Good strident stuff, wrestling against the prevailing pessimistic dogmas of English lit and ling. (e.g. "We can never fully understand each other as iGood 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 own work, but still 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 languages today. I imagine he's a great teacher.
A comedian and an artist - with some of the bloat and near-repulsive belligerence that entails
If you've not seen me before, right, a lot of what I
A comedian and an artist - with some of the bloat and near-repulsive belligerence that entails
If you've not seen me before, right, a lot of what I do, er, it's not jokes as such, it can just be funny kind of ideas or little, er, weird turns of phrase like that, yeah? So, 'owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk', yeah? And that's a giant, isn't it, a giant... So all I’m saying, if you’ve not seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, they're 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 onstage he 'portrays a smug wanker’....more
Crushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as aCrushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-desperate-teen, ex-psychiatric-nurse, metal fan, America's greatest lyricist of neurosis). Heavy.
It doesn't matter if you've never heard or never liked Sabbath. This explains it regardless, and might unlock it. His best prose (though his lyrics 1995-2004 are his best words).
Stuff White People Like plus Speak your Branes, but minus two hundred years. This is Flaubert being bitchy about C19th France bourgeoisie/hipstersStuff White People Like plus Speak your Branes, but minus two hundred years. This is Flaubert being bitchy about C19th France bourgeoisie/hipsters: the contradictory and petty zeitgeist. I myself have used 'alabaster' to describe a woman, whoops. ...more
Essay collection from his long heyday. His letter to his 10yo daughter is maybe the clearest statement of sceptical empiricism ever, though it also diEssay collection from his long 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:
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in your deep feelings inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Aaag he used to be so wise and grand, giving out words to live by. (He remains brave and clear, but you don't necessarily want to look through this windows anymore.) ...more
Distrust and death but never self-pity; drowning and drama but wise. Of one place’s Vikings, fish, and pain – like Under Milk Wood without the japery Distrust and death but never self-pity; drowning and drama but wise. Of one place’s Vikings, fish, and pain – like Under Milk Wood 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.”...more
What an excuse of a man he can be, but what a writer he always is. The piece on golf is characteristic - hilarious, fluid, razor-bladed.
The basic proWhat an excuse of a man he can be, but what a writer he always is. The piece on golf is 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. He has vast sensitivity or sensibility, 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 his friend Jeremy Clarkson brilliantly – as stooge, dim counterpoint to Gill’s own professed post-masculine, pro-gay, pro-grey, pro-oppressed enlightenment. But then Gill 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, and but needs the approval of neither side....more
A masked autobiography, which masking I resented. About 180pp of anxious stories about LM, and Caltech local colour; about 20pp of original, direct qu A masked autobiography, which masking I resented. About 180pp of anxious stories about LM, and Caltech local colour; about 20pp of original, direct quotation from RP. but even these are not so distinctive.
Feynman's work and worldview are fantastic and nourishing, but get it from him. (Funny line from a blurb in the front of this book: "physics, that seemingly grey subculture".)
2/5 for anyone who knows about RP already. ...more
There's been a lot of DFW hate lately – here, here, here, here. But who else marries the syrupy plain with the thrilling theoretical arcane? Could anyThere's been a lot of DFW hate lately – here, here, here, here. But who else marries the syrupy plain with the thrilling theoretical arcane? Could anyone fail to understand the retrospectively obvious point of this little lecture? (Roughly just: It requires constant work to divert yourself 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. 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. ...more
Start by listing Gould's virtues: passionate about paleontology and paleontologists, contagiously curious about nature and obscure history, scrupulousStart by listing Gould's virtues: passionate about paleontology and paleontologists, contagiously curious about nature and obscure history, scrupulously fair to the religious and the pre-modern, animated by justice. For an academic, his prose is highly flavoursome and fun. He has a considered opinion about Darwin's handwriting and the meaning of baseball. One of his essay collections was very important to me as a teen, showing me that I could unify truth-seeking and justice-seeking, and with style.
But this is all countermanded, because he is just not trustworthyon humantopics, and neither on core evolutionary theory, I'm told. From his enormously influential, fallacious dismissal of intelligence research in general and Morton in particular, to his dishonest coup of public discourse over punctuated equilibrium (pushing the flashy and revolutionary version in literary magazines, retreating to minimal and uncontentious forms in the science journals who could actually evaluate it), he muddied the waters even as he brandished real literary talent and noble political intentions. This is unforgiveable: empirical clarity is too rare and precious to sacrifice so.
Maynard Smith:
Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.
Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
Tooby and Cosmides:
We suggest that the best way to grasp the nature of Gould's writings is to recognize them as one of the most formidable bodies of fiction to be produced in recent American letters. Gould brilliantly works a number of literary devices to construct a fictional "Gould" as the protagonist of his essays and to construct a world of "evolutionary biology" every bit as imaginary and plausible as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Most of the elements of Gould's writing make no sense if they are interpreted as an honest attempt to communicate about science (e.g., why would he characterize so many researchers as saying the opposite of what they actually do) but come sharply into focus when understood as necessary components of a world constructed for the fictional "Gould" to have heroic fantasy adventures in...
"Gould" the protagonist is a much loved character who reveals himself to be learned, subtle, open-minded, tolerant, funny, gracious to his opponents, a tireless adversary of cultural prejudice, able to swim upstream against popular opinion with unflinching moral courage, able to pierce the surface appearances that capture others, and indeed to be not only the most brilliant innovator in biology since Darwin, but more importantly to be the voice of humane reason against the forces of ignorance, passion, incuriousity, and injustice. The author Gould, not least because he labors to beguile his audience into confusing his fictional targets with actual people and fields, is sadly none of these things.
Yet in the final analysis, there are genuine grounds for hope in the immense and enduring popularity of Gould. Gould is popular, we think, because readers see in "Gould" the embodiment of humane reason, the best aspirations of the scientific impulse. It is this "Gould" that we will continue to honor, and, who, indeed, would fight to bring the illumination that modern evolutionary science can offer into wider use.
Here is a fictional leaf from Gould's ad hominem book, to give you a sense of what he does, at his worst:
Gould is famed for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which holds that adaption and speciation is not generally a slow, gradual process measurable in tens of thousands of year periods, but instead a rapid response to environmental shocks, measurable in hundred-year periods. The political bias of this theory is too blatant to ignore: as a Marxist, Gould requires that sustainable change be possible by revolution rather than by long accumulation (...)
(For full effect I should now chide him for his genic panadaptationism.)
Along with Lewontin and Rose, Gould mediated a huge contradiction in our culture: they allowed the C20th left to feel we were scientific, in our comfortable blank-slatism. That we had already incorporated the deep challenge of evolutionary biology - since these eminent men told us it had no human implications.
Read Gould for fun and uplift, but take great care, for he cares about other things more than truth. (Read Midgley and Singer first if the politics scare you; they might stop you fleeing into Gould's dodgy arms.)
From James. The Leonardo and Columbus esays are 4/5. ...more
I don’t rate him – his matey adjectival register and cutesy knowledge get on my nerves – but this is great. Dead funny throughout, free of bluster, anI don’t rate him – his matey adjectival register and cutesy knowledge get on my nerves – but this is 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).
I read this aloud and it worked very well. Even my townie girlfriend wants to go hiking now. ...more
Wildcard psychologist writes meh tongue-twisters about the horror of recursivity.
“JACK: Forgive me. JILL: No. JACK: I’ll never forgive you for not forgi
Wildcard psychologist writes meh tongue-twisters about the horror of recursivity.
“JACK: Forgive me. JILL: No. JACK: I’ll never forgive you for not forgiving me.”
His point’s that conflict escalates because we forget the original contention and argue about the argument instead. Which is neat if not exhaustive. His logic’s more sophisticated than I expected – “Jack sees / that there is something Jill can’t see and Jack sees / that Jill can’t see she can’t see it. // Although Jack can see Jill can’t see she can’t see it / he can’t see that he can’t see it himself.” – but repetition kills the wit.
(Laing is on my list of Very Harmful But Oddly Lionized People - see also Cesar Chavez, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Zhou Enlai - but he has nothing on Freud in that regard.)...more
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