“Locusmag notice here”:http://www.locusmag.com/News/2012/06/ray-bradbury-1920-2012/. His earlier work was better than his later, and his short stories were better than his novels – some of them (especially the ones where over-ripe sentimental Americana turns into horror) are unforgettable. I’ve always had a specific weakness for the handful of stories he set in Ireland (where he lived for a bit, while working on a John Huston film), even though they’re far from his best. His piece, “The Anthem Sprinters,” about Irish cinema-goers’ mad rush for the exits after the film had finished, so as to avoid having to stand for the obligatory rendition of the National Anthem, captures something that America could learn from (I was reminded of it last week during the Chris Hayes disrespectin’ Memorial Day nonsense-kerfuffle). But his Mars stories and one-offs like “The Small Assassin” and “There Will Come Soft Rains” are what I think he’ll be remembered for.

Not long before I read Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, I happened to read Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (prompted by BBC Radio 4’s excellent 13-part dramatization), so I was very struck by the parallels in scale and approach between the two works. Both are conceived on a vast scale; both draw the reader into the lives of a large number of characters at all strata of society. In both books, real historical people mingle with fictional characters. The long shadow of Tolstoy is apparent in both. Grossman had a real advantage over Spufford in that he’d lived through the siege of Stalingrad which features so centrally in his novel, and he’d had exceptional freedom as a war reporter to talk to people from many different backgrounds. Of course Tolstoy had to recreate Napoleon’s invasion of Russia from research and imagination, but he too was immersed in his own society and culture, and was able to avail of first-hand encounters with veterans of the campaign. Spufford has had to re-imagine the world of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union much more thoroughly, through extensive engagement with scholarly literature, memoirs and other sources, in this vivid and beautifully written book.

But it’s the contrasts between Grossman’s and Spufford’s books that are perhaps more striking.

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I’ve been reading some of Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts with increasing horror as he details the apparent willingness of the US drone campaign to attack events where non-combatants will certainly be present, such as funerals and to try to evade moral and legal responsibility by redefining “combatant” to include any military-age male in a strike zone. I’ve also been monitoring various liberal sites and blogs for signs of a reaction and not seeing much (please correct that impression in comments). Sites that obsess about non-combatant immunity if the people firing the rockets are from Hamas are silent. Blogs that take attitudes to historic human rights violations as a litmus-test of political acceptability, have nothing to say as a liberal American President bombs civilians on the territory of nominally friendly states. Fortunately, I’m not an American citizen, so I don’t have a moral decision to take about whether to vote for Obama or not this year. If I were, I don’t think it would be an easy decision to take. Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama, but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not. That provides people with a reason to vote for Obama. But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn’t _deserve_ the vote of anyone who cares about human rights, even if, pragmatically they might feel they have to give it to him.

 There’s a mordant joke running thru Francis Spufford’s spectacular Red Plenty that can be illustrated in the following story.  A self-taught Armenian monk travels to Oxford to importune the most distinguished mathematician in England.  The monk eagerly presents his findings to the grand Don.  After listening to the monk, and observing some of his formulas, the mathematician says to him, “I have good news and bad news.”  The monk replies, “What’s the good news?”  “You are a genius,” says the mathematician, “and you’ve invented geometry.”  “Great!” says the breathless monk.  “What’s the bad news?”  “Euclid invented it a couple of thousands years before you did.”  (I know, I know—please don’t post comments noting that Euclid didn’t actually invent geometry—the story is heuristic!)

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A recent study by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that women using IUDs and other methods like under the skin implants or Depro-Provera injections were much less likely to have an accidental pregnancy than women using ordinary birth control pills, the trans-dermal patch, or the vaginal ring. (CT readers who are not up-to-the-minute on ladyissues may be interested to learn that the ring is a polymer, well, ring, which is inserted into the vagina, and then releases hormones over the course of three weeks. The birth control type is replaced after four weeks. Another version is used to treat the effects of menopause and has a different schedule.)

The women using the pill etc. were, in fact twenty times as likely to have an accidental pregnancy as the other group. “We know that IUDs and implants have very low failure rates — less than 1 percent,” says Brooke Winner, MD, a fourth-year resident at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the study’s lead author. “But although IUDs are very effective and have been proven safe in women and adolescents, they only are chosen by 5.5 percent of women in the United States who use contraception.” In this case the study provided the various types of birth control at no cost. Worth noting, when the cost barrier was removed, the percentage of women choosing long-acting contraceptives went way up, to 75%.
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More than two centuries ago, our Founders laid out a charter that assured the rule of law and the rights of man. Through times of tranquility and the throes of change, the Constitution has always guided our course toward fulfilling that most noble promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve the chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. America has carried on not only for the skill or vision of history’s celebrated figures, but also for the generations who have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents. On Loyalty Day, we reflect on that proud heritage and press on in the long journey toward prosperity for all.

— Loyalty Day Presidential Proclamation, May 1 2012

Red Plenty is so unusual in its structure and concerns, and it does what it does so well, that after reading it one wonders if there’s a Red Plenty Method that could – should – be generalized to tackle other problems. Teams of graduate students could construct knock-off Red Plenties, not as good as the original but still pretty good and efficiently targeted to meet increasing requirements. First I want to see them tackle the above Loyalty Day Proclamation, almost before irritation, was to wonder how the Red Plenty Method would approach it.  The stories of a generation of US policy wonks – earnest, careerist, idealistic, and/or cynical – required to press on in the long journey toward Prosperity, first figuring what Prosperity means, while doing so in a way that is faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents, as interpreted by political actors in the most bloody-minded way possible, in the context of political institutions that reduce every idea to crudely weaponized slogans. Anyway I suppose this is as good a place as any to make a formal request for Red Plenty Extended Universe franchise fiction.

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I’m sympathetic to a number of points made here (via Andrew Sullivan). I have been trying to institute anti-distraction mechanisms in my own life. Forced offline time. I have little doubt pretty much everyone ought to, these days. At the same time, I’m a big believer in effective multitasking. My philosophy is: peripatetic philosophy is healthy. [click to continue…]

Back in the days before I had realised that a guy who takes five years to deliver a simple book review probably ought to rein in the ambition a bit when it comes to larger-scale projects, I occasionally pitched an idea to publishers of management books. It was going to be called “Great Ideas From Failed Companies”, the idea being that when you have the perspective of the entire history of a corporate story, you’re probably going to get a more honest appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses, and that although companies like Enron, Northern Rock and Atari clearly had major problems, they quite likely also had some good points too, or how did they ever get so big in the first place?
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Francis Spufford’s earlier semi-autobiographical book on childhood and reading, _The Child that Books Built_, talks about fairytales. It tells us about Propp, Bettelheim and the others, relates fairy tales to Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood (the _ur_ source of all stories) and to his own childhood, and finishes by arguing that fairytales pose a challenge. They transport us to a dark wood; alien; removed from the comfortable assumptions of home and family and ask: now: what do you do? _Red Plenty_ is explicitly written as a fairytale in which the hero is “the idea of red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.” The high road dwindles into a path, then a track, and ends in a tangle of brambles and thorns. The idea not only does not know where to go; it does not know if there’s anywhere left that it _could_ go, or even whether there _was_ somewhere that it could have gone had it only taken the right road at the beginning. By entering the world, it’s become hopelessly ensnared in it.

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Apparently some readers have been confused about Red Plenty, thinking it is non-fiction. I had the opposite problem, or possibly it wasn’t one. I knew it was fiction but I had the wrong idea about what kind. This error persisted, uncorrected. I actively avoided all reviews or summaries. I solicited no assistance, along the way, from “the panther-footed Mr. Google,” as he is described in Spufford’s “Acknowledgement” section. As a result, I didn’t know what the hell was going on – at all – until the end. Because the one thing I thought I knew about the book – no, I don’t know where I mis-acquired this notion – was that it is a fictional alternative history of how Red Plenty, the fairytale dream, came true.

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Francis Spufford’s sprawling mosaic of the Soviet Union in the 1960s at first reminds one of Vasily Grossman’s account of Stalinism and the Second World War in Life and Fate. Both use a variety of characters—workers and soldiers, technical elite and normal party cadre—to shift places and perspectives, in order to reveal the hopes, contradictions, and failures of the periods they describe. Both are eminently historical novels, based on extensive scholarly reading in Spufford’s case and vast journalistic experience in Grossman’s.

But there the similarity ends; each novel has a quite different point. Life and Fate is horribly tragic. The Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad are marked for death by the Germans and by “resolute” party cadre behind the lines at the same time. Juxtaposed to the horrific image of the woman hugging the child in the gas chamber is the postwar anti-Semitism that seeps through the pores of late Stalinism. Red Plenty, by contrast, despite the wretched fates of some of its characters, reads like a comedy, at times a dark one. The hopes of the mathematicians and cyberneticians prove mere wishful thinking within the real system of state socialism—the actual subject of the novel. In the first chapter, the prodigy Leonid Kantorovich thinks his deep thoughts on how to optimize the Soviet system—”All he would have to do was to persuade the appropriate authorities to listen”—while tuning out the reality of the bus. “He could tune up the whole Soviet orchestra, if they’d let him. His left foot dripped. He really must find a way to get new shoes.” Idea confronts reality; were this filmed, it could be slapstick.
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From the “Washingtonian article”:http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/the-battle-for-cato/indexp4.php on the battle for control over Cato.

bq. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies, in Arlington—which offers seminars and scholarships for students interested in libertarianism—underwent a change in direction that one former employee described as “the Shadow falling on Rivendell.” “[Charles] Koch, evidently beginning to despair at the prospects of achieving political goals in his lifetime, became obsessed with a quick fix and decided that IHS needed to have ‘quantifiable results,’ ” onetime IHS professor Roderick T. Long wrote on his personal blog in 2008.

bq. Long said IHS officials began feeding students’ application essays into a computer program that counted how many times the applicants mentioned libertarian heroes such as Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman—regardless of what they actually wrote. “Then the management began to do things like increasing the size of student seminars, packing them in, and giving the students a political questionnaire at the beginning of the week and another one at the end, to measure how much their political beliefs had shifted,” Long said.

Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around us as debating whether a devotee of the Olympian gods should approve of transgenic organisms. (Or: centaurs, yes or no?) Contains mathematical symbols (uglified and rendered slightly inexact by HTML) but no actual math, and uses Red Plenty mostly as a launching point for a tangent.

There’s lots to say about Red Plenty as a work of literature; I won’t do so. It’s basically a work of speculative fiction, where one of the primary pleasures is having a strange world unfold in the reader’s mind. More than that, it’s a work of science fiction, where the strangeness of the world comes from its being reshaped by technology and scientific ideas — here, mathematical and economic ideas.

Red Plenty is also (what is a rather different thing) a work of scientist fiction, about the creative travails of scientists. The early chapter, where linear programming breaks in upon the Kantorovich character, is one of the most true-to-life depictions I’ve encountered of the experiences of mathematical inspiration and mathematical work. (Nothing I will ever do will be remotely as important or beautiful as what the real Kantorovich did, of course.) An essential part of that chapter, though, is the way the thoughts of the Kantorovich character split between his profound idea, his idealistic political musings, and his scheming about how to cadge some shoes, all blind to the incongruities and ironies.

It should be clear by this point that I loved Red Plenty as a book, but I am so much in its target demographic¹ that it’s not even funny. My enthusing about it further would not therefore help others, so I will, to make better use of our limited time, talk instead about the central idea, the dream of the optimal planned economy.

That dream did not come true, but it never even came close to being implemented; strong forces blocked that, forces which Red Plenty describes vividly. But could it even have been tried? Should it have been?

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The tedious thing about being a book reviewer is your obligation to be fair, thorough, and concise. You’re supposed to keep in mind that, quite possibly, all your readers will ever know about the book you’re reviewing is what you say in the review, so the poor author, who may have spent years writing the book, is to that extent at your mercy. You’re supposed to give a reasonably complete idea what’s in the book, not just what you found interesting about it, since you don’t know that what interests you will interest others. You’re supposed to put the author’s case in the most persuasive and plausible form, since she won’t get to reply in more than a few, inevitably inadequate paragraphs. You can’t just blather on, mentioning all the (often irrelevant) things the book made you think about and, in particular, dropping the names of other (often remotely) related books, just to demonstrate your cosmopolitan interests and vast erudition.
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