undiscriminating reads

Posted on April 12, 2009 by acb

on trains in and out of London

Ken MacLeod, the Night Sessions: very good and tightly imagined account of what a war on religion would actually mean; and what a secular Scotland would be like. Written with great sympathy for the villains; also I am extremely glad of the idea that the last best Calvinists in the world turn out to be robots. The best of his I have read to date.

Charlie Stross, Merchant Princes, books one two and three: ought to be really enjoyable fluff, and almost is. But in the end the mashup of chicklit , thriller and Marxism doesn’t work. The heroine is not exactly a Mary Sue, but she is too self-consciously meant as a a figure for readers to identify with. Either that, or the feisty, sexy, divorcee is this century’s answer to the carved white Victorian angel, and every bit as life-like.

Thomas Jackson , Darwin’s Error: very interesting book by an ex-Catholic with the subtitle “the poet who died”. Not about the science at all, but about the philosophy and the prose. I didn’t have room to squeeze it into my “big” New Statesman review,1 but should blog about it next week.

Nick Spencer, Darwin’s God, which, unlike Jackson’s, is actually about religion. A scrupulous account of the development of Darwin’s irreligious opinions.

And, since it is Easter Day, I throw in for free the news that a church in Västerås has, after two years’ work, and the collection of 30,000 white bricks, unveiled their life-size Lego Jesus.

1 I was sent a total of sixteen books, to be reviewed in 1400 words

Posted in God, Journalism, Literature, Sweden | 8 Comments

Auden at press conferences

Posted on April 4, 2009 by acb

I don’t often go to press conferences nowadays, but whenever I do, I think that Auden had been there too, on both sides. In my edition of the Collected Shorter Poems, the pertinent observations face each other across pages 190-191. First, the view from the floor:

When Statesmen gravely say ‘We must be realistic’,
The chances are they’re weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles
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Their generals are already poring over maps.

And then the view down from the podium, at us:

Those public men who seem so to enjoy their dominion,
With their ruined faces and their voices treble with hate,
Are no less martyrs because unaware of their fetters:
What would you be like, were you never allowed to create
Or reflect, but compelled to give an immediate opinion,
Condemned to destroy or distribute the works of your betters?
Posted in Blather, Journalism, Literature | Comments Off on Auden at press conferences

When life gives you lemons

Posted on April 2, 2009 by acb

The fatality rate on the roads goes down. No , Honest. Science proves it.

Thanks to Jeremy for the link

Posted in Blather | Tagged , | Comments Off on When life gives you lemons

Shortlisted

Posted on March 27, 2009 by acb
I should have posted this earlier, but Fishing in Utopia has now made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize. Soon there will be copies to buy again
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, as the paperback is reprinted with a lovely cover and quotes.

I need to start work on the next one.

Posted in Literature, Sweden | 1 Comment

Creative destruction

Posted on March 25, 2009 by acb

You know that feeling when you are sitting on the floor by the dusty disassembled guts of a computer and nothing works at all? It won’t even give a healthy cheep on startup? And then, slowly, it all comes together, until everything works, except, perhaps, sound, and you change something to fix that, and then nothing works at all again: you’re back in the smell of dust and silence and you can’t undo?

You will swear, when you finally recover, never to upgrade anything again. Yet you will. And I don’t know why , or didn’t, until I stumbled on a lovely passage in Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding.

I’m upset, so I’m taking apart my computers. If I were a poet, I’d get drunk and yell at the people I love. As it is, I’m gutting my machines.

My computers are not broken, but at times like these I like the look of delicate circuit boards open to the naked air. Several hours ago, in a fit of restlessness, I decided to install a pre-release version of a new operating system. Then there seemed to be problems with some of the internal devices. So I took them out, one after the other. Now they lie all around me—cards, wires, memory modules, screws—all in a jumble. To test components, I do what I’m absolutely not supposed to do: run the machines with the covers off. I’m supposed to discharge static electricity before touching anything. But I scuff around on the carpets, grab things with two hands, hold metal to metal. I recognize the nastiness of this mood, reckless and rebellious, like I could get away with breaking the laws of physics.

There’s a perverse comfort in broken machinery.

Reading this, I realised that the rage is itself an attractive part of the process because it feels so good when it is over , and everything dissolves into order. There is something in this process of destruction and recreation that resembles the state that long articles and still more radio programmes get into, just before they get right: everything is spread out in ways that look chaotic to everyone except me, and even I can’t quite explain how they will go back together. I can only show, if I keep my concentration. The element of risk makes it far more attractive than the times when everything goes smoothly and by routine. You feel you have discovered a hidden order to the universe. Alternatively, as sometimes happens, you take it all apart and it never ever goes back together properly. All you are left with is a heap of broken junk. But that’s more common with words than with computers.

Posted in Literature, nördig | 5 Comments

Nerd Notes

Posted on March 23, 2009 by acb

Well, if I tell you how the story starts, maybe the end will be predictable … I was given a truly wonderful camera at Christmas, a Pentax K20 which generates 14MB raw files. It was taking ages fro my ancient desktop to process them. So I thought I would switch to a dual-core Athlon processor and a bit more memory, along with a better graphics card. Shopping around online for these things, and trying to work out where the sweet spot was, where spending more money stopped getting much of a performance improvement, made a nice interstitial project. Then I remembered that there was something about Windows XP demanding a new licence if you rebuilt the computer around it, so I thought that I would just make sure there was enough memory to run it in an emulator, if need be. That turned out to be a nearly fatal mistake. Continue reading →

Posted in nördig | 1 Comment

A republic of laws

Posted on March 17, 2009 by acb

I haven’t finished The Wire yet, but I am reasonably confident that the best piece of dialogue in the whole series occurs pretty early on in the very first episode, where a detective is trying to persuade a judge to cut some corners. “This is a republic of laws” says one. “This is Baltimore” replies the other,and shuts the conversation down. It’s part of the ambiguities of the series that I can’t remember who in this exchange was playing the cynic and who the idealist. It could just as well have been either. They’d swap roles anyway within five minutes.

Now go and read Glenn Greenwald on the sanctity of contracts in American law, with reference to

  • (a) rich people’s pension plans and

  • (b) poor people’s pension plans.

(via)

Posted in the crash, USA | Comments Off on A republic of laws

Burned over

Posted on March 17, 2009 by acb

I’m sorry not to have posted here much. I have been very busy, but also approaching the condition of upstate New York, ca 1830, when it was known as the burnt over district because of the continual evangelical revivals which swept over it. Everyone in it had been saved till they could hardly stand up. No possible novelty of excitement could stimulate them any more. It was out of this spiritual charcoal that Mormonism emerged. I do hope I’m not going to invent a new religion. But I have entered the Sargasso Sea of feeling that nothing is new or fresh; all my thoughts feel vague and fleeting. It’s a condition very simply cured by spending a week or so standing in rivers

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, but that is difficult to arrange right now. In the meantime, sustaining thought for even 800 words seems a gigantic feat. (Another version of this state is described in Koestler’s Age of Longing, where he calls it fatigue of the synapses, and treats, if not cures, it with brandy and benzedrine).So here follow some quickies. Continue reading →

Posted in Blather, Housekeeping, Journalism, Literature, nördig | 14 Comments

An unexpected honour

Posted on February 25, 2009 by acb

Fishing in Utopia, already entered for the Oondatje Prize , has just to my astonishment been long-listed for the Orwell prize for political writing. Given that the other candidates include Patrick Cockburn, Ahmed Rashid, Phillipe Sands and Tony Judt I don’t think for a moment that I am going to win. But it would be lovely to make the shortlist, and in any case, even the longlist is a completely unexpected treat.

Posted in Literature, Sweden | 6 Comments

Sisters, not parent and child

Posted on February 22, 2009 by acb

An interesting and important point from John Barton’s essay on conceptions of the afterlife in the current TLS (not online):

Jews and Christians do not of course believe the same things, but the structures of the two faiths are much more similar than people think. This is not surprising, since they are siblings (rather than parent and child), both deriving from the religious culture of Israel in the last few centuries BC (the so-called Second Temple period) with influences from the surrounding Greco-Roman world and its philosophies. The impression that the two religions are so vastly different derives partly from the tendency among Christians to think that Judaism is the same as the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament
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, as they call it) – whereas in fact the religion of the Second Temple period had changed markedly from that of the ancient Israelites who are the source of the Hebrew Bible; and among Jews, to think of Christianity as a Greek religion only marginally related to Hebrew culture.

Posted in God, Journalism | 3 Comments