to win the Vietnam War and caused many subtle differences from our world such as a decline of petroleum economy (as he can synthesise unlimited lithium for batteries).

The storytelling is also complex. The main narrative is intercut in some places with that of a pirate comicbook, a form that dominates in this alternate world. It's interspersed with pastiche memoirs, case notes, monographs and features (for instance, on Max Shea, a leading comicbook artist who has gone missing). And in part it's told in a non-sequential stream-of-consciousness form from the viewpoint of Doc Manhattan, who sees all time segments simultaneously and whose increasing psychological estrangement from humanity becomes a major factor in the story. Furthermore, Watchmen is rich in verbal and visual cultural allusions (right from its titular reference to Juvenal's Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes) and is an extended exploration of the conflict between characters who apply radically different moral stances - such as uncompromising Biblical-style retribution, utilitarianism, and cynical nihilism - to the same aim of "doing good". Many of the characters are thinly-disguised heroes from Charlton Comics (a low-budget publisher that folded in 1986 after selling its characters to DC), and Watchmen can be read as an allegory of how superhero comics reflect the era of their creation, from naive two-fisted Golden Age heroes through more complex and flawed Silver Age reimaginings to postmodern angst.

All in all, it's a tour de force of the comicbook form that lives up to Alan Moore's intention to create "a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density". I'm certain that some of this complexity will necessarily be removed from the film. Nevertheless, the basic storyline appears to be faithfully followed. There's more on the whole movie project at Watchmencomicmovie.com, which has further photos. If you've read Watchmen, or don't mind spoilers, The Annotated Watchmen provides a concordance to its many allusions.
- Ray

Book Rant

Ooh ... another bookshop-based weblog! Check out The Book Rant .... Comments from a Bookshop Dog, coming from "a medium sized antiquarian bookshop in a cathedral town in the south of England". As it focuses, in Bookworm Droppings style, on the vagaries of customers, it's understandably anonymous. But I feel their pain, as many of the scenarios are not unfamiliar.
- Ray

Further beyond the woodshed

Further to Beyond the woodshed, a colleague just sent me a link to a fascinating paper, unfortunately in a controlled-access journal: Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars (Faye Hammill, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (2001) 831-854).

It's generally known that Stella Gibbons parodied various "loam and lovechild" novels for the 1932 Cold Comfort Farm, but as many of the source novels are little-read nowadays, the sheer extent and explicitness of that parody goes unnoticed. Faye Hammill's paper fills in that background, showing it to be "an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day" ... many of them books Gibbons reviewed for the Evening Standard ... "and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë".

Apart from such generalised connections, which also include George Eliot and the Powys brothers, Hammill identifies particularly explicit influences in the works of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. For instance, the scenario of the doom-laden farm and family comes straight out of Webb's 1920 The House in Dormer Forest, and the farming-obsessed Reuben Starkadder is clearly modelled on Reuben Backfield in Kaye-Smith's Sussex Gorse. Likewise, Gibbons' village sect, the Quivering Brethren, is very similar to the Colgate Brethren in Kaye-Smith's Susan Spray. The names Micah, Amos, and Agony appear to come from Harold Alfred Manhood's completely forgotten 1931 Gay Agony (I can't find this online, but Dashiell Hammett described it as "monstrously overwritten", Arnold Bennett said of it, "I await the next phase of Mr Manhood's talent with anxiety", and the Google Books keywords ...

Tobulus, Silla, Linah, Mistress Rue, Tampion, meadowsweet, splin, Seahouses, Goldcrest, cider, Coze, rhines, ramekins, taproom, Twas, pigeon's milk, Micah felt, costmary, marriage, Micah thought

... show clearly that it's in the kind of overblown faux-rustic idiom that Gibbons satirised. Another link is to Hugh Walpole's family saga set in the Lake District, the "Herries" chronicles, written in the early 1930s. Although the novels themselves have no close resemblance, Gibbons' spoof dedication to "Anthony Pookworthy", whose The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare she praises for its 100-page masterly analysis of a bilious attack, has a strong resemblance to Walpole's pompous dedication to JB Priestley at the beginning of Judith Paris.

The Hammill paper also analyses a number of reasons why Cold Comfort Farm, despite its popularity, had a relatively low status on the academic literary circuit. One, Hammill argues, is the until-recent general downgrading of female authors in appreciations of fiction in the inter-War years. Others are its tension with the genres of its time: its hostility toward the literary establishment (as in its dig at the Bloomsbury-style Mr Mybug - thanks to Beyond the Pale); its proto-feminism (in its heroine's rejection of Mybug's DH Lawrence view of women in primarily sexual and reproductive roles); and in its embracing of modernity. Rural-themed works of the period, such as Vita Sackville-West's poem The Land and Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, characteristically accepted rural England as a timeless fixture or lamented its passing (a stereotype that still persists - see Views of the countryside) whereas Gibbons' Flora improves the Starkadders' lives by bringing them into the modern world of motor-vans, boutiques, contraception, psychoanalysis, and cleaning dishes with a mop instead of a thorn twig.

If you have academic access, the paper is here. Otherwise, you may have to be content with Reggie Oliver's biography Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0747539952), which has a good discussion of the book's inspirations; many of his identifications appear in the Faye Hammill paper.
- Ray

Children's books and other controversy

The Independent just reported Rowling joins revolt over age banding for children's books" a big-name author seriously raising the profile of an ongoing protest at a publishers' scheme to categorise children's books by age. The No to Age Banding site hosted by Philip Pullman lists signatories and explains the problems: for instance, how such categorisation would affect marketing and packaging, perhaps deterring a child from reading books of merit. The issue, in any case, is a broader one of label, as discussed by Felix Grant at The Growlery (Juvenilia, feminism, love, and other labels); there is great merit in the view that "children's fiction" is itself a stultifying categorisation. Many nominally juvenile books, such as Louis Sachar's Holes, are good reading by any standard - see the previous post Holes and other non-juvenilia.

Via MetaFilter, The New Yorker recently had an interesting article on a controversy in the same territory. The Lion and the Mouse by Jill Lepore tells of the career of Anne Carroll Moore, a pioneering New York librarian who came to exert massive influence over US children's books, then largely published in New York. In some ways it was a positive influence: in the early 1920s she introduced multicultural books, along with open shelves and many of the now-standard formats that make libraries friendly to children, and instituted the reviewing of children's books in mainstream publications. The downside was that she imposed her own taste: as Jill Lepore puts it, "Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental". This eventually put her in head-on collision with the author EB White (who viewed her preferences as "mawkish, prudish, and daffy") leading to a showdown when she tried, unsuccessfully, to block his book Stuart Little. (Her stance seems daft in hindsight, but it needs to be remembered that the original book was not the same as the film - bizarrely, Mrs Little actually gives birth to Stuart the mouse).

The Lion and the Mouse touches on the age-banding issue, pointing out how many books now viewed as children's classics "Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Gulliver’s Travels or Huck Finn —were born as biting political satire, for adults" and argues that early 20th century writers and editors invented "children's literature" as a genre. I'm not sure how true that is overall; The Victorian Web's Children's Literature as a Victorian genre has plenty of links relating to the essentially didactic/moralistic genre fiction that targeted children in that period. The point of the non-childish nature of some such fiction is well-made, though; for example, Kingsley's The Water Babies is almost invariably abridged in modern imprints and adaptations, because the original is an intensely wacky Christian allegorical fantasy full of literary, cultural and scientific allusions way above heads of children. (More on this later maybe).

As to White, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, he wrote two other children's classics, Charlotte's Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. He was also one half of the Strunk & White, whose The Elements of Style has probably been the single most influential style guide for American writers in the 20th century. Like other century-old prescriptive guides, such as the relatively enlightened Fowler's Modern English Usage, Strunk & White is coming under increasing criticism nowadays, I think rightly, for advice that doesn't reflect real usage and, in some areas, doesn't seem particularly good stylistic advice and even disobeys its own rules. Language Log has regular snipes at it, where academic linguists have variously described it as a "stupid little book", a "horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices" and "a self-help book for social climbers".

- Ray

Someone that doesn't write anything?

The newspapers are currently full of the story of how, allegedly, Markers award students for writing obscenities on GCSE papers. The main point has been well thrashed out (it seems to gone unnoticed by those so outraged that even being awarded marks, the result for the student who only wrote "f*** off!" was still a resounding Fail). But I was particularly interested in one of the linguistic points mentioned by Arnold Zwicky at Language Log (Test obscenity, taboo avoidance, and prescriptivism): the subsequent criticism of chief examiner Peter Buckroyd for commenting "It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all" (as opposed to "someone who").

The idea that using "that" for persons is an error is a common language peeve, and Zwicky goes into its role as a piece of usage mythology. He notes that it's a usage that MWDEU demonstrates to be standard" ... see the citations under That 2 on page 895, which show the objection to be, typically for this sort of thing, a concoction by 18th century grammarians ... "and which even Paul Brians, in Common Errors in English Usage, classifies as 'non-errors'". In case of objections that these are US sources, a quick skim of English literature finds examples going way back.

*"the man that handleth the scorpion" (Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales)
* "a woman that feareth the Lord" (Proverbs 31:30, King James Bible)
* "Then I saw the Man that sat upon the cloud" (John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress)
* "The man that hath no music in himself" (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
* "While I stood thus amusing the Lady that was with me" (Daniel Defoe, Roxana)
*"The Lass that Made the Bed to Me" (Robert Burns)
* "He, the most excellent Man that can be imagined" (Jane Austen, Plan of a Novel)
* "I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to old Fagin's" (Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist)
* "The lady that was here last night" (Charles Dickens, Bleak House)
*"The Woman that Lives without Eating" (Rev. AD Milne)
* "The Man that was Used Up" (Edgar Allan Poe)
* The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (Mark Twain)
*"HMS Pinafore; or, The Lass that Loved a Sailor" (Gilbert & Sullivan)
* "The man I want to meet is the man that Candida married" (George Bernard Shaw, Candida)
* "The Girl That I Marry" (Irving Berlin)
*"she was also someone that millions of girls living hum-drum lives loved to identify with" (Betty Grable obituary, The Times, Wednesday, Jul 04, 1973).

With so many examples in prestigious sources, "that" for persons can hardly be called wrong. It may be a minority usage, but that can be tested. It's one of the many neat features of Google that nowadays corpus analysis is within anyone's grasp. There's bound to be some degree of bias: online sources naturally under-represent recent in-copyright books, and it may be impossible to separate out hits that don't cover the context required (in this situation, "that" as a relativizer). But as a rough-and-ready test, it's easy to get a broad idea of the frequency of usages: for instance

Global: "someone that" 18.2m / "someone who" 97.7m / 1:5.36
UK: "someone that" 0.647m / "someone who" 5.53m / 1:8.55

"That" as a relativizer for people, then, appears rather less common in the UK than globally, but descriptively speaking, it's still well within normal variation.
- Ray

Immortality through song

I was just browsing The Complete Newgate Calendar at the Tarlton Law Library's online Law in Popular Culture collection, a 1926 reprint of the venerable Newgate Calendar, a periodical/book series dating from around 1760 that was designed to edify the reader by reporting the lives and downfall of notorious criminals.

Volume I contains the account of Patrick Flemming, an Irish highwayman hanged in 1650 (his history of murder and mutilation hardly makes him a romantic figure). However, he became the subject of a contemporary "goodnight ballad" (a broadsheet format taking the form of a last confession, or sometimes statement of bravado) called Patrick Fleming and beginning "Patrick Flemming was a Vallient Soldier". A number of the lines - see the lyrics here at the Folklore Home Page, California State University, Fresno - give a clue...

As I was going over Ruberry mountain,
Gold and silver there was counting
He thought it little I thought it better,
I took the Gold from Colonel Pepper.

... that this is a precursor to the popular folksong, Whiskey in the Jar, an identity that crystallises in a mid-1800s version called The Sporting Hero (see the Bodleian library catalogue - Firth c.17(314), Bentley, J. (Bradford) - and scan).

From that point, the song flourished, its anti-establishment flavour giving similar appeal in the USA where there's a Vermont variant about "Lovel the Robber" and a Massachusetts one about an Irish-American robber "McCollister" hanged by the British. Over a century later it was freshened by the classic early 1970s rock version by Thin Lizzy, which in turn was covered as a Metallica version. Quite apart from the many other mainstream English pop and folk versions, it has since gone into Danish (thx for correction!) as the Lars Lilholt Band's Gi' mig whiskey in the jar, the Norwegian Svikefulle Mari popularised by Lillebjørn Nilsen - and even got into the Finnish humppa genre, a semi-comic ultra-fast foxtrot style based on German oompa bands, as Eläkeläiset's Humppamaratooni (which I confess I find has a bizarre Pogues-like charm). Further afield, you can find Roast Pork, a Japanese punk band playing it for St Patrick's Day in Nagoya.

It's a nice example of how a successful meme can propagate through history, and I'm sure the lineage will continue.
-Ray

Newman & Byrne: alternate histories

In Beyond the Woodshed, I mentioned the generally unexplored point that Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm is set in what has now become an alternate history, a 1950s with videophones, routine use of aeroplanes for personal transport, and past "Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46". I like the alternate-history genre a lot, and tidying the office, I found a book I'd forgotten, Back in the USSA by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman (Mark V. Ziesing, 1997, ISBN 0929480848).

Back in the USSA is a paste-up of a cycle of stories taking as its premise the idea that the 1917 Communist revolution took place not in Russia, but in the USA, led by activists such as Eugene V Debs. The scene is set by In the air placing Buddy Holly in the 1989 Soviet America, followed by a series of vignettes, Ten Days that Shook the World, telling the course of the revolution 1921-1917. Other stories include Teddy Bears' Picnic, a dig at the tropes of the US Vietnam War mythos by showing English comic characters conscripted to a British Indochina war; in this reality, Apocalypse Now becomes a very English It Aint' Half Hot, Mum ("I love the smell of burning flesh in the morning; it reminds me of cooked breakfast!"). Citizen Ed (1945-1984) tells the story of Ed Gein, who is allowed to continue his activities because, as in the real-world Soviet Union, serial killers officially don't exist. Abdication Street (1972) is a Tsarist retelling of the Charles-Diana wedding, and On the Road (1998) is a Kerouac-style journey through a post-Communist America satirizing the tycoon Robert Maxwell.

The tone is mixed, from outright comic to serious; but it's hard to take 100% seriously a work that cheerfully mixes real-world characters such as L Ron Hubbard, McCarthy, Capone and Lindbergh with fictional ones such as The Waltons, Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath, the Likely Lads, Nigel Molesworth and Pavel Chekhov. It's further lightened by many in-jokes and cameos, such as Kenneth Halliwell as a successful agent with Joe Orton as his wannabe-playwright assistant, and a Hitchcock film called Nutter, set in Skegness, starring Margaret Rutherford and a Lithuanian unknown called Larushka Skikne (Hitchcock's career suffers because he is never forgiven for the scene in which Sylvia Sims is murdered in a bathing-machine). The overall flavour, then, is satire in which the reversal holds up a mirror to real-world history.

If you like this kind of alternative-history-meets-pastiche, the journalist and novelist Kim Newman excels at it. I also recommend his series of Dracula novels, starting with Anno Dracula, which plays out Victorian and post-Victorian history along a timeline where Count Dracula, not Prince Albert, became the Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. See The Official Kim Newman Web Site for background. Newman and Byrne also maintain an Alternate History Pages site, where they keep notes and material relating to a projected series, The Matter of Britain, set in a Nazi-dominated Britain. It's not a new premise (compare Brownlow & Mollo's film It Happened Here, Len Deighton's SS-GB, Keith Roberts' short story Weihnachtsabend, Robert Harris' Fatherland, and many many others - see The World Hitler Never Made). However, their take ought to be worth reading if Byrne's The Glimmer Man is anything to go by (a story about Nazi-occupied Britain from the viewpoint of Bristol inhabitants, commmissioned for Bristol's bid for European Capital of Culture 2008).

A good many Kim Newman stories are online elsewhere: see the links at Wikipedia for stories set in a variety of alternate histories (some possibly offensive): Coppola's Hearts of Darkness with vampires; the McCarthy witch-hunts actually hunting witches; a Hollywood history as it might have developed - with well-known classics as grossly sexual explicit versions compared to the ones we know - if there had been no Arbuckle scandal leading to the Hays Code; and so on.

- Ray

Knots ... or not?

Living in a town with a maritime history, I notice a lot of nautical memorabilia about. One that baffles me, however, is a wall display of knot examples I've seen in various places that looks like the one here. It's kind of interesting, but even more so when you look closely at the captions. The knots are called "Ships Knot, Grapnel Knot, Sapajou Knot, Timber Knot, Deck Knot, Carrick-Bend Knot, Simple Knot, Fist Knot, Flat Knot, Double-Timer Knot, Eight-Ring Knot, Chasis Knot, and Piscalory Knot".

The strange thing is that almost none of them appear to be the correct names. The creators have got the Carrick bend correct, but they call the figure-of-eight knot a "timber knot", the bowline a "chasis knot", the reef knot a "flat knot", the overhand knot (aka thumb knot) a "simple knot", the fisherman's knot a "piscalory knot" (which looks like a stab at "piscatory" = pertaining to fishing), and something similar to a capuchin knot (aka blood knot or multiple overhand knot) a "sapajou knot". The last is actually explicable; a sapajou is a monkey of the genus Cebus, also called capuchin monkey, although the capuchin knot - see Dunc's shed - is named for its use on the cord of a monk's robe.

I've no idea where these display boxes originate; I assume overseas, as one supplier mentions they're Fair Trade items. But I'd love to know exactly how these misnomers were cooked up. Machine translation? Complete invention? It's slightly odd that anyone with enough knowledge of English to invent plausible - even erudite in some cases - false names couldn't go to the trivial effort of finding the real ones.

Addendum: in a lovely example of the kind of ultra-specialised study that the Internet allows sharing, check out Noeud de Franciscain and Noeud de Capucin, in which Charles Hamel (aka Nautile), explores the confusion between two very similar knots, the Capuchin and Franciscan, with examples as depicted in paintings and statues. The same knot, used presumably for its property of creating a node in a cord while keeping it straight, was the basis of the Incan quipu (aka khipu), a data storage medium using knotted string, used for bureaucratic recording and communication: more on this at the Harvard University Khipu Database Project.

- Ray

Addendum: 

Duncan commented:

I wonder if they knot boards are cheap chinese products with the usual shocking translations? It seems funny that a knot as common as the Bowline could be so badly misnamed!

Thanks for the blog link!

Cheers,
Duncan.

And  Andrew commented:

The blood knot is not a synonym for the capucin knot. It's a bend with two ropes involved, and neither rope passes back through its coils in the way the capucin knot does. I was curious about your reference on this, but the linked page seems not to be working.

While mis-naming of knots is common, as often as not, knots have multiple names from different uses and historical contexts.

The flat knot is pretty much the same thing as the reef knot. It's a name used widely in macrame, a nautical tradition from much the same time and ships as the reef knot. The flat knot is usually continued on with half knots (like overhand knots, except for the usage) alternating as the sinnet is formed.

It's much the same thing as the distinction between the overhand knot and the marline hitch, where the latter name makes no sense if there's nothing being hitched to. Also compare the carrick bend and the double coin knot, which is almost exactly the same kind of distinction as with the flat knot and reef knot.

Lots of knots have the same forms but different uses. Different names make sense, saying more than you could without them. The carrick bend and the double coin knot have the exact same form in terms of where the ropes go, but confusing the two could cost lives. Much the same is true of the reef knot and the granny knot, except that the reef knot should not be used where lives are at stake.

Disclaimer: I know enough to spot some of your errors, but probably not enough to be entirely error free myself.

July 4th and invented traditions

As may have been evident from the previous posts Unsung scientists and Views of the countryside, I very much enjoy iconoclastic analysis of history. A particular rich lode arises from July 4th and its annual (understandably) adulatory focus on the iconic events of the founding and formative years of the USA (for instance, The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence).

As an interesting antidote, check out the website of James W Loewen, a sociologist who has written a number of books on how American history is distorted in various media such as monuments and textbooks. I have a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me, whose target is US school textbooks. They won't tell students that Helen Keller was a Communist. They often omit a major war, King Philip's War. They won't show that the term of office of Woodrow Wilson, remembered as an enlightened and moderate president, involved more invasions of other countries than any other period of US history. Loewen's website has an on-line quiz, with surprising answers.

The book covers American history from ancient to modern: the now well-known history of Pre-Columbian colonisation; the mythology surrounding the first Thanksgiving; the Indian Wars; the invisibility in textbooks of America's racist past; the similar invisibility of anti-racist movements; and modern history such as poverty in the 20th century and the acts of Federal government, particularly destabilisation of elected foreign regimes. Throughout, Loewen argues, textbooks either omit facts or present them in a pro-mainstream light; students will never be told that mainstream America, in its historical past, did anything that was less than perfect, or even morally wrong. Meanwhile, they miss out on real history that is, if anything, more remarkable than the official version, such as Squanto, whose travels "make Ulysses look like a homeboy".

Loewen's second book also looks interesting: Lies Across America, examples of how monuments celebrate non-existent history - rather as Jebediah Springfield in The Simpsons is commemorated as killing a bear, although "modern historians recently uncovered evidence that the bear, in fact, probably killed him" (see The Telltale Head transcript). Loewen's Top Ten Silliest Historical Sites has examples such as the Indian massacre that never happened and the log cabin birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, built 30 years after his death.

The work of historian Ray Raphael is in the same vein. Without denying the remarkable history behind the origins of the USA, his book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past shows how those origins have been mythologised through iconic representations. For instance, John Trumbull's 1818 painting The Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776 shows a presentation that never took place (see The Art of War: an illustrated '1776'), and Leutze's painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware shows a flag that didn't exist at the time of the 1776 event depicted. Other examples include Paul Revere's Ride (whose reality has become buried in the fictional Longfellow version), Patrick Henry’s "liberty or death" speech, the "shot heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord, Sam Adams and Molly Pitcher, of which none appear to have been viewed as of contemporary significance. Raphael argues that such myths, while culturally understandable, are actually destructive, in encouraging people to think of history as shaped by a handful of superhuman figures rather than collective action of the people, the ideal on which the USA was founded. The book's introduction is online, and there's a July 4th 2007 interview, American Mythbuster, at AmericanHeritage.com.

Incidentally, this is not an anti-American post. This kind of invented tradition is common to all history that relates to cultural identity, and July 4th merely highlights it for the case of the USA. Examples in the UK would be the reinvention of the British Royal Family as the House of Windsor since 1917, and the cultural fixtures stereotypical to Scotland - kilts, bagpipes, and family-specific tartans (see The Highland myth as an invented tradition of 18th and 19th century and its significance for the image of Scotland). Nevertheless, the USA, with its strong patriotism and tightly-focused founding period based on memorable revolutionary events, seems especially prone to such mythologising.

- Ray

Encyclopaedic thoughts

I very much like old encyclopedias of the 1800s to early 1900s. At home we have The Popular Educator, John Cassell's dour but massively influential 1850s instructional encyclopedia (the full text is online at Google Books); Cassell's Book of Knowledge; and Arthur's Mee's eclectic and rambling Children's Encyclopedia. At best, these make excellent reading for their broad and clear presentations of the knowledge of a particular period. However, as Imagination in Education points out, their considerable artistic and instructional flair often comes with a certain amount of dated moralising and even propaganda, as in this extract.

Before the German Empire was shorn by the Paris Peace Conference - east, north, and east - the map of Germany was not unlike the picture of a stupid helmeted giant, sprawling on all-fours, with a pygmy master on top. Prussia made up the body and head, with Berlin at the heart, and its ore and grain-bearing province of Silesia, stolen long ago from Austria, as creeping arms and hands. Schleswig, filched in 1864 from Denmark, pictured the Hohenzollern masters; while the South German States and Alsace-Lorraine formed an undefined but important lower part

This excruciatingly hostile description leads the Germany and its people article in Cassell's Book of Knowledge, an encyclopaedia for children, ed. Harold FB Wheeler, The Waverley Book Company, London (early 1920s).

The problem of bias and accuracy in encyclopedias is an ongoing issue. I was reminded of the above passage on reading this opinion piece, The Wisdom of Crowds, by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He is, unsurprisingly, highly optimistic about its possibilities. This view has been challenged on various fronts. For instance, Wiki wars talks about the problems of vandalism. Or there was the fallout from the notorious "Seigenthaler incident" where an entry libelled John Seigenthaler Sr by falsely associating him with the Kennedy assassination (see his own account, A false Wikipedia 'biography'). The accuracy issue was, furthermore, highlighted in 2006 when, as described in A thirst for knowledge, Nature conducted a study comparing selected articles from Wikipedia with those on the same topics in Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Wikipedia itself has an extensive selection of quotes on its reliability).

My two cents on the matter (everyone has them so why not?): I'm not sure any of these tackles one of the more besetting problems with Wikipedia: active contributor bias. I very much doubt any regular good-faith contributor can have failed to run into articles that are either a permanent battleground, or completely gridlocked, because of "SPAs" (single-purpose accounts) - editors whose sole purpose on Wikipedia is to spin an article to their preferred view of the world, and argue at length with all comers in favour of that spin. It can happen anywhere, but it's particularly common in articles relating to controversial topics in religion, politics, medicine, science, biography, and so on. It's often associated with behaviours such as "wikilawyering" (nitpicking at length about the rules) and other obfuscation tactics. This, not general vandalism, I would say is the most serious and time-consuming irritation in editing Wikipedia, and probably the one most responsible for driving away good editors (in large part because Wikipedia's mechanisms for restricting or removing tendentious editors are slow and cumbersome). If there were one improvement I could make by waving a magic wand, it would be to install rapid procedures for banning troublemakers.

Part of the problem is Wikipedia's success. Nowadays, Google for a term - say "cat" - and Wikipedia will be one of the top hits. This privileged search placement means that it is a major vehicle for shaping worldwide what is known about a topic. Not unnaturally, this makes it inevitably a battleground, and Wikiscanner shows what's probably the tip of the iceberg.

If you enjoy "Wikidrama", the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard makes for compelling reading; there's a steady stream of quite well-known people caught out in completely crass attempts to game the system. If you see people elsewhere on the Web whining about being ill-treated by Wikipedia, it's always worth checking out the Talk pages of relevant Wikipedia articles. Maybe they were wronged like John Seigenthaler Sr; or maybe they were rightly slapped down for self-promotion and for behaving disruptively on being found out.

Despite such issues, other encyclopedias are moving toward their own modifications of the Wikipedia format, primarily by introducing some form of editorial oversight. Even mainstream encyclopedias look likely to move into the territory: Wired recently reported Encyclopaedia Britannica To Follow Modified Wikipedia Model. However, Citizendium was probably the first, founded by Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, who in 2007 described Wikipedia's organisational model as "broken beyond repair". Citizendium's differences from Wikipedia include a two-tier contributor system where "authors" are overseen by "editors", and all are required to identify themselves. Personally I like the idea; though Clay Shirky, in Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise, argues that Sanger's view of expertise is mistaken; also it's a matter of observation that the effort to spin is by no means removed by revelation of identity. It doesn't take much work to find articles where Wikipedia refugees - ones who left or were ejected because they couldn't/wouldn't work under its neutrality policies - are now editing Citizendium.

As to Wikipedia, I do find it useful (some articles are excellent) but I have some sympathy with the school librarian who put up a "Just Say No to Wikipedia" sign. It's good for a quick overview of a topic and getting an idea of what the basics are and where to look. But it also requires a strongly critical (paranoid even) attitude to the origins of an article, where you need to take a hard look at the article history, discussion page and even contributor histories to see if there are ongoing editorial disputes or contributors with known/likely bias.
-Ray