Grand unified books thread

[The Minsky Moment]

I had heard of him. A famous Yankee from one of their flop eras. Like Mattingly and his sideburns.

 

Like Mattingly?  Like Mattingly??????!!!!

Joe Pepitone was nothing like Don Mattingly.  Pepitone was a decent first bagger with some pop who gradually but steadily pissed away his potential popping pills and partying late into every night.  Mattingly was an MVP level talent, a universally acknowledged team leader with a relentless work ethic, whose Hall of Fame career was cut short by chronic and painful knee and back injuries.

[Norgy]

Yeah Mantel was a fantastic writer.

I also really, really enjoyed A Place of Greater Safety, her French Revolution novel.

Yes, I am not sure which one I would rate higher. When I finished the latter, I was in need of more Mantel. So I read "A Change of Climate", which I would also say is excellent.

I got "The Coming Wave" about AI since you recommended it, and it is a bit like reading Harari. It's not overly technical, and it is interesting that Suleyman himself was part of the team behind Deep Mind.
Not sure if I get any wiser and fully understand the implications AI and the wave of it will have, but at least Suleyman isn't just an optimist.

Finished the British historian Richard J. Evans' "Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich" before commencing on feeding my nightmares about AI. Nothing really new, and the biographies are a little on the short side. Still a good read.
Published in 2024, it frequently gives nods and winks to Trump 1.0 and Europe's flirtation with authoritarianism.

[Jacob]

Read Matrix by Lauren Groff last month. Historical fiction about Marie de France (about whom apparently little is known besides her writing). A little higher brow than how I usually like my historical fiction, but quite engrossing.

Also read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, about a near future US in a state of social collapse. It's set in the year 2024 and is really rather apt. The only thing that seemed far-fetched to me is the notion that the US would experience a collapse of social order of that magnitude, while Canada remained relatively unscathed. I'm fairly confident that if the US goes kablooie, Canada is going down with it.

Both books are worth a read IMO.

[Valmy]

I had heard of him. A famous Yankee from one of their flop eras. Like Mattingly and his sideburns.

 

Like Mattingly?  Like Mattingly??????!!!!

Joe Pepitone was nothing like Don Mattingly.  Pepitone was a decent first bagger with some pop who gradually but steadily pissed away his potential popping pills and partying late into every night.  Mattingly was an MVP level talent, a universally acknowledged team leader with a relentless work ethic, whose Hall of Fame career was cut short by chronic and painful knee and back injuries.

Well they both were stars of shitty Yankees teams. So they had that as a comparison.

[Jacob]

I just read Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim. It assumes familiarity with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The opening few paragraphs:

So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different "they," these were the "they" in charge, the "they" who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

And the newscasters said the hurricane had dissipated into a tropical storm, and the pipes were repaired, and the well-paid janitors cleaned up the sewage leak while wearing proper PPE, and the kid in the hole cried and cried and cried. Or they (the general "they," the "they" that meant you and me and the janitors and the newscasters) assumed that the kid was crying, because the hole was soundproofed so nobody could hear the kid, which didn't stop them from knowing about the kid, but it sort of helped.

The rest of the story is her (and an audio version as well, apparently): https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

[Barrister]

I just read Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim. It assumes familiarity with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The opening few paragraphs:

So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different "they," these were the "they" in charge, the "they" who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

And the newscasters said the hurricane had dissipated into a tropical storm, and the pipes were repaired, and the well-paid janitors cleaned up the sewage leak while wearing proper PPE, and the kid in the hole cried and cried and cried. Or they (the general "they," the "they" that meant you and me and the janitors and the newscasters) assumed that the kid was crying, because the hole was soundproofed so nobody could hear the kid, which didn't stop them from knowing about the kid, but it sort of helped.

The rest of the story is her (and an audio version as well, apparently): https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Not familiar with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

It's a not uncommon retelling of a critique of utilitarianism, and as such I'm familiar with the idea.

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole is referenced above.  It (as is obvious from the title) suggests just killing the one tortured child.  I've read through the short story, as well as the Wiki link above.

I don't know if it would have been immediately obvious to me, but from the Wiki leak it's an idea of "accelerationism" - that you need to intensify the conflict in society until you can pull out your ultimate victory (and on seeing the analogy seems obvious).  Accelerationism can be both a left or right wing idea - whether you're trying to bring on the coming Racial Holy War to bring on the all-white utopia, or the coming revolution of the proletariat trying to bring on the communist utopia (or any other such combination).

From the story's second-last paragraph:

Occasionally a content creator will walk into Omelas and film a video while standing on one of the balconies of the Nice Houses or while sitting on one of Omelas' beautiful beaches. They will talk about the history of Omelas in the same way that people talk about the Uyghurs situation in China, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the comfort women imported from Korea by Japan, the Belgian Congo, the Atlantic Slave Trade in relation to the American South, and the refugees who sink in ships off the coast of Western Europe.

We live in a far from perfect world.  Nothing has been done about the Uyghurs.  The holocaust or Japanese comfort women were only discovered at the end of the war.

But the Belgian Congo?  There was intense international pressure which led to King Leopold handing over personal control of the colony to Belgium (which was much more humane), and then peaceful independence 50 years later.

Atlantic Slave trade was rightly seen as a travesty.  The UK declared was against it.  WHile slavery as an institution required a war in the US, it as ended in places like Brazil peacefully - and by then the slave trade itself had been shut down.

Dying refugees?  Again - widespread shock and horror.  I can remember not long ago Canada taking on tens of thousands of Syrian refugees just because one little boy tragically died on a beach.


I am not a fan of accelerationism.

[Savonarola]

I read David Michaelis's biography of Charles Schulz (Schulz and Peanuts.)  It's a richly detailed account of Schulz's life and quite readable.  I was surprised how much of Peanut's was self referential; he lived in Needles, California as a teenager, he had a cousin Patty who was the model for Peppermint Patty (and the namesake of Patty,) he had a dog named Spike (which was the model for Snoopy,) loved a red headed woman when he was a young man (and seems to have carried a torch for her a very long time.)

I was surprised to learn that he didn't really like children; maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise since those kids are really mean to each other.  I did know that his first wife (Joyce) was the model for Lucy (except in the very earliest strips when she's based on his step daughter Meredith).  It's not a big surprise they eventually divorced, but the strip was never as good afterwards.  I was also surprised that he carried his grudges with him to the grave, even for minor bullying incidents that happened when he was a child.  I would have thought having thirty million dollars and global recognition would have compensated for that.

[Savonarola]

Last night I attended a virtual lecture from the Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, about Livre d'Art (the lecturer got all bent out of shape because the museum translated that to Art Books.)

The lecturer was a collector who had some really rare livre d'art; one was a copy of Paul Verlaine's Parallèlement  with illustrations by Cezanne.  The government publisher didn't look closely at the book and, with the title assumed it was a geometry book, so they gave it a science stamp to put on the overleaf.  There were only a few of these published before the copyright board realized their mistake and removed the right to use that stamp, he had one of them.

He also had James Joyce's Ulysses with Matisse's Illustrations (might not be safe for work) which, on a repeated theme, were done without Matisse reading the book.  So the illustrations are of the Odyssey, rather than Ulysses.

Since it was the Dali Museum he ended by showing us the Dali Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.  Those were pretty cool.

[mongers]

Last night I attended a virtual lecture from the Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, about Livre d'Art (the lecturer got all bent out of shape because the museum translated that to Art Books.)

The lecturer was a collector who had some really rare livre d'art; one was a copy of Paul Verlaine's Parallèlement  with illustrations by Cezanne.  The government publisher didn't look closely at the book and, with the title assumed it was a geometry book, so they gave it a science stamp to put on the overleaf.  There were only a few of these published before the copyright board realized their mistake and removed the right to use that stamp, he had one of them.

He also had James Joyce's Ulysses with Matisse's Illustrations (might not be safe for work) which, on a repeated theme, were done without Matisse reading the book.  So the illustrations are of the Odyssey, rather than Ulysses.

Since it was the Dali Museum he ended by showing us the Dali Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.  Those were pretty cool.

 

Song nice links there, though I really love the Matisse illustrating the wrong story and for a perfectly understanble reason 

[Sheilbh]

Just finished Playground by Richard Powers - which I absolutely loved. I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a novel. It's also I think a great novel of this moment - now - and addresses it more than any other contemporary novel I can think of.

[Sheilbh]

Separately, apropos of nothing, reading Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever and this line stuck out

America loves a successful sociopath. We are not so much a society where nobody knows anybody else as we are a society where only media celebrities are considered to have actual existence.

[Norgy]

I finished "The Power Worshippers" by Katherine Stewart. Some decent investigative journalism and legwork about Christian nationalism. It does put Trump's "king" moniker into perspective.

Review
Story:         
Writing: 
Overall: Hod help us all

[Admiral Yi]

Just learned on Youtube that Truman Capote was Harper Lee's childhood friend in Alabama, and thus the model for the Dill Harris character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

[Sheilbh]

A few books I've read recently.

Frank Dikotter's The Age of Openness: China Before Mao opens with the point I tried and failed to make in the 1619 thread, "Sir John Plumb, one of the great social historians of the eighteenth century, once said that bland consensus does not do much to advance historical knowledge, and consequently that there is little point in accumulating facts within agreed frameworks of explanation." Dikotter absolutely sticks to that plan with this provocative short book/long essay primarily focused on the Nanjing Decade but also wider Chinese "openness". It is interesting and there's some very thought-provoking stuff and fantastic details but I think it's maybe over-egging its argument a little bit (but that's the point of an essay I suppose). In some ways I think it's a text that is almost as interesting for what it says about its time - published in 2007 and expanding on a number of monographs Dikotter had published over the previous 15 years on globalisation in late Qing/Republican China and framed around chapters on "open governance", "open borders", "open minds", "open markets". It's not, I suspect, a framework that would be used now.

Semi-relatedly S.C.M. Paine's The Wars for Asia 1911-1949 which is also a bit of a provocation and revisionism - and I think broadly far more convincing. There's a series of arguments made here which are really interesting. The central idea which I'm convinced by is that the period needs to be looked at as a set of nested conflicts - a civil war, within and structuring a regional war, within and structuring a global war. As with Dikotter I felt some arguments were being pushed a bit more than was sustainable but generally it was very good and also a plea from 2011 for more attention to be paid to military history and to recover it from its huge unfashionability given how important conflict is in shaping societies and history - as someone who doesn't really read military history I feel suitably chastened Also really striking is just how central Russia is to this story and how (relatively) peripheral the US is, this is also slightly reinforced from reading the first two volumes of Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin (which came after this book) - the big thing I just had not ever understood was just how much of Stalin and the USSR's attention was on the Far East, Japan and China.

On fiction really enjoyed Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season - this is somewhere between a murder mystery or crime novel and horror. The start is the discovery of the body of "the Witch" a notorious local woman in a small Mexican town who helps sex workers with abortions, men with erectile dysfunction etc. It's a fantastically written novel (and an incredible translation) that is structurally long single voice (often single paragraph) chapters from one character's perspective circling down closer and closer onto the crime and what actually happened. But in the meantime you get the claustrophobia of the town and poverty, the machismo and male violence. Each voice and perspective shifting the sense of what happens and, as I say, riding the line between crime and horror - in that sense it reminded me a little of Mariana Enriquez. Strongly recommend.

Also Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. I read Tan Twan Eng's House of Doors as it was on the Booker list last year - and I loved it. It was a fantastic story of an English woman's life in Penang, Malaysia, both her involvement with Sun Yat-Sen's movement as part of his regular perabulations around areas with large overseas Chinese communities, and Somerset Maugham's subsequent visit with his lover. I loved it and was also delighted to discover he's not written many other books so I can be a completist

The Garden of Evening Mists is less accomplished, but still very enjoyable (if you like this type of novel). Honestly the first line will probably give an idea of if it's the sort of thing you'd like: "On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan." The narrator is a retired Chinese-Malaysian Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling (from Penang) who returns to the Cameron Highlands and a friend's tea plantations where she had lived during the Emergency and worked with a self-exiled Japanese gardener on his Japanese garden in a very alien climate. There's a bit of narrative complexity through different layers of flashback telling both her story in the present, where a Japanese academic is looking to research the now legendary creator of the garden; her experiences during the Emergency, working on the garden; and her experiences with her sister as a prisoner of the Japanese during the war. It is well-structured, well-written, with interesting perspectives (in particular from Japanese gardening) and a grounding in history - however I found it a little lacking in personality. Yun Ling's voice never really seems distinctive - though I could read this as the voice of a careful, lawyer and judge writing her story, I'm not sure that's actually what's happening. Enjoyable but I'd go for House of Doors.

[Razgovory]

I've been reading Timaeus. It's a about a very boring party where a guy makes up weird shit.