Month: December 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bd5YUEOwlE

Kathryn Hughes reviews a new book debunking the historicity of Merlin, the English wizard. “He is, in fact, a big fat hoax, made up by a writer who had run out of things to say and was getting desperate”:

“Geoffrey of Monmouth” sounds as if he should be a bank manager of scrupulous honesty. A man you could imagine wanting to count the daily takings twice. In fact, he was a 12th-century churchman who pulled off a textual forgery bigger than anything dreamt up by Macpherson or Chatterton at their most high-handed.

By the 1130s Geoffrey clearly felt that he was getting too big for the Marches and decided to do something that would make the world take notice. His bright idea was to write a History of the Kings of Britain. Into the slightly dull chronicle of battles and land grabs he embedded a big dollop of fiction about a character called Merlin, doing that classic thing of passing off his work as a translation of a long-lost ancient text. According to this confection, Merlin was a boy magician at the court of Vortigern, king of the Britons. Later, as an adult wizard, Merlin changes Uther Pendragon’s appearance so that he can sleep with the wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Out of this moment of magical pandering King Arthur is conceived. But Merlin, in Geoffrey’s version, doesn’t hang around to act as twinkly tutor to the marvellous boy. You have to wait until Thomas Malory, writing on the brink of the Renaissance, before you get the whole lovely dreamscape that is Camelot. …

It is, though, what happens next that is really extraordinary. Having got himself embedded in everyone’s consciousness as the maker of Britain, Merlin then managed to slip the leash and started popping up in European chronicles as a kind of international Mr Fixit. In the Italian tradition he morphs into a sibyl and hands out helpful hints on the future of Tuscany and Lombardy. In France he becomes a kind of Time Lord, able to advise Julius Caesar on some of his more troubling dreams while simultaneously urging an Muslim king to convert to Christianity. He even becomes a bit of a romantic hero, succumbing to a doomed obsession with wily Vivien, a story that would be revisited more than six centuries later by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King.

Update from a reader:

Is this author serious? It is news that Geoffrey of Monmouth lied when he claimed to have based his Historia regum Brittaniae on an ancient British text? Geoffrey’s deception was well known in the twelfth century, let alone in later years. (See William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum.) And one has to wait until Sir Thomas Malory – in the fifteenth century – for the full story about Merlin to emerge? Has this author ever heard about Robert of Boron, who represents Merlin as advising Arthur and comes up with the story of the sword in the stone, in 1200? Or of the Vulgate Cycle Merlin of the thirteenth century, which Thomas Malory basically translated? Yes, people like Alfred Lord Tennyson may have preferred to read Malory because Le Morte d’Arthur is in English, but there were three centuries of Arthurian romances written in French – with all of the central legends developed between the 1180s and the 1230s – before Malory got around to picking up a pen.

Lara Bazelon discusses the problem of false eyewitness testimony, which puts more innocent people in prison than you might think:

[A]ccording to Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Convicting the Innocent, eyewitness misidentifications have played a leading role in nearly 75 percent of 250 convictions overturned by DNA evidence between 1989 and 2010. In more than one-half of those exonerations, the eyewitnesses start off unsure, a “glaring sign” of potential trouble as Garrett puts it, yet appear to become increasingly certain over time. This often corresponds with police practices like suggestive photo arrays, lineups, and even well-intentioned comments like “Good job!” after a witness makes an identification, however tentative. All of this can cause “contamination” of memory, Garrett says so that “there is no way to know after the fact whether the eyewitness could have actually picked the person with any degree of confidence.” …

[C]ourts, prosecutors, and juries routinely take eyewitness testimony at face value. Garrett describes as “toothless” the standard the Supreme Court set in 1977 for admitting eyewitness identifications as evidence: “Even in cases with eyewitnesses who were drunk, half blind, observing someone at night, from a distance, it is almost impossible to find examples where appellate judges say it was error” to allow jurors to hear their testimony, he says.

Update from several readers:

In her article, Bazelon identifies what is a serious flaw in the criminal justice system in the US, but she is pointing to what is only one part (eyewitness testimony) of the larger problem that is police and prosecutorial misconduct.

We all saw how police and the local District Attorney in Sanford “investigated” the killing of Trayvon Martin as a justifiable homicide, allowed Zimmerman to wash evidence from his hands, etc. So it was not surprising (though a sickening miscarriage of justice) that the murderer walked free. Eyewitness testimony in that case also was conflicted and unreliable, but for different reasons. But in the end, Kash Register, the wrongly convicted innocent man in Bazelon’s story, was exonerated by, wait for it …. eyewitness testimony that was ignored and not followed up on by the police and prosecutors.

Another:

This was one of my favorite episodes of This American Life. It directly relates to a reader update on police malpractice. In the case of this episode, it was accidental.

The first act is about a cop who was absolutely convinced that a woman committed a crime, and then after revisiting the case years down the road discovered it was his fault that she confessed.  He now gives presentations to police departments to educate cops not make the same mistakes he did.

The second act is about a guy who everyone in town believed (and some still believe despite another man being convicted of the crime) he was guilty, but he never allowed the cops to interview him.

Another:

In response to your post, I thought y’all might enjoy Dr. Elizabeth Loftus’ plenary talk from the Psychonomic Society’s 2013 annual meeting on memory and false memory. She is one of the, if not THE, pioneers in this area of research. Her talk was really great – she covered faulty eyewitness testimony, did a small example of studies of this nature with the audience, and talked about her more recent research on testimony from a period of great stress. She worked with SERE participants and their doctor and it’s fascinating. Here’s the link to the whole video. It shows her presentation side by side. For the mini study example, see around 27:10. For the SERE discussion, see around 37:30. For her discussion on doctoring political memories, see around 48:30. Finally, she talks about implanting false memory, and it’s terrifying (around 53:30). She poses the question of whether this type of research is leading is in an ethical direction.

Daniele Quercia examines what city-dwellers like and dislike about their surroundings:

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot. Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

(Photo of London garden square via Charlie Dave)

Twenty years after MTV first aired Nirvana: Unplugged, Andrew Wallace Chamings revisits the “unforgettable document of raw tension and artistic genius.” He remarks that “there is no way of listening to Unplugged in New York without invoking death; it’s in every note, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a masterpiece”:

[Their rendition of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”] ranks among the greatest single rock performances of all time. All night, Cobain, while never quite able to hide his anxiety—sniping at band mates, grimacing and grasping at half smoked cigarettes—has remained definitely present and in control. That is, until the very end, when he briefly loses it.

For the final line, “I would shiver the whole night through,” Cobain jumps up an octave, forcing him to strain so far he screams and cracks. He hits the word “shiver” so hard that the band stops, as if a fight broke out at a sitcom wedding. Next he howls the word “whole” and then does something very strange in the brief silence that follows, something that’s hard to describe:

He opens his piercingly blue eyes so suddenly it feels like someone or something else is looking out under the bleached lank fringe, with a strange clarity. Then he finishes the song. When Neil Young first watched the performance, he described that final note of Cobain’s as “Unearthly, like a werewolf, unbelievable.” Four months later Cobain would quote Young in a scrawled letter to “Boddah,” his imaginary childhood friend, before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun at his Seattle home on Lake Washington Boulevard: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Judy Berman also can’t shake the feeling of tragedy:

Watching Unplugged for the first time in at least a decade, I was surprised at how different it felt to me as an adult — as someone who, while still a Nirvana fan, is no longer half-consciously displacing truckloads of adolescent loneliness and alienation onto a dead rock star. It’s not that it’s a “worse” performance than I remembered; the acoustic constraint alone imposes a mood of hushed intimacy that is entirely different from the loud, chaotic live shows Nirvana was known for. The wrenching string arrangements, the Meat Puppets guest appearance, the covers that transformed great David Bowie and Vaselines and Leadbelly songs — all are powerful. But still, what comes across to me in Cobain’s performance, and especially in his interactions with the audience, is not so much sorrow or wistfulness as flatness and detachment. Until the last two songs, “All Apologies” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” which truly do reverberate with emotion, Unplugged shows us that performer from Cobain’s suicide note — the one who is struggling to connect with his audience but can’t shake the feeling that he’s punching a clock as he takes the stage to greet them.