The unsinkable Jerome K. Jerome

First published on my own little website in 1999, after I had learned that many of my well-read acquaintances had never read one of the masterpieces of English literature.

Jerome K. Jerome was born in Staffordshire in 1859, grew up in London, and left grammar school at 14. As a youth and young man he worked as a railway clerk, an actor, a freelance journalist, a private secretary, a purchasing agent, a parliamentary agent, and a solicitor's clerk. In 1889, when Three Men in a Boat was published, he had only recently become successful as a journalist and author.

Three Men in a Boat is an account of a boating trip on the Thames undertaken by three male friends – Jerome, Harris, and George – and a fox terrier, Montmorency. It features several expertly written comic setpieces (for example, an account of trying to open a tin of pineapple when one has forgotten to bring the can opener but really wants to eat some pineapple) and several expertly written meditations, ranging from the mystical to the informative and solemn, on life and history. Jerome's style is masterful, and he uses it to create a strong sense of good humour, benevolence, and well-being.

Three Men in a Boat is commonly regarded as a comic masterpiece, which is true as far as it goes. The book is often comic, and it is a masterpiece, so therefore it is a comic masterpiece. But Three Men in a Boat is more than that.

What struck me most about the book during my most recent re-reading of it was that it had the character of a post-modernist book, although it was written by a pre-modern. If Jerome's autobiography is to be believed, the literary establishment of his day certainly thought Three Men in a Boat was different from the usual run of books. According to him they execrated the book, castigating it as impertinent and vulgar – two accusations which seem bewilderingly unfounded in this the last year of an impertinent and vulgar century.

These charges probably arose from Jerome's treatment of events – the idle recreations of young men – which would have been beneath the notice of most serious writers of the day, and from his frank materialism. Here's an example of the materialism, which even today would probably offend many people:

How good one feels when one is full – how satisfied with oneself and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal – so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.

Then there was his comment about a poor single mother whose corpse the three friends pull from the river, and whose story they later learn: "Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly." Suicide was of course considered in those days to be a result of grave moral weakness, and attempting it was a crime. Blaming it only on lack of money and, as Jerome did, on the failure of the woman's family and friends to support her was probably far too lax morally for the professional protectors of public virtue who flourished in the Victorian era, as in ours.

Instead of being moral, as writers of his day tried to be, Jerome chose to be adult. He did not encourage the reader to pay homage to a severe moral code which was a poor approximation of the true values of society. Instead he wrote a book in which people have failings and other people forgive them because they realize that they, too, have failings. As he wrote of the suicide: "She had sinned – some of us do now and then." And, as we have seen, he argued that the world had failed the sinner, not that she had failed the world.

Three Men in a Boat was probably also considered vulgar and impertinent because of Jerome's use of a style which was much closer to conversation than most writing of the day. His writing is, though, the glory of the book. He writes with exceptional facility in many tones ranging from the broadly comic to the reverent.

The book is in fact primarily a virtuoso display of writing. Perhaps in their day Jerome's comic pieces were novel and refreshing, but over a century later many are all too familiar. Nevertheless, thanks to Jerome's accomplished handling of them, they remain highly entertaining.

Jerome also used his mastery of style to accomplish a goal which would be considered postmodern in a contemporary book. Three Men in a Boat is full of
engagingly written passages in which Jerome persuasively imputes deep significance to mundane events but eventually reveals that he is less than serious. These exercises demonstrate the limited validity of both fictional and non-fictional accounts of human undertakings.

Along the same line, in his introduction Jerome asserted that Three Men in a Boat was a work of "hopeless and incurable veracity," even though the reader quickly realizes that it is in fact at least in part a fabrication. Nevertheless, Jerome was not lying. The book is true.

It is true in that it is not propagandistic, as the literature of the day tended to be. Three Men in a Boat is an honest account of honest feelings which Jerome and his friends doubtless had, and of beliefs which they doubtless held. This honesty, expressed in elegant and limpid style, produced a book which a hundred and eleven years after its publication thrusts the reader into the lives of Jerome and his friends with an invigorating immediacy and verisimilitude which make the humour of the story richly entertaining. That is why people who read this little book tend to read it again and again.

The Unsinkable Jerome K. Jerome © 1999, John FitzGerald

You are what you ought to eat

Every day it seems I hear something new about good food and evil food. Eat the good food and you will live forever! Eat the evil food and you will die, shortly, in sin and despair!

The decline of organized religion has resulted in the ascendancy of morality. Without God around to save us, we must save ourselves.

Food is important. We have to eat to live, and we have to eat fairly frequently. So our new morality has a lot to say about food.

Of course, Christianity had nearly two millennia to perfect its act. The new mainstream religion is considerably more primitive. In recent Christian days evil was considered to be intangible; it was an inherent personal disposition against which one had to fight constantly. We sophisticated moderns, though, prefer to think that evil is tangible.

Specifically, we have embodied evil as taboo food, most notably fat. Fat is evil made flesh. Fat clogs your arteries! Fat makes you fat! Turn from fat and all its works so that you may be saved!

What is this salvation, though? It appears to consist of losing weight and having a greater chance of living into that period of life in which health problems get extremely serious. It doesn't quite measure up to the Christian idea of salvation.

On the other hand, salvation by food has the advantage that evidence of its existence can be found. People do indeed lose weight by changing their diet. They tend, though, to gain it back, and more.

Then once you fail in your attempt to gain earthly salvation you are open to the religious argument that you have been following a false god. You were eating the wrong food. And on you go in your spiritual quest.

To be fair, food cultism may on the whole promote healthy eating. It exaggerates the effects of diet, however, and of specific components of that diet. It holds, for example, that blood cholesterol can be easily controlled by diet, while the research is considerably more equivocal.

The main point of food cultism is not really good diet. Food cultism uses food to satisfy our hunger for evidence that we are not ordinary and that we have control over our lives. It tells us that if we only stop violating its food taboos we will live healthy, productive lives, unlike the sinners who do not share
our knowledge of good and evil. Believing that we are pure and everyone else is foul is of course the traditional conception of human dignity.

Technology, globalization, and poker

There’s been a lot of speculation here at Global HQ about just why poker has become so popular. It seems to be on television somewhere at every hour of the day and night. They show poker tournaments, cash poker games, poker played by celebrities. People have always liked poker, but they haven't been gaga over it.

I realized that as a literary man I had an advantage in this discussion, since I had actually once read a book about the world of high-stakes poker as it was before the game became so popular. The book was The Biggest Game in Town by the British writer and poet A. Alvarez. Mr. Alvarez likes to play poker, and in 1981 he took a holiday in Las Vegas at the same time as the World Series of Poker. Like the enterprising writer he is, he got a book out of it.

The main event of the World Series of Poker was already a big deal in those days. In 1981 it attracted 75 entrants, each of whom paid $10,000 to compete. As it is now, the main event, like the other events, was a knockout competition, and the winner was the last player not to go broke. The first prize was $375,000, half the entry fees. Not bad for a few days’ work.

How the world changes, though, eh? In 2006 nearly 9,000 players ponied up the ten grand (or had the ten grand ponied up for them by poker websites at which they had won tournaments), and the first prize was $12 million. The prize for finishing 238th was nearly $43,000.

Even after changes in U. S. law which restricted the ability of poker websites to subsidize entry fees, the 2007 main event still attracted nearly 6,400 players. The first prize shrank to a paltry $8.25 million, in part because a smaller percentage of the entry fees was put into it.

Back in 1981, the game was dominated by a small group of professional players, several of whom Mr. Alvarez interviewed. Surprisingly, most of these players are still active or were active until recently. While Mr. Alvarez’s interviews were somewhat uncritical, he did use them to put together a good picture of the professional players of the time. Almost all of them were men, and all of them had two other important characteristics:

• ready sources of finance
  
• a consuming obsession with poker

The players made their living from high-stakes cash games, and since the luck of the cards can often run the wrong way for a long time, to keep playing in those games they often needed someone to provide a huge bankroll for them when they were broke. Going broke was a frequent danger, because they did little else but play poker. A couple of players (one of them the great Doyle Brunson) observe that in their younger days the only part of the world outside the poker rooms which interested them was the white line they drove along to the next poker room.

Their obsession seems to have had little to do with money. Mr. Alvarez notes that some of the players seemed not to understand the uses of money away from the poker table. The winner of the main event in 1981, Stu Ungar, died broke in 1998, although he had won $30 million at poker tables. A large percentage of that $30 million was simply given away; the rest seems to have been pretty well thrown away.

Nowadays things are different. To get into a tournament you no longer need friends with deep pockets. Chris Moneymaker, who won the 2003 main event, won his entry fee online, in a tournament he paid $39 to enter. The internet and the knockout tournament format have proven to be an ideal combination for poker. Because people from all over the world are playing at the big poker sites, you can always get a game. The tournament format means that you don’t have to have big money to get into that game, either. Entry fees reportedly start at under a dollar. If you’re playing in a game with a 75-cent entry fee, you won’t be winning much if you finish first, but you’ll have had some pretty cheap fun.

In Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death Alexander Cockburn argued that world chess champions tend to be narcissistic repressed homosexuals with Oedipus complexes – except for one group. The group which consisted of more or less normal people was the group of champions from the Soviet Union. The reason they were different is that they had been selected by the Soviet government because they had the abilities necessary to become a chess champion, then trained to play well, then required to play chess for their country. The chess champions from the rest of the world had not been encouraged by their countries to play chess, but devoted their lives to the game because of their obsession with it.

A similar process seems to have been at work in poker. Although poker players don’t seem to have a pathological or even a standard psychological make-up, in 1981 playing high-stakes poker for a living pretty well required that you be obsessed with the game and be able to get your hands on large sums of money on short notice. These days, though, a Chris Moneymaker can get to the heights of the field while working as an accountant.

Becoming a poker champion is no longer as much trouble, and the field is becoming flooded with normal people who just like to play poker and can now do it without making the personal sacrifices or taking the financial risk they once had to. Doyle Brunson observed to Mr. Alvarez that as the game grew more popular and amateur play became more competent, the professional players would find it difficult to maintain their dominance of tournament play. Since in tournaments you can’t buy more chips when you start to run out of money, the professionals’ big bankrolls wouldn’t help them when they hit an unlucky streak.

Mr. Brunson was right, of course, even though he couldn't have foreseen internet poker in 1981. Today you can play a lot of poker for very little money and develop professional skill. As differences in skill between amateurs and professionals become smaller the outcome of tournaments comes more and more to depend on luck. Amateurs can have good luck as easily as a professional can. No one has won consecutive main events since 1988; between 1970 and 1988 four players won consecutive main events.

So there you have it – poker has been democratized by technology and sound business thinking. The big poker capitalists have been forced to forgo their monopoly control of the big tournaments, and poker proletarians like Mr. Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Jamie Gold, and Jerry Yang have begun taking the World Series of Poker main event.

It’s no wonder the American government is trying to kill internet poker. The idea that technology and globalization might give ordinary people a chance against the big guys is not one the current administration is likely to want to see in general circulation.

But you can fight the Man! Stand up for democracy – shuffle up and deal!

Technology, Globalization, and Poker © John Fitzgerald, 2007

The myth of useless information

We are told that we live in an Information Age. If we do, though, we are remarkably uninformed. In fact, most people don’t know what information is. They routinely confuse it with data. Collecting data is described as collecting information, for example.

People noticed that researchers collect data and extract information from it, so they concluded that if they collected data, they’d be able to extract information from it, too. However, they might as well think that since Wayne Gretzky won the National Hockey League scoring championship by putting on some skates and carrying a hockey stick, they can win the NHL scoring championship if they also put on some skates and pick up a hockey stick.

Here is a simple example that illustrates the difference between data and information. A few years ago I was out of town on business. I had never been to the city I was visiting before, so I bought a map of it. The map had been published as recently as three years before, but failed to show a major street that, I was informed, had been opened five years or so before that. The street was the street on which my clients had their office.

To become information, data must at the very least be accurate and relevant. My map failed on both counts. If information is not accurate, it cannot be relevant. Obviously, if a city map does not contain a major street it cannot be valid. A map of London that omitted Trafalgar Square would simply not be a map of London.

Even if information is accurate, though, it need not be relevant. An accurate map of Detroit is not relevant to you if you are trying to find your way around Minneapolis. That point may seem irrelevant itself, but too often people trying to interpret data are performing the equivalent of trying to find their way around Minneapolis with a map of Disneyland.

For example, people often assume that opinions and other ideas predict behaviour, so that instead of observing the behaviour of the people they are interested in understanding, they need only collect their ideas. This assumption is often wrong. For example, students' educational aspirations often are unrelated to how far they end up going in school.

In general:

1. If you need to know what the capital of Ontario is, and you consult an encyclopedia that tells you the capital of Ontario is Toronto, the encyclopedia is informative (since Toronto is, in fact, the capital of Ontario).
   
2. If you need to know what the capital of Ontario is, and you consult a different encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Ottawa, that encyclopedia is not informative (Ottawa is the capital of Canada, but not of Ontario).
   
3. If you don’t need to know what the capital of Ontario is, then neither encyclopedia is informative, since you’re not going to be consulting either one. An aspirin you don’t take won’t make your headache go away.

Information is conventionally defined as data that reduce uncertainty, and the preceding three rules are consistent with this definition:

1. If you’re uncertain about where the capital city of Toronto is, then an encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Toronto has reduced your uncertainty to zero – you know what the capital is.
   
2. An encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Ottawa hasn’t reduced your uncertainty at all, even though you may think it has.
   
3. And if the question of the capital of Ontario is of no interest to you (because, for example, you already know what it is, or you don’t need to know what it is)), you’re not going to consult either encyclopedia, so neither of them will reduce your uncertainty about where Toronto is.

What these observations boil down to is a definition of information as:

1. necessary,
   
2. accurate, and
   
3. intelligible.

Data may be unnecessary for two reasons:

1. you have no reason to consult them, or
   
2. they tell you nothing about the subject you’re interested in.

Consequently, if data are not accurate they are not necessary, either. If you want to know who won the hockey game last night you don’t ask someone to guess who won. Instead you go to a reliable source. Even accurate data are unnecessary, though, if you don’t need to know them. If you’re not a hockey fan, you don’t subscribe to the Hockey News.

There is no such thing as useless information.

The Myth of Useless Information © John FitzGerald, 2008