Books read November 2008, with date finished:
I read Pirsig first when I was maybe 17, a copy from the year the book was published (1974) in fact, my parents' copy, and this was a period of time when books would mean a lot to me, this one especially, and so when I lent it to a friend I was disappointed that circumstances (I don't recall, just missed chances and then the moving away of everyone and the drifting apart of that group) meant I didn't get it back. Earlier this year or maybe last year at a birthday party that I, in a somewhat unlikely fashion, attended, my long-time-ago friend also - and in even more unlikely a fashion - appeared, and it turned out she had brought Pirsig along with her, just in case I was there, and so after 13 years I have the book back. It's pretty good, and presents a number of neat approaches and vocabulary, but I feel differently about Pirsig now and so I feel distant from the ideas despite having the physical thing in my hands.
Bhagat was also a little disappointing: I love the lyrical quality of Indian English, and enjoy reading the Times of India online, but the story didn't transport me. Le Guin is a favourite but I've maybe read it a little too recently; Moorcock is amusing but that's it; the design work and discussion in Product as Landscape is thought provoking and again shows some neat approaches, but didn't inspire in me any cascade of epiphanies.
American Psycho is disturbing. It's another book I first read at 17, I think, and I re-read out of curiousity. Ellis is a masterful storyteller. The tone is hypnotic and the chapters - it's a sequence of long photographs, I guess, a story told under strobe lighting - vivid and lucid. Humanity, when you see it once maybe twice, is a glass of fresh water. Compelling and horrible.
I'm beginning to feel about Nabokov how I feel about Vonnegut: an author I wish I'd found much earlier, both holding a level of control over their writing that means everything you want to read into the story is there and more besides. That quality lets the words burrow into you much deeper. Pale Fire is a poem by one author followed by detailed commentary by his friend and the story emerges, as in several books I've read this year, only in motion, slowly and from the coming together of many small and hidden parts. The story is steganographically encoded, unpacked by the act of reading. These stories cannot be summarised. Highly enjoyable; recommended.
So far in 2008 I have read 99 books (not counting online stories or graphic novels) and so my target for December is to finish another 5. These I have in hand although life details (moving flat, which is both time consuming and will eliminate my commute, which is where I read most; a different pattern of going out; energy devoted to reading; the holidays) may prove to make this challenging.
In contrast to the structures that I talked about the other day - the ones that Rothko and Markson set up halfway between your mind and what is ostensibly their art (but their art is actually these collaboratively unfolded mental sculptures) - I want to take a minute to talk about an alternative category of artistic expression, which is the transportation into the extended present.
There's something that happens when you listen to the music of Steve Reich which is that the pattern is at least short term predictable, and so you hear not only the presently-playing music but also you hear the previous 10 seconds (by memory) and the next 10 seconds (by expectation). And here I have to modify my argument with two points:
One: your expectations of music are not completely intellectualised. Your pattern recognition systems have their own particular grooves or lines of flight and so even when you know exactly what is coming up, your internal expectation might be different, like a corner on a known road which is always out of character. Two: this is of course true for all music, only it's easier to discern with the music of Steve Reich.
So what happens when your expectations are violated is a gap opens up between reality and your counterfactual present, a bridge over a chasm which suspended only because it is held at either end by the memory of the past and the predictability of the future. What's important here is not the bridge itself but the height of it, which manifests as either a tension - a kind of predictive vertigo - or a tickling. To me this tickling is the most enjoyable quality of this kind of art, arising from the joyful violation of expectations, and is only possible where the art allows the long present.
Another way the present can be extended is to make time smooth so that you slip over it and forget what the past is and what the future is. This I experience when I'm using the iPhone app RjDj, which takes the noise from around you and plays it back to you through your headphones, sliced and processed and echoed, so I'm not sure whether I'm hearing something live or a slice of it that is repeated a second later and incorporated into this generative soundscape. RjDj ends up being a world mindfulness enhancer because whereas I might not notice a sound because I am momentarily distracted by dodging a person on the pavement or reading a road-sign, here I have multiple opportunities in a several second window to listen. RjDj is especially enhancing when reading, because it turns out - at least for me - that my sense of linearity when reading down a page is anchored on time's arrow as it presents itself in sensory data from the world around me. Isolated from the moment-by-momentness of the world and having my sense of now extended by RjDj results in me reading the book page by page instead of sentence by sentence, having awareness of the page behind me and - because I am so aware of this larger context and the longer curve of narrative - an expectation of the page ahead. It dissolves the experience of reading.
There's a curious shift here in the focal distance of time. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, makes a comment that European men rest their eyes on an object so that they touch the surface, as if they are reading it, because of their history reading books; American men, by contrast, are from a televisual culture, and rest their eyes an inch or two ahead of the object, in order to take in a wider surface simultaneously. American women, says McLuhan, are disconcerted by Europeans because the men appear to be examining them closer, really penetrating them with the focal distance of the gaze, and this is felt as intimate and erotic. RjDj helps me move my focal appreciation of the present back a couple inches, a non-European connection with now, so that I can apprehend it; regard it; look at it from the side.
9 Beet Stretch, Beethoven's Ninth time-stretched over twenty-four hours, does this. Long hikes or drives through the desert - undifferentiated scenery - does this. Repetitive beat music does this; dancing does this; being in the flow does this. The communication of highly complex ideas relies on using rhetoric to construct a long present as a kind of carrier wave on which a subtle and highly structured object can be authored in the listener's mind: an example is the I Ching.
But to me it's this tickling quality that is what makes the production of the long present worthwhile. To have a constructed artwork that exists over time and mirrors your thoughts so completely as to mesh with your expectations, fooling you into thinking it's of your own origin, using repetition and rhythm to construct a smooth space over which you can slip between the past and the now and the easily expected future, and then to make a surprise key change, to demonstrate the autonomy of the artwork, well that tickles me and it's why A Thousand Plateaus makes me laugh out loud, and this is simultaneously the experience of flirting when you can find the flow, and of wrestling with a dog, and familiar music, and if you're lucky even your own body and your own mind, which are really one, and are yourself too actually, with their own grooves and own lines of flight, but still you reflexively look inward and predict yourself, incorporating that too, recursively, making a kind of extended present of self, which is what we call identity, and you make actions and create thoughts which are consistent with your sense of self, but sometimes, as I say, if you are lucky, your body and your mind can jump the groove and prove that they too, in the context of the long self, still have the capacity to surprise, and this, I conclude, making a comment on a feeling that makes me happy and how to achieve this, is how one is able to tickle oneself.
I like small plastic cows. I don't know why. I haven't owned any until today. For many years I have wanted a herd for my home, and 100 would do nicely. But there is no way I can justify spending that much money on plastic animals. I could however justify giving that same amount to charity. So how about 100 people buy me 1 cow each, and then I give £500 to the charity they vote for? It's a win-win. It's Matt Webb's 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008! Pass it on, buy a cow, round 'em up and roll 'em out.
Books read October 2008, with date finished:
It's to be noted that 63% of the books I read this month have titles that begin with "The" compared to only 29% for 2008 as a whole (26% if you exclude October). The run of five is unprecedented, although back in March there were two groups of two separated by an indefinite article.
Høeg: Seismology is the study of surface tremors caused by the tension built up below the earth's crust. The study of love represents the seismology of the individual and of togetherness.
This is one point of view: Høeg's characters are all have deeply different approaches, and I am arrested by how he is able to see love in such a variety of profound ways:
Information, a collection of essays from 1962, has a delightful turn of phrase: computers are referred to as "workers" and timesharing a computer installation is a way to keep them "gainfully employed." It makes me wonder when the word "working" changed from meaning productively labouring towards a goal to simply not broken. There's also this quote: They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them.
(Ridenour, 1952)
I've read Tainter's review of collapse before. He comes to a view that complexity has diminishing returns, and a change in circumstances can mean it makes economic sense for the population to decomplexify their society. It's a must read. An op-ed in the New York Times pointed out that Although banks perform an essential economic function — bringing together investors and savers — they are not the only institutions that can do this.
It's true. Just as the internet reduces our dependence on high street shops and advertising to choose the products we encounter, and big entertainment verticals to choose what media we consume to unwind, it also reduces the importance of banks as a problem solving mechanism for how capital and entrepreneurs meet. But the financial sector, as an organ of complex society, must be paid for. If its complexity is no longer required, perhaps we are all better off to see it simplified.
My recommendation this month is for On the Road. To mix pace and narrative and meaning like that. I was carried away. Poetry!
Two days ago, Sunday, I joined the Tate as a member to get access to their Members Room to have somewhere to sit to read my book and have a coffee. The cheesecake there is pretty good. I was looking out onto the river. I rarely see London from the side, and it was strange being six storeys up to not see the buildings looming up or from above, as from a plane, and not closing in on me but, as I say, from the side and set back from me somewhat, across the water.
I think it's good for the soul of a city to be able to take itself in, and that's something that Brighton can do, looking back on itself from the beach and the pier, and that San Francisco does very well, from above and across, but London cannot and in consequence often feels like an ant hill, with all of us the ants. When I am in London, I am inside it, in its belly. I cannot take it in. From the side I am not high up enough to look down on the city as a map, so I see London as a collection of buildings and cars and people, at a human scale, and with a little distance I am able to appreciate it, to study it. To apprehend London. It's a rare view, the one from the side.
The water and the sky and the buildings had, because of the lowness of the sun and the overcastness of the clouds, the same flatness of illumination and the same quality of colour, blue brown green. The Thames itself was highly reflective and it was possible to see the dark blue tint of the sky, but look through that and beyond it had no translucency, not even a little, so it looked like oil and moved like oil too: not just choppy (which it was) but rippling too so between every wave was another wave, and so on. The Thames was over-full, brimming, and the waves moving slowly as if the water was heavier today, or the air was thick, or gravity different in some way.
I understand that young people have translucent skin and so, in the light, they appear to glow, light reflecting from multiple depths of the skin simultaneously so their outer shell appears to fluoresce. The skin of adults is opaque, like old plastic.
Piercing through these three, the water, sky and city, was the reflection of the setting sun on a building, a blinding orange light smeared out and organised into a grid by the window. And on the river was an upright mirror the size of a billboard, on a raft and tethered, bobbing, glinting white then black, the waves speaking in Morse.
It reminds me of the last time I sat watching the Thames, waiting for a friend near the Oxo Tower, and again seeing London from the side. This time the river was flowing fast, and the clouds were moving fast, and the distances involved in both were such that I could see continuous parallax: those parts nearest to me moving quickest, and those furthest moving slow. And birds flew past me, and people walking and cycled past me in both directions, and boats went along the river, and overall there was a sense that everything in my visual field was horizontal; that everything was moving sideways today; that I might be on a conveyor belt.
Red on Maroon Mural, Section 2
After the Members Room I went to the Rothko exhibition, which runs until 1 February 2009.
There's something about Rothko's painting, especially a few of those in room 3, which means they operate somewhere different from other art. The interventions Rothko makes on the fields of colour are of the same order as the interventions my perception system makes, the way my subjectivity changes my perception, and the way the light and quality of the canvas changes as I move my eyes, my head and my body around the room. It becomes impossible to disentangle these influences, to know whether it is me or Rothko responsible for what I am perceiving and thinking. My reactions to the pieces in room 9 were of looking over a landscape: the heavy blacks at the top drew my head up, and the level of the horizon made me feel as though I was looking from a hill over a large plain abundant with life, or lying flat on the ground, or up at heaven. I was elated or deeply depressed. From where did this come? It humbles me. When David Markson writes, he's not writing the words, but writing instructions to author the thing that appears between the paper and my brain, which is brought into being and constructed by the act of reading. I cannot author on this level. Rothko was not painting canvases, but a structure held halfway between us: a delicate structure constructed by him and me both, where the art insists on me a certain context or emotion, causing me to feel the room around me he wants me to feel and to think thoughts felt as my own; simultaneously mirroring and leading me, like dancing, like speaking with a highly charismatic person, or really good sex when you can't tell whether it's you or your partner anticipating or actually something that is mutual and happening between you and outside you. Rothko's art is transcendent. I was enraptured. There were fireworks in my soul.
Books read September 2008, with date finished:
This month I've also picked up an original 1955 printing of the Rand Corporation's A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (which will go with my copy of Ulysses - with the words rearranged in alphabetical order - from Simon Popper's Borromean), and a reprint of 507 Mechanical Movements, but neither of those I'll read so they won't be included here.
It's been a month of sci-fi and Westerns (I've been watching a bunch of films too), which has left me dreaming of clear blue skies, long clear vistas, desert scrub, C beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate... I'm not kidding, this is manifesting as a heart-breaking yearning, a pining for frontiers and wide-open scale. I really don't know how to deal with it.
So Zane Grey was magical, and it's incredible to see the Western being written for the first time--the seed that turns into a genre. Egan's Diaspora was as poignant as the first time I read it: the hardest of hard sci-fi that delves into what it means to be human and opens it way, way up. The universe is a lot bigger after I finish reading that book. Ian Watson I'm pleased to have discovered as a sci-fi author: his stories have ideas I've read nowhere else, and I'm happy to find he has a large back catalogue to work through.
Lem was hilarious (oh and, like the best satire, true. Or was it the mascons telling me the book was good?); Jerome was also hilarious--it had me laughing out loud, so rare.
Heims' double bibliography of Wiener and Neumann paints the characters and context of early cybernetics, and in that way sits as a great companion piece to his later book Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953. But here's the thing: you also get a picture of Wiener's humanity (and the surprising humanity in cybernetics), and the horrendous contingency of the Cold War and the arms race, which appears to have rested heavily on one of the quickest and most convincing minds of the the 20th century - Neumann - understanding people like machines, refusing to have faith in humanity, and being a warmonger. Heims makes a powerful case for a science better embedded in society, and produces this marvellous quote from Paul Goodman:
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.
Recommended.
Volition
When I was young my family included Indigo, a golden retriever with his own towel and a wide smile. I would sit and watch him as he lay sprawled with his chin on one leg, staring into the middle distance. Suddenly he would leap to his feet and trot, tail wagging, a few paces before hurling himself at the carpet, twisting as he did so to roll and throw himself around and generally have a good old time right there in the hall. What was it Indigo, hey? What did you see, did you see a ghost who said -Come play? Why that moment, hey boy? Just as quickly he would stand and shake himself down, and come back to his spot near the kitchen where I could see him and he could see me, and I'd be laughing. Where did it come from, that abrupt desire for play? How come that exact second for decanting some of the internal flywheel into rolling about with his belly in the air and legs waving? It reassured me that I couldn't see any cause, that it was something inside. It meant Indigo had his own internal life, and so I could love him more.
Newly single I sit at the table in my flat, shuffling papers, wondering how I'll know what to do next, and wishing I could be like Indigo. I drink water because I'm thirsty; I pack because tomorrow I fly to Oslo.
I was 10 years, 9 months, 3 weeks and 3 days old the day they activated the Large Hadron Collider. I was at college in a lecture the day I found out they'd found the Higgs boson, which gives particles mass. Mass gives momentum, and momentum is what keeps you moving. The Higgs is where it comes from:
the universe is a house, and you're a particle - let's say a proton - and the house is packed full of ghosts, from wall to wall like a carpet, and from foundations to rafters like roaches. You're dancing in the ballroom - there's a ballroom in this house - and as you dance the ghosts tap at your arm and tug at your collar and rest their hands on your shoulder. You turn for a second to see who it is, but the face of the ghost is hard to make out, and besides the ghosts are restless so it has already mixed back into the crowd, and perhaps there aren't any ghosts anyway - you've had a few glasses of wine after all, maybe you're imagining things - but that aside, it means that your otherwise smooth dance is slowed and shaped by the constant contact of a million touches.
The ghosts are Higgs bosons, which fill the universe so they slosh over the sides, and the contact they have with particles - like you and me - as they pass by is what we see as mass.
The lecture that day was one on particle physics, and Dr L-- came into the hall with a grin and bright eyes.
-Gentlemen! he said. He always called us gentlemen, whatever the mix.
-Gentlemen, your notes are out of date! My colleagues at Cern let me know this morning. On slide, uh, 20 from last week, where we declared the existence of the Higgs boson was unknown, well that's no longer the case. We have it.
It shouldn't have hit me so hard. We assumed the existence of the Higgs, or something like it, in most of our mathematical models. But to have it confirmed! It didn't need to have come out this way: there could have been a field that created mass, like an electromagnetic field, covering the universe. Or each particle could carry within itself mass, just like charge or spin.
But to have it confirmed... it wasn't right that mass was an external quality, I was thinking, it belonged inside. I felt violated, like someone had knocked me to the ground and emptied my pockets. I walked up the Banbury Road with my head in turmoil, each iron bar on each iron fence looked empty to me, each paving slab on the ground looked hollow, and I eyed the so-called empty air with suspicion for hoarding mass to itself, for withholding the Higgs from me.
It's funny how these things hit you.
The way you show the existence of just one of these ghosts is you stop dancing and you barrel across the dance floor as hard as you can, shouting and roaring, barging ghosts and dancers alike hither and thither, scattering them and knocking them flying. If you get it just right, you splash a clearing in the ghosts, and if you're luckier still there's a moment before they get to their feet where you can grab one, sit on his chest and hold him down by his neck and grab his chin so you can wrench his dirty face round to look straight at yours and lean in real, real close and, panting, whisper straight at him through your gritted teeth: you little fucker: gotcha.
Post-doc I studied the origins of volition.
It's not enough to know that Higgs makes things slow down. What makes 'em move to begin with? Okay, so this proton dances with that proton and that's why that one moves... but why was the one before that moving? And the one before that? And the one before that?
-You're obsessed with work, you said, the day my paper outlining the experimental procedure for isolating volition was published. -Why do we never do anything? (That was the first time. I was at my computer, watching comments and cross-linkings appear on arXiv as my ideas rippled across the community. Physics changes fast when it wants to.)
With hindsight I see you were right. I didn't know how to do anything but work, anything but respond to comments and questions. But it was also unfair: we were as active as any other couple, popular round the faculty and taking full enjoyment from the art and music that sticks to any town with a population of students. We scoured the event sheets for unusual plays and exhibitions in new gallery spaces.
Maybe that slipped. The questions to field more than filled the day, as the detector moved closer and closer to coming online.
The ghosts that fill my head can be scattered and isolated, briefly and with much effort, and I can hold one down and recognise his face: my father, say. My very own Higgs; these are the things that join me to the world.
Volition strings, if they exist, are the faintest of the faint to see. We have to look for the ragged ends of the superstrings that comprise the real substance of the universe. Most strings exist in knotted loops, which are particles. Some strings, after the Big Bang, had their loops severed and the ends of these thrash around like the end of a hose with the water turned full on. They whip, their ends moving at light speed and their middles faster still, although it's impossible to ever detect those except indirectly.
The open ends of volition strings, when they touch a particle - which is rare and fleeting - impart it some unpredictable shove. They push it into a new orbit. And so: movement.
Seeing this in action is what the detector is for. The detector is lined up such that the cut-off end of the volition string will pass through the distant star σ Octantis, which is dense and should slow it just a little, and then through the Earth, which should slow it just a little more and focus it, and then we have our detector placed flat, facing down, in the Arctic Circle of Norway looking through the rock and the mantle and through the core, and we use the entire planet as a kind of lens, and we look close, and we hope we see a twitch in the fabric of the cosmos. Volition.
-You're inert, you said, there's been a year of trying, and we agreed it was best if we parted, and as to whether this decision was right - it has to be said - I numbly say it was. That was three months back.
But you're going to be there in Tromsø, in the calibration and operations team, as the detector is activated, and in three days we'll see one another again.
I'm here because I first suggested a form of this experiment in a paper years ago, a kind of honoured guest except that the details have been refined and revised by hundreds of physicists and mathematicians since. We crowd round the screens, and although really there's no need for personal presence these days, it's a happy moment to be in, with my fellow hunters. I think of Indigo and my father and Dr L-- and you and I see my life as a careering country dance, passed from one hand to another, swung from person to person, kept moving in do-ci-dos up and down and round and round. Somehow I'm standing behind you and, as the lens cap comes off - the culmination of my work - I find myself unable to think of anything so much as the nape of your neck just ahead of me, and it would be the work of a second to rest two fingertips gently on its soft concave curve; and I fancy that the end of a volition string passes right through me, skewers me from my head through my soul itself, or maybe volition is inside me all along and I just need to grasp it, to fan its spark to life, and I understand that what I'm facing now is a decision: to connect or to not connect, that there is no default choice, there is no momentum or inertia or carrying on as you were before; that every millisecond is a choice, an opinion, an act, and it can't be avoided because volition fills us, floods us, drowns the ghosts: and I look at your neck, and my hand, and I have a choice to make.
Hyperlinks are blue which is the colour of sky, of potential. The @ symbol looks like a whirlpool, the mouth of a wormhole. A rabbit hole we fall through. This is the internet.
In the Sweat-Shop: I ran across this excerpt in Heim's biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. It's the first stanza "In the Sweat-Shop," from Leo Wiener's translation of the Yiddish poems of Morris Rosenfeld.
The machines in the shop roar so wildly that
often I forget in the roar that I am; I am
lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I
am a machine. I work, and work, and work with-
out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time.
For what? and for whom? I know not, I ask not!
How should a machine ever come to think?
It reminds me how the processes that surround us drown and re-cut us.
The collection is online: Songs from the ghetto (1898).
Books read August 2008, with date finished:
I read a lot or a little when I'm feeling glum, and this month I read a whole bunch plus there was some travelling. (For those of you keeping count, this means I need to average 7.5 books/mo. for the rest of the year. So if I'm lagging behind in November, look for me to instigate a personal crisis or two to get the reading rate up. You have been warned.)
The Black Swan points out that big, rare events dominate continuous trending (50 years of stockmarket movement is mostly accounted for by 10 days), and that you should put yourself in positions where black swans - when they do occur - will be positive. A good framework. Ashby's 1956 Introduction to Cybernetics is a straight-forward argument from one end of cybernetics to the other: enough to see why it was believed to hold so much promise. There are foreshadowings of both the inevitability of order (autocatalytic loops) and selfish gene ideas in there, which shows how much was nascent in that early crystal seed.
I've had David Byrne on my to-read list since the book came out, and I can't believe I waited. Intelligent art and wise words: the cake results as least as much from the shape of the pan, the cooking and the timing than from its ingredients.
Ways of Seeing is also enlightening and brilliantly designed.
There's nothing in this month's reading I'd shy away from recommending if it took your fancy--we'd be able to have a good chat about it whatever you picked up. Le Guin's short stories are actually better than I remember; both Piercy and Ferris I couldn't put down; Doc Smith's space opera is pacier even than his subspace drives; and although Essays in Love seems a little childish now, and the protagonist is a dick, love is childish, and we are all dicks. Well, I am.
Okay, but I need to recommend one book and it's between Byrne and Berger. I'm going to say Berger's Ways of Seeing because it's rescued art for me and given me a way into a new world.
