In his classic How to Cheat at Chess, Bill Hartston explains that it's easy to annotate chess games once you know the result. If a complicated sacrifiIn his classic How to Cheat at Chess, Bill Hartston explains that it's easy to annotate chess games once you know the result. If a complicated sacrifice worked, praise it as "the logical conclusion to a well-played attack"; if it didn't, dismiss it as "desperation, but White was lost anyway." Hartston says that when you see a chess journalist intently studying the position in an ongoing tournament game, you can be sure that what they're doing is mentally composing those two parallel narratives, so that they'll be able to mail in the right one as soon as the game is finished.
Inspired by Hartston's remarks, I offer you the following two reviews of Stephen Wolfram's new book. I'm hopeful that at least one of them will turn out to be right.
Positive review
People who want to score big often need to do things their own way. Einstein, who changed the face of science for ever, spent his most productive years working as a patent clerk; it gave him time to develop his thoughts at leisure, away from the relentless pressure of the academic world. Wolfram has been no less original. Starting off as a science wunderkind - he got his PhD at 20 - he soon realised that what physics needed most was better computational tools. He started developing the software that eventually turned into the Mathematica package, and founded a successful company to market it.
The more he worked with computation, the more he began to suspect that this was the true substrate of reality. Investigating a huge range of computational systems, he found that even the very simplest ones - in particular, the remarkable 'Rule 30' - could display astonishingly complex behaviour. In his 2002 bestseller, A New Kind of Science, he presented his initial findings, but then returned to growing his company. Now, in this latest book, he completes the Odysseus-like journey that has led him back to the fundamental physics he started from, and shows new ways to address the problems that people have been stuck on since the 70s. Instead of increasingly recalcitrant mathematical frameworks, Wolfram uses a twenty-first century approach and shows how the power of modern computer technology can be harnessed to simulate artificial universes that are starting to reproducing the physical phenomena we see in our own world.
Wolfram's bold hypothesis is that the universe, at its deepest level, consists of a huge network, which is constantly evolving according to a single rule whose precise formulation is, literally, the ultimate answer. His intuition, honed on a lifetime of working with such systems, tells him that this rule is very simple - so simple, in fact, that it can be found by having machines systematically check through the possibilities. He has not yet found it, but he says he's close. Already, he has been able to demonstrate that a large class of these systems follow the equations that define Einstein's theory of general relativity. He has an incomplete but suggestive argument, developed with a student, to show that a slightly more restricted class of systems also display behaviour characteristic of the quantum mechanics we see in our own universe, and in particular reproduce the path integral formula developed by his one-time mentor Richard Feynman.
Wolfram takes a broad-brush approach, and freely admits that important details still need to be resolved. (In particular, it is still not quite clear how to resolve the difficulties posed by Bell's Inequalities). But he thinks his initial successes cannot possibly be accidental, and that we're now within sight of the answer. He is making all his findings and methods generally available, and encourages other people to join in. It's hard not to believe that there will be an enthusiastic response.
Exciting times!
Negative review
People who have screwed up big often feel an urge to justify themselves. Einstein, who wasted the second half of his life on a fruitless search for the Unified Field Theory, ignored horrified entreaties from his friends to stop throwing good money after bad after bad and move on. Similarly, Stephen Wolfram, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is unable to accept that his strategy for investigating the nature of reality might be totally mistaken. Having abandoned a promising career in fundamental physics to start a software company, he is determined to show that software engineering is going to reveal the secrets of the universe. He says himself that his physicist friends beg him in vain to do something else.
Discovering that simple rewriting systems like the overpublicised 'Rule 30' can sometimes create complex structure (a result already well-known, for example, from Conway's 'Game of Life' and the Mandelbrot set), Wolfram decided that the nature of reality had to be in some way related to this finding. In his 2002 self-published screed, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram outlined these ideas and was met with a resounding lack of interest from the scientific community. He went back to working on his company. But he has evidently not had the sense to leave well alone, and is now wheeling out the same old arguments again. He seems to have forgotten how to work with equations. Instead, he shows us interminable pages of output from his simulations, and tries to convince us that they are somehow better.
Wolfram's tired hypothesis, all too familiar from the earlier book, is that the universe, at its deepest level, is some kind of rewriting system. The novelty this time round is that it is, specifically, a certain type of graph rewriting system. A New Kind of Science already made the unsupported claim that systems of this kind can display behaviour describable using the formal apparatus of general relativity. Here, there are a few more details and a link to a recent arXiv paper by a student. There is some extremely handwavy speculation about how quantum mechanics fits into the picture. I do not understand the claimed derivation of the Feynman path integral, which relies on some legerdemain in which energies are related to angles in "multiway causal graph space" (where does the geometry of multiway causal graph space come from?) and the magic formula ∫ exp(iHt)dt emerges from what certainly looks like Wolfram's sleeve. He has still not found any actual rewriting system that displays the properties he keeps promising us must be there.
Bell's Inequalities come up momentarily in the final chapter and are then brushed under the rug, despite the fact that, as Wolfram says, they are the standard objection to hidden variables accounts of quantum mechanics. The best known book on this kind of framework, Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft's The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, is not even mentioned. For some reason, Wolfram thinks his work is interesting, and is making it all publicly available. Knowledgeable people seem less than blown away. You can see some typical comments here.
An unbeatable offer: two reviews for the price of one! If you aren't interested in dull hairsplitting, scroll directly to the Infotainment Review beloAn unbeatable offer: two reviews for the price of one! If you aren't interested in dull hairsplitting, scroll directly to the Infotainment Review below. But first, I'm afraid I must tediously present my
Scholarly review (fact-checked)
I'm conflicted about this book. There's plenty to love. As far as I can tell, Singh gets all the science right, and the fact that it's stuffed with entertaining stories about the historical characters involved makes it a fun read. I finished it in a couple of days. But how accurate are these stories? I am by no means an expert on the history of the Big Bang, but I have recently become interested in it and I've read several books. Last week, I read Kragh's Cosmology and Controversy. Given that Singh praises it as "probably the single best book on the Big Bang" and thanks Kragh for his help in writing his own book, I am puzzled to see a number of obvious inconsistencies.
Kragh comes across as an extremely careful scholar and Singh as an entertainer, so it's hard to believe that Singh is the one getting it right. For example, Kragh briefly mentions the tradition according to which the Steady State theory was born after its originators watched the 1945 movie Dead of Night, but warns that this is almost certainly a legend; Singh just presents it as fact, and spends a page describing the movie in great detail. Similarly, Kragh says that most people assume Gamow coined the word "ylem" to refer to the primordial matter from which the Universe was created, but that the word was first used by Gamow's collaborator Alpher; Singh says it was Gamow's invention.
The above are trivial matters, but then I don't know a great deal about Gamow or the Steady State group. One part of the story I do know fairly well, however, is the role played by Georges Lemaître, where I've read Lambert's two biographies, Un atome d'univers and L'itinéraire spirituel de Georges Lemaître. Lambert spent years of his life researching Lemaître and seems to have talked to just about every person still alive who knew him, so I'm inclined to trust his account. I've also Luminet's L'invention du Big Bang, which generally agrees with Lambert and Kragh and is also based on primary sources.
Well: with regard to Lemaître, widely claimed to be one of the three most important people in the Big Bang story, there are serious divergences between Singh's version and the ones I've seen in Lambert, Kragh and Luminet. Singh confuses Lemaître's 1927 paper, where he first suggested the idea of an expanding universe and his 1931 paper, where he named the hypothesis of the "primeval atom", and makes them sound like the same paper. They are in fact completely different, and were not even originally written in the same language. Singh doesn't mention that Lemaître's first paper presents experimental evidence in support of the expanding universe hypothesis, and calls it a purely theoretical paper. He says, correctly, that the original version of the paper was in French, but doesn't mention that the English translation had a crucial passage removed so as not to present the experimental evidence, which meanwhile had been independently presented by Hubble. (As Kragh points out, "Hubble's Law" should arguably have been called "Lemaître's Law"). Singh says that Lemaître wasn't very interested in the Cosmological Constant, whereas it was in fact crucial to all his work on cosmology and figures largely in the 1927 paper. Finally, Singh quotes Eddington as saying that he found the idea of the universe having a beginning in time as "repugnant", but makes it sound like this was a reaction to Lemaître's paper. Kragh and Lambert say it was the other way round: Lemaître wrote his 1931 paper as a reaction to Eddington's remark.
Okay... if you want infotainment, Singh is your man. He's a lot of fun, and you'll almost certainly learn something at the same time. But if you want serious history of science, go straight to Kragh. He's also fun, and it's just an all-round better piece of work. ________________________________
Infotainment review (not fact-checked)
Simon Singh was born in Wellington, Somerset, where his mother, reputedly a former go-go dancer, was also keenly interested in popular science. At her son's bedtime, she used sing him poems from George Gamow's Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland to tunes of her own invention. According to family legend, Simon's first word was "neutron"! Perhaps as a result of Mrs. Singh's unorthodox choice of lullabies, he soon showed great promise in science himself.
At Imperial College, he eked out his meagre student grant by writing a science column in a local paper. Singh has always denied it, but it has been claimed that he also contributed to the royal gossip column when the regular journalist, a notorious alcoholic, was too inebriated to meet his deadline. Singh's pieces became more and more far-fetched, until one day the editor, shocked at the latest installment, asked him to justify it. Singh looked at him completely straight-faced. "Everyone says Paul Burrell's former hairdresser has an excellent parole officer," he replied. "Are you calling the woman a liar?" The editor laughed and ran the piece anyway.
It was no surprise to his friends when Singh chose to combine his talents by going into science journalism, where he rapidly made a name for himself. Big Bang is a typical example of his approach, and it is natural to compare it with Cosmology and Controversy, Helge Kragh's magisterial work on the same subject. First, the figure on the opposite page contrasts the two authors' relative popularity on Goodreads. We imagine two stacks of books, with one book for each person who has read the work in question. Kragh's stack contains only two books, but Singh's has 1,911, making a pile higher than St. Paul's Cathedral (111 m)!
But what about quality? Here, another analogy might be helpful. Suppose that we divide the floor area of the Albert Hall (4226 sq m) into two exactly equal halves. On the left side, we drop one empty crisp packet for every factual error in Kragh's book, and on the right side we drop one crisp packet for every mistake in Singh's. Now imagine that two janitors are given the task of collecting all the rubbish. They start simultaneously, at exactly 12 noon [continued page 94] ...more
A Nice Brief Account Of The Inflation/Ω/Dark Energy Thread
Krauss, who was personally involved in some of the work and knows all the Point/Counterpoint
A Nice Brief Account Of The Inflation/Ω/Dark Energy Thread
Krauss, who was personally involved in some of the work and knows all the key actors, does a fine job of summarising progress in cosmology over the last fifteen years. The most significant development, needless to say, has been the discovery of Dark Energy. Krauss presents the background and shows why it wasn't quite as unexpected as has often been made out; he was one of the few people to have predicted it, though it sounds like he could hardly believe his own prediction. He is also good on showing you how solid the evidence is. To people outside the field, it isn't at all obvious that the case is a strong one, since it depends on ultra-precise measurements of the distances to the most remote galaxies, something that is anything but trivial to do. Krauss straightforwardly says that he had doubts at first and urged his colleagues not to jump on the bandwagon; but, after a while, so much material had accumulated that it was almost impossible to explain the facts in any other way.
Krauss also presents a compelling account of how the theory of gravitational lensing was first developed, almost by accident, by Einstein, and later used to obtain accurate estimates of the overall curvature of the universe. He explains how the various streams of research have combined to show that the universe is flat to within observational error, and how this fits together with the now-standard inflationary model to yield a model of a flat universe with zero total energy. As many people have pointed out, this opens the intriguing possibility that the universe could have been created from no more than a vacuum fluctuation in empty space.
Krauss is honest about the limitations of our knowledge. In an imaginative passage, he makes a projection of what hypothetical cosmologists three trillion years from now would be able to deduce about the history of the cosmos they saw; he argues that it would be impossible for them to find evidence for either dark energy or an expanding universe. The obvious implication is that changing conditions may similarly have erased evidence that we would need to understand the true history of the early universe.
The book would have been better if Krauss had not felt impelled to take frequent and generally unnecessary pot-shots at creationists, theologians and philosophers, but is still an informative and enjoyable read.
Holy Fucking Shit, This Book Just Blows My Mind
Oh My God, I was going to say, but Krauss, in this stunning book, gives you solid evidence that God doesn't exist. The latest advances in astronomy have uncovered a bunch of amazing new facts. Believe it or not, we now know the age of the universe to four significant figures!! Yes, the universe is 13.72 billion years old - not 13.71 billion or 13.73 billion!!!
But that's just the starting point in Professor Krauss's whirlwind tour of all human knowledge. He tells you how 99% of the universe is invisible dark matter and dark energy. Incredibly, there's exactly enough invisible stuff to make space perfectly flat. And that means... wait for it... that the universe could only have started from nothing! Yes, you heard me. If things started with nothing and got blown up by inflation (don't worry, he tells you what it is), then you'd have exactly what we see today!
So who needs God? Not Richard Dawkins, who wrote the cool afterword!...more
Al Gore Tells You What's Wrong With The US, And How To Fix It
Most Americans agree that their country's on the wrong track, but what exactly is thPoint
Al Gore Tells You What's Wrong With The US, And How To Fix It
Most Americans agree that their country's on the wrong track, but what exactly is the problem? It's easy to blame it all on Dubya - no one except a few true believers would say he's blameless. But surely there's more to it than that? Al Gore has thought deeply about the issues, and his analysis makes sense. The real strength of the US is in its system of government, but a democracy is only as strong as its citizens. If they aren't passionately involved in the democratic process and they don't understand or care about the Constitution, then everything will gradually fall apart.
And, unfortunately, that's what seems to be happening now. Gore argues that the US depends strongly on respect for reasoned debate, carried out through the written word. That's how it all got started. But since TV became the dominant medium, most people have stopped reading. They just absorb whatever comes out of the boob tube, and, as a result, they've become entirely too easy to manipulate. Politics isn't about reason any more. It's about buying 30 second TV spots, since they're what get you re-elected. So politicians become more and more dependent on vested interests who can pay for those TV spots.
Bush and Cheney were very bad, but they were more a symptom than a cause. They systematically trampled over the Constitution, but most people didn't even notice. According to polls Gore quotes, half of all Americans believe that the President can ignore anything Congress or the Supreme Court tell him to do - so when Bush said he was planning to work that way, most of the country didn't react.
But Gore says at the end that he sees signs of change. The Internet is starting to take over from TV, and it's quite a different type of medium. It's print-based and interactive. And, indeed, Obama won in 2008 largely due to a grass-roots web-based initiative. The fight is, unfortunately, far from over, but Gore's intelligent and perceptive book may help you understand what's going on.
Counterpoint
Loser! Loser! Loser!
If you want to know why Gore got rolled over in 2000, read The Assault on Reason. He's pompous, he quotes people you've never heard of to show you how goddamn smart he is, he whines. And he repeats himself, not once, but two or three or four times. Yes Al, we know you think Iraq was a mistake. You don't need to tell us again. And yes, we know you're worried about climate change. But maybe you noticed we had a really cold winter last year? How exactly does that fit into your fancy theories?
So what if Dubya's take on the Constitution was a bit different from yours? Alexander Hamilton thought the country needed a strong executive. Maybe he knew more about it than you do. When there's a war on, do you want to debate every little thing or do you want a decisive leader who can get things done?
Yeah - Al Gore's a sore loser. That's the take-home from this sorry mess of a book. ...more
**spoiler alert** L'Education Sentimentale is well known to be one of Woody Allen's favourite books, and it explores one of Allen's favourite themes. **spoiler alert** L'Education Sentimentale is well known to be one of Woody Allen's favourite books, and it explores one of Allen's favourite themes. Whether life is a tragedy or a comedy depends on hair-fine nuances. Melinda and Melinda is probably the clearest example: the perspective constantly, and rather confusingly, shifts back and forward between comedy and tragedy. A bit later, he redid the idea in a more convincing way, as the linked pair Match Point (the tragedy) and Scoop (the comedy).
In the same spirit, here's a linked pair of reviews. I wrote the tragic one first, but then felt that I really needed to balance it with a comic version.
________________________
Tragic review
O Hamlet, speak no more: Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul; And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct.
I'm afraid it's not exactly a fun beach read. If L'Education Sentimentale doesn't make you feel uneasy, you're either a remarkably secure person or you decided to quit before reaching the end. And Flaubert does a good job of sneaking up on you: for the first hundred pages or so, I felt it was one of those books where nothing was going to happen, and it wasn't until I was about halfway through that I really began to feel disquieted. He's good.
On the surface, it's unremarkable, except for the lovely prose. Frédéric is a stupid and shallow young man in 1840s France. After a chance meeting on a boat, he conceives a passion for Mme. Arnoux, a beautiful married woman. He manages to insinuate himself into her husband's social circle, and becomes friendly with him. After a while, M. Arnoux trusts young Frédéric enough that he introduces him to his mistress, the charming and scatterbrained Roseanette. Frédéric falls for her too, and then his romantic life becomes even more complicated. I'll try to avoid dropping any more spoilers, but I thought I should convince you that it's definitely not a book where nothing happens: as in Madame Bovary and Salammbô, there's ample sex and violence.
So, why's it so disquieting? One way to explain is to compare with two other novels, which were written not long after and certainly, at least in part, were inspired by it. In Proust's Le Côté de Guermantes, Marcel becomes as obsessed with the Duchesse de Guermantes as Frédéric does with Mme. Arnoux, but by the end of the novel he's got over her; we get a detailed account of how her charm gradually fades away, so that he can finally see her objectively. It's disappointing, but extremely rational. And in Maupassant's Bel-Ami, Georges Duroy cleverly exploits his series of mistresses to become rich and successful; this time, you're shocked at how cold-blooded he is, but it's also rational.
I thought at several points that Frédéric was going to take one of these paths; he doesn't. The novel's extraordinary strength is to get inside his mind as he dithers between the various women he's involved with, and demonstrate how he simply isn't capable of any kind of rational thought whatsoever. He's with X, and Flaubert shows with his usual exactitude how blissfully in love he is with her. Then, a few pages later, he's with Y, and his protestations of eternal devotion don't come across as hypocritical: much worse, they're sincere! And, in the next chapter, with Z... well, you get the picture. It's horrifyingly well done.
In the middle of all this, the Revolution of 1848 breaks out. (By the way: if you're as ignorant about French history as I am, I strongly recommend getting an annotated edition. Flaubert assumes you know the story already, and keeps referring to people and events I'd never heard of - I was flipping to the endnotes like I was reading Infinite Jest). I did wonder for a moment what the politics had to do with the main story; alas, that rapidly becomes clear too. Like the eponymous hero of the Rabbit series, Frédéric is constitutionally incapable of seeing past the end of his own dick. The fact that France has been given a once-in-a-century chance to establish a fairer and more democratic government completely escapes him. There is a magnificent sequence where a major event has occurred, and people are shooting at each other in the streets; all Frédéric can think about is the fact that he's missed an important date with one of his loved ones. I was strongly reminded of the scene near the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, where Shaun, who's just been dumped by his girlfriend, stumbles home in a daze while somehow managing not to notice that London is being invaded by flesh-eating zombies.
You will gather that L'Education Sentimentale does not present a positive and uplifting view of human nature. If only it were ugly or hastily written, one could dismiss it. But no: as always with Flaubert, it's meticulously crafted and a delight to read. A lot of the time, it's even funny. You may occasionally want to fling it across the room; more often, you're going to react with a wry smile. He's witty and entertaining.
I started with a quote from Hamlet, arguably one of the book's ancestors, and I'll conclude with one from Cat's Cradle, probably a great-grandson, and also a very funny book. Here's Kurt Vonnegut on the same subject.
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled 'What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experiences of the Past Million Years?'
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
'Nothing.'
________________________
Comic review
["Sex and the City" theme tune. CARRIE is lying across her bed typing industriously on her laptop]
CARRIE: [voiceover] I read that over 60% of all American men cheat on their partners. That's a lot of cheating. It's happened to me. It's happened to my best friends. It may have happened to you. And, the other day, I started wondering [the title comes up as she speaks the words] When Men Cheat On Their Partners, What Are They Really Thinking?
[Dissolve to a trendy Manhattan restaurant. CARRIE is sitting alone at a table set for four people, reading a paperback novel. Camera zooms in to show the title, "Sentimental Education"]
CARRIE: [turns a page, and shakes her head reflectively] Jeez!
[CARRIE is so engrossed that she doesn't notice that CHARLOTTE, SAMANTHA and MIRANDA have arrived, and are looking at her curiously.]
CHARLOTTE: Good, isn't it?
CARRIE: [starts violently] Uh... yes! So you've read it too? Don't tell me how it ends...
SAMANTHA: [checking to see how far CARRIE has got] Oh, you're nearly finished. You know, this reminds me of something that happened to Charlotte and me a few years ago. [She gives CHARLOTTE a teasing look] You don't mind?
CHARLOTTE: Um...
CARRIE: [voiceover] Charlotte did mind, but Samantha steamrollered her.
SAMANTHA: [steamrollering her] Come on, babe, all ancient history now! But we need some cocktails first. [To waiter] Four Cosmopolitans!
CARRIE: [voiceover] This was during Charlotte's first marriage, a period she doesn't like to talk about. Her husband Jack was a lot older than her.
[Montage. CHARLOTTE'S FIRST HUSBAND evidently doesn't take her seriously.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Samantha hadn't yet discovered she had a talent for PR. She was wondering if she would make it as an actress.
[Montage. SAMANTHA's movie roles don't require her to wear much.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Samantha was also a close friend of Jack.
[Montage. JACK and SAMANTHA are having noisy sex. Dissolve back to restaurant.]
SAMANTHA: [smiles and pats CHARLOTTE on the arm] Of course, Charlotte and I didn't know each other yet.
CARRIE: [voiceover] Now Jack ran this publishing company. He had a cute intern called Fred. One day, Fred met Charlotte.
[Dissolve back to the past. Montage. FRED, very young and innocent, meets CHARLOTTE. He's obviously smitten.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Fred had never seen anyone so beautiful in his life. He immediately knew he could never love another woman. But how could he meet her again?
[FRED looks sad and pensive, then suddenly brightens up.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Fred needed to get friendly with Jack.
[Montage. JACK is talking, FRED is hanging on his every word.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Jack liked the attention. He started inviting Fred to his dinner parties.
[Montage. Dinner party at JACK and CHARLOTTE's. FRED gazes raptly at CHARLOTTE, while she ignores him.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Jack had really got to trust Fred. He started taking him to parties at Samantha's place too.
[Montage. A much wilder party. FRED looks embarrassed, but is clearly eyeing up SAMANTHA]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Pretty soon, Fred had fallen for Samantha as well. Oh, and somewhere around here he went back to Wisconsin for a couple of months and managed to get engaged to the girl next door.
[Montage. FRED is with the adoring GIRL-NEXT-DOOR, who's even younger and more innocent-looking than he is. Dissolve back to restaurant. MIRANDA is struggling to keep up with the story.]
MIRANDA: So, uh, let me see, he can only love Charlotte but he's got the hots for Samantha and he's engaged to the girl next door?
[CHARLOTTE looks like she wants to sink through the floor. She takes a large sip of her cocktail. SAMANTHA is having fun.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Fred made progress with Charlotte. She let him hold her hand while she told him about her problems. But that's all that happened.
[Montage. FRED and CHARLOTTE gaze soulfully into each other's eyes, go for walks hand-in-hand, pick flowers, etc]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Obviously, Fred wanted more. He made a date with Charlotte at the New York apartment he'd just started renting. This was going to be it.
[Montage. FRED, in an agony of suspense, is waiting outside the apartment block. He keeps looking at his watch.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Unfortunately, the date was September 11, 2001.
[Montage. The Twin Towers erupt in flames. People screaming in the streets. FRED is still looking at his watch as they stream past.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] Fred was so angry with Charlotte for not turning up. He went to see Samantha.
[Montage. FRED and SAMANTHA are having sex. Dissolve back to restaurant.]
SAMANTHA: [elaborate shrug] Well, I needed a fuck pretty bad.
CARRIE: [voiceover] Fred liked being with Samantha. But deep down, he never forgave her for making him betray his true love. He started seeing someone else, the wife of a rich banker.
[Montage. FRED is having sex with RICH BANKER WIFE. Back to restaurant.]
MIRANDA: [completely lost] So, he's sleeping with you and the banker's wife because he can't be with his true love? And what's with the fiancée?
SAMANTHA: [large sip of cocktail] That's it, babe. He thought it was my fault, and the banker's wife's fault. And maybe the fiancée's fault too, but I was never quite sure about that. Of course, it all ended in tears.
[Montage. SEVERAL WOMEN are yelling at FRED, throwing things, etc]
SAMANTHA: [back in restaurant] Your friend Stanford told Charlotte and me we should read Sentimental Education. He was right. It's just uncanny. Flaubert is a bit of an asshole, but he sure spills the beans on how men think when they cheat. It helped. [putting an arm around CHARLOTTE] And somehow, Charlotte and I ended up friends. Sorry babe. [She drains her glass. CHARLOTTE drains hers and hugs her back. There are tears in her eyes.]
CARRIE: [voiceover] I swear, I'd become a lesbian if I didn't like cock so much. And I wish I'd read Flaubert earlier.
I somehow ended up reading them both simultaneously. So I couldn't help wondering
What Madam Bovary Might Have Thought Of Good Omens
Three days later, aI somehow ended up reading them both simultaneously. So I couldn't help wondering
What Madam Bovary Might Have Thought Of Good Omens
Three days later, a package arrived; there was no return address, but she immediately recognised Rodolphe's hand. It contained a paperback novel, whose title was Good Omens. Feverishly, she cast herself over it. Her English was poor, but, with the aid of a dictionary, she persevered and soon made great progress.
The more she read, the greater her bewilderment became. The book at first reminded her of Candide, which she had surreptitiously read at the convent, but M. Voltaire's ésprit had been replaced by another ingredient she was unable to name; she suspected that it must be the strange English invention they called humour. All the personages were well-meaning and agreeable; the witches, the torturers of witches, the prostitutes, even the Demons of Hell; they were filled with kindness and compassion, and their worst faults amounted to an occasional mild irritability. Where were the indifference and thoughtless cruelty that surrounded her, and which had now become the very air she breathed?
She did not know whether Rodolphe had sent her the book to comfort her or to mock her in her despair, and her futile attempts to resolve this question gradually resulted in an agonising headache. Her husband prescribed an infusion of valerian, and persuaded her to retire for the night; she lay sleepless in her bed a long time, until the drug finally took effect just as the sky was beginning to lighten. She dreamed of apocalyptic prophecies, red-headed women wielding swords, endless circles of horseless carriages, young boys with dogs.
In the morning, she remembered that she should purchase some arsenic. __________________________________
It seemed unfair for this to be one-way. So, in the spirit of granting a right of reply, here's
What Good Omens Might Have Thought Of Madam Bovary
"I saw this smashin' film yesterday on TV," said Adam, as the Them listened attentively. "It was called Madam Bovver-Boy -"
"She was a lady skinhead?" interrupted Brian.
"No, stupid," said Adam. "It's a French name. Bovver-Boy. By Flow-Bear."
"You mean Madame Bovary, by Flaubert," said Wensleydale. "I read about it in The Encyclopaedia of World Literature."
Adam gave him a withering glance. "That's what I said," he continued. "Madam Bovver-Boy, by Flow-Bear. She's married to this doctor, and he's dead borin', so she starts hangin' around with these two lovers, and then she maxes out her credit card, so she eats arsernick and poisons herself. The bit where she's dyin' of the arsernick is dead good. Her tongue's hanging out and she's screamin' -"
"Why did she max out her credit card?" asked Pepper.
"She was buying presents for her lovers," said Adam. "Roses an' boxes of chocolates an' stuff like that -"
"I thought the lovers were supposed to give her presents?" said Brian dubiously. "My sister's boyfriend gave her this huge bunch of roses on Valentine's Day, and a box of Quality Street, and a balloon with -"
"She gave them presents instead because it was a proto-feminist novel," explained Wensleydale authoritatively. "That's what The Encyclopaedia of World Literature says."
Adam felt that his control of the situation was slipping, and decided to up the stakes. "It's all true," he said, in an exegetical move that would have had Flaubert scholars around the world clutching their foreheads. "Based on a true story," he added prudently, in case the The Encyclopaedia of World Literature happened to have opinions on the subject.
Behind the bushes, Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. Crowley looked defensive. "Very loosely based," he whispered hastily. "I mean, I tempted her, it's my job you know, but Gustave changed the ending for dramatic purposes. Said it didn't work to have Rodolphe sort out her debts and then settle down in a cozy ménage à quatre with her, Léon and her husband. I told him that's what actually happened, but he insisted the arsenic worked better..."
Loading...
