Are we ancient or medieval?

in

A while ago, I wrote about the Persian Wars, where Greece kept itself independent of Persia.  We tend to look back to the democratic Athenian state of roughly 500-400 BCE, which owned its survival to those successful wars, as the source of our own democracy.  But how true is that?  Almost no Athenian political practice, from 500-person juries to election by lot, from one-year terms of office to ostracism, makes it into our own system.  It all vanished under Macedonian domination after 330 BCE or so.  Macedonian domination was replaced by Roman domination, and then the Eastern Roman Empire.  Does anyone see any trace of Athenian democracy in Byzantium? I sure don't.

Most of what we recognize as our democratic institutions are really graftings of revived Roman Republican rhetoric onto political practices with medieval origins, like 12-person juries and Parliament.  I don't particularly care for the Middle Ages, but realize that much more of my civilization grows out of that Christian, multifocal, continental civilization than from Rome, much less Greece.

Some of the Greek emphasis comes out of philhellenic propaganda from the wars of Greek Independence, in the early 19th century.  Greece had been ruled by Moslem Turks since the fall of Byzantium.  A nationalist independence movement had to hearken back to some unifying idea.  Now, it's not as if Greece had been of no interest to scholars--opera itself, a mainstay of European culture for centuries, was invented in imitation of what Renaissance revivalists supposed Greek choral odes had been.  Greek thought was everywhere.  But as a popular touchstone for your political system?  Not so much.

That war of Greek independence, the one in which Byron romantically died, led to western Europeans identifying their own culture with that of Greece, and their opponents the Turks with the ancient Persians.  History is never just "what happened", but how what happened speaks to who we think we are.  When we see the Persian Wars now, it has some of that conflict annealed invisibly onto it.  And that conflict itself was never as straighforward as European propagandists, anxious to pick up pieces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, would have had it.

This does have an influence over what we think is "interesting" history to read about, and what we don't.  It's inevitable.  We just need to be aware of it.

Where are our media drones?

in

Todays NYT has a story about difficulties in getting permission for media overflights of the BP spill area.  Here's something I've been wondering for some time:  why doesn't someone invest in drones for use by media organizations?

That might not work here, of course, because there might be yet other restrictions on their use. But you certainly could use them for disaster coverage, and imagery from regions too violent for journalists on the ground.

This is a limited capability, no substitute for close observation, but it would seem profitable in a variety of areas:  people pay for fast footage of earthquakes, fires, and other natural disasters.  Feeds from Somalia, Burma, or Zimbabwe might not be in such high demand, but still would be useful to someone.

Anyone have a line on a used Predator?

Punitive green

in

I appreciate efforts to be environmentally sensitive.  But is it really necessary to go to the lengths of banning shopping carts at grocery stores?

Look what it says right under the picture of the evil shopping cart: "Shopping carts make us buy more stuff than we can carry home."

I knew there were evil forces abroad in the land, but I had not suspected the depths of depravity to which they could sink....

This is just silly. So, if you are a busy parent with several children, you are right out of luck in Sydney, Australia, which is implementing such a ban. I buy many of my groceries by bicycle, and can testify that dealing with gallons of milk, cereal boxes, and things like toilet paper and paper towels, can be a real pain. And if you have a number of people to feed and clean up after...the Sydney city council must be mostly single people.

This is why normal people think green activists are oppressive, clueless jerks. The backlash is going to be ferocious. Is that really what we want?

How old is your evil child?

in

Here, free to a good home, is a possible study for literary sociology: an analysis of writers who wrote "evil child" fiction, and how old their oldest child was when the stories and books were written.  You know the kind: beautiful, normal-seeming child either suddenly turns evil, or is revealed to be evil all along. People are impaled, other children tortured. The world might even be at risk?

My hypothesis? Their oldest child had just reached adolescence. Your nice, sweet, adorable offspring is suddenly demanding, angry, duplicitous, independent, and utterly irritating. For a writer, life isn't just life, it's material. You can channel your despair ("this is the result of evil forces beyond my control") while simultaneously giving a sort of comfort ("it's not your fault").

Most writers are really pretty lazy, so domestic situations are a natural. You don't even have to get up from the kitchen table (except maybe to pick your demon-possessed offspring up from the police station).

Of course, I am much too lazy to back this up with serious statistical research. But if someone is looking for a thesis topic in modern competitive academia and want to do it using a kind of literature you already read for fun, this might be a good one.

Just mention me in your acknowledgements.

"Ball lightning" may manipulate your brain

in

For centuries there have been occasional accounts of free-floating spheres of light, sometimes destructive, that occur during thunderstorms.  These are one of those mysterious phenomena people like to spend a lot of time speculating on.

I always figured they were something like afterimages of lightning flashes, narratively exaggerated in the confusion of dangerous storms.

But a story in New Scientist indicates that they may be actual brain effects, with strong fluctuating magnetic fields resulting in electric fields that cause neurons to fire through transcranial magnetic stimulation.  A fast series of lighting return strokes can actually manipulate your brain into seeing something that's not there.

By this theory, ball lightning isn't real, but it's not made up either.  It's a shared brain effect caused by magnetic fields. A camera would show nothing.

Charming, though I don't believe it. But it's interesting to think what other effects might result from shared manipulation of neurons, and what the cultural effects might be if it happened with fair frequency.

My online friendship deficiencies

in

Nowhere are my personal deficiencies more clearly exposed than in trying to manage our now ubiquitous social media. Most people I know are on Facebook and participate avidly.  They have Twitter feeds.  They up and downvote things, write comments on blogs, post photos on Flickr, and, in general, polymorphously interact with huge numbers of other people.

To me, it all seems a little too much like work. I open up Facebook.  Tiny faces of various people I know, have met, or have confused with someone else appear, with their pert comments on their meals, their flight delays, their opinions on global warming, their daily word count. And below each of those are people responding to those comments, with an affirmation or an additional observation...it makes me tired just thinking about it.

I know I need to do participate, if only for professional reasons ("Hey!  Buy my book!"), but even with that brute goad, I do it only reluctantly and fitfully.  Today, for example, was a beautiful day, so I worked in my garden and read a book outside. I even dozed off in the sun. I'm telling you, because I'm making a point, not, like, actually telling you that I worked in my garden today, because that doesn't actually tell you much of anything--except that I was out of contact with everyone except my immediate family.  I might have answered the phone (landline, if you must know) if you called me, but not even a guarantee of that.  I did have a fight with my wife about money, so perhaps I should skip that immediate family thing too. It doesn't always work out that well.

Many people my age, and significantly older, are participating fully, so I don't even have my advanced years as an excuse.

So what gives? A mandarin disdain for current trends? An eye to the eternal? Smug, above-it-all arrogance?  Early signs of Alzheimer's?

Any and all of those things may be true, but the real reason is laziness.  Modern society is just too demanding. I love you all, really I do. But save your news for your annual Christmas letter.  If you send it a few months late, as is only proper, I might have time to get to to it.  How interesting about Junior's new braces!  Sorry about the job!  My, haven't they grown!

That's really about my speed.

Buying virtue with technology

in

We don't own slaves, and none of us are slaves. This is an unambiguous good.

But when you look back at history, slavery was pretty much universal. Sometimes subsets of slaves became incredibly weird and powerful, like Janissaries and Mamelukes, but some institution of bound labor was something everyone had as part of their cultural toolkit. Many variations existed, from house slaves that were able to behave more like servants, to field slaves that might work side by side with a small farmer--even Ulysses S. Grant did this, in his farming days.

And brutal large enterprises, like the latifundia of late Republican Rome that Tiberius Gracchus used as justification for his reforms or Athenian silver mines, used slaves up without mercy.

Anything that benefits us can be found to have a moral justification. If we don't have property we define property as theft. Once we have property to defend, our attitudes mysteriously change. Most of us like comfort, security, and pleasure, and become enormously resentful if some change threatens this arrangement. And in history, comfort, security, and pleasure were rare enough to be worth fighting for savagely, and accepting the enslavement of others to achieve.

And now? Who needs hewers of wood and drawers of water to be comfortable? Our thermostat turns on the furnace, and water comes right out the tap at the right temperature. Vacuum cleaners clean better than a brigade of maids with feather dusters and brooms, cars take us places faster and more comfortably than a sedan chair or coach, washing machines keep our cotton and synthetic clothes cleaner and more comfortable to wear than any handwashing of linen and wool.

And owned human beings require food, lodging, and care. They get sick, they get old, they get violent, they try to run away. They're high maintenance. Russian nobles often had serf orchestras. Much cheaper to buy some speakers and download some mp3s.

SF novels where slavery returns in some form seem to think that oppression is the point. They contend that people own slaves to express their power. Pushing other people around can be fun and emotionally satisfying for a certain type of individual, but this is quite secondary to the comfort and service they provide. Slaves that can't make your life physically more comfortable are a too-expensive luxury.

So if we look back at history and congratulate ourselves for our relative virtue, we haven't really earned it.  Really, to consider ourselves virtuous, we should all be saints compared to people from past centuries. But I doubt that ethics classes indicate that the most powerful force for good behavior toward others is the one that brings us microwave popcorn and HD TVs.

The pleasures of peer review

in

I just got back from Rio Hondo, a writer's workshop run by Walter Jon Williams and Maureen McHugh, in the mountains above Taos, New Mexico. Rio Hondo is a peer workshop, where a group of writers (12 in this case) get together to read and critique each others' work.

I don't know if other genres have such workshops, but they are very much a part of the culture of science fiction and fantasy, starting, I think, with Milford, started by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in the 60s. Most writers I know were indoctrinated early, at Clarion, a workshop where students spend some weeks with a succession of instructors.  I never went to Clarion, though I had a friend in college who did. At that time, I had no interest in becoming a writer. That just happened as I got older, and by the time I realized it was a big part of my identity it seemed too late.

Plus, like many of you, I am not a joiner, and like to pretend I am not affected by trends. Nevertheless, given my spotty career, I was pleased to be invited to this one, and had a great time. Many of the attendees like to cook, and Rio Hondo is known for the quality of the food. Plus, it's up in the mountains, with some great hiking trails. I can't sit still for that long, and afternoon hikes kept me balanced.

I have never intimately involved in the science fiction community, so it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, all whip-smart and a pleasure to be around. Aside from Walter Jon and Maureen, attendees were Daniel Abraham,  Karen Joy Fowler, Ty Franck, James Patrick Kelly, David D. Levine, Kristin Livdahl, Ben Parzybok, Diana Rowland,  and Jennifer Whitson (who writes as Jen Volant).

I'm used to getting up early, but Diana was always up before me and got the best seat, by the window, every morning.  She also makes a mean chicory coffee. 

I'm pleased to carry on a writing career while working full time, but Ben and Maureen do the same while running companies, and having to take meetings and resolve other issues during the course of the workshop.  Diana and Daniel had deadlines, and worked on their books. I just ate, hiked, and talked. David and Jen are both intellectual resources on areas of interest to me (interface design and organizational behavior, respectively), and were willing to share their knowledge. Ty has a intimate grasp of every part of popular culture, and one evening gave a bravura performance characterizing every nationality's favored form and style of horror movie. Walter Jon led our hikes and managed the rest of our affairs.  Karen told stories of workshops and Hollywood.  Kristen educated us about animals and their humans (she runs a pet adoption agency). And Jim Kelly was as charming as a ruthless story doctor can be.

Believe me, it takes some nerve to use up the time of these 11 people on your story.

It was a pleasure to spend time with everyone. Maybe this will get me back into this world a bit more.  I'm sure you will be seeing  the work we read here, and all of it will be worth your time.

Memories of Murder

A few days ago I watched a South Korean serial killer movie called Memories of Murder. It was reminiscent of the recent American film Zodiac in that it was not glamorous or clear--no taunting, no profiling, just a painful mystery, as one woman after another is killed.

It's set in rural Korean in the mid-80s. It starts with a couple of local cops, provincials more used to rousting drunks and beating up political protestors than with investigating a serious crime. Evidence is trashed, and suspects are picked up because of rumors and gossip.

And these guys are thugs, though its just regular. There is one vivid scene where, after beating a poor mentally handicapped suspect up repeatedly, they sit with him and watch a popular Korean detective show.

A big city cop shows up--and shows them that the murder they are looking at is only one of a series. The movie is excellent on the dailiness of it all. The local cop really does want to solve this crime--he works hard to collect histories and pictures of anyone possibly connected--but he just doesn't know how to go about it.

The background is cement factories, long dirt roads, small restaurants with TVs, a rural school. I particularly liked the dailiness. It's rare to feel that the detectives are part of the world they are investigating.

It gets a good rating from me:  much character stuff worth emulating here.

The spotlight of history

in

Regular readers know that I read a lot of history. I like to think it helps my fiction, but it's always been a favorite form of reading for me.

I've recommended some fun reads in past months, and readers have appreciated those recommendations.  But not all periods of history, not even all significant periods, with big events and big effects, are popular as topics for books.  In Greek history, for example, you've got the Persian invasion, the Peloponnesian War, and the artistic production of the fifty years in Athens that lie in between those two periods.

I recently decided to learn Greek history more broadly, and picked up The Ancient Greeks, a critical history, by John V. A. Fine.  It is specifically a history of politics and events--he explicitly says he's not the one to go to for art, literation, philosophy, etc.  So that's a distinct lack. But if you want to get the entire picture--or as much of it as we have, this is a good way to get it. Just don't expect a quick, entertaining read.

And that "as much of it as we have" is key to Fine's method, as he tells the reader in the preface:

My aim has been not to produce a smoothly flowing narrative which can lull a reader into unthinking acceptance of the views presented, but to try to make him think. One should never forget that we, as our predecessors were, are constantly being misled because we accept too readily the views that have become sacrosanct through tradition. A history which does not constantly cause one to reflect on what he is reading and to be cognizant of the nature and ambiguities of the evidence is hardly performing the function that a historical work should

The book covers from the earliest days until the Macedonian conquest of the peninsula. You can see the Peloponnesian War as just one large event in a series of miserably endless wars that never resolved anything.

If you want to work on the foundations of you knowledge of the classical world, this is an excellent way to do it. If you want to kick back with some entertaining reading, not so much.

Fear and loathing on the bike trail 2010

in

Food is never just about nutrition, and bicycling isn't just about getting from one place to another.

Well, maybe there are places where it is, but this country is not one of them. Riding a bike always seems to be some kind of statement, while being, yes, a way to get from one place to another, or a fun way to go in a loop through the countryside.

Consider the rhetoric you hear when someone proposes converting a disused railway bed to a bike trail.  Suddenly, the addition of a strip of asphalt a few yards across becomes a vast and unnatural expanse of pavement, and a way for thieves and criminals to penetrate pristine neighborhoods. It  is conceptually different than any of the other roads, parking lots, and driveways that surround it.

You might guess my attitude from my word choice, but, then, I don't own a house abutting on an abandoned rail bed that I've treated as an extension of my yard for years.  I might then be tempted to use the rhetoric of private property to assert rights over property I don't actually own too--good thing for my self-respect I don't.

But only some homeowners consider such things negative. Some people like having paths without traffic on them near their house.  If you count pedestrian and bicyclist deaths by cars as "secondhand driving", cars are way more dangerous to innocent bystanders than cigarettes.  But in this case everyone smokes. Even so, many people find  a small "no driving" area appealing, particularly if they have young children.

Does bike path support or opposition correlate with other political positions nationwide? Or is your position dictated almost entirely by whether or not you bike, or whether or not you abut a railroad right of way? Most politics is not as driven by naked self-interest as most people think, but this is a case where it in fact might be.

 

But it doesn't take an attack on someone's backyard to bring out the anti-bike in someone. We're all over, we get in people's way all the time, we ride at night without lights, and we act as if the road

The business of life

in

Next week I'll be off at an all-week writing workshop called Rio Hondo, held at some ski condos up above Taos, New Mexico.  I had a story I thought was pretty much ready, but as so often happens, once I started working on it, I realized that it was nowhere near ready. I rewrote a lot of it.  My productivity would be much higher if I figured out what I was doing sooner.

Ah, well. I get there in the end.

A week of vacation--where I'll be reading and commenting on two stories a day.  I usually don't have the time to spare for this kind of thing, but this year I have a bit of time saved up, and decided to give it a shot. Surprisingly enough, other writers can actually be kind of fun to hang out with.

So that's why I've missed some posts.

Our crumbling infrastructure--and sense

in

The physical substrate of the world we live in can be astonishingly fragile. For example, Boston's water supply was recently contaminated because of the sudden collapse of a pipe in the distribution system.  My city, Cambridge, escaped, because it has its own water treatment plant.

Now, the contamination was really fairly minor. You could shower, wash, etc. And even if you drank it, it would probably just make you a little sick, unless you have a compromised immune system. In much of the world, this would have been perfectly good water.

But it came out of a clear blue sky. One pipe (actually, a collar connecting two 10-ft pipes) ruptured, and an entire metropolitan area had water problems. And a federal emergency was declared, which is, frankly, kind of embarrassing.  A plumbing problem, even a big plumbing problem does not make us a disaster area.

And people were accused of price gouging when they sold...bottled water.  People reported stores that sold bottle water above some "fair" price.  Economists, of course, are all over this one.  But, for heaven's sake, it wasn't like they were withholding insulin from diabetics, or something. There was plenty of water pouring out of every tap. A few drops of bleach, or a boil, and you could have as much drinkable water as you wanted. 

Almost no one really believes in the free market. They just believe in cheap stuff. Fortunately, that's what the market usually provides. When it doesn't, people want to whack the delicate machinery of the market with a big monkey wrench to get it working again.

Infrastructure isn't only physical. It's behavioral too. If it's poorly maintained, you can get a catastrophic failure.  We'll need to be prepared for more disasters of both kinds.

 

The status quo test

in

Cambridge, where I live, is like most places: propose a change, and you get a lot of meetings where people denounce it.  A new building, a new bike path, a new field house--whatever it is, they're against it. There are some reasons for this. Our town is dense, and each new structure is larger than what it is replacing.

But the rhetoric does get...overheated. When there was discussion of building some structure at Fresh Pond Reservation, someone described Fresh Pond as "Cambridge's Yosemite".  I guess, in the same sense that Joe Sent Me, the bar I like to drink at with my friends, is Cambridge's Mermaid Tavern, and I its little Willie Shakespeare.

This is the thought experiment I perform whenever trying to parse out such changes:  what if what is being proposed were the status quo, and the current status quo what is being proposed?  Would you tear down that apartment building so there could be a parking lot?  Would remove those nicely drained paths from Fresh Pond?  And I love Fresh Pond--the first part of my first novel, Carve the Sky, is set there, in the far future.

And sometimes, sure, you'd go right back, tear that hideous apartment building down and put up a battered old house, throw that piece of "public art" back into cauldron it was poured from.

But you have to shake yourself free from status quo bias. Next time a change affronts you, try this thought experiment to see if it's really the quality of the change, or just that it is change at all.

 

Read the histories

in ,

One annoying piece of advice from a know-it-all fictional character immediately after stating some dubious political opinion such as "whenever people turn to entertainment rather than to duty, the system collapses within a decade", or "democracies only last fifty years" is: "read the histories!" This is supposed to demonstrate the truth of the assertion.

Robert Heinlein, for example, liked to do this, and I think he got it from GB Shaw.  They never say which histories, exactly, though I suspect they mostly mean works by Thucydides, Tacitus, and Plutarch. A Classical historian writing about Classical events with a moralizing atttude always gives the most status to your pronouncements.

I read the histories. The more I read, the less sure I am that they really tell us anything particularly clear about what moral virtues we should possess to successfully run a civilization, or a life. The Romans were corrupt, depraved, and totally self-interested while they were on their way up, while they ruled a vast empire, and while they were on their way down. Trying to find some kind of overall civic virtue among the squabbling generalissimos of the Later Republic is a futile endeavor.  Republican government was then submerged in the rule of the Emperor--and the system went on from triumph to triumph for another two and a half centuries, and remained incredibly powerful for two centuries beyond that.  What does that tell us about republican virtue?

And then there are the events, and the interpretation of them. To have to clearly distinguish between what is known to have happened, and what people of said about them: "This is reminiscent of the way William III had to let James escape to the Continent so he wouldn't have to try him: Macauley's account is not without interest here...." or "You cite Justinian's reconquest of the West as an example of imperial overstretch, but there is reason to believe that without the plague, he might well have succeeded in reincorporating at least North Africa and Italy for the long term...and don't pay too much attention to Procopius, that Sixth Century Kitty Kelley."

Of course, once you get specific, you've given your opponent (or person you're trying earnestly to instruct) something to argue with: "Just think of how much better atheists would have handled both those situations!" Better to stick with "read the histories".

 

Just blame PowerPoint

in

Is PowerPoint the focus of evil in the modern world? Is it the secret cancer that has eaten away at the ability to think clearly, present information to others, and understand the inner meanings of things? Has it made our military weak and obsessed with presentations rather than combat?

A periodic rant against PowerPoint seems to be a mandatory part of the discourse. But there has been a flurry of it, particularly in its military manifestation.  First the New York Times blamed it for our inability to pacify Afghanistan. Then an ex-Marine writing in Armed Forces Journal blamed it for poor military thinking in general.

Yes, we are at the mercy of potentially powerful cognitive tools that are misused by fools for their own feeble and inane purposes. We know this.

But I find the notion that military briefings have been damaged by PowerPoint to be particularly absurd. Somehow I suspect that these hierarchy-obsessed exercises in obfuscation and butt-covering have always been pretty much the same.

I was a civilian engineer working with the military in the early 80s.  Back then we had no PowerPoint.  Instead, we had another miracle of up-to-the-minute technology: vugraphs and overhead projectors. Vugraphs were transparencies held in plastic frames. You typed them up and printed them. Then you projected them up on a screen. They usually consisted of a bunch of bullet points, incomprehensible acronyms and diagrams, and amusing quotations. I never saw a large meeting of military people where this technology was not used. I presume something similar was used while planning the Vietnam War.

It's not that I love PowerPoint or anything. Like most professionals in the modern American workplace, I have to create, edit, or sit through a large number of long decks with too many bullets. But PowerPoint is but one tiny ridge in the vast nail file that abrades my life. I'm not defending it, but I see no reason why it should get singled out for special abuse.

 

Bike etiquette: the traffic light

in

Daily, I commute to work on my bicycle. Since I live in Massachusetts, much of the year is too cold and rainy for there to be much bike traffic to contend with. A windy day in the teens means clear bike lanes and easy locking at my destination.

This solitary period is over, and there are many more people pedaling along with me. But though there are a fair number of people on bikes, I'm not sure there is yet a clear bicycling culture, as I presume exists in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Cultures are defined not by explicit rules, but by the assumptions and practices that happen without even thinking about them.

For example. You ride at a certain pace. You are faster than some, slower than others (actually, I travel exactly at the best Goldilocks pace). You pass a couple of bicyclists who really don't seem to be working that hard, but then stop for a light.  The people you passed come to the light too...and push in ahead of you.  To me, this would be a clear violation of social norms, if there were social norms. Because, of course, you just have to pass them again, and with Cambridge and Boston streets as narrow as they are, this takes a bit of attention to traffic, etc.  They should recognize their slowness and acknowledge that you deserve to be ahead of them.

Of course, if people faster than you, having passed you, stop at a light ahead, and you don't feel a stop is necessary (e.g., you see it as safe to go through the cross street even though a strict interpretation of traffic signals might indicate that you shouldn't), you feel no hesitation in blowing past them, even though they will then catch up to you and have to pass you, etc. They should stop being such sissies and acknowledge your greater daring.

So, at the very least, you should stop well to the right at a light, leaving room for others to go past you, even if it is red, because it's not your job to enforce traffic regulations. Don't sit in the middle of the space, all wide and sassy, as if you've been riding all winter and feel smug about your own toughness and a little irritated at all these wandering newbies getting in your way.... Of course then you have to watch people pump through intersections when it is clearly rude and dangerous, forcing cars to hit their brakes, etc. and know they are reducing the margin of courtesy that you rely on to get home safely. Sometimes slow people who really don't deserve it leave you far behind as a result.

It really shouldn't be that hard to get it right.  After all, I do.

 

On reading history

in

It's clear that not all history is equally interesting, or equally popular.  Sometimes it seems that at least three quarters of all history books are about either the American Civil War or World War II, with most of the remainder devoted to the Founding Fathers,  the British Empire, and maybe a bit about the Winning of the West. In this case, English-speaking people triumphing over other races and nationalities (sometimes nobly over each other) is what makes it "interesting".

So, when history buffs get exasperated because students, particularly those of other ethnic backgrounds, ask how any of this is relevant, they should think twice.  Reading about young men on battlefields or middle-aged men in council chambers is a more specialized taste than it might first appear.  And believe me, I fit right into the demographic.

But despite the wails I used to read about overly technical monographs by professional historians and the death of narrative history, I think we are living through a kind of golden age of pop historical writing--as we are of pop science writing.  As a result, I can read three excellent books on the fall of the Roman Empire in close succession, and then start a fourth, Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, to find out what happened after it.

I know, I know:  Romans didn't speak English, but movies make it seem like they did, and so this hasn't moved that far from the Anglotriumphalism of mainstream history reading. At least it's about a defeat. That should count for something.

Next time: periods of history with narrative, periods without. Is the difference real, or just a matter of whether a great historian was around?