I’m reading Russell Muirhead, The Promise of Party In A Polarized Age: [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
Books
We acquired this fridge magnet at some point.
Nice use of Papyrus. Nice combination of Papyrus with whatever that faux-handwriting script font is.
Fits with Henry’s link to an incongruous appropriation of Beckett.
Suppose we wanted to make a collection of cheerful thoughts from depressed writers. You can’t spell ‘unhappiness’ without the happiness! What else might be included?
We’ve already had Janice Rogers Brown on Samuel Beckett as feel-good self-help guru. Now (from a bit of Molloy I was reading last night), here’s Beckett on the quantified self movement, half a century before it was a movement.
Update: I hadn’t realized that today was the 100th anniversary of Beckett’s birth.
First things first: thanks to everyone who dug deep (or shallow) to purchase (or just freely download) a copy of Reason and Persuasion, allowing us to enjoy evanescent ecstasies of semi-upward-mobility into the 5-digit sales range on Amazon for a period of some days now. Now please keep that Amazon aspidistra flying for the next several years running and we’ll have ourselves a standard textbook! (Sigh. I know. No hope. If I want sales like that, I have to update Facebook more than once every 4 years. And be on Twitter. Shudder.)
As I was saying: it is also fun to watch the (no doubt CT-fueled) evolution of the ‘customers who viewed this item also viewed’ Amazon scrollbar, associating our Plato book with all manner of comics and science fiction. I hope the present post shall further enrich that eclectic mix.
Back in December I posted about how I would like a history of semi-popular philosophy of mind, to complement the history of science fiction. Many people left genuinely useful, interesting comments, for which I am sincerely grateful. Today I would like to strike out along a semi-parallel line. Science fiction film, with its special effects, has a strong phenotypic and genotypic relation to stage magic. Georges Méliès was a stage magician. But sf is older than film; stage magic, too. We might enhance our sense of the modern origins of the former by coordinating with the modern history of the latter. I just read a good little book, Conjuring Science: A History of Scientific Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France, by Sofia Lachappelle, that doesn’t make the sf connection, but makes it easy to make. (It’s an overpriced good little book, I’m sorry to say. Oh, academic publishing. But perhaps you, like me, enjoy library privileges somewhere.)
It contains some nice sentences, certainly. For example: “While Robertson was presenting his phantasmagoria in an abandoned convent and professors of amusing physics were performing their wonders, scientific and technological innovations were impacting the world of the theater at large.” (118)
As I was saying: history of modern stage magic. I’ll quote passages, and comment, and supplement with relevant images. [click to continue…]
A little over a month ago Belle and I published the new edition of Reason and Persuasion, our Plato book. (She did the translations of three dialogues; I provided the commentary, illustrations and bookmaking.) Ta-DA! Well, actually it was more what one calls a soft launch. Since then I’ve got all the publication outlets squared away for the time being. You can get it on Amazon, in paper or in Kindle format. Making a workable Kindle version was an education in itself. Reflowable text and approximately 500 spot illustrations is a tough combo. It’s like practicing the fine art of flower arrangement in a sloshing bucket. It’s like trying to arrange all the little marshmallows inside the jell-o. But enough about my lifestyle choices. I set up Kindle matchbook so this thing that almost overwhelmed me is free if you buy the modestly-priced paper version. Good deal! I think the nicest-looking edition may actually be the fixed layout iBooks version (same as the GooglePlay and Kobo versions, if that’s how you like to play it.) Graphics are all very crisp.
As I was saying: we launched, and, since our lawyers told us we couldn’t use Harry Potter in the title, sales have been … modest. (Hey, it’s the fourth edition of a Plato book that is also available as free PDF’s. Did I mention: free PDFs?) We’ve been bobbing along in the low 6-digits, sales-wise, on Amazon. Checking Amazon rankings more than once a month is a thoroughly unhealthy form of fetish worship. Yet I confess to a moment of depression when we slipped below the 1,000,000-mark, albeit only briefly. Would it be too much to ask for the world to acknowledge that there are maybe not a million books better than mine? But then I checked Amazon UK and, like Spinal Tap in that scene in the film, was cheered to see we were charting! (Presumably 2 people bought the book in a matter of hours, producing this anomaly.) I screencapped, in case glory never came again: [click to continue…]
I went to a conversation the other night. It was between David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro and the approximately two thousand people watching them.
David Mitchell said he always asks other writers whether they played Dungeons and Dragons as teenagers. He keeps a mental list of writers who did and who didn’t. He played D&D himself (surprise!) and feels a certain bond with other writers who did.
Kazuo Ishiguro had never even heard of D&D. Not a surprise. He is the wrong generation. Too old. And also, he is that kind of very straight writer who conjures a pinch of the clothes peg when dabbling in ‘genre’. (That said, he came across as a lovely man, and one who has come carefully to terms with his necessary public persona.)
But, guess what, according to David Mitchell, Michael Chabon not only played D&D but was a dungeon master to boot. I wonder what other contemporary writers played D&D or who *must* have done? It would make me like them a little more, too.
As promised!
I finally managed to publish the silly fine thing! Reason and Persuasion, the 4th edition. It is currently available on Amazon. And I made a nice iBooks edition. (Fixed layout. Crisp look. Can read it even on an iPhone 6. I’m still working on the reflowable Kindle version.)
And never forget that cheap good people can get all the PDF’s for free at the book site.
Tell me what you think! Praise and criticize. Tell all your friends. Hunt typos. (I’ve found three. Minor ones.) [click to continue…]
Onto Tana French, the first of the ‘only counts as British because all Irish people who accomplish impressive things get claimed as British unless, of course, those impressive things involve some sort of successful military or political action against the British’ crime writers (Brit-ish, perhaps, with apologies to Jonathan Miller). I’ll be honest, I’d seen her books in airport bookstores for a while; my unreasonable prejudice against apparently made-up names (I know that Nicci French is a made up name, and suspect I was confusing Tana with Nicci); and quite well-supported belief that books in airport bookstores are not for me led me to dismiss her. [1] A friend gave me In The Woods for my 50th birthday, and I eventually turned to it. So…
All 5 books so far are brilliant.
I’m not going to feed all that Black Friday madness, but X-Mas is a time for giving nice illustrated books. One that just came out, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on, is Shaun Tan‘s The Singing Bones. It consists of photographs of sculptures, and some text, originally just illustrating Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but I gather he branches out from there. Like this. At this point I think you can only get it from the publisher. Anyway, looks great. And if you didn’t catch his award-winning animated short, few years back, here it is. Or watch a lo-quality version on YouTube. Of course, The Arrival is his best book. I assume you’ve read it already.
Ok, here’s the second in my series on new-ish crime writers. This one might well already have hung up her boots – if so, it’s tragic. I twice tried to read that Behind the Scenes in the Museum book, and just couldn’t get anywhere with it. Then, in response to a much earlier thread, Jerry Dworkin suggested Case Histories
So: two warnings and a tip.
Warning 1: I nearly put down Case Histories after a couple of chapters. One of the cases is so harrowing and gross that if you don’t trust her (I didn’t) you think she is coldly misanthropic. Trust me, you can trust her, she’s not.
Warning 2: once you are 1/3 of the way into Case Histories you won’t want to read anything else till you’ve finished all 4.
Tip: as with all good series you should read these in order. But, if for some reason you can’t, you can get away with starting with One Good Turn
I’m on to the macroeconomics section of my book in progress, Economics in Two Lessons. The key point of this section is that, whereas the academic economics profession has wasted most of the last thirty years on the project of founding macroeconomics on (some near approximation of) standard neoclassical microeconomics, the validity of the core results of neoclassical microeconomics depend on the assumption that the economy is operating at full employment[^1]. This observation isn’t original – it was why Keynes saw his theory as saving capitalism from itself. Even the title I used in this post on the macro foundations of microeconomics turns out to be a reinvention of the wheel.
Having noted the importance of the full employment assumption in the abstract, how relevant is it? If the economy is, with notably rare exceptions, at, or close enough to, full employment, then it seems safe enough for economists to continue, as the profession has for 40 years or so, to treat macroeconomics as a special subfield with little relevance to the rest of the discipline.
To put the question simply, are recessions abnormal?
Another excerpt from my book in progress, Economics in Two Lessons. There’s a partial draft here if you want to read it in context. I could spend a lot more time on the topic of advertising, but much of the ground has been covered in Akerlof & Shiller’s latest Phishing for Phools. As always, both praise and useful criticism are very welcome.
Here’s another draft extract from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons, looking at income distribution. The entire draft section on this topic is available here. And the introduction, describing the general approach of the book is here.
Praise is welcome, and useful criticism even more so. As a reminder, this is an extract. If you think a crucial point has been missed, point it out, but bear in mind that it may be addressed elsewhere in the book.
Over at the Monkey Cage, our very own Henry Farrell [sets out how Peter Mair’s brilliant *Ruling the Void*](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/14/this-book-explains-why-jeremy-corbyn-now-leads-labour-its-author-died-in-2011/) helps explain Corbyn’s recent triumph. A shout-out too for my friend [Martin O’Neill’s treatment of Corbyn’s victory at Al Jazeera](http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/the-unexpected-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn.html).
Here’s another excerpt from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons. Rather than work sequentially, I’m jumping between:
Lesson 1: Market prices reflect and determine opportunity costs faced by consumers and producers.
and
Lesson 2: Market prices don’t reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society.
In the section over the fold, I’m looking at how opportunity cost reasoning applies to policies that change the distribution of income, wealth and other entitlements.
As usual, praise is welcome, useful criticism even more so. You can find a draft of the opening sections here.