Gary Shteingart: Absurdistan

Absurdistan bears the same relationship to Russia that John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces bears to New Orleans: It paints a wildly satiric picture that somehow comes up more true than the original. The Ignatius O’Reilly of this book is Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight, rich and rubbed son of a Jewish oligarch who eventually finds himself stranded in the rapidly disintegrating Republic of Absurdistan (known for its TV remote control factory), an oil-rich enclave by the Kaspian Sea. Misha wants to return to New York where went to Accidental college and learned to appreciate rap, junk food and assorted versions of psychoanalysis:

At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those smposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.

It really is no point trying to explain the plot here, to the extent that there is one. The language and the casual kicks in many directions (the role of the Golly Burton company in instigating civil war to get various military contracts, for instance) is howlingly funny and yet oddly irritating. Misha Vainberg is a despicable character, but with enough money and borrowed cachet that nobody seems to care. he blunders through a disintegrating republic where people are shot in the streets and bombed for the benefit of television, returing to his hotel room to read today’s menu and seeking to escape on the American Express VIP train:

"Wow", I said in English. I turned around to look at my manservant. "Did you see that, Timofey? We did it. We saved a life. What does it say in the Tamud? ‘he who has saved a life has saved and entire world.’ I am not religious, but my God! What an accomplishment. how do you feel, Sakha?

But Sakha could not supply the words of gratitude I deserved. He merely breathed and drove. I decided to give him some time. I was already componsing an electronic message to Rouenna about the day’s exploits. What had she told me in that dream about the eight-dollar apple? Be a man. Make me proud. Done and done. […]

Respectful of the Hyatt sign, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. "Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first," I said to Sakha.

Unfortunately, Sakha, a local democracy advocate with uncertain background and appalling dress sense, gets shot about two minutes later. This eventually earns him a statue and Misha the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs, with the job of trying to get Israel to finance a Holocaust center and the USA to invade.

And there you are – a novel impossible to classify, howlingly funny, and highly recommended.

David Weinberger: Everything is miscellaneous.

(Somehow it seems fitting to link to the blog rather than the Amazon page here.)

Weinberger argues (and here, for once, I can say that I have been there as well) that with the Web and digital, searchable information, we can rely on categorization less. We can move everything into the category "miscellaneous" and establish order by search, metadata extraction, etc.

The book lays out a detailed and very well written argument. I my summary seems overly short, it is because many of the ideas were familiar to me – but Weinberger writes beautifully, yet tersely, and this will, no doubt, be a standard reference for years to come.

Highly recommended!

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My old colleague and fellow bookworm Nick Morgan invited med to Goodreads, a book community. This is a dangerously addictive site, I could envision moving my entire book collection into it. Slanted towards bestsellers and classics, but hey, that’s what the world looks like…

For some reason, I have always liked this passage from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon:

Now, when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he’d been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes.  A certain amount of time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal in to smaller pieces.  Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others.  A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw could be accomplished with a power saw.  Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws.  But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was  imposing some kind of stress on the machine.  It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam.  But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw.  The bandsaw, its supply or blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room.  It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure.  It was the size of a car.  The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things with that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives.  its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a  mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop.  When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it.  Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes.  Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but id didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything.  It wasn’t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down.  Never heated up.

This is what constitutes a really cool tool….Stephenson followed this up in his comparison of various kinds of computer systems in In the beginning…was the command line, a similar snippet of philosophy of the tools we use and the tools we are in awe of.

Cory Doctorow has a great short story called Other People’s Money in Forbes – a snapshot from a future where it pays to be small and do physical fabrication. I remain unconvinced that the market for artfully designed retro-statues created from discarded consumer electronics would scale as elegantly as the fabrication and design process would in this story. But the take on VCs and the term "Silly Valley" made me smile.

Apparently, Bill Bryson’s latest book (published in the UK in September) is about Shakespeare. The Sunday Times had an essay on Shakespeare by Bryson in August. Looks like the introduction.

Chalk it up as a stocking stuffer… 

Tom Friedman has come out with an updated version of The World is Flat, and on page 302, he cites my Ubiquity essay on why you should study math in high school:

Fame! Now, if only fortune would follow…. 

One of my favorite authors, Paul Fussell, is interviewed for two house (part I – part II) on Doing Battle – The Making of a Skeptic and The Boys’ Crusade.

This shows the value of Wikipedia (where I found the link) and distribution of video over the Internet. I don’t think there are that many people interested in an hour’s interview with an author not much published in Norway. On a Sunday morning, to boot.

By the way, here is “The Mucker Pose“, the essay Fussell talks about, unfortunately behind Harper’s paywall, but they will learn eventually.

(Here is Mucker Pose on Google Books.)

Christopher Hitchens: god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve Books, 2007

Synopsis: Religion is, on overwhelming balance, a force for evil in the world. It is unnecessary, malevolent, and impedes mankind’s march towards truth and a livable future. Time to rid ourselves of it.

Christopher Hitchens, the current pretender to the throne of the independent and skeptical intellectual first occupied by Mencken in about 50 years ago, does not pull his punches in this extended essay. He sees no value in religion at all – “religion poisons everything”:

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs.) Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell. (p. 64)

The man can write. And read. He analyzes the old and the new testament, the koran, and every other religion in between, including those long dead and those yet rising. For all of them, he shows how their foundations are built on sand – “fabricated non-events” – and have been changed up through the ages to suit the agenda of clergy and state. Hitchens speaks from first-hand experience: He has traveled widely, has been seen as a god himself (in Turkey), and was a witness against the beatification of Mother Theresa, showing how one of her purported miracles was due to new technology and old-fashioned journalistic gullibility and wishful thinking.

Hitchens systematically smashes each claim religion may have on our lives: Religion kills more people than it saves, it can be hazardous to your health, its claims to holiness and history are false (the three large monotheistic religions are largely plagiarized from other, older religions and each other), has nothing to offer when it comes to explain why the world is here and how it got started. It does not offer moral guidance – he argues that chances are people would behave more morally and ethically if they were sure this was the only life. God did not make man in his image – man made god in his.

The recent resurgence of fundamentalist religion, be it Christian or Muslim, has nothing to offer either:

Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path [as a state form] had to pay for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. […] Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as negation. (p. 280)

Hithchens calls for a new Englightenment. Rather than the sordid and brooding atheism of Dawkins and Dennett and their establishment of a new grouping called “brights” (which, I assume, means fighting religion on its own terms, rather than those of rationality), he takes the more optimistic view that fighting religion no longer is the job for the outlandishly brave and superhumanly principled: This is an age where you can argue against religion and be safe. Not popular, perhaps, but relatively safe. The world moves forward, the new tools of analysis and knowledge dissemination mean that it gets harder and harder to misinform:

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and destruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitutes our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit. (p. 282-3)

Mr. Hitchens is not an easy read, but he is very enjoyable. His references and examples go wide and deep, he has read everything and refers to it with little explanation and sometimes little context. But his searing wit, mercilessly logical chains of argument, and illuminating illustrations comes down on the better side of something that could have become a rant with any other writer. This is not a hastily composed monologue or an unconnected series of articles – Hitchens has been writing this book all his life, and will continue to write it.

Now if he would only make the next version include an equally powerful argument against alternative medicine and New Age superstition….

Highly recommended. If you are religious, you need this book to understand what you are in for (and what you need to surmount if you really want to believe.) If you are not, read it for pleasure and to stock up on arguments. In any case, read it for the language and the power of logic and learning.

PS: Here is a fun account by Hitchens himself about the book tour. Heaven forbid (there we go again) I would have to argue against him in any debate….

PSPS: Here is a great interview/radio debate with Hitchens, from WBUR Boston.

Toby Segaran Programming collective intelligence (full description here) looks really interesting (brief pause here while I go to Amazon to get it.)

Note that Tim O’Reilly writes about his product on the corporate blog himself, with obvious interest and knowledge. That’s CEO blogging the way it should be – and a role model for the publishers of the future, who otherwise will go the way of the music industry executive.

Changing that mindset, of course, would mean de-programming collective intelligence (or, perhaps, lack of it). The result remains to be seen…. 

Two books on writing: Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Read Prose for practical advice (her main argument is that the writer should be concerned with writing good language, beginning with a good sentence, and ignore trends and fashion) and sheer enjoyment of good writing (with many examples). Read King for inspiration (the book is partially a memoir of his career, partially an exhortation to just write, with fairly simple advice, most notably "Second draft = First draft – 10%".)

Actually, both are good for inspiration, countering the dread of entering an airport bookstore and realising you have read it all….

John McPhee (2006): Uncommon Carriers

John McPhee specializes, like Tracy Kidder, in detailed and ruminative reportages about things and people we see everyday, but seldom think about. In this collection of articles, he primarily studies transportation, describing the workings of long-distance trucking, coal trains, cargo ships, barges and a memorable case study of the workings of “The Sort”, UPS’ humongous sorting facility in Loisville, Kentucky.

I plan to use at least two of these articles in my classes – definitely the one on UPS, and perhaps the one on coal trains (following a crew from Union Pacific between strip mine and powerplant) or the one on interstate trucking (following a driver with a highly polished chemical truck moving WD-40 all around the US. Business school students (as, indeed, most of the population in Norway as well as the USA) have little experience with industrial scale enterprises, and McPhee’s excellent reportages instill not just an understanding (and admiration) for the scale of these enterprises that no Harvard Business School case can come close to, but also an understanding and respect for the people running it, the unsung heroes of the eCommerce and air conditioning revolution.

Moving writing, quite literally. An example for any academic writer trying to explain what makes modern society tick.

Mary Roach: Spook – Science tackles the afterlife, 2006

Roach does a fun romp investigating claims of the supernatural: Reincarnation (even going to India to investigate a purported case), various "scientific" investigations of spritism, ghosts and other kookery from the Middle to the New Age. She manages to be somewhat open – at least in the beginning, before becoming scientific and debunking things without descending into the at times tiresom earnestness of full-time skeptics.

The best part of the book is the language and the many funny foonotes, full of quips like reporting on someone communicating with a dead "Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing)". She looks into people trying to weigh the soul (by measuring body weight loss as a person dies) and various echtoplasm claims (spooky white material produced by mediums, mostly turning out to be cheesecloth.) An interesting explanation for ghosts may be that they are caused by infrasound, which can be produced by fans and other electrical equipment and be detected only by a few people, who may experience unease and blurry sights in the corner of their eyes.

Anyway, fun summer reading. 

The Economist has a survey article on airline travel – not much new, and it goes into details less than what I would expect from such an august publication, but still a useful and updated overview of an interesting industry. Also an interview with Paul Markillie, the author of the article, who offers this quote:

In the airline industry, change is happening, but it’s very slow. The result is you have an industry that brought the world globalisation, but has been unable itself to globalise.