Books this year: a book diary

 Molloy is part of Beckett’s Trilogy, three novels he wrote in French, which denoted a mature, experimental turn to his novels. Beckett is famous for his plays, but these three novels are considered experimental landmarks.

Which is to say that they sat on my shelf for a very long time. Everytime that I went to read them, I opened to Molloy, thumbed through, saw that it was a block of text, shut it, and put it off for later.

I finally forced myself through Molloy. I almost quit about 20 pages in, but pushed through. And I am infinitely glad that I did.

Molloy is comprised of two monologues, one by Molloy, the second by a detective named Moran. Molloy’s monologue spans the first 90+ pages of the book, and Moran’s is the second half.

What’s so daunting about the book is that Beckett has done away with many of the comforts of fiction, and stripped it to a bristling block of stream-of-consciousness. Molloy’s monologue is two paragraphs, with one lasting for over 90 pages. On top of that, Molloy is insane. This is not pick-it-up fiction, but a serious investment. But with the investment comes reward.

If you want studied, scholarly analysis of what Beckett is doing here, there are many internet resources. You most likely, if you haven’t read it, care little about his altering of character voice, his desire to reduce the first person to a point of simply consciousness; nor do you care about whatever his intentions were with stating something about language, about its inability to not introduce errors and intentional obfuscations. Maybe you do, but I have little interest in writing a second-rate lit paper. And when I say “interest”, I mean “ability.”

The book is worth reading, as opposed to articles about what it wants to achieve, because Beckett has one of the most razor sharp voices for our inner drive towards complete vegetation. There are images contained in Molloy that strike me as deeply as any in fiction. Not only that, but Beckett has an eye for the darkly humorous. Beckett is dark. Really, really fucking dark. After the hammering that is Molloy’s monologue, Moran’s quickly proves to be even more bleak, with the protagonist an abusive father, himself slowly going insane. But somehow this is tolerable due to Beckett’s imbuing everything with equal parts humor and dread. It’s a chocolate/peanut butter combo that runs through the book beautifully.

Beckett owes a lot to Joyce, as has been stated by others. Both monologues are similar, in a way, to Molly’s at the end of Ulysses. I think Molloy is more of an enjoyable read than Ulysses, however. Similarly, it is no surprise to me that Paul Auster edited Beckett’s collected works, as his City of Glass, part of it’s own celebrated trilogy, owes much of its final pages to Molloy. If Auster, Joyce, Markson, or Robbe-Grillet tickle any parts of you below the belt, then you probably have already encountered Beckett, and aren’t going at it ass-backwards like I am.

If you read only one 90-page stream-of-conscious paragraph this year, make it Molloy. I would easily say that it’s the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of a book since 2666/One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Great.  I see that I have a new moniker.  Anyways, The Mystical Baker will blog a mystical book.

As the title explains, The Drowned Book is written by Bahauddin, the father of Jelaluddin Rumi, the Islamic mystic poet of the 13th century.  The title comes from when Rumi was teaching something from his father’s writings by a fountain to his students, and Shams of Tabriz, a crazy wandering dervish that had an intimate friendship with Rumi, pushed the copy of the book into a fountain.  Rumi gets pissed, but Shams says that when he reaches in the fountain to get the book, it’ll be dry.  Of course, the book comes out dry and not ruined, and Rumi learns the lesson that he can’t be bound by his dead father’s teachings and that there are higher planes of experience.

Basically Bahauddin’s book was a private journal that he kept, with everything from mystical experiences written down, to meditations on the Quran, to wild sexual fantasies which would’ve scandalized the community, to tips on treating nausea and gardening.

I appreciate his realness as a person–he was a man who had appetites–sexual and spiritual, and his love for God wound both together.  Some of the spiritual wisdom he offers is a bit tedious to read though, but not enough to make me dislike the selections all together.

And I have to admit that I prefer the poetry of Rumi than to his father’s writings, but Bahauddin is a delight in his respective ways too.

The Mystical Baker has blogged.

I learned a lot from this book. It’s a cogently written analysis of the philosophy, theory, and practice of development. Rapley covers the history of development from the post World War II period to the present day postdevelopment movement.
The story begins in the postwar period, during which time the Keynsian consensus took hold. A model was adopted throughout the third world called Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI). The idea was to help foster the growth of an industrial sector by placing trade barriers on the import of finished goods from first world countries. Some countries went further by propping up local industry in various ways, such as reducing the number of firms able to produce a given product or import a given input, giving one firm a legal monopoly, or giving firms access to foreign exchange at concessionary rates.

Eventually, holes began to appear in this strategy. In 1954, W. A. Lewis published a paper which gave some of the theoretical impetus for state-led development. Lewis theorized that the wage rate would remain at the level of agricultural subsistence, thus providing a cheap source of labor for industry. In reality, urban wage rates grossly outstripped rural rates. These unequal gains precluded the emergence of a mass market for consumer goods, thus reducing demand and inhibiting the growth of the industrial sector.

Additionally, governments squeezed the rural agricultural population to prop up industry, making agriculture increasingly unattractive and giving rise to a rural-urban exodus. Squatter cities were born. This lack of focus on developing primary markets was one of the most serious omissions of ISI. From my own experience in Namibia, many families no longer even produce enough food to subsist, relying instead on the few of their relatives who have succeeded in gaining formal employment. These state-supported incomes then become stretched over many people.
In the late 1970s, state intervention was largely discredited and neoclassical theory came to the fore. It was posited by neoclassical theorists that the four “little tigers” or “dragons” of East Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea owed much of their success to a reduced role for the state.

Neoclassical theory also had problems. In insisting on state retrenchment, it seems the pendulum swung back a bit too far. It is not enough to lower inflation and interest rates to achieve increased investment. Infrastructure must be available as well. People will wait for paved roads, plumbing, and electricity from the government before tacking that cost onto their new factory. Investors, particularly from abroad, waited for governments to make the first move, but the orthodoxy of the day was that the state should not interfere, and the the governments never did.

Other problems included a tendency for neoclassicals to overestimate the extent of currency overvaluation, primarily because secrecy and black markets existed, thus making the official currency evaluations applicable only in some parts of the economy. In addition, it came to light that general theoretical assumptions such as the rational actor assumption and the efficient market assumption are sometimes far from true in the third world. People do not always behave rationally. One example of many is that laborers, because familial structures in some third world countries, often are not the recipients of the fruits of their toil. In this case, one can hardly expect someone to behave in a manner that would increase their economic gains. Rather, one would expect them to work far less than the rational actor theory would presuppose.

It would seem that bringing the state back into development would be the way to go. However, in most of the countries that could benefit from this, an increased role for the state is no longer possible. These states simply lack the strength to implement a strong state-led development model. First world countries are also not in the mood these days to give trade concessions and more aid to programs of this sort.
The most modern development is postdevelopment thought. Postdevelopment theorists question or reject the value of development. Some of them think that development is really just a way of integrating and globalizing people, and that achieving a net increase in welfare for the world’s poor has never been the goal of development projects. People may have been happily producing food for themselves instead of for the market, but because it was not monetized, it did not register on the most used statistics gauging welfare. Thus, when “development” takes places, gains are illusory and happiness may actually decrease. Postdevelopment thought is connected in some ways to the anti-globalization movement, but it’s not a perfect intersection. A major arc of postdevelopment theory is that we need to focus on the particular human cases and stop trying to develop grand theories for states.

I’ll stop here. I’ve touched on probably only a tenth of what I could say about this topic. In any case, despite my loathing for all things postmodern, there is something to postdevelopment thought. Before I came to the Peace Corps, it didn’t register to me that organizations like the Peace Corps only go to tribes that are “integrating” into the global system and trying to “develop”. They’re not going to send you to live with a truly traditional people like the Himba here in Namibia. In light of this, one wonders whether helping people is really the goal of development.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time, and finally got around to it this year. I have to say, it was everything I hoped it could be.

The book is what it sounds like. Zinn attempts to tell the story of US History from the side of the people instead of the ruling classes, the elite, or the establishment. He spends a good deal of time on issues of race, gender, minorities, labor and class struggles, slavery, war, and other forms of oppression.

There are some similarities with Lies My Teacher Told Me, but that book doesn’t attempt to be a comprehensive history as Zinn’s book does. I certainly learned a lot from it, and am very happy to have read it.

I read this book because it’s part of the Libertarian canon. In it, Hazlitt proposes that many fallacies in economics can be revealed as such by taking heed of one lesson – to consider all the groups that will be affected by a change instead of only a special group, and to consider long-range consequences instead of only considering short term ones.

Issues that are considered include war, anti-technology people, public works, unions, and interventionist policies of all kinds.

So many people support Keynesian theory these days that you have to seriously consider the possibility that you are a fool if you don’t. I’ve had a couple of spirited conversations with a friend of mine about the money supply and the gold standard and these types of conversations always seem to go to this place where it is remarked that the kind of thinking and logic one might apply to individuals and families is inapplicable to macroeconomics. Indeed, if Keynesian theory is to be believed, only experts can really understand macroeconomic policy. On this, Hazlitt quotes Adam Smith: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

I don’t know the answers, but I can definitely say that even if there were some merit in some of the interventionist policies taken by the government, these policies could definitely be brought about in a fairer way. For example, if it really is necessary to increase the money supply, why not give new money to everyone at the same time? They do it when they give us our “stimulus” checks. In any case, it’s quite clear to me that in the rare instances that logic can be found in macroeconomic policy, the middle and lower classes get the short end of the stick.

I tried to read something else; 62 by Cortazar. Something experimental, something adult. But the pull was too great, and I gave in. I had to finish, had to find out what happened. To the little kids in the fantasy novel. SHUT UP IT’S GOOD.

The Amber Spyglass wraps up the His Dark Materials trilogy. Trying to separate the books makes for a bit of a quandary, especially when read back-to-back, as they form a cohesive piece. But The Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy ending to the trilogy.

I will not explore the grievances I might have had with Pullman’s humanistic evangelical approach as I originally planned. Laying out my concerns to my roommate, she stated that she was unaware of the background of the novel, and thus didn’t notice when she should have taken offense. This seems like the most desirable position. If you have a novel for kids where God is getting killed, the lines are probably already drawn on whether you can enjoy it or not, regardless of what the author’s intent was.

The book follows two children as they attempt to bring about a second fall. Introduced are new characters and worlds and creatures, and the book is by far the most imaginative of the three in terms of content. The protagonists go to a world with miniature spies with poison-tipped spurs who travel on dragon flies, to the land of the dead, and to the home that the Authority (God) lives in.

What’s amazing is that Pullman dispenses with much of the religious overtones with over a hundred pages to go, and shows that the story is largely about love. Not love in a bullshit humanistic-hold-hands-fellow-men kind of way, but love in the sense that we all, if we are lucky, have experienced it growing up: the feeling that you aren’t a kid anymore, because you love. And it’s weird, and it’s sexual, and it’s confusing, and you know you’re still a kid, but you don’t want to be, and you figure out that this is the color of life that you have been missing. Pullman manages to capture this almost pitch-perfectly. And there are still little midget dudes running around with spurs on dragonflies.

I can see this book changing a kid’s life, probably for the better. And I can see it being helpful to occasionally be reminded of the wonder of logic and love as an adult.

I tried in vain to find a cover to put here that wasn’t all mass-media and space opera, because I know that some of you guys talk trash about “genre fiction”. I failed.

Anyhow, A Fire Upon the Deep was one of the most incredible, thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. The intricate plot is galactic in scale and impossible to summarize, so I’m going to gloss right over the story and talk about the backdrop, which is where Vinge shines. (Who cares about story anyways?)

Vinge believes in writing plausible hard science fiction, but believes that the technological singularity will happen before the middle of this century, making it impossible for anyone to really set a hard science fiction novel very far in the future. In some Vinge’s novels, such as Rainbows End, he stays away from the prediction wall by writing about the near future. In others, like A Fire Upon the Deep,  he’ll invoke a singularity-stopping deus ex machina. In this case, it’s laws of physics which don’t permit AI in our part of the universe.

So the galaxy is stratified. There are slow parts of the galaxy where people can’t get much more sophisticated than we are now. There are other parts where faster-than-light travel and all kinds of fancy AI are possible. Most races, given enough time, colonize the more permissive parts of the galaxy, experience a technological singularity, and then “transcend” into different kinds of existence, becoming angel/demon-like “powers” first, and then disappearing, for reasons that mere mortals could never understand.

And so this story is populated with everything from god-like creatures to unsophisticated bottom dwellers of the universe who make centuries-long voyages in “coldsleep” while civilizations and singularities pass them by.

It’s bewildering. After every two chapters or so I had to put it down and gaze at the wall, glassy-eyed, and contemplate the true possibilities of our future.

Our civilization’s history, mercifully free of planetary catastrophes and other game-changers, has always had me believe in a sort of unilineal cultural history of planets, culminating in a technological singularity and then happiness ever after.

Vinge, with a visionary mathematician’s erudition, took care to demolish my pompous simplicity with a half a dozen compelling examples of the different ways that a planet’s history might turn out incredibly weird. The combinitorics are unfathomable. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.

I didn’t know anything about this book before I started reading it, and I’m glad for that, so this will be a short post. After reading the book, I discovered through Wikipedia that there are apparently a lot of philosophical underpinnings to what’s going on, in particular that this is supposed to be an Absurdist novel.

The main character of the book is a really weird guy, but I can empathize with him. That probably makes me a weird guy too, but it might be that I have Absurdist feelings. He doesn’t really care about things and choices that people are supposed to care about, but it works.

I wouldn’t say I would buy the book for my friends or pull anyone’s arm to read this, but it satisfies my effort/reward limits. It’s a teeny book you could knock out in a few hours, so even with a tiny reward it’s probably still worth the read. On the other hand, if you can find a similarly teeny book which you think will have a lot of reward, you’re economically and morally compelled to read that one first.

I became interested in this book because it is about a former atheist who turned to Christianity because of rational considerations. I had hoped that he would talk a little more about what those considerations were, but it never really came up.

This is a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a book which I have never read. I have seen a few lectures and interviews with Dawkins and feel I know where he’s coming from. To me, it seems like he thinks atheists as a group are misunderstood and attacked, particularly in America. As such, atheists need to get angry and verbally attack religious people, in particular Christians who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design. He thinks it is a good strategy to compare people’s belief in God with a childish belief in Santa Clause and doubts whether most Christians will respond to anything other than an emotivist attack.

So, on to The Dawkins Delusion. I didn’t really learn much from the book. One interesting point which I’d never heard before is in answer to the claim that there is an infinite regress in causality so it doesn’t make sense to look for a final cause of the world. The authors say that this is precisely what physicists look for when they search for a “Theory of Everything”. I don’t know how true this is. I’m reminded of Hawking’s musings in A Brief History of Time that, even after discovering the single set of equations that describe all of nature, we will still have to wonder what breathes life into them.

I was unsettled by the authors’ rejection of the idea of “viruses of the mind” and “memes”. I always thought these were some of Dawkins’s most loved devices among academics, but the authors’ of this book seem to think it’s superfluous to use memes to understand culture and belief, and that many academics don’t think memes exist.

I was also happy to see the authors’ refutation of Dawkins’s belief that atheists are nonviolent. The authors’ bring up historical cases such as the Soviet’s destruction and elimination of churches and priests between 1918-1941 and other violent persecution of Christians in the name of Atheism. The authors’ also make the point that, based on Robert Pape’s study, Dying to Win, suicide bombings have a political rather than religious motivation, and that religion is neither sufficient or necessary to account for such radicalism.

Well, I’m still not religious, and I think the author isn’t going to get any converts out of this, despite the authors hope in the introduction that the book would be read by atheists as well as Christians. It might change some people’s minds about being militant a la Dawkins, but I think that’s unlikely and it will probably serve Christians looking for refutation more than anything else.

The Subtle Knife is the second in the His Dark Materials trilogy, composed, along with The Subtle Knife, of The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass. I read the first book almost a year ago, and though I liked it, I have only now gotten around to book two.

Fantasy books are not usually my bag. Especially children’s fantasy that adults read. I haven’t read, monolithic in the fantasy genre, Narnia, Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings. I am missing the essential building blocks of the fantasy genre. So, why start with a second-tier series like His Dark Materials?

The reputation of the trilogy is that where Narnia and, to a lesser-extent, Lord of the Rings (from what I have read of them, and not in them) are Christian tales, His Dark Materials is an atheistic rebuttal. I would like to state that if I chose to read a rebuttal of a style before reading what it is refuting because of some minor confluence of deistic opinion, which at best might be mere surface agreement, I should be beaten about the town square and forced to carry a sign that reads “Jackass.” The sort of small-mind that can only stand that which agrees with it, and will seek it out in a manner that allows it to ignore what that material itself very well might be referencing, is so child-like and retarded as to appear crippled irreparably.

I chose to read His Dark Materials based on strong recommendations from both of my roommates. I have yet to run across as determined a set of personal advocates for the other classics of the fantasy genre, so I bowed in deference to their taste. If a similar fan of Lord of the Rings or Narnia argues for those series as convincingly, I will gladly go through them. I was particularly swayed by the fact that I will, in fact, cry upon finishing the trilogy. I am slightly atwitter about the prospect of having human emotions.

Any advocate of fantasy, however, must first leap through my own prejudices against the genre. I don’t know why, but for some reason the whole business has very, very little appeal for me. Usually, the very mention of goblin, orc, or dwarf will instantly repel me.

The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist to the story, and follows him for the first chapters, but does eventually continue the story from the first book. The opening chapters of The Subtle Knife are compelling, portraying a boy of twelve living in Oxford who cares for his mother who is, seemingly, schizophrenic. However, it becomes apparent that something really is after Will and his mother. The story of the Golden Compass was much more traditional children’s fantasy fair, full of heroic little girls, armored bears, and magical fortune telling compasses from the beginning. So, maybe that’s why it took me a year, despite the fact that I liked The Golden Compass, to get to the Subtle Knife.

Which is unfortunate, on my part, because The Subtle Knife is, in my opinion, a superior book to The Golden Compass. It seems like Pullman has given up any semblance of pandering to children. His language isn’t simplistic, and his concerns seem to be as adult as most fiction every strives for.

There is a certain level of enjoyment at how subversive Pullman will go. And as the story shifts into a possible plot to murder God, its tough not to take this back to the realm of its social context. But suppressing that, ignoring that this is a children’s book (or young reader, or whatever the fuck), we have a fantasy story where Pullman has upped the stakes by using very potent symbolic creatures to say something that directly relates to most people with any connection to Western religion. But ignoring the target-audience and potential massive disagreements with the author’s final thesis aren’t exactly small caveats to leap over.

Update: After I wrote this, I decided to do my basic research. Which is Wikipedia. And the article on Pullman kinda made me want to scream. He sounds like a douche. A gigantic douche, in fact. I think I’ll fully delve into the whole thing once I finish with the third book, so as not to shitstain my perception too much with his potentially being a gigantic a-hole.