I haven’t had a chance yet to read Nicola Lacey’s biography of H.L.A. Hart, but it’s not every day you see this kind of exchange in the London Review of Books. Unfortunately, Nagel’s initial review is only available to subscribers. (Brian Leiter had a link posted to some comments from John Gardner on Lacey’s biography, but it doesn’t seem to be working now. Maybe Gardner has published his comments?)
I'm reading Ronin Ro's Tales To Astonish, about "Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American comic book revolution." So far I'm not finding it clearly written. Of Jack "Jacob Kurtzberg" Kirby's early days:
It was a difficult time to be a twelve-year old boy. Everywhere, kids were forming gangs. Kids on Suffolk Street became the Suffolk Street Gang and fought the Norfolk Street Gang. Then they fought Irish and black gangs. Some of his peers started running with the well-dressed mobsters hanging around the neighborhood. If he couldn't become an actor, Jacob figured, he'd do this, too, or become a crooked politician, like the ones he saw holding conferences and spending money in neighborhood restaurants.
But thoughts of the future had to wait. For now, he had to maintain his reputation and look out for his brother, David. Their mother wanted David to wear nice clothes, but velvet pants, a lace collar, and shoulder-length curly blond hair (at the height of the Depression) had made the kid a perpetual target. Five years his junior and over six feet tall, David was stocky and tough, but no match for the street-hardened gangsters stepping up to confront him. David did what he could when the gangs attacked, but sometimes Jacob would leave school, see his brother under a pile of opponents, and leap at them with both fists swinging.
Lessee: David, aged 7, over six feet tall, stocky, dressed in ... Can you even BE stocky if you are over six feet tall? I'm getting a Little Lord Fauntleroy Smash! vibe off this. Gangs of New York era tyke, Bruce Banner, after inheriting a fortune and being exposed to gamma radiation, is taken by "Dearest", to live with ... It's the sort of thing only Kirby could dream and draw. [If Mary Pickford is unavailable, I think 'Dearest' could be a sort of 'Motherbox', like Orion has got.] The gangs, the kids, the bizarre monstrosity. Clearly Kirby grew up with it all.
Kirby dating Roz: "Her father worked in a factory as a seamstress on women's dresses." Now this is not clearly wrong. See this definition. But I think 'worked sewing womens's dresses' would avoid the problem.
On Jack Kirby's war experience: "War was a series of events." That's right up there with "And, inevitably, the years passed."
Still, I'm such a Kirby fan. I'm enjoying it despite the stylistic lapses.
A plucky gang of writing chums thwarts the plots of nefarious vanity publisher - and a few others besides. Plots, that is. It's A Nest of Ninnies meets Carl Hiassen and John Grisham and they all drink each other under the table together. Here's how it all happened. Here are links to supporting documentation. It's "certain to resonate with an audience." A selection from chapter 2:
His old friend, Isadore, shook his massive head at him. "We know how it must be to have a lot of money but no working car," he said, the harsh Macon County drawl of his voice softened by his years in Atlanta high society. "It's my pleasure to bring you back to your fancy apartment, and we're all so happy that y'all is still alive. Y'all could have been killed in that dreadful wreck." Isadore paused to put on the turn signal before making a safe turn across rush-hour traffic into the parking lot of Bruce Lucent's luxury apartment building. "Y'all'll gets a new car on Monday."
"I don't know how I'll be able to drive it with my arm in a cast," Bruce Lucent shoots back. "It's lucky I wasn't killed outright like so many people are when they have horrid automobile wrecks."
"Fortunately, fast and efficient Emergency Medical Services, based on a program founded by Lyndon Baines Johnson the 36th President of the United States helped y'all survive an otherwise, deadly crash," Isadore chuckled. He nodded his head toward the towering apartment building, in the very shadow of Peachtree Avenue, where Bruce lived his luxurious life. So young, yet so wealthy, based on his skills as an expert software developer.
"I don't feel very fortunate," Bruce complained as his friend helped him from the low-slung red car, "I hurt all over and I don't remember a thing after I left that bar over on Martin Avenue. I wouldn't be surprised if the police didn't want to talk to me about what happened. Not that I could help them because I don't remember anything" he added as an afterthought.
Isadore pulled the collapsible wheelchair that he'd bought at Saint Irene's Hospital from the open trunk of his new Maserati and unfolded it on the curb beside where Bruce painfully stood, his recent ordeal only recently over. He helped his chum sit in the new wheelchair, and then pushed it rapidly toward the gleaming doors of the high-rise tower. The soft Southern breeze blew the sweet scent of magnolias over them as he said, "This is certainly something new for me."
"Never say that," he replied.
Via s1ingularity.
But the best writing is still to be found here. Ask yourself. "Can water die?"
British bookselling chain Waterstone’s have sacked employee Joe Gordon from one of their bookshops in Edinburgh . Gordon’s offence seems to have been remarks made on his blog, The Woolamaloo Gazette. Charlie Stross, who seems to know quite a lot about this case , reports that Gordon has been an enthusiastic and valuable promoter of science fiction over many years and that this looks like a really nasty attempt at corporate restraint of speech. Our campus bookshop is a Waterstone’s, but there are many alternatives nearby (and online). I shan’t be providing them with my reading lists or buying books there (despite enjoying a 10 per cent academic discount) until this case has been satisfactorily resolved. Others should do as they think fit.
On Michael Crichton’s new novel, State of Fear, in which environmentalists use weather control to fake environmental disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, a massive iceberg released from the Antarctic ice shelf) in order to convince the public that global warming is a genuine threat:
In “State of Fear,” it is money-hungry environmentalists whose illicit schemes are always being caught on tape. (As one environmentalist says to another, explaining the need for faked lightning and tidal waves, “Species extinction from global warming—nobody gives a shit.”) Meanwhile, the scientists who could reveal the truth are all co-conspirators; they suppress results that don’t support alarmist conclusions because they, too, are part of the “politico-legal-media complex,” or “P.L.M.” The P.L.M. wants to control free-thinking Americans by keeping them in a perpetual “state of fear.”
Hank Scorpio + Ralph Nader + every climate scientist in the world = PROFIT!!!1!
I sure hope that that’s bad reporting, but the “P.L.M.” thing is not; Crichton really talks like that. Like many intelligent people, Crichton seems to have a blind spot when it comes to conspiracy theories. There are fair criticisms to be made of the environmentalist movement, but international terrorism? Weather control? A shadowy conspiracy of hundreds of thousands of environmentalists, Hollywood, climatologists, the media, and trial lawyers… who’s prepared to swallow this? And have they ever tried to organize a friggin’ surprise party?
Answer here. Crichton is sticking it to the left, and that’s what’s really important in a work of art. We haven’t heard the last of this.
(Pretty good take on the novel from a weather site.)
UPDATE: Another, more detailed look at the novel via Chris Mooney. (I realize that I’m being a little one-sided, and will link to a serious-minded defense if it’s recommended in comments.)
The Washington Post finally gets around to reviewing Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, but makes a blunder. The reviewer, Gregory Feeley, commends Stephenson for his anachronisms.
Stephenson’s tongue-in-cheek verbal anachronisms can be witty, as when he manages circumstances so that a character can speak plausibly of a “Routine Upgrade” or name a private tavern the “Kit-Kat Clubb.”
But the Kit-Kat Club isn’t an anachronism; it was a real institution, and the epicenter of Whig debate in the early eighteenth century. That said, Feeley shouldn’t be chastized too harshly for his mistake. It’s exactly this collision between present and past, so that you really can’t tell the one from the other, that makes for the fun in “System of the World.” And indeed, Stephenson’s depiction of the Kit-Kat as a sort of elevated girly-bar may not be entirely true to history. To repeat myself
Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility.
The plot creaks, the characters are a little thin, and (as always) Stephenson isn’t very good at endings, but there’s still a zip and verve to the book. It’s ambitious, chaotic, and sometimes falls flat on its face but picks itself up again by virtue of its sheer exuberance. The combination of geek sensibility and economic history is difficult to resist.
Addendum: since I’m linking to the Amazon page for SotW in this review, I should say that I’ve earned approx $100 through the Amazon link in the last several days, which I have sent on to the Red Cross. Not as much as John (no terabyte drives alas, although I’m grateful to the person who bought several classic movies) . I’ve decided to make this into a permanent feature - all earnings from links from my posts will be donated to charity from here on in.
Following my thoughtful and inventive co-bloggers, here’s a list of 2004 recommended reading with links to the Amazon Associates programme and my promise to match and forward any fees to the Red Cross for tsunami disaster relief. It may take a day or so for my Associates registration to work out, so please be patient. But now that I’ve finally set an account up, I promise to match and forward any Associates fees I receive in 2005 to the ICRC.
First off, Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma was a short and sharp introduction to Japanese history. It’s full of interesting asides and sweeping generalisations, but in a good way…
I overdosed on Harukai Murakami a few years ago, but always wanted to get my hands on a copy of Underground: the Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. It’s a set of eyewitness accounts of a disaster that was the precise opposite of last week’s tsunami; insidious and unnoticed at first, an abomination perpetrated by a disaffected elite. The book’s structure and form recall an undistinguished morning amongst many, and what seems a lack of affect in the victims’ emotional responses. The overlapping perspectives with their corroborations and divergences reminded me of the whole set of vaguely post-modern fiction that tries to recreate the voices of many, such as Geoff Ryman’s enjoyable 253.
New by Haruki Murakami is a collection of others’ short stories called Birthday Stories. I bought this for two people this Christmas when I really wanted to keep it for myself.
A good one I robbed from Henry’s office shelf was Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order by Robert Gilpin. Apart from a slightly rusty appreciation of trade policy, I’d no background at all in the area and found this an excellent introduction to the topic. Skipping the first few chapters that situate the book and indeed the entire field of international political economy, I went straight for those on trade and the international financial system. Great book for anyone who’s always wanted to read the finance and economics sections of the Economist but thinks it might as well be written in Greek.
On the fiction side, I finally read Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog. Alongside Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Heart of a Dog captures most perfectly what I imagine the internal monologue of a dog to be. Forget babytalk. Dogs are funnier, wittier, probably think they’re human and just want to be loved and fed. Or fed and loved:
“”Whoo-oo-oo-oo-hooh-hoo-oo! Oh, look at me, I am perishing in this gateway… I am finished, finished. That bastard in the dirty cap - the cook of the Normal Diet Cafeteria for employees of the People’s Central Economic Soviet - threw boiling water at me and scalded my left side. The scum, and he calls himself a proletarian!”
Continuing the Russian theme, I robbed one of the two copies of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia that my Dad got for Christmas, and raced straight for the wonderful chapter on Akmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsvetsayeva. There’s not as much on Bulgakov as I’d like, but there are also wonderful bits about Kandinsky and Chagall and what it meant to them to be Russian. This is a superb book if you have various favourite Russian writers and painters and want to understand better where they fit. Or have a hankering to comprehend the unknowable Russian soul in under 500 pages.
My bedtime reading these days is Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems, which tells more about love and loss than I ever wish to experience first hand.
One I dipped into all year long (and another I whipped from my Dad) is Age of Extremes: the Short Twenthieth Century, 1914 to 1991.
Science fiction I’d recommend includes Pattern Recognition. I think it doesn’t work very well as a thriller, but the ideas and world Cayce Pollard stomps through in her CPUs are instantly recognisable and also very strange. I also read Darwin’s Children, the sequel to Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio does what science fiction does best; takes a skewy viewpoint in another reality to comment on the world we live in. The treatment doled out by the USG in Darwin’s Children to a frightening but helpless minority group is frightening, and only a couple of degrees beyond the reality of the Patriot Act.
Greg Bear’s quality is anything but uniform, though. Another of his I read this year, Dead Lines is absolutely wojus - a clumsy and predictable thriller/horror that might have worked better as a short story. For a much better story about what it’s like to see and speak to the dead, Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle. One of the Amazon reviewers puts it best: “Perfect Circle is a book about ghosts, about loss, about grief, about responsibility, about family, and about coming to terms with one’s lot in life. It is a fantasy novel of sorts, in that it expresses ideas that fall outside the “natural” laws we accept today, but it is a fantasy novel bearing the dark edge of reality.”
I know there are loads more I’d love to recommend, if only I could remember them. For the week that’s in it, I’d like to mention Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors. It’s the first book I read that really made me see the way we think about seemingly concrete things can determine outcomes as well as experiences. Another superb book on the social construction of disease, which I actually read and blogged about in late 2003, is Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression
I’d been meaning to write a brief end-of-year post about books I’ve read recently. I’ll do it now and pledge (like Henry and John) that any Amazon Associates fees I get if any of you are moved to buy any of them (or anything else after clicking on the links) will go to tsunami disaster relief. Full post below the fold.
Rousseau is, as so often, my point of departure. But not directly. Nick Dent’s new Rousseau (forcoming in the spring some time) alerted me to Andrew Crumey’s novel Mr Mee . Like Crumey’s other novels, it is a Calvino-inspired, multi-layered affair, moving from internet porn in the Scottish present to the adventures of two characters from the Confessions (Ferrand and Minard) who — like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — are given a life beyond Rousseau’s depiction of them. It is both funny and insightful and led me to explore three other novels by Crumey: Mobius Dick [link to Amazon UK], Pfitz , and Music, in a Foreign Language . I’d recommend all three. A fourth, D’Alembert’s Principle , lies unread by my bedside because I became diverted into the work of W.G. Sebald.
Next year’s Rousseau Association conference is on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker , and I had a vague, but unoperationalized plan, to do some walking myself in the summer and blog about the experience and the thoughts that occurred. It is probably just as well that I didn’t, but I have just finished a work of ambulatory reflection that is in some respects not unlike Rousseau’s: Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn . The walks in question take place in East Anglia, but they are really just a starting-point for extended digressions on China and the opium-wars, on Sir Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad, on Chateaubriand, and on much else. As with all Sebald’s writing, the pace of his prose coupled with the idiosyncrasy of his focus and the detail of his attention, gives rise to a very strange feeling of stillness within me. The two other books by Sebald that I’ve read recently have much the same effect: Austerlitz , about a boy evacuated from Prague and brought up by a Welsh pastor in ignorance of his Jewish roots is marked by digression after digression on architecture, writing, language. And The Emigrants , a series of accounts of the lives of Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany, follows something of the same model. In both books there is an enormous sense of absence, of disappearance, of the very ordinary family life of German Jews, swept away by Nazi tyranny. (By way of a digression of my own let me, on this very subject, link to a post the other day by Eric the Unread about Inge Deutschkron and her survival in wartime Berlin.) All of Sebald’s books are illustrated with remarkable photographs which sit, sometimes enigmatically and disconcertingly, on the page.
I’ll round off with two more novels. I didn’t know Italo Calvino’s work until I became aware of the impact of his writing on both Crumey and Sebald. I bought, more or less at random, his If, On a Winter’s Night a Traveller , and was hooked by the first few pages. After that it was much harder going, as the tale loops through a series of extracts from books that the protagonists are reading, never really to go anywhere. But I shall persevere, and read more by Calvino in the future (recommendations commenters?).
Finally, I just finished (yesterday) Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America . I’m a big Roth fan, and I’d rate his American Pastoral among the best novels I’ve read in the last ten years, but this wasn’t on the same level. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t enjoyable, but the writing wasn’t as good as some of his earlier work. The central character is Roth himself as a young boy, but in an alternate America where the soft-on-Nazism aviator-hero Lindbergh wins the 1940 Presidential election on a promise to keep America out of Europe’s war. The book is good psychologically about the creeping impact of fascism, about how people adapt to and normalize evil (there’s a connection to Heimat [PAL, region2 link to Amazon UK] in this). On the other hand, it is clear that Roth has an allegorical purpose, but it isn’t clear what that purpose is. Is the “message” that America cannot isolate itself from the world and must not compromise with dictators, a message that Washington’s neoconservatives would find congenial? Or is it rather that, with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo, with Fox News, and the right-wing of the blogosphere, a fascism of sorts can take hold by gradualist and constitutional means? My guess is that Roth leans to the second, but I can’t be completely sure about that.
Like John, I’m going to be donating whatever’s in my Amazon Associates account already, plus whatever commission comes in from people buying over the next quarter (up to March 31). I’ll make the first payment, like John, after the weekend, to the American Red Cross, and will donate whatever comes in after that to a combination of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and a charity dealing with long term reconstruction (suggestions gratefully received). I’d been thinking anyway of doing a round-up of books that I’d liked this year - a highly varied list of reading suggestions below. As John says, donate what you can directly - but if you want some holiday reading (and to give a little money to charity while you’re at it) use the links below.
Fiction
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I’ve already blogged at length about the book here - suffice to say that it’s witty, charming, subversive, and deeply intelligent. One I’ll be re-reading as soon as I can prise my copy back from my upstairs neighbour.
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. I’ve a weakness for well done faux-Victorian novels, and this is an outstanding example; nearly as good as Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx which is one of my favourite novels of all time. The sexual politics of Victorian England, dazzling imagery and writing, a visceral recreation of the smells, sights and sounds of 19th century London; what’s not to like?
Iron Council by China Mieville. Again, someone I’ve blogged about before, and I (and others) will have more to say about _Iron Council in the New Year. Suffice it for the moment to say that this is his breakthrough book - revolution, mythology and history colliding in a terse, agrammatic, weirdly beautiful prose style. As Michael Dirda at the Washington Post says, “China Miéville’s New Crobuzon is an unweeded garden of unearthly delights, and Iron Council a work of both passionate conviction and the highest artistry.”
The Etched City by KJ Bishop. A city which may (or may not) be an artifice created by the imagination of a sphinx like artist. Cavaliers’ skeletons in the gutter with roses twining through them. Ascetics with lotoses blooming from their navels. The Etched City is an extraordinary work of prose, tinged by Surrealism, but without that fatal sentimentality which afflicts many Surrealist writers; Bishop never falls in love with her own images. Timothy Burke says that he “can’t recommend this book highly enough”
It’s the opposite of Tolkien-esque world-creation, and far less often accomplished or attempted. The Tolkien-type fantasy, even the very good ones, approaches world-creation as a matter of comprehensive scholarship and geek-friendly mastery of consistent detail. Bishop’s Etched City is no less a masterful creation of a world, but it accomplishes this through simply beautiful, utterly original prose and equally memorable characterization. Reading it is like drawing deep in an opium den, a sort of delirium contract between reader and writer.
The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison. A bit of a cheat, as it’s a book that I read years ago, but it’s finally in print again, and is, for the first time, available in the US. Three college friends encounter (or do they? - they can’t quite remember) the Pleroma of the Gnostic mystics; it ruins their lives. Harrison’s Viriconium books are better known (they’re an acknowledged influence on The Etched City and on Mieville’s work), as is his recent novel, Light, but this is the mother lode. An extraordinary, savage little novel, written in crystalline (but treacherous) prose, which uses the tropes of fantasy as a tool to prise open the fantasies that we all construct about our lives and our failures.
Non-fiction
Great Transformations : Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century by Mark Blyth. A study of how our basic ideas of how the economy worked changed in the wake of the Great Depression; and how they changed again in the 1970s and 1980s when a new orthodoxy emerged on the right. This isn’t the only book that you should read on 20th century economic history - his explanation is overly idealist and frequently tendentious. Still, Blyth does a very fine job in explaining how ideas matter to the economy, and in describing how a particular set of ideas (some of which had little empirical backing) came to dominate economic policymaking. Blyth (along with Colin Hay and a few others) are engaged in a very interesting, and potentially fruitful intellectual project; trying to cut through the hype and figure out what our real economic options are in the 21st century.
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle. DeParle takes almost precisely the opposite tack to Blyth.
“Ideas are interesting—people are boring,” a welfare expert once told me. Ideas are interesting. But I proceeded on a broader faith, that what has occurred in the lives of the welfare poor is more interesting than either camp has assumed.
De Parle weaves together Washington policy discussions about the abstractions of welfare reform with the lived realities of three women on and off welfare, their children, and their extended families. It’s a powerful, subtle book, that doesn’t present any easy answers (and indeed shows, by careful demonstration, that there aren’t any easy answers).
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann. Multitudes of books are written on contemporary politics, most of which are rightly destined quickly to be remaindered and forgotten. Mann’s book is different - it has a real sense of history, and is genuinely revealing about the histories of the key players in Bush’s foreign policy team and the processes of policy making.
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stephen Fatsis and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus. I had ambitions to write a post comparing these two books (on competitive Scrabble playing and poker respectively) until I discovered that my friend Michelle had beaten me to it.. They’re both enormous fun. The McManus book can be a little dull when he reaches for strained analogies between poker, creative writing etc etc - but when he talks about what’s happening around the table, it’s dynamite. The Fatsis book does a very nice job of covering another (less well rewarded) group of combinatorial obsessives; “GI Joe” (who won his nickname for a peculiarly active gastrointestinal tract) is an especially memorable character.
The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing by Guy Davenport. This is a career-spanning collection of some of the best essays on literature and the arts that have been published in the twentieth century. Warm, humane, intelligent, with a telling eye for detail and for exactly the right anecdote. A joy to read.
Bound to Please by Michael Dirda. Another collection of literary essays and reviews; Dirda is a former editor of the Washington Post’s Book World and Pulitzer Prize winner. Necessarily lighter than Davenport’s essays because of their length, they’re nonetheless utterly wonderful - Dirda’s sheer enthusiasm and delight in the books he enjoys is infectious, and his knowledge of literature and catholicity of taste encompasses multitudes.
I just finished “Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, and I have to admit bafflement.
It’s great fun, with a great evocation of the period and plenty of sly digs at the modern reader (I liked the Duke of Monmouth as the Dan Quayle of the 1685 campaign). At the same time, I can’t help feeling I’ve completely missed the point here.
The style is that of fantasy, but the novel seems to be entirely historically accurate1 apart from the fact that the members of the Cabal have been replaced by new characters with the same acronym, some of whom play a minor role in the story, and that one of the key characters comes from the island of Qwghlm2, apparently a British possession.
I don’t know exactly what gives here: maybe a reader can point me in the right direction. A lot of readers had much the same reaction to “Jonathan Strange which I loved, so I’m open to the idea that there’s more here than I’ve seen so far.
There’s a whole Metaweb (a type of wiki apparently) about all this, which may be worth exploring.
1 I don’t claim to be an expert on 17th century history. There may be some other things I’ve missed.
2 Given my Manx heritage, the idea that Qwghlm is the Isle of Man seems appealing. Certainly the name has a certain resonance, though its disemvowellment makes it hard to interpret.
Prompted by Henry and other CTers, I’ve been reading, Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I was very interested in Henry’s latest Since it’s too long for a comment , I’ve posted my draft review over the fold. Looking at Jennifer Howard’s review article, I think it’s clear that a lot of people are looking for “Harry Potter for adults” and are likely to be disappointed.
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell gives the alternate history wheel a new spin, by imagining a starting point at which alternate and real histories have converged. Clarke’s Georgian England is just like the real thing, but has a history in which magician-kings ruled the North until some time in the 14th century.
For reasons that are never entirely clear, magic has faded away until its study has become the domain of gentlemanly antiquarians, ‘theoretical magicians’ who never actually cast a spell. Their comfortable clubs are suddenly disrupted by the emergence of a ‘practical magician’, the enigmatic Gilbert Norrell. He is joined by a student and potential rival Jonathan Strange.
Strange is much the more attractive of the pair, but appearances may deceive. Without anything much in the way of moral qualms, he joins Wellington in wreaking magical havoc on the armies of Napoleon, often finding it difficult to put the world back together afterwards.
Meanwhile, running in parallel, there is a traditional faery story, beginning when Norrell makes the classic mistake of accepting an attractive-seeming bargain from a faery king, to spare a young woman from death in return for ‘half her life’.
The real point of the book, though, is not the story but the style, complete with 18th century spellings and rhetoric. Academic readers will particularly enjoy the footnotes, of which I quote only one:
Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire, always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining that he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that1.
The book has been described as ‘Harry Potter for grownups’, and this is true in a sense, but also misleading. Most of those who loved JK Rowling’s magical version of the Billy Bunter stories will find Clarke’s recreation of the 18th century novel dry, puzzling and far too long. However, those of us with omnivorous tastes in reading may get enjoyment from both.
1 Footnoting the footnote, it was this post by Kieran that convinced me to go out and buy the book straight away.
Robert Irwin gets tough with Kahlil Gibran.
As a thinker, Gibran is easy to liken to Madeleine Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine Wooster falling for Gibran either, for he, too, was a drooper. Nowhere in his essays, short stories or dramatised dialogues is there any humour, sex or surprise. His writing conjures up fields of grey ectoplasm inhabited by plaintive souls. If Gibran is right about the universe, then we are all living in a banal and sentimental nightmare.
He seems to be a favourite poet of those who don’t like poetry. Similarly, I suspect that Gibranian spirituality suits those who cannot face the more specific demands that a real religion might make. The only thing you have to do as a follower is read more Gibran, plus, of course, ‘see’ more deeply, ‘listen to the language of the heart’ and so on.
Or more succinctly: “Gibranian spirituality seems to be designed to get one out of going to church on Sundays.” Seems about right to me.
Since people on CT seem to enjoy book lists (of ones not read, favorites, ones every educated person should read, ones lesser-known) I thought I’d post a link to the OCLC Top 1000 list.
OCLC Research has compiled a list of the top 1000 titles owned by member libraries—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.
The complete list page has links to top lists by genre. The site also features a page with fun facts about the list plus pointers to other top book lists.
Hat tip: Neat New Stuff.
What can we do to get our BoingBoing on (since the kids all love that BoingBoing feeling)?
Here's a link to a French SF site, Noosphere; but I'll hustle you through the front door straight to the very best stuff: scans - covers and insides - from a series entitled Club Du Livre D'Anticipation. If you can't read French (which is really just a mixed-up form of English, so give it a try) this page explains that this was a series of translations of classic English language SF, which you would have figured out anyway. It's all here: Asimov, Van Vogt, C. S. Lewis, Heinlein, Hamilton, Dick, Moorcock, Smith, Farmer, Sturgeon, Brunner, Butler, Niven, on and on. Pages and pages of mostly charming, Gallic-style illustrations to accompany old familiar titles. Much Metal Hurlant-style goodness. The titles are fun, too. A la Poursuite des Slan. (Not sure what was wrong with plain Slan.) En Attendant l'Année Dernière. (That's Now Wait For Last Year, but the other way sounds more Proustian than paranoid, no?)
Which is your favorite of the lot?
I'll just presume to point out a few choice bits from elsewhere in the site. The 17 pages of Ace SF doubles are worth checking. In other news, George Clooney is The Demolished Man. These funny little guns are funny. Conan as you've never imagined him. A couple of the Italian covers give you that Gina Lollobrigida in space feeling. Nice horizon on that one.
My top pick is Salome, My First 2,000 Years of Love, by Viereck and Eldridge. The cover is so-so, but I delight in lavish blurbs by famous authors on cheesy editions from unknown authors. Here Thomas Mann does not disappoint: "A great book ... a monumental conception ... amazingly rich in world vision and in sensuous pictures." That Thomas Mann? Off to Amazon we go. All is explained, more or less. A repackaging of sorts. Sounds strangely fascinating. Does anyone know anything more about it?
These findings [steep decline across the board, especially among the young] won’t surprise those who have spent any time in an average college classroom. Professors have always griped about the lassitude of students, but lately the complaints have reached an extreme. English teachers note that it’s getting harder to assign a work over 200 pages. Students don’t possess the habit of concentration necessary to plow through it. Teachers say that students don’t comprehend spelling requirements. Spelling is now the responsibility of spellcheck. Last October at an MLA regional meeting, a panelist who specializes in technical writing observed that while his students have extraordinary computing skills, they have a hard time following step-by-step instructions for an assignment.
I tend to be a sunny optimist in the face of this bad news. First, I assume profs have been grousing extremely about students since forever. (It is such fun I can’t believe any generation of pedagogues has had the will to forego this perk of the job.) Second, I tend to assume that somehow the rich, strange new cognitive shapes young minds assume are all right in their way. Yes, they can’t spell. (I had always assumed Matt used voice recognition software and was dictating his posts. How else to explain his homonym trouble? Matt has a brain like a planet. If he can’t spell, that means spelling can’t be that important.) But mostly I am just so bookish, and everyone I know is, and everyone I grew up with was, and my schools were crammed with bookish teachers and kids clawing after books … I guess I just can’t quite believe that it could be true that less than 50% of the population has read any literature in the last year. (The idea that you can’t assign a 200-page novel in a college class? Preposterous. Can’t be.)
In this vein, Matt Cheney has a fascinating post about teaching Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to high school students. (And Gaiman is duly fascinated.) Matt hits upon the same hard limit as Bauerlein: "I knew that few of my students would ever have read a book of more than 200 pages." But the really interesting and baffling hurdle actually came next.
The students got into it (what else is going to happen, reading that book?). But:
The more they read, the more I noticed many students were completely lost. Not because they had trouble keeping up with the reading (a few did), but because they had trouble figuring out how to read a fantasy novel. It was a minority of my students that knew how to read a novel that mixed reality and fantasy, history and fiction, myth and the mundane. The handful of kids who had read other fantasy novels did fine with the book — indeed, devoured it, finishing a week or more before the rest of the class. But the majority of students, kids who would have no trouble suspending their various disbeliefs for the most fantastic products of Hollywood, told me again and again that the book was nearly incomprehensible.
Now this is extremely counter-intuitive to me. You say you understand Sky Captain or The Incredibles or The Chronicles of Riddick or The X-Men; you can read English. But you can’t understand American Gods, even if you are enjoying reading it? Matt explains:
In the first half, they loathed and often skipped the "Coming to America" sections, but by the second half [thanks for the power of being made to take quizes] they were able to tie these seemingly unconnected parts of the book to some of the ideas fueling the main story. One of the things I like best about American Gods is its scope - Gaiman’s bold willingness to tackle American history (whether mythic history or real) from 14,000 B.C.E. to now, and to do so on the outskirts of the primary story, allowing the book the virtues of popular plot-based literature along with the virtues of philosophically serious literature (the two don’t need to be mutually exclusive, though they often are). That scope and breadth, though, is also what makes the book particularly challenging for people who are used to much less ambitious books, never mind people who don’t read many books at all.
That’s quite interesting. Young minds, video-game strong, capable of processing and integrating multiple streams of visual and audio data - I have no doubt - who find American Gods to be an incomprehensibly thick stream of data, coming at them from too many angles. Too busy around the edges. Weird. I was reading stuff that complicated when I was 10-12. But I guess what goes around comes around. I remember going to see Star Wars with my bookish mom. She’d never seen anything like it. The space battles almost overheated her brain, she confided in me afterwards. She didn’t really like it, but she agreed it was very good.
Speaking of that Golden Age of Science Fiction, I’ve just read a great collection of essays about the age that comes before. The Golden Age of Comics - which is eight - is fondly memorialized in Give Our Regards To The Atomsmashers! I’ll just quote the opening of Sean Howe’s introduction, about learning to read.
I learned to read from comic books. The first world sequence I ever sounded out, as my eyes moved from left to right, was "red" followed by "tornado" - an outrageously odd pairing that named a member of DC Comics’ Justice League of America. Burned immediately into my four-year old mind was this equation: reading = comic books. For a whole decade, I didn’t look back.
I spent nearly every dime that came my way on superhero comic books, memorizing origin stories, first appearances, and creator’s names. From comics I learned geography; I nearned the names of Norse gods, Greek gods, and Roman gods; I learned to draw; I learned scientific principles (though comic book science would turn out to be pretty unreliable). When I was eight years old, I bought a comic book price guide, and got a crash course in the rules of supply and demand (this was the eighties, after all). But more than anything else, I learned about language. I learned the meanings of dozens of extracurricular words like "invincible," "incredible," "astonishing," "uncanny," "quasar," "peregrine," "celestial," and, best of all, "tatterdemalion".
There you have it, I wager. What I had that Matt Cheney’s students evidently do not. Fascination with origins, mythology, geography, weird language for language’s sake.
Consider this an open thread. What words did you learn from superhero comics?
I will tell you a story. I can tell you where I was and what I was doing when I learned the word ‘tatterdemalion’, although I didn’t know yet what it meant. Just that he was slugging it out. I was sitting in a pizza parlor in Florence, Oregon. We were on our way to the cabin. It was raining outside. I was sipping a root beer out of a frosted mug. That word just electrified my brain. Must have been 1976 because I think was reading Ragman #1. (Of course, Marvel has a villain by that name. Easy to get confused when it’s a relatively common name like Tatterdemalion.)
You can’t leave ‘eldritch’ off the vocabulary list either. This is an adjective I associate primarily with the Scarlet Witch. But also the Black Widow, because, if memory serves, she is described as being like an ‘eldritch wraith’, on account of her acrobatic prowess (‘prowess’, there’s another) in a Marvel Team-Up issue in which she appeared with The Thing. I think they were fighting someone on an oil rig. (Oh, there it is. Hey, Claremont wrote and Janson inked.) ‘Eldritch’ probably appears in superhero comics more often than ‘dog’ or ‘cat’; a basic word you have to know.
Also, ‘Nazi’, although it was several years before I connected the Naw-zees Cap and Nick Fury fought with the boring old Not-sees my father taught people about.
‘Armageddon’ is an basic superhero noun that I pronounced Ar-MEDGE-uh-dawn. I once used it in a sentence. I don’t remember whether the occasion warranted. My mother was very puzzled as to what I could possibly be talking about. How embarrassing.
Ergo, the quote I’ve come across this past year that means the most to me may be this one from Bruno Schulz, about why the seduction of the innocent is such, such, such a good idea:
I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the the world crystalizes for us …. They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life … Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artists’s creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made.
It’s about Dostoyevsky, if you like. Or the importance of knowing what ‘tatterdemalion’ means. This passage would make an excellent epigraph for Atomsmashers! A volume I recommend to all who feel as I do about all this.
Brian and Matt are quite right about this. “While others quiver with pre-election anxiety, their mood rising and collapsing with the merest flicker of the polls, he alone radiates certainty.” Whatever can be the point of writing such a stupid column on this theme?
In unrelated news, I’m sure, the invaluable Ray Davis has thoroughly Repressed a simply gorgeous online edition of Andrew Lang’s Prince Prigio.Can you imagine anything more cruel and unjust than this conduct? for it was not the prince’s fault that he was so clever. The cruel fairy had made him so.
The story has a very wise moral.
UPDATE: Disappeared comment now appearing, but something is wonky with comments. Are other people having troubles?
try Dean R. Koontz’s “The Face,” as described by David Langford.
Koontz gives us an effectively alarming villain with a set policy of disrupting society via acts of chaos, a dark Merry Prankster; but the book seems inflated far beyond its natural length by … demonstrating this fellow’s wickedness again and again as he remorselessly kills a whole series of accomplices to his ultimate Big Bad Plan, while — being a deconstructionist professor — he naturally passes his spare time starving and tormenting a kidnapped colleague who gave offence by admiring such classics as Mark Twain. But of course.
A month ago John Quiggin posted about his basically happy experience downloading from Amazon an e-copy (PDF) of China Miéville’s new novel, Iron Council. Let me offer my own happy Amazon/China Miéville’s new novel-related tale.
The novel’s title, Iron Council, refers to the inhabitants of the “Perpetual Train”. The train is literally a steam train; it’s a runaway, in a peculiarly literal sense. New Crobuzon, Miéville’s great phantasmagoric metropolis, wants a transcontinental railway. An aspiring Robber Baron/Captain of Industry takes up the herculean task. But the enslaved and abused workers rise up and seize control of the means of conduction, if you will. They take the train into the wilderness - a very peculiar wilderness it is - by ripping up the track behind them, laying it in front of them, ripping it up behind them, laying it in front of them. The train ‘goes feral’, as the narrator puts it.
Now there are problems. But it is on the whole a quite successful fantasy novel. Matt “The Mumpsimus” Cheney has written a very thoughtful review here, with which I am in almost complete agreement. Cheney focuses on Miéville’s use of ‘anamnesis’ as a section heading:
The various meanings anamnesis has accrued over the centuries often suggest memories that lead to later inspiration, a kind of ethical pre-learning, the basic knowledge or experience known to the subconscious (either personal or collective) that motivates someone to commit ethical actions.
As Cheney notes, this fits with the role the train plays, its function as symbol. For those in the story, as well as for the reader, the Perpetual Train is a dream, a hope. It is an emblem of impossible freedom through force of will, impossibly frozen in … well, I don’t want to spoil any plots. Cheney again:
The anamnesis section of the book is a minor masterpiece, a story that is emotionally affecting, philosophically interesting, well written, inventive, and gripping. It is a pastiche of various types of writing - most clearly tales of the Old West - which also manages to maintain its own integrity. It echoes much labor history, utilizing archetypes from strikes and union battles past. (I couldn’t help thinking of the role of railroads in the Mexican Revolution, and I’m sure other readers will think of various parallels.) It is, appropriately, filled with the excitement of underdog stories, of good guys versus bad guys, fueled with a naive (but necessary) belief in wondrous progress.
This brings me to my Amazon experience. Miéville’s train reminds me of two literary precendents - two books, neither of which I can lay hands on at the moment, both of which are accessible using Amazon’s ‘search inside’ feature. Search Alfred Bester’s SF masterpiece, The Stars, My Destination, for ‘rails’ and there it is, on p. 163. I’ll just quote:
Just as the crowd of guests turned to enter Presteign’s home, a distant commotion attracted their attention. It was a rumble, a fierce chatter of pneumatic punches, and an outrageous metallic bellowing. It approached rapidly. The outer fringe of sightseers opened a broad lane. A heavy truck rumbled down the lane. Six men were tumbling baulks of timber out the back of the truck. Following them came a crew of twenty arranging the baulks neatly in rows.Presteign and his guests watched with amazement. A giant machine, bellowing and pounding, approach, crawling over the ties. Behind it were deposited parallel rails of welded steel. Crews with sledges and pneumatic punches spiked the rails to the timber ties. The track was laid to Presteign’s door in a sweeping arc and then curved away. The bellowing engine and crews disappeared into the darkness. “Good God!” Presteign was distinctly heard to say. Guests poured out of the house to watch.
A shrill whistle sounded in the distance. Down the track came a man on a white horse, carrying a large red flag. Behind him panted a steam locomotive drawing a single observation car. The train stopped before Presteign’s door. A conductor swung down from the car followed by a Pullman porter. The porter arranged steps. A lady and gentleman in evening clothes descended. “Shan’t be long,” the gentleman told the conductor. “Come back for me in an hour.”
“Good God!” Presteign exclaimed again.
The train puffed off. The couple mounted the steps.
“Good evening, Presteign,” the gentleman said. “Terribly sorry about that horse messing up your grounds, but the old New York Franchise still insists on the red flag in front of trains.”
Gully Foyle will have his revenge, and laying tracks of iron to Presteign’s door is a symbol of the absurd lengths to which our hero will go. (I do wonder whether Miéville had this scene in mind, consciously or subconsciously. It is a very memorable scene in an absolutely brilliant novel.)
Second, Tootle, by Gertrude Crampton. Have you ever read this odd little children’s book? It is a failed allegory - twisted anamnesis, if you will: ethical pre-learning, which motivates not ethical action but arbitrary repression. (You can read the first page as an excerpt. And I suggest you search inside and check out a few illustrations.) I’ll give you the bare narrative bones.
Far to the West lies the town of Lower Trainswitch, where baby trains are sent to learn how to be big trains. They learn important lessons like: Whistle Blowing, Stopping for a Red Flag, Waving, Puffing Loudly When Starting, Coming Around Curves Safely, Screeching When Stopping, and Clicking and Clacking Over the Rails. But above all they learn: Staying On The Rails No Matter What. But one day Tootle, our youthful protagonist, is lured off the rails into a race with a black horse. It was then (as someone or other says in the Iliad, I think it was) his mind first turned to Evil. Except that, this being a universe in which anthropomorphic trains can function quite nicely off the rails, it turns out that Stay On The Rails No Matter What is a false - at best an arbitrary - ethical stricture. Tootle frolics like a steam-powered hippy in the meadow. He turns up back at school with a little bit of grass between his wheels. But you know about grass being a gateway plant leading to the hard stuff, like flowers. And so Tootle slides into degradation and iniquity: “… the day after that, the Second Assistant Oiler said that he had found hollyhock flowers floating in Tootle’s eight bowls of soup. …” That’s it. Hollyhock flowers in the soup constitute the extent of the harm done to others by Tootle’s afternoon lying by the water barrel, admiring the butterflies.
The next act of our tale might be subtitled ‘It takes a village to haze a child.’ Bill, Tootle’s teacher, hatches a plan to trick Tootle into thinking it’s wrong to go off the rails (even though in this fictional universe it is morally right to go off the rails, since it’s pleasurable and harmless.) Everyone in the village gets a red flag and they all go and hide in the meadow and ambush our hapless hero. They trick him into accepting one arbitrary precept by mercilessly pummeling him with another. Such, such are the joys of culture, I suppose.
There were red flags waving from the buttercups, in the daisies, under the trees, near the bluebirds’ nest, and even one behind the rain barrel. And, of course, Tootle had to stop for each one, for a locomotive must always Stop for a Red Flag Waving.“Red flags,” muttered Tootle, “This meadow is full of red flags. How can I have any fun?”
“Whenever I start, I have to stop. Why did I think this meadow was such a fine place? Why don’t I ever see a green flag?”
Just as the tears were ready to slide out of his boiler, Tootle happened to look back over his coal car. On the tracks stood Bill, and in his hand was a big green flag. “Oh!” said Tootle.
He puffed up to Bill and stopped.
“This is the place for me,” said Tootle. “There is nothing but red flags for locomotives that get off their tracks.”
Hurray!”shouted the people of Lower Trainswitch, and jumped from their hiding places. “Hurray for Tootle the Flyer!”
Obviously this allegory of arbitrary social repression does not mandate a sexual reading. But I do like one line from p. 1: “But the best they can do is a gay little Tootle.” Too true. He was best among them. Too bad they broke the little guy’s spirit so completely, paralyzing him until he couldn’t move anywhere but on those tracks they laid for him.
And so I say that China Miéville has written the ultimate anti-Tootle. There is nothing but red flags for locomotives that get off their tracks. Transvalue that. I mean that in the nicest way.
I’m meaning to write a longer review of Iron Council. I thought it might be a good idea to clear this Tootle stuff out of the way beforehand.
And I do really like Amazon ‘search inside’.
Michael Brooke has a post up today about Ladybird books and their value to collectors. This sent my scurrying to look for an old post of mine on the subject from back when I was Junius. It had disappeared from the archives! I eventually managed to locate the source in blogger and republish — so here it is — but I wonder how much else has faded out of existence due to the general flakiness of blogger. Anyway it was one of my favourite posts, and resulted in an interesting reaction by Kieran . An important moment in the prehistory of Crooked Timber.
Here is one of the many footnotes from Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which Henry reviewed recently:
Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that.
“Publish-or-perish” is hardly the best motto for good scholarship, but if the alternative is to perish without publishing at all then perhaps it might not be so bad. This footnote may find itself stuck above my desk come Monday. Or Tuesday, at the latest.
The death of the book, like the paperless office, has been predicted so many times that people have given up paying attention. But, for me, at least, it came a big step closer today, at least in one sense, when I downloaded a PDF version of China Mieville’s Iron Council from Amazon.
This event was entirely unplanned. I went to Amazon planning a standard order and noticed that the PDF option was available. Since I didn’t want to pay for postage and wait weeks for delivery (and the PDF version was a bit cheaper anyway) I decided to try it out1. The download was pretty straightforward and the Digital Rights Management doesn’t seem too obtrusive - as I understand it I can use the file on as many computers as I want, with just a userid and password.
I’ve read about fifty pages so far2, and my feeling is that, with a large flat-screen monitor, reading a good-quality PDF is comparable to reading a medium-quality printed book. Given the limitations, particularly the need to sit in one spot, I can’t see this become my preferred mode for a while. Still, there are a lot of advantages to consider, and in many cases, these will outweigh the negatives for me.
First, it means instant cheap access to new books published overseas. This is important for Australians, and others outside the US and UK who often have to wait a long time for ‘colonial’ releases of books published in the metropolitan countries.
Second, there’s essentially no storage problem. Iron Council is 1.7 MB, so I could store about 20,000 similar volumes on an iPod. For someone whose home and office bookshelves are already groaning (and with no wall space remaining for more) this is a big issue.
Third, I can see big advantages for book reviewing of which I do a fair bit. I’ll easily be able to search for bits of text, cut and paste quotes3 and so on. And presumably we’ll eventually see the kind of added features that have made DVDs so popular.
So, is the death of the book imminent? Not, I think if we value books as texts rather than as physical objects. As I argued here, the idea, pushed by Camille Paglia and others, that the Internet is little more than a turbocharged TV set is the worst sort of pop McLuhanism. It may be that the medium is the message, but that doesn’t (or shouldn’t) refer to the distinction between paper and screens as delivery vehicles. A comic has more in common with a video clip than with a physics text, and a blog has more in common with a magazine than with a movie.
Far from spelling the end of the book, the advent of the Internet, and the expanded possibilities for digital delivery of text, represents the beginning of a new golden age.
1 I actually tried more than a decade ago, with a floppy-disk based version of Jurassic Park. It wasn’t unbearably bad, but not an experience I was keen to repeat.
2 As with Perdido Street Station, I’m finding it a bit slow going at the start. But I found Perdido Street Station really gripping by the end, so I’m not discouraged.
3 At least if Digital Rights Management doesn’t kill this option
I’ve just finished Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s being marketed as Harry Potter for grown-ups; the comparison is a little misleading (among children’s writers, Clarke is much closer to Dianna Wynne-Jones than to Rowling), but it captures the novel’s likely appeal to people who don’t usually read fantasy. JSAMN lacks most of the usual apparatus of the genre (dragons, rings and what-have-you), but still has something of its flavour. It’s a sly, funny, intelligent novel, and in its own way, quite subversive.
JSAMN depicts the return of magic to an England where history was quite different (magic once worked), but has resulted in an early nineteenth century very like our own. In Clarke’s England, magic stopped working some three centuries before JSAMN, as a result of the disappearance of John Uskglass, the Raven King, a magician who had carved out a separate kingdom for himself in the North of the country. As the novel opens, magic is of interest only to provincial antiquarian societies. This changes as two new magicians emerge - first, the quasi-recluse and pedant, Mr. Norrell, and then his pupil and rival, Jonathan Strange, an altogether more attractive and Byronic figure. They have very different views of what magic is and how it should be treated. Norrell wishes to sanitize and deracinate it, while Strange wants to give it free rein, to discover who the Raven King was, and perhaps to bring him back. This conflict drives the main part of the novel, although it eventually becomes clear that their disagreement is only the prelude to a much deeper set of changes. In the closing chapters, the reader realizes that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are more done upon than doers.
Clarke’s writing is a delight. Her prose has the rhythms of nineteenth century language, but there’s no fustiness; it’s lively and compelling. An example:
In the end is it not futile to try and follow the course of a quarrel between husband and wife? Such a conversation is sure to meander more than any other. It draws in tributary arguments and grievances from years before - all quite incomprehensible to any but the two people they concern most nearly. Neither party is ever proved to be right or wrong in such a case, or, if they are, what does it signify?
Writing of this quality (and there are other gems like this passage scattered through the text) is a joy to read. The observations are sharp and acute, and there’s a sureness of tone that is extraordinary in a first novel - note the implicit metaphor of a river that organizes the passage without ever being stated directly. Still, there is the question of whether or not the prose style conducts well with the underlying theme. John Clute’s review of Jonathan Strange suggests otherwise:
the crystalline civility of the Austenesque voice begins to baulk its author’s clear need to begin to convey something of the smell of worlds beyond the fields we know as the novel (whose story we’re almost ready to hint at) begins to pry the gates open. In the end, in other words, that civility of language works as an engine to maintain the world, not to change it, an effect only intensified by Clarke’s great skill at deploying Austen; in the end, it is a civil language, wedded to the thinning it depicts.
Clute’s review is very perceptive, but on this point he’s only half-right. As he suggests, the civilty of the tone surely reflects the comfortable assumptions of the nineteenth century English upper classes. However, both this voice, and the deviations from it that increase in frequency towards the end of the novel, strike me as a conscious choice on the part of the author, and a quite successful choice at that. She uses it to convey the overall impression of a self-assured social order that is beginning gradually to fragment as history returns to England. The main course of the novel obliquely comments upon the problematic foundations of the English social hierarchy through the lived experience of the black servant, Stephen, the refugee engravers Minervois and Forcalquier, and Mr. Norrell’s dogsbody, the enigmatic Childermass (perhaps the most interesting character in the novel). On those rare occasions where Clarke (or her unseen narrator) speak directly to the implied codes and rankings of gentle society, her judgements are no less savage for their understatement.
Hadley-Bright and Purfois were well-born English gentlemen, while Tom was an ex-dancing-master whose forefathers had all been Hebrew. Happily, Hadley-Bright and Purfois took very little notice of such distinctions of rank and ancestry. Knowing Tom to be the most talented amongst them, they generally deferred to him in all matters of magical scholarship, and, apart from calling him by his given name (while he addressed them as Mr Purfois and Mr Hadley-Bright) and expecting him to pick up books they left behind them, they were very much inclined to treat him as an equal.
It is just this set of assumptions, and the social order that it supports, which is beginning to give way as the book finishes. There are rumours of unrest from the fringes of the kingdom, as craftsmen and skilled labourers riot and break up the machines that are replacing them. John Uskglass (who is both protagonist and myth) starts to become a sort of Captain Swing or Ned Ludd to whom the insurrectionaries swear allegiance. The return of magic in Clarke’s book gains much of its metaphoric power from its consonance with the social unrest of our own nineteenth century; magic, as it escapes the control of Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange (both of whom have become agents of the state) begins to assume a distinctly radical tinge. One of the most important conversations in the book takes place between the unpleasant Mr. Lascelles (a type of the less radical Whig) and a domestic servant.
Lucas glanced up at him. He said, “We have been discussing what to do, sir. We shall leave within the half hour. We can do Mr Norrell no good by staying here and may do ourselves some harm. That is our intention, sir, but if you have another opinion I shall be glad to hear it.”
“My opinion!” exclaimed Lascelles. He looked all amazement, and only part of it was feigned. “This is the first time I was ever asked my opinion by a footman. Thank you, but I believe I shall decline my share of this …” He thought for a moment, before settling upon the most offensive word in his vocabulary. “… democracy.”
Lascelle and his class are on the losing side of history; he finishes very badly.1 As Faerie and magic irrupt into England, it becomes increasingly clear that there will be no room for gentleman-magicians like Strange and Norrell - the winds of history are blowing through doors that have been re-opened, and everything is about to change. Clarke’s language in the closing sections of the book reflects this, as the assured diction of the early nineteenth century novel increasingly gives way to something starker, wilder, stranger. She plans two more books in the series - it’s a safe bet that they will show us a very different England than the rather complacent country seen at the beginning of JSAMN. If they live up to the standard set by this first volume, it will be a quite extraordinary achievement.
1 After demonstrating his contempt for Mr. Norrell’s servant Childermass, , Lascelle finds himself trapped in Faerie as a direct result of his snobbery and perverted sense of noblesse oblige. The more pragmatic and flexible Childermass has already avoided the same trap.
Update: for more discussion of the Susanna Clarke/J.K. Rowling question (as well as some ill-tempered and ill-informed claims about Steven Brust and Emma Bull’s spiffy novel of Chartism, Freedom and Necessity), see this lengthy discussion thread at Electrolite.
Just came across a reference in a discussion board to one of my favourite bits from one of my favourite books - Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nights Companion - and thought it was worth quoting.1
Other [thieves] used to make use of a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back. They sent this creature ahead of them into the house they proposed to burgle. If the house was currently occupied, then the owner would surely exclaim in surprise on seeing the tortoise (‘Oh look! There’s a tortoise with a candle on its back. I wonder what it’s doing in my house’) and the thieves would be warned off. If, however, the house was unoccupied, then the candle would help to guide the thieves as they went about their work.
1 I blogged last year about Irwin’s related, and wonderfully tricky novel, The Arabian Nightmare .
Draft review of A Man After His Own Heart, by Charles Siebert. (Final version to appear in The Drawing Board.)
The language of the heart is all-pervasive. Art and everyday life are full of emotions expressed through talk about the heart, be it given or joined, singing or broken, closed or kind. The Ancient Greek view that the liver is the seat of the soul can seem plausible on a good Friday night, and Descartes’ case that it’s our head that matters may be felt with some force the following morning. For sheer range of metaphor, though, the heart has no serious competitors. But what about the thing itself? The cheerful curve of a Valentine’s heart does not convey what a real heart looks like. A heart ache is not a heart attack. We all know that the heart is a pump that moves blood around the body, but very few of us could give an accurate account of how it happens. The dynamic interplay of all those chambers, arteries and valves is difficult to picture, hard to explain, and took a very long time to discover.
Yet, at the same time, we are more familiar than ever with the risks of cardiac arrest and the danger of heart disease. Coronary bypasses are routine and a heart transplant these days is a standard (if difficult) option rather than an exotic experiment. So there are two ways of talking about the heart: as a metaphor for ourselves and our innermost feelings, and as a key bit of internal plumbing, in need of maintenance and regular upkeep. Advances in medicine over the past century or so, and especially in the last thirty years, have made it difficult to keep the two separate. The real heart intrudes more and more on its imagined counterpart.
An early example is Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Bodysnatcher,” written in the 1860s. It was inspired by the crimes of Burke and Hare, the “Resurrection Men” who procured corpses for use in Scottish medical schools. The usual way to do this was to trawl for the unwanted bodies of the indigent poor, or to rob graveyards. The medical faculty put a premium on freshness. Burke and Hare did very well because the corpses they procured were in unusually good condition. But it turned out this was because, rather than waiting for Edinburgh’s down-and-outs to die of their own accord, they had taken to murdering them instead. It was certainly more efficient. The horror of the resurrectionists persists in films like Dirty Pretty Things, whose characters fall into the world of illegal organ procurement, and in the still-common fear that medical staff might be tempted to rush to procure the organs of prospective donors on life-support machines. Two other recent films, Return to Me and 21 Grams, address (as comedy and drama, respectively) the connection between the recipients of heart transplants, the new heart beating inside them, and the survivors of the dead donor.
Charles Siebert explores this territory in his book. A Man After His Own Heart begins with Siebert lying in bed in New York waiting for a call to accompany a procurement team on a “heart harvest,” the process whereby a heart is removed from its donor, then packaged and rushed to the operating theatre where its prospective recipient lies waiting. This chain of events is usually hidden from public view, and the literature on transplantation contains few descriptions of it from an outsider’s perspective. Like the surgeons, the procurement co-ordinators and the transplant recipients, Siebert had to wait and wait, beeper in his pocket, for the call that a donor had been found — that is, for the news that someone had died in a car crash or some other terrible circumstance, had been found in time to be placed on a respirator, and whose next-of-kin had consented when asked to donate their organs. Siebert takes the length of the book to bring the reader from this waiting to the final moments in surgery when the donor heart is cut out of its chest.
Along the way, he digresses. His father suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and died when his weak heart finally gave up after years of struggling and near-failure. The heart attacks his father suffered were mirrored — or parodied — by Siebert’s own hospitalizations for what turned out to be anxiety attacks. But HCM is a hereditary condition and he is faced with the prospect of a test to discover whether he carries the defective gene that causes it. As Siebert takes us through the heart harvest, we also follow him through his past and his difficult relationship with his father. His fear that he might suffer his father’s end leads him to follow up on current science about HCM and the heart in general, as well as the history of efforts to unravel its function and document its failings. These themes are intercut with each other in a way that initially seems a little disorienting, but brings home Siebert’s conviction that “the heart is not only the mirror but also the mime of our ever-shifting physical and psychological states.” Both personal experience and scientific research, he believes, confirm that the heart itself — and not just its poetic representation — reflects and expresses our emotional life.
The central drama of the book — the heart harvest and subsequent transplant — is compellingly told. Siebert’s description of how a surgeon took his hand and placed it on the donor heart as it beat in its new body is remarkable. Considered as a piece of surgery, a heart harvest and transplant is not nearly as complex as the same procedure for a liver. But the heart has the shortest survival time outside the body, so its recipient must be ready and waiting for it. The heart is then harvested first and immediately transported to its destination. This can lead to a certain amount of tension between the heart surgeon and those in charge of the other organs, as procurement is delayed a little in order to prep the recipient. Even in the operating room, the heart retains its place at the top of the pecking order.
Siebert’s prose style is rich and allusive, and sometimes book’s arteries clog up and clot. The drama of the harvest suits his writing well, but small episodes from the author’s past are made to bear a little too much weight, and some observations become a bit too thick with references and significance, like Proust in need of a pacemaker. But Siebert’s account of the science of the heart is engaging, with unlikely links between fly wings and heart muscles and walk-on appearances by the Spanish Inquisition and highly-strung transplant surgeons. He visits patients waiting for a heart, clinging to life while hoping someone else will die in time for them to get a second chance, as well as the lucky ones with new hearts. Recipients sometimes say they have new cravings or habits post-transplant that they attribute to the personality of their donor. This might sound fanciful, but Siebert’s chilling description of the depressed and empty psychological state of some of the patients who received Jarvik-7 artificial hearts certainly gives one pause.
Just a few months ago, a grey, shriveled object encased in a cut—crystal egg was reverently transported to France and buried in the royal crypt at the Saint Denis basilica, having been identified through DNA testing as probably the heart of the dauphin Louis Charles, Louis xvii as he would have been, who died during the French Revolution. The ritual of removing the heart and burying it separately from the body is very old, and was common enough into the late 19th century. The actions of a few sentimental French royalists may seem like an odd survival, a bit of self-indulgence, but the work of transplant surgeons and organ procurement organizations gives us a new twist on the practice. We might think that, as transplants and related treatments become more and more common, the image of the heart as a simple pump would displace the older notions. A Man After His Own Heart suggests instead that the gap between the heart and its metaphors is narrowing not because the one is replacing the other, but because they are in the process of being stitched tightly together.
Finally, with the Google IPO pricing way below expectations and with a serious arbitrage1 showing up on the Iowa Electronic Markets, I get round to reviewing James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I’ll save the suspense; it’s a cracking read and well worth buying. To give you an idea of the style, I’ll start this review with my own shockingly unfair parody …
In 1762, Georges-Louis LeClerc, the Compte de Buffon, threw a hundred baguettes out of his laboratory window and watched where they landed on the courtyard below. He hadn’t gone insane and he wasn’t making a statement about the French baking industry. He was carrying out a whole new experiment and revolutionising the way that we look at mathematics, information and breadsticks.
An individual baguette is a pretty dumb object. Even when made with the finest poilane flour and natural yeast, it’s unlikely that the Fields Medal will ever be carried off by a loaf of French bread. However, when you get a hundred of them together, something special happens.
This was what Buffon did; he measured the baguettes before throwing them out of the window. When they had finished bouncing around, he counted how many of them were lying across cracks in the paving stones. He then divided the length of a baguette by the number that were lying on the cracks and multiplied by 200. The number came too … 3.1415927! Yes, while his contemporaries at the Encylopedie were hard at work using conic sections and convergent sequences to establish the value of pi, Buffon had it worked out more or less accurately using yesterday’s lunch leftovers. Although no individual loaf of bread had any particular information about the value of pi, when you aggregated the little bits of information contained in the length and falling of each baguette, something amazing happens. And even more amazingly, you can repeat the same experiment with needles, cucumbers, rolling pins or even everyday American lumps of wood, and get the same result! This phenomenon is what I call “The Wisdom of Sticks”.
Well that’s somewhat unfair (although truth is stranger than fiction; you can actually estimate the value of pi by throwing sticks onto a pavement, and James has about a hundred historical anecdotes like this one). But it’s a somewhat pointed parody, because there is quite a lot of material in TWOC which, while entertaining, is pretty tangential to the real underlying point. I’d group this material into two main categories.
Party tricks: As my example of the Buffon problem suggests, statistics can throw up some funny old things. For example, you and I are playing a simple coin tossing game, best of twenty, and I win the first toss. I offer you a side-bet that you will not take the lead at any time in the next 19 tosses; if I can get odds of 3-1 or better out of you I’m a winner. There are a number of startling demonstrations (people guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar2, for example) which look to me like carefully designed tricks with sampling theory rather than informational magic. Looking at the working paper describing the much-vaunted Hewlett Packard forecasting market, I’d be very tempted to place it into this category as well; the result that “the market did better than the official forecast” (Result 3 in the paper) is based on comparing a probability distribution of market prices with a point estimate for the official forecast and really doesn’t sum up the actual findings; that the official and market forecasts were very close to one another indeed.
Semi-attached anecdotes: Stories which are interesting, but which aren’t relevant to the main thesis of the book and have been uncomfortably shoehorned into the argument. Examples; the review of the invention of the motor car (an example of the wisdom of crowds – sure, Henry Ford invented mass production, but it was crowds of people who bought his products), the material on the Linux operating system (an informal hierarchy of people who use email and call each other ‘dude’ is a hierarchy, not a crowd). There are quite a few of these, and as you read the book, it’s worth thinking from time to time something along the lines of “but what the heck has this got to do with the wisdom of crowds?”
So when you strip away these ephemera, is there anything left? Well yes. In particular, monetary policy is better made by committees than individuals, in studies that can’t be explained away as party tricks. I’m also prepared to give a certain amount of credibility to the idea that pari-mutuel betting markets forecast horse race winners very well, although only a certain amount, because there’s equal evidence that they don’t forecast places and shows anything like as well. But the important thing to note is that TWOC does, at its core, describe a genuine phenomenon. In some circumstances, groups can outperform individuals at some kinds of decision problem. For interesting values of N, N heads are better than one. Where does the book go with this concept?
As I see it, James’ book goes in two directions as regards actual policy suggestions. As regular CT readers will be expecting, I don’t really agree with either of them, but one is very much more interesting than the other. I’ll call the first idea “market epiphenomenalism” and the second, more interesting one the “silver bullet theory”, for reasons that I hope will become clear.
Market epiphenomenalism
“Market epiphenomenalism” is my attempt at a name for what Robin Hanson thinks about markets; in my view it’s based on a misreading of Hayek’s original work on markets as information processing entities. To recap my argument from the post linked above, Hayek certainly did believe that markets were information-aggregating entities, but this view can only be understood in the context of his whole philosophy. He certainly didn’t think that you bring your information to the market, I bring my bit of information and that the market exchange process grinds them all up and turns them into one wonderful summary statistic called the “Market price”. Markets don’t “aggregate information” in this sense; the sense in which they aggregate information is that they co-ordinate actions without the existence of any centralised information. To make this more concrete, think of the Google IPO. People were bidding in that auction, but they aren’t setting the price (the price was being set, and suddenly reduced, by the company). What they’re doing is bringing along their little bits of capital and agreeing a set of terms on which they’re prepared to part with it. The market is aggregating these little lumps of capital into one big lump that can finance something interesting, and that’s what the market is there fore. The fact that it does so at a particular price, and that this price needs to, over the long term, bear some relation to reality if the market is to survive and keep performing its function, is an epiphenomenon.
This important point from Hayek has two implications. First, that there’s much more to a market than the prices, and it’s dangerous to kid yourself that the prices, hauled out of the context of the rest of the market, can stand as information on their own at all, much less as information of the kind that you need to solve your own decision problem. For one thing, the participants in a market are likely to have loss functions for their forecasting problem which may not be the same as your own; for example, if you’re forecasting sales, you might want to make forecasts which are systematically too high (in order to set stretch targets for your salesforce) or too low (because overruns are more expensive than underruns for you). It’s highly unlikely, for example, that traders in the Policy Analysis Market would have the same attitude toward different kinds of forecasting errors as the policymakers themselves.
The second and more important point is that if Hayek is right, you can’t just will markets into existence by saying “hey I’ve designed a few state-contingent securities, let’s gamble”. The reason why markets work is that they are performing a function, and that they are bringing people together whose little bits of capital add up to the whole investment capital of the economy, or whose total short positions add up to all the grain that has been grown. Opinions are like assholes in that everyone has one3, but unlike assholes in that it’s very easy to pluck a bunch of them out of thin air on a whim. Markets like PAM which have no real underlying need to exist, aren’t information processing entities in Hayek’s sense because they’re not co-ordinating actions, and thus attempts to use their record of closing prices as if it were information are doubly problematic. I note in passing that this isn’t a trivial point of Hayek scholarship and I don’t think any counterargument on Hayekian grounds is possible, because the point is fundamental to the Austrian critique of planning. After all, if you can construct a Policy Analysis Market out of thin air and gain all the Hayekian advantages of information processing, why couldn’t the Central Planning Committee just set up a bunch of these “shadow markets” and run communism on the basis of the output? If the Austrians were right about the planned economy, one of the corollaries has to be that toy “markets” are closer to children playing at shops than to the real thing.
But it has to be said that this is more of a hobby horse of Hanson than of James Surowiecki. At some points in the book (and more clearly, in some comments he’s made while arguing on the internet), he backs away from straightforward market idolatry and toward something much more interesting; a general theory about preference aggregation4. And that’s what I’d call the “silver bullet theory”.
The Silver Bullet?
The phrase “silver bullet”, in this context, comes from Fred Brooks’ book, The Mythical Man Month. In one of the articles which makes up that book, Brooks made the prediction that, as of the 1980s when most of the merely accidental problems of computer programming (bulky interfaces, lack of high-level languages, sheer novelty, etc) had been got rid of, there was now no further development at all which could promise even a single order-of-magnitude improvement in the productivity of software systems products5. For the last twenty years, the silver bullet prediction has looked pretty good (for about five minutes around the time of the VA Software IPO, some people thought that the Linux development model was a kind of silver bullet, but over time, I think it’s grudgingly been accepted that ten years to build a decent UNIX clone is pretty good for free, but it’s not an order of magnitude improvement.
There are a number of reasons why Brooks made his prediction but the core thesis of his book with respect to software development is that it is an “unpartitionable problem”; that software development tasks cannot be divided up among people very well and that for this reason there are fundamental cognitive constraints on the speed of software development. Under the classic model, most decision-making roles are also unpartitionable; the buck has to stop in some specific place, rather than having a nickel stop in each of twenty different places.
The thesis of TWOC, on the other hand, is that decision-making is a much more partitionable task than it is commonly supposed to be, and that it should be partitioned much more. As you can see, this comes close to suggesting that there is a “silver bullet” for a raft of organisational problems; that if we were to structure our businesses and governments so as to maximise our usage of the wisdom of crowds, we would get much better decisions for less or the same effort. Although James doesn’t actually say as much in the book, there are already some breathless futurologists out there who see a world in which nobody does normal white collar jobs any more, and instead we all sit around trading futures on our company’s internal markets. Sort of “The New Industrial State meets Trading Places.
Hmm. There is a lot of sense to the underlying idea; that people making decisions ought to discuss things with one another, and that effective communication can help groups outperform even their best members; the example of the monetary policy committees is a good one, and the book provides a pathological example of the lack of use of group discussion which helped lead to the last Space Shuttle crash. This is something which I agree with, and which is terribly important.
But I don’t like the actual “silver bullet” that James proposes. If I read TWOC correctly, it’s arguing for something a bit more radical than people talking to one another. Like anyone who’s ever said “why don’t we have a rule that you can only talk if you’re holding this bunch of keys” to try to forestall a nasty argument, the author of TWOC seems to believe that problems in human communication can be solved by simple institutional means. In the case of TWOC, the silver bullet is something called “preference aggregation”. This doesn’t have to be a market price; voting procedures are also preference aggregation, as (presumably) opinion polls could be; I understand from internet comments that James believes the best preference aggregation mechanism of all to be the hybrid market-like system used by the Tote and by pari-mutuel horse betting. Anything that takes the opinions of a group of people and distils them into a single number, with that number representing concentrated Wisdom of Crowds would suffice, though.
What’s wrong with preference aggregation?
I don’t like this idea. Specifically, it seems like too much of a free lunch. You take a bunch of views which contain some information, compress them down to a single number, and somehow come out with more information (or more usable information, which amounts to the same thing) than you started with. Granted, you can throw a basketful of bread off a roof and come up with an estimate of pi, but genuine free lunches like that are few and far between. Aside from this, I think that there are a two very serious problems with preference aggregation as a solution to organisational problems:
First, they’re black boxes. However partitionable decisions can be made, they’re not perfectly partitionable. In general, the bigger and more important the decision, the less partitionable it is. Which means that, in most important or interesting situations, aggregated preferences are going to be a decision support tool for a particular decision maker. And decision support tools shouldn’t be black boxes. I’ve spent quite a percentage of my professional life over the last ten years arguing this point and by now I think it’s won. Any improvement in decision quality that you get from a black box is more than outweighed by the fact that you can’t explain the output of the tool. You can ask questions of a committee, but you can’t ask a market why it thinks what it thinks. For most practical purposes, this is likely to mean that there would have to be an absolutely huge gain in information for it to be a good idea to move to aggregated preferences as a decision support tool.
Second, I think that the preference aggregation solution encourages pathological behaviour. Even assuming, in my view per impossibile, that careful design of the aggregation mechanism can get people to honestly estimate their information rather than “gaming the system” by misrepresenting their own views, there is a much more fundamental problem. A lot of TWOC, and for my money some of the most valuable insights in the book, is taken up with describing the conditions under which crowds perform really badly - market panics and groupthink. In order to avoid these pathological outcomes, the book is very clear that it is vitally important that you have a group of genuinely independent individuals, aggregating views which they have arrived at by thinking for themselves.
I happen to agree massively with James on the subject of it being vitally important that people think for themselves. But surely it sends entirely the wrong message to people if you’re on the one hand telling them to think for themselves, and on the other hand presenting a magical silver bullet/black box aggregation mechanism to which the eventual decision is going to be delegated? There are real-world examples of this pathological outcome at work; in particular, the Federal Reserve did not take any action to pop (or even to publicly criticise after 1996) the stock market bubble because it was not prepared to set its own judgement against that of the equity crowd. In general, I would argue that monetary authorities pay far too much attention to interest rate futures. There is a strong incentive created by all of these aggregation mechanisms for people to free-ride on the mental effort of others.
So what to make of it?
As I say, TWOC is a good book, but one that I think should be read critically rather than credulously. Crowds can give you very good answers if you know what questions to ask and if you know the correct way to interpret the answers (so could Buffon’s loaves of bread, mind). The wisdom of crowds should not be ignored, and it’s certainly a good idea to listen to what people are saying, but there is no magic solution here, and you shouldn’t delegate your own thinking to it. Even Humphrey Neill, author of “The Art of Contrary Thinking (the book in which the magazine cover indicator was first trailed) used to believe that the crowd was right most of the time. Specifically (and to be fair, in the context of stock market investment, this is close to being an analytical truth), the crowd was right during trends and wrong at turning points. I think that this captures an important part of the truth behind the “Wisdom of Crowds”; crowds are very good at answering questions, but not so good at deciding what questions to ask. Or another way to put it is that, whatever the I Ching might claim, you can’t tell the future by throwing sticks.
Footnotes:
1 Don’t know if it’s still there, but as of this morning, Kerry was being quoted at 0.51 in the vote share market and 0.49 in the winner-takes-all market. As I’ve noted before, this isn’t anything to do with the electoral college; despite the name the Iowa WTA market is simply a binary option written on the vote share contract with a strike of 0.5.
2 By the way, I’ve been in a lecture hall where the jellybean experiment was tried and it failed rather embarrassingly. As the theory predicts it will, every now and then.
3 And that in general, nobody’s all that interested in anyone else’s
4 The main reason why James seems so keen on markets is that he believes that they aggregate the preferences of all participants rather than just the marginal buyers and sellers. I think that this view is both mathematically and economically incoherent, but I’ve snipped the discussion of “Surowiecki on market microstructure” for reasons of space and time. I think my main objection can be summed up in a joke I made some while ago in CT comments that if people who neither bought nor sold a security were contributing to the eventual price by their abstention, then it seems to follow that there are Tibetan monks who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ but who were nevertheless part of the price discovery process in the Google IPO.
5“Software systems products” is a very specific definition in the context of Brooks’ book, btw; whatever your counterexample, he’s probably thought of it.
Since you don’t all listen to BBC7 religiously, and since the obit for Anthony Buckeridge obviously touched a nerve for some of you, you might want to know that, contrary to my speculation, the irresponsible BBC has managed to hold onto at least one of the early Jennings recordings, and played it yesterday as a tribute to the great man. Scroll down to 09.00. It actually lasts just over 50 minutes (not 45 as the page suggests), and stars Buckeridge himself as Wilkins, and, according to the announcer, a prepubescent incarnation of the appalling Jeremy Clarkson as Atkinson. It’s wonderful, and will be archived till next Saturday.
I’ve recently read some of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. Few who have picked them up will be surprised to hear that I’m finding them to be very, very good. But it occurred to me, while reading them, that virtually all of the non-human characters so far seem to act like humans.
They do things that real people can’t do, but they all seem to share the same motivations as people- pride, jealousy, duty, family ties, anger, love of power, and so on. Despite all the things separating them from humans- immortality, immense power, the obligation to hop around the universe picking up people when they die- the non-humans can be psychologically understood as super-people. They don’t seem noticeably less human than, say, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, or Humbert Humbert from Lolita.
Now, creating an alternate, consistent non-human psychology would be a damn hard thing to do. Telling a story about characters that aren’t supposed to think like humans would have even the greatest storytellers tripping over their feet. I know that I couldn’t do it, and I don’t fault Neil Gaiman for not doing it. The books that try it need to devote tremendous resources to character analysis.
But I can’t easily think of too many times that it’s been successfully done. There are a fair number of gimmicky attempts (Klingons and Vulcans, say), but not many take it seriously. Off the top of my head, here are a few that I believe succeed:
Isaac Asimov’s robots: This is probably the best example that I can think of. Their motivations are clear and comprehensible, but not at all like ours.The “piggies” in Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead: This is a bit of cheat, and I’m not sure if it’s really just a product of a different physiology. But by the end of the book, I could understand why they behaved as they did, even though no one I’ll ever meet would behave remotely like that. (A bit vague, I realize.)
The demon in The Exorcist: He takes over a young girl, and quickly makes such a mess of her that she’s going to die, and he’s going to die with her. He doesn’t even try to keep her alive, and only makes token attempts at saving himself. He doesn’t want power, or vengeance, or to breathe briefly the sweet, sweet air of mortal life. He’s just a hateful moron, with a lust for destruction that’s literally inhuman.
Thoughts? Additions? Subtractions?
UPDATE: In comments, Rob notifies me that Neil Gaiman has a blog. That’s pretty cool.
If I could have the answers to five questions in political science/sociology, the appeal of Stalinism to intellectuals would be one of them.I don’t think this is as difficult a question as is often supposed.
Most of the intellectuals who professed support for Communism during the rule of Stalin (and Lenin) were primarily victims of (self-)deception. They supported the stated aims of the Communist Party (peace, democracy, brotherhood), opposed the things the Communists denounced (fascism, racism, exploitation) and did not inquire too closely into whether the actual practice of the Soviet Union and the parties it controlled was consistent with these stated beliefs. I developed this point, and the contrast with the relatively small group of intellectuals who supported the Nazis, in a review of1 Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics
Two very different types of people have ended up as Communists. First, there are those for whom the central appeal was the cartharsis of a revolutionary smashing of the existing order. This was essentially the same appeal offered by the Nazis, and many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other.After writing this, I recalled something Orwell had to say in response to an early Cold War description of the typical Communist as a fanatical ideologue, subordinating all personal values to the global struggle against capitalism and democracy. As he said (I’m paraphrasing from memory here), “this all sounds convincing, until you try to apply it the Communists you actually know. With the exception of a couple of hundred hardcore members, they are nothing like this. Most drift in, become disillusioned after a while, and drift out again”.On the other hand, there were large numbers of liberals and social democrats who were dissatisfied with the obvious failings of their own countries and accepted, at face value, the claims of the Soviet Union to be a peace-loving, democratic and socially just alternative society. Beatrice and Sydney Webb are prime examples of this sort of ‘fellow-traveler’.
The fellow-travelers may fairly be accused of gullibility and wishful thinking in their assessment of the Soviet Union, but this does not imply that their own ideas contained the seeds of totalitarianism. In fact, unlike the Nazi sympathisers discussed by Lilla, the vast majority of fellow-travelers, including those who took the formal step of joining the Communist Party, ultimately realised they had been deceived. Some repudiated their previous views entirely and became, in the American parlance, neoconservatives. Others simply accepted they had made a mistaken judgement, and adopted a more skeptical view of life, while retaining their old ideals.
There is nothing similar among those attracted to fascism and Nazism. Although Nazi propaganda was mendacious in every detail, it never concealed the fundamentally brutal nature of Nazism. The closest parallel to the ‘fellow traveler’ on the right is supplied by the many decent Catholics who supported Franco as a ‘soldier for Christ’.
1 And also of a couple of books by Christopher Hitchens
Henry and I always make sure to post about China Miéville-related matters (here, for example; click from there for earlier posts. Here’s a more recent one by Henry.) So I have to make sure this exceedingly snarky Adam Lipkin review of Iron Council catches his eye, and gets a comment box (via the Mumpsimus).
I haven’t read Iron Council yet, so it may seem absurd to say I am sure this review is too harsh. But I’m sure it is, so I’ll just clear the air of this sour stuff before - sometime soon - Henry and I have our obligatory exchange.
The generic plot wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the writing itself. Miéville seems to have a thousand ideas that strike him as nifty, and he seems to feel compelled to throw them into the novel at any cost (I can only assume that that the deluge made it impossible for anyone at Del Rey to actually attempt to edit him). Some of it sticks, but then he’ll decide to toss out one of those cliched gems (like calling water magic “watercraeft”) that makes you realize that he can’t help slipping into the role of the fourteen-year-old writing his first masturbatory fanfic. bad fantasy language games (or “languagecraeft,” I suppose) and lines like, “I was verity-gauging,” are frustrating enough, but it’s less any one sentence than the overall structure and flow of these sentences into something resembling a cohesive narrative that makes this such an amazingly slow and painful read. Add in such gems as borderline stream-of-consciousness narration and an inability to avoid any digression, and reading the book just becomes a chore.
As I said, I haven’t read Iron Council, but watercraeft has been floating around since Perdido Street Station. And one of the most fantastic and visually memorable passages from that earlier book is the scene in which the watercraeft-working vodyanio dock workers have their strike broken up. I’ll just quote a bit:
That morning by Kelltree Docks dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of craefted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feed across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercraeft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.
In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.
As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. FAIR WAGES NOW! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.
On either side of the gorge in the river, small boats rowered carefully to the edge of the water. The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.
When the militia shows up to break the strike, things get wild. Fantastic scene. A showcase for Miéville’s inventive brilliance.
We may grant the point that the writing could be tighter. (Who am I to talk about unsightly extra pounds of prose?) An editorial exercise: how many occurrences of ‘water’ in the passage above should be cut or exchanged for ‘it’? And phrases like “patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped” are less powerful than obvious compressions: “patting at flat, vertical edges of water.” The charge that Miéville could do with an editor with a sharper red pen is made in the Mumpsimus post, and comment box, and in an old Jeff Vandemeer review of The Scar, also linked from the post.
But even if we get rid of some ‘water’, do we need to lose the ‘watercraeft’? I fail to see the problem. Maybe the reviewer is just expressing a profound but completely generalized distaste for the whole venture. What he really wants to say is that a book with such an atmosphere shouldn’t have been written. But if that’s how you feel, quibbling about little details is rather beside the point. Come to think of it, there should be a word for that critical sin. Reviewers called upon to consider a work they just don’t believe could possibly be good, because it’s somehow profoundly the wrong sort of thing, according to them. And then they sort of waste everyone’s time, scrutinizing and pretending it’s some detail that’s vexed them. They could only love steel and glass and you gave them a gothic cathedral, and now they say the stone work is ‘too rough’. This reminds me of a thing I posted about in relation to Miéville before. Edmund Wilson reviewed The Lord of the Rings for The Nation in 1956. The piece was called, “Oo, those awful orcs”. It is surprisingly unperceptive, more or less as per above. So it seems to me.
Maybe this isn’t Lipkin’s problem. He emphatically insists he is well-disposed to Miéville’s general subcreative vision, minus the excess verbiage.
Well, maybe I’ll just push my building metaphor a bit harder. Literary subcreation is like architecture. When someone comes up with a genuinely style of building, everyone hates it for 50 years because so much of it seems unnatural and arbitrary. Well, not everyone: but new architecture inflames negative passion, even though it wouldn’t get built if it didn’t have its devout partisans. And after 50 years the new building style settles compacently into its foundations, becoming an ancient law unto itself. Everyone loves it. Well, not everyone; but no one hates it for the crazy artificiality that was the cause for all the original indignant howling. Tolkien is like that. He is such a law unto himself that pieces like Wilson’s read like - I dunno, like complaints from New Yorkers from when the Empire State Building was built and everyone thought it wrecked the skyline. It’s funny to align Tolkien with any sort of ‘shock of the new’, but I really think there might be something to that.
And Miéville? Well, maybe this is going to far, but he’s sort of in the same boat. Like Tolkien he’s got some style issues. A red pen could be applied. And, like Tolkien, he’s got some storytelling issues. Namely, he’s a better world-builder than a storyteller. But he’s also gone and invented a new kind of world. (You can point to all that British New Wave stuff from the 1960’s, but I don’t think Moorcock holds a candle to Miéville, for example.) Miéville really has broken out of the Tolkien ruts. The vodyanoi on strike - working their watercraeft - are a perfect example. The introduction of complex labor relations, in place of the resolute economic unrealism of Tolkien, is a very delicate matter. It’s so anti-Tolkien, but can’t help sort of resting on Tolkien because you can’t get away. And ‘watercraeft’ is, I suppose, one of the moments when Miéville’s foot may look to have sunk into the ancient ‘elves and dwarves and wizards’ mud. It would be so easy for this to decline into parody, or self-parody. Socialism meeting magic can give you one of those Reese’s peanut butter cup moments of dismay, coming around the corner. Certainly it will always be easy for any reviewer to find some detail to seize upon and make Miéville sound like a complete, infantile geek.
But that’s the fate of new architects. They can’t point to anything that has come before as a plausible example of why building this way shouldn’t be regarded as arbitrary therefore basically silly. No one wants buildings to be silly. Well, you can build silly buildings - joke buildings. Yes. But it’s hard to try to be serious about a building in a new way. You look like a joke. Worlds are like that, too. Fantasy worlds especially.
Ever since I learned to read, there’s been nothing better than to find a new author with a shelf full of books that I haven’t read1. Inevitably, though the day arrives when she (or he) becomes an old favourite with a shelf full of books I have read. The first I can remember was Rosemary Sutcliffe; the most recent has been Patrick O’Brian. I’ve just reached the end of the Aubrey-Maturin series, though there are still a couple I’ve missed. I’ve always found finishing a series an ambiguous experience, and the following exchange from my blog has finally clarified the mixture of feelings.
‘Ambiguous’ for all love! Your future yawns darkly, meaninglessly and emptily before you, man! Isn’t that why you left Two Of The Canon unbroached? C’mon admit it, Quiggers. There are those among us who would understand.Posted by Rob Schaap at July 25, 2004 07:16 PM
Admittedly, my future yawns darkly, meaninglessly and emptily before me (apart from the Nutmeg of Consolation).Posted by John Quiggin at July 26, 2004 10:39 PMOTOH, I avoid the even greater risk of entering eternity with the series unfinished.
Hence, an ambiguous feeling.
Ah, I smoke it now.Posted by Rob Schaap at July 26, 2004 11:22 PM
1 Since we’re now grading our tastes, I’ll use Orwell’s scheme and class myself as lower-upper-middlebrow. Give me 20 volumes of good respectable reads ahead of one work of tortured genius (not counting Ulysses), any time.
I’m in the middle of reading Andrew Crumey’s rather intruiging novel Mr Mee at the moment. One minor point of interest is that this may be the first work of fiction to contain a description of the Monty Hall problem (see Brian’s post below ) in the form of a letter, supposedly written in 1759 from a Jean-Bernard Rosier to the Encyclopedist d’Alembert:
Sir, you may know that many years ago one of our countrymen was taken prisoner in a remote and barren region of Asia noted only for the savagery of its inhabitants. The man’s captors, uncertain what to do with him, chose to settle the issue by means of a ring hidden beneath one of three wooden cups. If the prisoner could correctly guess which cup hid the gold band, he would be thrown out to face the dubious tenderness of the wolves; otherwise he was to be killed on the spot. By placing bets on the outcome, his cruel hosts could enjoy some brief diversion from the harsh austerity of their nomadic and brutal existence.
The leader of the tribe, having hidden his own ring, commanded that the unfortunate prisoner be brought forward to make his awful choice. After considerable hesitation, and perhaps a silent prayer, the wretch placed his trembling hand upon the middle cup. Bets were placed; then the leader, still wishing to prolong the painful moment of uncertainty which so delighted his audience, lifted the rightmost cup, beneath which no ring was found. The captive gave a gasp of hope, and amidst rising laughter from the crowd, the leader now reached for the left, saying that before turning it over he would allow his prisoner a final opportunity to change his choice. Imagine yourself to be in that poor man’s position, Monsieur D’Alembert, and tell me, what would you now do?
(I promise to get around to that question in this post, albeit in a somewhat roundabout manner.)
Since Kieran has already reserved the right to ask for $50 bills here, I thought I’d ask for something else. Forget bills, they all look the same anyway. I am looking for something more random. I am still in the midst of unpacking some of my things since my move earlier this year and I recently came across my Absolut vodka ad collection. I haven’t looked at it since college when I began (and ended) gathering all the Absolut ads I could find. I have about seventy. By now there are some helpful Web sites for those of us interested in seeing the types of ads the company has featured. I found a few I had not seen before and would really like to have so I thought I’d see if anyone here can help me out.:) These mostly have to do with ads for places where I have lived (e.g. Budapest, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Texas, Geneva, Switzerland) or visited (Paris, Brussels, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, St.Louis), but also include some others just because I like them aesthetically speaking or because they are funny. I thought I would find listings on eBay, but I’ve only come across a few there and none of them of interest.
But so what’s this about cutting up a book?
There are books out there that feature Absolut ads. So if I was really desperate (which I am not, to be sure) to find some of the above ads then I could simply buy a copy of the book and then cut it up (assuming I wanted to have the pieces individually, which I do, because I want to put some of them up on my walls). But that just does not appeal to me. I cannot imagine cutting up a book. I have absolut(e)ly no problem cutting up newspapers and magazines. It is not as though some books don’t exist in numerous copies. In fact, publishers sometimes find themselves destroying books to save on storage costs, a sad reality when I am sure many schools, libraries and individuals could use additions to their collections. Many books are not a scarce resource and can actually be obtained for less than certain magazines. Thus it is not a question of scarcity. So why the aversion to cutting up books? In this particular example it may be partly that there is something about collecting ads that have appeared as ads and not simply collecting the images. But that is not fully convincing given that I am interested in some of these images purely for decorative purposes and I am not a fanatic collector. Clearly I have been socialized to consider books as something quite sacred if I am not willing to go at them with scissors. (I also won’t use pen to mark books although I will mark them using pencils.)
By the way, as a thank you to those who can contribute to my Absolut ad collection, I will be happy to send the contributor a copy of this neat book filled with great images, for free. (Just don’t tell me whether you decide to cut it up in the end.;) Send me a note for more info.
I recently read Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary cover-to-cover in one night. It’s the true story of a man named Jean-Claude Roland who takes a terrible path.
Roland missed an important exam at the end of his second year of medical school, but never rescheduled it. Impulsively, he told his parents that he had passed. Roland pretended to continue his studies. He married and had children, convincing everyone in his life that he was a high-ranking official with the World Health Organization. He paid the bills by defrauding his parents, in-laws, and friends. He told them that he was investing their money, or sold them worthless cancer treatments. He managed this way for eighteen years. Eventually, on the verge of being uncovered, he murdered his wife, his children, his parents, and made a (strikingly half-hearted) effort to kill himself.
I find his story fascinating for a number of reasons, but I’ll single out one: it was utterly irrational. On the stand, the judge asked him why he didn’t just reschedule the exam, and he wasn’t able answer. “That’s the question I’ve asked myself every day for eighteen years,” he said.
He could have just rescheduled the exam he missed. He could have gotten a job, rather than spending his adult life reading newspapers all day. He could have confessed, and taken his lumps- he knew all along that he’d come to a bad end sooner or later. Finally, if he was so concerned and embarassed about what he had done, he could have killed himself, and left his family alone.
I’m really not doing it justice; there’s a lot of food for thought here. Highly recommended.
Dan Drezner makes a highly questionable empirical claim.
The worst aspect of science fiction/science fantasy books is their malign neglect of the laws of economics.
Dan just hasn’t been reading the right science fiction/science fantasy books. For starters, there’s Ken MacLeod’s ‘Trots in Space’ quartet, Cory Doctorow’s and Bruce Sterling’s different takes on the reputational economy; and Steven Brust’s fantasy about a complicated insurance fraud. And those are just the economics-literate books written by bloggers. Neal Stephenson’s gonzo-libertarian novels are all about the intersection of economics and politics - his most recent set of books (which I’ve blogged here and here) is an extended fantasia centered on the birth of the free market economy. Can’t get much more economistic than that. Unless indeed you want to jump to the other end of the ideological spectrum, and read China Mieville’s Marxist account of mercantile capitalism at its nastiest in The Scar (also blogged here and here on my old blog - enter ‘ok’ for both userid and password if you want to read the entries). China has a freshly minted Ph.D. in international relations from the LSE - he’s a Fred Halliday student. And I haven’t even mentioned Jack Vance, or Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, or Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, or the interesting panel on the economics of abundance that I went to at Torcon last year. Or … or … or … And I don’t even know this stuff that well - I reckon that Brad DeLong could point to many other examples of smart econo-sf if he put his mind to it.
Dan does have a point - yer average Star Trek novelization or ten volume fantasy trilogy about Dark Lords on the rampage probably doesn’t have much in the way of well-thought-out economic underpinnings. Diana Wynne-Jones has some fun with the latter in her cruel, frequently hilarious Tough Guide to Fantasyland. But a fair chunk of the most interesting science fiction of the last few years starts with interesting economic questions and answers them, usually in rather unorthodox ways. It steals as much from game theory and Leontiev matrices as from hard physics. It’s never been a better time to be an academic in the social sciences with a weakness for sf - lots and lots of good, fun literate stuff out there.
I’m just back from a brief holiday in Pembrokeshire where, among other things, I managed to finish Hari Kunzru’s new novel Transmission. Transmission is a fairly frothy but sharply observed tale of globalized internet folk which centres around the intertwined lives of Arjun Mehta, a microserf swept from his native India to code in the United States, Guy Swift, a London-based postmodern marketing executive and Leela Zahir, a Bollywood icon. I won’t say more, so as not to spoil it. But if you’ve read his earlier The Impressionist , then I’d say that this one is lighter but, on the whole, more satisfactory. Definitely worth taking to the beach.
Night Shade Books, one of the best small press publishers around, is running a special offer until midnight tomorrow - order three or more of their books, and you’ll get a discount of 50%. I’d especially recommend M. John Harrison’s extraordinary novel, The Course of the Heart, and his short story collection, Things that Never Happen, which I’ve blogged about previously; NSB has also done very nice reprints of Dunsany’s Jorkens stories.
Kieran is blaming himself for the fact that somehow it is still last week around here. Some MT import/export thing. SQL data dump. Makes my head hurt. I just want to point out that there are alternative explanations for the mysterious linkrot, it’s sudden disappearance, and the disappearance of a couple days. And it could have been worse.
“Everyone know that in the run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which - like a sixth smallest toe - grow a thirteenth freak month.
We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot. More tentative than real.
What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days - white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster’s hand, stumps folded into a fist.”
- Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
I’m not saying it was senile, intemperate summer itself that did for a few days of posts. In which case Kieran has just been wasting his time, futzing with computers. I’m not saying that the disappeared days were actually extra days that weren’t on the calendar to begin with, that now the calendar has reasserted itself, that the superfluous temporal … I do not hestitate to say ‘efflorescence’ “lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it.”
I am not saying that comments and track-backs are still being left to these posts we no longer ‘see’ in ‘our’ world. I’m just saying.
Nelly, who checks George R.R. Martin’s website pretty much every day, tells me that after almost 6 months’ silence, George is getting impatient with his impatient readers.
“I will say, just to set some rumors straight, that I am not dead, I am not dying, I am not in ill health, I have not forgotten about my readers, and I am not lounging in my hot tub drinking chilled wine with hot babes in bikinis (though I’d like to be). I have been working on this bloody book almost every bloody day (okay, except for Sundays during football season and the two days of the NFL draft) for more years than I care to contemplate, writing, rewriting, revising, and writing again, trying to make FEAST a feast in truth.”
In the meantime, Martin has brushed a few crumbs from the table by publishing a sample chapter about Cersei, a character whose point of view we hadn’t seen before.
Her POV reads a little like the worst chick lit - it’s all about fashion, boys and Cersei’s glamorous job, with a little room at the margin for the reader to wonder where the narrator’s two-dimensional vision ends and reality begins. Cersei is a mechanical magpie stuck in a subroutine that flits from clothes and make-up to personal vainglory, briefly and cluelessly to affairs of state, and quickly back to dresses again. She really is as vapid, nasty and dim as she seemed. How has she survived so long?!!
Still no hint of a publication date, though Martin reminds us that Vance and Tolkien were much slower sequel-writers than he is. The comparison is fitting, but ever so slightly Cersei-like…
Today is the 100th anniversary of the day on which stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down the stairs of the Martello tower, razor, mirror and washbowl in hand. Like many other Dubliners, I’ve a distant relative who’s a character in Ulysses. “Professor MacHugh” is based on my great-uncle Hugh MacNeill. He appears in the Aeolus section, which is appropriate enough; he’s a bit of a windbag (and according to family hearsay, the original was an alcoholic and a chronic gambler to boot). This isn’t as unusual as it might seem: everyone in Ireland is related to everyone else, and ‘placing’ someone (i.e. finding what relatives or friends you have in common) is a source for hours of entertainment whenever two Irish people meet. Not only that - but Ulysses is a long novel, with many minor characters - Dubliners who don’t have some tenuous connection to the novel are perhaps even rarer than Dubliners of a certain age who don’t claim to have been regular drinking companions of Paddy Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Myles na gCopaleen (aka Brian O’Nolain). Which is to say, very thin on the ground indeed.
Update: Google too are celebrating Bloomsday.
Structured procrastination, oh yeh. I have an unfinished review of Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy” on the computer in front of me, which is looking like taking me longer to write than he took to write the book, plus James Surowiecki’s new book is out, covering a couple of areas which he’s argued with us about on CT1. And what am I reading and reviewing? The latest work by that noted metaphysician, David Icke. “Tales from the Time Loop”. Icke is a bit of a guilty pleasure for many of us here at CT, and a few others. But I’m rather afraid that with this latest one, he’s jumped the shark. See below the fold for my Amazon review, which to be honest I’m not anticipating getting posted. I’ve added a few links so that non-Icke fans can get up to speed. I don’t know why I’m so bright and breezy today btw, it’s actually rather sad.
Update Richard Kahn in comments points me to this forthcoming paper for the Journal of Utopian Studies. Opinions on this kind of free-wheeling, name-dropping postmodern cultural studies writing are somewhat split on CT, but I’m inclined to be a bit softer than the median. When this sort of thing comes off, it’s really good, and I rather think that Richard’s Icke paper comes off pretty well.
David Icke has always had a fond place in the hearts of lovers of kitsch conspiracy theories ever since the famous “Wogan” interview2. However, after scaling (pun intended for the cognoscenti) the heights of inspired lunacy in his second book, “The Biggest Secret”, his works have become less and less entertaining even as the “J” section of the index has grown and grown. “Alice in Wonderland and the WTC Disaster” was just about bearable as a compendium of every 9/11 conspiracy theory ever published on the Web, but “Tales from the Time Loop” is a desperate rehash; as well as having surprisingly little genuinely new material, for me it marks the point at which Icke takes the leap from mere dabbling with codewords into full-blown anti-Semitism.
Dealing with this issue first, Icke has always had a thing or two about “international bankers” as a group and the Rothschild family in particular, but has usually in the past been scrupulous and thorough enough in his disavowals of anti-Semitism to get the benefit of the doubt from me (if not from the ADL). However, the new material in TFTTL is just disgusting. Icke has got hold of a copy of Norman Finkelstein’s excellent “The Holocast Industry”, filtered it through his own wonky prism and come up with a view of history in which the Jewish people do not exist as a race, but only as a conspiracy to hoodwink Gentiles out of their cash. Of course, Icke is at pains to insist that “ordinary” Jews don’t incur his hatred; they apparently are as much victims as the rest of us of the “leaders” of the international Jewish conspiracy. This is boilerplate sub-Protocols rubbish circa 1902, and chucking a few lizards into the mix doesn’t improve it very much.
For the rest of the book, seasoned Icke fans will recognise almost everything here, not least because Icke doesn’t regard the acquisition of a new global conspiracy theory as a reason to dump any old ones, even if they’re laughably inconsistent. (Why is “…And The Truth Will Set You Free” still on sale, btw? It predates Icke’s discovery of the Annunaki Lizard conspiracy and thus should presumably be regarded by anyone who’s up to speed on the lizards as dangerously misleading.) We have more or less the Greatest Hits of Icke; the Bush/Rameses bloodline, Dick Cheney as a rampaging child murderer in Bohemian Grove, the pyramid diagram of the Illuminati power structure and here there and everywhere a lizard (the White Martians, interestingly, don’t get much of a look-in this time round, while Credo Mutwa has been downplayed as Icke takes on a new, South American shaman in the role of provider of vague confirmatory myths and psychedelic herbal teas).
The material on the Iraq War is pretty limp by the standards of AIWATWTCD; given the extent to which actual, documented evidence of state misdirection and intelligence cockups is available through the conventional media, this is quite surprising. If you want grainy reproductions of pictures from Al-Jazeera of child casualties of bombing, they’re here, and they look about as bad as one might expect. If you want some of the sillier factual assertions which Al-Jazeera and other Arab sources have tried to get away with, reported as indisputable fact, they are here too.
And then we end with the usual Icke chapter on muggy quantum physics, love vibrations and prisons of reality; Steven Hawking meets Doris Stokes. Except this time the cursed thing takes up half the book; Icke has apparently decided that all this conspiracy stuff is a bit negative, and the reason that the rest of humanity as yet remains unconvinced by his poor man’s Robert Anton Wilson act is mainly that we haven’t been sufficiently bored into submission by it yet.
So where next for Icke? To be honest, I’m not optimistic. Given his current trajectory, which appears to involve severe hostility to the USA, uncritical acceptance of Al-Jazeera television and some decidedly unpalatable views on the Jews, my guess is that pretty soon we will learn that his latest spiritual revelation is that the all-powerful love-force that permeates the universe has a name and that name is Allah. Roll on Icke’s Cat Stevens moment, I say; if nothing else, it has a decent chance of getting his books off the shelves.
Update: See comments below. Lots of people apparently object to my dragging Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam into this. I think they make a fair enough case; I personally regard Stevens as a figure of fun and his religion as a fair subject for mockery, but I wouldn’t want to pretend that this post is CT’s finest hour on the subject.
Footnotes:
1 Just a few jokes about the Surowiecki book to get out of the way so I don’t have to put them in the review. James S needs to shoot his blurb writer. Not only does the UK edition of his book promise to explain to us how it is that “you can buy a screw anywhere and it will fit into a bolt made 10,000 miles away”3, but also the message of the blurb more or less explicitly says “everyone thinks that crowds are always wrong and experts are always right. Well James Surowiecki is an expert on this, and he thinks that the conventional wisdom is wrong and he’s right”.
2 The page linked here suggests that Icke was stitched up by careful editing of the Wogan show. IIRC this is not true; it was live.
3Nuts fit into bolts. Screws don’t.
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: Well, I’d like to say I believed in God, of course, but I’m afraid that, as a thinking person … there are two very good reasons why I simply can’t. … A — Wasps. Can’t see the point of a wasp, can you? And B — caviar. I mean really, what is the point of having caviar locked away inside sturgeon? So inaccessible. I’m sure if there were a real God he’d have arranged for caviar to just sort of toddle over to your house on a pair of little legs in a self-opening jar.Or sociobiology:
Interviewer: [B]ut isn’t an anthill a very organized society?Or political theory:
Prof. Henrich Globnik: If your view of an organized society is thousands of ants milling around in corridors, bumping into each other with bits of twig and other rubbish in their mouth then I understand why you elected that woman.
Arthur Grole: No you don’t [speak Russian], you poor sod. And you have an inalienable right not to speak Russian in this country. In Russia you have to speak Russian. But in this country we have an inalienable right not to speak Russian.And philosophy of language:
Ludovic Kennedy: Do you speak any Lap yourself?
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: I have a smattering — or a smeurtering, as they call it. They don’t in fact call it Lap. They call it Leurp. But I do have a smeurtering of Leurp. A few words … I like to think if I found myself in fourth-century Lapland I could get by — probably. Or preurbeurbly.
So obviously you should just buy it.
Like many others, I’ve been re-reading George R.R. Martin’s ‘Ice and Fire’ series while waiting for the long-delayed next book, ‘A Feast for Crows’. Henry was in Paris last weekend and we three (he, me and our youngest sister Eleanor, aka Nelly) spent several dinners discussing our theories of how the next three books will pan out.
My favourite aspect of this series is the many hints Martin drops about his characters’ side-plots and back stories but that he never bothers to confirm. This makes me feel like a very clever reader (at least about the ones I’ve figured out). For example, we can infer that Jeyne Westerling, Robb Stark’s frisky young bride, is being fed contraceptives by family members during her doomed marriage. And the Knight of Flowers, beautiful Loras Tyrell, is in love with and loved by Renly Baratheon, a pretender to the Iron Throne. So we all had a grand old time running through the evidence for these and other revelations.
Then Nelly’s theory of how the next three books will go blew us away. It’s all there already in the first three, but for some reason I’m the only one who thinks old George has given us so much to chew on, he can relax and let his readers write the rest of the books ourselves.
Over to Nelly:
The first three books, gargantuan though they are (around 2400 pages so far), are nothing but a curtain-raiser for the main act. The civil war which has been devouring Westeros simply sets the scene for the main event; the fight between the forces of light and darkness. The main player for the good guys, the Prince That Was Promised (PTWP), has yet to be revealed.
Who is the PTWP? Stannis Baratheon has been hailed by the Red Priestess as the PTWP. Beric Dondarrion is another strong contender, as a messianic figure to the ‘small people’ and strong links to the mystical. But Martin has left plenty of clues pointing to another, stronger possibility; Jon Snow.
Firstly, we must consider the popular theory that Jon is not Ned Stark’s son, but Ned’s sister Lyanna’s, with Rhaegar Targaryen as his father. Now remember
the prophecy that Azor Ahai, an ancient hero, will come again and defeat the Others, in the form of the Prince That Was Promised. Ser Barristan tells Dany a story in which her bookish elder brother, Rhaegar, comes across a scroll which convinces him to become a warrior. Earlier, when Dany was in the House of the Undying, she had a vision of Rhaeger with his wife Elia, standing over their son, Aegon. Rhaegar remarks that Aegon is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of Ice and Fire. Unfortunately, Aegon later has his brains smashed in by Gregor Clegane, counting him out.
My theory is that Rhaegar came across a prophecy which convinced him that he would father the PTWP. If this is true, and if Rhaegar is indeed Jon Snow’s father, then that leaves Jon perfectly placed as the PTWP. He has the right parentage. The coming together of Stark and Targaryen symbolise the main theme of the books; ice and fire. Even more importantly, as part of the Night’s Watch, he has already started to fight the Others and is most definitely in the right place at the right time.
Jon may not have a glow-in-the-dark sword, or have been brought back to life several times, but he gets my vote for the Prince That Was Promised.
So, all going well (though it never seems to in Martin’s books), Jon will lead the lead the war against the Others, and, who knows, might even win. Maybe his prize will be to join two family traditions (ice and fire and,um, brotherly love) by also winning a queen, Daenerys.
When I met Henry in March we conjectured that one possible unifying influence on many even perhaps most of the CT-ers is the work of the analytical Marxists. It’s hard to find other unifying themes. But in the early days I noticed a penchant for Moleworthian phrases and even brief discussions (that I now can’t find). For the Molesworth innocents, unwilling to risk the miniscule cost of the collected works (also purchasable in the US at staggering expense), Radio 4 just rebroadcast its pretty good tribute to the curse of st custards. Have a listen. And then buy the book.
Speaking of books, I’m about 250 pages in to Robert Skidelsky’s one-volume abridgment of his three-volume life of Keynes. Joan Robinson has just shown up at Girton and is not being allowed to attend the meetings of Keynes’s Political Economy Club, despite being obviously the smartest economics undergraduate at Cambridge. Meanwhile, a little earlier Keynes complains about having to rework his Treatise on Probability for publication:
After every retouch it seems to me more trifling and platitudinous. All that is startling is gradually cut out as untrue, and what remains is a rather obscure and pompous exposition of what no human being can ever have doubted.
And a little later, Frank Ramsey cheerfully informs a meeting of the Apostles that their Moorean obsession with discussing the moral value of different states of mind “although a pleasant way of passing the time, is not discussing anything whatever, but simply comparing notes.”
David Bernstein feels he doesn’t have enough to read:
I find it a bit odd that I’ve been blogging for the VC for almost a year but have not made it on to any publisher’s review copy lists … a smart university press (or even trade press) would put me on their list for review copies of law books, or at least some subset of law books. … I just find it interesting that book publishers have been so slow to recognize a new medium through which they can publicize their wares.
As it happens, we have almost been drowned by blog-based publicity for books. The only thing is it somehow or other always seemed to be promoting the same book.
I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, the second volume in a projected trilogy. It’s a lot of fun, albeit a bit more sporadic than the first - a little patchy in the usual fashion of the middle volumes of trilogies where nothing is resolved. Stephenson’s intentions for the trilogy are becoming clearer. He’s making an argument about the historical sources of modernity. In the first volume as I read it, the key passage asks about the nature of the whirlwind, the invisible force not only impelling social and economic change, but also transforming our understanding of who we are, and our place in the universe. In “The Confusion,” Stephenson begins to articulate his answer to this question, when he places Jack Shaftoe in an alley in Cairo, which is perhaps the oldest marketplace in the world.
For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The Messe of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of the hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.
For Stephenson, as for many economic historians, the invisible whirlwind is the market. It acts as a Universal Solvent, dissolving social bonds, and uniting an unlikely congeries of characters (including a Vagabond, a Dutch captain, an Armenian, a crypto-Jew, an Electress and a pirate-queen) in the pursuit of wealth. It works further alchemy as King Solomon’s gold and the wellsprings of credit become one and the same thing. The creation of complex financial markets conjures money from thin air, just as alchemists sought to transform lead into gold.
Stephenson’s history is, quite literally, a Whig one - the Whigs and merchants who seek to uproot the rotten pilings of the feudal order are the heroes of his narrative. This has clear costs in terms of historical veracity - Stephenson glosses over the corruption endemic in Whig politics. Yet he continues to succeed in carrying off the difficult task of taking economic history seriously while maintaining an entertaining narrative. Recommended.
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to realize my bed-rest destiny: re-reading Proust. Yes, it’s the perfect project, though I’m hoping baby will be born before I’m too far along the Guermantes way. When I read it the first time (which I did, rather disreputably, under the table in a series of boring seminars), I was also taking a very interesting seminar on the Greek novel with Froma Zeitlin, and I noticed a certain parallel to Achilles Tatius.
Warning: Contains Remembrance of Things Past plot spoilers! And Leucippe and Kleitophon plot spoilers, I guess!
M. Vinteuil is not just a provincial piano teacher, but a great composer! No, wait, that’s not it. The spoiler is that Albertine dies. (You might have guessed something of the sort just from the volume’s title “Albertine Disparue”, though surely not from Moncrieff’s rather fanciful “The Sweet Cheat Gone.”) Now, many believe that Albertine is modelled, at least in part, on Proust’s lover Alfredo Agostinelli, originally a chauffeur (I guess Proust thought “Alfreda” was too awful a girl’s name, though “Albertine” is not the greatest). Here is a very nice page about him, with photos, but it is in Italian. From it, we learn that Proust paid for Agostinelli to enroll in flight school (under the name Marcel Swann!), and even gave him a plane with a verse from Mallarmé’s “The Swan” painted on it (the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past proposes to give Albertine a yacht, similarly emblazoned.) Performing some risky manouver in this plane, Agostinelli plunged into the sea and died in 1914. Now, given this, it is easy to see how Albertine’s death on a horse which the narrator gave her may be just a transposition of this real-life tragedy.
[Faithful family retainer Francoise brings him a telegram.] Alas! it was not a suppression of suffering that the first two lines of the telegraph produced in me: “My poor friend, our little Albertine is no more. Forgive me for breaking this terrible news to you who were so fond of her. She was thrown by her horse against a tree while she was out riding. All our efforts to restore her to life were unavailing. If only I had died in her stead.”
Nonetheless, reading them at the same time, I was struck by the parallel to this scene from Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Kleitophon (written in the second century A.D.). The narrator, Kleitophon, has a cousin and sidekick named Kleinias. Kleinias’ young (male) lover Charikles is being forced to marry by his father, much to Kleinias’ dismay and disgust — he offers a furiously misogynist rant when he learns of the impending tragedy. (So, too, Agostinelli apparently had liasons with women which drove the jealous Proust to distraction, and as for Albertine and Mlle. Vinteuil’s girlfriend, well…) Young Charikles goes off for a ride on the new horse which Kleinias has given him, but disaster ensues:
When Kleinias saw [his slave] he exclaimed, “Something has happened to Charikles!” Simultaneously the slave exclaimed, “Charikles is dead.” Kleinias froze, stunned and speechless at the news, like a man caught in the eye of a tornado. The slave told the story: “He mounted on your horse, Kleinias, and rode for a while at a gentle pace. After two or three laps he reined to a halt and began wipiing the sweat from the horse, still seated on it and dropping the reins without a thought. While he was wiping its back, there was a noise from behind and the horse gave a startled leap straight up into the air and began to run crazily…[bucking bronco action elided]…The horse in headlong flight galloped away from the road towards the woods and suddenly knocked poor Charikles against a tree.”
Interesting, no? I grant that having the character Albertine die in a plane crash would be improbable, but she could certainly have been in a car crash, especially given all the romantic drives they have been on. There is a feature of Achilles Tatius which I imagine would particularly appeal to Proust, as well. At certain points, all the action of the novel grinds to a halt for an ekphrasis or detailed description of some static scene, perhaps a painting, or a striking tableau (one of Leucippe’s multiple apparent executions, perhaps…), or, as here, a garden:
As soon as the funeral was over, I hurried back to the girl. She was in a formal garden adjoining the house. It was in fact a grove of very pleasant aspect, encloistered by a sufficiently high wall and a line of columns that together formed a covered portico on all four sides of the garden. Protected within the columns stood a populous assembly of trees. A network of sturdy branches interlaced to form an intricate pattern wherein petals gently emraced their neighbors, leaves wound round other leaves, and fruits rubbed softly on fruits, Thus far the world of plants knows intercourse….Grapes grew on trellises on either side of the tree, thick-leaved, ripe with fruit whose clusters tumbled through the trellisworks like locks of curly hair. When the highest, sunlit leaves fluttered in the wind, the earth took on a dappled look, with yellow patches in the shade.
The flowers of various colors displayed their beauty in turn — violet, narcissus, rose — the earth’s dyed stuffs. The calyx of the rose has the same contour as that of the narcissus — a natural drinking cup. The petals opening about the rose’s calyx have two colors — of blood at the edge, of cream at the base — but the narcissus’ calyx has throughout the same cream color as the heart of the rose. The violet’s calyx is nowhere to be seen; its color is like that of sunlight flashing on a dark sea.
Among the flowers, a spring bubbled up within a rectangular pool constructed to contain the flow. The flowers were reflected in the water as in a mirror, so that the entire grove was doubled — the realm of truth confronting its shadowy other.
Isn’t that just the thing for a man who could go into four pages of raptures over a pink hawthorn bush?
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for on of those days which are true holidays…but it was attired even more richly than the rest, so that the flowers which clung to its branches, one above the other, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed around the crook of a rococo shepheard, were every one of them ‘in colour’ and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the ‘plain’, if one was to judge by the scale of prices at those ‘stores’ in the square, or at Camus’, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink….High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from at altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistable quality of the hawthorn tree, which, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone.This is just before he sees Gilberte for the first time in Swann’s garden. Anyway, I hoped to use this searchable archive of Proust correspondance to find out if he ever talked about Leucippe and Kleitophon, but it’s not working. There certainly were French translations then, and it has always been the most popular of the Greek novels, I think. Any actual Proust scholars want to clear me up?
[Updated to correct typos]
Anne Applebaum on ‘the literary divide’ between highbrow and pop culture (via A&L Daily). Does this sound right to you?
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it.
Surely wrong on both counts. Chat amongst yourselves.
From Steven Brust, The Lord of Castle Black, p.128.
“It is sad,” observed Grassfog, “that our friend here is dead, and we have no wine.”
“It is your custom,” inquired Piro, “to become drunk when a friend dies?”
“Not in the least,” said Grassfog. “I was merely making an observation about two conditions that are both true, and both regrettable.”
Our first text for tonight comes from Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”, delivered in 1947 at Kenyon College and available in your local copy of The Liberal Imagination. The great man had been instructed to inform about ‘manners in relation to the novel’. Here he indicates the proportions of his subject, making points that have all been made before, no doubt, but making them exceedingly well and elegantly:
“Somewhere below all the explicit statements that a people make through its art, religion, architecture, legislation, there is a dim mental region of intention of which it is very difficult to become aware. We now and then get a strong sense of its existence when we deal with the past, not by reason of its presence in the past by by reason of its absence. As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multifarious intention and activity is stilled, all the buzz of implication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer.
Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet - the great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace - we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the remote unconscious corners of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.
Or when we read the conclusions that are drawn about our own culture by some gifted foreign critic - or by some stupid native one - who is equipped only with a knowledge of our books, when we try in vain to say what is wrong, when in despair we say that he has read the books “out of context,” then we are aware of the matter I have been asked to speak about tonight.”
This sets me up for what I want to talk about. I just reread Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, by Anatole Broyard.
Broyard, you may know, was a critic, columnist and editor for the NYT for many years. This memoir, published in 1993, is about coming home from the war and reading books and having sex in Greenwich Village in 1947. Our year for the night. And Broyard hung out with all those Partisan Review & etc. types. He told tales of Spanish Harlem to Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald and Clem Greenberg. A man tries to sneak into a club without paying his 75 cents, then draws a switchblade on the ticket taker. When the cry goes up that Pablito is dead, the clubbers take their revenge:
“I watched from above as they knocked him down and began to kick and stomp him. It went on for quite a while and I could hear the wet sound as they kicked him. When it was all over, they pulled out handkerchiefs and wiped the blood off their trousers and shoes. By the time the police arrived there was nothing left of the stranger but a suit of clothes and a shapeless mass. The police were philosophical and no charges were pressed.”
Then it turns out Pablito was only nicked. He emerges with a bandaid on his head. And the band, the Happy Boys, all embrace and kiss him.
“The thing about that scene, I told them, was the economy of it. A man who stabs another man over a seventy-five cent ticket isn’t worth even a shudder of compassion, not even a spasm of revulsion. I didn’t feel any pity at all for him. I didn’t even think of him as a man. Of course, those were days when violence was uncommon, when it could stil be seen as dramatic or moral. What I had seen was an act of tribal solidarity, and it was satisfying in its way to see how much the Happy Boys cared - how they laughed and kissed Pablito.”
Clem and Dwight wanted to know whether it was true about the handkerchiefs. “They wanted to see Spanish Harlem. They wanted to visit the primitive, see it in the flesh.”
Broyard - perhaps you didn’t know - is allegedly the model for the ficitional protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain. You know, the Anthony Hopkins movie about the black guy passing as white? (It’s not supposed to be good and, no, I didn’t see it either.) Anyway, Broyard was black, passing as white. And in the one picture I’ve seen of him he looks very slightly like Hopkins. Very slightly. Henry Louis Gates has a pretty interesting essay online (full of lots of typos), “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”.
Nothing about how Broyard’s black - or passing as white - in his memoir. Nothing about how he abandoned his wife and daughter, for that matter. (I strongly disapprove of that behavior, may I say. The abandonment, I mean. You can pretend to be whatever race you want in my book.) There is something strangely slick and a bit clinical about the whole presentation. A bit like a too-calculated Hollywood movie about Greenwich Village in 1947. Gritty and sexy and all. But sort of staged, and basically clean under a layer of stage dirt. Always sort of sneaking an anxious glance at you, to make sure you are happy with what the man is saying. It’s sort of sweet, like a nice movie that would have Tobey Maguire in it (but not as Spider-Man). When Broyard does something anxious or weird, his parents say ‘it’s because you’re a veteran’, as though that explains anything. Broyard’s friends say everything is ‘Kafkaesque’, as though that explains anything. It’s cute. Gates says that Broyard had neocon tendencies, among other tendencies - like having a jockey on his lawn - and this sort of attitude shows through at odd moments and puzzled me until I read Gate’s essay and things sort of fell into place. I like Gates’ comparison of Broyard to Gatsby. That feels right on the money (and we still have our nice Gatsby cover shots up at John & Belle, if you want to go take a look at the high-bouncing, gold-hatted loverboy.)
So what does this have to do with Trilling? Two things?
First, Broyard has this amusing recollection of a course taken at the New School:
“I took a course in the psychology of American culture, given by Erich Fromm. Though he had just arrived, he knew America better than we did, because it impinged on him … Sitting on a platform, behind a desk, like a judge in a criminal court, he passed his remorseless judgment on us. We were unwilling, he said, to accept the anguish of freedom. According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistomology run amok. In the name of freedom, we accepted everything he said. We accepted it because we liked the sound of it - no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom. [What’s with that last line, eh?]
Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I’ll never forget the night he described a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joylessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home.”
Can you see the conservative twinkle of disdain in Broyard’s eye? I can. On the other hand, Fromm really has always struck me as one of those ‘gifted foreign critics’ who hasn’t got a damn clue about America, so his gifts are wasted until he gives it a rest and talks about what he actually understands. (Cf. the case of Adorno, whose not inconsiderable influence on American cultural studies is and remains a source of dumb wonder to me. Like if you started a school of rock criticism based on that chapter from Allan Bloom. The very notion.) Always with the made-up philosophical explanations of why it’s deep to despise those who like ice cream on a Sunday afternoon, or jazz, or movies, or rock, or whatever bug has gotten in somebody’s European ear. At best, witnessing this sort of condescending sulk can give you a Barton Fink feeling, calling forth a superior and savage: “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” And all that jazz.
(For the record, I quite enjoy Adorno’s Minima Moralia. His total refusal to lighten up. Ever. Just becomes endearing. And it isn’t like he wasn’t a smart and learned man, who knew a lot about Hegel. Just as Allan Bloom knew a lot about Plato, without thereby being the least bit qualified to expound on how Mick Jagger is causing relativism.)
On the other hand, what the hell do I know about what it was like to live in America, and go for a Sunday drive, in 1947. Maybe it was invariably a desperate and pathetic flight from freedom. I sort of have my doubts. But it’s not like I was there.
Here is Broyard on sex in 1947, more than 20 years before it was discovered in 1969 (or whenever Larkin says):
“To someone who hasn’t lived through it, it’s almost impossible to describe the sexual atmosphere of 1947. To look back at it from today is like visiting a medieval town in France or Italy and trying to visualize the life of its inhabitants in the thirteenth century. You can see the houses and the cathedral, the twisting streets, you can read about the kind of work they did, the food they ate, or about their religion, but you can’t imagine how they felt; you can’t grasp the actual terms of their consciousness. The mood or atmosphere, the tangibility of their lives, eludes you because we don’t have the same frame of reference. It’s as if the human brain and the five senses were at an earlier stage of development.
In 1947, American life had not yet been split open. It was still all of a piece, intact, bounded on every side, and, above all, regulated. Actions we now regard as commonplace were forbidden by law and by custom. While all kinds of things were censored, we hadn’t even learned to think in terms of censorship, because we were so used to it. The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship.”
That is nicely said. Here is a bit of supporting evidence. Another case of someone having some difficulty - er, passing - so that you really don’t know what to think about what is implied by what’s going on:
“The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak. They led waiting lives - waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity …
There was another kind of silence: the silence of the body, not only in sex but in its other functions. I’ve known girls who never, even if they stayed a week at my apartment, had a bowel movement. If orgasm was difficult, excretion was impossible. And so these poor girls would be twice constipated, would have a double bellyache. In my small apartment, the toilet was too near, like the nearness of shame. I could see the evidence of this withholding in their clouded eyes, their fading complexions, even their speech patterns. Their faces would get puffy, their bellies would be distended, their bodies knotted. Their sentences would clot as they longed to get away, to let go of it all.”
I suppose Leon Kass is probably hrumphing, ‘and rightly so! The Wisdom of Repugnance!’
Meanwhile, back on planet 2004, if you are like me you are probably chortling in memory of that scene from “Secrets of a Successful Marriage” (season 5). Reverend Lovejoy is counselling Marge about why divorcing Homer is OK: “Oh, Marge. Everything is a sin. Have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically, we aren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom.”
Maybe Fromm was right after all, for all I know. I guess the moral of the story is: if you were reading a novel about life in Greenwich Village in 1947, and there was a girl staying in the guy’s apartment, you wouldn’t naturally infer that she was possibly severely, voluntarily constipated. As Matthew Yglesias might say tomorrow, since he has before: in the crazy hook-up culture of today, that sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Everyone just does everything with everyone, more or less. The kids these days don’t even think oral sex is sex (so I’m told.) So what are the odds that going to the bathroom is sex? I’ll bet even Leon Kass doesn’t think it’s sex. So how are you supposed to read and understand novels if major characters might be seriously constipated, and you would never know?
So how much else from the world of manners of a time and a place as recent and close as Greenwich Village, NY are we just missing when we read not so old novels?
I realize that was a lot of straining just for a potty joke, basically.
Some comments to this post by Ted raised the question of the public face of academic disciplines, as seen at Barnes and Noble or Borders. The shelf-test isn’t perfect, of course, because not every field needs to have a public face, even chain bookstores vary quite widely, and Borders and Barnes and Noble are not really meant for academics. But they are meant for everyone, and academics must form part of that category. (This reminds me, by the by, of an example from the late, great Dick Jeffrey. “Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me” goes the song. Who is my baby?) So, what can we learn about the social sciences and humanities from a visit to the local book barn?
Philosophy: The immortal giants continue to dominate the field: Kant, Nietzsche, and Rand. Especially the latter. In Metaphysics and Epistemology, Descartes may sometimes be found and possibly also Quine (whose work was both anticipated and eclipsed by Ayn Rand, in the manner of Kierkegaard and Hegel). But the most exciting work in contemporary Metaphysics is being done by David Icke, whose tightly-argued lizard ontology has revolutionized the field in recent years.
Sociology: Dominated in the 1990s by research on the O.J. Simpson trial, sociologists have recently turned their attention to Frank McCourt’s early adulthood and life in the year 2000.
Economics: The founding fathers, Adam Smith and Thomas Sowell, are the mainstays of this now defunct field which barely hangs on, surrounded by better-grounded research programs like Stock Marketeering and Retirement Planning.
Law: Core subjects like True Crime and Do-It-Yourself-Divorce Kits continue to be well-represented. But recently, constitutional theory has been on the rise through titles like David Bernstein’s You Can’t Say That I Didn’t Publicize This Book Enough.
Cultural Studies: Cultural Studies can now be found resisting capitalism every other month in a special pull-out-and-keep section of Cosmo Girl.
History: Content has stablized since the 1996 law requiring that 90 percent of all history books be about the Civil War or World War II. The remainder can be about how the ethnic group of your choice saved everyone else’s sorry asses, but it’s not like people are grateful or anything.
Psychology: See under Weight Loss, Substance Abuse Recovery, and Conversations with People and Pets who have “Crossed Over.”
Political Science: As noted in the comments to Ted’s post, the long-running scholarly disagreement between the patriot-realists and the quisling-islamofascists continues with no end in sight, unless the recent move to outlaw opposition to Hanniti’ite Clerics proves successful.
In honor of Passover, I’m pleased to pass on an essay from Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It’s a sad meditation on an absurd book, the phrase book Say It In Yiddish, for visitors to a country that never existed.
I dream of two possible destinations. The first might be a modern independent state very closely analogous to the State of Israel—call it the State of Yisroel—a postwar Jewish homeland created during a time of moral emergency, located presumably, but not necessarily, in Palestine; it could be in Alaska, or on Madagascar. Here, perhaps, that minority faction of the Zionist movement who favored the establishment of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews were able to prevail over their more numerous Hebraist opponents. There is Yiddish on the money, of which the basic unit is the herzl, or the dollar, or even the zloty. There are Yiddish color commentators for soccer games, Yiddish-speaking cash machines, Yiddish tags on the collars of dogs. Public debate, private discourse, joking and lamentation, all are conducted not in a new-old, partly artificial language like Hebrew, a prefabricated skyscraper still under construction, with only the lowermost of its stories as yet inhabited by the generations, but in a tumbledown old palace capable in the smallest of its stones (the word nu) of expressing slyness, tenderness, derision, romance, disputation, hopefulness, skepticism, sorrow, a lascivious impulse, or the confirmation of one’s worst fears.
Via scribblingwoman, who heard it from Maud, this is indeed a beguiling pastime.
Here are my hasty contributions:
Divine Comedy of Errors
Hell, twins, purgatory, mistaken identity, heaven, silly weddings.
Long Day’s Journey Into Twelfth Night
Eugene O’Neil, cross-gartered and gin-soaked most villainously.
Mr. Sammler’s Swiftly Tilting Planet
Elderly Jew and unicorn save world from ‘Mad Dog’ Branzillo.
Farmer Giles, Goat-Boy of Ham
It’s the cultural revolution, the dragon won’t fight. One of those really 60’s-style novels. Does anyone still read them?
Sixth Sense and Sensibility
Turns out she’s a ghost.
Huckleberry Finn Family Moomintroll
Huck, Jim, Snuff, Moom, Hem, and My on the ol’ Mississip.
A Separate War and Peace
Set in a boy’s school during the Napoleonic Wars.
Danny, Champion of the World As I Found It
Bruce Duffy’s novel of how Wittgenstein fed sleeping pills to chickens as a boy.
The Thin Man Without Qualities
Made famous by the movie, with William Powell as Ulrich and Myrna Loy as Diotima.
Little, Big Dorrit
Girl raised by fairies for reasons unknown in Victorian prison bigger on inside than outside. Dickens rails against the practice.
Room With a View to a Kill
Merchant-ivory production, with Helena Bonham-Carter as bond girl.
Charlie and the Great Glass Menagerie
Willy Wonka hopes Charlie can help Laura snap out of it and live a little.
The Runaway Bunny Jury
John Grisham’s first book for children. “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to sue gun manufacturers for turning a blind eye to illegal distribution of their products. So he said to his mother, ‘I am suing gun manufacturers for turning a blind eye to illegal distribution of their products.’ And his mother said, ‘If you do that, they will hire flashy jury consultants and you will lose your case.’ ‘If I lose the case,’ said the little bunny, ‘I will change my identity and travel around the country trying to infiltrate juries until I win.’ ‘If you do that, they will trash your apartment,’ said his mother.
Goodnight Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Goodnight penal colony on the moon. Goodnight earth controlling the penal colony on the moon. Goodnight supercomputer named Mike.
UPDATE: (ooh, ooh, I thought of these too.)
The Great Firestarter
Shirley Hazzard and Stephen King are reconciled.
The Crying of Salem’s Lot 49
Oedipa Mass and Mucho sort out legal tangles. Will vampires take over the town first?
Michael Bérubé asks the important questions about the eschatological, best-selling Left Behind series.
First of all, what does the Book of Revelations say about fundamentalist-Christian pulp-fiction writers who are trying to complete their Revelations-based book series before they’re raptured into heaven? Does Scripture itself predict whether novels about the Final Days will be published during the Final Days? Do they arrive in bookstores just after the seven-eyed, seven-horned Lamb opens the first of the seven seals (6:1), or do we have to wait until the appearance of the seven-headed, ten-horned dragon (12:3)? Second, when Christ returns, will He hang out for a while— maybe even serving as an editorial consultant on the remaining “Left Behind” books— before initiating the series of events leading to the Apocalypse, or will He just be all about the Apocalypse?
I must admit that there is a certain prima facie plausibility to the idea that the popularity of these books is a sign of the end times, in some sense. (We’re in the Kali yuga, you know, where the bull of Truth is standing on only one leg.) This reminds me of a good friend whose mother, a devout Catholic, wrote a Christian thriller of this sort. In it, people on a plane about to crash confront their mortality and faith. My friend’s mom modelled the doomed atheist figure on him.
Just finished James Hynes’ Kings of Infinite Space, which I found a little disappointing after his very funny The Lecturer’s Tale. KOISP takes up a failed academic (his downfall is described in a previous Hynes novella) who ends up temping as a typist/technical writer for the Texas state government. There’s some clever, funny commentary along the way, including this description of the protagonist’s previous job working for a school textbook company.
For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to accommodate an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism and homophobia).
Still, the book just doesn’t have as much venom and verve as The Lecturer’s Tale. The setting isn’t as developed; the character sketches aren’t as pointed or as sharp. My very strong impression is that Hynes is much more comfortable describing academia than bureaucracy and office politics - his best jokes still riff off academic debates. Further, the main conceit of the book - downsized penpushers turned feral ghouls, scuttling through the ceilings and walls of office buildings - has been done before, and done better, in William Browning Spencer’s wonderfully droll Resume with Monsters. If you want to read a funny dead-end-job/comedy/horror mash-up, read Browning Spencer; if you want to read Hynes at his best, buy or borrow The Lecturer’s Tale. Unfortunately, Kings of Infinite Space simply isn’t as good as either.
I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.
It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.
When Jim Treacher linked to the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi, he found a real gem. Garth Marenghi is wonderfully done narcissistic hack, the page is hilarious, and the internet is a beautiful thing for hosting it. (Oh, the internet. How can I stay mad at you?)
From one of the interviews:
What, scientifically speaking, is the most frightening thing ever? Garth: I’m not a scientist. I’m a fabulist, a shaman, a ferryman, a dreamweaver. But that’s not to say I don’t put forward scientific propositions. In Black Fang, I dared to suggest that if pollution kept progressing at its current rate, rats would soon be able to drive buses. This week, as I sauntered through Soho, I witnessed a rodent sniffing curiously round a discarded rollerskate. Are we really so far away from my apocalyptic vision? I fear not friend.
A description of one of his books, Afterbirth:
It’s the year 2050 and everyone can choose the perfect baby. Blue eyes, blond hair, and calcium-rich blood. Everyone, that is, who can pay. (Many people can’t pay). The West Country’s most beautiful woman, Silvie Mink, is certain her newborn will be as drop dead gorgeous as her. But when her baby drops dead, knifed by her own placenta, she knows her DNA modification program has gone too far… TAGLINE: After birth, comes Afterbirth
(On a related note, happy Day-Before-Zombie-Movie, everyone.)
Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis.
Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.
I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term) was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”.) Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.
The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a centrist. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .
Looking again at the titles of the books I’ve read, while there’s a vaguely leftish slant to them, one could scarcely call either Clash of Civilisations or Elusive Quest for Growth supportive of the left. The striking thing is that these are mostly the serious books, while those on either side are mostly lightweight polemics1 (I’m inferring this from the reviews I’ve read of some of them and the titles of the others). But it would appear from the cluster analysis that those who read leftwing partisan diatribes also tend to read serious books (and vice versa) while those who read rightwing partisan diatribes don’t read anything else.
In terms of the debate that’s been going on for some time about the relative intellectual capacity of the left and the right, the cluster analysis seems to imply that the left is doing a lot more to enhance its intellectual capacity than is the right.
(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution)
1 On rereading this makes me sound dreadfully highminded. In fact, I regularly read, and occasionally write lightweigh partisan polemics. But the targets are more likely to be obscure Australian politicians and pundits than the great and powerful of the world.
In general I prefer the American, hard-boiled mystery to the cosy English one. Ross Macdonald is my god. I still enjoy a “cosy” murder however, and there may be more well-written ones of this type. Perhaps it’s just that I find derivative “cosy” mysteries tolerable, if kitsch, while derivative hard-boiled mysteries are just brutal. See the works of Mickey Spillane, passim. Josephine Tey, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh (not British, really, but it comes to the same thing) — I enjoy all these, Tey particulary. P.D. James is a little precious and over-intellectualized, but that’s not to say I haven’t read them all. I even like Agatha Christie, though her works form their own peculiar class; the puzzles are insoluble because they require characters other than human beings to carry them out. The Christie murderer is someone of insane cunning, capable of planning things to the minutest detail, and simultaneously posessed of incredible, reckless daring, which allows them to seize a random, propitious moment for their scheme.
One thing that always strikes me in reading post-WWII novels set in England is just how incredibly poor it was (yes, and in the few set in Scotland, it’s worse). In novels set in the late ‘40’s, people are literally scrounging around for firewood, and everything is rationed. Everyone has that one annoying cousin who married a Yank and sends envy-provoking postcards about their new washing machine. In the Rendell book One Across, Two Down, published in 1971, the main characters don’t even have a refrigerator in their flat, and it is a source of friction when the meat in the larder gets high by Sunday (they are meant to be poor, but not abjectly so). This seems bizarre to me. Nor do I think of the 1970’s as a time of rocketing prosperity for Britain. So, when was the Wirtschaftswunder? When did the UK get to be the rich place it is today? Or should I stop trying to glean reliable sociological details from murder mysteries?
The incomparable Michael Dirda does a full-page review of Gene Wolfe’s The Knight in this week’s Washington Post. Dirda says that Wolfe “should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy” and he’s not blowing smoke. I’ve blogged before on Wolfe, who’s perhaps my favourite living writer. The Knight isn’t quite as wonderful as Wolfe’s “New Sun” books, which together constitute his masterpiece, but is still quite wonderful indeed. Its setting most closely resembles that of his juvenile novel, The Devil in a Forest, but its story is rather more complex; as Dirda says, the surface smoothness of Wolfe’s language is “that of quicksand.” The prose-style of The Knight is plain, plainer by far than the archaisms and loanwords of the New Sun books, but it is possessed of the same gravity and music. Wolfe is staunchly conservative, and the book shows it. The Knight presents a vision of chivalry and fealty in the Dark Ages that borrows from Tolkien, and that is likely to be signally unsympathetic to most lefties. But there’s something important there; like other good writers on both left and right, Wolfe’s understanding of human nature and society runs deeper than his immediate political sympathies. His depiction of life in a society on the margins of civilization (caught between the depredations of barbarism and the efforts of the monarchy to impose order) is note-perfect; Wolfe not only has an ear for the music of language, but for the rhythms of society. If you haven’t read Wolfe before, I still recommend that you start with the New Sun books (Shadow and Claw, and Sword and Citadel); but The Knight is a worthy companion.
I have a higher opinion of Peter Singer than many philosophers, but I still think this is a bad idea.
The President of Good and Evil: The Convenient Ethics of George W. Bush by Peter Singer
Anyone who has followed recent critiques of the administration would learn nothing new from these familiar arguments and conclusions, such as that the justification for the Iraq war might have been problematic. Singer’s logic can also be mushy. A chapter that decries the influence of religion on Bush’s policy dissolves into vague, emotional language better suited to a TV pundit than a philosopher. Singer’s most intellectually adventurous chapter involves stem-cell research, where the author exposes fissures in Bush’s “compromise” to allow research on existing stem-cell lines. But mostly Singer’s critique does little to distinguish itself from other anti-Bush books.
The quote is from the Publishers Weekly review on the Amazon site. I hope when the book comes out it will turn out to be an unfair review. But I fear it won’t be. The blurb makes it sound like the book is targetted at Michael Moore fans. Writing mass-market critiques like this is not what God invented philosophers for. Other people can do that better than we can. On the other hand we do careful analysis fairly well, or so we say, and I hope that Singer has written such a careful book.
It doesn’t surprise me that the chapter on stem-cell research gets a more favourable review. That’s a topic Singer is an expert on, and I’d imagine he has more resources to bring to bear than other commentators. Hopefully he’s brought similar expertise to bear on the other topics. Because it really would be interesting to see what Singer qua theoretical philosopher had to say on the Iraq war. After all, the war raises all kinds of juicy issues for a preference utilitarian like Singer.
I think these are all hard issues, some of which tell in favour of the morality of the war from the point of view of preference utilitarianism and some against it. A thorough discussion of them would tell us a lot about what one of the most prominent modern utilitarians thinks about the state of utilitarian theory. But it probably wouldn’t make Good and Evil leap off the shelves at Barnes & Noble.
Coming up with a good title for your book is a tricky business. There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago about the convention of “Vague General Title: More accurate but perhaps less interesting subtitle.” Sadly, the working title of my own draft book falls squarely into this mode. It’s hard to avoid it while also staying away from the grandiose, the misleading, the glib or the overly cheesy. Not all disciplines face this problem to the same degree. My other half is an old fashioned analytic metaphysician, for instance, and when you are developing a new property mereology to solve problems in ontology then you can get away with a book title like Objects, which might in other respects seem rather general.
One persistent trend is books titled “American [Whatever].” American Dynasty, American Skin,
Given the prevalence of this kind of title, maybe I should re-name my own book — which is about blood and organ donation in the U.S. and Europe — to American Kidneys.
My contribution to Henwood week will be up tomorrow … meanwhile, London-based CT readers can see the man himself give a talk on the general subject of the New Economy, tonight for one night only. The venue is 72 Great Eastern Street, kicking off at 7pm. I won’t be there myself because I’ve developed a really shocking head cold, but it ought to be fun. The nearest tube is Old Street or Liverpool Street, and here’s a map.
From Chapter 3 of Tacitus’s Annals:
In the same year, there was a religious innovation: a new Brotherhood of Augustus was created, on the analogy of the ancient Titian Brotherhood founded by King Titus Tatius for the maintenance of the Sabine ritual. Twenty-one members were appointed by lot from the leading men of the State; and Tiberius, Drusus, Claudius, and Germanicus were added. The annual Games established in honour of Augustus were also begun. But their inauguration was troubled by disorders due to rivalry between ballet-dancers.
Factotum: Caesar, the ballet dancers are rioting!
Tiberius: Oh, not again.
I’ve always admired the science fiction of Jack Vance; he has a baroque yet precise prose style, like steel draped in velvet. But one of his novels, The Killing Machine, rests on a premise that I always thought was a little silly. The money of Vance’s future society cannot be forged; fake-detecting machines can invariably tell the real banknotes from the bogus. The hero of the novel finds out why - the paper of real banknotes is crimped in a manner that is spaced “in terms of the square root of the first eleven primes” - and he’s able to print himself up a small fortune’s worth of undetectable forgeries. This sort of legerdemain always seemed rather implausible to me.
No longer. Now I discover via Ed Felten that
some color copiers look for a special pattern of five circles (usually yellow or orange in color), and refuse to make high-res copies of documents containing them. Sure enough, the circles are common on paper money. (On the new U.S. $20 bills, they’re the zeroes in the little yellow “20”s that pepper the background on the back side of the bill.) Markus called the special five-dot pattern the “constellation EURion” because he first spotted it on Euro notes.
A choice bit from Juliet Barker’s gigantic Wordsworth: A Life.
Tom Wedgwood was a committed philanthropist and Godwinian. Anxious to do his part for the furtherance of mankind, he had, in correspondence with Godwin, determined to devote a portion of his wealth to the education of a genius … Wedgwood had come up with a scheme. The child was to be protected from contact with bad example and from sensory overload by never being allowed to go out of doors or leave its apartment. The nursery was to be painted grey, with only a couple of vivid coloured objects to excite its senses of sight and touch. It was to be surrounded by hard objects to continually ‘irritate [its] palms’ … A superintendent [would] ensure that the child connected all its chief pleasures with rational objects and acquired a habit of ‘earnest thought’.
Wordsworth, to his credit, was not impressed by this plan.
I spent three days over Christmas reading Antony Beevor’s Berlin . It really is a magnificent account of the final battle of the Second World War [in the European theatre — see comments] and a suitable companion volume to his Stalingrad (which I read at Christmas a couple of years ago). When Berlin first came out, most of the reviews focused on the book’s detailing of the extensive rape of German women by the invading Soviet soldiers. That is indeed a prominent feature of the book, but there is much much more going on.
What did I take from it? Beevor is strong on both the geopolitics of the end of the war and also on the lived experience of both soldiers and civilians. It is a significant achievement to weave together these two strands as effectively as he does. He is highly critical of the Western allies — and especially the United States — for the naivety about Stalin. The British at least looked to the future state of Europe; the Americans were concerned simply to get the war over with as quickly as possible at the least cost to their own soldiers. As a result, Stalin was effectively handed the opportunity to finish the war in Berlin (which might have fallen more easily to an advance from the Western allies). Beevor is also indigant at the fate of Poland and at the abandonment of Poland to Stalin (the NKVD seems to have been preoccupied with rooting out and criminalising the independent Polish resistance).
Very much dominating the book, though, is the theme of payback. German soldiers, very much aware of the crimes they had committed in the East, were so fearful of what the Soviet soldiers would do that they were willing to fight right to the end. One such scene:
… a sixteen-year-old Berliner called Dieter Borkovsky described what he witnessed in a crowded S-Bahn train from the Anhalter Bahnhof. ‘There was terrow on the faced of the people. They were full of anger and despair. I had never heard such cursing before. Suddenly someone shouted above the noise, “Silence!” We saw a small dirty soldier with two Iron Crosses and the German Cross in Gold. On his sleeve he had a badge with four metal tanks, which meant that he had destroyed four tanks at close quarters. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he shouted, and the carriage fell silent. “Even if you don’t want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.” ’ (p. 189)
In their turn, Soviet soldiers, encountering the wealthy farms of East Prussian and Pomerania were uncomprehending and angry that a people with as much material prosperity as the Germans should have launched the invasion of 1941 against them. Throughout there are reminders of the brutality of that invasion (at one point someone draws the contrast between the war in the West and that in the East. Oradour-sur-Glane in France whose inhabitants were all murdered by the the SS is one of a handful of such villages there, but in Russia and the Ukraine such butchery happened hundreds of times).
Berlin is also a morality tale: it is a about what happens when a criminal gang takes over a great nation and about the willingness of people to believe the stories and myths they tell about themselves and the resistance of those beliefs to overwhelming counter-evidence. Until very close to the end there are many Nazis who cling to their view of the world and continue to adore Hitler. Afterwards many leading Germans remain completely dissociated from morality: they are willing to admit the unwisdom of some decisions but only for instrumental reasons. So, for example, generals concede that the Jews shouldn’t have been persecuted. But not because racism and genocide are wrong, but because they were a diversion from the war effort.
The pictures that one gets of Hitler and Stalin are also revealing. Hitler’s military incompetence and insistence on getting his own way against experts like Guderian comes across as a major contributory factor in Germany’s defeat (as it had at Stalingrad). Indeed Beevor suggests that the Western allies did not favour assassinating Hitler precisely because of the damage he inflicted on the German war effort. Stalin comes across as much more canny. Smart enough to leave most important decisions to the generals of whom he was insanely jealous; but knowing he had the power to reduce and intimidate them when he wanted to.
A great book.
As 2003 draws to a close, it’s time for me to reflect on all of the great books I did not read this year. This has been a particularly good year for not reading books. I would go so far as to say that there are more books I did not read this year than in any year in the recent past. Although a significant part of my job consists in sitting somewhere and reading something, I have still managed to find the time not to read a very wide range of material from many different fields. In special cases, I have bought the book and then not read it. Mostly, though, I did not get around to even doing that. I thought I would present my ten favorite nonfiction books I did not read this year. I hope that they will not deepen your knowledge or broaden your mind in 2004, as they didn’t with me.
Here they are, in the order I did not read them:
William Dalrymple has a review of a collection of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writing — Words of Mercury — in the Guardian. This contains, for the first time, Leigh Fermor’s own account of the SOE’s abduction of the German commander on Crete, General Kriepe, and, within it, one of the best wartime anecdotes:
… the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE party dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the Cretan highlands and thence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as “a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida” : “We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said: ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Socrate’. It was the opening lines of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off … The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine - and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. ‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”
If there were a list of Crooked Timber suggested Christmas presents, Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts , his account of his wanderings on foot across pre-war Europe (or at least the first volume of that unfinished trilogy) would be one of my recommendations.
I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s magnificent Development as Freedom this week. A more bloggable books would be hard to find: startling facts and insights jostle one another on every page. Even when you already know something, Sen is pretty good at reminding, underlining and making you think further about it. So this, for example on the life prospects of African Americans:
Even though the per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, African Americans are very much richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, the comparison of survival prospects of African Americans vis-a-vis those of the very much poorer Chinese or Indians in Kerala, is of particular interest. African Americans tend to do better in terms of survival at low age groups (especially in terms of infant mortality), but the picture changes over the years.
In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.
Shocking, for the strongest economy on earth to create these outcomes (which, as Sen reminds us, are even worse for the black male populations of particular US cities).
UPDATE: Thanks to Noumenon for a link to this item . I closed the comments thread because I didn’t want to spend my weekend fighting trolls. But email suggests that there are some people who have worthwhile things to say so I’m opening it again (though I won’t be participating myself).
Mark Kleiman has a nomination, from ancient Greece, for “the saddest poem ever written.” There are likely a lot of contenders for this title, and even a quick survey would reveal the emotion’s many different varieties (and do wonders for our readership), so it’s probably not the right thing to start a ranking. In any event, Mark’s post caught my eye because I happened to read the following lines just yesterday evening:
Andromache led the lamentation of the women, while she held in her hands the head of Hector, her great warrior: “Husband, you are gone so young from life, and leave me in your home a widow. Our child is still but a little fellow, child of ill-fated parents, you and me. How can he grow up to manhood? Before that, the city shall be overthrown. For you are gone, you who kept watch over it, and kept safe its wives and their little ones …
“And you have left woe unutterable and mourning to your parents, Hector; but in my heart above all others bitter anguish shall abide. Your hands were not stretched out to me as you lay dying. You spoke to me no living word that I might have pondered as my tears fell night and day.”
That’s from an old translation by S.E. Winbolt, which doesn’t seem to be available online. The Samuel Butler translation is freely available, though.
I’ve enjoyed reading the various book rankings. One problem with such lists, however, is that they rarely offer new books to consider. Were there any books on those lists that we haven’t heard of? Unlikely. I realize that isn’t necessarily the point of such lists, but it got me thinking along those lines anyway. I recall enjoying the thread generated on Kieran’s blog back in the summer about long reads.
I would like to read some more about books that I am less likely to have come across already but come highly recommended nonetheless. I thought one possible approach could be to compile a “best of” list consisting of books on our bookshelves that seem obscure (at times even to us owners of those books) or are perhaps not so obscure per se but are nonetheless unlikely to be found on the shelves of others.. not because they’re not good but because they are less mainstream.
So here are a few books I really like but are unlikely to be on too many people’s bookshelves.
I’ll start with the winner of the “absolutely most obscure book on my shelves” award even though I realize it will have limited appeal. It has to be the Hungarian-Japanese dictionary I acquired years ago when I was studying Japanese in Hungary. I’m afraid I have little use for it now, but it is too unique to get rid of (and too obscure not to mention here). I realize, however, that this will have little appeal to most people on the globe (including most people in Hungary and Japan). So moving on…
I suspect many would find my little collection of Titeuf cartoon books somewhat obscure. Titeuf was “born” in Carouge just outside of Geneva, but my understanding is that he’s become pretty popular in the rest of the francophone world as well. The stories are about everday events through the eyes of a little boy. His views of the world are very naive, but very understandable.. and quite funny.
A nice coffee-table book for people who like to ponder facts and figures about the social world is Understanding USA.
For those who like fiction, I recommend The Notebook by Agota Kristof. If you ever took a francophone lit (as in French lit not by French authors) class you may have come across her work. Otherwise, I suspect unlikely even though it’s really good reading. It’s about twins during wartime and if you know a bit about the biography of the author then you can figure out which time period, but that part is not essential to getting a lot out of the book. (The author immigrated from Hungary to Switzerland in the 1950s.)
A good chunk of the books on my bookshelf are art books so I’ll finish with one of those. Egon Schiele is not necessarily obscure depending on how much you know about early twentieth-century European painting, but he is much less known than someone like Klimt (an artist who had considerable influence on Schiele) and many others from that period. His rendering of the human body is quite incredible. I recommend collections of his work for anyone’s art library.
I realize that’s pretty eclectic and I’m reaching across genres, but such is my collection and that’s how I prefer it. Obviously, I could go on and on, but those are definitely books that would keep me good company if stuck on an island or at an airport one day.
I’m reading Michael Wood’s The Road To Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles now; there’s a lot of meat to it. The book considers the fascination that oracles exert, and traces some of it back to their mixture of infallibility and ambiguity; they tell us the truth, but not necessarily in a form that we can recognize or use.
Oracle-stories characteristically not only center on equivocation as part of their plot, the way they make the oracle come out right. They are about equivocation. They need the oracle to be both right and wrong; they need more than one outcome to lurk from the start in the oracle’s utterance.
I imagine that this is not only fertile matter for literary criticism (Wood is professor of English at Princeton), but for philosophy too. However, my skills aren’t well-suited to these debates, so I’ll confine myself to recommending the book, admiring the catholicism of Wood’s choice of examples, and suggesting a few of my own. Wood draws on a remarkably broad selection of sources; not only Sophocles and Shakespeare, but Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Still, there are many literary oracles that receive no mention; here are three of my favorites.
(1) The Green Man, in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Fettered and enslaved, he is exhibited in a tent at a public fair; he prophesizes so as to drive customers away. When the Green Man tells the fortune of the narrator, Severian, he tells him that he is destined to grow weaker with time, and to breed sons who will be his enemies. These predictions seem empty insofar as they are the fate of every man, yet they are soon fulfilled in a quite concrete and specific fashion. Wolfe’s tetralogy also casts the Cumaean Sibyl as a minor character. She does not act as an oracle, although she has the aspect of a serpent, a sly philological joke on Wolfe’s part (the technical term for a female oracle is ‘pythoness’).
(2) The monastic mountain-settlers of Karhide in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. These engage in frenzied rituals that allow them accurately to foretell the future. Their purpose in so doing: to demonstrate by example the uselessness of knowledge and the desirability of ignorance. Knowledge of the future does not necessarily guide our actions very well.
(3) The augur in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, who sets out a precise schedule of charges for his services. I use this text for my email signature.
‘What are your fees?’ inquired Guyal cautiously. ‘I respond to three questions,’ stated the augur. ‘For the twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I will speak a parable, which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.’
I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver the day before yesterday, and enjoyed it very much, despite the mixed reviews. In many ways, the book reminded me of another baggy-great faux-historical novel set in the same period, which similarly received scant critical acclaim; Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon. And Quicksilver is very nearly as good.
Which isn’t to say that the criticisms of Quicksilver are untrue, or unfair. But they still seem to to me to miss the mark. They treat Quicksilver as a more or less conventional novel, and concentrate their fire on its lack of vivid characterization, and its lack of pacing. All true. But I don’t think Quicksilver _is_ a conventional novel, nor does it aspire to be. It’s not really about relations between warm living human beings, although these are thrown in as a sort of garnish, to render the intellectual meat of the novel slightly more palatable. Quicksilver is about the birth of modernity, and how this rather extraordinary scientific, religious, intellectual and political ferment spewed forth the world that we have today (or at least something very like that world). The metaphor of mercury runs through the novel, referring sometimes to money, sometimes to natural science, sometimes to alchemy, sometimes to the palpable explosion of ideas that preceded the Enlightenment, but always, always, to whatever is acting to change things. I reckon that the keystone of the novel is found on p.722-3, where Daniel Waterhouse describes how
This morning, Roger, I sat in this empty courtyard, in the midst of a whirlwind. The whirlwind was invisible; how did I know ‘twas here? Because of the motion it conferred on innumerable scraps of paper, which orbited round me. Had I thought to bring along my instruments I could have taken observations and measured the velocities and plotted the trajectories of those scraps, and if I were as brilliant as Isaac I could have drawn all of those data together into a single unifying picture of the whirlwind. But if I were Leibniz I’d have done none of those things. Instead I’d have asked, Why is the whirlwind here?
This is the question that the novel is structured around. The book depicts the whirlwind of modernity, which catches its various characters in its turbulence, and flings them willy-nilly across Europe and North America. And then enquires as to the nature of that whirlwind, not giving any very satisfactory answer (or, more precisely, giving a variety of unsatisfactory ones). Which is to say that the book is really about the forces shaping history rather than about history itself. It bears the same relationship to a traditional historical novel that Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II bears to a conventional piece of diplomatic history - while individuals turn up here and there in Braudel’s narration, and even serve to illustrate important points, they are in the grip of forces larger than themselves. Stephenson’s project is a very ambitious one; I’m not at all sure that he’s going to succeed. But I’m certainly intrigued enough to look forward eagerly to volumes II and III.
Update: Mark Kleiman also likes Quicksilver a lot. Key quote: “I have no idea why you’re wasting your time reading this weblog when you should be reading Stephenson instead.” He also reminds me that Stephenson himself recommends another of Braudel’s books as a companion read to Quicksilver.
As I’ve said before, the Latham & Matthews transcription of the Diary of Samuel Pepys is a marvel of scholarship. I would be enjoying myself a good deal less if I didn’t have the footnotes to read. Take October 13 1664, for example, which I read last night. Pepys has just read a book containing the story “that Cromwell did in his life time transpose many of the bodies of the kings of England from one grave to another, and that by that means it is not known certainly whether the head that is now set up upon a post be that of Cromwell or one of the kings.” Then we get the editorial footnote:
The book is Samuel-Joseph Sorbiere’s Relation d’un Voyage en Agletterre … (Paris, 1664; not in the P[epys] L[ibrary]). The story (which struck Sorbiere as ‘un bruit ridicule’) is at pp.165-6 in the Cologne edition of 1667 … There seems no doubt that this was in fact Cromwell’s head: see K. Pearson and G.M. Morant, Portraiture of O. Cromwell, esp. pp.107+. For a contrary view, see F.J. Varley, Cromwell’s latter end. The head remained for display at Westminster Hall for about 25 years, when it was blown down in a storm. In 1710 it was said to be in London in a collection of curios: Von Uffenbach, London in 1710 (trans. and ed. Quarrell and Mare), p.82. In 1812 a head (allegedly the same one) found its way (via a pawnbroker’s shop) into the possession of a Suffolk family — the Wilkinsons of Woodbridge — whence it passed in 1960 to Cromwell’s college, Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, where it was given a decent burial in the ante-chapel. Journal R. Arch. Inst. 68/237+; N & Q., corr in vols for 1864 and 1926; The Times, 31st December 1874; ib., 15 April 1957; Sid Suss. Annual 1960, p.26.
Marvellous stuff.
While we’re on the subject of literature, Jacob Levy points to a subscriber-only piece in Even the New Republic about the perenially sad state of modern literature. I can’t read it because I’m not a subscriber, but Jacob quotes a chunk. Who’s to blame for the terrible condition of the novel? James Joyce, that’s who.
I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is less a bildungsroman than the chapter-by-chapter unraveling of a talent that, if “The Dead” is any indication, could have been formidable, while Ulysses is nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the writer and the critical establishment predicated on two admirable, even beautiful fallacies that were hopelessly contingent upon the historical circumstances that produced them: William James’s late Victorian metaphor of the stream of consciousness …and T.S. Eliot’s early modern fantasy of a textual stockpile of intellectual history that would form an allusive network of bridges to the cultural triumphs of the ages, a Venice without the smell of sewage, or mustard gas… Ulysses has served since its publication as the ideal for serious writers, and the twentieth century is littered with magnum opuses that have been written under its sway, and that have marked the nadir of their various writers’ careers.
Well, whether you like him or not, I think it’s hard to claim that Joyce realised Eliot’s antiseptic high-Anglican dream of “Venice without the smell of sewage, or mustard gas.” It was the sewage that so revolted many of his contemporaries, and brought out the worst of their snobbery. Virginia Woolf thought it an “illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are,” nothing more than the work of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” (In a letter to Strachey she amended this to “the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges,” Undergraduates presumably being too high-class.) Edith Wharton said it was “a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind).” Shaw thought it a “revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but,” he conceded, “it is a truthful one,” E.M. Forster felt it to be “perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day” but still “a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.”
And on and on. I’m more inclined to agree with Anthony Burgess (who wrote one of the best introductions to Joyce’s work): “the appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce’s big joke,” and Ulysses is “one of the most humane novels ever written.” I haven’t read the whole of Peck’s article, so I can’t say whom he’d prefer. I note, though, that having ham-fistedly smacked Joyce around he hurriedly tells us he cannot “that other strain, which I can hardly bear to slog through, the realists and the realists and the realists, too many to name, too many to contemplate, their rational, utilitarian platitudes rolling out endlessly like toilet paper off a spindle.” Perhaps a subscriber can tell me who, besides Dale Peck, counts as a great modern novelist.
Update: Thanks to Ogged, Jacob and Patrick for emailing me the full Peck article. I have to say that, after reading it, I am still not much the wiser. Most of the piece is spent in handwaving perfluffery, agonising over having to play the role of The Critic Who Appears Not To Like Anything. “I am leery of telling people what to look for,” he worries, “lest that’s precisely what they find.” Relax, Dale. Criticism is just part of the Big Conversation. Intelligent recommendations are what people pay you for. But he has bigger plans:
I wanted only to hack away the dead wood in order to discover the heart of the novel. That heart is, I believe, still beating, is still strong and vital; it needs a critic’s help not to grow, but only to be seen. Of course the heart in question isn’t a heart at all, but rather a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities.
It seems he wants to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, to coin a phrase. The problem is, his critique modern literature has rather too many targets:
Because—make no mistake—every writer wants to save the world. … Embedded in every story, every poem, every play is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary. But parody and pastiche have run their course in that effort. … It is time for a literature that opts out of such a limited, dysphonic call-and-response paradigm, and instead offers a real alternative, an imaginative solution that hints at something beyond the juvenile culture that today’s writers spend so much time making fun of in such a juvenile manner.
So are writers saving the world or parodying it? Presenting us with an emancipatory Utopia or parroting juvenile culture? No doubt Peck would say something like “they want to do both, trying to put parody to work in utopia but leaving us with only the toxic antinomy of the modern novel.”
At the end he says,
But only after a work of literature has accepted its own failure—has, as it were, elegized its stillborn self—can it begin the complex series of contextual manipulations by which meaning is created and we locate ourselves as surely as the ancient navigators fixed their positions between stars. … Contemporary novels have either counterfeited reality or forfeited it. In their stead we need a new materialism.
I have little idea what it means to elegize one’s stillborn self, or what a “new materialism” would look like. But it certainly sounds grand to say “a piecemeal approach won’t do anymore. The problem is too widespread within the insular literary and publishing world merely to pick at its edges: the entire scab must be ripped off.” I await Dean’s new scab-ripping novel. Maybe by writing it he can get over having to write pieces that read like Tenacious D’s “Greatest and Best Song in the World … Tribute.”
So Austen and Tolkien top Norm’s poll. Assuming fungible goods and transitive preferences, it follows that a hybrid version of these two authors would also prove very popular. Thus, I want to see Pride and Prejudice rewritten a la Tolkien. A new title might be needed. Pride and Preciousness perhaps, or Sauron and Sarumanity. Also vice versa. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in grubby clothes smoking pipeweed in the corner must be leader of the Dunedain, lost King of the West and worth four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our Hobbits!”
The results of Norman Geras’s Alternative Big Read poll are out, with Pride and Prejudice in first place. The selection is pretty good except for the appearance of Lord of the Rings in second place (ranked their top book by eight witless people).
I’ve been following the discussions about genre and literary fiction in the threads started by Henry and Maria with some interest. As I mention in a comment to Henry’s thread, I’ve always rated Ken Worpole’s writing on this topic both in his Dockers and Detectives and in another little book he produced called Reading by Numbers: Contemporary Publishing and Popular Fiction (Comedia, 1984). I picked it up of the shelf this evening to check on a passage I dimly remembered about book design:
Paperback cover design in the 1940s and 1950s was often very strong and innovative, employing traditions borrowed from Expressionist and Surrealist styles of the early part of the century. Typography was often highly innovative too.
Unfortunately, what displaced this bugeoning populist publishing tradition was the introduction of the “trade paperback” in the 1970s, a development of questionable value. The “trade paperback” is a larger format, more expensively produced paperback designed exclusively for bookshop sales, and carries an aura of a higher “seriousness” than the cheap, easy-to-fit-in-your-pocket book. Many publishers moved their more “serious” writers over into their new “trade” paperback lists or re-printed books with new “classical” covers … This not only raised the price of the books but literally took them out of the supermarkets and the chain-stores. The “trade” paperback was designed specifically to be sold by the book trade. Much writing was thus taken out of the arena of popular literature, as can be gauged by thumbing through the paperback sections in second-hand bookshops, where it is not unusual to find Sartre, Trocchi, Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Nell Dunn, Mary McCarthy, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Norman Mailer and many others being promoted as sensational fiction with garish covers - and being sold in their tens of thousands rather than thousands. It is the development of the trade paperback which further separated out “serious” literature from “popular” literature and created a vacuum in the cheap paperback field which formula writing rushed to fill. (pp. 7—8)
Now I don’t know about the very last bit there, but he’s definitely onto something with his observation that the publishing industry does a great deal via its marketing and packaging of books to categorise some as “popular” or “genre” and others as “serious” and “literary” and that this leads some readers to think of certain books as beyond them and others to think of other books as beneath them (quite independently of the actual content) — and that’s a great pity.
One question to ask is which books could survive — and indeed flourish — when repackaged on the “wrong” side of the divide. Most of the writers Worpole lists clearly can, as can Hemingway, Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte (I’ve a wonderfully garish supermarket Wuthering Heights somewhere). I mentioned Dashiell Hammett in Henry’s thread. Philip Roth could do well in both incarnations but Don DeLillo …. sorry, I fell asleep there for a moment.
I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that it is necessarily a bad thing if a book could not be successful if repackaged in a popular format. Some books both great works and only accessible to a restricted readership. But many other works can, if not presented in an inaccessible not-for-the-likes-of-me form serve as a bridge between popular and literary work.
Hmm, Henry’s post about genre fiction greats has sparked an interesting aside which I think deserves a thread of its own. Laura says (scroll right down to the end of the comments) that romance novels account for more popular literature sales than just about anything else. They certainly deserve our attention. I think romance, or its sub-genre - chick lit - can show some interesting things about just what it means to ‘transcend the genre’.
I’ll pick up where Laura left off and recommend a ‘chick lit’ book that I think transcends the genre; Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes.
Rachel’s Holiday starts with the familiar 20-something woman getting into all sorts of alcohol-induced flaps, failing to recognize the Prince Charming in her life, and stuck in/about to be kicked out of a job that is rapidly going nowhere. It’s full of stalwarts in the Bridget Jones mode; pushy mother, long-suffering father, brand names, late nights, and living beyond one’s means. And then Rachel goes to rehab.
I won’t spoil the book, because I really do recommend reading it. But I will try to suggest how this book transcends the genre and what I think it actually means to do so.
Rachel’s Holiday takes that hackneyed madcap girl-woman who’s rampaging through her 20s, and shows what’s underneath; alcoholism, depression and self-loathing. Dysfunctional relationships with her real family, and superficial, utilitarian ones with the pseudo-family/gaggle of mates so beloved of the genre. The career that’s going nowhere isn’t a precursor to an unlikely, deus ex machina type transformation into a successful tv producer / PR guru / best-selling author. It’s just a crap job that grinds away precisely because it bears no relation to Rachel’s real desire. And the hilarious drinking stories that follow too many mojitos? Well, they’re actually pretty funny. But the cold light of day in this novel is pretty damn cold.
I wouldn’t say Marian Keyes tries to subvert this genre so much as dig a lot deeper than most, and prise out what it might actually mean to be one of these characters. Maybe she’s able to do so because aspects of the book are autobiographical, and Marian Keyes’ life has a had a bit more colour and bouts of enforced self-awareness than your average hack with a publishing contract. Or maybe, just maybe, she’s a terrific writer who’s more concerned with telling the story, describing the characters, and bringing you along with her, than so many writers who just want their sentences admired. I found it as profound and telling a character study as anything I’ve read in ‘high’ literature.
Transcending the genre doesn’t mean simply taking the tropes and holding them up in the light in some early 90s, po-mo way. To do it, you have to dig back down through the layers of cyphers, types, characters and familiars to uncover the kind of people who gave rise to them in the first place. If I was a theorist, I might call this ‘interrogating’. In Rachel’s Holiday or, say, in Mystic River, it means uncovering the truths in characters that make them act in a way that is consistent with both their inner lives and the structures of the genre. And that is a deceptively difficult thing to do.
What else does Marian Keyes do to transcend her genre? Inversely to much literary fiction, she sticks to a quite strict plot structure but lets rip unself-consciously with literary devices like flashbacks and interior monologues. Maybe it’s the rigidity of the form that sets genre writers free to rip, mix and burn everything else. But Marian Keyes is no fluke. She has a mastery of her bag of literary tricks that allows her to whip them out with neither flourish nor apology.
Which is not to say that Keyes is a genius. But she’s a very, very good writer. She writes home truths but deep ones, and many people read her. She may not make her readers better people, but she probably does make us just a little bit more insightful and aware.
Which is why the arbitrary distinction between literary and ‘genre’ writing baffles me. (Why did the magic realists get invited to the party while the M. John Harrison’s are waiting at the gate?) Isn’t all writing about, or supposed to be about, the discovery or application of universal truths in a highly structured form? Surely the thing is not how it’s done, but that it’s done well?
A few after-thoughts:
The term ‘execrable crap’ is used and over-used, but is still applicable to most of the shoddy, shallow, assembly-line junk that women are thought to read going home on the Tube. It’s the adult equivalent of putting a three year old in a boob tube.
I like Harold Bloom’s line that we read because we can’t know enough people, or know them intimately enough. I’m just not as fussy as he is about where I run into them.
By the way, I have tried Gene Wolfe a few times, but I can never seem to get past the bits about flaying.
There was an interesting imbroglio at the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday. Stephen King, who had just won an award, made a speech telling the gathered dignitaries of the literary world that they should be reading more popular bestsellers. Another award winner, Shirley Hazzard, politely but firmly dissented from the idea that people should pay any attention to “a reading list of those who are most read at this moment.” According to Terry Teachout, who was there, you could tell that Hazzard “was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King.”
Update: more on this from Terry Teachout, Ophelia Benson and Sarah Weinman. Teachout also has a nice piece, which I hadn’t spotted before, about the merits of one genre series, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under the pseudonym of Richard Stark). It’s a series for which I’ve a weakness myself.
I think King is closer to the truth here, but I’m of two minds. He told the judges that he had “no use for those who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.” I haven’t read Higgins Clark, but I have read Grisham and Clancy, and in the improbable event that I ever deliver a NBA acceptance speech, I shan’t be recommending them. Grisham writes sterile but easily digestible pabulum. Clancy is fascinating as a case-study in US right wing politics, but he’s a rotten writer. There’s a difference between recommending that literary snobs read more popular fiction, and recommending that they read bad popular fiction.
Still, King is more right than wrong - many wonderful writers are overlooked, because they don’t write ‘literary’ fiction. This is a mistake on two counts. First, the literary quality of some writers is systematically discounted because their writing is ‘popular’ or ‘genre fiction.’ I know the field of science fiction best; I reckon that Gene Wolfe and John Crowley are major writers under any reasonable definition of the term. Nor am I alone in that judgement. Michael Swanwick, Kelly Link, Paul Park, China Mieville and M. John Harrison aren’t too bad either. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the merits of popular fiction as popular fiction are completely overlooked. PG Wodehouse is one of the masters of the English language; because he wrote light comedy, critics don’t take much notice of him. As a prose stylist, he’s the equal of Nabokov, perhaps even his better: he doesn’t feel obliged to show off. Donald Westlake writes crime novels in witty and vigorous prose; again, nobody outside the genre pays much attention. Other neglected writers, who manage to combine good prose style with an enormous sense of fun include Terry Pratchett, Steven Brust, and Iain M Banks (as opposed to his literary alter ego, Iain Banks). You can fill in the other examples yerself.
In contrast, there’s something unattractive about the unabashed snobbery of writers like Hazzard, whose ostentatious refusal of the modern world (she has no television, and writes in longhand) seems less a serious statement of aesthetic purpose than a snobbish tic or affectation. To identify the popular with the bad is not only wrong; it’s silly. While King overstates his case, he’s dead right on the facts. It’ll be interesting to see whether he succeeds in provoking a response.
Who knew that the book publishing world was so full of bizarre criminal intrigue? If this were fiction, an editor would laugh at the absurdity of a villian whose alias was Melanie Mills but whose name in fact turned out to be Roswitha Elisabeth von Meerscheidt-Hullessem. Real life, having no moral to impart or plot to resolve, has no such difficulties.
Austentatious is having a poll to establish everyone’s favorite Jane Austen novel. Mysteriously, the seventh option is “Other,” which is currently ahead of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. Perhaps the Janeites have finally gotten hold of a complete copy of Sanditon. Or perhaps someone is making a case for Lady Susan, The Watsons or her History of England.
On the topic of lost masterworks, let me recommend The Eyre Affair and its sequels Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde, for your next plane ride. Looking at the covers, I find myself wondering why the graphic design of books published in the U.S. tends to be so much poorer than that of U.K. editions.
Kieran has previously reported on all the fun one can have browsing the stacks in Firestone Library at Princeton. The library used to require that patrons sign their name when borrowing a book and Kieran managed to find the signatures of some famous people on the cards that had been left in some books. The system wasn’t so great about privacy, but it sure allows for an interesting glimpse into a book’s life.
Yesterday, one of my colleagues mentioned that she found an 1855 or 1892 book here at Northwestern’s library that had never been browsed by anyone else. The reason she was quite certain of this is that the pages of the book were uncut. The book had been pushed together so hard by the neighboring volumes that its pages were all white and it looks new despite being over a century old.
I have sometimes wondered, if one were to have a free afternoon in Princeton (as I may next week), what would be books to look for in Firestone on which one may encounter an interesting signature? I suspect Kieran will have tried several, but maybe something’s left for the rest of us.:) If anyone has suggestions, I’ll be happy to check next week.
I do not generally hold people in contempt because of their profession, their job or their calling. But copy editors! That is something different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence and indeed morality. You will object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it is no excuse for what copy editors also do - which is to interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the particular copy-editing mind which is at work….
Hmm. As an author, I share some of Norm’s frustrations. Indeed I’ve felt them keenly very recently. But I also once worked as a freelance copyeditor to supplement my then pitiful income as a 0.5 temporary lecturer. I remember having to justify myself to desk editors and production managers and hoping, hoping that they’d give me another book to work on. Most of these people are ill-paid casual workers constantly having to prove their worth. I’m sure that’s where the urge to over-correct comes from — to demonstrate that you did something for that miserable payment.
I picked up a copy of The Money Game over the weekend in a second-hand bookshop in Melbourne. It’s a minor classic in the literature on the stock market, so naturally I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago when Daniel mentioned it in a comments thread. The book is thirty five years old and it shows. It’s also very good. That shows, too.
The Money Game is assiduously laid-back in tone. The author — the cover says “Adam Smith,” but the back page tells you it’s journalist and fund manager George Goodman — tries hard to impress you with tales of the big money-shufflers he hangs out with, while working hard not to sound too impressed himself. He comes from the right schools, belongs to the right clubs and is comfortably networked with the right people. In matters of lifestyle, taste and fashion he lives bemusedly at the cutting edge of conventional wisdom. Adam Smith isn’t the right name for him at all. It’s more as though Richard Cantillon were being spiritually channeled by George Plimpton, or possibly Austin Powers. Much of the time he sounds a lot like this paragraph, and he clearly knows a great deal about how stock markets really work.
The book is littered with anachronisms, small and large. Pretty young things who read it — I’m sorry, I mean women who read this book may find the pipe-chewing, bachelor-pad atmosphere a little rich (unless they are fun-loving Scandinavian air-hostesses). Internet junkies might think Smith’s description of the new computing machines to be merely quaint (“Not only can the computer print out all these things, but if it is really equipped it can change this linear information to graphics and draw you a chart”). And followers of intellectual fashion might be a little dismayed to find that Freud stands side-by-side with Keynes as the intellectual lynchpin of the book, inkblots and all.
But all of this just throws the real substance of the book into sharp relief. The stuff on Freud leads to some condensed observations on the relationship between the market, identity and anxiety. (“If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.” “The stock doesn’t know you own it.”) The two chapters on computers have all the basic insights on automated trading, dependence on data, and the possibility of hacking the machines in order to rig the output — he gets this far just by observing a market environment where there are about five computers trading in a semi-automated way. Goodman’s chapter on accountants (“But What Do The Numbers Mean?”) could have been written last month:
For years, Wall Street accepted with religious faith an accountant’s certification as the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, especially those of the great national accounting firms … Then came a couple of cases in which corporations reported profits, had their reports audited and certified, only to come back several years later and say that the original reports were, for one reason or another, off by a very wide mark … Suffice to say that with lawyers and the SEC in full cry, the accountants have begun to thread some consistencies, but there is genuine confusion among these accountants as to what earnings really are.
Goodman even describes a real-estate scheme he lost money on that doesn’t really differ in its essentials from the likes of Global Crossing:
If memory serves me, you paid someting like $4.95 down on one of these houses and you got E-Z terms to pay the rest of the $50,000, say $25 a month. Certain-Teed reported as income the sale price of the whole house, even though the buyer had actually paid in cash only $4.95, and Certain-Teed’s reported earnings therefore went rocketing up. … I continued to fret about the difference between $4.95, abandoned, and the price of the whole house … And, feeling like Oliver Twist, I was ushered into one of the great senior partners [of the firm’s Accountants] … Timidly I asked whether everything was absolutely okay with reporting as income a whole house when all you had received so far was $4.95. And the great senior partnet drew himself up to his full nine foot three and indicated in stentorian tones that the great world-wide accounting firm of — would never sign anything that wasn’t true.
Two years later they had a little footnote to the financial statements. They said there were “certain readjustments,” recognizing that a lost of the houses were still standing there. This whacked the earnings back retrospectively to the price the market seemed to have recognized much earlier. “Sorry about that,” said the footnote.
All of which might lead one to ask how the likes of Enron and all the rest could happen again, and to wonder why commentators on those debacles began their columns on the topic looking back to a Golden Age in the 1960s which, as Goodman makes clear, never existed. But — and this is the great thing about The Money Game — the answer to that question is in the book as well. Another one of Goodman’s Irregular Rules is that “A stock is going up as long as it is going up.” And, he says,
since we are all watching each other, it is very comfy. This is called a Trend. And if we all stay with the Trend, then we have only to worry about how we will all get out when the Trend reverses, but maybe we can get the public enlisted for that.
One of the later chapters has a description of a stock crashing through the floor for no very good reason other than the market has lost faith in it — the point being that collective belief is what makes things run at all:
This is what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called anomie. In market terms it means anxiety builds up as the market drops … It’s like alienation, only it means “Where’s the bottom? Where’s the bottom? Where’s the bottom?” Nobody knows where the bottom is; nobody can remember where the top was; they’re all the way out there in the blue, riding on anxiety and a shoeshine.
Go read the rest yourself. It’ll prime your palate for a dose of Keynes himself, whose writings on the market experience are the foundation of The Money Game’s Irregular Rules and whose view of life underlies its cocktail-party tone.
I’m not going to Talk Like O’Reilly today. To attone for my sins, I am going to talk about his book, “The O’Reilly Factor- The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.”
My lovely, intelligent, largely apolitical fiancee was in a book group that chose “The O’Reilly Factor,” so she had to read it. It’s really something special. We would be lying in bed reading, and she’d crack up and have to read something to me. This was probably our favorite quote, from page 111:
Since the 1960s a couple walking down the aisle or taking their turn at city hall are going to have huge expectations.You know what they are: a big house, late-model cars, and expensive “with-it” clothes, great sex between hard bodies, varied and healthful foods, separate space but mutual interests, stimulating conversation that helps each partner “grow”, fun parties and swell vacations, exceptional children who can be bragged about on social occasions and at the office, constant hugging and supportive endearments, old-fashioned considerate behavior and also trendy progressive thinking- and don’t forget the intelligent, cheerful, gifted pets.
If that’s your agenda, there’s a quick route to reality. Run that list by your parents.
I blame Bill O’Reilly for our long engagement. I’m not eager to start eating gruel at every meal while watching my dog’s intelligence drop.
The bulk of the book is a mixture of personal reminiscences of his hardscrabble life growing up in Levittown, his career in television, and criticism of political figures that he doesn’t like. He’s not especially vitriolic, except about specific individuals like the Clintons and Jesse Jackson. What’s most striking is the Andy Rooneyness of the whole enterprise. At 214 pages, it still feels remarkably padded. I have no idea what he resorted to in order to fill out his new book.
Here are the subheads in chapter 17, The Ridiculous Factor
President William Jefferson Clinton
Attorney General Janet Reno
Larry Flynt
Charles Manson
South Park, the Movie
NBA Ticket Prices
Sex Tonics
Jerry Springer
Rosie’s Rants
“Are you making sense, or are you spouting propoganda? I mean, a guy named Jospeph Goebbels did the same thing on the very far right during World War II.”Kate Moss, Calista Flockheart, and the Rest of the Skull-and-Bones Crew
Pamela Anderson“Too much substance, if you know what I mean.”Al Sharpton and David Duke
Social Promotions
San Francisco
Skin Piercing
TV Weatherpeople
Gays in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade
Cliches
Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs
The Tax Code“Politicians will argue- as many have on the program- that the government needs your money to operate properly. This is a lie. There is more than enough tax revenue available today to pay for the armed forces, roads, police and other vital services without looting the take-home pay of working Americans.”(N.B. In 2002, federal income from all sources except individual income taxes and individual payroll taxes was $289 billion dollars. Federal defense spending alone n 2002 was $329 billion dollars.) As Dwight Merideth has noted, Bill O’Reilly’s economics require belief in Rumplestiltskin.)
Here are the subheads in Chapter 18, The Bad Factor
Any US Airline
Rice Cakes
Suburban Utility Vehicles
Roseanne
NFL Gear
Steak Tartare
Leonardo DeCaprio
Onion-Flavored Potato Chips
Warren Beatty
Abortion
Barbra Streisand (as an actress)
Donald Trump
Phone Solicitors
Wayne Newton
Jesse Helms
Ted Kennedy
Tattoos
Michael Jackson/Jesse Jackson
Chinese Food in America
Martha Stewart
Monica Lewinsky
Sushi
Charles Grodin (as a talk show host)
Daytime TV
Johnnie Cochran
Sex Talk Radio
Howard Stern
In the end, we didn’t walk away from the book feeling much particular dislike for O’Reilly. On the other hand, the book doesn’t present much of an argument for why anyone would take him seriously.
Eugene Volokh sez
Work? Blogging? Sleep? Or Quicksilver? I say Quicksilver.
Quicksilver junkies will want to know about the Quicksilver Wiki that Neal Stephenson has set up, which will allow people collectively to annotate the book, its characters, ideas, and whatever odd tangents they find interesting. Via BoingBoing.
It’s long been one of my theories that the user ratings on Amazon are useless as guides to my reading habits. It seems like virtually every non-political book that I look up has a rating between 4 and 5 (out of 5). It’s not hard to understand how this would happen; I expect that most people don’t take the time to read and review a book unless they enjoy it. Self-selection would weed out the most negative reviewers before they pick up a book. (I probably wouldn’t enjoy Those Who Trespass, but I’ll never know because I’m not going to read it.) Furthermore, people who love a book are probably more likely to choose to review it than people who were indifferent.
I’ve taken a completely unscientific look at Amazon ratings. I looked at six categories: General nonfiction, general fiction, history, politics, classics, and “bad” books (evil, discredited, or worthless books, not trashy fiction). Most of the books in general nonfiction, general fiction, history and classics are books that I’ve read. (I’m interested in whether Amazon ratings are useful for me, you see.) I’ve read a few of the politics books, and none of the “bad” books. (A list of books and their ratings are here.) I know that this isn’t a randomized sample and that it’s biased around my tastes. I have no intention of defending this study’s methodology, except to say that I didn’t pick books in an effort to get results I wanted. It’s just for fun.
Here’s what I found:
Category | Average rating | % of books rated 4-5 out of 5 |
General nonfiction | 4.5 | 95% |
General fiction | 4.2 | 94% |
History | 4.1 | 85% |
Politics | 3.6 | 35% |
Classics | 4.3 | 100% |
Bad books | 3.8 | 57% |
A few notes of interest:
- Amazon will automatically generate an average customer rating even if only one person reviews a book. With a handful books that nearly everyone would agree are evil, they seem to have turned off the average customer rating function. Amazon doesn’t present an average customer rating for Mein Kampf, White Power, or International Jew (by Henry Ford), and they’re not bundled with another book. (If this is intentional, they’ve missed a paperback edition of Mein Kampf. And they’ve bundled it with Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which I doubt the author would appreciate.)
- I had a hell of a time finding any books with an average rating under 3 stars. The only ones that I found were DOW 36,000 (average rating 2.5) and Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (average rating 2.5).
- Political books scored lower than any other category. Most books are reviewed by their fans, but political books draw a crowd of partisans to give one-star reviews of books they haven’t read (sample, from the reviews of Big Lies: “Please, this book is a load of garbage. If this is a representation of the Liberal Left, then we’re in big trouble. This is nothing but pure hatred. Don’t bother buying it, but if you must, buy it used.”)
As a result, the accumulated reviews of a political polemic make the average blog look like the Algonquin Round Table.
Out of the sample that I picked, liberal books seemed to score better than conservative books. All of the books that got 4 stars or more were left-wing books. I’m not going to assert that that means anything, for reasons just stated.
- Plenty of nonfiction and fiction books had 5 star averages, but none of the classics did.
- User ratings seem to be much more useful on products like consumer electronics and kitchen equipment. People who get crappy equipment don’t have to invest hours and hours to find out about it, and they’re happy to share.
Like Jacob Levy I’m waiting on the release of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver: and the early signs are good. Dave Langford, who’s part way through reading it for Amazon UK pronounces it to be a “joy to read, with a genuinely fresh slant on 17th/18th century history (or ahistory).” And Jacob and I are not alone - I confidently predict that September 23 (the book’s release date) is going to see prolonged blog-silences from everyone from Glenn Reynolds to Atrios.
But I’m digressing … I wanted to post about another book that I’m nearly as excited about, which will be released at around the same time. JG Ballard’s new novel, Millennium People, is about to come out. Ballard isn’t as popular in the blogosphere as Stephenson - but he should be; he’s a writer of genius. Which isn’t to say that he’s without flaws. He’s notoriously obsessive; ever since he developed his own voice, he’s written the same novel over and over. His language is (deliberately) flat, and his imagery repetitive - abandoned swimming pools; empty wastes of sand; rusting launch platforms. But there’s something admirable about his singlemindedness; something important.
For my money, John Gray has the most concise take on why Ballard’s important (indeed, I think that this short review-article is likely the best thing that Gray has ever written). Gray’s essay highlights the main theme of Ballard’s work - “life as it is lived when the fictions that sustain society have broken down.” If the Revolution was immanent in every moment for Walter Benjamin, the Catastrophe is immanent in every moment for Ballard. Polite society is always wobbling on the verge of savagery. Gray also mentions how funny Ballard is - something that a lot of people miss (his humour, like Beckett’s is black and so understated as to be very nearly obscured in the shadows).
Two of Ballard’s recent novels are of particular interest to social scientists. If I ever teach my dream course on muddy thinking in social science, Cocaine Nights will be the first required reading in the section on social capital. It presents in satiric form the disturbing thesis that the vibrant civic activism prized by Putnam, Fukuyama, Etzioni and other neo-communitarians is best produced through systematic clandestine violence. For Ballard, it’s not only impossible to have Salem without the witchburning; it’s the witchburning that brings Salem together as a community. Super-Cannes is of more interest to sociologists, geographers, and urban planners. It’s all about the return of the repressed in a very thinly disguised version of Sophia-Antipolis. The orderly planned community of Super-Cannes doesn’t so much break down into chaos, as it perpetuates it - again, community and violence reproduce each other.
At the end of Science as a Vocation, Weber famously claims that the age of prophecy, when an inspiration might sweep ‘through the great communities like a firebrand’ is over; we live in an age of disenchantment. Ballard’s work is a direct riposte to Weber; it claims that the New Millennium is most likely to have its start amidst the bored and deracinated upper middle classes and suburbanites, the willing victims of Weber’s ‘rationalization.’ A rough beast is slouching towards Shepperton to be born …
Dan Drezner quotes Clive James to good effect on snarky literary reviews. James is the author of the poem “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered,” which captures the quintessence of literary schadenfreude that we get a whiff of when reading snarky reviews:
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
From one to the next … having just gotten back from the annual American Political Science Association meeting, I attended one day of the science fiction Worldcon in Toronto, stopping only to go listen to my cousin’s band, who were playing in a small club here last night. Caught up with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow, as well as China Mieville, who apparently sometimes reads CT. Indeed, I’ve met people who know the blog at both conferences; it’s a little unnerving for me to find out that we actually have readers, and to meet them in a non blogging context.
Early, banal impressions of the differences and similarities between the two conferences …
(1) Science fiction conference-goers are no more nerdy than political scientists. They’re just unafraid to embrace their inner nerd. As Dan Drezner says, it’s good practice for political scientists to take off their badges when they leave the conference; they don’t want to come across as geeky conference goers to the mass public. In contrast, Worldcon attendees are proudly parading their badges around downtown Toronto as I write this post.1 Not only that, but they really represent with their conference badges, attaching little stickers to show their allegiance to this or that cause, subculture or individual within fandom.
(2) Both political science conferences and science fiction conferences oversample heavily on bearded, slightly to very overweight guys with glasses.
(3) SF conferences are, by and large, more fun. Worldcon had more outre panels, more entertainment from simply sitting, watching the people go by. Also, a much better book room - scarfed a nice first of John Crowley’s Aegypt, as well as a few early M. John Harrisons.
(4) But panel discussions from the floor are, probably inevitably, much more mixed in quality in sf conferences than in pol sci ones. I attended a pretty good panel today on scarcity and economics, which I’ll blog more on later; the discussants, most notably Charlie Stross, knew their stuff. The commenters from the floor, in contrast, didn’t, leading to a pretty confused discussion. People who ask questions from the floor at pol sci conferences almost always have some intellectual axe to grind - but they usually know what they’re talking about.
1 But as one conferee observed to me, it doesn’t take much extra bottle to wear a SF conference badge in public when you’ve already constructed yourself into a Dalek outfit.
Our household has just finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the general feeling is one of disappointment. Henry has already written about the claim, made recently by the much-reviled A.S. Byatt,that Harry is derivative and ersatz. The real problem is more that Harry seems to be an idiot.
Spoilers, and a certain amount of ranting, ahead.
J.K. Rowling is not good at plots. She is superb when it comes to the incidental touches that make Harry’s world entertaining — the paper aeroplane memos, the names of Hospital wards, and all the rest of it — but she is constantly painting herself into plot corners where the only way out is for a character to be quite unbelievably stupid. Over and over again, things are made to happen because “Harry felt his anger well up inside him” or “Not caring what happened next, Harry …” Unlike Byatt, I don’t believe that the books have to abide by some Grand Laws of Children’s Fiction, so I was happy to excuse a lot of this on the grounds that Harry is now a hot-headed adolescent and doesn’t always make the right choices. But having it happen for the nth time (with Harry showing absolutely no capacity to learn from previous mistakes) begins to grate in a book that’s 760 pages long.
There are other problems besides the overreliance on the “Angry Young Harry” device.
Grawp. The character of Grawp serves no purpose at all in the story other than to save the day, deus ex machina, a few chapters after he is introduced. (Harry’s inability to figure out what Grawp’s cry of “Haggy!” means is further evidence that he has been licking the lead paint at Number Four Privet Drive.)
The Two-Way Mirror. I will be very happy if anyone can explain to me (1) Why Harry does not use the two-way mirror to communicate with Sirius, but rather puts himself in mortal danger by breaking into Umbridge’s office, (2) Why the first words out of Sirius’s mouth when Harry uses the fireplace to talk to Sirius are not “Why aren’t you using the magic two-way mirror I gave you, idiot boy?”, (3) Why Harry does not even bother to unwrap the package containing the mirror that Sirius gives him when leaving Grimmauld Place, choosing instead to put it at the bottom of his trunk and not unwrap it until it’s far, far too late, even though Sirius hands it to him with the words “If you want to get in touch with me, use this,” and Harry spends most of the book wanting more than anything to talk to Sirius, and (4) Why Sirius even waits as long as he does to give him the mirror in the first place, having already had to put his own neck at risk by trying to talk to Harry earlier, and putting Harry in danger by forcing him to send messages via owl post.
The Order vs the DA. When Harry et al found the DA, they are very careful not to get caught. They do an excellent, well-organized, and wholly successful job of maintaining an illegal secret society of 25 people right under Umbridge’s nose. In contrast, Harry and Ron seem unable to take the Order of the Phoenix seriously, routinely yakking about it over breakfast in the Great Hall, ignoring the requests or demands of its leaders (even if they have repeatedly put their lives on the line to save the worthless boy) and never once, despite four years of repeated attacks on Harry by Voldemort, giving a charitable interpretation for why the order is guarding Harry so fiercely, hiding him so carefully, or asking him not to put himself in danger.
Wot, Magic?! Harry’s been living in the wizard world for more than four years, and has seen a lot of weird stuff. He also knows that the wizard world is hidden from the muggle world. So can we please stop having tedious little scenes where Harry is amazed — amazed — that some innocuous looking side alley or department store window turns out to be the entrance to the Ministry of Magic or St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies, even though he knows he’s being taken to these places. “Harry looked at Mr Weasley blankly… why was he talking into a broken telephone box?” “Harry couldn’t understand why they were whispering into the empty shop window.” Harry needs a smack upside the head.
The Dreams. Harry never once asks himself why he is repeatedly having his dream about the locked door at the end of the corridor, or why he is so curious to see what’s behind it.
Other Members of the Order. “We have to risk our necks because there are no members of the Order left at Hogwarts!” said Harry, his anger welling up inside him. “Um, what about Snape? He’s over there, waving at us,” the normally clever Hermione unaccountably did not reply.
Malfoy Jr. I have no idea why Harry is now even remotely afraid of or even irritated by Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, all garden-variety school bullies who have never displayed much in the way of special magical talents. Harry, meanwhile, is spending his time battling Death-Eaters (including Malfoy’s and Crabbe’s fathers!) not to mention Voldemort himself. But of course when it’s necessary to have something plot-related happen, Malfoy has no trouble goading Harry into one of his now-trademark Terrible Rages.
Some of these issues were evident in the fourth book. (In a move worthy of late-period Dallas, the long-hidden and wholly implausible secret of Scabbers the rat had to be pulled out of a hat in order to make the plot work.) They seem to be getting worse, to the point where all the great little details and ideas are drowned out by the blaring idiocy of the central characters. Despite the reams and reams of dialogue, it’s amazing how many opportunities to have a short, sensible conversation about what’s happening are passed up by children and adults alike. It’s one thing to say that misunderstandings happen and that people make errors of judgment. But Rowling forces her characters into places where they must be stupider than we know they are, because she has no other way of making things happen. It’s just not that satisfying when everything is driven by Harry’s permanent rage or Ron’s ever-deepening stupidity or Hermione’s sudden lapses of judgment.
There aren’t that many philosophical romances published in English any more; the genre seems to have fallen into a quiet desuetude. Me, I blame Umberto Eco. His splendid The Name of the Rose gave us high expectations, which were to be disappointed by the arid academic score-settling of Foucault’s Pendulum, and then forcibly dashed into the gutter by the otiose Island of the Day Before. At a stretch I suppose, you can count popularizations like Sophie’s World, which are of arguable philosophical merit and inarguable novelistic triteness, but I don’t really see why you’d want to. However, if, like me, you enjoy books of this sort, I’ve got three recommendations which I suspect many CT readers will never have come across.
First out of the gate is Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. Cunningly disguised as a collection of science-fiction short stories, this is really philosophy of science and knowledge by other means, and is rather well done. Chiang’s prose is no more than competent, but he has some fascinating ideas, and unlike, say, Greg Egan, he’s actually interested in human beings. My favorite story is Division by Zero which takes the results of Godel’s second theorem and arguments about imaginative resistance, and smashes them together. The story is all about how really good mathematicians can ‘feel’ that a theorem is right. Imagine if one of them came up with a flawless logical proof that 1=2 (which Godel suggests is entirely possible; arithmetic cannot guarantee that it will not produce such contradictions). How then could she reconcile her feeling of the rightness of the theorem with her day-to-day experience of the world? Chiang works through the consequences - and creates a heartbreaking metaphor for human failures of understanding.
Second is a little older, but still relatively obscure, Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare. It’s an altogether unique and unsettling work. The Arabian Nightmare is a disease of reason, a journey into the Alam al-Mithal, the dream world of 14th century Cairo, in which “there are always more causes than events.” The hapless Balian gets dragged further and further into a half-imaginary city, stalked by the Father of Cats, where dreams are impossible to distinguish from reality. The book is infinitely more subtle and disturbing than bog-standard brain-in-a-jar efforts like The Matrix, and better read too. As Dave Langford describes it
Laughing Dervishes confound the wise with Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes, and courtesans indulge in Freudian dream interpretation. … All is subject to change without notice.”The Arabian Nightmare is a guide to the Orient of the mind,” the blurb concludes, and that’s about it: the meaning of the title keeps shifting and expanding, until it stands for the darker side of that whole complex of fantastic romance conjured up by words like “Cairo”, “Orient” or “Arabian Nights”. If you like historical fantasy and booby-trapped reality, grab the book.
What more do you need to know? Go buy it.
Finally, M. John Harrison’s Things That Never Happen, another volume of short stories with a sharp philosophical edge; you’ll cut yourself if you pick them up carelessly. All about desire, and its frustration, about our need for reassurance, for ontological solidity, and how it screws us up.
“And there’s always this fucking sign on the baker’s van: ‘REAL’ BREAD. I mean,” I asked the old man, “what’s that? Inverted fucking commas! Even the fucking bread calls its own existence into question?” (The East)
“In London the light was like the light you only see on record covers and in the color supplements. Photographic precision of outline under an empty blue sky is one of the most haunting features of the London landscape. Ordinary objects - a book, a bowl of anemones, someone’s hand - seem to be lit in a way which makes them very distinct from their background. The identity of things under this light seems enhanced. Their visual distinctness becomes metonymic of the reality we perceive both in them and in ourselves” (A Young Man’s Journey to London).
Harrison is one of the best prose stylists of his generation; his writing is savage, lucid and exact. Strongly recommended.
I settled down last night to re-read Firebreak, Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake’s) last-but-one Parker novel, which begins with the sentence.
When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
This induced a feeling of complete comfort in me, which is rather odd when you think about it. Why is it that so many people find it relaxing to read about murder and violent crime?
I’m not the only one by any means - there are murder mysteries by the yard down at your local bookstore, ranging from the hardboiled to the ghastly coy (housecats as detectives). All of them - even the goriest - are comfort reading. G.K. Chesterton, no mean constructor of mysteries himself, describes this property of the detective novel precisely in one of his Father Brown stories, when a philosopher speaks to the joys of reading a penny-dreadful called The Bloody Thumb.
“I can’t analyse myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday. It was security, eternity—I can’t convey it… the cigars were within reach…the matches were within reach… the Thumb had four more appearances to…it was not only a peace, but a plenitude.”
My suspicion is that this feeling of murder-mystery nirvana stems from the specific nature of detective novels and crime thrillers. They’re little clockwork universes, in which everything is predictable. When you start a Parker novel, you know exactly what you’re going to get - amoral villains plotting a heist, unreliable civilians getting in the way, and Parker somehow finding his way through. This written in glistening hard prose, with all the meat stripped off. Westlake’s comic crime novels, such as his Dortmunder books, have the same basic heist-based plotline, but with some of the values reversed, so that the villains are friendly but inept, and the civilians are amoral and calculating. There are few authors out there who can pull this off as well as Westlake/Stark - Michael Blowhard calls him America’s greatest fiction virtuoso - but his most successful books stick exactingly to the rules of the genre, and create self-contained universes in which a leads inevitably to b which leads inevitably to c. And that, I would contend, is precisely what’s comforting about them.
Although, come to think of it, this motif can be used against itself. The best single treatment of murder-mystery predictability that I know of is Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, Death and the Compass. It’s a crime novel stripped down to its barest elements, a game in which the detective and the villain are complicit. The villain creates an elaborate structure of murders, with hints of atrocious Kabbalism, in order to entice the detective to investigate. The detective realizes that this is a trap, but has no choice but to investigate anyway. Borges makes predictability into something scary and metaphysical - an elaborate, ritualized dance between detective and villain in which both know that they are playing out pre-ordained roles. Closed universes aren’t comfortable at all when the characters are aware that they’re closed universes; in fact, they’re damned creepy. But enough amateur literary criticism; I’ve got a paper to write …
I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)
I’ve blogged about this before on Junius. But a new forum gives an opportunity to look again, so I thought I’d do a series of posts about important books in the field that I’ve learnt from and been inspired by. First of these is Stewart Brand’s remarkable How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built. Brand’s book really gripped me when I first read it, and looking back over its pages is still both informative and fun. I’ve given copies to a number of friends and relatives over the years and I’d recommend it to anyone. Aside from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, Brand had a biggish effect on my political and philosophical outlook. To caricature what I believed before somewhat, I moved from being somone who thought that smart people applying the right principles could make the world right to someone inclined to be much more sceptical about what we know or can know in politics, who takes much more seriously people’s lived experience of institutions, plans, projects and buildings (devised by ‘experts’) and who has more of a focus on rules of thumb, practice, ‘knowing how’, tacit knowledge, “satisficing”, skill, craft and so on.
Brand’s book is a visual delight. Much of the book consists of pictures of the same buildings or urban vistas over a series of decades. The cover features at drawing of two identical Greek Revival brick townhouses from the 1850s next to a photograph of the same buildings in 1993. One has become a storey higher, the other has grown sideway. This kind of juxtaposition is repeated through the book for restaurants, gas stations, living rooms and streetscapes, all complete with commentary on the pressures which led to change. Brand’s focus isn’t on any one kind of building: he’s happy discussing Chatsworth and Salisbury Cathedral one moment and MIT’s Building 20 or an office in a container the next.
As a fairly neglectful and manually incompetent householder, I can’t read the chapter called “The Romance of Maintenance” without feeling guilty, but Brand manages to bring some poetry to the subject:
The root of all evil is water. It dissolves buildings. Water is exilir to unwelcome life such as rot and insects. Water, the universal solvent, makes chemical reactions happen every place you don’t want them. It consumes wood, erodes masonry, corrodes metals, peels paint, expands destructively when it freezes, and permeates everywhere when it evaporates. It warps, swells, discolors, rusts, mildews, and stinks.
Most basically the book is about adaptation and flexibility and the need to design in ways that permit change. Most architects build to a conception of a building’s purpose. But two things are likely to happen after a building gets built: people start to use it in ways that the architect didn’t predict (will the building help or hinder their preferred ways of working or living) or the building gets sold and used for some quite different purpose. As Brand puts it “All buildings are predictions. All buildings are wrong.”
Although the book has a more or less sequential text, much of the pleasure of it (particularly coming back later) lies in the little bits of sidebar commentary to the pictures, the diagrams etc. Brand really is a master of all this and he also has a magpie like ability to draw on anecdote, history and literature in support of his thesis. (Check out, for example, the Gregory Bateson story about the renewal of the oak beams in the New College, Oxford dining room on pp. 130-1). Highly recommended.
Brand’s book finishes with a really extensive list of further reading, some of which I’ll write about in future posts.
I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
Contrast this with an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions. On this view what is out there has no intrinsic value that we ought to respond to and respect. (And perhaps when we think that it does, we are just engaged in a projection of our concerns onto the world.)
As I’ve suggested, I’m not really sure how to think in this area (is this ethics, aesthetics or what?). And I’m alive to the danger that I’m running together a whole range of different issues that ought, properly, to be distinguished from one another. While worrying about all this, Orwell came into my head. I’m thinking partly of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier who is revolted at technology-freak socialists of his day and who observes that the tendency of of modern development is to turn us all into brains on the end of wires. But a famous passage from Coming Up for Air also came to mind: the one where Bowling bites into a sausage:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs!’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue, wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.
The attitudes Orwell’s character is repelled by are now found less on the left and more in parts of the right (especially the libertarian right). TechCentralStation is a good place to observe them. But this clearly isn’t a left-right thing. Nor is it straightforwardly a matter of modernism versus anti-modernism. I also want to be alive to and to respond to the excitement and fluidity of the modern world - driven, in parts by markets and technological developement. Nevertheless, Orwell (together here with Rousseau, and Wordsworth, and …) is onto something important, I just wish I could better articulate exactly what it is.
Today’s Guardian has a profile of biologist David Sloan Wilson, whose book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with philosopher Elliott Sober) defended group selection against Dawkins’s “selfish gene” model. His latest book, Darwin’s Cathedral, is about religion. Functional explanations of the religion do not have a history of success (c.f. E. Durkheim), but Unto Others was impressive enough for this one to be worth a look.
Having blogged about Alasdair Gray on Junius and declared my intention to read Lanark, of course I had to do so (especially given Henry’s encouragement). It is both an extraordinary and a really frustrating and perplexing work, combining as it does both the quasi-autobiographical story of Duncan Thaw and a Kafkaesque allegory about his double, Lanark. The Thaw parts (the middle of the book) I thought quite wonderful in their description of childhood and early youth both in Glasgow and as a wartime evacuee. The allegorical sections worked less well (sometimes the socialist didacticism is just too heavy-handed). The general effect is something like a random wander through a large gothic mansion: sometimes you find youself in a room full of interesting objects but the next moment at the end of a bare subterranean corridor. Recommended - but don’t expect an easy time.
Andy Egan at Philosophy from the 617 responds to some of the debate Henry’s Harry Potter post produced, and in doing so brings up an interesting point about how we judge fiction. Lots of people say that in fiction, especially visual fiction but also in written works, the author should show the audience what happens, not tell them what happens. But what exactly does this rule mean?
One first-pass thought is that it’s something like this: when you’ve got a choice between making something true in the fiction directly (by, e.g., writing down a sentence that expresses the proposition you want to make true), or making it true by saying a bunch of lower level stuff that entails it (or demands that we imagine it, or whatever), you should always do the second. In other words, it’s always better to force the higher-level facts by explicitly fixing the lower-level facts. But that’s pretty clearly crazy- it calls for books written entirely in the vocabulary of microphysics, which would be incredibly long and boring and incomprehensible and awful.
Andy goes on to argue that there’s some privileged intermediate level of detail that’s appropriate for writing at in particular the “level of description that our imaginative faculties operate at”. I’m not entirely sure what that is. Are concepts like CHAIR - things I can easily imagine but which I always imagine as having more detail than just being chairs - at the “level of description that our imaginative faculties operate at”? I don’t know, but perhaps we can work out an appropriate privileged level.
(In these cases I always think the class of monomorphemically lexicalised maximally precise concepts can play a crucial role. But that’s probably just because I (a) read too much Fodor and (b) use too much jargon. So ignore that suggestion.)
But I think the better response is just to accept the allegedly absurd conclusion that Andy offers. The “show, don’t tell” rule does imply that everything should be written in microphysics. But it isn’t the only rule authors should follow. Among other salient rules, there’s the “keep it simple, stupid” rule, not to mention the rule against repetitiveness. If we wanted to try and find one rule for writing it would look something like “Show rather than tell as much as possible consistent with keeping the work accessible to the average reader and not being boring and …” Or, in slightly fewer words, “Show rather than tell as long as ceteris are close enough to paribus”. But once you’ve said that you may as well go back to the simple “Show don’t tell” rule, remembering that if you forget the other rules it will have fairly silly consequences.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. On the metro this morning I got to the passage in The Wings of the Dove where James beautifully describes why Kate Croy, “a young person who wasn’t really young, who didn’t pretend to be a sheltered flower” readily allows Merton Densher to call on her;
“…she was just the contemporary London female, highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free.”
I revere James’ two great heroines, Kate Croy and Isabel Archer, and wish I was like them; admirably cool without being coy, analytical but not truly manipulative, reserved and self-reliant yet possessing great depths of passion. But I’m afraid Bridget Jones is a much more accurate self-reflection; gossipy, hapless and profoundly trivial! And BJ II (the Edge of Reason) follows my favourite Jane Austen, Persuasion, which shows that even spinsters pushing thirty can sometimes be nudged off the shelf…
A.S. Byatt is splendidly caustic in the NYT about the success of Harry Potter. It’s rather an interesting piece. Byatt rips into the Potter phenomenon, which she sees as part of a dumbing-down of fiction.
It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.
But she does so without dismissing either good popular culture or children’s literature. The problem with Harry Potter, as she sees it, is that it’s too comfortable. It’s unoriginal, “a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature.” And it has no mystery about it - the Potter books are remarkably prosaic for all their emphasis on magic. In Byatt’s view, the books don’t have any counterbalancing concern with the serious things of life. Byatt contrasts Rowling with children’s authors like Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, who convey a real sense of mystery and danger in their books. Magic should bite.
Now Byatt is going a bit far - comfort books aren’t necessarily bad, even if they don’t have a scintilla of seriousness. First witnesses for the defence are the wonderfully scruffy Molesworth public-school comedies (for a Molesworth-Hogwarts collision, read the wicked parody here). And silly adult books can be good too; Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are utterly frivolous, but they’re undeniably works of genius.
Still, Byatt puts her finger on something. Harry Potter has been so successful because it feeds into two sets of fantasies. It gratifies children, who dream of being popular, good at sports, and possessed of spiffy magic powers. It gratifies adults, who fantasize about the uncomplicated joys of childhood. It has very little to say about the awkward in-between stages in which children become teenagers and then adults. Talking about messy and complex stuff like this would break the spell. This is why Harry Potter doesn’t have the sense of mystery that Byatt is looking for. Magic is dangerous and exciting for the young adults in Garner and Cooper’s books precisely because it’s tied up with their burgeoning sexuality. Here be dragons. If Byatt’s right, the Potter series is likely to become increasingly awkward and dissatisfying as the protagonist moves further into his teenage years. Rowling won’t be able to pull off the balancing act for very much longer without looking silly.
Update: interested parties, pro and con, should read Ruth Feingold’s bit in the comments section to this post, as well as John Holbo’s response
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