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Reading to Understand The Past
When I read books i read to be transported back to a different time and a different way of thinking. That’s why i read James Bond books, among others. The books are old-fashioned but it is that obsolescence that makes them interesting.
They take us to a time before travel as we know it today. Imagine reading about being sun burned and sun oil. Imagine reading about speeding cars. Imagine reading about a time before road safety laws and speed limits. Imagine reading about when scuba diving was still exotic and more.
Recently people have been reading old books and destroying them by changing words and meanings. By editing books to be socially acceptable today we are behaving like the priest with a bell in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Do you remember the scene. Clang clang clang, insert a paper into the film reel where the kiss has to be spliced out.
The morality police isn’t splicing kisses or sex. It is neutralising gender, offensive terms and more. Words that make children giggle and laugh are being removed by grown ups.
They, the adults, see this as a social good but I don’t. In the age of Brexit, COVID denialism and a shift by political parties to the Far Right why are we worrying about books when the real social ill comes from what politicians are saying, of how populism is being used, to mislead people to vote against their own best interests?
A book is just a glimpse into the past and i am worried about the present.
My view on books is that we read them to understand how people saw the world before, whether from the 90s, the 50s or a century ago. We read Jane Austen A) because our English teacher told us to, but second to understand a different age and way of seeing the contemporary world. The world, contemporary to the writer, not to us.
I remember reading The Tiger that came to tea, thinking, “this is old fashioned and sexist” but that doesn’t stop me from reading it for a sibling’s offspring. Instead, it would be an opportunity for a well brought up child to say “but that tiger was not kind, that tiger was rude, and so was the dad when he came home.”
This brings me on to “All Creatures Great and Small”. “Oh I do wish you would pay attention” and more. Siegfried tells James off on a number of occassions for what he told James to do. James gets angry, but doesn’t say anything.
The issue with sensitivity readers is that they are moving on to adult books, with adult themes. James Bond is old fashioned, but if it is re-written then it loses some if its allure. I read James Bond while working in a humanitarian organisation. I knew that it was written in a different age, when people had different values and norms.
I worry about what contemporaries think, say and write, rather than what people wrote 60 to seventy years ago. The past is the past. Modern conversations, and modern books should reflect modern values. Will old films be re-edited to remove smoking? Will old films be edited for modern values?
Where will the line be drawn, on changing the past, to suit the views of people today?
And Finally
Roald Dahl was edited for modern audiences but the originals are still available, so you can have the “modern politically correct version” or the old fashioned historical version. Will you read the old fashioned version, and have a conversation about values, or read the sanitised version, and skip the conversation on morality and ethics?
The Bomber war – Documentary and book
When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.
While reading the Bomber War I also watched a French documentary available on curioisitystream called Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima“. It is a two-part documentary looking at bombing, from the experimental bombing of Guernica and the request for bombing not to target civilians to the bombing of London, Berlin and many cities in between. It takes a look at what motivated the change in bombing tactic.
By the end of the documentary, I thought that they should have addressed the cultural cost of bombing Europe. Plenty of beautiful old cities were destroyed in such a manner that we now travel to specific towns to see what Europe looked like before the Second World War and its bombing campaigns.
One sentence from the second documentary that may stick with you is that it was more dangerous to be in the bombers on their sorties than in the cities that were being bombed. This is due to the air defences, whether Flak, enemy fighters or mid-air collisions.
In the book, we read about the challenges of finding the way to the correct bombing site. They needed to navigate by the stars but also using dead reckoning. Eventually, both sides used beams to guide bombers to and from targets. If you’re interested in technology then the book is worth reading.
Although slightly off-topic the documentaries have some nice images from the war to give you a glimpse of how things looked at the time. It appears that some of the footage was colourised which is both a shame because it becomes a creative representation rather than accurate, and great because it brings certain images to life, making footage easier to interpret.
A topic that I had not come across until watching the second documentary is the dropping of Napalm on Japenese cities with more than 300,000 people, and then on cities of more than 100,000 people. You have images with a percentage of the cities that were destroyed by bombing.
Transmitting Photos by Phone
Recently I watched a 1930s film about how photographs were transmitted by phone. What makes this feature so interesting is that it is explained in a simple to understand manner, using, string that has an image, of all things. This is a clear explanation of how image sending works, but also how television and other technologies would work in year to come.
This is about the analogue sending of an analogue image. The image is scanned, “line by line” and sent via an electric current from the sender to the receiver of the image. On one side the scanner detects whether the image fragment is dark or light and the voltage changes accordingly. This is reflected on the other side to expose the film to reflect the image. Over the space of a few minutes the image gets sent from A to B, to be used in newspapers.
When sending an image as illustrated in the video the process is slow, but with time and technology advances television cameras would do the same thing, but rather than print an image they would send it to a Cathode Ray Tube(CRT) to be printed line by line. As the process sped up to 25 images per second for PAL and NTSC (Never the Same Colour;-) ) so the opportunities increased.
For those with twelve minutes to spare.
100 year of broadcasting.
Scotland’s Roman Wall – Tweet
When I started writing about the Roman civilisation in the summer of 1996 content was still new on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist and we still relied on books and encyclopedias. We still had to visit ruins and more. Today the web has matured to such an extent that you can find tweets about the Roman civilisation every day. This means that history is not updated when books or newspaper articles come out. It is updated on a weekly, or even hourly basis. The beauty of tweets, as opposed to blog posts or articles, is that you can share snippets of information, as you get them.
13 Minutes to the Moon
13 Minutes to the Moon is an interesting podcast dedicated to the Lunar Landings. This podcast, along with audiobooks, is interesting because they allow us not just to read the dialogues that took place but to hear what the controllers and astronauts heard.
At one point in Episode two, you hear two communications loops at once. It’s a shame that they didn’t balance the audio so that loop 1 was in one ear and loop 2 in the other. If they had done this then we could have heard the audio as mission controllers had heard.
The podcast is also interesting because it’s divided into twelve 50 minute podcasts so each topic is explored in depth. There is some overlap with the books I have read. For enthusiasts, this overlap is interesting as it allows them to fill in gaps in their knowledge.