Good to see all the “fuss and hype”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4683503.stm over the new Harry Potter. I wonder whether it’ll be better than the last one, which I thought was a “bit of a disaster”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/08/04/harry-potter-and-the-implausible-plot-device/. It’s a little shorter, which is a good sign. Like many people, I have my doubts that Potter will still be read by children a few generations down the line. He may end up a curio like Billy Bunter, or even the Oz books. The characters enter the culture but the novels hardly bear re-reading. But bugger posterity, to be honest: at some point you can’t argue with the huge queues of people waiting to buy the books. I’d happily settle for the gift of being able to write something that would be read by a hundreth as many people.
From the category archives:
Books
This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!
Talking-up the good things about the English national character is all the fashion in the wake of last week’s bombs: stoicism, stiff upper lip, mustn’t grumble, etc. As it happens last week I also read Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology participant-observer account of the English. Funny and well-0bserved in parts is my verdict on the 400-odd pages of “Watching the English”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340818867/junius-21 , though it was getting a bit crass and tedious towards the end. Still, the book has its moments, most of which have to do with class. The most memorable being the ironic-gnome rule:
bq. I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.
bq. But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden — I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as _intrinsically_ amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….
bq. The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.
Quite wonderful news; Kelly Link’s short story collection, “Strangers Things Happen,” is being “released under Creative Commons”:http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/sth/index.htm to celebrate the launch of her new collection, “Magic for Beginners”:http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/mfb/index.htm. I can’t even start to say how great this is; Link is one of the best short story writers of her generation, and I generally keep a couple of copies of “Stranger Things” in the house so that I can press spares on likely-sounding visitors. The stories make you want to proselytize. I’d recommend starting with “Travels with the Snow Queen,” then “Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water,” and then the sublimely disturbing “Water off a Black Dog’s Back” and “The Specialist’s Hat.” But more than that I’d recommend downloading the book, trying it out, and buying it if you like it (it’s a beautiful book, and easier to read on paper).
(via “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/01/kelly_links_gorgeous.html)
My usual few years behind the curve, I picked up Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060512806/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ yesterday. Right now I’m about a hundred pages in, and I’m wondering whether I should keep reading. The prose is flat. Stephenson keeps lathering-in in chunks of his background reading. Much of that material is interesting, but it’s applied with a trowel. Most of all, a strong whiff of “Mary-Sue”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004188.html wish-fulfillment pervades the whole thing. Here is the author/soldier in Shanghai on the eve of the second world war, earning the respect of Nipponese soldiers by composing haikus, eating sushi and learning judo. Here is the author/genius talking about computability and mathematics with Alan Turing, impressing the hell out of him with his raw, untutored brilliance. Here is the author/unix nerd putting down a bunch of cardboard-cutout cult-stud poseur academics about the _real_ meaning of the Internet. And so on. Does the book warm up at all, or are the next 800 pages more of the same? If the latter, I think I’d be better off finding some of the stuff Stephenson relies on for detail (like Andrew Hodges’ brilliant _Alan Turing: The Enigma_) and just reading that, instead.
“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ links to a “terrific paper”:http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.html by E.M. Purcell called “Life at Low Reynolds Number.” The Reynolds Number is, roughly, the ratio of intertia to viscosity in fluids, and if you want to learn more about it I strongly urge you to read the rest of the talk for yourself. I learned about the Reynolds Number in graduate school. It’s not something they teach sociologists, as a rule, but I discovered during my first year that Princeton University Press often had sales at the University Store. Because I am in inveterate dilettante — er, I mean, polymath — I picked up a great book by “Steven Vogel”:http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/svogel called “Life’s Devices”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691024189/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.
Cory Doctorow’s new novel, “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=72-0765312786-0, is out. Now Cory is a mate, so I’m not sure that I’m entirely unbiased in warmly recommending it. But I can honestly say that while I enjoyed his first two novels, I think that this one is on an entirely different level. It’s matter-of-fact surrealism; the main character’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and his brothers are nesting Russian dolls, an island, a prophet and a very unpleasant reanimated corpse. It’s a love poem to Toronto (which is part of why I enjoyed it so much – the house in which much of the novel takes place is about 15 minutes walk from where I used to live). And it’s a warm, funny romance between two flawed, interesting people. Gene Wolfe says it’s a “glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.” And you can read it for yourself before buying; the text is Creative Commoned and available for download at “http://craphound.com/someone/download.php”:http://craphound.com/someone/download.php.
!http://www.henryfarrell.net/cory.jpg!
John Cole has tagged me with his own book meme:
What fiction did you read as a teen/young adult that you have re-read as an adult (or would like to)? What pieces of fiction meant something to you? Put up your list, and pass it on to 2-3 people.
“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002117.html pre-empts a post I’ve been toying with writing for the last couple of weeks by discussing the usefulness of Douglas Adams’ “Somebody Else’s Problem Field”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field to the understanding of international politics. There’ve been books on Star Trek and International Relations Theory, Harry Potter and International Relations Theory etc, etc. Why hasn’t somebody written the Hitchhiker’s Guide to International Relations? Adams made far punchier contributions to the understanding of IR than either Rowling or Rodenberry; not only the SEP Field, but the Babel Fish theory of the effects of globalization.
bq. The Babel fish, said the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
bq. The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Via my eagle-eyed (make that obsessive) little sister Nelly, here is the fantastic news that George R. R. Martin has finally finished the long-awaited 4th book in his Ice and Fire series. Kind of.
Feast is now too long to publish in one book, so it’s being cut in half. But instead of going half way through the story with the full cast of characters, Martin is taking half of the characters (the Westeros based ones) through the whole story and then publishing the other half’s (Dany & co. and probably Tyrion’s) stories in the next book. This should make things even more interesting, I think, and even a tad more post-modern.
Much of the fun in this series has been in re-reading and discussing the books to piece together the real story from what’s unsaid or only hinted at in each narrative. The key elements of the plot-driving back story are either assumed by all and never stated, or known only to dead characters. This time round, the wait for the other half of the same story will be madly tantalising and great speculative fun as we are frog-marched half-blind through the book, wondering what is happening in the other camps. Martin is still only half-way through the second installation, which gives the opportunity for some nice play between the storylines. No better man for it.
Regular readers will “know”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/ that my list of “indispensable applications”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/11/indispensible-applications/ includes the “Emacs”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html&e=9707 text editor, the “TeX/LaTeX”:http://latex.yauh.de/index_en.html typesetting system,and a whole “array”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/&e=9707 of “ancillary”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.astro.uva.nl/~dominik/Tools/reftex/&e=9707 “utilities”:http://www.berger-on.net/jurabib/ that make the two play nice together. The goal is to produce “beautiful”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/&e=9707 and “maintainable”:http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html documents. Also it gives Dan further opportunity to defend “Microsoft Office”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/11/indispensible-applications/#comment-53902. I am happy to admit that a love of getting the text to come out just so can lead to long-run irrationalities. The more complex the underlying document gets, the harder it is to convert it to some other format. And we all know “which format”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx&e=9707 we mean.
Well, yesterday morning the long run arrived: I finished the revisions to my book manuscript and it was now ready to send to the publisher for copyediting. Except for one thing. The University of Chicago Press is not interested in parsing complex LaTeX files. They are “quite clear”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/emsguide.html about what they want, and it isn’t unreasonable. I had a horrible vision of spending weeks manually futzing with a book’s worth of formatted text. But thanks largely to the awesome power of “regular expressions”:http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html, or regexps, and the availability of free tools that implement them, the whole thing was pretty painless.
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David Greenberg had two “interesting”:http://www.slate.com/id/2118854/entry/2118924/ “articles”:http://www.slate.com/id/2118854 last week about the gap between academic and popular history, and how to bridge it. This suggests an interesting question. Which academic books are fit for human consumption? Or, to put it less polemically, which books written for academic purposes deserve, should find (or in some cases have found) a more general readership among intelligent people who are either (a) non-academics, or (b) aren’t academic specialists in the discipline that the book is written for. Nominations invited. To start the ball rolling, I’m listing three (fairly obvious imo) contenders myself.
bq. E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class. A classic, which reads more like a novel than a piece of academic history, rescuing organizers, sectaries, pamphleteers and gutter journalists “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Moving, smart, and wonderfully written.
bq. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty. A stunningly simple idea, worked out to its logical conclusions – it creates a new vocabulary for understanding how social institutions work.
bq. James Scott, Seeing Like A State. Libertarians will like the critique of state-led social engineering, but be discomfited by Scott’s account of the totalizing effects of markets. Traditional social democrats and socialists will have the opposite set of reactions. Both should read it (as should anyone else interested in the intersection between political theory and real life).
Matt Yglesias writes about “philosophical zombies”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/05/zombie_attack.html which reminds me to mention that this particularly refined class of undead gets a nod in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. It’s a nice example of a genre trope getting picked up by the academy, spun around, then yanked back into the popular culture with its references skewed. The few moments in the last couple of days which I haven’t spent grading, I’ve been reading Stross’s The Family Trade, a novel contribution to the somewhat exiguous genre of economic fantasy. Sort of like Roger Zelazny’s _Amber_ but with real feudalism – illiterate peasants, aristocrats who are obsessed with their fishing and mining rights (even if they don’t know much about what fishing and mining actually involve in practice), and a spunky heroine determined to reform the gung-ho mercantilism of her family business. It’s all enormous fun. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, but I couldn’t wait for a year to order a copy of the sequel, which is coming out in June. Good stuff.
China Miéville has just won the “Arthur C. Clarke award”:http://www.appomattox.demon.co.uk/acca/News/Winner%2005.htm for _Iron Council_, which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the “current issue”:http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/interview_mieville.php of _The Believer_. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.
Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.
“I don’t look at it as censorship,” says State Representative Gerald Allen. “I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”
Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” has lesbian characters.
Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics, although he still can’t define what a classic is. Also exempted now Alabama’s public and college libraries…
“It’s not healthy for America, it doesn’t fit what we stand for,” says Allen. “And they will do whatever it takes to reach their goal.”
Hi, I’m the bloody corpse of satire. Rep. Gerald Allen, you have defeated me in mortal combat.