Mark Miodownik - Stuff Matters

This was such a vibrant, informative and enjoyable book! Saturated with the author's enthusiasm, his passion for the subject bursts from every page.  Written for the layperson, Miodownik achieves what all experts must dream about in attempts to popularise their subjects; the reader feels like a learned expert after reading each chapter!  He seems to possess a kind of synesthesia for materials whereby they “speak” to him in a way they do not for an average person. For instance, he calls gold the full fat milk of materials and fondly recollects being entranced on a visit to the Crown Jewels writing, “The gold and jewels seemed to speak a fundamental language to me, more fundamental than art, more primitive.  A feeling akin to religious devotion came over me” (p184).  Another example comes from the chapter on paper, where he draws comparisons between the type of paper used in an activity and the activity itself. Soft, crafted paper bags for expensive clothes, which mimic their contents, and hard rigid travel tickets that are redolent of the hard, rigid machines they allow entry to.  This is especially true of transport because as trains, cars and planes have become thinner and lighter so have the tickets!  This connection of object to its usage reminded me of fellow scientist Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table although there Levi draws connections between the characteristics of elements and people he has known.  Plastic cups are anthropomorphised too, “they look jolly and sweet, the material mirroring the state of infancy.  It would be appropriate if plastic juice cups grew up to be ceramic tea cups as they got older, becoming stronger, stiffer and more distinguished” (p203).  Not all of his synesthetic impressions ring true and sometimes he gets a bit carried away with himself allowing the pleasure of making connections to override the truth of the connections made!  When writing about glass he notes that in spite of its ubiquity and myriad applications it doesn’t engender much affection from humans,  “It is a featureless material: smooth, transparent and cold.  These are not human qualities”.  He thinks people seem to prefer warmer, more solid things as the objects for their affection.  “The very thing that we value it for has also disqualified it from our affections: it is inert and invisible, not just optically, but culturally” (p178-9).  This is an interesting idea, while not actually being true, as glass can be used to engender very strong emotional reactions, as in the creation of glassware, the works of the artist Chihuly or, most obviously, stained glass windows in churches, which he actually mentions himself in the same chapter!  However, given the generally high standard of the connections he draws, it seems fair to allow him the odd swing and a miss.

The style and structure of the prose is similarly enthusiastic and engaging.  The chapter on plastic is a great exemplification of the author’s style.  He takes a quirky, folksy experience from his day to day life, past or present, and moves on to expound the material in question’s basic science and history.  In this case, the quirky experience is an argument with a cinema goer during his student days and the material is plastic.  The experience is usually remembered with some form of self-deprecation or mocking and in this case he paints himself as a pretentious, condescending and socially awkward student.  In short, plastic facilitated photography’s switch from using glass plates to using thin films of celluloid, which later led to the invention of the eponymous moving pictures (movies) and, eventually, cinemas.  Here too, his enthusiasm and creativity can take him a little bit too far.  He writes the key historical interactions in the style of screenplays, albeit with mixed results and copious amounts of extraneous jocular dialogue, but it is totally in-keeping with his slightly zany creative flair.  I personally preferred the chapters without screenplays although there were a couple of good bits and others may enjoy them more than me!  He is also funny and some parts made me laugh out loud.  The chapter on glass starts with a hilarious passage where the author recollects an experience he had driving through the never ending olive groves of Andalucia.  He writes, “as the trees that lined the roads rushed past, I found myself catching glimpses of the groves moving repeatedly into perfect alignment, flickering like an old silent film.  It was as if the ancient olive trees were performing a magic trick for me….these brief snapshots, of line after line of trees stretching seemingly to infinity, were addictive.  I watched the road, and then the trick, then the road, then the trick, the I hit a tractor.”! (p160-1)

The book's concluding passages contain a good summary of the love for materials and interpretation of their role in society that’s in evidence throughout, “although materials around us might seem like blobs of differently coloured matter, they are in fact much more than that:  they are complex expressions of human needs and desires.  And in order to create these materials - in order to satisfy our need for things like shelter and clothes, our desires for chocolate and cinema - we have had to do something quite remarkable: we have had to master their inner structure.  This way of understanding the world is called material science, and it is thousands of years old.  It is no less significant, no less human, than music, art, film or literature, or other sciences, but is less well known” (p236-7).  For the author, materials are a central part of our humanity and, on finishing the book, I’m inclined to agree with his statement that, “They mean something, they embody our ideals, they give us part of our identity” (p246).

Inevitably, when attempting to make such a complex and scientific subject accessible to the non-specialist there’ll necessarily be instances of over-simplification or omission.  These didn’t seem very common to me but one question that struck me as glaringly in need of further explanation came in the chapter on glass. Here we read about how light is refracted (see chapter notes on GLASS, below) on the basis of wavelength. In the earlier chapter on foam we have learned that the appearance of the sky is blue is due to scattering of blue light within the earth’s atmosphere because shorter wavelengths scatter more easily than longer ones (see notes on FOAM). But it is purple, not blue, that is the bottom of the rainbow of refracted light (i.e. it has the shortest wavelength), which begs the obvious question:  Shouldn’t the sky doesn’t look purple in this case?  The answer seems to lie in the human eye’s ability to see blue more readily than purple but this is left conspicuously unaddressed.

In conclusion, this was a wonderful book!  Especially given that my interest in science is quite limited and it is not a subject that excites me much.  The author’s enthusiasm and love of his subject is so great, he’s able to transmit it through his writing with a childlike fervour that’ll surely rub off on anyone who reads it.  He made the subject interesting, entertaining and accessible and presented lots of complicated and specialist ideas in a comprehensible way for a non-scientific lay reader.

Below, I’ll include my notes from the chapters as they contain a wealth of interesting facts about, and explanations of, the materials that surround us everyday. I wouldn’t have given a them a second thought to before reading this book!

STEEL

• All metals have a crystalline structure and are malleable / move because of billions of imperfections called dislocations p18

• Inchtuthil, Scotland was the site where almost 1m Roman nails were found buried in a pit.  They did so as nails were such a valuable commodity for their enemies they didn't want them to fall into their hands p22

• Samuari swords use low carbon, flexible steel at the centre and high carbon, sharp but brittle steel as an outer wrapper and were incomparable before science of steel was understood p25

• Henry Bessemer, and his process of blowing oxygen into molten iron to remove carbon, originally didn't work very well / reliably until metallurgist Mushet suggested removing ALL the carbon then adding the ideal quantity of 1% back again p26

• In 1903, Gillette sold 51 razors and 168 blades. In 1904 he sold 91k razors and 124k blades! P28

• The inventor of stainless steel, Brearley, did so while trying to make tougher gun barrels. He discarded the failures in a pile but exhumed the stainless steel one when he realised it had no rust. It wasn't hard enough for gun barrels. the combination of iron, carbon and chromium creates a steel with a layer of chromium oxide adhering closely to its outer surface meaning it won't rust.  The oxide doesn't react with saliva meaning cutlery doesn't taste of anything and that people no longer taste their cutlery. P29-30

PAPER

• Strangely, I didn’t write any notes on this chapter except the example of “material synesthesia” mentioned in the review! Perhaps it’s because the chemistry is more simple of more familiar than the other materials; I think I remember studying how paper was made a few times at school.  Or perhaps I simply wasn’t concentrating much during this chapter!

CONCRETE

• Is made up of calcium carbonate (usually Limestone), powdered iron-rich and aluminium-rich rock containing silicate and water.  The powdered rock is heated to around 1450 C to release the constituent elements from their bonds.  Water is added to the powdered mixture and the it forms a gel; cement.  If rocks are added to cement it becomes concrete, a structural material.

• 50% of everything built in the world is concrete!

• The Romans’ discovered concrete ready-made in Pozzuoli, near Naples, because silicate rich rocks had been superheated in the volcano and spewed out as ash.  All they had to do was mine this powder and add limestone and water!  This substance would help them to build their empire. The Pantheon in Rome is an excellent example of their concrete engineering prowess; it remains the world’s largest unsupported, concrete dome!

• After the fall of the Roman empire concrete technology was lost for about 1,000 years.  It’s not clear why this knowledge of material science was lost but the author thinks it may have partly been because of the Roman failure to solve concrete’s major issue as a construction material; it cracks under stress. p72

• However, in 1876, a French gardener called Joseph Monier wanted to make large pots for his plants that wouldn’t crack like terracotta.  He put rings of steel inside the concrete mould before pouring the pots and discovered reinforced concrete! This concrete was able to withstand bending stress without cracking because of the steel within it.  The key here is that cement, and concrete, both bind to steel and have a similar coefficient of expansion.  Hence, the structure is solid and will remain so in both hot and cold conditions when both the steel and the concrete will expand and contract. p74-5

• Reinforced concrete’s structure can still be compromised by small cracks, the entrance of water into these cracks and freeze-thaw shattering.  However, self-healing concrete has been invented whereby bacteria found in highly alkaline, sulphurous lakes is added to the concrete along with a form of starch.  These bacteria lie dormant until water and air enter their environment, which activates them and they start to feed on the starch before excreting calcite that helps the concrete to refill these gaps! p80

• Self-cleaning concrete uses titanium dioxide particles, which react with UV in sunlight to create free radical ions that break down any dirt that comes into contact with them.  This new technology may also have applications for removing pollutants from the atmosphere much like plants. P84

• Concrete cloth, which comes as a roll and only needs water to be added to harden, can be made into any shape desired before being set and may be used to create structures and shelters very quickly.

CHOCOLATE

• The triglycerides in chocolate can take 5 forms depending on how the crystals are packed together within the substance: Types I & II are not very dense, mechanically soft and unstable and will change into types III & IV very quickly.  Types III & IV are dense but soft and crumbly and have no snap when broken, which is important from a psychophysical perspective as this is associated with feeling of pleasure and freshness!  Types III and IV are what you will get if you melt chocolate and leave it to cool down and re-congeal.  Type V is the form sort by chocolatiers.  It is the most dense form, has a hard, shiny, mirror like look, snaps when broken and, perhaps most importantly, has a higher melting point than the other forms meaning it melts in the mouth at 34C whereas the others are, in varying degrees, lower.  Getting chocolate to form type V crystals is hard and takes time so chocolatiers add ‘seed’ type V crystals during the cooling process to encourage their formation before types III and IV, which are formed more easily. p87-8

• The reason cooked chocolate tastes different to chocolate in your mouth is that many tastes evaporate from the chocolate while it is cooked whereas in your mouth these are all picked up by your sense of smell, which gives chocolate its unique flavour. P91

• Cocoa beans must be fermented for a few weeks in a pile on the ground before they are ready for roasting as this creates ‘fruity’ ester molecules, which are essential for chocolate’s distinctive taste. P93

• Maillard reactions (protein + carbohydrate) in the roasting process creating nutty, meaty esters within the beans themselves. P94-5

• The Mesoamericans, who invented chocolate, would then grind up the fermented, roasted beans and add water to make a drink (chocolatl) and it was in this form that chocolate first came to Europe as an unsuccessful competitor to tea and coffee in 17th century. P95

• It remained like that for 200 years until Dutch chocolatier Van Houten invented the bean press in 1828, which allowed cocoa butter to be separated from cocoa powder.  Cocoa powder found popularity as hot chocolate but the process also allowed chocolatiers in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland to refine the composition of their chocolate.  Now they could fine tune the amount of butter, powder, milk, sugar and any other number of additives creating new, pleasurable experiences in the mouth.  This development allowed Fry and Sons, an English firm, to create the first chocolate bar. P96

FOAM

• MM geeks out a bit too hard over a material called silica aerogel, which is 99.8% air, and was invented in 1931 by Samuel Kistler.  Made by taking a liquid silica gel and increasing its temperature, while under sufficient pressure to prevent evaporation, the liquid changes to gas and is then released leaving behind the structural skeleton that previously held the liquid.  It is the lightest solid on earth and a fantastic insulator.

• Aerogel has a blue colour when placed against a blue background but should be clear as it is essentially made from glass.  When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits lots of molecules before reaching the ground.  If all light was scattered equally then the sky would be white but blue light waves are shorter so these get scattered more than other, longer colours.  Hence, when we look at the sky we see the blue light waves that have been scattered and bounced around the atmosphere.  This is called Raleigh scattering and is very slight indeed so you need a huge volume of molecules to see it; hence, the sky looks blue but a room doesn’t.  However, aerogel is a small amount of air encapsulated in a transparent material that happens to have billions of billions of tiny internal surfaces.  As such, these myriad internal surfaces scatter the light sufficiently to make it appear blue! p112

• Largely unappreciated during the inventor’s life, the material eventually found applications for space exploration at NASA and particle identification at CERN.  To the author’s delight it was eventually used as a net to catch space dust!  It’s probably these rockstar geek credentials that engender the author’s enthusiasm for the substance, which is, admittedly, interesting and somewhat magical.  However, for the layperson, it’s not as relevant as the preceding chapters on more common, everyday materials.

PLASTIC

• Plastic was first invented in an attempt to create billiard balls without using expensive ivory as a raw material.  Around 1869, John Wesley Hyatt mixed nitrocellulose with alcohol to create a coating for wooden balls, also experimenting with making solid objects like combs, false teeth and jewelry.

GLASS

• When the silicone dioxide (SiO2) quartz is heated up the molecules vibrate and break their bonds to form liquid glass but, unlike many other substances like water, it does not return to its previous state when it cools but rather becomes a solid with the molecular structure of a chaotic liquid; glass. P162

• Making anything equivalent to modern glass is hard because you need quite pure quartz, as raw material, and very high temperatures (1200C).  However, these conditions can occur naturally when lightening strikes sand.  Here, temperatures of up to 10,000C cause the sand to form fulgurites, which look like rough, sandy lightening bolts (fulgur in Latin). While the outside is rough, because the dissipating heat from the lightning only fuses together the sand particle rather than melting them, the centre, where the lightning vapourises the sand, is a completely smooth, hollow glass tube.  Air bubbles trapped inside fulgurites can be used to analyse the atmospheric conditions of past eras in the same way as ice cores.  P163-4

• In one part of the Libyan desert there is white sand composed almost entirely of quartz, which forms very pure, clear fulgurites akin to modern glass.  A piece of this desert glass forms the centrepiece of a decorative scarab on the mummified body of Tutankhamun! It can be dated to 26 million years ago and, thus, couldn’t have been made by the Egyptians. P165

• Both the Egyptian and Greek civilisations experimented with glass and made some progress but it was the Romans who added a form of sodium carbonate to their sand, which allowed them to form transparent glass at a much lower temperature than would be possible with pure quartz.  This helped them to develop the first glass windows.  Until then windows had been open holes in houses, hence their original name; “wind eye”! P165-6

• The Romans also used glass in combination with thin sheets of polished metal to create cheaper, more durable mirrors and discovered glass blowing to create thin walled objects like glasses that were difficult to manufacture using a mould. Not only did this allow for a drinking vessel with a neutral taste, unlike pewter or ceramic, but also allowed people to see what they were drinking for the first time!  The author links this with the later development of golden, sparkling, visually appealing lager vs. the dark, opaque ales that were drunk from pewter tankards.

• Interestingly, Eastern cultures had little interest in developing glass technology despite their mastery over other types of material science.  Traditionally, Japanese and Chinese cultures used paper to construct windows in their houses and pretty much ignored glass all the way up until the 19th century.  This prevented these cultures from inventing the microscope and the telescope, which were introduced by Western missionaries, which could have retarded their scientific development vs. the West. p169

• Given that glass’s atomic structure is similar to many other materials, i.e. the nucleus and the electrons barely take up any room and the majority of the atom is air or nothingness, why is glass transparent and other substances are not?  The answer is to do with ‘quantum mechanics’! When energy, in this case light, hits an atom the electrons within the atom try to use this energy to change their position within the atom.  This takes a certain amount of energy and if there isn’t sufficient energy for the electron to change position then the light will simply pass through the atom making it transparent to the human eye. Higher energy light, like UV, does have sufficient energy to move the electrons in glass and so make it seem opaque. This is why you can’t get a suntan through glass, because the UV never reaches you.  Substances like wood or metal have electrons that don’t need a lot of energy to change position and so look opaque under visible light and UV. p171

• Even if glass can’t absorb visible light, moving through the interior of an atom still affects it, slowing it down until it emerges from the other side and speed up again.  This is why when light strikes glass at an angle it refracts because the different parts of light are momentarily travelling at different speeds.  The same process allows magnification to be achieved using a curved lens.  p171

• In 1666, Newton explained the natural phenomena of rainbows demonstrating that water droplets refracted visible light in the same way as glass prism. P172

• Chemistry was transformed by glass like perhaps no other discipline as it is so important to be able to observe what happens to the substances and solutions under examination!  The addition of boron oxide to glass to make it expand and contract less under heat, know by the trade name PYREX, was also extremely important to countless chemical discoveries!  Apparently, every really serious chemistry lab has it’s own glass blower! P173

• Safety glass and bullet proof glass are made by inserting layer so of plastic, called laminates, between the glass to hold the glass together (safety glass) and help to spread the energy of the impact over a wider area (bulletproof glass). One layer of laminate will stop a 9mm bullet, 4 a magnum .44, and 8 an AK47!! p177

GRAPHITE

• “The biggest diamond yet discovered is located in the Milky Way in the constellation of Serpens Cauda, where it is orbiting a pulsar star called PSR J1719-1438.  It is an entire planet five times the size of the earth.” p183

• India was the sole source of diamonds until the mid 18th century, when they were discovered in other parts of the world, most notably SA. p184

• The marketing phrase “Diamonds are forever”, coined for De Beers during the expansion of diamond sales for engagement rings in the 20th century, is totally untrue as all diamonds are slowly turning into their more stable cousins; graphite.  The process, however, would take billions of years before an appreciable degradation could be detected! p186-7

• Graphite was mistaken for lead in the past, hence the use of the term ‘lead’ for the graphite in a pencil, and was called Plumbago.  Plumbago mines became more and more valuable as uses were discovered for it, such as casting musket and cannon balls.  During the 17th and 18th centuries in the UK, it became such a valuable commodity that theft became a major issue with enterprising thieves, or “artisanal miners” digging secret tunnels into existing mines to steal it.  In 1752, an act of parliament was passed to make stealing graphite an offense punishable by a year’s hard labour or 7 years transportation to Australia.  Many mines were protected by armed guards by 1800! P188

• There is a type of coal, revered for its aesthetic appeal, commonly called “jet”, which is the fossilised remains of monkey puzzle trees.  Queen Victoria made it popular by wearing a lot of jewellry made from the substance while mourning her husband Prince Albert.  It became so popular that towns located near sizeable deposits stopped using it as fuel and started to make jewellry from it.  P190

• The idea that diamonds might be related to coal or graphite was laughable until Antoine Lavoisier heated a diamond in 1772 and discovered that it glowed red hot but left nothing behind as residue.  Other gemstones seemed impervious to heat but diamond was not.  Lavoisier repeated the experiment in a vacuum and under these conditions, astonishingly, the diamond turned into pure graphite demonstrating that both materials were made of carbon! P191

• In 1967 it was discovered that diamonds were not the hardest material known to man.  This carbon based material is based on graphite's hexagonal planes but, unlike graphite’s intra-layer weakness, this substance had a three dimensional version of the same structure giving it far more strength than even a diamond.  It was called lonsdaleite and is thought to be c.60% harder than diamond although it only occurs in very small quantities so it is hard to test.  The first sample was found in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, where the intense heat and pressure of impact transformed the graphite into lonsdaleite  P192

• In 1963, at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, engineers invented a material stronger and lighter than aluminium for constructing aircraft.  It was made by spinning graphite into a fibre and laying these fibres lengthways, to retain their strength, while encasing them in a epoxy glue to overcome the intra-layer weakness, which normally only have very weak Van der Waals forces to hold them together. This new material was called carbon fibre. A new aircraft like a Boeing Dreamliner is 70% carbon fibre.  P193

• Recently, Andre Griem and his team at the Uni of Manchester discovered graphene or rather; discovered the unique properties that a single layer of graphite possesses; they called this ‘graphene’.  It is the strongest, stiffest and thinnest material in the world and can also conduct heat faster and carry more electricity, with less resistance, than any other material known to man.  These properties mean it could become an electronic powerhouse, possibly replacing silicone at the heart of all computation and communications! P199

PORCELAIN

• The first drinking vessels were wood, which is bad as it has a strong taste, absorbs the liquid it contains and is hard to clean.  Metal cups were used later but conduct too much heat for hot drinks and also make quite a loud, unsophisticated sound when used.  Plastic cups are also used, mainly for children, as they are safe, warm and feel comforting in the mouth.  However, they are not very sophisticated and also affect the taste of subtle drinks like tea.  They also degrade when exposed to UV.  This leaves ceramics as the material of choice for drinking, especially hot drinks.  P202-3

• Ceramics resist scratching, are impervious to UV, are easy to clean, last a long time, don’t conduct much heat and have little taste too.  The social cache of ceramic is also high, it being considered fine and sophisticated p203

• People think paper cups are sustainable but the wax coating applied to make them water proof means they are almost impossible to recycle p203

• Ceramics started life as river bed clay placed in the fire to make basic terracotta and earthenware pots.  These were porous, fragile, dusty and weak.  When used in cooking, liquid will seep into the pores, turn into steam and crack or shatter the material.  P204

• Clay is a mixture of eroded minerals and water.  In the case of riverbed clay, rocks and other materials are eroded and washed down rivers.  When this is heated, first, the water evaporates leaving a structure of unconnected crystals.  Then, if the substance continues to be heated, the atoms in these crystals begin to bond with each other forming a far denser, less fragile material.  However, this process occurs far more easily, and extensively, in certain clays.  Terracotta has the advantages that it is easy to find and becomes a ceramic at a low temperature.  For uses like bricks to build houses, this makes it a perfect candidate as it won’t be moved around, heated and cooled or dropped much.  However, for a cup, plate or dish the materials porosity and fragility become major issues. P207

• Asians led technological advances in ceramics, beginning with glazes whereby the earthenware vessel was covered in ash, which gave it a glass like protective finish.  This solves the problem of water getting into the clay but doesn’t solve the internal problem of its fragile structure.  P208

• Two thousand years ago, potters in the Han Dynasty in China discovered that if kaolin was mixed with quartz and feldspar and then heated to extremely high temperatures (1300 C) then the clay turned to an almost watery looking solid and formed a white ceramic with an almost perfectly smooth surface.  It was also incredibly strong and tough allowing it to be fashioned into very thin, fine objects.  This was porcelain and it became a status symbol associated with drinking tea in China. P208-9

• Visitors to China were amazed at this magical substance and a large export industry grew up around it, simultaneously exporting the custom of tea drinking to Europe.  However, Europeans did not know how to make it indigenously until the 18th century.  Indicating that the Han dynasty contained effective keepers of secrets! p210

• Eventually in 1704, some 1,000 years after it was invented in Asia, a alchemist called Bottger, who was imprisoned by the King of Saxony and told to discover how to make porcelain, or ‘china’.  Some 50 years later, Britain invented its own version of ‘bone china’ made by mixing kaolin, minerals and animals bones.  This industry lead to much trade between Cornwall, where the requisite raw materials could be found, and the Midlands where manufacturing took place.  It is still a large industry in Stoke, aka “the Potteries” and Stoke FC are know as “the Potters”. P214

IMPLANTS

• Allowing bones to heal themselves is an ancient technique practised by both the Egyptians and the Greeks.  Egyptians used linen, as they did in the process of mummification too, and the Greeks used bark, honey, cloth and waxes.  Plaster was a Turkish invention made by dehydrating the mineral gypsum and then adding water, which make the powder turn hard like cement.  However, plaster alone is too brittle and will simply crack into pieces in a few days.  Adding cotton bandages to the plaster gives the combination both stiffness and strength sufficient to allow the bone to heal while the patient can still move around a bit.  P219

• Dental implants are a relatively recent phenomena.  Greeks and Egyptians would have either lived with the pain or pulled out the tooth when it became unbearable.  In 1840, ‘amalgam’ was invented by mixing mercury with silver and tin.  At room temperature, amalgam is a liquid metal because of its mercury content.  However, with the addition of its other components it hardens and, as such, can be inserted into a cavity as a liquid then left to harden into a solid.  It will also expand as it hardens meaning the filling will obtain a snug fit in the cavity.  More modern fillings are made from resins (plastic and silicia, liquid at room temperature but become solid when UV light is introduced) or porcelain.  P221-2

• Ligaments are like the elastic bands of the body and connect one bone to another.  Despite this central role in the body, ligaments do not have a blood supply and therefore can’t heal themselves like bones or muscles.  Sometimes, ligaments can be taken from one part of the body and screwed into the bones that have lost their ligaments.  However, most foreign substances are rejected by the body although one exception is titanium, which forms strong bonds with bone, so screws for this type of procedure are usually made with titanium.  P223

• Another part of the body that wears out quickly and can cause problems are the internal surfaces in joints, most commonly, the knees and hips although it can happen in any joint.  Unlike bone, it these surfaces will not heal themselves because they are not made of bone at all.  Rather they are made of cartilage, which is very smooth and acts as a shock absorber.  The first hip replacement was attempted in 1891 and used ivory although today ceramics or titanium are used.  In a hip replacement the ball of the ball and socket joint in the hip is sawn off and replaced with a metal or ceramic one.  A plate of the same material is then drilled into the pelvis and polyethylene is inserted between the two to act as cartilage.  More recent transplants have experimented with not using a replacement for cartilage, as the surfaces can be engineered to have very little resistance, although it’s unclear how this will work with wear and tear currently.  P226

• Replacements may not be necessary in the future.  Scientists can now grow replacement cartilage cells for a person in a lab.  However, these cannot simply be injected into a worn joint to replace the lost cartilage there as cartilage is made up of chondroblast cells contained within a collagen skeleton.  Without this skeleton to support them, the cells will die.  As such, the focus has been on creating temporary scaffolds to allow the new cells to divide and grow within the body before the scaffold either dissolves or is consumed by the cells.  Hydroxyapatite or bioglass, invented in the 60s by Larry Hench to help Vietnam War veterans regrow limbs, is on such scaffold substance that encourages the growth of bone cells before being consumed by the same cells as they reach maturity.  Such tissue engineering has been very successful but only in areas where the bones do not experience much structural stress (e.g. face and skull) whereas in hips and knees this approach is virtually impossible because of the stress placed on these bones in everyday life.  In these instances, replacement sections of the body must be grown in bioreactors that mimic the conditions inside the human body before being introduced, whole, into the body.  The major advantage here vs. replacements sourced from donors or animals is that the new parts are still made up of the recipient’s cells and so will not be rejected by the body.  p228-9      

• As with your skin, it doesn’t look old simply because of the passage of time.  Rather, each generation of cells is slightly worse than the one before and these errors in replication are repeated meaning the quality of new cells in our body is constantly declining as we get older.  The same is true of the cardiovascular system, which causes a third of deaths in the UK, and currently there is no prospect of replacing that in its entirety. P233-4

Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye

The book starts with a rhythmic, repetitive, almost chanting text about the perfect American family and their lifestyle.  Investigation reveals it is taken from a first grade primer used in the 1940s to teach both black and white children to read.  Even without this information, the prose itself has a haunting quality.  It’s clearly criticising the white, middle class conception of the American dream and its exclusivist definitions of beauty and happiness.  The text is repeated three times.  Each time the spacing and the punctuation become closer and closer until there is nothing separating the letters, the words and the sentences.  I wasn’t sure about this technique but it definitely has the effect of a crescendo of claustrophobia and anxiety as the rules and structures of the text fall further apart with every repetition.  Perhaps it is also an attempt by the author to take this primer, a white document handed down to black people by white masters, and turn it into something identifiably African-American thus overturning white hegemony over the written word.  Throughout the text, the lines of this text form a substructure of chapters, beneath the four seasons that constitute the primary layout; referring to the character that will be discussed or feature in the next section.  Stylistically, the author also uses italics quite liberally throughout the book.  Usually these are used to denote colloquial dialect or recollection by the book’s black cast of characters and may be another device to highlight the African-American status of this book.

When I first finished the book, the contents felt fragmented and somewhat incoherent.  First, I thought it might be traumatic nature of the described but Morrison mentions in the afterword to my edition (Vintage, paperback) that this was an intentional device to encourage the reader to piece together the fragments and, perhaps, attempt to make some sense of the incomprehensible acts therein.  I went back through the text in an effort to extract the structure of the book to see if anything emerged from it.  It was definitely a helpful exercise as what had felt like haphazard muddle of atrocities is transformed into an exhaustive demonstration of how badly the ‘American Dream’, described in the primer, fits with many of the experiences of black America; especially Pecola Breedlove’s.  Another thing that emerged from the exercise was the centrality of Pecola’s story.  In some sense, all the other stories about her mother, Pauline, and her father, Colly, serve to contextualise the central act of Colly raping Pecola.  

Very broadly, Autumn establishes Pecola in the house of sisters Claudia and Frieda.  Claudia is the primary narrator.  Pecola’s there because her father is in jail.  Following this, we encounter sections using fragments from the introduction.  For instance, “HEREISAHOUSE…”, which is followed by a description of the Breedlove’s house.  Here a sofa, purchased on an exorbitant monthly payment scheme, is delivered broken and the recipients are told ‘tough shit’ (pp26-7). This excited feelings of hatred and anger in me.  Hatred of the people subjecting me to this ignominy and unfairness if I were in their shoes.  And anger that I’m powerless to do anything about it, a second class, silent citizen with no voice and no clout.  Next, “HEREISAFAMILY…”, which describes the intense domestic violence that takes place within the family.  Pecola lies in bed wishing she would disappear and it’s tragic and devastating scene.  The section when she hopes for more blue eyes, white people’s eyes, beautiful eyes so that, perhaps, such ugly things won’t happen in front of them is heart wrenching and poignant (pp33-4).  Identifying the eyes are the primary sensory experience reminded me of Dostoevsky too.  Pecola also has her first period, which the sisters try to help her with in the bushes.  They’re discovered by a neighbour’s daughter, who raises the alarm, and they receive a beating from the girl's’ mother for ‘playing nasty’ before the misunderstanding is discovered.  She also has an awkward interaction with a white shopkeeper while purchasing sweets;  illustrating the huge chasm that exists between their worlds.

Winter finds all the girls at school with a beautiful and popular new student, who I at first assumed was white before thinking that the novel is probably set in the era of school segregation.  She is later revealed to be half-white but the initial ambiguity serves the author’s point well.  The girls save Pecola from being bullied and then walk home with Maureen, the popular new girl, who buys Pecola some ice cream but then bullies her about seeing her father naked, which is an ominous foreshadowing of Pecola’s fate.  The sisters get angry with Maureen and try to beat her up but she runs away.  Then there was have story about a well-to-do black family who live beside the school and whose son is only allowed to play with white kids.  He resents it and begins to hate his mother but is too afraid and powerless to take it out on her, a theme repeated often in the book, and so does so with her beloved cat. In this section, entitled “SEETHECATITGOES…”, the son lures Pecola indoors before throwing the cat in her face and then almost killing it by throwing it against a wall.  The son blames Pecola  when the mother returns, who agrees with her son, and abuses Pecola her while she is tender towards the cat.  The boy abuses both the cat and Pecola to make himself feel more powerful in the face of his impotence before his mother.

Spring brings the first of three examples of black men abusing young black girls.  Frieda has her breasts pinched by the family’s lodger while everyone is out.  She tells her mother and father and the lodger is beaten up and thrown out of the house.  Frieda frets she will be ‘ruined’, like one of the prostitutes who is fat, and equates the two words.  Claudia says the two other prostitutes aren’t fat because they drink whisky so they go in search of Pecola as her Dad is an infamous drunk who might have some liquor.  Pecola is not at home and is collecting laundry from the house where her mother works so the girls go on there.  The girls wait in the kitchen where Pecola’s Mum works, they marvel at all the luxuries and admire a pie “Polly” has just made.  Pecola accidentally smashes it on the floor and gets beaten by her Mum who then mollycoddles her employer's child who is frightened by all the noise and the black children. She asks who they were and Polly won’t say, either ashamed or reluctant.  We begin to see Pecola as rejected, dismissed and despised by all around her.  For me, it recalled one of the first things Pecola says in the book:  After her first period, the girls discuss its significance for pregnancy and how one becomes pregnant.  Frieda says you have to get someone to love you before, heartrendingly, “Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind.  “How do you do that?  I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” (p9)

Next, we hear her mother’s story in a section entitled “SEEMOTHERMOTHERISVERYNICE…” which is powerful coming directly after such a devastating display of indifference towards her child.  Pauline’s life is one of hardship, living in a large, poor family in the countryside.  The story (pp86-102) is rich, evocative and covers a huge expanse of personal and societal material despite it’s brevity. The contrasts experienced by Pauline as she moves from child to adult, countryside to town, Kentucky to Ohio, housewife to worker, childless to mother are sketched so powerfully using so few words. When she moves to Kentucky she meets Colly and marries him before moving to Ohio.  In Ohio, she is lonely and looked down on by the white people and the other black people there as she is uncultured.   She begins to fight with her husband and turns to clothes, makeup and the cinema to console her.  After having children, she finally finds acceptance at the church where she channels her pain into becoming excessively moral and somewhat revels in the burden of her drunk, violent and slovenly husband.  The children are treated to exceptionally harsh punishment for any perceived indiscretions. We watch as she becomes understandably disillusioned by her lot and takes refuge in the luxuries of the white people's house she works in (pp99-100) although Morrison clearly wants to show the damage this rejection of herself and her family will do to her own children's’ development shown in the previous incident of the smashed pie (pp84-5).  Then there is her father’s story, “SEEFATHERHEISBIGANDSTRONG…”, which can be heartbreakingly summarised by this quotation, “Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose.  He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him” (p126).  After he was abandoned by his mother he was raised by his Great Aunt who then died.  At the funeral, he goes off to the woods with a girl and loses his virginity but is discovered by two white hunters who humiliate him. Colly can only hate Darlene, the girl he is with, and not the hunters who embarrassed them because, ‘hating them would have consumed him’ (p118).  His subsequent paranoia about Darlene being pregnant and the formation of a plan to run away to Macon, like his father, to find the man who had abandoned him and seek his understanding completes the tragedy.  The fact that the white men are simply too powerful and overbearing to hate seems, to me, to be one of the primary explanations offered for the inexplicable, incomprehensibly destructive rape he perpetrates on his daughter at the end of this section.  Spring finishes with Pecola visiting a sort of fake pastor, himself suffering from the effects of perceived racial superiority, where she asks him to change her eyes to blue ones.  He tells her if she gives his landlady’s dog some food then she might get blue eyes.  However, he hates the dog so the food is laced with poison.  She does so and the dog dies.  The fake pastor sits down to write a letter to God attempting to justifying his paedophilia with young black girls, which is one of the strangest and, to me, most extraneous parts of the book.

Summer shows the two girls, Claudia and Frieda, selling seeds door to door to make some money.  On their rounds they hear people gossiping that Pecola is pregnant with her father’s child and are amazed that no one shows any pity towards her.  They bury the money they have made and the seeds they’ve yet to sell in an attempt to help Pecola and her unborn baby.  Last, we have a strange, other worldly and quite incoherent conversation between Pecola and an unnamed friend.  I feel like it represents her descent into madness and this is how we find her at the end of the book; wandering around the neighbourhood picking at the rubbish with birdlike gestures.  

Analysing the text with a focus on the structure showed me how Pecola is rejected by every constituent part of the American dream.  These foundations, which are supposed to support the structure of her life, fail her and crumble beneath her causing her insanity; presumably because her own world is too cruel and incomprehensible to bear.  Her house is a nightmare of domestic violence and poverty.  Her mother and father both reject and abuse her.  Even normally happy objects of pleasure, like cats and dogs, turn out to heap yet more misery on poor, young Pecola.  In this sense, the book became more powerful and meaningful for me after looking at it for a second time in this way.

Something that is immediately apparent and does not require any further analysis is the quality of Morrison’s prose.  The first section that struck me was the description of Claudia and Frieda’s mother holding a conversation with a friend while they do the laundry in the back yard:

“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop.  Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly” p9

It’s evocative and enhances the dialogue that has preceded it with its inventive and original similes and metaphors; with the possible exception of a conversation described as a dance, which is quite commonplace.  Yet more impressive to me was a section describing young men hanging out on the street and smoking.  While one might expect the author to be intimate with the feel of female conversation, her ability to penetrate the feeling and ambience of teenage boys is a little more unexpected but what she writes transported me back to similar experiences in my own life;  or was so evocative it made me invent the memory! She writes:

“These young boys met there to feel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrages.  The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth.” p24

The aspects of the book I didn’t like were far fewer than those that I enjoyed.  The misery is totally unrelenting and sometimes I felt it could be leavened by some warmer or more humorous interludes to better replicate the experience of life.  There are a couple of examples of this, for instance the warm chatter between the ladies doing the laundry quoted above.  Another would be the worldly and entertaining chatter between the prostitutes that live above Pecola.  The wonderful trio of prostitutes (pp38-44) are warm, vivacious and reaffirming.  The enjoyment and camaraderie contained in both conversations shows an aspect of life that cannot be devastated and cheated by circumstance.  It gives a meaning to some of the suffering and saves it from becoming a meaningless abyss.  Claudia and Frieda’s acts of kindness fall in a similar category but struck me as far less convincing, which I’ll discuss in the next paragraph.  An example of what I’m talking about could be the film Manchester By The Sea (2016) where terrible tragedy is mixed with the inevitable comedy of day-to-day life.   In a way, I thought the book would probably have benefited from a bit more of this but perhaps it would’ve reduced the overall effect.  The author is clearly aware of the nature of the book, saying in the afterword to my edition that it is, “a terrible story about things one would rather know anything about” p170.

Another criticism I have is the terrible portrayal of men in the book.  There are exactly zero positive male characters in the entire book! All of them are paedophiles with the exception of Claudia and Frieda’s father.  However, this one hope for a positive male figure in the book plays a very minor role.  While he appears to have a job and remain faithful to the girls’ mother, at least to the extent of remaining in the household, his only part in the narrative is to beat up the lodger who squeezed Frieda’s breasts.  Even the boys are horrible and cruel, bullying Pecola and using her to take the blame as Junior does.  As such, I feel like this book displays an unfairly negative view of men in general.  In fairness, some of the women aren’t much better but all of the good, kind or altruistic acts are carried out by women.

Claudia, and to a lesser extent Frieda, conduct most of the acts of kindness in the book.  Indeed, Claudia is close to being portrayed as a kind of saint throughout the novel.  Despite her age, she is not enthrall to the image and values of white culture as almost everyone around her is.  She destroys her white dolls earlier in her childhood as a demonstration of that.  However, if American culture is totally saturated with ideas of white supremacy and superiority, as the rest of the novel suggests, how has a child managed to free herself from these norms?  I felt the author writes Claudia’s character almost like a superheroine.  She rejects what everyone else in society believes at an almost impossibly young age seemingly through some innate ability.  She saves Pecola from bullies at school and defends her from Maureen’s sharp questions at the ice cream shop.  Then they bury their money and seeds for her in an act of extreme, albeit ineffectual, altruism.  Her character is almost too good to be true and I felt it distracted from Pecola’s story, which is the one with the real value contained in it.  I found little of interest in the description of the improbable adolescent superwoman that Claudia is portrayed as and I wondered if it might be the author’s attempt to place her own views and perspectives into the story.  The last lines of the afterword, “With very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread.  And it has taken 25 years to gain for her the respectful publication this edition is.” indicate a kind of self-importance and pride that I would associate with the creation of a heroine type character like Claudia.  Of course, I can understand the author’s frustration that such a good book took such a long time to gain recognition but to equate it with Pecola’s experiences is too much for me!

This book’s basic formula appeared to me as, if you belittle and abuse people, seemingly especially men, then they will feel the need to find something else to abuse in order to restore their agency.  This seems like a reasonable premise to me but I do take slight issue with the gender divide.  If abuse creates abusers then why are all the victims of abuse women and all the abusers men?  Pauline is arguably also an abuser but the gender divide is stark and this question goes unanswered.  Pecola doesn’t want to abuse someone else, she wants a superficial trapping of white beauty; the bluest eyes.  She wants to possess a property that she thinks will make people stop all the horrible things she has witnessed in her life.  However, blue eyes won’t make a black girl beautiful, they’ll make her a freak as they don’t fit with the rest of her appearance.  When she goes to see Elihue and asks him for blue eyes, when he abuses her by making her kill his landlady’s dog, she eventually receives the outsider’s status she seeks.  However, it comes in a form commensurate with the chaos and devastation of her world and existence; people avoid her because she is too illicit rather than too beautiful.  The book shows how we all look down on the weakest and most powerless around us to make ourselves feel better:

“among all the waste and beauty of the world - which is what she herself was.  All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed.  And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us.  All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.  We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.  Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour.  Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent.  Her poverty kept us generous.  Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares.  And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt.  We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.” p163

However, it also attempts to explain these acts of abuse and violence by placing them in their context.  As the author says in the afterword, “I did not want to demonize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse” p168.  The final paragraph seems, to me, to show the author’s extreme pessimism about the fate of African-Americans in America:

“This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers.  Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.  We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s too late.  At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late” p164

This is deeply depressing but does not seem wildly inaccurate when American society is viewed through the number of African-Americans in jail or the disparity and inequality that exist between whites and blacks. It reminded me of the same pessimism I discovered in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me, which I would describe as a book of similar quality as well as subject matter. I hope that eventually reality will prove better than their predictions, although both these authors are hardly poorly placed to comment and their experiences outweigh my feeble hopes!