Sometime ago (just after the 2001 general election), I was listening to a senior adviser to Tony Blair at a non-academic public policy conference. He started saying some things that were quite critical of the promises New Labour had made, and implemented, in education, and I found myself, at first, thinking how sensible and well-thought out the criticisms were. Then, I started thinking that I recognized the language in which they were couched, and, eventually, realised that the reason it all sounded so good was that it had been taken, more or less verbatim, from something I had written. My first, momentary, response was to be irritated by this—but, once I remembered where I had written it (the cover story of a magazine that was distributed widely at the previous Labour Party conference) I was, simply, pleased. Of course, he is not going to cite me in a speech, and if you write in that sort of venue you should be hoping that somebody like him will take your words and ideas and make them their own.

If an academic had done that, I would have remained irritated (for about 20 minutes, I imagine, I really don’t care that much), and I think that it would have counted as plagiarism. If a student did the same thing I would regard it as serious academic misconduct. But in the context it seemed just fine.

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*The Half-Made World* and *The Rise of Ransom City* are both rich books, full of pleasures for the reader; but the pair of them are also, to an unusual degree, in the business of being deliberately frustrating, of withholding from readers a set of expected pleasures that seemed to have been virtually promised us. I mean pleasures that are usual to fantasy – pleasures, even, that are usual to the implicit contract a plot makes between writer and reader. And it’s this I want to concentrate on a little, because it seems to me that what Felix Gilman holds back, what he refuses to deliver, is essential to the power of the effect he does create. (Spoiler alert, by the way. I can’t talk about what Gilman doesn’t do, in plot terms, without sometimes revealing what he does.) [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.

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Apropos nothing at all I thought I might address the suggestion, sometimes raised, that John Maynard Keynes’s “love” for Carl Melchior, German representative at Versailles, might substantively have influenced Keynes’s position on what reparations the Germans ought to pay.

Keynes made early calculations for what Germany should pay in reparations in October, 1918. In “Notes on an Indemnity,” he presented two sets of figures – one “without crushing Germany” and one “with crushing Germany”. He objected to crushing Germany because seeking to extract too much from the enemy would “defeat its object by leading to a condition in which the allies would have to give [Germany] a loan to save her from starvation and general anarchy.” As he put in a revised version of the same memorandum, “If Germany is to be ‘milked’, she must not first of all be ruined.”

Keynes also worried that too large a reparations bill might distort international trade. “An indemnity so high that it can only be paid by means of a great expansion of Germany’s export trade must necessarily interfere with the export trade of other countries.”

The point of mentioning it is that Keynes developed these concerns prior to going to the negotiations and meeting Carl Melchior.

Which is not to say that Melchior did not make a great impression on Keynes; as Keynes wrote in 1920,

A sad lot they were in those early days, with drawn, dejected faces and tired staring eyes, like men who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange. But from amongst them there stepped forward into the middle place a very small man, exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar which seemed cleaner and whiter than an ordinary collar, his round head covered with grizzled hair shaved so close as to be like in substance to the pile of a close-made carpet, the line where his hair ended bounding his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve, his eyes gleaming straight at us, with extraordinary sorrow in them, yet like an honest animal at bay.

Keynes was so impressed by Melchior’s account of German suffering – both his implicit and explicit account – that he would illicitly confer with Melchior to try to strike a deal whereby the Germans would receive food relief in exchange for giving up merchant ships.

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes criticized the treaty not only for what was in it – the reparations demands – but what was not – “The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe, – nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of solidarity among the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.” He warned that without such provisions, ” “depression of the standard of life of the European populations” would lead to a political crisis, such that some desperate people might “submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”

At the conference, Keynes himself had made such a proposal, suggesting refinancing the international debts to provide funds for reconstruction and development. Here it is worth noting that Keynes developed the plan after hearing Jan Smuts’s account of “the pitiful plight of Central Europe.”

So it seems that Melchior did matter to Keynes, and inspired him to propose relief for Germany. But as for his critique of the peace, what really mattered to Keynes was British self-interest, which inspired him to warn against reparations before he even went to France, and sympathy for the people of Central Europe, which inspired his “grand scheme for the rehabilitation of Europe” – which of course was only one of many “grand schemes” that showed Keynes’s interest in the long-run welfare of humanity.

I was going to get started listening to Ian Tregillis, Bitter Seeds today. It’s book 1 of a trilogy whose conclusion is getting a boost on Boing Boing:

Milkweed began in 2010 with Bitter Seeds, an alternate history WWII novel about a Nazi doctor who creates a race of twisted X-Men through a program of brutal experimentation; and of the British counter-strategy: calling up the British warlocks and paying the blood-price to the lurking elder gods who would change the very laws of physics in exchange for the blood of innocents. These elder gods, the Eidolons, hate humanity and wish to annihilate us, but we are so puny that they can only perceive us when we bleed for them. With each conjuration of the Eidolons on Britain’s behalf, the warlocks bring closer the day when the Eidolons will break through and wipe humanity’s stain off the universe.

Sounds like fun!

But not today! Henry tells me I’m late to The Rise of Ransom City. Which is, come to think of it, probably similar, rock and hard place-wise. In this faux-19th Century America fantascientifiction alt-history, and the previous installment, The Half-Made World, Gilman’s human protagonists spend most of their time on the run, or watching for their chance to run, or just laying low, for fear of being crushed between sinister, inhuman, vaguely unworldly forces of Line and Gun. The Line is technological, but also demonic – demon trains, running on rails laid down by regimented, reduced human servants. And how long are such masters likely to need even such machine-servicing specimens as we humans can be made into? I listened to Audiobook versions of both books, so I can’t flip through to transcribe tasty quotes. I’ll just crib from Hermann Melville, The Confidence-Man, which is public domain and – eh, close enough: [click to continue…]

Last night, I posted on my blog this post about statements that have been falsely attributed to some famous person. I got some terrific responses, on the blog, FB, and Twitter, and now a magazine wants me to develop it into a longer essay. So I thought I’d post it here in the hopes of crowd-sourcing the essay. Do you have any experiences with the Wrongly Attributed Statement (WAS)? Any more elaborate or extended thoughts? [click to continue…]

I was reminded this morning of an old Dotcom Era commercial from IBM. With some helpful prompting on Twitter, I eventually tracked it down. As you can see—pixelated video notwithstanding—IBM had some of the main concepts of Google Glass covered back in 2000, notably the clear presentation of the wearer as a jerk.

One of the standard jobs in software development these days is UX Design. User Experience covers “any aspect of a user’s experience with a given system … addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users.” Products like Google Glass make it clear that we should formalize the development process further to include what we can call “Experience of User” or XU Design. The XU Designer’s job will be to assess and tweak how third parties experience the users of your product or service. Is the XU experience intrusive? Is it annoying? Do our product’s XU Metrics all point in the direction of “Christ, what an asshole?” As the XU specialty develops we can trace its history back to phenomena like people loudly using cellphones in public, or people talking to you while wearing headphones, and the various ways norms and tolerances developed for these practices, or failed to develop. Right now, though, it looks like Google Glass is shaping up to be the leading XU Design disaster of our time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to trademark the term XU Design and start a consulting company.

As an undiscerning, lowbrow reader, my reactions to books are heavily driven by plot; I expect competent prose, but what I’m usually looking for in genre fiction is a series of engaging events that wraps up neatly with a bow on the end. On the other hand, while both *The Half-Made World* and *The Rise Of Ransom City* are entertainingly written in terms of story and event, the structure of the setting is more interesting than anything that actually happens in either book.

The most obvious thing to be said about *The Half-Made World* and *The Rise Of Ransom City* is that they are fantasy Westerns, centered on a long-term war between the Line and the Gun: industrial totalitarianism against anarchic violence. The fantasy Western is a familiar setting for speculative fiction, from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to Firefly, but Gilman makes it unfamiliar by broadening the setting beyond the stylized frontier/gunman/saloon/dusty cattle-drive world of a TV Western to include a range of other aspects of the nineteenth century American West, and putting those aspects together in a way that is very alien to my sense of what the American West generally represents. [click to continue…]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about being in the south coast of England for a few months and wondered if any CT readers live here, too. It turns out some do!

So to commenters Sean, Billy, Kevin, James and anyone else (?), we have a meet-up. Tomorrow, Tuesday 6th at 1800 in Espresso Kitchen on The Triangle, there’ll be a highly informal gathering of a few people to maybe organise a book club or just have a coffee, cake and chat. It’ll be a BYO Book, i.e. bring one you’re interested in, reading or just can’t get along with for some show and tell.

I’m also bringing a couple I’ve read recently & am done with to see if they can find another home; Hollinghurst’s Stranger’s Child and Mohsin Hamid’s rather wonderful How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Finishing Stranger’s Child was a slog for the last few hundred pages, but the scenery was interesting. And by scenery I mean characters. But it is objectively a very good book, far above the faint praise that it is ‘beautifully written’. Which prompted me to wonder about when you do/don’t bother to finish a difficult book, especially given comments on Corey’s thread that have segued for some into a discussion on Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I gave it the full college try a year ago, and still managed only 200 pages. My efforts were heroic, and my will was strong. But still. Surely there’s more to it just liking or not liking a difficult book that is nonetheless interesting and worth the effort? Or is anything else just rationalisation of personal taste, anyway?

The latest issue of Jacobin came out the week before last. It’s already generating a lot of discussion and debate. Just a few highlights.

1.  Jonah Birch’s interview with NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber about Chibber’s new book on subaltern studies and postcolonialism theory has pissed a lot of people off.

Here’s Chibber:

A typical maneuver of postcolonial theorists is to say something like this: Marxism relies on abstract, universalizing categories. But for these categories to have traction, reality should look exactly like the abstract descriptions of capital, of workers, of the state, etc. But, say the postcolonial theorists, reality is so much more diverse. Workers wear such colorful clothes; they say prayers while working; capitalists consult astrologers — this doesn’t look like anything what Marx describes in Capital. So it must mean that the categories of capital aren’t really applicable here. The argument ends up being that any departure of concrete reality from the abstract descriptions of theory is a problem for the theory. But this is silly beyond words: it means that you can’t have theory. Why should it matter if capitalists consult astrologers as long as they are driven to make profits? Similarly, it doesn’t matter if workers pray on the shop floor as long as they work. This is all that the theory requires. It doesn’t say that cultural differences will disappear; it says that these differences don’t matter for the spread of capitalism, as long as agents obey the compulsions that capitalist structures place on them. I go to considerable lengths to explain this in the book. [click to continue…]

Apparently, a new survey shows that Millennials (more precisely, US high school students interviewed between 2005 and 2007, and therefore born in the early 1990s) are lazy and entitled. More precisely, as textbook worker-consumers are supposed to, they would like nice stuff, but not if they have to work long hours to get it. I’m too bored to link to it, but you can easily find it.

The best that can be said for this kind of thing is that it relieves the monotony of boomer-bashing. Apart from that it is a repeat of the formulaic denunciation of adolescents that has been applied (in my memory) to Gen Y (insofar as this group differs from the Millennials) Gen X (Slackers), Boomers (hippies) and the Silent Generation (the original teenagers). Then there were the Lost Generation and so on back to the (apocryphal, I think) rant often attributed to Socrates. Only those who have the good fortune (?) to come of age in a time of full-scale war miss out on this ritual denunciation.

On a brighter note, Jocelyn Auer restates the reasons why treating generations as coherent groups is silly. As she says, the situation of the wealthies 20 per cent of boomers is much different from that of the bottom 20 per cent, looking forward to retirement with little or no super, and worse if they don’t own their home. A neat point, true of almost any attack on people based on their age, is that the attackers can’t lose. Boomers who retire early are a burden, while those who work past 65 are keeping younger people out of a job. Similarly, young people are coddled if they are full-time students, dropouts if they start work early and neglecting their studies if they combine schoo//uni with a part time job.

A minor footnote to the controversy over Niall Ferguson’s homophobic remarks about John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson claimed that the key to Keynes’s economic philosophy is a selfishness and short-termism rooted in the fact that Keynes was gay and had no children. No kids=no future=big deficits.

What is supposed to have prompted Ferguson to these meditations was a question comparing Keynes to Edmund Burke. According to the main report, “Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead.” As Ferguson explained in the apology he subsequently issued, “The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.” [click to continue…]

As previously foretold [here](https://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/27/upcoming-felix-gilman-seminar/). The participants:

Miriam Burstein is an associate professor at Brockport. She [previously participated](https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/11/undoing-messiahs/) in our seminar on China Mieville’s *Iron Council.* She blogs at [The Little Professor](http://www.littleprofessor.typepad.com/).

Henry Farrell blogs here.

Maria Farrell blogs here.

John Holbo blogs here.

“Lizardbreath” is a pseudonymous lawyer, who likes writing about cake. She blogs at [Unfogged](http://www.unfogged.com/).

Abigail Nussbaum is a programmer in Tel Aviv and the senior review editor for [Strange Horizons](http://www.strangehorizons.com/). She blogs at [Asking the Wrong Questions](http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/).

Francis Spufford is the author of several books, including Red Plenty, which was the subject of a [previous CT seminar](https://crookedtimber.org/category/red-plenty-seminar/).

Claire Messud has written a novel that apparently features a character named Nora. Publisher’s Weekly posed the following question to Messud: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” Messud responded:

 For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”

Cue Katie Roiphe:

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