Colors of Spring

"It teems with life. It glows with color and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a spring/summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined."

CSL

Grand Children: Bella, Benny and Valeska

Images from Eindhoven at Night

Got our Tickets for PSV x Feyenoord on April 11

26 years later Adrie and I will watch another European Football Match together. The last game we watched together was Manchester United versus Manchester City at Old Trafford.

We just got our tickets for PSV x Feyenoord on April 11.

Spring Arrived in Eindhoven - Aslan is On The Move

Beyond Peer Reviews - Part II

Continued - - - if you are interested - long reading - I should have read these advices before I edited a book last year :-)

- - - -

Now of course it is true that a good critic may form a correct estimate of a paper or a book without reading every word of it. - - - I am not, however, speaking of evaluations based on an imperfect reading, but of direct factual falsehoods about what it contains or does not contain. Negative statements are of course particularly dangerous for the lazy or hurried reviewer. And here, at once, is a lesson for us all as critics.

It would be wrong to leave this point without saying that however it may be with reviewers, academic critics seem to me now better than they ever were before. - - - On the whole we now do our homework pretty well - but not yet perfectly. I have an amusing piece of private evidence in my possession. My copy of a certain voluminous author formerly belonged to a great scholar. At first I thought I had found a treasure. The first and second pages were richly, and most learnedly annotated in a neat, legible hand. There were fewer on the third; after that, for the rest of the first poem, there was nothing. Each work was in the same state: the first few pages annotated - the rest in mint condition. Yet he had written on these works.

There is, of course, another lesson in it. Let no one try to do too many peer reviews. The fatal ignorance of the text is not always the fruit of laziness or malice. It may be mere defeat by an intolerable burden. To live night and day with that hopeless mountain of new papers and books (mostly uncongenial) piling up on your desk (or computer), to be compelled to say something where you have nothing to say — indeed much is to be excused to one so enslaved. But of course to say that a thing is excusable is to confess that it needs excuse.

I now turn to something which interests me much more because the bottom sin I detect in the reviewers is one which I believe we shall all find it very difficult to banish from our own critical work. Nearly all critics are prone to imagine that they know a great many facts relevant to a paper or a book which in reality they don't know. The author inevitably perceives their ignorance because he knows the real facts.

The critical vice I am talking about consists in yielding to the temptation they hold out and then, instead of telling us what is good and bad in a paper or a book, they create situations about the process which led to the goodness and badness. Or are they misled by the double sense of the word Why? For of course the question 'Why is this bad?' may mean two things:

a) a) What do you mean by calling it bad? Wherein does its badness consist? Give me the Formal Cause.

b) b) How did it become bad? Why did he write so ill? Give me the Efficient Cause.

The first seems to me the essentially critical question. The critics I am thinking of answer the second, and usually answer it wrong, and unfortunately regard this as a substitute for the answer to the first.

Simply to know what the critic imagines, and imagines wrongly, is of no use. Nor is it of much use to the public. They have every right to be told of the faults in my paper or book. But this fault, as distinct from a hypothesis about its origin, is just what they do not learn.

I now turn to interpretation. Here of course all critics, and we among them, will make mistakes. Such mistakes are far more venial than the sort I have been describing, for they are not gratuitous. The one sort arise when the critic writes fiction instead of criticism; the other, in the discharge of a proper function. At least I assume that critics ought to interpret, ought to try to find out the meaning or intention of a paper or a book. When they fail the fault may lie with them or with the author or with both.

I have said vaguely 'meaning' or 'intention'. We shall have to give each word a fairly definite sense. It is the author who intends; the book means. The author's intention is that which, if it is realized, will in his eyes constitute success. - - - Meaning is a much more difficult term. And especially when we differ and dispute as we do, about their real or true meaning? The nearest I have yet got to a definition is something like this: the meaning of a paper or a book is the series or system of emotions, reflections and attitudes produced by reading it. But of course this product differs with different readers. The ideally false or wrong 'meaning' would be the product in the mind of the stupidest and least sensitive and most prejudiced reader after a single careless reading. The ideally true or right 'meaning' would be that shared by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private preoccupations, states of health, spirits, and the like cancelling one another out when they cannot be fused so as to enrich one another.

As for the many generations, we must add a limit. - - To delay, even if we cannot permanently banish such interpretations, is a large part of the function of scholarly, as distinct from pure, criticism; so doctors labor to prolong life though they know they cannot make men immortal.

Of a book’s or paper’s meaning, in this sense, its author is not necessarily the best, and is never a perfect, judge. One of his intentions usually was that it should have a certain meaning: he cannot be sure that it has. He cannot even be sure that the meaning he intended it to have was in every way, or even at all, better than the meaning which readers find in it. Here, therefore, the critic has great freedom to range without fear of contradiction from the author's superior knowledge.

Cheers,

Paulo

Beyond Peer Reviews

As some of you have articles and books reviewed or served as reviewers, the following - a compiled version of the essay titled “On Criticism (*) - maybe of help.

- - -

"I want to talk about the ways in which an author who is also a reviewer may improve himself as a critic by reading the reviews and criticism of his own work. But I must narrow my subject a little further. It used to be supposed that one of the functions of a reviewer was to help authors to write better. His praise and censure were supposed to show them where and how they had succeeded or failed, so that next time, having profited by the diagnosis, they might cure their faults and increase their virtues. In that way the author-reviewer might no doubt profit, as a critic, by reviews of his critical work. - - -

There is of course another sense in which the author of a paper or a book is of all men least qualified to judge the reviews of it. Obviously he cannot judge their evaluation of it, because he is not impartial. And whether this leads him, naively, to hail all laudatory criticism as good and damn all unfavorable criticism as bad, or whether it leads him, in the effort against that obvious bias, to lean over backwards till he under-rates all who praise and admires all who censure him, it is equally a disturbing factor. Hence, if by criticism, you mean solely valuation, no man can judge critiques of his own work. - - - Now in so far as his reviewers do that, I contend that the author can see the defects and merits of their work better than anyone else. And if he is also a critic I think he can learn from them to avoid the one and emulate the other.

I hope it will now be clear that in talking about what I think I have learned from my own critics I am not in any sense attempting what might be called an 'answer to critics'. That would, indeed, be quite incompatible with what I am actually doing. Some of the reviews I find most guilty of the critical vices I am going to mention were wholly favorable; one of the severest I ever had appeared to me wholly free from them. I expect every author has had the same experience. Authors no doubt suffer from self-love, but it need not always be voracious to the degree that abolishes all discrimination. I think fatuous praise from a manifest fool may hurt more than any depreciation.

One critical fault I must get out of the way at once because it forms no part of my real theme: I mean dishonesty. Strict honesty is not, so far as I can see, even envisaged as an ideal in the modern literary world. When I was a young, unknown writer on the eve of my first publication, a kind friend said to me, 'Will you have any difficulty about reviews? I could mention you to a few people. . . .' It is almost as if one said to an under-graduate on the eve of the finals, 'Do you know any of the examiners? I could put in a word for you.' Years later another man who had reviewed me with modest favor wrote to me (though a stranger) a letter in which he said that he had really thought much more highly of my book than the review showed: `but of course,' he said, 'if I'd praised it any more the So and So would not have printed me at all.' Another time someone had attacked me in a paper called X. Then he wrote a book himself. The editor of X immediately offered it to me, of all people, to review. Probably he only wanted to set us both by the ears for the amusement of the public and the increase of his sales. But even if we take the more favorable possibility—if we assume that this editor had a sort of rough idea of what they call sportsmanship: 'A has gone for B, it's only fair to let B have a go at A'—it is only too plain that he has no idea of honesty towards the public out of whom he makes his living. They are entitled, at the very least, to honest, that is, to impartial, unbiased criticism: and he cannot have thought that I was the most likely person to judge this book impartially. What is even more distressing is that whenever I tell this story someone replies with the question, 'And did you?' This seems to me insulting, because I cannot see how an honest man could do anything but what I did: refuse the editor's highly improper proposal. Of course they didn't mean it as an insult. That is just the trouble. When a man assumes my disonesty with the intention of insulting me, it may not matter much. He may only be angry. It is when he assumes it without the slightest notion that anyone could be offended, when he reveals thus lightly his ignorance that there ever were any standards by which it could be insulting, that a chasm seems to open at one's feet.

If I exclude this matter of honesty from my main subject it is not because I think it unimportant. I think it very important indeed. If there should ever come a time when honesty in reviewers is taken for granted, I think men will look back on the present state of affairs as we now look on countries or periods in which judges or examiners commonly take bribes. My reason for dismissing the matter briefly is that I want to talk about the things I hope I have learned from my own reviewers, and this is not one of them. I had been told long before I became an author that one mustn't tell lies and that we mustn't take money for doing a thing and then secretly do something quite different. I may add before leaving the point that one mustn't judge these corrupt reviewers too harshly. Much is to be forgiven to a man in a corrupt profession at a corrupt period. The judge who takes bribes in a time or place where all take bribes may, no doubt, be blamed: but not so much as a judge who had done so in a healthier civilization.

I now turn to my main subject.

The first thing I have learned from my reviewers is, not the necessity but the extreme rarity of conscientiousness in that preliminary work which all criticism should presuppose. I mean, of course, a careful reading of what one criticizes. This may seem too obvious to dwell on. I put it first precisely because it is so obvious and also because I hope it will illustrate my thesis that in certain ways the author is not the worst, but the best, judge of his critics. Ignorant as he may be of his paper or book's value, he is at least an expert on its content. Unless you have been often reviewed you will hardly believe how few reviewers have really done their homework. And not only hostile reviewers. For them one has some sympathy. To have to read an author who affects one like a bad smell or, a toothache is hard work. Who can wonder if a busy man skimps this disagreeable task in order to get on as soon as possible to the far more agreeable exercise of insult and denigration. Yet we reviewers do wade through the dullest, most loathsome, most illegible answers before we give a mark; not because we like it, not even because we think the answer is worth it, but because this is the thing we have accepted to do. In fact, however, laudatory critics often show an equal ignorance of the text. They too had rather write than read. Sometimes, in both sorts of review, the ignorance is not due to idleness. A great many people start by thinking they know what you will say, and honestly believe they have read what they expected to read."

TO BE CONTINUED

Cheers,

Paulo

(*) C.S. Lewis

On Reviewing Papers

"There is, of course, another lesson in it. Let no one try to make a living by becoming a reviewer [or to do too many peer reviews). The fatal ignorance of the text is not always the fruit of laziness or malice. It may be mere defeat by an intolerable burden. To live night and day with that hopeless mountain of new papers and books (mostly uncongenial) piling up on your desk (or computer), to be compelled to say something where you have nothing to say — indeed much is to be excused to one so enslaved. But of course to say that a thing is excusable is to confess that it needs excuse." CSL

Family Newsletter 2010

Technical Meeting in Paris - Always a Beautiful View