Untitled

Table of Contents
 
 Exordium.................................................................................................................3
 Scores......................................................................................................................4
 Reviews, 2012-2016..................................................................................................
 Human deaths in Werner Herzog's filming diary................................................167
 (2012) by Nassim Taleb....................................................................259
 (2004) by Richard Morgan.........................................................271
 (1987) by Colin Thubron..........................................................274
 !!!"......................................277
# (1999) by Charles 
Bukowski..............................................................................................................281
$ (2015) by Larissa MacFarquhar........................................287
%&''( (2014)...........................293
 Curiosity (2012) by Philip Ball...........................................................................296
 Colophon.............................................................................................................302
 Index....................................................................................................................302
2

Exordium

I read )once. After finishing it, I realised I’d

read it before - way back, as a teenager with similar social skills to

Ignatius. In case you’ve never felt this sensation: it is a dire one, deja vu

crossed with a stubbed toe. I felt myself draining away; I saw my

meander as the circular, witless thing it had been.

I decided to review every book I read. This was a very good decision

for a few reasons (not just posterity); I am vain and this vanity, with

my inbuilt curiosity, has driven me on to a hundred books a year.

And to this.

The period happens to cover me making my way from complete

technical ignorance to an extremely technical profession, which might

be of more general interest than my opinions. I had nine jobs in this

period (bookseller, procurement analyst, statistician, data analyst,

database developer, C# / MEAN developer, PHP developer,

Angular developer, and data scientist), completed a Master’s, half a

Bachelor’s, and fell in love twice.

There hopefully won’t be another of these books. Hopefully I’ll do

something of consequence. But if I don’t, be sure to do something

yourself. There’s always been a glut of bugger all.

- Gavin

Scores

1/5: . (Significantly ugly, false, or derivative.)

2/5: ! (Not worth your time unless you’re a fan.)

3/5: $'. (Worth reading in places.)

3*/5: . (4* but for fun things.)

4/5: *. (Well worth one good readthrough.)

4*/5: . (Exceptional, but just the once.)

5/5: %+&. (A life companion, a ‘vade mecum’.)

I also started using Julia Galef’s magnanimous typology of ways books can affect you:

Data 1 that provide a window on a interesting

piece of the world

!!&,-.-

)'/01

Data 2 that present surprising case studies, “What

is implied, that X could happen?”

!!,+.(-



Data 3 that highlight patterns in the world 2''3-

-4-!!!

Theory 1 with a model of how something works 5$-4$(-

Theory 2 with a model of what makes something

succeed or fail

64-''-

''-$3$

Theory 3 that point out a problem .'-

Theory 4 that make predictions $(-,'-

,!

Theory 5 that give you a general concept or lens

you can use to analyze many things

$)-$-.

3-$'-)3!

Values 1 that make explicit arguments about values '-*-

*-7

Values 2 that are thought experiments for you to

reflect on how you feel about something

8-,'-%(

)

Values 3 that express a holistic value structure,

letting you experience it from the inside

$---

9**+

Style 1 that teach principles of thinking directly $8%-353-

.(%8-%.'(

Style 2 get a style of thinking by studying the

author’s approach to the world

$#97!'-

'-*,

Style 3 aesthetics that obliquely make you a more

interesting, generative thinker

3&-%8&)--:

%!

Came back from Tanzania, where I'd been stuck with the same 5 hard books

for 3 months - ;-.(

%8, Lipsey's ',', Crawford & Imlah's

$<, and *,8 - I binged a bit, re-reading old

favourites. (This included three different books with "How To" in the title,

but they're much better than that might suggest.) Also got a job in a

bookshop, so, y'know.

OCTOBER 2012

• Monogamy (1996) by Adam Philips. Casually radical bunch of aphorisms

questioning our automatic pair-bonding. Every page has something to raise or

furrow yr eyebrows.

4/5

• Bring the Noise (2007) by Simon Reynolds. My favourite pop writer traces his

own development, from slightly clumsy Marxist projecting onto old-school rap,

to the most acute theorist of pop-culture I know.

4/5

• Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews (2009) by Simon Reynolds. Less

impressive collection, but his love of the music shines through, and his

scepticism about the more wanky post-punks helps considerably. David Byrne

and Green Gartside come across particularly well.

3/5

• Re-read: Stumbling on Happiness(2006) by Daniel Gilbert. This is really

amazing, pop-psych survey of how to apply the last 50 years of psychology /

cognitive science. He's one the pioneers of the Economics of Happiness school,

but nowhere near as annoying as those tend to be. Also has a good Woody Allen-

type flow.

5?/5

• Re-read: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (2008) by Pierre Bayard.

Astonishing and therapeutic work against the reading classes (of which I

obviously am, but still). Bayard actually disowns it, and there's plenty of obvious

irony involved, but the "Bayard" of this is still a credible and persuasive devil's

advocate.

5/5

• Re-read: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Favourite children's book.

Sarky and warm and overflowing with ideas.

5/5

NOVEMBER 2012

• Read aloud, aborted: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871) by Jules Verne.

Proper boring. First 150 pages (out of 220) is a completely uneventful dialogue

about an obscure Victorian geological debate. Narrator is kind of charming.

Didn't help that we were just waiting for the dinosaurs to appear. Gave up.

2/5

• Flight to Arras (1942) by Antoine Saint-Exupéry. Powerful nationalist elegy

written during the defeat of France. I don't think I've ever been moved by

anything that subsumes the individual so totally. The central thought is that war

is futile and absurd &'!The existentialism can get kind of

leaden in comparison to his other stuff.

4/5

• How to Travel With a Salmon (1994) by Umberto Eco. Bunch of satirical pieces

about academia and consumerism. One piece, analysing a cheapo catalogue, is

quite affecting. But it hasn't aged all that well. He's still funny. This has the feel

of a notebook which is cool?

3/5.

• Read aloud, aborted: Critique of Criminal Reason (2006) by Michael Gregorio.

Couldn't resist this after reading the blurb - Kant solving murder mysteries in

wintry Konigsberg - but gave up after 80 pages of samey dirty Gothic blah. I

really don't like crime fiction: by virtue of its conventions, it is rarely

humanistic, fantastical, or realistic - the three ways fiction can impress me.

2/5.

DECEMBER 2012

• Escalator (2006) by Michael Gardiner. Incredible set of short stories by a Scot

living in Japan. I rarely engage with the form, but each of these is too powerful

to stay distant from. Racism, hyper-reality, economic pressure, family, handled

with subtlety and quiet desperation.

4/5

• How to Live Forever Or Die Trying (2007) by Bryan Appleyard. A versatile

thinker being critical about transhumanism and cryonics. His portrait of us as

morbid/paranoid pill-munching nerds is not obviously incorrect. The book's a bit

of a mishmash, with an extended middle section on ultimate meaning and

Medieval funeral habits not totally meshing together - and his grasp of the

science is, as he admits, insufficient. But his summation is balanced, and (

his estimate of the intractable philosophical problems and potential social

catastrophes of these disruptive technologies is at least coherent.

4/5

• Museum Without Walls (2012) by Jonathan Meades. Another favourite, the best

bellowing arts contrarian in the land. This is mostly just a collection of TV

scripts I've already seen, and though this means that we can at last catch up with

his rapid-fire aesthetic barbs, they still suffer without their inspired, bizarre

visual production. A sense of loneliness comes through on paper, where anger

and historical sweep is the dominant note in the final programmes. You can see

almost all his work at this Youtube channel. It is a fine use of a week.

4/5, for 5/5 programmes.

• No Other Place: Poetry from the Aberdeen University Review (1995). Got this

as a xmas present for someone - but I know they encourage pre-using media

presents (why wouldn't you?) so I snuck in a read-through. Lots of poems about

Aberdeen U specifically, which got me good and sentimental. The final piece, by

Archibald Wavell, is fun:

...My chin, once glossy as a nectarine,

Now looks like holly on a Christmas card,

Or straggly hawthorns in a woodland scene

Such as is deftly drawn by Fragonard;

No R.S.M. would pass me for a guard

However much I titivate and preen.

My luck would daunt a Roland or Bayard;

I left my shaving-brush at Aberdeen.

Pity me, Prince : the water here is hard,

Hourly my tongue inclines to the obscene,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

I left my shaving-brush at Aberdeen.

3/5 in general tho.

JANUARY 2013

• Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell. Was impressed by this, but I also felt a

little contempt. It has features befitting a great book: stunning detail, perfectly

historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of

multiple genres. It's too clean, somehow. Though it depicts us being preyed on

by us at our worst; though its dystopic future is a plausible extrapolation from

our current world-system, it's not as challenging as it thinks it is. Pop-

Hegel, pyrotechnic Joyce.

On structure: there are ten sudden and non-linear narrative shifts, moving back

and fore through four or five centuries in a world which almost matches our

history up to 2000CE. These sections are connected by each having a reader (the

opening sea journal being read by the Romantic composer, whose letters

are obsessed over by the journalist, whose memoir is seen by the hack editor,

whose tale is seen as an ancient film by the saintly clone, who is remembered as

a god in the post-apocalypse story that is as far forward as we see. (They are also

connected by a nice reincarnation overlay - but apart from giving brutal history

more chances to be brutal to the same people and giving matters a hint of

fatalism, I don't really get it.) The bit with the composer Frobisher is my

favourite strand: he transcends his cheeky bohemian archetype and becomes

horribly tragic despite his pig-headedness and camp pretention.

The book's last line, returning to the original C19th narrator, is a good summary

of the book's wounded, pessimistic collectivism:

&'2'

'((5''(

':5(&

-''(

':#&'(;

So: Enjoyable, ambitious, occasionally profound, unsatisfying.

4/5

• Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) by Tom Robbins. Funny, cynical comedy

about the politically radical hippies. DeLillo on MDMA (if he had less of a

problem with women). The narrator is loud (talking to his typewriter and the

moon) in the manner of Douglas Adams but with subtler prose.

%!!-

(-&---'!8&

(''&-('-

-7'!(&'

'(&'!!!$'(&'!%(

'!((&'!

While it mocks New Age politics, Robbins still loves an outlaw and a weirdo,

and so he takes on their anarchic personal project, to "preserve insanity" and all

that. ("&'!'?")

The book's conclusion is funny and irresponsible: roughly that, when faced with

a conflict between social activism and romantic individualism (as we all always

are), ditch the former. Man.

3/5.

• [A bunch of works of philosophy of essential indexicals.] Interesting stuff. It's an

oddly light-hearted debate, I suppose because the wry John Perry got to set the

tone. I'm now convinced that (some) indexicals are irreducible, and need to be

included as a base ontological category, if you're into base ontological

categorisation. So that makes for  types of things in fundamental reality:

physical units, qualia, and (some) indexicals.

3/5.

• The 80,000 Hours website. Graduates attempt to maximise the good one can do

with a life (within the system). I don't endorse every part of their bright-eyed

gradualist careerism - but it's broadly the correct way to live, so I joined up. (For

something more substantive, try Will Crouch on the ethics of career choice.)

4/5.

• Edge Magazine's Answers 2013. A portrait of the worst things in the world by

some of the cleverest people in it. Loads of people went for the cheap way out

and said "We should worry about too much worrying", which is true. Quality

varies: these are the most astonishing bits.

4.5/5.

• Is that a Fish In Your Ear? (2012) by David Bellos. Great strident stuff,

wrestling against the prevailing pessimistic dogmas of English lit and ling. (e.g.

"We can never fully understand each other as individuals or cultures." "Truth is

just power.") This is a poppy treatment of his work, but he stills manages to pack

in a lot of brilliant (original?) theory, a refutation of Sapir-Whorf in four pages,

and lots of charming stats about the state of world language today. I imagine he's

a great teacher - provocative, clear and original.

4.5/5

FEBRUARY 2013

• Read aloud: And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie. My first go

with her. Didn't guess the baddie.

3/5

• The March of Unreason (2005) by Dick Taverne. Good and grumpy attack on

the strange alliance of anti-vaxers, environmentalists, and anti-globalisers that

attack science when it shows up their ideologies. Greenpeace's internal

mechanics turn out to be quite Stalinist. Rorty is cited in this - as a man of

unreason! -and Taverne's whole chapter on postmodernism misses the point

profoundly, but still. Optimistic in the manner of successful scientists.

3/5.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman. Gentle collation of forty

years' work on systematic errors of the human mind. Basically a quieter, less

hostile version of $(which was based in equal measure on

Kahneman's research and Classical stoicism). I confess to being a bit obsessed

with the Heuristics and Biases program. They are hard ideas to grasp, no matter

how they are presented, and since the science he presents is solid - and vital for

the prosecution of a halfway rational life - I'll be back.

5/5.

• Kluge (2009) by Gary Marcus. A rare beast: a funny and humane work of

evolutionary psychology. Part of the cognitive bias project and so I am mad for

it.

4/5

• [Loads of Critical theory, Queer theory, Race studies, two sociology dictionaries,

a lot of Tumblrs, and a shower of political philosophy], for my piece on

Liberationism.

2/5

• The Social Construction of What? (1999) by Ian Hacking. Wonderful. Balanced

and humane analysis of the usually partisan matter of constructionism. I've been

sympathetic to SC for years (anyone who looks closely at gender must be), but

he is the first scientific constructionist to not irritate me. He gives an

illuminating logical analysis of the different kinds and many muddled uses of the

idea. He concludes that, in science at least, construction is a very real and

consequential process, one that cannot be dismissed by appeal to the "Context of

Justification". This is all the more plausible because (more so than Bruno

Latour), he is clearly very well-informed about the science he discusses. He's

fond of the science, even. The section where he tries to navigate the trade-off

between realism's history of oppression,  relativism's potential for totalitarian

abuse is really touching. (He concludes that he is of the wrong generation to get

behind radical constructionisms!) Required reading for anyone who wants to

use, or dismiss, the concept.

4.5/5. (First two chapters 5/5.)

MARCH 2013

• Unspeak(2006)by Steven Poole. Startling and witty linguistic analysis of

modern politics' '.

=$.,>2'((&-,!!-

'---'(!

Poole is a model for political writing in his eloquent, empirical, reasoned rage. It

is a product of the time - attacking New Labour and the Bush administration in

particular - but its principles transfer to today. Enough to radicalise anyone. I've

struck off "ethnic cleansing", "community" and "West Bank barrier" from my

active vocabulary, so should you.

4.5/5

• Everything Zach Weiner has published online, including his reading lists (2005-

13). He's just a really inspiring guy. A literature graduate, now studying physics,

his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has an amazing wry grasp of

basically every academic field. His jokes are sceptical and romantic, puerile and

hyperintelligent. (Unlike most topics, there are not enough jokes about

economists being bastards!) His science podcast with his wife is badly recorded

but always worthwhile, his Youtube group is always funny and often

transcendent, and even many of his blogged offcuts are charming- see in

particular this one about the future of the library. /mancrush.

4/5

• How to be an Existentialist (2011) by Gary Cox. Chatty, trite, and

presumptuous. ("Young people are stupid", "disabled people should stop

moping" "political correctness is oppressing me".) It is at least trying to process

the massive abstractions into an accessible intro, but ends up childish and

uncritical. He's a tenured academic, too! Taken as systematic description of the

real world, Existentialism is a fruitless neo-Kantian mess. Taken as extreme

postwar poetry or stoic-fictionalist cognitive stance, it is beautiful and stark.

2/5.

• My Uncle Oswald (1979) by Roald Dahl. Comic novella about raping famous

men for money. I got appalled at this here, but without denying it’s a great read.

3/5. (1/5 if you're sensitive to deadpan horror.)

• Social Identity (2003) by Richard Jenkins. Was drawn in by the cute epigrams

("Everybody needs somebody"), but this is turgid. Sociology/anthropology

mix, producing an airless, evidence-poor citation-circle-jerk. Reading around, I

find this to be typical of the field.

1/5.

• 'The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality & What

to Do About It" (2010) by Joshua David Greene. The first PhD I've ever read: a

witty and authoritative piece of meta-ethics. He surveys almost every large

approach under the criteria of strong naturalism, and concludes that anti-realist

utilitarianism is the least unsatisfying - which is handy, since I just read 377 A4

pages, and anything that long had damn well better confirm my prejudices.

4.5/5

New Zealandish propaganda about New Zealandish propaganda (1917)

.(8!

%&(&&

2'(--

?((!

%((8'!!!

'-8

'((:

– Wei Tai (C11th)

Was in a sciencey mood. (This makes my ravishing encounter with Rorty - the greatest

of the irrealist literary crusaders - more notable still.) Science is most easily taken in via

sweet funny geeks - so I returned to scifi for the first time in years. Poetry overtook me

mid-May. Been active, but the increase in reading is really just redistribution, taken

from my crash news diet and cutting down on my beloved web aggregators

(3QuarksDaily, Wood S Lot, and Arts & Letters Daily). Some long gushes here; forgive.

APRIL 2013

• Read aloud: Trial of the Clone (2012) by Zach Weinersmith. Super-fun choose-

your-own-adventure book. It's a satire of Star Wars and classic scifi, your

character's greed and passive aggression matched only by his/her incompetence.

Bellylaughed a lot, which is unusual for me. Sometimes the gags fall back

on scat when it gets tired of mocking religion, but I mean that in the best

possible way.

4/5. [Read twice, one and a half hours each]

• Mogworld (2010) by Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. Similar to -this is a pop-

postmodern treatment of its genre's conventions, for fantasy: it's self-aware

videogame NPCs living and suffering in an uninspired swords-n-sorcery MMO.

The parts where the characters begin to realise that the gods are incompetent

nerds are my favourite. It doesn't have the vitriol of his famed game reviews, but

the ending is suitably brutal, and there is a sad tension throughout (the

protagonist repeatedly and sincerely asks to be killed) which elevates things a

bit.

3/5. [4 hours, lightly]

• Thinking About Texts (2001) by Richard Hopkins. Just an A-level English

textbook, with good, long extracts and scrupulous presentation of alt

perspectives. English students at my university were taught very little Theory

indeed - and while this made discussions much less pompous, they were also

kinda toothless. Without theory, the subject "English" has little to distinguish it,

being as it is just an odd dilution of philosophy tied to narrow history of ideas

with sprinklings of sexy concepts from newer humanities (e.g. Media

studies, Race studies, Queer theory, Area studies). Anyway: tutorials would have

been less unbearable if this book had been ubiquitous.

3/5 (4/5 for culture people.) [6 hours]

• Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in C20th Art (2002) by Wendy Steiner.

Warm, masterful. Main thesis is that beauty and women were so intertwined a

hundred years ago that Modernism, as rejection of old beauties, was essentially

misogynistic - in form, as well as just in its practitioners. Furthermore, that this

misogyny, as part of a wider smashing of old things, was key to feminism finally

breaking out and establishing new options for women. Convincing.

4/5. [5 hours]

• Key Concepts: Gender (2006) by Tina Chanter. Annoying: conventionally

unconventional, dogmatically anti-dogmatic. I've been looking for a

good introduction to give to Questioning friends. This is not that. (Is it a

coincidence that the best popularisers - Paglia, Greer, Moran - are all highly

problematic feminists?) It manages to make the most exciting parts of current

feminism - standpoint theory, Calhoun's post-deconstruction ideas - sound dull,

dense and theoretically empty, as if it were the same kind of navel-gazing

theorism as the hyperinflated Althusserian-Foucauldian stuff. (To be fair, 

overview has to cover French theory, because that's what our counter-gender

people have actually been up to. But not necessarily with this much

blind acceptance.)

You get the impression that the only progress in feminist thought is in calling

your predecessors timid or bigoted - JS Mill calls out the Victorians, Okin calls

out JS Mill, Butler calls out Okin, Wittig calls out Butler, and then Calhoun calls

 heteronormative(!). The book does give a breakdown of French feminism

in slightly less abstruse language, and goes through all the Waves, including the

intentionally confused interference-wave that is pomo-poco gender

studies. And it's brief.

2/5. [3 hours]

• Turn Off Your Mind (2003) by Gary Lachmann. I'm a sucker for this book's

thesis: that Charles Manson, Scientology, and Altamont were not horrible

subversions of the 60s' ideology - but its logical conclusion! The book's a series

of pop history lessons, and is in fact a bit too full of sections like: "...and then

Ram Dass went to India and met Guru McFamous who also knew Bastard

McProfound who was notorious for writing a best-selling book of consciousness

revolution and being racist for kicks". A fairly clear-eyed account of a bunch of

fucking creeps who still have cultural capital.

3/5. [3 hours, very lightly]

• Audiobook:The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps (2011-3) by Peter

Adamson. Ongoing series of free podcasts. It's mostly introductory, the standard

readings plus the odd surprising debunking (e.g. "Heraclitus is not a philosopher

of chaos"). Not a massive amount of women here, even given that he's going

through the Medievals and Islamic Golden Age atm. (Hypatia? Arete? Heloise?

Hildegard of Bingen?)

3/5. [30 hours with my ears]

• Conundrum (1974) by Jan Morris. "%((

%%&&&-&!%

'''." Memoir by our first trans national treasure. (Even

the  said:

'('8-'&

'&@.

!!) Her:

%-(%(8

!!!%A'B

%!%%'!%

'2-'

!

While it's technically detailed - dealing with the nittygritty of eight years of

medical tourism, voice training, colleague adjustment, and a compulsory divorce

from her wife - it leaves lots about the subjective experience of 

unanalysed. Which is both fine and disappointing.

4/5. [3 hours]

• Map and Territory (2010) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Manifesto for LessWrong's

radical empiricism, and a genuinely good intro to epistemology (and formal

epistemology) to boot. Being a tricksy wishywashy philosophy student, I

unfortunately can't follow them in stamping Bayesian-Quinean realism as The

straightforward answer to everything (as he says, "the simple truth"), but I

admire Yudkowsky's hard-headedness, technical creativity, and style a whole lot.

4*/5. (LessWrong is reliably between 3*/5 and 5/5.) [2 hours.]

• Capitalist Realism (2012) by Mark Fisher. Short book by one of Britain's

premier net intellectuals, trying to demystify the Hegel/Baudrillard approach to

society, existence, and pop culture. He is humane, focussing on why we might

think we need these Theorists, and he does well to handle critical theory without

the field's usual airless, salacious presumptiveness. But it's still logic chopping

without the logic. YMMV.

3/5. [3 hours. (Short; not simple)]

• The "Transcendental Analytic" (1787) by Immanuel Kant. Difficult, flashy

apodixis. His arguments are gappy; prose awful; goals anyway radically different

from mine (he wanted certainty, exhaustiveness, the establishment of free will at

any metaphysical cost: a.k.a. submission).

NB: The  is only about 1/8th of his )B.! I don't

doubt that there's enough subtlety and complexity to spend a career reading him.

I just doubt there's world enough and time for ' to return for the rest.

2/5. [14 hours, including modern help.]

• Anglo-English Attitudes (2013) by Geoff Dyer. Stunning bunch of 3- or 4-page

essays. Often on French or Italian figures or places (Althusser, Cartier-Bresson)

or unusual objects of aesthetics (Action Man). What we call "research" is

just incidental to Dyer - glittering coincidences and correlations fall into his lap

as he sets about reading, apparently, everything.

4/5. [2 hours, skipping some of the French ones]

• Read aloud: Until Before After(2011) by Ciaran Carson. Solemnly blatant.

Plainly good. 157 unpunctuated sentence-poems, each poem holding maybe

three jarring, run-on thoughts. It's melancholy, about loss, time and rhythm,

but present itself as neither pitiful nor gnostic. It's really difficult to parse, but

you don't resent that. There's a shout-out to China Miéville in the back, which is

mad! because these poems are stylistically nothing like Miéville's clotted,

neologistic prose. There are maybe 2 words less than a hundred years old in the

whole book ("credit card"). Closer inspection.

4/5. [Twice = 2 hours]

• Hijack Reality: Deptford X(2008) by Bob and Roberta Smith. Aggrandised

history of a cute London art festival he helped found. I'm not much into zany

(atm. Art, as an institution, seems much more hollow and ritualistic than

it recently did. Which leads me to wonder: am I on the CP-Snow-seesaw? Does

my current enthusiasm for science mean I must gain some contempt for

arts? (Art might be the proper home of structuralist waffle - being, as it

sometimes is, a floating system of signs with no correspondence or weight.)

Anyway, this gets an extra point for being starry-eyed and literally democratic -

too rare in art today.

3/5. [< hour.]

• Read aloud: Aphorisms (1838) by Napoleon Bonaparte, compiled by Honore de

Balzac. Not very good, mostly. He's obviously  independent - e.g. there's

lots of praise for Muhammad here, lots of fearless anticlerical scepticism, lots of

examination of despots. He's not coherent at all - he's & an anti-intellectual

"man of action" and a shiny-eyed Enlightenment rationalist; Machiavellian

bastard  Aristotelian virtue-seeker; imperial elitist  populist revolutionary.

Consider: Napoleon caused the deaths of between 3 and 7 million people (i.e.

0.5% of every person alive at the time), imposing significant effects on almost

the entire world - and he's a very average writer. Read him next to Nietzsche,

who plausibly never harmed anyone in his entire life, but whose writing stills

scorches and stuns us. (This gets better when we remember that Nietzsche

considered Napoleon one of a handful of people who have been truly 'great'.)

Charitable reading: We happen to have caught up with Napoleon's thoughts, but

not with Nietzsche's.

Some good lines that don't depend on their speaker being extraordinary

for impact:

#8'&

!

.2&'2''

''(!

$(&8((

+C

2/5.DEF

MAY 2013

• The whole of the Open University course MST125.I am a really bad student. I

am @promising enough, @engaged enough for my laziness and bluffing to

be actively shameful rather than a mere sad fact. (I expect glory regardless.) This

course is obviously as abstract as can be, but the occasional human fact still

breaks in - e.g. when the anonymous author(s) complain about the chilling effect

Christianity had on the development of probabilistic reasoning. This is funny. I

excuse my own lack of drive here.

2/5. [60 hours, including ratiocination.]

• Read aloud(!): Perdido Street Station (2000) by China Miéville. Enormous

steampunk social commentary dressed in gorgeous nasty prose (think Nabokov

on America). This is science fiction. His dank, evil city, 'New Crobuzon',

is a dark mirror of Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork (itself a funhouse mirror of

Elizabethan London) without its animating sense of fun and justice. Instead, it

has fearsome class consciousness; satires on academic, tabloid and political

speech, misogyny, and the deeply tainted political economy of

science/capital/government.

%&'!-

+C('-

8&&8---

'-&&'!

9'8-

9!&'8

-''8&

.

What I take to be the central metaphor: one of the oppressed races are found to

have a native power - the 'potential energy of crisis' - which, with a scientific

harness, could revolutionise the world: i.e. Classical Marxism. Our heroes are

not especially heroic. In the face of The City, no one has all that much power.

4*/5. [22 hours, because spoken]

• The Marxists (1962) by C Wright Mills. I take this to be a fair appraisal of the

development of the great opposer. Book is mainly extracts from brilliant, now-

obscure theorists and commentators (e.g. Kardelj, Luxembourg, GDH Cole).

Mills is anti-Stalinist and anti-McCarthyist - i.e. he took what we now take to be

the only virtuous path through the marsh of the day - which required

considerable bravery and fairness (as the respective failures of Orwell and Sartre

on the matter show). The chapter on "How Not to Criticise Marxism" is

amazing, distinguishing types of Marxist that people still confuse these days. He

died just before publishing this, thus missing the great wave of neo-idealism

from Frankfurt, a wave that more determines the character of today's radical Left

than the classical economics detailed herein. He wouldn’t be one of them.

4/5. [5 hours, some skipping.]

• The Rorty Reader (2009) by Richard Rorty. Epochal, encompassing, uplifting.

I've been in love with the  of Rorty for years. (He is: the renegade

Analytic, the outrageous unifier, the literary soul, the pessimistic utopian, the

great puncturer, and the bravest postmodernist by far - because he just comes out

and  it, bites the bizarre bullets.) He is illuminating about philosophy of

mind, poetry, foundationalism, the public/private divide, feminism, America,

MacKinnon, Derrida, Davidson, and Dewey (obv), among lots of other

things. One can usually taste meanness in postmodern writing - stemming, I

suppose, from our sense of being hopelessly undermined by it - but never in

Rorty. I found this really hard going - I've been reading it since January - despite

his being utterly clear, original and sometimes funny.

5?/5. [Long. 40 hours?]

• Surface Detail (2010) by Iain 'M' Banks. Meditation on consequentialism and

moral progress, only more fun than that sounds. (")B

8.") I'm a big fan of his Culture novels, but this is only good.

Spends 300 pages setting up its thirteen protagonists into like seven plot threads.

As a result, he has to repeat a lot of exposition to keep us - including, in one

instance, a full page of quoted dialogue which we'd heard 50 pages back. Oddly

simplistic despite its fifth-order intentionality, then. $fills out some

of the mechanisms and organisation of the Culture; throws his usual bucket of

ideas at the plot (graphic descriptions of Hell, a first-person account of an

aquatic, hair-thick species, an extended section in a Medieval convent) and

keeps a good amount of tension and mental strain going. Good, full of simple

dramatised philosophy.

4/5. [6 hours]

• Matter (2008) by I M Banks. This entry's mostly set on a C17th world, the rest

given over to barely interesting galactic politics. The Culture novels feel free to

wave away technological plot devices with talk of "energy grid!" or "nanotech!",

but Banks shows off hard-scifi cred here, giving a few lovely, moving images

based on meteorology and astrophysics. A scathing note on the current-affairs

blogosphere:

(+(&'8(''-

-(+(!!!'-

-8!

'(-8-'@@

'(.

Ending is good and brutal, made me stop and infer for ten mins afterward. So,

yeah, Banks has been playing the same "ooh, neo-colonialism", "ooh,

consequences", "ooh, angst in utopia" note for a while. But it's a  note.

3/5 for a 4/5 series. [5 hours.]

• Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner (1987) by Alastair Reid. So

beautiful: set of long essays punctuated with poems. He's a poet,

Hispanicist, translator and long-time New Yorkerer. He was right there when the

Latin American lit boom began, giving Neruda a home in London - mates with

Marquez, insofar as anyone is. I like his prose even better than his excellent

poems.

--&'!-

((8''((-

''&(GGA&-

&&-'-!%

&&

'-8.

I love him for his scepticism about identity - the piece on returning "home" to

Scotland is great & of his distance from it. "Scotland":

%(((-



''!

*&!

8(-

!

-%--

''2(!H:

%-''!

8;

&&-8

('

9(-9(-9(:

5?/5. [3 hours]

• Desperate Characters(1970) by Paula Fox. Amazing, portentious realism. Wife:

"Oh, never mind what I say." Husband: "I don't and I can't." Fox draws intense,

evil significance out of ordinary irritations (a cat bite, a smashed window, a feud

at work) - as we do when at our lowest. It's dark without being Gothic;

apocalyptic without melodrama; heartbroken without self-pity. On a hospital

waiting room:

%-'-&

''''

!%'&

'!4''(-

&'(&!'

(+((-

'((---'-

'''(&-(

(-'!!!&B'

&--(-&8(&

('''(-

...

The quiet, careful way that 8 character is sketched in their paranoia is

convincing, and unnerving. Sure, it's about upper-middle class people's pain, but

that's still pain. The least tractable kind, in fact.

4/5. [4 hours]

• Stuff White People Like eBook (2010) by Christian Lander. Didn't really get the

point of this. It mocks a certain small, ridiculous group - C21st upper-middle-

class lefty American hipsters -and sets them up as the whitest people in the

world. I'm in the same boat as the author - white guy liking "white" things (

-green tea, public transport, Europe) and worrying that this marks my

participation in class trends that exclude people. I also share his contempt of

people with contempt for practicality. So this is, I suppose, a handy guide to the

fads of a certain group of middlebrows in our particular cultural moment. Insofar

as it encourages actual class consciousness among alt.consumerist hipsters:

hooray. Insofar as it sneers at trends that actually could change the world if

adopted en masse (e.g. vegism, bikes, actual diversity, engaging with foreign

art), boo.

2/5. [1 hour.]

• An Embarrassing Book Title (2010) by Tim Ferriss. Hodgepodge of extreme,

supposedly scientific Pareto "lifehacks" for: rapid weight-loss, lazy

bodybuilding, polyphasic sleep blah, regeneration from chronic injury, DIY

female orgasm therapy. (One of the worst tropes in reading culture is the stupid

presumption that '((8. So, I feel bound

to mention that I'm not interested in the stats-obsessed quasi-pro-ana muscle

busywork this book centres around; I don't like his Silicon Valley

technicism either; his conspicuous consumption of medical attention is risible

("Just $3800 four times a year for this battery of vanity tests!"); as is his

desperate name-dropping self-promotion.) Came across it in the course of my

new favourite hobby: grazing on other peoples' Kindles. Ferriss has a ... creative

grasp of biochemistry, and his brute lack of self-doubt lets him be productively

provocative (e.g. "I do not accept the Lipid Hypothesis of cardiac disease"; "DO

NOT EAT FRUIT"). He quotes heavily from more expert people, and he does 

everything he advocates. The main advantage of him is that he is fearless about

ridicule, actually following what he sees as the evidence. Thus there's a long

section on the bodybuilding potential of vegetarian diets - which got him lots of

scorn from the meathead-o-sphere - as well as an idiosyncratic list of the

substrates that vegists are often missing. (Boron, anyone?)

Alongside the unreflective drive to thinness, his most telling concern is his

fixation on testosterone and morbid fear of infertility. So I scoffed at his fear of

phones irradiating his testicles - but there actually is reason to think so. Less

annoying than your average loud guru pseud.

3/5. (1 hour, lots of skipping - which he actually explicitly recommends.)

• Blood Meridian(1985) by Cormac McCarthy. Say it is 1985 A.P. (After

Peckinpah). How can anyonewrite anything new about poor white psychopaths

in the hot rural places of Victorian America?

The answer turns out simple: just have prose so tight and freshening - a jet hose

comprising one-third Bible, one-third Emerson, one-third Ballard - that you

again uncover the elemental bones of the Western. Also savagely de-emphasise

your characters. Place them in enormous, indifferent vistas; give us no inner

monologue - nor even indirect report of subjective life; have no speech marks to

set their words apart from the landscapes (do not draw the eye to their presumed

humanity); have no apostrophes, no hyphens even, lest we remember; have as

few names as possible, leave them as types - "kid" or "captain" or "mexican" or

"brave"; set their incredible violence among such vast places it looks like little;

have few capital letters but for God's. Lock your readers out; make everyone and

everything opaque. (As he says himself:

%('

&BB(

&('(.

These cowboys and injuns punctuate the beautiful land of Central America with

hanged babies; rings of decapitate heads; a four-eyed dog; a man calmly eating

his own shit; endless thirsty hallucinogenic despair. This is exhausting, quite

hard to read:

&!$

8-!%'

&('!

'!!!

(&8'

((((

(&'(&

'!!!'&8

'

&.

(As well as this Nabokovian trudge through the middle section, McCarthy

sometimes steers close to the comical with sentences like "%

&((!") A typical human interaction in this

book is "The kid looked at the man"; no more. There's plenty of grandeur - just

not in humans. At the centre of the book stands the Judge - Satan, Ahab and

Moby Dick all in one. ("His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment.")

Racism, fear and poverty form the baseline. The Comanches, for instance, are

here worse than demons

!!!B&'('!!!

('''&

&')!!!

- "at least demons are Christian"!

Lots of descriptions of the stars, inbetween brutalities

((

&&

'&!!!&+

'&'

'8!

For the first time I understand why Aristotle's physics divides the world into

different celestial and terranean operations: from down here back then, the stars

look so clean and permanent, they're just not of our world, dirty, unhinged, and

endangered as it has been, for almost everyone.

4*/5, but I understand if it's 2/5 for you. (11 long hours)

JUNE 2013

• Open City(2010) by Teju Cole. Careful, slow-burning diary-novel. We follow

Julius, an upper-middle New Yorker doctor who lives, largely, in the absence of

overt reference to his race (half-Nigerian, half-German). For existential reasons,

and observes. ("2-%-

'8?-

&.") Cole mixes in plenty of banality, setting up the tension

to come, in which the brooded past breaks in, and freedom (in its American,

European and larger, shadowy senses) is weighed up and found to be a

very mixed bag. The most interesting & flawed character is the Moroccan

critical theorist Farouq - a hypereducated livewire working in an internet cafe.

Who probably got to me because I flatter myself to be like him... if I had racism

and massive chips on both shoulders to deal with.

4/5. (4 hours.)

• Read aloud: Stranger Music (1993) by Leonard Cohen. I don't think he's

depressing! Does that make me in some way broken? Anyway: Cohen the

Jewish Buddhist leverages literary power from a faith he does not own: his

poems are thus as erotic and grotesque as the best Christian writing. Much

funnier and more concrete than his songs, too. Sure, 8' in his

work, but it's also banal, and these often admit they're ridiculous. To my surprise

he is never obscure; to my relief he is never fatally wounded by the vicious

retribution his many flaws invite. His is a gnarled urban spirituality.

A strong, unlikely comparison: Bukowski. They both fixate on: plain poems

about poems, bitter desire, nakedness, grandiose self-loathing, losers in love, and

the significance of everyday things. (Look at this: "The art of longing's over and

it's never coming back.") Speaking of Bukowski: is Cohen sexist? Arguable. For

every slap in the face like 'Diamonds in the Mine', there are several tendernesses

('Portrait of a Lady') and self-aware apologies for lust. I would say: shocking and

honest about patriarchal shapes, generally not unfeminist. ("#

'(I$%8'.") Moments of chastity

inamongst the randy fury - for instance he never says 'God', always 'G-d'. Lots

about the Holocaust too, mostly its banal consequences.

>'

&!

(''8

'.

The newer stuff is generally weak, because less wry, profane and specific.

(4/5 with lots of 5/5 moments: 'French and English', 'Israel', 'A Working Man',

'Queen Victoria and Me', 'Montreal' 'Hydra 1960', 'A Cross Didn't Fall on Me',

'Disguises', 'It's Probably Spring'.)

• Altered Carbon (2002) by Richard Morgan. Class act: cyberpunk without cheap

gothic neon and lolspeak; noir without cartoonish conventions. A meditation on

identity and consent via sex and violence. Genuinely.

The Scene: Consciousness can be up- and downloaded. In this world, if you are

rich enough, !If you're richer than that, you can be uploaded into a

young clone of yourself - otherwise you take whatever marginalised corpse is

going and adjust your sense of self to fit. Advertising can be beamed

obtrusively into your mind. The UN has become a Shady Galactic Empire.

He picks out implications from this tech brilliantly (e.g. what happens to

celebrity culture?). The inevitable neologisms are excellent, intensely suggestive

of the new culture's inner life: death is just "storage"; bodies are just "sleeves"

and to be reincarnated is to be "sleeved"; a plasma gun is a "sunjet". Murder is

just "organic damage". Catholics are (once again) the world's underclass - unable

to travel interstellar because it involves casual storage (suicide) and resleeving

(heresy), and killed with near-impunity because they alone cannot 

'.

Cartoonish moments: our anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs is attacked or apprehended 7

times in the first 150 pages.) People transition gender with regularity. Morgan

makes a bold essentialist statement, which is somewhat backed-up:

&'+(&'!!!'-

&!'!

8!

(Kovacs is tortured, horrifically, as a woman.) It is strongly implied - not least by

our trained-psychopath protagonist - that this transhuman society is more

psychopathic, owing to the lower stakes of violence, injury, and taboo-

breaking. Gritty but not just gratuitous. Better than Gibson.

4/5, at least. (9 hours.)

• Read aloud: Poems of the Late T'ang(8th & 9th Century)-translated by Angus

Charles Thomas (1965). I've been playing at knowing China for years, but of

course I do not. (For instance, I picked this calm, modest book up unwittingly,

and learn it is the gold standard translation by the greatest Western sinologist of

the day.) It's a great hook: supposedly, Chinese poetry (world poetry?) peaked in

the Ninth Century. For almost their whole history, passion and violence were

considered inappropriate topics for poetry! They resented melodrama and

fantasy in their poets! I must be jaded to think this is great. The poets seem all to

be old men trying not to care about death - "snail shell men", in Ancient Chinese.

They are mainly ultra-concrete - lots of masterpieces about mountains and rice

and fish. Graham is a droll, masterful guide, making the requisite comparisons to

Baudelaire and Pound for me, the clunking reader. (I can only assume the

strange meters he uses are good approximations to the original.) The war

between Confucianism and Buddhism is prominent here, and is hard for me to

imagine -probably because I have a Hollywood understanding of these two

"serene" "coping" philosophies. Li Shangyin's (李商隐的) "Written on a

Monastery Wall":

@!(&!

(&-(((&'

!

$-'8

$'-((!

&'&

'&--''&'(!

%%8

('(&.

Like a typical Westerner, I like the weirdoes: Li He (李賀), who's their wild

fantasist (Blake?) and Meng Jiao (孟郊), barren kin of Poe. I enjoyed this, but

don't really have the tools to judge:

TBC / 5. (3 hours)

• Read aloud: De Rerum Natura / The Nature of Things (-0060) by Lucretius,

translated by Alice Stallings. An epic, declarative philosophy of peace and pre-

scientific science. Lucretius poses a serious problem for a neat theory of poetry I

like (from IA Richards): the claim that poetry's meaning and significance is

almost independent of its truth-value; that poetic language is thus the opposite of

scientific language, in which truth-value is the first and critical quantity. 

' messes with this because it explicitly sets out to lecture us on the ultimate

reality of all things in verse. (Maybe I can say that "from the European

Renaissance onwards" poetry becomes the land of the irrelevant fact.) Anyway:

long, full of skippable stuff about a random rich guy (Memmius), but also a

catchy guide to Epicurus, the most modern and loveable Attic Greek. (He was

secular, undramatic, naturalist, tolerant, good-humoured...)

&8

8'!

8-

(??

2&8'?

'&?

&-&-B?

(8-(?

&'(-'&

(-(&(-&8

Also worth reading for the ironies of Epicurus' lucky guesses and near-misses -

e.g. ghosts aren't real: there are just images of mental atoms, and so on.

4/5. (3 hours.)

• Wild Harbour (1936) by Ian Macpherson. Post-apocalyptic Morayshire folk do

Cold War survivalism before the Cold War? I was of course primed to love this,

but it's a lead ball of a book, drab and flattened. This probably makes it a

brilliant picture of the era's background of vast fear, but that doesn't make for a

good read. The three characters are just scared, and though their hardships are

harsh indeed, they're oddly unaffecting. The political economy that drove them

out there is completely absent, only represented by sketches of bland armed

thugs. Nor is the world-justifying love of the central couple convincing, either.

So it's tragic, but in no meaningful or honourable way. The prose does

sometimes have a lovely Doric lilt - J&!8

$(-(!%

'@--!" - and local loons

will get a kick out of it.

2/5. (2 hours)

• Read aloud: Of Mutability (2010) by Jo Shapcott. Wasn't this '8, as

contemporary poetry goes? ('What dyou mean it's on display in the of the

shop?') Of water, London, transformation, plainness. It's a moderate book.

Moderately sad, moderately whimsical, moderately vulgar ("Piss Flower"),

moderately modern, moderately transcendental. Good. Am I supposed to say this

makes it immoderately British?

3/5. (1 hour)

• Read aloud: Women's Poetry of the 1930s (1996), edited by Jane Dowson.

Raising up unjustly obscure things is one of the main points of having academics

around. However, half the poets in this actually refused to be segregated in their

lifetime (that is, refused to be anthologised as women, or at all). Dowson is

candid about this, and half the book is just suggestive little biographies as a

result. Though she is shackled to the humanities' chaste, hyper-qualified prose

%8

-(((

+(''!!!@

'!!!

and their fear of judgment / love of equivocation

%8('&(&-

8'&+!!!

it's not exactly hateful. Whether through Dowson's bias or the necessities of the

time, these poets are even more independent than their male counterparts. Of

those selected, Stevie Smith and Edith Sitwell are already fully reclaimed as the

canonical boss ladies they are. Two big oversights of mine: Naomi Mitchison

and Sylvia Townshend Warner. Mitchison is amazing - wise when wounded,

droll and passionate, politicised but never journalistic: check out "To Some

Young Communists", "Woman Alone", "Old Love and New Love". Warner is

both blunt and metaphysical. (Others are just passable. Vita Sackville-West's

are surprisingly poor, in fact. Highlights: "Beauty the Lover's Gift?" (bitter

objectification); "Pastoral" (Manly Hopkins after empire). "A Woman Knitting"

(the infinite in the finite); "Song of the Virtuous Female Spider" (satirising pious

motherhood clichés); "The Sick Assailant" (rare for the time: male violence

focus); "On August the Thirteenth" (on abruptness, gentle impotence of human

pretensions).

4/5. (5 hours)

• Read aloud: Red Ice (1987) by Colin Mackay. Bitter, accusatory collection from

a self-described "European pessimist" (i.e. Diogenes, Hobbes, Arnold,

Spengler, Schopenhauer). Politically betrayed, he goes in for nihilism.

&

('!

Aside: Mackay had a bloody tragic life, suffered without even any thrilling

hubris or heroic end. Of course, many, many Canon artists had unusually hard

lives and/or mood disorders. But it's not necessarily that ((&

in general. Instead, readers - we cheap egoists - are just not receptive to others:

we need to be woken up to a book, whether that's by recommendation, or

biographical detail, or some other gimmick. A tragic biography is the most

reliable primer. (Witness the death bump.) I would love Mackay's poems to be

incredible; I've never been as primed as I was by reading Mackay's published

suicide diary.

But they're just ok. Of moons, angels, deserts, atomisation, Hendrix. % was

written well before Bosnia (the crowning, horror of his life), but

it's already overflowing with dense ruined empathy and snarly emptiness and

survivor's guilt.

Are there great paintings in only black and grey? Well, yes, sort of. Calvary

features four times in twenty poems. (J''I

8(I

J) Mackay was playing at genocide logic, forty years after Adorno and

twenty-five after Geoffrey Hill. (Does it matter, being  to the worst thing

ever? No, but do it right, do it new.) The brute fact of the C20th drives him

to nostalgia and lairy isolation

[I said] %&'

[he said] 2

.

So the poems are chaste and flat, romanticism with the innocent wonder ripped

out; unleavened except for his spurious racial memory of everything being ok,

once. (Wordsworth at Katyn.) (I do not think highly of Wordsworth.)

The long title poem has automatic force, being as it is about the gulags and the

shame of Stalin apologism (and same of Lenin, tbf). But it's also uncompressed,

clumsy with rage ("('!"). It contains a direct

condemnation of MacDiarmid, which is rare and titillating. On the like of his

and Sartre's hypocritical silence on Stalinism:

[They said to]

"''(:J

8')''-

+(!

%'%

+(!!!"

There is one poem that gets somewhere: "Phantoms", a fast, vocal,

twisted/triumphant repudiation of war and hippies alike. And "Holy, Wholly

My Own" is admirable Golden Age crap. Faint praise: 'Nightwatchman of

the lonely ex-socialist Scot's soul'.

Anyway: for loads of reasons it's not nice to attack the '

in art. 1) They are still good, when they're good; 2) they are often Witnesses,

speakers-against-power, and anyone can be crushed and saddened by having

to do that; 3) leave them some bloody consolation!

2/5. (2 hours)

Dead confused in September: read three people with absolutely different politics, one

after another. First, Clive James, who in latter years is the consummate droll liberal

railing against both wings of partisans: he’s against celebrity culture, Ostalgie, and anti-

American critical-theoretical cuteness, but also ‘clash of civilisation’ nonsense, socially

destructive austerity and conservatism in the arts.

Next, James Kelman. Kelman’s what I call a &, a beautiful and extreme

sociologised Leftist focussing on society’s failures, exclusions and legal crimes, who

demands much of themselves and everyone else (but who does so via a terrible error:

reducing the world whole to politics).

Lastly, John Gray, the really disturbing wildcard. Technically a (radical) conservative,

Gray actually agrees with no-one. He is anti-Communist in the highest degree, but anti-

torture, anti-war, anti-Thatcherism, anti-Hayek too(!) His dreadful challenge – backed

by considerable historical understanding and true scepticism – is that we, humans, have

problems that will not go away, and that attempts to make them will only make matters

worse. Is this true? (Isn’t this exactly the attitude a dominant system trying to perpetuate

itself would spread?) But that's circumstantial, ignoring how well-supported Gray’s

pessimism is (...)

Kelman and Gray agree that old-style liberalism (universalism plus rationalism equals

justice) is made untenable by multicultural life – so Kelman bites one bullet, shedding

universalism; Gray bites another, shedding rationalism (and therefore progress). James

bites neither, and seems to get on alright

JULY 2013

• Building Stories (2012) by Chris Ware. Enormous, 3kg, 150-piece jigsaw-comic

about ordinary desperation at varying physical scales (from anthropomorphised

insect up to anthropomorphised house). I actually resented the format at first -

it's a unwieldy doorstop that cannot be read outside - but by the end is a pleasing

experiment: that Ware has succeeded in making the order of reading more or less

irrelevant is of course incredible.

4/5.

• Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989) by Liz Lochhead.

Never read her before. Not sure how she slipped me by, given the absolute

consensus in about her, as Greatest Living Literary Yay. It’s hard to picture in my

head – there’s lots of disjointed speech and speaking to camera – but no doubt it

was important to take Mary off the shortbread tin and into her real, human sense

of betrayal.

3/5.

• Learning to Live: A User's Manual (2010) by Luc Ferry. Awful title, awful

cover, but interesting from start to finish. Fleeting pop tour of the development

of philosophy (particularly the Continent), with an emphasis on those moderns

who do eudaemonic life-work. Ferry is a compleat product of 's elite École

culture – Sorbonne, philosophy prof, did his time in Office - but his insistence on

clarity, even when talking about the likes of Bourdieu and Gadamer, and his

rejection of their anti-humanism is somehow free of elitism. Another instance of

the biggest trope in pop philosophy: 'reclaiming philosophy from the analysts'.

Makes Nietzsche out as more unavoidable than he is?

3/5.

• Reread: Master of Reality (2008) by John Darnielle. Totally crushing, beautiful

portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and Black Sabbath, from a

man uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-psychiatric-nurse metal

fan, also 's greatest lyricist of neurosis, delusion, and the car running on vapours

but still running). That's heavy.

4/5.

• Unstated: writers on Scottish Independence (2012), edited by Scott Hames.

Bunch of generally radical Scots thinking things through. It’s good, occasionally

surprising. The entry by Asher is a ( example of the horrible clotted prose

of the humanities today, form as wall obscuring content, assuming there actually

is content behind it. In summary:

- John Aberdein: The SNP suck. We already control plenty and little

changed. Still we must go independent to have any hope of foiling

capitalism. Take the fisheries and mines, and take out tax evaders.

-Armstrong: SNP are crypto-unionists. Diluters! (They’re keeping ,

the Queen, NATO, same bankers, low tax.) Need "Internationalism

from below".

- Alan Bissett: We are atomised because of Thatcher. Class never

went away. Despite the jokes, do not underestimate what 8

and (did for us. May 2011 majority is The Moment. 's

Yes will inspire change elsewhere.

- Jo Calder: , for proper arts funding(!)

- Margi: is a woman.

- Suhayl Saadi: Wooo! Waa! Hypercognitivist hoots mon!

…

4/5.

• Shakespeare (1990) by Germaine Greer. Was expecting this to be theory-laden

and partisan, but the keynote of its 80 pages is just love, context and facts,

deflating the man-myth while insisting on the incredibly modern philosophy to

be found in him.

3/5.

help blah books do. (It doesn’t help that the sequel is a dialogue with the Dalai

Lama - who, though an incredible, important world figure, isn’t exactly an

authority on contemporary cognitive science.) The core claim seems important:

“IQ, abstract fluid intelligence, is separable from EQ, the rapid and humane

understanding of social situations, emotional networks, and intentionality.” I

want to believe, but this isn’t enough.

3/5.

• A Chinese Anthology (1984) edited by Raymond van Over. Bunch of parables

and fairytales taken from three millenia. Fun, and Other to me. Van Over has a

thing for Pu Songling, the vernacular master of the form shunned by the

mandarin system because of his colloquial and ornamental style. I’m not sure I

learned much, but it beats Aesop.

3/5

• Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (2000) by Lewis Wolpert. I

am disposed to dislike Wolpert - he's anti-philosophy in the most tired scientistic

way - but this is clear, historical, philosophical stuff, and since he suffers from a

filthy case himself he can wield authority properly for once. The chapters on the

cultural variation in the expression of the illness (e.g. as a result of even more

intense disdain for mental illness, Asians tend to report its symptoms as physical

ailments rather than mental malaise) is startling to hear coming from such a

conservative scientist, and all the more persuasive as a result. Learnt a very good

word, too: "somatisation".

3/5.

AUGUST 2013

• Nothing to Envy: Real Tales from North Korea (2010) by Barbara Demick.

Horrible portrait of a deluded, brutalised and shadowed country. You’ve

probably already imagined the emotional sway of the political religion, the

incompetence and manipulation of the cadre: here are some of the only first-

person accounts. The dozen defectors she interviews agree on enough. She

repeats entire sentences verbatim at various parts of the book, and runs out of

ways to reflect somberly on collective madness and individual caprice (fair

enough). It’s hard to see a country in which 10% of the population die of state-

caused starvation ever rising up.

4/5.

• Waltz with Bashir (2009) by Ari Folman and David Polonsky. Comic of the

crushing film about the Lebanon war. This stark honesty is maybe not what we

associate with , but of course it suits the lobbyists for us to forget the large part

of the population that are two-state anti-settlers.

4/5.

• Witch Wood (1927) by John Buchan. Wonderful, subtle, ornate picture of the

Scots Borders during the Reformation. Mystery novel without a detective. Went

into this with unfair scepticism - he was such an imperial gank - but was dead

impressed by his making boring theological debates portentious, and his

unsentimental nature prose. I also learned lots of words.

4/5.

• The Blade Itself (2006) by Joe Abercrombie. Perceptive, subversive high

fantasy. Prose is a delight, lucid and free-flowing - the opposite delight to China

Mieville's prose. There's a sarcastic wizard, a torturer for a protagonist, a corrupt

feudal society. 'The blade itself' is from Homer - a rare moment where that

fucker recriminates about war. The details are the most convincing - the

torturer's inner monologue is always asking questions, casting doubt - the

amputee waggling his stump thoughtfully, scared people forgetting where their

sword is (when it's in their hand). Addictive.

4/5

• Before They Are Hanged (2007) by Joe A. Yes, that addictive. So yeah it's about

a big siege, a big battle and a big quest, but somehow new and uncliched. The

heroes, of the quest: "What are we doing here?"; "Got nowhere better to be".

3/5.

• A World Without Time: Einstein and Godel (2004) by Palle Yourgrau.

Popularisation of his scholarly expose of Godel's mathematical argument which

seems to prove time's nonexistence as a direct consequence of General

Relativity. Yourgrau argues this case using the overlooked friendship between E

& G to stir up human interest. He beats the drum a bit hard, taking

popularisation to mean more superlatives and jibes ("A German Jew among

WASPS"). I get the feeling that Einstein’s in the title more to boost sales /

Godel's profile than because the men's relationship is all that critical to the proof

Yourgrau thinks has been hushed up or ignored.

3/5

• The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil (2011) by Stephen Collins. "Beneath the

skin of everything is something nobody can know. The job of the skin is to keep

it all in and never let anything show." Beautiful, pellucid, interpretable graphic

novel about social angst. Baldest and most passive drone Dave suffers

catastrophic facial hair - the first outbreak of disorder in a neurotically ordered

island society (ours). The sea surrounding them is the Other (and the

construction of 'evil'). Collins’ text is almost blank verse, and the drawings are

clean, with just enough detail to make each panel pop. (Dave hangs his wig on

the hatstand every evening). In the middle of a boring meeting - suddenly chaos

and apartheid. It's honestly not stretching matters to see the thing as a treatment

of the Deleuzian idea of the Event. I cried at the climax of part 3, but it's part 4

that makes it exceptional: after Dave's gone, his society papers over and

commoditises the event that threatened to destroy them.

5?/5.

• Ecce Homo (1908) by Nietzsche. Despite studying him off and on for two years,

I still don't have much of a handle on Nietzsche. I do have a predictably

humanist reading which I hope is true enough – “N as the grandest troll in

history, as a necessarily scathing surgeon”. But I can't ignore his brutality, his

never showing his working, and his less funny self-regard. The chapter titles of

this, his autobiography, speak to both possibilities.

4/5.

SEPTEMBER 2013

• Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In these Times (2002) by Various. Anthology of

news from an American newspaper written largely by Left historians. I expected

to disagree with much of the contents, but the selected pieces - uber-brief and

factual - instead offer a shocking and low-ideology portrait of the news

unreported or begrudgingly reported by mainstream sources. It’s way left of 

*and still undeluded. I’d never looked into the Contras scandal which

%' scooped – if you don’t know, this was that time Reagan-funded

murderers imported massive amounts of crack into the using government money.

For real. Even the Zizek piece is low-key, wise, and borne out by history!

4/5.

• The Meaning of Recognition (2005) by Clive James. Stunning cultural and

political essays, often really funny to boot (his series on the 2005 general

election is acid and insightful). I needed to read someone who doesn’t believe

that everything personal is political tbf. (Larkin is a great poet and was a terrible

man – why is this so difficult for people to accept? Is it just the halo effect?) His

long essay on Isaiah is fantastic and contentious, and his retorts to the

professional philosophers who come at him about it devastating, inspiring.

Everything I learn about this man increases my affection.

4*/5.

• Some Recent Attacks on the Public (1992) by James Kelman. Righteous,

detailed, paranoid liberationism, mostly about and race. Published by the

redoubtable AK Press –  anarcho channel into the pre-internet teen bedrooms

of . 4Life.

3/5.

• Gray’s Anatomy (2009) by John Gray. Hard to read - not for his prose, which is

luminous and droll, but because he disagrees with almost everything almost

everyone holds dear (whether reason, science, or organised social movements

are your tool for improving the world). These essays span his career, satirising

Marxists and Neocons, eulogising Santayana and explaining why communism

sucks and doesn’t work, and why liberalism is cute but doesn’t work. (I

paraphrase somewhat.) This leaves only Stoicism and resistance to dangerous

meddlers as the ‘good’ life. Lucid, unclassifiable, horrific.

4*/5

• : The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan. Totally

straightforward book: it is constructed of plot plus the geography of the Borders.

Even so, it's just about full enough of archaic words to be diverting. Totally

irresponsible book: it made of Germans omnimalevolent villains in EKEL,

blaming them  for the war, and suppressing ambiguity!Buchan was an

unusually humane imperialist, and couldn’t know we’d do this properly at soon

after, but still, a dick move.

2/5.

• : Steppenwolf(1927) by Herman Hesse. Aging Romantic pessimist

Harry comes to a crisis, and learns that fun is fun (and meaningful). I’ve been

avoiding this book because of its status in rockist, hedonist circles, but after the

first 50 pages it begins to subvert this reputation, and itself, over and over again

until charming. also inserts himself, as the domineering, sparkling ‘Hermine’

which is mad and excellent. Would’ve changed my life if I’d read it aged 16, or

in 1930. As it is, Regina Spektor, the Supremes and DJ Hixxy had already forced

me to admit the existence and glory of non-cognitive, non-consequential, non-

political pop sides to life.

4/5.

• Read aloud: The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) by Maj Sjowall and Per

Wahloo, translated by Joan Tate. Acclaimed yet awful pioneers of Scandinoir. I

couldn’t stand the prose – uniformly banal, full of aimlessly detailed descriptions

of rooms never returned to, and, the weirdest thing, they’re in the habit of

repeating the protagonist Martin Beck’s full name, eight times a page, which

reminds me of nothing but preschool stories. Gets an extra point because this

translation might just be terrible.

2/5.

• The Logic of Life (2008) by Tim Harford. Celebration of the entrenched

imperialism of economics (the application of the field’s hard-nosed acquisitory

rational choice theory to more and more human phenomena - crime, romance,

addiction, corporate pay, and The Ascent of Man). Harford is better than Levitt -

to whom the books owes its format, cheek and some of the original research -

because he’s less delighted (: sociopathic) about the unflattering anti-humanist

results people have uncovered.

Some of the research is properly astonishing – and thus contentious (I have in

mind the 2003 paper that purported to show significant shifts in [expressed]

sexuality as the AIDS epidemic peaked, in proportion to how well people

personally knew sufferers, “cost of AIDS”.) In any case, Harford writes

extremely clearly about technical things, and the research can’t be ignored,

because it suggests routes for generalised policy (rather than cynical rules to

apply to all individual cases).

Extra point for his lovely immanent-performative ontology of maths: he claims

cricket players and economic actors maths unconsciously when they

catch a ball or opt for an optimum (third-order differentials). This implies that

sunflowers are mathematicians - that all the world is not merely describable

with maths, but acts as maths,  maths. I don’t believe this, but isn’t it lovely?

4/5.

• Flat Earth News (2010) by Nick Davies. Calmly furious hatchet job on what I

will call mainstream media - but don’t thereby imagine me in a tin hat. I was on

a news diet anyway (though this 9 mean politically disengaged), so this

told me what I’d already nastily assumed: commercial ownership of outlets

means vast staff cuts and over-milked productivity; which mean no time to

research or check facts; which means “churnalism”, the frantic-lazy reproduction

of PR and State material, and worse, their interpretations. (88% of all stories are

now based on press releases. This trend includes the *(50%) and '

(59%).) His model of the origin of hysteric snowball stories like the Millennium

Bug or Diana’s death is brilliant and convincing, disparaging conspiracy-theory

suspicions

1. Uncertainty exists.

2. An expert sexes up the dangers to increase popular impact.

3. Impact stirs commerce, who exaggerate for gain.

4. Exaggeration is absorbed by cranks (cultists, columnists), who

begin to scream.)

Economise, kowtow, slink, hegemonies, neutralise, service, decontextualise,

validate, exaggerate and conform: the rules of production. Was balling my fists

through most of this.

4*/5.

• Notes from a Native Son (1964) by James Baldwin. Cultural and

autobiographical essays by a lionised black-consciousness writer. His attention

to pop representations of blacks prefigures the modern Left (Racealicious and

Feministing) by 60 years; his political wit and casual familiarity with high and

low art prefigures Clive James, though with more weight and tragedy put upon

him. ‘The Fire Next Time’ is the single piece to give anyone who wonders

whether quieter, structural racism has all that much effect on people.

4/5.

• Questioning Identity(2000) ed. Kath Woodward. Bleh. I’ll continue to give

radical sociologists a chance to show me they have something to say, because -

although the evidence is not good that they do - the consequences of ignoring

them wrongly are too awful.

2/5.

• Consciousness Explained(1993) by Daniel Dennett. Damn: impressed. The

title’s supreme arrogance is misleading: his prose is clear, stylish and flowing,

he's as expert in the relevant experiments as any neuroscientist, and he’s much

less hectoring in book form – he admits his theory’s counter-intuitive and hostile

appearance, he flags alternate positions and possibilities, and it’s hard to doubt

him when he says he’d change his mind if the science pointed away from his

detailed eliminativism. And yet it doesn’t? I am 8 resistant to functionalism

and mind-brain identity – in fact I’ve never been able to take it seriously - so that

he manages to patch my failure of imagination is a mark of the book’s power.

You begin to wonder – for instance when he talks about his work on children

with multiple personalities disorder – if he’s cultivating a humane exterior to

make his theory more palatable. But it's probably just that our backlash against

his loud, cartoon atheism overlooks his humanity. The first section, where he

admits the wonder and difficulty of studying consciousness, and carefully lays

out the method ahead, is a model for modern scientifically engaged philosophy –

and at the end he suggests a dozen novel, detailed experiments to test his theory

(ante up). I begrudge it being so amazing but won’t deny that it is. Read it (and

)) if you want to have a serious opinion about mind: you

shouldn’t entirely agree, but nor can you ignore. Minus a half for being twenty

years old in a field where that matters.

4*/5

questionable utility of his field – he doesn’t seem to help some of the people, let

alone cure them – and this makes the book.

3/5.

• Hamewith (1979) by Charles Murray. I’m away from home, and so must retreat

into an archaic and falsely distinctive version of it. (“9(&.”) ’s

poems about Aberdeenshire were written from , and they’re funny and

surprisingly brutal. Some jingoism too, unfortunately, though check out

‘Dockens Afore His Peers’ for subversion. He avoids the kailyard by focussing

on tatties instead (the Classics, drunks and work-sore backs, over the lad o’

pairts and the light on the rapeseed).

4/5.

• Buzz: The Science of Caffeine and Alcohol (1999) by Stephen Braun. I only

recently started dosing caffeine, so thought I’d check up on it. This is fun, with

lots of historical flavour and scientific wonder. The coolest fact in it is that the

body’s direct link between effort and fatigue is the result of an incredibly elegant

cycle using adenosine: the production of energy in the body (by breaking down

adenosine triphosphate) is exactly the same process as inducing sleep, as the

process’ byproduct adenosine triggers dampening receptors in the brain. He

doesn’t give a straight answer to the question “Does our rapid formation of

caffeine tolerance make its long-term effects zero-sum?” but the evidence isn’t

good.

3/5.

• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) by Iain Banks. Banks was super-

important to me as a boy – )-though even darker than his sinister

average, offers a sincere and positive vision of atheism – but I’ve been less

enthralled on rereading the real-world novels (while his scifi feels instantly

classic). This is relatively light, offering the familiar Banks themes: the

extended-family drama, a focus on human foibles, and globalised , which are

inexhaustible enough.

3*/5.

9&8-

98-

9&8-

98'!

- Glasgow city motto

8-''-

&!

- Clive James

Unemployment, so the library. (Free meaning, also free heating.) Worked back up to my

big themes (Formal theory v informal humanity, Scottish independence, the

contemporary Left). Books by Gill, Malcolm X, Rousseau, and Moran pose a really big

question: how should we read people with moral or political failings? I blab on about

this here.

OCTOBER 2013

• Open the Door! (1920) by Catherine Carswell. Wise but wearing

bildungsroman, full with super-Romantic sincerity. Joanna’s life is about

embracing pleasure and freedom, but is suffused with the bible; even living

godlessly, J thinks in its language and punishes herself in its mood.

Unconventionally emotional: while she doesn’t love her husband (“What they

had was not love, but it had beauty, and it served.”) and doesn’t grieve her

mother’s death, Joanna (and Carswell) are brimming with strange new emotions:

at one point she’s thrilled to ecstasy by a dripping tap. (“It was the still small

voice of a new birth, of a new life, of a new world… For it was the voice before

creation, secure, unearthly, frail as filigree yet faithful as a star.”) Ornamented,

worthy, but hard work. Probably important.

3/5. [Library]

• Read on the bus: Moranthology (2012) by Caitlin Moran. Gleeful but rarely

zany. I don’t laugh at books much, but snorted all the way through this on a long

megabus. The middle section on class and gender is light and uncliched and

makes her fall from grace among strict people all the sadder.

4/5

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1985) by Oliver Sacks. Repetitive

and overwrought, but also of course astonishing and extravagant and humane.

Quirky case-study format and title suggest a voyeuristic pop sci jaunt, but it’s

deadly serious, theoretically couched, concerned with the poor buggers’ well-

being. He’s against “mindless neurology and bodiless psychology”, the long

tradition of cognitive elitism and relegation of emotion and spirit in his field.

“Disease is not always just an affliction, but sometimes a proud engine of altered

states” – so a man with severe Tourette’s is an excellent pro jazz drummer, a

woman with debilitating migraines is the polymath Hildegard of Bingen. Sacks

has a funny habit of using philosophers’ names as misrepresentative pejoratives

– a man with radical amnesia is a ‘Humean’ (a flow of unrelated sensations), a

woman who loses sense of her own body has a ‘Wittgensteinian’ life (because

doubting the hinge proposition ‘here is a hand’). Actually, that last one works,

never mind.

4/5

• Seeing Things (1991) by Seamus Heaney. Don’t like nature poets. I can’t pardon

their casual nihilism about science and humanity, however much beautiful

innocence they display. But Heaney’s a naturalist, not a nature poet. He talks

about the same few things – stone, dirt, the nature of light for a child, the act of

building, wind – hundreds of times and still casts newness. It hurts to read it, for

some reason – he’s never miserable, and rarely handles tragedy explicitly, but I

get tight behind my eyes, short of breath.

3/5. [Library]

• Read aloud: The Shape of the Violin (1997) by Andrea Camilleri. Cynical but

not very cynical, funny but not very funny. Uses food for comic and existential

relief between murders. Maybe Sicilians love the book's local colour, but meh.

Half a point to compensate for translation.

2.5/5

• A Point of View(2011) by Clive James. Ah! pleasure. What others get out of

Wodehouse or Rowling, I get from this grumpy old Australian’s stoic nonfiction.

Had my notebook handy the whole way through, sieving gold gobbets.

4*/5. [Library]

• The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009) by Chinua Achebe. Title

suggests nostalgia for colonialism, a gag which needs you to know who he is to

work. He waffles a bit, full of avuncular banality as well as post-colonial ire. The

most shocking anecdote is of Jim Crow in Africa – up to 1961, black people had

to sat behind a partition at the back of the bus, in fucking 6'&.

3/5. [Library]

• The Classical World: Homer to Hadrian (2005) by Robin Lane Fox. Was tired

of my own titanic ignorance (Where was Carthage? Were Spartans Communist?

Did Greeks ever love their wives? What did upper class women do all day?) and

mostly got answers. Bit of a story-book, though he does always tell us when he

papers over something controversial. Most common phrases in this are ‘surely’

and ‘in my view’ (e.g. he just says that the Greeks probably had our kind of

parental affections), which is nice.

3/5. [Library]

• Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (2013) by

Paul Offit. Heinous illusions leech £200bn off the world’s vulnerables, annually.

The problems of CAM have been covered with more originality and verve by

Goldacre / Singh & Ernst, but Offit covers its history, as well as some newer

meta-analyses (2005: n=136,000 finds increased mortality from dosing vitamin

E. 2008: Cochrane (n=230,000) concludes multivits correlate weakly with

 in cancer and heart disease risk, further confirmed in 2011). But you

can’t hear these ideas too often:

988'

9"?

8'?

8'?

'?

.

I’d say Offit’s too quick to jump from the conclusive (weak-magnitude)

evidence against multivitamins (particularly overdosing vitamins A, C, and E) to

his simple attack on all supplementation. For instance: some two-thirds of the

world is deficient in vitamin D; few people get enough magnesium through their

food; and it’s uncontroversial that vegists should supplement B12 and creatine.

But we’re not really in conflict, because he’d change his mind if he looked at the

evidence, and we each accept that (public-funded) science will out the truth.

Prose 2/5, ideas 4*/5. [Library]

• Previous Convictions (2009) by AA Gill. What an excuse of a man he can be,

but what a writer he always is. The piece on golf’s characteristic - hilarious,

fluid, razor-bladed. The basic problem with him: his horror of golf would be

better spent on actually horrific things (e.g. his own aestheticised violence). To

be fair the second half’s travel pieces spend exactly that: from being right

inamidst hallucinatory police brutality in Haiti, to the Africa pieces which buck

stereotypes and complacency. There’s vast sensitivity or sensibility in him, but

he pairs it with a kind of generalisation (e.g. “begging is a consequence of

opportunity, not poverty”) and off-piste counter-PC phrasemaking, as if to shock

us out of respecting him. He uses Jeremy Clarkson brilliantly – as stooge,

counterpoint to Gill’s own professed post-masculine, pro-gay, pro-grey, pro-

oppressed enlightenment. But then he reports all these uber-macho exploits and

self-conscious leering at women. What compels him to be so indirect about

being progressive,? It’s that he wants to be both LAD and liberal intellectual, but

needs the approval of neither side.

4/5. [Library]

• Feynman (2011) by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick. Properly brilliant man

with a peerless anti-authoritarian anti-pomp streak. But this is hagiography,

presenting his good puns as profundities and his bad puns as good puns. It

avoids his maths and almost avoids physics, which needless to say is vitiating in

dealing with the Lives of technicians. Worthwhile for its 20-page comic

distillation of his (already distilled) pop masterpiece QED.

2/5. [Library]

• My Shit Life So Far (2009) by Frankie Boyle. He is more than he’d have us

think – but that isn’t saying much, since his core gag is wanking over

inappropriate objects and taunting the weak. Book’s tolerable when he’s busy

liking things – Chomsky’s politics, Grant Morrison’s comics, Moorcock, old

Clydeside socialism – and hating on the powerful (he disses working in the civil

service). A cursory rant against PC, which he bizarrely (satirically?) blames on

the Mail. Humane islands in an insincere sea. On marriage: “Fuck it, I tried”;

“we struggled along like badly set bones”. Makes Gill look like Tolstoy. Higher

humour’s about laughing at yourself.

2/5.

• Read aloud: The City and the City (2009) by China Miéville. Heavy-handed

metaphysical mystery (“there is another world - economic world, national world

- visible but the vision suppressed”). His usual incandescence is present under a

shade: the prose is conventional, with spectacular Miévillian words like

‘topolganger’ (identical-but-Other place) popping up only twice a chapter, rather

than page. Similarly his characteristic details – protagonist Borlu is in an open

relationship with a woman identified only as an economic historian. Hints of the

Matrix’s ontological sensationalism and noir’s worn-out idioms, but it works

because Mieville’s good enough (with ontology, but also generally) to redeem

clichés. tC&tC twists repeatedly without losing credibility; the Cities’

omnimalevolent atmospheres make great noir. There’s even a rooftop

showdown. An unfair consequence of extreme talent is that your ‘merely’

interesting well-constructed books are marked down, judged by ghostly

expectations.

3*/5.

• Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther (2006) by Derek

Wilson. Poppy, secularish, filled a large gap. Downplays Luther’s anti-Semitism,

who knows if rightly. A huge, dictatorial person, without whom fake European

unity could have continued and prevented Enlightenment and the attempt at real

European unity.

3/5. [Library]

rewiring, infidelious twinges and infant irrationality).

4/5. [Library]

• Celebrity Culture (2006) by Ellis Cashmore. Kinda lightweight sociology.

Picked it because it asks the right questions in its Contents (“What part did

consumer society play in making us dote on celebrities? When did the paparazzi

appear and how do they pedestalise and destroy people? How are cosmetic

surgery and the preoccupation with physical perfection linked to celebrity

culture? Why have black celebrities been used as living proof of the end of

racism? How have disgrace and sexual indignity helped some celebrities climb

onto the A-list?”). But while chatty, he’s critical in an uncritical way, high on

anecdote, low on data - and there are no footnotes. Cashmore’s answers are thus

suspect, trendy. The big contrarian move in sociology is to view fans as active &

canny manipulators of the ‘culture’ (…)

2/5.

• The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) by Simon Critchley. List of little

biographies, ends and attitudes to endings. Plenty of good anecdotes –

Avicenna’s raging horn, Nietzsche’s supposed 'lethal masturbation', Ayer vs

Tyson – but Critchley’s argument (“my constant concern in these seemingly

morbid pages is the meaning and possibility of happiness”) is lost to me in the

plurality of attitudes on display. His new canon is a success anyway, including as

it does Mohists and Daoists, Christian saints, John Toland, women. Good toilet

book, or introduction to (continental) philosophy.

3/5. [Library]

• Interpreting Pollock (1999) by Jeremy Lewison. Does Expressionism do

anything but look cool and foil the old School of Paris? I’m a slave to content, so

I resent the mindless haste and vitiating freedom of Pollock and Co’s anti-

painting, born of the macho belief in chaos (cf. Hunter Thompson, Jim Morrison,

Debord). But Pollock’s not empty nor, really, chaotic. Apart from anything else,

he makes Picasso look smooth and Mannered, a useful service. Apart from

anything else, nothing made or viewed by humans can be non-representational. I

like Full Fathom Five & The Deep (1953).

2/5 [Library]

NOVEMBER 2013

• Cultural Amnesia (2008) by Clive James. Dark, teeming cultural biography of

C20th humanism and its enemies. James homes down in detail: the century,

down to “the relationship between Hitler’s campaign on the eastern front and

Richard Burton’s pageboy haircut”. It’s full of faded and non-Anglo stars (Egon

Friedell, Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Paz, Urena), villains

(Brassilach, Celine, Pound, Sartre, Brecht), pop-defining celebrities (Beatrix

Potter, Dick Cavett, Michael Mann) and sad outrage. It’s also or really an

autobiography, a list of the people and one-liners that struck James as he

travelled the century. WW2 and the Soviet Empire dominate as the most deadly

instances of the theme “how politics invaded art and came close to killing it”. I

can’t suggest this is inappropriate.

Other themes: irrational violence, the nonconformist left, collaborators and

fellow-travellers, achievements by Jewish people, the failure of totalitarian

simplicity, ‘the American century’, rise and fall of jazz. He falls for clash-of-

civilisation talk a bit, but he’s never conservative without a reason. I think what I

love about him is that he stands up for boring truths – ‘it takes another power to

keep a power in check’, “the law’s imperfections are tokens of its necessity” etc.

5?/5. [Library]

• The Divine Comedy (2013) by Dante and Clive James. He claims

Amnesia took him 40 years to write and that this translation took 50. Lucky he

saw the two keystones to the end! I was surprised by how much of Dante’s this

audacious fleshing out of vague Scripture is revenge verse; standing in judgment

over historical (Alexander, Attila) and contemporary enemies (his Latin teacher).

He was probably echoing Church proclamations, but still: the author as towering

demigod. After Book One you’d be forgiven for thinking that most people in hell

are Italian. It’s impossible to ignore Dante’s medieval sneer in places (even

though he was a big liberal by the going standard): he parades the Church’s

varied idiot retributions, some of which persist, e.g. promising suicidal folk that

they are going to get (, or having sweet modest Epicurus roasted alive

forever for holding the soul to be mortal. The final, most irredeemable circle of

hell is reserved for, well, me: childless anti-nationalist atheists. Didn't quite have

the stamina, but I'll be back.

4/5 but da capo. [Library]

• Radical Evolution: The Promise and Perils ofC (2005) by Joel Garreau. Pop

account of scary/apotheosising technological accelerations and explosions.

(AKA transhumanism v bioconservatism.) We face four types of potentially

dislocating technologies: Genetics, Robotics, Infotech and Nanotech. Garreau

gives loads of stage time to two dogmatic cranks from each side: Kurzweil

(booster technocrat), and Fukuyama (neocon fearmonger) as well as an

unclassifiable polymath, Lanier. But this is the way science journalism is done,

and Garreau is later courageous in half-endorsing the transcendent transhuman

rationale of beautiful bioprogressive Bostrom. Unfortunately his prose is

Gladwellian, full of glib pop references and leaden line-break punch-lines. Still a

balanced intro to the scenarios and figureheads.

Prose 2/5, object 4/5. [Library]

• Fooled By Randomness (2004) by Nassim Taleb. I had skipped this, assuming I

had the full contrarian worldview from Black Swan and Bed of Procrustes. But

it’s a different beast, more playful and modest, with less of his latter-day

overstatement and invalid ad hominems. As anti-disciplinary provocateur and

writer of empirical art he is unbeaten (I rank him with Nietzsche for delightful

arrogance and hard-ass enculturation.) Still, these ideas (from cognitive science

and applied statistics) are hard: one needs several runs at them. Taleb is a great

introduction, then Kahneman and Gigerenzer for the calm conservative estimate.

4*/5.

• Identity and Violence (2006) by Amartya Sen. Nice: in one ugly sentence ‘how

overlooking intersectionality ruins worldviews and gets folks killed’. He repeats

this idea fifty times or so, but it’s a good one. It’s stats-free but I trust him, he’s

proved his mastery.

(&B-2

&A((-DF'&''

&''

&((H'

@9!

– neat, catching the antithesis in the thesis' process. Sen’s prose & I don’t get on:

he’s clear and warm but studied in a way that chafes me.

3/5. [Library]

• Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Conan Doyle. Dull, four-

fifths preamble. Got whodunit, didn’t see why.

2/5. [Library]

• *,B (2008) by Robert Crease. Droll, scientifically proficient,

philosophically superconductive. The cast is standard – ‘Pythagoras’, Newton,

Euler, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg – but his treatment’s lucid and

alive to the art and philosophy of the things. (Get this: “special use of language,

often over the heads of untrained readers, that seeks to express truths concisely

& with precision, that allows us to understand otherwise inaccessible things,

changing our experience in the process” – equations, or poems?)

Thermodynamics is best, casting physicists as Shakespearean (there were four

suicides in the twelve of them). Crease wants science to have cultural presence,

since at the moment it has authority, cultural reputation without real presence).

He suggests that “science criticism” is the way to get this - not in the sense of

know-nothing postmodernists attacking instrumentalist hegemony (Holmes on

Cochrane), but as in the work of engaged human bridges between practitioners

and audience. Every art has a surfeit of such critics. Pop science comes close,

but it’s more often cheerleading and radical simplification than artful play on

precedents, implications and meaning. Well, here’s at least one example. (See

also the Edge and 3QuarksDaily people.)

4/5. [Library]

• $8&' (2008) by Douglas Blackmon.

$(((?



!

– MLK.

Toe-curling account of the extra century of de facto slavery in America: hidden

in plain sight from 1865-1945, hidden in archives and historians’ de-emphasis

since then. ‘Jim Crow segregation’ is a grave euphemism. (I didn’t know the first

thing about it, but assumed the South had something of the sort judging by lack

of progress after formal emancipation.) Sham laws, racist courts, and ‘prisoner

leasing’ led to millions of (especially) black men spending years in forced labour

for ‘vagrancy’ (being black in the street). Blackmon’s research is no doubt

exemplary, but his prose is a big dim bulb.

3/5. [Library]

• Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (2005) by

Ziauddin Sardar. Wanted a life of Muhammad to match the life of Luther, but the

available biographies were credulous, downplaying his Machiavellian – or

rather, since successful, ‘Napoleonic’ – accomplishments and mercantile

background. So, the ‘sceptical Muslim’ it is, and a good thing too: Sardar has

been everywhere, involved in every big event in the Muslim world for 40 years.

He gets beaten up by Iranian revolutionaries; sees Bin Laden in Peshawar in ‘85;

is offered £5m by the Saudis to shut up; is at Anwar’s side in Malaysia; his

nephew worked in the WTC in late 2001. He shows the full crushing procession

of forces in Muslims’ lives – Western bootprints old and new, Israel locking up

1.6 million and scattering a million others to the wind, the former Ba’athists, the

Brotherhood, the ‘simpleton’ Tablighi Jamaat, Saudi power soft and hard, and a

dozen home-grown oppressions and gross inequalities. Sardar in the middle:

willing the backward chaos to end, but recoiling from the resulting medieval

theocracies. “But maybe paradise does not want to be found”.

4/5. [Library]

• Consider the Lobster (2005) by David Foster Wallace. Ah, ah. Postmodern and

prescriptivist, enthusiastically wise, Wallace was the one, as loveable as

intellectual, as iconoclastic as judicious. He’s the model of finding meaning in

places beyond sanctioned loci like Dostoevsky and 9/11: in for example an old

sincere conservative, in tennis, and arthropods. Not that he ‘found’ meaning: he

generated it, erupting bittersweet priority over parts of the world held to be

artless or empty. Theoretically rococo and colloquially concentrated. Our loss is

marked. It’s disappointing that ‘Consider the Lobster’, his more or less honest

analysis of vegetarianism, founders and shrinks from responsibility. (In short, the

piece says “they feel: so why do we do this?”. But he asks: “Is it all right to boil

a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Is the previous question

irksomely PC or sentimental?” without discounting the latter weaselly ad

hominem aspersion.) Tensions: he insisted on democratic clarity and yet wrote

wilfully distracting pieces. But he’s one of the ones.

4/5.

• Both Flesh and Not (2012) by David Foster Wallace. Bravura essays from all

over the cultural instant he encompassed and abruptly let go (1988-2007). They

are I suppose dregs, but DFW’s dregs are better than decade-projects of others. I

can’t help but see foreshadows of %7: he touches on

1) the obsessive, commercial, and religious aspects of pro tennis,

2) the obstacles to good prose about or involving maths,

3) self-conscious engagement with pop (for how else can we understand a world

constituted by and obsessed with pop?),

4) ‘interpretation-directing’ books (like 7), and above all

5) on the need to & after waves of high-entropy postmodernism, to work past

its crucial (but bewildering) negativities. It was ‘obvious’ to him that ordinary

late-capitalist life is ‘at best empty and at worst evil’. But he was +ordinary;

panoptic, judicious and sensationally beautiful, and that wasn’t enough either.

4*/5.

• The Emotional Brain (1999) by Joseph LeDoux. Maybe a bit dated, but

thoughtful and historical enough. His big contention’s that conscious feelings are

red herrings: most emotional activity is demonstrably unconscious (though not

in a Freudian way). So we should see emotions as products of several separate

bodily-response systems: “the word ‘emotion’ does not refer to any thing the

mind or brain really has or does”. Getting there takes a lot of careful conceptual

work, debunking old artefacts (“the limbic system”), probing the line between

cognition and emotion, evolved emotional setups and enculturated expressions

of them. Rather than reporting his theories as settled, he lets us in to the history,

experimental setups, and argue for his theory choices. He’s well-versed in the

philosophy (he cites Rorty!), is a master of fear (research), and I feel smarter

coming out of it.

4/5.

• )'( by David Lodge.

Changing Places (1978). Beautiful 60s farce, mocking the zany side

while accepting the force of the hippy challenge to all sorts of things,

lastingly sexism. The jokes rely heavily on the difference in vitality

and affluence between 60s Britain and California – one grey and

without central heating, the other soaked in optimism, sex and cute

subversions. 4/5.

Small World (1984). Even better, more romantic, full of risky

narrative moves – regular cinematic cuts, 40 characters in two dozen

Richard-Curtis conjunctions, a character commenting on his

narrative role, a cod-Japanese passage without articles... Generous

and barbed and fun. 4*/5.

Nice Work (1988). I suppose what I like most about Lodge is his

marriage of (and subversion of) highfalutin Theory with daft

romcom conventions. This last one’s grimmer – based more on the

mutual misunderstanding and vices of literary theory and industry.

Thatcher’s jaws lurk in the background. Also race. Robyn, his

feminist protagonist is good and 3D, principled and struggling with

the contradictions of the radical academic (their privileged position

in a system they abhor, ‘revolutionary’ abstractions, the attack on

logocentric realism leading to detachment from lived life where

things happen). Robyn’s attitude to love inspired this great satire by

the Pet Shop Boys. 4/5

Read it!

• The Retreat of Reason (2006) by Anthony Browne. Pamphlet about PC by a

man most famous for blaming Britain’s AIDS on African immigrants. Tricky: the

pamphlet is pumped up with outrage, playing with the nastiest fire, and on the

face of it his central claim's the most hallucinatory tabloid racism. On the other

hand, he’s careful to list PC’s achievements, and official figures underlie his

arguments. Like everyone, he tries to claim the rational high ground over his

enemies, but the connection between identity politics and postmodern irreason is

nowhere near the tight caustion he claims. However, reality is fucked up; if we

can’t even  any hypothesis which offends anyone, then we really are doomed

to delusion.

2/5.

• Scott and Scotland (1932) by Edwin Muir. Exciting, novel and almost

totally wrong, in a fertile and important way. Muir diagnoses four hundred years

of post-Reformation Scottish art as weak, makes giant claims about national

psychology, and traces out a Scottish Renaissance at odds with the nationalists,

MacDiarmid in particular (Muir thinks it’s not the Union’s fault but Knox’s.) A

sort of radical conservatism. Pairing Muir with Allan Massie’s careful hatchet-

introduction strikes me as a public service.

4/5.

• Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (1995) by Michael

Eric Dyson. Because we have gotten better, old radicals often seem less radical

over time. The pragmatic hedonism and secular calm of Epicurus was once

fanatically detested, but is now a standard worldview (it's roughly that of the

happy scientist); at one time Spinoza’s Ethics (determinism, Nature as deity,

religious and political tolerance) was the wildest thing ever said in the history of

the Christian world; Montesquieu’s disgust at aristocratic brutality, gross luxury

and torture are commonplaces; Paine’s raging insistence on human rights and

total secularism are very successful (in Europe at least); and anyone who

disagrees with duBois’ or MLK’s aims is foolish or virulent. Malcolm X has not

yet been so incorporated - but on reading his less demagogical stuff (not the

early “TOO BLACK, TOO STRONG” variety) you wonder why. Might have

been his influential homophobia, but that’s hardly stopped other thinkers. (This

suggests it's because we have a false, caricature of him in mind, one that believes

in whites-as-devils and Fanonian purifying violence.) Dyson does not skimp on

his downsides, and tackles the thorniest idea in identity politics: that experience

is absolute, and so understanding a group’s ideas and values B group

membership – that ideas have colour as people do.

4/5. [Library]

• The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 Easy Pieces (2006) by George Szpiro. Tiny

happy columns on false proofs, primacy wars, Newton as a gigantic loon, and

the Swiss maths scene. He assumes no background - explaining primes even -

but is concise and so not hand-holding. Lots of repetition because originally

standalone columns, lots of bucolia because he likes mathematicians so much.

Harsh words for Wolfram, though. The banality of eternal truth:

+'''(

DL00)@F!

@-&8((!

3/5.

• Shakespeare is Hard, but So is Life (2002) by Fintan O’Toole. Angry. Angry at

lazy teaching, angry at Aristotelian crap being applied to and vitiating Shakey,

angry at four hundred years of racists reading Othello. Ra ra raar.

3/5.

• The Faber Book of Useful Verse (1988), ed. Simon Brett. Amusing mnemonics

and proverbs, mostly from ancients and Victorians. Includes a canto explaining

exactly how James Watt’s steam engine was different and several songs to

remember the list of English monarchs and US presidencies, etc.

3/5.

• Selected (1993) by George Mackay Brown. Distrust and death but never self-

pity; drowning and drama but wise. Of one place’s Vikings, fish, and pain – like

= without the japery and authorial distance. Seal Market is

amazing; the Hamnavoe poems are so good I feel I’ve been there (which means I

don’t have to go). Brown seems stuck writing about the Middle Ages – “what are

these red things like tatties? (apples)”– but then the Middle Ages lasted right

through to the 1960s, on Orkney. And since “a circle has no beginning or end.

The symbol holds: people in AD 2000 are essentially the same as the stone-

breakers of 3000 BC.”

4/5.

DECEMBER 2013

• Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) by David Graeber. Forceful anthropology

against certain obvious delusions of economics (and from there to the entire

globalised world). As exciting as polemic, reliable as literature review, his

iconoclasm, logic and impressive clarity are the more impressive for my

“bullshit detection” prejudice against anthropology. He goes into an array of new

and fucked up human economies, slaving, . He’s careful with evidence, moving

from what must be false (the idea that barter preceded money) to a grand

identification of the market and the state and then (implicitly) to resistance to

them. As someone who went through the great crypto-conservative fairytale that

is ‘training’ in positive economics, I can’t fault his argument about barter, but his

estimation of its significance is perhaps excessive. An anthropologist who cares

about the balance of evidence? Take me now!

5/5. [Library]

• Empire (2000) by Hardt and Negri. A crock of shit. Economics without

reference to anything of production or consumption, Marxism without even

speculative economics, melodrama without sweetness. Much less clotted than

I’d expected, though: you can read it, you just won’t get anything for your pains.

2/5.

• True Brit (2004) by Kim Johnson “&” John Cleese. Superman Englishman,

Jonah Jameson Murdoch. I don’t much care for the core commercial thing

Marvel and DC do where they reboot series over and over with one new

gimmick – Commie Hulk, Zombie Hulk, Nihilist Hulk. One good joke “We

should have taught him to control himself, like a true Brit”.

2/5. [Library]

• Kick-Ass 2 (2013) by Millar and Romita Jr. Eh; art’s really good, dialogue and

world are lazy, hardcorer-than-thou (the one centrefold is of a groin being bitten;

“I feel like Rihanna after a quiet night in”). Inevitable matching gangs of

vigilantes and villains form after pioneer, attendant cheap gags (“I’m Insect-

Man!”). The bit where they tweet each other is good (and surreally true, á la the

last Israel incursion). “I guess the cops couldn’t tell the heroes from the bad

guys.” Yeah.

2/5. [Library]

• $.; (2010) by Sheila Heti. Ooft. Uncomfortable, nor in

the way we’re used to. Autobiographical metafictional first-world problems:

unrequited narcissism and joint solipsism. Also writer’s block. It’s hard to talk

about pretentious things that know they are and discuss it well: this is

sophomoric navel-gazing, but masterful about sophomorism and novel about the

navel. So it directs interpretation – ‘I can’t call it wanky, it just called itself

wanky’. Heti’s deadly serious about frivolous things, but also important ones

(e.g. the passage detailing her sexual masochism, or ‘The White Men Go to

Africa’, mocking poverty tourists.) The artistic equivalent of a hundred selfies.

Distinctive and intended even when dull. The answer to the title is “My friend

Margaux but not too much so” (twee and wilful and sceptical and direct).

3/5. [Library]

• The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013) by Rolf Dobelli. Shonky list of cognitive

biases / love letter to Taleb. It has occasioned raging critique rather than

reciprocation. At first I was very taken by Dobelli’s article ‘Why you shouldn’t

read news’, and still think there’s something to it (particularly as goes news'

inevitable over-dramatisation of reality via availability bias and our inbuilt

credulity), but it’s all Taleb’s work, except unjustified and not actually good.

(Consider that one is to free-ride and, in the hypothetical aggregate of a trend of

people quitting news, suppress journalism’s deterrent effects on governmental

and business malfeasance.) Anyway his Art isn’t well-organised or

-conceptualised – he stretches the perhaps 20 reputable cognitive biases of

Kahneman et al into 99 anecdotal smirks. (Redundancies: he splits illusion of

control and action bias, the paradox of choice and decision fatigue...)– consider

the ‘It’s-gotta-get-worse-before-it-gets-better effect’. The big problem for the

heuristics and biases program is when you get contradictory pairs of biases –

how can people be both ? The actual researchers have done well in synthesising

these and providing base-rates for effect sizes (without which the programme is

little more than a new way for intellectuals to insult each other). Dobelli offers

no classification, effect sizes, or even citations (they’re hidden online), just

clomping informational candy. Taleb for dummies. (Where Taleb is already

Kahneman for dramatists.)

2/5. [Library]

• Statistics: Conventional Methods and Modern Insights (2009) by Rand Wilcox.

Introductory versions of knowledge are usually misleading (e.g. the eukaryotic

cell, first described to me as a circle with a dot in when it’s really a fourth-order

factory crammed full of reflexive difficulty). Wilcox’s excellent obvious idea is

to render advanced post-Fisher statistical fixes in ordinary language and teach

them from the get-go, so to preclude the damaging simplification that most

people (who don’t spend three years studying it) take away from Stats 101. (If

Economics were to make the same qualifications in its freshman iteration, the

business world would be unmasked as more obviously ideological and

unjustified.) Wilcox’s big three modern fixes are Winsorizing, bootstrapped

confidence intervals, and non-linear estimators of the Theil-Sen variety. It’s

worth going for posher books on technical matters, since a single extra insight

goes a long way there.

4/5.

• The Overflowing Brain: the Limits of Working Memory (2009) by Torkel

Klingberg. Nice gentle probe of our faddish fear that tech is pumping too much

info through us, and thereby vitiates our branes and produces ADHD. Working

memory, if you haven’t heard, is trumpeted as  constitutive component of

intelligence. Klingberg’s optimistic about it all, pointing to the Flynn effect as an

epidemiological sign that we are (cognitively) ok with being overloaded. His

own research is much more promising about training working memory and gF

than others I’d read.

3/5.

• Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry (2008)

by Joel Paris. Not what you’d expect (“DSM hiss!! Pharma woo!!”). An

‘evidence-based psychiatrist’ (a good guy), his main target is people who

overinterpret current neuroscience and just churn out pills. He concedes that the

old analysts were ‘brainless’ but calls the worst of the new brain-scan boom

‘mindless’. The evidence for talk therapy – things like CBT (for anxiety and

personality disorders) – is much better than I’d thought, and Paris reckons this is

now overlooked in favour of cheaper and truthier biological determinism. A

good, hard thing to say: “What causes mental illness? By and large, advances in

neuroscience notwithstanding, we still don’t know.”

3/5.

• Gods and Soldiers: Penguin Contemporary African Writing (2009). Africans

set down in English, whether by birth or choice (or translation choice).

‘Contemporary’ is pushing it a bit, since these pieces are from the last sixty

years, but the scope raises the bar. Achebe laid the ground for Anglophone (and

Francophone) writing when mocking the incommensurability people. A piece

about Aberdeen oil (Leila Aboulela)!

4/5.

• The Ig Nobel Prize (2002) by Marc Abrahams. Sublimely silly: my favourite

piece of modern art. The joke is the same each time – informality in formal

contexts – but like modern art it’s the framing makes them. The titles alone:

Williams & Newell (1993) ‘Salmonella Excretion in Joy-riding Pigs’; Wyatt

McNaughton (1993) ‘The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow’; Watanabe &

Sakamoto (1995) “Pigeons’ Discrimination of Paintings by Monet & Picasso”;

Solodi (1996) “Farting as a Defence against Unspeakable Dread”.

4/5.

• Triumph of the City: Our Greatest Invention (2011) by Ed Glaeser. Engrossing

optimistic catalogue of counter-intuitions of urban economics: “poverty can

mean a city’s doing well, since they wouldn’t stay, otherwise”, “cities are

greener and more democratic (smaller houses, less travel, scale utilities)”,

“zoning laws ensure prices are too high, apartments too small, congestion,

sprawl, slums and corruption”, “people are less unhappy and less suicidal in

cities”. Glaeser’s aims are larger than simple Gladwellian gee-whizz

information: he’s out to get a prevailing anti-city mood (e.g. Blake, Rousseau,

Thoreau, hippies). Explains why art is urban, why we didn’t have good ideas

before settlements, the origins of the restaurant (in a crap Parisian health-food

place), the skyscraper, and the global bank Chase Manhattan (in a scam

defrauding money meant for NY’s first public water supply). Valuing the

devalued, staying within evidential warrant, and honest about the achievements

of public agencies, for an American economist.

4/5.

• The Selfish Capitalist (2008) by Oliver James. Much less glowing about the

modern way. His thesis is the $(38again: social inequality and the ultra-

individualism of the last 30 years hurts everyone. Amazing how dated this book

seems when it discusses Cheney’s ties to Halliburton, or that John Perkins guy.

Another world. James attacks CBT (praised for its effectiveness in Paris, above)

as the psychic equivalent of overmedication – “society makes people anxious

and then reprograms them to fit in with the anxiety” – which seems a bit much.

Empirically dubious but at least clear.

2/5.

• Present Laughter (1982), ed. Alan Coren. Strange anthology of mostly amazing

excerpts from e.g. Wodehouse, Naipaul, Thurber, Perelman, Joyce, Updike. I say

strange because some of them are more poignant than funny, and the only

connection seems to be that they tickled Coren. I say mostly cos there’s a couple

of nasties mixed in (e.g. someone called Keith Waterhouse’s racist Caribbean

calumny). But drowned out; see them as historical, what Punch magazine has

always represented.

4/5.

• Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (1993) ed. Emilie Amt. This

is the thing: primary sources in all their muddled import, but abridged so as to

avoid the four years of sifting it takes to know what’s important in a given

historical period. Was surprised by how obsessed with precise fines pagan

society was – you can tell the monotheists’ moralising from the lack of numbers.

Many of the mortal heresies of the time were about giving women more respect

– teaching them to read, letting them be judges… The tone of voice is often alien

– and a good thing too.

3/5.

• A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science (1999)

ed. Noretta Koertge. Title is more strident than the excellent contents. Their

common target is the over-interpretation and over-socialised Foucauldian

muddle of seeing society in supposedly objective scientific matters. Some –

especially Collins – lump in dogmatic radfems with more scholarly and right-on

constructivists. My admiration of Sokal grows - his entry is both the clearest and

the most constructive. The book also furnished me with a large and excellent

distinction, Phillip Kitcher's one between two incompatible but valuable modes

of thought: the 'realist-rationalist' and the 'social-historicist', which form a

spectrum that most people unforgiveably cluster at the ends of.

4*/5.

• The Pursuit of Unhappiness (2009) by Daniel Haybron. I find it hard to think

about happiness, and the first great thing this does is show I’m not alone. The

next is to pick up an abandoned conception of happiness as (mere) emotional

state, rather than common broad-base ideas – happiness as net pleasure, as being

in a good overall situation, being treated justly, as the net outcome of a whole

life (Solon), etc. The third is admitting the twin awful points that we are neither

good judges of our own happiness nor skilled at pursuing happiness. He

nonetheless resists the decentring findings of cognitive psychology (and they 

frequently overturned). Haybron appreciates the virtue revolution in ethics while

subordinating it to well-being. He has read everything. In a sweet but possibly

inadmissible strategy, his paradigm for a happy society is an unnamed fishing

community in an island somewhere on the Pacific – the tiny size, low-stress and

natural fixations being emotionally 'best' for people. Yeah, maybe mate.

5?/5.

(&&&@''&

&-(8'8

!$A(&2-(&

'(88&''!8

-8(&

8!(&--'&8&!

'+(&!

- Norman Cousins

&'''

'(?&&@8C88

''8';%'!%

C-'8-

8;'?&'

+?&-'&-&'!%!

8;

%!

- James Gleick

%(&C+''-'

-''-'-'(-5'&5

&8'&'-'8&!

- Rousseau

'%(('

(('('(

die.

- Robert Nozick

Another prejudice pointed out: I don’t review the blogs or articles I read. It’s not even

that they’re too numerous to bother with, for I’ve no home internet access. I like to

think this means I live among crystalline info. But I also don’t reflect on films – nor

webcomics – nor the semiotics of my colleagues’ clothing choices: if the implicit

criticism is that I and my nearest cultural kin - the temperamentally afk - are subject to a

big old retrograde print fetish, then yes it's obviously so. It’s a fetish with implications,

too, for the hardcore generalist, cos key work in many fields - maths, sociology,

economics, physics - is only ever published in article form, at least until it appears in

pop science books fifteen years later. Hoorah for Access to Research, then!

The fact remains: a book’s content is very likely to be more balanced, original, and

stable than work that can be researched, composed, and published in the time before the

lady at Costa starts to scowl at you for sitting with a laptop and a cold

mochafrappalatino. Anyway there are two journals and some magazines in the

following, leave me be.

Am dissatisfied with my scale, emphasising though it does the highest single dimension

of any piece: its extent. (By which I mean its durability under the disc-sander of our

attention, its being larger than me in whatever terms seem good at the time of reading,

beauty or multifariousness or originality or pathos.) The messy reality of writing gives

the lie to my scale being numeric at all: fun is usually more exhaustible than meaning,

so things which are just very good fun will get a 3*/5 on this scale. Also, reward

durability to social change; being larger than the moment it was composed in. Masterful

untransferable things like Svenonius’  will make me redo the scale; she

wrote in granite, but for a forever-limited audience. Problematics get several scores.

JANUARY 2014

• Knots (1970) by RD Laing. Wildcard psychologist writes meh tongue-twisters

about the horror of recursivity.

“JACK: 8'!

JILL: !

JACK: %9888'!”

His point’s that conflict escalates because we forget the original contention and

argue about the argument instead. If this explanation is not exhaustive, it is

anyway very satisfying. His logic’s more sophisticated than I expected – “7

I'797I79

9!II7799I9

9'.” – but repetition kills the wit.

2/5.

• A Writer at War: Letters & Diaries 1939-45 (2010) by Iris Murdoch, ed. Peter

Conradi. Reading letters like these is panning with others’ gold-filled pans.

Pleased to find her young and conceited – letters laced with ‘mon dieu!’s and

‘passim’s and ‘ye gods!’es. To my shame, these people are all always learning

five languages at once, wittily discussing the exigencies of Turkish declaratives.

Interesting how comfortable Conradi is to contradict her – apparently she

excised quite a lot from her archive, mostly on sex. Some fuckups despite his

obvious breadth (Thompson’s last letter is dated ’43 here!) and one piece of

gratuitous dramaturgy: he includes only one reply from (admitted headfuck)

David Hicks, making him seem sadistic rather than grudging and aloof. Her

generosity / terrible co-dependence in the face of Hicks’ brutal breakup is too

moving.

4/5.

• A Bigger Picture (2012) by David Hockney. Superficially superficial, Hockney’s

the rare man: wholly lovable, highly postmodern. This is a whole retrospective

weighted towards his very recent and distinctive work in the Yorkshire woods.

The words are less annoying than usual for coffee-table-badge books. Keep

looking til you like it.

3*/5.

• Lost Worlds (2004) by Michael Bywater. Ooft. Coruscating, funny list of things

high and low which are no longer.

“''&--(((&-

9-%9'.”

He knows about apparently everything: network protocols and Latin

conjugations, how meerschaums and primitive sweeties were made. It’s *'(

4 except with teeth, wit, & iconoclasm and without mummery,

ressentiment, & squidge. His fond memory of corporal punishment is put a bit

irresponsibly, but generally he’s balanced, seeing what’s been gained by loss.

Irresistible examination of our tendency to stupid nostalgia  stupid amnesia

both. Never heard of him, watch for it.

4/5.

• Read aloud: A Walk in the Woods (1997) by Bill Bryson. I don’t rate him – his

matey adjectival register and cutesy knowledge get on my nerves – but this is

really really great. Dead funny throughout, free of bluster, and passionate about

marginal researches (the fate of the hemlock tree in Northeast America, the

punctuated history of very long US roads). Comforting and galvanising. Even

my townie girlfriend wants to go hiking now.

4/5.

• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) by Christopher Hitchens.

GRAAAAAAAAAAAAR.

4/5. [Library]

• Inventing the Enemy (2012) by Umberto Eco. More like it! Calm, panoptic and

ennobling. (Funniest clause all month: “32'G

.”) There’s good sad Realism under his fun semiotic

historicism: it’s only lazy academic cliques prevent people seeing that the critical

realist & the pomo skylark can coexist. So it’s a surprise but not a shock to see

him use basically Johnson’s defence against relativism. High larfs: Eco chides

the Church with its own history! Title essay’s composed of quotations from

virulent historical racists / misogynists / puritans: hard to read. He walks the

difficult line between being maximally clear & slightly banal (thus he says

things like “Fire is a metaphor for many impulses…”, but also:

(('(

!

). Whose side is he on? The text’s!

4/5. [Library]

• The Confessions (1770) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau via JM Cohen. I am

prejudiced against Rousseau, him with his straightforwardly false anthropology,

melodramatic politics, and preposterous egotism. His three big legacies are even

easier to disparage – ‘Revolution as salvation’, ‘Feelings as truer than thoughts’,

and the ‘Noble savage’ dogma. This much arrayed against him, it’s miraculous

that Confessions (‘the first modern autobiography’) is as clear and wise as it is –

a deeply honest story by a deeply deluded man. (Just one instance of courage: to

talk about being a sexual sub as a man in eC18th Europe!) A stroppy Forrest

Gump – blundering into great events, loudly blaming them for the collision – but

he is also large and savvy enough to test the great iconoclasts of his time.

(Strong parallels with DH Lawrence, another supremely wilful, influential, and

ridiculous soul. Virtue in spite of themselves.) Skim heavily.

3/5. [Library]

• I’d Rather We Got Casinos & other Black Thoughts (2009) by Larry Wilmore.

(The title is as in, “Are you in favor of Black History Month?” “Hell no. Twenty-

eight days of trivia to make up for centuries of oppression? I’d rather we got

casinos.”)

Irreverent about stuff good people don’t tend to be: ‘community leaders’, the

funeral for the n-word, Jesus’ race, Katrina, Letter from Birmingham Jail, The

Man. His patter gets pleasurably baroque:

“((-

':='-%:'”…

“8&&B

8&!#9((

2

&7-&-&('8

&882((%)&G”…

“THE SIMPSONS: &8&.

FAMILY GUY: &8&!”

Lines this good scattered throughout.

3/5.

• Read aloud: A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh. Funny ruling-class

tragedy like he always does. Was at the limits of my sight-reading here; Waugh’s

timing and compression are too grand to be scudded aloud, really. Check this out

for tight material symbolism:

82' -&

'"(C&@

9'?&(

2&-8-&2&-8(-

2'-+(8,'C

(implies so much! That Beaver is subordinate to guests and his dead dad, who

was married before 21, unlike him...). Is Brenda’s infidelity punished in a

regressive Victorian way? Yes. But pater gets his too: the nasty colonialist final

act is topped off with a crushing twist: Dickens unto death.

3*/5.

• Article: ‘Hume and Prejudice’ (1995) by Robert Palter. Close reading of

exactly how &8 totally dismissed one-sixth of the world on no

evidence with invalid logic – mistaking contingency for essence, current state for

all-time capacity. Palter breaks the question ‘How racist was Hume?’ into four.

1) ‘Of the people he is said to be racist about, who was he racist about?’ 

((: yes, in an egregious and cruel footnote. Also ‘passionately anti-slavery’,

go figure. 2: at one point, but he contradicts himself in the

same edition and in another retracts this idiocy. 7 ((: probably not.

%: no. : no! 2) ‘What’s the damage?’ Unclear. Not an ‘enormous

influence’ [cf. Popkins] anyway. Even some evidence that Hume galvanised his

religious critics to be abolitionists, to spite him. 3) ‘Is racism entailed by any of

his proper philosophical work?’ No, and his own social theory rebuts it. (“A

small sect or society amidst a greater are commonly most regular in their morals;

because they are more remarked, and the faults of individuals draw dishonour on

the whole. The only exception to this rule is, when the superstition and

prejudices of the large society are so strong as to throw an infamy on the smaller

society, independent of their morals.”.) 4) ‘Was Hume a colonialist bigwig? – no.

Palter sees Hume’s prejudice as a grave lapse of his own principles, a sorry

indictment, but not the fundamental disqualification that some others do.

4/5.

• How I Escaped my Certain Fate (2010) by Stewart Lee. An artist, with the bloat

and near-repulsive belligerence that involves (“So all I’m saying, if you’ve not

seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, but some of you, you might have to

raise your game.”). Book has tons of general merit: it’s about trying to be artful

in a genre where populism is a condition of being recognised as a practitioner at

all. And Lee just has his shit worked out, is by turns harshly enlightening and

plaintively endearing. (“Basically there’s a whole generation of people who’ve

confused political correctness with health and safety regulation. ‘It’s gone mad.

They saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case

queers see it.’”) I even love his intellectual flab: the Wire mag chat, ignoble

snarking, and attempt at epic free verse. I trust him – but you can’t trust him.

(Recent shows are founded on outrageous lies, satirising spin/smear cultures in

our media and government and employers and friends.) Hard to know who the

joke-explaining footnotes are for – since his fans already get it, and no-one else’s

going to read this. That said, if you don’t like him or don’t know about him,

please read this. (For instance, he explains that he 'portrays a smug wanker’.)

4/5. [Library]

• Sociology, 7th Ed (2013) by Anthony Giddens and the other guy. I went to a lot

of lectures I wasn’t down for, and that’s about the extent of my sociological

‘training’. I am thus at risk of making  mistake of disgruntled undergrads

everywhere and assuming that my fantastically limited understanding of a field

is all the field is, but: I worry that even this shallow diet exhausted the potential

intellectual benefits of the field. Owing to blameless methodological holdups

(e.g. the 'causal density' of human behaviour, that little experimentation is

possible or fruitful, Hawthorne effects, low statistical power), the benefits are,

perhaps, a matter of offering reminders and details of structural oppression, and

some new vocabulary - rather than subterranean insight, or either predictive or

explanatory progress in the understanding of societies. That's not nothing. Kudos

to Giddens for this passage then: “…is sociology merely a restatement, in

abstract jargon, of things we already know? Sociology at its worst can be exactly

that…”

It is good at first-order description – social behaviour is incredibly diverse, and

that diversity is now subject to accelerating growth in most of the world - to the

point where few of us would ever know about the other half’s behaviours

without social research. Also we can probably never be reminded enough about

the ways in which people are grouped up and done down. I suppose I’m just

unconvinced of the use of further elaborations, provided that one already doesn’t

ever persecute behaviours out of ignorance. (That’s a vital role for it then:

looking at which laws and policies affect whom unfairly, at which common

notions inadvertently hurt people.) Sociology can be great at unpicking

‘neoliberal’ delusions (roughly the set of theodicies that say, “Everything ‘bad’ is

just individuals making free decisions, so back off”) – but is (usually) terrible at

following through with the counterpart act of constructive doubt: self-criticism,

wondering if our neat structural ‘explanations’ are as general, applicable, or

explanatory as we like to think. Finally, my own values certainly constrain my

opinion of the field, because it trucks mostly in collective identity, which I see as

a series of enormous blocks to human dignity and understanding.

Let’s get back to those good new words sociologists have dreamt up –

‘socialisation’ vs ‘structuration’, Verstehen oder Erklärung, or the disturbing

hypothesis stereotype threat, or the master status of a given society, or the

‘manifest’ vs the ‘latent’ functions of an action. Interactionism is the really

valuable strand (it is harder for us to disappear up our own ass with our ear that

close to the ground).

3/5. [Library]

• Read aloud: Night of the Living Trekkies (2010) by Kevin David Anderson.

Unremitting. (I only know it’s crap even as fan service because I read this to a

lifelong fan.) Plot brought to you by a cursory study of Resident Evil spin-offs,

and prose by soap operas.

1/5.

• All the Sad Young Literary Men (2009) by Keith Gesson. Ivy League Arts boys

fail at life, measure themselves against Lenin, cut coupons – “At the same time,

Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have

done? Lenin would have called Mark’s hesitation a social-democratic scruple.

It’s pretty clear what Lenin would have done.” – ‘blech’, you say. But it flows so

smoothly that it’s effortlessly nommed and hard to hold its tragic treatment of

untragic subjects against it. It follows history closely – we see [Al Gore]’s

daughter at college, and a cartoon [Chomsky] –

3'--2(8-

'$'.

There are gauche pictures of Hegel, Lincoln, Gore inserted intext in an equivocal

Safran Foer way. Meh. The women – i.e. the boys’ ideas of the women – are the

fixation, they set the structure and timbre and volume of all else. I think I am

hard on it because it is so much the book I would write. Clever, but. (Extra half

point for unclichéd Palestine bit.)

4/5.

• Read aloud: Penguin American Supernatural Tales (2007) by ST Joshi. I

usually find horror pathetic, but this cherry-pick of two centuries is varied,

trend-setting, often golden. The phases: High Gothic lit to pulp to magic realism

to splatterpunk, but blessedly omitting the most recent and hypersuccessful

form, ‘paranormal romance’. Hawthorne, Poe, Bloch, Matheson, Oates. I have

no patience for Lovecraft and his legion. Henry James’ prose is every bit as

clotted and unpronounceable as reputed. High point (apart from Poe’s ‘House of

Usher’ – a hellhound in a fluffy corset) is probs Theodore Klein’s ‘The Events at

Poroth Farm’, a queer sleepy beast with its own internal supernatural anthology

and sidewise unnerves.

4/5.

• Our Posthuman Future (2002) by Francis Fukuyama. Attack on transhumanism

brought to you by a man most famous for being wrong. Now he worries that

science is going to make life too easy – that overcoming human evolution’s

horrible legacy issues (e.g. ubiquitous mental illness, moral myopia, unspeakable

death) with biotechnology will amount to the death of the soul. (Where the soul

is that which thrives on adversity, is real / spiritual / creative, and Takes

Responsibility.) I shouldn’t mock; Fukuyama handles this fear secularly and

reasonably, and the existential claim is not wrong by definition, and it is nice to

see such a man endorse regulation for once. However, his arguments are piss-

poor: he argues via 1) using fictional evidence – Brave New World and the

Bible; by 2) suggesting, without evidence, that there are insurmountable trade-

offs between longevity and cognition, happiness and creativity, and personality

and freedom; and by 3) a truly massive suppressed premise: that Things are ok

as they are (or, at least, as good as they get). The first section, laying out 2002’s

cutting edge in life extension, neuropharmacology, and genetic engineering, is

fair and good. He accuses bioethicists of being gung-ho shills for Industry, which

is interesting, but untrue in my experience of them as timid precautionists with

just about enough knowledge of the technicalities. YMMV.

(4/5 for newbies, alongside Bostrom’s 5s.) [Library]

3/5.

• The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K LeGuin. Michty me. Hot-foot

mystical parable afloat on a bed of Tao, psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche. Bad

guy’s a Grand Unscrupulous Utilitarian: excellent, manipulative, and innocently

destructive (Confucius?). Her memorable para-omnipotent protagonist George

Orr is put-upon, dismissible, infuriatingly passive (or, rather, wu wei): the Tao.

Scifi has a lot of conventions which can easily end in literary clumsiness – think

contrived alien names, more or less stupid extrapolations from current science,

brooding passages about the damned Capitalised Social Change of Twenty-three-

dickety-four – but LeGuin, even this early, was in charge of them. Munificent, a

clusterbomb from page one.

4*/5.

FEBRUARY 2014

Two taking much of my spare time from now til August:

• Open University TM129 (2013). It is mildly shameful to be unable to code in

this day and age. Sort yourself out.

4/5.

• Open University M248: Data analysis (2013). People sometimes claim that

maths gets good @ you leave behind the rote and miserly formula-

mongering of high school for the awing free space of proof's transcendent

exploration (i.e., just after almost everyone gratefully leaves it behind.) Stats

does  get more fun the deeper you go, but it makes itself incredibly useful, for

people whose conception of their intellectual life includes doing useful things.

Perhaps. Living up to its promise: of summarising a raucously uncertain reality,

without adding delusions equal to those it destroys.

2/5 and 5/5.

• Journal: Proceedings of the Royal Statistical Society, Volume 137, Series A

(2012) by Various. Series A is the "less technical" of their three journals. I won’t

pretend to be able to follow the dynamic-treatment analysis stuff, but there’s a

cool bit on Carroll’s influence on stats and some dreary obituaries - including a

fawning one for Imperial Tobacco’s head stats guy in the 50s and 60s!

2/5.

• The Thistle & the Rose: 6 Centuries of Love & Hate between Scots & English

(2005) by Allan Massie. Light, unpolemical history via small biographies of the

obvious (Mary Queen, Scott, Livingstone, Buchan) and nearly unknown

(Waugh’s granddad, a soldier called Henry Dundas). Charles Churchill on Scots:

"%(-&(?

8(!"

Weighted towards mongrel literary figures and quashing polarisations; Anglo-

Scots and pro-Stuart Englishmen feature heavily. (Disproportionately.) He’s soft

on empire and Thatcher, but this is out of an unjudgemental attitude in general.

Welcome scepticism about some of our organising myths – the idea of a ‘race’

called the ‘Celts’, the idea that Scotland is or has ‘always’ been more Left (when

e.g. half the votes in 1955 were Tory).

3/5.

• Espedair Street (1987) by Iain Banks. First-person sulk by an ambivalently

Scottish, ambivalently Left, ambivalently alive Standard Banks Man. Book aims

to study spiritual clumsiness and pop music, ends up in a midlife crisis at 30.

Has its moments (“We put a value on what we treasure, and so cheapen it”; “her

blonde hair slid across the pillow like gold chains over snow (and for an instant I

thought Suzanne takes you down…)”).

3/5.

• Radical Renfrew (1990) ed. Tom Leonard. A nice thing about Britain, or the Old

World at large, is that there’s a piece of art for most places. Thus even my tiny

village has a passable ballad, ‘where the river meets the sea’, while my mate’s

Wirral has a full seven hundred years of contempt to draw on, as well as my top

album of 1998. Paisley has the first bit of Espedair Street – and, what's more, the

hundreds of Industrial pamphlets and gazetteers that Tom Leonard dug through,

finding it a hotbed of utopian socialism, zero-wave feminism and farmer’s rage.

Moreover, he won: the wiki for Paisley has benefited from Leonard’s

revisionism. (I don’t know if it’ll sink in with local schoolkids though; they’re

more likely to raise a susurrus over the fact that Gerard Butler went to Paisley

Grammar.) See here.

3/5.

• Overtime (2009) by Charles Stross. Ace throwaway with British Men-in-Black;

they've the organisational despair of &more than the existential awe of

Lovecraft. (“('-4(-'(

8((8(

A9M&-(8&&&

'&(2'.”). Expected forbidding, stark post-Ballard nastiness,

but it’s matey, British, nerdy (BBC, C++, and Bayes jokes).

3*/5.

• The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organisation (2000) by Elaine

Svenonius. Commanding Analytic philosophy of libraries. Cold and relentlessly

substantial, in full command of the many many issues entailed in cramming the

output of humanity’s outputers into one framework. (It’s reassuring that someone

is.)

'&'&

'&C%(&-

- The Iliad, The Messiah-(

$)(!!!

Info studies comes across as the most gargantuan construction, librarians

building as they are the least ambiguous & most exhaustive language in the

world: the god’s eye view of the diary of the human race. Read half, the

remainder user’s details of bibliographic languages. It’s sufficient: now I know

to hush & cross myself when a librarian enters the room. (Also: Imagine a better

name for a library theorist than ‘Svenonius’!)

2/5 & 4*/5.

• Read aloud: The Gun Seller (2003) by Hugh Laurie. Urgh. Douglas Adams

crossed with Ian Fleming, with more of the latter’s appalling clumsiness than

Adams’ philosophical glee. Srs military-industrial politics addressed via flashy

froth. I suppose his unmacho, anti-sex secret agent deserves applause, but the

gauche chapter epigrams and LOUD joke prose were distressing.

2/5.

• Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2011) by Mark Mazower.

Casually brilliant and persuasive, readable and oddly fond history of the UN 

(. (I've never understood the fetish for national sovereignty - when you

look at what states tend to do with it.) Practical cosmopolitanism - the promotion

of any supranational structure at all - was for a long long time a view held only

by strange peeps indeed - visionaries and ranters and scifi writers - until it was

suddenly in the works, laboured over by full secretariats with big bucks.

Mazower puzzles over why the US and Britain put so much into these structures

when the previous world order suited them fine. Answer? Camouflage, of

course.

4*/5.

• Broken Angels (2005) by Richard Morgan. Morgan has carved out a niche near

to Mieville’s scrimshaw métier: stylised, politically-literate hi-octane plotfests.

This one’s less noir than war reportage. Kovacs - his broke-down hard-boiled

super-soldier - is great, able to carry off the witty sociopathies of the action hero

by virtue of involuntariness – the tropes having been brutally programmed into

him. ‘Quell’, Morgan’s Marx-figure lurks larger here. There’s a bucket of great

tech ideas, but they’re never the focus; the people scrambling in the wake of

their machines are still recognisably human. Great names, too (a nuked town

named “Sauberville”, a broker of mercenaries named “Semetaire”.) His many

characters are vivid; his prose brash and stylish; his themes enormous, dark, and

unmoping.

4/5.

• Woken Furies (2009) by Richard Morgan. And why not? This one errs on the

splattery side: cybersplatterpunk. Nasty, entertaining look at revolution and

market forces. Quotable too. On privatising and repressive currents: “This

enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged into the depths, and

teach your children to watch the waves for its return”; on political pieties: “it’s

amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths

irritating enough to disagree with”. Morgan still manages to surprise – e.g. the

fully sadistic episode involving the massacre and torture of misogynistic priests

is hard to forget. The sea planet itself is the best of the new characters, weird and

postmodern in layout, mechanics, oligarchy, mores. The last of the Kovacs

novels – I’ll miss his nasty universe, with its fully fleshed-out cybersociety – its

religions still boycotting technologies, its new types of decision (“which clone

should I repay if their interests conflict?”) and crime; its remarriage customs

when one spouse gets a new body… It holds up.

3*/5.

• The New Yorker, Feb 17th-24th (2014). My 1st hardcopy of this patent blend of

self-obsessed candy-floss and hard-rock social conscience. Puffs include the

Orientalist ballets of Manhattan, two dozen in-joke drawings of past New Yorker

covers, and a pathetic quest for the best Buffalo wings in NY. Bright political

banners include pieces on discriminatory voter legislation; Amazon.com as an

unprecedented malign influence on the book world (and moreover the republic

of letters); and Adam Gopnik’s deft and equitable eye on the role of religion in

today’s secular places, atheisms past and the wishful futility of natural theology

and ‘reformed’ epistemology. Anthony Lane’s obit-filmography of Philip

Seymour Hoffman is gushy, de trop, though I really liked him too. Final thought:

We all live to some extent in a vicarious America; its pop and other muscular

businesses have long ensured this. This magazine is shibboleth to America’s

other, real glory: their omnivorous collation and perfection of the world’s ideas

and arts. Even given the glory, it feels strange to submit voluntarily.

4/5.

• Reread aloud: Guards, Guards! (1991) by Terry Pratchett. Even better than I

remember. Feudal-fantasy satire in the voice of pubs of C20th England, with

dragons, wizards and pre-Peel police wheedling, appealing to genetics, sod’s

law, and an incongruous, dogged self-awareness. The prose is quieter (less self-

referential and wilfully surreal) than his peers – Adams, Holt, Rankin – and

reaches wisdom among levity. Discworld is his noble funhouse mirror of Britain.

Pratchett is very good at technology fads, social class, the duality of human

nature, and the excruciating embarrassment of romance. Everything a growing

boy needs.

4/5.

• Fruit Gatherings (1916) by Rabindranath Tagore. Really wanted to like him –

he’s such an inspiration in the abstract. But it’s unreconstructed Romanticism,

based in cheap inversions (“the dignity of peasants! The worthlessness of

wealth!”) but also an odd deathly religiosity .

I liked #8:

&-

&&'!

-'-':

3/5.

MARCH 2014

• The Information (2010) by James Gleick. Ah! I am a sucker for this form in pop

science: “primary research into some unjustly obscure x, pulling together the

historical and scientific strands, revealing the excitement and transcendence in

the unsexy, un-Arts thing, and making the reader feel smarter and more solidly

located in the modern world for it”. Here X is information technology 8

& – so African talking drums, Morse, bioinformatics, memetics,

Hawking radiation, Wiki, and so. I’d never heard of the hero of the tale, Claude

Shannon, because he was quiet and didn’t make any metaphysical claims for his

deeply scientific and metaphysical work. Loads and loads of tasty gobbets to

boot

“%&8'.%& 5

("CN238

O(88'!N

O@(-

>(&&-'-&CN

Shot through with the joy of discovery, and all of it unbleached by the drudgery,

familiarity, and commercialism evoked in “I.T.”.

4*/5.

• OU TM129 (2013). How much less dystopian modern art would be if we only

learned technology from the inside – the things we have built of tiny ons and

offs!

• OU M248 (2013).

2/5 & 5/5.

• Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (2008) by Catherine Wilson. I’m a

fan of Epicurus and Wilson both, so I was well-primed for this. (Check out her

piece on Descartes, the bottom of p.87 on. Chutzpah out the wazoo.) She ranges

over Epicurus’ many vindications in the C17th with style and irreverence;

Wilson's histories evaluate their subjects in current terms as well as just

mumphing over their contemporaneous development:

$(A9'(@(8

('('(.9

''(

((+8'!

This isn't unfair or anachronistic if you don't &' them for not getting it right -

which means not praising Epicurus too much for guessing things in ways that

accord with our world-view. Like every early-modern scholar I’ve ever taken the

time to read, she's set on hailing the nervous Christian Epicurean Gassendi as the

most overlooked pioneer in the philosophy of science. (At least the most

overlooked outside of unsexy fields like agronomy or stats.) Nutritious, wry.

4/5.

• Reread aloud: Men at Arms (1994) by Terry Pratchett. S’ok. Identity politics and

gun control – so, a very American British fantasy. Works: my audience squealed

in horror at the right places, the deaths of fond characters.

3/5.

• We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet Interviews (2001) ed. Daniel Sinker.

Stunning sift of the best from a good institution; PP showed up the ideology in

things but also, more importantly, the muddiness of the ideology in things; the

genuinely thoughtful people here interviewed share a tendency to blur party

lines. There are radicals talking radically in the usual manner (Chomsky, Biafra)

but also practitioners (the Central Ohio Abortion Access Fund and the

remarkable Voices in the Wilderness), iconoclasts of iconoclasm (Hanna,

Mackaye) and even a few apolitical ethical-egoist libertines (Albini, Frank

Kozik) whose like are common in punk but rare in its commentary. Sinker’s

super-earnest intro text inserts all the right misgivings about Chumbawumba’s

entryism or Kozik’s blithe first-generation patriotism, but he somehow retains

his beautiful faith in ‘Punk’ (as empowering civil-disobedient grass-roots social

justice) in the face of vast variation in actual punks.

My own attempt at the meaning of punk gave up on seeing it as one thing (or as

good things) entirely. What are we to judge a social phenomenon by? Its

majority expression? Its noblest exemplars? Its effects? (Which in punk’s case,

let’s not flatter ourselves, were aesthetic rather than straightforwardly political:

there is now slight freedom in clothing and hair colour in the workplaces of the

land; there is now a standard pretence to deviance in all youth movements (e.g.

pop music)...) While Sinker’s judgment is strong (cf. writing the oral history of

Black Flag, with each member contradicting each other!), his prose gets

seriously wearing. This is the real thing though: one type of inspirational young

person in their own words.

4*/5.

• Reread aloud: Feet of Clay (1996) by TP. Another monarchist plot, another

wonderful slice of Vimes. This instalment, one of his increasingly cinematic

plots, pivots on the enduringly poignant trope of the Golem, the put-upon

automata given life by holy words. Their persecution doesn’t quite map to any

one political issue, a point in favour really– they echo slavery, class struggle, and

A.I. Pratchett also stretches to get a big bad pun into every scene, with mixed but

gladdening results.

4/5.

• New Yorker, March 10th (2014). Christ, Morsi is fucked.

4/5. New Yorker, March 17th (2014). Christ, ITER is fucked.

4/5. New Yorker, March 24th (2014). Eeh. Didn’t gel – there’s an inexplicable

10 page piece on a pricey brand of sportswear, a celebration of fucking video art,

a hollow paean to Scarlett Johansson from the usually urbane Anthony Lane, a

nasty short story about being old in Liverpool. Bit on Paul de Man by Louis

Menand is worth the admission though.

3/5.

• Jingo (1997) by Terry Pratchett. In a sentence: “War and diplomacy, race and

nation: all stupid, but what you gonna do?”

3*/5.

• The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1982) by Lewis Hyde.

A dreadful cover – until you see the testimonials from two badass novelists,

DFW and Atwood. I spend a decent wedge of my time with art, but my ethics

lead me to disparage artists (and anyone who picks lovely low-intensity

bohemia) as shirking the demands of economic justice.

&

C8'&

'88'

&'+!'8-

'-('-

8'8;

The gifty anthropology he relies on has been called into question (but see

Graeber for masterful synthesis of the contemporary reckoning) but it doesn't

affect the core, angry, joyous point. Hyde is successful in showing my

disparagement to be ''P less valid, but the point is that few artworks are

gifts to the world in this grand manner, so few are socially valuable alternatives

to activism. (What about private value – the joy and casual divinity of spending

your days indoors on your art? Well, that’s different.)

4/5.

• The Uses of Argument (1958) by Stephen Toulmin. I had presumed that

'ordinary-language philosophy' must have had some highlights before becoming

the dead scapegoat it now is, but I hadn’t found any before this. (Does Ryle

count?) This about logic and is yet gloriously not made of logic. Super-original

still, full of things that the analysts at my university didn’t know or didn’t let on

about (e.g. that the division between deductive and inductive reasoning is an

extremely lazy partition obscuring four dichotomies; that the thing to watch out

for in an argument is not really logical form but the field's own idiosyncracies).

Exciting, even – the primacy of the informal over the formal! First essay asks if

there is anything in common between modes of justification (of propositions like

“It won’t rain tomorrow”, “The defendant pleads Not Guilty”, “Kleist is shit.”,

“Epicurus influenced Boyle more than any other philosopher”). Second is a

strange and not wholly fruitful go at informal probability theory, but the third

through fifth's his application of his model to explain the good reasons that

formal logic isn't generally very good in real argument. (The bad reason being

that people are ignorant of its force.) Panoptic, interdisciplinary without

generalising; dry in a very good way. A reconfiguring book, and I haven’t really

gotten the half of it yet.

4*/5.

(more Leyendecker, c.1910)

&88'-8

8'.

- Erich Fromm

&'?&

?&''

?&(?

8'?8

&&88?

8&88!

– Lydia Davis, jks

%'B((&&!

88C?&8-

((&!(-((

8;

– Martha Gellhorn (1949)

Why write down what you've been reading?

Well, there's the happy, crass braggadocio of it (('(); in

addition I imagine it improves my reading (since when you know you’ll talk about

something, you're forced to be critical); by scoring the greats I vent my vast stocks of

'; it scratches a scrapbooking itch; a reading list is some defence against the

disease cryptomnesia; when I mark something '5?' I suspect it’s greater than one

reading. My past becomes less spectral, my interpretations less unbridledly vapid, the

whole practice less vain. In the Biblical sense of vain, obviously.

A less self-obsessed reason to is that we are more or less accidentally biased against

various sorts of people, and it's only with a method like this can one know oneself

relevantly and do right by them.

APRIL 2014

• Ban this Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive (2012) ed. Ben

Thomson. Rather than dismissing her as @ the archetypal religious-

conservative idiot, how about treating her as a scared and thus angry lady who

prefigured modern ambivalence about the extremes of our culture? OK, so it

turns out paying attention doesn’t make her less ridiculous, but she’s certainly no

longer alone: moral criticism of pop is an enormous cottage internet industry by

now. Her small-mindedness put her, somehow, on the same lines as

compassionate ideology does some of our contemporaries. (The ends meet in the

middle Golden Hammer Marxism.) Thomson:

"''2('(=>=-&-

'-''!”

Hrm: is she the reason people use complaint as a political tool? No! (Particularly

not if you view protest as organised complaint. There  a distinction between

complaint and protest - one is the expression of distaste, the other the ascription

of injustice - but it's tricky for beasts like us to tell them strictly apart.) Was she

the prototype? Yeah, OK.

2/5.

• Saturn’s Children (2008) by Charles Stross. Morbid, playful. Robots,

emancipated by our death, fall into slaving each other. Stross’ science makes it:

he defamiliarises ordinary human conditions (e.g. water is just another arbitrary

compound to them, and the emphasis on, well, time that fiction about humans

finds it hard to do without is off), he focusses on the many many vagaries of

spaceflight (“The dirty truth is that space travel is shit…”), and offers a harsh,

clean sociology (“Architecture and economics are the unacknowledged products

of planetography.”)... Prose is hard to describe: there’s definitely an Adams

twinkle in there, but it’s buried beneath hard science, sexual complexity and glib

lifts (“that corner of me which is forever Juliette”). His society’s accidental

oligarchy is dissatisfying; the plot’s repetitive and disintegrates towards the end.

Still cool, obtrusive.

3*/5. [Library]

• New Yorker April 7th (2014). I expect to be equipped by this magazine, prepared

for present trends and shibboleths and jargon, and this week certainly did. Some

vital vocabulary for negotiating modern culture: Emily Nussbaum’s term ‘bad

fans’ (people who identify with the nihilist protagonists of complex dramas, e.g.

Tony Soprano, Walter White, sort-of Don Draper); the ‘creative bumbling’ of a

veteran journalist (i.e. using stupidity as an elicitation technique). Then there's

Jonathan Lethem’s touching piece about a man guilty about his meat-eating; it

includes a daydream that I myself dreamed on long childhood car journeys (you

imagine that your eyes are a huge great knife cutting away everything taller than

you as you pass by, in the back seat. I wonder if it’s in the DSM? 'Juvenile

Vehicular Megalopsychosis').

4/5.

• Reread aloud: The Fifth Elephant (1999) by Terry Pratchett. About oil,

conservatism, the Inscrutable Balkans. The most literary of his excellent police

books: telecomms as model and amplifier of emotional and cultural ties; contact

with otherness as cause and defining feature of modernity. Less grandiosely, he

trots out his satisfying werewolf point again: in actual fact, the creature that lies

halfway between human and wolf is not a terrifying lunatic chimera but a dog.

4/5.

• Travels with Myself and Another (1978) by Martha Gellhorn. Hilarious,

patrician, blunt account of the worst of her many journeys, to: Guomindang

China 1941, the U-boated Carribean 1942, East through West Africa 1949,

liberal Russia 1966, hippie Israel 1971. Her uncompromising generalisations

about the people she meets skirt racialism, particularly in the long Africa chapter

(e.g. she categorises each new tribe by average attractiveness and prevailing

smell; she calls ‘racial’ what we’d deem cultural traits; like many vets, she

insists on using the word ‘Jap’). But her discrimination is as in ‘discriminating’:

making just distinctions. She’s fair, keen to empathise -

“%'''

'!#--8H(9?

!'?9?%9

'2'”

– a point you can find in p’Bitek, among others) and holds colonialists and

bigots in far higher contempt (“it seems conceited to foist off our notions of

religion, which we have never truly practised, onto people whose savagery is

much more disorganised, personal and small-scale than ours”). My mate Paul – a

noted cynic – believes, along with most of our generation, that travel is

ennobling, inherently. It surely is not, but it certainly does put an edge on some

folks’ writing. (Not their souls:

“4,B-@&

8?B'(-

&-”...

) Generous, stylish, and a fine if not superior substitute for going these places.

4*/5.

• A Paradox of Ethical Vegetarianism (2000) by Kathryn Paxton George.

Original, empirical, principled, and wrong. “Saying people can’t hurt and eat

animals is sexist”. Appreciative dismissal forthcoming.

3*/5.

• Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) by Melissa Mohr. Cool blast

through three-and-a-bit millennia of talking Christ’s bowels and fucking shit.

She distinguishes between ‘obscenities’ and ‘oaths’ (the first takes profane

subjects, the second, sacred) and then between the proper and the vain oath (e.g.

“Bejasus! Godammit! Hell’s teeth!”). Adding the generalisation that ‘we swear

about what we care about’, she can use known changes in the expressive power

of swearwords to cleverly trace the movement of taboos across cultures and over

time. (Very broadly: power went from Shit’s precedence to Holy and now back

and with more political terms.)

Rome’s nasty little sexuality is seen to be the model of a lot of our crap

associations; in the Middle Ages vain oaths were criminal while scholars and

physicians used ‘cunt’ in textbooks without heat. In our time, racial slurs (very

young as slurs – only WWII for real malevolence) have taken the biscuit from

sex, excrement and God - which you can see as encouraging (if that means we

now care about the targets of racial language) - or depressing (if that means we

now care more about Race, dividing lines for their own sake). Mohr is full of

fact without being trivial; and she lets graffiti, court records, and primary

quotation damn the damnable – e.g. DH Lawrence’s holy cock-mysticism, the

spume of Twitter bigots.

4/5. [Library]

• Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001) by Lydia Davis. Went on guard when I

heard that the title story’s one sentence long – speaking, as such conceits do, of

the holy-urinal sort of superstitious art – but this is standout, a series of droll,

exacting capsules and nutshells. A typical piece is one page long and part gag,

part compulsive meditation, part confession of petty vice. Once you get over her

diffident, terse non-being, it is fun stuff. The long piece on jury duty is best, its

length and repetitious babble a symmetry of the trial.

4*/5.

• Read aloudNight Watch (2004) by Terry Pratchett. Perhaps his darkest book

(though he never was just about puns and japes – consider the extent of

extinction and futility in Strata). All about the Night, as in inherent human

brutality and in being metaphysically lost. Remarkable for being about being the

police in a police state. Cried my eyes out at the climax the first time, a decade

ago.

3*/5.

"Der Gruss (1990) by Quint Buchholtz

MAY 2014

• Between Faith and Doubt: Dialogues on Religion and Reason (2010) by John

Hick. Why would anyone want to take away someone else’s sense of the

ultimate goodness and unity of things – want, that is, to be a New sort of atheist?

Well, you might have misread history so that religious identity looms as the main

cause of violence. Or you might note their continuing key role in keeping

heinous patriarchal shit on the go (but this reasoning misses the long tradition of

smuggling real progress in through churches). Better, you might view the act of

worship as in fact degrading to the worshipper, or see the epistemology implicit

in religious practice as an unhealthy stance to take to the world. (Preventing as it

does healing doubt and honest, energetic inquiry; outmoded as it is given better

methods at hand.) Anyway: Hick of the rearguard talks fairly and at length with

a fictional scientistic interlocutor, demonstrating how, if the theist is willing to

retreat ad hoc about ten times, scientism actually cannot touch them. Amusing

example: Hick responds to the solid neurological explanation of religious

experience by saying that this is all perfectly consistent with electrical induction

in the right angular gyrus just &(8(. I adore

bullet-biting of this magnitude. Hick ends this mostly fair tourney still “as

certain as it is possible to be” about God, despite only having parried the critical

arguments at great metaphysical cost. At least his atheist doesn’t convert at the

end.

3/5. [Library]

• Black Man (2012) by Richard Morgan. Another geno-soldiers-get-invented-

banned-and-what-then chin-scratcher. Nearer us in time and space than his

Kovacs novels (this isn’t interstellar) – but they’ve still all forgotten us, bar the

historians. Morgan lets genetic determinism run away with the plot: everyone’s

always explaining themselves with reference to their or others’ “wiring”. At one

point the protagonist hears a similarity in two people’s diction and “wondered

idly what genes the two men might share”. Also his theme, ‘GM humans as

future Other’ gets ponderous inbetween the ultraviolence. But Morgan is always

worthwhile: his books suspend the ideological alongside the unhappily sexual

alongside big strange guns (e.g. an AIDS pistol, loaded with GM virus

‘Falwell’). More mature in some ways – there’s a feminist imam, and a religious

character he doesn’t have violent contempt for – but also a bit busy and

contralto.

3*/5. [Library]

Stross and Morgan refer to ‘black labs’ a lot – that is, dastardly underground

geneticists. Every single time they did, I wondered what the authors had against

Labradors. Sort it out.

• The Adoption Papers (1991) by Jackie Kay. Strong, po-faced verse portrait of

her own birth and adoption, in three voices. Really lovely details throughout –

her mother hiding all her Communist décor for first meeting the birth mother;

Kay kissing her poster of Angela Davis goodnight, a traumatic, funny dismissal

of the idea that your real mother has to be your birth mother

(“''''''''

%'C”).

Meeting her bio-mum much later, Kay’s disillusionment is subtly and truly done:

“the blood does not bind confusion” (mop it up, like carbon dioxide). It becomes

apparent that Kay has just created the birth mother character – her mouth filled

with vivid Plathian violence and articulate confusion not born out by the real

woman. If so, more the better. See also ‘I try my absolute best’, a perfect

snapshot of C20th hippy despair at agrichemicals.

4/5. [Library]

• The Great Infidel: The Life of David Hume (2004) by Roderick Graham.

Gossipy. Says at the start that he isn’t aiming at Hume’s thought or worldview –

just his personality, context, happenstance – but since Hume spent a big chunk of

his adult life alone thinking, this is quixotic, and Graham predictably does have

to go into the Treatise and Essays and Dialogues (and to be frank he does so

badly, uncritically). This is filled instead with all the bad reviews Hume got, and

the clubs he got into, and the middlebrows that quarrelled with him rather than

his eternal legacies, i.e. judgment under uncertainty, reason’s motivational

inertia, cognitive naturalism, the frailty of natural theology, the kernel of all

these ideas. The bit on Rousseau as incredible drama queen is good – here is R’s

reaction to Hume looking at him:

-*:'&+

&:&8

?%&8&

-%9&C(-%''&

-%(-'&'

'&&!!!

Graham is super-fond of the C18th’s loud intellectual tribalism, but it’s not

enough.

2/5. [Library]

• Anselm (2009) by Visser and Williams. An Analyst metaphysician and a

Catholic Medievalist walk into a bar… V&W manage to make light of a

thousand years’ semantic drift and logical innovations; so their Anselm turns out

to be an ingenious and honest rationalist wrestling with the many millstones of

Christian lore. (e.g. Making original sin’s indiscriminate infinite hellfire seem

just, making the Trinity seem unavoidable rather than a fundamental logical

error enforced by terror.) Anselm’s work is a testament to the cornucopaic

potential of motivated reasoning – a.k.a philosophy, in its middle millennium. A

testament to something.

3/5.

• Read aloud: Pyramids EKKE"- The Truth 100L"-Unseen Academicals 100K"-

Thud! 100Q"-Snuff 10E1" by Terry Pratchett. The Disc grows modern,

here gaining a media, sanitation, a soft-power politics, and institutionalised

sport, to add to its latter-day civilian police, telecoms, and steam power. The key,

most literary thing about the Discworld books is this modernisation, from magic

to steampunk. (This happens comically rapidly – Colour of Magic, the first

book, is standard non-chronistic High Fantasy, so, set circa circa 1200CE. Snuff

takes place not twenty discursive years later – yet the central city is clearly

Victorian. And that’s not including the burgeoning intercontinental fax network.)

Technology is given its due, but the institutional side isn’t neglected. Modernity

began with the despot Vetinari’s marketisation of crime, moves through ethnic

diversity reforms and open-door immigration, and marches on and on. UA, the

sport one, is solid, poignant. He doesn’t often let his wizards get earnest and

truly develop – by this stage, magic is comic relief, no longer the determining

power or symbol of the Disc. It just remains to be seen if democracy and

international organisation settle in. Snuff is dark and politically worthy, but not

his best. He’s been reusing jokes in recent books, and I refuse to speculate on the

cause. The series is

4*/5. [Library]

• The Hydrogen Sonata (2012) by Iain M Banks. His last utopian statement.

Tame by the histrionic standards of space opera and his own usual plot webs –

though there are the usual infuriating Machiavellis and convincing dilemmas.

Grim implications about immortality, decadence, international relations. Worth

reading all of the Culture books for the discussions between AIs.

3/5. [Library]

• Mao’s Great Famine (2010) by Frank Dikötter. Deadpan documentation of the

most awe-inspiring and culpable misrule ever. (I don’t mean to weigh Mao’s 40

million counts of negligent manslaughter and 5m conspiracies-to-murder against

e.g. the 12 millions of more intentional monsters; the exercise seems childish,

past some asymptote of human suffering.) The Party took their land and animals,

melted their pans and hoes, killed billions of birds and 40% of the trees in China,

starved them until they sold their children, and them starved them some more. At

the same time they exported 30 million tons of grain, mostly for guns. Historians

are impressive for their readiness to sift through so much irrelevant tonnage –

and so much that is boring even when relevant – just so as to be careful and

good. Mao comes across as a self-deceiving sociopath; Zhou as a decent man

nevertheless allowing atrocities. Heavier than The Black Book, than Primo Levi.

4/5. [Library]

• Chuck Klosterman on Media and Culture (2009) by CK. Extraordinary raid on

modern tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of

the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the Unabomber’s good point.

Klosterman’s not going to get away without comparison to DFW – but he’s

really good in his own way too. He’s a more relaxed, atheoretical Wallace, with

pop music (rather than Art writing) at his core, and technology (rather than

general Irony) as the source of his worries about us all. This slices through the

reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive

himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had

correctly identified Klosterman’s mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman

denied that he shared the character’s view in order to preserve a cheap narrative

uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here

undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers). Applied instance:

“'''@'&

(&(-&&8!

9'!''

8&!98&'8M

'''''

''8!4

'88

-&'8!'

'!”

Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care (that, I take

it, is what) you’d expect of pieces written for ,B magazine. But he

transcends it. He doesn’t resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension

between a) affirming low culture’s power and unique charms against bullshit

classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common

denominators. Went through it in an hour, but the best hour of the year.

4*/5.

• The Almost Totally Perfect People: The Nordic Miracle Examined (2014) by

Michael Booth. Fault-finding things received opinion finds no fault with?: good.

Booth’s says the weather, the expense, the pressurised homogeneity of ethnicity

and manner leading to marginalisation, the hypocrisy (e.g. Statoil’s tar sands),

and the diet are the only subtractions. The bit on their peerless state education

(for decades Finnish kids have scored the highest on tests with the lowest

inequality – but the kids’ own satisfaction with the system is the lowest on

record) is good, basing the whole Miracle on their school system: “It is no

coincidence that the region that is consistently judged to have the highest levels

of wellbeing, also has the greatest equality of educational opportunity… To

achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need power over your

own life…” How to recreate this, everywhere? He concludes that it’s a difficult-

to-copy feedback loop from 1) actually respecting teachers and funding

everyone’s Master’s, so 2) attracting excellent people, who 3) teach excellently

and thus 1) earn the respect of their charges and society... Booth can be a bit glib

(“Is it still racist if they’re rich?”), and is obsessed with tax to the point where he

has to ask five different professors how on earth people don’t simply die from

50% income tax. But he gets into the cracks and his wonder and affection rise up

afterward: “please don’t [form a separate Nordic Union]. Truly the rest of us

would not stand a chance.”

3/5. [Library]

• The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) by Richard Dawkins. He’s good when he sticks to

his damn field! Loads of lovely examples and vivid analogies. The sidebar that

naturalises human races is surprisingly careful and illuminating - that ( of

the phenomenon that's genetic is more straightforward than I’d thought, in my

Arts student way. (Though his placid definitiveness on the social interpretation is

obvs controversial as hell. He’s an unqualified eliminativist, implying that the

harm resulting from reifying race totally outweighs all gains from positive

discrimination, which can’t be right.) I hadn’t heard of the ‘two-fold cost’ of sex

before, super-interesting. Not as snarky as you’d expect, and full of alternative

perspectives so long as they’re evolutionists’ perspectives.

4/5.

• New Selected Poems 1984-2004 (2004) by Carol Ann Duffy. A world in a tone.

I’d thought of her as sort of obvious – all first-order, meaning near the surface

and all on worthy themes like childhood perversity and elderly loss. But her best

(“Auden’s Alphabet”, “Shooting Stars”) unfold, see her wielding that

obviousness and having fun with drudgery. More historical pieces than I

expected, too. Impression: ‘dissolving into childhood’, life as school forever, if

school is undemonstrative alienation and uninteresting torment. The epic

autiobio documentary “Laughter of Stafford Girls’ School” is dead good; the key

to it is that after the anti-authoritarian lark, the poem follows home the prim

teachers who failed to control the ruckus, and imagines their own repression give

way a touch; plus half a point.

4/5. [Library]

JUNE 2014

• Intention (1957) by Elizabeth Anscombe. Christ: difficult. Very brief, very

ordinary, and yet unsettling. Her language looks very clear – it’s jargon-free –

but on engaging with it you'll see that it’s blurred, terse, arduous. She never

introduces the question at hand, or have any introduction at all: on page 1 she

just sets about the concept with that sort of Wittgensteinian observational-

tragedy monologue. Anyway I think it’s about the problem of intention (‘what

answers ‘why?’, and why?’ Or: ‘how can teleology be explained in terms of

brute causation (science)?’). I think her central points are that: intentions are

justified with reasons, not evidence; intentional explanation is not at all causal

explanation; so intentional action is not amenable to a naturalist reduction

(because to explain an action with reasons is precisely to not explain it with laws

of nature); that intention is not a mental state but a process involving (?); that we

have synthetic, non-observational, non-inferential knowledge of the world; that

we have this simply because we know about our bodies and intentions. (OK, that

needs filling-in to make it less misrepresentative: 1) if you don’t know that you

are doing something, you’re not doing it intentionally; 2) if it’s only during, or

after the fact that you infer you’re doing something, you can’t be doing it for

100

reasons. So, if you are doing something intentional, you necessarily know you

are doing it, and she thinks this knowledge isn’t based on observing oneself or

post-hoc theorising. % was meant to be the first piece in the first 'proper',

psychologised account of agency. (She thought one needed an action theory

before one could have a real moral theory. But I think consequentialism

sidesteps that need, just as it ducks the free-will responsibility question, and the

warm-glow problem, and the meta-ethical status of moral language... But of

course for humans the key need, the one consequentialism can never avoid, is

people’s need for bullshit intuitions about their own importance and uniqueness.)

?/5. [Library]

• Karl Marx (2003) by Francis Wheen. Portrait of Karl Jeremiah Wooster Cosby

Marx. Wheen’s an ideal biographer: fearless, careful, eventually sympathetic.

(So, ideal for the readers rather than the subject.) Most of his shortish book is

debunking slanders; the rest is in cementing others. Was Marx a bully? No:

bullies take weak targets. A dogmatist? No; spent twenty years researching one-

quarter of his big book, and admired his bourgeois forebears Ricardo and

Feuerbach. Was he a Whig ‘historian’? Sort of. Petty? Oh yes indeedy. A

hypocrite idealist? Tried not to be. Anti-semite? Yes, or, used the language.

Russophobe? Definitely somewhat. Bourgeois patriarch? Very much so. A

heartless philanderer? Once. A show-off? Yup. I came up with an epitaph for him

– “KM. Excellent journalist, journeyman economist, awful leader.” but I am not

learned enough to assert it yet. Wheen is in a rush (Hegel’s system gets five

lines) but he writes fantastically, has read everything and understood a great deal

more than e.g. me.

4/5. [Library]

• The Living End: The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality (2008) by Guy

Brown. Cambridge neuroscientist lets himself go, speculating a bit aimlessly on

the meaning and ends of present trends. He goes via Gilgamesh, Swift and Woolf

as much as HeLa, Hayflick and Kirkwood. Core evidence-based conclusions are:

Life expectancy increases are not slowing down much; dementia is exploding

upwards; we know very little about aging and have almost no power over it (but

a start has been made – e.g. we know inflammation is important if not the core –

101

and ). The core attitudinal point is to view aging as a disease and death an

injustice. Cute (“build a dream, write that novel… have lots of sex”), and it

comes from a position of strength, but not so deep. I recommend instead Nick

Bostrom (as kaleidoscopic booster), Bryan Appleyard (as somewhat sympathetic

sceptic) and Michael Sandel and Habermas (as non-contemptible

bioconservatives).

3/5.

• On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (2013) by Noam

Chomsky and Andre Vltchek. Echo-chamber dialogue about our barely

recognised crimes against humanity. I have mixed feelings about Chomsky,

beautiful fist of a man that he is. For half a century he hasn’t stopped talking

about unbelievable global crimes that went unreported at the time, and are now

unremembered, let alone punished. But. Full discussion here.

Even given their slips and general exaggeration, there’s no way around some

evidence-based conclusions: we are not in general a positive force in the world

(almost no-one with power is); this is not well-known; as long as the US is

legally immune from prosecution, international justice is a joke; we have very

often given money and guns to the worst people in the world; we did this for

money and control.

3/5* [Library]

* Only to be skimmed if you  know about about Leopold II,

Britain in Palestine, Operation Boot, Operation PBFORTUNE,

Lumumba, the Plain of Jars, Pinochet, Noriega and Just Cause,

Suharto, El Salvador, and that Iraq matter. If you don't, this is 4/5 if

taken alongside Dikotter and Kolakowski.

• On the Pleasure of Hating (1818ish) by William Hazlitt. Toty brace of

magazine pieces in which he philosophises bare-knuckle fights, juggling, and

yes petty hatred. He’s cute, what with his italicised phrases that are now clichés

(“blue ruin”), his enthusiasm for enthusiasm, his mid-sentence verse quotations,

his Latinate insults (“O procul, este profani”), and enthusiastic woe. is reaction

to seeing someone juggle four balls at once:

102

%''''!%%

;!8%&';C

&,:'-

:#&%!

The essay that’s from is about juggling and the concept Greatness and the

character of a dear dead sportsman friend – and all this in 20 pages. Big man,

only sometimes clotted in the seven-clause sentences of his age.

4/5.

• Stories, Volume 1 (1884ish) by Anton Chekhov. Was expecting these to be very

severe, but, though it has more than its share of erroneous suicides and fist-

shaking dread, his tack is usually to laugh at the cold.

?/5

• Most of Gwern.net (2008-2014) by Gwern Branwen. Fantastic freelance

research into the technical and the existential, with practical recommendations

aplenty. (For instance, I abuse melatonin after reading his argument, plus prudent

second- and third- opinions which lack the key risk/reward reasoning.) I have

never seen cost:benefit reasoning this inclusive and persuasive. His breadth,

depth are plain, so I'll just link some important ones: on effective altruism,

mathematical psychology and metamathematical risk, abortion, analysing the

analysts, sceptical self-experimentation. I skipped the animé essays – but in light

of his detailed, affirmative sociology of subcultures, they make perfect sense,

probably even strictly (that is, as expected value).

4*/5.

…%((!%'&

,+(8-%&')88

%!!%&')8!&

'('-&&+!

&')8(&8!%(

'(-&%'!%8&8

'-((!

- Chuck Klosterman

103

&''(((@M

( -8-(&8"

--&C

(&'8&'@'

--!-9!'

''R!&'@'-&8-

(8!%'

''((((3+&('(&!

- Neal Stephenson

8'8''(&

&O((NG

8!&!

- the Unknown Anti-Ethicist

Why not write down what you’ve been reading?

Well, it’s pompous. It also adds a loud implicit audience - yourself - who gawks over

your shoulder and interrupts to say what they fucking think. (Fiction benefits from

leaving behind such gremlins as your tutors and yourself.) There’s also some pressure to

rush the reading and keep up with yourself. Also, forcing out reviews of things is a

recipe for banality and witless caution (see any newspaper with a small review staff).

And, of course, time spent writing is time not reading.

104

JULY 2014

• Niubi!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School (2009) by Eveline

Chao. Actually I was - but only because my laoshi was a saucy linguistics grad

who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or ever

to shout “3-8!”. Anyway this is dead funny and valuable for understanding the

place’s otherwise inaccessible working-class or web or queer registers – and as a

way of generally not seeming like a prig. So: language is fossilised sociology;

Chao excavates what would take us decades. She begins with slurs of all sorts,

but doesn’t list any homophobia – claiming it isn’t a well-rooted hatred there

(…).

There’s loads and loads of ableism, though. Gets more serious as it goes, with

whole chapters on gay culture and web ‘activism’ (恶搞 is ‘evildoings’, lulz).

This turns up details like the infallibly hilarious “potato queen”. I also loved her

decoding the ancient innuendoes: 云雨 (clouds and rain), 鱼水之欢 (the fish and

the water, happy together), 余桃 (sharing peaches), or “playing the bamboo flute”

or “bamboo harmonica”. (BTW, the title term is 牛屄 – ‘Cow-cunt’ – and means

“Awesome!”.)

4/5 for subcultures.

• Capital in the 21st Century (2014) by Thomas Piketty. Well then! Long separate

blog review in the works. Was swooning by the end of the preface

(&-('8

(''(

(-+(

&!,'

(((''(&'

'8!&''B

((8'

'(+B(&8!

8&''-'

('&

(!''(

(&''-

('&!

105

He's understandably keen to emphasise his ideological hygiene - but, as the Tory

media correctly noted, the act of paying attention to inequality is itself a weakly

left-wing act. With a few more diagrams and boxed definitions, this would make

an excellent intro macro textbook, gentle and empirically obsessive as it is.

Policy chapter is superb an' all.

Weighed down only by (forgiveable) overstatement of its own achievement (“the

fundamental laws of capitalism”). Lot of redundancy - whoa-there steady-now

summary paragraphs every few pages - but I suppose that's what you need to do

if you aim to be understood by policymakers.

4*/5. [Library]

• Deaf Sentence (2008) by David Lodge. Gentle, silly-solemn, but limp campus

novel. Examines middle-class middle-age without angst, despite the narrator’s

being very hard of hearing. There’s a sudden tokenistic Auschwitz section which

gets about one page of build-up and is soon left behind (when the actual plot

revives itself). Its affairs are less farcical, ambitions less contemptible, plot less

unabashedly neat (though there is this: “Perhaps one day we’ll turn up in a

campus novel” – “God, I hope not”), and I miss all that of Lodge.

3/5. [In one sitting]

• Even As We Speak: Essays 1993-2001 (2002) by Clive James. The last twenty

years see James taking his dark intellectual turn to the history of totalitarianism,

and bringing it into everything, everything else, dragging Hitler and Stalin

around like the stations of the cross. His long excoriation of Daniel Goldhagen is

angry, entertaining, and an education in itself. (The question the two men are at

odds over is, “How could civilised, literate, assimilative Germany Do Such

Things?” Goldhagen says: because they – all Germans – were eliminationists

just itching for an excuse. James’ answer is complex, but puts due weight on the

simplest explanation: they did it because a single word of dissent meant death,

for any of them.) James is a bit obsessed by his chosen field tbh – Hitler

references turn up in his sunny, giddy Sydney Olympics pieces! Then there’s his

ornately maudlin account of his acquaintance with Diana Spenser.

(I spent a little while trying to pigeonhole his politics recently – this non-

106

republican, anti-Marxist, pro-American-culture hobnobber – and decided it is

wrong to call him right-wing. “Democracy is really valuable only for what it

prevents…”) Funny, profound in places, but his late themes had solidified

already and are covered better in .< and )'.

3*/5. [Library]

• The Rhesus Chart (2014) by Charles Stross. Brave, for a writer of taste to write

a vampire book, these days. But then in a sense Stross doesn’t give a shit, since

he has written a vampire book in which the vampires are literally high-frequency

investment bankers who become vampires literally because of high-frequency

investment banking. Then there’s his occult computer science (“Magic is a side-

effect of certain classes of mathematics… Sensible magicians use computers.”).

Stross is the only writer I know who depicts the corporate/bureaucratic way of

life properly, as well as just its deadening language. Millions of people now

spend much of their lives within a structure encouraging this mindset; we need

art that knows its vagaries and petty circumlocutions and administrivia. So, extra

half-point for detailed solidarity with the office drone. And the TVTropes

reference.

3/5. [Library]

• Reread: Collected Poems (1988) by Philip Larkin. Of the consuming fear of

death, sexual frustration, impostor syndrome: Britain. (In fact this is the

apotheosis of male British misery: Housman, if he was honest about his

appetites; Lawrence with a sense of humour; Auden plus even more jazz.) He

was forever overawed by lack of control over his life; we are left with his

superlative control of form. Motifs are well-known: the hostile wind heard from

the cold attic; the diminishing of strength; the fall of desire - without a matching

fall in the desire to desire; the conviction that age is not running out of time, but

running out of self. These are not moans: he loves jazz and booze and other

things that make death recede. He’s vulgar, but never as a punchline; what starts

with “Groping back to bed after a piss” will end with the universe:

107

&(

2

%'(

4&?9'-

''!

There’s too much in this volume. I mean that as criticism of its editor, not as

expression of Larkin’s o’erflowing sublimity. But that too, actually: “Sad Steps”,

“Aubade”, “For Sidney Bechet”, "No Road", and “Continuing to Live” are

among my favourites. By ’72 his bitterness and fear had overcome his basic

kindness, and he dried up, leaving doggerel for mates and nasty biz like “The

Old Fools” or “The Card Players”. And yet even after three years of this came

“Aubade”. I avoided the juvenilia, perhaps even out of superstitious respect.

5/5.

AUGUST 2014

• The Good Women of China (2002) by Xinran. Ripping, horrible portrait of

patriarchal suffering – but undermined by the editing process; the narrative she

ties the various cases of abuse, suppression and loss is too neat for my jaded

nonfiction hopper. She may have just had a very cinematic few years as the most

famous woman in the country, bearing witness, but the coincidences make it

difficult to take it too seriously. I don’t actually doubt that the interviews

happened, nor that she received the aggregate worry and misery for millions; so

I’m not sure which part I’m taking issue with. The unnatural dovetail. China

comes across here as a little village where Xinran was wise mother, and all

distant rumours burst into her life.

(Maybe my reaction is just a cheap defence mechanism against the thought of an

11 year old repeatedly giving themselves pneumonia to avoid their rapist father

and other such tales of ordinary madness.)

Nothing in the text matches the simple implicit horror of the hanzi on the cover:

“nu” (female), nu+er (female + housework = woman), hao (female + son = good,

The Good). Even granting that it is much easier to see oppression in cultures

108

other than your own...

3/5.

• In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) by Neal Stephenson. Classic,

cynical cultural history of popular computing. Also a noob-friendly guide to

breaking free. (As such it's a love letter to GNU: “Linux… are making tanks…

Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free… It is

the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old

and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of

operating systems to become free.”) If you’re like me (human?), you need

metaphors and binary distinctions to get abstract stuff, and Stephenson has them

coming out of his ears, which sometimes leads to stone-tablet patronising tone*.

((I'&2

&-+(8&''+(8

!N"

An amazing writer, though: he finds program comments "like the terse

mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes." In tech,

15 years is a full geological era and a half*, so some of his insights have taken

on a sepia hue (e.g. “Apple are doomed because they are obsessed with

hardware”). But astonishingly, most have not – and how many other tech articles

from the 90s are still worth a single minute of your time?

4/5 for noobs like me.

* He uses this very metaphor in this short essay.

• Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Fooled the World (2009) by Barbara

Ehrenreich. Sharp, sharp! Blames the grinning tendency in its many forms – the

New Age mystic sort, the New Age pseudoscience sort, the self-help,

motivational, pink ribbon, megachurch, and positive psychology forms – for

much suffering and tastelessness, including the whole 2008 financial crisis. And

she writes with sardonic muscle:

%''-'-

&!%'(@

109

&(-%;C

&&8

&8-''

'''&8!

8&988'

-&&!$9

'(&&?&8

&(&C%8

(88'(-8-''

&C%9@2(!

Was a bit disturbed by her personal impressions of the legit psychologists

(Seligman’s profiteering and evasiveness, the apolitical blitheness of it).

4/5.

• I, Robot (1940-1950) by Isaac Asimov. So sunny! So clumsy! (“His dark eyes

smoldered.”) So misanthropic! (The humans call the bots “Boy”, who call

humans “master”.) So warmly cool!

3/5. (The story ‘Evidence’ is 4/5.)

• Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise of Living Alone (2013) by Eric

Klinenberg. This research is very important – tracing the ideological roots of

normative pairing, looking at chimps and orangutans and showing the deep

flaws in the research that claims that married people are on average happier. But

that’s all covered in the preface, and Klinenberg’s prose is canting and repetitive

– after chapter 4 I could not stand any more of his interviewees’ corporate self-

conceptions and language (“I needed this in order to grow as a person”). It is

wholly cool and righteous to live alone; but talking about it this way is revolting.

3/5, once you’ve absorbed the headline.

110

I’ve often said, I grew up under socialism, and it saved my family”), but

otherwise this is one long Acknowledgments page.

2/5.

• The End of an Old Song (1957) by JD Scott. Good, nasty coming of age story

of some Borders boys, one diffident and Carawayan, one coiled and voracious.

The narrator's one distinguishing quality is eloquence about his friend, and for

once this device is not taken for granted – people remark on his skill at

describing and paeaning Alastair. He reuses certain idiosyncratic, ear-worm

words – “illimitable”, “aviary” as an adjective for a woman – to great effect.

“$9,!N%!

'$&!

Annoyed at the conclusion – there’s an Oxfordian twist that I resent. But the

details make it – rationing, the Scotch cringe, the good, miserable wages of sin.

4/5.

• Hyperion (1997) by Dan Simmons. Starts terribly, with the broody protagonist

playing a grand piano outside in a storm. Also, despite being set in 3200CE or

whatev, it makes a gauche number of leaden references to the culture of C20th

Earth. But the structure (6 tales from 7 travellers, from Chaucer) and the sheer

variety of styles and themes soon kick in and drag you through its delicious

cyber-goth intrigue. The poet character is fucking annoying, but he’s meant to

be. (The key problem of metafiction: to write a great poet character, you really

have to be a great poet yourself. Nabokov was, but even he dodged the issue by

making . about a flawed poet.) At one point it implies that Keats’ poems

were retrocaused by the schemes of time-travelling AIs, a thing that must be

admired.

4/5.

111

SEPTEMBER 2014

• Government Expenditure Review Scotland 2014, and the Dunleavy Report,

and the McCrone Report, and the Stiglitz Currency Advice-

 (2014).

• Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt (c. 2009) by the Unknown Anti-

ethicist. …And redundant, procrustean, and worse than nothing to boot!

Interesting iconoclasm uploaded to the Open University unsigned. Their

criticisms of thought-experiments and the absence of real emotional

phenomenology from academic ethics are not unprecedented, but the

constructive answer offered here is: “instead of calculation or logic-chopping,

just love”. There are no hatchet jobs on humans here; the axe is for concepts and

methodology. (Singer is cited as an example of what not to do, but not cruelly.) I

think their attack on the psychological possibility of having a Master Factor

ethical life by holding apart the criterion of rightness from the deliberative

procedure is the only key wrong part of this; but if you disagree, then you may

well never have to read moral theory ever again (just novels instead). I wonder

whether they really couldn’t publish this under their own name. Anonymity has

certainly suppressed interest, which, given this paper's power, speaks very ill of

the ability of philosophers to transcend social pressure. (PhilPapers records just

97 downloads for the paper.)

5?/5.

• The Atrocity Archives (2001) by Charlie Stross. Four books in, I’m starting to

get annoyed at every character sharing Stross’ fondness for naff nerd references

at moments of high drama. But it took four books. So! Nazi mages, Turing as

founder of scientific magic, and some very rigorous nonsense – e.g. the killer

gaze of the Medusa is modernised as a quantum observer-effect in which the

collapse of a super-position adds protons to carbon nuclei, forming silicon(!)

Cosma Shalizi calls it ‘mind candy’, which is perfect.

3*/5. [Library]

112

• In the Light of What We Know (2014) by Zia Haider Rahman. Two globish co-

dependents of unequal intelligence but equal mawkishness take turns at

monologue, for ages and ages. One’s oracular, the other Boswellian, which

means that both talk about the nasty past of the oracular one, Zafar. Everyone’s

always trying to educate everyone else, without invitation. Tragic, panoptic, and

handles critical C21st problems – neocolonialism, quant finance, the

ineffectiveness of NGOs, the nature of the transnational élite that administers all

these things. But also dull, overwritten and clumsily polymathic (characters can

be found over-reading, variously, Gödel, Middlemarch, the birth of Bangladesh,

the Brit-pop band James). The book is aware of its pomp – there’s a long

discussion of sincerity as virtue and vice, a raging attack on Anglophone Indian

literature, and Zafar quotes more and more as he disintegrates, suggesting that

the book’s larding of quotations is a knowing prop. But while I don’t know

whether it’s Zafar or Rahman that the book’s clumsiness is rooted in, I don’t

have to, to know that his conceit of desperate knowledge didn’t take root in me.

I shouldn’t say panoptic: there’s only one woman in this, really, and we don’t see

much even of her except as deceiver and appalling vehicle for privilege. Chapter

14’s good – a big bickering, drunken dinner with Pakistani elites, and there are

details to admire throughout (Zafar broods over microaggressions, and some of

his apercus are sparkling – like his characterisation of maths as “thinking

without the encumbrance of knowledge”, or his likening of a good essay to “a

good dress – long enough to cover the important bits, short enough to be

interesting”). Last, very superficially: there are no speech marks, and this

deadens the dialogue for me; it makes everything look past-tense and snarky.

(Ok sure this works incredibly well in , but only because all the

men in that are wholly dead inside). Will Self minus electricity; Coetzee minus

originality and 12-gauge philosophical calibre. Speaking as a pompous

generalist and an inveterate over-writer…

3/5.

• Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated by Olena

Bormashenko. Ah, great! Earthy, economic sci-fi; aliens visit, ignore us entirely,

and soon leave, leaving behind only transcendent junk and horror-film

113

phenomena from their little picnic. Prose is lovely and plain, translated with

subtlety (we get “scabby”, “sham”, “mange”). The ordinary, crude protagonist

Red is scrabbling illegally to provide for his mutant family (the Strugatskys use

cash and cash pressure amazingly, grounding the whole cosmic fantasy in

commerce, crime, exploitation). Every time Red gets cash, he throws it away –

in someone’s face as an insult, in someone’s face as a distraction to evade

capture, or just away. No explanations except bureaucratic filler; no salvation,

just dumb defiance. A really nice original touch is that Red interprets the body

language of his friends in extreme detail – a scratched nose means, to him,

“Whoah, Red, be careful how rough you play with the new kid”. Also notable

for being a Soviet novel set in mid-west America, evoked very, very well. And

the Russian Soul bubbling under their dismal economics rings out without

catching in the barrel:

..%,$$-,,-4,<,#4,?3,44,,

4*4,:

4/5. [Library]

• Gave up: Another Country (1952) by James Baldwin. Doubtlessly important,

but formally and lyrically grim. Impossibility of interracial love among racism,

impossibility of calm for anyone with any really big plans, impossibility of

sexual satisfaction, impossibility of peace for a manly man, impossibility of

finishing the damn thing. [Library]

• The Signal and the Noise (2013) by Nate Silver. A nice surprise! He's very

pleased with himself (as well as being pleased with the Bayesian methods he

owes his success to). But arrogance can be earned. (A minor peeve: the hot

topics "data science" and "big data" are really just good old Victorian statistics

with a sprinkling of Silicon Vally fairy dust. But don't tell anyone I said so, or

my wage will drop 30%.)

4/5. [Library]

114

• Reread: The Pleasures of the Damned (2009) by Bukowski. The anti-social

phallocrat waves his pen in the wee small hours – yet often manages beauty. It’s

a Best-of, but actually not his best. Bukowski is Springsteen after Rosalita,

Mary, Janey, Sandy, Trudy and the rest have either moved town forever to get

away from him, or died.

3*/5 and 5/5

• Big Java – Late Objects (2013) by Cay Horstmann. And again I sign away my

mind’s dirigible dilettantism for a whole damn year. I got a lot more out of

Codecademy and being shut in a room until I eventually produce working code,

though.

2/5. [Library]

'8-

+(!

$&(&

((!

'&-&-

-'8!

%'(

&(8'!

('&&

(!

-

89-

(&&&&

&!

- John Clare

115

Cover of Colin Farrelly's 'Introducon to Polical Theory' – unsigned.

'&''&

(G

(&'

8@'!

%Homo faber Homo sapiens 

BHomo ludens!((

(8B

'(''C

– Luciano Floridi

?((S&

('-(&&!%'&

-%(&-&-'

&-&%'''-%'

&C%'&

-(-8!8!

– I Corinthians 13, via William Lorimer

Formal education is really interfering with my studies.

116

OCTOBER 2014

• Anthologie Prévert (1981) by Jacques Prévert. Hooray for the only poems I can

read in French! Nursery rhymes, but with razorwire not far beneath. The

simplicity (loads of basic nouns repeated dozens of times – “oiseaux” and “roi”,

“oiseaux” and “roi”) makes me look look nervily over my shoulder – for the real

attacker. ‘Chant Song’ is so gorgeous, daft.

3*/5.

• Andromache (1990) by Douglas Dunn. Epic verse sounds pat to me, and doubly

so when it’s forced to fit dialogue: mumming couples expositing couplets. (“%9

'!(8I!%98&'

8I%.!N) Not Dunn’s fault – the pentameter’s solid, but 3/5

is the highest I can give epic couplets cos I am limited and jaded. And he agrees:

“It was a bloody hard piece of work… and I think it was universally agreed that

I didn’t fully succeed.”

2/5.

• The Regulars (2004) by Sarah Stolfa. Very exposed and yet kind portraits from a

Philadelphia bar she tended. No action soever, just an ordinary sleazy goofy

beauty. All worth it. Foreword from Jonathan Franzen is full-on ‘eh’.

4/5.

• Antifragile (2012) by Nassim Taleb. The most ambitious and messy book in his

four-volume %. This is vast, chaotic philosophy of resistance, equal parts

artful and rigorous. Every other page has something worth hearing (for its

iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote), if not something globally and

evidently true. (I think he is right about 35% of the time, which is among the

highest credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 40% right, for instance.)

The core point, repeated a couple of hundred times for various domains:

%-''((

 288"-&''

&8&((!&&

'-'(('

''(!

117

There's a whole bunch superficially wrong with the book; I discuss my gripes in

more detail here. But it talks about everything, is historically wide-eyed,

relentlessly rational, and often funny. Also the method-worldview-style it

suggests might be one way to stop life crushing us utterly.

4*/5.

• Aloud: The Stairwell (2014) by Michael Longley. Flickers between the Classical

general and the wattle-byre specific. All really personal – but not in the

universally interesting melodramatic way. It is personal in the way that hanging

around the vestibule of a friend of a friend of a friend’s house when one didn’t

know they were dropping past and one quite needs the toilet is personal. Also,

it’s full up with the (apparently haute Irish?) obsession with Attic Greece. One or

two amazing ones – see “Amelia’s Poem” at the bottom of this.

3/5.

NOVEMBER 2014

• Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction (2001) by Luciano Floridi.

Whistle-stop hyperbole in the way of Continentals, but grounded by its technical

knowledge and techno-optimism:

'&&

(&'!%(

(''&&8

&-B8&!>8('9

(2'!%'&

&@&''-'(-

'&@!'

&-&@-88

--'

!

Notice the skilled and non-fatuous use of phenomenological blah! Chapter 2, his

fast and very formal discussion of Boole, Gödel and Turing, took me about half

a week. The tiny concluding chapter – in which he locates computers in the

history of human freedom, as Hephaestean handmaids – makes me giddy.

Slightly dated where it talks PC specs, and he loves a goofy neologism

(“egology”, “corporeal membranes”), but grand, sceptical, grand, supervenient.

118

4/5.

(His ‘Informational Nature of Personal Identity’ and ‘Turing’s

Three Lessons’ are 4*/5.)

• Surviving (2009) by Allan Massie. Drunk or ex-drunk Anglos bitch around

Rome. Some of the literary references are a bit much (“The boy was reading

Stendhal; how bad could he be?”) but the nasty driving fatigue underneath is

good. Has a really ugly binding and font, so I’ve compensated the score in case I

am shallow.

3/5.

• Aloud: ‘The’ ‘“Rubaiyyat’” of ‘Omar Khayyam’ (2014) by Vanessa

Hodgkinson. I use those apostrophes advisedly. Gaudy and hectic word-

association, with only tenuous formal or thematic links to Khayyam, but fizzing

with verve of its own. (Vine is a video fragment public diary; Wine is an

excellent Windows emulator.) Teeming with clumsy nerdy ephemera, but I think

it will be worth reading in 10 years. Let's see. Works ' better aloud.

4/5.

• Rationality for Mortals (2008) by Gerd Gigerenzer. Yet another volley in the

‘rationality wars’. GG sets himself against the heuristics and biases folk (though

note he is also not of the fatuous constructionist camp which says, roughly: ‘it’s

impossible for 8 to be irrational, because reason is  social, so we are

the measure of it’) by minimising the apparent irrationality uncovered by the

cognitive sciences in the last little while. Key claims:

1. Heuristics are not just faster or more tractable, but & than

Bayesian formalism.

2. People are not flawed Bayesians but natural frequentists.

119

Bayesian algorithmics is attainable by humans; nor are the misconceptions in

table 1.1 (p.9) ever stated so strongly. Also 2) GG's evidence on e.g. the framing

of the conjunction fallacy doesn't replicate. But anyway this is well-argued, well-

written, scientific in the highest sense, and wrong? Read this instead.

4/5.

DECEMBER 2014

• Reread: ‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ (1853) by Herman

Melville. One of the , those endlessly interpretable load-bearing

columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence,

impermeability. What is Bartleby, if not just depressed or hyper-lazy? Well

there’s the defensive Stoic catatonia, or wu wei; Bartleby as crypto-proto-

Marxist; Bartleby as waning Übermensch, squatter monk, annoying Christ;

Bartleby as dissociating schizophrene or autist; Bartleby as Death of Dead

Letters; Bartleby as PTSD ghost; Bartleby as all our inarticulate idiosyncracy; as

utter Other – “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”

Some people (e.g. Blanchot, Hardt & Negri, Setiya) view him as heroic, but he’s

more hallucinogenic and morbid: he lacks everything but refusal; he throws his

life away. And that’s a living death, a non-human void (“I never feel so private

as when I know [Bartleby is] here”).

$-&-((

'&?&-

(-&(!

8&

'!%('

('+8!

8&-('(!

(8(-

''&&!

That copyists are an extinct breed only adds to the seething flavour; it is (&

that OCR and distributed Captchas could have minimised Bartleby’s suffering -

that the condition the piece wrangles with isn’t eternal. What would Bartleby be

today? Not, I think, an Occupier; rather a impassive backstreets bookshop

120

owner, or a kombucha stallholder or whatnot. I prefer to read Melville’s voice -

waffling Victorian persiflage - as an assumed decoration for the windbag

lawyer’s voice (however much & shouts otherwise).

5/5.

• Question Everything (2014) by New Scientist readers. 132 lovely earthings of

sky-high theory. Not much new to me, but was vital as refresher course and mind

candy. The tacit connections between the answers are the real thing – for

instance, I guessed (wrongly) that synchrotron radiation and Cherenkov

radiation were based on the same mechanism, and feel very happy that a quick

and public disconfirmation was available. Here (and Quora is apparently very

good becuase of its paywall).

3*/5.

• The Blunders of Our Governments (2013) by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe.

Insofar as anything is uncontroversial in politics – the most mired of intellectual

backwaters – this sticks to uncontroversial blunders. So we only get the

internally incoherent or screwy policies like Suez; poll tax; ERM Black

Wednesday. (The book’s larger point is that there are more and more of these to

come, because of the shape of Westminster’s gears.) A compressed, formal style

– hiding its anger, so ministerial ignorance and snobbishness gets called "cultural

disconnect" – but constructive and schadenfreudish too. First chapter is a list of

state successes (green belts, social housing boom and sale, Clean Air, seat belts,

vaccinations, minimum wage, smoking ban, swine flu prep) included as a

counter-libertarian tonic before launching into the peaky blunders. (This first

chapter actually made my chest swell.)

4/5.

• The Reith Lectures 2014 by Atul Gawande. Cool stories, world-changing

practical interventions - but indifferent philosophy. Of systems, fallibility,

humaneness. As with other systems theorists like Meadows, I accept the general

swing – ‘this shit is hard; the pieces don't show the whole’ – but don’t see how

their proposals are actually different from classic reductionism (that dirty word

which is in fact clean practice). A checklist  a reduction of a chaotic array of

121

options into atoms of action! A system can only be specified if you understand

what are interacting. The points about treating patients like humans are

presumably right but not that simple to implement without first lessening medics'

workloads a whole lot?

3/5.

(Cites ‘Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility’ (1975) by MacIntyre and

Gorovitz. 4*/5.)

• Reliable Essays (2001) by Clive James. Mostly  subjects here, always &

on crap. He: brags about having spotted Heaney’s ambit very early, points out

the fatal ideological flaws in both Mailer and Greer, fiercely challenges

translations from the Italian, the Russian, the German; summarises every major

photography book of the late 70s; shows that liberalism and classicism remain

standing, “less bad than all the others” even after the sustained insult of C20th

Theory; and other such generalist feats. The titles of the last two sections –

“Almost Literature” and “Practically Art” – are scale models of both his style

and critical mission: to raise the foully sunken, or shield the great assailed.

4*/5.

• Dictionary of Received Ideas (1870s) by Gustave Flaubert. $.(

3 plus $(, for C19th France: the contradictory and petty

zeitgeist. I myself have used 'alabaster' to describe a woman, whoops.

3/5.

• In one sitting in a hotel café: Wolf in White Van (2014) by John Darnielle.

Scrunched-up, guileless portrait of outcast youth via choose-your-own-adventure

and emotional reconstruction. Though first-person, it circles the ruined

protagonist Sean warily, not looking directly at him in his isolation,

powerlessness, and very occasional gratuitous joy. A couple of those Darnielle

lines resonate out from the hurt and 80s ephemera – “[All I knew of Lance were]

the parts he hadn’t been able to stop himself from mentioning, the pieces of

himself that flew naturally from him like sparks from a torch”, “…No shortage

of things still left to do” – but JD is not so concerned with making the narrator

122

lyrical; in fact a large theme is that Sean (as with Lance’s folly) is mundane and

inexplicable, even to himself. 4! And, as always with Darnielle

we get the quiet or defiant or perverse or poetic appreciation of the devalued

(p.186!). (Alan Bennett: “Oh, I’m unhappy, but not unhappy about it”. Darnielle:

$&D'F''

$&'&!

8'-%-&-*

'-!%9

!%'%'!%9

'-'88&

(!9'!'(

@!

)

3*/5.

• The New Testament in Scots (1967 CE) by William Lorimer. In the form that

survived, Scots is a uniformly profane language – not in the sense of profanity,

but as in worldly and comic and demotic. Some of that opinion is classist

stereotype; it certainly wasn't true four hundred years ago (the devotional poems

of Dunbar and Henryson stand up to the sacred efforts in any language); but

most is real, down to Knox's decision on a legally-mandatory bible in English,

but even more to the cultural capture of the nation’s Anglicised elites, but even

more than that to the simple dictates of shared economic activity, over three

hundred years: i.e. 8 English our sacred talk, then we gave English our

intellectual talk, and then trade talk, and law talk, and all their formal

accoutrements. Until only the informal and proletarian was left. Atweill, the

kitsch prevails (“Hoots ma wee bonnie lassie! Ahiiii wid wauk fyv hhundrid

myles”). When Lorimer wrote this, the dialectisation of Scots, and the cutesy

granny-aff-a-bus process wasn’t so advanced - but this is the register we

moderns read it in, unless we are rural and lucky.

(Nasty but probable thing I once heard a linguist lecture on: relatively few

languages develop the scientific-philosophical register and benefit from its

sharpening vocabularies. He reckoned that only nine ever have, : Chinese,

Arabic, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, English. Scots

definitely had speakers sophisticated enough, in its High Medieval heyday, but

the internationalist use of Latin precluded it.)

123

Lorimer saw a Bible translation as one of two conditions that would revitalise

Scots. (The language, rather than the dialect Scots English.) (The other big brick

being the great Dictionary.) Well, we have both now, and they are not enough. I

think the argument for bringing back languages is only superficially the humane

one, since language is for communication first, and our condition is more and

more a global one. (I find it difficult to fault Katja Grace’s analysis: the standard

arguments fail, and the present matters more than the past, because it is where

value actually happens.)

Lorimer translated it straight from the Koine Greek over a full decade, finishing

the second draft just before his death. The art comes in his rendering the apostles

with their own voice and distinctive idiolect. (Paul is, here as ever, a nasty little

man: smug and litigious.) While I’m very glad this exists, the book itself can do

little for me, whatever language it’s wearing. (Nothing takes me further from

religious awe than the actual things we said God said. Hauflin’ indeed.)

N/A.

'-&'

)'&'9

-''

8

.&G&

(-$8(G

982

'2-



&

'-

$(&''-

&--B

'!

- Michael Longley

124

Self-criticism in Anderson (2005)

*C#'&!!!

9'!

– Robert Penn Warren

(''8

&(&8

'''-(88@

T@'?

T@'

((?

T(AA2&@

'8(?

T@-(?

T''&M(

2M8+-'8-

2&@!

– Fred Brooks

125

When I give something 5?/5 I'm predicting that I’ll reread the thing, not more. It's a

hedged bet: I don't think the very greatest echelons of value can be known immediately.

It takes time, and continuity, and the accumulation of meaning. Only if one’s

appreciation survives the changes one goes through can you really say it's the top. Call

no book favourite until you are dead.

JANUARY 2015

• At the bells: The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (2002) by Hilary

Putnam. A remarkable piece of meta-ethics, established in large part by

undermining... neoclassical economics.

Important quibble: The title evokes sexy French relativism – e.g. there is no fact

of the matter, il n’y a pas de hors-texte – whereas his actual thesis is that only the

strictest, stupidest partition between facts and values collapsed. (A distinction is

the mild statement that A is not the same thing as B – whereas a dichotomy is the

strict logical exclusion of two things: ‘if something is A, it is a priori not B’.) A

pedantic quibble: god he is fond of italics.

Anyway. It collapsed, but still lives on in other fields, decades after the fall of

the positivism that was the only thing motivating it. Book is: a scathing modern

history of the distinction, a Pragmatic reconstruction, a love letter to Amartya

Sen. Putnam blames the philosophical dichotomy for the failures of economics,

and from there for real suffering.

ON!!!'8-!

%'('9-%

J8-J%8&A'

C'!%8-J

JJ'!J%'(!!!-

J8('-J&

!#JJ&((8-

'

+(-'

(8'&&!J)J'(

((I8'

&'''8((''

(8'! %-''

J'!J"

126

Some claims: Factual and evaluative statements are necessarily entangled, since;

Facts are ascertained  only by the application of epistemic values:

"coherence, plausibility, reasonableness, simplicity, and elegance... if these

epistemic values do enable us to correctly describe the world... that is something

we see through the lenses of those very values."; i.e. facts are thick too; i.e. he

has been made to "' ''(';"

&@88&@8". Of course, coupled to his

ditching foundationalism, this leads him a long way down the Rortyan road -

'science is just another social practice' yada yada - but he tries to salvage a sort

of pragmatic objectivity for science. Dunno if he's winning, but I loved the race.

4*/5.

• Twice: The Collected Poems, 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Bought it for

someone else, but couldn't give it away. Does much that I usually don’t

appreciate – both Holocaust musing  the relative innocence of nature. But his

indirectness and attentiveness lift it way, way beyond the ordinary run of those

themes. Never mawkish. Epochal. Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here.

5/5.

• The Serpent’s Promise (2013) by Steve Jones. Interesting idea: take Bible

literalists literally; see how much of the book’s many empirical claims are

anywhere near right, re: cosmogony, hygiene, heredity, migration. Couple cool

results –

-D'F'-8-A

-'''E0(

C'-&'

+-8((B8

9=$!!!

H9-'

(('(!

-'8(!

– but unstructured, often unclear, and tiring, in the main. Minus a half for having

no citations for any of its thousand claims.

127

2/5.

• The Mythical Man-Month (1975) by Fred Brooks. How big teams make things.

Also how awesome tech can feel:

'-'+((

--!'8

(':-(

!8'@!

The oldest thing by far on my computing syllabus and nearly the most stylish.*

Anniversary edition has a chapter which is just the whole book boiled down to

its propositions, and whether or not they stood up twenty years later, which is a

thing that most non-fiction could gravely benefit from. (You sometimes see the

like of this in honest philosophy books, included as ‘analytical index’ or

‘prolegomenon’ or ‘exordium’.) Brooks is not merely exoteric, not just an IBM

mook; suitably acerbic and suitably enthusiastic. The open secret of

programming is that it is actually a whole barrel of fun, just one that scares the

shit out of most people. NB: The Christian God rears up at unexpected intervals

– and at one point Brooks recommends openly patriarchal programming teams

on the model of “God’s plan for marriage”. But it doesn’t much get in the way.

4/5. [Library]

* (I set myself Shannon, Wang, Knuth.)

• Hermione and Her Group of Serious Thinkers (1916) by Don Marquis. Funny,

bitchy slander of the hippies and pseuds of a century ago. Vague, snobbish,

hypocritical, self-congratulatory, appropriative: that is, not much has changed up

to our New Agers and hipsters. Repetitive – too many puns about howdahs, etc –

and more than three-quarters of it assumes the voices of rhythmically

insufferable idiots. Its real value, apart from hammering home the difference

between Marquis’ own true poetic voice and the banal vers libre he uses, is as

history lesson. The Orientalist, relativist bohemian mysticism was  from an

innovation of the Sixties. Notice that, even while despairing of Hermione,

Marquis hangs around her all the same, a hanger-on to hangers-on. Give it an

128

hour, do.

4/5.

• Reread, aloud: Monogamy (1996) by Adam Philips. Harsh, circuitous,

questioning gobbets on the greatest secular religion. I guess he’s a bit overfond

of the knowing paradox (“Seduction, the happy invention of need”; “The

problem of a marriage is that it can never be called an affair”) – and of course

aphorisms have to compress away the qualifications that could make them fairer,

and easier to take in large doses.

%(&'&''

?'!.(

-'

!&&&''!

(!%

(8-'&8

@&&

&C&8

D&F88

(!

But it’s non-partisan and original and funny and wise and I still haven’t absorbed

the finer points.

5/5.

FEBRUARY 2015

• The Black Halo: Collected English Stories (1977–1998) by Iain Crichton

Smith. Best Scottish poet writes good Scottish stories about, mostly, terrible

Scottish pragmatists. Steady observational tragedy, and quiet outcast statures.

Recurring structure: a staid, professional male narrator tells us his profession on

page 1 and admits a whole puckle of flaws. Recurring people: the censorious,

crabbit islander who was not always so; the passionate and creative woman

slowly eroded by island gossip, monotony, stasis; her husband, who knows this

129

happened because of him. Most striking are ‘The Scream’, ‘What to do About

Ralph?’, ‘The Spy’, and ‘The Exorcism’ – but particularly the latter, because I

recognised the worst of myself in both the little bastard obsessed with

Kierkegaard and the small-souled lecturer who saves him:

%''

8CDF%&'

'@&(&

('((-(-

&

;

Much more than clever. 5?/5.

• Wars, Guns, and Votes (2010) by Paul Collier. Economist slices through much

bullshit in the course of identifying empirical handles on democracy in the

extremely-poor world. His work is deadly serious, innovative and data-rich; but

this & is chatty and low on representations of his mostly unprecedented,

mostly persuasive data. How much does an A-K cost in different parts of the

world? Are peacekeepers worth it? Does democracy promote civil war in the

absence of wealth? and such vital things.

4/5. [Library]

• The Hearts of Men (1983) by Barbara Ehrenreich. Unstereotypical gender

sociology: traces the male revolt – years before the sexual revolution – against

the comparably rigid breadwinner social role inflicted on them. At the time it

was too universal to have a name; it was just known vaguely as 'Conformity' or

'Maturity'. On the white-collar worker:

&B'

B8&'

&!

The key virtue of it is that she sympathises (more with the Vidals and Roths than

the Menckens and Kerouacs, obviously - but in general too). The key thesis:

%(((-'

(&'&

'+!!!'+('

&&?-''-

'''

130

''(&'+'

(8'!!!

! Her characteristic wit and resistance to received responses is much in evidence.

4/5. [Library]

• User Stories Applied (2005) by Mike Cohn. I only recently learned about a

fundamental dichotomy in expressing oneself: you use either the 'esoteric' or the

'exoteric' mode. (The exoteric writer says exactly what she means, minimises

ambiguity and tries to do everything with explicit reasoning, for the largest

audience they can, with imagery and irony only as decoration. The esoteric

writer – who is distinct from but often coterminous with the woo-woo mystical

metaphysics fans also called esoteric – does the converse. Most ancient writers

wrote esoterically, which is one reason that undergrads and other fools, like me,

think that ancient writers are vague and low on content. Up to now, I have been

confusing the rhetorical stance - see Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Caputo - with

the magickal crap. But so much of the Analytic / Continental divide can be

explained in this single distinction! [The revival of the distinction is due to the

lionized demon Leo Strauss.] Maths is an interesting border case, but its clarity

and attempt to destroy ambiguity make it exoteric, I think.)

The exoteric intention strikes me as firstly just good manners and important for

intellectual honesty (accountability, critical clarity). But one thing I dislike about

studying computer science is that  the materials are utterly exoteric. I crave art

and irreverence in formal contexts, and that's always at least somewhat esoteric.

The ‘Agile’ software thing strikes me as good, a way of making the hag-ridden

and monstrously expensive dev process work. But all the material around Agile,

LEAN (and the wider business-marketing-HR-systems theory blah that

represents most employed adults’ only engagement with passably academic

work) is so exoteric that something in me rebels.

3/5.

• Out of their Minds: The Lives of 15 Computer Scientists (1995) by Dennis

Shasha & Cathy Lazere. An oral history of pioneer computing. These people

131

aren't generally regarded as what they are: simply that sort of ((

8(&'(&.

(&&

B'(8



• 3%';

• '8(&'

''(;

• )%&&'(;

• $(%)%('

;

The men here developed things modern life could not function without: high-

level programming, the hard maths of networking, the hard maths of

timestamping, shortest paths, probabilistic solutions to deterministic questions.

Knuth comes out as so goddamn wholly loveable.

4/5. [Library]

• Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs. Disgusting but virtuous. I liked his

scientific reports more.

3/5. [Library]

• Get Doomed: A Fucking Novella (2015) by Paul Wilhelm Crowe. Scattered,

scatological Robert Rankinism, written for a friend. Every chapter is called “In

which Rupert finds a map”; there is no map and are no Ruperts. The fact that I

am a principal sidekick in it (killed on page 3 by a tidal wave of kebab mank and

reanimated as a Roomba with a T-Pain vocoder) is besides the besides.

3*/5.

132

MARCH 2015

• Essays (1570-90) by Michel de Montaigne, via JM Cohen. Woosh. How many

Renaissance people sound this modern, this undeluded? Essay on erectile

dysfunction is very funny:

%''($

'!!!&'&'&!&

(2!

@'('((!

&

'

&!!!

Most of the others are just very wise and touching, as when he talks about his

terrible memory, and misquotes Latin poetry by the bushel, from it. This was a

very cut-down edition (only 100 pages, out of maybe 700 in the Complete

edition) - probably what one wants, to begin with. Will be back.

5?/5.

• A whole lorra stuff about pharmacy information systems.3/5.

• The Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1962) by

Ved Mehta. Curious portraits of Oxbridge people: the ordinary-language

philosophers just as they were awaking from their long radical nap, and the arsey

titans of Modern history (Trevor-Roper, Carr, Taylor, Namier). The book was

originally a New Yorker series, fitting their house style – gossip on the

transcendental – but there’s more gossip than concepts. We get to relive all the

angry Times responses to bitchy reviews, learn what Toynbee ordered for dinner

at the Athenaeum in late ’62; also the hair colour of everyone involved

(Murdoch ‘straight and blonde, recalling the peasant aspect of Saint Joan’). To

their faces, Mehta is way too much the deferential alumn, tentatively prodding

the dons to be unkind about their peers.

The humans are worth it if you already care: Austin and Namier are tragic

hubristic husks; Hare, Ayer, and Toynbee’s charisma blare straight through

Mehta’s quiet journalism. The common point is both fields' slow recovery from

133

positivism/Wittgensteinian reductionism - the cautious return of theory, and of

' posits. He has some spirit: after meeting Strawson he says “I took my

leave of the scaled-down Kant.”; he finishes the book with this wonderful

medievalism:

=(((&

G.-

$-'B%''>

G'&'(

8-&-(

'(-8&

--H':%98

:%98:9

3/5 [Library] (4/5 if you like linguistic philosophy / British historiography).

• Reread: Making Money (2008) by Terry Pratchett. One sitting. $. 4/5.

• Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh. Another very dark, funny prod of the posh

and awful. Lord Monomark, Ginger Littlejohn, Colonel Blount, The Drunken

Major, Lottie Crump, The Honourable Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice...

The Bright Young Things – who are dim – ludicrous wagers – which are won –

and the runaway motorcars – oh. Jeeves and Wooster if it had death, teeth,

madness and war in. Predicts the next war, or, rather, concocts it in order to

punish the frivolous protagonists.

3*/5.

• The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (1991) by David Stove. Funny,

unfair, rabid dismissal of most philosophy ever. Uses '' Bulwerism

openly - despite that going against his own ideal of reason - because he views a

great range of people as being too mad to engage with. His other move is to use

the positivist's wood-chipper principle a lot: 'your position is literally

meaningless; you're too stupid to see this', occasionally correctly. Attacks

idealists mostly, including whole chapters making fun of Goodman, Nozick, and

Popper(!) - but does not spare Mill ("here doing his usual service of making

mistakes very ") and Russell, who you'd think were his kind of men. The

last chapter is scary and hilarious and suggests the man's basic pain, underneath

134

his roaring pessimism.

4/5. (keep it away from freshers though)

• Occasional Poets: an Anthology (1986), edited by Richard Adams. Poems from

people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and

diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the big grim novelists

(Lessing, Coetzee, Fowles, Murdoch, Golding) write enormous grit-tooth verse;

&

(2



&(!

$(8

%('!

%!

&'('((!

$'('

'!

)(

&;

Raymond Briggs, a quiet, brutal elegy; David Lodge, some good meta jokes;

animal bits from Jan Morris and Stella Gibbons; Wodehouse, two wonderful

gossipy hyperboles. Adams manages to pick out the only Naomi Mitchison

poems I don’t like. A lot of unbridled sentiment, e.g. Arnold Wesker depressing

his children, Francis King's lies spiralling down, Enoch Powell lying awake

listening to his wife's asthma; the writers aren't expecting the irony-making

pressures of publication, or the obsessive polishing of any work that will be

identified with '. So it's free indeed. Until Adams.

4*/5.

135

– JM Coetzee

136

%-(('('(+(-

&G'(&(-'!

.&''&'8

D+F(!

– Niklaus Wirth

“%9'%9N(

2-'(&

C%&8-

&'! O#(-

&?'&(8!N"

– Jasper Griffin

Had my Final exams, but that didn’t stop me doing these, for reasons of perversity.

I wonder about books that would take me a full 3 months to read. %7 seems to

take people at least this long (not me, cause I'm a fanboy who flatters himself as living

very near to DFW's own native frequency). I’ve just gotten the LessWrong bible, but

that is more of a single happy month, to be administered whenever one feels that human

history is futile... There's the giant crunchy formal bastions: Kendall’s Advanced

137

Theory; University Physics; TAOCP. (Though, as DFW points out, the reason these

would take 3 months is not their difficulty, really:

%-H%(&-

((9-'9(&

(

(2'

(8''

&--'9!

)

APRIL 2015

• Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978-1984 (2006) by Simon Reynolds.

Exhaustive essay on art and/versus pop, politics and/versus aesthetics, intellect

and/versus passion, and on how seriously music should, in general, be taken. He

reads post-punk as far wider than the sombre anti-rock art-school thing people

usually take it to be – so he includes Human League and ABC as post-punks

with emphasis on the post: His scope is total: everything’s here (except for oi,

hardcore, Ramonescore – i.e. the people who failed to make it past punk).

Reynolds divides the genre in three broad camps:

1. modernists (PiL, Cab Vol, No Wave, industrial, SST prog-

punk),

2. New Pop and synth,

3. retro-eclectics (two-tone, Goth, Northern Soul).

Reynolds has more critical acumen than any of the mooks in the brainy bands;

more love than the fey melodists. I have lived in the post-punk woods – too

jaded and too hopeful to be a punk – for getting on a decade, and I thought

myself a connoisseur: until now I was not. Full review here.

4*/5.

• Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (2005)

by Bruce Schneier. Some hard lessons taken from computer security are spun out

into a general theory of Defence. His language is sometimes a little banal, but

138

there is a fully worked-out and rigorous model of the world underneath, without

deference to the creeping establishment or the splurging radicals.

3*/5. [Library]

• Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing (1991) by David Harel. A thing of

beauty: Harel’s attempt to write a work of computer science that doesn’t date.

The general abstract introductory matter. The field is hugely consequential:

different algorithms for the same task can differ in performance by massive

orders of magnitude. Bible quotations book-end each chapter and give this a

frisson of something other.

4/5. [Library]

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) by David Foster Wallace. Draining,

scarifying, funny, hyperactive, elevating. ‘Content warning’, as we now say. For

instance, the person described in this passage is one story’s hero, a remarkable

and powerful agent:

[her] ((-&--

'-'&-+'&

-(('(8-&

-&'(--

'8&-(&(22

8(2((C

i.e. He comes up with a perfect encapsulation of a facile social trend, but throws

away his anger about it, makes us realise that our efforts to be tasteful / rational /

grown-up are, here, making us small. DFW was an early mover in the revived

Third Culture we can all enjoy: writing about the technical in terms of its

meaning. But he was different: his syncretism came out of the negations of high

postmodern theory, rather than the usual humanists with science backgrounds.

4@'(8(('9

8&((&''

''!

‘On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand’ made me cry long.

5?/5.

139

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2009) by Donella Meadows. I was a tad hostile

to this at first – mostly because her field bred a generation of pseuds who use

‘reductionism’ as an insult (rather than as an ontological term or useful way of

thinking, instances of which denote the highest achievements of the species).

This is the power behind the quotation from Niklaus Wirth, above. It is an

attempt to make holism rigorous; given holism's deep intuitive appeal for people,

the attempt is worthy attempt. But let's get clear:

“REDUCTIONISM” (to the pseud): The claim that complicated or

immeasurable things do not exist.

“SYSTEMS THEORY” (to the pseud): The only way of

understanding things is as a whole. Everything else omits and so isn't

full.

REDUCTIONISM (ontology): The claim that complicated things are

made of simpler things. Only the simplest of them are physically

real; the rest are mental models of their interactions.*

REDUCTIONISM (methodology): The attempt to isolate causes and

treat phenomena in terms of their most basic units (whether quark,

string, person, transaction).

SYSTEMS THEORY: When things get together, they exhibit

features the individual things don’t.

So stated, there is no conflict between good old reduction and shiny systems

thinking. But Meadows distils the juicy bits into <200pp here, and freely admits

that systems theory has an intractable indeterminacy built into it, and says this,

too:

,8%8-&

'--'8'!

.(''

(&'O-NO!N%9

'&&'''-

(&'8-C

+'(&'!

$(&'8&8&+

M(8'(+-(-'8

'(((8!

'&'-8-'

ON8(&'C-(8-

8'-'&-'('-

---+'(-(

140

(&&8

&'!&

(&'-'(-&(

!

&'(&'G

&&8'

('!'-

(&'-'

(&'-'!

Systems talk is not just interdisciplinary, but meta-disciplinary. But it can rarely

8 empirical questions in the way that physics does. In saying, probably

rightly, that a flow could go either way, depending on the state of the rest of the

system and neighbouring systems, you lose or sideline crucial power to find out

a single cause's influence, and thereby know more or less exactly what to do to

the system. In other places, knowledge comes from isolating causes. A

reductionist can agree with all the clever diagrams in this, happily concede that

they  the gnarly problems of collective action and other ecosystems

very clearly, and not give up their peerlessly successful ontological stance at all.

3*/5.

* Also PHYSICALISM: Everything is made of physical things.

(However, the physical may be stranger than you think.)

141

MAY 2015

• The Conquest of the Useless: Diaries from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (2004)

by Werner Herzog, transl. Krishna Winston. I have a weird relationship with

Herzog. The films’ typical tone and message (Nietzschean tragicomedy) doesn't

really appeal to me. I watch them – and I watch them all, even since  –

for their literal and figurative voice: his relentless Teutonic ecstatic absurdity. I

watch, waiting for that voice to roll out and make me hurt or laugh. (Since his

humour is only sometimes on show, I am often laughing at him – and yet, out of

mawkish brutalism, through my irony, rise the most affecting scenes I’ve ever

seen: the beach shot in )&<; the clouds in *; the wandering

penguin in ,; above all the final shot of .)

These diaries show him to be more thoughtful, rational, contrived and poetic

than I had guessed. His sincere interest in the locals’ territorial plight, his

physical participation in the set construction and management, his absorption in

the suffering of jungle animals, his incongruous bright-eyed interest in

mathematics, his astonishing codependency with Kinski, are all deeply

disarming. The prose takes some getting used to, since the plain unflinching goth

awe of it is the kind of thing we are primed to mock. It is well worth acclimating

to: each entry is both bleak and hilarious, and the translation is rapturous and

pellucid. There is such a lot of death.

He certainly views the natural world right: as overwhelmingly a place of

horrifying and pointless suffering, cooed over by rationalising pseuds from cars.

There’s not a lot of technical info here, or explanations of the crew’s role or

background; there's no timeline or context added; nor even very much about the

film at all. But who cares? This is incredible as nature writing, dream journal,

and logistical poetry.

5?/5.

• Preliminary Assessment of Linux for Safety-Critical Systems (2002) by RH

Pierce. UK government commissioned this to sanction what was happening

already. Clears it for SIL1 and SIL2, and SIL3 is said to be accessible after some

more testing. Because this report has a very specific aim, it actually provides a

142

very clear introduction to the Linux movement and the technicalities of OS

safety, both.

3/5.

• Reread: What the Hell are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley (2006).

Hilarious, abject, shoddy magical realism. Voices from the last bus and the dawn

of time, from dank cells and strip-lit service stations. Against institutional art and

other pretences, and against indifference, and against no fun.

5/5.

• Authorship and the Art of David Lynch (2012) by Antony Todd. Pompous and

shallow, with less intellectual content than the Rotten Tomato summaries of the

films, let alone the films. (“)(4+!”)

Wields critical-theory Freudian shite to justify writing a book without any real

discussion of the films, or the films' themes, or even any real biographical

aspersion of Lynch-as-seen-in-his-films. Instead there is second-hand gossip

dressed up as historical context and post-structuralist intertextuality (“Jaussian

reception theory”: the discussion of reviews, ad campaigns, corporate

manoeuvring).

'(in critical theory): the position that both artwork and authors are

irrelevant to the study of the artwork.

3--''((

&''(9

'2+2+'

''('(

+'!!!

I’m not suggesting Todd is dishonest, or intentionally vague: instead, I think film

studies has deluded this man into thinking he’s doing intellectual work when he

shuffles these words around.

1/5.

&'(: I was very much looking

forward to this book, and so I fell far. Also it’s been a while since I

read any academic Arts work that didn’t strike me as hollow and

143

fatally decoupled from the work at hand. Let alone its coupling to the

world. I will strive to cherry-pick in future.

• Neptune’s Brood (2013) by Charlie Stross. Extended essay on the

macroeconomics of space bitcoin and the Graeberian lightness of debt. Also

dead good breakneck fun, as always. Protagonist is a historian of finance and a

gentle soul in ravenous space capitalism. Set in the Saturn’s Children world,

with perhaps too much in common with that book (a powerful, psychotic

matriarch antagonist; economic pressure as main plot driver; a serially

manipulated and unviolent lead; space travel is shit). But good.

Note: He devises a species of terrifying scavenger, the ‘Bezos worm’, which fall

upon the wounded in vast packs, and incorporate their prey into their intestinal

lining, to steal their genetic essence and thereby ease future cannibalism.

3*/5. [Library]

• Aloud: Sentenced to Life (2015) by Clive James. Poems written in the

lengthening tail-end of his prognosis, mostly to his estranged wife. Plain,

Classical, of cycles and renewal, death as travel, and the similarity of ends to

beginnings.

'('

%'-%-'-

3'''-

(8

%-&

'

.&!&-8-

%8

.&>-+!

Some rage: against Assad and his torturers, against unreflective

environmentalism, against Laura Riding or Gabriele d’Annunzio. Black humour

relieving the strain of being wise and stoical.

4'&

$((

8!

144

&

%'

%'!

Wanted to love this, but it is just good. It really picks up halfway through. His

simple ones about e.g. Oxfam shops / action films are better than the cosmic

ones. Best are ‘Plot Points’, ‘Echo Point’, ‘Transit Visa’, ‘Event Horizon’,

‘Nature Programme’, ‘The Emperor’s Last Words’.

4/5. [Library]

• Object-Oriented Software Engineering (2005) by Lethbridge and Laganiere.

Software engineering is just a fancy word for design. It consists in getting a long

way away from your code – procedural, data, architectural, set-theoretic

abstraction – which I resented at first, but which is far more important than it

looks. UML is a rigorous, machine-readable graphical logic. Rather than lines of

code, design patterns are the real units of serious work. This book is exoteric to

fuck (infected by the ‘stakeholder’ bureaucratese bug) and occasionally the

examples are not illustrative, but all right.

3/5. [Library]

• The Decline and Fall of Science (1976) by Celia Green. Sullen Objectivist

parapsychologist rant, aimed at convincing someone to give her £10m

(“Considering how much there is to be done in this subject, that much would be

reasonable”). Somehow this blared forth from elite trappings, Hamish Hamilton;

it certainly bears an old, old Oxbridge sneer.

%(--

(&8'8&@(

8!!!

Chapter 1 is “The Decline and Fall of Civilisation”. 6 and 7 get the declines of

physics and medicine out of the way in 22 pages. Chapter 14: “Psychokinesis”.

Chapter 17: “Conclusion, for the Particular Attention of Millionaires”. So I

admit I picked this up to laugh at it: the first page has Green declare herself an

unappreciated genius, followed by pages of largely inapt aphorisms:

145

((&H89

'H'9!

'((!

8((&

(!

H$@9G+(8!

(Though I like ‘Democracy: the idea that everyone should have an equal

opportunity to obstruct everybody else.’)

2/5, extra point for her sheer force of aristocratic woo. [University! Library]

• The Philosophical Programmer (1998) by Daniel Kohanski. Damn! Would

have been fantastic to read first, before the stress and sheer pace of How To

Program overcame the space I had in mind for What It Is To Program. Gentle,

brief, happy introduction to the totally basic elements and history. Not abstract or

sweeping enough for its stated aims, though. See Floridi for the grand

social/phenomenological bits, Dennett and Minsky for its relevance to all

thought.

3/5, but 4 for noobs. [Library]

• Reread: This is Water (2006) by David Foster Wallace. I’ve seen a whole lot of

hatin’ on DFW lately – here, here, here, here. But who else marries the syrupy

plain with the thrilling theoretical arcane? Could  fail to understand the

obvious, masked point of this little lecture? (Roughly just: “It requires constant

work to direct oneself from egotism and irritation; this work is the point of

education and the essence of maturity.”)

The audience titters throughout the recording; this grates on me. It’s the forced,

knowing laughter you hear in theatres (or wherever large groups of upper-middle

class people gather). I submit that it’s this feature of DFW’s audience that Ellis

and TLP hate. I don’t know if reading DFW makes me any less self-obsessed

and disdainful, but actually it feels like it might.

146

5/5. [Here]

JUNE 2015

• Human Chain (2010) by Seamus Heaney. As ever, it’s of hands, eels,

parents, wakes, digging, kennings, regret, the RUC, Cuchulain, and Caesar.

Fully half are in memoriams. You have to be brave or famous to write this

plainly. Plainness can be mistaken for absence of technique – ‘here, I could do

that’ – but here it is very, very obvious that I could not. Feel your tongue:

%998

'!%'&-

=8-&!

!'!

.'('8!$!!

&&&!

8'-!

8

8&8

4'8'!

'8'8

'&-&89&'!

Best are ‘A Herbal’, ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, ‘Miracle’, ‘Loughanure’, and ‘Route

110’, an odyssey about buying a second-hand copy of the Aeneid and then trying

to go home.

4*/5. [Library]

• The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (2011) by David Foster Wallace. What to

say? Fifty fragments: unintegrated, contradicting, only some of the time

amazing. Themes are as you’d expect: self-consciousness, freedom, duty,

routine; the awful effects of unconstrained self-consciousness, freedom, duty and

routine; the death of American civics; ‘the horror of personal smallness and

147

transience’; the repugnance we feel for pure virtue; the extraordinary fires that

are alight beneath some people. But, where in Jest these were expressed through

(burdened with) drug slang and pharmacology, valley-speak, advertising dreck,

and calculus, here we get accountancy minutiae, surely intended to repulse us.

Yet the style of most of them is far less mannered than his finished work, which

style we might call Post-Doc Valley-Girl

(&!

=$AI-

&@+('

!8-(!

%'(&8'(!

)-'$89((8-8

--'2'&'(+!%$

88'B(

'(&((((-

&''8

!89

!

Institutional tedium – the default state for developed-world adults – is a

profoundly important thing to address, one it takes (still will take) an unusual

mind to illuminate for us. But .> is actually not a Kafkan tale of the

monstrous and growing horror of bureaucracy; actually he is deeply impressed

and convinced of the value of the people and their work, in large part & of

its inhumane strictures, and lack of glory, and unpopularity. "U

%$&('!" (Though if

‘corporate’ is there read merely as meaning ‘maximising’, the distinction can be

a misleading one.)

'-B(8&

('('!'

!&9&(?'&

9(H9H+9

''!'&'!&

((&'9

(8'((''-

(((-'&2

8C%9&892

H'9@&'!,8

9&'-!

I tried to read them as short stories rather than chapters. This half-works.

Actually the entire book was an intentionally fruitless setup – the major agonists

all off-stage and everyone else just enduring. Stand out bits here. A couple of

148

intentionally unconvincing first-person authorial inserts – “I, David Wallace,

social security no…” – which affirm the reality of the garish IRS underbelly he

fabricates, puts him in the scene. Fragment #8 is a horrifying Cormac McCarthy

lyric, childhood psychosis. One (#22) is a hundred-page monologue, the

character repetitive, rambling and conceited, but also the most developed and

affecting. Of this wreckage we are given to read. What to say? That you’d have

to love him, that you should.

X / 5. [Library]

• Introduction to Speech and Language Processing (2005) by Coleman.

• ‘A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models’ (1989), by Lawrence Rabiner.

Hidden Markov models are interesting: they let us get at things around corners.

In my case, the corner is linguistic accommodation.

• Eloquent Javascript (2011) by Marijn Haverbeke. Verbose, thoughtful and

extremely well-implemented. Part of a growing tradition of artful tech textbooks

– Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, Learn You a Haskell, . Hides the specific

things you need to know about JS – its mad liberal syntax, semicolon insertion,

functors, – among a My First Programming. But no harm in seeing what one

knows already.

4/5, 4* for noobs. [Here]

• The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944) by Neil Gunn. Odd anti-rationalist

fantasy on the model of TH White. (What’s the word for the pre-Tolkien, pre-

swords-and-sorcery model of fantasy?) Everything is oblique, from the

discussion of Auschwitz at the start, to the Kafkan bureaucracy seated in a

pastoral landscape. I admire his portrayal of the totalitarian Administrators:

when defeated, they are not destroyed but put in their place. There are also

passages like this:

…8&-'(

&!&

'!%'-&'

'&! 88

,-(-8'

149

'(H#8'(!9"

'-!

!

88!

(&8G

&&"H'

-

(!9((;

('!

A good children’s book: pure of heart and finely weighted. But too didactic.

3/5.

• John Dies at the End (2005) by David Wong. There was a time, as yet

unnamed, before self-conscious Social Media but after broadband. It can be

sketched out in its totems: LimeWire, ytmnd, Something Awful. In this time was

JDatE born. Slapstick body horror, and you’ll know already what you’ll make of

it from that description. This is scarier than it is funny, but not a huge amount of

either. I’m very happy that he was anointed and raised by the internet, that the

gatekeepers were evaded. But.

2/5.

• American Hippopotamus (2013) by Jon Mooallem. Blasted through this

nonfiction novella with great delight; so much astonishing Victorian detail, so

much damn fun. The story of two hardcore spies, American and Boer, who

ranged over the eC20th, blowing things up and meeting presidents and dissing

Churchill’s fitness level and mining by hand as an anti-fascist action and striking

oil and maybe killing lords – who campaigned together to bring an invasive

species in to eat another invasive species and introduce a new meat animal to

America. Duquesne to Burnham:

''--

8'(!%8'-

&-%+''!

So damn fun, and, in the last instance, also deep. Mooallem reproaches us for

having clicked on American Hippopotamus to make fun of the men. But:

150

8+('-

8(''''(!

*-(''2

'(8M'''

8((

(''-'&2

&-((&%-

'&&&'-

&''+(9&

(&'&!'

((8'-(

9&BA-8

B''!!!

9(&'''98

((MB8-

(&'&8'&

'!

U!''B!

Simple, thoughtful, astonishingly well-written.

4*/5.

• Consciousness and the Novel (2005) by David Lodge. A grab-bag as friendly

and sensible as you’d expect. He’s certainly much, much more trustworthy than

other humanities academics, on either title topic. Main question: what

implications do the new cognitive and biological sciences have for yr subjective

life and art? How damaged would the great novels be by decentring and anti-

human stuff? (Aside from the long and thoughtful opening essay, inspired in

large part by Dennett, we are given a jovial bunch to consider: Dickens, Forster,

Amis elder and younger, James, Updike, with Roth and Kierkegaard the

outliers.) Closing interview, with Craig Raine, is seriously stilted, but it’s

because he doesn’t want to play the invited game, waffling deepity. And so this

book: refusing to hide from the reality of the mind, and succeeding in holding up

books against that reality against great odds.

4/5.

151

%

>';



>'

)';

-

'



-



-

3%





49

'

'-

$(-

&-

&

'

'





&8-

8

!

32

9'

8

'

=9

-

&-





&

'9-

!

– Seamus Heaney

152

'88&8M 88&M 

'!$&'!(

(('8C

&[eating]!%&'

8('2'C

– of BJ Miller

4'2(-2-2

&'(&-&G'(

-8-&!!!

&8

'?(&-(&'(9

('!!!

– Daniel Dennett

Unintentional quarterly theme is '. So

a lot of political sci-fi; nice brain-cooling fun while I hammered out a machine learning

thesis way too late. I am not a 'solutionist', nor a techno-utopian about politics, nor a

proto-guru. There is ' wrong with the full anti-political technocratic air (this

long thing does it smugly but not unfairly), which the Venkatesh Rao piece suffers.

Even so, I trust nerds (sci-fi writers, devs, EAs) to handle speculative and theoretical

politics more than I trust litérrateurs or traditional radicals; the latter too seldom have a

sense of what has fundamentally changed about the world in the last 60 years, and little

chance of grasping what is newly possible.

153

(I am constantly tempted to expand this scoring system, to give many separate scores

for each book (e.g. "stylishness", "fun", "overall truth", "quality of justification", and

well as "durability") and then sum them. Something holds me back; perhaps mere taste.

Re-readability is not the only book virtue but it's the most significant single book virtue,

the one that keeping a reading list is most concerned with. Signposts, breadcrumbs,

flares for my future.)

JULY 2015

• Intuition Pumps (2012) by Daniel Dennett. A self-help book! in the form of a

set of tricks and tools for good non-routine cognition. But it's utterly personable

and scientifically charged, and a defence of naturalist semantics, mind, 'free'

will, and philosophy itself, to boot. He’s so much more subtle than he’s given

credit for – for instance, a large theme here is the central role of imagination in

science and the other potent sorts of thought. I confess that I simply can’t

conceive of some of his positions (e.g. 'qualia' being non-necessary illusions

produced by theory); but one of the book’s burning points is that this may well

be a failing of my person, and not his philosophy. Also a meta-philosophy:

%(&'

&-&&((&

-%&+('

88!

&&!&&!%

((-8('

''((

'!

Every book of his I read increases my respect and his breadth. (Though note

Galen Strawson's rebuke to the narrativist theory of identity, 4* here.)

4*/5

• Market Forces (2004) by Richard Morgan. So totally a book of its time: of

cinematic &ish rage and paranoia. By 2086, military aid has been fully

privatised, making a free market out of unilateral political force:

8-''

!';88

';8;!%(

154

!$)%8'-

!;(;

His economic naivete is balanced by his writing's characteristic virtues: pace,

pro-social rage (here, wifebeaters and Nazis suffer retributive atrocities), cool

uncliched weapons. In a rarity for SF, Morgan estimates the rate of tech

growth (by his 2086): for instance, their drones are much larger and more limited

in application than ours are already. Crass and flashy, but politically and

psychologically ambitious. I have read everything Morgan has written and will

return. Full review below.

3*/5. [Library]

• ‘Non-Materialist Physicalism’ (2015) by David Pearce. (Or, as he subtitles it in

grand C17th fashion: .&')$8?

,+(*()?.&''?6'&?

.'$8.) A detailed call for a experimental test of panpsychism; also

an alternative quantum theory of mind to Orch-OR. So exciting! Not many

writers make me feel I am on the edge of the world and world to come.

4*/5.

• Island (1962) by Aldous Huxley. His last book: a half-rational vehicle for his

late contrarian mystical worldview; in fact it reads as his making amends for the

vivid bioconservative paranoia of 8. It certainly handles the

same themes, simply inverted in their consequences: we see drugs as & of

enlightenment; a much healthier view of suffering, as a pointless trap; a

surprisingly pragmatic view of genetic engineering; and a very balanced view of

civilisation and economic development.

So: he constructs a Taoist-Hindu-Buddhist utopia which mostly avoids

primitivism and annoying mysticism for a sustainable East plus West non-

industrial modernity. It's not my idea of paradise, but other people's utopias

usually aren't. Moreover, it is a ' utopia nestled in nasty 1950s

international political economy. The animating enemy of % is not the

authoritarian consequences of technology, but what Scott Alexander calls

Moloch: the forces of self-fulfilling inevitability and destructive competition.

155

Protagonist is a mirror of John the Savage: an open-minded liar and shill, a

fallen outsider who manages to undermine the utopia he infiltrates. Huxley

himself is the model for him: in fact we can see Will's journey from cynical

aestheticism to materialist spirituality as autobiography in allegory. The mystic

character, Rani, is amazing: an enraging theosophical flake. This reflects well on

Huxley's own weirdness: the Rani is as far from traditional organised religion as

Huxley is from her.

Given the times and his project, lots of Huxley's worldview have become

clichés: e.g. “you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the

same as not being here and now ”. The prose is arch and syrupy but I like it.

( is saddled by the air of a smug jeremiad. % is every bit as didactic but

nowhere near as smug.) It's chock-full of bad poetry though. I love his use of

reported speech to denote characters he disrespects: this saves him the bother of

writing it and us the bother of reading and makes a conspiracy of us and Huxley:

'!

%(&-('!4-

?&-!'(8-?&

'-&!

Pala's structure is cool but not at all radical enough to solve what is wrong with

us, I think – technology is controlled very carefully and considered one of the

'dozens' of fronts to aid people on. (Hypnotherapy and tantra are given way more

credit than they deserve, for instance.) Is “one-third” of suffering intrinsic? I

look forward to science seeing if that is the case. I elect Huxley into the hall of

fame of people who make a very popular error and later recant to no acclaim.

(Niels Bohr (and his memetically dominant false model), Frank Jackson, André

Gide, Bertrand Russell, )

4/5. [Library]

* Can we call a 8 mistaken? As a whole, not in some particular

claim of a character. 'Misguided', or ideologically harmful, maybe.

156

AUGUST 2015

• Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992), ed. Anthony Thwaite. In which his

sheer vulgarity and vitality show through. Letters were a massive part of his life,

the only time he was (able to be) properly social or affectionate. Only shows his

letters, not the interlocutors, which amplifies the grim humour and passive

aggression. Couldn't believe how big a DH Lawrence fan he is.

+(-''

(!%-!

%-5'(

''&28-8'

&?'8'

2('!!!

&--%!3

-5!%9%!%'8

!%9'(!%

&''&'5'

'(!

Silliness abounds, particularly in the spells where he and Amis are railing against

the world:

&'8LL-

'-'&(

-%'('3(



*****

Totally obsessed with the passage of time throughout his entire life.

%''( 8'&

("%!%%'&8-(-

&'2!%'

'8-''

'8!

His existential decline is so steep through the 70s that I actually couldn't finish, it

was too sad.

4/5. [Library]

157

• The HTK Book (1989-2009). Dry as hygroscopic sand: the handbook for a

powerful set of free open-source linguistics software. I based almost my whole

MSc thesis on this software; I am not all that proud of the results, but I was

thrown into a whole bunch of new things at once: acoustic analysis, phonetics,

social signal processing, machine learning, Python, and eventually surfaced with

a stronger mind. HTK (the Hidden Markov Modelling ToolKit) is the pre-

eminent speech recognition software for linguistics research - that is, top-flight

language modelling tools are freely available to all. But the barriers to anyone

making use of this incredible research tool are unbelievably high: even if you

know a decent amount about finite-state machines and statistics and scripting,

you have to learn HTK's internal computer language, parse this manual, which

assumes postgraduate linguistics, and then run your first halting attempts

through a fully unforgiving DOS system in which missing newlines and

unaligned file structures cause hours of debugging. We are so close to being able

to understand ourselves and the fully specific linguistic ecology we and our

friends inhabit, but because of bad design and writing, we are not there at all.

2/5.

• Sort of re-read: Rationality: from A-Z (2015) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In which a

very modern and rigorous form of rationalism is promoted, with buckets of

scientific insights and a few genuine innovations* unified into a grand theory of

reason and action: probability theory and decision theory. An ongoing concern.

Yudkowsky’s writing suffers a particular phenomenon: we incorporate the ideas,

but everyone begrudges the insight they glean from him and forget they ever

thought otherwise. This is perhaps because his site laboured under a shallow pall

of nerdiness (fan-fiction and Streisanding), a status deficit which prevents people

from according the ideas their actual merit. His dismissive attitude to high-status

people and ideas also drives a lot of people crazy, sometimes making them

unable to care if the ideas are right. So we minimise his contribution to the life

of the new mind, some of the brightest prospects in the dark world. This is unfair

but the new mind is the thing, and much broader than him already.

5/5.

* # '((":

• The abstract research chain into FAI: i.e. logical uncertainty,

tiling, corrigibility, value learning. The leading academic

textbook on AI gives a full page to his ideas.

158

• Pascal's mugging (see final footnote here).

• A new completeness theorem in probabilistic logic, discussed

by a big-name mathematical physicist here.

• The term "Friendly AI"

• Probably the first to tie the Jaynesian probability calculus

plus the Heuristics and Biases program plus rule-

utilitarianism.

• The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (1949) by Silone, Koestler,

Fischer, Gide, Wright, and Spender. Remarkable accounts of conversion by the

most independent and earliest ex-Communists. From where we stand, it is easy

to write off their conversion because, well, "&8 Stalinism was fucked" -

but many of the most brilliant people kept clinging on to it through Kronstadt,

through Pitchfork, through the Volksaufstand, through Hungary, through Prague,

and even today (Carr never acknowledged the genocides; Hobsbawm knew the

death tolls and kept betting on red; Grover Furr is still teaching) 8.

.'(('8?&(

&'+(&

'((!

B?!

Foreword, by what today's standards make a peculiarly intellectual MP, is careful

to set itself apart from the red-bashing of the time and lay out its humane

purpose: to understand the emotional appeal of communism (: a religious one)

and the disillusionment that the very most independent communists had already

suffered.

)'''((-

)''(((-8

'!888-8

''A!!!

)''8-&@>'-

')'&-

&(8'!

Silone’s testimony about the Comintern's sick irrationality would be enough to

make the book prescient. Richard Wright’s account of the parties outside of

Russia is another really chilling bit: the rot was deep and wide. This was my

great-grandfather’s copy.

5?/5.

159

(Form warning: Arthur Koestler was himself a monstrous man.)

SEPTEMBER 2015

• The Book of Disquiet (1912-1935) by Fernando Pessoa. Astonishing. A long

series of eventless autobiographical sketches about being beautifully self-

obsessed while working a shit job in a shit town. About a mind whose

uniqueness was invisible during his life; about what we now call

neuroatypicality; about everyday aesthetics. His obsessions are a cute fatalism,

his inadequacy, nothingness and loneliness, but almost every passage is wise or

funny or beautiful. I catch no despair off him. Shite into gold. Like Larkin if

Larkin were likeable; like Montaigne if he were terser and darker. This

paperback is a super-slim selection of the full chaotic archive he left behind. Ah!

floreat inertia, the worker-poet distinctive and supreme. I read this while on a

22-hour international journey: unsleeping, undrinking, unreal; I prescribe the

same conditions for you when you read him.

5?/5 [Kristi]

• The Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov.  in Moscow with

laffs and a less-straightforward moral; also a solemn and harrowing Passion

play; also a revenge play on the various apparatchiks and shill artists that made

Bulgakov's life a constant question mark. I loved book one, in which the devil

upends Stalinist control with seances, magic tricks, telegram lulz, and horrible

trolling of only somewhat venal people.

38('(

-&!-

:

It has a sweet fairytale air over and above the murders and the Satanic chaos.

':--

8:8&:

160

Was wondering if it's a Christian novel, but the view of Christ is heretical to all

balls. Yeshua to Pilate:

%-%'&

'!&DF%!

3*/5. [Kristi]

• Glasshouse (2006) by Charlie Stross. Sickly-satisfying but blunt satire on

memory, gender and the dark side of memes. A bunch of polymorphous,

polyamorous, post-scarcity posthumans volunteer for a closed-system

experiment replicating the strictures of 1990s Nacirema, and are quite rightly

appalled by the prison of social norms and physical limitations. (Not to mention

the sinister panopticon modifications of the experimenters, with a public point-

scoring table of conformism and no contraception.) The space-opera frame (a

software virus that censors people's minds) is good too, wielding the deepest

creepiness: brainwashing which actually works.

%8&'&%'2(

&'(!!!

'8-8'8-8-

@'!(-

(((!

(-(&''!'+&

(-'''

'!

&'(';

8''-!

''%&'2

@((&(-''

8-BA8'2&

(!'-&&'

.

I love him for his quiet use of the technical for emotional ends, as when two

characters "merge their deltas". The most interesting sci-fi writer alive? No; Ted

Chiang. But still.

4/5. [Library]

161

• Nexus (2011) by Ramez Naam. Deeply unsubtle bio-libertarian thriller. Tom

Clancy plus software plus anti-statism plus globalisation. Lots of ideas; Naam

knows enough about code and brain-machine interfaces to make gestures

towards the big info-nano-tech turning point in our near-to-mid-future, and

acknowledges the horrors it is likely to enable.

) ,'10/1"

(8$!

-

!3'JJ-

&82-'2-(8-'

8''((

'88!

Naam has a nice message:

'8'

(!%8-9(!.

But the cheap prose and action (and the abuse of Nietzsche) are too wearing,

particularly coming right after Stross, a master thereof.

2/5. [Library ]

• Breaking Smart, 'Season' 1 (2015) by Venkatesh Rao. A grandiose low-res

narrative covering all of history from the perspective of technology (or, rather,

the perspective of the tech industry (or, rather, of the )) in 30,000

words. Rao is one of the big in-house theorists for Silicon Valley*, and this is

reflected in his contagious enthusiasm for just how much is becoming possible

so quickly, the degree to which this time actually is different ("Software is eating

the world"). Second half of this season attempts to generalise software

engineering ideas (Agile, forking, ) to all human endeavour (...) Yeah, I hate the

title phrase too. People got cross at him being pretentious about the format

(long-form blog posts released in huge chunks, to binge on like a boxset) but I

like it. Very exciting for techies, and readable for nontechies. just unreliable. Full

review here.

162

4/5.

* See also Floridi, a deep but similarly narrative thinker. Compare

them to Freud and Marx: wonderfully original but lacking

justification.

• To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) by Evgeny Morozov. Sharp, original,

and broad mismash: an intellectual history of information technology, law,

political economy, as well as an ok bit of polemical sociology and theory of

Design. His targets are the '', those technocrat techies who derive

from the half of the Enlightenment which became positivism. (It is roughly: the

will to perfect things and people, plus theorism, plus economism, plus the sheer

power and scope of modern software.) Morozov is, bluntly, afraid for us all

& software is eating the world:

%'(-'&-(-((-

8''-

'(''!!!

8(88'(&-

'8&('-

-'-

(8''

@'(&&(&8&!!!

But I do not deserve the freedom to believe harmful falsehoods, nor the freedom

to hide my errors behind ambiguity; nor the freedom to throw away resources

which others need. And I don't want the freedom to waste my life. Technology is

the only untried way of responding to our grave Darwinian inheritance of

intolerance, selfishness, and irrationality. But Morozov makes his case well

about the specific case of technologised politics. Full review here.

4*/5. [Library]

• Constructions: Making Sense of Things (1974) by Michael Frayn. Book of

aphorisms, again glorifying unanalysed practice and the majority of the world

which is beyond theory. Self-consciously Wittgensteinian (.%), as he declares

repeatedly in the preface. This declaration is a shame, because it means that his

163

nice-enough notes on perception, knowledge and emotion are vastly, vastly

overshadowed by the giant spectre he has called up; it's .% without the thought

experiments and devastating reductios. But a nice supplement to it:

3!%'-

!#!

!!!!#+?(

'!3-

-'8!

(The brutal conservative relativism underpinning .% is, needless to say, not

addressed either.)

3/5. [Library]

• 'Fuck Nuance' (2015) by Kieran Healy. Exciting, drawling piece of

methodology and philosophy from the first sociologist to impress me in a long

time. It is a lot easier to believe that social science can be fixed when people like

Healy are there, defying the field's stereotypes and clearly plotting a course in

relation to other kinds of inquiry.

4*/5.

164

If anything’s to be praised, it’s most

likely how the west wind becomes the

east wind, when a frozen bough sways

leftward, voicing its creaking protests,

and your cough flies across the Great

Plains to Dakota’s forests. At noon,

shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may

well be a rabbit in snowfields, so that a

shell widens the breach between the pen

that puts up these limping awkward lines

and the creature leaving real tracks in the

white...

... and when “the future” is uttered,

swarms of mice rush out of the Russian

language and gnaw a piece of ripened

memory which is twice as hole-ridden as

real cheese. After all these years it hardly

matters who or what stands in the corner,

hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind

resounds not with a seraphic “do,” only

their rustle. Life, that no one dares to

appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth,

bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter.

What gets left of a man amounts to a

part. To his spoken part. To a part of

speech.

… You reach for a shirt in a drawer and

the day is wasted. If only winter were

here for snow to smother all these

streets, these humans; but first, the

blasted green. I would sleep in my

clothes or just pluck a borrowed book,

while what’s left of the year’s slack

rhythm, like a dog abandoning its blind

owner, crosses the road at the usual

zebra. Freedom is when you forget the

spelling of the tyrant’s name and your

mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian

pie, and though your brain is wrung tight

as the horn of a ram nothing drops from

your pale-blue eye.

- Brodsky

165

Human deaths in Werner Herzog's filming diary

A is famous for being a film about a German maniac having locals drag a

huge steamboat up a hill, made by a German maniac having locals drag a huge

steamboat up a hill. Anthropological hearsay aside, his moral responsibility for the

following is minimal; the region just seems to have been a very violent chaotic place,

1979-1981:

1. p.17 (a dead Peruvian soldier floats down the Pongo, eyes missing)

2. p.24 (a boat of 11 drunk men is lost in the rapids)

3. p.34 (he mourns Larisa Shepitko)

4. p.50 (a labourer falls off the ship in Iquitos and does not surface)

5. p.79 (remembers Kainz Ruepp, burned to death in his bed)

6. p.105 (a child in camp vomits itself to death)

7. p.120 (two in one day: dysentery in the morning and drowning at night)

8. p.168 (a cot death)

9. p.169 (recalls the ghoulish death of René Barrientos)

10.p.183 (recalls a drowned Swiss billionaire)

11.p.192 (two people shot by Amahuacas)

12.p.214 (recalls a child grabbing a pylon)

13.p.218 (find a body in the river, 'valiant swimmer')

14.p.227 (a boiler explodes; chunks of a man hit Herzog's hut)

15.p.261 (chuchupe bite; logger amputates his foot with a chainsaw)

16.p.264 (Asháninkas offer to kill Kinski)

17.p.287 (drug dealer found with his tongue cut out)

This is not to mention the animals' deaths, or his dreams about death, nor to say

that all of these actually happened.

166

&&

-8&!''&

&-&B!3?

(!%@'''

?+&8-&+?

!

– GK Chesterton

&''(-(''&

82! &'((!!!"

– Gwern Branwen

I continue to overthink this model which has relevance only to me and even then only

sometimes. This time: if I reread a book,  I then award it a 5/5, since it has 

proven to be re-readable? Or only if I subsequently think I will read it again? This petty

point reveals a somewhat less petty one: Is the above scale purely descriptive of

durability - or what's to stop me from marking as 3 those low-status things I actually

love?

OCTOBER 2015

167

• Twice aloud: Rain (2009) by Don Paterson. Wonderful: sincere, grotesque,

solemn  shrugging; both elemental and goofy. Rhymes are delivered straight.

Going by the ambient temperature and the coverage of light, Paterson lives very

near to outer space.

'

(

%'(

&

A unique, dry view of family life here; sneaking downstairs so as not to disturb

them with your inexplicable angst. There's even a painfully goofy evocation of

the mating call of the  magazine reader:

%'%&'++

&2B2'

2&'(((

(8&2&B'+

&'

'8'!

Which is best read as a scherzo. Half of it's written for a dead friend or in

homage to lesser-known world poets; I rarely get poems like that. I don't know

why I'm cavilling; this is the best collection I've read since... the last Don

Paterson. Sentimental by his standards but bruising by poetry in general's.

Teetering upright.

5?/5.

[Library]

• Aloud: De Origine et situ Germanorum (98) by Publius Tacitus, translated by

Lamberto Bozzi (2012). Versified, and well, which makes even the boring bits

about ploughs a pleasure. We had a long inconclusive discussion about how

many of the claims are likely to be complete bullshit. Most interesting were: the

prevalence of Greek myths among the Goths, and Tacitus' very early cross-

cultural approval of ' things.

'

$''&'

'&&

'

&8there

4('!

168

'

8'-

'?

&-&-2



8'''!!!

Nowhere near as racist as expected!

4/5.

• J (2014) by Howard Jacobson. Picked this up looking for a laugh, but my god.

Of sordid, heartbroken, soft totalitarianism. The ineliminable danger of being

different, and the specific danger for one difference in particular, which I'll let

you discover. A companion piece to 8, underneath Britain's (and

humanity's) downside. Britain insulates itself against a self-inflicted atrocity by

pushing away history and strongly banning modernist or pessimist ideas and

people. So many despicable characters, like the art professor who defines

everything by how little it reflects darkness or human brutality, 'primitivism' and

'degeneracy' (the irony being that this attitude, of art as mere grinning

decoration, is itself a backslide from modernism, however empty and stupid

much conceptual art is).

'&-

-&-A8&-&

--@-

8'(&!

The book (if not Jacobson) has a terrifying attitude towards bigotry: that it's

never going away because it based on the deep need of exclusive identity, that

bad marriages and ethnic atrocities appeal to something much deeper and more

formal than what happens to have been socialised into us. 'Necessary Opposites',

as he puts it:

!!!%&!

%-'';!!!

4888

8!(('!%''&%'-

!%'&(!%

@'8'8!

$8;

''!

%-!.'!

169

%&&;

.(!8;!

It starts slow, give it 50 pages to worm its way.

4/5.

[Library]

• Bitter Experience Has Taught Me (2013) by Nicholas Lezard. Smooth,

uninspired columns about bohemia (that is, bourgeois poverty), knitted together

post hoc. I really like his book reviews - they are breezy, fearless, concise and

yet unhurried. But this isn't very funny and not all that bitter, apart from in a few

apercus:

'%&8+

8!

His straddling class lines is interesting - his private schooling, Booker dinner

invites, and going out with Allegra Mostyn-Owen clash well with his

freeloading, bread-line salary (net of child support) and thieving of ashtrays

from embassy mixers. I may be down on him because I used Pessoa as reference

class and not Tim Dowling or Saki.

2/5.

[Library]

• The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) and Carry On, Jeeves (1925) by Pelham Grenville

Wodehouse. Musical, uplifting, and still so, so funny. Each story draws on a 8

small pool of the exact same jokes (Jeeves hates a new piece of Wooster's

wardrobe; little old lady Aunt Agatha is completely inexorable; shit gambling on

unconventional sports, headgear is misappropriated, monsters are slain) and only

four supporting characters (Pals, Uncles/Fathers-in-law, Aunts/Fiancees, Trade).

But they only gain from the repetition somehow. Even here, in Wodehouse's

smiling, sun-dappled imperial nest, there are echoes from reality: for instance

The War as well as the spiky and still-reigning art it set alight:

%((8((&(

9&'!

$'8-@&8-8'

('!!!

170

JDF-78;J

J%&&+-'9!J

J%'-78!J

J#8'-!J

J;J

J,'-J%''-J'&

'(-!J

J,'''+''!J

J<-!J

So frivolous it loops back round to profound.

3**/5.

• .. (2012) by Alex 'Eevee' Munro. Half of the

internet runs on PHP, a language which was not initially intended to be used for

actual programs. This article, a long list of design criticisms and roaring

frustration, is how I learned the language in the first place. It is indispensable,

rigorous, and wise. I had to look up not a few terms in it, because I am not a

computer scientist at all, but a sneaky back-stairs conversion boy.

All inquiry is hard; this might be because the mind was not initially intended to

be used for real, permanent inquiry. But an often overlooked fact is that people

 looking out for you; that is what half of all books . In the tech world they

cry lookout! a click away. If you care.

4*/5.

• Also: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5 (2014) by Robin

Nixon. I didn't read tech books during my first year. This was a serious mistake,

not least because my brain is geared towards book-learning and depth-first top-

down imposition of order. This is excellent for people starting from 0, but too

slow for anyone with much practical experience.

4/5 for noobs which I am not quite, any more.

• The Days of Surprise (2014) by Paul Durcan. Disconcerting autobiographical

fun; sometimes jolly to the point of childishness - gynaecologists! priests!. And

171

so full up with the Church, though teasing its pretensions and persisting

brutalities. Here is the grand title poem, both = for Ringsend his

town and an occasional for Francis' coronation (who is, much like himself, "

(8I"). A lovely man,

clearly. When angry, he mocks his own anger. He does not denounce; instead he

scolds. Also full of lovely banal lists:

%&(G(@

@&

%&*7$,*2

3,'&>

)49

7)V3)'&,

7!

GGGGGGGG$%:

Best are "The Actors' Chapel"; and the title one.

3*/5.

[Library]

• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) by Philip Pullman. Or:

"A Story." It's intentionally didactic, but that knowing intention doesn't stop it

being annoying. Found myself reading it just to see what Pullman's next revision

would be (e.g, Joseph being bullied into taking the teenage Mary for a wife).

J%''&'-J&'!J7!'

$&&-!('$&&!

8!J

J'-J''!J4'!#''&

!'(&!J

J8;

!#&&-J-

)-J'

-'-(;,;

7'((!J

Compassionate, subtler than the title suggests, dull.

2/5.

172

[Library]

• In Praise of Love (2010) by Alain Badiou. A leftist defence of marriage and a

postmodern attempt at making love a big deal, ontologically speaking; beyond

this initial frisson of meta-contrarian goodness, though: meh. Book's a bite-sized

transcription of a formal literary talk - a genre which may well have no good

instance. Here's the solitary pair of beautiful moments in an otherwise lukewarm

bath of the history of philosophy of love and lazy sub-systematic Lacanian

guesswork

-'DF

'-(&@-&-&-8

8&-(-'

&-'B(2!

38+(@-'(

8'''(882''

!!!%'%8--

9-(8'(-2

--&2('&

&((&(-M'

+(-&'M

'-8(?

8(-8''-(+identical

-8+-('+!

%(B&@-&@8

8('('-

&8-&&-'((

'8A!38(&&(

&!

Clearer prose than you'd expect, though, isn't it?

3/5.

[Library]

1 e.g. laziness: his claim about there being four "conditions" of philosophy, none of which are in fact

 conditions, and one of which is good old dyadic love:

82(8

8((&!

(Never mind, Cavendish; oh well Newton, sorry Schopenhauer; you tried real hard.)

173

NOVEMBER 2015

• High Performance MySQL (2004) by Zawodny and Balling. Databasing is all

of the following: a hard precondition of almost all modern social activities; the

high-stakes application of some very deep intellectual tortures; unutterably

boring. This book's a nice intro to higher-level considerations: Query tuning (i.e.

ask the question better), indexing (i.e. ask if it's been asked before), server tuning

(ask a better person), replication (ask several people), benchmarking (ask trick

questions). Not exactly chatty, but as engaging as you could expect:

('''

'+!

And it's not as gruesomely platform-specific as the title implies.

'-&-8E02

(!Boften 8E0002

('!$!

Not deep, though: they namedrop B-trees and the query optimiser, but do not

explain them beyond noting that they are very good and you should trust them. I

haven't yet seen a bad O'Reilly book.

3*/5.

• Don't Make Me Think: A Common-Sense Guide to Usability (2006) by Steve

Krug. Very clear, very humane. Underneath his smiley-grumpy homilies is an

intuitive applied cognitive science. (He does give a couple of scientific citations,

but the model has more to do with simple sympathetic cynicism. That is:

Minimise text; have a strong visual hierarchy of size, prominence, clickability;

have clear spaced sections of content on each page; keep page names literal;

keep the background quiet; never write instructions - make it wordlessly,

mindlessly obvious; use conventions unless you have a good reason not to.

Which is obviously all good stuff, but overall I didn't like the dad-joke air.

3/5.

• Bad Pharma (2013) by Ben Goldacre. Or - his preferred book title - 

%'$8%-

174

%8&'.-'&

)2,8)-&B.&.. An

empirically rigorous angry manifesto! <3

Here are all of the book's theses in one paragraph, which is another thing I love

nonfiction writers doing:

&((''-(

-(''&-(8(-

B&-

+&'!=(-

(8'!(

'(9-('

'(-8(

9!'-&'

9-898

(-8(8'!8

''((!

%(8'-

&-'(-@!

&('(GG

@-!((!-

'((-8&@8-8

(&(('(-

!$'''@

&'(!'-8'

'((&''-8

&'-&99

!(&'-((8

'+''-'(8?

('(-&8-&((

(8!

[Low external validity] ''(82

((-&-

&---&((

9'82

B!B-'!9'((

-@(

'8&'!

Exactly as fair to pharma as it deserves and no more ("there is no medicine

without medicines"). Business gimps sometimes use the term "thought leader",

meaning powerful, original thinker. They usually use it spuriously; Goldacre

actually is one. Please at least join AllTrials.

4*/5.

175

• Reread: Use of Weapons (1990) by Iain M Banks. The most tender and literary

book in the ) series. Zakalwe, the protagonist, is almost cartoonish in his

piratical energy, but is saved from usual boring super-soldier effects by pathos of

the 3 variety. Banks was always quite open about how didactic the

sci-fi novels were; they are saved by his sheer inventiveness and the grand

psychological realism amidst the technological fantasy.

Cough. What do humans have to offer, after the singularity? What skills are

scarce? Banks' answer is: "a lack of scruples; excessive force; the ability to not

care." We should be so lucky.

This scene had a large effect on me as a child:

4%8-'2'-

&'(!((-

&'!J?&!

&!

J=-'!J%2222?

,'(%4&8?'(!!!

'(8(8

?;-%-8-'(?%'

(-!!!!

@&8?+'(-82

8-(('&

!!!&-((&-J&

&!#8'!%8'!J

J-&!J

J'8;

'!

'('-J-!

;;%'(-

;%'('-2

'(-&;*8(((;

(&8'(!(('&-

8'(!J2'2J((?

?8!8'-8-

';4-%(&-

''(&'

(!&%-8'(!-J

''-J'((!J

As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding

confirmation of it:

176

“-'?-''!N

O%9&8'-N-!

O#9;N,-(!O$-%%

!N

O%9'-N!O%@((88

'&'8!N

O4-!N

O%9'-%((!N-&

-(-!!! ''

+(-((-!"O((

((8'-N!O%

((@'-

((&'A@-

+!N

O,+-;J

J#-+-J-,'@8&

&!J%(((&8

@8?+-

@-((&-'!

'((&!

'-'-(8(-

&8(!J,!J#8

!N

But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the

above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and

epistemic care. Sometimes.

4/5. (By revealed preference, the series is 5/5.)

• Pro Git (2013) by Chacon and. Neal Stephenson once hyperbolised the situation

in OS choice as follows, hyperbolically:

3++&!%&<-

-(-'(A&

!((8'!2

-2$8?'E

=!$!'-'(2'@''(

'!&'!

8&'8-8&-

'8&-

'&'(!&-

(-(-8'&'(

!

'('&8!

177

This is overstated; Debian and Ubuntu, the chief consumer descendents, are as

buggy as any other. As if you had to hook up the ignition system of the tank

yourself, first.

But the very same people built Git, and  is a battle-tank. Fast, unbreakable and

life-saving. Why hasn't it taken over the world, outside of tech industry? 1) most

people don't need non-linear incremental backups; 2) the learning curve is

bloody steep even for techies.

Entities that you need to know about to use Git without absurdity: the files, the

working tree, the index, many local repositories, many remote repositories,

'remotes' (pointers to remote repositories), commits, treeishes (pointers to

commits), branches, a stash

"git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are

homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert

space."

— chi wai lau (@tabqwerty) March 9, 2011

This book covers so much of the internal detail, the gotchas, the customisability,

and comparisons with other source-control systems that it was adopted as

canonical docs by the official working group. Skip sections at will, but do have a

go.

4/5.

• Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the 20th Century (2013) by

John Crace. A tasting platter of C20th literature (one book synopsised per year of

the century), as well as very successful pastiche, as well as highbrow larfs, and

also, occasionally, a tiny philosophical critique of revered writers. It is of course

easy to make anything ridiculous if you compress it enough, but Crace is not

cheap about it. He reserves most of his scorn for the obscene sensationalists

(Ballard, Burroughs, Joyce, Kundera). Here is the main joke Crace makes in at

least half of all of them, fourth-wall shamelessness:

178

(-O%98&(!

''-'3

'(N!

I read books about books because I'm a prig: my ignorance of these things makes

me anxious. As a result of reading Crace, I can tell I won't read about fifty of the

hundred. So, big gains, even if the larfs wear thin halfway through.

3/5.

179

DECEMBER 2015

• Why Your Five Year-Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained

(2013) by Susie Hodge. An attempted defence of the current reigning artistic

paradigm: low-skill, high-concept, contemptuous of past, audience, and self;

identitarian. Call it ('. It is also a nice illustrated

catalogue of some recent objects that have managed to piss various people off.

150 years ago, we direly needed people to make art larger, to stand against the

Academic approach of Nice Hard Mimesis Only. The problem is that since the

50s many artists replaced that shallow spectacle of mere mimetic skill with the

even shallower spectacle of empty originality and flashy cynicism. This book

has  a patronising presentation; it could have been named "How to explain

conceptualism to your five year-old". (I guess that could have been an

intentional irony, but to me it just told me what she thinks of anyone sceptical of

the trend. But some kudos for being clear, since this makes the hollowness of her

points blatant.)

I have to applaud her; unlike the rest of her curator peers, she has at least

'( to justify a gigantically expensive, creativity-draining, status-hogging

practice with close readings. I should also thank her for tacitly admitting that the

only hermeneutics that can justify anaesthetic conceptualism is a small-minded

and super-conservative intentionalism (i.e. 'what matters about the work is what

the artist meant').

"It doesn't really matter how the object looks; what really

matters is how deep the creator was and how much history you can project on

it." But this philosophy of art is convincing to no-one not already invested in the

great tedious playground. I dislike most of this art, and this way of talking about

it, because I want to love art.

2 Though the so-called intentional fallacy is not actually a fallacy - it does not make sense to say that

someone is ' to think that the creator's view of an artwork is the only relevant one,

since aesthetic interpretation doesn't admit of literal error - instead it's just an incredibly limited and

superstitious philosophy - along the same lines as deontology in ethics. It makes art a small and

mostly ancient thing, while aesthetic experience could instead rise to each of the potential billions of

minds that come to it, and it always takes place in the present, with entirely novel meanings

generated, far beyond the ken of any creator.

I am aware that 'fallacy' has found usage outside of its original meaning, 'a failure in logical

reasoning'. But the new usage, committed for instance by Beardsley, is something shitey like 'a

horrible belief I don't like boo'. I'm generally torn between a descriptive and a prescriptive philosophy

of vocabulary, but in this case the bullying and sloppy-mindedness of the new usage makes me deny

it outright. Some words are too important to give up. (Mostly epistemology tbf.)

180

That’s an unforgivably poncey thing to say, not least because I don't think I

really mean it. If crap artists had not usurped a good portion of all the species'

attention and reverence, I don't think I'd care what modern art was like. But as it

is they are cheaters - even the great ones. They cheat themselves into

immortality and perceived profundity via the handy expedient of prettiness and

vagueness or ugliness and vagueness. In a way, they and we cheat malaria

victims of huge sums, while the very people who claim to care about global

injustices cheer us dumping more money into it, while saying things like 'life

isn't worth living without art'. Well, '& it wouldn't be, but life is not worth

living if you're dead either, and there is enough art already.

Anyway, this is a useful catalogue of the kind of low-skill pieces that have only

recently been possible and that you need to know about to move in certain

presumably unbearable circles.

3/5, for the pictures. [Library]

• Awakenings (1973) by Oliver Sacks. An oppressive book: case studies of

profoundly frozen people: contorted, whispering, impassive for decades, at best.

One of the most poignant real events I think I've ever heard of: the medical

reversal of effective, affective death - and but only a temporary reversal. Sacks

really hadn't developed his style by this point: I quite liked the technical medical

report feel, but it both highly technical and highly melodramatic: there is much

of infinitudes of the soul, titratabilities, and perseveratably festinative

resipiscences in it. Also a nice subtle stylistic note: he breaks apart dead

metaphors to revive them (e.g. "wild life", "death bed").

Also lacking is his later grand balancing of romance with reason.

For instance,

he falls right off the edge on pp.97, seeing numbers as enemies of people:

%-B8

('!!!4(-(-

-@2-

(+2!!8''(!

3 Call it the  vs the ' (as does Pirsig), , oder < (as in Dilthey,

Weber), the 8 v the 8 (Kahneman), or 3 v  (as twere in ancient

Greece).

181

.'2;

'(-'2'

-'&'8

&;!!!%-%%

&-(&-'&

.'!%A-''-

.'&

&'!!!'?

'-''(&

'''-

'-'-8!!!D

F%B'(

&EKW0-(

'!

A-'-(('

'---@

'!8(8(

(-8-

'(-''-'-'!

-+(

('(8;

It's a repetitive book for a maximally repetitive disease. The wonder and

personalising detail he lavishes on each case aren't enough to get me past the

surprising uniformity of the bizarre symptoms and the hell of it all. Just as well

I'm not a doctor.

4/5.

• Expert Political Judgment (2005) by Phillip Tetlock. Showing that very few

political analysts know what they're talking about - they are usually worse than

chance - and then trying to find out why. Deeply important. Discussion here.

4*/5.

• Reread: WhatIf? (2014) by Randall Munroe. Completely rigorous whimsy,

often the first time science has been applied to the thing at hand. Pure mind-

candy - but, in the absence of real physics education, also improving. They are

free here.

5?/5.

182

• More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2002)

by various. Not a sequel. Little counterfactuals involving single decisions of

single lives that would probably have had vast effects on the present world.

Needed this book because, at my school, the big historical cliches - Hastings -

were divorced from their effects. Had Socrates died before meeting Plato, two

thousand years of persuasive anti-democratic thought might have been

prevented; had Zheng He just kept going, a Confucian America without a divine

mandate to convert and subjugate, and an overwhelmed, boxed-in and thus

united pre-colonial Europe might have resulted.

%'&-&8

'

&('

('(+'-((

!

They are also just great stories, cf. Adam Gopnik:

%''''

''?

((''

-&''!

This is the former people doing the latter work. Damn good fun, and maybe

valuable in the absence of proper modelling.

4/5.

• In one gulp: Never Mind (1992) by Edward St Aubyn. Tense, effortless, funny,

devastating. A single day in the lurid upper-class, building to a dinner party, but

eliding all the contempt we might feel with pathos and pain and humour.

Dialogue is consistently impressive. Victor is the most convincing philosopher

character I've seen in ages - neurotic, analytic. Patrick's model of the world is

slightly too sophisticated model for a five-year-old, but the scene in which he's

introduced is the most convincing childlike prose:

.!%

(-(

8(!

183

'-

'!%'(

B-&B&

!&8&

&-9

!%9B&

'(-&(((8

!

&&!

2(!

And the venomous, purely perverse relationship of his parents produces gasping

lines like

&-&''

'!%!

I stumble over David, the charming psychopath rampant. It is too hard to

understand intentional evil, even when snobbery, tough love parenting and

simple rage are proffered as explanations. I had a (' at the end. Really

fantastic.

4*/5 or more.

• The Utopia of Rules (2013) by David Graeber. Bureaucracy is the dominant

structure in adult life throughout the world. And everybody hates it, including

the people nominally in power. How does  work? This discursive and

suggestive answer is full of his usual sparkling insights and big dubious

historical claims:

A$8='

*'(8!

He makes a serious of pretty serious economic errors in his wonderful "Flying

Cars" essay. I will send them to him and think he will agree, if I'm right. His

point about corporate life being just as bureaucratic as public orgs, but rarely

called such in policy debates, is very important, and that left utopias also tend to

wrap themselves in inane regulation. Book is in general slightly overegged - but

compared to most anarchist social theory he is a model of rigour, epistemic care

and systematic focus. (In fact he is very critical of academic theorists and

applied leftists both):

184

9(

'8&&'8'-

&'8''(8'

((--8'8'M

89'(O(IN+-

''

(--''('(-

(((!

&'&

?&%(!%@

-(

&(!8

99'(-'(

((!(&@

'!

Grovels to standpoint theory when he is told that they had similar ideas earlier

(which he hadn't read and which they never put so clearly). But pure and clear

and witty, heretical to his tribes - and as original as always.

!!!9'(&

(-98'

8(('&'

&(M

(2((((

!4&&'

'!&&

'),4M

''8'('-

'&''

'!

4/5.

• Smarter than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence (2012) by Stuart

Armstrong. Very clear and brief, just the bare argumentation. Published by

MIRI, but not propaganda. Not sure what I think, even so.

4/5.

185

• The Year of Living Biblically (2010) by AJ Jacobs. The Old Testament has

roughly 700 rules of varying severity and absurdity; Jacobs tried to follow all of

them for a year. For a host of reasons, this can't be done, and so this is a reductio

of biblical literalism. It is also a sympathetic anthropology of the literal Other

Side, who are low-status, even in parts of America.

1. The mad rules: never wear mixed fibres; no rubber tires; burning a red

cow is the only way to be pure person; all the precise shabbat rules about

what you can and can't do; basically anything involving women. Judaism

actually has a specific word for the arbitrary, stupid divine laws: the

'. The various brilliant, witty cafeteria theists he consults are open

about them being silly tests - fun puzzles, even.

2. The blatantly evolutionary / patriarchal rules: no other gods before me,

no shellfish, modest women.

3. He is keen to show the noble side to the real literalists: they practice

tithing, pacifism, no hell, are activists for global debt jubilee. (A handful

of lovely policies out of the mad and thoughtless other 700, mind you.)

One group are even admirable on epistemic, philological grounds!: "#

&&'

'!" Sure they take this to be a reason to be even more

extreme than ever stipulated, just to be safe, but I admire the rigour of it.

An extremely open-minded man; he meets the Creation Museum people, and the

Amish, and the snake handlers. I didn't like the constant stream of cheap gags or

his wielding family details for padding. I def didn't like his earnest attempt to use

cognitive dissonance to delude himself into theism:

&8+(

@!''-%8&

(''&88&!

8&&-!%8@'&!

... %(&(-%((+!

%&&!('(

8-&(-

'--;%'

!

B8!%

&!&8-(

186

8&!=8

-&(!

(That simply strikes me as choosing to be mistaken and then hardening oneself

to injustice.)

He is not quite sophisticated enough to pull off rigorous naturalist wonder fully

(but again this is me cruelly comparing a journalist to Nietzsche, Pessoa,

Gopnik). But the following affirmation of mythos here is more or less my view:

%'!,-%'

8!+'-%!%&8

*-

!3!$&&&!.

&!'-&

8!%(&'

8-&'('(!

Literalism is impossible, immoral and inconsistent with our new, better picture

of the world; biblical liberalism is mercenary and inconsistent with itself. So

don't bother?

3/5.

• Thing Explainer (2015) by Randall Munroe. So wonderful; technical diagrams

big and small, annotated with only the 1000 ("ten hundred") most common

words. Perhaps the greatest book that everyone above the age of 3 can

appreciate.

4*/5.

• Behind the Wall: A Journey through China (1987) by Colin Thubron.

Spectacular, unskimmable, the best China book I've seen. (It's not a long list.)

5?/5.

• Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) by Richard Webster. What a fucking book! Title

is apt: this is not just a comprehensive catalogue of the gigantic errors and lies

Freud told throughout his career - some of them criminally negligent and

emotionally abusive - but also a psychological explanation of why he made

187

them. Full discussion forthcoming.

5?/5

188

&((-

&2(

'-(-'



8!



((-

-(!

9-

"&

-''-

9'?

9

&2(&

'((9

!

7'-9'!

'+!

B&&

&&'

>

(!

'2

9'?

8-

&-

2&22

&&2

8'

&

(-

@9(&&X

8

'2@

(

8!

2.

189

I'm back on part-time university maths, which saps most of my real reading time. There

is maybe something pathological about how irritable and small I feel when not reading

in quantity. But half of life is about steering one's pathologies into productive rhythm,

so whatever.

JANUARY 2016

• Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2002) by William Donaldson. Addicting,

horrible and hilarious biographies of British folly, banality and sin. A thousand

years of tabloid gossip and popular madness, events too ephemeral for most

serious historians: degradation, unchecked insanity and petty cruelty. But

incredibly funny. The biographies are spaced out by Donaldson's wonderful little

hooks, dry sentences that lead one on a wiki-walk:

• -&

• 8-(8&(''

• &''((



• '-'&

• 8(2&)

• -E12

• Q/(88-

He has particular obsessions, and the book is organised around this: the fate of

gays throughout British history; criminal priests, eccentric spinster aristocrats,

the line of succession of London ganglords from Jonathan Wild onward;

politicians doing what they ought not; the odd fates private schoolboys often

find themselves in... Obviously this is no demerit in an unsystematic historian.

The modern gang biographies attest to his personal acquaintance with the big

diamond geezers (which makes him a "silly bollocks", a foolish gang dilettante).

His wit's mostly very dry, on occasion boiling over into outrage:

+(&1Y7EYYY

&A&'

''(&&(

('!%''-8-&

&(&(&

190

'(+!EL22(-

7-'

-8((-'7!

=EKYE-

(((

&'!$'((

8'!

I made the mistake of trying to read it over one week - so the endless succession

of 18th century rapist officers being instantly pardoned and/or their victims

being arrested kind of ran together. It is actually the best bog book ever and

wants 4 slow months. I understand Britain a lot better now. The author would

emphatically deserve an entry of his own in any future edition: astonishing wit,

astonishing connections, astonishing potential, with little to show for it but a

barrel of laughs and this.

4*/5.

• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) by Naomi Klein.

Thoughtful and exciting but not persuasive. As economics this is shaky, and as

politics unlikely, but she remains one of the best journalists I know of. (i.e.

person who works at the “These terrible and wonderful and unknown things are

happening; here is what the people involved say. What might it mean?” level.)

Considerable. Full review forthcoming.

3*/5.

• Selected Poems (1975-2011) by Jaan Kaplinski. A very broad swathe from

Estonia's most stately rustic. He keeps a high eyrie but has a fatherly musk as

well. It's a chilly nest though - occasionally anti-human:

%8!!

-'

(!'(

&AA!(

(((!

!

191

(!4-

&&&!

%((<@'&&

(&22

'!%'!

#'('

&&(!8

&8!&88-

(&&''!&!

.!

He gets called a particularly European (a particularly Unionised) poet, and this is

true enough: Kant's rationalist cool and Smith's pragmatism really are pedal

notes. But there are snippets of  languages in this mid-sized selection,

including Sanskrit and Japanese (the ukiyo-e/mono-no-aware rhythms of which

he owes a great deal to) and a poke of originals in pragmatic, wriggling English.

That is, he's really a globalist. His own Estonian ("serious, greyish") is of course

not remotely Indo-European, instead fluting and crashing, riverine, out of the

Urals. (It would be silly to say that his work's bleak because some people he is

descended from came from Siberia, but if I were a marketer rather than a gadfly

it would be a good hook.) Let's complicate matters with paternal domestic and

wide-eyed enquirer:

3((+?(!

7-

'&2--'-

8-(8C

-(-((--

'8BC

&8&!

48&!

4'&-

'!

%''G-8

-&'!

%--'&+-

(!!!

''-'8

-

''(

(!!

'2''!

3'('!

''!#'!$!

192

('!%('+

(!%!

This wonderful latter aside (and anti-poetry though he is) I do not like him

constantly bringing up poetry; the poems where he does are often po-faced and

contentless. But he is a master and it's his business what he chooses to cool by

just gazing at it.

4/5.

193

FEBRUARY 2016

• Accelerando (2004) by Charles Stross. His grandest statement so far: a scary

family-dynasty epic told at that point in history where generational gaps grow

unbridgeably vast on the spume of telescoping technological progression. First

book is a wonderful freewheel through the near-future, with his technolibertarian

booster protagonist – Sam Altman meets Richard Stallman meets Ventakesh Rao

– running around as midwife to the future. Includes a nepotistic jaunt through

Edinburgh because why not (it's a tech town after all). It is both funny and

prescient (about e.g. our dependence on feeds and open-source expansion).

'2-'!%9

>->!93+&-

'!(

'8'&'((+'1+E0



'!-&'(28

&&-(E0

%.$((!

-&'

'(-(E0

%.$!%E0

'-'%.$'&'2

'!

The later books work less well; they become less and less convincing as we

reach the singularity (his grasp of the physics and the economics of computers

and space is characteristically excellent, and it's all hard enough) - more and

more of that omniscient voiceover guy is needed.

8(!it’s '(:%

8-9'M9&(!&

B'

(8-9''8

+!%9'&&

''&((&

-((:

I agree with Kahneman, though, that it is wrong to put as much weight on a

weak ending as people tend to; the experiencing self, who was deeply impressed

most of the time, should not be relegated so.

%-&'

8-''''

194

&-

&(!&

&-((

8(&'

((@&!

As always, many incredible thoughts embodied in very vivid scenes – it deserves

the technical glossary supplied by fans here - and you've no regrets about

spending time with him. But again I've the patronising sense that he fluffed it.

Book I 5/5, Book II 3/5, III 2/5

= 3*/5.

[Free! here.]

• Stamboul Train (1932) by Graham Greene. Better known as 4,+(. He

 to write a stupid book – murder on a train, a neurotic Jewish financier, a

doomed third-rate dancer, a clumsy lesbian journalist - and failed. Actually about

gender and lasting damage:

J';%'(!%%'

8!J

$!J#8-&-

J-&8

('?8(

-8-8'

+('88!

!''(!

J%!%%!J$

'!

J#-J-8(('-J%'

J!!!

Heartbreaking in his usual profound manner.

4/5.

195

MARCH 2016

• Reread: Gateway (1975) by Frederik Pohl. Hits hard, leaves marks. The same

ignoble, epistemically pinched, economically realist sci-fi written by the

Strugatskys or Stross. I love it so much that even the Rogerian psychotherapy at

its core doesn't annoy me; that even its 90% focus on one spoiled and abusive

bastard is a merit of it. Spoilers everywhere. Physics and sin. No shortage of

things left to do.

5/5.

• Superintelligence (2014) by Nick Bostrom. Like much great philosophy,

$( acts like a space elevator: by making many, many small,

reasonable, careful movements - you suddenly find yourself in outer space,

home comforts far, far below. It is as rigorous as any work whose topic doesn't

exist can be; its author is one of the clearest thinkers I have ever encountered,

(and I've been trying quite hard to encounter those). I didn't find this hard to

read, but I have been marinating in tech rationalism for a few years and have

absorbed much of it at third-hand so YMMV.

('&(&&!%

'(%

-&8''

!%8'

+M'&

'O(&-NO'-NO'-NO-NO

'-NO(&&-NO8-NO'!N,

B&(&!#

((((''?

'&(('&''

&!'%&8'

&&'-%

888&(

&28-

'&&((

(!

196

Bostrom introduces dozens of neologisms and many arguments. Here is the main

scary apriori one though:

1. Just being intelligent doesn't imply being benign; intelligence and virtue

can be independent. (.)

2. Any agent which seeks resources and lacks explicit moral programming

would default to dangerous behaviour. You are made of things it can use;

hate is unnecessary. (%'8.)

3. It is conceivable that AIs might gain capability very rapidly through

recursive self-improvement. (2&(&

!)

4. Since AIs will not be automatically nice, would by default do harmful

things, and could obtain a lot of power very quickly

, AI safety is

morally significant, deserving public funding, serious research, and

international scrutiny.

Of far broader interest than its title (and that argument) might suggest to you. In

particular, it is the best introduction I've seen to the new, shining decision

sciences - an undervalued reinterpretation of old, vague ideas which, until

recently, you only got to see if you read statistics,  economics,  the

crunchier side of psychology. It is also a history of humanity, a thoughtful

treatment of psychometrics v genetics, and a rare objective estimate of the worth

of large organisations, past and future.

$('s main purpose is moral: he wants us to worry and act urgently

about hypotheticals; given this rhetorical burden, his tone too is a triumph.

&'&-&

&(-B&'-

!#8

&'-(''!

(

''&!$'&

(&@((!

&-&+(

&''!2(!!!

4 People sometimes choke on this point, but note that the first intelligence, Satoshi Nakamoto, to

obtain half a billion dollars virtually, anonymously, purely via mastery of maths occurred... just now.

Robin Hanson chokes eloquently here and for god's sake let's hope he's right.

197

(('!+(

'&'!8-

-(-''

-''-'8

''(&'!&

'&!

I don't donate to AI safety orgs, despite caring about the best way to improve the

world and despite having no argument against it better than "that's not how

software has worked so far" and despite the concern of smart experts. This sober

and kindly book makes me realise this has more to do with fear of others'

sneering insinuations than noble scepticism or even empathy.

4.5/5.

• A Devil's Chaplain (2003) by Richard Dawkins. Essay collection from his

heyday. His letter to his 10yo daughter is maybe the clearest statement of

sceptical empiricism ever, though it also displays the blithe wonkishness that

alienates most people:

$((%!#9&8(-

9(&&-H;;

((;9((%H%9.(

!%88!%@8(

'!9#9&('-

&9H9

&8((!#8!

8'''-''

&''9!-((

8((-

;&'-

((?&&'&

'8!

.('''&8(

-98&H

8'9!&'!&(

8'&8!

'&8-&

8-(!%9(-

(8!&

(-8-

8?8!

198

Aaag he used to be so wise and grand. (He remains brave and clear, but you

don't always want to look through this windows anymore.)

3*/5.

• Reread: Tell Me No Lies (2004) edited by John Pilger. Anthology of great

investigative journalism, mostly of ignored or neocolonial massacres. (You don't

resent Pilger putting his own Cambodia piece in.) Went into this with one eye on

Pilger's ideology, but almost every piece is grounded and humane and appalling

and beyond the reach of theory to pervert. (Only the Eduardo Galeano rant

addresses too many targets at once and fades into zine-ish aspersion. But even

that's more than half true.) Gellhorn on Dachau. Cameron on North Vietnam.

Hersh on My Lai. Lockerbie. Iraq. The overall target is the powerful who stand

by or enable atrocities; Kissinger leers like a terrible wraith from more than a

few of these pieces. I cried at this ten years ago and again now and again

whenever.

5/5.

199

$(''8!

.(-'-

''(-

'''(-

8-

,-'-,,-

&'.4!

,8&'('!$'

&-

&

&''&-2

'(-&'8&

!B'%8

(''('&!

%%'-%'

&-(-'

!3*&-

+!-'

!

%-

'!

-!'

&&&&!

%'-%(.-

8-%'

&!

((&-'

'

(-

'--+(-

,

('(-

(2('-'

'!!!%8

%'&88!&

8!.

'!-

--

'-(&!

&'

'''

('

(&&(!

27>(

200

The actual comment thread on the final blogpost of Hilary Putnam

201

!!!4+88'-

''-+-

$'&'-!!!J

- fragment from Anders Sandberg

%A%8&&8

(((%8

&-(8-'!

- obviously I had to read the book this sentence refers to,

and pay it much more heed than I otherwise would've

Spent a dreadful week preparing for a data science interview. It was dreadful because

it's about memorising hundreds of difficult ideas from a few different fields: a more

descriptive job title would be "Statistical programmer / machine teacher / web scraper /

sysadmin / graphic designer" - so you see how this is my latest scheme to find

interdisciplinary freedom outside the academy. (The headers in this crib sheet for the

profession are "Predictive Modeling, Programming, Probability theory, Statistical

Inference, Data Analysis, and Communication". From the outside, those topics look

very samey - just a load of stats stuff, right? - but they are actually heterogeneous talents

rarely found in the same braincase. Even "predictive modelling" and "(Fisherian)

statistical inference" are or were socially incompatible approaches!)

I'm still far from possessing real mathematical literacy, and I'm a positively jejune

systems engineer. but something must've stuck cos I'm starting in the autumn.

202

APRIL 2016

• Reread: The Algebraist (2008) by Iain Banks. Satisfying mind candy. (Themes:

the fate of citizens in a war between fascists; simulationism as an official state

religion; a jolly solipsistic species which enjoys civil war). Too full of infodumps

and too circuitous to reach his personal best (which I would say is the genre's

personal best): it lacks the grander metaphysical framework of the )

books, which handle civilization at the limit - where philosophy is at last

unavoidable because practical matters have been solved and tucked away. It does

have a right good baddie - a calm galactic overlord driven to be demonic and

obscene for PR reasons. But the protagonist, a thoughtful manipulated academic,

isn't interesting. I missed the book's grand conceit the first time I read this: the

MacGuffin that drives everything is an epic, lost book called the &,

described only as being:

&''-8'(--8--

-8'!!!!

3*/5. (Series is 4*/5.)

• Reread: Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond. Recognisably a

popularisation, but it's in an under-reported field (speculative human geography)

so it is still high in nourishing insight. Exciting, thoughtful, deserving of the

hype.

Q: ((8('

&*-&&((

;

A: ((&

'((8'-&&

'(('8!

Title's misleading: all three of those pro-colonialist environmental factors are

merely proximate effects of what he argues is the ultimate cause of world

inequality: domesticable crops and livestock ((&

''8'. His

theory explicitly disclaims racist explanations of world history - e.g. his chapter

203

on the conquistadors is the most harrowing account I've ever read - and he says

things like

%8*'-&'

'*-B-8((

'(+(-8

,('!%*-

%9'(9'

'!

Yet the anthropologists' party line on him is just that: that he's a racist and,

almost worse in that circle, a determinist. I feel perfectly fair in explaining their

rancour by his skilful scientific intrusion on their ill-tended turf. (Diamond was

originally an ornithologist and geneticist.) Engaging and original as it is, his

thesis faces a hard explanatory limit: agriculture has not been the limiting factor

on economies for more than 200 years, and yet the Great Divergence dates from

then and not earlier. Diamond could appeal to simple path-dependency: "we win

now because we won then" or argue that the technological and military edge

yielded land, and that land yielded the economic miracle. But the evidence (also

known as Gregory Clark) certainly does not warrant crop or zoological

supremacism.

Anyway I know of no better introduction to cultural evolution theory, human

population genetics, the Clovis / pre-Clovis controversy, philology, New

Guinean traditionalism, the origins and downsides of civilization, animal

husbandry, and the ancient history of Africa.

%: See Q&A above.

4/5 (minus a half for awful references - vague, without page numbers in the text

or in the source, nor footnotes).

• The Victorians (2002) by AN Wilson. A witty and sloppy synopsis. It is neither

materialist nor idealist: he locates power in people. Or, in anecdotes about

people really. (Is that still materialism? Funny kind if so.) He has such a huge

throbbing agenda - e.g. his caricature of Bentham, his bizarre claim that

capitalism suppresses individuality, rather than being totally, totally dependent

on it - but I didn't resent it because he is so patent about it and because he is

funny:

204

@'(%*'

7!*8-(''

(&%7?

!

>+--'&8

('!

He loves Disraeli and Albert, hates Gladstone and Palmerston. I have no idea if

this is an original position. Got tired of his tone and scattergun of stories about

two-thirds in. About as good as popular history that isn't data-driven can be.

%: This is where modernity - feminism, multiculturalism,

managerialism, professionalism, mechanised warfare - originated: in little

moments that happened to people who happened to write them down.

3*/5.

• The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

(2009) by Jonas Jonasson. Surprisingly acerbic! The advertised Scandinavian

pop silliness is present, but tamped down nicely by *88 satire: a

man blown around by the mad political convulsions of the past century. Key

tension: the book's main target is people in the grip of political ideologies. The

eponymous Allan is held up as a model exception: possessing sensible,

apolitical, unfashionable grit and humour. But Allan ends up enabling atrocities:

he saves Franco's life in '39! He gives Stalin the bomb! Are we supposed to

conclude, against the narrator and protagonist, that political neutrality is actually

a horror? Jokes were ok, this tension was good.

%: You shouldn't underestimate old people or hurt anyone over

politics, lol.

3/5.

205

MAY 2016

• Critical Mass: ,B%()

')-)'-%-)()

 (2004) by Philip Ball. An elegant pop treatment of the burgeoning physics

of mass human behaviour. (Which physics follows hundreds of years of stupid

and/or inhumane theories claiming the name "social physics"). A love letter to

statistical mechanics:

((8''&

'-&'(&

8+('!'-

&'!

(2

'&-(

''''&

8!''

-&!!!

-'8(&

'&8&8((

8-'

(((((!.

(!

Introduces a hundred topics from thermodynamics, economics, econophysics,

game theory, and fields which don't have a name yet, including intuitive

explanations of such fearsome concepts as: self-organized criticality, the 2D and

3D Ising model, diffusion-limited aggregation in bacteria and cities, Lévy-

stability, the business cycle, random walks, superfluidity and supercooling phase

transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, the Small world

phenomenon, catastrophe theory... Unlike the shiny TED-style of nonfiction, he

refers directly to the original scientific papers and includes small interviews with

the original researchers. No equations, but beautiful diagrams relating micro

with macro, too: snowflakes to traffic and bacterial colonies to cities.

The book's reception, in the main by middlebrow, mathematically illiterate

reviewers shocked me a bit: their banner conclusions were "boo! people aren't

particles!!", a truism which Ball spends much of the book thinking about, and

"aaar horrible people have said they've found the laws of society before!!", a

truism the first fifth of the book is a history of. In their haste to protect ordinary

206

human difference from averages, and the notion of free will from technical

explanations, they flee to safe refuges like "complexity" and "reflexivity", i.e.

out of science. Ball can speak for himself though:

8J(J

[e.g. classical Marxism] --'&!)-

J(J(8!4

&'&(-

'-'--'-

'&!)('

'('

-&(8

'(8-'

-'-(!

'-B8'

(((&'&8-

(&B!

&B-&'&'

!

((@((-(

'8&-'-8

(-!%'

(8&?-8'

!%'-('-

(-&-'

(8!48

((-'(

'&-

((!

$'(+&(&!

8-'(+'A'

'((('&

'8!

There is a real question about how deep into human behaviour the statistical

approach can go. Econophysics, as a term and as a living, funded academic

subfield, fizzled out shortly after this book was published. Apparently the SOC

results have come in for a lot of criticism, though mostly of their overreach than

the method being humanistically inapplicable or whatevs.

Even so, I wish I had read this 5 years ago: it would have saved me lots of

contortions. it taught me a huge amount anyway. (e.g. the  moral panic,

207

following the invention of descriptive statistics, about 8 using means to

describe  human characteristics, since the remarkable stability of e.g. the

C17th London crime rate across decades seemed to speak of divine or diabolical

insurance.) One of my top 5 books on economics, one of my top 5 books on

physics.

%: Social physics had at last begun to make exciting progress on

understanding mass human behaviour.

5?/5.

• Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith (2012) by Richard Holloway. The

emotional case for not being religious. I should like him - he is the most

honourable instance of a public figure rationally changing his mind in living

memory. And another thing sorely needed: a sympathetic, literate public

nonbeliever. Also he quotes poetry from memory - for its sense, not in order to

curry literary status. (We know this because he leaves the attribution of the

poems to the endnotes.) He is adorable, basically, and quotable to boot. But

there's a clunkiness here too, one I can't quite articulate.

As a boy he loved religion's melodrama and un-Scottish grandeur; he goes away

to an eccentric militarist monastery, aged 14:

(+2&'

&!'8'

+8('!-

888&-&&

&,!!!&-

&'',8+2!-'

('!2

)'(-!!!,8(-

(('

!

Fun! Rammed full of order and space, but not religion per se. He was always

unorthodox: he gave communion to just anyone who walked into church,

happily married off divorcees, joined the LGBT movement and even claims to

have held a Catholic gay marriage in the 90s. I am childish enough to enjoy his

swearing, as the Bishop said to the actress. He had no more place on a

government bioethics committee than any other nice clever old man, but I don't

208

suppose he did any harm at all.

%: Religion is pretty nice, but you must take it less seriously.

3*/5.

• The Data Science Handbook (2015) edited Willian Chen et al. I had been

holding out hope that data science (or mining plus statistical programming, as it

used to be called) could be an intellectual, rarefied place within the private

sector, where the practical and the abstract are wed sweetly. It might be, but this

book gives you little sense of that. Even the demonstrably brilliant (DJ Patil) talk

like third-rate vice-presidents-of-munging. (You might shrug because you

expected no better of computer people, but you are ill-informed: some of the

great stylists of the age are programmers first of all: Gwern, Paul Graham, Alan

Perlis, Jonathan Gillette, Alan Kay, Zack Davis, Aaron Swartz, Steve Yegge.)

%: Data is Innovation for incentivising proactive momentum-based

cultural synergy change

2/5.

• 120 Data Science Interview Questions (2015) by William Chen et al. As

labelled. Well-structured and demanding though. Rather than pay the $15, you

can piece together a comparably good list from Quora, StackExchange, the R

community and the strange confessional-professional blogsphere (and unless

you are a postdoc savant you will be doing that anyway). You will need a solid

statistics background (late undergrad) or you may freak out. Software is less

scary because it is more amenable to live logical reconstruction. Following this

book closely meant that I overprepared for my interview quite a lot, but that's a

graduate role at a big corp in the UK so YMMV.

%: If you were given five minutes to work out in detail what others

spent 5 years building, how would you split this answer into its partial fraction

expansion?

?/5. Invaluable, for a tiny number of people.

209

JUNE 2016

• Hitch-22 (2009) by Christopher Hitchens. Stylish and consequential. He spread

word of the most terrible injustices of his day; was arrested by several

authoritarian regimes; he wrote three original, important books (on Teresa,

Kissinger and Orwell); he had a lot of fun. That's a good life. Why, then, are we

so uneasy? Because of his changing his mind so forcefully about revolution?

About America? Because his direct, tactless opposition to conservative Islam

sounds vaguely similar to that of contemporary racists? Because he found

Thatcher sexy?

He raised my estimation of the British 'International Socialists' (i.e. Trots) of the

1960s by a giant interval: though nearly powerless and outnumbered on all sides,

they really did resist both the US and Soviet empires  the humourlessness

and cultishness of their peers,  post-modern, Foucaultian passivity, and really

did manage to help in undramatic ways (fundraising, letter-writing, war

tourism). Bravura. On some points Hitchens didn't change at all; the Left did:

[In 1968] ((&O.%

.N!%+(-%

'&

8&!'-&''&

+-('&8-O(N-

B8!%&(

B'-&&

(&-O$(CN

28(!%8ON

3'(8&

+(!%88

(++('

&B'8!'

''3G%(G

'8-&'%

2(!

>'!!!-%(-

'8%88%8!%

'(--(-'-(-

&-'!%8'--

'-8-+(!!!2

(''

('''&

210

'8A-

!'22&

8,' &

"'')-&

'!

%&''(23-&

(((&'8-

B!

8'-''

23@'-8'

''!

%(%((

(%''?'(

((!

But never mind that. Lots of gossip, lots of travel writing, lots of quotation from

the heart, lots of interesting digressions about the old New Left, nationalisms,

Jewishness - have you ever heard of the Haskalah? - and two massive eulogies to

his dear friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Everything he said and did from

the age of about 18 proceeded from a fully-developed worldview: sarcastic,

elevated, British post-Marxist intellectuality. He becomes the Hitchens you

know - the drawling, boozy pal of neocons, more Dawkins than Dawkins is

(",8&)('

!") - late on in life and even later in the book, so even if you refuse to

forgive him his shocking, & transformations, it doesn't

warp the weft. Beautiful despite crudeness; very modern in several clashing

senses.

%: The establishment's awful, until you get well in it.

4/5.

• Plato at the Googleplex (2014) by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. It is very hard

to say anything new about Plato. Except, of course it isn't, because he spoke in

the most general possible terms, and the world continues to do unprecedented

things and so allow for new commentary and new applications of Plato. It will

always be possible to say something new about Plato because, until the heat

death draws near, it will be possible to say something new about the world, and

211

criticism should relate the old but general with the new and unanalysed.

This was really deep fun: Goldstein debunks a great deal about him via close-

reading (e.g.: that Plato's book, (& / Πολιτεία, has no etymological or

structural relation to modern republics). Some very moving chapters, too,

particularly the neuroscientist dialogue: she renders this man we know almost

nothing personal about as polite, curious and modest, willing to suspend

judgment on e.g.  popular democracy. The titular chapter is best, involving

the philosopher wrestling with one highly imperfect implementation of his

epistemocracy, the data-mining Silicon Valley engineer:

J#'(('

'';*8

;&'!!!(

-''

8-&

''';J

J.-%-%8'+8

*!J

J;J!J%!J

-%'(-%

.-'-(

+'-(+!$%&

'%!!!JJ-

JJ(&-

(!

J((*;J

J%8!J%''!

'R

((8!

J'J--J((2J!

Goldstein's move for each chapter is to draw out an inconsistency in Plato that

later became a persistent philosophical dichotomy; the chapters are all classical

dialogues, actually trialogues at least. Also she makes us note how little

explanation of modern culture Plato would actually need to be able to deploy his

existing arguments. Witty and persuasive. (You'd think I'd need no persuading of

the eternal value of philosophy, and nor do I, but I'd no intention of studying

Plato properly before this.)

%: Plato wanders contemporary America, Chromebook tucked

under his arm, looking to understand the few ways we are radically different.

212

4/5.

• The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) by Ruth Benedict. War

anthropology! That is, anthropology conducted by the opposite side of a total

war, for predictive military purposes of the highest consequence. She was of

course robbed of the moral superiority of field work by an ocean and a bunch of

tanks and whatnot, so this is all based on expat interviews and extremely

secondary sources. I'm still struggling to overcome my deep suspicion of cultural

anthropology; thus I was actively drawn to Benedict by this hatchet job, by a

modern relativist anthropologist.

Sadly the book's only ok, very nicely written but falsely general. She introduces

the key terms of the toxic wartime Inazo-Satsuma-Shówa ideology, but mislabels

this particular modernist system as "the Japanese worldview". Even so, in the

one truly essential passage, Benedict lays out (and later tries to ameliorate) a

popular reified caricature of the Japanese: as morbid, conformist, and

paradoxical:

7(8&&'

H!!!&98!

&8&((7(

((--H

8&!9(('

'(&&8--

('8+'8!

((&'8-+(

'&'&8!!!

'(-

8!!!

&(('8

8(

8''-&8

&(('&8

((!!!-

8-(&7(!!

''((!

7(-&8

8-&'-&

(-(&-&'8&(

--&8'-88

(&!

213

People say she made this worse, but you can't claim that she didn't know

something was up with the Western concepts used. There's an intriguing

suggestion that the book is actually a satire (Geertz: ")''

$'(2(22(

D*88F&!"). But she actually was attached to

military intelligence at the time and actually interviewed Japanese-American

internees, and I find I don't much care either way.

%: The above passage with a question mark on it.

3*/5.

• The Donald Richie Reader (2001) by Donald Richie, ed. someone else so that's

ok. The greatest @? Famous for introducing Japan's incredible cinema to the

West, but actually fewer than half of his thoughts are anything to do with that.

Richie has an eC20th directness about describing other peoples - think Martha

Gellhorn or Kipling - their pure skin, their atrocity-enabling 'innocence', their

circuitousness and tribalism - which directness causes a frisson in the present

climate. (It is now sometimes inappropriate, sometimes oppressive to emphasise

differences so.)

%'.8-& O

-NO&N"!!!&7(& &

'("'((-!((

!

'&2

He Gassen (The Fart Battle)-((

'4A#A@Ohayo-7(

88+'(!!!

'

J

-'%;J

'!

8((

%8



!

214

7-%-&7(

!is -8

&!(

7(%&&7(

'!(

'!8&'-ningen-

kusai J''J"R

屁

"

&(!

%&%(;8&

bunjin!7((

)--'(2(

((EQ!%-8-&8-

'@-((

(''

('&!'-

''!

--

((!

Similar to Hitchens in its consistent, adventurous aestheticism, though with

much quieter prose; however, neither has that certain Alastair Reid

transcendence. Minus a half for seriously ugly layout and typography, but I will

seek out his real books.

%: Ah, so innocent, so subtle, so far away from Ohio.

4/5.

• The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (600BCE - 2000CE) ed. Geoffrey

Bownas. I feel able to say it at last: the haiku is a pathological genre, absolutely

limited to the pretentious engraving of flat single images. A single verbal image

does nothing for me; it is relation and juxtaposition and story and reductios and

original presentation that give images life. And the haiku leaves almost no room

for these. (This is not about length; the  retains wonderful possibilities,

because they are animated by satire rather than po-faced nature-worship. Jokes

can stand alone.)

This book cannot be blamed for being half haiku, because its mechanical law

ruled Japanese poetry for thousands of years and this is first of all a historical

selection. Lots more to see. Currently I am only fond of the ancient gnostic

215

hermits and the droll postwar internationalists (no multi-culturalists here). Many

of the others emote at us too directly - "Oh how // I miss my wife // out here // on

the border wall" - which brittle superficiality fails Wei Tai's test and mine. In

general their ancients have dated much better than ours, perhaps because they

grokked ironic minimalism a thousand years before us. The emperors and

shoguns all write poetry, are still all required to profess about the land that they

perch upon. Meiji:

%((-

-

!

8:

Amen. I liked Yamanoue Okura, Yakamochi, the Kokinshū, Ki Tsurayuki, Tsuboi

Shigeji, Kaneko Mitsuhara, Takahashi Mutsuo. I absolutely do not have

sufficient knowledge to stop there. Skip Bownas' enormous Preface too, you

don't need it.

%: 無.

?/5.

216

- Asabuki Ryōji

217

$'(('&&

8&8'-%

!#&&!#

&8!%&

(-'%&8!

%'-I'm -&%2

,::%':%8&-%8&

'!@%'!@'&?%@

&8'!%like (:'&8-'

'&%':%

-%@'C

– Louis CK

$(''&'-&8&-

8'!%((

'-

((!$'(

(-+--&+

!

– Ben Goldacre

Decent haul. Was on holiday, which always makes me feel restless and foolish and eager

to flee myself in books; and I was later perked up by a big new job and big new city.

JULY 2016

218

• I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that (2014) by Ben

Goldacre. A hundred clear, witty, and literate attacks on the agreeable

nonempiricism of alternative medicine, journalism, and politics and policy. His

website is a bit ugly but has most of this content for free. The extras in this

volume are oddities for fans: an undergraduate paper of his, BMJ editorials and

notes from his heartening rise into the British policy establishment (he is a

public health researcher at the NHS). I was again refreshed and uplifted.

Goldacre is that rare thing, someone doing the best work they possibly could be.

5?/5.

• Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years

of Diaries (1989) by Donald Keene. Bought this expecting a book of diaries;

instead it is a book of essays & diaries, with fairly sparse quotations from the

diaries I wanted to read. My rating may be undiluted petulance, as a result.

2/5.

• The Nice and the Good (1968) by Iris Murdoch. A joy, a dirge,  so sincere I

cried. Both a tame London murder mystery and a sliding-doors comedy of

manners in Dorset, the two plots dreaming each other, running laminar. These

mere genres are electrified by Murdoch's ethics and filled up with her wit. Like

Greene, she is the apotheosis of trash conventions. I feel I am a better person

afterward, or at least a better fool. The following derives its power from 200

pages of buildup suddenly letting loose, but it might give you an idea:

7'(!!!%

'&8&

-8&'(''

'(!&8

-''-!#-

7-8G'%@-;

G(!'-7-

((8'!#

8+(&!#

219

8-8&-&

8'-'!.

-'

(8'!

-7-(((-

'!

((-'

;8&'@

;'''-7-

(8(!

((-7-&88

-%!

&&-8-&-+

(-('8

(('!((-

&(&-8

8(!!!

An essay on the benefits and limits of polyamory; on the trials of self-conscious

virtue; an extended gag about virtue's unlikeability. I love the appalling drawling

fops Octavian and Kate, I love the notably indistinct Fivey, and I clutch Ducane

to myself like a home-knitted scarf against strong winter wind. So pure!

4*/5.

• Fermat's Last Theorem (1997) by Simon Singh. Good. Lucid in many places

("any logic which relies on a conjecture is conjecture"). Does well in using plain

language to communicate some of the exciting complexity and dismaying

complication of higher maths - But not as well as ...

3*/5.

• The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991) by Robert Kanigel. One of the best

biographies I've ever read. (The subtitle says it is about Ramanujan, but it is

equally about Hardy, that perfect British intellect: more crystalline than Russell,

more lofty than Moore, more self-critical than Hare, more fun than anyone,

loveable atop it all.) Ramanujan's story is of course maximally moving to anyone

with a shred of curiosity or pity. The most moving part of all is an absence, one

of the darker thoughts among all thoughts:

220

''@-&-%-

A;''-

'-

;

His research is patent throughout: he decodes South Indian religion and cuisine,

British upper-class slang, and even something of the impressiveness of higher

mathematics, while using mere natural language:

'@(2

''(-((

!'--

-28-

'(-'('(!

!!!''&(8?9((

'8!#98-8--

'('!

Ramanujan himself left a tiny dense literature that we are still decoding:

'@&'!%

'8A'''B

'!-J+'(JM'-8-

((M'@

'!JJM'

''B((M

'''A-B(!

''-''&'&

!

Many passages raise goosebumps: Kanigel unites the abstract and the bodily, the

true and the human all-too-human.

#'&'@

self!2-2-2'!$''

8&&'((

''8&

'!!!

8'@;

EKE1'@8!

A life-giving book.

221

4*/5

• A Very Short Introduction to: Modern Japan (2009) by Christopher Goto-

Jones. Terribly written, with the glib say-what-you're-going-to-say structure, cod

psychology and thoughtless overreach common in social theory.

7(!!!)

[unacknowledged] ('((-'

('''8;

No and no they don't. But he gives a brief and clear sketch from Edo to their

World Cup; still helpful if you are a total novice like me. (Never knew the

shogunate were the internationalists in the Meiji struggle!) Needless to say Goto-

Jones is unable to step beyond C20th stereotypes - to note, for instance, that by

time of writing Japan had likely stopped being the place the future happens first.

2/5.

• The Magus (1965) by John Fowles. Contemptible, but worth reading: it gets

really good around page 450. The way there is a slog: the de Sade epigrams, the

unreflective Freudianism, this:

%*-+*)8?

(?&!

,(!

Snobbery, delusion, bad sex, worse chat, and the limits of reason: Ladies and

gentlemen: we were The Existentialists!

Not a patch on Alain-Fournier, nor on 3, nor Bioy Casares. The

eponymous sage is not sagacious, just imperious. I liked the vignettes that show

Conchis' personality as a stolen (or put-on) patchwork of people he had met in

his life (the nasty aesthete Comte, the mad Norwegian mystic, the Nazi firing

squad). It took quite a long time for me to realise that Fowles might not endorse

the nasty blithering of basically every character. (The book seems to have Bad

Fans and Bad Haters who never realise this.)

222

'''-'8

'8'(%'

!

Anyway my time was recompensed by the great big postmodern explosion of the

last 150 pages. Some very lovely passages throughout too:

&-&!$-8(-

88-8-88A(

!-(!$('-'

-'((!&&-(-

'&!(8?

''-A-''!

''&8!

The ending, so easily hated, does not strike me as meaning "to win love eternal,

go on just hit her in the face", despite appearances. It is rather a parting stab at

your opinion of Nicholas, a big Straussian dischord thrown into the supposed

perfect cadence of the godgame people's efforts; Lily's grand second

commandment dissolves suddenly, saltily, and then: a warm mist descends. Go

guess. If you're a glutton for philosophical dialogues and '$

recursions:

3*/5

223

AUGUST 2016

• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, trans. Ken Liu. Dense, clever and

conveying a pleasant worldview; but also rushed and very clumsy. In fact the

prose is awful - full of flat descriptions of people's expressions, people's full

names inserted into the dialogue - and the characters are completely

interchangeable ciphers (apart from the one who is a stock renegade cop, and the

one who is the Ultimate Eco-Terrorist).

)''&;)

&&&'('

B&'88-28

;

'((-(('8

!-)8-'((

'-'(''-#

8!#'&-

!-A

''!#9

'98&Silent Spring.

This is no impediment to good hard scifi, it just means that the reference author

is Asimov, not Banks or LeGuin. Liu's ideas are well worth the trip - firing at a

nuke as a last-resort for disarming it (since the small ones rely on a sealed

pressurised container) is about the least ambitious thought in it:

'-9<'

'2''(&(U

E!0('!O&'(H

E!09:N'(!O$

''(':3':

3'':3('

':,('C&

:N'&(('

8!''(&

'(!

%(-'(8

&'(&(;'

;.&&'!

,8(&&8A

''!

224

)':8:8:

',9

8!'((8%

'8''!%

2:%8'-

&''C

I don't understand why this won the Hugo - except, that, being foreign, it didn't

trigger canned political backlash on either side of the sad affair we have made

the Hugos. Tom Clancy for real nerds.

3/5 in this translation.

• A Structured Approach to the Adam Smith Problem (2016) by Christopher

Hodder. The third PhD I have ever read, the first to which I've contributed, and

certainly the most well-written. ”The "Adam Smith Problem" is just that Smith's

two big books seem to dramatically contradict each other:  is

methodologically and normatively individualist and abstracts out the economy

from the rest of human life, but $ is a holistic and altruistic picture, one

which subsumes economic behaviour as a special case of all virtuous or vicious

actions. Hodder's job, which, remarkably, went undone over 200 years of

scholarly debate, is to consider the possible explanations (e.g. "Smith divides

society into disjoint private and public spheres"; "one of the two books is

ironic"; "he changed his mind"; "he was a idjit") through close exegesis and

logical reconstruction, and somehow weigh them.

The conclusion is satisfying enough: '$'.&';

&(&'?&(&'. Basically, a series of bad

readers (from the German Historicists to Paul Samuelson) misread certain key

terms and passages, imputed an anachronistic atheism and efficient-causation

empiricism to him, and then propagated a straw-man ("a shadow history")

throughout the secondary literature and the tertiary sewer we call the media.

(They also missed the timing and the explicit initial audience of : the book

is avowedly a polemic to affect British trade policy, and a highly successful one

at that.)

Hodder writes with absolutely minimal jargon; this is as easily grasped as C18th

political economy can be. One of my notes was that an institutionalised marker

225

might penalise it for omitting jargon to the degree it does; after all, what's the

point if just anyone can waltz in to constructive thought without using the gaudy

tools made in desperation by knowledge pieceworkers?:

$'(('WN 

(8&&%8!%

&-&&-+'(-

8&8&2-

'''88B

&82!

&8'($'(!(8

(-+(&(&

+(&(-

(((&8+((

8!%('8-&

&

''-'&$'(

'&(!

O*8'%-8

NB%('2

-8&8

$'(%!

$'('((88-

'$'(&8

8&(!B(

'(-O2(N!%

&2&

TMS-$'&&8O'

'&N-'((

'!

Without faulting Hodder, I do wonder at the fact that someone with no

historiographical background and only half an economics degree could make

substantive corrections and suggestions at the very frontier of the field's

knowledge of . In one way this is nice: reason is a universal

solvent, and specific facts make up relatively little of total intellectual work! But

in another way sad: the pompousness and boundary-work of the non-formal

academic fields is again shown to be needless, and narrowing.

4/5.

226

• A lot of 1960s newspaper articles and court reports for this odd endeavour.

2/5.

• What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999) by Charles

Bukowski. Bukowski's poems are just a man in a room. Odd that this is enough

to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all

contemporary poetry (with their bigger brains and better politics and more

eventful stories and uplifting messages).

5/5.

• Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

(2015) by Peter Pomerantsev. Anecdotal evidence of the new culture,

orchestrated and predated upon by an amoral mafia state. In a phrase: Oil-wealth

pomo medievalism. Postmodern dictatorship unnerves me far more than the

clumsy fascism of the Ba'ath or Juche. It is one thing to steal almost everything

from your people; one thing to demean, torture and murder millions; one thing to

employ solid portions of the entire country as rabid, unaccountable secret police;

Even if you do all of this, your people still know you are evil, and long for your

death. It says something about me that the perversion of meaning, the co-

optation of important language, and the erasure of the possibility of objectivity is

more emotionally taxing to me than straightforward torture kleptocracy ("

&$'-!!!").

The most appalling figure in this long list is Vladislav Surkov. He is at first hard

to credit as real: think Russell Brand crossed with Don Draper crossed with

Laurentii Beria. His exploits sound like totally mental conspiracy theories, but

are actually open secrets:

!!!('-$8

&(&'

O(N(-'

''-!&(

''(((((-

&2-'&

'8'-'&!4''

$88''*4-+

B(('8'*4

227

&!(8

8'(88'-

((4+'-&

-'+&!!!

The book is  anecdote. He does state some statistics, without sourcing; the

book has no footnotes. We need to do better than this, what with the Kremlin's

internet troll army. It is journalism, then, not social theory: a picture of a hundred

of so individuals, high and low. Russia is so skewed that one can capture

important things about by focussing on the ultra-powerful, though: Berezovsky

and Putin, Surkov and Deripaska. He views "international development

consultants" as bumbling, ineffective ambassadors of our best side. He is very

glib with attributing daddy issues, as if people's psychology were that

straightforward or as if Freud were that credible. His prose has the distracting,

unbalanced sentences of indifferently translated work ("'B

B", "8(''8'

<%.-+-(8B"). The drama

of it all is wearing: he was a Channel 4-style hack documentarian before

becoming a respected literary insider.

But this is good, outraging and intelligent (e.g. he takes for granted that we will

understand the contrast between Kaliningrad as the home of Kant  grand

larceny and sleaze). A small salvo of authenticity against the Kremlin's apparent

wall of disinformation and corruption.

4/5.

• Revelation Space (2000) by Alastair Reynolds. Sterile prose but still very

readable goth space opera. Simmonsian - "Stoners" and "shrouders". Herbertian

atavism and castes. Ideas are good - but I compare everyone's ideas to Banks and

Stross. POV switches way too frequently - sometimes on every other page. This

produces glibness. The narrative takes a series of 10 year slips, or 22 year slips,

between scenes, which produces agreeable disorientation. Notable because of its

lack of play on human nature: Reynolds' people, no matter how bionic or

brainwashed by aliens, are just us in different places. Also same politics and

same weapons. Aliens properly alien. Absolutely incredible denouement, best in

recent memory.

228

3*/5.

229

SEPTEMBER 2016

• Doing Good Better (2015) by Will MacAskill. Best in class. (The class is "pop

philosophy aimed at changing the world".) What you should do if you want to

improve the world as much as you can: that is, he skips the soapbox moral

suasion and spends the whole time explaining his impressive framework for

getting shit done. (Includes a defence of foreign aid, achieving in two pages

what my dissertation limped over the course of 40.) His rubric for assessing the

optimality of an act is:

1. How many people does A affect, and by how much? (Magnitude)

2. Is A the best thing to do? (Relative magnitude; opportunity cost)

3. What's the difference my doing A makes? (Effect minus counterfactual

effect)

4. What's the difference that one more A makes, on the margin? (Marginal

benefit)

5. How sure is A to help? What harms does A risk? (Risk)

Too plainly written for my liking, but then it's not for me: it's for everyone.

4*/5.

• Reread: New Year Letter (1940) by WH Auden. 800 heroic couplets written off

the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his

verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his

beetling, piecemeal research into  age at least: cell biology, crank

psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences

nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the

genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind

silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):

'&-

-'

$'(AA

(&

'8!!!



230

%-

=8?

)'-

'&



+

''((!

(4-

B((

%8&



8!

%&-

(-(8-

&''&!!!

8&'

%'&

'&'-

&-

'!

-

'&?

&(

4!!!

#&-

'2'

'-

(&

4-

((&-

(

''&&-



&'-

8(

'((!!!

One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden's bad style, which #3 is

supposed to be an instance of, "snide bright jargon", which is a perfect

compliment! (if you don't view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive

outsider has said before you as poetry's point.) I've not read it alone on New

Year's Eve like you ought to, but I will.

231

5/5.

• Programming Pig (2011) by Alan Gates. Another totally readable introduction

to something new, without a full StackOverflow safety net yet. (Pig is very good,

like an imperative, Pythonic SQL: an omnivorous abstraction over MapReduce

with Pythonic data structures, optional Java typing, optional schema declaration,

fully extensible in Java, Python, etc. Pig is not Turing-complete, but offers

several no-fuss ways to extend and delegate, including this beam of sunlight. I'm

porting a bunch of SAS and MapReduce code into Pig Latin atm; the job can

sometimes be done in 10 times fewer lines.) However, I read this in the slightly

dazed and impermeable way that I read anything I am to read for work.

4/5.

[Free!]

• Learn Python the Hard Way (2011) by Zed Shaw. Much, much more my style -

opinionated, joined-up, irreverent - though not my speed ("&8

''.&

'"). Shaw is a beautiful mind housed in a slightly

unhinged shell:

('''!

(''

&((&

!

.''8'

8!#(@

(((-'!

'B8!8

!.'8!)&!

.''('!!!#

'&(

(!!!.(&-'-8'-

-(--''(

'A8(!

A good way to spend an hour after a year away.

3/5.

232

[Free!]

• The Establishment and how they get away with it (2015) by Owen Jones.

Begins very well:

,&'''

J((('%&@J!

But this awareness didn't immunise him to self-service: instead of writing a book

about just "the people with power", or "people who abuse their power", he

focusses on one sort: the many cronies and neoliberals that cling to the country's

upper reaches. The Jonesian Establishment consists of: fiscally conservative

think tanks (but not powerful fiscally liberal ones); Old Boy MPs (but not

originally working-class ones, however much they use the same revolving

doors); the news media (but not himself, with 500,000 followers); the police; all

corporate bosses; anything to do with the City.

This is only a problem because of his choice of term, which implies that his

description covers all the powerful in Britain. (A big omission, for instance, are

the unions. Unite and Unison have extremely frequent meetings with the most

powerful politicians in the country - quite rightly - and have an incredibly strong

role in selecting some of those people - quite dubiously. They sometimes use this

power against the public interest, e.g. GMB propping up Trident. But they are

not Establishment to Jones.

)

He is thinking clearly, and that's half the work in finding the truth, which is half

the work in changing the world. But, above the level of reporting individual

events, he is just not empirically reliable: he notes that the $ has 3m readers

and just assumes that this means they are all-powerful in elections. Actually the

(British, C21st) media has little effect on election outcomes - they produce only

1-2% swings.

A more general problem, endemic among progressives: Jones has

a fundamentally ' conception of society's problems: "the poor primarily

suffer because of the greed or cowardice or ignorance of our rulers.

Nationalisations and the £20 minimum wage would have no real downside."

5 I also wish he'd stop capitalising the damn word all the time, but I'm aware that's shallow.)

6 A belief in the brain-washing power of the media - to change voting behaviour, to instil sexism, to

desensitize us to violence - is one of the defining quirks of the modern hard left, despite there being

decent counter-evidence against each effect. .(!

233

This is as opposed to the engineering conception, which sees the constraints,

tradeoffs, and tries to design solutions with these in mind. Still, my sympathies

are with people who get attacked on both sides of a war - in Jones' case, for

being both naively idealistic about economics and democracy,  insufficiently

radical and obedient to the party line. He bears some millstones, like his totally

unanalysed use of the Left/Right divide (he prefaces every single bloody

interview with bloody anyone with a binary tag, one way or the other).

Anyway this is good as very recent political history. (If you were paying

attention to politics during the Noughties, then you maybe won't learn much new

here, but it's a great primer for foreigners and younglings.) I was angry

afterward, so clearly he is effective at his chosen task; god knows if political

anger is what we need though. (I read a  of non-data-driven nonfiction, god

knows why. Maybe so my anger can be relevant at least, or in preparation for

pseuds' dinner parties.)

4/5.

• Herzog on Herzog (2002) by Herzog and Cronin. Such a luminous person:

contrived and dour and absurd, and yet charming and sincere. Here is him

describing  6 month block of his youth:

%((('((

%((&

'!'+&82

8-&222

'!%''--A'

('(!!!4%''-%

(@('

$!%''$((82

&(-8'-'(

8!%8&

'-&@&%&

'C%8%

&&+('!!!%

<#8&!%8

''-8

%''&%&

B&@'(!!!-

-/[!'!-'#28'

'2'''(-

234

88

'&&&(!,8%@

(5+!

His whole life is lived with this undemonstrative fervour. However, the

interviewer is completely uninspired: he just works his way stolidly through

Herzog's back catalogue, with no insight into anything much (".

'-&A'

88(''

!'';"); we are fortunate that Herzog is self-stimulating and

full of himself. I'll just let him show you how good he is:

%88&&((!

((!%'@'!%8

&'?%'!%'&

'((-&%8!

%''88!!!%'

8&@B-&!%88&

(&((!%@(!

8('

&'!-%'&(2%

8&2&%'

!

%&!%''@

'!#&-!'-%

-&%&''!

''('!+

(''-

((('

!4-%'-&;

&'(!!!%8B

8''!

Everything he makes is worth your time.

4/5.

• Intelligence (2015) by Stuart Ritchie. Calm empirical rebuttal to 50 years of

politicised ranting and ostriching. Incredibly clearly written, stopping short of

off-puttingly plain.

(I wonder: Is the  theory of intelligence the most mature, replicated theory in

235

psychology? 100 years old and ever-replicating; language- and culture-blind by

now; predictive of the highest human states and traits... What theories can

compete? Operant conditioning, I guess. Libet on readiness potentials. But

neither touch all of human life in the way IQ somehow does.)

Ritchie treads 8 lightly over the group differences part; but this is laudable in

an introduction, since otherwise people would throw out all the settled and

helpful noncontroversial truths that come before chapter 6. (This book is part of

the "All that Matters" series, a coincidental subtitle which has no doubt enraged

many people and caused him no end of grief.) I highly recommend his Twitter.

4/5.

• The Bald Prima Donna (1950) by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Donald

Watson. Almost unmitigated shite. I suppose it might be just a satire of hollow,

SO RANDOM surrealism? But apparently not - and either way it is not a good

play. Plus a half for its structure (a continuous loop with new characters

substituted in, taking on the same mannerisms and follies); plus a virtual half for

maybe losing its wit in translation. I cannot remember the last time I binned a

book (rather than risk anyone else wasting their time).

1.5/5.

• On Being a Data Skeptic (2014) by Cathy "Mathbabe" O'Neil. Extremely sane

and salutary; along with MacAskill and Gates, this was one of the books I felt

worth schematising, to hold its insights close; bullet list forthcoming. She

appears to have taken a (book-selling?) pessimistic turn in the years since (but I

haven't read that one yet).

4/5.

• The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches (1931-1987) by Martha

Gellhorn. My favourite reporter; a great, compulsive, austere, compassionate

writer. Better than Fermor when happy, better than Orwell when irate. I am

always interested in what she has to say about literally anything: this edition

covers her peacetime reporting, which is to say her poverty-and-rubble-

reconstruction reporting: Great Depression Deep South; the arts in Communist

236

Poland; the difficult path to democracy in Spain; Thatcher and the miners (...)

She ranges over the whole sad half-century, bringing her maternal, judgmental,

sardonic history to bear on what could otherwise have been ordinary journalism.

Chastises communists and capitalists, liars, mercenaries and torturers of

whatever justification. Never mentions her gender; she never let anyone stop her

for any reason, let alone that.

Her natural compassion and fairness only cracks when it comes to Palestine; she

contorts herself terribly in the face of shocking Nasserian anti-Semitism. It's 

a whitewash; she talks to dozens of Palestinians in Jordan and Gaza, covers the

Irgun and the bulldozers. But she is totally defensive about the Balfour

Declaration and the Six Day War; is unusually eager to show up the many fibs of

the Palestinian refugees (: confirmation bias); and excludes their self-

determination alone among all the nations of the earth:

(''&

.-

&(8'(2

!%

(B-

..!!!

%%&-%8'

<''@<-((&

'!'!<'

<'!!,$8

$8!!

((2'!%8'

&8-&&!

How many deep inconsistencies are we allowed, before we stop being great? I

don't know exactly, but more than one.

4*/5.

237

4B!!!

&-

)8(

%-8(-

%8

4'''



8&

(-

(2(-

$-

(!

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This page is related to that page!#'

(-''&&

'(((-'$(!

8('-(+'-

-('!+

&?&?

''!

!!!(DF&

-&'&(M

@2-

J-J-

'-(8-(

-+('(!!!

(&8;(AA

&;%!&'

-&%'!

G.

28((!!!''M

8M(

((2'!!!8'(M

239

+(-8

(&M!%9'8'9'

8&&'8!

– Michael Lewis

As well as my usual durability scores, I added in how each book is trying to affect you,

using Julia Galef's types of books. Her model is that a book can offer you new Data,

Theories to explain data, arguments for Values, or entire Thinking styles. She also

assigns a number 1-5, roughly "Concreteness -> Generality". I should like Data books

better than I apparently do.

OCTOBER 2016

• So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) by Jon Ronson. Actually important.

What angry people are doing to jokers and liars and fools, generally on political

grounds. A representative online shamer is interviewed, and you realise quickly

that she is not especially hateful: she's just ' – e.g. she still thinks shaming is

great, even after suffering it horribly and losing her job as a result of her own

aggressive humourlessness and insensitivity. In her interview with Ronson, she

shows no signs of empathy or learning. It is a tragic example of how addling

identity can be.

Contains one essential passage, the payload inamongst Ronson's ordinariness

and self-deprecation: a human-rights lawyer pointing out the emotional power of

noncriminal acts:

“3'B-N!O9'!

U4988';%9

!#98!U9

'8&'';U

''8';N

'8&'''&!

';'!%8

240

'!%

'!%''!%!'''

!''('!O*8'-N

!('-&&'-!

9'&!%(-&(!

%8';%&

!%8'!%9!

)89('@'((('-

&'(M-&M8&

''@'(((

'M&&-&8-&-&-

&!

(It has been claimed that this phase of internet social justice is on its way out -

that the tactic is now to "call in"- that is, to correct an offender, but also to appeal

to the offender's humanity, to try to bridge the gap. We can hope this will gain

traction (3 years and counting...). In the meantime a roaring subculture has been

founded upon the glorification of bad behaviour and utterly unpersuasive

flames.)

Ronson investigates the possible solutions to finding yourself shamed: you can

1) refuse to feel bad (or at least refuse to show them you're bleeding), own the

thing they're trying to shame you for, like Max Mosley. This only works

sometimes. 2) You can hide from the internet, try to SEO the affair down to

Google page 3, where no-one goes, like someone it would be counterproductive

to name. 3) You can start over, asking for forgiveness like Jonah Lehrer. (There

is none; the internet is not interested in you improving your behaviour.)

4/5.

[Library]

[Theory #3, Values #1]

• The Best Software Writing I (2003) ed. Joel Spolsky. Odd beast: a time capsule

where half the items are of purely historical interest, and half are general and

extremely wise arguments that are still not acted upon today. He had planned

them to be annual collections, but they didn't happen, so this looks to represent

more than one year's best. Recent enough to tell us something about the internet,

241

though with lots of anachronism. But it's more at the lexical level - "weblog",

"Sociable media" - than the semantic.

Found (the eminent media researcher) danah boyd excessive and insulting: her

whole schtick is to call developers autistic, and people with several online

accounts as multiple-personality disordered (a person is one person. So all their

activites have to be one person!) . Disappointing typical social theory. She

aggressively pushes a risky single-sign-in for all sites based on hare-brained

polemic and nothing else.

Contains helpful principles which will not age:, e.g. "if you can't understand the

spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either,

and the technology won't be that important".

4/5

• Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. Engrossing, inspiring, deep. Full

review here. (Wasn't an index in my Penguin copy; perhaps a sign of the ebook's

dominance, since an index was always but a shadow of full-text search - or

perhaps just another mild technical challenge on our way to having no boring

tasks to do.)

5?/5.

[Data #2, Values #2]

• Doing Data Science (2014) by Cathy O'Neil and Kathryn Schutt. Really:

&$; the equations and code samples in it are a fraction

of the book. And that's ok! Two careful, socially conscious techies talking is

nice, and you would never get the dozens of handy heuristics in this from a usual

STEM textbook. Highly recommended for outsiders and newsiders.

4/5.

[Thinking #1, Theory 5 #2]

• Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (2016) by Various. Mostly bad. I adore Harry

Giles' verse; his big one, 'Brave', is a roaring, bouncing 4 / Walt

Whitman schtick with more point and verbal invention than the rest summed up,

even with his (2((.*slowing him down. The eventual winner,

242

Tiphanie Yanique, is particularly glib: an entire collection glorifying romantic

insensitivity.

2/5.

[Library]

[Data #1, Values #3]

• The Codeless Code (2010) by "Qiless Qi". Parables about software

development, violent and twee. Overwrought, and you can get them in a minute

or two each time, unlike the bizarre originals which demand convoluted

confabulation.

It is a passable instance of an important genre: the self-conscious

'&8. We

need such things; otherwise those of us without internal wellsprings of meaning

will find it boring, and will thus never excel; otherwise a culture will never grow,

and nothing human lasts without growing a culture.

"Ah!", you say, "But Yudkowsky did just this, and got roundly mocked and

called a cult leader and divers other bad things." Yes: that is the main tax we pay

to be on the internet. I think of Yudkowsky as George Eliot thinks of Carlyle

(though she hated him btw):

!!!''

''-'-&&(-(

-&'&'&!

'8'((

B'('

B'-((!!!

4''&'8!!!

8'8-

''-

88(

8!!!'''

'((!-((-8

-&-8-'!#

&&-&&&(

(''-&'8&

&'&'''!$'

)!

243

%B&&

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(-&8

!(8'

&'&)9?

&,&8

8&)8!!!

+'&&

8'

&'''2(!'&

&!!!

(Who didn't start the fire...)

3/5.

[Free online]

[Thinking #3, Theory #2]

• The Shepherd's Crown (2015) by Terry Pratchett. Don't know if the flatness of

this comes from its being Young Adult, or from the smoothened, modern nature

of his late Discworld, or from the cortical atrophy. Little of his obliquity and

spark to show; it feels like someone else's writing, and no doubt it substantially

was. Trades on past power, and what power it was: his witches are pre-modern

doctor, social worker, priest, undertaker, and night watch. Came to say goodbye,

and I got that after 5 short chapters.

2/5.

[Library]

[Values #3]

244

NOVEMBER 2016

• Learning Spark (2011) by Holden Karau. Tool books are difficult to stomach:

their contents are so much more ephemeral than other technical books. It often

feels like it's not worth it: in 10 years, will it matter? etc. (This is an incredibly

high bar to pose, but that's how high my opinion is of the technical pursuits.)

O'Reilly soften this blow, occasionally, by enlisting really brilliant authors who

bring in the eternal and the broad while pootering around their narrow furrow. (I

am incredibly fond of Alan Gates for this, for instance.)

Spark is the biggest deal by far in my corner of the world and will probably

affect your life in minor ways you will never pin down (see O'Neil below).

3/5.

[Theory #1, Thinking #1]

245

• Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (2012) by Philip Ball.

Actually a history of the early modern origins of science: the long trek via

Natural Magic, Alchemy, Neoplatonism, herbalism. The context of discovery is

messy. Ball doesn't but in general people make way too much of this fact.

The received view of scientific history is one-dimensional: you have the

superstitious qualitative cretins at one end and the atheistic mathematised

moderns at the other. Really it needs at least 5 axes before you get even a basic

understanding of the great, great revolution that began to happen around the

C16th. I've graphed the intellectual space in the full review.

3*/5.

[Library]

[Data #1, 2, 3]

• Signifying Rappers (1989) by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello. The

first book on hip-hop? Certainly the first High Academic one. Though, not really

a book, as they frequently acknowledge: it's a "sampler". And not expert, as they

constantly acknowledge: more than half of it is them pseudo-nervously hedging

about being two elite white guys peering into what was then a fairly closed

circle. A solid effort too - it knows and guesses and connects more than most

critics today, despite the scene being far more ethnically closed, and far less

obviously of artistic wealth; despite their often comically mishearing the lyrics;

and despite not being able to find anything out about the people behind the

music, because no-one returned their calls (until they pretended to be

journalists).

Anyway this has 80pp of recognisably enervated DFW popping off the top of

this allocortex, decent fuel for the fire of an admirer, or at any rate the only coal

on offer (he was embarrassed by this book, but it is too stylish and enthusiastic

to be embarrassing to us):

%&--'

!((2'&-2)'

&-&''-

-'&2&36(((-

36('@2&'5

)9)!$8-2)

9'+3

6((((&!O

246

NQ0&'(

-&''A

&$A!%-(('

!!!

%98'''

H29-&$

'2&@8G&'2

'+(8G&-9

82-',8&--@

((2'A&

'8('-(-2-2

&-8-(8-2@-&-

(22&'&''

'8C

I had been putting off reading this because of the title: I didn't know about

Schooly D's track, so I read the verb in a gross academic voice ("in which we

give rappers true signification") rather than the adjectival sense they actually

meant ("rappers who signify").

Costello's bits are ok, DJ "MC" to MC "DFW". Wallace is harder than Costello -

noting that MCs really are just yuppies, that Chuck D's claims to not be

glorifying violence are absurd, that part of the fascination of hard rap is the

snuff-spiral of trying to be nastier and nastier than previous hard rappers, which

is just the commercial impulse of Alice Cooper minus musicianship. But this is

also a winning early bet: that rap is poetry, that it was and would be "the decade's

most important and influential pop movement":

4(--'((-

&-'A-(*=!$!

-((A8

'&98&

-9B(&''(

(('(!H9 8A!'"

=!$!(-(-

&8-'-+-

&'& ("&

@98('

(-2!!!

247

Your enjoyment will depend on you giving a crap about the sheer horror of rap's

initial context, and on being able to tolerate intentionally torturous pomo prose

and juxtapositions (e.g. %'7 vs race riots). I loved it and twice

missed my stop on the tube reading it.

3*/5.

[Library]

[Data #1, Theory #1, Values #1, Thinking #2]

DECEMBER 2016

248

• House of God (1971) by Samuel Shem. Updikean satire, more delightful than

funny. Its surrealism, puns (-343 [litle old lady in no

obvious distress]), sexual glibness earn it a right to sentimentality in the face of

human filth and pain:

!$(&&&!$9

&'9&'

(&'&'

'(&8-'

8%8

(---'-9

(-&'

&''&-98

(!48-

-&(888-&

--(

(!$-%-'

(%98&''-'&'

-9

'+''8-'

&-'G9'(4!!!

Shem's dialogue is pleasurable - the Flann O'Joyce variety of brainy silliness.

His two eloquent Irish cops are the best people in the book:

J('-&8$*!J

J%)'';J

J!

(-(&'-

88!J

J2-%&8%8!%-

((;'''

8(%'!J

J2''-;J

)''(!!!

J-&&-%''

'&<2('!*2&-

8-

$34*&!J

$8--8!

249

Like any psychologically ambitious work of the mid-C20th, it has a lot of Freud

in it, much of it going unchallenged. The book is also about the distress and pain

of an extremely lucky and insulated and remunerated man surrounded by women

who do massive amounts for him, but you mostly forget this, it is that good.

I imagine there are still pockets of people out there who still believe in the 1950s

George Clooney heroism and omnicompetence of doctors. So Shem, hot-shot

prof at BMS, and his book have work to do.

4/5.

[Theory #2, Values #2]

• Seveneves (2014) by Neal Stephenson. Amazing hard worldbuilding from a

lunatic seed: 'what would happen if the moon just blew up?' You will stomach

pages of physical exposition before most scenes, but none of it is superfluous.

First two-thirds are psychologically convincing: you will ball your fists at the

politics. Couple of railroaded plot points - e.g. it is taken for granted that a

psychopathic war criminal has every right to an equal share of the genetic future.

And the last third's extrapolation of 5000 years of cultural creep is less formally

ambitious than e.g. ).

First two-thirds 4*/5, last third 3/5.

[Library][Theory #1, Theory #2, Theory #4, Values #2]

• Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) by Cathy O'Neil. Original, important,

expert, impassioned in the right places. I have some gripes of course; full review

here.

4*/5.

[Data #2, Theory #1, Theory #3, Values #1]

• Born to Run (2016) by Bruce Springsteen. Fans only. Though you probably will

be one if you've given him the time: he is unusual among rock auteurs, since he

is populist and wholesome to the point of naivete:

250

%!!!'&'2%!!!

%&'!%'

''!%

828&!!!'

%!!!&

((88&2+(%!

Prose is clumsy enough to be actually his work, and is eloquent by rockstar

standards:

-''&

''('R

9!%9&%'!%9

'?''+(?9

-'-&

98!(M

-'M(('8-(-@'

(-(&&--'8-8-'8

(&'

-'-'-!!!

He's had thirty years of psychotherapy, the poor sod. He is intellectual enough to

take his feelings and their theories seriously - but not intellectual enough to be

sceptical about their interminable unscientific faffing.

2/5.

[Values #3]

• Keeping On Keeping On (2016) by Alan Bennett. Diaries in the lee of becoming

actually famous. I love him dearly and bolted all 700pp in a couple of days.

General sense of him reaping decades of quiet acclaim: he bumps into well-

wishers and heavy-hitters (Stoppard, ) every week or so. One of the reasons I

love him is that I had a very similar adolescence to his. And he remains a

reserved sort, kind-but-grumpy:

8((-%-

!%'@&&&

(

&''!

%8#.&3&%'&

'3&3!!!A&

(((''&

('((-'

251

EE!((&'!

%8-

%'-&!

He still feels outside of things (for all his reminiscences of dinner with Harold

Wilson or Liz Taylor perching on his knee). On winning a Tony for Best Play

aged 72:

%'&&

B'-&H

2;

Talks so much about 50s Yorkshire. (People in general seem to think about their

childhoods more than I do. (or just writers?)) I suppose he is taken to be a twee

writer for this nostalgia, along with his cuddly speaking voice. But he simply

isn't twee - he is the author of several of the finest nihilist soliloquoys in English

literature. You may know the ignorance of people by their use of this stereotype.

He is touchingly agitated by British politics, in the exact way I used to be. His

protests are unprogrammatic, based simply on the meanness or indignity or

cowardice of the policy at hand, whether it's a Labour or Tory hand;

%3&8'%(&

(-9

(-8-2

!82

2-9&

8!%98'

&8'-

!!!

%98((

&&2'88'

'(8!%''!!!

D48(/0F&'

!

With the fading of the old loud left, and the abject failure of the sneering

theoretical sort, unpretentious justice of this sort might motivate people,

even/especially opportunist Brexiters. So to the defence of public libraries, the

unprecedented conviction of policemen who murder, the provision of good to all.

4*/5.

252

[Library]

[Data #1, Values #3, Thinking #3]

• On the Move (2015) by Oliver Sacks. Rushed: just a string of events and bad

prose extracts from his adolescence. Also two long chapters exaggerating the

achievements of two scientific titans vs consciousness studies (Crick and

Edelman). Hadn't known his love life was so fraught - he looks like such a bull

(and indeed Bennett remembers Sacks at Oxford as a brash alpha). Weightlifting

chat is endearing in an intellectual. Read his real books.

3/5.

[Values #3, Theory #1]

253

'&

&&88&

-

97'9-

;,;!

'--'&-

+(-(-

-!

(&

'&-!

+

'-!

(-!

-

$

'+

(!



&!

$

(($

$&24

'3)((((.*



@-

('A&A'

'&C

$&

@('

&-

(+$

((

'&!

%$9

4-9(''

-'

+-(&

8-

!

- Harry Giles

254

Antifragile (2012) by Nassim Taleb

"8('M

'M'&&8!

'(&(

!

%(&((&

-;%&

-&(-

+;"

— Adam Phillips

(&'''('

%'''8!

— Taleb

The most ambitious and messy book in his idiosyncratic four-volume work

of evolutionary epistemology, the '%'. (It is ',

$, ., and yonder.) The former three books are

largely critical, hacking away at theory-blindness, model error, and the

many kinds of people he sees as possessing unearned status (economists,

255

journalists, consultants, business-book writers): this is the upswing, a

chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms

general positive advice.

Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a

Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently

true. I think he is right about 30% of the time, which is among the highest

credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 35% right, for instance.* But

a core point of his system is that his approach should work even given our

huge and partially intractable ignorance.

The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains:

%-''

(( 288"-

&''&88!&&

'-'((

'''(!ZZ

This observation leads to his grand theory of everything: every system is either 

(damaged by volatility), & (resistant to damage from volatility), or . This

isn't a trivial distinction, because each has formal properties that allow us to change

arrangements to, firstly, prevent explosions, and then to gain from chance volatility.

Biology is definitely one of these antifragile systems***; his case that, absent gross

financialisation, the global economy would be one is convincing too; and the idea's at

least plausible when applied to the cultivation of virtue or existential strength in a single

person. The danger with this - an indissoluble danger because there can be no general

strategy to avoid it - is that in welcoming constructive stress we'll miss the point at

which the welcomed dose turns destructive (where fasting starts to atrophy, where

training becomes masochism, where critique becomes pogrom, where sink-or-swim

encouragement turns abuse).

* This claim is remarkable for both its extreme vagueness and apparent

arrogance. Here is a post to handle the former fact. And the latter:

It might strike you as beyond arrogant to assume that you @(( to

be the most reliable inference device in the world, but that doesn't (have to)

follow from my claim above, which results from the trivial thought “I

256

believe my own beliefs most”, instead.

(Consider the converse: if I came to view anyone as more reliable than me,

the rational thing to do would be to incorporate their truer views (and, better,

their methods) until I again thought of myself as at least their equal. So,

either one believes the superficially arrogant position “I believe my beliefs

most” – or else one must believe that one is incapable of adapting enough to

superior methods when faced with them, or else one must believe that one

cannot know which methods are best. So the above assumption is more

about having a high opinion of rational adjustment than impossible egotism,

I think.

Good news! We can now calibrate ourselves, at least for the most

sensational and available predictions using this cool thing.^

Finally!: The fully-unpacked, properly defensible assumption might be

something more like: “I am the agent that I know to be most transparently

reliable or unreliable; I assume I’m adjusting properly to better methods; as

such I have at least equal confidence in my own belief set, compared to the

best known alternative agent's.”)

^ You might wonder if this argument suggests that I should have

100% confidence in my beliefs. No; even if I was the best

inferrer, I would suffer uncertainty because of the opacity of my

errors: that is, I know I'm often not right but don't know exactly

whereabouts I'm not right. Also from the unsystematic internal

PredictionBook every non-psychopath has ("'

&"). And another source of

uncertainty is down to the unknowable (like what stocks will

crash next week).

I do worry that, whatever my particular self-credence estimate

is, the whole approach is subtly wrong somewhere – since

"40%" gives the impression that I think of myself as a worse

guide to the world than dumb chance^^ – but I think it works.

Particularly if much of the missing 60% is made of safe

scepticism rather than errors.

^^ For binary event spaces – but, really, how many of those are

there in real life?

** He credits the formal basis of all this to Jensen's inequality, in a chapter

which might be the clearest expression of the idea there is.

257

*** (In particular species-level evolution, but also organism-level health.)

*************************************************************

Some pigeonholes you might think to put all this in:

• )88; Yes; but a good-hearted Burkean (“'(

(C88'&8'

(('&9(CN).

Most people are conservative over ' things (e.g. the natural world; we just

happen to call that conservationism instead). Also approves of any high

technology that removes anything he views as a disease of civilisation, like these

things were supposed to be. So, in general, conservative only in the sense that

existential risk people are.*

• ,'8'. Only sort of; he's a trader, and would have speculation

free to flow (8(&, and prioritises

deficit reduction in a way we associate with conservatives but which e.g.

Sweden pulled off without any lasting social justice sting. More formally he is

against centralisation on both moral and technical grounds; that is  a

principle with some conservative effects, justified, in theory, by its keeping us

alive. (Life-critical politics.)

• 3A; No: he recommends radical change to e.g. science funding, but no

decrease. Big fan of Switzerland’s government, read into that what you will. He

sees “optionality”, an originally financial concept, as the solution to fragility

risks and the key to success in every domain there is. This isn’t at all as

economistic as it sounds; the sacred and the humane somehow fit perfectly into

his core rationalist agenda, persistence through change.

• $8'; No sign; no discussion of discrimination. Some people

think such abstention is oppressive, but they are probably wrong.

• $; Nah.

258

• 88; Absolutely; he describes himself as the ‘diametric’ opposite of

Ray Kurzweil, and he’s in full uproar over the global risk posed by synthetic

biology (and recently fleshed out this horror in highly rigorous terms).

• 2; Not at all! Only anti-academia, and they still do not represent

the whole of quality intellectual life. Hates irresponsible ‘canned methods of

inference’ too (statistical significance, etc).

• 3'; (That is, does he glorify suffering?) Not quite. He certainly views

comfort as vitiating. His opposition to transhumanism is too quick and doesn't

take the moral challenge of a world of pained beings seriously enough, for me.

• ; Hm. Well, nature  made certain challenging actions optimal.

Amusing proto-paleo attitude, too:

%-'(-,

 %O%N%'

A'"!%8

8*&'-'-

((-8!4'&('8

B8?+!

* His work fits the x-risk paradigm very well, but he developed his edifice in complete

isolation from them, and has an uncompromising scepticism about expected value that

might not make cross-overs all that fruitful.

*************************************************************

How original is the core point, really?

Well, who cares? His claim is that he had to invent the word 'antifragile', not the idea.

He says, idiosyncratically, that Seneca and Nietzsche had the nub of the idea, and

Jensen the formal essence; Darwin certainly did too. "Resilience engineering" and in

computing, 'defensive programming' (b. 1998) and 'self-healing systems' (b. 2001) are at

least on the same track, though not getting beyond a lively sort of robustness. But I

doubt that most systems can become antifragile - e.g. it's hard to imagine an antifragile

jet engine (one that harvests bird strikes for fuel, or soot cleaning)? So maybe it's only

259

the grand generalisation to all design that's new.

*************************************************************

Gripes: His footnotes are collected by theme rather than linked to his claims directly,

which makes it so difficult to follow up his sources that his credibility suffers. He

namedrops, which is not the same as showing his working. I would really like to see his

backing for his cool claims (about e.g. an irregular sleep pattern as a good thing, or

things like ‘I suspect that thermal comfort ages people’), but it’s hidden away and often

one-study. (Again: (( one-study, since his working is not easily on show.)

He has a surprisingly high opinion of Steve Jobs – who I view as a grand example of an

empty suit: there are 9 references to Jobs’ hokey shark-wisdom, (where Gigerenzer and

Mandelbrot get 8, Jensen gets 7, Marx 7). Does Jobs really count as a ‘practitioner’ with

‘skin in the game’? Eh.

His homebrew jargon starts to drag – some sentences are wholly composed of his

neologisms plus a barrel of articles and prepositions. (I used the glossary early and

often.) Repetitive: tells what he’ll tell you, tells you he’s told you. Some passages really

suffer from his wholesale hostility to copy-editing; there are some flatly bad sentences

here. And he namedrops a lot, more than fair attribution of ideas – there are several

passages that are just lists of people he likes (e.g. p.257-8).

I don't see that it's worthwhile to criticise his arrogant style; it's what animates his

points, and he never uses it on weak targets.

Lastly, he sometimes makes of a system’s persistence the highest good. (Where its

persistence is to be contrasted with mere stability.) This is in tension with his wonderful

emphasis on artistic and quasi-sacred values elsewhere in the book.

But it talks about everything, is historically wide-eyed, relentlessly rational, and often

funny. And the method-worldview-style it suggests might stop life crushing us utterly.

4*/5.

260

Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978-1984 (2006)

by Simon Reynolds

An exhaustive essay on art and/versus pop, politics and/versus aesthetics, intellect

and/versus passion, and on how seriously music should, in general, be taken. He reads

post-punk as far wider than the sombre anti-rock art-school thing people usually take it

to be – so he includes Human League and ABC as post-punks with emphasis on the

post:

8-(('('-

('8!'(

''-''('-

'(8+'C9

'((.(-'(8-

H(8((9!'('

(C

.(&'&8&G'

'-8-'!)--

& '(("

(& (&-@(2(92

('"!

261

His scope is total: everything’s here (except for oi, hardcore, Ramonescore – i.e. the

people who failed to make it past punk). Reynolds divides the genre in three broad

camps:

1. modernists (PiL, Cab Vol, No Wave, industrial, SST prog-punk),

2. post-pop (New Pop, electro, mutant disco, synth)

3. retro-eclectics (two-tone, Goth, neo-mods).

He gives chapters to the Other Places of lC20th popular music: whether Akron (Devo,

Pere Ubu), Leeds (Gang of Four, Mekons), Sheffield (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League),

Edinburgh (Fire Engines, Josef K, Associates). There is a covert critique of punk (that

is, the messianic punks) throughout the book:

,-&)&

'8(&M%<(

'C

''8(+&(-'

2'+&(

'+M2'&2((&

&*'-3--

$'C

2'(&'-2(

'('!

'-&8!%

2-('8

(&'88(8

!

Instead, his favourites are the gorgeous misfits-among-misfits, who managed to be

neither modernist nor entryist nor shill: Talking Heads, Meat Puppets, Associates, Japan.

Crucially, he is charitable to all the tributaries: chart-hungry post-pop, politically-rabid

modernism and the interminable ugliness of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and No

Wave: this makes Rip It Up real history rather than hagiography, and so much more than

I or anyone has managed.

He has more critical acumen than any of the mooks in the brainy bands; more love than

the fey melodists. I have lived in the post-punk woods – too jaded and too hopeful to be

262

a punk – for getting on a decade, and I thought myself a connoisseur: until now I was

not.

4*/5.

263

Breaking Smart, 'Season' 1 (2015) by Venkatesh Rao.

A grandiose and low-res narrative covering all of history from the

perspective of technology (or, rather, the perspective of the tech industry (or,

rather, of the )) in 30,000 words. Rao is one of the big in-house

theorists for Silicon Valley*, and this is reflected in his contagious

enthusiasm for just how much is becoming possible so quickly, the degree to

which this time actually is different ("Software is eating the world"). Second

half of this season attempts to generalise software engineering ideas - Agile,

forking, sprints and all that - to all human endeavour (...)

'(+'(-E[22 

(&"(''-

&(2(@-&'

(2(''&EQ!

breaking smart''

'8M

88M((

'!

4'8&8M

((%M(

''!8&''(

-8'8(

8-'28!

'8&

'(&EQ22(\E00-000

8B!%

''-&8

!'+'((

&-$9(-

8('8&'(&

8&&-&

'(+(('(

(82'!

Yeah, I hate the title phrase too. People got cross at him being pretentious

about the format (long-form blog posts released in huge chunks, to binge on

like a boxset) but I like it. Very exciting for techies, and readable for

nontechies. just unreliable.

4/5.

* See also Floridi, a deep but similarly narrative thinker.

Compare the two to Freud and Marx: wonderfully original but

mostly lacking justification.

264

To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) by Evgeny Morozov

Sharp, original and broad mismash: an intellectual history of information

technology, IP law, political economy, as well as an ok bit of polemical

sociology and a theory of Design. His targets are the '', those

technocrat techies who derive from the half of the Enlightenment which

became positivism. (It is roughly: the will to perfect things and people, plus

theorism, plus economism, plus the sheer power and scope of modern

software.) Morozov is, bluntly, afraid for us all & software is eating

the world:

%'(-'&-(-((

-8''-

'('

'!!!8(

88'(&-'

8&('-

-'

-(8'

'@'(&&(&8

&!!!

(The book is only rarely as alarmist as this.) He gives a helpful survey of the

present-day gurus and scholars who are involved in the uncritical adulation

or demonising of the internet and its associated ideology (hyper-efficiency

for everything, transparency for everything, the benevolence of emergent

social processes like markets, no need to pay artists or other intellect-

workers). His first great distinction is between a  to a problem and a

(; the former is objective, final, uncontroversial (i.e. maths at its

best) while a response is the partial, negotiated, and rarely decisive. The

novelty, promise, and danger of the solutionists is that they proffer solutions

to more and more of the world, particularly in politics.

Morozov is not the oppposite of Rao, because Rao is more subtle than

people give him credit for, and no subtle thinker ever has a single opposite.

But their values and policy recommendations are totally opposed.

His own ideological perch is really interesting: he's constantly emphasising

( over theory, admiring Oakeshott and Illich while emphasising that

everyone of whatever politics should be worried about the hegemonic

techies. It occurs to me that the word 'practice' is a way of smuggling in

status quo bias without tripping people's political alarms: the conservative

word for 'practice' is 'tradition'; the left word for it is 'culture'. All three

concepts impede change, whether through fear and status quo bias or

relativism. Morozov's bipartisan curmudgeonliness is charming, but this

caution and cynicism echo throughout, in his worries about e.g. the

265

infantilising effect of technical ease, speed, gamification. I'm no longer the

kind of person who dismisses someone based only on political or existential

differences, but I do distrust people who think that the world is fine as it is

(rather than just incredibly better than the other points in history), or that

states of affairs are justified by their longevity rather than their being good

for people. Practices need justification; justification is the practice of reason;

reason very often implies efficiency. He's not anti-rationalist, but the

products he attacks stem from that good tree.

At one point he gets very excited over the idea of people giving each other

ratings online and thereby creating new dystopian social control

mechanisms; this bold conjecture has recently been confirmed by the

imminent launch of Peeple. I was going to write something about how

MeowMeowBeans paranoia is unnecessary - for we already endure

dystopian ranking algorithms: your salary and your number of followers are

already wildly globally dominant rank orders - but it certainly speaks well

of his mental model that he saw this coming. Only an outbreak of common

sense (leading to Peeple's abject failure) will prevent solutionist horrors.

Many of his points apply to two of my tribes, the rationalists and the

effective altruists. (Who seek to theorise and thereby improve on our native

knowledge-seeking and moral reasoning, respectively.) But I don't think his

critique does much against them: efficiency is humane and common-

sensical in a world with scarcity and miscoordination as deep as ours;

inefficiency in science and medicine bankrupts and kills people; inefficiency

in charity and aid prevents many, many lives being saved or transformed.

The absurd examples Morozov rightly holds up (the BinCam, the

publicising of weight gain) '& just misapplications of the principle. We

are a  way from the point where politics, charity, academia, or even

science are over-rationalised and losing their other virtues because of excess

efficiency.

Returning to his beautiful quotation, the first above: but I do not deserve the

freedom to believe harmful falsehoods, nor the freedom to hide my errors

behind ambiguity; nor the freedom to throw away resources which others

need. And I don't want the freedom to waste my life. Technology is the only

untried way of responding to our grave Darwinian inheritance of

intolerance, selfishness, and irrationality. But Morozov makes his case well

about the specific case of technologised politics.

4*/5.

266

Market Forces (2004) by Richard Morgan

So totally a book of its time: of cinematic &ish rage and paranoia. By 2086,

military aid has been fully privatised, making a free market out of unilateral political

force:

8-''

!';88

';8;!%(

!;(;

Morgan’s ultra-capitalism is internally coherent, but weighed down by Chomskyan

exaggeration and a clumsy + road-rage system in which people drive FAST and

MEAN to get corporate promotion. (Oh shit, metaphor.) Like many a bright-eyed anti-

globaliser, Morgan tends to overdo it; at one point, a senior partner at Shorn erupts into

a caricature of an inhuman plutocrat. At best, this is Morgan’s homage to the stupendous

“corporate cosmology” rant in ! I’ve numbered the rant because it is such a

dense cluster of Morgan's (and the anti-globalisers') muddled good intentions:

0) 88(8(;

#888'-)

((;#'

&-"(';43'

&';7'''!((

1) -2) -3) -4) (!5)

'-:((-

)!W"(&(;7)

267

';8) ((

(&(';9) &';J

0) A totally false dichotomy: uncoerced trade is never zero-sum! Also,

everyone has an economic interest in the economic development of the

world; roughly, the richer my neighbours are, the more they can buy from

me, the richer am I.

a) Corruption is terrible for business; it subsumes about one dollar

in twenty (. Individually beneficial acts of

bribery collectively lead to a ludicrously bad (and anti-capital!) state;

1) Education is good for economies, and thus good for the West (by point 0);

2) healthy workers are 8 good for economies;

3) war disrupts consumer spending more than anything else (as opposed to

the economics of inflicting war, admittedly, but that isn't the plutocrat's

point);

4) (a certain limited form of) aspiration is the very heart of a consumer

economy;

5) there were huge economic gains from feminism;

6) this is mildly true, but governmental horrors like the CAP give Morgan's

rage some urgency;

7) By 2086? Robots; 8) By 2086? Robots; 9) This one is true and horrible.

This economic naivete is balanced by the characteristic virtues of Morgan’s writing:

pace, cool uncliched weapons, his pro-social rage (here, wifebeaters and Nazis suffer

retributive atrocities). In a rarity for SF, Morgan estimates the rate of tech growth

(by his 2086): for instance, their drones are much larger and more limited in application

than ours are already. (The book is also a very good portrait of ordinary marital pain.)

4'8'&-&

('8-&2A&

((&&)8!('-

82'8&8

'+&-&&@''

'82!

268

A few nice meanings in there: Morgan's apparent self-deprecation is actually bragging

about his still being in print in a hundred years; Kovacs is just this book's Faulkner

character plus genetic mods; thus Faulkner finding the book "alien" is actually a serious

comment on his lack of basic self-consciousness, and explains why the loss of Carla is

so fatal to his character (can't introspect enough to prevent his fall). Crass and flashy,

but politically and psychologically ambitious. I have read everything Morgan has

written and will return.

3*/5.

269

Behind the Wall (1987) by Colin Thubron

UA'(,

A stunning travel book in the best aristocratic tradition of wandering about talking to

people and expecting monasteries to put you up unannounced. But it's as much moral as

geographic or historical. China had only just opened up to foreigners, again; the

Cultural Revolution, just 15 years past, looms large. A lost generation. In fact the book

is obsessed with the difficult question, "How could they do that to themselves?", a focus

which makes it excellent, informal long-form journalism as much as gentleman's what-

ho travel narrative.

'(&8

8!%'(!7(!!

&'-&&!!

%''-''-'-&

''(!4'

&((''-(&+(&&

!)-%-@';%-

(''';

The question isn't as simply answered as it is for Hitler's Germany (answer: "Because

the merest dissent by any German meant death") nor even as it is for Stalinist Russia

(since the unbelievable violence of the Holodomor and gulags was meted out by a

270

comparatively small number of people). Millions of educated Red Guards brutalised

millions of untrendy people without much central control at all (indeed, they often

revolted against and scared the shit out of the PLA and the apparatchiks).

Thubron's important points include: that the Party cadres are nothing more than the

latest garb of the long, long line of elite mandarins. So the poor Laobaixing got all the

downside of an absolutist bureaucracy ( all the incompetence and terror caused by

people who think that violent unending revolution is desirable. Another large theme is

the appalling state of women: The patriarchy there was without even the paltry

sweetener of chivalry - married off at 14 if not murdered as infants; old women sitting

in the aisles of busses while young men lounge, etc, etc. Many of the people he meets

(mostly lower-middle-class) were (are?) unbelievably obsessed with class, even after

forty years of 'communist' rule; the brief, cursory glorification of the nongmin bounced

back as soon as the big sticks went away. He calculates the cost of things - TVs, train

tickets, hotel whiskies - in that most decent of measures, fractions of an average

worker's monthly wage.

There is, already in 1987, an ambitious, irreverent, apolitical youth which any graduate

of a Western university will now recognise readily.** The modern Modern China -

Deng's China - is visible here, just. Thubron watches the future radiating out from the

city:

='8'(

'&(!%8'&8'8

&-(&(((8

!(22-

(2&+-&8-'(-

-&(&2&,&

8!82''(8&

&(-(2'

'-'!

271

reportage he endorses: thus, a couple of outlandish claims are possibly deadpan jokes

(e.g. only '100' cars on mainland China in 1987?? Human flesh on sale in Canton?

Unsurprisingly, the book received a dab of cursory post-colonial critique.* This is

unsurprising because he is interested in  stereotypes out - in particular, finding

out if innate cruelty enabled the Cultural Revolution; it is thus not unfair to imagine the

book as a Eurocentric hatchet job. But this dismissive cynicism is only possible &

you've heard his frank encounters with a hundred vivid, intelligent, and mournful locals,

seen his solid grasp of the history of the dynasties and of 'pedantic and kindly'

Confucianism. (Which is the best description of it I've ever seen.) Those interviews 

novelistic - impossibly sincere, compressed, tragic, poetic - and far beyond anything I

could elicit as a foreigner, in my summer there. But you believe him even so.

Anyway he doesn't pretend to have answered his burning question:

('-('

8&2!3*'-!4-

8-&!!!

4!%!(-&%

'&!%+(

(('-&''&

&&'-(''(

'-'(

-(2&%'&

!%@'8-!%

!

I oughtn't skimp on the book's adventure-story side just because it happens to be a

beautiful and humane psychological portrait; the prose is persistently gorgeous, the

sights are dryly and comprehensively evoked, and Thubron presents himself as a very

fine comic character to boot. My favourite China book.

* Anti-Eurocentric writing used to minimise totalitarian genocide can be

found in the critical discussion of Thubron here, the snob passage around

the dismaying line: "%&', the Cultural Revolution reached

the epitome of atrocities in terms of intensity and scope..." (emphasis mine).

That author also takes the prize for most dishonest truncation of the week,

since Thubron's monologue goes on to display cultural sensitivity in the face

of cultural horror (see "This sort of thing", above).

** There must be a better word for 'occidentaphile' than that itself. (We used

to call it simply 'being civilised' - but let's be civilised about it.)

272

The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule (...)

……... (2012) by Sharon McGrayne. A slightly forced oral history of the least

romanticised scientists: Bayesian statisticians. She makes up for the long-missing

romanticism single-handed! The two-hundred year eclipse of the Bayesian method was

much longer than that suffered by even the irrationally-maligned continental drift theory

(50 years). And this neglect and opprobrium was suffered by a paradigm now accepted

everywhere as powerful and useful in literally all kinds of research.

She wins us over, particularly with her chapter on the secretive, truculent,

omnicompetent genius John Tukey, who used Bayesian methods for elections 40 years

before 8, with comparable success. But her prose is borderline, with lots of

clear but dim-bulb sentences. She has one infuriating mannerism: she constantly refers

to Bayes' rule, Bayesian logical foundations after Bayes, Bayesian inference, 

personalist Bayesian epistemology by the single terrible metonym "Bayes":

-(8

B&@8(!'&!

8'$&

''&'!

273

--'(('

!

2'-

-.(&&8

'!&('.'!

I suppose she did this to elide away jargon, but it both equivocates between very

different entities, hides the complexity of the 'Bayesian' marquee, makes it seem like the

frequentists were attacking a logically sound theorem, and produces a whole list of

bizarre images, where we see the reclusive Reverend doing all these things: cracking

Enigma and Tunny, finding H-Bombs lost at sea, calculating appropriate worker's comp

amounts in the absence of reliable data, attributing .( to Hamilton,

and blocking 99.9% of the spam email from reaching you (yes, you). It is also even

' unfair to Laplace than usual. (It was he who developed Bayesianism into the

powerful applied framework it is, into more than a single gambler's theorem. Ok, so

"Laplace-Coxism" is admittedly even less admissible as a term to which the wise and

honest may repair.) But grammatical twitching aside this was a fun introduction to an

important thing.

She focusses on the soft, social side (and on applications vaguely summarised). There

was a huge amount of factional bitching between these serious and cloistered men:

EKYW-7'

'!,8'&

-&((&(&@8-

$8-&@8-728+('

!

%&'-.

7.B'A'8

-&''(!

''

(-(3

&''B'!J

J-3'(!3--(&(

(&(@B!!!

-3-J

J!

274

This human focus means she gives no treatment of Cox's theorem, certainly the most

remarkable result in formal epistemology (and probability theory?), and one of the main

things which rationally warrants the partisanship and excitement she displays for

Bayesian thought throughout. ("Justified fundamentalism", as one great commentator

puts it!) It proves that any attempt to use numbers to model belief must be Bayesian or

logically equivalent to it. With other results, it raises Bayesianism to the only viable

quantitative theory of rationality and of right learning, a behemoth of which Aristotelian

logic is a mere special case. No doubt I'm unusual in finding this the most exciting bit.

She's to be applauded for digging out novel examples of Bayesian analysis which were

classified or which avoided using the word: early actuarial work, Tukey's US election

model, the pre-Three-Mile-Island federal report of reactor safety, and the entire field of

operational research. But she is so concerned with emphasising the (genuine) long

oppression of the paradigm that she under-emphasises the good reasons to resist

Bayesian methods before 1980: they were simply computationally intractable before

MCMC. (Which makes the sheer effort put in to shortcuts and approximation methods

by ingenious people quite tragic; they just aren't needed anymore, thirty years later.) To

her credit, she does mention the parallel dogmatism of the 60s Bayesians and the

presumptive overenthusiasm of some people in the last 10 years.

(The great contemporary frequentist, Deborah Mayo, is able to subtitle her blog

"Frequentists in Exile" without being absurd - even though Stats 101 and "Methods for

[Social Science]" courses are still everywhere dominated by canned Fisherian tests and

frames. She means exile from the philosophy of statistics and probability.)

Insofar as you want to understand the large trends of the present and coming age, you

need to know its economics; insofar as you must understand the new economics, you

must understand AI; insofar as you must understand AI, you must understand machine

learning and decision theory; insofar as you must understand machine learning, you

must understand both frequentism and Bayesianism. Insofar as you do not yet have the

mathematics to understand Bayesianism, nor the excitement of the promise of a final,

real synthesis of objective with subjective, you must read this gentle prose work. Once

you are excited by its vague promises, you can find progressively more rigorous people

and will have actually have reason to stomach the formalism.

3/5, 4*/5 for those just beginning the march.

275

What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999)

by Charles Bukowski





-

'

(

&&8?

%(

&

(!

%&8&&

8!

8

&

'&



!

If you can't sleep and it's 2am and tomorrow's going to be a pain in the arse and you're

alone in the house, well, there is no better book. Unbeatable at what it does, which is to

slide through the mind with zero cognitive friction, depositing the emotional silt and

cheap, warm style of a previously insane and helpfully hopeless man in you – whatever

you want that for. More than any other poet, he just literally talks to you. You can roll

your eyes at his gaucheness and despise his chauvinism and feel nothing all you like:

that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's not the point.

So it's barely art, but he knows it. Pity any academic working on CB: these poems don't

invite analysis; they are worn on their own surface. They mean just what they first

mean. Many of them are just about writing poems, but I cannot resent their hollowness,

since emptiness is his brush. Bukowski's poems are just a man in a room. Odd that this

is enough to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all

contemporary poetry with their bigger brains and better politics and more eventful

stories and uplifting messages. Its main virtue is complete honesty.

!!!'&'-

8-(

8&8

?

&9-

276

'&--@-

3@

8

'&-

-

8&!

'

'(

'&



@

@!

!!!&8E00&'

@

'I'!

(

'(((!

!

'

&"

8!

!!!8'



88





8!

'

'?

8



-

&+'--

8-

--

9(

&((?



'

'?

9

''&-

8



277

Everything that people mock Leonard Cohen for is much more true of Bukowski

(misery, drawling, self-obsession, archness, chauvinism, treating the whole world as

your confessional); he is just more direct and macho about it; that fact, and the 8

different crowd surrounding his medium is enough to earn him contempt rather than

mockery. (And contempt is a kind of involuntary respect.) Backwards analogy:

Bukowski is Tom Waits minus gospel, minus FX pedals, minus Brecht and Weill, minus

one steady Kathleen peer. And minus metre of course. A grumpy adolescent old man; a

sensitising misanthrope; a beautiful lech.

He has only two modes: midnight countercultural raving and laconic woke-at-noon

observation. Neither would work without his lecherousness and/or meanness and/or

arrogance; they are the absolutely necessary breve before he blares out his concern.

''''

''!

&

'8!

'&&-%-

-

%'!

%8&8&''-

&-

9!

'('

'''

''&'

!

'

+'''

9'-

''&!

%8&&%8

&M

&

&'

&&'!

278

&8&'

8'

&'

&8M

M



;

''(

''

''&

''

'



&'



!

'&

&

!





%'

&

!

(That ^ might have gotten your back up, because it pattern-matches to modern whining

about women's choices. But it isn't that: remember, from above, that he is calling

himself a pig and a dead soul.)

This is three books written over thirty years, one sentence per ten lines as always,

stapled together to give the impression of a late-life opus. It covers the whole lot: his

Great Depression origin myth; his meaningless, crabbed middle years; and his long,

long late period spent in contempt of the arty people who pay and applaud him.

279

'8

%!

!!!'!

%&'&

(8'

@'

@

(

(''

!!!

8&

'

/['

'

%'

'



%%

'

&,!

I am nothing like him, except maybe in sense of humour. He is not anti-modern - grew

up through the Great Depression, a simulation of pre-modern subsistence; loves shit

cars; lives for late night recorded music - but science, growth, and the expanding circle

give him nothing of the sense of direction, transcendence and hope that it gives to me

and mine. But still I "relate", as the disgusting verb puts it.

I have read this a half-dozen times over a dozen years. (It isn't hard; it takes maybe an

hour and a half.) I know of no better poet to & to explain why poetry is good and

unique and feeds life. Whether or not this says something about my own character: I

don't expect to stop reading it.

5/5.

.$ Bukowski's epitaph is "Don't try". On the face of it that's mean and

funny and fine, but it also means what Yoda means by it: don't force it. Don't

betray your nature; do only what you are absolutely aligned behind. Is that

good advice? Maybe not, but it is epitomises the man, more than the

nihilistic joke.

280

Strangers Drowning (2015) by Larissa MacFarquhar

"Optikaa" (c) Zaky Arifin (2015)

%9'!-%'

%&'%'''!!!'

8-(!!!+'-(2'

8-'(

&-2-8(

!!!'&'''!

– Susan Wolf

!!!'9+'''(!4

(((?'!

[André] *'-'

(8(-8

&(!!!B((J(2'J-

8''?J('J-

&A2&8&!!!'

'''8'&

'(((!

– Larissa MacFarquhar

†

281

!!!&''(-[Bernard Williams] -

&'&8''!

(M(((-

--8(

-&-(M!'

(-&8!

– Larissa MacFarquhar

†

Twelve profiles of recent radical altruists, and the backlash they receive from the rest of

us. (^) Besides, MacFarquhar has some deep reflections on the good life and human

nature to work through. So: There are people who shape their lives around the need of

the world – in particular around strangers who are constantly, in some sense, drowning.

This category of person does more than just work a caring job and be dead nice to those

around them: instead, their entire lives are dominated by the attempt to do the '

good.

The profiled altruists are:

• A fairly fearless nurse who organised the Fast for Life and trained

generations of Nicaraguan nurses, continuing for thirty years despite

specific threats to her life by Contras.

• A pseudonymous animal rights activist who has rescued or won

improved conditions for millions of chickens.

• Two early effective altruists, Julia and Jeff, who live frugally and

donate more than half of their salaries to the most effective NGOs in

the world. They plausibly save 100 lives a year, far more than a

doctor or firefighter (even before considering replaceability).

• A real Christian, who opened her church to the homeless (over the

hostility of her flock) and donated a kidney anonymously.

• A charismatic, outcaste social worker and jungle statesman, who

created a self-sustaining leper ashram, 5000-strong, out of nothing.

Also his equally hardcore descendents.

• A Buddhist monk who created the largest suicide counselling site in

Japan, stressing himself into heart disease.

• The omni-parents of Vermont, who adopted 24 of the least cute and

easy children on the lists.

• A taciturn altruistic kidney donor.

• A burned-out idealist.

282

(I've compiled data on their nature here.*)

MacFarquhar appears suspicious about these people, whose lives are taken over by their

morals. She calls them "do-gooders" while admitting the term is dismissive.** Even the

most humble and quiet do-gooder is, she thinks, making an extremely arrogant claim:

that the moral intuitions of the whole species - i.e. family favouritism, supererogation,

the right to ignore the suffering of strangers - are totally wrong. She leaves no-one

unsuspected.

+''$*'@((8

'&8-&8!

B('&

B8(((8

88!!!8'-

8(8!%'(-88'

8&(''!

†

I see these lives as victory laps: the victory of broad reason over narrow animality.

MacFarquhar is more nuanced, less willing to dismiss particularism, nepotism and

speciesism – which are together known as common sense. (Though I have only a mild

case of the radicals: for instance, I am mostly immune to misery about the state of the

world, and I help my loved ones without much guilt. I'm giving 10% now and 50%

eventually, but I am such a bookish scruff that the absence of luxuries does not really

cramp my life at all.)

One part of Williams' humanist case against radical altruism has dissolved in the last

decade: the idea that single-minded ethical focus must erode your connection to your

community. Well, the effective altruists are growing in number and maturity; they offer

a deep, global community of at least partially serious people to support and be

supported by: and all with the stamp of moral consistency.

MacFarquhar doesn't much like utilitarianism, but she is too moved and impressed with

her subjects to take the standard, safe, quietist line (which her reviewers have tended

to). Throughout, she presents contradictory philosophical propositions, and makes it

difficult to know which she believes; she constantly uses indirect speech and deictic

discussion, blurring her voice with the debate at hand. This is, I think, an impressive

rhetorical strategy – an "esoteric" one. The book is addressed to common sense readers,

but also to our uncertainty and faint guilt; it's dedicated to her parents, but explicitly

283

constructed to bring us closer to the altruists:

%((&9

'9(((-9!$'B-

'&'''-&

''(9'!--

'(9'!$B

-'('B'

H9H9G9''

'! ***

So $ covertly brings us closer to radical altruism. Her task is not to

establish their ethical premises, nor to win over new obsessives: instead, she simply

shows us their sincerity and incredible effects on the world – and, better, shows the lack

of evidence and interpretive charity behind their opponents' aspersions. (This goes for

the Freudians, the Objectivists, and the anti "codependency" crowd.) It humanises the

threatening side of ultimate goodness. She mostly avoids editorialising about the

radicals. But one of her clear conclusions is that these people are not deficient, instead

having something most people lack:

2((&!((

&'((-''-'

&&!28'8-(

-8((-

'' "@(((

@!-''&-('8'-

(&!!!

need -[Julia] M8

&-&(

'!$-

-((8'!

'8(';(;

while also noting that, in general

%&'-!!!-

8-&!$''(

?''(8(

''(!''-8-8

'-&-(!!!'&

(((-&8!!!%'&

284

8&2!

-(---'-2-

((-&+8+'(-((2

B8!

An amazing book, anyway: charged, critical, structurally ingenious, and filled with

humanity – or, with this other, better thing.

4*/5.

"Sedia hujan sebelum payung" (c) Zaky Arifin (2015)

†

Note the absent quotation marks around MacFarquhar's report of the

psychoanalysts' and Williams' positions. I talk about what I think she's up to

here.

The chapter on the blitheness and cruelty of psychoanalysts enraged me - all

285

the more because MacFarquhar leaves their unscientific bullshit

unchallenged, instead letting it mock and degrade itself. (One hopes.) $

' glibness and spite:

ANNA

FREUD:

&-&

&'

(&'

(!8&

-'

'!-&2

(8&!!!

(My, what rigorous science.) So, here's yet  way I am fortunate to

live when I do: these people have by now been mostly sidelined in polite

discourse. The harm they are able to do is much reduced, and I need not

spend my whole life convincing people that they are just making things up.

⏎

* Philosophy - e.g. Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Mark Lee,

Geoff Anders, Stephanie Wykstra - looms large here, in this little corner of

the race; larger than organised religion. Since all of the philosophers are

from Analytic departments, this gives the lie to the generalised standard

criticism of academic philosophy (: that they are fatally detached from the

concerns of society, dehumanised, etc). ⏎

** "Do-gooder" is still much better than Susan Wolf's term, "moral saint",

because, as MacFarquhar notes, to call someone a saint is to nullify the

challenge of their difficult actions: saints are not just 'people who do really

good things'; they are (thought to be) a different sort of being. Any

movement (like EA) which seeks to make radical altruism mainstream has

to resist this demarcation and get people to see such a life as, first, good;

then, possible for them; and then reasonable - the sort of thing that people

would do if they thought about it more.

*** MacFarquhar's account of Stephanie is misleading: she makes it seem

like she has opted for ordinary amoral innocence, where the real Stephanie

has taken on an incredibly high-impact job, activism for oversight of

pharmaceutical clinical trial data.

286

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that (2014)

A hundred clear, witty, and literate attacks on the agreeable nonempiricism that most

worldviews and most conversations are based in, even in the modernised, developed

world. (It covers such anti-scientific fields as alternative medicine, journalism, politics,

and policy. You may regard anti-vaxxers, face cream 'science', homeopathy, and AIDS

denialism as too obviously false to be worth your time deriding. But these hopeful,

manipulative falsehoods are where many if not most live: someone has to defend

people.)

This makes it a collection of a hundred enjoyable tutorials in statistics, experimental

method, and epistemology:

8('((-&'

&82&'-&

+'!(88

((&G'-8G

(8!!!

Goldacre is a gifted populariser: by focussing on particular abuses, he is able to animate

very hard and theoretical topics by leveraging our anger, or our humour. (In a similar

way to Nassim Taleb's snark. Of course, as strict empiricists, the two men share many

287

targets: the powerful and overconfident, the famed and hollow, the predatory and

avaricious). Since British libel law opens him to constant financial hazard, 8

, he calls his writing "pop science with a gun to your

head". (Actually it is mostly pop metascience; even better. There are shout-outs to the

great critics of C20th science: Celia Mulrow, John Ioannidis, Uri Simonsohn, who are

too-rarely praised; for they turned on the people who might otherwise have lionised

them.)

He shows policy analysis to be lagging a century behind the standard set by medical

trials, and not mostly for the good reasons (which are: that they have a more causally

dense subject than medicine has; and because they face absolute ethical restrictions on

their experiments: it is politically impossible to experiment with welfare systems). e.g.:

Policy people set  required evidence threshold before administering their treatments

en masse, have no controls, no randomisation, no calibration, no statements of formal

uncertainty, no malpractice system to punish their recklessness, nor often any honest

fucking posthoc 8 of their treatment.

[Andrew Lansley's] (28@-

'!&

-''J8J'(!%

''--'--'

(-'(-8J8J((

'!

Journalists come across as badly as the quacks - even BBC, Panorama, C4 News. This

' be being ameliorated at last by the rise of the specialised blogospheres and by the

Nate Silver / Rich Harris / Keith Frey school of data journalism. But not generally yet

and not for sure.

I love his rationalist war-cry, against the public and dinner-party proponents of the

never-supported MMR -autism link:

((+'2'2

''&8%'

A-(8'-&(!'

'''82!

!!!'(!)'''

&-&(((!'

288

&-(8-(-(-'!#

@%8&'-&-''

'('!-'(

(&(&''%

+(!%'('-%88

(!'-

8&-''!

His website is a bit ugly but has most of this content for free; the extras in this volume

are oddities for fans (an undergraduate paper of his, BMJ editorials and notes from his

heartening rise into British policy establishment (he is a public health researcher at the

NHS). This was my second pass at his columns; I was again refreshed and uplifted and

enraged. We might despair at how persistent insensitivity to evidence has been, and at

how unnatural empiricism remains, in a society totally transformed by it. But I don't

despair, because it has never been easier for us to check and rebut liars and fools. I

sincerely aspire to become a "research parasite" (an independent checker of analyses, a

rogue forensic statistician) and to write as clearly and well as him.

Goldacre is that rare thing, someone doing the best work they possibly could be. (If he

could be persuaded to migrate to the global south...)

5?/5.

289

Curiosity (2012) by Philip Ball.

—;

M8'-;

M('&;

M'&8;

M('

&8;

M@&;

MB;

M-8'

(-

(;

M8;

MB-;

M8&

;

M&(('

;

M8

&;

M-8&((-

'((&

'8;

M''8-'8; 

8''8'

-('!"

M8

(;

M((&8

';

M8-

8;

M''&-

8-;

— Adelard of Bath (c.1120)

“How Science Became Interested in Everything”. Another history of the

origins of science: our long trek to GWAS, livermorium, and CERN via astrology,

290

natural magic, alchemy, Neoplatonism, herbalism, occultism, and philosophy. So,

superficially, the book is just about an especially fruity context of discovery. But this

period holds two of the most important lessons in history:

1) science grew out of work by people who diverge wildly from the modern idea

and practice of science, whose variously false frameworks led to the Royal

Society and e.g. the Newtonian triumph. (And from there to contemporary,

professional, university science.) So wrong people can still make progress if

their errors are uncorrelated with the prevailing errors. And

2) a small number of the most powerful people in Britain - the Lord Chancellor,

the king's physicians, the chaplain of the young Elector Palatine and bishop of

Chester, London's great architect, Privy Councillors

- successfully pushed a

massive philosophical change, and thereby contributed to most of our greatest

achievements: smallpox eradication, Sputnik and Voyager, the Green

Revolution, and the unmanageably broad boons of computing are partly theirs.

The received view of all this is one-dimensional: you have superstitious,

pompous cretins at one end and rational, experimental moderns at the other.

But really you need five axes before you get a basic understanding of the great,

great revolution that began in the C16th - before you can see how science differs

from every other community:

7. Bacon has some claim to being the most influential philosopher ever, in terms of counterfactual effect on

history. (Rather than number of bloody citations!) No-one with his social standing was resisting the

Aristotelian consensus in 1620; his prototype scientific method is a century ahead of its time. (Yes, ibn al-

Haytham's was 7 centuries ahead of its time, but to limited avail.)

291

• Supernaturalism vs Naturalism. Did they explain things solely in

terms of natural causes? (Absentee Gods only.)

• Apriori vs Aposteriori. Did they view actual observation as

decisive and indispensable?

• Qualitative vs Quantitative. Did they make measurements? Did

they model the data? Did they use standard units?

• Holism vs Reductionism. Did they analyse things into their

constituent features? Did they explain phenomena in terms of ?

• Infallibilism vs Fallibilism. Did they allow for the possibility of

error? Did they view uncertain knowledge as still worthwhile?

8. This one is hard to refer to, because we now find it incredibly easy to understand why "go and look" works as a

general route to knowledge; Medieval thought rejected this on the basis of things like the problem of induction.

The cliched way to refer to the split between those who want to  with the apriori and those who want to start with

data is "Rationalism" vs "Empiricism". But these words confuse people: the two of them are also used in a C17th

debate about psychology, to do with the nature of mental content. More: it can't be a dichotomy, since many of the

greatest rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz) were experimentalists too, doing what we now call empirical work. Three

meanings of rationalism, and three words for them:

• Continental rationalism: Belief in innate ideas. Descartes and Leibniz but not Dawkins and Shermer.

• Apriorism: Belief in the supremacy of apriori knowledge over empirical knowledge. Aristotle was

apriorist, and Descartes.

• Modern skepticism: Belief that everything should be subject to reason and evidence. IncludesDescartes

and Leibniz  Dawkins and Shermer. Contemporary rationalists are highly if not radically

empiricist.

9 Hard to imagine a fallibilist apriorist: perhaps Lakatos. (Some say Leibniz was, in practice.) I actually have met a

methodist infallibilist apriorist, but I won't meet another.

10 I had included "openness" in the model -

Obscurantism vs Openness. Did they write in the vernacular? Did they publish for a wide readership? Did

they spurn Noble Lies? Did they encourage replications with and data sharing? Did they build scholarly

networks?

- but I admit this is just wishful/normative thinking: modern academic science fails at this. Things can be science

without being published, obviously: consider the invention of public key cryptography by a GCHQ wonk, classified

for 25 years - or even the secret infrastructure and algorithmics of high-frequency trading. And, whether with the low

status of replications, the unreadable prose, the paywalls on most research (tax-funded or no), the pathetically low

levels of data sharing, or the prevalence of noble lies... But it's definitely a core ( now: the greedy impulse

behind hermeticism is blatantly unscientific, if not actually shunned by actual scientists. First, lip service...

292

So I'm modelling science as naturalist, fallibilist, quantitative empiricism with

pretensions to openness. I've categorised the early scientists mentioned in )

according to this: you can see the data with additional justifications here. (Ball doesn't

state this model, but it floats around in his debunkings and "well actually"s.)

Obviously these five factors aren't the end of the matter either. But I reckon it catches a

decent amount of the variance in the term "scientist". Others e.g.

• Particularism vs Consilience. Did they believe that the scientific

method could explain every phenomenon?

• Realism vs Instrumentalism. Most scientists are realists about best

current theories

• Theism vs Nontheism. I  included non-theism in the core of

modern science - and so it is, in the form of strong naturalism.

Scient, on the other hand, differ from this, globally. This is

partially because humans are so compartmentalised and can hold

severe contradictions indefinitely. But, clearly, atheism is not an

essential part of the modern method. But causal closure and (at most)

a (8 faith are.

I use Alberto Vanzo's criteria for deciding if someone was enough of an experimentalist:

('+('((

293

Proto-scientist Floreat

Naturali

Aposteriori

Quantita

Reduction

Fallibili

Open? Modernness

Aristotle C-6th Y N N N N N 17% Reference bad scientist

Nicolaus Copernicus C16th ? ? Y ? ? Y 33%

Francis Bacon eC17th Y Y Y Y Y Y 100% Reference cheerleader

ibn al-Haytham C11th ? Y Y Y Y N 67%

Rene Descartes C17th N ? Y Y N ? 33%

Galileo Galilei C17th Y Y Y Y N Y 83%

Giambattista della Porta C16th N Y ? ? ? Y 33%

Gottfried Leibniz C17th N ? Y Y ? Y 50%

Johannes Kepler C17th N Y Y Y N ? 50%

Tycho Brahe C16th N N Y ? N N 17%

C17th Y Y Y Y ? Y 83%

Robert Hooke C17th Y Y Y Y Y Y 100%

Isaac Newton C17th N Y Y Y Y ? 67%

Thomas Hobbes C17th Y N N N N ? 17% Reference troll

Margaret Cavendish C17th Y N N N N ? 17%

Christiaan Huygens

• self-descriptions+('((('8

!8-('(

+('((!

• friends and foes+('(('8(

O(N'

)((!

• method+('(((2'

((B-&'+('

&8?-&&'!%-

+('(('(A(

(!

• rhetoric@+('((-'

O+('NO&8N-O(N

O(N&!&-'-

!

This is unusually inclusive: the famous Rationalist Leibniz counts as experimental

under this rubric. But a stronger definition of aposteriorist - like "refuses to use

purely analytic reasoning", or even "spent most of their time running experiments

and analysing data" would exclude many contemporary scientists. Sticking with

Vanzo for now.

All of the pieces of science are very ancient - we had mathematics and data collection

well before the Ten Commandments, naturalism before Buddha and Confucius,

reductionism before the Peloponnesian War at least one controlled trial centuries before

Christ, fallibilism likewise. Everything was ready BCE; we can see indirect evidence of

this in the astonishing works of Ancient Greek engineers, mostly unmatched for 1000

years until y'know.

So the question is not "was Bacon the most original blah blah?": he wasn't, particularly

when you remember Alhazen's Baconian method, developed in the C11th. But we need

an explanation for how we messed it up so badly. The received view, which is all I have

at the moment, is that the fall of Rome, Christian anti-intellectualism and, later, the

enshrining of Aristotelian mistakes was enough to destroy and suppress the ideas. I want

deeper explanations though. (For instance, what did we do to the economy?)

A fun regression on this data would be to see how my scienciness measure correlates

294

with the importance of the person's work. It would not be that highly proportional, in

this time period.

***************************************************************

Back to the book eh! Structure is lots of little chapters on fairly disjointed topics: early

modern ideas of space travel, universal language, pumps, etc. Chapter on "cabinets of

curiosity" is great though: suddenly their dull zany blare makes sense and I want to

build one:

'%8!(

Wunderkammern '&!!!

'(''('!!!

(''2(@'&&

exercising '!&

'&(&

&'(8('&

+('*8!

Ball doesn't like us calling the Scientific Revolution a revolution, and I agree: the

revolution didn't consist in the theories of Bacon or Newton: it consists in the diffusion

of the worldview into all subjects and all inquiry. It transformed society and gave us

marvels, but it hasn't finished happening. The general will, or default state, is still

strongly unscientific. (The largest and most grievous holdout, larger even than the

enduring hold of fideist religion, is our tribal politics and our largely nonempirical

government policy.)

Ball expends a lot of time on a history of wonder vs curiosity vs dispassionate robot

inquiry. People hated all of these things for various reasons, up until the Renaissance

when curiosity became acceptable on what are now classic economic grounds, or in line

with the Italian cult of the virtuoso - someone who's so bloody brilliant that you have to

just let him get on with it.

I always like Ball's drawling prose and catty editorialising. (For instance, Margaret

Cavendish - the darling of arts academics who latch on to the only woman in sight in

this period - gets a round dissing by Ball, as an anti-experiment idiot, a vitalist, and a

misogynist.) Stimulating as always.

4/5.

295

Colophon

The cover image is from the British Library archive and is of what

Nietzsche called a (, that shallow, aggressive amateur

pundit that every middle class person feels some need to be.

The manuscript was prepared in LibreOffice.

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'((." -RMS.)

The cover and inner font is Liberation Serif.

This text contains many solecisms and obscurities; these should be

taken to be due to the absence of all hypertext references, which can found

in the original at

http://afterallitcouldbeworse.blogspot.com/search/label/books.

or, if you come to this later in the century, post-Google, at

http://web.archive.org/web/*/afterallitcouldbeworse.blogspot.com

The author is a data scientist and an effective altruist, whatever those are.

He has lived in the north of Scotland, Beijing, Kagera, and London.

He was kind of educated at Aberdeen and Glasgow, but better herein, and

better yet to come.

Index

296

Index

Aberdeen............................................................................................................................45, 295

Achebe, Chinua..........................................................................................................................48

Adelard of Bath........................................................................................................................289

Adorno, Theodor........................................................................................................................33

Altman, Sam.............................................................................................................................193

Anonymous..............................................................................................................................105

anti-globalization......................................................................................................................266

anti-psychoanalysis...................................................................................................221, 227, 250

Asimov, Isaac...................................................................................................................103, 223

Auden, WH...............................................................................................................................229

Bacon, Francis (philosopher)....................................................................................................293

Baldwin, James...........................................................................................................................43

Ball, Philip................................................................................................................205, 245, 289

Banks, Iain....................................................................................................22, 45, 117, 202, 223

Bayard, Pierre...............................................................................................................................5

Benedict, Ruth..........................................................................................................................212

Bennett, Alan............................................................................................................................250

Berger, James...........................................................................................................................273

Blackmon, Douglas....................................................................................................................56

Bonaparte, Napoleon..................................................................................................................19

Bostrom, Nick.............................................................................................................54, 122, 195

Boyle, Frankie............................................................................................................................50

Brecht, Berthold.................................................................................................................53, 277

Briggs, Raymond......................................................................................................................134

Brooks, Fred.............................................................................................................................127

Buchan, John........................................................................................................................38, 41

Buddha.....................................................................................................................................293

Bukowski, Charles............................................................................................................226, 275

Burke, Edmund.........................................................................................................................257

Burroughs, William..................................................................................................................131

Camilleri, Andrea.......................................................................................................................48

Carroll, Lewis.............................................................................................................................78

Carson, Ciaran............................................................................................................................19

Carswell, Catherine....................................................................................................................47

Cash, Johnny............................................................................................................................103

Cavendish, Margaret.................................................................................................................294

Chen, William...........................................................................................................................208

Chomsky, Noam..............................................................................................50, 76, 84, 122, 266

Christ................................................................................................................................160, 293

Christie, Agatha..........................................................................................................................10

Cixin, Liu.................................................................................................................................223

Cochrane, Archie........................................................................................................................55

Cohen, Leonard..................................................................................................................27, 277

Cole, Teju...................................................................................................................................27

Collier, Paul..............................................................................................................................129

Collins, Stephen.........................................................................................................................39

Conan Doyle, Arthur..................................................................................................................55

Confucius.........................................................................................................................182, 293

Crease, Robert............................................................................................................................55

297

Crowe, Paul..............................................................................................................................131

d’Annunzio, Gabriele...............................................................................................................143

Dahl, Roald................................................................................................................................13

Dante..........................................................................................................................................53

Darnielle, John......................................................................................................................35, 94

Davies, Nick...............................................................................................................................43

Davis, Lydia..............................................................................................................................113

Davis, Zack..............................................................................................................................208

Dawkins, Richard.....................................................................................................................197

death................29, 92, 96, 99p., 110, 121, 133, 141, 143, 152, 165, 180, 226, 269, 276, 283, 289

Dennett, Daniel...........................................................................................................44, 145, 153

Diaconis, Persi..........................................................................................................................273

Diamond, Jared.........................................................................................................................202

Dikötter, Frank..........................................................................................................................117

DJ Hixxy....................................................................................................................................42

Donaldson, William..................................................................................................................189

Dostoevsky, Fyodor....................................................................................................................57

Durcan, Paul.............................................................................................................................170

Dyer, Geoff.................................................................................................................................18

Eco, Umberto.........................................................................................................................6, 71

Ehrenreich, Barbara..........................................................................................................102, 129

Fanon, Frantz..............................................................................................................................59

Feynman, Richard......................................................................................................................50

Flaubert, Gustave........................................................................................................................94

Ford, Paul.................................................................................................................................238

Foster Wallace, David...............................................................................................................245

Fowles, John.............................................................................................................................221

Freud, Sigmund........................................................................................................................263

from James.................................................................................................................3, 10, 70, 94

Fukalot, Michelle..................................................................................................16, 66, 184, 209

Fukuyama, Francis...............................................................................................................54, 76

Galef, Julia...................................................................................................................................3

Garreau, Joel..............................................................................................................................54

Gates, Alan...............................................................................................................................231

Gavin cries................................................................................................................138, 198, 218

Gellhorn, Martha..............................................................................................................198, 235

Gigerenzer, Gerd........................................................................................................................91

Gilbert, Daniel..............................................................................................................................5

Giles, Harry..............................................................................................................................253

Gill, AA......................................................................................................................................49

Gillette, Jonathan......................................................................................................................208

Gleick, James.............................................................................................................................83

God.....................................................................................................................96, 113, 127, 199

Goldacre, Ben.............................................................................................................49, 218, 286

Gopnik, Adam..........................................................................................................................182

Goto-Jones, Christopher...........................................................................................................221

Graeber, David...........................................................................................................................61

Graham, Paul............................................................................................................................208

Gramsci, Antonio......................................................................................................................261

Gray, John..................................................................................................................................34

298

Green, Celia..............................................................................................................................144

Greene, Graham................................................................................................................194, 218

Greene, Joshua...........................................................................................................................13

Greer, Germaine.........................................................................................................................36

Grosz, Stephen...........................................................................................................................44

Gunn, Neil................................................................................................................................148

Gwern.......................................................................................................................123, 166, 208

Hacking, Ian...............................................................................................................................11

Hamilton, Alexander.................................................................................................................273

Hare, RM..................................................................................................................................219

Harel, David.............................................................................................................................138

Harford, Tim...............................................................................................................................42

Hazlitt, William........................................................................................................................122

Heaney, Seamus..........................................................................................................48, 146, 151

Heidegger, Martin.....................................................................................................................130

Hersh, Seymour........................................................................................................................198

Herzog, Werner.................................................................................................................141, 233

Hesse, Herman...........................................................................................................................41

Hitchens, Christopher...............................................................................................................209

Hodder, Chris...........................................................................................................................224

Holloway, Richard....................................................................................................................207

Hume, David..............................................................................................................................47

Huxley, Aldous.........................................................................................................................154

Ioannidis, John.........................................................................................................................287

Ionesco, Eugene........................................................................................................................235

James, Clive..............................................................................34, 40, 43, 46, 48, 53, 94, 99, 143

James, Clives..............................................................................................................................53

Japan......................................................................................................................................213p.

Jonasson, Jonas.........................................................................................................................204

Jones, Owen.............................................................................................................................232

Juster, Norton...............................................................................................................................5

Kahneman, Daniel..............................................................................................................11, 193

Kanigel, Robert........................................................................................................................219

Kant, Immanuel......................................................................................................................6, 18

Kaplinski, Jaan.........................................................................................................................190

Karau, Holden..........................................................................................................................244

Kaufman, Jeff...........................................................................................................................281

Kay, Alan..................................................................................................................................208

Kay, Jackie................................................................................................................................115

Keene, Donald..........................................................................................................................218

Kelman, James......................................................................................................................34, 41

King, Martin Luther..............................................................................................................56, 59

Kissinger, Henry.......................................................................................................................198

Klein, Naomi............................................................................................................................190

Knuth, Donald..........................................................................................................................131

kpunk..........................................................................................................................................18

Kurzweil, Ray.............................................................................................................................54

Lane Fox, Robin.........................................................................................................................48

Lansley, Andrew.......................................................................................................................287

Laplace, Pierre-Simon..............................................................................................................273

299

Larkin, Philip......................................................................................................40, 100, 156, 159

LeDoux, Joseph..........................................................................................................................57

LeGuin, Ursula...................................................................................................................77, 223

Lewis, Michael.........................................................................................................................239

Li He..........................................................................................................................................30

Li Shangyin................................................................................................................................29

Lodge, David......................................................................................................................58, 150

love................................................................2, 166, 172, 179, 186, 195, 210, 219, 222, 250, 281

Lucretius.....................................................................................................................................30

MacAskill, William..................................................................................................................229

MacDiarmid, Hugh.....................................................................................................................59

MacFarquhar, Larissa...............................................................................................................241

Mackay Brown, George..............................................................................................................60

Mackay, Colin............................................................................................................................32

Malcolm X.................................................................................................................................59

Mann, Michael...........................................................................................................................53

Marquis, Don............................................................................................................................127

Marx, Karl................................................................................................................121, 259, 263

Massie, Allan..............................................................................................................................78

Mayo, Deborah.........................................................................................................................274

Mazower, Mark..........................................................................................................................80

McCarthy, Cormac............................................................................................................106, 148

McGrayne, Sharon....................................................................................................................272

Meades, Jonathan.................................................................................................................7, 270

Meadows, Donella....................................................................................................................139

Melville, Herman........................................................................................................................92

Miéville, China...............................................................................................................19, 51, 81

Mill, JS.......................................................................................................................................16

Milosz, Czeslaw.......................................................................................................................126

Mitchell, David.............................................................................................................................8

Montaigne................................................................................................................................132

Montesquieu...............................................................................................................................59

Mooallem, Jon..........................................................................................................................149

Moore, GE................................................................................................................................219

Moran, Caitlin............................................................................................................................47

Morgan, Richard...................................................................................................28, 81, 115, 153

Morozov, Evgeny.....................................................................................................................264

Morris, Jan..................................................................................................................................17

Muir, Edwin................................................................................................................................59

Murdoch, Iris......................................................................................................................70, 218

Murray, Charles..........................................................................................................................45

Naipaul, VS................................................................................................................................65

Newberger Goldstein, Rebecca.................................................................................................210

Nietzsche, Friedrich....................................................................................4, 20, 40, 54, 229, 258

O'Neil, Cathy............................................................................................................235, 241, 249

Offit, Paul...................................................................................................................................49

Paglia, Camille...........................................................................................................................16

Pearce, David...........................................................................................................................154

Perlis, Alan...............................................................................................................................208

Philips, Adam.......................................................................................................................4, 128

300

Phillips, Adam..........................................................................................................................254

Philosophical................................................................................................................................4

PHP..........................................................................................................................................170

Pilger, John...............................................................................................................................198

Pohl, Frederik...........................................................................................................................195

Pomerantsev, Peter...................................................................................................................226

Poole, Steven..............................................................................................................................12

Pratchett, Terry....................................................................21, 82, 84pp., 111, 113, 117, 133, 243

Prévert, Jacques..........................................................................................................................89

Pullman, Philip.........................................................................................................................171

Qiless Qi...................................................................................................................................242

Rao, Venkatesh.........................................................................................................................263

Reid, Alastair..............................................................................................................................23

Reynolds, Alastair....................................................................................................................227

Reynolds, Simon...........................................................................................................5, 137, 260

Richie, Donald..........................................................................................................................213

Ritchie, Stuart...........................................................................................................................234

Ronson, Jon..............................................................................................................................239

Rorty, Richard......................................................................................................................14, 58

Russell, Bertrand......................................................................................................................219

Sacks, Oliver......................................................................................................................47, 252

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine.................................................................................................................6

Sandberg, Anders......................................................................................................................201

Sardar, Ziauddin.........................................................................................................................56

Sartre, Jean-Paul.........................................................................................................................33

Schneier, Bruce.........................................................................................................................137

scotland.............................32, 45p., 50, 59, 61, 64, 78p., 95, 104p., 115, 128, 193, 207, 253, 261

Sen, Amartya..............................................................................................................................54

Seneca......................................................................................................................................258

Shakespeare................................................................................................................................60

Shaw, Zed.................................................................................................................................231

Shem, Samuel...........................................................................................................................248

Shrigley, David.........................................................................................................................142

Silver, Nate...............................................................................................................................287

Simmons, Dan..........................................................................................................................104

Simonsohn, Uri.........................................................................................................................287

Singer, Peter.....................................................................................................................282, 285

Singh, Simon............................................................................................................................219

Smith, Adam.............................................................................................................................224

Smith, Iain, Crichton................................................................................................................128

Sokal, Alain................................................................................................................................66

Spinoza, Baruch.........................................................................................................................59

Spolsky, Joel.............................................................................................................................240

Springsteen, Bruce....................................................................................................................249

Stallman, Richard.............................................................................................................193, 295

Stephenson, Neal..............................................................................................................102, 249

Strauss, Leo..............................................................................................................................130

Stross, Charles..........................................................................................................................193

Stross, Charlie.............................................................................................79, 100, 105, 143, 195

Swartz, Aaron...........................................................................................................................208

301

Tagore, Rabindranath.................................................................................................................82

Taleb, Nassim...............................................................................................................54, 89, 286

Thubron, Colin.........................................................................................................................269

Thurber, James...........................................................................................................................65

Toole, John Kennedy....................................................................................................................2

Toulmin, Stephen........................................................................................................................86

Tukey, John..............................................................................................................................272

Turing, Alan..............................................................................................................................273

Updike, John..............................................................................................................................65

Verne, Jules..................................................................................................................................5

Waits, Tom................................................................................................................................277

Wallace, David Foster...........................................................................................56p., 138, 145p.

Waugh, Evelyn.........................................................................................................................133

Weinersmith, Zach......................................................................................................................15

Williams, Bernard.....................................................................................................................281

Wilson, AN...............................................................................................................................203

Wilson, Catherine.......................................................................................................................84

Wirth, Niklaus..........................................................................................................................136

Wise, Julia................................................................................................................................281

Wittgenstein, Ludwig.............................................................................................................4, 47

Wodehouse, PG..................................................................................................................65, 134

Wolf, Susan..............................................................................................................................280

Wolpert, Lewis...........................................................................................................................37

Wong, David.............................................................................................................................149

Xinran.......................................................................................................................................101

Yudkowsky, Eliezer....................................................................................................................18

Zizek, Slavoj..............................................................................................................................40

302