Links
You Can’t Tell People Anything: a short post twenty year old post on the difficulties of describing things. People don’t see what you mean until you can show them. (You may need to experience this phenomenon to truly understand it.)
Greg Cochran on Polynesian ancestry. An example on how current DNA analysis techniques can inform us when there’s no written history. Eg, current Tongans are part Polynesian and part Melanesian (think of people from Papua New Guinea or Solomon Islands), but their mitochondrial DNA (DNA from the female line) has more Melanesian ancestry than their Y-Chromosomal DNA (male line). This is the same for Mexicans’ Native American ancestry. In their case, we have written history that matches: Spanish conquistadors were mainly men (so Native American women make up a higher proportion of Mexican ancestors than Native American men). An event like this must have happened in Polynesian history.
The musician Jacob Collier on the importance of play. An interesting discussion of two talented but very different musicians. Collier comes across as constantly exploring music in the most playful way possible. This attitude can be extended to problem solving more generally.
Nathan Cofnas on hereditarianism, arguing that it’s difficult to counter the common non-sequitur that disparities imply discrimination while ignoring HBD.
Books
Meaning of Liff
Fun to flick through as you would a dictionary. Douglas Adams chooses not well known locations in Britain and uses them as names for things that don’t have names yet.
My favourites:
Abilene: (adj) describes the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.
Peoria: (n) the fear of peeling too few potatoes.
Hextable: (n) the record in your collection that makes you undatable
Anglesey: (n) hypothetical object at which a lazy eye is looking.
Tildonk: (n) the wedge-shaped plastic thing placed on a supermarket conveyor belt between one person’s shopping and another’s.
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Eh, maybe not for me. I guess I’m afraid of big bad Virginia.
It’s difficult to read and I didn’t have the patience to persevere to extract the value which no doubt is in there. It reminded me, not in a good way, of reading the classics at school.
The funny thing is I quite like stream of consciousness in some of the rap I listen to. Kool AD, the Andre 3000 of Das Racist, and Andre 3000, the Andre 3000 of OutKast, are both great. Either way, I’ll be vetoing Ulysses as a book club read for a while yet.
I did notice that Woolf’s stuff on the subjective experience of time and flashing between multiple perspectives seems to have influenced a few sections in Infinite Jest. Funnily enough these were my least favourite sections on my first read through, but enjoyed them on the re-read. So there’s hope for Woolf yet, but I’ll take a break from modernism for now.
I feel a bit guilty as this was the first female author in the book club. A bit like Maggie in Extras when she’s dating a black guy and feels bad for not liking jazz.
David Lodge - Modes of Modern Writing
I picked this up after struggling with Woolf. I actually quite enjoyed understanding her place in the pantheon.
Lodge’s taxonomy was similar to Cyril Conelly’s. They had different labels but it’s essentially Modernism vs Realism. Modernism is the stuff that’s full of metaphor, stream of consciousness, confusing changing perspectives, and poetic flourishes. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Realism is more plain English style and structured linearly.
Everything used to be realism. Modernism came along around the 1920s and some of the realists didn’t like it so they argued with the modernists. The modernists won the argument convincing most people that modernism had value. Then in the 1930s writers started popping up like Orwell and Graham Greene that sort of looked like the old realists again.
Also, realism is kind of an awkward label because the modernists claim that their stuff is real. In fact, realer than the realist stuff. This was in defence of accusations by people like Artie Bennet, a realist writer who was this massive name at the time that no one seems to read anymore. He claimed that modernist characters didn’t feel real. Woolf responded that modernist writers write what they feel.
This demarcation made me think about a question Tyler Cowen asked someone on his podcast: Why do some smart people not like artistic films? Bergman, Tarkovsky Godard, even Malick. The guest didn’t have an answer, but I feel like it’s related to these two literary styles. For better or worse, I lean towards the plain stuff.
It’s partly a skill issue. Difficult texts and movies are, well, difficult. But it seems to be a preference thing too. Someone like Patio11 is one of the smartest guys around but I can’t imagine him sitting down for a long, artsy film.
I can finally admit that I didn’t wholly enjoy the Turin Horse when I watched it as a teenager.
Still partly a skill issue, I think.
David Foster Wallace - Brief Interviews of Hideous Men
This is a sort of cross between short stories and a novel. The actual brief interviews can be read together although they’re geographically separated. The other short stories are separate but sometimes thematically connected.
Like all Wallace’s work, the stories are dark and funny but also dark and sad.
The brief interviews are almost proto-gender war stuff that you see online nowadays. Some of the hideous men could be found in the PUA space and on internet message boards. It’s not clear how much DFW sympathises with them. It probably depends on how much the reader does.
The deeper theme is the fear and vulnerability of truly connecting with others and loneliness. This transcends gender wars. It’s also what Infinite Jest is about, also written in DFW’s middle period. Brief Interviews looks at how these things manifest in relationships between the genders. But it also examines how they manifest in the relationship between writer and reader.
Zadie Smith has a good but long essay discussing these stories in her Changing My Mind collection. In fact, my friend thinks that a good starting point for Wallace in general is Smith’s essay as a concomitant to the Brief Interviews. It’s a way of understanding what Wallace was attempting to do in his writing: Namely, form genuine connections with readers.
That said, his non-fiction is his most accessible and Infinite Jest is his best. Maybe the order should be: (1) a few non-fiction essays; (2) a few Brief Interviews story; (3) the Zadie Smith essay; (4) Infinite Jest; (5) give up on Infinite Jest and throw it across the room.
This collection has other stories aside from the brief interviews that can be read stand alone:
Forever Overhead - Wallace’s most straightforward story: A 13-year old boy plucks up the courage to jump off the swimming pool diving board. A metaphor the inevitable plunge into adulthood.
Octet - As recursive and Wallacian as it gets. It starts with three and a half short moral dilemmas which are called “pop quizzes”. It then closes with a metafiction about the struggles with writing these sorts of vignettes. And then a meta-metafiction about the struggles with writing metafiction about if the (potentially unobtainable goal) is truly connecting with readers.
The Depressed Person - Aside from Dickenson, Wallace is perhaps the best writer on depression. Be warned: reading about depression isn’t fun. He’s also written about this topic in The Planet Trillophon story in his first collection as well as parts of Infinite Jest, mainly the Kate Gompert sections. The Jest stuff is probably the best of the lot. This story focuses on the relationship between depression and narcissism. Inextricably linked perhaps. It really puts you in the mind of the depressed person, showing the recursive self destructive loops depressed she gets into.
Church Not Made With Hands - A bit too modernist for me but you’re sort of meant to let it wash over you like impressionism. I tend to fail at this sort of thing.
A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Society - a nine-line mini short story. I quite liked it. I’ve been noticing more and more links between Hansonian signalling and Walllace’s work.
On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the … Father Begs a Boon - A dark story about a father who hates his son. You grow to realise that father’s an unreliable narrator in terms of justifying this hatred. However, one reading is that this is a fairly accurate description of a child’s behaviour if you judge them as you would an adult. One of the themes of the entire collection is the tension between radical honesty and happiness or kind-heartedness.
It’s a good collection but you may get Wallaced out by the end of it. Probably best to pick a few.
Thanks Cam. I'm looking forward to looking up 2 or 3 of these. I plan to share The Meaning of Liff and Jacob Collier link with my teenager.
Thank you for sharing!