There might be such a thing as ghosts, but they rarely say "boo."

Well, readers, it would seem that any devotion you have shown my humble blog has been pretty poorly rewarded. It has been nearly a month since my last post and I can't make a very good accounting for myself: a little writing, a bit of socializing, too much Medieval II, Total War (yeah, I'm still on that kick. You'll be pleased to know the Venetian Republic won their war with Milan). But very little reading, I'm afraid.

Luckily, I do happen to have a cultural axe to grind–it stems from cinema rather than literature, though. Have you guys seen the movie Waitress? Well, I had high hopes for it; I mean, it has Andy Griffith in it for fucksake, it also has Nathan Fillion (did I spell that right? Anyway, he played Captain Reynolds on Firefly. He rules. I was glad to see him getting work).

I initially struggled with my opinion of the movie, because there was a lot right with it, but what was wrong eventually won the thumb war. As an adopted semi-southerner I've grown more and more impatient with movies that assume the South, and its people, to be what I call QCQHW. This stands for Quaint Cute Quirky and Heart Warming–sort of the Fried Green Tomatoes effect. This movie is so full of folksy wisdom, ol' fashioned home-cooking, and guys named Earl it nearly collapses under the weight. I do believe the South has its own unique culture and aesthetic, but somehow it never makes it into movies. Southerners are generally smarter and a lot less friendly than they come off in films. Your typical movie-land Southerner is a drawling, sweet-natured simpleton. I'm not really sure where the myth of Southern hospitality comes from; it's always seemed pretty far-fetched to me. Here's the facts as I see them: I never saw a fist fight in my life, until the first hour of my first day of school in Memphis. I find rural Yankees to be more consistently friendly than rural Southerners. I think the Civil War left us with a feeling of needing to prove something. Who knows. Anyhow, Waitress was pretty lame.

Speaking of the Civil War, me and my friends have been playing a drinking game derived from Ken Burn's Civil War on Sundays for the last month. The rules are fairly complex, but here's the gist: You pick a side, North or South (I'm drinking for the North) and when your side is beaten in battle, or has some general feat of badassness perpetrated against it, you drink. That's the basic rules, but for advance players there are bonus drinkies: DRINK when Shelby Foote shows bias, DRINK when there's a "That's what she said moment" (i.e. "the balls were flying withing inches of my face"), adopt a personality, like Frederick Douglass or P.G.T. Beauregard, and DRINK when they're mentioned. And, of course, "Mary Todd Drinkin": act crazy for a second then take a shot whenever Mary Todd shows up. If this seems a little disrespectful...well...there's a reason.

OR WHATEVER. This is supposed to be a blog about books, remember? And I do have one good book to talk about: Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum. The title pretty accurately sums up what the book is about: It focuses on a period in the late 19th century during which an extraordinary collection of men and women addressed the question of the supernatural using sound scientific research. These people were not hobbyists or homeopathic crackpots, they were Nobel prize winners, writers, and academics. Their numbers included William Crookes, William James, Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Lewis Carrol.

This is a book that has the power to alter one's worldview (or, if you are a person with some spiritual/supernatural beliefs, reinforce it). It details many, many experiments that were conducted by this group in their efforts to prove the validity of supernatural phenomenon, and to go into all of them would take more space than is proper for a blog, but the plain truth is that–if you credit that these respectable, educated, stodgy, 19th century scientists knew their business, and conducted it scrupulously–well, dammit, they proved their case. Their tests showed, again and again, credible evidence of telepathy, telekinesis, and even communication with the dead.

I know what you're thinking: "If the father of Psychology, the grandfather of radio, and a few other various Nobel prize winners got together a hundred years ago and proved the existence of life after death, why haven't I heard about it?" Well, one of the great things about Blum as a writer is that she never breaks from her narrative to address this question, rather she writes, alongside her history of parapsychology, a history of mainstream science's hostility
to parapsychology. Again and again throughout Ghost Hunters the reader is no sooner floored by the discoveries of the psychical researchers, than he is again floored by the pigheaded disregard paid to those discoveries by the science world at large. One sees the careful, meticulous rigor that these early parapsychologists applied to their discipline, and then reads the hollow, uninformed dismissals of the traditional scientists: "Oh, you clearly weren't careful enough with your record keeping," "Ah you were clearly hoodwinked by a clever fraud," and, if all else failed "Well, clearly that couldn't have happened, so you must be making it all up." Blum paints a portrait of a young, struggling branch of learning that exists half-way between religion and science and is hated by both. The church saw Psychical Research as encroaching on its turf, and science saw it as asking questions that were inappropriate for science.

In the end, I think that what one takes away from Ghost Hunters is dependant on one's particular usage of an old philosophical device known as Occam's Razor. The Razor says that if two explanations for a given event are put forward, all things being equal, favor the simpler. So: William James, Henry Sidgwick, and their team of researchers conducted probably thousands of tests with the aim of ascertaining the existence of telepathy, life after death, and other supernatural phenomenon, and they found evidence that is solid enough that I wouldn't think twice about calling it "proof". So, you tell me which of the two following explanations is the simpler:

(1) This group of notable scientists, philosophers, and researchers, including some Nobel laureates, for no monetary gain to themselves, and at the cost of serious harm to their own reputations, devoted 30+ years of their lives to orchestrating a huge, pan-continental conspiracy with the aim of faking the existence of the supernatural. Or, (2) they did their jobs honestly, wrote down the results, and found some truth.

I think #2 is simpler, but I know many will side with #1. And never the twain shall meet. Anyhow, READ THIS BOOK. It's Amazing.