Cobb

The Books That Made Me

What I discovered as soon as I thought about this subject was that these are not the best books I've ever read. They are also not the most enjoyable books. They are simply the books that changed the way I look at myself and the way I look at books. They changed me in ways that last to this day. So let us begin.

The Juvenile Years

The first important book that I read, like many on this list, was something I didn't want to read at all but ended up very glad that I did. And I specifically remember that to be true of Tom Sawyer because, not only had I not heard of it before, I read the first page several times and was bored by it. As a youngster, I was very wary of books that involved outcasts, the impoverished, or broken people. I had no room in my head for tales of woe and I refused to listen to them or read about them. That Tom Sawyer didn't live with his parents was my first clue that I wouldn't like it. I pressed on beside myself and came to very much enjoy the first book I realized could not be judged by its first pages. As I recall the book, images of Injun Joe and Becky Thatcher are fresh, though I get mixup all of my graveyard memories with those of Frankenstein. What was and what wasn't in Huckleberry Finn also is dim in my memory, but I certainly felt more ambivalence over reading White Fang than I did about Nigger Jim. Though it did come back as I learned to speak Progressive. I made something of a squawk about it in the abstract during my 1990s Boohabian Period. As a kid, I loved the book because it was such a big surprise.

I cannot remember which was the first book of Mssrs Williams and Abrashkin I read, but my favorites were Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Into this series of books I have to throw in a couple more. That would be The Secret Language by Usrsula Nordstrom and Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry. The last in that category of kids books before middle school would be The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett. These rounded out my juvenile period.

 

First Sci-Fi
After those, and especially after reading practically all of the Danny Dunn, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and The Martian Chronicles. And while my brother and I digested every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, I went on to read as much science-fiction as I could get my grubbies on, specifically that of Heinlein. Of all of his, the one that convinced me that I was destined for space was Starman Jones. Although I and other people made a bigger deal out of the fact that I read Clarke when I was 10 years old, it was Heinlein that got to me. The Martian Chronicles were depressing and if I had known that it was permissible not to finish a book, I would have left it alone. But it was a big book, and I was proving that I was a big boy. Before I was a teen, there was nothing that got so deeply under my skin as the pathos and drive of Max Jones. He was me. My imagination was captured the moment I began reading and I saw the crashing train missing the loop in the early part of the book. The wistfulness of wanting to be elsewhere is what I recalled. It defined my youth. I understood the inevitable fact that my mind and my courage would take me far from home and the homeboys of my pre-teen neighborhood. I strove to understand nuclear energy. And suddenly, I did.

Growing Up Fast
In middle school, there were eight or so books that stuck fast in my head. Four because I read them and four because I refused to. The first I refused but read anyway was The Contender by Robert Lipsyte. Anybody who wants to know my biography and state of mind as an adolescent living in Crenshaw ought to read Stop Time by Frank Conroy. As I think about it and my desire to grow up and out, it probably ought to be paired with the song Zoom by The Commodores. So there was never any part of me that felt trapped by circumstances and place, and any suggestion that I had to adjust my way out of that with the kind of YA fiction that existed then, notably The Cross and the Switchblade was simply anathema to me. So while the Contender was good enough on its own, the other titles by Lipsyte left me cold. So too were fantastic and escapist stories, which I took to be the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, and Two Years Before the Mast. Finally they pointed me to Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I was sick of all that depressing shit. I must have been something of a piece of work to deal with. Fortunately for all concerned, I read Jaws by Peter Benchley. Suddenly all was right with the world. Here was an excellent, real life portrayal of life in America. Ahh but that was just the beginning. For there was Fail Safe, the book that made me. As I ponder this moment, science and courage were the two signal themes in my life at this point. I might have read Silent Spring, but I was set. I read Red Alert instead. Nuclear was everything. The Cold War was everything. I was in it. And so I read the classic Hiroshima by John Hersey.

 

High School
My English classes put me in touch with some rather standard fare. Billy Budd. Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Red Badge of Courage. The Man Who Lived Underground. Taming of the Shrew. But the entire period seemed devoid with the exception of one monumental book, again something bigger than I was expected to read: Roots by Alex Haley. And while I found that I favored the work of Flannery O'Conner (not Harper Lee) and was stunned by Kate Chopin's The Storm, Ellison's Battle Royale and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, in the end it was Roots that absorbed me completely. I must have also gone through my father's substantial library but found nothing more interesting than M and J's Sensuous Man and Sensuous Woman, both quite practical in theory if not practice. In the end, there was no place in books worthy of disappearing into as with my prior younger life. Filling this period during my lonely moments were music, pinball, Star Wars and chess openings.

A Marginal Need
I had worked and earned money, got girlfriends and vehicles. It wasn't until my new job at a bank and the attempted assassination of President Reagan that I thought that perhaps I wasn't as intelligent as I should be. So with only that slim motivation I started reading. I picked three authors who seemed appropriate to the time. When I think about it, I reflected then as I often have since about the lesson I was taught in my private prep school that literature was spoken in the important world. This was the answer to the inevitable question, why Shakespeare? The answer was that someday in a job interview the boss might begin "There is a tide in the affairs of men.." to which we are obliged to reply "Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." and thereby demonstrate our worthiness. Now 40 years later I have yet to hear it, but the bell hath tolled for me. But at the beginning of the 80s it had to be about Woody Allen, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. I also read the plays of Neil Simon and began some fantastic daydreams about New York City. But Los Angeles nourished no greater literary desires beyond the banter of Regis Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford. So I figured I was up to speed, so long as I watched art films.

Science!
After 4 gap years, I returned to collegiate life. As an old frosh I jumped in with both feet. Metamagical Themas, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Soul of a New Machine were stuffed into my brain like buns in a hotdog eating contest. They were poorly digested, especially the second one, of which I only recall the Incompleteness Theorem. Maybe I should read it again one day. But the most significant books I read and appreciated were The Mind's I and Turing's Man. These were my blueprint. I also later read the biography of Mishima and long considered his phrase 'the unity of pen and sword'. By my fourth year, I was disenchanted with the dearth of higher though in my environment. So I struggled for a clue among my contemporaries and professors I didn't respect, especially my drama teacher who idolized Terri Garr. I found a toehold of solace in music, and the bold strokes of Ayn Rand, Henry Miller and Malcolm X. That was pretty much it. On the whole it left me nothing but the desire to remake the world digitally. Of course I still have some of my textbooks, still remember the boredom of Abcarian & Klotz. still repsect Springer-Verlag and still look wistfully at the old volume of Salas & Hille on my shelf. But outside of academics I learned a great deal by reading Thomas Sowell. While his bigger books were very informative, it was Ethnic America that I took as my personal blueprint.

Shock and Awe
So there is no black unity, the world needs to be taken over digitally and The Rise of Managerial Computing is inevitable. Shoshanna Zuboff kicked off my career with here informative book which reminded me of the terrors of Taylorism. My bets were that machines like the Xerox Workstation, distributed, graphic, object-oriented would change the world and I could ride that wave. By the time I got my American Express card and people from Dean Witter and Amnesty International were calling me at work asking for money, I guessed that I had the whole thing figured out. But something in me was disturbed. So I felt that I could take a ride on the wild side. So I started listening to Pacifica Radio and reading Ishmael Reed. As I got deeper into jazz and reggae and soca and finally dub, I recognized that I was not as cookie cutter buppie as I might have been. There was yet that conversation I could never find. But I tried seriously to see what the deal was in black literature. I kept swinging and missing. Gloria Naylor didn't nail it for me. I was highly disappointed. Terry McMillan was operatic, but soap operatic. I was highly insulted. Ah but then I found Jean Toomer's Cane and Kabnis became my alter ego. But it wasn't until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved was I swept away. During the time that I entered my professional career and began reading not to learn so much as to not insult my intelligence with the blather of conventional wisdom, I discovered many interesting books to read. Along with Beloved were the roots of the Afrocentric and multicultural era. You see, given my education, I was prone to believing that there weren't so many civilized Americans as I once believed. So my shock and discovery of a certain amount of critical work was in order. One of the first was Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Cornel West and bell hooks. West's The American Evasion of Philosophy was a great milestone. For while I took a shine to H.L. Menken in his Fifty Years of the New Republic, and was somewhat radicalized by Theodore Cross' Black Power Immerative, it was West's description of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C. Wright Mills and Reinhold Neibhur, that convinced me once and for all that everything I ever wanted in life was philosophically consistent with American thought. No need to go to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America for that.

The Mythopoetic.
But I did go. First stop Jose Luis Borges. I can't remember how it was that I got caught up in Borges, but I'd have to guess that it came from the direction of reading Ishmael Reed. There has been a streak of attraction in me for the cryptic and complex meaning that I believe cannot be expressed through pedestrian language, at least not efficiently. The first time I saw rambling classified ads in the back pages of the LA Reader. There was a bizarre set of conversations going on that were deliciously weird, rambling and sometimes poetic. It was like nothing I'd seen before. So I might have been thinking about that when somebody suggested Mumbo Jumbo.  I blazed through a half dozen of Reed's books, but all of that changed when I finally read Japanese By Spring, as far as I'm concerned, his best work. Yet of course I'm hanging out with nobody particularly interested in such literature. It's a wonder I found Borges at all. I did. And so Dreamtigers. Somewhere deep in my psyche are the echoes and implications of the Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

During this time I was floating and flying through different worlds of mind. The sense of play was elaborate. I read Moliere, and especially loved Tartuffe. I listened to Thelonius Monk. I finally read Candide by Voltaire. This thread of reading foreign authors took me to Carlos Fuentes, to Paolo Friere's seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then around to Sun Tzu. But also I found myself deeply attracted to the work of  T. Coraghessan Boyle. Little did I know that I was heading towards an interesting sort of intellectual dead-end. But in the moment, I declared myself a champion of reason and of logic, abandoning faith and filling myself with the kind of eclecticism that is at once edifying, exotic and self-congratulatory. Like everyone my age, I knew exactly what was wrong with America, and I was finding all of the proper expressions of my own humanity in the retinue of art films and the like. So I found my way to Tarkovsky's austere visions. I dug the quirky sensibilities of Eating Raoul and Repo Man. I was drawn to the films of Henry Jaglom (and Woody Allen) and the wordy narratives of Joe Frank and especially Spaulding Gray's' Swimming to Cambodia. I was digging the discovery of Kurasawa in his latest works. 

At some point I've got to stop this post. I suppose this point is just about right. I'm almost up to my late twenties when I started really taking my journaling seriously, and evolving myself to stand up and speak in public from my own poetry and thoughts. Here I was in the depths of trying to get international in my head. Sun Tsu's Art of War and the Otomo's Akira were two of the gateways. 

Kafka on the Shore

Well, this book deserves a longer review than I'm going to give it. Perhaps I'll make the effort in the Dreamtime and so it will be done, if not written.

Murakami gives us a world of mystery, ultimately the mystery of the self and of the many interactions we make with the world based on our interpretations of what it may want from us and what we want to give it all while figuring ourselves out (or not) day by day. He creates a platter of characters some of whom have purpose none of whom quite understand it and it becomes a delicious marvel.

For me to have been gorged with the plot driven and the diet of the autodidact, this was something of an adjustment. But the characters were so lovely that the entire snack expanded in my stomach filling me up and causing me to belch up flavors that are surprisingly fragrant. In all the time reading it, jumping in and jumping out as I have over the past month, there was no telling where the lightning storms, missing persons, talking cats and animated American mascots were going to end up. There were so many lovely references to music and literature and language - so much plain talk and simple actions swooping gracefully through a web of curious reflection and occasional profundity and confusion - so much to taste and consider. It has a quiet and subtle majesty. I found myself thinking so many times how this clearly Japanese author had such a facility with the English tongue. I can read about him now, but I just wanted to read more of the story.

Murakami's book has a gentle absurdity that never becomes hateful. Even the bloody murders seem to evoke the lightest kind of obligation, the kind that is never questioned from characters who are incapable of stepping outside of themselves and offering special opprobrium. What is taken must be replaced. What is opened must be closed. Over generations if it must be. Time is not so important here, but what is unspoken remains inevitably true. All theory is followed lightly, logically and we live in the margins of certainty until we don't.

Ah Nakata. You are our simple selves. We knew you when we saw you, but never before, only knowing someone was out there to know. Now we know.

 

 

Valkyrie: Joe & Skippy Adventure #9

Valkyrie by Craig Alanson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ahh yeah. This is the one we've been waiting for. And the conclusion is absolutely devastating, and that's about all I can tell you. All of the thrills chills, antics, close calls, near misses and odd historical moments dredged up into a soup whose recipe we have all come to know and love.

There's some ass-kicking. There's some name taking. New friends, old enemies and a lot of, shall I say, wrapping up of loose ends? Yeah that's kind of what's going on. Well, now that I think of it, I might as well spoil the whole thing. Ready?

Nah. I'm not going to do it. I can't. You just have to read to the end because it's a great mind-blowing kind of thing you deserve to experience, you filthy monkey.

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The Supernova Era

Supernova Era by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very imaginative book best approached with no preconceived notions. It certainly isn't as dark as Liu's previous trilogy, nor is it as complex. It is a fascinating look at human nature and the inertia of geopolitics and social organization. I think it is both realistic and optimistic and it's certainly unique. It is nothing at all like Lord of the Flies, so please dispense with that notion.

It moves in its storytelling at a rather predictable pace. You can easily imagine the scenarios presented at the beginning and middle of the book. But as the children take over and their ultimate values make themselves evident things evolve in a fashion nobody could predict. Because we're adults, that's why.

The case is very clear that children and adults think very differently and I think Liu has nailed it. In some way this book is conceptually reminiscent of Dennis Taylor's Outland. The very fact that the protagonists are young heightens the sense of danger and drama.

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Red Metal

Once upon a time I remember believing that Robert Ludlum was on the government payroll and that his fiction was partly paid for by our intelligence services just to scare the enemy into thinking about how we might be thinking. Then I started reading Tom Clancy, so I thought no it's not Ludlum, it's Clancy. Then, if you can believe it, for a short time I thought it might be Dick Marcinko. Now who knows? I mean there are writers like Littel and LeCarre and my new favorites Jason Matthews and Ben Macintyre all who know quite enough history to have their work reviewed for approval. 

None of that approaches the verisimilitude of Greaney's new book with Rip Rawlings. These two in combination have done to the genre what Speilberg did to the war movie with Saving Private Ryan. Suddenly everything prior seems fake, staged and artificial and 'tacticool'. 

This collaboration is stellar. It puts together a complex timeline, memorable characters, geographic settings, strategic consideration, battle details in a compelling narrative. It works on multiple levels with remarkable precision that doesn't sound stilted and it doesn't force you to suspend disbelief while delivering just the right amount of drama. It is not romantic, nor pessimistic and it is far from far-fetched. The duo have set a new high water mark for the military thriller. 

The way this turns out I even wonder if there is much of a market for this kind of fiction written in Russia. I feel sorry for Russian authors. 

This one gets tanks, militias, choppers, close air, infantry, submarines and artillery operations down with stunning precision (as far as I could possibly tell) and by doing so takes a great combined joint strike at the genre of the special forces that do it all. What a refreshing take. The story itself is certainly plausible and it gives the reader a new take on how quickly things can go from bad to worse. No book I have read has ever done a better job of dealing with the fog of war in the manner this one does. 

A stellar effort. 

Toni Morrison

I was 28 years old and at a summer pool party. It had been a year since I moved out to the beach and had been driving my BMW. I was coming to the end of my patience with yuppie indulgences, but I was still trying to find a consistent highbrow aesthetic in black culture. I had joined a couple memberships in theatre companies, I toured all the black bookstores in the city. I went to all the coolest clubs and bars. People knew me and I knew people. It's funny I was just talking about some of that period in my life when my friend Charles and I ran GDZ and were part of the Babeless Crew. Nothing like being affluent, single and somewhat attractive in Southern California during the Cosby Era. It struck me that I was about as connected as I could get when I had been invited to hang out with Robert Townsend's Partners in Crime. I watched Bobby Brown practice at the Wadsworth Theatre for his comeback. 'My Prerogative' was the song. I knew it would be a hit.

At the pool party I was reading Toni Morrison's new book "Beloved". It was rather the last straw. I had pretty much had my fill of what was explained to me as the best of black fiction. I found it shocking that 'The Women of Brewster Place' was considered the best. It left me rather flat and unimpressed. I knew that as a student of Computer Science that my background in the Liberal Arts needed work and I tried to ignore the conceit that we in what would eventually be called 'STEM' worked a bit harder and were a bit smarter. Yet I kept singing myself to sleep with that song from the film After Hours "Is this all there is?" Jeopardy and Thelonius Monk didn't quite cut it. What was an intelligent young man to do, just make money? And then about 20 pages into the novel, I realized that here was the writing skill and imagery I had been craving. Suddenly the world around me began to pale and the sounds got tinny and muted and I was in Toni's world. She owned me.

That summer marked a major change in my life. Eventually all of the dance clubs, in fact all of Los Angeles fell into the background. I had found, at long last, the powerful black literature that I wanted to experience. For all of the extraordinary complexities of Beloved, I found an even better lesson in Jazz and started to understand through her narrative grace and insight something that boiled down to a Michael Jackson lyric "You're just another part of me." It's often hard to communicate what differences I expected and experienced between race and culture as flattened as they have become in the popular imagination. But the very last lessons of race I learned from Jazz and the works of John Langston Gwaltney and Adrian Piper. From Jazz came the subtle yet profound consequences of the emotional rejection of family and what comes of the rejection of genuine love between individuals who owe loyalties to their racial identities. It doesn't have to be hate that brings one to ruin. Exclusion from family is sufficient because it is the ultimate betrayal.

Beloved's Sixo was for me, Morrison's best character. Of all the characters in all of the black literature I ever read there were ever four that marked me as something close to the self. They were Jean Toomer's Kabnis, Paul Beatty's protagonist in the 'White Boy Shuffle', as well as Darryl Pinckney's in 'High Cotton', and Sixo. That was for then. I don't often think of Sixo now - I found my Thirty Mile Woman and she bore my progeny. My time out of time is best described in the time and place I wrote that some 20 years ago if I did. Morrison, more than any other black literary figure I can recall stood in a unique place. There was something ineffably affecting in her writing, not only in its evocation but in its syntax. Morrison's sentences went on and on folding and unfolding like tesseracts of consciousness capable of delivering you into parallel universes. You live in the world, but your mind is captivated elsewhere. That's what I recall floating through the NYC undergrounds. It was an alien diet that made your aura transmit in the ultraviolet spectrum where Earthlings still see only black and white.

Like all great writers, Morrison had a psychological wisdom that allowed her to occupy the consciences of her characters. I can't tell if she was going inside herself or not as the book following Jazz took me into a gory corner I could not stomach. Was that Paradise? I don't recall - I only remember choking on blood. The last bit of Morrision I took was from Playing in the Dark, as she metastasized into America's black woman author. In that, she talked theory, perhaps it was critical theory of a sort. I think she overplayed the 'masters tools' hand while making an excellent point of the matter of the rescued.

'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full.' -- Toni Morrision, 1992

Morrison brings up an interesting tangent. If America paid the Negro his Reparations, what do you think it would ask for in return? It doesn't matter the actual price, it's a psychic bargain, a deal with the Devil if you will, another form of shackles. Perhaps we ought to note and confess that the Negro is always with us.

This thinking remains with me, as does the echo of Sixo's self-liberation. I wonder if literature today, American literature, ever bothers to reach as deeply into the human psyche as Morrison's once did for me. I marveled at the empty profundity of so many somebody's daughter books, as if only the trials of women's souls were worth examining in literature. Unlike academics, I am not part of the industrial process of constant dealings with the intellectual and social maturity of our youth - these examinations of the dimensions of the soul are for me processed at the level of history and philosophy. Dostoevsky most recently. It is difficult to bear witness and learn at once. I am not growing tired or bitter, but I do sometimes wonder why so much is politics and so little is life. We are shocked at murder and want to blame somebody. We don't recognize the dimensions of our own souls, that is, I reckon an eternal human problem. We should wonder why we want to think we can program an AI to figure it out, or somebody else to tell the tales that Morrison has already told. Humanity lies in plain view in front of us, and maybe it is her death that can remind us of the transformative power of actual art. Can we bear our own imagination? Here lies Toni Morrison.

Richard Kadrey and the Morality of Dark Degenerates

I have been enjoying the Sandman Slim series of novels by Richard Kadrey for years. This week I just finished his latest novel, The Grand Dark. It is a revelation. I will place it, in my ultimate library right next to Gene Wolfe's 'The Land Across'. The new book, The Grand Dark, takes place in what could be described as an alternate Mitteleurope postwar near future. It's at once both futuristic and retro, a brilliant creation in which serves as a kind of gothic background for a tale of youth and innocence lost, repression, rebellion and decadence. In describing it thus, having read it, I find myself getting excited about something I'm sure I wouldn't have been excited about had I read an overview. It's Kadrey, a writer of wondrously dark imagination. There's not much of any other way to describe him now as the caretaker of the morality of dark degenerates. 

So start with the phrase 'entartete kunst', and imagine an American 1980s romantic punk sensibility in a Reagan era where the CIA was not turned against Soviet Russia, but against Americans whose common folks had turned to a minimally employed louche cokeheads and heroin addicts. Imagine thin wastelings like the Pet Shop Boys, East end punks in tattered jackets looking after scores with West End girls, dragging on Shermans all black lipsticked in sheer gauzy blouses. Imagine a precisely speaking man in small hornrimmed glasses dressed formally with a preternatural intelligence lording over a bicycle delivery service with a ratpack of couriers looking just out of the workhouses of Oliver Twist. Imagine a grimy industrial city barely hanging on to civility patrolled by automatons, robot taxi drivers, spiderlike police bots. Imagine disfigured war veterans who wear steel masks covering their deformities grumbling to themselves on public transit everywhere you go. 

The Grand Dark is the pseudonym of the theatre of the absurd in which the most crumbly of human dramas are shot through with sexual drama and political innuendo that caters to the most ribald and degenerate sensibilities of a bounding youth and a slumming aristocracy - where poets and students and grand dames & dukes meet at opioid cocktail parties signifying about the potential of transgressive creativity, each production aiming to rise the level of shock and awe to that of civilizational neutron bombs. And around every corner are the brutal police and the even more vicious secret police. 

The novel is the story of a naif and his lover, an actress, two against the whole demonic world. Like Forrest Gump stranded in Milan Kundera's Prague, Kadrey's protagonist Largo struggles against the news of the world as he manages to escape its crushing jaws by inches every day. He is animated by his passionate love for Remy whose love and life are romantically reckless in the way only an energetic and beautiful youth animates to the stunned jealousies of the jaded who surround her at work. Their love is true and it surpasses all until things with gravity and grit get their grubby ways. Remy disappears. Largo struggles to find Remy. Has she abandoned him? Is she lost? Kidnapped? Dying of the miasmic vapors of this cruel industrial wasteland?

In all ways subtle and clever, Kadrey's world pulls you into its twisted orbit, drowning you in gothic mystery and the horror of war, the heat and hate of the beat down humans and the intrigues of revolution and counter-revolution. It is a world of creeping cold claustrophobia, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in Eastern Europe. Kadrey's writing simply and occasionally brings you directly into the head-pounding despair of a sweet young man fighting for his very survival in a world intent on destroying all that gives him hope. 

In all this, Kadrey has brought me face to face with something I would not have known how to approach - which is how one who is weak and powerless with no cause to hope and no ethos beyond survival lives at the mercy of sophisticates who see in him only a means to crafty ends. Largo's degeneracy is genuine. He is a son of the underbelly of society, and no he doesn't know how to tie a tie. He doesn't jog for his health, he grabs on to the parcel of peace that can be purchase by a couple of drops of opioid under the tongue, by the hot breath of his lady love, by the thrill of outrunning the gangsters out to bash his brains. And so we are left breathless trailing a youth with none of the degraded common sense of a degraded time, yet whose honesty is the only sort that can reflect the humanity of those who struggle on the daily. He is dirty and unsubtle. He is weak and frightened. He is used by inches in ways he cannot comprehend and all he can do is try to stand up straight and stand up for his friends. He who suspected no one finds himself pinioned, as was my heart. 

Recursion

Blake Crouch is the most emotional sci-fi writer I read. In that regard, what he writes may be a great deal more accurate for his characters and NPCs. Danger, confusion, loss and suffering are more vividly illustrated in this book than in others, but quite resonant with his prior 'Dark Matter'. Oddly, I preferred Dark Matter's protagonist who was a bit more bumbly and challenged. 

However the scale of Recursion is a great deal broader. The entire planet is entangled in a quantum dilemma. At its best, this book gets us close to Michael Crichton level drama. Its take on 'time travel' is a very clever working on the order of Primer and Inception. 

There is a kind of blind naivete driving the ambition of the characters here that didn't ruin the book for me, but annoyed me for a time. And since this is a book about people's lives rather than the situational drama created by technological disruption I think it's something Crichton would have handled much better. The way the ordinary Joe protagonists in this cinematic drama handle their dilemma puts a locus on character that requires me to suspend disbelief more than I should. In other words, if you give somebody the talent, financial and technical wherewithal to change the world, and their ambition is actually to change the world, how do they end up so squeamish when they actually do change the world and people die? That said, I find the protagonists' reactions to the tragedies that ensue quite realistic in an oddly informative way.

What Recursion reveals, emotionally and psychologically is the extent to which people whose lives spin out of control tend to seek comfort and solace from an ever-shrinking circle of intimates. In Crouch's world, the keys to all survival are the hugs and kisses that only one person in the world can give and losing that person drains all meaning from life. Recursion is the illustration of what could happen when that person is erased or altered by memory. The world comes apart.

Fall; or Dodge in Hell

Fall is a massive book that runs across multiple generations in two different planes of reality. In the world we are familiar with, characters we know from previous books by Stephenson appear, and we are pleased to be reunited with them, even though we don't remember much about them. In the alternative world we are entertained by an entirely coherent mythical universe that contains some of the same characters as they play into an epic struggle. The barrier between the two planes of existence is opaque but events in one affects the reality of the other.

What makes this book particularly brilliant is how well Stephenson's mythical universe dovetails with archetypes we all know. In that it is part sword and sorcery, part game of thrones, part creation story, part clash of the titans.

Allegorically, as is expected, Stephenson proposes answers to some eternal questions that vex us in contemporary American society. How bad can a post-reality internet get? What might be the consequences to an America subject to powerful schismatic cults? How far could a War of the Worlds level hoax be perpetrated on social media? But even more curious to fans of his fiction, what is really going on with Enoch Root? How can we live in virtual reality? What about the Singularity? And even, Why does God allow suffering in the world?

Where REAMDE was a giant action movie in book form and Seveneves was a hard science fiction, this is an extended study and romp into virtual reality. Moreover it proposes some questions about the nature of the human mind and what are the inevitable effects of is disembodiment? Nothing is so revealing as Stephenson's understanding that the limits of our imaginations are essentially nothing more or less than the human drama of dreams. More importantly that our dreams are of little value to us if they are not shared with other people. So whatever humans can be, they must dream it first, and guess what - practically all dreams are familiar, but being social creatures nothing quite defines humanity as 'make my dream come true and share it with you'. Well, the other side of the coin, which is 'I am your worst nightmare'.

There is something altogether familiar in science fiction that I think C. S. Lewis came to understand, Arthur C. Clarke explained famously and now that Stephenson understands. That is that science fiction and ultimately science is best understood as magic. Magic is nothing more than the wish fulfillments that defy the constraints of our knowledge of cause and effect in the physical universe. What humans will always want from science is predicted by science fiction which is nothing more or less than magic. Once you connect magic to science fiction, you inevitably connect it to fantasy, and human fantasy is, in that way, predictable. Fantasy tastes like mythology - in the end these are the stories we use to teach ourselves, and religion is how we discipline our mythologies and engrave it in memory and dreams. It's all connected.

So in that way, Stephenson knows that he is writing books that come full circle in mythology, in fantasy, in science fiction. In all of these, miraculous things happen. The only difference is the selection of machina, type of deus and the direction of ex. In Fall, they are executed in parallel between the two planes of existence, each an opaque reflection of the other.

It comes as no surprise, and is a usefully instructive matter that Stephenson does not create a post-scarcity universe in either plane of reality. In fact, his illustration of the relativity of time and its relationship to energy and matter is spot on. I'll let you read that. His words do it best. That is best when you are wanting to please readers of science fiction. But in a cryptic ending, Stephenson gives us a surprise we have to leave as a mystery. It is either a massively hokey joke or the test condition of a recursive story. In the case of the former, it can be forgiven considering the scope of the tale. The very idea of history stopping is a hokey joke and Stephenson's best books are historical fictions. But there is a playground out there for alternate planes of reality that are not only turtles all the way down, but perhaps turtles all the way around. After all, which way is down?

Fall, does not induce dizzying nausea. It delivers some stunning moments that are exciting and dramatic in the way the best fantasy can be. Stephenson's characters are less well defined as a matter of course if you read the book as I did, which is to give equal weight to both analogues in both planes of reality, but it is easy to be enchanted by those on either side. Nevertheless Stephenson weighs more deeply on the fantasy side - as some fraction of the book plays interestingly with rather hackneyed stereotypes of extreme Americans. The heroes and villains are not so clear in our world.

My overall take is that this book is an ambitious attempt at something only a few writers are bold enough to try. I don't know any who have come close. I would like to say that Stephenson has been reading Gene Wolfe who is, to my reckoning, the absolute master of sword and sorcery fantasy writing. He remains intrigued by the probabilities of magical science and remains upbeat on the whole. Although Fall might have been made profoundly darker - all the elements were there - there is a happy ending. And in the end one must confess that in this rendering, Hell is a relative term. Where there might have been some Kafkaesque absurdity throughout, Stephenson's characters never lose their minds or abandon their purposes in confounding frustration. Where there might have been some great experimentation with the element of chaos, a fundamental building block of the fantastic plane of existence, it is only marginally mysterious and stochastic.

Since I cannot believe that Stephenson is finished with his characters or the fecund prospects of co-dependent universes, I must conclude that Dodge and his entourage must have more adventures in our future. Please.

Gangster Warlords

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America by Ioan Grillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Informative in the best kind of 'journalism for the good folks at home' way. The book is full of fascinating dramatic stories and eyewitness accounts of a horror in progress. The details are at a personal level which makes for a good story but a poor history. The perspective is about what one would expect from a battlefield journalist - an accounting that is light on the strategic perspectives of government leaders but heavy in the tales of the streets. Because of this one gains no insight from other thought leaders and expert analysts on the geopolitical situation in the Northern Triangle or the Caribbean. I can't recall that the Organization of American States was mentioned once. Not that OAS might have a solution, but the author suggests that the War on Drugs was all Nixon's idea. Nor was Manuel Noriega or Hugo Chavez mentioned. One might think, given this account, that almost nobody thinks about drug trafficking but 8 or 9 countries. Granted, it's a huge issue that could never be covered in one volume, and this book will no doubt be cited in the future - for good reason. Nevertheless, the concluding chapters fall rather flat.

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Gray Man Eight

Mission Critical by Mark Greaney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An excellent Gray Man book, one of the best. This one captures a sense of duplicity and partial knowledge with deft sensibilities. Superbly memorable characters in this one. Sometimes I wonder why I ever read any other spy books, Greaney has mastered the craft.

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The Coddling of the American Mind

The book is a long and sometimes tedious explanation of what we all know to be true - that undergraduates are slightly unhinged and that colleges treat them as a market, not as adults. A 10-30% minority of students who are willing to advocate for violent action against offensive speech have upset rationality on the American campus. iGen girls are committing suicide at an alarming rate due to the outsized influence of social media. Threats to liberty come from alt-right and Antifa activism and that college campuses overreact by creating speech codes, safe spaces and taking 'microaggression' seriously. The lack of political diversity in the professoriate threatens the capacity for institutional bias disconfirmation. The distortions of social justice premises of equality generate profound dislocations and moral hazard in Title IX implementation. 

In the end, Haight seems to be directing his primary admonishments to a generation of helicopter prone parents in the top (half) of socioeconomic class in hopes that the next crops of undergraduates have their heads screwed on straighter and so do not corrupt the reality of the mission of academia, which is the search for truth. He does so with care, rigor and the best intentions.

His description of 'safetyism' is fair but does not encompass the larger political narrative of what the Right has been calling the 'nanny state'. So he has limited the applicability of this term to academe, but it is part and parcel of a larger infantilization of Americans and the major political movements that seek to disable the individual. I am talking of course about abortion and gun control, two perennial issues in which partisans aim to remove responsible choice by legal fiat 'for their own good'. It seems to me that Haight has sacrificed the greater argument for greater specificity and so it goes under 'whats wrong with these kids today'. But the enemy is us, and Haight leaves most of us off the hook.

I am fond of the book for its consistency in demonstrating the effects of acceptance of the 'three great untruths'. The truths they contradict are part of enduring human wisdom. We are thus simply left with using them to clean up the mess in American higher education and everywhere else foolishness reigns. 

The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Liu has, with some very short logic whose parsing I will leave to the realm of suspension of disbelief, put a cap on all of the possible adventures of hard science fiction. In the end, it is about how we deal with ourselves. So with that said, the realm of science fiction ultimately resolves to how human we remain augmented by our own inventions and reinventions. The only remaining good thing about it is that its scope remains the fate of humanity.

Now having read so much science fiction and fantasy over the past decade, I may be running out of space for its philosophical import. That is because the irony of the remaining good thing is that no one should be responsible for such a great vision. Liu understands this which is why his invention of the Wallfacers is one of the most brilliant turns in the genre. Better than Asimov's Foundation geniuses. There. I said it.

Taking us at long length through the most mind-bendingly clever strategies to save the Earth from extinction at the hands of the Trisolarans, their insidious henchmen and panoptic technology, Liu comes up with a lengthy way of telling so much of human past, future, desire, bureaucracy, treachery and bravery.

Liu's Dark Forest is finally a tragedy of galactic proportions. Few works have located the entire technological prospects for humanity in such tight bounds. In all the hard science fiction I can imagine, there cannot be much more to say. I fear what the next book will bring. But I must know, starting tomorrow.

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Back to Bookage

I don't know much about politics. Don't know parliamentary dirty tricks.
Don't know much about NBC. That's not how I view society.
But I do know that I love books. And if you do to we could exchange looks.
What a wonderful world this could be.

I've been over at Goodreads probably about a decade. I should tell more people about it. When my buddy Richard visited me from out of town last week, we spent a lot of time trying to remember which books we should recommend to each other. Goodreads is the best shortcut. I still belong to The Library Thing, but that's about as moribund as Orcutt. Goodreads is hooked up to Audible and to Amazon, and my short reviews go over to Facebook too.

Here at Cobb, I haven't been maintaining my Bookage column. That's it over to the left. Scroll down. It should be up to date now. These are the latest of the 19 books I've finished this year, a bit ahead of schedule for my modest 30 book pledge. I would like to bring that up the books I read a bit more often, and I should also return to more involved book reviews. There are a couple directions I intend to go in my reading, right now it's all following the little Jordan Peterson in my head, whom I find to be the most exciting dude since Steven Berlin Johnson. So that means psychology, obviously, and I am keeping Steven Pinker on the list of course. And that also means the history of religion. And that therefore means Aldous Huxley, which dovetails nicely with Michael Pollan's latest on psychedelics. So yeah, all that so I can quote the Vedics to suit my purposes.

This follows suit with the prescriptions of Nassim Taleb to understand the wisdom of the ancients, and yeah I'm slogging through The Odessey at long last. Not fun, but more entertaining than I expected. I suppose I'll end up eating some Augustine as well as Neitzsche, God help me.

Naturally, I will keep up my diet of spy novels and space operas with tangents into real history and realistic-er sci-fi.

Stay tuned.

Farewell to A Dream of Baldwin

In the summer of 1989, at a buppie pool party in Southern California I discovered in the writing of Toni Morrisson's Beloved something I had been searching all my life to find. In retrospect, it was inevitable. It wasn't a discovery but rather the culmination of what I had been raised to believe and understand. It was that black mountain my generation had been born to climb and I was experiencing its revelations and horrors as my peers were eating canapes. I had surpassed the base camp of what I was expected to know as a black man of the 20th Century and was now officially on the crest toward the summit. Over the next four years I enjoined 'The Struggle' at a new level. It ended with marriage and James Baldwin.

I knew, ever since reading the tender mercies of Beale Street's Fonnie, that there was in black literature a loving sensitivity. I had almost no one to appreciate with me what courage and grace I found in Jean Toomer's Kabnis, a character whose mind I inhabited innumerable years ago and have probably only written of this one time since. I found in the diet of the Talented Tenth, a great deal to satisfy and sustain galaxies more than what has ever been widely appreciated as black. I have never questioned that I have pierced through the skin game and found that which we call the soul of humanity. It was an expectation of literature I never questioned, and once I heard it said by Albert Murray "Literature is my religion", I understood, with given words, what I had always expected from the given word. But I also knew I had to give back. I knew this from the moment I began being confused by LeRoi Jones as a teenager. His book had footnotes. It was difficult, harder than any book I had ever been assigned. I would enter this world and represent with my writing skills what has become of my generation. I would become the next James Baldwin.

It wasn't until almost twenty years later that I gave up that dream. I came to see what everyone came to desire in the presidency of Barack Obama. Payback. I thought James Brown sung it better, a generation ago. The unity of pen and sword, of writing and power politics fell apart in speeches nobody remembers, and in contradictions unworthy of anyone considered to be the new King of black America. Yet there he sat on the throne, grinning sincerely and then dropping the mic like Chris Rock. I never expected Obama, then again I never wanted a black political apotheosis of black manhood. Or perhaps I simply say that in retrospect because he was so clearly a peer, someone who merely picked the right elevator. My inspirations have been subdued by the ham-fisted calumny of American politics. It ain't beanbag. So my Fonnie and my Kabnis cannot be sustained in such an arena, only sacrificed. I knew even Colin Powell could only do so much, and although I occasionally still wish he had, by late 2007, in the year I won black blogger of the year, I had come to the end of my politics. I was inalterably disappointed. I desired nothing so much as to leave the tasks to others who needed it more than I.

The needy one who emerged was Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man I never met and never much enjoyed reading. Like Obama, I felt that I knew him. We shared a secret language, an intonation and emphasis for all those from that small town called black. Obama went off to Harvard Law, and I went off to Silicon Valley. Young Coates went off to The Atlantic where Newyoricans writ large and the reverse-poetry slams of literature, rather like rhyme-bites of Mr. Barack Smith gone to Washington could generate distinctions for audiences hungry for racial representation. I finally had to admit I lost the taste. Like the jazz that becomes too clever for all but jazz musicians themselves. Like insider jokes between Colson Whitehead, Lani Guineir and Cornel West. Like the war between Bernal and Lefkowitz, the platform was both arcane, elevated, remunerative and all but irrelevant to me. In a snippet of an interview Steven Van Zandt said of the 1960s that greatness was popular. I felt in 2007 that greatness would never be popular again, and thus greatness had no obligation to be. Greatness was expended on mendicancy, or was greatness simply not around? What became popular wasn't great enough for me. I'm sure I said so.

This morning I have reasons to be disappointed in any number of things. This is something I have yet to work out in my personal life. I don't know where it will lead, but I read enough Baldwin to be have been perfectly rewarded. With his new book "We Were Eight Years In Power", none other than Toni Morrison has declared Coates to be the next Baldwin. I am relieved at long last of failing to win that battle royale. The title couldn't have fallen to a more appropriate champion.

The book I am reading at the moment, like many other science fictions, is dealing with questions of the fate of all of humanity. I have become stoic and find most interest in assessing how well greatness fares without power. The fate of the scientist among populists is a meditation on the tragic. Yorick's benediction is all we may merit. The book finds the very last humans discovering that the Universe is a simulation. They had to go to the very center of the galaxy to find out the great projector upon whose screen mankind had strutted and fretted. This journey required a combination of impossibles, immortality and faster than light travel, to make that discovery. And yet it was a non-discovery anyone in possession of those two impossibles would inevitably encounter. It was the nature of reality made manifest by stepping outside of two seemingly omnipotent constraints. I have yet to finish this book, yet I find in my disappointments many synergies with its narrative. Of all the things Coates or Baldwin might write, of all the directions Obama's heft of the sword of politics might take, the imposition of the impossibility of evading race constrained them from finding the nature of the American universe as a simulation.

In literature all meditations on reality require imagination, and the true test of the greatness of literature is how that imagination can create immortality and faster than light travel. The imagination of humanity requires God, without which all of our sciences torture us to death merely explaining innumerable hows without an inkling of the first why. To seek and discover noble purpose, transcendent purpose, is all that humans can achieve wrestling as we must with our earthly constraints.

I don't know why Toni Morrison would dub Coates with the scepter of Baldwin. After all, his book is in the non-fiction section. But it is true that the religion of Obama's popularity is the stuff of narrative and that wishful thinking could be called imagination. The fiction that is race in America does in fact compel us all to defy the innumerable questions of science and find purpose in skin color alone. Race is a powerful god, and I am one of its apostates. As such I have given up the genre in search of inspiration. There is in me no expectation of insight. I cannot accept the constraint that I am black and so the rules of race are not to me laws of physics. My imagination resides a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, not one you are likely to be considering, even with those given words as clues. And so I am sentimental for Baldwin in what he gave over the years and at last in 1992 when I last read "Another Country". I never read "The Fire Next Time". I joked even when Los Angeles burned for Rodney King that the fire would be out by next Wednesday. I knew then, as I know now that the god of race is an angry Old Testament god who offers no salvation or redemption. So Baldwin's threats were empty as eventually were Obama's promises and as I finally presume Coates' testimony to be. The god of race suffers as do all American gods. If Baldwin was his final prophet, then perhaps enough has been said already.

As an apostate I am trapped to a certain degree by my prior ambition to be an explainer. To aim to inherent the mantle of Baldwin is to meet the challenge of coming up with new flavors of lollipops to seduce children into accepting inoculations against racial reasoning. I might die with nothing of my non-race work gaining fame, but I do eat well. This probably cannot be an epitaph of this sort of writing. It is my enduring compulsion to work against wishful thinking and my fate to have learned to swing the hammer. I was born in a quarry. Rocks ruled everything around me. Hulk smash.

Kadrey: Kill Society

The Kill Society by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something sobering happened to Sandman Slim. He's dead and stuck in Hell. Here is a chapter in his existence that has him surviving in a minor key, forgetting his own arrogance and trying to figure out a better way. If he's ever earned a way around his arrogance, it is on this epic journey that he does so. Yes, to the point at which he gets through the Styx and actually enters Heaven. A really fine ending in this book, as entertaining as ever.

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Kasparov: Deep Thinking

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've recently started following Kasparov's Twitter feed. I like his style. But this book is a whole lot more about chess than it is about machine intelligence. Which is to say that its documentation about the machine intelligence applied to chess is in and of itself a very interesting and tightly written memoir that names names and gives a comprehensive exploding diagram of its history. However as a computer guy, I found it lacks a lot of the context I would have liked to have about machine intelligence in general. Which is basically saying Kasparov knows his domain but I think I over-estimated how much he has a general theory about thinking and thinking machines. Nevertheless, this is a book that shouldn't be missed as it covers its bases very well as a history of the evolution of chess play since Bobby Fisher.

There are some excellent examples that illuminate the stresses and strains of chess play on grand masters and their teams (teams? who knew?). And some good debunking about the conventional wisdom about the general intelligence represented by chess mastery. Definitely something for the shelves, but not quite Stephen Berlin Johnson.

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Three Sci-Fi Giants

I have returned to reading science fiction after overdosing as a precocious teen. I am startled to find how good it has become. I can say without question that the most imaginative and all-encompassing vision of space-faring sci-fi has come from Iain M. Banks. His Culture series of novels pose a galaxy that I find realistic and puts all other post-scarcity novels to shame. Start with Consider Phlebas. You won't be able to put it down, and you will be spoiled for all sci-fi yet to come. I won't tell you what Banks does, but once you read him every other sci-fi will sound lightweight and incomplete. Banks answers *all* the questions of humanity's relationship to the galaxy and once you've finished, you just wonder why nobody else has gotten so far. 

The most well-written, ethically thoughtful science fiction I have ever read is the work of Gene Wolfe's Tales of the New Sun. While I'm guessing you mean sword and sorcery as fantasy as opposed to spaceships and high tech, I'm going to say that this is science fiction. It is something else though, it is a deep rumination, told from the first person, about power, and it is told at a distance from a technical explanation about the science involved, much of which is alien and inexplicable. It is in the end a human fiction, a man's long journey into becoming legend through many travels and adventures in a strange land (that may be Earth) but billions of years into the future. It is about the conflicts on a planet of many races that live with a mix of tribal and medieval kingdoms - a planet whose sun has been dying and has lost its ability and knowledge of space travel, and a man whose story is wrapped up in growing conflicts as he gathers mysterious powers. Nothing shiny though. Way better than LoTR. 

Then this wouldn't be complete without Charles Stross, who is the single most brilliantly twisted mind in the world of sci-fi. The Laundry Series is great near future, spy-thriller involving a guy named Bob who is a computational demonologist on a hapless mission to save earth from gibbering horrors in other dimensions. But the other works of Stross are great because he envisions the universe as a can of hideous worms in which humans are amusing in their struggles. It really opens up your mind and pours sludge in.

My other favorites are:

Alastair Reynolds : Peter F. Hamilton : Paolo Bagigalupi

Bloodlands

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A completely different way to think of WW2, not that I haven't revised my understanding several times over several years. In this telling, I sense the madness of Hitler to a greater extent than before in that he escalated his perfidy conveniently pursuant to his own failures. Hitler played brinksmanship beyond the extremes of reason and passion. Stalin, on the other hand seems to be have a kind of arrogance of inevitability to his calculations of starving the masses, which he moderated only to the extent (as did Hitler) that he required slaves to achieve his ends. The striking fact that both Hitler and Stalin were trying to achieve a land-based empire to rival the US is a parallel I'd never heard expressed before. Nor was I aware of the extent to which the destruction of Poland as an intellectual capitol was necessary to the achievement of that goal for both Germany and the Soviets. It is bracing to discover how much Stalin feared the wrath of the Japanese and what China's sitting out implies.

Most of all, however, Bloodlands brings home the scale of murder in between what we've all been exposed to. It is neither the pitiful tale of a family destroyed by military units or the mind boggling scale of 'millions' gassed, starved, tortured and shot. It is the village by village, train car by train car, ditch by bloody ditch account of 237 shot per day diaries, replicated all over for weeks and months on end.

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How I'm Living - Part Two: Digital Media

Virginia Postrel asks:

Do you have, or have you had, a large book, record, or movie (DVD/VHS) collection? How has it changed as everything's gone digital? Advantages/disadvantages? 

Yes. It has changed quite a lot. Admittedly I'm on something of a cutting edge, being an IT professional, the advantage is that I've gone through several iterations of the business of what we in the business call 'lift and shift'. 

Music
I currently possess about 25 thousand songs on close to 4000 albums in digital format. Now this is actually small relative to many folks I've met in the recording industry.  It's relatively large for laypeople and only just now accomodatable for easy, secure digital use, by which I mean streaming my own music from the cloud.

I started collecting music as a DJ in 1979 and had about five milkcrates of vinyl, most of which were albums but about a crate and a half were 12 inch singles. I still have many of my old favorites like Reach For It by George Duke, and IQ6 Zang Tumb Tuum Sampler but I've replaced all of my actual favorite songs from those. I started buying CDs in the mid 80s when they first became available. I can still recall the days when you couldn't get reggae music on CD. I got up to about 800 or so and then stopped counting.

About 10 years ago I ripped all of my CDs to disk and then started selling them to Ameoba and gave several hundred to my sister. Right now I have about 500 in the house and about two milkcrates full in the garage. Now here's the odd thing. I've been buying external hard drives pretty much every year because they always fail. They were getting to fail on the regular so I had to come up with a strategy. The first strategy was to duplicate my music on multiple drives. Before cloud backup systems became widely available at reasonable prices (about 4 or 5 years ago), the safest thing to do was manual JBOD replication. I've spent $600 for a home RAID system and it blew up too. So I realized that I had to re-buy some more of my must have CDs when I couldn't recover from disk, just in case. 

Then that created a new problem. Now I have 6 versions of my favorite songs. Which one did I rip at a high bit rate? Which one did I get from a friend? What song is 'Track 01'? BTW Gracenote is one of the great innovations of America. Who says metadata isn't important?  So I had to invest in a deduplication software program, and once again when I switched over to Mac once and for all. 

When Steve Jobs finally announced iCloud and its replication service, that was the beginning of the end. I migrated all of my deduplicated music, finally onto a single massive disk drive and let Apple do the rest. But I'm constantly pruning and clipping and gardening my music metadata, because neither Shazam, iCloud, Soundhound, MusicBrainz nor Amazon can remember all the details perfectly. Not to mention how reissues make identification even more fuzzy. Chances are that if you didn't buy the original CD or vinyl you cannot know that the metadata are correct. Even so, iCloud was good enough.

However, I knew that Google and Amazon would be getting into the business shortly. In fact, I have always purchased MP3s from Amazon and played them in iTunes once all that DRM nonsense was worked out. But no longer. While I still have all of my 500+ CDs and 25,000 songs on hard drives, I only listen to streamed music from the Amazon Music Player. I can upload unlimited amounts of new music, which I almost never do because I buy it all from Amazon. I still have an (old) CD burner in my (old) MacBookPro for MP3 disks I burn for use in my truck, but everything else is streaming digits. 

I should say that music quality matters a great deal to me, but I cannot afford to be the kind of audiophile I'd like to be. So while I have a very nice set of powered studio monitors and subwoofer in my living room, my ears have dumbed down to the standard of digital fidelity. 

Movies
Unlike music, most movies I like are generally unrepeatable. Once you know Keyser Soze, it's over. Furthermore  I can multitask quite well with music, in fact some improves the quality of my work, but movies require focused attention. For me, movies are all about the visual experience, so I still go out to see first run special effects blockbusters. Some of them I don't mind seeing again once or twice, and of course there are a few delights from which I never tire. One of these happens to be The Fifth Element. Yeah. Action and spectacle. But I also like short films and I have collected almost all of the Pixar shorts. I miss the Spike & Mike film festivals and all of that in general and have lowered my expectations for film boosting that for literature and video games. 

I 'own' streamable copies of just a dozen or so films and I possess about 120 titles on DVD. I haven't bothered with BluRay at all. I own a subscription to Netflix and have had it and Tivo since the very beginning. I used to rip Netflix disks onto my hard drive but they were susceptible to the same hardware failures as my music. Plus, even as I traveled with a very small portable hard-drive on my laptop, it finally wasn't worth it to watch my own in-flight movies. Reading was just better. All of my VHS was Disney crap for the kidlings, but they've outgrown them and we garage-sold them all. I cannot imagine that I will purchase any more than a dozen hard copy movies for the rest of my life. If I'm not in (cheap or free) streaming range, I won't ask for video. 

I should make note of the point that I consume video vastly differently than I used to. That is to say I watch almost no 'primetime'. I will watch the extraordinary live sports event, Tour de France, Olympics, Super Bowl, World Cup, NCAA Title Game, but other than that, everything goes to the DVR. Even for massive hit series (of which there have only been about 7 or 8 worth my while since the debut of 24) I tend to wait for the critical success to happen and then watch a couple seasons's worth in retrospect. In fact, my taste in video tends towards that serial mode. I consumed all but the last season of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones that way. The only thing I watch daily are my YouTube subscriptions.

I've never been much of a TV person since I moved away from home. I bought my first black & white 12 incher after my 30th birthday and vowed never to have one in my living room - a vow I kept until.. oh wait, the kids. When I was single I only watched Seinfeld and David Letterman to understand what people were talking about at work. Other than that it was strictly News Hour and Charlie Rose. That would be from 1982 until 1997. So basically after the end of Hill Street Blues until the Teletubbies, I'm a blank.

Books
My father has one of the most impressive collections of black literature of the 60s that exists. I grew up building bookshelves. I still tend to be the kind of book snob who denigrates people who don't have big shelves in their living rooms, and I will check the titles I see and make character judgments. But I have definitely changed all that and only a fraction of my books are shelved in the house. I keep a small technical libary in my office about 50 books and a smattering of others. There are 100 in my big ornamental shelf downstairs and another 100 strewn throughout other nooks and crannies. There are probably another 200-300 in the garage.

I bought the Kindle within a few months of its entry into the market. According to Amazon, I have 401 books in that library. Additionally, as a subscriber to Audible, I have amassed about 120 volumes. I read about 2 or 3 books per month which is about a third of my reading. Mostly I'm online reading the hundred or so blogs and sources in my RSS. So a huge amount of my reading has shifted from books and notes taken at seminars, to online. 

About a fifth of the books that I get from Audible are reference books, history mostly. And for those I find most appealing, I will also purchase the Kindle version. I often want to cite something from those books I find compelling and I enjoy swapping back from reading to listening. That said, I get most of my listening done when I drive long distances or at night before bed. 

When I buy actual books, they are mostly technical texts and older rare books I remember from childhood. I just bought a farmer's encyclopedia published in 1892. Very cool. I wish there were more books in digital form. I actually don't like the prospect of inheriting that large physical library. Books are meant to be digested, not shown off, and it's always about what you're learning now isn't it? Attachment to the printed page is sentimental, a worthy sentiment to be sure, but they take up a lot of space. 

Goodbye Darkness

William Manchester sounds to be the source of much of today's ambivalent confusion about war, and is writing a fact filled, yet soppy emotional memoir / history of compelling stuff. Writing in 1978 or thereabouts, he illustrates perfectly a Me Generation dream sequence which is absent the conviction of necessity. Manchester writes as if, and clearly you can hear it in his articulation, the war was a great revelation to him and thus to everyone. In this regard he displays a kind of shocked naiveté, as if the two World Wars were something just invented for his father and himself, custom-made to drive him to madness. So he deals with repressed memories, and the shock of being amidst the random chaos and violence, and the amazement of how empty such places were after the war. 

 Manchester plays the role of the callow youth experiencing war, trying to deal with cowardice and bravado, and how neither of these simple expressions of manhood seem to have much to do with who dies and who survives the brutalities of the Pacific theater. A sergeant trying to lead men, who develops through sheer luck, an ability to survive the horrors of jungle warfare on extremely remote inhospitable islands. 

The book serves as my first look into the complexities and the battles of the Pacific. Ask me yesterday and I might have said, Iwo Jima, Midway and Pearl, but now my understanding has been extended a great deal. Recognizing how close the Japanese came to Australia was a great revelation of the book, as well as the parallel drives northward of McArthur and Nimitz. The change in tactics by the Japanese and their all-consuming drive for victory as Dai Nippon has given me a new appreciation for why they were so hated by the Chinese. The devotion of many Pacific island natives to the Americans was something you never hear about, nor the primitive manner in which they lived and how Dai Nippon forced them into labor. The Solomons, the Marianas. 

It may be because he also wrote extensively about McArthur and Churchill that his own experience as recounted in this book seems to define so well many of the anti-war sentiments of the a man who clearly absorbed the import of the counterculture in American life. He ends the book describing the traditional values of the America he grew up in as if they were long gone and never to return. He so concludes that he fought for the equivalent of an instinct for his fellow soldiers, all of whom possessed a logic in defense of things that no longer exist in the modern world, which only goes to demonstrate how mashed up in the illusory narrative he became, all the while railing against its ignorance through the book. It is this tension between the personal in the context of 

 Manchester is nothing if not an intelligent and articulate master of languages and betrays the kind of respect for it that makes all of his descriptions of dialect and war era terminology quite a treasure. Terms erased by polite and cowardly conventions  spell truths that defy historical revisionism stand out everywhere in Manchester's writing. In reading this book you are submerged in a way of speaking American English that has all dried up into today's yuppy-speak. It's useful just to read the book aloud to experience something genuine. Manchester thus is at war with Hollywood and American ahistorical ignorance as well as with his former self. 

This book is an absolute necessity. 

My Brick is BRCK

It turns out that one of the original ideas in my novel-in-progress Borky's Beach, is becoming a reality. Now I have to keep my ears closed. It's rather strange that they've come up with the exact same name with the exact same purpose, but it makes perfect sense with regard to the fact that I've been talking about it for some time. As well, one of the premises of my near future novel is that most people can no longer afford commercial broadband. Ushahidi is the new inventor and their use case for rural Africa is exactly what I predict.

In Borky's future, ordinary people generate huge amounts of data they cannot afford to share. All of their experience goes into their brick, which is a personal storage device of massive capacities, some fractions of which are bursted to backup or for communications on a periodic basis. One of the radical elements of change in the novel is that bursting is hosted by a sort of rebel network. But there is also foafmesh...

The first time I thought about a personal brick (using the term 'brick') came to me sometime back in 1998 or so when I was thinking about what I wanted my smartphone to do. Now I have to go back and see exactly what I've written. But what I vaguely remember at this moment was that I wanted a wireless device that had about a couple gigabytes I could access any time - I don't remember that there were iPods at the time, if there were, I wasn't paying attention. There was another brand that had my attention, behind Palm. Palm, was the ruler back then, but there was another, I think Creative MP3 player whose form factor was brickish. The primary form factor that I recall was the Altoids box shaped 2GB modular disk drives that we used in ThinkPads of the era. That was what I thought of as a brick. And so I wanted one of those that I could put in my pocket and have it talk to my Palm Pilot and laptop - because back in those days, 2-5GB were all the digital assets anybody ever needed to be mobile. 

The older idea I had about a 'brick' was a nightmare that I kept having most of my adult life - which was that at some point in my life, as a very successful person, I would have the last backup of  my life's creations embedded in a chip in my left thumb. In the nightmare, I step onto a private jet whose door jam contains a scanning device that erases my thumb chip.  

---

Anyway here's an excerpt from Borky's Beach, which needs work but puts a lot of the bursting and bricking into the context of which I've been thinking of the digital future:

Zack took a token and pre-swiped some credits into his Archon Zyro identity. It would be enough to put a lease on a nice SUV and head out to the Emerald City. Molly was already nervous enough about this, so he wanted to spare no expense, or at least give her that impression and make everything smooth. He dropped his tablet into his backpack and grabbed a Gator from the fridge on his way out. 

 It was a short walk to the rental lot, but he wanted to make sure that he had something to drink along the way. Especially for a baller, he didn’t want to be tempted by the shops between his house and the lot. His building was just three in from Reseda but he would have to walk several long blocks down Reseda and this was college campus territory. Though only a fraction of the students attended Northridge than had in years gone by, somehow all of the businesses around the campus managed to survive. There was something about what it felt to be a freshman away from home for the first time that was appealing to more and more people of all ages these days, and all of the storefronts, restaurants, clubs and chillout zones were magnetic to the that crowd. Zach couldn’t blame them, most were probably on some balance of Blue Lively, like the majority of the population here in California, especially families and Groups still missing members from the Big P.  He knew there was temptation between here and there.

 Here was Reseda Boulevard, and so he made a right turn south and his eye was immediately caught by the Jack Denny’s on the corner. It shone a picture of Molly, looking bustier and leggier than she actually was in a one piece maillot luxuriously pouring a bowl of Panang Borky’s all over herself. Damn! He forgot to turn on Archon Zyro. He turned away before the smell of panang curry tied his guts into a pang of hunger and did his best to sublimate the creeping boner in his pants. He tapped the side of his glasses three times and pushed them back up his nose to remind his tablet to broadcast him as Archon Zyro. He took a swig of Gator, darkened his shades and started moving faster down the street. 

Across the street there was a Floradonna store, bright and menacing;  brilliant seduction of Lipson glass, light and color.  Several youth were spilling out giggling over a small bottle. 

 The Super A Foodmart stood as supermarkets usually do, backed into a corner of a large flat parking lot with its strip mall arms reaching to the main  streets. This was no exception to the architectural rule, except that when it was looted and burned during the Big P, nobody bothered to build it back. It's arms remained untouched and rather dowdy but in the strange way that things that seem out of sorts eventually come into their own meaning, this strip mall had its own special sense of security. The exposed steel girders making the flattish A framed which before the fire held an actual roof now served as a kind of hallowed reminder of the chaos, of the loss of life in the way of the dark, anonymous world before LastID.  Zack began crossing the lot diagonally. He could see the bronze SUV ahead of him parked a few meters from a lightpole.

As he approached, he could see that this lightpole was the same Zulu tower he used to use. Today he had no use for it. In fact, now that he had his promotion, he hadn't needed them at all. He was a node and there were only 255 nodes in LA County. Still, he retained the habits of not being hardwired into important networks.  As he approached the area in the middle of the mostly empty parking lot, he instinctively addressed the tower as if he were actually using it, just in case somebody realized exactly who he was. Then, moving towards the SUV, slowed his pace slightly until he heard it pop its locks, recognizing Archon Zyro with a welcoming chirp. 

 Zack drove east past the university several miles and then under the 405 with its stream of quiet vehicles blurring by in a rush of wind. He reached Panorama in 15 minutes taking the back streets towards Molly's place. Zack always liked to cruise the ghetto, rolling deftly through alleys and the streets with cars parked end to end on both sides narrowing to what is barely a lane and a half wide.  He practiced the stare of an agent on teens too young to get Lively or any kind of Blue. He gave them the look, and when they tried to ping him, they got the 404. That's right bitches, I can see you but you can't see me. 

 Molly was waiting out in front of her apartment building. Zach pulled up and double parked with flashers for a moment to get out and hug her. She smelled like something fresh and clean and orangey. It cleared his head in an instant. As she got into the passenger seat, her brick took over as DJ in the SUV. Zach noticed the blatant switch, it didn’t fade into her song, but clicked.

 “Let me adjust your fade pattern. You can set that up you know. Pull out your brick and thumb it.”

 Molly hesitated for a moment. It was a rather dangerous request. Once you thumbed your brick, a level of interface became available that allowed lots of important changes to be made. She would be confiding much in Zach by doing so.  Zach’s eyes said trust me, and she did. Molly reached into her backpack and produced an aluminum box with rubberized corners and a small black glass window. It was smaller than an actual mason’s brick by about half in all dimensions, yet Zach’s eyes widened at the sight of it.

 “You’re kidding me right?”

 “What? Oh. Yes I know it’s kind of old..”

 “Kind of? It looks like first generation.”

 “It is. I got it when I got my Orals. You know how Grandmother feels about these things.”

 “Yes but it… Wow. When’s the last time you ran an integrity check on it?” 

 “I don’t know, every year on my birthday, I guess.“

 “Molly, you are living on the edge, babe.” 

 “Well, it’s still backed up at the bank. I mean, I couldn’t prepay or subscribe if it didn’t work, right?” 

 “I know but you need to check it out all the time…”, Zach broke off. He was about to mention if you’re married to an Associate, but he didn’t want to press the issue so much as make sure that she’s OK and backed up. Talking about hacking was not a good idea right now. “Well, we’ll make sure it’s all good right now, OK?”

 Molly thumbed her brick and handed it over to Zach, the expression on her face like a child handing over a kitten to the vet. She let her fingers linger on it a second longer and looked shamefacedly down for a moment and then back full to him, trusting. The moment was awkwardly pregnant. Zack leaned over and kissed her. With the brick firmly in his hands like a football, he make a joke of clutching onto it. They relaxed into their seats in the SUV, exhaled and then fell into spontaneous laughter. 

 “God’s blue! Ok lets do this.” Zach tinted the windows to dark brown. Correspondingly the interior lights came up, as the vehicle wasn’t moving and he got to work using his own tablet now hooked to Molly’s brick. He brought up the maintenance screens and ran a simple diagnostic. Everything seemed to be fine, except that he noticed that there wasn’t much usage. Contemporary bricks, now in the fifth generation, held enough local storage to handle triple redundancy of almost four months. The first generation held six months but didn’t have adaptive redundancy. The idea that somebody would be running foafmesh for more than six months without bursting was pretty much unthinkable, but adaptive redundancy allowed a person to go from triple to double to single redundancy, at the end of which time, it would autoburst. But that almost never happened and most people had autobursting on a weekly basis, monthly if they couldn’t afford the bandwidth. There were still people who were not billies, not completely off the grid, who ran the older, first generation protocols, and of course people with luxury subscriptions could have all sorts of interesting things, or so he had heard. Zach had even heard that there was a secret seventh protocol of LastID. Now that he was an Associate, it seemed that a lot more was possible than he'd ever imagined. 

 

The Castle

I have begun something of a stupid quest, because in fact I'm done with questing. I have all of the answers to big questions that my life requires and I am settling down to being practical. Nevertheless the habit of reading for the sake of enlightenment dies hard, and in between the epic video games and the occasional universal series, there ain't nothing else out there. 

So I'm kind of hooked on W. H. Auden's University of Chicago syllabus. The first of these pegs to knock down was Kafka's The Castle. 

I never had much of a predilection for Kafka whom I generally associate with Camus, Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs. He always represented to me a kind of lunch lady serving hunking dollops of self-pity lit for the appetites of Slackers and Schleprocks. So there was never any incentive for me to actually get into his sort of genius. Now I think I'll have to, having read The Castle. 

The story drew me in immediately and now having finished it I have noticed in its first person narrative a kind of strength of character I seldom notice around contemporary individuals. The sort of self-possession K. exhibits while endlessly frustrated among the peasants and commoners all striving to be part of the obiter dicta of functionary hierarchs is remarkable. Even more so when you recognize how much he must condescend; he is barely above freezing and starving. He commits to associations and relationships out of that necessity and that is all he can do. 

I am impressed with the possibility that The Castle is an unfinished book. One can imagine that its lack of completion is prescient - that this is and remains the condition of the modern Western man and that there is no resolution to the problem of the meaningless ascent into the Castle -- that there is no Lord and the functionaries function around a void. 

Well, that's all I have. More on the first person after I finish Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Roger Zelasney's Amber Series. 

Related articles

The Auden Project

Lure of the Guild

There is something retro deep inside me, and I think in all of us, when it comes to dealing with alienation of modern, global life. I think the proper thing to do is to work your way through modern, global life and supplant its alienation with a whiff of the tribal and a considered portion of the guild. You know the guild, the moose lodge, the order of buffalo, the brotherhood of the otter - something like Fred Flintstone had. You see, George Jetson had no running buddies. 

I am reading Gene Wolfe's tales in the Book of the New Sun.

What impresses me now the second time around literarily, since Stephenson's OMVI, is the concept of a small group of men who are self-sustaining in their ways. They could be monks in their monastary, perhaps a royal family in their castle, maybe a group of makers in their hackerspace. Organized around an arcane competence. Prepared to initiate noobs into apprenticeship and grow them into journeymen. Dedicated to sentence fragments with implicit subjects, but descriptive nonetheless. 

From Wolfe comes the Seekers of Truth and Penitence. Aah but maybe it's just little old me finally tasting a good portion of sword and sorcery. As I've read on, I can see how this story goes down the tunnel of a single quest and how different it is from more of what I'd call an 'open world / sandbox' adventure, of which Iain Banks is the master. And I've also gotten most of the way through Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, and see some of the same interesting, but limiting first person-ality. 

This morning I heard the first whiff of the conspiracy theory behind some elaborate and scary intra-agency rivalries that verge on warfare. According to this particular Lt. Colonel, there are some sneaky agencies that run training operations in public and have patsies in place just in case something goes wrong. But I will deal with that at length on its own because that subject would overwhelm this, which is simply the following. 

Since 9/11, I sorta kinda predicted then end of the nation state. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about, because some time later, Colin Powell convinced me that state sovereignty is too powerful for anyone to let go. So state sponsored terrorism remains to me, an evil to be taken quite seriously, and more seriously than any other kind. But that doesn't change the fact that many states have many elements with many agendas, many of which come into and out of power. Today's African National Congress is in much better shape than yesterday's. Today's KKK is pathetic. Today's OWS gets no news. So the nation state continues, but watch for the movements below that level. 

Here in the US, we've gone diversity happy. I am convinced that just about anyone who flies diversity flags is eating their own dog food, much of which they didn't grow themselves. Which is to say that out of 1000 diversity programs, 990 are funded by non-diverse sources. In other words, we have a lot of cliques on the inside that aren't really on the inside. A lot of guilds have politicked their way into permanence, but a dependent permanence. Kind of like the class of people with driver's licenses and gas station credit cards as compared to auto mechanics and petroleum engineers. As long as there are auto mechanics and petroleum engineers willing to work for the public, driver's licenses and gast station credit cards are meanningful, but the guild of diversity is like the guild of driver's license holders. You can call it important. That doesn't make it important.

So all of this depends upon how well the rule of law and open society functions, leveraging the standing of the American general public. But at some point, I have decided to prepare myself for what might come next, which is the degredation of all that. How shall I say it? When it's time to cross the desert, the entire value of your cool low rider is nullified. Time to buy a Jeep.

So I'm interested in, as I said, my own martial education - but in the context of a reasonable guild. Not survivalists, but people whose value transcends the relative luxuries our open society provide today, but are not promised for tomorrow. That means that I need to make real tribal links. 

The Auden Project

As readers of Cobb know, I swore several years ago that I will not spend another dime on movies with posters of a man with a gun and a woman wrapped around his leg. Unfortunately, they don't do movie posters any longer, so it's harder for me to judge. And, quite frankly, I enjoy movies with heroes. Movies need to have heroes and we would be a poorer society without such heroic narratives upgraded with car chases, defenestrations, explosions and machine gun fire. Why? Well, imagine what kind of place this would be if a Saturday night date consisted of vegetarian dinners and movies by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The suicide rate would triple. Hell, we'd be Greenland. 

But the point is that I cannot resist heavy reading, at least in literature. So I have taken it upon myself to shoulder the burden of W. H. Auden's syllabus which had been making the rounds of the Chatting Class & Cool Kids recently. In fact, I've already eaten my first slice of that hearty bread in Kafka's 'The Castle'. Strangely nourishing - review soon to come. Here's the rest of the meal:

• Dante - The Divine Comedy
• Aeshylus - The Agamemnon
• Sophcles - Antigone
• Horace - Odes (Loeb)
• Augustine - Confessions (Loeb)
• Shakespeare - Henry IV pt 2
• Shakespeare - Othello
• Shakespeare - Hamlet
• Shakespeare - The Tempest
• Ben Johnson - Volpone
• Pascal - Pensees
• Racine - Phaedra
• Blake - Marriage of Heaven & Hell
• Goethe - Faust
• Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling
• Baudelaire - Journals
• Ibsen - Peer Gynt
• Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamzov
• Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
• Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
• Melville - Moby Dick
• Rilke - Journal of my Other Self
• Kafka - The Castle
• TS Elliot - Family Reunion

All that and 9 Opera Libretti. 

And thus my Auden Project.

With today's news that Iain Banks has terminal cancer, I had to fly to John C. Wright's page to discover where I might ever find his like, or at least those authors that the Cool Kids know which will get me by rights to participate in the Long Talk. So as we speak I am downloading somebody named Gene Wolfe, who apparently has a universe, and we begin with the Shadow of the Torturer. So this may be a light side trip, or maybe even a detour. We shall see.

The Negro Speaks of Books

I just saw one of those Facebook things about who reads what books etc. Of the hundred they listed, I read 26 and then there were 7 others that I tried and found tedious, or just never got around to finishing. It was an odd list. Then I got to putting together a list of black books, horrified as I was by the set recommended by the Huffington Post. So without comment, I've read 90% of these..

Roots - Alex Haley
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
For Colored Girls. - Ntzoke Shange

The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Black No More - George Schuyler
Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Z. Huston

Cane - Jean Toomer
Middle Passage - Charles Johnson
The Wig - Charles Wright
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Native Son - Richard Wright

Another Country - James Baldwin
Disappearing Acts - Terry McMillan
A Gathering of Old Men - Ernest J. Gaines
Kindred - Octavia Butler
A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington
Narrative - Frederick Douglass
Narrative - Olaudah Equiano
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois

The Big Sea - Langston Hughes
If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
The Best of Simple - Langston Hughes
Dutchman - Amiri Baraka
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man - James Weldon Johnson

Captain Blackman - John A. Williams
The White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty
Miseducation of the Negro - Carter G. Woodson
Faces at the Bottom of the Well - Derrick Bell
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby - Stephen L. Carter

The Economics & Politics of Race - Thomas Sowell
The Content of Our Character - Shelby Steele
Breaking Bread - Cornel West
Black Macho & the Myth of the Superwoman - Michele Wallace
Notes of a Hanging Judge - Stanley Crouch

The Alchemy of Race and Rights - Kimberly Crenshaw
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual - Harold Cruse
Race Matters - Cornel West
Ethnic America - Thomas Sowell
Malcolm X Speaks - Malcolm X

Afrocentricity - Molefi Asante
The Oxherding Tale - Charles Johnson
Sula - Toni Morrison
Japanese by Spring - Ishmael Reed
Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Greg Tate
Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos - Nelson George

The Inutitionist - Colson Whitehead
The Colored Museum - George C. Wolfe
The Piano Lesson - August Wilson
Sugar Cane Alley - Euzhan Palcy
Biko - Donald Woods

Kaffir Boy - Mark Mathabene
High Cotton - Daryl Pinckney
Parallel Time - Brent Staples
Colored People - Skip Gates
Jazz - Toni Morrison

Waiting to Exhale - Terry McMillan
Bloodchild - Octavia Butler
The Neveryon Series - Sameuel R. Delany
Yes I Can - Sammy Davis Jr.
The Street - Ann Petry

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde
If He Hollers Let Him Go - Chester Himes
Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley
The Rage of a Privileged Class - Ellis Cose 

 

The False Majority

It's better to be the king of a small hill, than a prince at a higher elevation.
-- Cobb's Rule #9. 

The last book I just finished reading is Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. It is a very interesting and good book which goes into some detail about security, trust, society and all things related to rule following and rule breaking. It's very thorough, not very technical and so truthful that it almost sounds obvious. What's extraordinary about it in retropsect is that Schneier told almost no stories from his personal experience. Good on that security.

Schneier is in my T50 - the list of thinkers that I am limiting myself to hearing out for the rest of my life. It's interesting how he sounds a little bit like a boring Gladwell. Gladwell is such a good writer that he makes everything sound exciting and profound. Schneier quotes almost as much as Gladwell, but not quite - still he mentions other folks in my T50, including Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky, and even though he didn't mention John Boyd by name, I hear a lot of OODA thinking in his talk about the 'Red Queen Effect'.  

At any rate, there are bigger takeaways from this common sense sounding book that I now recongize in my own evolution. And so I remark about it here. 

F1 racing has been my metaphor for the kind of work I want to do and am now doing, 15 years later than when I first really wanted to. What it took me a long time to learn is the cost of largeness. What Schneier described very well in his closing chapters is how the cost of communication in large organizations rises with a factor of each incremental person added and there comes a point at which the technologies and processes are unable to sustain any single-minded agenda. This is precisely a characteristic of what I call information thermodynamics, but what I never quite envisioned was the negative aspect. I understood that within a large organization that it costs money to keep the brass informed about how the business is actually operating, and Schneier did make use of the Dunbar Number. But what I thought was the know-have-nots would simply be dragged along with the know-haves. I didn't think that there might be a point at which it drags down the ability of the organization to accomplish *anything*.

In other words, organizations don't get 'too big to fail', there is literally a point at which they get so big that they *must* fail. The nature of that failure is primarily in what I would call an 'open agenda', but not necessarily the failure of the entity. Xerox, for example, once owned American Express. Hard to believe, but true. While I was working there, ostensibly for the workstation business, Xerox' most profitable division was VanKampen Merritt Investments. They were playing money games on Wall Street but failing to be Xerox, the innovative product company. Soon, small companies like the PC printer division of HP and a company called Adobe kicked Xerox' in what used to be some of their core competencies. 

So, as certain people predicted several years ago, my disinterest in politics has left me to be a Libertarian. But I suppose as I have been called a RINO, then I may be a LINO as well. Except that there's no such thing as a LINO because libertarians seem to have the good sense to know they won't rule, and since they won't - the don't have pretenses to ideological fidelity - or at least they don't bother enforcing a party line. 

It occurred to me this week that you probably could run America with half a million people. That if we were really connected on Facebook Next, and you paid us 600 times our annual salaries, we could take care of 600 people each and we would all do just fine. 

Combine all this and what do you get? Well I get an idea that The System is permanently broken and that when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as a nation of 300 million. Somewhere around whatever we were in the 1950s in breaks and there is the active nation and there is the passive nation. America keeps struggling to have all of us in the active nation with a real nationalism, but in the next 20 years that's going to break dramatically and we will split into the active nation and the passive nation. We will be more of a civilization than a society and the fakery of all patriotism will be exposed. Not that patriotism is false but patriotism that scales will break. Of course the great news is that we won't amend the Constitution, because that's too difficult. Put another way, democracy > 200 million is a Wicked Problem.

I expect that significant liberal and libertarian subgroups of the American population will have money enough to support the Elon Musks of the world and that they will come to build their cars for our markets. So long as personality and dynamism wants to be rich as in American rich, the active patriots will win the day. And we need fewer of them than we think, I think. I'm fairly confident of this rather in the same way that Vannavar Bush was confident that we wouldn't blow ourselves up with nukes. 

Conservatives aren't who they think they are, by the way. If they think the country is going to hell, it's simply because they think we're all in the same handbasket. As they discover that virtue will out, they will relax. This young generation has had its fair share of douchebags and they won't put up with it despite of all their other wimpy sensitivities. The free love to remain free and they will put down their celery sticks and fight when it comes down to it.

All of this is to say that the Fifty States are in for some real big fun and the Feds are going to have their asses handed to them. I am confident of this - because the states will fail and get right first. Experts will have their way again in the future and bullshit will walk. This is my optimism for the future of everything. We have too many cultural memories to forget how free we have been. That which is too big will fail, the small, smart and agile will perservere, there will be no Idiocracy, because the majority simply will not be clued in, and they will not be able to chain the minds of those who know. 

 

Borky Concepts - Education

Borky's Beach is the working title of a near-future science fiction novel I'm writing in the spirit of Aldous Huxley & George Orwell. It describes a pleasant simalcrum of life with some sinister overtones which I think are generally imperceptible in today's society. But it also allows me to do some futuristic speculation.

On education, the premises & concepts are the following.

#1. Everything that allows people to live healthy lives to 80 years old is pretty much known and understood. To learn this (and how to fit into society) costs money. The purpose of public education is to help know and allow you to pick where you wish to apply yourself. To that end, the government allots $50,000 for the equivalent of primary, secondary and tertiary education, tertiary being two years of college equivalent, which amounts to roughly equivalent to an Associate's degree, but really about as useful (or useless) as what is considered today to be a solid college prep high school education, with one provision. There is no language requirement - as language is translated automatically by your cellphone.

#2. Everything inventive is proprietary and there is pretty much no way around it. 'Mental Services' is an economy unto itself, including education, entertainment, and all non-material consumption. You want to hear it? See it? You pay for it. There is an open market. 

#3. The state provides educational facilities that are only marginally staffed by full time professionals who are primarily the equivalent of janitors and administrative staff. There is a very sophisticated universal credentialing system (run by the ISO - International Standards Organization) that has replaced every 'degree program' in existence. So the Professoriate are less like today's professors and more like consultants. Large consultingn partnerships teach - they are guild like, but there is also no such thing as tenure. Anybody with the ISO credential can teach anything they please in a state facility. You learn what you want to learn, and people teach what they want to teach. All that matters is the credential. 

#4 If you want to homeschool or go off the ISO recommended list, you are entirely free to do so. That's 50K in your pocket. It's all you get. It is pretty much your single government benefit. 

#5 Private universities exist, but they are generally extensions of professional guilds and corporate training programs. Which is to say there is a significant economy in educational certs which are finely tailored to the specific training requirements of proprietary organizations. Wealthy people mostly invent toys and entertainments for wealthy people, and wealthy people with no scruples mostly invent toys and entertainments for the rest of the people. IE there is porno of every sort imaginable. See 'Mental Services' above.

#6. Open source as we know it does not exist. The demand for it has gone pretty much to zero. Why? Because of the $50K benefit, and the fact that a high standard of living for no cost is well nigh universal. If you don't understand that, think of it this way. If you were a rich kid who got a free iPhone with every app you can think of, why would you try to learn Android and hack it yourself. Or. Think of it this way, if you lived in the United States in 2012 and you wanted to drive from LA to NYC, why would you try to build your own road? Exactly. You wouldn't be a civil engineer studying how to build roads - it's already done. 

In Borky's future, everything is already done. Humanity is on the verge of intellectual and material post-scarcity. So what do we do? That's the premise of the book..

 

Bleak

I'm reading and about 40% through Charles Dickens' Bleak House. What strikes me most is that there is in Dickens' mind such a minute and detailed accounting of character that it's rather frightening to consider how little we might do in comparison. Much of Bloom's criticism inflects my perception to trust the story more than the author but one cannot help but notice how perceptive one must be to manage all the recondite nuances without prejudice. I am comparing and contrasting with my almost recent going through of the Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes mysteries as examples of Victorian literature in pursuit of a more thorough going understanding of our mutal history, much of which was spurred on by my less recent review of Stephenson's Baroque Series. I expect that this interest will continue as I feel less and less bound by contemporary social and political imperatives - I'm ready to unbelong. 

What matters then is character somewhat limned by deportmant, but character over all. 

I am writing, and may finish today some reflections on Neal Stephenson and his Neo-Victorianism and implications of.. well let me do that because there's little sense in writing more about Bleak House until I complete it, which won't be for another week. 

Stephenson holds my attention because he is, like I am, invigorated by the lacuna of modern self-sufficiency and looks to history to reconstruct that bit of human knowledge which our contemporary conveniences have obviated for the sake of the masses. I am certain that he has seen, via Anathem, the value of a monastic discipline in education and what a social lack of that produces. He, better than most writers I have ever encountered understands the value of practical knowledge - what the Enlightenment has done and how a lack of disciplined education will undo. It will not undo humanity, but the Humanities. And so in that gap which arises from the failure to mass educate, he inserts his literature, and lately a corpus of tools that go beyond literacy. 

As a backgrounder, understand that I strongly believe that the masses and those who lead them for better or worse will fail to correct their failures until they are lying in its detritus. The wasteland must be upon us for our bearing to adjust - and that is born of the beeline for convenience which has been the impetus for the vast majority of our social change in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have educated without enabling and have left it to the Lords to oversee. But they too have been outstripped and do not, I assert, with any constancy maintain the integrity of their realms. And so we live on the brink of disease and disaster amongst a lot of men who have forgotten not only the recipe for survival, but indeed how to be men. We have gone beyond feral motorcycles to zombies. We know that the motors will not survive.

Like my old friend Charles Cameron, I'm paying attention to the millenarians and listening intently to those people who believe the world is about to end, or atleast collapse in parts of Europe and the United States. It might be a bit corny to say so, but I think that all such Westerners with a bit of motherwit are going to survive very much more like Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes than any Mad Max. I say in fact that there will be a style and a virtue and a power in the post-industrial man which will very much resemble that of the pre-industrial man. We will eat better and have better hygene, but I think the NeoVictorian is the model.

To the extent that I don't believe the Vickies will be the model, Stephenson has me again. It will be the logistics of the swarm that rule the next generation (which is not necessarily an evolution) of organizational dynamics. IE Mongolian hordes. The Khan model of assymetrics will dominate, but (and the new Mongoliad is out this week) OMVI tactics cannot be far off. The individual tactitian organized in the small group of multi-thinkers will have advantages I think cannot be overcome by those driven to complete selfless devotion to battle. But it will be a good fight one way or the other.

So I am preparing myself and my family, armed with Peasant Theory, books and swords, and some Mongolian organization dynamics, amid the view of Dickensian London for that which might devolve here in the US, understanding that cities may seem 'unlivable' by today's yuppie standards, but the woods will be much, much worse. So how is a gentleman to survive? The model is already out there. Victorian manners are survival skills. So the future doesn't seem too bleak to me at all. 

So What If Christian Zombies Take Over?

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've already decided to like Bob Howard, and I get the cleverness of mocking up some evangelicals with a scarier God than any of them suspect, but this particular drama was a great deal more earthbound and yes, less mindbendingly frightening. I keep imagining Bob Howard being played in a movie by Simon Pegg and then the whole matter seems settled.

The book seemed to cover a lot of ground, background that is, with this or that describing what happened to Bob in the prior books. Too many times, I hear 'all Hell breaks loose' and not enough of 'gibbering horror'. There's just not enough crazy going on in this one. And I hate to say it, but the stakes haven't been raised high enough here. Bob is not getting his head bloodied quite enough, he's not frightened enough of the Laundry bureacracy, and the bad guys in this episode are basically little more than Christian zombies. Sorry but without the actual Sleeper possessing anyone, the Case Nightmare Green seems like just another WMD scenarios.

I just can't help but think that Stross is wanting Howard to live long and prosper like Harry Dresden kicking him upstairs at the Laundry, but something ugly is going to have to happen to people close to him or the next episode is not going to have the emotional weight. More creatures! More horrors! More debilitating pants-shitting mishaps! I mean, I'm sorry, I just can't listen to Howard telling me not to do black bag jobs and how much he loathes killing innocent civilians. He's got to be forced into it and let it wrack his consciousness later... It's too bad Harry Dresden already did the bit with touching the forbidden sigil and be partially possessed. That's exactly the kind of experience Bob Howard needs to go through, or else he's just Simon Pegg.

View all my reviews

Against Historicism

I picked up Harold Bloom last night. He's got quotable quotes that say brilliantly and concisely what I needed to have heard several years ago, but better late than never. 

To recap. Several years ago maybe 4 or 5, I decided that I was never going to go watch another movie where the main character had a badass expresssion on his face & holding a gun in the movie poster. And I realized that while my favorite movie was 'Ran', I really hadn't read/watched enough Shakespeare or history. Around about that same time, I realized what a scholar Winston Churchill was. That too was about the time I found Larry Arnn and began looking at Western Civ in a bigger picture context. What I hadn't done is get rid of the political bug and so while I've been getting more serious reading done on that program, I've dragged along many of my political interests as well.

One of the first of many excellent lessons learned was the nature of the Marxist materialist view of the world as well as some echoes of the historicist matter as well. But it was the materialist, ie anti-spiritual, anti-religious aspects that held most of my attention. So I filled out the 'godless commies' thinking in my reperatoir, in defense of Western religious freedom. In parallel with that was the very important understanding that your soul and your character is really none of the government's business and that went categorized under the general buckets of 'new man' and Michelle Obama's 2007 UCLA speech. More recently I have been trying to get a grasp on the weakness of the New Atheism which cosigns a lot of Progressive politics.

But then I found myself watching more gun movies. My venture into sci-fi has kind of unwound because basically it's all about Stross, Stephenson, Banks & Bacigalupi. Meiville not so much and maybe not at all. Dunno. So I've been uneasy for the last few months and really bored with my historical stuff. I mean Koestler's Darkness At Noon was brilliant, and I really enjoyed the massiveness of Robert Conquest's great work. But my Civil War history lost my interest, as did the history of Eisenhower. So once again, I started back towards the Big Books. And that's why I'm reading Pynchon. 

But Pops dropped off the massive Yale Shakespeare last weekend, and he's been reading Bloom (at my suggestiong). And I decided to spend my Audible credits on two from Bloom. Boom.

Bloom within an hour reminded me of a number of authors I have rather forgotten. I'd dabbled with them but never gone as far as I might have. Chehkov, Mann, Coleridge, Maupassant. What's wrong with me? But he really zinged me in 'How to Read and Why' with suggestions about the attitude I should take with me towards reading. What surprised me the most was that as I was just now rummaging through an old diary of mine (circa 1990). that used to be my attitude. 

The biggest problem I have had in my intellectual career is that reading books has always been for me a zero-sum game with my sociability. I stay at home over the weekend and read 300 pages, that's a whole weekend I make myself happy and one step less engaged with everyone in front of me. What do I do on Saturday night when the rest of the people are drinking beer and watching the game with friends? I'm reading, with no friends and alienating myself from the beer crew. Which is perfectly fine with me: in 1990. Then along comes the internet and I become convinced that I can catch up to the fete manque of where ever Yale humanities dorm bull sessions go after graduation. So I invent all sorts of online personnas (about eight including Cobb, now 20 years gone) for my projects using the internet as social media as I have been since 1993. 

Bloom may be curing me of all that. Obama deserves credit as well. I couldn't sustain the fiction that by adding to myself I might be communicating better with whomever out there. It's just me cranking out my writing because I must - for me - for selfish reasons. And now I'm about to be 100% cool with that. And I don't expect to find that place I used to call the 'noble arena' - I discounted it long ago, now I'm about to release it. 

Two years ago I went Epicurean. I knew I had to get rid of politics four years ago. Now I think I'm somewhere between Epicurean and Stoic. If I remember correctly, the Epicureans were more public with their findings and the Stoics didn't give a rats if you were 'in' or 'out'. What may ultimately make that determination is how I resolve to deal with Historicism.

Historicists are those people behind every multiculturalism. So the Culture War and those things that drive the agenda of those who must Minister to Peasants, is based on what Bloom considers the uselessness of expecting people who read literature to 'get it' in some way that positively and predictably affects society. Guess what? Society has nothing to do with it. You're either individually fortunate to find the individual whose self-improvement has worked or not. Reading the great works is about self-improvement. Period. It is actually about *be* and not *do*. And I can get into that, because I have discovered what all the Peasants do, and it's merely survival. 

Historicists want to craft a framework for the interpretation of history. They're the ones that are compelled to leash the humanities curriculum to *something*. And it has all been identity bullcrap. Formulaic. Unimaginative. And that's what I have been pissed off about. The complete lack of imagination in all of the public discourse I've been part of for so long. 

So mark my milestone readers. I am once again off the chain. Unleashed.  My mockery factor is going up. Which means I'll probably be able to renew my friendship with Sean Paul, the Agonist. Maybe now I'll understand him better. And maybe I'll be a lot more subversive than ever before. We'll see. 

An Intricate Question for Martin Amis

The good folks over at Goodreads have invited me to pose a question for Martin Amis. It's an honor I will do the dubious thanks of writing in longhand over here at Cobb. The opportunity to be drawn to the attention of the man I find to be one of the last and greatest of this generation is.. an invitation to which I will oversubscribe.

My interest in Amis is not coincidently related to my writing skeptically about the pursuit of religion here in the West in the Sun God Theory which is inspired in part by a story he wrote called The Janitor on Mars. I began reading Amis and other British writers somewhere back around 1990 when I got a little tired of T. Boyle and happened upon a journal called Granta. Or that's what I recall at the moment. Additionally of course, I was long tired of those more or lesss flat characters which were to be the role-monkeys for a man such as me, black and I wondered what there was worth conserving in all of Western Civilization. Reading Borges can do that. Since I was accustomed to reading out of school and out on a limb, picking up Amis wasn't difficult and was greatly rewarded. London Fields, Time's Arrow, Dead Babies, Money, Einstein's Monsters, Heavy Water and finally the book that broke my life in two Koba the Dread. 

Amis has the great advantage of good company, something you rarely get without the right tackle in your box. And who would know what bait to use without hearing a sea story or two from the keepers of all that? It's not much fun reading directly out of the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. That advantage I percieve manifest in the company of men of wit and taste who actually try to be, unpretentiously, men of wit and taste. We over here have Woody Allen. I don't mean to complain much but Amis has had his headstart, the kind which obviates the heedless sensing and searching for a young man who wants to be something other than a rebel, a dropout, a sports hero, a billionaire or a gawdawful professional. We're connected by the language to the imaginations of millions, except the millions all watch TV and movies circumscribed by the vocabulary of an eighth grader; an American eight grader. I suppose that's why most of the time I'm listening to histories narrated by Simon Prebble. Somewhere in time, men were more than this.

So it falls to men of imagination who haven't had to hack through too many literary jungles to remind us of our possible virtues and our present failures. CYPHER: Gee-zus! What a mindjob. You're here to save the world. You gotta be shitting me. What do you say to something like that?

The rest of us, meaning me, are tired. After 4000 orgasms and 600 books. Meh, I'd rather compute. The adrenaline is not coming from those worldly pursuits. In fact, I think I was sold a bill of goods on adrenaline. It turns out that gin is just as good. So we read a bit of Martin and a precious few others narrowing in on something ineffable. But it's all too private and for me that's all it ever was. All the celebrity and community has been doled out to narcissistic sociopaths whose vices remind us to play it close to the vest and be happy that we're not actually James Bond, the last man. It's hard to be free. It's hard to be free when men of imagination stand in the margins society, when virtue seems idiosyncratic, when we need writers like Martin Amis more than they are able to save the world. 

It's YouTube that can remind us that the spark lies in odd places. Some kid plays the guitar, or stacks cups, or does the robot and you gasp. There are supposed to be writers like there are piano virtuosos, and we're supposed to mob them or at least wave a lighter. But I guess most people want to just dance and not read, and I suppose that's what has gone wrong. I would be more declarative but I'm not so sure as a man like Amis must be.

And yet I could not, for the life of me, find anything to do with The Pregnant Widow but fall asleep. Can it be that the days of men are numbered? Maybe it was just a bad book, maybe I've already exhausted my disgust for those enticements that were supposed to be so spicy to the Boomers and so have no use for it said in more righteous English than my own.

So after all that, my question is simple. Are we not men? What will it take to move us off our asses? ls David Petraeus the last among us all that both think and act? Is there room in our world for men, or has our imagination on the whole, failed us? Are we unpledged ronin to a dead daimyo whose legacy is lost to the wind? I have lived my entire life in an era whose greatest hero is a man who made us to stare at perfect metal and glass boxes - the titan who built the wealthiest company on the planet by making us all look at i- stuff. A kingdom of introversion. A black hole of short attention spans spewing Hawking radiation of bucks to the Martyr of Silicon Valley. 

But the question is more particular. It is about a Europe about to crumble. It is about an America, that like a nuclear gas turbine, can run on anything that burns. Neither seems to serve any principle well and the unprincipled way of life seems to dominate. We all play act at manly virtue fearing we can never really afford it.  Except.

Except in our reading. In our listening for inspiration. In hearing the moment in a sweaty apartment on Houston summer night of the echoes of 20 million dead told true in the wake of the madness that inverts society and is born in the bearing of the man who must finally face death unafraid. Oh yeah, there's that. But how to make it public. How to make what we know to be true be the living way that rules the day? 

I suppose we gather our courage inches by inches, word by word and action by action.

Is that a question? 

Martin Amis is coming to America. Or perhaps he is here, I don't read the New Yorker or watch Charlie Rose enough to know. Is this the last refuge for a man who knows what freedom should be like? Here's the hard question. Can we rely with much certainty that we will rescue from mediocrity that which ought to support the best in us, or should we hack it out in the sticks? Does the Western city still work? Is it a metropolis or an aggregation of oddity? This seems to be a conversation I can only have here at midnight from my desk. Do you see my problem?

 

 

 

Ellis Cose - 18 Years Ago

(from the archives - Jan 1994)

Finally read the book. 
Definitely a precise one to put next to Ishmael Reed's "Airing Dirty Laundry"
Cose is a well measured writer and not prone to excess. The matter of fact
way he writes this book almost makes me think twice about the title. He
seems to be one that wouldn't even care to use that one. Of course, 'rage' is
necessary.

He comes from the perspective, it seems to me, of a man who you might
think of as a buddy of Earl Graves in that there seems to be no indication
or question on his part that the middle class and the upper middle class
as traditionally defined is the place to be, and quite naturally that 
respectablility comes from that, period.

His employment of examples such as this well recognized journalist or
that highly successful (in wall street journal terms) attorney is quite
the last person who should feel any anxiety about their place in society.
These types tend not to be extraordinarily articulate about their existential
dilemnas and some of the dialog left me somewhat unmoved. Nevertheless,
the degree to which their case is made left me with an unshakeable 
conviction that these folks are indeed suffering. This is not some relative
suffering which could be called a disaffection, rather it is an intense
anger and dread - a haunting feeling - they possess that clearly goes
to their core as employees and often spills over into their personal life.

As he spells this out clearly, it becomes more and more evident that a
number of myths Americans hold about the workplace are simply false and
that the passage of blacks through this maze makes it clear.

Cose does a fine job of separating this from a general spiritual crisis
I would have expected this book to be about, but this is very much about
how blacks feel as *citizens*. Cose names names, quotes figures and goes
around behind what less painstaking posers have passed on as fact. He 
takes no moral high ground rather speaks politely about the lack of
intelligence normally intelligent people display. This is a particularly
effective way to deal with people whose influence doesn't go away. For
example, he deals with the popular assertion that blacks in the middle
and upscale classes should be responsible for black criminals and that
racism will not go away until (justifyably) until white folks are not
afraid to walk the streets. This held by Koch, who goes on to justify
white fear of black men.

(largely borrowed without permission)

Moynihan read James Q. Wilson into the congressional record as he said
that the "best way to reduce racism... is to reduce the black crime
rate"

'Koch contend that "eventhous who feel deeply about discrimination 
against blacks...feel estranged from the black community" as a consequnce
of "black violence." According to Koch's [and Jared Taylor's] calculations
blacks, who make up 12% of the poplation are committing 45 percent of
violent crimes. And since "for the most part only maels are committing
the crimes of violence...roughly 6% of the population is committing 45
percent of the crimes." Even if one accepts Koch's statistics, one must
judge his conclusions perposterous, for it would mean that every black 
male in America - the 6 percent in his equation - is engaged in acts
of mayhem. In other words, even black lawyers, accountants, teachers
and salesment who put in long hours at work are apparently getting their
jollies (during their lunch breaks, one supposes) by cracking hapless
innocents of the head or "wilding" in big city parks.

It is true, as Koch indicates that blacks account for about 45 percent
of those arrested for America's violent crimes. But it is not true that
most black males are vicious. FBI statistics show that blacks were
arrested 245,437 times in 1991 for murder, forcible rape, robbery and
aggravated assault. The country's total population then was just under
249 million, including nearly 31 million blacks and roughly 15 million
black males. If we assume that each arrest represents the apprehension
of a separate individual, blacks arrested for violent crimes made up 
less than 1 percent of the black population 1n 1991 - and just under
1.7 percent of the black male population (less, in fact, since the
aggregate figure of 245,437 includes [arrests of] females). In other
words, less than one-tenth of a percent of the population - not 6
percent - is committing 45 percent of violent crimes. These numbers are
not completely accurate, since the FBI population base is somewhat
smaller than the entire US population, and since it is not correct to 
infer that thoses arrested in any one year make up the total population
of violent criminals. But they are accurate enough to show the inanity
of implying that most black males are sociopaths.

To many thoughtful people, certainly to many blacks, arguments like 
Koch's seen not only absurd but fundamentally unfair. For they suggest
that discrimination against an entire race, if not exactly sanctioned
is acceptable because of the sins of a relative few. They also suggest
that blacks who do not commit crimes bear a special responsibility for
those who do.

...These days, no serious thinker in the field of criminal justice would
propose that the answer to violent crime among whites is for up-and-
coming white executives to make crime prevention their special mission.
Nor would anyone propose, for instance, that until the murder rate
among twenty-something whites was made equal to the murder rate among
seventy-something whites, all young whites deserved to be ostracized
and scorned...yet that is precisely the the approach many reputable
people are now recommending in regard to blacks. And it is a most
percnicious proposition. To contend that we should penalize all members
of a racial or ethnic group because some members are engaged in egregious
behavior is to enter into a pact with the devil whose evil has no end."

(end of borrowing)
That's one of my favorite set of paragraphs...

Cose inputs his own experience in a manner that doesn't pander, very much
to his credit. Unlike some other writing commentators on the scene, Cose
seems to keep his wits about him and doesn't extrapolate his own experiences
to project psychological states onto would be perpetrators and victims.

Cose handles with some wit and steadfast aplomb a number of scenarios we
have all (at least in this forum) heard of and dealt with...

Affirmative Action, redlining, Stephen Carter, Shelby Steele, the next
generation(s) of racial gridlock, Marge Schott, Derrick Bell, the glass
cieling. But most critically and importantly, Cose lays to rest the myths
that race doesn't negatively affect blacks who are not 'underclass' and
that 'things are getting better'.

mo' later

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[email protected]                                                    harambee!
[email protected]
                   'When I was in the torture chamber, my thoughts were fixed
                    on my own campaign for liberation and not on what to me
                    seemed the idiotic fixations of my oppressor. Thus all
                    their questions and comments are obscure to me now.'
                                                          -- Samuel R. Delany

 

 

The Purpose of Identity in Fiction

Not the monkey but my friend George makes something of the shock some New Yorker readers got from discovering that Tweeters were dismayed to find that Hunger Games protagonists weren't all white.

You can't make anything of this without considering the purpose of fiction writing itself. The catch line in the New Yorker article is the last - "“But then again, whenever I read something, I wonder, ‘where can I find the character who represents ME?’ ”. 

The way multiculturalists have politicized the 'problem' of identity in fiction is to respond with a call to a new representational flowering of fiction writing that must be both exceptional and broadly accepted. It does so with the presumption that there is an element of unambiguous oppression in such writing not deemed appropriately representational. This underlies the assumption that there is something *wrong* with the idea that internalizing a 'white' character is somehow detrimental for a reader who is not nominally white. The irony of course is that it can only be detrimental when the principle of modernity is erased - that principle that says human experience is human experience and not essentially racial. If my terms are somewhat off, it is because I associate and equate modernism with humanism. 

The multicultural argument is familiar to me. I have made it myself, but in service to an agenda of cultural production that was conceived to be both one of anti-racist and ethnic chauvinist intent. While the first component is admirable, the second cannot be ignored. I don't have the time nor inclination to demonstrate the extent to which multicultural literature and literacy are chauvinist but rely on the reader's familiarity with the term 'positive role model' when considering the ethically correct sort of fiction. 

But let us consider what I consider to be the neutral case - which is that authors need to make fiction writing with respect to the complexity of their characters fit into a more rainbow like spectrum. Even the color of that rainbow is biased by the American black/white polarity and other politically charged dimensions of the multicultural agenda. If you doubt this, consider the reaction you would expect if you were to suggest that authors would do just as well to make complex characters to be Czech or Eastern Orthodox. It's all rather well to consider that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation makes its point until you try to consider a Ludwig Bemelmans Foundation making a similar point about childrens books featuring young Catholic French girls like Madeline. And what, pray tell are we to think about Bugs Bunny? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the fact that we learn and internalize stories and lessons from talking rabbits? What about curious monkeys? 

If it's OK to learn from an animal, is it OK to allow readers to make racial and ethnic identifications of characters read from text? I mean is there anything that tells us quite specifically what Sherlock Holmes looks and sounds like? I've read several of Conan Doyle's books and I'm still stuck with the images I had gotten earlier from TV. And now I particularly favor the spin I get from Guy Ritchie's two films. It is difficult for me to imagine Robin as anyone other than Burt Ward. Is it OK for the reader to make what they will of a fictional character? It seems to me that the best way to answer that is to consider the alternative, which is that an author must make racial and ethnic choices for all of their characters and the reader must not stray from that interpretation. That doctrine seems further than any other in the pursuit of anti-racist aims.

It is my opinion that the best thing is done by the 'counter' fiction which is unselfcounsciously that, but it's difficult to unring the bell of political correctness. So I expect to find those black Americans writing about people they knew personally, before there was any call in the literature for such characters, to be what's best - for what it's worth. Surely those readers feeling the oppression of absence or over-simplification would find libraries worth recommending. As one who has used the multicultural argument, my recommendations are as good as any. What I have found then, is a set of a few books that makes the case, the implication being that there were so many others which ended up being a waste of my time. And then of course even as I wrote the recommendation, it was in the context of a cultural and political project, this blog. 

I am finally apt to say, paraphrasing Hugh Laurie who was likley paraphrasing someone else, that there are exactly two types of fiction, good and bad. I think that what has stood the test of time as good is all we should concern ourselves with when it comes to picking what to read and how to assess them. It is only when our heads are full of that which we know to be good that we can say with any certainty whether 'the character that represents ME' is a a good character at all. After all, if ME is so damned important, then ME should write a book about ME.

Drag Out the Dickens

This evening I watched Jean Reno in The Professional with my two daughters. It's movie night. I'm figuring out what I might do to deal with foul language. I'm unsure.

When he was about 12 I told my son that he shouldn't curse - not because cursing is bad, but because he doesn't have a real reason to curse. You shouldn't say that your life is fucked up unless your life is fucked up, and he doesn't know what fucked up is. And so while there is something to respect about Jay Z, I do puzzle about my daughters' choice in music. They do have the decency to listen to it out of my earshot, as do their addictions to the petty bullshit that runs through pop culture. I was listening to Fishbone's 1991 single "Bonin' in the Boneyard" and recall that their record corporation wouldn't even let them say 'funky ass bass'. Times have changed for the worse and people curse, but we really don't know what fucked up is.

His name was Charles John Huffam Dickens and he died during Reconstruction. I have yet to determine how much it might have been on his mind, and when time permits, I will. He was certainly one of the coldest eyes for detail in the detrius of civilization of the English speaking world; he could not have been immune to the charms of American slavery. That is, for what it's worth, our darkest chapter, and for all that - it's not so damned dark. The darkness of Russia's 20th century is so overwhelmingly ghastly that it's difficult for me to give us any credit for spine, though you must admire our nerve. 

So while I poke around for the equivalent of Conquest to plumb the depths of Chinese depravity, I do know what I want to get from Dickens - some flavor for the shit smell of London in the days when workhouses were the norm. I want to get the feel of what it's like a half to a full order of magnitude more socially polluted than what's going on here in the - Dont Tase Me Bro Generation. I know I ought to have a gun or two for my dumbbell strategy, but knowing when to shoot is more important than knowing how. 

You see, every day on Google Plus, middlebrow America is pissing and moaning and yes, cursing, about how depraved American society is. I ain't buying it. The ATM networks may charge you 3 damned dollars for an out of bank transaction, but they still count the money out right, and maybe we ought to pay that much for the convenience. In fact, maybe I'm going to join the ranks of those selling leeches for the boneheads seeking immortality. It only makes sense that for Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, and two dozen others - all of their works can be had for free or close to it. But if you want tickets to see Justin Beiber, well.. I'm not buying the expensive insanity or Linsanity of going Gaga over anything. That's for the young, bored and illiterate who, with any luck, will be out of a job and learn to live without all the disposable income competing in our economy for people with brains. What was it that Neal Stephenson said about the best minds of a generation writing spam filters?  Our society is not depraved, it's just lazy and uncomfortable. But that's an opinion as of yet uniformed by the details of the Dickensian.

Not for long. 

London, like the Holy Grail's Monty Pythonite who the Witch turned into a newt, got better. And all of the blather going on America's lightweight media, both old and self-righteously new, sounds to me like the illogic of the ensuing discussion about whether our society is actually a bitch of a witch. To much free fucking speech and no real thinking. 

How bad was London and how did it get better? I think maybe Dickens has the answer I'm looking for.

 

Harold Bloom and The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages

shamelessly stolen from Pops

Without fear of contradiction or being accused of unwarranted hubris, I start here by saying that I have something in common with the illustrious and famed critic, Harold Bloom.  First, we were both born during the 1930s.  But as it is commonly known, there are countless (albeit dwindling numbers of) folks who can claim that spirited decade as the point of their earthly entry.  Second, our surname begins with the same letter.  However, “B” is a common letter for last names, so that’s no big thing.  And, third, we have/had an attachment to Yale University.  I was born at Grace-New Haven Hospital on Chapel Street, a few blocks from that esteemed institution; and grew up on Dixwell Avenue in the Elm Haven Housing Project, a scant mile north of the university.  Still, geographical proximity is a no brainer and few flags can be waved because of it.  Anyway…now that our questionable but unplanned kinship has been duly established, I’ll move on to other concerns.

I must say that I consider myself to be a late Bloomer in that my familiarity with Haughty Harold [and I say this with unfettered admiration] comes many years after reading other lesser known literary critics.  But Bloom has a special “touch” which I find appealing, unique and off-putting all at the same time.  I am kinda sorta sadly nearing the end of his well known and widely read The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages.  Tradition and common sense might suggest that I wait until (finally!) closing the well-worn cover of the tome before attempting to craft any kind of assessment or review.  But I am thoroughly convinced that neither his style, reach, wisdom nor attitude will diminish by the time I reach “endgame.”  If nothing else erudite Harold Bloom is nothing if he isn’t consistent.  I find reading him as much a labor of literary love and just plain and simple labor.

Bloom has a way of more than casually hinting that those who venture to read him should [make that must] likewise read extensively or, at the very least, be vaguely familiar with the broad sweep of literature that he has absorbed over the years.  I am convinced that this is an all but impossible undertaking.  I am furthermore convinced that he was reading prenatal hieroglyphics on the lining of his mother’s womb well before his rush into the waiting world – or perhaps some waiting New York library– on July 11, 1930.

A personal contradiction and wake-up call immediately came to my mind after reading his early (p 16) observation that “…literary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elitist phenomenon.”  If there was/is anything that I did not and do not need it’s the well-intended machinations of elitists of any and all genres.  Years ago I had read with measured albeit real disdain, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know.  It galled me that someone would have the (excuse the intentional redundancy) gall to actually construct a list of what one should read in order to be – and I did not excuse the expression – culturally literate.  It stuck me as paternalistic on the one hand and highly presumptuous on the other.  But I suppose that’s another review for another time.

Fast-forwarding to bombastic Bloom, I self-queried: “Why am I wasting my time with this Elm City academia elitist dude?”  And I had and have no sane and sensible response except that there was and is something about what he does so well that I continued to pour through his insightful and enlightened pages with no small measure of struggle coupled with appreciation.  To my surprise and delight I very early learned of Bloom’s virtual worship of no less a literary giant than William [the Bard] Shakespeare.  One cannot even casually think of Harold Bloom absent frequent and unabashed reference to Shakespeare.  Whether extolling the contributions to world literature of Emily Dickinson, Dante, Milton, Beckett, Neruda, Proust, Molière or Cervantes, Bloom magically and intentionally weaves his views around the accompanying indispensability of – what I will designate – William the Great.  My conscious bias comes from an earlier not-to-be debated list of Hillhouse High School English class readings.  We read lots of Shakespeare.  Period!  And in those days, the word “canon” was better understood as the “cannon” that would be leveled at the posterior of students rebellious enough not to memorize and, on occasion, act out what the Bard had penned centuries before.  So, in terms of relative familiarity, Bloom most competently treads on turf that isn’t all that strange or unattractive to me.  He places an unbending emphasis on originality, which can also be viewed as unprecedented creativity.  For example, he says  Shakespeare:

 “…wrote the best prose and the best poetry in the Western tradition”

and that he

“…will not make us better and he will not make us worse, but he will teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.” 

Wow! Not even parents can achieve this result!

Harold Bloom cannot be faulted for readily falling into line with some all too often accepted and unchallenged contemporary thinking on topics or persuasions.  He will and does find himself at odds with those in and out of academia over such matters as social justice, multiculturalism and most assuredly feminism.  He doesn’t spend much time addressing these issues but then neither does he back away from his occasionally combative convictions.  Whether this makes him a stubborn literary elitist or the skilled provocateur of a good argument is the choice of the reader.  Just as it is the reader’s choice to “buy into” his predispositions on a headache-inducing list of authors and insights, which he takes for comfortable granted.

To his quasi-credit – at least from my perspective -- Bloom asserts “the Canon will never close” even with the caveat that “it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders.”

 There is a small measure of contradiction to his non-stop journey through the broad literary landscape when Harold the Hun offers this morsel of reassurance to the reader:

 “No one has the authority to tell us what the Canon is.” 

 I cannot help but wonder then what good purpose is served by some 500 plus pages of Bloom making a rather convincing case to the contrary.  Perhaps hanging out in New Haven for too long has its New England downside…a well-earned Yale PhD in tow notwithstanding.

Finally, one might ask, is Harold Bloom “worth” reading?  Well, to quote someone Bloom probably wouldn’t, I say:

    “You betcha!!”

Chris Kyle: The New and Last American Soldier Archtype

The first chapters of American Sniper are a perfectly suited introduction to the aw shucks, God, Country Family school of American kickass manhood. It is mind-bendingly simple to understand exactly why this nation will continue to be greatly defended for generations to come, because anyone who reads Chris Kyle's book and knows where Kyle is coming from (I do!) will recognize in a heartbeat the kind of Texas cowboy we will always have millions of. Kyle himself would never tell you that he's a one man army, but he is just the kind to fill the top ranks of the best army on the planet so long as it's funded.

There's only a little to say about the metastory here, as I will be slightly intrigued but much informed and entertained by the story to come. That is that you see in Kyle's story, the new soldier - the prototype by which humanity will be defended for generations to come.

He is not an outsider. He is not from the dregs of society. He loves his father and his family - his is not desperate for approval. He rises to the challenges of defending his country, and it makes all the difference that he is a volunteer and that this remains a free country. So long as our military institutions retain their transgenerational links, then they will be the fuel that will power militaries of the future. We must hope and indeed pray that armies comprised of such free men will remain victorious from here on.

It's corny. It's easy to understand. Because of that we are most fortunate. We retain the formula. He's just a fighter and he hates to lose. He understands that he has become a weapon and he is serious about his patriotic committment. His mission is a job and he is remorseless and relentless. He understands the deal of morality he has made, and he values an American life first. That is the kernel of it. The rest is training and experience, and now his knowhow is plowed back into instruction. That, my fellows, is a professional, and that is what we want our military forces to be. 

Are those Raybans or Oakleys?

A Cobbian Library Tour

Library Tour from Michael David Cobb Bowen on Vimeo.

I don't know what's up with these video services. All my stuff plays perfectly natively, but when they stream from Vimeo or YouTube the audio gets ahead of the video. Short videos aren't a problem but the longer ones seem to baffle the streamers. Oh well. Better than nothing, I suppose. Most of these books, btw are fairly old, which is to say they reflect where my head was at (with the exception of the technical books and the spy books) from around 86 through 96. 

I think next time I'll go a shelf at a time and get a bit more into detail.

Updated Bookage

I rarely get a chance to talk about the books I read. It has never been a way for me to socialize. Maybe the whole reason I'm online is to find the people who read the same things I do. Anyway, I'm slowly seeing myself disengaged from various aspects of online society - after 18 years, it's finally getting tiring. To wit - the books.

Ringworld
I now have read this in the original and see the ideas of many other sci-fi guys out of disguise.  It must have been absolutely mindblowing back when it was originally published. Smells very 70s with the idea that humans could be bred for luck and that luck would dominate physics, also that all civilizations are constrained by population and that they wouldn't bother to control it. Fascinating that an advanced civilization could terraform without superluminals but be wiped out by a meteor. Sounds preposterous to me. I mean if you can harvest a solar system's worth of planets, how does a meteor destroy your greatest creation. Aside from that bogosity, it was very enjoyable with such a small cast of characters. But 'Puppeteer'? Really?

Steve Jobs
As said elsewhere, it was just a must read with only a few big surprises. The coda is worth remembering.

Napoleon's Wars
Never quite finished it. Never got what I wanted out of it which was some idea of how the Napoleonic Code came to be, what it meant and how the ancien regime was swept out. But still some very interesting stuff to put alongside what was going on in the Americas at the time.

Reamde
Neal Stephenson makes an action movie. Enjoyable. But my buddy Lee and I agree that The Diamond Age lies unsurpassed as his greatest work, followed closely Anathem and then Cryptonomicon. The entirety of the Baroque Series is magnificent, and I re-read it all this year. Too bad there aren't many folks to talk to about it. 

Micro
Crichton's last book is probably his darkest yet. He just inexorably butchers academics with the most hideous details. It is not a cautionary tale but one that makes you supremely glad that you are not stuck with the dilemma of the main characters - which is that they have been shrunk down to half-inch size and let loose on the slope of a lush Hawaiian rain forest. You had no idea that bugs could be so vicious - but that's the point. We romanticise nature without acknowledging the destructive nature of life itself. Dog eat dog is child's play, and Crichton and his ghostwriter deliver with a wallop. 

Endurance
One of the most enjoyable adventure stories ever. I think I have discovered something about myself in this one. It is quite refreshing to see another culture so closely related to our own that rewards the kind of knowledge which has fallen mostly out of favor. 

If I Never Buy Books Again

There's a hard drive at auction for five million dollars. It has a torrent-load of fiction and music and software and other random digital junk obsessively collected. A lot of it is good; I've checked out the list. Most of it, I think, is destined to fall to a value of zero. Now that 'everybody' knows, perhaps only a few will be interested. As I checked, there were only about 4 seeders for the $300,000 collection of English fiction. 

Last evening I remembered an old dream of mine which was to become a digital archivist. Once upon a time, I wanted to be the steward of all the richness of African American cultural artifacts that could be put online. I am satisfied at this point, however, that is unlikely to be very useful considering the dilemmas of funding housing for the actual items. Still, there must be some intellectual properties out there worth scavenging and hoarding. But I think that those that do exist are unlikely to be made digital.

This past weekend, I visited BooksOff, the new discount retail meatspace bookstore. The First Daughter and I perused the shelves of $2 Compact Disc recordings. I found exactly 3 worth considering having browsed a complete aisle and told the tale of how all record shopping used to be so risky and tedious. I much prefer the contemporary method, and really don't have all that much nostalgia even considering John Cusak's High Fidelity. 

My latest audiobook is Gayle Lynds' Book of Spies which opens with a murder at the annual meeting of the most exclusive roundtable of book collectors on the planet. They quiz each other on the existence of rare histories. 

It has been a while since I've visited the Gutenberg Project. So far as I can tell, they keep chugging along, exploiting the gap between lack of attention, liberal arts nostalgia and intellectual property law such as it stands today. If we could compile a list of the people who have read A Pilgrim's Progress, how many would there be? In my spelunking of Western Civilization (what's worth keeping?) I keep finding little but the Long Tail, and most people bedeviled by arcane obsessions or shallow zeitgeist. 

I'm preparing to write a book review of Michael Crichton's last book, Micro. But maybe I won't.

Having a life of material comfort is indeed its own reward, but our society doesn't quite know what to do otherwise. There is no Europe for guidance, there are no cherished traditions, there is no canon of literature serving as a framework for the Examined Life. I may have to reconsider the University with my new understanding of its hermetic nature. I think most people of my inclination are in relative hiding. More's the pity.

All that goes to say that it is no longer worth my while to spend money on those artifacts which I and a few others might treasure but hard times and twisted priorities have devalued in society. I shall pinch pennies and torrents and await the New Victorians.

Umberto Eco & The Moral Superiority of MOBI

There is none. .mobi is a brand. But it is less a brand than that it is a format, except when it is not. Consider the following:

Short post – more of a call to arms, to discuss burning point for many people today. That is, What Platform to choose to purchase this iconic Steve Jobs biography eBook. I am completely at a loss – what could have been price war between heavyweights in this category, turned into a paralyzing situation for consumers (like me) preventing our purchase completely. My interpretation is that Publisher insisted on same pricing across all platforms! What Gives?

Anyhow, let’s recap the contenders

• Kindle – Interestingly, I don’t own any – and yet I have Tons of options for reading Kindle books (iPhone, Tablet, PC, Mac, etc) and already own many books on the platform. This is truly an achievement, which I applaud Amazon for!
• Nook – I really have nothing against them, but I have virtually no prior books on the platform and no dedicated eInk reader. Still, their readers looking better all the time and they caught up to Amazon with Nook software reader being available on most platforms. Good job, B&N!
• Kobo – Once partner of failed Borders, is an independent maker of eInk devices and the software platform. They are also present on many platforms and ironically I do own that eInk reader I picked up at Borders closeout. We use it once in a while, but who knows about long term prospects?

It is possible to care about this, and Ari does. But I think he cares like the guy at Uniroyal who is convinced that you will appreciate your vacation more if you drive there on his tires. 

Content is king. On the other hand, as a reference book, the Jobs biography is not particularly referencable. This should matter much more to students, in which case, Amazon has already proven to have the right foresight. In fact I'm going to make a prediction, and please rememeber that I said so.

If the internet has value, it is only partially because of content, but mostly because of network effects. That matters most for consumer networks for the exactly the same reason television commercials and super bowl ads. It provide markets.They are delivery vehicles for consumer markets. Period. 

But when it comes to knowledge. Amazon has the superior strategy over Google. To get the same amount of knowledge, Google has to surf a whole lot more web. Amazon already has it in a book. 

Now let us presume that you are some sort of savant, or just extremely well-read. The marginal value of a Google search decreases in proportion to the amount of knowledge you actually already have.

Getting back to the original question: Likewise the more well-informed you are, the less you will care to look backwards to what you already know. Therefore the marginal utility of the openness of the digital publishing platform is less significant. 

Somewhere, I have read about a conversation between an admirer and Umberto Eco. Upon seeing Eco's vast library, the admirer was shocked to find that Eco didn't put much stock in it. "I've already read those books". What was interesting to Eco was what he had yet to read.  From Eco's perspective, the format that mattered most was the internal format of his mind. 

Oh. And for the record, I got the audiobook.

Factoring The Universe with Lieibniz

Quote of the Week

Leibniz answered. “For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme — of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme — pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again.” “But what if it can only be understood by a mind as great as God’s? What if we can only find what we want by factoring twenty-digit numbers?” “Let us understand what we may, and extend our reach, insofar as we can, by the making of engines, and content ourselves with that much,” Leibniz answered. “It will suffice to keep us busy for a while. We cannot perform all of the calculations needed without turning every atom in the Universe into a cog in an Arithmetickal Engine; and then it would be God —” “I think you are coming close to words that could get you burnt at the stake, Doctor 
Stephenson, Neal (2009). The Confusion (P.S.) (Kindle Locations 5837-5846). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. 

I do indeed love Neal Stephenson's writing. 

Big Mother

Over the past couple of weeks I have been indulging the warrior sentiment. The last book I finished was the new SEAL Team Six memoir of Wasdin from Georgia. Just before that was the extraordinary King of the Vagabonds and now I'm a third way through the latest Tom Clancy. Last night I watched True Grit. All of this is making me wonder what the point of feminism is in our civilization. 

True Grit has one of the most extraordinary characters I've seen, Mattie Ross a fourteen year old girl out to avenge the murder of her father. Smart as a whip, crafty and headstrong she is a gal of grit herself. But in each of her bold actions in the Wild West, there is a power behind her words that come indirectly from the barrel of a gun. She threatens with a lawyer. She employs with money. She understands her claims. True Grit does a great deal of justice to the genre of the Western which,  I think my generation never learned. We have outsourced the word of the warrior to Bruce Lee and his descendants, the Kung Fu film. Steven Segal never made it. Jet Li did. And so what we mistake for something Asian, courage, honor and determination is something we had in Westerns all along. I didn't quite know it until I started watching the best John Wayne films, the finest being Red River, and in this, the Coen Brothers remake, the workings of honor and deceit are sparkling. 

Mattie Ross was not made for the trail, nor for hunting down fugitives in Indian territory. She was made for exemplifying and enforcing those edifications our civilization and our human nature demands. Sobriety, honesty, thrift, industry. 

We have made another mistake. That is to call the tyrannical forces that array to stifle our freedoms in masculine terminology. Our enemy is not Big Brother, but Big Mother. In every way that we might conceive as artfully as the Coen Brothers have presented, a woman child leading two bickering bounty hunters on a mission of deadly revenge, we are reminded of the tyranny of order, logic and justice which is so often pursued against our lazy wills. There is no romance in it. It is as searingly compelling as the demand of a child for protection against monsters. 

There is something useful in us, I suspect, that resists duty. I am reminded of Aaron from Titus Andronicus. The world is upside down often enough that slacking is equally often the best protector of our souls. Moral discipline is exhausting and its rewards are inconsistent. We too should be so inconsistent so as not to grow completely weary of seeking those rewards. 

It has been said that a soldier's experience of war can be accurately characterized as long periods of interminable boredom interspersed with moments of extreme terror. That sounds about right. And so too it is not romantic. We have been inundated with myths of warrior mentalities - of constant vigilance. Let us put that myth to bed. There is nothing for it. Constant vigilance is the enemy. It is paranoia. It is Big Mother.

Instead let us be the periodically brilliant but generally sated lion. Let us enjoy our rest and let things go to shit while we snooze. We'll wake up and clean up, but now we relent. I think it is more manly. 

I'm on vacation this week. 

King of the Vagabonds

I have decided to return to the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. I have determined that the only reason I really like science fiction is because the kind I really enjoy make me think of history. Historical fiction is my favorite literary form. So perhaps I am now officially an old man.

I don't feel old. I feel slow, and I see no good reason to hurry up, because I know what's on the other side of the mountain. It's another mountain. 

Stephenson's Quicksilver, which I read long ago, is now available in audiobook. So I'm wasting my money on that old mountain. But now that I have a peasant theory, the misadventures of Half Cocked Jack Shaftoe are all the more fascinating. In fact, I think he becomes much more of an archtype in my mind. 

Fay Politics in the Never Never

I've become devote to the exploits of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden and have been trying to figure out something in the well-crafted stories. It is the transcendance of the value of life.

You see, one of the things that happens all of the time in these books is that Harry Dresden and other mortal humans bump heads with creatures that do not die. So I keep wondering why the immortals bargain with humans and find them worthy opponents. The immortals obviously have access to orders of magnitude more information / knowledge / wisdom, and yet with scorn and disgust, they deal with mere mortal humans whose powers are so much weaker. Doesn't it make sense that if you could not die or be permanently injured that you wouldn't particularly hesitate? 

There may be somthing engineered in the narrative of author Jim Butcher that suspends our disbelief, and perhaps there is no need to be logical when we're reading fantasy, but then I came upon an insight yesterday listening to a particular passage. It had to do with the idea of the infinite politics in the Never Never, that netherworld where the magical immortal creatures live. Without the consolation of death, nothing focuses the mind of eternal beings. When you have all eternity to exist, you might very well waste 100 years being a bitch just to be that. You might learn to connive everything possible without the use of intellect, but soley on physical beauty for 200 years. Or you might decide that revenge and dark perfidy is all you want to do for a millenium. 

As a programmer, I am always put in the position of telling people who don't know what I think they need to know about the limits of systems. But that doesn't stop them from wanting what they want, nor does the absolute no of a product limitation stop the politics from trying to squeeze blood from a stone. One might be the general the president wants to defend and indefensible position on the battlefield, and you are just one mortal general in a line of hundreds of men who want your job, none of whom can produce the impossible result. But when you're immortal, you don't need to care. 

When you're immortal, politics are infinite. Every faerie, ghoul, ghost, zombie, and vampire can be what they want, when they want, made real and solid because of their desire. It is the only the drama of desire that animates the spirit world, the laws of physics can be ignored when the time horizon expands.

The other thing I think I figured out was that mortals had to be interesting because they were either foolish of poignantly prescient in the extreme short period of time they have, relatively speaking. It makes each of their limited decisions that more important. Each of their 4000 orgasms more meaningful. All of their energies and discipline directed towards something that had to be transcendent. 

There's a lot to this - exactly why immortals would care about mortals. Perhaps in the same way men care about dogs. 

Harry Dresden After Six Books

Harry Dresden is an instinctual hero, and he is so because he survives. He is a  blockheaded, stubborn, self-absorbed, overpowering man guided by simple instincts - to protect the weak- who is beleagured by his burden and often overwhelmed. But he manages to triumph against all odds by being resigned to his mortal fate. He is not angry, nor vengeful. He is not often misunderstood. He is only awkward from having been orphaned and has come to love the people of the city of Chicago as his own without them acknowledging his gifts and many good deeds. He treads an arcane path having been born with a mystical talent and has nurtured this talent and stretched it to his limits through trial by fire, and he has saved the world. You see, Harry Dresden is a wizard, and his talent is magic.

I speak of the character Harry Dresden whose sixth file, Dead Beat, I have just completed to the narration of a cat named Marsters scripted by a dude named Butcher. Marsters *is* the voice of Harry Dresden and Butcher is the mind, and they have created a combination of fiction that is as emblematic as any in the literary sci-fi world. 

Dresden started off as a sighing, beleaguered mystical gumshoe who stumbled around within the well marked boundaries of the hard boiled detective novel. But somewhere around the middle of the third book, he suddenly burst beyond those boundaries into a ragged but elegaic prince. He not only got the girl, he saved the city, then lost the girl. He not only resisted temptation, he faced his own deep psychological weakness and admitted his desire for the prize offered. Dresden has metaphorically died and been resurrected into the same tired bones and in each episode has reached new heights and depths. Surely there is a narrative type at work that keeps the drama ripe for human consumption, but there is an unremitting yet slowly twisting core that surprises us with its simultaneous ability and lack of depth. In almost every way, Dresden is on the verge of being anti-heroic, but he is unable to restrain his desire to do the right thing. He is the man who never had a woman or children, who never managed to be a father and consequentially he is inevitably and shamelessly drawn to save them at his own peril. He is the man shouting the loudest "Women and children first!", adopting them in their moment of terror against any foe. 

Harry Dresden is an American urban gothic practitioner. He seems to take no great pleasure in eating or drinking, except in drinking in the curves and features of the odd number of beautiful women who plop into his world, but almost never into his arms. He's not excited by fast cars, deep contemplation of the universe, art appreciation or spectator sports. He's something of a loner. A guy with a cat who lives in a basement with no electric lights, computers or stereo equipment. He harbors suspicions about the people who protect him. He pisses off the few that understand him, and he of course always confounds and destroys his enemies, the nefarious characters of the Never Never and their minions who defy the Laws of Magic.

One could say that the Dresden series is like Harry Potter for grownups. The challenges facing Dresden have gotten exponentially more difficult and consequential each outing. There is more death and destruction with Dresden responsible for more and more each time, but Dresden has become more complex and faces greater internal perils each time. In Dead Beat, for the friendship of a woman who seems to be his last friend, Dresden makes a deal with a metaphorical devil - he delivers the equivalent of Dr. Mengele's research to a literal queen vampire. Unlike Potter, Dresden has no arch-rival he is fated to confront. In the end it may be himself. He finds himself offered no honor or official position in which he can see dignity bestowed. Instead, he merely survives the calamities he gets worked into either by his own hardheaded morality or conniving parties in conflict.

You see Dresden is a member of the White Council of Wizards but has been on something like a lifelong probation for having killed his own Jedi Master in his youth. It was self defense, for his master had gone over to the dark side. The White Council is now engaged in a global war with the three courts of vampires, the White Court of life draining seducers, the Red Court of bloodthirsty shape shifters and the Black Court of nightcrawling monsters. Dresden himself is partly responsible for escalating the millenial conflict and has all types of prices on his head from various factions. As he has survived, he has been exposed to the most extraordinary circumstances, even for a wizard, and events have consipred to have him in a position to have been offered eternal life. Literally strung up in a dungeon with a knife at his throat he was offered the choice between death or treachery in the form of one of the original thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. He touched the coin and locked it away, but its spirit has been working away at him, giving him the unexpected dark power of Hellfire. Moreover, he has discovered that he has a brother and that brother is an expatriate of the White Court of Vampires. With each episode, Dresden is exposed to more and more dark knowledge and must find ways to use it in an ever escalating war between great powers with whom his relationship grows increasingly complex.

Dresden is the superman in the middle, and he knows too much. He can't win, he survives despite of himself and he cannot get out of the game.

Bad Blood

Virgil Flowers. It doesn't sound like a detective's name, nor is the character described by John Sandford one who looks like a detective. I often imagine that he looks and acts rather like James May. A bit pensive, more definitely spiritual, and at ease with the ladies. Although I'm not sure that May is ever completely at ease - then again neither is Flowers. He is after all a detective.

He does a fair bit of detecting and as Sandford writes more for Flowers, his books move past hard boiled into something much more subtle, and yet he never fails to kick us in the pants so that the book flies along to a satisfying conclusion. You couldn't pick a better theme for the times a tale of a religion gone bad and the distinction between privacy and secrecy.

What if, Sandford asks in this detective story, there was a small church somewhere in America suspected in murder and child pornography? What if they had only one person who ever left the fold, who was hard to find, and afraid to talk even if you found him? What business is it of any lawman to go snooping around with no evidence that points to other members of the church, but you suspect them?

It's a good story. I continue to read Sandford.

Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly

Iain Banks' latest Culture novel 'Surface Detail' is on the street and in my Kindle. I'm a few days and approximately 28% into the book and the stage is set for the drama to come. It has moved along rather nicely and gives us yet another view into Banks' galactic historical drama, and it is satisfying although a bit lighter than I recall his other books. Despite the fact that I have already visited one of his Hells, perhaps there are even murkier events to come.

The ambit of this venture into our galactic future involves the afterlives. Banks whose 'Notes on the Culture' I have just discovered has gone and done something rather bold. He has held up the idea of Hell as an option. What if your civilization was so advanced that it could preserve all of the thoughts of a human being into such an arrangement that you consciousness could be maintained essentially permanently? To put it crudely, put your mind into the Matrix and keep your self alive without the goofy provision that if you die in the Matrix that you are actually dead. Would your civilization choose for there to be Hell as well as Heaven? Is there actually a good reason for Hell? What could anyone possibly do in life to deserve eternal punishment & torture? If you had godlike power, or if your civilization could contract out for a godlike power, why would you create, staff and maintain an inescapable Hell?

With this premise, Banks brings us into a story that seems to be headed for some smashing revenge - a woman who essentially comes back from the grave to avenge her own murder; the murderer being the rough equivalent of an evil Richard Branson, the most powerful, wealthy and charismatic man on his planet. But of course it's much more than that, since this man has become significant in the multi-civilizational *virtual* war over the morality of Hells that now threatens to become a real shooting war.  The anti-Hell side lost and the Leviathan Culture, although anti-Hell, decided not to interfere in the virtual war. Now that a real war is possible, the rules may change.

Banks' Culture, which I have been considering at length now reveals the author in his experimental purposes. As a large set of fictions, his Culture novels reveal more and more of the optimism of moral intellect which is part of the essential design of science fiction.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.

The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.

It only takes a slight tweaking of mind to understand the possible beauty of an evolved planned economy. After all, isn't this what working for the best company is all about? Nobody doubts that an enterprise such as Steve Jobs' Apple Computer exists in a free market, but inside of Apple the economy is planned. Your salary as a programmer doesn't have labor market volatility inside the company, only outside of the company. Inside the chaos is reduced to with reasonable, planned limits. Apple is a great place to work because the plan is generous and wise - that Apple as an entity must compete at a higher level doesn't mean the external dynamics must bet transcendent. The ability for Apple to exploit the market does not translate. The same thing applies to Google, Cisco and other large, cash rich and employee friendly corporations which are now the most successful in America. It is as Banks suggests the post-scarcity future of space-faring civilizations will be, chaos outside but socialism inside. (Cue Intel jingle).

Granted, there are a number of assumptions that must be engineered in order for such things to be held together in his fiction. I might come around to scrutinizing them after I've digested the whole of his Notes. The Culture series is so damned entertaining, suspension of disbelief is entirely enchanting and easy. Especially for gearheads like myself. But I expect to understand with greater capacity why it is that scientists and technologists tend to be more than ordinarily compelled to beleive in Leviathan. With an future that might be as stunningly attractive as life in the Culture it's not hard to see why for surface reasons, but the deeper reasons are more revealing, and I believe that Banks has considered most of them. I call this the Virtual Utopia Problem:

The problem of the virtual utopia is then, a dilemma of choosing whether or not to believe if human progress is inevitable. The proper life, is it to be pursued with the assumption that we enable the achievable utopia? Or should we relent and live in the relative utopia of today?

If it is possible to alleviate suffering through the establishment of a better society, is it more noble to accept those betterments achieved by prior sacrifice or to make additional sacrifices in the attempt to make what's already good better still? At what point does it all become hubris? Should we make plastic surgery affordable for everyone, so that everyone can look beautiful, or is the very idea a conceit? Should we make university education affordable for everyone, so that everyone can be informed and smart, or is that chasing rainbows? Should we strive to improve air quality so that nobody will have their life cut short by lung disorders or are we playing God here? One man's trash is another man's treasure, on man's floor another man's ceiling. And it's all here, all now, merely unevenly distributed. We have a scarcity problem. Some people are already living in utopia.

I pose this as a problem of 'utopia' rather than as a problem of class because I am thinking of the possibilities of a post-scarcity world. Americans, for example, have no scarcity of calories. Pollan spells it out. As the nature of work and learning is undergoing massive change, we cannot necessarily depend on our current understanding of class. There are conspiracies afoot to make many things post-scarce. Surely the upper classes will see them first, but as they pass through society, they lose their class significance. As they become commodified, they lose their marginal significance. Like ATM cards. 30 years ago, almost nobody could get cash out of the bank on Saturday. Electronic funds transfer is a commodity today. So is Viagra, something men have killed every beast, plant and fungus possible to find.

Banks solves this problem by removing human agency from the dealings of galactic sized problems. He steps us into a world where the Leviathan is already established, the wars already won, the technology already developed and the human already acclimated to the utopian regime long ago accomplished. His Leviathan is the community of Ship Minds that run the Culture. He takes the term 'good ship' to the extreme. Godlike all-knowing minds that manage the affairs of billions of humans and sentient creatures in giant volumes of space and still have time to speak to you on an individual basis exist in his world. They are powerful enough to destroy worlds, and yet ethical enough not to read your mind without your permission. They are fundamentally respectful of millions of years of history and yet work democratically with peer-minds. What's not to love? This is profoundly enhanced by the understanding that humanity had something to do with their creation millions of years ago. It makes us creators of our own God and it validates on a galactic scale that the sort of intelligence we possess is indeed part of the singular sort that requires moral consideration. Our intelligence is our soul and the nature of the universe's laws (at least to the extent that humans can exist in its various space-time dimensional combinations) is consonant with our will. We are indeed on a path of destiny.

Whatever that path, humans will be humans, and our nature is well taken care of in Banks' imagination. There seems to be no avenue of human behavior he has ignored or given short shrift. Given what the Culture is, his situation of humans in it is perfectly natural. That is why his take on internal socialism is important. Once again to his theory:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

This idea was also encountered in some recent sci-fi I read. The premise was reversed. Some powerful creature had reduced humankind to living on a large flat disk whose gravity and enormous size precluded space travel, global positioning or communications. It was the perfect prison.

So space remains the final frontier with the greatest promise of liberty, there has got to be enough Uranium out there, perhaps planets full, that someday we might use to fuel the dreams of trillions of humans. Until then, we read on.

Himes of Memory

I've been reading like a mad man in the gap between projects, and catching up and reorganizing. A thoughtful reader added to my Goodreads list reminded me of Chester Himes. And so I wrote:

Chester Himes, now that was something I could barely stand. I read 'If He Hollers' just through a couple dozen pages and could take no more. He so brilliantly made me angry, and brought to mind so much of what I felt that I couldn't take it. There have been books like that - too painful to read. And Himes was the last of his kind that I read in the days before the LA Riots, before I left Los Angeles at the age of 30. One image stands in my mind of the man described by Himes, of the black man so angry that he drank hard liquor alone in his room and only got up for the fresh breeze of the open window in order to throw empty whiskey bottles at the white men in the street. It was the dead end of despair I know I was not born for, and so I left Himes alone.  

There is that canon of black American literature I read once upon a time. At the beginning it was so very frustrating. Intensely painful it was as I tried desperately to connect with any black literary scene. It was part of my fête manqué out of technical school and clueless about the higher elements of the humanities. When I decided to be purposeful in reading contemporary black American literature I first found Gloria Naylor's 'Women of Brewster Place'. I purposefully didn't want to read the older authors that I had known - no more Richard Wright, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones-Amiri Baraka, Alex Haley, Ralph Ellison. Nobody old. Nobody ghetto. It left almost nobody. It took me almost forever to find an author that actually spoke to me in a way I wanted to share in joy and pride. It took a lot of long hard looks inward and outward. I didn't know what to expect - I didn't know how my literacy would serve me. I didn't know what to make of what I learned. After a few years, I became comfortable with exactly that. It took from 1989 to 1993 to make peace with that itch. I didn't give it up finally until 1996. 

In the end, I was most satisfied by Ernest J. Gaines, Jean Toomer, Darryl Pinckney, Paul Beatty & Toni Morrison. I can't describe in any small way what they meant. They were each an Emerald City that pointed my home, each a patch of blackness in serious literature I needed to see and experience, each a solid stepping stone in a garden of forking paths.  

Himes sat out there like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goins and John Edgar Wideman. Just all blue collar and urban, so unlike my father, the soft-spoken Connecticut Episcopalian photographer, Sierra Club hiker and part-time poet. It was impossible for me to accept stories of the mean streets as real literature, as impossible as it is for a Hebrew to accept Baptist ministry as Gospel. It all may have had the ring of truth, but not of destiny. 

I wonder how much literature has served an existential purpose for me, and yet some part of me resists the question. I know who I am and who I must be, but it is ever the case that I am engaged with writers far more than with neighbors. Sooner or later, I find a part of myself waiting for me in the words of strangers. What will I find in Tolstoy? Another part of me. 

I reflect on that aspect of my generation immersed in a struggle for self-reflection in the arts and in the mainstream. It seemed so god-awfully important and significant and momentous. Just standing in line for a Spike Lee movie or a play by August Wilson or a book signing by Toni Morrison was portentous. There was a day in the 80s when George C. Wolfe snarked about the world's last 'mama on the couch play', and I think that time has come and gone, then again I've only seen one Tyler Perry. 

An Intriguing Idea I'm Supposed to Fear

One of the cool things about being on the conservative side of life having previously been on the progressive side, is that I have developed senses for the narratives that are supposed to appeal to me as the Peasant I am. Which is to say that since I get propaganda from MoveOn.org as well as RedState.com I'm familiar with the diatribes.

Just a bit ago I tripped by the names of Barthes and Levi-Strauss. By way of my now fully developed conservative spidey senses, I know that I'm supposed to be wary of such French intellectuals and all of their mumbo jumbo, especially Barthes who is one of those guys who talks about coded speech, which is something Progressives like to say we conservatives do when we open our mouths. Be that as it may, there is something I think I like about Structuralism, being a programmer and all.

The last book I finished was a re-read of 'The Diamond Age', and as much as folks like CD hate that I prefer to get my moral instruction from literate fiction instead of social science white papers, I remain addicted to excellent prose and imagination. Which I think rather disqualifies great swaths of post-modern mumbo jumbo and academic publications. I suppose if I could bother to get on with Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments then I might be immune to any tedium. My point however is that one of the striking premises of 'The Diamond Age' is that there is a book that adjusts itself to the young reader and immerses them in a set of instructional and interactive videogames of her own life and education. It is a book to be read over a series of many years. Its adaptation by 50,000 girls known as the Mouse Army fuels a righteous insurrection that begins the overthrow of a corrupt regime.

The interesting thing to me, of course, is the book itself as a mutable lesson, a sort of sandbox RPG of the self full of moral tales and intellectual & moral puzzles. That is not so much the actual story of The Young Lady's Primer, but it's close enough. Barthes for his part in this intrigue is the popularizer of a Russian by the name of Vladimir Propp who authored a book called Morphology of the Folktale. This book is like a Dewey Decimal system of fairy tales, wives tales and all other sorts of basic lit.

There's a joke about a group of comedians who are close friends who know all the jokes being told in the country. Since it's bad form to tell somebody else's joke, this is something they must know. When they get together, all they have to do is tell the punchline and they laugh it up. After a while they come up with a numbering system and all they then have to do is speak the number to illicit guffaws. After a couple years of this, they start to sound like accountants. "42!", Hahaha!. "607!" Heeheee.

Propp is the expert in this field of identifying the skeletal structures of folktales / narratives and categorizing them by type. Wouldn't it be cool to have all of the world's folktales translated into all of the popular languages?  With these frameworks, you essentially have a narrative creation machine. It only takes a little imagination to see that there are endless variations on various themes that can be used for just about any purpose. The human mind wants to hear stories. Propp shows the universal framework upon which all such successful stories work their magic.

-

Having just finished Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbows End'. I find some of that a bit obscured by the number of characters he uses. Of course I listened to the book rather than read it, and it seemed to go on a bit overlong. The extent to which the intrigue went was not quite deep enough for my fandom, but was nicely blended with a broad cast. There were enough real people in the book to give the events adequate dramatic investment and there was a fair share of twisty stuff, nicely playing on the old crypto-terms of Bob, Alice and the Rabbit. 

But the main event of the book, and a constant theme, was the extent to which seemingly spontaneous events might garner global audiences and the monetization of same based upon an adhoc virtual marketplace of labor and consumption was a bit too much. One could think about 'Rainbows End' and 'The Diamond Age' as two ends of a spectrum of market speed and assimilation. In Vinge's world, propriety is reduced to almost nothingness in the events of ordinary people. They live in a cyber-reality-based contest world where people make commercials based on creative tweaks of prior aired commercials. It's a world of long-tail aggregation in the extreme, where competing worldviews don't really exist except as matters of avatar style.

In Vinge's world, the poet is an outcast, isolated and thus seeks the comfort of isolation. Power extends only from military necessity, and entertainment market share. The subversion of network security is the great crime. But surely Vinge didn't mean to describe the whole world in the ways that Stephenson does, consequently his characters are a bit more resilient. It's a good enough story of character in a strange new world. 

The point of bringing in Vinge is to consider whether or not it will matter that variations of the enumerated themes of folklore will be human generated or not. The prospect of literary Singularity exists if the voice of the author becomes subjugated to the sweep of the plot within the context of the finite world of the morphologically proper tale. That's where the rubber meets the road. If the author ceases to matter, and all we do is come up with more interesting avatars who do more dramatic things or 'creative' things in the context of the narrative, then that's when we lose. It won't matter if books are virtual or real if that happens. Just like it doesn't matter if we read Harry Potter or watch the Harry Potter film - so long as Rowling disappears.

So what's necessary is the human bit of wrangling over the context of creation. A successful critical thread is the thing that humanizes literary production. What astonishes us is the wisdom of the creator, his grasp of not just morphology but the human condition, and that is gotten through understanding the context of his will to create. This will always differentiate those who write in service to the individual from those in service to the mass market.