Books

Golly, I haven’t posted to a blog for nigh a month. I haven’t actually been off in the wilderness but we’ve been on vacation and I resolved to keep my news and blog engagement to a minimum, while enjoying the great outdoors – Oregon and then New York – just to see how that treats my head. Good, it turns out. Reading several whole books, I started to feel the old attention span growing back.

Best: two short Tove Jansson novels – more or less ‘adult’ novels, at any rate not moomintroll books: The Summer Book and The True Deceiver [amazon]. Lovely stuff. Seasonal and moody and melancholy and not as funny as the moomin books, but funny. Mildly obsessive characters sort of bump into each other as they make painful and pleasurable private ways through the summer or winter. Some moomintypes have turned human – palpable touches of fillyjonkery (fillyjonquerie?), hemulic tidiness, whomperish literality, my-ish determination, etc. Which is interesting to watch. (But that’s not the only reason to read the books.)

And now that I check my Flickr contact updates …

The Library of Congress is serially posting to Flickr what promises to be a huge set of Golden Age jazz photos taken by William Gottlieb. (First link takes you to the easier-to-overview but only just started Flickr stuff. Second, to the complete and text searchable, but less overviewable complete collection.) I like this Cab Calloway. And a nice Django Rheinhardt. Gene Krupa as a zombie? Eh.

Gottlieb released it all into the public domain but some of the images still have publicity and privacy rights issues, apparently.

Usually, John Quiggin or I discuss the nominees for the Hugo Awards at some point – and time is running out. The nominees this year for Best Novel:

_Boneshaker_ by Cherie Priest (Amazon, Powells)
_The City & The City_ by China Miéville (Amazon, Powells)
_Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America_ by Robert Charles Wilson (Amazon, Powells)
_Palimpsest_ by Catherynne M. Valente (Amazon, Powells)
_Wake_ by Robert J. Sawyer
_The Windup Girl_ by Paolo Bacigalupi (Amazon, Powells)

[click to continue…]

“Here”:http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100723/REVIEW/707229988/1008

bq. It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia’s worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology. “I am not a donkey,” he liked to say, borrowing a line from Max Weber, “and I don’t have a field.” He wrote clearly and trenchantly, with brio and dry wit. Clearly these were not among the qualities that had rubbed off on him from Weber (let alone from Immanuel Kant, another of the master-thinkers defining the horizons of his work). By my count, roughly half of Gellner’s almost two dozen books are collections of essays – a wry running commentary on half a century of public intellectual life following the Second World War: existentialism, structuralism, the thaws and re-freezings of the Soviet bloc, and the varieties of dissident enthusiasm in the West… These pieces revisit the themes and preoccupations of his monographic works, and retain their vitality, well after the original polemical targets have been forgotten. All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner’s monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. There are Foucauldians aplenty and Rortyans by the score – and even the occasional stray Marcusean, tending the flame. But of Gellnerians, there is scarcely a trace.

Count me as one of those barely visible Gellnerians, and Cosma Shalizi too1. I’ve often wondered about why Gellner doesn’t get the respect he deserves. I had a genuine moment of intellectual horror last year when I realized that two articles I had co-written got more cites on Google Scholar than “Plough, Sword and Book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226287025?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=022628702, which has to be one of the great synthetic works of scholarship of the twentieth century. Not that I don’t like my articles fine. But they are not _Plough, Sword and Book._ My working theory is that Gellner has less influence precisely because his work is unclassifiable. Not only because (as the quote above illustrates) his range of interests was extraordinarily catholic, but because his theoretical ambition is hard to confine within the usual academic strictures. In email conversation, Scott describes him as the liberal thinker who is closest to Marx’s historical materialism, which serves as an indicator of his ambitions. He wanted to come up with a Theory of Everything, and while he didn’t succeed, he came up with a body of work which is nothing short of extraordinary.

I’m looking forward to reading the biography that Scott reviews. I recommend you read his review. I recommend even more strongly (if you have an interest in the social sciences) that you read as much of Gellner’s own work as you possibly can. It’s wonderful stuff.

[Post updated to remove banalities]

1We are currently writing a paper that could fairly be summarized as Gellner wedded to an explicitly evolutionary theory of institutional change. With network theory! And machine learning! And cognitive science! And handwaving! Lots of handwaving.

The choice of cover design for a book is always a tricky process, at least for authors like me who are more comfortable with text than images. A while back Eszter dealt with the problem by crowdsourcing the cover for her book Research Confidential.

I got lots of input from readers here on the text and title of Zombie Economics, but I left the cover design to the professionals, and I’m glad I did. Here’s the cover, based on a horror comic and here,at the Princeton University Press blog, is a discussion of how it came about.

There was one anxious moment when we discovered that the design included a reference to a chapter (on central bank independence) that I’d deleted at a late stage in the process. But the designer came up with a clever tweak that changed the reference (to refer to financial markets) without affecting the impact of the design.

This is the first book I’ve done since I took up blogging (I use to say blogs kill books, but this book grew out of the blog) and the process has left me with renewed respect for the range of skills that are involved in turning an idea and a rough draft into a book.

Now that it’s out, I want to strongly recommend China Miéville’s _Kraken_ ( “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9780345497499?p_wg, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034549749X?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=034549749X ). By complete coincidence, I started Michael Chabon’s _Maps and Legends_ last night. It notes in its introductory essay that:

bq. Many of the finest “genre writers” working today, such as the English writer China Miéville, derive their power and their entertainment value from a fruitful self-consciousness about the conventions of their chosen genre, a heightened awareness of its history, of the cycle of innovation, exhaustion, and replenishment. When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play.

This is a nice description, (a few years before the fact), of _Kraken._ Miéville’s previous book, _The City and the City,_ was very tightly controlled. Its metaphors mostly pointed in the same direction. _Kraken_ in contrast, is full of plotlines and images that _aren’t_ intended so much to cohere, as to play with each other, with the hope (but not the certainty) that they will get on well together. This has its problems. The book’s plot is a little baggy in places. But it also means that _Kraken_ overflows with things counter, spare, original and strange; odd and original monsters, horrible villains and quite peculiar magics. The book, at its heart, seems to me to be about the creative potential of incongruous connections – how metaphors, when they are concretized, may have entirely unexpected implications. If I don’t say more about the actual story, it’s because I don’t want to ruin the surprises. The bit (which readers of this post may recognize in retrospect) when Miéville starts to unfold his alternative world before our eyes is quite wonderful – but I imagine it would be less wonderful if someone had told you about it before you read it. If you like Miéville for his imagination, you’ll like this book. I suspect that he had enormous fun writing it. I certainly had enormous fun reading it.

The idea that Obama (or rather, the wisdom of crowds in anticipating the election of a socialist-Islamist Obama administration) caused the recession is getting another run, this time from Nobel[1] prizewinner Ed Prescott. I haven’t been able to track down more than a precis of Prescott’s argument, but I assume it’s similar to the version put forward by Casey Mulligan. I had a go at this in my Zombie economics book [2], and here on CT, so, I thought I would link to it here, to give a bit of context to the current flap.

[1] Yes, yes, I know about the Sverige Riksbank. And winners of the economics prize aren’t the only ones to say silly things later on.
[2] Still on track for Halloween, and already taking pre-orders! Join the Facebook group here.

“Here”:http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Edward-Said-The-Charisma-of-Criticism/ba-p/2721

bq. And so, two or three generations of young radical intellectuals have now had the pleasure of discovering that they are ever so much more radical than Edward Said. It must be very pleasant for them, but none of them has yet amounted to a replacement. With H. Aram Veeser’s _Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism,_ we have a different sort of Oedipal drama on display. The stakes are less political than personal. It is an insightful book, but also a strange one, charged with an ambivalence towards its subject that is perhaps as intense as Said’s toward the works he discussed in _Orientalism_ or _Culture and Imperialism._

John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction “here”:http://www.newstatesman.com/fiction/2010/06/human-life-world-science-city. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.

bq. The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.

However, the main argument seems to me to say more about John Gray than it does about the genre he is writing about. [click to continue…]

Those who have followed CT from before its inception will know about the important role of Ladybird Books in our intellectual formation. Here, via Jacob C and via the Guardian’s NZ-Slovakia commentary, is “Naranjito: World Cup Final in Danger”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ from 1982, featuring an Adolf Hitler lookalike.

More at “The Pointless Weblog”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ .

A week or so ago, I received an email from an old friend – the redoubtable Bridget Hourican – asking for some family background about a great-great uncle who was made a character of in Ulysses. It should have clicked with me that 12 16 June was coming up.

Alluding to the other Timberteer who also rejoices in this ancestry, Bridget wrote:

“… when a friend of mine was asked in Germany what he thought of Ulysses – as all Irish abroad are asked at some point – he admitted that he hadn’t read it yet, but saved his reputation and astounded his questioner by adding that his great-uncle was in it. This great-uncle was Hugh MacNeill (the more disreputable brother of the revolutionary Eoin MacNeill) who appears, with his name cannibalised, as professor McHugh, murmuring “biscuitfully”.

Prof. McHugh is apparently a quite funny character who wanders around Dublin lecturing in Greek and Latin. Bridget’s written a gorgeous Bloomsday essay about the real people immortalised in Ulysses. It makes me want to give the book another go.

I’ve read all John Lawton’s novels, and have never discussed them with anyone. I remember formulating a post in my head several years ago asking why on earth publishers give novels different names in the US and the UK, after enthusiastically buying Bluffing Mr. Churchill only to discover that it was Riptide (and, no, I am not going to buy the claim that “Churchill” was added to make the book more familiar to Americans, any more than I buy the claim that Brits know better than Americans what a philosopher’s stone is — the number of Britons who buy a book because it is named after an Al Bowlly hit is vanishingly small). The animating device in each book is that Frederick Troy of the Metropolitan Police, son of a very wealthy Russian emgire, and brother of a future Labour MP, is confronted by some mystery that is connected to some major historical event or character (WWII, Suez, fictionalized versions of Profumo and the Kray twins). This presents lots of opportunity for rich and seemingly authentic historical detail, which is the real attraction of the books (the mock-Profumo case is done especially well). Real people, major and minor, appear here and there, always well drawn and just about plausible. They’re tautly written and literate. But I’ve never felt able to recommend one without reservation — they’re very, very well done, but the central drawback is the amorality and, frankly, the unlikeability, of Troy himself, who seems, at best, to have some sort of a screw loose. I confess that I found the last one (Flesh Wounds or Blue Rondo, depending on your preference) sufficiently unpleasant that I almost gave up (to see why it was so unpleasant you have to read the others first, unfortunately).

I’m glad that I came back. Second Violin is by some distance the best of the books. Set earlier than the others, in the mid-thirties (but hinting that an even earlier book might be on its way) it focuses almost exclusively on Troy’s brother Rod, a journalist friend of Hugh Greene’s, and still a future MP, and the efforts of a young and rather mysterious Jewish tailor called Joe to escape Austria after the Anschluss to Britain, escaping death several times only, eventually, to be sent to one of the Isle of Man internment camps, along with Rod. The mystery Troy, who is not the second violin of the title but might as well be, investigates seems to be a bit an afterthought for most of the book. The journeys from Vienna — Joe’s, Rod’s, and Sigmund Freud’s — dominate the book. In the other books the mysteries and the portraits of the age vie for attention — in this one the portrait dominates. Several slightly unlikely coincidences drive the plot forward, but Lawton cleverly distracts the reader by embedding them in quite realistic accounts of real and traumatic events — outrageous as the internment of a significant number of people who were only in Britain because they opposed, or had reason to fear, the Nazis, has always seemed to me, Lawton’s harrowing account of the train journey north really brings home how cruel and destructive it was. The mystery is successful and satisfying, not least because, for once, Lawton doesn’t let Troy get in the way at all.

Very curious what others who have read these (if anyone has — I’ve never met anyone!) think.

Every six months or so I pose an amateur copyright puzzle, so here goes. Is there settled law, or substantial precedent, for dealing with the fact that copyright terms differ in different jurisdictions, as a result of which many works are in copyright in the US but public domain elsewhere, and vice versa? Project Gutenberg, for example, passes the legal burden onto its users. Many of its offerings bear notices to the effect: “Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.” I take it this works, otherwise they would have been sued into the ground. But what if you want to publish a new paper edition of – oh, say, Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. It’s in the public domain in the US, so if you are a US publisher, go to. But Russell was a tough old bird and only passed on in 1970, so it will be decades before it’s in the clear in the UK – or Singapore (which has UK-style copyright). But if you sell your book on Amazon, someone might order it from the UK, or Singapore. And even if you only sell your book in the US – hell, it might be printed in Singapore. What about selling ebooks, as opposed to giving them away, Gutenberg-style? Is there any case of a non-US rights holder bringing successful suit against a US publisher for overstepping the geographical bounds of the US public domain (or, vice versa, for a US rights holder)? It seems as though, in this webbed-together world, there would have to be a settled way of dealing with such cases. But maybe there isn’t.

Amartya Sen’s recent book The Idea of Justice is a rich and wide-ranging book, that covers a broad range of issues related to social justice, public reasoning, rationality, human agency, well-being, equality, freedoms, democracy and related concerns. Sen formulates a strong critique of contemporary theorising on justice, and proposes an alternative that focuses more on identifying injustices rather than talking about (perfect) justice, and strongly stresses the importance of deliberation and public debate when addressing questions of injustice.

However, in my discussion here I will limit myself to one major claim that Amartya Sen makes in this book, namely that transcendental theories of justice are redundant (This relates especially to the preface, introduction, and chapter 4 of the book; anyone interested in academic discussions of the other chapters should pop over to “Public Reason”:http://publicreason.net/, which hosts a reading group going through the book one chapter a week). But as said, I will only focus on the ‘Redundancy Claim’, and will argue that it is mistaken, since for justice-enhancing actions we need both transcendental and non-transcendental theorising of justice. Nevertheless I endorse an implication that follows from the Redundancy Claim, namely that theorists of justice should shift their priorities from transcendental theorizing towards thinking about justice-enhancing change. I will argue that this ‘Priorities Claim’ not only follows from the (mistaken) Redundancy Claim, but also from another (correct) claim which Sen advances in The Idea of Justice about the current practice of political philosophy. I will conclude that the Redundancy Claim does need to be rejected, but that this is not a big loss, since what is really important is the Priorities Claim, which is vindicated. [click to continue…]

Just before Christmas, I wrote a piece discreetly titled “Sunnyside: Best Book of the Year“. I was surprised that one of the most inventive, funny and profound books I’ve ever read hadn’t made it onto the seasonal glut of ‘Best of 2009’ books. That post elicited an email from no less than Glen David Gold himself. And always with you, gentle reader, in mind, I asked Glen if he’d be willing to take part in a CT book event. He said he would.

So here we are, with (northern hemisphere) summer right around the corner and the paperback of Sunnyside due out in the US any minute. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be posting on CT a set of essays about Sunnyside. Some great writers are going to take part. We’ll have Stuart Evers, a writer many of you will know and love from the Guardian’s book review pages; New York comics guy Adam McGovern, the man behind Pood; deadlines permitting, Robert Hanks, who reviews films books and pretty much anything, often for the Independent; and of course Glen himself with an essay in response to all of ours, and plenty of badgering about in the comments.

Consider this a heads up to read that lovely hardback or rush out and buy a copy before the event kicks off. Sunnyside is a terrific read; fantastic fun, tugger of heartstrings, prompter of head-scratching thoughts on the meaning of life. You won’t regret it.