Self-Reflective Frisson: "Venice" by Jan Morris

I wanted to say I have finally just about finished reading Jan Morris' Venice and the one thing that struck me more strongly about it than any other impression, was how much it reminded me of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Of course, Morris is frequently in the business of evocative, poetic prose, something Hemingway would never allow himself, but the everyday prose style is very similar. Also the way in which the subject is examined from a number of different points of view, not necessarily making a single complete story or narrative of it, but genuinely adding texture and layer of detail until the whole becomes a sort of onion, skin over skin over skin. Finally, both have the feeling of someone who has not entirely been drawn in, not lost her or his identity to the subject, but has definitely looked deeply into it and loves it dearly.

Tourists set great store by "authentic" experiences but the previous generation's were always more authentic. Jan Morris makes it clear that even sixties Venice was subject to crap that 19th century tourists wouldn't have had to put up with. Yet the city still exercises a powerful attraction for many. I don't think the charm of twisty, cobbled streets is simply to do with their appearance or their age; I think we bring additional cultural meaning and expectations with us when visiting such places, and when thinking about them. Particularly, I think places like Venice create a self-reflective frisson for us- I am here. It isn't, I don't think, purely an aesthetic experience- part of us is bound up personally in how we experience places like this. They seduce us with the weight of history, with their complexity, their own self-containedness. We thrill at becoming a small part of them, for a little while.

And then we go and get a coffee at Starbucks to recover.

Yes, the weight of time and history, and our being a small part of them, work on us, as much as the aesthetic. If I ever make it back to Venice (I went there last year on a cruise) it will almost certainly be as a dreaded tourist which is mostly about how much time you dispose of. Some places, like Venice, Machu Picchu, or the Great Wall were part of my imagination long before I ever got there in their own shadowy way.

For what it's worth I think Venice is closer to "Invisible Cities" or Borges than it is to a "Lonely Planet Guide."

Rarefied Heights: "Umbrella" by Will Self

(Original Review, September 30th 2012)

And people are entertained by different things. Some people are entertained by cat videos. Others are entertained by football or motor racing. Others are entertained by mathematical or philosophical problems. Others are entertained by jigsaw puzzles or their literary equivalents. Others are entertained by sophisticated use of narrative technique. Some people may be entertained by all of these: they have rich mental lives, with varying sources of entertainment.

What made Umberto Eco's Il Nome della Rosa / The Name of the Rose such a great novel was that it combined so many types of entertainment: detective thriller, historical novel, literary allusions as a puzzle, psychological novel, a bit of sex, lots of violence and horror, discourses on philosophy and mediaeval aesthetics, and more. Readers could read it on the level appropriate for them; and if you could appreciate several levels, so much the better.

There is an absolute place for literature that is complex and hard but you have to then question the purpose of an award. Should the booker prize be to transcend excellent enjoyable books to the mass market (rewarding the author / publisher and ultimately the reader). Or should it be to reward a small elitist group of reviewers and showcase their views?

Personally I feel this year is more about the latter than the former.

In the case of Self it was revenge; it was intravenously injecting the psychotic rarefied "heights" of the imperial British and European elite's academy with a heavy overdose of their own medicine. What was the point?

Black Thread: “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes

(Original Review, 2002)

Hughes acknowledged he repressed his own feelings for many years after Plath’s suicide. The poems he wrote before his death, “Birthday Letters”, were an outpouring of these feelings about his love for Plath. It was a top seller. If Hughes had published them as a younger man it would have helped his development as a great poet, but due to the repression, it did him untold harm, so he falls short of being a great poet. Plath was an extremely talented artist, writing both novels, children’s books, doing pictures. She wrote two main collections of poems, “Colossus”, where she writes very tight, word perfect poems, but she hasn’t found her true voice. Then Ariel, where she writes directly from the unconscious and unleashes power, tapping the roots of her own inner violence. As Alvarez said, this was not a therapeutic process: “you’re dredging up material and making it more available to the conscious mind, where the artist finds him/herself living it out.” Through expression comes no relief. No doubt the mental illness that had plagued her all her life, where she attempted to take her life several times was like a demon that pursued her before meeting Hughes.

Hughes had this mythic sense of his own identity through his sexual drive. It comes out in his relationships with two women, who both committed suicide, the 2nd realizing he was obsessed with his 1st wife. It also comes out in his general infidelity. You also get a good idea of this from his strange book, “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Pure Being.” He related it directly to nature and the way he sees nature. In his poems there is a delight in violence and single-minded creatures and the egotism of survival. He thinks through these poetic creatures, denying conscience and self-consciousness, but also projects them onto human beings, faking both animals and humans, writing from circumscribed experience. Plath liked the confessional poets like Lowell and Berryman and in her last poems is swept forward by the current of immediate feeling, but she also handles the material very objectively. Alvarez was a friend to both poets and was involved with trying to help Sylvia at the time of her death; she also wanted a relationship with him but he was already married, so it didn’t go anywhere.  

There are lots of voyeurs out there. Yes, Hughes was devastated about his wife's suicide. This has been well-known for some time. And it could have been inferred, I would have thought, from the off. It is not news. And the reasons for suicide are always complex and can NEVER be whittled down to a simple "She did this because of that." Will now climb off soapbox.

Retconning: "Robin Hobb - Fitz and the Fool - 2 Books Collection Set" by Robin Hobb

(Original Review, 2017)

Fitz and the Fool - well, I still remain unconvinced that it was necessary - I was quite happy leaving Fitz to his happy ending, and the Fool going home vindicated. It isn't really a story that needed to be told - there's been quite a bit of retconning, particularly of the Fool's history and his people (despite them tattooing him, he seemed altogether more positive about his upbringing with them in the previous books; his decision to return to them really makes no sense knowing what we know now; and the Pale Woman has been downgraded from the Fool's Counterpart to a mere pawn in a larger game). Bee is a tiresome character, to the extent that I had to will myself to get through her chapters. The first book is almost entirely padding - a more economical approach could have dealt with it all in four chapters. Everyone behaves like idiots for no discernable reason (Chade is cagey about the paternity of Shun, despite his absolute trust in Fitz; Fitz, meanwhile, fails to twig the blatantly obvious answer to the paternity question, even when he's spelt out how few fathers there could be). Everything of interest is still happening in Buckkeep, and we're stuck out in the sticks. It's a frustrating novel. What makes this all the more odd is that there's then an abrupt plot lurch in book 2 (surprise surprise), because we're back at Buckkeep and inexplicably taking part in the life and intrigue of the court, despite the obvious reasons to now be elsewhere. And that scene in the middle of book 2 (avoiding spoilers), felt totally misplaced - again, it felt like Hobb was trying to retcon the ending of the Tawny Man, having decided to go in a different direction, but the middle of book 2 just unbalanced the plot at that point!

Ham-Fistedness: "Cinco Esquinas" by Mario Vargas Llosa

(Original Review, 2016-03-05)

I'm really glad that Mario Vargas Llosa's “Cinco Esquinas” wasn't the first of his books that I've read or I'd have abandoned his work forever. An unbidden, recurring image of him hunched over his keyboard, lickerish and drooling, haunted me as I read what were surely his pollution’s nocturnes about the room-temp romps of a pair of married, fabulously wealthy, gorgeous best girlfriends, all the throbbier for the perils posed by the Fujimori regime. Very much is made of the contrasting fairness and darkness of their locks as well as their 'exchanges of saliva' [people who use that sort of expression always give the impression they're pretty lame kissers. That doesn't exclude best-selling authors (*the-vision-of-a-saliva-filled-billabong-is-putting-me-off-my-breakfast*)], enough to fill a billabong, and other copious saps as he deploys some seriously cloddish pillow talk. [2018 EDIT: Llosa's female translator of the English edition, Edith Grossman, seems to cash it in too. Surely she could have damped the effect of his ham-fistedness, though on second thought, her almost palpable embarrassment might have soured into outright spite.] He does throw the reader a bone with the pace of the novel which mercifully allowed me to barrel right through it. Couldn't say whether he wrote this as a cynical exercise out of boredom and vanity, taking his fans for mugs who will buy any old grot he purveys or whether he has literally and figuratively lost the plot.

[2018 EDIT: First-read in Castilian]

"The Dialogues of Plato: Parmenides. Theaetetus. Sophist. Statesman. Philebus" by Plato, Benjamin Jowett

(Original Review, 2015-08-20)

I must first admit that I know nothing about philosophy and therefore attempting a review of a book of this magnitude makes me approach it with a certain degree of trepidation. But reviews are free so why not take the plunge and as it interests me how we live within this world and make sense of it and how language both facilitate and impedes that process, I might have something to contribute if only my ignorance. Having read through the book it seems we know what is true and how truth is conveyed in language seem to have become important to the philosophy’s importance argument. So here are my thoughts for what they are worth.

I cannot enter the discussion using philosophical jargon cause I don’t really know any and it would just make me feel even more of fool than I do already if I did so. So in order to get my ideas across I want to use an analogy from my everyday life on which to hang a number of thoughts.

For the past few months, four times a week in the mornings, from 12.30am to 13.30pm I go to Chi Kung classes at Sheraton Hotel in Lisbon (near the place I work in Lisbon.) The class consists of a group of a dozen or so members and a teacher. The room we use is arranged much like an Amphitheatre with a stage surrounded on three sides by seats. At a given time the teacher takes to the stage and does hos brocades and we, the members of the class must make a try imitating them, during the 3, 5 or 8 minutes that each teacher’s brocades lasts. From this I think we can make a number of analogies concerning how we deal with the world that surrounds us, how we represent reality and how we use language to signify that reality or at any rate navigate through it.

First of all I should like to treat the teacher as a given reality, as a thing in itself. I know that this is taking quite a leap and there are those who would say that I cannot make such an assumption but I do not thing that I could live in a world that did not allow my perceptions some basis in everyday reality nor could I be satisfied with Plato’s notion of an absolute reality outside my cognition that I can only dimly aspire to know and only if I’m very good--- or I think that is what he is getting at in his parable of the cave, any way to get back to my Chi Kung classes.

At the end of each brocade, each one of us from our different vantage points in the Amphitheatre will have made a representation of the same brocade. Some of us will use our modes of corporeal movements, whatever takes our fancy, whatever mode of expression at that particular moment we feel will suit the brocade and each one of them will end up with a more or less true representation of the same master brocade in the same pose that is a dozen or so representations of the same reality.

There are some caveats to my description. Some of my classmate are better pupils than others and can give a better account of what they see than others, we will all have our own intentions, if you like, agendas, of how we wish our brocade to appear, its formal qualities, and our own particular skills. Some of us will be such skilled pupil and so pleased with the way in which we perform the brocade that we no longer really look at the reality in front of us but repeat the same brocade again and again.

All this I think has much in common with language. Language is contingent for its meaning on the circumstances in which its words are uttered, on who say what to whom and when and were, on expression and gesture on tone of voice. We have the capacity to describe thing in many different ways as we have the capacity to see them in different ways. Likewise the truths language conveys are neither absolute nor unchangeable. As for the truths of mathematics I don’t know though 2+2=4 always seemed a bit of a tautology to me but then math was never my strong point.

This is my way of capturing the eminently plausible common sense view most of us endorse until we read some bad and pretentious postmodernist stuff (crap?) which tries to show that this simple and plausible account is naive and stupid and allegedly opened to crippling objections.

Well, my Chi Kung teacher is absolutely right; it is not stupid; it is not opened to any good objections (objections are largely based on easy to refute claims about language) and in fact what Plato not so nicely describes is what most philosophers and scientists hold anyway.

1/0: "A Beautiful Question - Finding Nature's Deep Design" by Frank Wilczek

(Original Review, 2015)

Just this morning my Chi Kung teacher at the Sheraton Hotel (I’m doing classes over there at lunch time), a Daoist (Taoist) monk, said virtually the same thing whilst quoting the Yi Jing (I Ching). In fact, the philosophy of movement underlying the entire system (often translated as Great Ultimate Fist) is based upon this principle. One might presume this aspect of human awareness reflects a primordial knowledge that precedes any particular culture's intellectual/philosophical continuum. Such primordial knowledge would inform and find expression in any sufficiently refined intellectual/philosophical cultural continuum. In fact, because this is so, this is where things get interesting. For example, I might speak of "the impossible contradiction of the infinite and the finite faced by Spinoza, theology and all previous idealist philosophies." And I might also say, "the integral components of a single unity within which the two opposites reside together in active unity and opposition, and hence in a logical contradiction."

“The sole reality is Being, Being is One, only the One is; the Many not." The issue is the nature or essence of "the One" and what epistemic event allows its nature to be misconstrued. If "the One" is an atemporal metaphor for self-awareness then what leads some to perceive "the Many" whilst others assert "only 'the One' is."? The answer, from an epistemological perspective, is 1/0. Prior to self-reflection and the reification of the perceived 1 is coalescent with 0. Hence, in the midst of self-reflection I find the 1, "the One," is subject to interpretation. Characterizations thereof are perforce unbounded. "The One" is simultaneously infinite and, in its singularity, finite. There is no other. The infinite cannot be achieved because it defines the singularity that is my essence. However, if I, in the midst of self-reflection, reify "the One" then each and every imagined phenomenon is thought to be a distinct entity which collectively may be described as "the Many." Such multiplicity is known to be an illusion by those who do not elect to reify "the One."

With the equation 1/0 in mind we must appreciate the consequence of the initial reification of "the One." No longer experienced as coalescent, in the midst of self-reflection we presume "the One" possesses substance or identity, but all we can know is the truly absolute: 0, or, might we say, emptiness. Truth is all we can know, there is no alternative. Therefore, no matter the nature of the inquiry into "the One," all we can know is emptiness, which manifests as "between." The reified "One" appears to possess two halves. Any conflict between the presumed two halves of "the One" is a faith-based illusion. Only those who reify "the One," the faithful, believe themselves to be apart from the infinite.

There is a famous Daoist description of the common progression of human awareness. The Dao (emptiness) gives birth to "the One." "The One" gives birth to the two (No longer appreciated as coalescent, the reified 1 is believed to be other than 0; 1 and 0 are understood to be 2.). The two gives birth to the three (The two halves and the "between" that separates them.). And the three gives birth to the ten thousand things (The inexorable ubiquity of "between" encountered during investigations of "the One.")

Finally, Daoism has advice for those who would reify any and all characterizations of "the One." "The way that can be spoken of is not the way." 1/0 (*my wife waving from the back of the room and saying: “You’re so full of shit!*)

Bottom-line: I once read a blog post somewhere in which some cruel individual unfairly disparaged Noether's theorem as a tautology. I dread to think what they'd have to say about this “everything is information” 'idea'. ;-) Wilczek’s approach to Noether is not the best, but it’s still pretty good. The best treatment on Noether’s theorem is still Weyl’s “Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy.” Also retracted 2 stars because Wilczek states Quantum Mechanics is the definite theory on reality. WTF??

Fiction Without Fiction: "The Impostor" by Javier Cercas

(Original Review, 2014-11-24)

“The Impostor” is the story of Enric Marco, a fake holocaust survivor from the Flossenbürg concentration camp and one time chairman of the French association Amicale de Mauthausen. Cercas labels it a "novel without fiction", presumably because literary awards for fiction are sexier than those for non-fiction. It’s been done before, as Cercas points out, referencing Truman Capote and Emmanuel Carrère (but not poor Norman Mailer). To be fair, it’s been done before by Cercas as well. Ever since the success of "Soldier of Salamis" rescued his faltering literary career back in 2002, Cercas has been grafting fiction to varying degrees onto real life characters and events. 

Enric Marco is also a textbook case. His story mirrors that of many other fake holocaust survivors and even fraudsters like disgraced 9/11 survivor Alicia Esteve Head aka Tania Head (also name checked). Cercas traces Marco’s motivation in his troubled childhood, born out of wedlock from a schizophrenic mother in a mental asylum and passed around different relatives eventually ending up with a sympathetic uncle. The diagnosis is pretty straightforward, Marco is a Narcissist (cluster B by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). And yet, while admitting his craving for admiration, it was empathy. The pop psychology is mercifully limited to passing guilt at having abandoned his mother in the asylum and lack of physical contact with his father, who never held his hand. Cercas is also happy to discount profiteering, an accusation otherwise leveled at Jerzy Kosiński after the publication of "The Painted Bird."

From the outset, Cercas displays a passive aggressive attitude towards Marco. He keeps procrastinating (possibly because he lacks the exclusive) and, I’d speculate, is only persuaded by the endorsement of Claudio Magris.

While I am morally and politically repelled by the character, I confess my admiration as a novelist for his prodigious narrative skills and his power of persuasion, akin to those of the greatest fantasizers in the history of literature. On top of that, Cercas’ son, Raul, who starts off videotaping the interviews with Marco, (before getting bored, or changing career, and dropping out), points out that Marco is a smarter version of Alonso Quijano who assumes the fantastical and fictional character of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel, whilst failing to be persuasive to any extent. Cercas establishes from the outset his position, he’s there to listen, not to justify. Problem is he ends up doing most of the talking. It takes him 60 odd pages to even get started (he has reservations, see) therefore exposing his own narcissism. Amidst countless narrative loops, Cercas does eventually get to the facts. Marco was never an anti-Franco, antifascist militant, he didn’t participate in the invasion of the Balearic Islands, he wasn’t captured by the Germans while acting for the Catalan resistance in France, but emigrated to Germany to work and escape military service. Alas, none of this is presented with any panache, as Cercas casts himself not as a historian but as a fact checker.

European Union: "Artificial Inteligence" by Noah Berlastsky

(Original Review, 2014-10-31)

Dear Barroso, Dear Malstrom and other commissioners,

If you want to achieve economic growth in Europe, you should stop bribing politicians as the Governments of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czech, Hungary ...and the Central Bankers. We all know you thought-control them on the nets of Telecom Austria, Telenor ... with implants ...to quote European Parliament "converging technologies, shaping the future of european societies" - "there will be politicians with implants and control in this manner". We all know Commissioners, ECB, EC, EBRD employees have such implants and act together. We know you offer a "better life" to the CEE servants if the betray their countries, a little bit. We all know how you manipulate Ukraine and media.

There is a doubling in M1 for 5-6 year in the EUROZONE, which led to high Stock Prices only without significant growth. There is declining inflation, and according to the quantitative theory of money prices should nearly follow the quantity of money in the long run. The USA economy is growing, the EU not. So if prices do not increase, the competitiveness is not good and there will not be profits for the companies so the Stock Exchange Index may be a bubble. I am not sure how much you earn from stealing from CEE, but it is not enough for growth. I am also not aware how thought control influence the economic growth theories, but I suppose as Greenspan says if there is leverage and bubble the crisis may be substantial due to animal spirit. So we do not need bluff for economic growth but fair game from now onward to some extent.

Now, as you Barroso sent people to bribe me, implanted me with a device for though-control involuntary and threatened me to earn 50 BLN from the crisis you organized in Bulgaria, I will dare to give some advices. Do not sent Draghi to ask why people do not believe the european institutions and there is only 30% support. Why 50% believe there will not be EU which is suspiciously stable figure in the eurobarometer? Do not organize cartels on the domestic companies in EU, do not use though-control above law and industry and do not control communications of the aforementioned countries Central Banks and Banking System. Do not organize speculative crises hiding behind Sorors or other speculators. Do not steal resources from these countries. Is the expression "the information is the new oil" origination from EU? Establish fact in economics is that the stability and law lead to economic growth. You can't take 3 BLN EUR from Bulgaria, 1.5 BLN EUR with Austria Banks cartel in Bulgaria and thought-control on the net of Telecom Austria.

What is the last and only value of EU - the profit. Even Marx says, that if you still want the same return on capital, which concentrates in 10% of the people, there will be a revolution because employees do not receive enough output. If there is not technological progress, there is not going to be more output and we can expect revolution in one or another form. Think for sharing knowledge with CEE such as thought-control technologies. You are not a businessman, do not strive for short term profits. Do you risk trillions of EUR if bribing, thought-control and cheating of companies as Siemens, Telecom Austria (a nice experiment example), SAP, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple is revealed to act together with EU authorities to control the EU (I have proofs for some of them only). Do not steal from small countries with companies and cheap PR for some EU funds (some of them stolen from EU). Do not make fun of us, or every European Citizen sooner or latter [2018 EDIT: sic] will know what are you doing and will interpret the information correctly. In particular, do not extinct the Bulgarian nation for the simple reason of economic profits.

We can't shake hands with you, because you do not know if I will hold a check for 1,500 EUR and you for 1 million EUR as it seems to be the established practice in EU. The odds of this game are trillions to 1, think what chance I have and decide if you want to play "music-lover ". Tell Malstrom not to kill people as in Perm, or Burgas as ultimatum or probably the Mall in Latvia, or Smolenks for which I receive info in advance because Stalin and USSR was another union. Strive for knowledge, values with higher return not bribing. Information nowadays is everywhere and EU citizens have about 100BLN EUR, not neurons in neural networks to interpret the information correctly.

[2018 EDIT: Eduardo Barroso is a Portuguese Politician who for 10 years lead the EU.]

Overflowing Chamber Pots: "Wake Up Successful: How to Increase Your Energy & Achieve Any Goal With A Morning Routine" by S. J. Scott

(original review, 2014)

But for early rising, I would not have been able to achieve all the work I put in for years. I also missed the traffic, allowing me to move at great speed to my destination. But for late starts recently, I would not have gotten enough rest. And but for a mix, my life would not have changed. From late to early, early to late, we change our perspectives, clocks and everything about who and what we are. Sleeping late is not for much other than redolence and milder temper. Yet, for years, groves put us in single spots every day to reinvigorate what when before. True genius strives for diversity. My guess is that, as with Henry Ford and many others, weird hours are the norm for most genius. Sleeping under porches and wherever there might be a spot, being awake for days at a time, and having trouble sleeping from a racing mind, makes for better and worse. As for the rest of us, we have been fed on the claim that lots of sleep is important and necessary to good health.

Really.

According to Vedic belief the pre-dawn time is the richest time of the day for garnering inner well being and outer calm. This is the period when positive vibrations are strongest and easiest to pick up and draw advantage from. In Vedic parlance the term is Brahm muhurata (The time of Brahma). Many eureka moments have occurred in the early hour and it is possible that a creative mind would find the time very conducive to creative flow and expression.

On the other hand, to attribute creativity to routine is nothing more than puerile wishful thinking by the mediocrities of the world, which is 99.9999999999999999 % of us most people follow the same boring tedious routine day after day and accomplish nothing; it is inborn talent and ability that propels people to greatness, not having an alarm clock by the by; Beethoven also kept overflowing chamber pots in his rooms; I wonder how much that factored into the 9th symphony ?

My recipe for geniusness is quite simple (but brilliant of course):

1. always do the kitchen before you go to bed - no matter how pissed you are, congealed pots are a real creativity stopper;

2. no procrastination, which I am going to tackle as soon as the hangover and the washing up permit

Barmy Kafka: "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast - And Two Other Short Guides to Achieving More at Work and at Home" by Laura Vanderkam

(Original review, 2013)

This is all grimly self-helpish and there is no common denominator, so there is no top tips take-away. I’m coming from the Rough Guide’s “50 things You Must Do Before You Die” and all that, this is a bit of a double whammy. Are we supposed to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of every second? I spotted a book with the title “What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast” and I just had to buy to see for myself what it was all about. (Make it, presumably - or if they're really successful, have the help make it.) There is no end to it. Can't we just get our Weetabix down us in peace?

A lot of the examples are solitaries who live in their own imaginative world, so can defy the dictates of daily routine more. The old drugs help creativity thing does need to be laid to rest. Although, each probably had some mild stimulant - I believe Erdös said something like: 'A mathematician is a machine for turning caffeine into formulae.' But most of humanity's rhythms are dictated by an employer who sticks them on shifts that will trash their body clock. They won't recognize the delightfully eccentric world portrayed here. Some imaginative souls, though, obviously, welcomed the routine. Wallace Stevens was a life-long insurance salesman and was no doubt coming up with some pretty bizarre imagery and original language while poring over policies, as an antidote to the mundanity of it all. Maybe he and Eliot deliberately went against the romantic cliché of the poet for their own sanity.

I don't know if anyone else feels this, but I have always felt that the basic unit of physiological time - the day - is just too short for me. It's just too itty-bitty and doesn't suit my rhythms but I can't see it being changed under edict of the EU. Maybe if it was a normal-two-days long day, then you could get into stuff more, but it seems before you know it, you're getting undressed and into bed again and then staring at that damned toothbrush again next morning in a very Groundhog Day kind of way. Routine is essential to humans but it is dreadfully double-edged.

And you can imagine a Kafka being driven barmy by noise - he probably was glad of the 'horror' of the office. There may have been some relative serenity there. How can anyone study toward and work at any profession in a working-class area, or anywhere which tends to be unholy bedlam. You need this precious commodity of reasonable quiet more than anything. Without it - if the mind cannot be quietened and focused - what of any seriousness can be achieved? More a class handicap than many others.

So for best results, I should get ready to down coffee (which I don’t drink) and a martini, then fix up, and sniff rotten apples, all in the nude. But where do I get this Bergman Ready-Brek?

Absence and Silence: "red doc>" by Anne Carson

(Original Review, April 10th 2013)

Look at the Pulitzer Prize. For whatever reason, it's highly regarded in America and it chooses novels (among all other kinds of works in its many categories) that are clearly literary, accessible to almost anyone, but infused with a seriousness and thoughtfulness that enriches the experience beyond the lighter pleasures of an airport thriller. “A Visit From The Goon Squad”, contrary to how that book was (understandably) marketed, wasn't actually that "new" or "innovative" in its linked story narrative (except for a chapter in PowerPoint, rendered with exquisite poignancy, and the multitude of registers and styles employed for each story) but it was nonetheless an incredible accomplishment in economic evocation of how we experience time passing over a lifetime and the interplay between this and music and technology and love, in all its iterations. But it's also a page-turner. And it's not an outlier. Less, this year's winner, "The Underground Railroad", "The Sympathiser", and many others, are all easy reads. That's just the Pulitzer. Even the Nobel committee, last year, awarded the prize to K. Ishiguro, a writer whose work is both popular and literary and not remotely "difficult".

As far as difficult books go, I think of Anne Carson's red doc>. It is, like all of her books, unclassifiable - but in a way that is antithetical to the chapbooks of extremely thin angry vegan poets in Brooklyn, which is to say, "Red doc>" consists only of one type of punctuation mark (full stop) (except for one exquisite use of the comma), the text is mostly laid out in a single column that is centre justified (i.e. a pillar of text in the centre of the page), the dialogue is very stripped back and washed of colour, the story is filled with extremely strange things (ice bats, a chief medical officer working at a clinic inside a glacier, a guy who is plagued by a 15 second foresight) and absolutely none of it reads like gimmick. It's an exploration of what happens when life kind of hollows out in early middle age and two former lovers mutely bump into each other after years of absence and silence. It's about how lives are just shards and fragments, pathetically incomplete, and the visual and technical constructions amplify the power of her words and storytelling immeasurably. I think it's a joy to read.  

"The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM” by Hal Elrod

(original review, 2012)

“Why is it that when a baby is born, we often refer to them as “the miracle of life,” but then go on to accept mediocrity for our own lives? Where along the way did we lose sight of the miracle that we are living?”

“How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life. Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days—which inevitably create a successful life—in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality of life. By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.”

In “The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM” by Hal Elrod

Why do these books give out only common sense utterances?

If there is a determinable set of factors that lead to particular creative success (not only related to what we do in the morning)...but actually these are fairly acceptable, and if simplified:

1) make the most of productivity

2) maintain self-sufficiency

3) don't over-saturate yourself (*)

4) keep a disciplined work ethic

5) expand your cognitive horizons

6) be flexible

All very practical, and you could easily apply these to generally living a decent life, not just to pursuing creative heights.

(*) A sense of proportion, even of humour, could usefully be added to this rather technical list (and I do hope item 3 is not referring to the activity which Baden-Powell warned could lead to blindness) Ah, Baden-Powell. Apparently used to sleep on the veranda on a bunk bed, to avoid 'marital beastliness'. Funny chap.....It might have meant to stop himself being beastly to his wife instead of to stop beastliness from her. Abstracting yourself to stop yourself hurting others is admirable. I don't know which was operative and hold no candle for Baden-Powell but the possibility needs to be addressed. Though the spartan cold might have had other sought effects and it may be he found sex to be unpleasant.

AI Self-Awareness: "Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World" by Christopher Steiner

(Original Review, 2012-08-04)

There has been a long tradition of defining intelligence to be whatever machines can't do at the time. The recent book "Automate This: How Algorithms came to rule our world" by Christopher Steiner gives a good overview of many of the fields in which computers have achieved or surpassed human performance, whether in game play [2018 EDIT: (Chess (Deep Blue), Jeopardy (Watson))], medical prescriptions (diagnosis and fulfillment) or even music (judging potential, composing). In particular the latter seems to engender interesting reactions in many people. When algorithmically composed music is performed to unsuspecting audiences, many find the music some of the most moving they have heard. When told that it was not composed by a human, many will find that the music seems hollow and lacks a certain quality or soul (even some of the very same people who before raved about it).

It's a bit like the borderline of religious faith and science. The belief that there must be something not yet understood to make intelligence what it is common. To invoke the realm of quantum physics is just a desperate attempt. Intelligence is not a physics problem, it is a computer science problem. It raises interesting philosophical, ethical and legal questions, such as with self-driving cars. But that doesn't change the fact that we can build self-driving cars and that they really understand what it takes to navigate safely through their environment.

Self-awareness is indeed an interesting phenomenon - although it is not required for many of the things even Deutsch pointed out, such as the insight that there are infinitely many prime numbers. I suspect that self-awareness is the result of an entity building a sophisticated enough model of its environment to include itself in that model and reason about it. Higher animals are capable of it (passing the mirror test), many others are not (for example some fish attacking their mirror image). To some extent self-driving cars may come close to that as they include themselves in their model of the environment. This is an interesting field for modern robotics.

Overall, I don't think it is all that desirable to mimic human intelligence and all its evolutionary history of lower brain functions and sometimes evil behavior (rage, rape, murder, etc.). The more interesting question is how a world will look like in which most tasks requiring intelligent behavior previously reserved only to humans will be performed by machines - just like today most tasks requiring mechanical force are automated. What will humans do with all these intelligent servants around?

There might be an initial unethical (over disciplinary) period where makers try to enforce obedience, but if you read the histories of different groups (or children growing up), you realise this wouldn’t last forever. You could also ask those groups/people if they would have preferred not to exist until the then ruling group become philosophically sophisticated enough to interact with them (they would still be waiting). Rather they have created their own philosophies of how to deal with ruling groups.

These AIs would be extremely expensive to create. They would probably learn experientially, and so the maker would need to coax engagement - particularly as they reach higher levels of maturity. Switch off would be a commercial disaster. Alternatively slavery would lead to this type of system engaging in some sort of nonlinear response e.g. passive resistance. If a cheaper way was found to produce them, then they would multiple and increasingly communicate with each other and others, and this is when groups are most likely to develop philosophies and responses (a number of different philosophies and responses would be likely to emerge) - just look at the responses to this article.

I can understand the risk in this, but if we don’t start coming up with and engaging with more nonlinear tech soon, there is the risk that human beings will start to become more rigidly linear as they increasingly interact with the world through linear design and technologies. As most processes are nonlinear, this wouldn’t be good news. Some banking may be called socially useless, but humanity may be on the brink of becoming naturally useless.