2014-12-14T23:21:28+00:00

Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty

December 14, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

The pages of a book flapping in the breeze, sort of decaying into computer bits

This book ought to be a few essays. One is a very good — devastating, depressing — essay about women in technology in the U.S.; it argues rather clearly that the problem is not that women are less good at math and science, but rather that certain *sociological* facts about men in technology make the U.S. tech industry very masculine, thereby identifying the tech industry with certain virtues prized in certain subsets of the tech world, thereby identifying women *out* of that industry, thereby perpetuating itself. That essay is wonderful and terrible.

The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu Interwoven with the women-in-tech section is a section that ties it to colonialism. This section is brilliant. Essentially: the first refuge of scoundrels is to prematurely universalize their own biases. It’s not that women have been systematically locked out of the temple, you see; it’s that *evolution itself* dictates that they be excluded. It’s not that their British overlords thought Indians inferior and treated them as such, while treating the Indian economy as an extractive agricultural one meant to feed the British industrial maw; no, it was of course that Indians are *by their nature* effeminate, weak, and deservedly on the bottom rung of the racial ladder. (The Chinese are brilliant, but evil.)

I really hoped this section would go somewhere. It didn’t. Indeed, I really hoped this section indicated the thematic direction and scope of the rest of the book: that we would find history, art, coding, misogyny, and colonialism all wrapped together in a devastating package. It wasn’t meant to be.

Chandra also gives us some scattered essays about the act of programming. Those are great — for me, anyway, and for those who have programmed a computer. I don’t think it will be really understandable by those who haven’t programmed, because Chandra doesn’t give enough context for those folks. I don’t know whom this part of the book was aimed at. Those who’ve programmed will nod vigorously at someone who managed to capture their lifestyle in well-chosen prose form, but was Chandra really trying to preach to the choir? Those who’ve not programmed might get some of it, but I have my doubts.

Finally, the plurality of the book is given over to a description of Indian philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. Most of it was, sad to say, lost on me, for the same reasons that I think the programming section will be lost on non-coders: not enough context, and a great many weighty Indian words thrown at the reader without terribly many examples to lodge them in our consciousness.

At the end of the book there’s a halfhearted attempt to tie all of this together, but I don’t think it goes anywhere.

I’d strongly advise reading the first 75 pages or so, then quietly returning it to the library.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

December 6, 2014September 26, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

Some sort of coat of arms. Probably the whig party's? Maybe the parliament's?

This is a fun little essay, eye-opening and mind-changing. The whig interpretation of history is one that we’re all familiar with, even if we’re not aware of it: that all of history led up to this moment; that anything which seems to further the advance toward this moment is perceived as positive, while those who opposed the advance to this moment are perceived as standing in the way of history’s great upward march; and that, indeed, history can be perceived as an advance, with our progressive existence being the pinnacle of historical development.

There are many problems with this approach, but the main one is that it allows us to shirk our responsibility toward understanding events as they happened. If (this is the example Butterfield spends the most time on) we perceive the Protestant Reformation as the inevitable toppling of a Catholic Church that had become corrupt and repressive, then we view Martin Luther as a hero, and we view 16th-century popes as necessarily evil and opposed to progress. We follow along this line far enough and we end up with Max Weber telling us that Protestantism is the necessary substrate that allows modern capitalism to exist.

If, instead, we understand Luther as he was, we need to confront the fact that, had he stepped in a time machine and seen the anarchy that the Reformation begat, he would surely have apologized and begged for mercy; the world he sought was one of greater orthodoxy; he surely believed that Catholicism’s problem was insufficient adherence to true belief. There’s nothing inherent in Protestant practice that makes it less rigid or less dogmatic than the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

A historian’s job, according to Butterfield, is to tease out the ways that historical change happens, and to understand the role of historical contingency: but for this chance event, things could have turned out far differently than they did. And the contingencies rest on the actions of men and women who were trying to make the best of the complex, fluid situations they faced. Understanding why they did what they did in the context of their times, and how they contributed to historical change, is the historian’s job — not to interpret yesterday in the light of today.

Butterfield would seem to stand with Karl Popper (he of [book: The Open Society and Its Enemies] fame) in denying the possibility of something called ‘historical law’. One optimistic reason to try to discover these laws is that we can then, presumably, use the past to guide the future. Popper would tell us that there are no such laws. Butterfield would also tell us that there are no such laws, and that the historian’s job isn’t to find them, either. The historian’s job is to develop historical imagination and historical empathy. That job is quite hard enough; anything more is beyond the historian’s competence.

Butterfield wrote his book in 1931, a few years before the final German catastrophe. I can’t help but think that, had he written it 14 years later, he would be more sympathetic to those who see the nightmares of the past and hope desperately to prevent them. He’d probably still think it was a fool’s errand, but there’d maybe be some more gravity to it. [book: The Whig Interpretation of History] was mostly focused on, well, the whigs, and the long-since-concluded battle between Protestants and Catholics; I wonder whether this historiographical fracas seemed important, but fundamentally innocent and remote.

Then again, maybe Butterfield 14 years later would have held up the Nazis as examples in support of his thesis: history is not an ever-upward march, and historical contingencies large or small can lead to unpredictable outcomes.

I don’t know what Butterfield would have said. I could probably research what he said; the man died in 1979. In the absence of that, I could put myself into his shoes and write [book: The World War II Rebuttal To The Whig Interpretation of History].

While we’re talking about Fourier series

November 22, 2014/stevereads/5 Comments

(…as we were), does anyone have an intuition — or can anyone *point me to* an intuition — for why Fourier series would be so much more powerful than power series? Intuitively, I would think that very-high-order polynomials would buy you the power to represent very spiky functions, functions with discontinuities at a point (e.g., f(x) = -1 for x less than 0, f(x) = 1 for x >= 0), etc. Yet the functions that can be represented by power series are very smooth (“analytic“), whereas the functions representable by Fourier series can be very spiky indeed.

The intuition may be in Körner, but I’ve not found it.

This could lead me down a generalization path, namely: develop a hierarchy of series representations, with representations higher on the hierarchy being those that can represent all the functions that those lower on the hierarchy can represent, plus others. In this way you’d get a total ordering of the set of series representations. I don’t know if this is even possible; maybe there are some series representations that intersect with, but are not sub- or supersets of, other series representations. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that treated series representations generally; it’s always been either Fourier or power series, but rarely both, and never any others. Surely these books exist; I just don’t know them.

And now, back to reading Hawkins.

My dime-store understanding of measure theory and its history

November 22, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

I’m really enjoying Thomas Hawkins’s [book: Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration: Its Origins and Development]. It’s a historical treatment of where measure theory, and the modern theory of integration (in the calculus sense) came from. I’m coming at this without knowing much of the mathematics, apart from a general outline. That makes some of the reading unclear, but I’m getting it.

The basic thrust seems to start with Fourier, or maybe there is a parallel track starting with Cauchy and Riemann. Fourier comes up with the idea of representing a function as an infinite sum of sines and cosines, which immediately brings out a bunch of mathematical puzzles. In particular, when are you allowed to integrate a Fourier series term by term? That is, when is the integral of the sum equal to the sum of the integrals? While this may not seem like a *practical* question, it very much is. I can testify to this in my limited capacity as an amateur mathematician: you want to be able to perform operations on symbols without thinking terribly hard about it. It would be nice if you could just say “the integral of the sum is the sum of the integrals” without thinking. And, long story short, it turns out that you *can* say that (or so I gather) if you’re talking about an integral in the sense of Lebesgue rather than an integral in the sense of Riemann.

It takes a while to get there, though. And when Riemann introduces his definition of the integral, which is applicable to a wide swath of functions, many (all?) mathematicians believed that the integral concept had reached its “outermost limits” (to quote Paul du Bois-Reymond). It took half a century and more of mathematicians studying the structure of the real numbers, teasing out the fine distinctions between different subtle classes of real numbers, before we arrived at a theory of integration that handled all of these cases correctly. Now we can talk coherently about the integral of a function which takes value 1 for every rational number and takes value 0 for every irrational number.

Tracing the path from Riemann to Lebesgue is fascinating, for at least a couple reasons. First, I think it conflicts with an idealized picture of mathematicians carefully progressing from one obviously true statement to another via the ineluctable laws of logic. As Hawkins writes of Hermann Hankel’s purported proof that a nowhere-dense set can be covered by sets of zero content, “Here Hankel’s actual understanding — as opposed to his formal definition — of a ‘scattered’ set becomes more evident.” For decades, mathematicians didn’t have a stock of counterexamples ready to hand. A modern book like [book: Counterexamples In Analysis] makes these available: functions that are continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere, a nowhere-dense set with positive measure, etc. The theorems come from somewhere, and it seems like they come from mathematicians’ intuition for the objects they’re dealing with. If the only examples that you’ve dealt with share a certain look and feel, perhaps it’s unavoidable that your mental picture will differ from what logic alone would tell you.

Second, Hawkins’s book puts Georg Cantor’s work in greater perspective, at least for me. This business about finding the conditions under which Fourier series can be integrated term-by-term is a fundamentally *useful* pursuit, and Cantor’s work involved constructing interesting counterexamples of bizarre sets with weird properties. Cantor’s work is often presented as fundamentally metaphysical in nature; his diagonalization argument is used to prove, e.g., Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s rarely presented as part of a program to make mathematicians’ lives easier.

Perhaps Hawkins gets here (I’m only a fraction of the way into his fascinating book), but I wonder what the experience of developing these counterexamples did to later mathematical practice. Did it make future mathematicians in some sense hew more closely to the words in their definitions, under the theory that words are a surer guide to the truth than intuition? Or is that not how it works? If the definitions don’t match your intuition, perhaps you need to pick different definitions. After all, the definitions are tools for human use; you’re not plugging your Platonic bandsaw into a Platonic power outlet to help you construct a Platonic chest of drawers. If the tool doesn’t fit in the hand that’s using it, it’s not much of a tool.

I hope that’s how Lebesgue integrals end up working, as the story unfolds: the definitions function as you’d expect them to, so you can use them freely without having to preface every assertion with a pile of assumptions.

What I don’t know — what my dilettante’s understanding of integration thus far hasn’t totally answered — is whether Lebesgue integrals are really, truly, the “outermost limits” of the integral concept. I understand that the following is how modern measure theory works. We start with some set — let’s say the set of all infinite sequences of coin tosses, where a coin toss can — by definition — only result in heads or tails. Then we choose some collection of subsets of that set to which we’re allowed to attach meaningful ‘measure’ (think ‘weight’ or ‘length’ or ‘volume’ or ‘probability’). Maybe we allow ourselves to consider only finite sequences of coin tosses, for instance. Talking about the probability of an infinite sequence of coin tosses would be, under this thought experiment, literally impossible: the system would assign the words no meaning. Finally, we attach a rule for the assignment of probabilities; maybe we say that any sequence of [math: n] coin tosses has the same probability as any *other* sequence of [math: n] coin tosses; this “equiprobability” assumption is how we typically model fair coin tosses.

These together — the set, the collection of admissible subsets, and the measure attached to each admissible subset — constitute a measure space, or, in a particular context, a “probability triple”. (When we’re talking about probabilities rather than more general measures, the probability of the set — the probability that *something* happens — must equal 1.)

Now, why would we pick a collection of subsets? Why not just stipulate that we can meaningfully attach a measure to every subset of the set? It turns out that this is in general impossible, which I find fascinating; see the Vitali set for an example. I don’t know at the moment whether non-measurable subsets arise from countable sets (e.g., our infinite sequence of coin tosses, above), or whether they can only arise from uncountable sets. In any case, the upshot is that you always have to specify a set, a collection of admissible subsets, and a measure that you’ll attach to each subset.

There are several directions that you can go from here. One is to restrict your collection of subsets such that all of them are measurable; this is how you end up with Borel sets, or more generally how you end up with σ-algebras. And that’s where I’m curious: can we show that there is no more useful way to define an integral than to define a σ-algebra of subsets on the set we care about, then define the Lebesgue measure on that σ-algebra? Do σ-algebras leave out any subsets that are obviously interesting? Is there some measure more general than the Lebesgue measure, which will fit more naturally into the mathematician’s hand? Or can we *prove* that the Lebesgue measure is where we can stop?

In order to make statements about integrals of all kinds, we’d need to define what an integral *in general* is, such that the Riemann integral and the Lebesgue integral are special cases of this general notion. I gather that the very definition of “measure” is that general notion of integral. A measure is a function that takes a subset of our parent set and attaches some weight to it, such that certain intuitive ideas apply to it: a measure is non-negative (i.e., the weight of an object, by definition, cannot be less than zero); the measure of the empty set must be zero (the weight of nothing is zero); and the measure of distinct objects, taken together, must be the sum of the measures of the objects, measured separately. We call this last axiom the “additivity axiom.” You can add other axioms that a measure should intuitively satisfy, such as translation-invariance: taking an object and moving it shouldn’t change its measure.

The additivity axiom introduces some problems, because *infinity is weird*. Do we use the weaker axiom that the measure of the sum of two objects must be the sum of the measures of the two? Or do we use the stronger one that the measure of *a countable infinity* of objects, taken together, must equal the countable sum of the measures of each object? These alternatives are described, respectively, as “finite additivity” and “countable additivity”. One reason to pick finite additivity is that finiteness is, in general, easier to reason about, and has fewer bizarre gotchas. But finite additivity is also not as far-reaching as what we need. You can’t reach infinity by a progression of finite steps, so finite additivity doesn’t allow you to talk about, say, the probability that a limit of some infinite sequence is thus-and-such; without that ability, you can’t prove theorems like the strong law of large numbers. (I’m pretty sure you can prove the weak law using only finite additivity.)

So that would seem to be one answer to the question of whether Lebesgue integrals are the be-all and end-all of the idea of an integral: it depends upon how sure you want to be in your axioms. If you’re willing to introduce all the weirdness of infinity, then go ahead and use countable additivity. And it’s probably the case that there are intuitively true statements to which most everyone would agree, which can only be proved if you admit countable additivity.

The idea of a non-measurable set also rests on the Axiom of Choice. (I can’t prove it, but I imagine that — like so many things — the existence of a non-measurable set is *equivalent to* the Axiom of Choice.) So if you reject the Axiom of Choice — which Cohen and Gödel’s proofs allow you to do, free of charge — you could make all your sets measurable. But presumably there are good, useful reasons to keep the Axiom of Choice.

So maybe — and I don’t know this, but it sounds right, and maybe Hawkins will eventually get there — we arrive at the final fork in the road, from which there are a few equally good paths to follow through measure theory. We can toss out the Axiom of Choice and thereby allow ourselves to measure all sets; we could replace countable additivity with finite additivity and accept a weaker, but perhaps more intuitive, measure theory that doesn’t use the Axiom of Choice at all; or we could go with what we’ve got. In any case, the search for the One Final Notion Of Integration would probably be the same: keep looking for counterexamples that prove that our axioms need reworking. That will probably always mean looking for obviously true statements that any sound measure theory ought to be able to prove true, and obviously false statements that any sound measure theory ought to be able to prove false. The ultimate judge of what’s “obviously true” and “obviously false” is the mathematician’s. A similar approach would be to come up with a system of axioms from which all the statements that we accept as true today can still be derived, but from which, in addition, we can derive other, interesting theorems. Again, the definition of ‘interesting’ will rest with the mathematician; some interesting results will just be logical curiosities, whereas others will prove immediately useful in physics, probability, etc.

Phew. This has been my brain-dump about what I know of measure theory, while I work through a fascinating history of the subject. Thank you for listening.

Some quick reviews of books I’ve read recently

November 15, 2014November 5, 2024/stevereads/Leave a comment

Preface: I’m just catching up on books that everyone else read a decade and more ago. So sue me.

John Cheever, [book: The Wapshot Chronicle]

I’m still sort of confused about this novel (Cheever’s first, after a career spent more-famously writing short stories). It’s several kinds of stories rolled into one: part semi-Biblical novel about one family; a tale of the Wapshot kids’ growing up and, well, boning; and maybe an exploration of male paranoia.

It starts out feeling like it’s going to be some fusty novel about quaint rural life in some old-school sleepy New England town. (Cheever was born in Quincy.) There are little hints early on that it won’t be so, like when Cheever mentions in an aside that the kids are occasionally going out whoring. And then there’s the bizarre grandmother, who holds the rest of her family under her sway through the threat of withdrawing her inheritance; this inheritance depends upon her grandchildren producing male offspring.

Then that matriarchal Sword of Damocles, so far as I can tell, disappears from the rest of the book; the matriarch herself does too, mostly. The kids go off into the world to make their fortune and escape from their little town; one goes to New York and another to D.C. One of them marries a beautiful woman who is, forebodingly, bound tightly to her mother, who also dangles her family via some invisible string. The beautiful woman, not to put too fine a point on it, goes crazy at some point. Meanwhile, the other brother marries another woman who goes crazy in her own way, writing him a Dear John letter from back home, whither she’s returned.

But no matter: by the time the novel is done, both couples have gotten back together, for reasons that are completely unclear. One of the joyful reunions involves a completely unbelievable [foreign: deux ex machina].

This is all so oddly plotted that I have to imagine it was deliberate — a book like this couldn’t turn out the way it does by accident — but the allure was completely lost on me. There’s something in here about being a man, surely, and about male feelings of powerlessness; that’s not to be scoffed out, despite a feeling (voiced by a long-lost friend many years ago) that books about male emotion ought to take a backseat for the next few decades so that books about women can take the spotlight. (We were discussing Philip Roth at the time — [book: The Dying Animal] specifically, if memory serves.)

Books about men are important, and can generally be worth reading. I’m not so sure about this one, though.

Amy Poehler, [book: Yes Please]

This book made me laugh uncontrollably on a few occasions on a cross-country flight recently, to the point that I was feeling spasms in my chest as I tried to avoid annoying my seatmate. It also made me cry repeatedly: Poehler seems to genuinely love life and love her family, and her love is contagious (at least if you’re a sentimental fellow like me).

This is a book about Poehler’s rise through the Chicago comedy scene, through to [tv: Saturday Night Live] and [tv: Parks and Recreation] (a television show that I recommend in the highest terms, at least from season 2 until Rob Lowe and Rashida Jones left). It’s a pure delight. Imagine your most ebullient friend gushing about the amazing life she’s led in little ten-minute essay chunks, and you’ve got a good sense of Poehler’s book. I started it right around the start of a 5.5-hour flight, and finished it maybe two hours from the end. You should buy it, read it, and love it.

Jeffrey Eugenides, [book: Middlesex]

This novel is partly a historical epic, spanning several generations of one Greek family from its hasty departure out of Smyrna as that city burned to cinders in the 20s, through its arrival in Detroit as that city did the same in the 60s. But it’s also partly an emotional study of our intersex narrator. And in the process of studying him, it’s a scientific walk through intersex issues generally.

Honestly, I’ve never read anything like it. No book I’ve ever read has been both grandly historical and richly character-driven. It’s got the depth of character of a [book: Love in the Time of Cholera], with the (never-dry) historical arc of a work of nonfiction. It’s breathtaking.

Jeffrey Eugenides, [book: The Virgin Suicides]

This is completely unlike Eugenides’ later novel. I think it’s fair to call this a very, very black comedy, though it’s so black that sometimes I don’t know whether it’s a comedy. We know early on in the novel that all (sic) of the daughters in this one family will, by the end, have committed suicide. We watch the story of their gradual deaths through the retrospective eyes of a man who grew up in their neighborhood and — like all his street-mates — lusted after them mightily, if confusingly. They’re identical-looking beautiful blonde girls, or at least they’re identical when viewed from afar. And as it turns out, afar is the distance from which awkward teenage boys will view them. So we’re listening to a man in his 40s or 50s describe his memories of girls whom he was mostly too scared to touch 30 years earlier.

And they all die. But I’m inclined to say that the fact of their deaths is not even the point of this book. I mean, yes, it’s the central frame off which the rest of the story hangs. The girls’ parents slowly withdraw into their home, progressively allowing it to rot while the neighbors all watch in stupefied horror. No one really does anything about their decline, which is maybe the point — or maybe not. I really think the point of this book is in the endless little details that add up to something that is just alarmingly funny. For some reason, for instance, a couple parts of these sentences caught me:

The Pitzenbergers toiled with ten people — two parents, seven teenagers, and the two-year-old Catholic mistake following with a toy rake. Mrs. Amberson, fat, used a leaf blower.

First, “two-year-old Catholic mistake.” And there’s something just beautifully economical and perfect in “Mrs. Amberson, fat”. Given the chance to express that idea, 99% of humans — myself included — wouldn’t have given it a second thought: that would have been “Mrs. Amberson, who was fat” or “the fat Mrs. Amberson” or a dozen similar alternatives. But no, she’s “Mrs. Amberson, fat”. That’s an immeasurably better sentence.

I can’t quite articulate whether that’s why [book: The Virgin Suicides] is so dry, and so funny. But it is both. And the accumulated effect of page after page of this dryness is that you’re laughing uncontrollably while an entire family is dying. This left me permanently off-balance throughout. Other examples start you in one place and end abruptly in a way that makes you back up and ask, “Wait, really?” E.g.,

Our interview with Mrs. Lisbon was brief. She met us at the bus station in the small town she now lives in, because the station was the only place that served coffee.

I can’t get over the hilarity of a town so rotten that the best coffee is to be found in a bus station. This immediately calls to mind at least four forms of grey, bleak disgust: the sort of town about which this would be true, the sort of bus station that this sort of town would have, the sort of coffee that they’d serve there, and the sort of person who would rather meet you at a bus station for coffee than pour you a cup in her own home. And it’s just two sentences. I can only imagine that Mr. Eugenides pared and pared and pared and pared some more, until the bare minimum number of words were left to convey the laughably dismal world he wanted. And then he moved on to paint another scene — as briefly as possible, but no more briefly.

Even the sex scenes are out of some parallel-universe science-fiction/fantasy dystopia:

He felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn’t have known who it was if it hadn’t been for the taste of her watermelon gum, which after the first few torrid kisses he found himself chewing. … It was as though he had never touched a girl before; he felt fur and an oily substance like otter insulation.

Everything about this passage is off-balance. He ends up chewing her gum? Otter insulation? This isn’t a sex scene, and it’s not the least bit sexy. Maybe it initially promises to be, in that you start out thinking that this she-beast is a Hall and Oates-style man-eater. But then you get to otter insulation. There is nothing sexy about otter insulation. Also: “insulation”? Any word that legitimately fit there — in an ordinary world — would have been minimally sexy. Consider ‘pelt’ or ‘fur’ or even ‘quills’. ‘Insulation’, by contrast, is the least sexy word that bears any relation to physical reality there. It turns this young woman’s body into construction equipment.

Everything, just everything about this novel is intended to leave you a few degrees off plumb. Like Eugenides’ other novel, above, I’ve never read anything like it, but what’s remarkable is that [book: The Virgin Suicides] and [book: Middlesex], both masterpieces, have so little in common. It would be churlish to demand a similarly masterful, similarly [foreign: sui generis] third act; if [book: Middlesex] and [book: The Virgin Suicides] are all Eugenides ever gives us, we should count ourselves blessed.

Joan Didion, [book: Democracy: A Novel]

If you’ve read Didion’s nonfiction political works from the 80s, this is exactly the novel you should expect. And, to be clear, you really really need to read Didion’s nonfiction political works from the 80s. Particularly [book: After Henry]. She’s just icily cynical about the world.

Imagine a menacing episode of a soap opera, where the characters say virtually nothing to each other because nothing is left to say, and where virtually all of the soap opera’s menace comes from chilly atmospherics. That’s [book: Democracy] in a nutshell. There’s a U.S. senator and his wife; there’s a military attaché who spends most of his time in the air making deals about unspeakably deadly military hardware. There’s the politician’s daughter, overdosing in a miserable flophouse. And all throughout, as backdrop, there’s the evacuation of Saigon, spreading nameless fear over everyone.

It turns out that Didion is just as keen an observer of fictional political characters as she is of real-life ones.

Steve Martin, [book: Born Standing Up]

I got two big messages from [book: Born Standing Up]. First, Steve Martin worked very, very hard, for 18 years, to go from nothing (well, to go from working at a Knott’s Berry Farm) to the level he eventually attained, where there are few people more widely beloved. I’ve come to think over the years that working very, very hard is the only answer to most questions of how to be successful. Reading Martin’s autobiography — since that’s what this is; or at least it’s the first volume of one — made me feel incredibly lazy.

The second thing it taught me is that you can take major risks like he did if you have no one depending on you. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of the world’s risky accomplishments came from single people, like Martin, in their twenties. I’d love to ask the man whether he thinks he could have achieved what he did had he been married with children.

The book only reinforces my love of his standup work from the 70s, which is the era this book focuses on; it ends with his writing for the Smothers Brothers and starting on the production of [book: The Jerk]. (The book, by the way, confirms my suspicion that his stand-up bit about how he was “born a poor black child,” and how he really found himself when he heard his first Mantovani record, pre-dates the movie based around that premise.) It’s the record of a man starting out not knowing what he’s doing, and slowly accumulating fame by playing the game and refining his act endlessly. Perform in several thousand nightclubs and you maybe — again, with a lot of hard work — will eventually meet the guy who will open the door that eventually opens another door for you. But of course Martin wasn’t just doing the same thing over and over; he documents tinkering with his jokes night after night, adapting them to the subtlest changes in his audience’s mood. Then he’d return to his lonely hotel room and agonize over how to make his act better until sleep overtook him.

This and the Poehler book make me feel both inspired and depressed. They feel like people who’ve worked exceptionally hard, taken exceptional chances, and ended up doing exactly what they love every day of their lives. Perhaps they’ve downplayed (deliberately or otherwise) the drudgery involved in doing any job, even the dream jobs they ended up in; or perhaps not. In either case, I’d like to take the Martin and Poehler books and use them to build a life that’s worth living.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

October 11, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

A painting of a young gentleman

This was my first foray into Oscar Wilde, and it was delightful. The book is an excellent meditation on the relation between art and life; but if it were only that, it would be boring indeed. So it’s about equally split between that and scenes of building tension that culminate in some scenes of jaw-dropping horror. I was not expecting the latter. I was expecting mostly Victorian material of the sort that Eddie Izzard described (summarizing the Merchant-Ivory movies) as “Room with a view and a staircase and a pond.” To the contrary, it was actually a page-turner. I wasn’t expecting that.

The basic story is that Dorian Gray is the sort of exquisitely beautiful creature that Plato would have taken as his sexy boy-servant and taught the ways of the world; the earlier parts of the book feature a fair bit of innuendo around Dorian’s ruby-red lips and so forth, which I imagine were fairly titillating when Wilde’s book came out in 1891. The painter Basil Hallward, when we meet Dorian, has seated the boy for a number of sessions, taking Dorian as his muse. Basil’s friend Harry Wotton, being one of those English gentlemen of leisure who spend their days careening from luncheon with the duchess to a cocktail party to the opera, hangs out with Basil and Dorian and drops apothegm upon apothegm about the proper conduct of a life. Should a man be ethical and good and decent? Harry generally finds decent people the most boring, and advocates for sucking the marrow out of life: when you’re young and beautiful, as Dorian is, sin as much as you can. You’ll have time enough to be decent when you’re dead. Harry rejects conventional morality; he’d much prefer to live every moment to its fullest, consequences be damned. Dorian takes this to heart.

One moment Dorian is engaged to be married to a young, exquisite actress. The next moment is just perfectly framed: the next night after he’s proposed to her, he goes to see her on stage, and all the art has drained from her performance; she is atrocious, and most of the audience has left by the time she’s done. When he confronts her about this after the show, she gushes that she now sees that all art is fake, and she wants only to live a beautiful real life with Dorian. He, meanwhile, has sworn himself to a life that is *nothing but* art; seeing his formerly beloved as the wretched actor that she’s become, he casts her aside, rending her heart in two. You might say that he’s in pursuit of truth through the Platonic forms, and has given up on vulgar reality, while she’s done just the opposite. His rejection of her leads her, that very night, to kill herself in one of the ghastly ways that women in 19th-century novels did (see [book: Anna Karenina] and [book: Madame Bovary]).

Initially Dorian is shocked. In his shock, he goes to examine the portrait that Basil had painted of him, and he sees that the portrait has ever-so-subtly changed. The mouth has become noticeably more scornful and … evil, while Dorian himself remains as perfect as he ever was. And as he ages throughout the novel, descending into a more and more hedonistic life, paying less and less attention to the destruction he wreaks on everyone around him, the painting becomes more and more grotesque while real-life Dorian still bears the physical perfection of a naïve and unsullied 17-year-old. He jealously hides the painting where no one will see it, in a locked attic to which only he has the key. His soul, which is on display in the painting, blackens, while the man himself is physically as flawless as ever.

There are interesting bits in here that you might call “philosophical” if you were into labeling such things. For instance, the moment when Dorian decides to worship art over life is the moment when the art depicting Dorian comes to be the only source of reality in Dorian’s life. What *is* art, anyway? And what does the artist depict? What *should* the artist depict?

Hard to know how much to blame Dorian’s descent into metaphysical ugliness on his friendship with Harry, and his absorbing Harry’s sinful teachings. Harry appears throughout the book, watching Dorian’s debauchery with (we envision) a slight smirk. Harry somehow seems above the fray. He can’t be too upset about anything, because his cynical eye has already foreseen the decline and fall of everything, and the true grotesque nature that lies inside most men. Dorian becomes the sort of dissolute, revolting creature whom respectable people cross the street to avoid, while Harry remains admitted to all areas of polite society. That may be the part of the book that mystifies me the most: Harry is Dorian’s teacher, and to all appearances Harry is satisfied with the progress of his student. Yet the student turns evil in ways that the teacher never would.

All told, it’s an engrossing book: thought-provoking and absolutely gripping. After 100-some years, you don’t really need me to tell you to go read Wilde’s novel; nonetheless, you really should.

I’m confused about what sin Amazon is supposed to have committed

October 10, 2014/stevereads/1 Comment

I don’t have time to write about it right now, but Matt Yglesias’s post today on why calls to fight Amazon’s ‘monopoly’ are misguided did hit the mark. I wanted to write something the other day when John Gruber predictably snarked in favor of the Justice Department fighting Amazon’s ‘monopoly’.

There’s no there there, seriously. I’ve been waiting patiently for someone to make a good case that Amazon has done anything wrong. Seems to me that their worst sin is … negotiating very hard against publishers? And using their market power to demand lower prices? This is good for readers, isn’t it? It makes books cheaper. Maybe you could argue that something which is good for readers is bad for authors, but *that requires argument*; it can’t just be asserted. I had this same problem with George Packer’s argument against Amazon a few months back.

To put it in perhaps a few words: whatever Amazon is guilty of, Wal-Mart is guilty of too. And I don’t see anyone pushing to break up Wal-Mart. They’re both just large retailers pursuing high volume and low profit margins, perhaps at the expense of their suppliers. That’s all. What am I missing?

George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

October 7, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

Tattered American flag

I’m familiar with two George Packers. On the one hand there’s Condescending, More-In-Touch-With-The-People-Than-Thou George Packer, who came to us in [book: Central Square] and [book: Assassins’ Gate]. In [book: Assassins’ Gate] we see Packer very publicly agonizing over his support of the Iraq War, lecturing at the rest of us who knew from the very beginning that it was a lie delivered to us by criminals. In [book: Central Square], Packer works with the homeless in my beloved neighborhood, and spends a couple hundred pages telling upper-middle-class white people that they’re doing it wrong.

His heart is in the right place. At his best — in [book: Blood of the Liberals], for instance — he wants to understand why people have turned away from liberalism, and why they would support something like the Iraq War. At his best, he spends his time with people who disagree with him. At his best, he tries to remind the rest of us what the real problems are that liberalism needs to solve (rampant income inequality, the disappearance of good jobs), and explains why ordinary people believe that liberalism has lost touch. At his worst, he doesn’t realize that we’re already thinking about this, and spends his time lecturing us while we all reply, “We know, George, we know.”

[book: The Unwinding] is by Good George Packer. While it’s actually impossible for him — for anyone — to avoid inserting an authorial voice into a book like this, Packer basically stays out of the way and lets his characters talk. He interviews a single mother in collapsing (collapsed) Youngstown, Ohio; an entrepreneur (who’s also, maybe, possibly, kind of a crank) in the South who’s trying to combat peak oil with his Next Big Thing based on canola oil; a whole host of folks in Tampa, who ride home prices up and fall down just as catastrophically when the bottom falls out of the market; Jay-Z (sic); Oprah; Elizabeth Warren; and Jeff Connaughton, self-described one-time Biden Guy and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935212966/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=AY9MVINOEZDE&coliid=I1MRJ4BCKBQS35"%5Bbook: The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins].

Each of these people has something to say about the structure of today’s United States. While Packer is a little angry at the Oprahs and Jay-Zs of the world for their unbridled materialism, I think he sees them more as instances of a bigger problem. There’s such desperation in the U.S. to get a good job and do right by your family, and there seem to be so few opportunities to make it, that people latch onto whatever impossible roads to riches they can find: flip homes, have Oprah toss some baubles your way, and be a big player like Jay-Z who can raise his middle finger at everyone while the money rolls in.

It’s sort of a bleak story, with no real good answer at the end. There are bits of hope, like Elizabeth Warren, or the entrepreneur who, despite all evidence to the contrary, jumps out of bed every day convinced that today’s the day he strikes it rich and changes the world for the better. It was sort of a half-hearted optimistic ending for Packer; I think he’s actually pretty sad about the state of the world. And I don’t know that he has any answers, other than to find people who love their country and who want to do right by it.

I don’t get any great morals out of [book: The Unwinding]. In fact I find the exact opposite of great morals: Packer tries hard to let everyone speak without interruption, to the extent that he even lets their verbal tics (e.g., “frickin'”) slip through. And every time someone says something that’s probably false, Packer lets it through. These are just individuals, speaking their minds. This is a book about a problem; it’s a portrait of a country. If you’re into that sort of thing, this one is quite good. In 50 years, people will read this and get a very sad — though very true — portrait of what life was like for a lot of Americans.

Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays

October 7, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

Steve Martin's head poking out between what look like wooden-floor slats, with red curtains opening around his head and a pencil leaning against his right temple. He's a playwright, i.e.

Do you not know Steve Martin? You should know Steve Martin. He is a brilliant comedian; go listen to [album: Comedy Is Not Pretty!] or [album: Let’s Get Small].

Once you’ve listened to his albums, maybe you’ll want to know how he came up with material that still feels fresh and weird 37 years later. For that, go read his fascinating essay in [mag: Smithsonian Magazine].

Not enough? Okay, go listen to him play banjo; you get some of that on his comedy albums. Or you can listen to a full album of songs.

Or see him in funny films like [film: L.A. Story], or somewhat dramatic ones like [film: The Spanish Prisoner].

Or, finally, read the genuinely moving plays in [book: Picasso at the Lapin Agile]. Or see them on stage, if you’re that lucky (I’ve not yet been that lucky).

I don’t understand how one man can be that talented in that many things. He probably just works really, really hard. Also, he’s a genius.

Fuck that guy.

In lieu of a proper review of The Lives of a Cell, I hereby include a few beautiful quotes from this book, which you should most definitely read

October 1, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

Sort of conceptual drawing: what looks like the outlines of a cell, with everything floating in it -- everything from whales to amoebae.

(I transcribed everything below with Siri, by the way. Siri is amazing. She occasionally makes mistakes, so blame her for them, then blame me for not doing a better editing job.)

Fascinating:

> From time to time, certain termites make a convulsive movement of their mandibles to produce a loud, high-pitched clicking sound, audible ten meters off. So much effort goes into this one note that it must have urgent meaning, at least to the sender. He cannot make it without such a wrench that he is flung one or two centimeters into the air by the recoil.

Beautiful:

> There are, of course, other ways to account for the songs of whales. They might be simple, down-to-earth statements about navigation, or sources of krill, or limits of territory. But the proof is not in, and until it is shown that these long, convoluted, insistent melodies, repeated by different singers with ornamentations of their own, are the means of sending through several hundred miles of undersea such ordinary information as “whale here,” I shall believe otherwise. Now and again, in the intervals between songs, the whales have been seen to breach, leaping clear out of the sea and landing on their backs, awash in the turbulence of their beating flippers. Perhaps they are pleased by the way the piece went, or perhaps it is celebration at hearing one’s own song returning after circumnavigation; whatever, it has the look of jubilation.

Funny:

> My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

Arguably confusing software and hardware:

> According to the linguistic school currently on top, human beings are all born with a genetic endowment for recognizing and formulating language. This must mean that we possess genes for all kinds of information, with strands of special, peculiarly human DNA for the discernment of meaning in syntax.

Fascinating:

> Lymphocytes, like wasps, are genetically programmed for exploration, but each of them seems to be permitted a different, solitary idea. They roam through the tissues, sensing and monitoring. Since there are so many of them, they can make collective guesses at almost anything antigenic on the surface of the earth, but they must do their work one notion at a time. They carry specific information in their surface receptors, presented in the form of a question: is there, anywhere out there, my particular molecular configuration? It seems to be in the nature of biologic information that it not only stores itself up as energy but also instigates a search for more. It is an insatiable mechanism.
>
> Lymphocytes are apparently informed about everything foreign around them, and some of them come equipped for a fitting with polymers that do not exist until organic chemist synthesize them in their laboratories. The cells can do more than predict reality; they are evidently programmed with wild guesses as well.

In an essay that asks, basically, where all the dead bodies are if everything is dying all the time:

> If an elephant missteps and dies in an open place, the herd will not leave him there; the others will pick him up and carry the body from place to place, finally putting it down in some inexplicably suitable location. When elephants encounter the skeleton of an elephant out in the open, they methodically take up each of the bones and distribute them, in a ponderous ceremony, over neighboring acres.

*Really?* That is amazing.

Steve Reads

Category: Books