Archive for books
Sleeping with John Updike by Julian Barnes
February 2nd, 2010 books, elsewhere
Resentment, jealousy, dishonesty simmers along (for 40 years?). Nothing boils over in this story of two women on a train on the way home. Found here on guardian books.
“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
“You know, I never worry about that any more. It fills a slot.”
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
September 22nd, 2009 books
It amused me to think that Anna Wulf’s notebooks are born out of the desire not to exclude. It reminded me of a journal article I read a long time ago, written by an accountant, asserting that accounting systems are designed by men. She explains that by virtue of the shape of their reproductive systems, a man classifies by defining what belongs to his body, what is excluded from his body, whereas a woman would find a way to include everything. I wonder if a ordinary women reader might have an easier time ‘getting’ the book. The book is not an easy read for me mainly because it is too brilliant. Every other page, I was stopping to admire how brilliant it is and it can be distracting. I think an attempt to read it all in one go, would result in whatever is the book-reading equivalent of throwing up after having pigged out at a buffet. While reading the book, I toyed with the idea of reading the discussions on the online book reading project at goldennotebook.org/blog and goldennotebook.org/forum. I’m glad I didn’t do it. The blog talked about the book whether or not it is feminist, which I didn’t quite understand. She’s a single woman having some particular challenges and viewpoints doesn’t mean she’s representative of the challenges or viewpoints of women in general.
It’s not just the internal conflict I enjoy. The book draws the reader intimately into the conversations between Anna and everyone else around her – Tommy, Molly, Michael, Saul, Richard, Marion. The conversation were analytical, illuminating, hurtful but did not cleave apart their affections for each other. The frankness impressed me and I’m fascinated because all honest conversations I’ve heard inevitability result in an apology and/or awkwardness. Anna, an intelligent woman, the most analytical, most sensitive character I’ve met, thinks through every thought, every encounter and tries to compartmentalise each thought, every experience and achieves this without falling into melancholy. Anna Wulf (Lessing) considers her behaviour schizophrenic, and presents an illusion of her schizophrenia at the end of the book where she covers an entire wall with newspaper cutouts. Perhaps that I live in times when every article is tagged, clipped/quoted or linked, I think she’s too hard on herself.
While I cannot identify with the character, nor do I particularly want to be her, I am marking every other page on the book, thinking “how true” or “brilliant”. Reading Lessing is like going to Redang for the first time. Everything is beautiful – even the scary/nasty parts – because you can see how very clear everything is. Only at the end of the book that I realise the book was written in the 60s. I came to this book only because the reprint was placed prominently (cover facing out) and I was looking for a new author to follow. I have never before heard of Doris Lessing – well, other than reading on BBG Muse, while waiting for data, she had won something a prize. Knowing it was written 40 yrs ago was surreal. I could not believe she could, in the heat of the events, consider these matters so clearly. The only rational explanation is this: Lessing lived in a parallel universe where everything is terrible and nasty so she’s come to warn us about it. She has access to a time machine which has a paradox resolving device to compute the right moment to insert her presence without creating problems. Lessing having observed everything, took her knowledge of the world she came from and inserted herself in the 60s to publish this book and lived on in our world since then.
Audio books, E-books
September 5th, 2009 books
The nicest way to read a book is to have a physical book, read it, uninterrupted, from the first page to the last.
Reading lets a person linger on beautiful turns of phases. Listening is too fast. While I prefer reading, audio books can be a nice companion on long walks. I have been catching up on the podcasts on my walks and for a change, I put on two audio books in the iPod: The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett , narrated by the author) and The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (Alexander McCall Smith, narrated by Hugh Laurie ). With audio-books, I am less picky about the books since it takes lesser time to finish. That I got less enjoyment from listening (even though both Bennett and Laurie entertained well), isn’t because of the audio books I pick. I have listened to a reading of Greene’s Cheap In August, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and still feel this way.
A slightly improved alternative is the e-book. I’ve got a few Heinlein downloaded to the phone and I can now linger if I want but it doesn’t satisfy the deep magpie-like urges.
From the Uncommon Reader:
“Your employer has been giving my employer a hard time.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order.”
“Her Majesty likes reading.”
“I like having my dick sucked, I don’t make the Prime Minister do it. Any thoughts, Kevin?”
“I will speak to Her Majesty.”
“You do that, Kev, and tell her to knock it off.”
Against The Gods by Peter Bernstein
August 20th, 2009 atwork, books
Thanks, Phil for the two books!
The book began with a lot of mathematical history tracing the developments of mathematical concepts in the application to the management of chance. It was fun at first but I found the fun difficult to sustain. These math greats are often discussed on In Our Time so it wasn’t because of unfamiliarity but that brief bios and accomplishment listings become quite boring after a while.
Closer to the end of the book, I got interested again when Bernstein talked about Prospect Theory. It’s not a new theory (part of behavioral economics) but I’ve not thought about it from a risk perspective. What Prospect Theory says is that how a person chooses depends on how the choices are framed and from this, the person selects the option that gives the highest utility, which we could think about it as the least pain/regret.
This leads me to re-think about Index funds. Since indices are baseline measures to rate fund manager’s performance, perhaps to rate equity index funds as for clients with high risk appetite is not quite accurate since the risk is approximately market beta and the return for that risk is approximately market return and it might frame the fund as high pain/regret and therefore shift investments into greater proportions of bonds/money market funds that earn much lower returns.
From Our Man In Havana
Listening to this at work in between loud and long conversations, this jumped at me.
“I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the UTC and the British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment – he and I.” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh I forgot. There is something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, USA and USSR. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom.” I said I sympathised with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary System.”
“My God, you said all that?”
“Yes. It was quite a speech.”
“Did you believe it?”
“Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.”
When the plane lands and the control tower in Changi comes into view, does the heart feel heavy or light?
Where one chooses to put up one’s feet cannot be derived by drawing two columns and labeling one Pros and the other Cons. It is a feeling of inexplicable contentment, of sentimentality, of (even) relief. To some the cause of such feelings of goodwill is family – that tiny nation of two, three, four or more. For persons whose family does not generate such feelings of goodwill, perhaps friends play the part. What if neither friends nor family play the part – what then gives the heart it’s lightness? Adventure, curiosity, strangeness, newness. Or is it routine, old ways, traditions, familiar sounds?
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress b Robert A Heinlein
July 30th, 2009 books
A week ago, when my brother saw the book in my room he said, “You read Robert A. Heinlein?”
“Not yet.”
“BUUUUUUUGS!” he made his eyes large and held invisible guns in his hands.
“Eh?”
“Starship Troopers? Remember? Robert A Heinlein – he wrote it.”
“Oh my God! BUUUUUUUGS!”
Hyuk-yuk-yuk went the both of us. “Crap, is he going to do something like that in this book?”
Heinlein did do something like that. Right at the end, Man said to the computer, Mike, “Do it, Mike, throw rocks at ‘em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit ‘em hard!” YAAAAY!
~
I really enjoyed the novel. It was engaging, cheerful and had a adorable supercomputer call Mike. I kept thinking about what Stephen King once said about writing, that he would let the reader have the puppy, let the reader stroke it, then kill the puppy. I was worried with every turn of the page Mike was the puppy and Heinlein would make the adorable supercomputer do something heartbreakingly cruel because it wanted a laugh. Then, I’m surprised when Mike didn’t do a thing like that. What did I miss? Mike seems to understand loneliness and loyalty. As a computer, it shouldn’t because it has only processing power and artificial intelligence to guess the next step – it doesn’t have motivation to be loyal or to be social. A computer doesn’t fear being pushed out of a pressure lock and has no need for other computers, unlike human beings.
I think Heinlein is conducting a thought experiment with this story. Let’s have a few intelligent, loving, capable people in the mix, give them a bit of trouble with the authority. What do they do? Like all intelligent folks, they begin with ideals – let’s do away with government. Then, they end up with the machine rigging the votes so they remain in power, propaganda and all other bad habits of governments. I didn’t feel cheated and let down at all because Heinlein is so readable, so friendly a writer.
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
July 28th, 2009 books
Perhaps that I am sick and hence short of patience. The book is all over the place. He keeps explaining everything in music theory or neuroscience terms without saying anything new or interesting. I stopped halfway where chapter talks about studies showing that the 10,000 hours of practice makes a person an expert. I’m not sure if he wrote it wrongly but the idea is stupid in the extreme. First, there must be pleasure in practicing music – which provides the motivation to improve. Second, to a certain extent, we take the path of least resistance – generally speaking, musicians who become professional, doing music for them is relatively easier when compared with the rest of ordinary folks. So, if there is no dopamine spike, and doing it is relatively difficult, a person could practice 10,000 hours and still won’t become an expert. This can only explain that a person can’t coast on talent alone. Scanning the rest of the chapter, I find the chap trying to talk about talent in music, saying it could be genes or social conditioning, or a bit of both. If you have nothing to say…
Dune by Frank Herbert
July 24th, 2009 books
Every writer has a flaw and it is the flaw that makes them interesting as a writer because with every work, the writer strives to resolve the flaw. I haven’t read all of F. Herbert’s work but I can see his particular flaw. He’s not a novelist. He’s, at heart, a schizophrenic who sees all the things in his head and has to write it down or his brain will explode from containing everything in it. He doesn’t create the emotional link between the reader and the characters very well – the people are there so that he doesn’t go mad thinking about Dune. His tricks to pretend that the hero young Paul can see the future, the insight of his mom Lady Jessica, downplays the propaganda machine in Duke Leto’s popular leadership are not very effective. I keep seeing him, the writer, planting these tricks everywhere. Perhaps the problem of his narrative? I don’t know.
There are some bits I don’t like – how women are unimportant in this power playground and used mainly for breeding purposes or creating political allies, Also, that perverseness is the Baron asking for a nice boy is strange: would he be less perverse if he asked for a girl?
What I think Herbert did succeeded in this novel, is condense the drama of human history into a book and show us his world view. (I’m guessing that Arabic and Roman history is his background when he planned the rise and fall of the houses?) The development of the entire planet ecology, the conflicts between the houses, the habits of its people is impressive in its logic (water in the rites for death, marriage, Freman taking control of sandworms, spice trading). I have always liked finding Christian religion in a story. In this, I particularly enjoyed the effective presence of religion/superstition as a tool to gain various goodies:
Protection:
Jessica thought about the prohecy – the Shanri-a and all the panoplia proheticus, a Bene Gesserit of the Missionaris Protectiva dropped here long centuries ago – long dead, no doubt, but her purpose accomplished: the protective legends implanted in these people against the day of a Bene Gesserit’s need.
Power:
“Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”
Leadership position:
Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him
…She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong – faster and fast and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a bland rush until it’s too late.”
…
“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.
“Nothing about religion is simple,” she warned.
But Paul, seeing the clouded future that still hung over them, found himself swayed by anger. He could only say: “Religion unifies our forces. It’s our mystique.”
“You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura,” she charged. “You never cease indoctrinating.”
Soldiers: This startled me slightly – did something similar happen to all those who had gone to elite schools? Is this the worry of a brain drain a reaction to the waste of all that expensive conditioning? Is this why the breaking of a bond reimbursement of university fees is said to be framed as an immoral act since one can’t use a religion without upsetting another religion? How v interesting…
“How could you be sure of the loyalty of such recruits?”
“I would take them in small groups, not larger than platoon strength,” Hawat said. “I’d remove them from their oppressive situation and isolate them with a training cadre of people who understand their background, preferably people who had preceded them from the same oppressive situation. Then I’d fill them with the mystique that their planet had really been a secret training ground to produce just such superior beings as themselves. And all the while, I’d show that what such superior beings could earn: rich living, beautiful women, fine mansions…whatever they desired.”
I’m curious about one thing not dealt with in detail – the economics of spice trade. Spice is expensive because of its rarity so why would anyone increase the production of spice, or hoard spice? There would be more interest in maintaining the sustained rarity of spice, especially when spice is not perishable. If spice is just like any other resource, there will be a robust futures trade to regulate supplies. So, when a thing is in the ground and the prices are not good enough, to get profits, it would be better to leave it in the ground until the prices are better. Power, it seems, is the addictive spice consumed by the Heads of the Houses but the desire for power is the same as the desire for spice? I don’t know. Well, I suppose this is not very interesting at all to sci-fi writers.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
June 22nd, 2009 books
Never thought I would find another writer whom I would obsess over the way I read Greene…
Meanwhile Molly, talented in so many directions, danced a little — but she really did not have the build for a ballerina; did a song and dance act in a revue — decided it was too frivolous; took drawing lessons, gave them up when the war started when she worked as a journalist; gave up journalism to work in one of the cultural outworks of the Communist Party; left for the same reason everyone of her type did — she could not stand the deadly boredom of it; became a minor actress, and had reconciled herself, after much unhappiness, to the fact that she was essentially a dilettante. Her source of self-respect was that she had not — as she put it — given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
Anna said: ‘You’re not going to get anywhere if you two go on like this.’ She sounded angry; she tried to right it with a joke: ‘What it amounts to is, you two should never have married, but you did, or at least you shouldn’t have had a child, but you did —’ Her voice sounded angry again, and again she softened it, saying, ‘Do you realize you two have been saying the same things over and over for years? Why don’t you accept that you’ll never agree about anything and be done with it?’
‘All right, I’m not tactful. Why should I be? Richard says my life isn’t up to much, well I agree with him, but what’s his? Your poor Marion, treated like a housewife or a hostess, but never as a human being. Your boys, being put through the upper-class mill simply because you want it, given no choice. Your stupid little affairs. Why am I supposed to be impressed?’
‘Perhaps it would have been better if you had in fact chosen a stupid and insensitive woman?’ suggested Molly. ‘Or you shouldn’t have always let her know what you were doing? Stupid! She’s a thousand times better than you are.’
‘In short, I couldn’t get a hard on with Marion. Is that clear enough for you? And we’ve been back for a week. So far she’s all right. I’ve been home every evening, like a dutiful husband, and we sit and are polite with each other. She’s careful not to ask me what I’ve been doing or who I’ve been seeing. And I’m careful not to watch the level in the whisky bottle. But when she’s not in the room I look at the bottle, and I can hear her brain ticking over, he must have been with some woman because he doesn’t want me. It’s hell, it really is. Well all right,’ he cried, leaning forward, desperate with sincerity, ‘all right, Molly. But you can’t have it both ways. You two go on about marriage, well you may be right. You probably are. I haven’t seen a marriage yet that came anywhere near what it’s supposed to be. All right. But you’re careful to keep out of it. It’s a hell of an institution, I agree. But I’m involved in it, and you’re preaching from some pretty safe sidelines.’
‘I’d rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I’m not saying I’m choosing failure. I mean, one doesn’t choose failure, does one? I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want.’
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated.
Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?
The battles and conflicts and debates inside our group which might have driven it into growth, had we not been an alien body, without roots, destroyed us very fast. Inside a year our group was split, equipped with sub-groups, traitors, and a loyal hard core whose personnel, save for one or two men, kept changing. Because we did not understand the process, it sapped our emotional energy. But while I know that the process of self-destruction began almost at birth, I can’t quite pinpoint that moment when the tone of our talk and behaviour changed. We were working as hard, but it was to the accompaniment of a steadily deepening cynicism. And our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary to what we said, and thought we believed in. It is from that period of my life that I know how to watch the jokes people make. A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I’ve seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organizations.
…
The two groups agreed to continue to work together — so much sanity remained to us; but we had different policies. I want to laugh out of a kind of despair even now — it was all so irrelevant, the truth was the group was like a group of exiles, with exiles’ fevered bitterness over trifles.
For years my life seems to have consisted of activities I began to do provisionally, temporarily, with half a heart, and which I then stayed with.
I did not like Willi. He did not like me. Yet we began to live together, or as much as is possible in a small town where everyone knows what you do. We had rooms in the same hotel and shared meals. We were together for nearly three years. Yet we neither liked nor understood each other. We did not even enjoy sleeping together. Of course then I was inexperienced, having slept only with Steven, and that briefly. But even then I knew, as Willi knew, that we were incompatible. Having learned about sex since, I know that the word incompatible means something very real. It doesn’t mean, not being in love, or not being in sympathy, or not being patient, or being ignorant. Two people can be sexually incompatible who are perfectly happy in bed with other people, as if the very chemical structures of their bodies were hostile. Well, Willi and I understood this so well that our vanity wasn’t involved. Our emotions were, about this point only. We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not, isn’t surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in a situation long after I should leave it.
But really what I discovered, though I didn’t know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: ‘Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour:’ Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write ‘a story’, ‘a novel’, because I simply don’t care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality.
We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organizing meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytizing. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back — for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her The Golden Bough because, ‘when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.’ She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: ‘I’ll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.’ (They didn’t strike me at the time, though.)
An Indulgent weekend
May 24th, 2009 books, screen, theatre
Dancing On Your Grave by The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs was a tad depressing. It has its funny moments but some rhymes/ ideas were predictable therefore, not as funny as I would like it (eg, working fingers to the bone + skeleton). I did find one part funny, when someone sang that when he was alive, every seven seconds, he thought about [pause] current affairs. Their idea of afterlife was at first Christian (Pearly Gates), then, Buddhist (reincarnation) finally completely atheist (Worm food). It wasn’t hilarious but not horrible.
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink feels like an essay masquerading as fiction.
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Nick Mitchell AKA Norman Gentle
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