Thomas
One of my projects this year was to finish reading all of McCarthy's works that I hadn't yet. Without checking, I believe I'd read most or all of The Border Trilogy, The Road, Blood Meridian, and The Passenger series. I started on this because The Road is my favorite novel, and I am fascinated with the way that McCarthy writes. But really I started it because The Passenger and Stella Maris totally stumped me, they simply made no impression. So I felt I needed to go back through the collection and return to them, eventually.The play, screenplay, and “novel in dramatic form” (I have no idea what that means, as it is indistinguishable from a play to my eyes) were challenges. No Country for Old Men is a novel, adapted into one of the best films of the 2000s by the Coen Brothers. Adapted almost word for word. Yet, I have trouble imagining the play and stageplay (and this novel) as successful adaptations. Part of that is because The Counselor (a screenplay) is not very good, and the film adaptation might be one of the worst film adaptations of the 2010s if it weren't so bland and forgettable.While not as bad as those, Sunset Limited certainly feels flat. It is a two-man play where the symbolism could not be any more direct. The characters are called White and Black. One is a white man, one is a black man (guess which is which). One is a suicidally depressed atheist, the other is a reformed criminal and believer in the Man Jesus (guess which is which).For the first half, we dance around a little bit the direct confrontation of suicide. The Sunset Limited is the euphemism used for a character seeking to jump in front of a speeding train. That character has done the math, the train outruns the neurons (evidence of a kind of McCarthy verbiage that I like in his novels, but seems to struggle here).As the pages dwindle you start to grow concerned that the story may not have a resolution. Ambiguity in endings is very Cormac, and he fulfills the brief. I do wonder if we are supposed to believe that a thing happens between the final closing lines, but I am also disinterested.Ultimately, it comes down to a pretty rote discussion between an atheist and a believer, and it doesn't do much for me. Because the discussion feels less about faith and doubt, and more about worldview. It isn't White's lack of faith that isolates him in his community. He clearly detests himself. So what does it matter whether he believes in god or not? Plenty of believers detest themselves. It felt like we were missing the point a little because Cormac wanted to poke at these ideas of faith and doubt alongside sociological worldview in a way that I don't think exactly works. And I think when he does this poking in a different way, elsewhere (The Road), he is much more thoughtful about it, and more interesting.I did flag some interesting exchanges, my favorite is probably on page 118:>BLACK: The point dont change. The point is always the same point. It's what I said before and what I keep lookin for ways to say it again. The light is all around you, cept you dont see nothin but shadow. And the shadow is you. You the one makin it.Earlier in the book, Black spoke of the light as a quasi-physical thing, a thing with weight. I like this thread of connection to “carrying the light” in The Road. This is also the line that most clearly gets at White's context, I think. That it is not a lack of faith that has led him to this deeply cynical, self-murderous place. It's that he has brought himself there, maybe hurried along by things we don't know about.Maybe part of my response is that White and I are very different kinds of faithless. I do not think that people are evil. I think we live in a world that hurts. We try to stave off the pain; we form connections, we fall for people, we mourn together. Some of us are lost. I don't know if it is forever. But I think hurt, lost, people hurt other folks, too.There is another exchange. White is asking Black why he lives in the slums (my word):>WHITE: Well I still don't get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good?>>BLACK: As opposed to someplace where good was needed.I don't know how to connect that to any point that I'm making, if I'm trying to make one. But I like it. It makes me think about purpose. Black feels that he has a purpose, and I think that's important for us. Not in a theological way, but in a way that we have a sense of belonging to one another. A responsibility, or commitment. I don't have any idea what my purpose is, but my lack of faith doesn't mean that I feel life is a waste of time. I hope it isn't. I can't look my friends in the face and think life a waste of time.Yet, that is not exactly explored here. Every conversation feels like it is skirting around these ideas in favor of this belief / disbelief dichotomy.I think I could ramble on a lot about these things and go nowhere. So, anyway, I think the book feels very flat. Similar to his other screenplay/play works, I think these themes are explored more fully and thoughtfully in his novels.As an aside, there is a lot of literature out there on suicide from a theist perspective. There is less written for the atheist. The best book I have read towards this is [b:Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It 17802953 Stay A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It Jennifer Michael Hecht https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368813378l/17802953.SX50.jpg 24904624] by Jennifer Michael Hecht. I found it in the UIC Library in 2013 and it saved my life back then.
Chambers dedicates the book, “For anybody that could use a break.” It's quite a good way to spend a break. I didn't mean to read this in one sitting, but found it read fast enough to about page 60 or so and by then I couldn't put it down. I have marked up a lot of passages that really spoke to me, though I can't say why other than that I can see myself in them. And by seeing myself in them feel connected to the writer and to others who inevitably see themselves in them.
Some of these passages are just short and sweet (“I'm somewhat invested in this now.”). I think my favorite is a long monologue by a character deeply lost that feels like they have no reason to feel that way (page 119 carrying through in dialogue until 121).
Then there is the later discussion of purpose, that elusive thing. Moving goalposts, nothing good enough, not knowing exactly what to do. I thought it was lovely. “So, why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without? If you understand that robots' lack of purpose–is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy into seeking purpose?” Followed by the closure (or what can be had of it) on page 139.
It is a very sweet story. As always with the great robot stories, there is nothing better with which to examine all of the loves and goods of being human than the inhuman.
All of this positivity does come with my pricklishness around the writing. 98% of it is very good (sometimes verging on saccharine but that is welcome). I find that as much as I enjoy cussing and cursing in my daily voice, I bump on it pretty hard in writing. Something about it so rarely rings true (“whole-ass” please). Anyway I am happy to put it aside and will re-read this book. Probably several times.
McCarthy's third novel. The one I've enjoyed the least. It is very dark, about someone with a sad life who descends into depravity. I read in two sittings, last Sunday and today.
It feels like McCarthy still finding his form. The story is more or less a character study, following Ballard throughout his life. It's difficult to say why I leave so uninterested in Ballard. It it not an interesting thing to be sad and lonely. Maybe the things that happen to a person to render them this way can be interesting, but watching a person descend was not for me. Ballard is dealt a bad hand and makes no decision to help himself, or even to not hurt others. He demonstrates little care for anyone, and is cold and isolated to the point of being a figment of nature.
I wonder why McCarthy wrote this story. Where does it come from? Is it an expression of anger? I have not read either title deeply enough to make a connection, but some elements of it feel much more thoroughly explored in Blood Meridian. McCarthy's sort of biblical view of evil and humanity. A view that I don't know enough about for which to say whether I agree or not.
You can certainly tell a difference between these earlier novels and The Road. People read The Road and feel it is bleak and depressing, but at its core The Road is about love and endurance and pushing on. Carrying the light, no matter how dark it gets. These earlier novels feel much more cynical and shrouded. There is no light in Child of God. It is about a person who is wounded and wounds others until he is taken back by the earth.
It feels like there is something here in that in the first half of the book, Ballard's backstory is explored. His eviction from home, suicide of his father. I think we're supposed to understand that Ballard is pushed farther and further from society and he degrades as a result. That's fine. I don't think it is interestingly told. There are sad and lonely people all around. You can stand next to someone and they are a thousand miles away, some place in their head. Remembering or wishing to forget. That they continue on is more interesting than this story of a person choosing to harm others and become wrath.
The first hundred and some pages resisted all effort at interest. UKLG is a dry writer. I know she is beloved by many, but this is my second fiction from her (first was Left Hand of Darkness), and I'm left with the same feeling that I am interested in the story in spite of the pacing, structure, and characters.
It is bizarre to say, but Dispossessed has a little kinship with Atlas Shrugged. Rand's tome is also a thin-to-barely veiled excuse to talk about philosophy and economics. Dispossessed is certainly better than that in most measurable ways. It's shorter, much better written, and has a lot more interest in interrogating ideas and stressing them.
I mentioned in my review of Everything for Everyone(?) that I have no interest in the anarchy idea and typically find it dumb. When it comes to fiction, part of that disinterest is the idea of a post-scarcity world. It is difficult to imagine and doesn't pass any reality testing, in a way that I find difficult to suspend disbelief. Dispossessed does not take place in a post-scarcity utopia and is interested in how an anarcho-syndicalist world would navigate things like droughts and resource shortages. That's interesting!
I think UKGL's Anarres manifests a lot of my concerns with a totally stateless world. The absence of government is an illusion, and factionalism and cults of personality still spawn as a part of human nature. We see that Anarres has no actual protections for this, only protections on paper. Sabul is able to accrue power and exert outsized influence on his world by virtue of being an expert, and this results in suffering. Shame, which is the primary enforcement tool of the Anarrean norms (think on that), does not impact Sabul at all. I don't think we ever see Shame deployed against a power-holder in Anarres, only the people struggling against the power holders.
And that's the problem with a Stateless world in which shame and fear are the enforcement mechanisms. Anarres portends to be a quasi-utopia, still navigating scarcity, where individuals can do whatever they like (with the possible exception of rape of a woman or child, I don't think there's mention of rape of a man). Deviations from this are shamed, bullied, or beaten to accept therapy. We see this break at least one character after they write a play that is poorly received. This world does have laws, but they are unwritten. My suggestion is that the unwritten law is more dangerous than the written law, because it is immutable by anything but, if optimistic, time.
An unwritten law, when questioned, can be waived away easily, “there are no laws!” One of the Odonianisms is, “to create crime, create laws.” That's something that sounds deep and moving until someone is raped or beaten near-death or run from every town because they hold an idea or an association. The power-holders in this world are creating laws, but they are calling them norms and acting as if they are mutable.
To an extent, this is a deviation from what I understand to be Odo's initial setup. I don't think Odo means “write” when she says “create,” and would thus still consider these as laws. But that's all semantics, because in the reality of Anarres in the story we find it, the society has failed to resist laws and hierarchy and operates within these structures, veiled now against critique and change.
I like all of this. It is the most realistic working on these ideas that I've read in fiction. UKGL is poking these academic ideas with sticks and seeing where they break and where they hold. One of my favorite bits around this idea is when the utopia is hit with a (I think multi-year) draught, and the scarcity of it all begins to warp people.
I think UKLG's Anarres is successful within a window of scarcity: things must be scarce enough that mutual aid and sharing is required and beneficial, but not so scarce that people's survival instincts trigger. Well enough!
There is a passage around page 312 where a character talks about having the job of counting people as numbers, and making lists of who will eat and who will starve. I thought this had tremendous potential and wish we'd have seen this instead of had a character tell us they did it at one point. I want to be in that character's head while they're navigating that crisis. Nearby this passage, another character is describing actions taken during the famine - plotting of food raids, food supply lines, etc. I loved the logistical discussion and the picture of this society's resort when scarcity begins to crunch it.
——
A big part of the book involves the main character trying to figure out his unifying theory and then figuring out what to do with it. The middle section of the book has a lot of interesting ideas on this — scientific research co-opted by States, control of ideas, scientific communities being quasi-Stateless in times of peace. I wonder how much of this is inspired by the atomic sciences and specifically the process of scientific research around the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (an incredible work of non-fiction) explores these themes in our history. There was an earnest belief that ideas, if explored, would be found unusable or as a deterrent. Scientific naivety combined with the fear of the threatened State.
——
In terms of the book itself, I pained myself to read the first half. It simply does not move with any swiftness and has ideas that are only vaguely interesting. There's a lot of world building that is written in the driest possible prose. It got a lot better in the second-half, which is where the book really does become an excuse to poke and prod at these ideas. The plot in the second half is basically nonsense but the idea exploration is quite good.
Speaking of the plot in the second half — where'd it go?? There is a deus ex machina the size of a civilization or two, and then the book sort of clatters to an abrupt end with nothing resolved. I'm not someone who needs everything to be resolved, but it'd be nice to be left with the impression that the author didn't leave half the manuscript on a park bench somewhere.
It feels unfinished. I think the problem with writing a book to poke and prod at philosophy is that once your poking and prodding is done, you have to figure out what your story is. I don't think the book has a good idea of its story. The alternating timeline chapters bemused me, but ultimately they add nothing at all to the story other than a false feeling of suspense. I wonder if it was written chronologically and then shuffled because, if read straight through, there really is very little of interest happening.
That said, I found it very thought-provoking and it made me turn some ideas around in my head that I've previously been dismissive of.
——
One last note: my copy of this book is RIDDLED with errors. One every few chapters, it seemed, to the point where I became on high-alert for them. I think these are with the publisher, not the author. They almost feel like OCR errors; for example one error on pg 148 is ‘life' instead of ‘like,' another on pg 181 is ‘them' instead of ‘then.' These errors were really distracting and annoying.
One more down in the Year of Cormac.
I am not surprised to be less than pleased with The Counselor. In my Letterboxd review of Ridley Scott's adaptation (https://boxd.it/5bor6n), I lament the film's incoherence. The screenplay is certainly more coherent, but I think it has some problems.
Reading this let me understand why The Stonemason didn't quite work for me, either. In Cormac's novel/prose work, the entire construct belongs to his language. All facets of the world are crafted by it. The dialogue is enmeshed in the narration, thought, and description. All blends, and he is fantastic in this form. In a screenplay, you have stage direction and dialogue. Nothing else. It lacks a dimensionality on which McCarthy's work depends.
For me, this is evidenced by the strange merging of Cormac's dialogue with a rather contemporary world. Outside of his screenplays, I've never read a line from McCarthy that rang any less than perfect true. Yet, in this, some half the lines read strangely. Part of this is the curse of casting, having seen the movie first I must imagine Cameron Diaz say the final lines. Some of these lines, where McCarthy decides to talk about routers, VPNs, encryption; source code, compilers, machine-readable language, simply not in his element. They do not ring.
There are very good lines. Some examples:
-CAFE MAN — No. Of course not. All my family is dead. I am the one who has no meaning.
or
- JEFE — Yes. An understanding that the world will not take you back. I have no wish to paint the world in colors more somber than those it wears, but as the world gives way to darkness it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss the understanding that the world is in fact oneself. It is a thing which you have created, no more, no less. And when you cease to be so will the world. There will be other worlds. Of course. But they are the worlds of other men and your understanding of them was never more than an Illusion anyway. Your world—the only one that matters—will be gone. And it will never come again. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are. ...
This mere pages from the Diaz character speaking of Sequel servers and remote access Trojan Horses, Zrizbi or Torig... I don't think so!
I wish I'd have read this before watching the film. I wonder if my approach would be any different. I don't think so — but we'll never know. I think Cormac's work is at its best when it is in novel form and when it has space to really muck around in ideas. Something about the screenplay format hollows it out.
I technically “finished” this because I skimmed the rest, but I more or less gave up after the Staten Island chapter. And ‘gave up' feels like it does me a disservice, because I should be framing it as, “died after a long struggle.” I wanted to put it down after the first chapter. I stuck with it as long as I could.
I am preconfigured to dislike it. I find anarchist theory and ideas to be woefully stupid, and I don't even know how to phrase that more respectfully. I simply do not think they are in line with reality. Not in a “you're saying no before thinking about it,” way. Part of it is that I believe a State can be a force for good, maybe in the same way that anarchists think that the Stateless can be. I'm not sure. I know there are a lot more examples in history of the State being a force for good than an anarchist “State” being a force for anything (to be fair, more examples of a State as evil, too). Anyway, I find the whole thought really dumb and bizarre, not to mention a woeful waste of time when so much could be done to improve the real world.
This is a work of fiction, so I'll review it like that. The writing is abysmal. An interview format can be interesting, though I think it is almost always an insanely lazy way to write because it lets the authors get away with such little detail and the infrastructure that makes a good story. You can do these things in an interview format, but these authors do not. They fail even to write decent interviews. No one in the world has ever or will ever speak like this. If an interviewer tried to interview like this, they the conversations would never get off the ground.
One of the authors is a professor at my alma mater. I frantically checked to ensure they DIDN'T teach in my program because I was appalled that someone professing human development would write such poor interviews. Surely, this is not how they engage when interviewing real people. I don't believe the people writing these have ever interviewed anyone. I hope not!
Struggling to put my personal beliefs about anarchy and its feasibility aside, considering the world described - there is no detail put into anything. The lack of detail drains conflict. There is no intention or opposition in the telling of this tale, and that means there is no drama. We are never held in suspense. We are never wondering what will happen next. If you set out to tell a story in an interview format, a certain amount of suspense is already lost because you are removed in time. So, you must keep us engaged somehow. They failed to engage me or try even to hold my interest.
In my book club, someone said something to the effect of, “it's in the aches, not the details.” I'm glad the book worked for them. That is not how books work for me. A good idea does not save a bad book, and let me be clear: I think this is an egregiously bad book. It lacks detail, it lacks consistency, it lacks interest in anything but the ideas the authors wanted to package up and proclaim as workable. They present no evidence for their assertions. They talk about a future 40-60 years from now in which everyone agrees with everything. They present no discussion of how the world achieved this peace, other than some passing glances at the great fun of remembering war and murder. Characters wave away any emotional conflict with “I've been to therapy.” Were it so easy.
I think these things MUST be engaged with if you're going to write a good book. If you want to write a vibes book, write a vibes book! But this isn't that - this is a work of worldly fan-fiction that tries to sell a political and economic ideology that does none of the work required to convince anyone. You can't give someone an idea and say, “figure it out!” That's a dumb thing to do!
This thing has already wasted too much of my time - safe to say I hated it!
Not exactly my favorite Cormac, but still a treat to read. About half of the book is sort of non-plot... stuff. I would call it a heavy vibes book. What plot exists is heavily weighted at the start and end.
There were a few things that happened that I thought didn't go anywhere. One of these, on a double check, I realized I had just lost the thread. Some of the others really don't go anywhere and are more about establishing the feel of the characters.
I continue to really love the dialogue that Cormac writes. At no point, EVER, do I bump against a character speaking. It never feels out of true.
Really an odd book! I believe I saw a review of this in the NYTimes a few weeks ago and thought it sounded interesting, but forgot everything about it except the name. I picked it up in my local bookstore's summer sale based on that and the cover art, which makes it look like a spec-fic. Needless to say the first 50 pages were pretty unexpected.
Parts read like a fever dream. I had no concept that this was based on / inspired by / referencing a real person until about halfway through. Not sure what to think of that.
In some ways it reminds me a lot of Stoner, in that it follows a person who is sort of stumbling through his life. This character is less endearing.
I enjoyed the writing. I might have more to say on this after I let it digest.
It feels absolutely stupid to call a book about creativity by perhaps the most successful music producer of the last century bad, but holy shit is it not for me.
I'm not sure exactly when I began reading it. Several folks in a movie community I'm active in began reading it more or less as a devotional, and I started it in this way. I quickly found the writing exceedingly annoying, and the lessons overwritten and cliche.
This is nearly 400 pages of the same basic thing over and over again, dressed up in different decoration. Sometimes conflicting with itself (which I don't care about much). It is written in the same tone of voice as instructional tarot cards and horoscopes: incredible authority without any connection to anything. Gaping generalities and astounding assumptions.
I kept thinking, “this sounds like so much pseudoscientifical nonsense,” but of course it isn't scientific and isn't trying to be. It is really more pseudo-religious or pseudo-metaphysical. After more or less every ‘area of thought' there is a little broken out piece of text that sort of languishes on the page. The spacing is broken up to add some extra... Something. Here's one:
“Is it time for the next project
because the clock or calendar
says it's time,
or because the work itself
says it's time?”
Wow! Deep!
Much of the text of the book exists only to add length to basic thesis statements that really stand alone. The added scaffolding does nothing but subtract and annoy. I wonder how this book came to be, and I wonder how exactly Rick and Neil Strauss collaborated on this. Who is responsible for all this pretension and preaching? It seems so counter to Rubin's personality. It has a religious feel, but in the way that you hear a Recent Convert talk. It's one of the most grating things I've read in recent memory.
There are a few parts that I liked, mostly the thesis statements. If you stripped away all of the superfluous gobbledygook, I feel like there's some good stuff here. I had the thought about 250 pages in that there are probably blogposts about this book that are better than the book.
“The work reveals itself as you go.”
I like that! This is actually quite good. It is also one of the standalone things unencumbered by a bunch of scaffolding written by someone on a pay-by-word contract.
To be fair, my hackles were raised at the very start. Rubin (or Strauss, I guess) talks about “receiv[ing] direct transmissions from the universe,” and this sort of thing I am deathly allergic to. I was also really annoyed with some of the early rather privileged ‘wisdom' the book proclaims. Rubin has had a pretty exceptional life with a net worth of some $300, so some of this external/internal experience talk (around page 60) is rather easy for him to say.
There is also a passage on page 39 that simply blew me away — in the wrong direction:
“A helpful exercise might be opening a book to a random page and reading the first line your eyes find. See how what's written there somehow applies to your situation.” (A quick interruption — see how this mirrors religious writing and fortune telling nonsense??? My mom used to read the Bible like this.) “Any relevance it bears might be by chance,” (it is) “but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that's at play. When my appendix burst, the doctor who diagnosed it insisted that I go to the hospital immediately to have it removed. I was told there were no other options. I found myself in a nearby bookstore. Standing out on a table in front was a new book by Dr. Andrew Weil. I picked it up and let it fall open. The first passage my eyes went to said: if a doctor wants to remove a part of your body, and they tell you it has no function, don't believe this. The information I needed was made available to me in that moment. And I still have my appendix.”
Don't take medical advice from this guy. Probably not from the nutjob book he picked up, either.
I picked this up at Politics & Prose at the Wharf on Tuesday, at an event with the author. This was the first I'd heard or read Demsas' writing. It's good! The event was enjoyable.
The book is a collection of Demsas' writing on housing for The Atlantic. I appreciate the continued focus on housing supply as the critical component to our struggles, especially as relates to homelessness. Our country loves finding scapegoats, but it really is a simple problem: we need more housing. All other considerations are secondary.
There are some parts of the articles I'm not in total alignment with, but these are relatively few. Good collection of articles.
I have a LOT of mixed feelings about this book. I think I'm going to try and separate my thoughts into a few categories: 1) as a topic; 2) as an academic text; 3) the author's voice and presence; and 5) gut reactions.
1) As a topic. As a topic, it's interesting. I spent a lot of time in the library stacks trying to find and understand myself when I was an undergraduate, and I read a lot of stuff this book cites. Especially CJ Pascoe's work. This book takes some issue with the diametric opposition of hetero and homo, and sort of dances around bisexuality. There's a section on the concept of sexual orientation as a congenital, fixed, trait. “Born this way.” Ward doesn't have much interest in it, and takes time to explain its rather weak standing in capital-R Research and the protective haze that surrounds it. Ward draws a line to the “homonormative” gay folks for putting this line in place.
I don't really know much about that. I can see where Ward is coming from, as someone who in general doesn't believe anyone is 100% gay or straight. And, I guess, as someone who in general is not a big fan of labels, and who thinks our (the LGBTQAI+ community in general) fascination with subdivision and labeling is probably a little more damaging than it is healing. But, I can also recognize that as a relatively vanilla gay white guy, that's easy enough for me to say.
The cultural angle of the book, centering the discussion on straight white men, is another interesting angle. Personally, I really like exploring this specific subset, as I think Ward is right in denoting the pernicious influence of white superiority in many of these contexts (military, frat, etc). Ward essentially says that whiteness facilitates the creation of a context by which homosexual activity can be understood as straight. Ward doesn't use the word “context” but throughout, I thought a lot about Goffman's facework theory and the idea of cultural contexts, and I think these things are in play in a big way in these environments.
However, I think the research question (if, indeed, there is one) gets lost in Ward's tangential exploration of her personal life and experiences. I'll talk more about that in the next section and section 4.
2) Did you notice what I just did there - say that I'll talk about something in the next section? That's a sin that a lot of academic texts commit. I'm sick of it. It's bad writing, folks. This book commits it over and over again and suffers from too much scaffolding. The first chapter lays out the rest of the book, along with the thesis and supporting points of each chapter. Each chapter strings together its sections by referring to the next in the same way I just did. This is not good writing! I find it hard to blame Ward for this because it's a sin I see in academic writing all the time. Are editors telling their writers that their readers are too dumb to get through a text without their hands being held? With all this scaffolding, Ward's book is only 211 pages long. Believe me, I can keep an idea in my head long enough to get through!
That aside, I bumped on the writing frequently. Is this an academic text? It isn't an ethnography. It isn't exactly a sociological study (though Ward refers to it as one). Having images denoted as figures does not an academic study make. There are endnotes, which I appreciated, and this is the most studious element of the work. It does read like a very long literature review, which is fine! It gets its point across. However, I can't help but feel like there was a better academic text inside of this somewhere.
Now, maybe this is intentional. I have edited academic journals and (especially the last time), I've thought a lot about what “academic” writing is supposed to look like. Why does it have to look a certain way? So, I'd be inclined to give this a little more grace if it weren't for the author's voice (see the next section — see how annoying that is?).
3) The author's voice. Ward talks about herself and her personal life a lot. On the one hand, this has given me the absolute best understanding of what it means to be gay versus being queer. On the other, it is very much so presented as a versus. Ward repeatedly voices her frustration and pity on the gay movement and, to be frank seems really condescending and rather privileged about it at times.
Pg 200: “I am not suggesting a direct causal relationship between the cultural turn to gay love and the emergence of heteroflexibility discourses, but rather a convergence of mutually complementary forces. As the gay movement continues its transformation into a PAC-funded celebration of homonormative love, it becomes more difficult to conflate naughty, casual, and disavowed homosexual encounters with gay identity, as gay identity is now so commonly represented by the image of out, proud, and respectable gay couples.” Tell me how you really feel!
Ward talks frequently about the damage that the view of homosexuality as a congenital trait does to the overall queer movement. She talks a lot about the kind of relationships and sex she likes, and the kind of behavior she finds ‘exhiliarating' while vaguely side-eyeing the plain gays that just want to go to work and go home and have a regular fuck now and again. I don't really get her frustration. I don't understand why Ward believes that sex is inherently and always, ALWAYS, political. Why does every liaison have to be about sending a message to somebody? She seems to contradict herself at times with this, by saying that by ascribing meaning to men's non-homosexual-homosexual behaviors, that we're putting a meaning onto them that they have not taken upon themselves. One of her key points is that men who have sex with men (MSM) who say they are not gay... Are not gay! So why does she devote so much time to judging non-queer folks?
This is a significant cause for my bridling at thinking of this as an academic text. Ward is happy to tell us about her time viewing pornography (for science! though this is really the least of my concerns, I simply am not sure I'd ascribe quite as much meaning to hazing porn videos as Ward does), her fetishes, and her judgments on gay vs queer culture. That does not feel academic, to me. At some points, I was wondering, ‘why is Ward sharing this with us, what are we supposed to take from it?'
4) Gut reactions. I had a few. Particularly about the gay vs queer politics that book talks about on and off throughout. But I had one that I'm not super proud of, and I'm thinking through its source. I am not 100% sure that a lesbian feminist sociologist is the best person to try and interpret the dynamics of gay or queer men. Problematic take, right!? It was a gut reaction, and when the thought went through my head I put the book down to think about it for a minute. I'll tell you where it came up the loudest. Page 139. Ward is comparing surfer bros and leather-clad bikers and cowboys. She contends that these forms (the surfers) are desirable for white MSM because leather-clad bikers and cowboys have higher associations with queer culture.
Let me put it bluntly: I don't buy it. My actual thought? “Has Jane Ward looked at a surfer bro and a leather-clad biker dude next to each other before?” Not to be too stereotypical, but they don't look much alike! I think there is an element of truth in the “simply buddies” thing, but I think that is but one element and not the most significant. It's little things like this that add up and make me wonder, “okay, has Ward talked to a gay guy about this?” She probably doesn't have too, but I hope my gut reaction is understandable.
It's also worth noting that Ward addresses this head-on in the closing chapter, which IMO is the best chapter of the book (in particular, this discussion takes place at 204-206). There is another place in the book (unfortunately I can't find the page rt now) where Ward talks about the particular importance that a feminist lens can bring to this examination, and I found it super interesting. I came away wanting to read more from that lens.
I'm still thinking a lot about this book, Ward's arguments, and the way in which she presents them. I don't fully understand why she chose to discuss so much about herself in this, but she clearly made that choice and feels it is important. I may come away with a deeper appreciation for this after more thought. But, while I found the topic super interesting, I think I'd have valued a modern-day take on Howard's “Men Like That” (which Ward references here), compared to this amalgamation of personal essay and literature review.
This is not a review, just some rambling. I liked this book, a lot.
At one point in Fun Home, Bechdel wonders what a father is. She ventures into the dictionary and finds a tautology. I think about what it is to be a father a lot, and what it is to have a father. I haven't spoken to mine in a long time.
Later, Bechdel recounts a period of life where she and her father have a currency, a common language. I put the book down there and wondered if my father and I ever had one. It's probably been close to ten years since I spoke to him; certainly, since I meaningfully spoke with him. More? Even so far removed in time, it's hard to get through my immediate simmering rage or cold disdain to think about positive traits that he had. I have spent my life doing all that I can to not be him, searching for similarities and erasing them if any sprout. Positive traits. He must have had some, sometime. What drew my mom to him? It surely wasn't the 9-year age difference.
I know that he was charismatic. Perhaps he still is? Sometimes I'll describe him as a master manipulator, though I suspect that's a bit grand. Perhaps I pump it up because, in some small way, I want to feel that I won something. I'm not sure master manipulators flame out in St. Louis or central Illinois and have their lives collapse in on themselves. At least, not before the age of 50.
I know that we have the same name. Nearly. He is a Junior, I'm a Third. Rich man's title, poor man's bank account.
I know that he worked on cars. He had a 1967 Mustang, a glistening blue bolt. He worked on it in his blue Morton building. Raspberries grew on the north side of it. I remember being in the side seat with him going from — to — on the highway. I remember him asking me something, my enthusiasm. The engine. The thunderous horses as the fields ripped away. Smiling and laughing.
I remember driving from St. Louis to —. I remember sitting next to him in the 1966 Impala. Screeching doors and mumbling engine. A color theoretically white, once. I remember seeing a Lamborghini in the contraflow and turning my head to follow as he tearfully explained the newest collapse of life. Always the crying.
I lived with him in —, a suburb of St. Louis. Not enrolled in school, but variously wondering alone around town or sitting in the bodyshop's office. Snooping around and finding an ancient green-on-black computer terminal, or a closetful of porno discs in a black trash bag at the bottom of a closet. Or burnt spoons. The smell. Always the smell.
We came home to the little green house his sponsor rented to him. Locks changed. I'd moved most everything I owned into the house. I never saw it again. The little maroon King James Bible my great-grandparents bought me.
How long before that — I remember thinking that I could end it if I went outside and got a shovel and hurled it into his head. ‘It' being his beating down a door that my mom was behind. Who remembers what the fight was about? He wasn't a hitter, though.
I remember him picking up a little, thick, white-covered copy of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I think it was the Signet Edition, though my memory has it about twice as thick. Perhaps it seemed bigger because I was nine or ten years old. It certainly seemed thicker when it smacked into me. Punishment for taking books out of the library, unchecked. Returning them without alerting the librarian was a logistical affair, but what stands out is his condemnation between blows, “I won't have a thief living in my house!”
I remember at most two years later his firing and conviction for embezzlement. When I looked later, did that court website say more than or less than one-hundred thousand dollars? Certainly, enough to buy all kinds of photographic equipment to take nude pictures of prostitutes. Not to mention a lot of crack cocaine.
Goodbye bungalow, someday to be pushed in. Hello, little factory-adjacent apartment. Do you remember the way the air smelled at the top of your closet, where you'd hide and write on the topmost shelf? Yes. A green stain on pink, plush carpet. Silly putty. Bright side: no more mowing.
I remember after that drive living with his father. Grandpa Tom, rather than Dad. Grandpa Tom was nice, as was Grandma Debbie. They still are. I remember getting angrier and angrier, having been snapped out of my brainwashing by the loss of my material possessions, and whatever shattered illusions I had. Very capitalist. What had possessed me to think so fondly about that one night spent alone in a roach-filled motel in East St. Louis? Was it its freely available, grainy, porn channel that my little eleven-year-old self found so novel? Maybe it was the interesting way that the police cruiser circled the parking lot once an hour. I only know because I kept looking out the window, wondering why going to grab some Marlboro's was taking so long.
Some time later, after his release from prison, I had a confrontation with him. I'd envisioned a fight. Anticipated. Craved? Relished? Intended to relish. How best to take all of the anger out but to tell him I was gay. I'd hoped to wait until my great-grandma was dead, but she was still inside the doublewide in her slow death. Destined for a hospital and for that black bile to be pulled from her in a tube. Compassionate healthcare at the age of 92. He was sitting on her patio, in her glider. The glider is a double seater with a little table-like space built in. It has two hearts in the center. It is still there today, unmoved.
Of course, I did not get the fight that I wanted. He pivoted so easily to whatever was said, some variant of everlasting love. Unconditional Who knows its depth? I didn't believe it for a moment, and I can't remember anything more of the conversation, not even anything worth lying about. I just remember spoiling for a fight. You can never tell the truth when you always lie.
———
I had that reaction a lot, coming out. I remember standing in the UIC Forum when the gay marriage bill was signed in Illinois. I was standing at the very back of the room, so terrified that my mere presence would say something I'd said to so few people. I had no reaction at all to the bill signing other than to think, “I'm too late, the fight is over.” What fight did I think I had in me? Imagine being in 2013 and thinking the fight is over. I'd just turned 19 a few weeks before, what did I know? I didn't even know myself.
The fight I was spoiling for probably wasn't about being gay. Twelve years after that moment, it isn't being gay that I have rageful dreams about. At most, my dreams about being gay are vaguely frustrated at not being both pretty and gay.
———
This to say, I do not know what common language I have with my father. Unlike him, I am not currently in the Midwest dying of lymphoma, or some such cancer. Dying awfully slowly, as far as it seems. I know that when I started watching Top Gear, I was afraid to enjoy it, because cars were my dad's domain. While I could be in that Morton building, I couldn't touch anything, and I wasn't taught anything. The progeny of a long line of mechanics that doesn't know how to change a tire and refuses now to learn.
When I started taking pictures I had a nagging somewhere in the brain matter, too. Just like pops, hm? What lovely local prostitute will you be photographing? Will you seek one out with the same name as your mother, like he did? Thankfully, I don't know any male sex workers. Let alone any called Jennifer.
———
There must be good things about this person. They're for other people. They are, I hope, for the little blond-haired and blue-eyed boy that his partner seems to have in the pictures. It is impossible to see pictures of that child on his lap and not recall the picture of me in my little white button-up shirt and suspenders, blond-hair and blue-eyes, looking so happy in whatever local JC Penny the picture was probably taken in.
———
All this wallowing to say that the book made me tearful. Bechdel's life and my life are not similar. Other than, perhaps, the fleeing to the library stacks and trying to understand just what the fuck is going on by reading books. That, I understand. It is beautiful, and honest, and searching. I loved it.
Pretty weird that it made me want to read Joyce's Ulysses, though.
2.5/5.
I'm giving some benefit of the doubt / grace here to the author, but also to myself because I do not typically read novellas and other short-form fiction. I recognize these as different forms than novel writing, and I don't have a well-developed critical eye for them.
That aside... We're reading this for my spec-fic book club this month. A friend of mine, in her review, called it “trite.” I was surprised by her review, because when I read it I was only about halfway through the novella and had been enjoying myself. I ended up using the same word in one of my notes. That note came on page 81, where some minor mumblings came to a head.
Like many speculative fiction works, the book is interested in a post-currency economy. But... not that interested. I recognize that in a short-form work, we're not going to get a long explanation of how the economy works. The thing is, the book tried to do a little of this and fell into a no-man's land of too-much but not-enough. The book starts in a busy marketplace. We get a sense that information and favors are effective forms of currency. Later, we learn that our protagonist is very rich — rich enough to live several lifetimes at ease, we're told, if not more. But what does this mean? By virtue of what? Many authors write away problems by making characters rich, but that seems really bizarre in this setting where the author is trying to put forward a favor-based economy. Has this character done so much that people owe them so many favors that they don't have to work? Of have they sold information to such an extent that they have monetary means of survival? How do money and favors interact? I don't know, and I'm not 100% sure the book does, either.
That's a pretty minor complaint, and one that basically every speculative fiction bumps into at some point. Star Trek is famously inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical on this, so we can leave it aside.
The characters are a bit strange. Our protagonist began their experience in their current reality as a misplaced Oxford PhD student in the 1960's. I am not totally sure that Bugs Bunny was the most popular thing among Oxford Students in the 1960s, but apparently he was popular enough for our lead to name her computational companion after him. This gave me a chuckle at first, but by the end (keep in mind, only 100 pages later), I was nonplussed at the Bugs Bunny dialogue. Similarly, I had written down, “Can you call a character Alice without conjuring up Alice in Wonderland?” Not 3 pages later, there is a reference to following the white rabbit — so the answer is no. I think calling a character Alice and having them leap across strange worlds is clear enough as a reference, I'm not sure we needed several textual references to the tale. It took the reference from maybe-subtle thematic shorthand to “HEY, YOU EVER SEE THAT DISNEY MOVIE?”
Remember when I said our lead was a 1960's Oxford PhD student? I'm wondering if Oxford had lower standards in the 60s, because for an old(*) and experienced being in the Universe, our lead is remarkably dumb when it comes to how she interacts with the unexploded remnant. This thing tells her exactly what it is over and over again, and yet, she is surprised that it does exactly what everyone, including the thing itself, says what it'll do! I don't get it! In a longer form, maybe we'd have an explanation as to why Alice doesn't listen to this thing and insists she knows better than it.
I think there was space to explore that, even in these 105 pages. There is a chapter where Alice visits a friend and meets their family. It is entirely without purpose and also... pretty weird. I'd have suggested cutting that whole chapter and character and giving us more space to understand and relate to Alice, something we're never given in the novella.
The ending is a little hard to follow. It's sort of unclear as to the sequencing of events and the consistency of things. It doesn't really matter because the ending can be seen coming from miles away and it's not terribly original.
It was a short read and that makes almost everything pretty forgivable. I enjoyed big parts of it, but I think with some editing this could have been something a lot more than it ended up as.
I read this for the small press book club at my LBS. I didn't have any big expectation going in — I don't follow book awards and wasn't familiar with Ernaux's work. As I started reading, I found the use of we/one etc interesting, and then challenging. I flipped forward in search of chapter breaks — none! On page 102 I wrote a note: “the tense is feeling exhausting.”
I read the last 110 pages or so (ie the second half of the book) in one sitting, just before book club. I really enjoyed the first and final quarters of the book. In the middle, I started to feel a bit of a lull, and as if we were meandering. On finishing the book, the pacing feels intentional. I don't know how much to go into this, but one does feel meandering in the middle of life, so it tracks, anyway.
I thought a lot about my mom while reading, especially as Ernaux is describing her children as they grow into adulthood, and visit her. There's a great moment where she is following her sons and pondering how they could come from her. In another, she's musing about how she is a grandparent, where she still thinks that word is only for her grandparents.
There's a lot more in the book — discussions of class, sex, consumer culture. I might update this review later to think a little about those parts of the book. Overall, though, I enjoyed this. I think I'd enjoy making an attempt to read it in the original French, as well.
I don't have any deep thoughts on this one. As far as books go, it's a good length, funny, and I had a good time reading it. There were a classic Vonnegut lines in it, and the whole thing is as Vonnegutty as you could want a sci-fi / near-space-opera thing to be.
There's a passage where a character writes lists to himself for later reference. This is a great vehicle for Vonnegut to get some of his one- or near-one-liners out. “1. If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.” “I am a thing called alive.”
This was my favorite: “The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.” It reminded me a lot of the line in Fahrenheit 451: “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.”
Two more:
“Theology: (15.) Somebody made everything for some reason.”
“Psychology: (103.) Unk, the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe that there is such a a thing as being smart.”
There is also a really nice little parable of Tralfamadore presented later on, which is simply classic Vonnegut, using a foreign entity (in this case the history of an alien species) to comment on humanity. I know we've been doing this for an awfully long time, but nobody does it quite like Vonnegut.
Probably closer to a very strong 3.5/5. I had a good time with this!
A lot to think about with it, as usual. Vonnegut's satiric style is biting and anything but subtle, but when the writing is this good, who needs subtlety? The themes around the first industrial revolution devaluing muscle power and the second (ongoing in the book) devaluing brain power/know-how are fascinating to read today. In 1952, I imagine Vonnegut would have been thinking mainly of very early computation and then robots in automotive plants (as one example). 70some years later we're well into that, and into the emergence of a technology that got its start back in the 50s and is now sort of blasting into popular knowledge. A lot of the discussions I have around AI are tinted with fear of how emerging technologies could replace people. The little scene where an Engineer invents a gizmo that puts him and all 71 of his counterparts out of their jobs hits pretty well in that context.
It's interesting to see that, from the very beginning, Vonnegut uses outsiders as a way to poke and prod at assumptions and ask very pointed questions. The interludes with the Shah, while pretty well divorced from the main narrative of the story, are great vignettes of life and opportunities for Vonnegut to interrogate ideas.
I'm rating this as a three (or 3.5) because it didn't really smack me upside the head with inspiration. It was a fun read with a lot of ideas that really haven't aged a day. But, it won't be an annual re-read like Slaughterhouse Five.
This book has been on my TBR for a little over a year and I happened upon it in a little free library on my street. A first edition complete with dust jacket and clippings of obits for Louis W. Schalk (handwritten: WP [Washington Post] 8/21/02; Schalk was a test pilot, the first to fly the Blackbird. He died in Northern Virginia.) and Ben Rich, author of this book and former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works.
The book is pretty good, if you're interested in the U-2, SR-71, Stealth Fighter, or management of an operation like Skunk Works. The voice in which it is written is casual and approachable. Rich (and his co-author, Leo Janos) puts dialogue to historical conversations that are sometimes as many as 40 years in the past. Sometimes this dialogue is a little suspect to my ear, but I don't think it's meant to be taken as if it were printed in the New York Times. It's typically expository and that's fine. There is plenty in the writing that clearly encapsulates sort of 60's-80's business ‘sense' that I had to skim over, because it is not very interesting or compelling.
The trials and tribulations of the various major projects that Rich describes, however, are. They're especially interesting when Rich & Janos talk about the engineering problems present, and they're talked about in understandable ways.
There are little sections of the book with commentaries from other folks - typically industry, government, and military veterans. Think generals and such. Some of these are patently political and flat out disinteresting. Some of the worst offenders may as well be writing press releases straight to the WSJ in 1994. Fine. Some of them (typically by engineers or pilots) are super interesting, and put is in the drafting room or cockpit.
This is probably the most Dad-energy book I've ever read. I could see a 50 year old Dad eating this thing right up in the airport lounge. I liked it, but would also be interested in a much more technical and detailed discussion of the projects (especially the SR-71) from a Richard Rhodes type.
In the opening chapters of Stoner, Archer Sloane asks a young William, “Don't you know about yourself yet?” Stoner seems always to be pulled between the idea of what he wants and what he is willing to do. He thinks constantly about what would be burdensome to others. Throughout the book, his placidity verges on ambivalence — as if he is aloof to the living of his own life. Sloane tells him later that he must remember what he is, and what he has chosen to become. We follow Stoner's becoming for the rest of his life.I thought a lot about [b:The Sun Also Rises 3876 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876.SY75.jpg 589497] as I read. There were many times where I wanted to reach through the page, grab Stoner by his shoulders, and shake him. He is often times a passenger when his life cries out for a pilot. In Hemingway's book, Jake is often a passenger (or, maybe, valet), especially as it relates to Brett. But we don't spend a lifetime with Jake. We watch Stoner watch his life pass by.So many passages stood out to me that I transferred about 18 pages worth of A5 to my little borrowed-books notebook. What is a teacher? Where are the bounds between complacency, apathy, and acceptance? What makes a life worth living – is it success? What is success? How much are you willing to give up for your principles? How much of what you do not yet possess are you willing to stake, blind?Some of the most painful moments in the book are between Stoner and his child. They're a collection of deaths so complete that in the end nothing is there really to die. They barely know one another, and in fact Stoner barely knows anyone at all. You might call that a failure, and Stoner thinks of it in this way until he considers kindness. He's always thinking about how not to offend, to the extent that even his very few triumphs he thinks considers “amusingly contemptuous.”Another disconnected thought: there's a bit here about rural boy moves to ‘urban' center and is irrevocably changed, so that when he visits home, he is an ‘alien.' I know the feeling. There's a lot here about inheritance and legacy, to an extent. Nothing that I have words for.The writing... I loved the prose. I notice that Williams, in writing Stoner's thinking, almost never phrases anything as positive, but as not negative. The phrase, “not unpleasant” appears repeatedly throughout. We get a crystal-clear sense of Stoner's quasi-nihilistic view on life.Not sure what else to say. I finished reading this about 30 minutes ago and need to let it cook for a bit. This is definitely the sort of story that appeals to me, though. Down to the occasional odd turn of phrase that I had to sit back and admire (the best in the closing chapters may be, “chaos of potentialities” – wowza).
I read this on the bus from Planet Word, my mom having purchased a copy. I liked it! Morose. My mom always had a copy of [b:Where the Sidewalk Ends 30119 Where the Sidewalk Ends Shel Silverstein https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168052448l/30119.SX50.jpg 30518] around when I was growing up, so it was nice to revisit Shel, if only briefly.
It's been a bit since I read Annihilation, but I'm surprised at how different this is from that! Nearly a totally different genre. Yet, the story picks up more or less where Annihilation ended.
I definitely had more fun with Annihilation. This book tries to feel a little more John Le Carre and doesn't really get it, IMO. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief when it came to some aspects of the organization management / roles / responsibilities drama (which takes up a lot of this book). When we start using codenames like Control, Central, Voice, etc., some of the spy novelty wears off. Can't say why, but it becomes far less interesting, to me. For example, there are a few things that are in question throughout big parts of the book (who ix X, what is Y, stuff like that). Yet, when they're revealed, I am never that surprised.
The final third of the book is worth the much slower first third. The middle third is a transitional space. Once we get a bit nearer the ‘weird fiction' of it all, the suspense elements return and it is far more interesting.
I'll be interested to see how the third book continues on. It is clearly setup and that bodes well for a compelling beginning. I wish this had been a bit shorter. I also bumped upon the author's use of sentence fragments as illustration's of internal thought or whatever. I'm not sure if this featured so prominently in Annihilation, but I noticed it big time in Authority.
I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed in this. I think it is a rare case of not one but both of the adaptations I've seen being better than the source material.
Anthony Minghella's 1999 film with Jude Law as Dickie and Matt Damon as Tom, has a lively excitement and almost eroticism (especially in the first third) that the book simply does not have, almost shies from. Plus, we get the legendary Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie.
The more recent adaptation, the 2024 mini-series directed by Steven Zaillian featuring Andrew Scott as Tom and Johnny Flynn as Dickie, feels custom-made for me. Scott is about double the age of book Tom, and I did not find Johnny Flynn to be in any way comparable to Jude Law (but then, who is?), but the ambiance, the cinematography, and the fantastic performances by Scott, Dakota Fanning as Marge, and Eliot Sumner as Freddie (even if not remotely book accurate) produce a thing that is much more compelling than this book.
It is very readable, I'll say that. Few chapters if any are more than 10 pages, so there's always a sense of getting one more chapter in. Then again, Tom is simply not an enjoyable character in this debut. His self-hatred becomes tiresome, and while there are interesting bits in his exploration of Dickie and navigating his schemes, it all falls a little flat for me.
I wonder about the reception of this book on its publication in the 1950s. The 1999 film will have viewers thirsting over Jude Law. The 2024 mini-series has us thirsting over Andrew Scott, wishing we could go on a European vacation with the ill-gotten-gains. The 1955 book gives us a (closeted? probably?) Ripley that essentially detests everything, most of all himself; he is capricious, and mostly trades off of the incompetence or good faith of others, not necessarily his own cleverness.
I am not sure why I expected the book to be a little more gay, or at least a little more gay-friendly. I think many of my fellow gays have fallen for a straight guy, perhaps had the question of, “I don't know if I want to be him, or sleep with him.” Tom clearly has this feeling, but is self-hating to the point of denial and scorn. Almost to the point of unawareness. I guess this was the expectation in the 1950s. The book rarely misses a chance to throw out words like fairy and sissy and queer, and again, I guess these are all the words that would be going around in the 1950s. The end result, however, is not the erotic, dark, passion of the 1999 film or even the 2024 adaptation. Instead, the scene of Tom dressing as Dickie feels more like Norman Bates wearing his mother's clothes than something of passion. Tom is simply very cold, and his blue flame only crackles to life when he is smashing someone's head in with an ashtray or lying to the police about it. Or, watching someone else struggle to lie.
In any event, the book is readable but after the first third it became a little laborious. I have a copy of the third book, but I probably will not get around to reading any of the sequels.
I'm not 100% sure I can well encapsulate my thoughts. This is the June book for the Small Press book club I attend, and reading the back I knew it'd appeal to me. “Parasite meets The Good Son in this piercing psychological portrait of three women haunted by a brutal, unsolved crime.”
It's a brisk 147 pages and reads easily. I had a hard time putting it down. We have a vague timeline, a smattering of characters, and the interior of their minds to think about for those pages, sometimes wondering whose head we're in, other times wondering what the point of a passage is. I am not sure all the questions are answered (rather, it is clear not all questions are answered), and I am okay with that. About halfway through the book I thought, “this would be great if x didn't happen,” and I wasn't disappointed.
——
As an aside, I find that I really enjoy translated Korean works. I'm not sure why, maybe because the emotion inside of them is so tangible, and so palpable to me. PAST LIVES, Celine Song's directorial debut, was my favorite film of 2023. Flux, another work of Korean-American fiction, is another book from last year that I really enjoyed. There are some other examples in the recent past. Something about the way things translate, the resulting English feels often novel but perfect. It may not look exactly perfect on the page — you may be able to tell it's a translation — but the emotion it evokes works very well.
There's a passage in this book: “We were all seized by the same guilt, and the classroom was as still as the inside of a vacuum.” What a great utilization of a word with two images attached. The vacuum of space, and the inside of a Bissell. As my eyes read of quiet, my ears could just hear roaring. If the reader didn't get there on their own, the next page has the line, “Just like a vacuum that sucks up everything, she easily commanded all of our attention.” Once again, perfect utilization of one word, meaning two things, that works perfectly with both meanings. That is a lovely attention to detail.
Looking forward to hearing what others from the book club think!
DNF.
Maybe I shouldn't count this as “read” but I got about 70 pages in, and I've read books shorter than 70 pages so, what the hell?
It's not for me. I lived through the internet lingo of 2009 once and I don't need to do it again. It has a lot of “clever” quips but none are enjoyable for me. I also find it very preachy and it violates my “make your social commentary not be tweet shaped” rule.
I am thoroughly impressed with Christian's documentation of AI's development and emergence from nascent geekery to world-altering capital-T Thing. This book released in 2020, and a mere 3.5 years later basically every tech product you're likely to see has had “AI” thrown at the front or back of its name. There is so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt around this technology that half of the conversations I'm in that involve it seem to want to resolve into people fleeing for the woods.
Christian does a good job of documenting the historical, psychological, ethical, and epistemological origins of AI. I was particularly drawn to the psychological analogies, many of which surprised me. I rented this from the library in physical form and so to save my notes for future reference had to painstakingly write page numbers on index cards and go back to scan/dictate the text to my Notes app, but I'm posting those here for my convenience.
—
Notes:
The Alignment Problem
P30 - In one of the first articles explicitly addressing the notion of bias in computing systems, the University of Washington's Batya Friedman and Cornell's Helen Nissenbaum had warned that “computer systems, for instance, are comparatively inexpensive to disseminate, and thus, once developed, a biased system has the potential for widespread impact. If the system becomes a standard in the field, the bias becomes pervasive.”, ^40 (Representation)
P49 - As Princeton's Arvind Narayanan puts it: “Contrary to the ‘tech moves too fast for society to keep up' cliché, commercial deployments of tech often move glacially-just look at the banking and airline mainframes still running. ML [machine-learning] models being trained today might still be in production in 50 years, and that's terrifying.” ^93 (Representation)
Feedback loops
“Machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way.” - Moritz Hardt (^3, Fairness)
“No machinery is more efficient than the human element that operates it.” (??)
“One of the most important things in any prediction is to make sure that you're actually predicting what you think you're predicting. This is harder than it sounds.”
P123 - Thorndike sees here the makings of a bigger, more general law of nature. As he puts it, the results of our actions are either “satisfying” or “annoying.” When the result of an action is “satisfying,” we tend to do it more. When on the other hand the outcome is “annoying,” we'll do it less. The more clear the connection between action and outcome, the stronger the resulting change. Thorndike calls this idea, perhaps the most famous and durable of his career, “the law of effect.”
As he puts it:
The Law of Effect is: When a modifiable connection between a situation and a response is made and is accompanied or followed by a satisfying state of affairs, that connection's strength is increased: When made and accompanied or followed by an annoying state of affairs its strength is decreased. The strengthening effect of satisfyingness (or the weakening effect of annoy-ingness upon a bond varies with the closeness of the connection between it and the bond. ^7 (Reinforcement)
P127 - Continuing to develop machines that could learn, in other words—by human instruction or their own experience-would alleviate the need for programming. Moreover it would enable computers to do things we didn't know how to program them to do.
P141 - “this is apparently the first application of this algorithm to a complex non-trivial task,” TESAURO wrote. Re: use of algorithms to play go, I got you got, learning from guesses steadily coming to learn one adventure position look like. ... “it is spelling it, with zero knowledge built in, the network is able to learn from scratch to play the entire game at a fairly strong, intermediate level of performance, which is clearly better than conventional commercial programs, and which in fact, surpasses comparable networks trained on a massive human expert data set. This indicates that TD learning may work better in practice than one would expect based on current theory.“
P151 - Meanwhile, we take up another question. Reinforcement learning in its classical form takes for granted the structure of the rewards in the world and asks the question of how to arrive at the behavior-the “policy” —that maximally reaps them. But in many ways this obscures the more interesting—and more dire—matter that faces us at the brink of Al. We find ourselves rather more interested in the exact opposite of this question: Given the behavior we want from our machines, how do we structure the environment's rewards to bring that behavior about?
How do we get what we want when it is we who sit in the back of the audience, in the critic's chair—we who administer the food pellets, or their digital equivalent?
This is the alignment problem, in the context of a reinforcement learner. Though the question has taken on a new urgency in the last five to ten years, as we shall see it is every bit as deeply rooted in the past as reinforcement learning itself.
P160 - But Miyamoto had a problem. There are also good mushrooms, which you have to learn, not to dodge, but to seek. “This gave us a real head-ache,” he explains. “We needed somehow to make sure the player understood that this was something really good.” So now what? The good mushroom approaches you in an area where you have too little headroom to easily jump over it-you brace for impact, but instead of killing you, it makes you double in size. The mechanics of the game have been established, and now you are let loose. You think you are simply playing.
But you are carefully, precisely, inconspicuously being trained. You learn the rule, then you learn the exception. You learn the basic mechanics, then you are given free rein.
P161 - in both cases, the use of a curriculum – an easier version of the problem, followed by a harder version – succeeding in cases we're trying to learn the more difficult problem by itself could not.
P169 - “As a general rule,” says Russell, “it is better to design performance measures according to what one actually wants in the environment, rather than according to how one thinks the agent should behave.”^50 Put differently, the key insight is that we should strive to reward states of the world, not actions of our agent. These states typically represent “progress” toward the ultimate goal, whether that progress is represented in physical distance or in something more conceptual like completed subgoals (chapters of a book, say, or portions of a mechanical assembly). (^50 Shaping).
P185 - Learned helplessness; “As the celebrated aphorist Ashleigh Brilliant put it, “If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.” ^11 (Curiosity)
P202 - All rewards are internal. ^61 (Curiosity).
P222 - Conway lloyd Morgan - “Five minutes' demonstration is worth more than five hours' talking where the object is to impart skill. It is of comparatively little use to describe or explain how a skilled feat is to be accomplished; it is far more helpful to show how it is done.” ^32 (Imitation)
P228 - At its root, the problem stems from the fact that the learner sees an expert execution of the problem, and an expert almost never gets into trouble. No matter how good the learner is, though, they will make mistakes – whether blatant or supple. But because the learner never saw the expert get into trouble, they have also never seen the expert get out. In fact, when the beginner makes beginner mistakes, they may end up in a situation that is completely different from anything they saw during their observation of the expert. “That means,“ says Sergey Levine, “that, you know, all bets are off.” (Cascading errors).
P247 - Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote an influential 2004 manuscript in which he argues for imbuing machines, not simply to imitate and hold or norms as we imperfectly embody them, but rather, we should instill in machines what he calls our “coherent extrapolated volition.“ “In poetic terms, “he writes, “our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wish we were.“
P251 - Warneken, along with his collaborator Michael Tomasello of Duke, was the first to systematically show, in 2006, that human infants as young as eighteen months old will reliably identify a fellow human facing a problem, will identify the human's goal and the obstacle in the way, and will spontaneously help if they can-even if their help is not requested, even if the adult doesn't so much as make eye contact with them, and even when they expect (and receive) no reward for doing so.^2 (Inference)
P261 - We are now, it is fair to say, well beyond the point where our machines can do only that which we can program into them in the explicit language of math and code.
P268 - Russell dubbed this new framework cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (“CIRL,” for short).^40 In the CIRL formulation, the human and the computer work together to jointly maximize a single reward function - and initially only the human knows what it is.
“We we're trying to think, what's the simplest change we can make to the current math and the current theoretical systems that fixes the theory that leads to these sort of existential-risk problems?“ says Hadfield-Menell. “What is a math problem where the optimal thing is what we actually want?“^41 (Inference)
P282 - He has the students play games where they must decide which side of various bets to take, figuring out how to turn their beliefs and hunches into probabilities, and deriving the laws of probability theory from scratch. They are games of epistemology: What do you know? And what do you believe? And how confident are you, exactly? “That gives you a very good tool for machine learning,” says Gal, “to build algorithms—to build computational tools —that can basically use these sorts of principles of rationality to talk about uncertainty.” (...) Gal: “I wouldn't rely on a model that couldn't tell me whether it's actually certain about its predictions.” (re: uncertainty in models and models communicating uncertainty; ensembling; dropouts...).^14
There's a certain irony here, in that deep learning–despite being deeply rooted in statistics—has, as a rule, not made uncertainty a first-class citizen.
Note from TB: thinking about uncertainty in prioritization. Weighing measures in a prioritization algorithm.
P292 - Another researcher who has been focused on these problems in recent years is DeepMind's Victoria Krakovna. Krakovna notes that one of the big problems with penalties for impact is that in some cases, achieving a specific goal necessarily requires high-impact actions, but this could lead to what's called “offsetting”: taking further high-impact actions to counterbalance the earlier ones. This isn't always bad: if the system makes a mess of some kind, we probably want it to clean up after itself. But sometimes these “offsetting” actions are problematic. We don't want a system that cures someone's fatal illness but then-to nullify the high impact of the cure-kills them. ^43 (Uncertainty)
Note from TB: thinking about uncertainty in prioritization again, and how to measure / quantify “impact on PEH,” in algorithm. What is the impact of each stage of the prioritization process, from inflow to referral, etc.
P294 - Turner's idea is that the reason we care about the Shanghai Stock Exchange, or the integrity of our cherished vase, or, for that matter, the ability to move boxes around the virtual warehouse, is it those things for whatever reason matter to us, and they matter to us because they are ultimately in some way or other tied to our goals. We want to save for retirement, put flowers in the vase, complete the sokoban level. What if we model this idea of goals explicitly? His proposal goes by the name “attainable utility preservation“: giving the system a set of auxiliary goals in the game environment, and making sure that it can still effectively pursue these auxiliary goals after it's done whatever points-scoring actions the game incentivizes. Fascinatingly, the mandate to preserve a tangible utility seems to foster good behavior in the AI safety gridworlds even when the auxiliary goals are generated at random. ^49 (Uncertainty)
P295 - One of the most chilling and prescient quotations in the field of AI safety comes in a famous 1960 article on the “Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation” by MIT's Norbert Wiener: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it... then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.”^51 It is the first succinct expression of the alignment problem.
No less crucial, however, is this statement's flip side: If we were not sure that the objectives and constraints we gave the machine entirely and perfectly specified what we did and didn't want the machine to do, then we had better be sure we can intervene. In the Al safety literature, this concept goes by the name of “corrigibility,” and—soberingly—it's a whole lot more complicated than it seems.^52 (Uncertainty)
P299 - But, they found, there's a major catch. If the system's model of what you care about is fundamentally “misspecified”-there are things you care about of which it's not even aware and that don't even enter into the system's model of your rewards-then it's going to be confused about your motivation. For instance, if the system doesn't understand the subtleties of human appetite, it may not understand why you requested a steak dinner at six o'clock but then declined the opportunity to have a second steak dinner at seven o'clock. If locked into an oversimplified or misspecified model where steak (in this case) must be entirely good or entirely bad, then one of these two choices, it concludes, must have been a mistake on your part. It will interpret your behavior as “irrational,” and that, as we've seen, is the road to incorrigibility, to disobedience.”^63 (Uncertainty)
——
Notes
Representation
* 40 - Friedman and Nissenbaum, “Bias in Computer Systems.”
* 93 - Narayanan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/993866661852864512
Fairness
* 3 - Hardt, “How Big Data Is Unfair.”
Reinforcement
* 7 - Thorndike, The Psychology of Learning.
Shaping
* 50 - Russell and Norvid, Artificial Intelligence.
Curiosity
* 11 - See Henry Alford, “The Wisdom of Ashleigh Brilliant,” http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/BrilliantWisdom.html, excerpted from Alford, How to Live (New York: Twelve, 2009).
* 61 - Singh, Lewis, and Barto. For more discussion, see Oudeyer and Kaplan, “What Is Intrinsic Motivation?”
* Sing, Lewis, and Barto — “Where Do Rewards Come From?” In “Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,” 2601-06. 2009.
Imitation
* 32 - Morgan, “An Introduction to Comparative Psychology.”
Inference
* 2 - See also Meltzoff, “Understanding the intentions of Others” which showed that eighteen-month olds can successfully imitate the intended acts that adults tried and failed to do, indicating that they ‘situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions.'
* The citation for the Warneken paper: Warneken, Felix, and Michael Tomasello. “Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees.” Science 311, no. 5765 (2006): 1301-03.
* 40 - Hadfield-Menell et al., “Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning.” (“CIRL” is pronounced with a soft c, homophonous with the last name of strong AI skeptic John Searle (no relation). I have agitated within the community that a hard c “curl” pronunciation makes more sense, given that “cooperative” uses a hard c, but it appears the die is cast.).
* Note from TB: I agree w/ the hard c note.
* 41 - Dylan Hadfield-Menell, personal interview, March 15, 2018.
Uncertainty
* 14 - Yarin Gal, “Modern Deep Learning Through Bayesian Eyes” (lecture), Microsoft Research, December 11, 2015, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/modern-deep-learning-through-bayesian-eyes/.
* 43 - As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “If you're going to cure cancer, make sure the patient still dies!” See https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-hard-and-where-to-start/. See also Armstrong and Levinstein, “Low Impact Artificial Intelligence,” which uses the example of an asteroid headed for earth. A system constrained to only take “low-impact” actions might fail to divert it—or, perhaps even worse, a system capable of offsetting might divert the asteroid, saving the planet, and then blow the planet up anyway.
* 49 - Mind Safety Kesearer o
* designing-agent-incentives-to-avoid-side-effects-elac80ea6107.
* 49. Turner, Hadfield-Menell, and Tadepalli, “Conservative Agency via Attainable Utility Preservation.” See also Turner's “Reframing Impact” sequence at http://www.alignmentforum.org/s/7CdoznhJaLEKHwvJW and additional discussion in his “Towards a New Impact Measure,” https://www.alignmentforum.org/ posts/yEa7kwoMpsBgaBCgb/towards-a-new-impact-measure; he writes, “I have a theory that AUP seemingly works for advanced agents not because the content of the attainable set's utilities actually matters, but rather because there exists a common utility achievement currency of power.” See Turner, “Optimal Farsighted Agents Tend to Seek Power.” For more on the notion of power in an Al safety context, including an information-theoretic account of “empowerment,” see Amodei et al., “Concrete Problems in Al Safety,” which, in turn, references Salge, Glackin, and Polani, “Empowerment: An Introduction,” and Mohamed and Rezende, “Variational Information Maximisation for Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning.”
* 51 - Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation.”
* 52 - According to Paul Christiano, “corrigibility” as a tenet of AI safety began with Machine intelligence Research Institute's Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the name itself came from Robert Miles. See Christiano's “Corrigibility,” https://ai-alignment.com/corrigibility-3039e668638.
* 63 - For more on corrigibility and model misspecification using this paradigm, see also, e.g., Carey, “Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework.”