peteg's blog 2007-02-01-ParadoxOfChoice.autumn

The Prose Works of Henry Lawson

Việt Nam News: Golden Autumn

I bought this collection in the shadow of the doubts created by the short stories in the Sunday edition of Việt Nam News. Apparently:

Golden Autumn, a selection of short stories from our monthly Outlook magazine, talks about contemporary Viet Nam through authors who offer a variety of intelligent and colourful perspectives on our ever-changing country. Here, ordinary lives, struggles and successes are examined within the backdrop of the nation's emergence from war.

I found most stories to be stultifyingly conventional, and irritatingly politically correct: the women are rarely more than objects to be wronged or righted, and the men are continually evading the forces of the South. One could read this and believe that not much has changed since 1975.

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

A classic, but somewhat dated now. The chapter on X11 was quite amusing when I was actually using X11, but now it just makes me glad I've slipped that particular noose, and most of the other ones. I wonder how they feel now that their shiny Macs are powered by UNIX.

Kingsley Amis: The Old Devils

What a crock. Still more proof that the Booker Prize (awarded to this book in 1986) is worthless; out of the books I've read, I think they got it right, just twice, with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. According to the back of the book, the Guardian said:

Crackling with marvellous taff comedy ... this is probably Mr Amis's best book since Lucky Jim.

Setting the bar this low is hardly an endorsement of anything else he's written. Unlike Martin Amis he didn't seem to have the courage to just run with it.

Robert S. McNamara: In Retrospect

This is a distinctly repetitive, and rather depressing, memoir of Robert S. McNamara's time as U.S. Defence Secretary, a period that is not coextensive with U.S. operations in Vietnam. This was the first of many irritations, the lack of framing; we get a very limited presentation of the Eisenhower Administration's policies and almost no mention is made of McNamara's successors or the French colonisation.

The lasting impression I take away from this book is that the U.S. preferred to spend billions on a war rather than thousands on a few more people who would have given it better advice. I grant that it was a chaotic time, but why not hire more people?

Some further links:

A good review by a professor of political science at Boston College.
Another review and account of his attendence of a panel discussion of the book at the Kennedy School of Government.
The book somewhat complements the movie, Fog of War.

Julian Barnes: Letters from London

Aptly reviewed on Amazon as being "a bit like reading yesterday's newspaper", this book collects Julian Barnes's New Yorker essays from 1991 to 1994. His take on Thatcher's dying days, and the rise of Tony Blair (whose era coincidentally came to an end recently) entertained me, as did some of his coverage of the Chess World Championship match between Englishman Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov. Perhaps the most intriguing story is about Lloyd's, though it suffers from a lack of framing; the repetition could have been expunged in favour of a potted history, I feel.

Quarterly Essay #26, David Marr: His Master's Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate under Howard

To think of this unfocussed essay as essentially another, better written, chapter of Silencing Dissent would be both apt and to miss the point. As the pull quote on the website says:

More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what's done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard gets us nowhere.

The Smage review abbreviates the quote and swiftly rebuts it:

The frustration is palpable as David Marr writes, "What's done most to gag democracy in this country is a sense that debating John Howard is futile".
It's not, as the polls are showing on a weekly basis. But for much of the past decade this is how it has felt to those who do not share the Prime Minister's political and social agenda. Marr describes how the terms of engagement in public discussion have evolved - deteriorated - during the long years of the Howard Government.

I almost choked on my Weetbix; since when has an opinion poll been a debate? Perhaps, like electricity and frogs' legs, they indicate that some force is at work, but what? Let not informed debate inform that, lest the Government lose control of the agenda! Elsewhere, at The Australian, the faceless editorialist similarly opines:

This last thesis [that Australia is becoming an increasingly authoritarian state where dissidents are silenced], expounded at length in Silencing Dissent published earlier this year, would seem difficult to sustain at a time when the marketplace of ideas has never been so crowded. In newspaper opinion sections and magazines and on radio and televisions and increasingly online, Australians are engaged in intelligent conversation about the issues of the day great and small. Blogs and internet chat rooms have given everyone a seat at the debating table. Technology has lowered the barriers to publishing. A host of new periodicals online and in print including The Monthly, New Matilda and The Australian's own Australian Literary Review are providing new platforms for discussion while established journals such as Quadrant and the Griffith Review are reaching new readers and providing a home for new writers. The queues outside venues at this year's Sydney Writers Festival, record attendances at similar writers festivals around the country and new events such as next month's Adelaide Festival of Ideas are public expressions of a confident, mature democracy in which informed debate flourishes.

Ah yes, if people are talking, they must be debating! How could they not be contributing to Australia's democratic future if they are sitting around in cafés, lecture halls, cubicle farms talking about John Howard? Clearly there is discourse in the public sphere, and these polemics are not complaining so much about the amount of it, but how it is informed and almost entirely summarily ignored along petty partisan lines. For the Government to be blown around by the winds of focus groups and opinion polls, as apparently advocated by the Smage, is to reveal how small an agenda it has now that most of its narrow ideological goals are in train.

It is the restriction of the foundational acquisition and dissemination of hard information that is troubling; this is an expensive business (look at how much your average university professor is paid and how much knowledge they produce) that the media is loathe to do a decent job of in these times of economic rationalism. If whisteblowers are persecuted, public servants valued only in their capacity as executors of Government policy, Freedom of Information requests evaded, and so forth, are we not well on the way to thinking of citizens purely as voters, entities of limited memory and interest whose coarsely aggregated opinions only matter once every three years or so?

It makes more sense to consider Marr's piece a response to Judith Brett's Quarterly Essay 19: Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia, where the intelligentsia is entreated not to abandon the field to Howard, but to join him out in the middle, the mainstream, arguing for the future of this country. Marr finds this futile, as the pull quote makes abundantly clear. The above-quoted editorial from The Australian goes on to insist that the "left" is completely dysfunctional and has dealt itself out of the debate, though the "argument" left me cold; take, for example:

Closely related to their hatred of the US is their contempt for capitalism. The impact of the modern share-owning democracy has yet to dawn on them. Corporations no longer answer to the bourgeoisie, they answer to shareholders -- ordinary people who are now stakeholders, either directly or through the <$1 /> trillion in superannuation. Karl Marx's dream has been fulfilled now that the workers truly do control the means of production.

Any given worker may now own 0.000001% of some very large means of production, but even that much control is diluted by the fund managers and the machinations of the big boys. One only has to look at Rupert Murdoch's poison pill to see what kind of stakeholding The Australian has in mind; "privatise the profits, socialise the losses" springs to mind, albeit from the broader perspective of influence rather than just money.

Andrew Norton's review (and the ensuing commentary) is much more thoughtful than those of the mainstream press, though I mildly disagree with his closing (unargued for) claim that "Public debate [...] is not under any threat". Andrew Bartlett's comment there almost makes me mourn the passing of the Australian Democrats. Also Andrew Elder treads similar (good) ground.

Woodward and Bernstein: The Final Days

A sort-of-sequel to All the President's Men, recounting the events up to Nixon's resignation. As before, it ends rather abruptly and one has to scour Wikipedia for a few hours to figure out what the longer-term implications of Watergate were. In short, those with fingers in the operational pies seem to have been fed to the tigers, and the political and Cabinet associates (such as Kissinger, Haig and Cheney) either continued or were resuscitated in later Republican administrations.

These are a great pair of books, though you'll need (to acquire) a working knowledge of (some) U.S. constitutional law if you want to follow the legal narrative, which is what it's mostly about, of course. I'm not aware of similar books about the Dismissal; I've read Gough Whitlam's The Truth of the Matter, but that's it.

The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

Edited by John Barnes. There's not much point to this collection, given that you can get most/all of Lawson's work online, for free, or, if you prefer, his complete prose works in book form. (In my defence it cost me two bucks at the UNSW book fair, one of the more expensive acquisitions of the day.)

Having said that I did quite enjoy the Joe Wilson and his Mates yarns. These serve as a sort-of autobiography of the man, purportedly written while he was in London. His prose is mostly prosaic, with the occasional flinty observation tossed in, just to check you're paying attention.

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: All the President's Men

The book which, while preceding the movie, was apparently written because of it. Again, the irritation is that it focuses on the authors' part of the story, and suddenly stops when things get really weird (p331, five pages to go):

On Saturday the 14th, Woodward received a phone call at home from a senior memeber of the [Senate] committee's investigative staff. "Congratulations," he said. "We interviewed Butterfield. He told the whole story."
What whole story?
"Nixon bugged himself."

I would have preferred the narrative to be situated in history a bit better, such as by clueing us into other events in the U.S. by providing some correlative newspaper headlines.

Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison: Silencing Dissent: How the Australian government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate.

I finally finished reading this book, so long after the book launch. In many ways I found it unsurprising and somewhat pointless; it catalogues and sometimes adds to the vast piles of evidence that the current government is a mendacious, insecure mob of control freaks. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't already suspect that will read this text, and so I have to wonder what the target audience was imagined to be. The only things I found novel were the instances of modern-day heroism in the public service, and even those couldn't keep me awake. (I mostly read it after midnight.)

One thing that struck me as less than helpful was the stridently bare ideology in this potted take on public choice (p32, Dissent in Australia, Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison):

At a deeper level, the revisionist view of democracy advanced by the Howard Government rests upon a particular belief about human nature. This view considers that it is normal and natural for people to be the self-interested 'rational maximisers' known as homo economicus in the economics textbooks. In this view human beings are understood to be 'fundamentally acquisitive creatures' for whom 'consumption and acquisition are the means to happiness'. The purpose of society, then, is 'to provide the secure space in which these naturally self-interested individuals are left free to discover and pursue their own (basically material) happiness'. This is hardly a modern view; the idea of government as being structured around the self-interested individual dates back to Hobbes and Locke. In the modern variation — known as rational choice theory, and its offspring, public choice theory — citizens are regarded as having little concern with democratic participation unless it is in their own material interests. In turn the model of government designed to support the activities of the 'instrumentally rational egoist' is a 'minimal democracy' that can at best provide 'few safeguards against tyranny'.

Offered up to support the quotes are Australian Politics (Emy and Hughes) and Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Dryzek, what a great name). Me, all I've got is Wikipedia and a smattering of Amartya Sen's work. While I agree that taking any of these theories to be normative might lead one to think their conclusions are profoundly distasteful, the mostly negative mathematical results are enough to convince me that they're still working on the foundations. Rationality here is just the set of extra assumptions needed to make the model tractable, and it clearly is a poor approximation of human behaviour. No surprise that the hot new trend has a strongly psychological flavour.

Still, this paragraph does make a good point (by example) in conflating the limitations of the models with their supposed support for a highly artificial set of desiderata, something I'm sure the political public choice theorists encourage. Take, for example, Jane S. Shaw's overview of this discipline for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

One of the chief underpinnings of public choice theory is the lack of incentives for voters to monitor government effectively. Anthony Downs, in one of the earliest public choice books, An Economic Theory of Democracy, pointed out that the voter is largely ignorant of political issues and that this ignorance is rational. Even though the result of an election may be very important, an individual's vote rarely decides an election. Thus, the direct impact of casting a well-informed vote is almost nil; the voter has virtually no chance to determine the outcome of the election. So spending time following the issues is not personally worthwhile for the voter. Evidence for this claim is found in the fact that public opinion polls consistently find that less than half of all voting-age Americans can name their own congressional representative.
Public choice economists point out that this incentive to be ignorant is rare in the private sector. Someone who buys a car typically wants to be well informed about the car he or she selects. That is because the car buyer's choice is decisive — he or she pays only for the one chosen. If the choice is wise, the buyer will benefit; if it is unwise, the buyer will suffer directly. Voting lacks that kind of direct result. Therefore, most voters are largely ignorant about the positions of the people for whom they vote. Except for a few highly publicized issues, they do not pay a lot of attention to what legislative bodies do, and even when they do pay attention, they have little incentive to gain the background knowledge and analytic skill needed to understand the issues.
Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the "public interest," they make decisions on how to use other people's resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not. Politicians may intend to spend taxpayer money wisely. Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the "ear" of the politician and often gain support for their goals.

I guess you can see where that is going. I find the use of rationality here persausive, even if the portrayal of private enterprise is overly narrow and rose-tinted; my experience of corporate Australia is that the meat is not lean, and most are awestruck by the Enron fiasco. And yet there is an alternative to the right-wing minimalist (or absent) government: a more participatory democracy, a path that the Swiss have taken without apparent catastrophe. As Australia's infrastructure crumbles (specifically universities and urban transport, at least in Sydney), the populace will have no choice but to turn away from the high-def plasma for long enough to make their opinions felt.

None of this is to say the book shouldn't be read, indignation raised, action taken, but when the revolution comes I doubt anyone will say this is what got them off their arse. David Marr wrote an upbeat review for the Smage, though his closing observations are similar to mine:

The trouble is, the nation seems to care little about the successes or the failures in Canberra's long war against information. "While Australia has been transformed," Manne writes, "large parts of the nation have seemed to be asleep."

I have to say, bleakly, that these days this is only rational.

Martin Amis: The Information

Another airport novel from Martin Amis. This review in the New York Times, when not summarising the plot, made me wonder if we had read the same book. I didn't think it was particularly successful apart from the as-usual excellent characterisation and turn-of-phrase that has gotten the bums on the seats in the past. The narrative moved incredibly slowly, and it appears that this dawned on the author as he flurries his way through the final section, beginning to (somewhat) tidy up the loose ends somewhere past the 400 page mark.

Griffith Review #15: Divided Nation: Inequality in Action (Autumn 2007)

Another excellent edition of this journal. I only read the ones on subjects I'm interested in, but this one makes me think I should read it more often than I do. Unlike Quarterly Essay, Griffith Review is a compilation of about 300 pages of mostly interesting work centred on a particular topic (rather than just a single viewpoint). This one is concerned with the gap between how good our gangbuster economy is said to be and how those lowest on the (cough) life security ladder have it.

In this edition, in particular:

David Burchell's Trying to find the sunny side of life is an excellent brief history of the fashions of public housing, focussing on the recent events at Macquarie Fields.
Peter Meredith's Down-at-heel among the well-heeled is a riveting sequence of interviews of people living in the Southern Highlands.
In Cracks in the veneer, Jago Dodson and Neil Sipe talk about the tension between oil price fluctuations and the structures of Australia's cities, reminding me of Pete R.'s PhD topic. Unfortunately their writing does not do their research justice.
Meera Atkinson's piece on the long term effects of domestic violence, The exiled child, is so much more insightful than the Government's ads, rightly satirised by The Chaser.
Charlie Stansfield says a lot about the state of boarding houses in The words to say it, providing a voice-by-proxy to those who lost a point of stability in their lives and are now probably on the streets.
Natasha Cica's On the ground recounts some urban renewal projects in the housing estates north of Hobart.
In Beyond pity, Robert Hillman recounts his experiences with an Iranian and an Afghan refugee.

Others, such as Randa Abdel-Fattah's Of Middle Eastern appearance, didn't add much clarity to the issue of identity politics:

[In Sweden, at the Göteborg Book Festival]: While we interacted with other international guests, one person asked Nabila: "Do you feel Swedish?"
"Yes, she replied. "Until you asked me."
[...] "What about your Kurdish and Lebanese background? How does it impact on your identity?"
[...] "To be honest, I'm tired of defining myself. Am I Swedish? Am I Kurdish? Am I Lebanese? I'm all of these things, and none. Sometimes I'm more Swedish than Kurdish, sometimes I'm more Lebanese than Swedish. In the end I'm just me."

Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence, emphasises the fluidity of identity and the contextualisation of it, observing that imposed or misunderstood identity leads to such wonderful absurdities as the "end of history" and "clash of civilisations" rubrics. I guess Abdel-Fattah's piece shows some nascent awareness of these ideas, though their expression frustrated me.

The final three articles on Aboriginal dispossession by Anna Haebich, Anita Heiss and Kim Mahood make for sombre reading.

The photography throughout the journal is also praiseworthy, especially the portrayal of the Vietnam Vets.

I come to this as an interested non-specialist and hence am probably the target demographic for this journal. I wish UNSW or another of the technical universities (the University of Technology, Sydney perhaps, they tend to innovate) could do something similar for technological culture.

John Gall: The Systems Bible, The Third Edition of Systemantics.

Finally got around to finishing this one. It's a book to savour, though the newer sections are a lot drier than the sharply observed witticisms of the first two editions. From the preface to the second:

Things have never been better — but they're improving.
Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.

The departure point is the insight that new systems mean new problems, married with the even deeper insight that there need exist a treatise on a general theory of systems that apes the lingo and pomposity of truly excellent academic work. I'm sure a lot of the concepts are treated formally elsewhere — feedback, for example, and the trickiness of making observations — and as such the book serves as a great overview of the field. Also memorable are the discussions of humans embedded in a system, the possibility of changing system behavior and the likelihood of success.

Charles Handy: The Age of Paradox

First published as The Empty Raincoat in Britain.

I am not in the target demographic of this book. The style is chatty, presupposes a disposition towards competitiveness, material success and traditional (authentically conservative) values. This is philosophy for managers, low on empirical or even argumentative justification, expressed in inimitable corporate språk. Their let's-get-on-with-it attitude, even in the face of vague goals and the damage inflicted on larger or external systems, is perhaps what grates the most with me.

Even so, he's not bereft of ideas, or perhaps of synthesising other people's ideas, that one might hope will improve the status quo of capitalism. (There is a bibliography but the main text does not cite it.) Handy himself implies his goal is pre-scientific (p246):

... [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind] ... American college students, he observed, were not only lifeless and ignorant, they were reluctant to offer or to hold any opinions at all. People who thought that they were right in the past did terrible things as a result, therefore it is best to have no opinions at all. The only true knowledge is science. Everything else is wishful thinking. From that it follows that it is wrong to take a position on anything, worse still to try to impose your wishes on your bit of the world. A passive voyeurism will have to suffice, preferably uncritical and politically correct because it is wrong to suggest that any one way of life is superior to another.

I tend to agree with him here, largely as I have found discourse on ideas largely absent in my university experience, especially between the faculty and student bodies. From my perspective it might help if the profs remember that they were once naive and that formalisation may better come after the idea or intuition, not before. I'm sure they have corresponding advice, unarticulated, for the students. Handy says (p218):

Portfolio workers need more than agents, they need somewhere where they belong. Learning is alienating if you do it all by yourself. Teleworking is fine in theory but lonely in reality. That asset which is yourself can atrophy is isolation. ...

Wow, only thirteen years later this has come to pass.

Handy's "inside out doughnuts" with "cores" and "empty spaces" (p69) reeks of a desire to have a diagrammatic shorthand for an ill-formed concept. NICTA's logo must be a sophistication of this idea:

A quick stab at Handian analysis would be to say that NICTA has two self-identified cores (permanent staff, intellectual property?), one centred and the other overlapping the big don't care (?) space, there is an anonymous auxiliary core-like thing (???), and that they feel ambiguous about their empty space (non-permanent staff, students?). I think there's scope for a profitable new form of logo analysis based on these insights.

Similarly the corporate social contract is hexagonal (p165) though the traits tend to be enumerated in the rank order that reflects a particular corporation, or nation-stereotypical corporation.

The apparently enduring Handy classic, the sigmoid curve (p49 etc. etc.), is a strange one. (See here or ask Google.) The focus is on the second hump, the bit where we have overmilked the cow. Sure, I'll buy that, but little explanation is given for the initial downward dip. For it to encompass relationships as well as business I would have to think that before I enjoy the company of a significant other, first I must suffer. Perhaps he is talking about capital, not success, or maybe the early stages of a "successful" relationship puts a crimp on his liberty.

Why carp about his iconography? Well, as my friend Sus says at the end of every email: "Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information." (Edward R Tufte)

To move onto perhaps more substational criticism, Handy has a habit of being a bit wrong with some of his examples. Apropos the computer industry, he claims (p20):

... In theory, anyone can be intelligent in some way or can become intelligent and thereby have access to power and wealth. There is little to stop a small firm muscling in on Microsoft's territory just as Microsoft did to IBM. When the key property is intelligence, you do not have to be big or rich to get in on the act. It is a low-cost entry marketplace. It should make for a more open society.

I'm sure Netscape would agree wholeheartedly with him, and they sure weren't small in the mid-90s, soon after this book was published. Moreover while I would concur that the cost of entry to the information processing market is low, the end result seems to be Google, i.e. a de facto monopoly. (A general criticism of capitalism seems to be that it tends to oligopoly, in which case his faith that low entry cost implies a more open society is misplaced. By way of evidence I offer up the state of the car industry in the U.S. and otherwise pass the buck to Google.)

Also irritating is his enumeration of "intelligences" (p204) which actually reads more like a shopping list of talents or skills. I don't think of Shane Warne's bowling action as physical intelligence any more than I elevate a pain reflex to the status of a thought. I do grant that Warne is a cricketing genius, but not merely because his fingers have been taught how to behave.

My carping could be endless, so I will stop after just one more: his response to "what is the point of it all?" is (p245):

... We are all accidents in the evolutionary chain. We can lie back and enjoy it, or we can occupy ourselves, as scientists do, in trying to understand more about what is going on. There is nothing we can do to alter it, even when we understand it. We can only play with it. Man is as the smallest piece of dust in the universe. ...

I find this fatalism misplaced and irritating, perhaps because engineers are charged with altering things. In any case, Systemantics treats this issue more broadly and insightfully, and with more humour.

On a more agreeable note, he does propose:

A decoupling of credentialism from age, allowing for the differing rates of individual maturation;
A proper mutual obligation scheme, the "double bond" where the state pays for education and employment for a limited period with the intention that these be learning experiences that repay society in the long term;
Decentralisation of control in companies.

...and many more. I guess I'd prefer to read something more factual and logical.

Deborah Robertson: Proudflesh

A collection of short stories. I enjoyed her effort in the Big Issue and so managed to extract this book from the chaos that is the UNSW Library undergoing massive physical reorganisation.

I think the Western Australia Premier's book awards reviewers more-or-less nailed it:

Proudflesh is a collection of coolly cynical stories about the contemporary world, concerned particularly with connections and relationships between people as well as their foibles and stimulants. Its range of interests is wide: popular cultural forms, psychology, addictions, missed connections, love, obsessions, loneliness. Most of these stories have a sharp edge; the writing is always controlled and self-consciously literary.

It's the last bit that kills some of the stories, the self-conscious literary style, the substitution of enumeration for description, the invocation of a name that connotes all to her and naught to me. Still, as David Malouf ably demonstrates, writers tend to begin like this and amble towards naturality.

Memorable:

Consuming Passions (I and II). These are character sketches of two women whose lives happen to intersect in London, concluding in a rather lamely observed powerplay.
Living Arrangements, an easy-come-easy-go entanglement. I couldn't help but compare it to David Malouf's Every Move You Make (from the recent collection of the same name), similarly told from a woman's perspective.
The Human Kiss, a tale of a woman moving in with a man with kids, one of whom has a heroin addiction. The portrayal of split loyalties is excellent, though the drug theme is fairly standard and unenlightening, somewhat like Helen Garner's efforts without the levity.

The title story, Proudflesh, is available online.

Milan Kundera: The Joke

Again, not one of his best novels. The humour is droll, dry and melancholic, with some "jokes" stretched from the start of the book to the end. These are the jokes that life plays on you, not the ones that make you laugh. Conversely there are flashes of gentle humour, particularly apropos his eternal fascination with the Communist mindset:

You smile as though you were thinking to yourself.

Being his first novel he attempts to do everything within it, and his characteristic authorial interjections are lamentably absent. Indeed, one feels that Kundera's life to that point (the mid 1960s) is a variant of Ludvik's (p170):

... I had begun my own research almost ten years later than my colleagues — I had still been an undergraduate in my thirties. For a few year I had tried desperately hard to bridge this gap but had then realised the futility of devoting the second half of my life to a pathetic chasing after lost years, and so I resigned myself to it. Luckily this resignedness had its compensations: the less I chased after success in my own narrow field, the more I could allow myself the luxury of looking out from this field on to other areas of research, on to man's being and the existence of the world, and could experience the joys, among the sweetest there are, of speculation and reflection. My colleagues, however, knew full well that if such contemplation gives a man personal pleasure then it is of little use for a modern scientific career, which demands that the scientist should burrow zealously in his own field or sub-field like a blind mole and should not lose time lamenting lost horizons. For this reason my colleagues half envied my resignation and half despised me for it, as they gave me to know with gentle irony, calling me the institute's 'philosopher', and sending me journalists and news editors from the broadcasting company.

The book is essentially about change and capriciousness, mutating loyalties and the unknowability of others. He revisits some of these themes in his later (and to my mind, more successful) novels, painting less dire images of how life slips out of control.

The translation of this one has apparently caused him grief over many years. I read the original butchered translation from 1969.

Milan Kundera: Life is Elsewhere

Not one of his better novels from this vantage point of the twilight of his career. The timidity of his characteristic authorial interjections brings nothing to weak and cliched characters and plot. Clearly he lacked the courage to just run with it, to make the novel respond to his whimsy in the facile and melancholic way that made his later work so much greater.

The text is replete with the vaguely amusing contradictions of communist propaganda, e.g.:

"Revolution in love" - would you mind telling me what you mean by that? Do you want free love in contrast to bourgeois marriage, or monogamy in contrast to bourgeois promiscuity? [...] that can be put much better: "Long live socialism, long live the socialist family!"

Perhaps most disappointing is that his attempts to skewer the Czech communist regime lack his later dexterity and indignation.

(I read the revised original English translation by Kussi.)

Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice.

Finally got around to reading Barry Schwartz's book that fleshes out his excellent talk at Google. It's a well assembled melange of ideas organised around the gap between what economics promises to optimise (property, wealth, choice, income levels, education, ...) and peoples' wellbeing. Yes, you'd be right to call it a self-help book, albeit one with a lot of academic citations.

I hope to go through this book again in the near future and tease out some of the arguments over on the wiki.

On a related note, an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, Why Hawks Win.

The Big Issue #269 (26 Dec 2006 - 16 Jan 2007): Summer Fiction Special

This one is wall-to-wall short stories, some quite good:

Linda Jaivin: Jaklyn & Lucinda (subject-aware voyeurism).
Mark O'Flynn: Stealth: Fire, Explosions, Death, Catastrophe, Screaming, Crashing, Destruction. And that's a wrap. (Hollywood goes to the Megalong Valley).
Deborah Robertson: Seeking Jasmine ("I like sad girls.").
Cate Kennedy: Ashes (a ceremony at a lake).
Michel Faber: Adopt a Tiger (homelessness).
Emily Maguire: Dependence (internet dating).

For four bucks and a conversation it's a steal.

Helen Garner: The Feel of Steel

I enjoyed this the most out of the books of hers I've read so far. The cataloging keywords are: anecdotes, attitudes, family relationships, women authors, political and social views; all apposite, and here there is no claim to anything beyond indulging the need to write.

I particularly enjoyed:

Writing Home.
Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice, an account of her trip to Antarctica.
Tower Diary, of post-breakup trauma in Bellevue Hill.
Melbourne's Famous Water, of returning to Melbourne (home).
A Spy in the House of Excrement.

... and pretty much the rest of it. She writes in an intimate style that would make for a decent blog.

Raymond Smullyan: The Tao is Silent

This is much like his autobiography, quite indulgent and rambly. I think he summarises the text quite well in Chapter 43, Mondo on Immortality:

Zen Student: So Master, is the soul immortal or not? Do we survive our bodily death or do we get annihilated? Do we really reincarnate? Does our soul split up into component parts that get recycled, or do we as a single unit enter the body of a biological organism? And do we retain our memories or not? Or is the doctrine of reincarnation false? Is perhaps the Christian notion of survival more correct? And if so, do we get bodily resurrected, or does our soul enter a purely Platonic spiritual realm?
Master: Your breakfast is getting cold.

There are lots of things about this book which feel tenuous and loose, so much unlike the logic he did up to that time (1977) and the puzzles soon after. It'll take me a while to do it justice.