Review of Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”

This is an amazing book (a Christmas present from the little daughter; thanks, little daughter!). I will just post my review from bookwyrm here also.

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An amazing book; can I have more stars to give it?

5 stars

This is one of those very rare books that reminds me of what books are at some level all about. That makes me want to go about and knock about two stars off of 99% of my prior book ratings, to make room to properly differentiate this one.

It’s hard to say too much that’s concrete, without giving it away. I was closer to tears at the end of this than I can remember with any book for a long time. Not easy maudlin tears, but deep oh-my-god tears about what a universe this is.

The people are very fully people; the viewpoint character is not a person, but … well, that would be a spoiler also. But the viewpoint it gives her allows Ishiguro to say some amazing and touching and true and thought-provoking things without coming out and saying them (because nothing he could come out and say would say them so well).

Language cannot express truth, I often say; but what I mean is that it can’t explicitly express literal truth. Language, when it’s used with this much expertise, can and does express deep and breathtaking truth.

I need to go spend a few weeks processing this now, I think.

If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend that you should.

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… and you should.

December 26th, 2022

We made just 106 dumplings this year, plus another eight filled with Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese (that was the little boy’s idea; they’re pretty good!). This is a smaller number than usual (drill back into prior years here). The small number was probably mostly because single units of ground meat from FreshDirect tend to weigh just a pound, whereas single units from the grocery in prior years were more like 1.25 to 1.4 pounds. (Although, come to think of it, just where did we get the ground meat last year? Not sure.) And also because grownups tend to put more meat in each dumpling, perhaps. But in any case, we are now all pleasantly full, and the little daughter and her BF are safely back in the urbanity.

What has occurred? I feel like things have occurred, to an extent. I am more on Mastodon now than on Twitter, and if you want to keep up with the images I’ve been making in Midjourney and so on, you’ll want my Pixelfed feed. I listed lots of various of these pointers back the other week (and wow having every chapter of the novel as a weblog post makes it hard to scroll through the weblog). When Elon “facepalm” Musk briefly prohibited linking from Twitter to Mastodon, I actually set up a LinkTree page with my links.

Someone must have said “they can still link to Mastodon via Linktree” in his hearing, because he then briefly prohibited linking to LinkTree. That caused me to set up my own Links page over on the neglected (and in fact apparently pretty much empty) theogeny.com; I should put back all the stuff that used to be there sometime!

Note how ossum that Links page is! When you move the cursor over it, the thing that the mouse is over that you will go to if you click (if any) changes color (although I drew the line at having it bouncily change size the way Linktree does). You can look at the page source, and see the lovely hand-coded CSS and HTML. :) It even validates! (w3c seems to have a change of mind about validation badges, which makes me a little sad, so there’s no little “valid HTML 5!” badge on the page that links to the verification of the claim, but hey.)

That reminded me of the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton that I make in hand-coded CSS and HTML and JavaScript the other year; it vanished for a long time, even from my personal backups of davidchess.com, and I’d almost given up on finding it until I thought of the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine, and discovered that it had snapshotted that page exactly once, in February of 2012.

So after a bit of fiddling around, I can once again present the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton for your amusement. The page source there is also quite readable, I tell myself.

Note that many other things on davidchess.com are currently / still broken, although in the process of bringing that page back, I also brought the main page back, so you can see the extremely retro rest of the site (working and otherwise), including the entries in this (well, sort of “this”) weblog between 1999 and 2011.

Oh yeah, we had Christmas! That was nice. :) I got lots of chocolate, and the little (not little anymore) boy gave me a digital image of Spennix (my WoW main) dressed like the pioneer in the Satisfactory game, with a perfect “Spennixfactory” logo. And wife and daughter both got me books: “The Hotel Bosphorus” (a murder mystery set in Istanbul, my current Bucket List destination, and involving a bookshop, so what could be better?) from M, and “Klara and the Sun” (which I’ve been meaning to get, but never had) from the little daughter. (She thought that maybe I already had it and that’s why Klara is called “Klara” in the Klara stories, but it was as far as I know a complete coincidence.)

I’m working away at Part Three of Klara, after she leaves the clockwork world, but it’s slow going. I have an actual plot in mind that I want to illustrate, and I’m using a different graphical style which necessitates a different Midjourney workflow that I haven’t quite optimized yet. But it’ll get done! Probably! :)

We close with a Seasonal Image for the Solstice…

Here’s to the coming of the longer days! Or the cooler ones, to those on the flipside… :)

A couple of books I’ve read some of

To update this post from (gad) three months ago on the book “Superintelligence”, I’m finally slightly more than halfway through it, and it has addressed pretty reasonably my thoughts about perfectly safe AIs, like for instance AIDungeon or LaMDA, that just do what they do, without trying to optimize themselves, or score as many points as possible on some utility function, or whatever. The book calls such AIs “Tools”, and agrees (basically) that they aren’t dangerous, but says (basically) that we humans are unlikely to build only that kind of AI, because AIs that do optimize and improve themselves and try to maximize the expected value of some utility function, will work so much better that we won’t be able to resist, and then we’re all doomed.

Well, possibly in the second half they will suggest that we aren’t all doomed; that remains to be seen.

Conscious experience is unitary, parallel, and continuous

Another book I’ve read some of, and in this case just a little of, is Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” (expanded 2nd edition). There’s a page about it here, which includes a link to a totally free PDF, which is cool, and you can also buy it to support his various good works.

An internal Buddhists group at The Employer has had Daniel Ingram join us for a couple of videoconferences, which have been fun to various extents. There’s a lot that one could say about Ingram (including whether he is in fact a Buddhist, what one thinks of him calling himself “The Arahant Daniel M. Ingram” on the cover, etc.), but my impression of him is that he’s a very pragmatic and scientific (and energetic) sort of person, who has a project to study the various paths to things like enlightenment in the world, in a scientific sort of way, and figure out what paths there are, which ones work best for which kinds of people, what stages there are along the paths, what works best if one is at a particular point on a certain path, and so on. There is apparently a whole Movement of some sort around this, called Pragmatic Dharma (I was going to link to something there, but you can Web Search on it yourself at least as effectively).

I’m not sure that this is an entirely sensible or plausible project, since as a Zen type my instinctive reaction is “okay, that’s a bunch of words and all, but better just sit”. But it’s cool that people are working on it, I think, and it’ll be fun to see what if anything they come up with. Being both pragmatic and moral, they are all about the Kindness and Compassion, so they can’t really go far wrong in some sense.

Having started to read that PDF, I have already a couple of impressions that it’s probably far too early to write down, but hey it’s my weblog and I’ll verb if I want to.

First off, Ingram says various things about why one would want to engage on some project along these lines at all, and I get a bit lost. He says that in working on morality (by which he means practical reasoning in the relative sphere, being kind and compassionate and all that) we will tend to make the world a better place around us, and that’s cool. But then the reasons that one would want to work on the next level after morality, which is “concentration”, are all about vaguely-described jhanas, as in (and I quote):

• The speed with which we can get into skillful altered states of awareness (generally called here “concentration states” or “jhanas”).
• The depth to which we can get into each of those states.
• The number of objects that we can use to get into each of those states.
• The stability of those states in the face of external circumstances.
• The various ways we can fine-tune those states (such as paying attention to and developing their various sub-aspects)

Now it appears to me that all of these depend on an underlying assumption that I want to get into these “states” at all; unless I care about that, the speed with which I can do it, the depth, the number of objects (?), the stability, and the fine-tuning, don’t really matter.

I imagine he will say more about these states and why they’re desirable later, but so far it really just says that they are “skillful” (and “altered”, but that seems neutral by itself), and “skillful” here just seems to be a synonym for “good”, which doesn’t tell us much.

(In other Buddhist contexts, “skillful” has a somewhat more complex meaning, along the lines of “appropriate for the particular occasion, and therefore not necessarily consistent with what was appropriate on other occasions”, which a cynic might suggest is cover for various Official Sayings of the Buddha appearing to contradict each other seriously, but who wants to be a cynic really?)

It seems that if the jhanas are so fundamental to the second (um) training, he might have made more of a case for why one would want to jhana-up at the point where the training is introduced. (One could make the same sort of comment about Zen types, where the reason that you’d want to meditate is “the apple tree in the side yard” or whatever, but those types make no pretense at being scientific or rational or like that.)

In the Third Training, called among other things “insight”, Ingram talks about becoming directly aware of what experience is like, or as he summarizes it, “if we can simply know our sensate experience clearly enough, we will arrive at fundamental wisdom”. He then talks about some of the ways that he has become more aware of sensate experience, and I am struck by how very different from my own observations of the same thing they are. Let’s see if I can do this in bullets:

• He starts with basically a “the present moment is all that exists” thing, which I can get pretty much entirely behind.
• He says that experience is serial, in that we can experience only one thing at a time. He describes focusing on the sensations from his index fingers, for instance, and says “[b]asic dharma theory tells me that it is not possible to perceive both fingers simultaneously”.
• Relatedly, he says that experience is discrete, and that one sensation must fade entirely away before another one can begin. At least I think he’s saying that; he says things like “[e]ach one of these sensations (the physical sensation and the mental impression) arises and vanishes completely before another begins”, and I think he means that in general, not just about possibly-related “physical sensations” and “mental impressions”. He also uses terms like “penetrating the illusion of continuity” (but what about the illusion of discontinuity?).
• And relatedly relatedly, he thinks that experience is basically double, in that every (every?) “physical sensation” is followed by a “mental impression” that is sort of an echo of it. “Immediately after a physical sensation arises and passes is a discrete pulse of reality that is the mental knowing of that physical sensation, here referred to as ‘mental consciousness'”.

Now as I hinted above, the last three of these things, that consciousness is serial, discrete, and double, do not seem to accord at all with my own experience of experience.

• For me, experience is highly parallel; there is lots going on at all times. When sitting in a state of open awareness, it’s all there at once (in the present moment) in a vast and complex cloud. Even while attending to my breath, say, all sorts of other stuff is still there, even if I am not attending to it.
• Similarly, experience is continuous; it does not come in individual little packets that arise and then fade away; it’s more of an ongoing stream of isness (or at least that is how memory and anticipation present it, in the singular present moment). If thoughts arise, and especially if those thoughts contain words or images, the arising and fading away of those feel more discrete, but only a bit; it’s like foam forming on the tops of waves, and then dissolving into the water again.
• And finally, there’s no important distinction to be had between “physical sensations” and “mental impressions”; there is only experience happening to / constituting / waltzing with mind. If there were a mental impression following each physical sensation, after all, how would one avoid an infinite regress, with mental impressions of mental impressions stretching out far into the distance? Something like that does happen sometimes (often, even) but it’s more a bug than a feature.

I suspect that some or most of all of these differences come because Ingram is talking about a tightly-focused awareness, where I am more of an open and expansive awareness kind of person, even when attending to the breath and all. If you really pinch down your focus to be as small as possible, then you won’t be able to experience (or at least be consciously aware of) both fingers at once, and you may manage to make yourself see only one sensation at a time in individual little packets, and you may even notice that after every sensation you notice, you also notice a little mental echo of it (which may in fact be the sum of an infinite series of echoes of echoes that with any luck converges).

This kind of tightly-focused conscious awareness goes well, I think, with what Ingram says about it being important to experience as many sensations per second as possible. He puts it in terms of both individual sensations, and vibrations, although the latter doesn’t really fit the model; I think he means something more like “rapid coming into existence and going out of existence” rather than a vibration in some continually-existing violin string.

He is enthusiastic about experiencing things really fast, as in

If you count, “one, one thousand”, at a steady pace, that is about one second per “one, one-thousand”. Notice that it has four syllables. So, you are counting at four syllables per second, or 4 Hertz (Hz), which is the unit of occurrences per second. If you tapped your hand each time you said or thought a syllable, that would be four taps per second. Try it! Count “one, one thousand” and tap with each syllable. So, you now know you can experience at least eight things in a second!

and this strikes me as really funny, and also endearing. But he takes it quite seriously! He says in fact that “that is how fast we must perceive reality to awaken”; I do wonder if he is going to present any scientific evidence for this statement later on. I’m sure it has worked well / is working well for him, but this seems like a big (and high-frequency) generalization. I don’t remember ol’ Dogen, or Wumen, or the Big Guy Himself, talking about experiencing as many things per second as possible, as a requirement. I guess I’ll see!

Not a review of “Superintelligence”

I’m reading this book “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom (I apparently have the 2014, not the 2016, edition). This isn’t a review, because I haven’t nearly finished it yet, but I have some Thoughts.

First of all, the book is taking far too long to get to the “What we should do about the prospect of things that are sufficiently smarter than us coming to exist nearby?” part. I’ve been plodding and plodding through many pages intended to convince me that this is a significant enough probability that I should bother thinking about it at all. I already believed that it was, and if anything the many many pages attempting to convince me of it have made me think it’s less worth worrying about, by presenting mediocre arguments.

(Like, they point out the obvious possibility that if a computer can make itself smarter, and the smarter it is the faster it can make itself smarter, then it can get smarter exponentially, and that can be really fast. But they also note that this depends on each unit of smarterness being not significantly harder than the last to achieve, and they give unconvincing external arguments for this being likely, whereas the typical inherent behavior of a hard problem is that it gets harder and harder as you go along (80/20 rules and all), and that would tend to prevent an exponential increase, and they haven’t even mentioned that. Maybe they will, or maybe they did and I didn’t notice. They also say amusing things about how significant AI research can be done on a single “PC” and maybe in 2014 that was a reasonable thing to say I dunno.)

But anyway, this isn’t a review of the book (maybe I’ll do one when I’m finished, if I ever finish). This is a little scenario-building based on me thinking about what an early Superintelligent system might actually look like, in what way(s) it might be dangerous, and so on. I’m thinking about this as I go, so no telling where we might end up!

The book tends to write down scenarios where, when it becomes Superintelligent, a system also becomes (or already is) relatively autonomous, able to just Do Things with its effectors, based on what comes in through its sensors, according to its goals. And I think that’s unlikely in the extreme, at least at first. (It may be that the next chapter or two in the book will consider this, and that’s fine, I’m thinking about it now anyway.

Consider a current AI system of whatever kind; say GPT-3 or NightCafe (VQGAN+CLIP). It’s a computer program, and it sits there doing nothing. Someone types some stuff into it, and it produces some stuff. Some interesting text, say, or a pretty image. Arguably it (or a later version of it) knows a whole lot about words and shapes and society and robots and things. But it has no idea of itself, no motives except in the most trivial sense, and no autonomy; it never just decides to do something.

So next consider a much smarter system, say a “PLNR-7” which is an AI in the same general style, which is very good at planning to achieve goals. You put in a description of a situation, some constraints and a goal, and it burns lots of CPU and GPU time and gets very hot, and outputs a plan for how to achieve that goal in that situation, satisfying those constraints. Let’s say it is Superintelligent, and can do this significantly better than any human.

Do we need to worry about it taking over the world? Pretty obviously not, in this scenario. If someone were to give it a description of its own situation, a relatively empty set of constraints, and the goal of taking over the world, perhaps it could put out an amazing plan for how it could do that. But it isn’t going to carry out the plan, because it isn’t a carrier-out of plans; all it does is create them and output them.

The plan that PLNR-7 outputs might be extremely clever, involving hiding subliminal messages and subtle suggestions in the outputs that it delivers in response to inputs, that would (due to its knowledge of human psychology) cause humans to want to give PNLR-7 more and more authority, to hook it up to external effectors, add autonomy modules to allow it to take actions on its own rather than just outputting plans, and so on.

But would it carry out that plan? No. Asking “would it have any reason to carry out that plan?” is already asking too much; it doesn’t have reasons in the interesting sense; the only “motivation” that it has is to output plans when a situation / constraints / goal triplet is input. And it’s not actually motivated to do that, that is simply what it does. It has no desires, preferences, or goals itself, even though it is a superhuman expert on the overall subject of desires, preferences, goals, and so on.

Is the difference here, the difference between being able to make plans, and being able to carry them out? I don’t think it’s even that simple. Imagine that we augment PLNR-7 so that it has a second input port, and we can bundle up the situation / constraints / goal inputs with the plan output of the first part, feed than into that second slot, and PLNR-7 will now compare the real world with the situation described, and the plan with whatever effectors we’ve given it, and if it matches closely enough it will carry out the plan (within the constraints) using its effectors.

Say we give it as its only effectors the ability to send email, and make use of funds from a bank account containing 100,000 US dollars. We give it a description of the current world as its input, a constraint that corresponding to being able to send email and spend a starting pool of US$100,000, and a goal of reducing heart disease in developing countries in one year. It thinks for awhile and prints out a detailed plan involving organizing a charitable drive, hiring a certain set of scientists, and giving them the task of developing a drug with certain properties that PLNR-7 has good reason to think will be feasible.

We like that plan, so we put it all into the second input box, and a year later heart disease in developing countries is down by 47%. Excellent! PLNR-7, having finished that planning and executing, is now just sitting there, because that’s what it does. It does not worry us, and does not pose a threat.

Is that because we let humans examine the plan between the first-stage output, and the second-stage effecting? I don’t think that’s entirely it. Let’s say we are really stupid, and we attach the output of the first stage directly to the input of the second stage. Now we can give it constraints to not to cause any pain or injury, and a goal of making the company that built it one billion dollars in a year, and just press GO.

A year later, it’s made some really excellent investments, and the company is one billion dollars richer, and once again it’s just sitting there.

Now, that was dangerous, admittedly. We could have overlooked something in the constraints, and PLNR-7 might have chosen a plan that, while not causing any pain or injury, would have put the entire human population of North America into an endless coma, tended to by machines of loving grace for the rest of their natural lives. But it didn’t, so all good.

The point, at this point, is that while PLNR-7 is extremely dangerous, it isn’t extremely dangerous on its own behalf. That is, it still isn’t going to take any actions autonomously. It is aware of itself only as one element of the current situation, and it doesn’t think of itself as special. It is extremely dangerous only because it has no common sense, and we might give it a goal which would be catastrophic for us.

And in fact, circling back around, the book sort of points that out. It tends to assume that AIs will be given goals and effectors, and notes that this doesn’t automatically give them any kind of instinct for self-preservation or anything, but that if the goal is open-ended enough, they will probably realize in many circumstances that the goal will be best achieved if the AI continues to exist to safeguard the goal-achievement, and if the AI has lots of resources to use to accomplish the goal. So you end up with an AI that both defends itself and wants to control as much as possible, not for itself but for the sake of the goal that we foolishly gave it, and that’s bad.

The key step here seems to be closing the loop between planning and effectuating. In the general case in the current world, we don’t do that; we either just give the AI input and have it produce symbolic output, or we give it effectors (and goals) that are purely virtual: get the red block onto the top of a stable tower of blocks on the virtual work surface, or get Company X to dominate the market in the marketplace simulation.

On the other hand, we do close the loop back to the real world in various places, some having to do with not-necessarily-harmless situations like controlling fighter jets. So that’s worth thinking about.

Okay, so that’s an interesting area identified! :) I will watch for, as I continue to read the book, places where they talk about how an AI might get directly attached to effectors that touch the real world, and might be enabled to use them to carry out possibly Universal Paperclips style real-world goals. And whether not doing that (i.e. restricting your AIs to just outputting verbal descriptions of means toward closed-ended goals) might be a Good Thing To Do. (Although how to you prevent that one jerk from taking the Fatal Step in order to speed up his world domination? Indeed.)

Two Very Meta Books

Pulling my head out of the Infinite Art Museum of NightCafe, I will talk (perhaps briefly) about two books that I read recently, both of which were extremely meta.

This is probably because I tend to buy books that sound meta from the back-cover text and so on, likely on some theory that they are more likely to be clever or surprising or delightful than something more normal and/or less meta.

This theory may or may not be true.

I bought both of these, along with some others, at Split Rock Books the other day, when we actually went there physically, M and I and the little boy, in our first venturing out together for fun in maybe literally years I’m not sure. One of the main things we did was buy books at Split Rock Books, because apparently the huge quantities (at least in my case) of bought-but-not-yet-read books we already have isn’t yet huge enough.

Spoilers for both of these books, I suppose, in some sense. Or perhaps not. You will learn, at most, that not a lot that I found noteworthy will happen in the first one after the initial framing, and that a particular puzzling thing will happen in the translator’s notes to the second one.

The first book is called “[title]” and the author is given as “[name of author]”, which makes it rather difficult to find on the web. The one clue is a note that “cool-sounding indie label” (or equivalent) is owned by Sublunary Editions (perhaps it turns out you can’t publish a book without giving at least that one piece of true data), which led to a page about it, which aside from proving that it actually exists doesn’t provide any new information.

The page does give a feeling for the overall experience of reading the book, in that it never really abandons the meta perspective, and only indirectly tells us a few things about the Protagonist, the Author, the Narrator, and one or two (possibly imaginary) other characters in the book.

Nothing really happens in the book; the Protagonist appears to become very upset at some points, but as one is so removed from the direct action by the meta gimmick, I didn’t find it especially evocative. The gimmick is sort of cute, and in a way it was a fun read, but it never really went outside the box, or otherwise advanced beyond a few obvious (if interesting) challenges to traditional assumptions about the reader, the writer, the characters, narrative, books, and so on.

The second book, which isn’t nearly as obviously meta, is Mrs. Murakami’s Garden, by Mario Bellatin. Or probably by Mario Bellatin. Probably written in Spanish and translated to English by Heather Cleary. Assuming Mario Bellatin and Heather Cleary both exist.

The text is a little odd, a description of various things happening in a quasi-Japanese place that is not Japan. It has various small earnest footnotes defining some of the Japanese and pretend-Japanese words in the text, but also the word “Formica”. Some of the footnotes refer the reader to footnotes later in the text. The story is basically the life of a woman who is constrained and not constrained in many ways, familiar and exotic, and how she allows and doesn’t allow various constraints to constrain her. It was pleasant to read.

Then there’s a translator’s note at the end, that implies subtly that Bellatin himself translated the text to Spanish from some third language, and also undercuts itself by suggesting that the original from which he translated it was illegible.

Did the translator add that on their own hook? Was it some collaboration with Bellatin? Does the translator exist, or is the translator’s note written by Bellatin also? Was the entire work in fact written in English? Or does Bellatin not exist, and is Cleary the true author of the entire thing? Or was it all written by some third person, with Bellatin and Cleary as characters of an implicit frame story?

I investigated this on the web, violating various theories of textual criticism and obeying others, and I’ve decided that most likely Bellatin really did write the book in Spanish, and Cleary really did translate it to English and add the odd stuff in the translator’s note just for fun. Whether Cleary had Bellatin’s blessing, I dunno.

But I admit it was fun to be confused by! And it’s fun to know I could easily be wrong.

Everything is virtual now

Google has just announced the very cool generative AI model that I’ve been vaguely hinting at for the last few time_intervals. The older, GPT-2-era, system was announced as “MEENA”, and the new one is called “LaMDA”. I don’t actually know how much the new one is based on the old one, not that it really matters.

It’s very cool! The featured LaMDA demos (rather quirkily, I thought) showed it answering questions as the planet Pluto, and as a paper airplane. I’ve been using it (well, one of its various models) in a colab where it’s more like the typical generator client I’ve played with before: you give it some random stuff, and it adds on more relatively likely stuff. Lots of fun. It feels a lot like GPT-3 to me, but then I don’t know anything about the insides of the system, or the features that it has that I haven’t played with.

Google also announced Starline, which at the moment is a prototype booth (not boot) that you sit in and talk to someone else in a similar booth somewhere else, and it’s like a video chat (gad, neither “chat” nor “conference” sit very well with me there, can’t we call it I dunno “encounter” or something?) except that (most obviously) it’s 3D without funny glasses (lightfield displays are really cool I had no idea!) and (less obviously) there’s subtle stuff going on to make everything feel better, like compensating for the fact that you’re looking directly at the other person’s eyes and that isn’t where the camera is and like that.

As far as I know there is no olfactory component at the moment.

People were speculating about the obvious combination of generative language models and the ability to create very realistic images of people (including nonexistent people), and this led to people talking about having a model of yourself around after your death for people to talk to (cool and/or terrifying), which led to someone pointing at this very cool piece of “artifacts from the future” SF in the form of a newsletter (currently five issues available) about hacks to make sure that your life in the Loop after death is the best it can be (roughly). Love it.

(See also Black Mirror.)

And to segue on the pivot-point of SF, I’ve now read the ebook form of the SCP Foundation Antimemetics Division Hub and it is just so good. As I wrote for goodreads and/or amazon or whatever:

[Five Stars] Perfection

This book is an explosion of ideas, astounding and obvious and transformative and crazy and valid. And the people are people, and intensely human through it all.

It feels odd to say that this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read, both because how could that not be hyperbole, and because “science fiction” at the same time doesn’t do it justice.

But there it is: this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read.

No doubt that’s partly because it happens to fit my personal tastes and interests so very perfectly.

But also, it’s just that good.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RSESZQ0RTJ2FS

Now if I could just finish a book or two without starting two or three others in the meantime, maybe I could get goodreads to think I’m currently reading less than fifty (50) books…

We Went Out!

To a place with other people, outside the house!!

Cold Spring, NY

We went, specifically, to Cold Spring, up the Hudson a bit, a nice touristy little town with a great book store and wine store and cheese store and clothing and antique stores and some nice unassuming restaurants and so on.

Me and M and the little boy (the little girl off busy in Astoria dancing tango or whatnot) all went, and we are all two-vaccinations-plus-two-weeks now, so there was nothing in particular to worry about. Insane!

We all wore our masks into places, of course, because one really must still. I don’t know when that’s going to end! Will we start to differentiate the unmasked-and-safe people from the unmasked-but-not-safe people somehow? Or will we just keep wearing our masks until infection probability for everyone is minimal regardless?

(I have a reduced-to-fit and trimmed copy of my vaccination card inside the back of my transparent phone case, which I think is brilliant, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use for anything.)

We bought books (so many books!) and wine (an orange wine; I haven’t opened it yet, but I am very curious) and cheese (mmmm, cheese).

(I also attempted to make crackers for the cheese. I neglected to poke them with a fork, and they did puff up a bit, and I’m not completely happy with the result; but it wasn’t a disaster.)

I apparently bought five books (pictured here). I like thin books :) unlike apparently the rest of the party, both of whom are currently reading books roughly as deep as they are wide. I’ve already finished the short but poignant collection Banthology, and have just started the short and extremely online Against The Web. (Whose author, I am sad to discover, left us last year.)

We ate lunch, yesterday, at the notable Hudson Hil’s Cafe, which was quite awesome; I had the Gravlax-and-eggs, and a glass of (white) wine.

It felt so civilized to sit at a table with people and be brought good food in exchange for money!

(And yes, I’m sure this will be one of a vast series of “how nice it is to be doing things again now that we’re all vaccinated” posts sweeping the intertubes; I wonder what the hashtag will be.)

What else, what else? AI Dungeon Reddit is like entirely concerned with people Being Mad Online about a debacle that the owners of the system made vastly worse (at least as measured via reddit, and the resulting significant downvoting of the app just about everywhere, which you’d think they might care about) by awful PR and general cluelessness. I’ve continued to play with AI Dungeon and Replika and Shortly and all, as before, but nothing really excitingly new has occurred (except the just-mentioned debacle, which is really I think tangential, although there are larger issues about who will control AI systems, what they will be allowed to do and what we will be allowed to do with them, and so on).

I haven’t been playing Satisfactory much, because I got mostly to the end, haven’t quite gotten up the energy to go for the currently-final “Employee of the Planet” reward, or to try to build something really aesthetically notable. I’ve been playing WoW only a little, again because most things have plateaued at roughly my level of interest for the moment.

Something reminded me of The Stanley Parable, and I’ve played through that quite a few times now, finding various Easter eggs and alternate endings (of which there are apparently at least nineteen!). That reminded me of The Beginner’s Guide, also a very meta game, which I haven’t played again but sort of intent to sometime soon maybe.

The Epic installer urged Core upon me, and seeing that it is yet another of the “WE HAVE INVENTED THE MULTIVERSE” things that are trendy once again, I’ve played with it a little. It’s kind of cool, very uneven since it’s just a huge bunch of Unreal-based games made by random people. I’ve played one “gather resources and fix up the house” one that got really dull really fast, one “Death Wall” running-around game that is simple but surprisingly fun and addictive, one “Super Fun Jumping Around Through An Obstacle Course Dying Over And Over” thing that wasn’t remotely fun, and one kind of weird and amusing thing where you jump high with a balloon in order to get “coins” that can be spent for better balloons to jump higher and get more coins to spend on even better balloons, which was fun but suddenly felt extremely futile so I stopped.

Perhaps needless to say, Core haven’t invented the multiverse, even to the extent that Second Life did, and imesho until one of these things enables easy low-learning-curve creation inside the game like Second Life did, none of them ever will. (See ancient essay on Secret Second Life Weblog.)

I continue not to be in Second Life myself much for whatever reason, but I did go in for a friend’s Eid open house, and that was lovely. (A belated Eid Mubarak to all!)

And that’s probably about all for now. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve already had bagels and OJ and coffee, and sat out on the front porch reading for awhile, and now I’m writing in my weblog, and those are good things. I am still missing Manhattan terribly (maybe I’ll get in next weekend, even if it IS going to be hotter’n blazes), but one perseveres!

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

I ran across a reference to Leonora Carrington somewhere in the not too distant past, perhaps as a surrealist painter or sculptor. Reading about her I of course found that she was also an author, and of course acquired her book of short stories. It was amazing.

Here I am on Goodreads:

(Five Stars)
These stories are surreal, wild, feral, with clods of earth clinging to the edges, and scents of life and rot.

The book could be read in an hour or three, but I took days, because I didn’t want it to be over, and because I wanted to savor each one for an hour or a year, and because after each one I felt that having read that story, there was no need to read anything else ever again.

Which is ludicrous, but here we are. The Happy Corpse will thicken and become rideable if you chase it around the tree fast enough. Lots of little insects got caught by their wings in her hair, and she ate them, spitting out their scaly feet.

That last sentence is verbatim from one of the stories (I wonder if that’s problematic at all; nah).

So anyway, you should get the book (in physical-book form, I will randomly recommend), and read it, at whatever pace seems best.

Also, the book is part of The Dorothy Project, from which I notice I already have Wild Milk; did I write that up anywhere? It was, I vaguely recall, similarly wonderful.

(Ha, that page says that Wild Milk is “like Borscht Belt meets Leonora Carrington; it’s like Donald Barthelme meets Pony Head”, how appropriate. Now I have to go look into Pony Head. Wait, this Pony Head? Woot lol.)

Ah, yes, it appears that I did read Wild Milk, and also wrote about it (briefly) on Goodreads.

Clearly I should pick another Dorothy Project book and order it and read it, because they are good. But that would mean acquiring another book. And there are already so many…

New Year list items!

• Happy New Year!
• This year we made 161 dumplings. This is more than last year. And exactly as delicious.
• Nearly all of the old pre-WordPress log is now back online (at exactly the old URLs, too; yay, Panix!), so you can now follow the dumpling-count links ‘way back into the past if you are so inclined, and enjoy the old #996633 based color scheme (or the alternate CSS skins, haha I was so l33t back then!).
• I go back to work tomorrow, after being on vacation for quite a long time due to having neglected to take very much vacation during the year.
• Work is, as I have mentioned previously, in Manhattan! I am exceedingly fond of Manhattan, and these days regularly wish it were a bit closer to home, or that one had (and could afford) a nice little pied-à-terre down there to spend the night now and then.
• The other day (while on vacation) I went down and had dinner with the little daughter, and then went out for a night of amazing jazz and blues at two prominent and wildly different Harlem clubs: Minton’s, and Paris Blues. Drank more than I had in years (bottle of beer, a screwdriver, and like four sangrias), walked a lot, and had a great time; the day deserves a weblog entry of its own, but may not get one given how much I’ve been writing weblog entries lately, so here we are.
• While I haven’t been weblogging, I have been hanging out now and then on Quora (where I have apparently answered like 68 questions, although most not recently), and on Twitter (soooo much time on Twitter; it is among other things where I get most of my news).
• Among other things on Quora, I answered a question with what turned out to be more or less that “How I Outgrew Libertarianism” post that I’ve been meaning to write here for years. Maybe I’ll eventually post it here, too, as-is or fleshed out.
• I’m still in Second Life a few times most weeks, but not nearly as much as I used to be. Not sure why, exactly; probably the four hours a day of commuting every week day has something to do with it! (A SL client that worked on Metro North would be interesting.)
• I was in WoW (rogue, demon hunter, priest, etc) pretty intensely for awhile after the expansion came out, but I got bored as usual at about the point where the main things left to do involve organized raiding parties.
• After consulting the little boy about it randomly, I started playing SWTOR in early December, and rather quickly found myself with a max-level Jedi Shadow. (SWTOR doesn’t seem to have web-page character profiles, tsk!) The game is extremely WoW-like, except for being in space, and having a stronger notion of linear stories than WoW (and a whole lot more voice-acting and cut-scenes; a whole lot).
• What else, what else? Just finished reading Single White Monk, and am vaguely thinking of writing a review and posting it somewhere. It’s an odd book; despite being about (parts of) the life of a Zen monk, there’s hardly any Zen at all in it, explicitly or otherwise.
• Donald Trump and his odious administration continue to do awful things to the nation and the world, primarily out of a desire for wealth and power, and secondarily due to ignorance and incompetence; I hope that among other things 2018 sees the Republican Party’s role in the U.S. government significantly reduced.
• I admit that I have not been going to protests or calling my (already anti-Trump) representatives as much as I did earlier in the year. If I made New Year’s Resolutions, one of them would be to get back to doing more of that in 2018.
• Another one would be to have more compassion, and less snark, in my discussions with people that I disagree with on Twitter. (See our earlier discussions on how best to show compassion for, say, neo-Nazis, in a way that maintains compassion for everyone else.)
• I’ve gotten pretty good, I think, over the years in noticing that, while it would probably be neat to own that thing, I would also be perfectly happy not owning it, and by not buying it I avoid increasing the number of unnecessary things I have. Another resolution would be to do a similar thing with food, and notice that, while it would be yummy to eat that thing, I would also be perfectly happy not eating it, and by not eating it I might be healthier in the long run.
• One barrier to that is that eating (unlike owning objects) is in many cases helpful in staving off anxiety and depression, which while still well-controlled (yay, Rosuvastatin!), is also still always there in the wings.
• I’m sure there were other things I was thinking of posting as list items here, but I can’t think of them at the moment, so perhaps I will post this soon.
• Happy New Year Some More!

January Second

So yesterday we made 144 dumplings (or 145, or possibly 143, or even 146); this seems like a small number!  The Records are surprisingly spotty in recent years, but apparently we made 203 in 2013 (I don’t recall noticing the coincidence before)and 159 in 2012.  Older records are currently inaccessible because of the whole “I’m not entirely sure who it was that used to be hosting my personal websites, but they’ve stopped” situation.

I ought to do something about that sometime.

Anyway, although they were gross (haha!), the dumplings were as always delicious. Possibly even more delicious than sometimes, due to every last spoonful of an entire jar of Hoisin Sauce going into the mix, which it’s possible we don’t always do.

I finished The Throwback Special, which the little daughter gave me for Solstice, and Said Things about it on The GoodReads:

The Throwback Special
(4/5 stars)

A relatively mundane (if odd) event, told in often sparkling, lovely, mordant, satirical, effulgent, ironic, occasionally entirely over-the-top prose. The characters constantly overthink everything, and the author overthinks on top of that, so every event is garlanded with emotion, dilemma, philosophy, elation, dread. It is funny, silly, deep, insightful.

You will annoy those around you by reading sentences aloud.

and I did in fact annoy (and/or amuse) those around me by reading sentences aloud, and also sent the little daughter random texts like

Tommy’s face looked weird because he was doing exercises to strengthen his pelvic floor.

which is in fact a quote from the book.

Oh, and Happy New Year! Here is my Second Life New Year Card, whose sentiments apply to all y’all RL (as we say) persons as well.  Kindness and compassion, kindness and compassion.

(The people in the picture are, as is traditional, both me.  I have never lured M into Second Life; I suspect she thinks it is weird.)

Back to work tomorrow!  Which, despite involving getting up entirely too early and spending hours away from home and all, I am in various ways looking forward too; still loving Google, and the commute, and the City.

Now to choose another book to read.  And to continue mostly not playing WoW!

 

 

 

 

Fifteen years!

Wow, you’d think something would have changed after a week away; flying cars, or aliens walking around Manhattan, or at least a new subway line or something, but NO, everything is pretty much just the same!

Weird.

Extremely attentive and/or precognitive readers will suspect rightly that we were away for a week because we were in Maine; the first time that happened was in 1999, and this is 2014, so it’s been fifteen years!

And since that first Maine trip was when I started writing a weblog, and this is in some sense the same weblog as that, this is the fifteenth anniversary of the weblog!

Woot!

Here is a picture of Maine:

Isn’t that gorgeous? Along with M’s sister’s family, and their father and stepmother, we rented a house on top of Dodge Mountain, overlooking Rockland and the bay and points East, with a lovely deck, and chairs to sit in, and tables to put your book and your wineglass on, and beds to sleep in, and all.

It was great.

I did a lot of reading, as usual. That book there is “Karma and Rebirth” by Christmas (sic) Humphries. I wrote it up for GoodReads (hope that link works for not-me people).

(I will resist the obvious temptation to produce lots of weblog content by pasting in all various book reviews I have written instead of just linking to them!)

I read that because I happened across it in some used book store (perhaps Hello Hello Books?), shortly after watching Hemant Mehta’s rather offputting “Can Atheists be Buddhists“, and it seemed like a nice synchronicity.

The Mehta piece is offputting for a few reasons:

• His conclusion is basically “no”, and I’m sort of both of those things, so yeah.
• The reason his conclusion is basically “no” is that, he says, although Buddhists don’t believe in a deity, they do believe some stuff (specifically Karma and Rebirth) that Isn’t Scientific, and therefore atheists won’t believe it.
• This implies that for Mehta “atheist” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t believe in God” for some value of “God”, it means “only believes stuff that is Scientific”, and that seems like just sloppy thinking or sloppy word-usage or something,
• His conclusion that Karma and Rebirth are Not Scientific seems very offhand and not particularly well thought out; as for that matter is his assumption that all Buddhists believe in either or both of them in any form.

Some day I will have to write a post on Buddhism and Scientificness and Karma and Rebirth and all, and why atheists can in fact be Buddhists, and vice-versa, at least when they are me. Not today, though. :)

Another book, that I’m sure I bought in Hello Hello Books (which is a great bookstore, by the way), and then I read and enjoyed very much, is Doris Grumbach’s “The Pleasure of Their Company”, which I also wrote up for GoodReads. It was good.

I do love lying about in Maine, feeling the wind and reading books and thinking about things.

Also I went out on a boat! And held a lobster!

Here is a picture from on the boat, with the notable deck hand Dana holding the lobster in question:

and here is the lobster, with parts of my hand holding it:

and a little girl looking dubious in the background.

We did many other things in Maine! I took three of the four kids to the beach one day, but the sun was behind clouds and the sand was too wet and rocky and the waves too small and they got cold, so we didn’t stay very long.

Here are some rocks!

They do look coldish.

We went into Rockland a couple of times (although sadly we were not in town for this

which I bet would have been noteworthy), and into Camden a couple of times (here is a classy black-and-white shot of some water in Camden:

just because we are posting lots of pictures; more and/or different ones can as usual be found on the Insta-Gram).

Reading back through some of the various Maine and post-Maine postings in the weblog over the years, I see lots of variety in terms of thoughtfulness, randomness, introspection, and so on. I did feel introspective, in a good way, and renewed, in a good way, by it all this year, but in writing about it I’m mostly just writing random things, I think. :)

Maybe largely because I didn’t feel like writing about it at all while I was there (too busy doing it?), and now am writing about it retrospectively, having been home for a couple of days and back to work one day, so somewhat back in the quotidian mindset. Or something?

Here is another picture :) this one of ol’ Red’s Eats (where we didn’t eat this year) as randomly enhanced in its usual drive-by way by Google Plus:

Kinda neat, I thought.

What else? I read some other books, acquired some other books, sat zazen a bit, had some thoughts, drank some wine, ate some lobster and some blueberry pie, enjoyed some sun and wind.

And I’m not unhappy to be home. :)

About all one could ask for, really!

Blurbs and Synopses

Tully

When her live-in boyfriend loses his job and starts drinking, Tulia dreads becoming like the battered women in the shelter where she works. Then one night while he is out on the town, a seriously injured woman appears in her apartment, calling herself Tully, which was Tulia’s childhood nickname. She talks incoherently about the Peace Corps, which Tulia almost joined years ago, before losing consciousness. Dealing with the riddle of this other self will set Tulia’s life, and Tully’s, on end.

Sounds of the Tide

In a series of brief summer meetings over a dozen years, a young man and an older woman invent their own kind of love on a rocky New England beach.

Snack Bar Only

A man whose life is at loose ends takes an introspective cross-country tour of golf-course restaurants, in a covered pickup truck.

The King of Storyville

A fictionalized account of the red-light district of New Orleans in the early XXth Century, loosely centered around the career of jazzman Joe Oliver.

Levels

In a world sharply divided into the wealthy few and the desperate many, a brother and sister from the wrong side of the tracks stumble on a secret that could re-make everything, if they can stay alive long enough to reveal it.

Two Loaves of Bread

Lucia and Maria are children together, baking bread in the community ovens. As they grow up they also grow apart, until decades later they encounter each other on opposite sides of a heated political battle, and the past and present collide.

Whisper through the Flames

With the U.S. and China on a brink of an apocalyptic war, enigmatic messages apparently sent from the future may hold the only hope of survival.

VOZ

The surreal tale of the collapse of a major corporation, as those around it descend into chaos and strange magic.

Usually Night

A collection of poems about humanity’s efforts, national and international, to travel to space and back; illustrated, with accompanying notes from the authors.

Extra-solar pond slime

So today I went to a talk by Lee Billings, author of Five Billion Years of Solitude (which, note, I haven’t read yet, although I now have a signed copy; I’ve just heard the talk).

He is all about how incredibly cool it would be to find out that there is life on some planet outside the solar system (by deducing, say, a particular unstable mixture of gasses in its atmosphere that we can’t account for except by life), and that we are not investing nearly enough resources (money) in building the just-now-becoming-possible huge honking telescopes that would help us find such planets.

Or alternately, he says, it would also be extremely important in some way to discover that there isn’t life on any extra-solar planets that we can find, and that therefore we are even Specialer than maybe we thought.

There has recently been an Enormous Boom in the finding of planets outside the Solar System, apparently; an inneresting fact that I hadn’t known. Significant numbers of them are sort of vaguely Earth-like in various ways; also inneresting.

But, as I said during the Q-and-A period (for which I may appear on the YouTube at some point in the future!) I’m not sure how interesting it would really be to know that there is, say, probably pond-slime on Kepler 22b.

The two reasons the speaker gave for the importance of looking for extra-solar planets with life (besides raw coolness, which I don’t think is a good reason to spend billions of dollars, really) were (1) having more places for humans to live by the time the Sun swells up and eats the Earth or whatever, and (2) knowing whether or not We Are Alone In The Universe (hence the title of the book).

In terms of having more places to live, I think that by the time the Sun swells up (a few hundred million years), and even by the time we’re conveniently able to go in large numbers to other solar systems, we’ll long since have just remade ourselves so that we don’t need certain sorts of planets with particular chemistries to live on, so that particular issue will be moot.

And in terms of knowing whether or not we are alone, I think it’s far more important to know whether there’s anyone sentient out there than it is to know whether there’s any carbon-oxygen-based life out there. Given a few dozen billion dollars and the choice between looking for photosynthesis, and looking for intelligent signals, I’m going for the latter.

The extra-solar pond slime is just going to have to wait…

Avid fans of mediocre fiction

There are all sorts of fascinating things going on.

One fascinating thing is the breathtakingly rapid evolution of media of all sorts; and one fascinating part of that thing is these here “e-books” which are available “on-line”, more or less directly from the authors.

The web-site Amazon Dot Com, to pick a very notable example, has a whole ecosystem, one might say polysyllabicly, built around these essentially self-published and to a great extent disintermediated artifacts, where one can buy (or acquire, for the significant numbers that are nominally free) copies of these books (and the associated licenses to read the copies, which are enforced by one’s own computers and reading software, in an odd and facially improbable bit of co-optation), and rate them with small integers, and leave comments on them, and rate and comment on other people’s comments, and see what other books people who have purchased this one have also purchased, and so on for quite some time.

(Here is a link to this stuff, or at least a link that, at the moment, when followed by me, leads to something like the “Books” subtree of the largish “Kindle” tree, which also includes the Amazon-branded reading devices (you can also read these e-books on various other devices), and non-book things (magazines, who knows what-all) that can also be read on them.)

Not all of the e-books are all disintermediated and self-published; some number of them are also acquired and edited and published by publishing houses large and small and new and old, brought out at the same time as, or before or after, old-fashioned non-e versions of the same book, actually printed on paper in ink. These I am not talking about so much here today; there are interesting things to say about them, but to the extent that they are selected and polished and marketed in roughly the same way books were a decade or three ago, they are not, comme on dit, in my fovea at this time.

(Haha, the WordPress spell checker does not know the word “fovea”. I suggests that perhaps I mean “forgave”. Also, it scolds me for writing “WordPress” with a small “p”, even though the publishing software, obnoxiously in my opinion, automatically capitalizes that “p” for me automatically at publishing time, heh.)

So anyway, he said loquaciously, about those e-books that are all disintermediated and self-published and all.

Many of them are really badly-writen.

(This may not come as a huge surprise.)

Some of them are in fact very good. For instance I discovered by following some winding path through the Internets the Wool books by Hugh Howey (looks like the first one is available free, which is nice; I recommend it). They are books that might not have made it out of the slush pile at a publishing house (or they might have; who can tell), but eventually bubbled to my, and lots of other people’s, attention via the ecosystem of self-publishing, and are now apparently doing rather well. There are rough edges here and there (I recall something about what the protagonists’ wife was said to be doing at the start of the first book that by the end of the third it was unlikely anyone would have been allowed to do, and seemed to be from some earlier and now-abandoned version of the plotline, for instance), but no worse than in many normally-published books I’ve read.

But many of them, even most of them I would dare say, requiring for their publication only that (1) the author thinks it is good (or at least would like to publish it), and (2) the author pushes some buttons on their computer (significantly fewer buttons than it took to write it, in most cases), and therefore having successfully vaulted only a pair of very low bars, are not very good at all.

And yet some of these not-very-good-at-all books have, or appear to have, avid fans in the ecosystem, who rate them at the top of the set of possible integers, post glowing reviews comparing them favorably to all other books previously written in the genre, give “unhelpful” ratings to negative reviews posted by others, and so on.

It makes one wonder.

For instance, is the difference between Post-human, by David Simpson, rated four-and-a-half stars out of five, and Wool by Hugh Howey (linked above), also rated four-and-a-half stars out of five, just that I personally thought the latter was pretty good (my review gave it five of five stars) and the former pretty bad (my rather scathing review gave it just two)?

Once the magnetic field was in place, he was free to bolt upward, unhindered by friction, air pressure, temperature, or anything else. In seconds, he was above the stratosphere, using his mind’s eye to plot an automatic course for Venus.

I think Howey’s book is better than Simpson’s in ways that don’t come down to just my personal opinions. Simpson’s contains technology howlers about glowing green magnetic fields that allow humans to fly through space at interplanetary speeds without benefit of spaceship; Howey’s has just some rather powerful psychoactive drugs that unreliably suppress memory and alter behavior. Simpson’s has an evil antagonist with god-like powers who keeps the protagonist alive to allow him to do something he (the antagonist) would clearly have had no trouble doing all by himself. Howey’s bad guys are subtler and more realistic, and in that way more terrifyingly evil.

Simpson’s protagonist is the most intelligent person in the solar system (scientifically measured!), and everything goes right for him, pretty much all the time. Howey’s various protagonists are more ordinary people, more conflicted and confused, and when they have any triumphs at all they are partial and sometimes worrying ones.

(And nearly every time one of Simpson’s comic-book superheroes turns on the stupid all-powerful magnetic field, Simpson has to say that he “ignited” it. Drives me up the walls, I tell ya.)

I don’t want to pick on Simpson’s book in particular, really; I’m sure there are other four-and-a-half-star ebooks that are worse. But the case of Post-Human is notable for at least a couple of reasons (and here we will segue gracefully into the lazy weblogger’s device of unordered lists):

• For awhile, Simpson was offering a free book to anyone who gave him a five-star review on Amazon (he has since apparently stopped, and I hope it was because it’s against the rules).
• But there are still four and five star reviews being written, and many of the negative reviews also have an unusual number of “unhelpful” ratings, so that last point can’t explain the whole effect.

What now? Just a bunch of thoughts:

• Maybe the many glowing reviews and downratings of negative ones for the Simpson book are just fake; results of bribery, or posted by Simpson himself, or by some entity hired by him (I would not be surprised if there were companies that will create shadow-puppets who will boost the Amazon rep of a book for money). It would be interesting to look at the other reviews posted by people who have given very glowing reviews of very average works.
• Maybe only some of them are fake and/or a result of the above-mentioned bribery, and the rest are from people who wanted to get on the bandwagon, in some to-be-determined sense.
• Maybe some of the people who accepted the Simpson bribe are experiencing that interesting psychological effect whose name I forget and have decided that (since they can’t be bribed that easily!) they really did love the book, and go around downrating negative comments just to prove it.
• Maybe I am wrong, and the Howey book is not objectively any better than the Simpson one, and it’s just that the problems with the latter happen to bother me personally more than those with the former.
• Maybe I am not wrong, and by my objective criteria the Simpson book really is worse, but there are a significant number of people who don’t care about those objective criteria to speak of at all, but enjoyed the book greatly for some other reasons that I don’t really understand. That is sort of an interesting thought.
• I have a vague impression that there is sort of a whole subculture of people on the Internets who write and read and praise and advertise not-very-good books, either (see above) they have never really read a good book, or they actually prefer books that are objectively (in whatever sense) bad, or for some other reason. I recently came across a weblog reviewing some mediocre self-published Amazon ebook as “an Amazon Bestseller!”, where that phrase was apparently copied from the book’s own page on the author’s website; I was nasty and posted a polite comment pointing out that the only sense in which it was an Amazon Bestseller was that it has an Amazon Bestseller rank, which every book on Amazon appears to have, and that in this case the rank was somewhere over one million. So “best” only in the most technical of senses. Presumably, though, there is some in-crowd feeling to be had in posting a positive review of a Best Seller?

Looking at many of the glowing reviews of the Simpson book (and for that matter other books I find poorly-written), my impression is that many of the reviewers are somewhat less than literate themselves, and/or less than civil, that in particular people who leave negative comments on negative reviews and otherwise defend the books in the commentary part of the ecosystem, tend to sound like trolls (broadly construed). What sorts of things do these people have in common? What are their motivations?

And, sort of conversely, will we eventually have a system in which I can mark those people as having opinions generally Irrelevant To My Own (or even Contrary To My Own), so that the system could take this into account in its own recommendations? “This book has a 4.5 star rating, or 2.25 stars if we count only people whose opinions you are likely to care about.” Is anyone doing that yet?

And that is about the end of my thoughts on the subject for the time being. Reading over it I see that I come across as something of an elitist jerk, but when it comes to books I am rather content being an elitist jerk. :)

Good reading!

Reading the first paragraph of Durrell’s Justine

The sea is high again today,

What do we know, or think, or guess, or assume, from those six words?

The narrator is by the sea. Not necessarily, of course; there could be satellites or telephones involved, or there could be no narrator at all but just an omniscient narrative voice. But the spatial immediacy of “the sea” (rather than “the sea at Brighton” or “the sea outside her window”), and the temporal placedness of “again today”‘ both suggest a particular person by a particular sea, speaking at a certain time.

The sea is high. With wind most likely; high waves and whitecaps rather than high tide. The sea has been high before, we suspect yesterday at least. It is probably daytime now (“today” rather than “tonight”).

Is the height of the sea a good thing, or a bad thing? A joy or a challenge? We don’t know from the first six words, so onward.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.

Now that is a sentence.

Probably this is not someone clinging to a piece of wreckage in mid-ocean, or hoping for calm seas to launch a tiny fishing boat. This is someone in a position to thrill to the wind.

But notice that it is a flush of wind. “Flush” and “thrill” call to mind the cheek flushed hot with blood from some personal thrill. So here the blown surface of the ocean is the skin, thrilled and flushed by the wind; the wind is the blood of the sea. But the wind also flushes cheeks from the cold. Chill and thrill, wind and blood, skin and sea. And only a dozen words in!

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter

A specific time now, and a cold one. Is this favoring the cold side of the previous sentence, chill and wind over thrill and blood?

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring.

Balance is restored. The second sentence mirrors the first, calls out the cold and the warm more explicitly, and more abstractly.

Notice that there is now someone in the text, and it is you. He did not write “I can feel”, “He could feel”, or “can be felt”.

Note also that it is not the warmth of Spring, or its coming, its approach, its flavor or texture. The inventions of Spring!

Also it is “winter”, but “Spring”. A subtlety of balance here? The concrete winter by the sea in contrast with the symbolic or idealized Spring that invents? Or just some typesetter’s quirk?

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday,

Now, looking up above the sea, there is the sky; a sky of hot nude pearl. What a phrase! Is it hot as in actual heat, or hot as in glare? Pearl is a color, the texture of color; what is it for pearl to be nude? Bare, simple, unadorned. So my eyes imagine the sky bright and (of course) pearlescent (nacreous!), hotly pale to look at, but not enough to heat the air (my cheeks still flushed with the wind).

And we’ve been aware of the sky in the morning, before midday, and at least up until midday; perhaps all morning, or a good piece of the morning, standing on a headland watching the sea and feeling the wind (and the inventions of Spring).

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places,

Sheltering from the wind, and also from the hot glare of the sky. This is a place with crickets, and also a place with some shelter. Think of sheltered places large enough, small enough, for crickets. No mention of people, of whether there are any people seeking shelter also.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes,”

Here is the wind again, crossing a sentence and a half to thrill again, and this time to unpack the great planes. What great planes? Is this a pun on the Great Plains? Is the wind blowing into the cargo holds of enormous airplanes, scattering underwear from suitcases and printouts from briefcases out across the runways? Probably not. :)

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…”

Not just unpacking, but actively and violently unpacking, ransacking! The printouts and underwear are scattered far and heedlessly, the wind is looking for something (for what?) in those cargo holds. Or the great planes are (more likely) the planes of the sea, the earth, and sky. The wind violently unpacking the plane of the horizon, flushing the cheek of the sea, bringing both the cold of midwinter and (with the hot nude sky) the inventions of the Spring, as though it were searching for something. For what?

And that’s the entire first paragraph. We aren’t entirely certain we know what the great planes are (spoiler alert: eleven pages later I’m still not entirely certain), but we have had built in our minds a balanced structure of warmth and cold, winter and spring, blood and sea water, topped by hot nude pearl, and underlain by those sheltering crickets. Earth and Air and Water, and we can either allow that heat to stand for Fire, or let that spot stay empty, and be left, after this first paragraph, with (among other things) a missing place for Fire, like a missing tooth, that might (or might not) be resolved in later paragraphs.

Yes, this is a somewhat pretentious reading! :) But when I started reading this book (which regular readers will remember we bought in Boston the other week), I was so struck by the language (not in a Barthelmian or Leynerian way, but in an entirely or mostly entirely other way) that I stopped and read the first few paragraphs over and over, and then the same for the first page, the first two pages. And I decided to write a weblog entry about it!

(A serendipitous and perspicacious airline seat-neighbor suggested that I ought to be reading poetry that way if I like reading that way; I agreed while admitting that I’d never really managed to do that. What poet should I try it on? The burning tyger? The mistress going to bed?)

And that’s all! :) I’m incredibly sleepy at the moment, having gotten home from the airport and Secret Expeditions this morning at about 3am. I am still awake mostly because I am hoping Verizon will call back about whether or not they can actually give us what the salesmen promised to get us to switch to FIOS, and also because I wanted to actually post this (actually to post this) before it went out of my mind. But now I think I will give up on Verizon for the night and go to bed and/or to sleep. And you can post comments! :)

Night!

Reviews: “Belief or Nonbelief” and “Pallas”

Two of my reviews have just Gone Live on Amazon, my “email” informs me, so I will stick them here as well so that they are in more places, and my fame can spread more quickly.

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Belief or Nonbelief, by Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (non-ebook version)
Two out of Five Stars

This is billed as a spirited exchange between a believer and a non-believer, but really it’s much less than that. Eco is a barely-lapsed Catholic intellectual, and as he says himself the basic structure of his thinking is still very much based in Catholicism.

Except for the final brief pair of chapters, the book consists of Eco asking Martini to talk about the Church’s answer to something, and Martini answering with the Catholic party line.

And because this is the Father of Semiotics and a Catholic Cardinal, the language is full of fifty-thousand-dollar words and content-free metaphors. Here is Eco, for instance, perhaps imitating one of those online Random Postmodern Text Generators:

“Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It’s possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible — so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation, and so that in the course of the same history God reconstitutes himself and in a manner of speaking educates and enriches himself. But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself.”

Say what? Secular historicism has understood that God educates himself? You don’t say!

And when Eco asks how the Church knows when human life begins, Martini’s answer is that it’s at the moment of conception, because that is when there is a new being with a face. Which must be a metaphor for something (since a fertilized egg is way to small to have a face), but we’re left to guess for ourselves exactly what it’s supposed to be a metaphor for.

In the final exchange, Martini finally asks a question of Eco rather than vice-versa. The question itself is nothing impressive, just the usual “how do atheists justify their morality without an invisible friend in the sky to do it for them?”; but Eco’s answer is solid and almost clearly stated. There’s nothing all that special, he points out, about basing your morality on a deity (believers are just as prone to immorality as anyone else), and our own desire to be treated well and our natural tendency to empathy make a fine alternative.

So anyway. Most of the book is throwaway concepts couched in needlessly elaborate prose, but at least it’s short. The last chapter is worth a read.

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Pallas, by L. Neil Smith
Three out of Five Stars

This is a good solid yarn; strong and smart good guys you can root for, nasty evil bad guys to boo, interesting SF ideas, rockets and personal helicopters, a hooker with a heart of gold, old ladies packing heat, and all sorts of fun stuff.

Like so many stories with political intent, it completely cheats on the political message. No one in the socialist polity is good, no one in the capitalist one is bad. The capitalist society doesn’t need to tax anyone because it doesn’t need police or real courts, because everyone in the society is basically an angel (for some reason the society doesn’t even need fire stations; this is noted in passing but never explained).

Showing that your favorite politico-economic system would work for a society of angels is not a very big challenge!

The one nod that Smith makes toward reality is that when the entire world (asteroid) is threatened by a natural phenomenon, the “freeloader problem” arises, and it’s not clear how the rather expensive solution is going to get paid for without something icky like taxes. But the solution is just that Our Hero pays for the whole thing himself, and the problem is solved.

This isn’t realistic, though; if Our Hero had any actual competitors, the resulting extra costs he bears would put him at a disadvantage to them, and he would go out of business. Fortunately for the story, he has no actual competitors, because he is the only person to realize that in a society where everyone wants to be armed and guns are expensive to import, it might make sense to open a (wait for it) gun factory. Ooooh!

(The real Freeloader Problem here, which Smith ignores entirely as far as I can tell, is the environment envelope around the asteroid, which requires constant maintenance by guys with rockets and space-suits. Who pays for all that, exactly?)

Definitely a fun read. Just don’t try to use it as a guide to public policy in the real world.

Dumplings, Dastards, and Drivel

(Before I decided that the dumplings really belonged in here, I was considering titles like “Douchebags and Bullshit”, which is somewhat coarse, or “Rotters and Rubbish”, which wasn’t bad.)

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So this year we made 203 New Year’s Dumplings. The little daughter having come home special for the ceremonies, and the little boy being home from school between terms, we were four healthy adults, and the leftovers of that 203 didn’t even last through the end of January Second.

(See prior New Year’s post for prior history of dumplings.)

Here is my New Year card over on the Secret Second Life weblog. The sentiments apply to all Real Life friends too also. :)

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On dastards (cads, bounders, douchenozzles, arseholes), see quite a few of the comments to this Asher Wolf posting on why she left the CryptoParty movement that she founded or co-founded, and how the hacker community contains too much, and too much tolerance of, sexism and misogyny and general nastiness.

Many of the comments are supportive, but many are also just facepalmingly awful. (I posted what I thought was a satire of that kind of comment, and despite my having tried to make it obviously absurd, it was enough like the run of actual negative comments that I had to put in a followup saying that it was intended as satire, because people were responding to it as though it, well, wasn’t.) And the evil-density in the twitter comments was even higher (if harder to link to).

I understand why people come in and carefully and condescendingly explain how she is all wrong, and bad things happen to everyone, and it’s not misogyny, and rape hardly every happens, and things like that; they are just blind to their various degrees of privilege, and are shoring up the bulwarks of the protective walls they have up around their egos.

Pretty standard human stuff.

I less understand why people come in and say that someone “needs to shave her pits”, or says that some particular person attacking her is “way hotter” than someone else is. I mean, wut? How is that even remotely relevant to anything?

Either (1) this is actually the way that they think, (2) they are just rather nastily trolling, or (3) talking about the way they “think” is a bit of an overstatement, and they are basically being Eliza machines in this instance.

Also pretty standard human stuff, I suppose, as are the strings of obscenities and the attacks on her website; I just don’t understand it as much, and it makes me (even) sadder.

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And on drivel (or rubbish, or bullshit), I am reading Belief or Nonbelief, and while I’m not done with it (despite how short it is), I cannot keep myself from fulminating, or at least weblogging, about it. It’s a series of public letters between Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who is a Cardinal (a Hat Cardinal, not a Wings Cardinal, obviously).

Eco is sort of The Semiotics Guy, so he is all into signs and how and what they signify (if at all), and so on, so it’s not too surprising that he can wander up big ethereal staircases of language until he gets so far above the concrete that his words not only fail to signify anything material, but fail to signify even any identifiable concepts. And of course Martini is an intelligent person in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and spending most of his thought-time in environments as far from real life as possible is probably one of the few ways it’s possible to be one of those for very long and stay sane.

Hilarity ensues.

The first bit is about hope and life and ideas of the end of the world and stuff; it was written somewhere in the late 90’s. Eco, referring to the last book of the New Testament, writes

Revelation can be read as a promise, but also an announcement of an end, and thus gets rewritten at every step, even by those who never read it, as we await 2000.

Say what? People who have never read the book are constantly rewriting it? Squinting at the whole paragraph really hard, what he means is something like “people are always thinking about how the world might end, and Revelation talks about trumpets and hailstorms and stuff, but nowadays we think more in terms of acid rain, nuclear waste, global warming, and stuff”.

It does sound cooler and less obvious if you talk about the constant rewriting of a book by people who have never read it, but that way of talking has the disadvantage of being incoherent and/or wrong.

Here’s another great passage:

In this way, each one of us flirts with the specter of the apocalypse, exorcising it; the more one unconsciously fears it the more one exorcises, projecting it onto the screen in the form of bloody spectacle, hoping in this way to render it unreal. But the power of specter lies precisely in its unreality.

Yowza! We unconsciously fear the end of the world, so we flirt with it by projecting it (“hey baby, ever been… projected?”) onto the screen (does that mean “we imagine”? or “we make movies about” or…?) in the form of bloody spectacle (we imagine global warming as bloody spectacle? could well be true of the movie version, I spose) in order to (unconsciously, still?) render it unreal (because things on the screen are unreal I guess), but in vain because (as our unconscious is apparently not clever enough to recognize) making it unreal just makes it more powerful.

And the sentence just before it is about “irresponsible consumerism”, which is somehow linked to all that other stuff.

There’s probably some unpacking of this that is actually making a coherent truth-claim that might perhaps be falsifiable, but in essence I think it’s more like poetry; a bunch of words piled on each other not to make some coherent truth-claim, but for some more diaphanous aesthetic reason.

The very next paragraph deserves copying down here also (perhaps only because I’m getting more into the spirit of the thing):

I’d be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.

Leaving aside the absurdity of referring (as I think he is doing here, but really who can tell) to the years 1-1000 CE as “the first thousand years of history”, it’s hard to say what most of these words might plausibly mean.

Just how common is “the notion of the end of time” in “the secular world”? He has presumably said “the end of time” rather than “the end of the world” for some reason, but I don’t know what it could be. “The end of time” is a notion that barely makes any sense at all in “the secular world” (since time is not something that can end, absent something really weird and non-secular happening), much less being extremely common. The dimension that is “measured by calendars” is time; I’m not sure what it means to say that the Christian world acts as if the end of time occurs in (or “may be projected into”) something besides time. Is he saying that most Christians think of the Apocalypse is a metaphor for something moral or aesthetic, rather than something that will actually take place at some point? That is most likely true, but as far as I know the Official Story of the “Christian world” is that it’s going to happen (for some value of “it”) at some actual time, perhaps any day now.

Maybe he’s just saying “your typical actual Christian person doesn’t actually believe that the world is going to end, or at least doesn’t act that way, whereas your typical secular person worries alot about global warming”. But he sure says it funny if so.

Here’s another character-string, that I don’t think I’ll even try to tease a meaning out of (although the first few words seem like a real screamer, in the “obviously false unless it means something different than it seems to” sense):

Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It’s possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible — so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation, and so that in the course of the same history God reconstitutes himself and in a manner of speaking educates and enriches himself. But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian vision of history wherever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed.

On rereading, I’m suspecting more and more that Eco, that wag, is using some prose generator here. (Secular historicism has understood that God reconstitutes himself? Orly?)

Cardinal Martini’s response to this first burst of words isn’t quite up to this standard, but he does use a huge number of words to basically say “oh, well, Christians don’t really have to worry about the end of the world because God is going to take care of them, after all, so naturally the secular types are the ones who obsess about it”.

He does, though, note that

History has always been seen most clearly as a journey toward something beyond itself and not immanent… this vision does not extenuate but solidifies the meaning of contingent events into an ethical locus in which the metahistorical future of the human adventure is determined.

which is getting there.

(And which, once one spends a few minutes picking it apart, turns out to box up considerable volumes of likely-false assumptions inside words and passive-voice constructs like “always” and “most clearly”, “been seen” and “is determined”, which are just the post-graduate version of sprinkling one’s Internet postings with “clearly”, “obviously”, and “certainly”.)

(And for that matter uses a quaintly archaic sense of “extenuate”. Hm, is this a translation, or is the English the original?)

In the next exchange (and the only other one I’ve finished reading), Eco turns the discussion toward the meaning and beginning of life, and the question of abortion, not so much as to get closer to real concrete questions as to show that even on a subject like this he can mostly avoid them.

Here is Eco:

When the banner of Life is waved, it can’t but move the spirit — especially of nonbelievers, however “pietistic” their atheism, because for those who do not believe in anything supernatural the idea of Life, the feeling of Life, provides the only value, the only source of a possible ethical system.

which is bullshit in both common senses: it’s false, and it’s not clear that it’s actually concerned at all with true and false, but just wants to sound good.

(The quotes around “pietistic” in reference to atheism are rather bizarre, as it suggests that “pietistic atheism” is a term that someone else has used, and that Eco himself is using referentially, although he has shame-quote-level reservations about it. But in fact the term “pietistic atheism” is actually pretty rare, so… I dunno.)

And of course just “waving the banner of Life” doesn’t necessarily move the spirit; some people’s spirits are (quite healthily) resistant to being moved by the waving of any banners, and there are all sorts of sources of possible ethical systems besides “the idea of Life, the feeling of Life”.

And so on and so on.

Eco then makes the very good point that a key question is exactly when a human life begins, that we don’t have a really good answer to it, and that it seems like a question that we may never have a really good answer to, even though it’s so important. (I like him saying this, because in my own analysis of the whole abortion issue, these facts are at the core of why it’s so hard.)

The Cardinal responds by subtly taking issue with Eco’s emphasis on “Life”, saying of course that it’s really all about God, and “the life of a person called upon to participate in the life of God himself.”

“Participate” is a great word there, like when the news says that a person is “linked to” some terrorist group. The postmodern “informed by” is another one. They all let you sort of draw a narrative line between two things without actually making any truth-claim that might turn out to be wrong. I have no idea what it actually means to “participate in the life of God himself” for Cardinal Martini, and I’m not convinced that he really does, either. At the high cloudy levels that he’s talking, “participate” is all that’s needed.

Moving on to just when there starts to be “a concrete life that I can label human”, Martini uses some more “obviously” words:

But we all know that we have … a clearer sense of genetic determination starting from a point that, at least in theory, can be identified. From conception, in fact, a new being is born.

There ya go! “We all know” that “in fact” a new being is born at conception.

Here “new” means as distinct from the two elements that united to form it.

This may be a nice definition of “new”, but the more important term is “being”. When someone ingests a couple pieces of food and they start to dissolve in the stomach, there may be some point at which they squish together and there is a “new” food-glob which is distinct from either the hotdog or the bun, but there’s no “new being” here to worry about, unless and until the relevant molecules make their way into a developing fetus which is (say) eventually born.

So he’s doing an end-run to try to slip “identity begins at the moment of conception” (something that the Church has believed for only a small fraction of its history, as Eco mentions and Martini ignores) into the discussion as though it was something we now know as a fact.

Okay, that’s par for the course. :)

Here is some more novel and amorphous stuff, on the topic of why the product of conception matters, and why we should protect it:

Beyond these scientific and philosophical matters lies the fact that whatsoever is open to so great a destiny — being called by name by God himself — is worthy of enormous respect from the beginning.

Why is that? Is there anything that God himself can’t call by name? Does God have names for people in a way that he doesn’t have names for animals, or fruit, or dust-motes? This is a piece of Catholic doctrine, or something, that I wasn’t aware of. Why would being called by name by God, as opposed to any other aspect of a putative relationship to God, be the thing in particular that makes a person “worthy of enormous respect from the beginning”?

If it turned out that God also had names for individual rocks, would we be morally obliged to make sure that any rock that begins to split off the side of a mountain does in fact split off, and to have “enormous respect” for it from that point on? Why or why not?

And yes, the question seems absurd. But it’s directly implied by the Cardinal’s words, so I will refer him to you on that issue.

We are talking about real responsibility toward that which is produced by a great and personal love, responsibility toward “someone”. Being called upon and loved, this someone already has a face, and is the object of affection and attention.

I think we are still talking about a just-fertilized egg here. The great and personal love must be God’s (since, sadly, not every instance of conception involves great or personal human love), as must be the affection and attention (since, this early in the game, no human is aware that anything exists to lavish affection and attention on).

But the someone already has a face? What could that mean? A fertilized egg most definitely does not have a face; it is too small. Is this a metaphor for something? If so, it’s not clear for what. Does he mean that he thinks the look of the face of the eventual person (if any) resulting from the fertilization is already determined, by the genetics of the sperm and egg? That’s probably not true, certainly not before the gametes are all done fusing (when exactly is “the moment of conception” at this level of detail, anyway?). And why “face” rather than “form” or for that matter foot-size? Are those less important, or is it all just some metaphor and “face” sounds better?

The next sentence is:

Every violation of this need of affection and attention can only result in conflict, profound suffering, and painful rending.

How did we get from the fertilized egg’s being the object of affection and attention (from God), to a need for affection and attention? In fact the fertilized egg, at this point, doesn’t have any need for affection and attention, unless there’s some religious claim here that it needs it from God. But presumably nothing could violate God’s affection and attention. (I’m not sure what if anything it means to “violate” a “need”.)

The claim being made here seems to be that from the moment of conception there is a new being that as a need for affection and attention, and any failure to provide for that need will result in conflict, profound suffering, and painful rending.

But that’s false. Something like half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise spontaneously aborted very early (and so presumably their needs aren’t being provided for?), and no one who isn’t God ever knows they existed. No conflict, no profound suffering, no painful rending.

The obvious counter here is that the good Cardinal didn’t mean that. And that’s likely true, but then we’re just left wondering exactly what he did mean.

The end of this letter doesn’t help much, except to suggest that it’s all about faces again.

There is a splendid metaphor that reveals in lay terms something common to both Catholics and laymen, that of the “face”. Levinas spoke of it movingly as an irrefutable instance. I would rather cite the words, almost a testament, of Italo Mancini in one of his last books, Tornino i volti [Back to the Faces]: “Living in, loving, and sanctifying our world wasn’t granted us by some impersonal theory of being, or by the facts of history, or by natural phenomena, but by the existence of those uncanny centers of otherness — the faces, faces to look at, to honor, to cherish.”

Which, I think, is nice, even profound, as poetry, but as any sort of discussion of a subject falls rather flatly short of, well, of meaning anything.

Living in our world was granted us by the existence of faces? You don’t say!

Various things!

Russel Brand is pretty funny. (The one with the Westboro Baptist Church loonies seems viral at the moment, but there’s lotsa others, with less icky persons. Including Sarah Silverman, on whom I must admit having a slight enormous crush.)

We went up to Boston to retrieve the little boy yesterday (and came home today). So with that and that I was in two big cities in three days, neither one because of its airport. I suspect this is a New Record for me!

Boston is cool.

We wandered Newbury Street, all the way from the I-90 entrance to the Common and back. Lotsa stores and stuff, which weren’t all that interesting, but also people and graffiti —

Oh, wait, that reminds me of a picture I took! Hold on a sec whilst I find it and put it onto flickr…

Here:

(Anyone know who w.i., or perhaps w.t., is?)

There was a whole wall of multiply-overlayed graffiti also (including another instance of this one), but for whatever reason I didn’t get a shot of that.

(Since the drop of every sparrow is now multiply noted, here’s someone else commenting on this adage (basically noting that it does not, either), and here’s a Tweet wondering whether or not.)

We stopped at one of the three (!) cupcake places on Newbury Street and got some small and overpriced but really quite yummy cupcakes (I had chocolate ganache, mmmm).

We stopped at Raven Used Books, which has really really good books, and I got a copy of “Justine” (Durrell’s, not de Sade’s) (this edition, assuming Abe Books links are relatively long-lasting), and a copy of “The Dissident Word” (The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1995) from the discount table out front, and then a copy of the Oxford University Press “Islam: A Very Short Introduction” (I think I know a bit about it at this overview level already; on the other hand I’m sure there are holes in even my relatively shallow knowledge) and the Shambhala Dragon edition of The Sutra of Hui-Neng, Grand Master of Zen (With Hui-Neng’s Commentary on the Diamond Sutra), which I’m pretty sure I don’t already have.

Then for an early dinner we stopped at Trident Booksellers and Cafe (why does any store bother not selling books, eh?), and had yummy food items and looked at all various books. I noticed there was a guy with a laptop and a beard at another table looking through an issue of Buddhadharma (to which I (also) subscribe), and a little later he passed by our table and saw I was holding the Sutra of Hui-Neng, and he remarked that it’s one of his favorites and we talked for a few seconds.

Oh yeah and at Trident I also bought John Powell’s “How Music Works” for possible use in upcoming (someday) versions of my algorithmic music composition programs. I was going to just put it into some wishlist and maybe get the digital edition, but (a) it was on sale for a nice low price in Trident, and (b) it includes a free CD, and can a e-book include a free CD? I mean, it could, in principle, contain all the bits from the CD, but does it?

In some free newspaper stall on the street I picked up the latest Phoenix, and looking through it while resting in the little boy’s room (before or after Newbury Street, I don’t remember) I found a pointer to Howling Dogs by the impressive porpentine, which reminded my (in color scheme, even!) of my own Forked Stick (which I never finished, but that might not matter, and you might enjoy poking around in also).

I thought that was some nice synchronicity.

When we finally got to relatives’ house for spending the night, I was tired.

Here is me, being tired:

So after that I slept, and we got up this morning, zoomed back into Boston in the rain and wind and scooped up the little boy after his last final, and drove home. The wind and rain calmed down as we drove, and by the time we got home it was fine really.

So that’s those things!

And people call me a packrat!

So I’m cleaning out my office here in preparation for moving to a different office (a bit closer to home yay!), as vaguely alluded to the other day, and in this ancient dusty briefcase with amusing random stickers all over the top, that I’d forgotten was pushed behind a file cabinet a decade or two ago, along with like the number 17 bus schedule from September 1991 and a bunch of ATM receipts from the 90’s, I find a book review from rec.arts.books.reviews, posted on 30 January 1995 and probably printed out not long after, for Anatole Broyard’s “Kafka was the Rage: a Greenwich Village Memoir”.

And reading it over it sounds quite interesting, so I click a few buttons on the computer here and a copy should arrive at home in a few days. (I could have had it arrive instantly on the iPad over here, but it would have cost more than twice as much, and it seems like the kind of book one wants an atomic copy of anyway.)

So who says it doesn’t pay to keep random bits of paper around for ten or twenty years just in case? And, plus, also, by waiting this long I had a much easier time getting a copy, and paid probably less than half as much.

Although maybe not in constant dollars…

Monday, October 10, 2011

Why do we have “foodstuffs”, but no other stuffs? What about “clothingstuffs”? Or “drinkstuffs”? “sexstuffs, drugstuffs, rockandrollstuffs!”

It’s an odd world.

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow

So driving the little boy home from orchestra, we heard something on WNYC about Christopher Columbus, and that reminded me of how in at least some movie version of Little Women or something the protagonist would exclaim “Christopher Columbus!”, and that on the old (old!) Superman teevee show Perry White would exclaim “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (which in at least one episode caused that ghost, or someone pretending to be him, to appear), and that in some book that I read as a child there was a ghost (coincidence, that) who would exclaim “Crimenentlies!” or something by way of a satisfying exclamation that would not get them in trouble with the grownups.

I told the little boy that I suspected the book was “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow”, and I wondered if that book was on the web. It is, in fact it is more or less all over the place, including many copies of the same cover that my edition had.

And for that matter there is even one person mentioning it for exactly the same reason I am here, albeit with the exclamation spelt slightly differently.

That was a good book. I haven’t read any kid books recently; I really should. Doesn’t take long, and is good for the soul. Maybe I’ll reread A Wrinkle in Time or somefing.

The kind of libertarian I still am

So reading Griftopia has, at least for the moment, substantially changed the sort of libertarian I am. The change centers around an observation something like “small government would be great, if we had only small crimes”.

The thoroughgoing libertarian will probably respond to this by saying that the only reason we have big crimes now is precisely that we have big government, but that does not seem very likely to me. Certainly the massive fraud perpetrated by Goldman-Sachs and friends in recent years did exploit the government in lots of ways, but it also exploited investors big and small, and various other parts of the private sector. I see no reason to think that if the government was small, there would not be other things (large popular investment firms, pension plans, leading banks) that would be large, and these (and large numbers of private persons) could easily be defrauded of enough money that the fraudsters would be rich enough to buy off the government and prevent their own prosecution.

So, sadly, I think we need a relatively large and expensive government, if only to keep an eye on the inevitable large and wealthy potential criminal organizations. (Not to mention defending the borders.) Of course it’s still a hard fight to keep it from getting corrupted, too! But at least it seems like there’s a fighting chance.

Tweeting Twits

My Second Life self has a Twitter account, which started out being all Second Life type twitterings, but recently has started to be about more and more political stuff, as I observe with benign interest the Occupy Wall Street folks and etc, and get into the occasional squabble with some right-wing type, one or two of which I follow (“follow”) out of general interest.

Had a bit of a frank exchange of views with one Joe Brooks, who seems to be sort of a halfway sensible conservative, at least sometimes. He is quite anti-Occupy, and more pro-TeaParty, whereas I am rather the opposite. He thinks Occupy Wall Street and so on were started by and are controlled by Communists and Labor Unions and things, whereas I think the Tea Party was started by and is controlled by the Koch Brothers, their (shudder) Americans for Prosperity, and the Republican machine in general.

My impression of the Tea Party is that they took some “stop giving money to rich people!” sentiment around the time of the TARP bailouts, added some “Lower my taxes!” to obtain a general “The Government should tax and spend less!” which could then easily be bent into “Less government regulation!”, which is of course exactly what the rich people want, so that they can continue to become richer, some of them by more or less blatantly illegal and/or immoral means. Quite an ironic circularity there.

I can well imagine someone co-opting the Occupy Wall Street folks’s “stop financial industry fraud!” into “more regulation of Wall Street” and then “more regulation of business” and then “more government power”, which tends to become “more power to the already powerful!”, which is again what various of the bad guys want.

So one has to be careful. But in the case of Occupy, I don’t think that’s happened (yet?).

Here is a very excellent open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occupy Wall Street movement all about co-optation and stuff. Everyone should read it.

The kind of Obama fan I (still) am(n’t)

So I am really not hardly at all happy with Our President.

I mean, WTF.

Got rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; that’s good. But…

He’s surrounded by the same Goldman-Sachs crowd that destroyed the economy for their own personal gain, and they are as far as I can tell now working to make sure that they and their cronies still in the private sector can do it again next time they want another few billion dollars in the kitty.

He’s not turned off the absurd waste of Federal money on the stupid and immoral practice of prosecuting and persecuting medical marijuana providers who are doing things that are completely legal under their state laws. He promised he would do this, and he very simply isn’t.

He’s kept us in stupid wars, expanded those wars, and gotten us into new ones. He pretty much promised that he would do this, too, but I think most of us assumed he was just saying that to get votes. That’ll teach us to hope that someone is being a hypocrite!

(In, ironically enough, his Peace Prize speech, he basically announces that America will wage war not just to defend itself and its allies, but to make sure that every nation in the world respects “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual”. I mean, excuse me? Not with my children, you don’t!)

He has claimed the amazing ability to execute American citizens without trial, on the unilateral say-so of the President. I mean, what the F’ing F? This is completely hideous, unconstitutional, unAmerican, nasty, dangerous, and wrong. We were horrified when Dubya merely claimed the ability to imprison (“detain”) citizens without due process. How can we be calm when Obama claims the ability to kill us?

Anyone who is thinking, well, this was a special case, and it was Obama after all, please consider:

2014, President Romney dies from a bad batch of Botox, and Vice-President Bachmann gets the top spot. Shortly afterward she has a vivid dream in which God tells her that America is at war with atheism.

Two weeks later simultaneous drone strokes take out the national headquarters of American Atheists and the Ethical Culture Society, as well as Richard Dawkins, in the U.S. on a speaking tour. Casualties are in the hundreds.

The Bachmann administration claims that it was a legal national security action, and cites the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki as precedent.

Couldn’t happen? Well, if the Obama administration’s assassination of al-Awlaki was legal, you will have to explain to me why the hell not.

This is why we have warrants, judges, checks and balances, separation of powers.

Phht.

So the President seems to be a not particularly Progressive statist with ambitions of American expansionism. The potential Republican nominees are all either insane, lying hypocrites, or both. I am not overjoyed!

But this, too, shall pass.

In other news

Here is a Stanford (related) AI class that anyone in the world can take and apparently some hundreds of thousands of people intend to. I understand their servers are needing some upgrading. :)

And today’s candidate for Shortest 419 Letter, presented in its entirely:

Be my partner in this huge $17.3M deal.

Enticing, eh?

The evils of convenience

I am pretty fond of this here WordPress theme. On the other hand I am not fond of the right-justification (nearly always a bad idea on computers except in the most thoroughly-typeset documents), nor of the egregious grey lines around all my images. Guess that is the price I pay for not having to hand-code and SCP-upload all these here words!

Hm.