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The taste of bitter fictions, the ring of contradictions
It is not entirely facile of me to recommend Dermot Turing's Reflections of Alan Turing: A Relative Story (2021) on the grounds that he dislikes The Imitation Game (2014), even though I am in sympathy with his position even without a personal relation to the subject; he dislikes the film not just because it is inaccurate, which is after all par for the course in Hollywood, but because its inaccuracies flatten, they simplify a real and surprising person to a succession of easily identifiable tokens in a familiar constellation, eccentric, tragic, brilliant, queer, dead. Since the publication of Prof: Alan Turing Decoded (2015), Dermot Turing seems to have made a serious second career as a historian of science whose other books are now pinging my radar, but as a biographer he attracts my attention for his acute awareness that the spaces the dead leave make ideal containers for the dreams we want to pour into them, so that this short, wry, thoughtful book represents a sincere effort to disinter Alan from the pop-culture iconography which has effaced so many of the corners and creases and accomplishments of his life. He looks at his uncle in context of Empire, specifically the British Raj whose traditions and privileges structured his family's life for more than two hundred years and whose expectations he dodged as successfully as he did heteronormativity. He looks at his uncle in context of the future, which is built on history, not so much secret as fallen between the cracks of the conventional picture, like Alan's mentorship of Beatrice Worsley, the first-ever PhD in computer science—Dermot cares a lot about women and other marginalized people in science, especially that there should be more of them. He has far more time for Sara Turing née Ethel Stoney than any fictional treatment I have encountered, not eliding her difficult relationship with her famous son but recognizing her own scientific interests that were stopped short by the requirement to marry out of engineering and into the ICS. He would like to see Joan Clarke celebrated as a legend in her own right rather than a romantically misrepresented adjunct to the downfall of Alan Turing, one of many points in the book where my reactions were an unsophisticated right on! (Every now and then, we did hit a point which was more in the line of are you sure? I don't necessarily agree that an autism diagnosis can be ruled out for Alan except in the sense that diagnosing the dead runs the same risks as trying to categorize their sexual identities per the latest lingo of the current decade, but then I don't consider the question to be an accusation of dysfunction as opposed to a neutral possibility in the case of a highly social person with a documented aversion to eye contact. When the assertion of Alan's autism is advanced as stereotypically as it is in The Imitation Game, however, Dermot is probably right that it is just another manifestation of the ways in which intelligence is pathologized, the anti-intellectual reinforcement that to be smart is not just to be different, but damaged.) He is at pains to make the reader understand that while Alan is remembered as a codebreaker, he should be remembered as a mathematician and in that capacity as a polymath who was just as groundbreaking in developmental biology as in computer science. His explication of his uncle's technical achievements—and the achievements with which his uncle is credited which have elbowed the contributions of others out of the popular eye—is as lucid as his concerns about AI, which begin by exploding the specter of Skynet. He opens with the ghost of John William Turing, his eighteenth-century ancestor refused service with the East India Company because of his mixed race. If Alan Turing is an icon to Dermot Turing, it's as an incitement to the future which we must choose rather than congratulate ourselves is bending effortlessly toward justice. I get to feel good about myself because his touchstone among all the real and embarrassingly fictional quotations attributed to Alan Turing is the one with which I titled my post for his birthday: "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done." Does there ever. I like the idea of Alan serving as a template and an anchor, not a repository of nostalgia but a summons to something really new. Of course it is how I think of him, but I think the idea has merit besides. It was the last book I bought in the old apartment and the first to arrive in the mail at my current address.
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This short, wry, thoughtful book represents a sincere effort to disinter Alan from the pop-culture iconography which has effaced so many of the corners and creases and accomplishments of his life. --This is a lovely sentence ("corners and creases ... of his life," love it) and a very strong endorsement.
the ways in which intelligence is pathologized --wow, I had never thought about this phenomenon in precisely this way, but now that you say it, I sure do see it. Ughh, I suppose it's just the age old way of further strange-ifying those who seem different; makes me very, very tired.
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It's really good! Alan seems to be a relatively recent field of study for Dermot Turing—he's very clear that in his childhood, Alan was off-limits as a subject for discussion—but from where I am looking, he does well by him.
--This is a lovely sentence ("corners and creases ... of his life," love it) and a very strong endorsement.
It's really the thing I loved about the book, although the information I had not previously had access to (he makes really good use of the Manchester archives discovered in 2017, which have much more to do with Alan's interior life than was apparent at the time) I also enjoyed.
--wow, I had never thought about this phenomenon in precisely this way, but now that you say it, I sure do see it. Ughh, I suppose it's just the age old way of further strange-ifying those who seem different; makes me very, very tired.
The less that different ways of thinking are seen as strange, the less they will be able to be used as a stigma by the ignorant or malicious, but it certainly hasn't gotten better in my lifetime. (Or perhaps it got better in terms of understanding their existence, but the anti-intellectual pendulum, like the rest of the retrograde, is swinging very hard right now.)
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Thank you. I am glad to have been able to think enough to write one.
*hugs*
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Welcome! I recommend it highly, along with Prof. (And if you have not read it, Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), the first serious biography of Alan and in many ways still the gold standard.)
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*hugs*
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Nine
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It was unintentional but appreciated!
Off topic
https://www.vulture.com/2022/04/martin-scorsese-film-foundation-screening-restored-movies.html
Re: Off topic
Absolutely!
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Thank you! I wanted people to know about it.
Love that Alan Turing quote.
It is one of my favorites, along with the famous one from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." And the postcards, and also some complaints in his letters.