Kindle. A collection of Marr's journalism and other things since about 1975. There is not much framing and little in the way of updates, so most are about times past and often blissfully forgotten. Does anyone really want to read about John Howard these days? And for those who do, do you want Marr's take on things?
Marr is a Sydney boy, well-educated in the liberal arts. That means that political commentary takes the form of discerning character by psychoanalysis, and often shades into theatre reviews of the kind regularly derided by Andrew Elder. Sometimes we get a burst of historical context, such as for the much feted 1967 referendum that ended up having some deleterious effects on the native title holders of Hindmarsh Island, but these frustratingly fail to be complete explanations, and you won't find him anchoring the big issues in the Western canon. Marr's take on "[his] country" does not extend to music, sport, the environment (much), cars, food, the beach, economics or the 1980s. His enthusiasm for Jim McNeil shows that he was hopelessly naive about (domestic) violence and alcoholism.
Sometimes this approach is wildly off the mark. Marr claims Australians "[t]rust our politicians. We expect them to look after us." but recent data — and indeed data going back as far as I remember — show this to be patently false. It seems more likely that the majority of Australians are epically politically inert, passive beyond the imagining of this kind of writing. The whole corpus falls far short of the analytic depths of Donald Horne's classics and Hugh Mackay's empirics.
Reviews are surprisingly thin on the ground. Helen Razer on Marr's response to the marriage equality outcome. He seems to have learnt nothing about unintended consequences.
Kindle. South-Central L.A., the setting of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, finds Isaiah Quintabe ("IQ", geddit?) in the thick of an angling-for-a-TV-series hybridization of The Godfather and Sherlock Holmes. This Michael Corleone finds himself railroaded into the dark arts by two-track workmanlike prose that tries to keep us guessing within the genre constraints of crime/mystery/thriller. There are mercifully few characters, and doubtlessly more sapient readers than I figured it all out by halfway. I lost interest in what the author was doing with all those drugs. Gangsta rap is tired, as is the violence. Cheap guilty fun, not cinematic. The misogyny is unreconstructed. I don't think anything comes under substantial scrutiny. There are two more since this came out in 2016.
Kindle. On the strength of her book reviews for the Sydney Review. This is apparently her third novel.
Briefly we're thrust into the mythical Bidgalong Valley (just think Nimbin) where the local commune (the Hive, of course, ruled over by a despotic King) has been razed and its denizens are still dealing with the fallout perhaps a decade later. (Time is not one of the themes of this novel.) We are given an outsider's sense of the place via escaping cross-dressing teacher Jim Parker, who desires his neighbour, free woman Evangeline, and stumbles upon her performing some rites of memory in a state of undress. Later on, she makes the move. Her husband, seemingly taken casually or prevailing upon her at a moment of forgetful weakness, is Germanic ex-surfer/libertine Stefan, who aspires to keep bees as well as his grandfather did in post-war Berlin. Other characters present as survivalist preppers, drunken nymphs, mute schoolgirls, dying daughters.
At some point I realised that the plot is at best secondary; too many points are left to simmer for far too long, and too much time is spent manipulating the epistemic states of the characters. Why are these bitchy women spilling these secrets now, or suppressing the facts then? Each may or may not learn anything or unknowingly spill some beans but us readers don’t learn a thing. In any case the stakes are too often too low. Needy city-girl Sylvie is impossible to warm to, and taxes Jim's loyalties not at all: he knows what he doesn’t want. Similarly I had to wonder if his opinion of Evangeline's pregnant belly ("Has he ever touched anything more erotic in his life?") was justified by any field research. I still don't know why he'd be embarrassed by being allergic to bee stings, and it's a stretch to have him move next to a bee farm. The final part has the big revelatory deck-clearing moves of a soap opera's season ender.
Overall this novel is frustrating. It sometimes fires, sometimes misfires. The quotes from literature are tedious, apart from some gold by Maurice Maeterlinck. There is the odd good observation, for instance, that the use of GMO and pesticides has made the country as filthy as the city. The author is on a first-name basis with much pharmacology; using proper nouns to connote authorative knowledge is shallow. Is this chick lit, or have we gotten to the point where all Oz lit sounds like this? The writing is mostly fine, but a hefty edit and narrower focus would have helped.
Andrew Riemer baldly states he's talking it up. Just maybe it will be turned into a soap opera. Juchau spent some time working on this at the Bundanon Trust. Julieanne Lamond does the literary analysis. Lisa Hill. Goodreads. And many other local boosters who helped get it onto the long lists of many prizes circa 2015.
Another almost total bust. I skipped at least half after two-to-three pages, and mostly regretted not skipping the others. Tuffield states in her introduction that this collection is intended to put new writers in front of readers.
Kindle. Mostly a bust. I skipped anything that didn't grab me in two or three pages. The hits:
- Gillian Essex's One of the Girls has lots to say in one big run on sentence: mothers at their daughters' gig, mining the generation gap, supporting each other as they all age, learning to accept what comes. Tight. She doesn't seem to have much of an internet presence.
- Nam Le takes up the most space with The Yarra: a Romper Stomper-ish account of young brotherhood, a tad flat but executed with his customary technical excellence.
- Joanne Riccioni: Can’t Take the Country Out of the Boy. A well constructed two-track with the thick Australian country patois and near horizons; the brittle prison of farm life.
The reviews are provincial and boosterish.
Kindle. Peter Carey's latest novel, and his first Australia-focussed one in how long? The alternating male/female first person narrators tell us a story about Bacchus Marsh, Holden versus Ford, parenting, Aboriginality and the Redex Reliablity Trials of the early 1950s; topics (mostly) beyond the pale of John Howard's nostalgia for that era. The somewhat tiring setup introduces the supposed novelty of a female driver, and just like in Kushner's novel, she's actually really good. Cue the eyerolls, and more when the father in law turns out to be an overbearing white man who can’t deal with her and his son’s relative success. Quiz champ protagonist and apparent ladies' magnet Wilhelm Bachhuber is given a German gloss that allows him to take on aspects of Voss and his tormentors, for instance by being at a suitable remove from the horrors of the real, internal Australia. Carey wants Aboriginal culture to have innovated since 1788, but his "new Law" is apocalyptic, millennial, unimaginative: a new Noah’s ark and holocaust for those very same reasons found in the Bible. Similarly the proposal that you can go home again, or at least rework your earlier stuff (Until the End of the World etc.) in the museum of your mind is sterile. I like to think his juxtaposition of Banjo Paterson and Jack Brabham, Orange boys as I understand it (sorta?), was a wink to those of us brought up in small towns.
Reviews are legion, of course. Craig Taylor wants more. Ron Charles bemoans the beginnings of what to him becomes a worthy narrative. Andrew Dickson. Natalie Quinlivan wades into the mucky politics of cultural appropriation. Goodreads has the unvarnished truth.
Kindle. David Free writes ridiculously high-brow reviews for The Australian, for instance this one about Peter Garrett's autobio, which some NIDA students have recently turned into theatre. This book appears to be his attempt to imitate Peter Corris by retooling his wordsmithing from reputable yet penurious criticism to that grand Australian moneymaker, crime. Is that trick still working for those who started in 2017? From his sickbed Clive James provided a cover blurb that identifies the genre as psycho thriller, and throws around accusations of excellence.
It's funny with a strong intro and high culture referentiality that comes for the ride. The humour is mostly of the predictable, oxymoronic kind: comfortable and effective. I'm guessing the implausible storyline is a fantasy recreation of the author's own biography: a bloke living in the Blue Mountains reviews books in return for (sub-)subsistence income having failed to get his novel published. He occasionally ventures into the city to what I pictured was the old News Ltd. offices in Surry Hills. A woman on the make uses her sexuality for personal gain in that old fashioned way and winds up dead; something similar for a TV interviewer. There are love bites that draw blood, freely given and received. Some graphic murders. A police inquiry, more in sorrow than in anger, that leads to a do-it-yourself investigation because they won't. A dutiful sexy scene. A final brawl following a less terminal one. An outro that is not much of anything after a few too many iterations without deepening. All of this is made possible by alcohol and pills: pain killers for nerve damage suffered literally as a kid and figuratively in the present.
Thematically Free bangs on about the culturelessness of Sydney, the death of the Australian book and newspaper industries, the emotional shallowness and fragility of Australian men, that sort of thing. He gestures at every loose literary reference he can think of; for instance T. S. Elliot's classic "distracted from distraction by distraction", an apposite observation of the new manners, of making people wait while you play inessentially with your phone. Never be lonely again, except with others. I probably read in a critique of any or all Australian writers, with Ern Malley representing some kind of excellence (in fraud if not art) contrary to the use Peter Carey made of him. Disappointingly Free reaches for the Goldberg variations and not the cock rock he writes so fondly about; it's a kick in the teeth to all those Australian males who are totally prepared (without having undertaken any specific preparation) to engage in extreme existential violence.
B. C. Lewis on the local boy done good. Goodreads — Rake? Sure, why not. Man Genius of OZ Lit. has given him the review he deserves.
Kindle. This book does involve a lot of crying, blubbing, sobbing, torrential downpours and their every cognate. It's a bit apocalyptic, like his movie Until the End of the World, and is set in England and Germany, which is to say that he doesn't spend too much time in Australia. Horology, the sex lives of conservators at stuffy museums, Deepwater Horizon, life in the Black Forest in the mid-19th century, varieties of theft, imitations of life, consumption of alcohol, medicated mental illness, that sort of thing. I got the impression that Carey does not have much mechanical sympathy. His presentation of Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox is befuddling: amusing it really isn't; You cannot see what you can see is obscure enough to originate from the same master. Cruikshank is transparently Babbage. Structurally we have an English woman recounting the framing story in first-person circa 2010, and an Englishman talking about commissioning a mechanical duck from the German master (cuckoo) clockworkers but getting a swan (I think). Overall I struggled to get a sense of what he was trying to achieve.
Andrew Miller. There are heaps of other reviews, none of which really spoke to me.
Kindle. Picked up when the philosophical bio of David Lewis got too dry, or at least too hard to think about while I'm travelling like this.
This novel felt like an assembly of spare parts from the classics. It's a bit Coleridge (an albatross), Joseph Conrad (a failure to kill or accommodate Kurtz), an Australian literary scandal from the 1940s (Ern Malley), and much else I'm sure. The outer frames are expressed in the female first-person, who is recounting her long-ago experiences in semi-colonial Malaysia being subjected to a long and twisty yarn about a poet, or poets, that takes us in further retrospect to Melbourne, Sydney and Indonesia. The multi-layered stories don't fully cohere, and while Carey's technique is impressive, the shifting pronouns at frame transitions are a bit tricky to parse at times. I don't think there's any poetry in there really.
Terrence Rafferty, back in the day. Of course, this is Frankenstein. And so forth. He also reminded me that I've recently seen this change of meaning without changing a word: Borges's take on it was canvased at length by Errol Morris. Peter Craven. Blake Morrison.
Kindle. On the strength of Deb Olin Unferth's review. Well, her review is better than the source material. The titular story made me wish for Charles Yu's inventiveness (time travel via tenses); this one is more mechanistic, less playful, and small minded. Addiction, escapism: the modern world is fully horrible or at least thoroughly incapable of satisfying. The story on Argentine Ants was nothing special, and the one about the classic spam fraud/hoax somehow left out all novelty whatsover. Well written, sure.
Kindle. A collection of shorts, many too short, barely more than an idea or scenario, picked up on the strength of her review of T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Relive Box. Some are fun, most are tied up with being a woman in a city, often a member of the precariat, sometimes an academic, maybe a family member. I most liked Bride, on not really getting over someone while they move right along, and Online, with doubt that there is much life beyond the screen these days undermining all attempts to kick computer addiction. Within these frames Unferth is assured and funny, and quite often empathetically painful. Brief. She's such a romantic.
Helen Phillips provides a synopsis of Voltaire Night and the other more-fully-conceived stories here.
Kindle. The book-length version of a story Morris started telling back in 2011 about his relationship with his onetime supervisor, the incommensurable paradigm-shifting Kuhn, and the non-relative "truth". Moving past the colourful stories of the day, some fun interviews with Kripke, Putnam, Weinberg and others, some great quotes from Bertrand Russell, the text acts mostly as a sourcebook. Morris points at the following amongst many others:
- Kripke: Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) and all his other works ever.
- Chomsky on Kripke's Naming and Necessity and his own Dewey Lectures in 2013, titled What Kind of Creatures are We?, which apparently outline his mysterianism; to which Daniel Dennett is the only opponent (?).
- Juliet Floyd: Wittgenstein on Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics.
- Arthur Schopenhauer: The Art of Being Right on rhetoric, or how science might be made more like politics.
Morris sometimes seems confused: he mostly wants to be able to refer to a truth that is out there in an absolutist, realist sense, but sometimes writes as if it were a mutable thing, somehow forgetting the roles of belief and epistemology. He makes Kuhn sound like a Supreme Court originalist.
Originally a pointer from Tim Maudlin, who rails as hard against Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation as Morris does against Kuhn. Laura Miller and commentary at Hacker News. David Kordahl observes that Morris is often constructing the Kuhn he is dismantling. Philip Kitcher. These reviewers and the many others should thank Morris for allowing them to parade their esoteric knowledge at mainstream venues.
Kindle. A brief introduction to political philosophy. The first section is on violence and Hobbes's insight that any politics is superior to an every-man-for-himself "state of nature". This sets the explanatory bar quite low, so we get some Machiavelli, and Max Weber's definition of the state as "that entity which successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence." The second section wants to separate out political knowledge from the technical, and technocracies are bad, ok. The final section slides into philosophical ethics though it wants to talk about justice. Runciman observes that democracies don't fight each other but are extremely brutal in warfare. Fukuyama is rehabilitated. Amartya Sen and Rawls are name checked.
As with How Democracy Ends, but more so, Runciman is quite sloppy: he often cutely phrases a series of overly strong assertions that are not causally or necessarily connected before weaseling out of drawing their (implausible, ridiculous) strong conclusion. These presentational failures detract from the fine points he makes. It strikes me that Rousseau's notion of the social contract was a way to progress past Hobbesian inertia, but Runciman does not go there.
Kindle. Adam Grant led me to believe this book would have an interesting take on decision making. I read it closely and got bored by its repetition and failure to map well-known techniques for groups to individual circumstances. Recounting the final days of bin Laden and praising story-telling and novel-reading as empathy-building was tendentious at best. I didn't see what Collect Pond and NYC's High Line (cloned by Chicago's The 606 and Sydney's Goods Line, and doubtlessly others) had to do with much of anything. At best a pointer to other works in the area.
Better value are the comments at goodreads.
Kindle. Not exactly what Charles Finch (New York Times) promised: it's a dumb revenge fantasy screenplay, though I grant it is vicious and sometimes funny. A detached bloke with a twenty-first century revenue stream (no-collateral cocaine provision) wreaks havock on the gang of supposedly professional assassins, the Fincher-/Tarantino-derived Seven Demons, capriciously sent to deal with him. Being written in occasionally-obscuring first-person, you can imagine how it goes. The author avoids 'of'. The Demons are dumb enough to miss the obvious move in the coke wars: don't introduce a new brand (Beyoncé) but instead assume the protagonist's (Pale Peruvian Stallion); retaliation would have been so much harder. Fun for what it is, which isn't much.
Yes, Tony White, it's often just like a Carl Hiassen.
A new Kindle from Amazon AU turned up back on 2018-09-18 and I cleared most of the dead tree backlog about ten days later. This time it's a Paperwhite, $AU179 minus a $AU30 credit for having a dead, now discontinued Voyage, and a too-cheap but well-designed origami case for another $AU14. So far the touchscreen is far better than its predecessor's ever was.
It's been an age since I read Asimov. Last time I chugged through these seven books (this time in publication order!) I was underage, and now I can detect his influences more transparently: there's a lot of stock (Roman) history in there, some stock 1984 or Brave New World dystopianism, a naive fascination with the "too cheap to meter" nuclear technology of the day, an empty-headed teleology that is trumped by statism. The 1980s fat books are tediously repetitive. I'll resist too much critique as none of that is the point.
Asimov reckons that something like psychohistory is only going to work if those the subject of its predictions are oblivious to those predictions. At the time he was formulating this position, others were making self-reference mathematically respectable, leading to the solution concepts of game theory and similar that account for the effects of reasoning about other's strategies and knowledge. Asimov's position might be rescued by considering it more like biology: the existence of a reflexive entity stymies many desirable properties (e.g. locality, robustness, sustainability). I wonder if his take on zombie ideas (that they get tried repeatedly because they're not fatal) really holds.
Since I first read this series Asimov has passed and others have added their bits. I'm sure the canon is now as confused as every other.
A dead Kindle means extracting dead trees from the library, in this case from Compactus (their stacks) at the Maroubra branch of the Randwick City Library.
White clearly resented writing this autobiography, so much so that one wonders why he bothered doing it straight when he might have made some theatre of it. It's pedestrian and there's less score settling than I was led to expect. I skipped the second section Journeys. We get a very few anecdotes about fellow culturalists (Brett Whiteley and fam come to visit for instance, also the Nolans, an early encounter with Melba he tells twice) but little about other sybarites (Norman Lindsay for instance) who were further down the food chain in his eyes. There are some clangers: no clear picture emerges of life-partner Manoly, or the basis of attraction; at some point White decided to move to Centennial Park and we don't hear from the other parts of the household. Somewhere in there White observes that Aussie women are blokey (there's some truth in that), but also somehow concludes that the blokes are feminine. London, World War II in North Africa, nothing much about the jackerooing, the Queen comes to Sydney Harbour and other old, upper-class Sydney, when all the money was young.
As with everything White, reviews and commentary are legion. I think I read C. K. Stead's contemporaneous review. Similarly Humphrey Carpenter. More colour on the Castle Hill of the day from Mireille Juchau. David Marr on scattering Manoly's ashes at Clovelly. He says "Howard appealed to something in Australians that White knew, feared and fought all his life: our yearning for small comfort and respectability." — and yet White himself never did motivate many Australians to reach for more than this.
Another dead tree from the Randwick City Library. Second time around, and just as good. Here he is on zombie ideas (p106):
Ideas are the oldest software virus, the history of ideas being written by those fortunate enough to get born into enough physical and mental spare time to think beyond food and shelter and the protection of those they love, always blind to the resulting bias, the resultant imbalance of perspective. Ideas kill and maim as many children as any epidemic, they mutate and reappear as new strains, now immune to the propaganda that killed them off a generation ago, the science of actively combating a virulent idea being still rarely more sophisticated than crude attacks on the hardware, the meat. "Enlightened" people claim ideas should be free to spread and compete in our soft minds, always, you'll find if you really talk to them, with the exception of one or two ideas considered beyond the pale to people like them for no consistent reason beyond their mounting rage and fear as they spray you with the reinforcing dinner-party repartee of their peers, the soothing commentary and opinion published in broadsheets and parroted by the gazette brains of public broadcasters and the social and political satirist "comedians" who comfort them all in their othodoxy.
Quarterly Essay #70, Richard Denniss: Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next.
Sun, Sep 16, 2018./noise/books | LinkMore dead tree from the Randwick City Library. Denniss pushes a simple argument: the right's decades-long pitch that politicians are untrustworthy and government is the problem, not the solution, or is anyway ineffective, has come home to roost in the form of the fragmentation of their parties; for what does it matter who you vote for if these assertions hold? Adding in a war on expertise, waged on the public service in particular, has made for some dire political times.
The title is a bit confused as the neoliberal/economic rationalist project is still broadly supported across the political spectrum, having been started by Hawke and Keating, furthered by Howard and Costello, and now zombie-shuffling along as even Keating now accepts (and rants about; Ken Henry was there a lot earlier). Denniss wants the parliament to respond to popular ideas (i.e., to destigmatise populism to some extent) and makes a few suggestions along lines he thinks are non-partisan. However it's clear from other polities that even civics education (p68) is contentious; one route forward for parties with demographically declining support is to doctor the electoral process with gerrymandering and voter suppression, as the Republicans are apparently doing in the U.S., and to generally discourage citizens from engaging in politics. Perhaps his best argument is that economics be put in a proper perspective; that Australia is richer than ever but can't afford the services of previous years is absurd.
Ross Grittins is a bit skeptical, and he's right this is a book more for the heart than the head. Many other responses were predictably reactionary.
Quarterly Essay #60, Laura Tingle: Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How To Govern.
Tue, Sep 11, 2018./noise/books | LinkI read this on the dying iPhone and laptop via Overdrive, on loan from the Randwick City Library. From circa November 2015, which may have been when Turnbull had some amnesiacs thinking he could take things somewhere. Tingle bemoans the loss of institutional governmental memory, and cites several egregious examples of it. This process has been ongoing since at least the 1980s as part of the neoliberal / economic rationalist project, so one has to wonder why it took so long for the journalists to catch on. (I saw some of this lobotomising towards the end of my father's career at the NSW Department of Agriculture.) The active destruction of expertise and resulting churn is overly familiar to anyone who works in the modern computer industry; a case in point is Javascript and the perpetual motion machine of user interface frameworks, which inevitably converge on the old ideas.
Tingle seems to be sparring with David Marr on the tired and frankly empty topic of political leadership in Australia. As she observes here, the best functioning parts are those that self-evidently do things only governments can do (e.g. the Reserve Bank, the military, foreign affairs); perhaps those contain governance and structural expertise that can be transferred to other spheres, and Australia can have the technocracy she deserves. Her commentary on Shorten is dated: it doesn't seem that he'll need much of a policy agenda to ascend to the throne, given Tony Abbott's destruction of the Liberal party. The stuff on the Roman Empire is completely dispensible. Much concords with Donald Horne's classic critiques of the Australian situation; I tend to think that more technocrats will increase the luck that our second-rate politicians lean so much on.
Andrew Leigh observes the fine prose and corrects the framing (as economists are wont to do). Surprisingly Andrew Elder did not take this one apart at the time (or since AFAICT); this defence of the Canberra press gallery reads like classic special-pleading material custom designed to press his buttons. Tingle wrote the current Quarterly Essay, on authoritarianism.