Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

One of many great things of getting off Facebook is that it gave me more time to read. Lately, I have been reading a lot. This may sound like nothing new, since I was already reading tons of stuff on the Internet. The difference is that now I’m reading actual books. Some of them are even made of paper!

The Internet is a phenomenal resource, the likes of which the world has never seen. But somehow books are better. When you read a book from beginning to end, you get one coherent viewpoint (if you’re lucky), without a lot of jumping around. Reading things on the Internet is like watching movies on cable. You pick up a little here and a little there, and the big picture suffers. Between the time cable became popular and the introduction of pay per view and the DVR, it’s completely possible that I never saw the beginning of a single TV movie.

At least it feels that way.

I am still working on Herodotus. I got into this book as part of my guilt-motivated program of trying to read the books I pretended to read for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course, and once I was in, I was disturbed to see how long it took. I read very quickly, and it seemed like I was getting nowhere. Suddenly I had new sympathy for little twerps students who are currently struggling with heavy doses of assigned reading.

Last week I discovered the problem. I had misread the syllabus. Somehow this seems like a fitting punishment for a person who got B’s for doing as close to nothing as possible. I thought I had to start off with pages 1 through 140. Looking at the syllabus through bleary eyes after cracking the 140 mark, I discovered I was supposed to read paragraphs 1 through 140. Or something like that. Herodotus is divided up into little sections which look like paragraphs to me. I would speculate that they are the original Greek page divisions, but it’s my understanding that his work was first written on scrolls.

Whatever.

I was reading well over twice as much as I had to.

The nice thing about this is that my contempt for college students was restored. Little sex-crazed goofs, whining about safe spaces and roofying each other.

When I discovered my error, I decided to keep going, because I knew I would eventually want to finish the entire book, and it would be a bummer to have to go back and read the stuff between the parts I had already read.

So now I’m stuck in the 300’s, plowing through a lot of small talk. It’s really difficult, because he talks about 5,000 ancient countries and cities, and each one has 15 names which he uses interchangeably. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey last month, and even after that, I didn’t know until last week that Lacedaemon was Sparta.

Also, the book must have 3,000 characters, and he brings them in the way pigeons poop on expensive suits. No warning. BANG…there’s Adrastus. Is that the same Adrastus he talked about fifty pages ago? Danged if I know. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip…

I’m actually looking for a book on the Ionian Revolt, because I have realized that there is no way on earth a human being can understand Herodotus’s summary without help. The weird thing is that any book I read will be based on Herodotus, but at least the author will, hopefully, have unraveled the digressions and put it in order.

Writing the previous paragraph reminds me of another annoying issue that has come up: the proper way to use apostrophes when turning names that end in “s” into possessives. My Lit. Hum. professor taught my class that we should avoid the common practice of simply adding an apostrophe to the end of the word, and I figured he must be right, since he swam in a sea of terminal-“s” names all day, every day, with a Ph.D. to back him up. I stuck with that for decades, but then a few years ago, I read that it’s only okay to add an apostrophe and a new “s” when the result is easy to pronounce. So it’s okay to write “Jesus’s,” but you should never write, “Cambyses’s.”

It’s bothering me right now, so I think I’ll check The Gregg Manual, which is a neat reference book. I probably have Strunk & White somewhere, but I don’t know if they cover this problem.

Well, Mr. Gregg and The Macmillan Handbook of English (saved from my college days) agree: you use an added “s” except when the result is hard to pronounce. But Mr. Gregg says “Jesus’s” is hard to pronounce. Geez. Doesn’t seem hard to me.

One of the aggravating things about grammar is that authorities disagree. People who have different authorities run around correcting each other (especially in Internet comments) when neither side can really claim the high ground.

I may not be able to find a book on the Ionian Revolt. Given that they all pretty much have to restate Herodotus, maybe the people who have considered writing such books have changed their minds. This is a good example of a gap the Internet can fill. Somewhere out there, I promise you, there is a web page that sums it up in an organized manner. There are probably a bunch of websites that will do. Even Wikipedia is better than fighting with an old Greek who loved to gossip.

In addition to ancient history, I’ve been reading up on the Holocaust and submarines. I’ve always wondered how submarines work, and it occurred to me that it’s possible to find out, so I downloaded a free book, and I bought a couple of videos. I also watched some stuff on Youtube.

Torpedoes always mystified me. How can you make an engine burn alcohol under water in a sealed tube? Turns out they had compressed air tanks inside them, to feed the engines! That’s why they left bubble trails. Submariners liked electric torpedoes because they didn’t leave trails. The problem with the trails is that they were like arrows guiding destroyers’ guns directly to the submarines.

If you combine things like books, video, and the web, you can learn a lot in a hurry, in much greater depth than any student could have only 25 years ago. And yet somehow Americans are more stupid than ever! How did we pull that off? It must be the damn cat memes. They take up all the bandwidth and keep us distracted.

I’m making good use of Google Books, Google Play Books, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Scrib’d, along with various public domain downloads I’ve found, but paper books are still hard to beat. You can make notes in them. You can draw diagrams. You can make corrections. Try that with a tablet. Maybe in ten years. Also, I don’t have to worry that Big Brother Bezobama is going to get mad some day and suck all my books out of my electronic devices. He’ll have to send the jackbooted thugs. And I have all sorts of bullets. He can get at a few things, but the rest are here moldering safely on shelves, coffee tables, and exercise equipment seats.

I feel so smart these days. And I didn’t even have to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and catch a disease from the bedspread.

Before I sign off, I may as well admit that I have a new Facebook account. Because I’m a hypocrite. No, it’s because I wanted to put up a message to the people who wonder where I went. People thought I blocked them and unfriended them. Facebook doesn’t put up an announcement when you leave. So I put up an account with a brief explanation, but I refuse to add friends or spend time on the site. I may use it when necessary; some companies use Facebook to communicate with people, so if I deal with such outfits, I will have access.

I will be the only person on Facebook with NO friends. A new low. At least on Myspace I would have Tom.

I never hear from Tom. I quit looking at Myspace, and he cut me off dead. Some friend.

That’s all I have now. Wish me luck with the Ionian Revolt thing. Agent Mulder has to be right; the truth must be out there somewhere.