Books

(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?

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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.

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“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001477.html makes a highly questionable empirical claim.

bq. 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”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ ‘Trots in Space’ quartet, “Cory Doctorow’s”:http://www.boingboing.net/ and “Bruce Sterling’s”:http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ “different”:http://www.craphound.com/down/ “takes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553576399/henryfarrell-20 on the reputational economy; and “Steven Brust’s”:http://www.dreamcafe.com/weblog.cgi fantasy about a “complicated insurance fraud”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441010105/henryfarrell-20. 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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001721.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001362.html) 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345444388/henryfarrell-20 (also blogged “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/movabletype/archives/000149.html and “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/movabletype/archives/000157.html 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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000436.html 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/057560106X/henryfarrell-20. 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947604/junius-20. “Transmission”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947604/junius-20 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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452283973/junius-20 , then I’d say that this one is lighter but, on the whole, more satisfactory. Definitely worth taking to the beach.

“Night Shade Books”:http://www.nightshadebooks.com/index.html, 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”:http://www.nightshadebooks.com/harrison.html, which I’ve “blogged about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000322.html previously; NSB has also done very nice reprints of Dunsany’s “Jorkens stories”:http://www.nightshadebooks.com/dunsany.html.

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.”

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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”:http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Fiction/Other/Joyce_Ulysses/Ulysses_07_3.htm, 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.

!http://www.google.com/logos/james_joyce.gif!

James C. Moore is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.”

He has just released “Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House, and the People“, and is engaging in an unusual form of publicity. He’s written an essay, exclusively for blog publication, which is posted under the fold.

I haven’t read the book and am in no position to recommend it. Honestly, I just think that it’s neat to be asked to be part of this. And if the essay is just something that didn’t make it into the New York Review of Books… well, I have no pride. Enjoy the essay.

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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 CT[1]. 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.

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I spent a lot of a flight from London to Singapore reading “Tragically I was an Only Twin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031231891X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, a well-edited collection of the comedy sketches, monologues and occasional journalism of “Peter Cook”:http://www.petercook.net/. It turns out that Cook addressed many of the issues that preoccupy us at CT. Like “intelligent design theory”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001543.html:

*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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001642.html:

*Interviewer*: [B]ut isn’t an anthill a very organized society?
*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.

Or “political theory”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001856.html:

*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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001408.html:

*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”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031231891X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.

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:

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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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001729.html of books, I’m about 250 pages in to “Robert Skidelsky’s”:http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/skidelsky/ one-volume abridgment of his three-volume life of Keynes. “Joan Robinson”:http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/robinson.htm 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:

bq. 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”:http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ramsey.html cheerfully informs a meeting of “the Apostles”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Apostles that their “Moorean”:http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/moor.htm 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.”