peteg's blog - noise - books

Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man. (1934)

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Kindle. Private dick Nick Charles retires to San Francisco upon marrying sassy west-coast lumber heiress Nora but returns to NYC to dodge Christmas social obligations. There, of course, old entanglements suck him into a murder mystery and you've got to wonder if these people are any better than those the couple were avoiding. Hammett uses very effective first person narration and gets in some cracking lines. Nora is a fun interlocutor but I felt her character could've been rounded out some more. I'd say it's the best written of his novels but that might be sacrilegious as it's not in his signature hard-boiled style. It struck me as wildly inventive at times and then I remembered The Maltese Falcon.

Having completed his novels I took a look at his biographical details at Wikipedia. I'd just say I didn't see a lot of politics in these books.

Goodreads. I saw the contemporaneous film a decade ago but don't remember a thing. Roger Ebert gave it four stars as a "great movie". Apparently it has five successors.

Dashiell Hammett: The Glass Key. (1931)

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Kindle. Again Hammett adopts and is more successful with third-person narration. This time around the main character, always addressed by his creator using his full moniker "Ned Beaumont", is a political svengali / consigliere who outsources the private dickery. His boss Paul Madvig runs a city somewhere not too far from NYC. There's some extreme violence in and around the speakeasies of the day. The central thread — the killing of a Senator's son — seems tepid in comparison to the other events, and its resolution is icy cold. He gets off the odd cracker of a line but I wish he'd found room for an interlocutor as he did in The Dain Curse; we get a bit too much mouthing off by drongos.

Goodreads. Wikipedia tells me the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing drew on it.

Dashiell Hammett: The Dain Curse. (1929)

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Kindle. The second and last of the "Continental Op" series, inevitable after Red Harvest.

Our private-dick first-person narrator stays local to San Francisco for the first two thirds and then relocates to Quesada which Google Maps suggests is a long way south. It's a bit more Holmes and Watson with an interlocutor who presents as smarter than our main man. He gets off some snappy lines. There's also the Doyle-ish (and unconvincing) theme of a family or blood curse that centres on a young lady of odd appearance; I didn't know what to make of her pointed lobeless ears, small teeth and pastiness. Was this some image of a demon? One might expect that to make her less effective as a femme fatale but Hammett has it otherwise.

There's a bit of everything here: the lethal cults of California, the drugs, the guns, the vapid lifestyles, the Mexicans — it feels so modern! There's even a Trainspotting-esque relinquishing junk (morphine) sequence. Hammett must've felt the plot got away from him as he spends a final chapter explaining it all back to us. Be that as it may he didn't obfuscate the perp too well as I picked them out by about the halfway point without much effort.

Goodreads.

Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest. (1929)

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Kindle. I found it a bit strange. Having been hired out of San Francisco to investigate a murder, our unnamed first-person narrator decides for reasons unknown to clean up Personville (or in a Looney Tunes accent, Poisonville) which is apparently not too far from Ogden and Salt Lake City in Utah. It has all the tropes: the busted police department, the mob, the godfather, the gamblers, boxers, a solitary femme fatale, many shootups/outs, love triangles and so on. There are a few elements of Basic Instinct. Despite terminal issues with their operation the mob doesn't send help. As far as I remember Hammett doesn't develop a few of his named, notionally central characters: Lew Yard for instance.

The narrator always seems to know more than he's told us and that gets annoying. The episodic resolutions reflect its serialized form and suggest that Hammett made it up as he went along; the ultimate ending is nothing very special. I think his use of the third person and tighter control of the overall narrative arc in The Maltese Falcon was more successful.

Goodreads. The source of many a movie.

Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon. (1930)

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Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: "Well, Wilmer, I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but — well, by Gad! — if you lose a son it's possible to get another — and there’s only one Maltese falcon."

Kindle. Prompted by the Bogart adaptation and the lack of promise in anything newer on the stack. First time around with Hammett. It's mostly a novel-length character study of Sam Spade which is more show than tell; I guess these were the days before things got so psychological. He doesn't do much more than show up, cogitate (we don't get to hear his thoughts) and provoke other people to tell him more than they want to — in other words it's essentially a script for a talkie. There's a lot of detail in the descriptions and apart from the incessant smoking all of it points away from casting Bogart. Set in San Francisco.

Immediately afterwards I read Hammett's Spade shorts A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived and They Can Only Hang You Once. None are as good as the novel but all passed the time. Hammett is addictive but perhaps not that satisfying.

Goodreads.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms. (1929)

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Kindle. Not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls. As the tin says Hemingway takes us autofictionally to the Italy v. Austria front of World War I. The first-person narrator is an Italian-American ambulance driver/organiser who doesn't get much driving in. He's keen on the ladies and gets an English rose interested; initially he puts up a fight emotionally (let's just get physical) but the nurse's self-deluding/abnegating chatter and submissive willingness wears him down. (She regrets not having got it on with the now-dead love-of-her-life.) After Hemingway exhausts us with lengthy and recurring bouts of the idleness and boredom of war, they end up in Switzerland, eventually Montreux. This isn't something I'd usually wish on anyone but the parts adjacent to Italy and France do sound civilised. It's readily affordable if you have a family that keeps sending you money to feed your alcoholism and obliviousness. There's a touch of Samuel Beckett in his self talk.

Goodreads. Yep, the girlfriend was a doormat, which made me expect more parallels to be drawn with Twilight. Not a love story. The connection the narrator has with Doctor Rinaldi is well drawn.

Dwight Garner: The Upstairs Delicatessen. (2023)

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Kindle. Notionally an autobiography / bibliography by New York Times books man Garner with a side of food. I remain thankful for his pointers to Paul Beatty, Atticus Lish and especially Francis Spufford but since 2015 he's given me mostly bum steers, and so it goes here: after an amusing introduction things rapidly bog down in gobbets engineered for short attention spans.

Perhaps the central flaw for me is that a lot of it falls into the uncanny valley of having been almost read before: much of the material (quotes and opinions) appeared in his New York Times reviews. He tends to return to the same authors a bit too often, specifically on the topic of Asian cooking where he leans heavily on Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer, The Committed — where's that final entry in the trilogy?). I guess Garner's project here is very similar to Andrew X. Pham's A Culinary Odyssey: My Cookbook Diary of Travels, Flavors, and Memories of Southeast Asia which (at least) has healthier aspects. As far as I remember African cooking isn't mentioned. Australia is represented by Les Murray.

He is similarly limited in his account of coffee: too many words are spilt on Starbucks. I saw no mention of the best of the South: the soups (I have fond memories of jambalaya and gumbo). I wanted to hear more about growing up in West Virginia and Florida. There's no posturing with typewriters or fountain pens — it appears his book duties are hard sedentary labour. He remains an unabashed fan of Chistopher Hitchens. There's a bit too much social and dinner party chaff, characterization-by-product.

Jennifer Reese had the thankless task of reviewing it for the New York Times. Goodreads.

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. (1899)

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Kindle. Standard Ebook edition. Perhas the third time around with this classic. The ambiguities, inspecifities and vagueness bothered me less though I still got stuck on such basics as whether Marlow was specifically commissioned to remove Kurtz — we're not exactly told but that's all he does. I was a bit more prepared to accept Conrad's game of personifying extractive European colonisation in the Congo and therefore was less put out by all the claims made about Kurtz that are not substantiated, such as his oratory powers.

There's also the question of locations and routes. Obviously we start on the Thames and Marlow proceeded down the west coast of Africa, past the erstwhile French colonies, and up the Congo River to the Belgian outposts that were accumulating ivory. I expect the sepulchral city was and is Brussels. I was at a loss as to where his boat left from, it being French: Brussels, or perhaps Marseilles? It struck me that the company he worked for was overly dependent on other organisations and people for getting dirty work done.

The Orson Welles broadcast from 1938 is available at the Internet Archive. I'd forgotten that Patchett's State of Wonder is a reimagining.

John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar. (1968)

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Kindle. Second time around. I couldn't help noticing how much William Gibson cloned for the last two-thirds of the Neuromancer trilogy. Apparently this belongs to the genre of social science fiction.

Francis Spufford: Cahokia Jazz. (2023)

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Kindle. Two years on from Light Perpetual: he's speeding up!

Spufford tries his hand at holistic world building, taking us to a 1920s America which is essentially the same noir as everyone else's (prohibition, racial divisions, the Klan, ... jazz ...) but bent in one specific way: Cahokia is a large Native American city on the Mississippi. (He explains the counterfactual fracture in an afterword which really should have been an introduction or, more Spufford-ly, stuffed into a character's mouth in the main text.) This and actual Utah are not-quite republican states: here there's a hereditary monarchy of the Sun and the Moon, of Aztec undercurrents fused with Catholicism by the actions of farsighted men and women. This functions just fine as mythmaking if only because it is so far beyond what is possible in the actual here and now.

The plot (murder, what else) moves slowly and sometimes unsatisfyingly, often finding excuses to explore his construction; the tone is didactic (Spufford can't help himself): this is how you do a recap! — but we needed a few more recaps. That's how you introduce an invented language! — just like Tolkien. Drop your clues like this! What, you think that coincidence was too much? That's just how it goes for this character, it's fate. Did I just lift a bit too much from The Godfather? Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain!

Spufford's bursts of Christianity feel less forced here (c.f. Unapologetic) but stinking things up are the transactional relationships (which is most of them; the ladies all want leading man Burrows but never on his terms), the cold calculational utilitarian vibe, the forced symmetries. Sometimes he can't keep his characters in character: their speech patterns become too playful.

It's lengthy and cinematic which invites the question of when he's going to get a film deal. (I'm now trying not to think of it as Spufford's Wakanda.) I felt it was well-researched — his hinge of history was as plausible to me as any story he told in Red Plenty — but could've stood more analysis. Clearly much of it is inspired by the topical breakages in present-day society though it is not reassuring that he has the idiocy of the Klan save the city at a critical juncture. As always I'll take what I can get.

Widely reviewed. Most are summaries. Much thoughtful criticism at Goodreads. Could've used an edit. It bears the scars of a sprawling pandemic project.

Xavier Herbert: Larger Than Life: Twenty Short Stories. (1963)

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On dead tree from Caerwen Books. Herbert's own introduction overlaps with his autobiographical Disturbing Element, which was apparently published in the same year. In it he derides the work contained here, dashed off rapidly for the money and accepted by venues with no taste. I had hoped for some Henry Lawson-esque colour and perhaps the odd insight into the remote places and work he found out there. Mostly tedious. He's far better at length.

Sam Wasson: The Path to Paradise. (2023)

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Kindle. David Kamp's review at the New York Times lead me to think it'd be mostly about the production of Apocalypse Now and related interesting things with a side of present-day where-are-they-now. Well, if I'd read it carefully I'd have known that the focus is Francis Ford Coppola's mutating mania for a utopian creative space invariably called Zoetrope. That makes it one for the industry types, those who know and care more about the Hollywood studios and non-artistic mechanics of movie making than I do. Matthew Spektor explored adjacent spaces in his Always Crashing in the Same Car with more success.

It may have been that the ebook I was reading was poorly edited but I found the structure to be too scatty to enjoy. Wasson jumps around a lot in time and often omits dates, leaving us to wonder what caused what, where we're up to in some fable of mental (dis)integration. Werner Herzog is mentioned but not his Apocalypse-esque precursor masterwork Aguirre or his more transparently self-aware thirst for experience via filmmaking. I got very bored with all the Zoetrope bits (party, party, party) and have no idea why Coppola went more than all in on One From the Heart which I still won't see despite now knowing it has Tom Waits music. (Wesson gets epically bogged in this production in the second part of the book.) Similarly I have even less desire to dig through twenty-first century Coppola.

What was David Lynch supposed to be doing at Zoetrope in the early 1980s? We're told that he was very bored but not bored enough to direct Revenge of the Jedi (yep). Did he learn something from the implosion of that incarnation of Coppola's ideas factory? George Lucas comes off as a genius for maintaining an appropriate distance after having his fingers burnt at the start of his career. I realised at some point I'd be better off reading Eleanor Coppola's Notes: On the Making of "Apocalypse Now" which probably eclipses all other coverage.

Wasson interviewed a lot of people and some of his material is right-up-to-the-minute: there are accounts of Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel on the set of the as-yet unreleased Megalopolis. He makes it sound like a dog.

Goodreads. A Cesspool's review struck a chord.

William Gibson: Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive. (1988)

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Kindle. Revisiting the latter parts of the "Sprawl trilogy" was inevitable after re-reading Neuromancer. As with its derivative The Matrix, this pair feels like a tacked on two-part sequel. Many words are spilt on colour but not on anything critical to the plot. For instance I had no idea why Kumiko (sprog of a big cheese in the Yakuza) felt it so important to inform Sally Shears / Molly Millions ... well, about what? Also the ultimate "marriage" of Count Zero and Angie Mitchell seemed to have no consequences, and nor does Angie's replacement with Mona Lisa on the TikTok of the day. Slick Henry's robotic sculptures were derivatives of what we saw in Bladerunner. What made no sense at all was the use of payphones when everyone is jacked into cyberspace, and more generally, having all these characters zoom around in meatspace. Gibson seems to have conceived cyberspace as mostly a spectator thing apart from those cracking crypto (ice) or living in it (artificial intelligences and insane reconstructions of humans). He nailed the ghosts of Yakuza past though ... we're there now. Wintermute gets a walk-on role in the first and is little more than a shadow in the second.

I guess I just wish there was more there, here.

Benjamín Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World. (2021)

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Kindle. Inevitable having read The MANIAC despite not being sold by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim's timely review nor its appearance on the New York Times list of the best of 2021.

This is a collection of shorts that end up being a bit of a sprawling mess. The MANIAC worked better as Labatut went narrower and deeper: all the ventriloquy centred on illuminating von Neumann. Here we're made to think that almost all of modern theoretical physics arose from fever dreams, that Einstein was the last sane man and that's only because he ran out of imagination in confronting the extreme weirdness of quantum mechanics. I think the central theme was that there's a void at the centre of everything (physics, mathematics, morality, so on); Labatut doesn't to know that there is a crack in everything, or more prosaically, that we're stuck in the realm of unsatisfying phenomena. Alexander Grothendieck's life gets embellished; we get merely a sketch of Shinichi Mochizuki. Erwin Schrödinger at a TB clinic in the Swiss mountains, philanderer, predator, opposed by unstable Werner Heisenberg. Fritz Haber: the process, the poison gas. Karl Schwarzschild's solution to Einstein's field equations of general relativity, black holes, wartime. It's too much and not enough.

Labatut writes well and moves us around fluently but to what end I know not. One of these years Francis Spufford will teach someone to write a masterpiece of this genre.

Goodreads. Most reviews recount the tales and gesture at the imponderable.

Xavier Herbert: Disturbing Element. (1963)

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On dead tree bought from Adelaide Booksellers a while back in expectation of getting to it before now. The Australian Dictionary of Biography's entry for Xavier Herbert claims this is an unreliable autobiography which might be a polite way of observing that it is generally inadequate.

The ADB details what Herbert needlessly mystifies: his to-be-wed parents had him in Geraldton W.A. in 1901 and the family soon moved to Fremantle where he studied pharmacy in an archaic master/indentured apprentice manner before moving to Melbourne to acquire medical credentials. This plan was abandoned after a year and the book abruptly ends with him on a boat to Sydney (I took it to be England) after the first World War. The title was what his train-engine-driving Dad called him whenever he was a problem which was often.

Annoyingly he doesn't give us any idea how he came by the source material for or views he expresses in Capricornia: I wanted to know how he got to the Northern Territory and about all those jobs he had. Instead we get too many tales of manliness: fisticuffs and tupping the sheilas, some really tedious med student humour. On his account if you were born in Australia between about 1917 and 1984 there's a good chance he’s your father. We don't hear about how or where he met his wife (ADB: on a boat to England in 1930) and what she thought of his salad days. It is as prolix as you'd expect but too short; I don't think this was the most interesting time in his life.

Summarised at length at The Australian Legend. Apparently Herbert was buried in 1984 at Alice Springs Garden Cemetery on the Stuart Highway, near the trucking hall of fame. This is quite distant from the town cemetery where Namatjira was buried thirty years prior. I was probably better off reading Frances Olivia de Groen's 630-page PhD thesis on Herbert.

Werner Herzog: Every Man for Himself and God Against All: a memoir. (2023)

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Kindle. What a title. If you go in cold (I did for the first half) it's a lot of fun. However things are more tedious the more familiar you are with Herzog's schtick (as I was by the second half). His stories of growing up in post-war Germany, in "the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang" near the Austrian border show him self-constructing the globetrotting auteur who remorselessly hunts down his cinematic visions at all costs to everyone. Of course Klaus Kinski comes in for another serve (more than twenty years after My Best Fiend) and we get another retelling of all the fables attached to the making of Fitzcarraldo etc. He skims over his romantic attachments and domestic situations; he's always out there chasing the next thing. Digital filmmaking has allowed him to increase his output exponentially. He shared a particular attitude towards truth in the world with Bruce Chatwin. I wonder why he never worked with Rutger Hauer.

Prompted by Dwight Garner who claims he didn't believe a word of it. Bonus points for the Douglas Adams reference. A lengthy Q&A assembled by Tim Lewis: unacknowledged German humour is a laughing matter. Goodreads was generally impressed. Much later and at great length, David Trotter at the London Review of Books. Similarly Mark O’Connell at the New York Review of Books.

Trent Dalton: Lola in the Mirror. (2023)

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Kindle. Third time around with Dalton after Boy Swallows Universe and the less scintillating All Our Shimmering Skies. More of that winning formula: we're back in Brisbane, things are cinematic, there's a love triangle, some complicated story about parentage, junk, alcoholism, drug distribution but not consumption, more underbaked secondary characters, a dash of magic realism and/or mental unwellness, the river, the city. Novel is the choice to set it in the near future — therefore predicting an epic flood during the coming summer — and the focus on homelessness and domestic violence.

I couldn't help but trainspot Dalton's borrowings again. The Brisvegas underclass is so very Andrew McGahan. Our first-person heroine's relationship with glamorous red-dressed bombshell Lola Inthemirror is pure Last Night in Soho. The scenario is more De Palma's Scarface than Trainspotting — leaving aside Begbie clone Brandon Box but noting the complete lack of humour and general absence of non-romantic pleasure — and even more Kill Bill (femmes lethal with blades at ease with cartoon violence and so on) with a dash of Pulp Fiction (that scene where Bruce Willis sees Ving Rhames on the street amongst others). Jacki Weaver for Lady Flo for sure, and obviously Timothée Chalamet for Charlie. I'm sure others will cite others.

The main (structural, literary) flaws are the repetition, that so much text progresses neither character nor plot, the heavy foreshadowing, the busted pacing and predictable dei ex machina in the last movement. Relinquishing destitution appears to require a big pile of drug money (ronin capital, stage one) and (stage two) a rich talented characterless boyfriend with parents who allow you to park your decrepit van on their property; what a stinky disempowering vector, especially in the wake of the plot-convenient elimination of your purported best friend, a male alkie, who you do not mourn. Hmm. Dalton does effectively get out some of the big (positive) emotions but his oft-repeated airheaded takes on love (come on man, rainbows are ephemeral) and the rest are entirely subsumed by the mantra of Kieren Perkins's mum: It's gonna be all right in the end. And if it's not, it isn't the end.

Jack Callil: misguided, nothing new, no nuance — Dalton boils the ocean in search of a rise. Dangerously lazy with his ideation. A conservative worldview adjacent to Scott Morrison's. Ouch. Or is Callil just taking a dig at someone who works for Murdoch? Callil points to Catriona Menzies-Pike's critique of Dalton's first two. Damn straight, no sex! — the most we get here is some tepid fingers-on-arm in the morning. (I now realise that there are no sexual deviants amongst the Daltonian marginalised.) Dalton's prose is relentless and militantly sentimental. Details deployed to smother the deep chasms of difference. And yet she does not compare him with the similarly commercially-successful Tim Winton. Juliette Hughes sells it at the Smage: Paul Heppell's Tyrannosaurus-headed man makes you think of the Minotaur? Hmm. People at Goodreads are loving it so far, or at least those who scored free review copies.

Dalton's books have all the pleasures of tabloid newspapers, including, in this instance, the pictures.

Benjamín Labatut: The MANIAC. (2023)

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Kindle. It's a good, sometimes fun, well built jaunt through the early days of cybernetics and artificial life that continues with what feels like tacked-on coverage of a recent success. The appeal was that it might reach the heights of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, which it doesn't. I also hoped for a dash of the crazy inventiveness of Ned Beauman.

For the main meal Labatut ventriloquises various people around John von Neumann as a means of giving some insight into the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century, and, I guess, the madness that hard thinking seems to induce in anyone. He opens promisingly with an account of the unknown-to-me Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest committing murder-suicide but soon enough retreats mostly to the well-rehearsed greatest hits: Albert Einstein struggling with a dice-playing God, Oppenheimer, David Hilbert claiming that Cantor had created a paradise and so on. But the opportunity to unpack these things is missed: just why did Einstein struggle with a probabilistic/undetermined universe? Apropos Hilbert, Gianpaolo dug up the following quotes for me:

I stated a general theorem on algebraic forms that is a pure existence statement and by its very nature cannot be transformed into a statement involving constructibility. Purely by use of this existence theorem I avoided the lengthy and unclear argumentation of Weierstrass and the highly complicated calculations of Dedekind, and in addition, I believe, only my proof uncovers the inner reason for the validity of the assertions adumbrated by Gauss and formulated by Weierstrass and Dedekind.

The value of pure existence proofs consists precisely in that the individual construction is eliminated by them and that many different constructions are subsumed under one fundamental idea, so that only what is essential to the proof stands out clearly; brevity and economy of thought are the raison d'être of existence proofs.

In other words, Hilbert relied on some idealised objects (that set theory justifies the existence or at least manipulation of) to obtain general results and felt the increase in quality paid for the ontological complications. (Less generously he declared ontological bankruptcy and thieved some theorems.) Of course many did and do disagree with the formalist position though the vast majority apparently continue to shrug and get on with their knitting. But what did von Neumann think about the foundations of mathematics? What was he aiming for before Kurt Gödel brought absolutist foundations (aka the Hilbert program) to an end? (The sketch at Wikipedia is thin and makes it look like he was completely eclipsed by Gödel and later Gentzen.)

Gianpaolo pointed me to von Neumann's The Mathematician (in Works of the Mind Vol. I no. 1, University of Chicago Press, 1947, pp180-196.) which contains some philosophical musings on these points. He was a fan of the axiomatic method which resolved millennia-long confusions over Euclid's axioms, but knew the lack of rigour did not inhibit the development of calculus/analysis for its first 150 years or so. He reckons it may be mostly just a matter of aesthetics (good taste) informed and freshened by empirical ideas.

The title is the name of von Neumann's computer at the IAS, the model of the JOHNNIACs. I was bothered by some clangers. In the context of artificial life, Labatut has an embittered Nils Aall Barricelli spout off about some of Alan Turing's assertions. He claims "Turing proved mathematically: there is simply no form of knowing what a particular string of code will do unless you run it." — which (under a generous reading) is true of machines but not necessarily of the oracles that are the central concern of this chapter. Also there is nothing so very strange about Turing's oracles: he originally only considered deterministic machines while being aware of the true randomness of quantum mechanical processes, and leaving the possibility that human insight might also add power.

The slight second part makes for a strange counterpoint, being mostly overblown coverage of AlphaGo's match with Lee Sedol in the style of sports journalism. Just the highlights thanks, and not enough to get to grips with anything of substance.

Tom McCarthy at the New York Times. Goodreads. Sam Byers: underpowered, diffuse. Ben Cosman summarises and sets it against Oppenheimer and notes there are three movements not two. Labatut is Chilean and has SBF's hair.

Djuna: Counterweight. (2023)

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Kindle. Prompted by an intriguing review by Hari Kunzru in the New York Times, which is unfortunately superior to the source material. Korean sci-fi. The writing/translation is fine but I can't say I totally got it. Most of the ingredients are cyberpunk staples: the zaibatsu, the AIs, the ultra-competent violence, and of course the space elevator takes the concluding action to something like a space station, all just like Neuromancer. There is some nasty retconning in the final movement. Cinematographic, of course. I have no idea what the point was.

The publisher's summary at Goodreads says it all. Otherwise I didn't find too many reviews.

Aravind Adiga: Last Man in Tower. (2011)

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Kindle. Not great. I'm guessing this was Adiga's followup to The White Tiger — and with Booker won his editor let him off the leash. The result is an overlong take on how real estate is redeveloped in Mumbai. Residents of "Vishram Society" receive an offer that few can refuse and readily warp under money hunger. There are far too many characters: some are barely more than names, others are overdeveloped, and none are interesting. The plot regularly stalls under the weight of excess colour as things escalate in an entirely predictable way. Everyone is hypocritical and self-deluded. Many are Lady Macbeths. This Last Man is no Orwell.

I didn't find many reviews. Goodreads. Every so often there's a sentence that shows what could have been.