Books

I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s “The Confusion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060523867/henryfarrell-20, the second volume in a projected trilogy. It’s a lot of fun, albeit a bit more sporadic than the first – a little patchy in the usual fashion of the middle volumes of trilogies where nothing is resolved. Stephenson’s intentions for the trilogy are becoming clearer. He’s making an argument about the historical sources of modernity. In the first volume as I read it, the “key passage”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000910.html asks about the nature of the whirlwind, the invisible force not only impelling social and economic change, but also transforming our understanding of who we are, and our place in the universe. In “The Confusion,” Stephenson begins to articulate his answer to this question, when he places Jack Shaftoe in an alley in Cairo, which is perhaps the oldest marketplace in the world.

bq. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The _Messe_ of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of the hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.

For Stephenson, as for many economic historians, the invisible whirlwind is the market. It acts as a Universal Solvent, dissolving social bonds, and uniting an unlikely congeries of characters (including a Vagabond, a Dutch captain, an Armenian, a crypto-Jew, an Electress and a pirate-queen) in the pursuit of wealth. It works further alchemy as King Solomon’s gold and the wellsprings of credit become one and the same thing. The creation of complex financial markets conjures money from thin air, just as alchemists sought to transform lead into gold.

Stephenson’s history is, quite literally, a Whig one – the Whigs and merchants who seek to uproot the rotten pilings of the feudal order are the heroes of his narrative. This has clear costs in terms of historical veracity – Stephenson glosses over the “corruption”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394730860/henryfarrell-20 endemic in Whig politics. Yet he continues to succeed in carrying off the difficult task of taking economic history seriously while maintaining an entertaining narrative. Recommended.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to realize my bed-rest destiny: re-reading Proust. Yes, it’s the perfect project, though I’m hoping baby will be born before I’m too far along the Guermantes way. When I read it the first time (which I did, rather disreputably, under the table in a series of boring seminars), I was also taking a very interesting seminar on the Greek novel with Froma Zeitlin, and I noticed a certain parallel to Achilles Tatius.

Warning: Contains Remembrance of Things Past plot spoilers! And Leucippe and Kleitophon plot spoilers, I guess!

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Anne Applebaum on ‘the literary divide’ between highbrow and pop culture (via A&L Daily). Does this sound right to you?

Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it.

Surely wrong on both counts. Chat amongst yourselves.

From Steven Brust, _The Lord of Castle Black_, p.128.

bq.. “It is sad,” observed Grassfog, “that our friend here is dead, and we have no wine.”

“It is your custom,” inquired Piro, “to become drunk when a friend dies?”

“Not in the least,” said Grassfog. “I was merely making an observation about two conditions that are both true, and both regrettable.”

Our first text for tonight comes from Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”, delivered in 1947 at Kenyon College and available in your local copy of The Liberal Imagination. The great man had been instructed to inform about ‘manners in relation to the novel’. Here he indicates the proportions of his subject, making points that have all been made before, no doubt, but making them exceedingly well and elegantly:

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Some comments to “this post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001639.html by Ted raised the question of the public face of academic disciplines, as seen at Barnes and Noble or Borders. The shelf-test isn’t perfect, of course, because not every field needs to have a public face, even chain bookstores vary quite widely, and Borders and Barnes and Noble are not really meant for academics. But they _are_ meant for everyone, and academics must form part of that category. (This reminds me, by the by, of an example from the late, great “Dick Jeffrey”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bayesway/. “Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me” goes the song. Who is my baby?) So, what can we learn about the social sciences and humanities from a visit to the local book barn?

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In honor of Passover, I’m pleased to pass on an essay from Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It’s a sad meditation on an absurd book, the phrase book Say It In Yiddish, for visitors to a country that never existed.

I dream of two possible destinations. The first might be a modern independent state very closely analogous to the State of Israel–call it the State of Yisroel–a postwar Jewish homeland created during a time of moral emergency, located presumably, but not necessarily, in Palestine; it could be in Alaska, or on Madagascar. Here, perhaps, that minority faction of the Zionist movement who favored the establishment of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews were able to prevail over their more numerous Hebraist opponents. There is Yiddish on the money, of which the basic unit is the herzl, or the dollar, or even the zloty. There are Yiddish color commentators for soccer games, Yiddish-speaking cash machines, Yiddish tags on the collars of dogs. Public debate, private discourse, joking and lamentation, all are conducted not in a new-old, partly artificial language like Hebrew, a prefabricated skyscraper still under construction, with only the lowermost of its stories as yet inhabited by the generations, but in a tumbledown old palace capable in the smallest of its stones (the word nu) of expressing slyness, tenderness, derision, romance, disputation, hopefulness, skepticism, sorrow, a lascivious impulse, or the confirmation of one’s worst fears.

Via scribblingwoman, who heard it from Maud, this is indeed a beguiling pastime.

Here are my hasty contributions:

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Michael Bérubé asks the important questions about the eschatological, best-selling Left Behind series.

First of all, what does the Book of Revelations say about fundamentalist-Christian pulp-fiction writers who are trying to complete their Revelations-based book series before they’re raptured into heaven? Does Scripture itself predict whether novels about the Final Days will be published during the Final Days? Do they arrive in bookstores just after the seven-eyed, seven-horned Lamb opens the first of the seven seals (6:1), or do we have to wait until the appearance of the seven-headed, ten-horned dragon (12:3)? Second, when Christ returns, will He hang out for a while– maybe even serving as an editorial consultant on the remaining “Left Behind” books– before initiating the series of events leading to the Apocalypse, or will He just be all about the Apocalypse?

I must admit that there is a certain prima facie plausibility to the idea that the popularity of these books is a sign of the end times, in some sense. (We’re in the Kali yuga, you know, where the bull of Truth is standing on only one leg.) This reminds me of a good friend whose mother, a devout Catholic, wrote a Christian thriller of this sort. In it, people on a plane about to crash confront their mortality and faith. My friend’s mom modelled the doomed atheist figure on him.

Just finished James Hynes’ “Kings of Infinite Space”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031245645X/henryfarrell-20, which I found a little disappointing after his very funny “The Lecturer’s Tale”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312287712/henryfarrell-20. KOISP takes up a failed academic (his downfall is described in a previous Hynes novella) who ends up temping as a typist/technical writer for the Texas state government. There’s some clever, funny commentary along the way, including this description of the protagonist’s previous job working for a school textbook company.

bq. For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to accommodate an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism and homophobia).

Still, the book just doesn’t have as much venom and verve as _The Lecturer’s Tale_. The setting isn’t as developed; the character sketches aren’t as pointed or as sharp. My very strong impression is that Hynes is much more comfortable describing academia than bureaucracy and office politics – his best jokes still riff off academic debates. Further, the main conceit of the book – downsized penpushers turned feral ghouls, scuttling through the ceilings and walls of office buildings – has been done before, and done better, in William Browning Spencer’s wonderfully droll “Resume with Monsters”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565049136/henryfarrell-20. If you want to read a funny dead-end-job/comedy/horror mash-up, read Browning Spencer; if you want to read Hynes at his best, buy or borrow _The Lecturer’s Tale_. Unfortunately, _Kings of Infinite Space_ simply isn’t as good as either.

I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.

It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

When Jim Treacher linked to the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi, he found a real gem. Garth Marenghi is wonderfully done narcissistic hack, the page is hilarious, and the internet is a beautiful thing for hosting it. (Oh, the internet. How can I stay mad at you?)

From one of the interviews:

What, scientifically speaking, is the most frightening thing ever?

Garth: I’m not a scientist. I’m a fabulist, a shaman, a ferryman, a dreamweaver. But that’s not to say I don’t put forward scientific propositions. In Black Fang, I dared to suggest that if pollution kept progressing at its current rate, rats would soon be able to drive buses. This week, as I sauntered through Soho, I witnessed a rodent sniffing curiously round a discarded rollerskate. Are we really so far away from my apocalyptic vision? I fear not friend.

A description of one of his books, Afterbirth:

It’s the year 2050 and everyone can choose the perfect baby. Blue eyes, blond hair, and calcium-rich blood. Everyone, that is, who can pay. (Many people can’t pay). The West Country’s most beautiful woman, Silvie Mink, is certain her newborn will be as drop dead gorgeous as her. But when her baby drops dead, knifed by her own placenta, she knows her DNA modification program has gone too far…

TAGLINE: After birth, comes Afterbirth

(On a related note, happy Day-Before-Zombie-Movie, everyone.)

Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis.
Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.

I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term) was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”.) Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.

The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a centrist. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .

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In general I prefer the American, hard-boiled mystery to the cosy English one. Ross Macdonald is my god. I still enjoy a “cosy” murder however, and there may be more well-written ones of this type. Perhaps it’s just that I find derivative “cosy” mysteries tolerable, if kitsch, while derivative hard-boiled mysteries are just brutal. See the works of Mickey Spillane, passim. Josephine Tey, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh (not British, really, but it comes to the same thing) — I enjoy all these, Tey particulary. P.D. James is a little precious and over-intellectualized, but that’s not to say I haven’t read them all. I even like Agatha Christie, though her works form their own peculiar class; the puzzles are insoluble because they require characters other than human beings to carry them out. The Christie murderer is someone of insane cunning, capable of planning things to the minutest detail, and simultaneously posessed of incredible, reckless daring, which allows them to seize a random, propitious moment for their scheme.

One thing that always strikes me in reading post-WWII novels set in England is just how incredibly poor it was (yes, and in the few set in Scotland, it’s worse). In novels set in the late ’40’s, people are literally scrounging around for firewood, and everything is rationed. Everyone has that one annoying cousin who married a Yank and sends envy-provoking postcards about their new washing machine. In the Rendell book One Across, Two Down, published in 1971, the main characters don’t even have a refrigerator in their flat, and it is a source of friction when the meat in the larder gets high by Sunday (they are meant to be poor, but not abjectly so). This seems bizarre to me. Nor do I think of the 1970’s as a time of rocketing prosperity for Britain. So, when was the Wirtschaftswunder? When did the UK get to be the rich place it is today? Or should I stop trying to glean reliable sociological details from murder mysteries?