Books

So I finally got around to making book for our recent event. I had fun devising an appropriate cover and table of contents page:

Here’s the PDF. And here are mobi and EPUB versions. Those are zip files, not because the actual files are large – they’re not – but because WordPress apparently doesn’t ‘trust’ EPUB and mobi.

Speaking of untrustworthiness: when I made our last event book – Red Plenty – I got some complaints that the EPUB version was barfing in an unlovely fashion when read on a Nook. Sorry about that! I am an amateur! And Nookless, to boot. I tried to do better this time. Perhaps some Nook user will report back, one way or the other. If all is well, I may remake the Red Plenty stuff.

Here’s a thing. Call it: the view from your tintype. (We could make it a regular contest!) Can you identify the work I appropriated (that’s a fancy word for ‘swiped legally’, since it’s public domain)?

Frederik Pohl, RIP. A nice write-up from Annalee Newitz, at i09. [UPDATE: Henry’s memorial post went up while I was writing this one!]

A personal story. I read my first Pohl book, Gateway [amazon], in 1978. I was 11. Wikipedia will spoil the plot for you, if you’re into that sort of stuff. [click to continue…]

It wasn’t snobbery that kept me from reading Harry Potter, just a calculation that at some point I’d have to read them all to one of the kids, and didn’t want to have read them already. But my wife read the first 4 to the eldest and then the first three to the middle one, and by the time my youngest wanted them J.K. Rowling had already published a book for grown ups and I realized that I could be one of the first people alive to read her adult novels without reading having read her children’s books. (In fact, I was about 3/4ths through the first Harry Potter when I finished The Casual Vacancy – and still am, because the boy got scared at that point, and I couldn’t be bothered to find out how it ended). I was drawn to The Casual Vacancy by the couple of slightly sneering and tepid reviews I read, which said it was rambling, misanthropic and full of children’s cruelty, making it sound like I’d love it, and a recommendation from a reliable friend. And, I did.

But not as much as The Cuckoo’s Calling. How long she thought she would remain anonymous I can’t imagine. It is so obviously the work of an experienced, accomplished, writer, and is slyly witty in the same way that The Casual Vacancy is. She does indulge in one moment of male fantasy fulfillment that, perhaps, was designed to make herself seem like a male author; but just the pseudonym, itself, is a dead giveaway (did no-one really guess?). I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so request that commenters also refrain from discussing the plot (but no guarantees). Suffice to say it is thoroughly entertaining, brilliantly plotted, and tautly written. When you read it you’ll see that Rowling must be incredibly pissed off that her secret came out prematurely. Clearly the book was going to become a major success even under the pseudonym and, equally clearly, she was looking forward to having it properly evaluated in its own right which, I think, The Casual Vacancy wasn’t.

I’ve been suffering withdrawal since Reginald Hill died, and about 5 months ago I realized that the possible posthumous Dalziel/Pascoe that amazon uk mentioned at the time of his death is unlikely to see the light of day. So having a brilliant mystery writer appear, fully fledged (which is rare – the only other I can think of is Benjamin Black), and clearly intending a long series, is a specially delightful surprise. Thoroughly recommended.

(Oh, and, if you haven’t been following the story, apparently all her royalties for the first three years, starting July 15th when she was unmasked, are going to the Soldier’s Charity).

Discussion of the books is very welcome below but if you haven’t read them, BE WARNED there MAY be SPOILERS

If you are only going to read one book on Hamlet this week … well, I guess it could be Stay, Illusion, by Critchley and Webster. (If you’d like to read about it, go here.) But it could also be To Be Or Not To Be, a Chooseable Path Adventure, by Ryan North, Shakespeare, and You! (If you would like to read an interview with Ryan North, click here.)

The girls and I explored a few paths yesterday. I thought maybe it would be a bit too old for the younger one. It is the story of Hamlet, ‘a teenager in his late thirties’, after all. But she really liked it. Later she asked for the iPad. ‘I was the ghost and I had a chance to explore the bottom of the ocean some more, but I didn’t take it. I wanna do that.’ Fair words! “The ocean, overpeering of his list/ Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste!” than a young lady, playing as Hamlet, Sr., in a chooseable path adventure. “Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-choice, via author’s snarky voice.”

(Just so you know: it’s not written in mock-Shakespeare-ese. Ryan North is a writer for “Adventure Time” comics, and he goes more for that tone.) [click to continue…]

Do you know how I would describe the actions of a powerful black woman against a defenseless fraulein, if I were, like, not racist at all? CANNIBALIZATION. *[I am wrong here–please read the ETA for why.] Buh–huhh? What now? WTF? Cannibalization, are you out of your ever-lovin’, blue-eyed, mind; this is part of your defense against people thinking you’re racist? Probably that’s just from laying down with the Daily Mail and getting up with pubic lice, as the venerable British saying goes. Oh, what’s this you say, over here? The original article in German? “Sie ist so mächtig, und ich bin bloss eine Verkäuferin. Ich habe niemandem etwas zuleide getan. [Sniffles audible–ed.] Ich verstehe auch nicht, weshalb sie das so gross im TV ausschlachten muss.” My German is rusty, so first I thought, that’s just some form of ausschlagen and the Daily Mail are being a bag of racist dicks per the uge’, but–naw, this is–oh, no, I can’t eve–God, why? For real, cannibalize! Apparently Swiss people are so racist, this is how you can explain you’re not racist! Also, by explaining that you can’t be racist because you’re Italian! [Raises hand, tentatively, ‘excuse me, I–] And, erm, this explanation works great for British people, apparently. And American Gawker readers eat this shit up with a spoon! OMG! Racism is the Cronut for the summer of this August you guys! CANNIBALIZE. No, for real. Cannibal.

I started writing the other day because I wanted to talk about how John’s question, “when did it stop being acceptable to say mind-bogglingly racist things in public?” is half a good question and half a misleading one. In politer society certain awful things were never acceptable to say. As time has passed the band of “can say ‘x’ and retain future political career” has been getting narrower, and higher, and that’s a good thing. But on the other hand, people who were racist never really stopped much being racist, or saying and doing stupid racist stuff. One thing that remained true was that certain words and phrases continued to be considered low-class and redneck even as many other whites remained very racist indeed. Thus we have the continual problem of rural whites doing something obviously racist (like the MO rodeo clown show (I am pretty certain this applies to their state legislature but have not done the research)) and then they are stuck simulaneously saying ‘that wasn’t racist’ and ‘you’re the real racists, playing the race card,” and “AIDS is thinning the herd in Africa and among blacks here in America–I call it natural selection for our country–no racism.” [Promise for real quote which I have cleaned up and can’t be bothered to find among 4,000 new ones on the rodeo article.]

Everybody on the internet is dissecting this thing 12 ways to Sunday and why? Why? Because they’re sexist and racist, I’m so flattered that y’all even asked! No, but a boringly obvious thing happened: A store attendant in Zurich didn’t recognize her (fine), so she treated Oprah like crap because she was racist. Yes, racially prejudiced against black people, is where I’m going with this. R-A-C-I-S-T. OMG, and yet an Italian person! Totally unbelievable, right, be… Later, Oprah was asked in an interview about the last time she experienced racism or racial prejudice. She said that because of her current social position it’s rare, but that when she’s the only minority and the only woman in a huge boardroom she still can tell they think she doesn’t belong. Then she told this story and that it had happened in Zurich, while she was out sans entourage or fake lashes but with [gestures to face] “my full Oprah on.” She did not name the boutique (this detail was ferreted out by gossip site TMZ) or the shop assistant (who is still anonymous.) THE END. CANNIBALS.

Please, please, go read the comments on the Daily Mail, and at Gawker, and elsewhere, and think, ‘these are my people over here. This is who I’m all about identifying with in this situation.’ Y’all know to whom these comments are directed, ye “I’m Richard Dawkins, except about all of left politics, fnarf! Sucks to be you, women and most non-white people, unless you’re willing to take part in the matinée, evening and sometimes midnight showings of the ‘Richard Dawkins is Right About Everything Finger Puppet Theatre'”-types. You begin to cease to interest me.

In conclusion, CANNIBALIZE.

*ETA: My German being, as I said, not the greatest, I trusted my dictionary for this one word and got only “cannibalize,” but I didn’t read carefully enough and get examples. I assumed the Daily Mail was just completely making things up, and my shock at seeing them (apparently) be right overrode my lexical caution. I was wrong. Commenter js suggests and commenter David Woodruff pretty well confirms, that this is “cannibalize” in the “we cannibalized the three crashed planes for enough parts to get the fourth off the ground” sense and not the “we stood around with bones in our hair saying ‘ooga booga’ while stirring a huge cast-iron pot with a skinny Italian woman inside, and we had it on a nice simmer, with some celery and carrots and onion and bay leaves in there” sense. So, we can continue to marvel at the racial cluelessness of a woman who argues that she cannot possibly be racist because she is Italian, and you should read the Daily Mail article carefully to see why her story is implausible in every detail, but I was wrong in my central accusation that she was calling Oprah a cannibal.

Nonetheless you all should continue to read the comments on the article, at, perhaps most surprisingly, Gawker, where the “cannibalize” quote is taken for granted and yet most everyone, every, everyone takes the shop assistant’s side. What reason does Oprah have to lie? How many reasons does this other woman have to lie?

I’ve lately been contemplating the question of what makes a popular philosophy book a good book. I am focussing on the case of philosophy professors who are writing a book that is explicitly aimed at a broader audience, and who may or may not also have written scholarly articles on the topic of their popular-philosophy book. Which quality-criteria should that book meet? Here are some thoughts.
[click to continue…]

“My contribution”:http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/half-poulantzas-half-kindleberger/ to the _Jacobin_ seminar on Panitch and Gindin is up. Extract:

s Panitch and Gindin’s book shows … there’s a lot that they could learn. And if most standard issue international political economy scholars don’t know much about Marxists, the opposite is not necessarily true. Panitch and Gindin not only know the debates among radicals, but have read very widely across the field of IPE, engaging with (and often usefully repurposing) the ideas and empirical material that they find useful.

I learned a lot from their book, and will be assigning it to my students. Still, I think there’s room for useful argument. To be clear, Panitch and Gindin are clearly far better read in the debates that I follow than I am in the debates that they follow. This means that some (and perhaps most) of the disagreement below is of the ‘why didn’t you write the book that I would have written if I were you’ variety, so discount it as you think appropriate. I’m almost certainly not the audience they imagined that they were writing the book for. Yet their account of the entanglement between American imperium and neo-liberalism conceals as well as reveals. There are some causal relations — arguably quite important ones — that are invisible to it.

[A few years ago](https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/17/vance-in-the-nyt/) I suggested that I wanted some day to write a longform piece on the sociology of [Jack Vance](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html?_r=0). Unless I get funding from some unexpected source (e.g. some [Vanceophile billionaire](http://www.paulallen.com/)) to take time out from my more traditional academic responsibilities, that probably isn’t going to happen. However, I have drafted a few short blog posts (a couple of which are yet to be completed), primarily for my own entertainment over the last few years. I’ll be publishing them over the summer lull, for the edification of those four or five of you who share my paired interests in f/sf fantasy writers with baroque prose styles and social science theory. A final post, “The Feminist Jack Vance” (consisting of 20 lines of carriage returns, followed by a note in eight-point type explaining “This page intentionally left blank”) is probably better described than written. Vance has few female characters indeed who cannot immediately be categorized as waifish love-pixies, self-centered sexual manipulators or plain-faced man-hating harridans (there are women such as Paula Volsky who clearly like Vance’s work and are influenced by it, but far fewer, I imagine, than there might be were he even slightly more enlightened).

Forthcoming at Irregular Intervals:

I – The Spirit of Market Capitalism in Master Twango’s Establishment at Flutic.

II – Positional Goods and the Column-Sitters at Tustvold.

III – Robust Action among the Breakness Wizards.

IV – Informal Institutions and the Old Tradition of the Perdusz Region.

V (to be completed) – The Stationary Bandits of the Tschai Steppes

VI (to be completed) – Class, Status, Party, Distinction, Clam Muffins.

Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone!

Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book. [click to continue…]

I recently wrote a short ‘comment’ for the American Journal of Bioethics. The piece is 1788 words long, the names and affiliations of my co-author and myself included. So that will make for 3, perhaps 4 printed pages, right? Now, Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the AJoBE offered the possibility to make this piece Open Access. Price: $2,950. I say: ridiculous. One of my colleagues said: Obscene. Sure, you might say, but they need to pay the editorial office who guards the refereeing proces of the target article to which we respond. But who did the refereeing? Indeed: two (or three) scholars, for free. And where does the net profit of all this goes? Right, not to the author, not to the referees, not to the universities, not to the taxpayers in the case of publically funded research. I know it’s practically very difficult to boycot this commercial Open Access model, but my little revenge will be in making some free advertisement below for two wonderful Open Access initiatives.

The best news from the open access front that reached my desk is that Open Book Publishers, the Cambridge(UK)-based open access publisher (where – full disclosure- I also have a book under contract), has published its first philosophy book. And not just any philosophy book, but a book by the very eminent philosopher David Velleman, called Foundations for Moral Relativism. As with the other books published by Open Book Publishers, it can be read online for free, or bought as a PDF for a few pounds or bought at a low price as a bounded copy via print-on-demand. I love this model, and perhaps should go off the internet completely until I’ve finished my own book that will also be open access. In fact, if I can raise 3500 UK Pounds, I can make the PDF available for free too. I think that’s a much better way to spend (public) funds than $ 2950 for a 3 or 4 page piece.

But equally good news comes from Axel Gosseries and Yannick Vanderborght, who published a year ago a Festschrift for Philippe Van Parijs, called Arguing about Justice. The book was published in paperback by the Presses Universitaires de Louvain, and now, one year later, is available online, here or here. At a conference a few weeks ago, Axel said that this is what he negotiated with the publisher when they published the book with them a while ago. So that’s an Open Access model too — individual negotiation – that some of us can consider to pursue. In any case, the Van Parijs Festschrift has lots of interesting and provocative pieces, well worth browsing and subsequent reading. Enjoy!

This is, in a silly way, a footnote to my previous Kevin Williamson post, but, more seriously, to my contribution to our Erik Olin Wright event. In my post on Wright I remarked that, in a sense, he’s pushing against an open door: he wants Americans, who think ‘socialism’ is a dirty word, to be more open to utopian thinking. The problem, I pointed out, is that thinking ‘socialism’ is a dirty word is positively, not negatively, correlated with utopianism, because conservatives are, typically, very utopian, especially in their rhetoric – more so than socialists these days; certainly more so than liberals. Wright responded that his project “is not mainly directed at ideologically committed Conservatives whose core values support the power and privilege of dominant classes. The core audience is people who are loosely sympathetic to some mix of liberal egalitarian, radical democratic and communitarian ideals.” [click to continue…]

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” – J. K. Galbraith

Kickstarter is glorious insofar as it is a well-earned kick to a rotten door.

That’s why a lot of people are griped about Zach Braff funding his Garden City sequel this way.

The idea – and it’s a great one – is that Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies. Zach Braff has contacts. Zach Braff has a name. Zach Braff has a track record. Zach Braff has residuals. He can get in a room with money people. He is represented by a major talent agency. But the poor schmoe in Mobile, Alabama or Walla Walla, Washington has none of those advantages.

[click to continue…]

A reminder to CT readers that we hope to start our seminar on Felix Gilman’s _The Half-Made World_ (Powells, Amazon) and _The Rise of Ransom City_ (Powells, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765329409/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0765329409&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20) soon – so if you want to be able to participate fully, buy or borrow the books and read ’em. It should be a good seminar – and for once we should have a decent gender balance among the respondents. More soon …

I hate to say it, but “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/22/economics_of_ice_fire_iii_the_market_for_dragons.html has just gone too far this time. If you want to apply simplistic economic arguments to complex social situations, you can’t just wave your hands and suggest that the market for dragons in Westeros and neighboring lands is riddled with Akerlof style information asymmetries and complementarity problems. Instead, you should be waving your hands and arguing that under reasonable assumptions, there isn’t a market for dragons in the first place. The problem isn’t an Akerlof-style one, where there are unobservable variations in quality between dragons. The actual qualities of dragons for plunder and conquest appear to be highly visible – the bigger your dragon, the better they are at toasting enemy armies (the slavers in the TV series know this, and go for the largest of the litter). The problem is that the actual good being bought and sold is not the dragon-as-a-physical-entity, but the _loyalty_ of the dragon-as-a-physical-entity. And this simply isn’t a salable commodity, as best as we can tell from George R.R. Martin’s books and the television series. Daenerys can’t sell a set of affections which appear to be rooted in a quasi-maternal bond, based on the Targareyn bloodline, or some combination of the two. Dragons don’t seem to vary in this quality.

Furthermore, even if George R.R. Martin’s world was one in which Daenerys were somehow able to transfer the loyalties and affections of a dragon to another, this problem would still be insuperable, because dragons are so powerful. The buyer of the dragon’s loyalty could never be sure that Daenerys had actually ‘sold’ it, because loyalty is unobservable. Perhaps Daenerys and the dragon were simply waiting for the right moment to turn on them. And since dragons mature, and fully grown dragons can more or less do whatever the hell they want, Daenerys and the dragon are “essentially too powerful”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/distrust.pdf (PDF) to make bargains that they have a long term incentive to keep. This is a classic form of Thomas Schelling’s credible commitment problem – Schelling remarks in _The Strategy of Conflict_ that the right to be sued is very valuable, because it allows one to make credible commitments. Daenerys, with her dragons, is too powerful over the longer term to be able to make credible commitments.

Hence, the sale of the Unsullied could never occur in equilibrium. The slavers are offering a military asset whose loyalty is unimpeachably transferrable – once the Unsullied have a new master, they obey that master unquestioningly. This is why they are supposed to be so valuable (lots of dubious implications in there of course …). Daenerys is offering a military asset whose loyalty is at best unobservable. Therefore, it can’t be readily sold or exchanged. The exchange should never happen.