‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles th
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’
‘An innocent, then?’
according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.
What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age
Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev's tailor's memoirs; he visits the dance hall; "all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)"), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well.
We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It's easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth:
If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge...
Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born. And he could hasten the hour, he thought, intoxicated. He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity. He could help to do that. He could help to make it happen, three extra percent at a time...
When a market is matching supply with demand, it is the actual movement of the potatoes themselves from place to place, the actual sale of the potatoes at ever-shifting prices, which negotiates a solution, by trial and error. In the computer, the effect of a possible solution can be assessed without the wasteful real-world to-ing and fro-ing; and because the computer works at the speed of flying electrons, rather than the speed of a trundling vegetable truck, it can explore the whole of the mathematical space of possible solutions, and be sure to find the very best solution there is, instead of settling for the good-enough solution that would be all there was time for, in a working day with potatoes to deliver...
The theory in their heads was universal in its reach, and their expertise was supposed to be universal too. They were the agents of humanity’s future, which they were to manufacture by being, in the present, experts in human nature. In this sense, even the grimmest of them was, professionally, a people person. They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers, talent-scouts, comedians, therapists, judges, executioners, inspirational speakers, coaches, and even from time to time as politicians of the representative variety, carrying a concern of their constituents to the centre for attention
The Plan:
Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year]
Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev's coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes:
They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest comrades...
at last it was becoming possible to make good on all the promises which they’d fed to people during the hungry years. All well and good, he thought, because we really meant them, we weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone, but there’s a limit to how long you can keep going on that kind of diet. You can’t make soup out of promises. Some comrades seemed to think that fine words and fine ideas were all the world would ever require, that pure enthusiasm would carry humanity forward to happiness: well excuse me, comrades, but aren’t we supposed to be materialists? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who get along without fairytales? If communism couldn’t give people a better life than capitalism, he personally couldn’t see the point.
Khrushchev had taken the advice of experts. He had tried to do the virtuous thing, the anti- Stalinist thing, and it had just made him a mass-murderer again... Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground, and when stains still remained, the square was repaved overnight with a fresh layer of asphalt. The bodies were distributed to five different cemeteries, and buried anonymously, in graves already filled with more peaceful bones. Relatives were never told what had become of the dead. It was as if they had suddenly evaporated...
Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no means to lose the thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above... So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured.
Spufford manages this without knowing Russian!
Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities
The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever:
If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything
(No.)
Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century
Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. Law, economics, history were sterile, insignificant fiefdoms, ruled by ‘little Stalins’, pint-sized intellectual stand-ins for the great mind in the Kremlin. After Stalin’s death, these subjects had to be revived by incomers from engineering and the pure sciences – who brought with them the engineers’ faith in the solvability of problems, and the scientists’ uncompromising delight in pure pattern.
The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality:
life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below
The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division.
One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history.
It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard...
There had supposed to [have been] a space preserved inside the Party for experiment and policymaking, but the police methods used on the rest of Russian society crept inexorably inward. The space for safe talk shrank with the list of candidates to succeed Lenin as the embodiment of infallibility, till, with Stalin’s victory over the last of his rivals, it closed altogether, and the apparatus of votes, committee reports and ‘discussion journals’ became purely ceremonious, a kind of fetish of a departed civilisation...
They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them... Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics).
She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell...
The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?
The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But
The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet...
Tumbling from the back of my tongue down to my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. Technology with a human face.
Exhausting - but funny! - postmodern critique of postmodernism. Maybe David Foster Wallace did it better but this is still a thrill...more
I love James because, though he is a literary intellectual through and through, he makes room for the other half of the human mind. He is still an artI love James because, though he is a literary intellectual through and through, he makes room for the other half of the human mind. He is still an arts supremacist - this personal portrait of the century contains no scientists, and many actors and novelists and politicians, but he is at least aware of the narrowness of this.
Cultural Amnesia is an invitation to the humanities; defence of philosophy and art against politics; an attack on the hypocrisy of the left (Kollontai, Sartre, Brecht, Saramago), on the heartlessness of the right (Junger, Brasillach, Pound, Heidegger); a dark, teeming biography of C20th humanism and its enemies; a reading list for all of us bewildered by the bullshit critical fortresses of serious writing about art and history. James is deeply opinionated, often funny and occasionally heartbreaking.
Of “the relationship between Hitler’s campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton’s pageboy haircut”. It’s full of faded and non-Anglophone 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”.
Other themes: irrational violence, the nonconformist left, collaborators and fellow-travellers, Jewish achievements, 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.
For every villain we are given a counter exemplar: Marc Bloch, Sophie Scholl, Jorge Borges...
This is my second read-through in five years; I expect to read it again in another five. ...more
To be read when: teenaged; burdened by the thought of the millions of unread books; before going to a posh party In one sentence: Relax, it's a game.
To be read when: teenaged; burdened by the thought of the millions of unread books; before going to a posh party.
There are too many books; among those worth reading at all, most are best skimmed; others are best interpreted via interpreters; you only see part of the possible meaning of the books you've read; and you've forgotten almost anything about even those. So relax and talk about the 'virtual' book, the idea of it, the version of it that you and your interlocutor inadvertently generate between you.
The title sounds like vacuous click-bait (indeed, a friend who later wrote his thesis on Bayard initially thought I was recommending something like this fluff). But it is instead all of the following: a thrilling act of virtuoso postmodern over-reading, a serious look at intellectual status and neurosis, a really interesting phenomenology of books, a glowing review of a dozen writers (including my beloved-but-low-status Greene and Lodge), and sheer backwards-land satire.
I found it liberating, not because I go round pretending to have read things (a free-rider in literary conversations), but because by the end of my arts degree I had found out, to my surprise and dismay, that high culture is 90% bollocks. Or, maybe: that arts culture is shallow and irrational, a thick and grasping vine overgrowing the lovely lonely tower of great writing and painting.
Bayard (or anyway his cheeky narrator) help unhook you from the blind devotion of the reading classes, and lets you face books on your own terms, sceptical and skimming and agentic. I was freed - and immediately started to get technical.
And 'Bayard's' style - pointing out the inconvenient but undeniable things about a cherished phenomenon - now reminds me of the arch-rationalist Robin Hanson. Which is where I went next.
Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something, &
Style 2 - learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker
In one sentence: Harsh, circuitous, critical aphorisms on the greatest secular religion.
To be read : At the start of every new relationship; when yo In one sentence: Harsh, circuitous, critical aphorisms on the greatest secular religion.
To be read : At the start of every new relationship; when your contempt of psychotherapy boils over and needs correction.
I guess he’s a bit overfond of 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 would make them fairer, and so easier to take in large doses.
Infidelity is such a problem because we take monogamy for granted; we treat it as the norm. Perhaps we should take infidelity for granted, assume it with unharassed ease. Then we would be able to think about monogamy.
There are no relationships without conflict. If psychoanalysis has a value, maybe one of its values is just that it abides by the idea that there is always going to be conflict… in a way the book holds out for the value of conflict [being to let] the diverse voices inside of oneself speak.
But it’s non-partisan (not anti-monogamy, not anti-polyamory) and original and funny and wise and I still haven’t absorbed the finer points.
Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something, & Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker. ...more
In one sentence: Great journalist goes on holiday to the shittest times and places on earth. To be read when: travelling; refusing to.
Hilarious and p In one sentence: Great journalist goes on holiday to the shittest times and places on earth. To be read when: travelling; refusing to.
Hilarious and patrician account of the worst of her many journeys, to: Guomindang China 1941, the U-boated Caribbean 1942, East through West Africa 1949, Russia 1966, hippie Israel 1971.
She generalises a lot (e.g. she categorises each new tribe she comes across by their average attractiveness and prevailing smell; she often calls ‘racial’ what we’d deem 'cultural' traits). But her discrimination is more usually discriminating, making just distinctions. She’s fair, keen to empathise -
I said it stood to reason that we must smell in some disgusting way to them. Yes, said Aya, they say we have the ‘stale odour of corpses’; they find it sickening.
This cheers me; fair’s fair; I don’t feel so mean-minded
– a point you can find in p’Bitek, among others. And she 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:
One needs Equanil here too, not just in our white urban civilisation; tranquilisers against impatience, against the hysteria induced by heat, and the disgust at dirt...
Generous, stylish, and a fine if not superior substitute for going there.
Galef type: - Data 1 - a window onto an interesting piece of the world, & - Values 3 - a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside. ...more
The most vibrant presentation of sceptical empiricism since Dawkins stopped being beautiful.
Black Swan is a furious pompous attack on macroeconomics, The most vibrant presentation of sceptical empiricism since Dawkins stopped being beautiful.
Black Swan is a furious pompous attack on macroeconomics, journalism, and risk modelling via heuristics and biases; so it is an amazing introduction to modelling. But it's also an entire original worldview, applying to history, policy, science, and personal conduct. This is taken even further (too far?) in Antifragile, which is more or less a work of evolutionary epistemology, or evolutionary practical ethics. There's a lot of redundancy between them; Fooled by Randomness gives you the highest signal:rant ratio.
The first 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, 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 is that he thinks his approach should work even given our intractable ignorance.
The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains: In real life, many systems deteriorate without an irregular supply of stressors (non-fatal negative events), and actually benefit from them by constructively overreacting. By robbing such 'antifragile' systems of stressors, modern approaches to managing them do damage in the guise of helping out.
Taleb was my introduction to the post-classical theory of reason, but the project overlaps a bit with the LessWrong school I now favour. Underneath (i.e. in the technical appendices), his approach is very similar but with more conservative goals. I think Taleb saved me years of synthesis and conceptual invention.
His conduct on Twitter (ridiculous chest-beating, insulting anyone who disagrees with him, including great scholars like Tetlock and Thaler) is embarrassing, but does not detract from the accomplishment.
In one sentence: Extraordinarily rude man marries classical ethics to modern mathematics and cognitive science.
To be read when: young; if you have a news habit; when despairing of university economics.
Data 3 - highlights patterns in the world & Theory 1&2&3&4&5 - a general concept or lens you can use to analyze many different things, & Style 1 - teaches principles of thinking directly.
Atrocious, agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is litera
Atrocious, agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is literally unspeakable and unimaginably dreadful. Under a Darwinian regime of natural reproduction, truly horrible experiences - as well as endemic low-grade malaise - are both commonplace and inevitable. Chapter Two argues the moral case for stopping this nastiness. Since 'ought' implies 'can', however, it must first be established that scrapping unpleasant experience really is a biologically feasible option... from an information-theoretic perspective, what counts is not our absolute location on the pleasure-pain axis, but that we are "informationally sensitive" to fitness-relevant changes in our internal and external environment. Gradients of bliss can suffice both to motivate us and offer a rich network of feedback mechanisms; so alas today do gradients of Darwinian discontent.
On what science is for, on the very most we could aim for.
Late one evening, early one morning, I realised that I was not reading a crank on the internet. I'm not sure what exactly tipped me off: the page was called The Abolition of Suffering; the Naturalisation of Heaven. Maybe the extensive and thoughtful series of responses to objections. Not as late as the heart-stopping Alone Amongst the Zombies. Or the mixture of staggering ambition with modesty:
As hedonic engineering develops into a mature biomedical discipline, the generic modes of paradise we opt for can be genetically pre-coded... The innovative, high-specification bio-heavens beyond will be far richer. We lack the semantic competence to talk about them sensibly. Yet however inelegantly our goal may be accomplished at first, the ultimate strategic objective should be the neurochemical precision-engineering of happiness for every sentient organism on the planet.
Sounds flaky? Yes, but then so, originally, has almost every radical reform movement in history (including, of course, the genuinely flaky ones.)
and philosophy with biochemistry. It is difficult to return to what you were studying - mealy-mouthed, apologist, naturalistic-fallacious bioconservative bioethics - after that.
I hadn't considered wild-animal suffering before, the giant and at-best-ignored horror it is. People are at last starting to work on this, but Pearce was there decades ago. We have a long way to go before people stop making it worse even.
More than {Singer, Ord, LessWrong}, Pearce set me on my way with an ideal ethics, which led quickly to effective altruism and AI safety. I'm not a negative utilitarian like him, but unlike almost everyone else I take that challenge seriously.
I've met half a dozen people whose lives he affected this strongly, but the nonacademic setting limits his status.
(The published collection Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? is better, newer, covering more ground. I would have called it "The Molecular Biology of Paradise", a site header used elsewhere. Or "Better Living Through Chemistry".)
Galef type: Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that X could happen?, & Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, & Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, & Theory 4 - making predictions, & Values 1 - an explicit argument about values, & Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker.
In one sentence: An anthology of the greatest investigative journalism, mostly about ignored or West-sponsored massacres.
To be read when: one becomIn one sentence: An anthology of the greatest investigative journalism, mostly about ignored or West-sponsored massacres.
To be read when: one becomes too complacent about world politics, thinking it generally benign; when one despairs of journalism; when you need righteous anger; when evaluating Kissinger's place in history.
I 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 about 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.
Galef type: Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that this could happen? & Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something. ...more
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 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.
In one sentence: Eventless autobiographical sketches about working a shit job in a shit town, and but the beauty of self-obsession. To be read when: In one sentence: Eventless autobiographical sketches about working a shit job in a shit town, and but the beauty of self-obsession. To be read when: unable to sleep; e.g. at 3am or when travelling for more than 15 hours.
I asked very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.
Pessoa's uniqueness was invisible during his life; this is a shining, astonishing instance of what we now call neuroatypicality and of the everyday sublime. He's obsessed with cute fatalism, with his own inadequacy, with nothingness and loneliness, but almost every passage is wise or funny or beautiful. I catch no despair off him. Turning shite to gold. Like Larkin if Larkin were likeable; like Montaigne if terser and darker.
And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul's salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life's pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.
Floreat inertia! the worker-poet distinctive and supreme. I first read this on a 22-hour international journey, unsleeping, undrinking, unreal; I prescribe the same conditions for you when you read him.
I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.
This paperback is a super-slim selection of the full chaotic archive he left behind; only a tenth of the full Desassossego archive has been translated in to English; this is a great temptation towards a language I presently have no other reason to learn.
Galef type: Data 1 - a window onto an interesting piece of the world, & Value 3 - written from a holistic value structure, letting you experience that value structure from the inside, & Style 2 - from which you can learn a style of thinking by studying the author’s approach to the world.
One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how it is that other people exist, how it is that there are souls other than mine and consciousnesses not my own, which, because it is a consciousness, seems to me unique. I understand perfectly that the man before me uttering words similar to mine and making the same gestures I make, or could make, is in some way my fellow creature. However, I feel just the same about the people in illustrations I dream up, about the characters I see in novels or the dramatis personae on the stage who speak through the actors representing them.
I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on. There are figures from times past, fantasy-images in books that seem more real to us than these specimens of indifference-made-flesh who speak to us across the counters of bars, or catch our eye in trams, or brush past us in the empty randomness of the streets. The others are just part of the landscape for us, usually the invisible landscape of the familiar.
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, that with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate.
I'm not ashamed to feel this way because I know it's how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.
In one sentence: The apotheosis of perverse contentment or British miserabilism: Housman, if honest about his appetites; Lawrence with a sense of hum In one sentence: The apotheosis of perverse contentment or British miserabilism: Housman, if honest about his appetites; Lawrence with a sense of humour; Auden plus even more jazz..
To be read when: ill, heartbroken, very young, quite old, too cynical, too hopeful.
Of the consuming fear of death, sexual frustration, impostor syndrome: Britain.
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 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, and wields it, but never as punchline; what starts “Groping back to bed after a piss” will end with the universe :
The hardness and the brightness and plain far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and the pain Of being young; that it can’t come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.
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 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.
In one sentence: Long essays on nations and nonbelonging, interspersed with reallyexcellentpoems. To be read when: home too long.
A poet, Hispanicist,In one sentence: Long essays on nations and nonbelonging, interspersed with reallyexcellentpoems. To be read when: home too long.
A poet, Hispanicist, translator and long-time New Yorkerer. He was right there when the Latin American lit boom began, giving Neruda crash space in London - and mates with Marquez, insofar as anyone is. I like Reid's prose even better than his excellent poems.
Foreigners are, if you like, curable romantics. The illusion they retain, perhaps left over from their mysterious childhood epiphanies, is that there might somewhere be a place – and a self – instantly recognizable, into which they will be able to sink with a single, timeless, contented sigh. In the curious region between that illusion and the faint terror of being utterly nowhere and anonymous, foreigners live.
I love his scepticism about group identity - the piece on returning "home" to Scotland is great because of his distance from it.
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet, when larks rose on long thin strings of singing and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels. Greenness entered the body. The grasses shivered with presences, and sunlight stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills. Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat, the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is! cried I, like a sunstruck madman. And what did she have to say for it? Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves as she spoke with their ancient misery: 'We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!
Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, & Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.
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