For those that don't know, my New Year's Resolution #1 was to stop dotting lower-case I's.  Why?  Because the dot is completely extraneous, especially in typing, where the dot can make an i look even more like an l (especially in sans-serif fonts), and because in handwriting it is a) one more mark on a page, one more effort that is unneeded, and b) only introduced in the late medieval period to distinguish it from lowercase n, m, and u, which weren't usually ligatured. Mine are ligatured, so I don't need the dot.

As an aside, one of the main tools used to date Beowulf as a really old poem (~700) instead of a newer poem (~1000, a difference larger than the existence of the USA) is the use of the ancient word "wundini" when really, the word on the page is [w]iiiidiiii (or, if you have a good unicode font installed, ƿııııdıııı, which could be "wundini" or "wundmi" or "wundun" or even "winidun" or "wnudnu." Only "wundini", "wundmi", and "wundun" are legitimate Old English words, and "wundun" makes more contextual sense, with more parallel in the poem, and therefore makes a date as early as 700 quite ridiculous, given so much else in the poem that points to the early or even middle of the 9th century (1000-1050).

Anyway...


New Year's Resolution #2: I will post about every book I finish in the year 2007.

Book One: Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott

I wanted to read this for a while but didn't, because I thought on one hand I would have to go and buy it or check it out or somehow go out of my way to obtain it physically; also, I thought it was also pretty long.  It is a novella of about 62 pages, printed in 1884 and so public domain and available anywhere there's an internet connection for free. Both objections cancelled, I began reading it, even though I'm also reading another book and playing Final Fantasy V. I finished it in two days. Easy-peasy.

I thought it was quite good, particularly in its discussions of the world. Wikipedia says it's a commentary on Victorian attitudes towards women and lower classes, as well as on religion, and I can see where people are going with those, but, as a lover of innovative world-creation, I see what Abbot's doing.  With a flatland, there are necessarily also a lineland and a pointland. Abbott's Pointland has only one being, the King of Pointland, and all that is is him. Abbott's Lineland has line-people and point-people--the line-people men, the point-people women--and the Lineland people to survive reproduce by one line and two points, always producing one line and two points. This may seem sexist, and I might indeed have made the points male and the lines female to better coincide with hivelike systems, but that's me. Because of that system, in Flatland the men are polygons and the women are lines, and the angle of a polygon seems to indicate the level of intellectual intelligence: women are entirely emotional, triangles are workers, and circles are scholars and priests.

Note also that when a Sphere from Spaceland approaches the main character, a square, the Sphere speaks in emotional terms that the square cannot understand, leading me to think of the male polygons of Flatland as a necessarily increasingly boorish people. The Sphere is declared neither to be male or female, and gives no thought to the possibility that it is male, and that in Spaceland women are two-dimensional; as something not stated, it cannot be argued ("Lady Macbeth's Children" is a term for this*); we are merely given that the Sphere is both intellectual and emotional, which confuses and disturbs the narrator Square. We cannot take Abbott for a misogynist because of this, and given that in Flatland women do not appear to be unintellectual, wholly emotional creatures, but merely are, we cannot judge the Narrator of his story. This is an exercise in mathematical world-building, not an exploration of sexual mores.

Socially, however, how does the book fare? In a world of polygons, where smart people have wider angles, it becomes readily apparent that the most dangerous polygons have the sharpest angles, and so lowly isosceles triangles and women are deadly, and polygons above a certain rank are effectively defenseless except by social rules--ignoring the result of a social rule, if 100-sided polygons are rare, intelligent, and defenseless, but each successive generation develops more and more sides, it would be quick and inevitable for a social system of protection set up. Again, it's a non-issue that the circles are the bosses; they're the bosses because of necessity, because they're the smartest but also the weakest, so stratifications in society need to be set up to protect them. If anything, I don't believe Abbott is using mathematics as a metaphor for the problems with society, but using a mathematic example for how society is.  What is interesting, of course, is how the physically powerful are kept in their places by social rules: the more deadly isosceles triangles, the most deadly almost brainless with an acute angle of only around 4 degrees, and the women with no angles at all but able to pierce any person without much danger at all, are still kept reserved from all others.  They are necessary, especially the women, the deadliest of all--without them, there would be no generation; because of this, there can be no violent uprising of the weak against the strong, because the strongest cannot take care of themselves, being completely without ration. Also, if even the lowliest isosceles marries a woman, the next male generation will be, by the rules of Flatland, an isosceles of a lesser acute angle, until an equilateral triangle becomes a square, and so on. Perhaps Abbott might have criticized in this way, the idea of rebellion rather than the establishment; in Flatland, it is a mathematical certainty that the rebellion will become the establishment in ten to fifteen generations.

About Abbott's critique of our concepts of higher dimensions: it is interesting to note the King of Pointland's acceptance of another as simply his own wandering mind, the King of Lineland's acceptance of Square as merely an odd sort of line that grows and shrinks, and Square's first belief of Sphere as simply a growing and shrinking circle. Does Abbott criticize human clergy in our dimension by his descriptions of the circle priests in Flatland, who, when Sphere comes to them every thousand years, try and deny his existence? Is Abbott saying God is only a higher-order being? He does not say so, and even makes Sphere scoff at the idea of a fourth dimension, or fifth, or so on, proving his limited, though advanced, mind. Abbott's flat circle Priests are called "priests" but really could be called "bosses"; to use the word "priests" is telling, but I imagine that the reason they cannot understand Sphere is because he merely announces his presence to them. To Square, Sphere proves the third dimension by pushing Square off his plane into it. Sphere tells everyone, but only proves it to Square; Square thinks Sphere is womanlike because Sphere talks of emotions, and perhaps in the Flatland world Sphere can only be understood by those with a little emotion, those without the wide-angled intelligence of the 200-sided nigh-circle Priests. I do wonder if Abbott, in using the word "priest" is being ironic, and commenting instead on the intelligent scientists of our day who, thinking they have it all "figured out", deny the existence of things they cannot conceive of. That, perhaps, is the most direct social criticism I can ferret out in this book.

Overall, again, I liked it. As one who dabbles in math, to whom math seems a fine mystery, this book did capture my imagination. As one who admires world-building, I love how Abbott just works all of his details out--the chapters on how Flat people recognize shape, when they only see (in a 2d world) lines, is fantastic, and one of the best examples of good Whale Blubber**.

* "Lady Macbeth's Children" is used by LC Knights in his 1964 essay criticizing Shakespeare criticism; the problem as he saw it was that critics focused on things that weren't textual, but could be: Lady Macbeth was never mentioned to have or not have children, to ever have or have never had children, and so to examine her in the context of a mother is a false question, approaching nonsense like "What is the color of five?"

** A reference to Moby-Dick, in which Melville devotes a varying amount of time (some say "far too much", some say "just enough", almost none say "too little") to the physiology of whales and the commercial uses of their parts. I use "Whale Blubber" to mean the horribly long passages of explanation that get in the way of Plot. Of course, to be fair to Flatland, the sections of Explanation and Plot are completely separated into Part 1 and Part 2.