Book Group: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" - Discussion Thread

oh, and S's occupation - a typist who transcribes articles and such - immediately brings to mind flaubert's bouvard et pecuchet, the two most famous copy clerks in the history of literature. the transmission of knowledge - whether it is received calmly and without complaint or introspection, or received critically and with an untrusting eye - is obviously a big theme here.

Ok, I'm going to post my thoughts before reading the thread first, and then have a look through. I suppose the first thing to say is that it's very enjoyable. I'd read the first couple of chapters when I got and whizzed through them.

The first chapter reminded me a lot of Peter de Vries - the compressed humour describing an intelligent assimilation into the American middle-classes, plus of course the strong element that religion (and love) plays the process. The epigrammatic wit is also similar - 'a clever man so rarely needs to think'.

One of the things, I think, makes the structural games of the following chapters so enjoyable is that they're predicated not on aesthetic whim (not that there's anything wrong with that) but on the distractions of a child, the necessity for work, the boringness of work, all things that are kin to all of us I'd imagine (well, not necessarily the child bit - but boredom, distractions, necessity etc).

Her voice has that catholic approach to knowledge which I associate with some American writers, Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach for intance. The high and the low is inseperable.

The general tone is also totally unpompous, which makes it an utter pleasure to read. Elements like fate and chance, which are often dealt with maundering seriousness are dealt with deftly and playfully. And, hey, I learnt stuff too. Great.

Ok, now I'm going to read through the thread, see what's what.

the compressed humour describing an intelligent assimilation into the American middle-classes

This in itself was too compressed. What I meant to say was perhaps 'compressed humour describing a relucant, but nevertheless articulate assimilation into the... not middle I don't think... clerical? business classes?

I felt the seduction scene was deliberately arch, and it's amusing the way she's 'bored' into sleeping with him.

when she's describing beautiful languages and expresses her affection for them by listing out the grammatical cases

yo ppl do this

this is proving a great book to pester my girlfriend about.

'what is this word' 'ganglion' 'how does gamma alpha gamma gamma make gang' 'two gammas together make an ng' 'oh'

'what even is a ganglion in greek anyway' 'go away'

-

an utter pleasure to read

i totally concur with this, i am going to get into work late because i decided to find time to finish part two today. i am enjoying this more than any of the other ten books i am currently reading and it is not even close.

-

does anyone want to hazard a guess who liberace and lord leighton are figures for?

i'm curious about sibylla's attitude toward diligence, so i thought i'd go through the books she mentions to see if they have any particular bearing on her character, or if they show some sort of pattern of omission. (...)

doesn't she also mention reading and rereading leave it to psmith?

Yeah, got the impression that was her comfort book. (again, one of the iterations - says she reads it something like 23 times, like the Revolutionary Etude and the Chopin's Prelude 23.)

when she's describing beautiful languages and expresses her affection for them by listing out the grammatical cases

yo ppl do this

i'm well aware! just saying, it marks her as a certain kind of person. (also, she's a linguist/classicist.)

re comfort books, notice that she also derives comfort from gesenius' hebrew grammar. to the point, apparently, that it helps stave off suicidal thoughts (better than anything you could get from a 'help line'). i'm not sure how to take the detail she focuses on—'excepting the phoenician' or somewhat. gives the impression of a kind of aestheticized attitude toward the things rather than the scholarly/scientific one it seems to aim at.

Is "Penguin English" a real term? Did the character mean "pidgin"?

I think it's her coinage, but she means the stiff, slightly fussy kind of English common in old Penguin Classics translations, esp from the 50s and 60s. (read a lot of these while self-educating as a teen, so Penguin English made me laugh).

OK, that's possible.

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

I'm reminded, somewhat, of Richard Powers whose books are very clever and entertaining but who presents you with a lot of people who are hard to love or even like. Stil, I do really like his books in spite of my misgivings.

I generally find child prodigies v. annoying. I had forgotten that.

haha same. this is what had put me off the book in the past (but i'm enjoying it despite that)

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

i only really liked them in 2nd half of the book, which is a lot more tender and less rigid

that's good to hear, ta.

yeah i've just started that part

Ok, wrote some more notes on the way to work -

child as accumulation of frustrated careers of forebears?

Fragments/uncompleted works symbolic of uncompleted thwarted careers (Aaron and Moses - Schoenberg's artistic plan frustrated by commercial requirements in the US). (Fragments also see 'one task a day' stuff of Yo Yo Ma). Like Browning? The attempt to achieve something achieves spiritually the same as the greatest artists no matter your lack of skill? ("Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,or what's a heaven for?")

Sybilla often wanting to say one thing but realising she must say another because it's polite - a learning process of its own (and often the problem that high intellectual acheivers have? socialising in an equal way with others?). Still, doesn't come naturally.

That said, I find her sympathetic and funny. Engaged with the difficult business of bringing up a child and uncomplacent about him growing up normally (ie, not as the sort of person who could throw someone into the sea if told to) without instruction.

i still haven't read on to next week's section, where i expect things to open up a bit in respect of both language-learning and self-other relations, but i was reflecting the other day on how much or whether this book is very 'psychological', and it occurred to me:

the use of extremely elementary greek in the '-syllabic' sequence serves to set up interiors/exteriors between the characters and between the characters and reader in a quite particular way. when it involves the occurrence of signs on the page that the reader can't even make sense of, he's likely to feel just shut out, and in that sense alienated from the characters for whom the words are supposed to be meaningful. but when the greek is written out in latin script, the reader could at least sound it out; and since in the '-syllabic' sequence, at least, it follows a pattern the reader can use to reconstruct what the sounds mean, it's within the reader's grasp to translate and then understand what's being said. but, knowing well enough what's being said without having undertaken to translate it, the reader will probably also recognize how little understanding it in the original will help him understand about the people who understand it 'untranslated'; nevertheless, the barrier is still there.

at this stage ludo can act as an intermediary between the reader and sibylla since we're closer to his stage of (foreign) language-learning than sibylla's.

sibylla's relationship to ludo is different from ours partly because of the way, in the '-syllabic' scene, she's able to ignore him. we might have to ignore something that is closer, to us, to 'noise'; she's ignoring something that makes sense; it's just not related to what she needs to be doing right then.

(i suppose this is connected in a pretty straightforward way to the kinds of stuff about dewitt in that LRB article about 'your name here' and her post-'samurai' existence: the amount of alienation between people effected by failures to understand one another's language, versus the relative ease with which that alienation could be removed with just a little bit of work.)

Feel like I should post -something- before I start the next session. You've all seen and said way more than I'm able to though. It took me longer to read this thread than to read the assigned section, hah.

I am curious about one bit of reference: my copy said Boris Sidis was a wunderchild that turned out not so great etc -- but surely that was his son William James Sidis. Was this simply an error that was changed in other editions? (I see J. upthread mentioning him without commenting on it, hence my suspicion)
I was trying to figure out if it was intentional, and if so, what it means. I don't know enough about most of the language stuff etc in the book to know if there's a lot of bluffing on Sibylla's part. I assumed there wasn't until I saw that reference.

Ennihoo, I've enjoyed it moderately well so far. Liked the stuff about "Something" looking out of the father etc. Funny that Ratsey mentions de Vries, as the Chopin references made me think of his "The Blood of the Lamb". But that didn't feel relevant; certainly just a product of me having read that recently.
Not sure I trust the telling of the evening with Liberace -- on the one hand the story is sort of pathetic, so perhaps that's a reason to believe it, but then I can't help but think Sibylla'd rather convince us that it was -her choice-, even if it's a silly one, than to admit she'd been wooed by that offputting fellow. I was wondering why she went home with him in the first place.
There was one scene that I found tedious, but since it's been a week already, I've managed to forget whatever it was.

Hrm, probably should've started writing this at home, so I could look up whatever I've underlined etc, but I don't think there was anything not mentioned already. Think there was something near the beginning that made me think "honor" would be a major theme. Believe it was the dad who went on about "giving the other side a fair chance" etc. Fits well with the samurai as well.

Ideally you'd want your kid to be a greater physical presence to you than a wailing voice who occasionally needs to be dumped upstairs.

― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 12:49 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well he's more than a wailing voice, he's a questioning, information devouring, knowledge vampire, who might well leave little time/effort left for a proper mother/son relationship.

― ledge, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 13:07 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think I've changed my mind, or at least my attitude. The clues are in the chapter headings in this section: 'We never get off at Sloane Square for Nebraska fried Chicken', 'We never get off at Embankment for McDonalds', 'We never go anywhere', 'We never do anything'. Ludo is perhaps not entirely happy or fulfilled in his savant enterprise. Those clues only barely filtered through my consciousness though, and during the Circle line chapters I was starting to find the interruption-heavy narrative schtick somewhat irritating. But then I read the Yamamoto chapter, and it was devastating. Not Yamamoto's story itself, which didn't quite ring true (specifically the part where the kid asks him to save him - if you were trying to escape your village under fear of death, would you be persuaded to hang around and beat a large drum as loudly as possible?), but the concert. Still not entirely sure what Yamamoto's (or Sibylla's) aesthetic thesis is, let alone whether I agree with it, but the concert sounded extraordinary (admittedly a two minute description can't exactly give a true impression of sitting through all ~10 hours of it), and I was almost moved to tears merely by Sibylla's account of being moved to tears by it. And then we find that Ludo is missing, and it was an OMG moment. I felt complicit for having forgotten about him while just reading about the concert! The poor kid! And when she gets home and finds him, her first and only thought is not of apologising but of chastising. In short, difficult as it must be for her, I now think Sibylla is being a bad mother.

I found the whole Yanamoto interview slightly absurd. That's not how interviews go, is it?

I'm not actually sure where I am in relation to where we're supposed to be, but I think we're gradually seeing a reversal of roles between Ludo and the mother, where the amount of learning Ludo has exceeds Sybilla's. Increasingly concerns about integrating knowledge into life (whether that's school or the emotional relations that to a certain extent Sybilla's approach was intended to compensate for) seem to complicate their relationship and both their approach to work and intellectual matter.

Ludo's learning becomes increasingly targeted at finding out who his father is, throwing knowledge at the absence.

And yes, the whole Yanamoto thing, of fragments (of a life, of art, unfinished business) gesturing beyond the whole...

What was that moment (haven't got the copy with me) where she talks, during his performance, about the multiplicity of possibility that the fragments represented, but then how the single performances represented the one chance at getting the whole right. That seems to fit in generally with what's happening (the CCTV cameras on the underground showing alternate realities for instance).

perhaps this is partly investigating the idea that Sibylla possibly feels total knowledge can thwart these mutually exclusive possibilities, can bind all fragments in a totality, which she realises they can't. Ugh, overthinking this, and work is getting in the way, how dare it. Then there is the seven role models rather than one.

That's not how interviews go, is it?

maybe it is if the interviewee is a headstrong ex-child prodigy with a bee in his bonnet (and, perhaps, shades of autistic spectrum disorder).

It was more the questions in fact. But yes, I take your point. Anyway, I'm still enjoying it very much, finding it very readable.

putting this here for future thought:

"I began imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party"

p. 128 in my edition

made me think of the discussion upthread about how 'out of place' the parts with the plane pushers seemed. will return to investigate

I'm still enjoying the reading, but Sibylla is really annoying me now. Ludo, to his credit, does appear to have the capacity for other interests if only he were allowed to get out and try them. But she's stuck and has stuck him in an ur-Canon of received culture-that-is-good, of Greek epics and Kurosawa and Bach - basically the things that posh people of my acquaintance like to quote at each other to show how learned they are. It's all very far from pool sharking and motels, and only the odd glimpse of an Ohio Fried Chicken or idiot members of the public hint at any other kind of life beyond.

Wd agree that the knowledge gathering is increasingly looking like a pathological response to an absence (you may know everything as long as you do not ask about one thing - a slightly fairy tale motif - you will be happy as long as you never ever go in room x/blow crystal horn y, oh whoops guess what happened).

As this continues Ludo has more and more control of the narrative. He's become something other than the sum of knowledge, and is seen to actually be growing into a human being, as his mother's narrative presence declines.

Whether this works in terms of reader enjoyment is a different matter, I'd agree - she does go on rather, and the early compressed narrative of how she came to be in the situation she's in was far more varied.

That said, I too am still finding it v readable + Ludo taking over more = still plenty in it for me.

If I hadn't left it in someone else's house that is. Retrieving soon, and looking forward to it.

1. are we to take it that sibylla gets into more or less the same arguments, on the underground, about (it seems) the rationality of ending one's life, over the course of weeks or months? is she having these arguments with strangers or with people she has met before? (is it a common thing, still, in the uk for people to say 'not in front of the child' in french? if not it's odd that she meets two people who say it. are we to take sibylla's reaction to the person who says it in italian as odd, given that she represents herself as being able to speak italian—and right before that had been told the same thing in french? 'let us converse in one of the four million languages i know, if you should happen to have one of them'.)

2. sibylla and rationality: when she reacts to the person on the train re 'the seven samurai', her counter-interpretation of the movie seems absurd and self-serving on its face. is it apt in any particular way to the actual movie? her problem with the 'elite band' seems to be that the very idea of them gives rise to the kind of deference to authority that causes one to forsake use of one's own reason—to do things like push people out of planes. is her concern more with the effects such an attitude one would have if one were not in an elite band, or if one were?

3. what's with all the wolf books, dog books, books about creature adventures? at least one purpose they serve in the story seems to be that by showing ludo read them obsessively, it's possible to neatly point out that he reads for a kind of comfort, not to be bored, at the behest of his mother, etc., since there should be little other reason he stays so content to read them after he's otherwise blazed far past them in his 'serious' reading. why, if sibylla is so elitist about what people should read, does she coddle him with these other books? is it simply connected to her attempt to keep his hunger for new material under control? some kind of moral-instruction angle? it's odd that we don't see her permitting him more advanced english material—he could easily be reading dickens or something instead of rereading 'white fang'.

4. earlier mentions of 'the alien' are somewhat twisted around because, i think, sibylla's own attitudes toward the alien are pretty twisted around. it seems that when she describes the alien, in this week's reading, as whatever it is that gives specious reasons for cruelty, that firmly establishes that what we would normally think of as everything normal and caring for a mother to do, she regards as cruel, irrational. but the main fault she's concerned to avoid is the one she feels was done to her: to put checks upon her native love of knowledge and to constrain her acquisition of it. at the end of this week's reading, when she sees that ludo is somewhat politely disdainful of the idea that she should give him any help with learning japanese, she thinks that she has been a monster. not, i think, because she thinks that her job as his tutor has been bad so far (in the usual sense), but because she thinks that simply the constraints she enacted for practical reasons—to be able to keep him under control enough that she could try to hold on to sanity and keep them alive—have been taken, by ludo, in exactly the way she hoped they wouldn't, as an inhibition.

5. sibylla is the narrator of the story (in this part). so when she's relating the content of the magazine article with the interview with the pianist, she's the one conveying his story about traveling to africa. so it's meant to be doubly (triply) devastating when we see the pianist give only a self-concerned reaction to the death of his companion, more concerned about the failure of his trip's intended purpose than with having been part of those events; but then see our own narrator relate this story with no comment, apparently unmoved at all, taking as little notice of it as the pianist did: like him, she's concerned to see him pursue his genius. but we do see a compensating reaction, in that she's one of the few people who stays to the end of the concert, and her reaction is massive, tears streaming down her face.

Oh man, I am only like 30 pages in and this thread is totally running away on me because I'd prefer to avoid spoilers. I look forward to reading all your wonderful thoughts when I'm a bit further through it.

just finished the second week's reading. wondering how the yamamoto piano anecdote relates to s's mother - playing a piece N times in a row, practicing scales in a way that maybe resembles percussion (weight must come from the shoulders), etc. also, wondering how yamamoto's experimental division of music into fragments & passages relates to yo-yo ma's father's proclamation of teaching by dividing into quarters.

Just by chance I watched The Magnificent Seven yesterday, as it was on TV. Will try and screen The Seven Samurai asap. And then Battle Beyond the Stars.

About midway through wk III's reading now. It gets so much better and more enjoyable once ludo takes over - not only is he a more sympathetic and mature character, he appears to have the capacity to develop and to distinguish between important and unimportant, which means a plot is beginning to emerge.

Stayed up way past my bedtime finishing wk III. It was great, I really enjoyed the long yarn across Asia.

It's very interesting how far we are into the thicket of unreliable narration. I think the proportion of incontrovertibly real events ('He said...', 'I went...') is much greater now Ludo/Stephen/David's in charge, but how high that proportion yet is I do not know.

Also interesting and kind of a relief to find out that Sibylla's been fronting all along, and eg still can't follow the film dialogue, though it does rather take what she's done to the boy beyond the quirky/comic/farcical and into the monstrous. Whether there's a wider metaphor beyond the futility of learning I guess we'll see. How much greater the boy's capacity is to distinguish between point and pointlessness we'll see too, though the first sentence of wk IV is promising.

On a personal level, it's nice to have pomp & snobbery lampooned so. You occasionally come across people who claim to have spent a year learning Russian in order to read Tolstoy in the original or whatever, and it's such bollocks. My french is v good and there isn't a magazine article I'd get more out of untranslated. I seem to have little capacity for front, and sadly not much more capacity to recognise and deal with it, and frankly I feel I'd be better off if I did. It's been a pleasure to see bollocks exposed, if you'll pardon the expression.

Not sure what you mean about Sibylla's fronting? She's obviously a sharp cookie and has a remarkable command of languages, and it's also fairly clear that he is more of a prodigy than she ever was, him outstripping her at some point was fairly inevitable. And, certainly from her perspective, he was the one driving the process, demanding to be taught rather than being forced to learn.

I meant that while she was narrating I understood that she was prodigious at languages, but as soon as it switches to Ludo I got the impression that she was an amateur. Though as I say it's hard to know how reliable the narration is - this might be simply because he's stunningly gifted so everyone looks amateurish, plus it might just be Japanese and iirc she considered herself not fit to teach it right at the start. But his remark that 'she's been watching The Seven Samurai for a decade and still has trouble with the japanese' was quite cutting I thought.

i did japanese at university and have difficulty understanding anything toshiro mifune ever says tbh

to me, 'she's been watching this film for a decade and she still has trouble with the japanese' is mostly just revealing of how Ludo doesn't get what it is like to be a normal language learner! Plus Sibylla tends to learn languages as languges-to-read, not languages-to-speak/listen, and I think these are significantly different skillsets. I was rereading the bit where Sibylla describes Liberace (not the)'s writing style and started thinking about what 'language' means - Liberace has this monstrous facility with language in his writing (even if strewn w logical fallacy) and Sibylla has this delight in language in her reading, but particularly in parsing it (and even just thinking about parsing it - the fact that Estonian has fourteen cases as something to cling to).

i guess i don't think of her as fronting being good at languages because the whole bit where she drops out of her phd (or whatever it is) after losing 30+ hours trying to read a book in german!

ps i am really enjoying Ismael's reactions because i totally heart Sibylla and it's a v useful corrective

Ha yes, there is something of a 'taking sides' about it at this stage.

yeah i'm not a huge fan of sibylla but it's interesting to hear how many ppl think she's great.

Finished WK.II, now into WK.III

I love the Yamamoto interview (not like a Sunday Times interview but obv the Sunday Times interview you'd like to read.) Just felt that Cecil Taylor was begging to be somehow inserted into this, as a piano-percussion man.

Lots of London concert detail I was amused by. Ice cream (which is kinda weird) and you're always home on time but what if you did miss the last train home (circle line closure), what then?

Is Ludo demonstrating a capacity for other interests? He has learnt way too much, wants to devour more, but has no curiosity about the other boys at school. At the point where he takes over so...

(I just happened to read Elsa Morante's History in between sections of this last week and was really struck by Giuseppe: similar age, a mother and no father, but he is undernourished and develops illness post-WWII, illiterate, has the odd friendships and acquaintances. Just noting the coincidence of coming across these two novels.)

where yall at?? some slack-ass book groupers on this thing.

I left it in a place I am not. Will rectify at the weekend. Feeling the lack.

really busy period of my life, acutely aware that I missed last week's reading. hope to get back in the saddle soon.

I'm done. And I don't know what to make of it. What was it about, what was its purpose? It wasn't really a story, or only in the barest sense. Was it just 'a bunch of stuff that happened'? It wasn't short on themes, really it was overburdened with them and they were picked up and dropped more or less at random.

The second section seemed weaker than the first, being essentially a loosely strung series of anecdotes. The dads were caricatures - albeit highly accomplished ones, I was continually wondering if this or that anecdote had been cribbed from some Sunday Times supplement about a real-life adventurer or intellectual or artist. It was entertaining, but not engrossing.

Also the suicide chapter I found problematic. The dismissal of the Samaritans was trite and the whole understanding of depression was very limited. You can hardly blame Ludo for this but when it was shared by Sibylla and never countered I can't help but see this as an authorial problem. Other people have found the actual death scene moving, I just found it a bit creepy and weird.

(I checked Jonathan Glover's 'Causing Death and Saving Lives' and he does indeed unhelpfully suggest changing jobs, emigrating or leaving your family. He also suggests psychiatric help but groups this with the others as an 'upheaval'. But it's just a throwaway line really, the book is really more about dealing with these issues from an outside and relatively dispassionate perspective.)

accidentally finished the book again last week and can't quite remember where we are meant to be? are we meant to have finished?

(nb just after writing the 'basically i can never understand what Mifune is saying' comment above, i read on, and found Ludo mentioning the fact that no-one can ever understand what Mifune is saying. it is not just me!)

this is the week for finishing i believe, the home straight, late finishers should be aware there may be no tea or cake left in the village hall.

Haven't finished it, saving the last part for this weekend. Didn't post on part 2, as I didn't feel there was much to say about it. I kinda enjoyed the Idiot's Guide To Greek part, was a bit bored by the pianist's African adventure, enjoyed the rest of his silly interview, and felt happy that I didn't attend that concert.
Agree that it's picked up a bit again when Ludo takes over the writing (or is everything in the book filtered through him to some level or other? Not sure how many levels of narration we can assume here ... )
I'm a sucker for portrayals of geniuses, I must admit, though the business with the school was the first time I started thinking about how Sibylla might indeed be a pretty bad mother.
Take his ruminations over people's amazement at his knowledge, how he just started wondering if everyone else who -didn't- say anything didn't because it's actually completely commonplace, even subpar.

What do we know about his time in school? I didn't catch any reference to how long he stayed there, and how they managed to get him out without getting into any trouble. It was interesting how his notes on the school don't have a word about the other kids, except through his and S's arguments with the teacher.

Sibylla on the subway was kinda sad comedy, I think it was around this part where I started thinking of A Confederacy of Dunces. She somehow reminds me of Ignatius Reilly -- the shock at what people are saying, the lack of social skills. The whole allcaps repetition of phrases bringing to mind "Can I BELIEVE what I'm hearing" or whatever his riff was. Ah, I haven't read that book in a long time, I cannot say more than it gave me a sort of whiff of remembrance.
There's good comedy in her ranting always resulting in responses like "I really think", "I really don't think" ... Wait, is this a comedy? (Or how does that work, if it's jokesy in the middle it's going tragedy in the end? How'd 7 Samurai end again? Ingratitude? People getting back to work? Uh, nevermind)

So we finally got to see the first lesson L learned from 7 Samurai, when he decided to just go ahead and parry the blow and get himself a different dad than his real one. His conversation with his real dad was nice, particularly when he let on that he never bothered to read S's ridiculous note.

I've been wondering how after a bunch fo years S hasn't found herself a better job. Is she so damn isolated and weird that other work is pretty much out of the question? I can kinda imagine her job applications being the worst/greatest things ever and scaring the hell out of potential employers.

Loved the story of RD and HC. All it lacked was some good old swashbuckling and a fair maid.
Hrm, there's a fair amount of sadness in this book, but at this slight distance I seem to only recall the fun.

(Sorry, this was awfully random and rambly, I really ought to have tried writing down some thoughts immediately after finishing)

Oh lord, how did so little thought become so much text.

Just finished. I enjoyed all the yarns (both real and recounted) but the rest I need to have a think about. Otherwise, what ledge said.

not you ffs

is this where i have to guess whether this is lex, the pinefox or tuomas

the answer is contained within your post

Pleased to note, before I embarked on a long post, that I have already said what I was going to say here, and I would have said it much worse (apologies to those trying to parse my recent posts – wrong unclear words put down in snatched moments between work).

However, there are a couple of additional things I will put down, which are tangential to HdW at best but maybe it’ll come back round. I’m fooling around in a very sunny, bustling Leiden, while my partner is at a conference, and I’ve got a good, cold glass of wine, so let’s give it a go.

(so this ended up being very very long - sorry not sorry. tl:dr: tyler cowen isn’t *all* bad, the universe leaks, I think, and I’m feeling more generally forgiving to the HdW Situation, but that may just be the wine. may not be very well or at all proofed, sorry)

The first is that I do actually have a sneaking admiration for Tyler Cowen, and am slightly fascinated by him as well. A couple of things I like – his interviews, if you can bear listening to him*, can often be good, when they’re not right wing libertarian, extropian or rational community love fests. He has a well-cultivated skill of asking very direct questions that get at the heart of his interviewee’s philosophy and his ingrained habit of trying to ‘solve for the equilibrium’ produces more demanding interviews of his guests than I think you’ll find anywhere else.

Why do they all talk like this? I’m looking at you, Dwarkesh, or you Patrick McKenzie (who can also do some very good stuff). I think it’s significant. They don’t realise the importance of language or conversation as performance, and that’s significant because it also how they relate to the world, they don’t understand proportion (other than as a cost-benefit problem), they’re extremely data point is a 0 or a 1, and their methodology doesn’t allow for things that aren’t that.

It is amazing listening to Cowen talk about literature. He reads a lot, probably more than any of us will ever read, yet I have no sense that he has any emotional understanding of literature at all. I know - who will save us from people telling us what to enjoy or how to enjoy it? It’s up to him. But I find his descriptions of his engagement with art hilarious, slightly alarming and also a bit sad.

(One distinguishing capability, among others, about Helen de Witt, is that this is a space she operates in extremely successfully. She *does* evividently love and enjoy both worlds, and is able to bring them together. An underrated book of hers is Lightning Rods I think – the insanity of the corporate optimisation mentality applied to a small slice of the sex industry. I’m not sure I’ve read anyone outside Swift or Jane Austen who can do what she does in holding multiple intents and meanings in one sentence in this novel - she does it very well in The English Understand Wool as well, as well as creating an infinite loop, in the same manner as Finnegans Wake. It’s a really interesting work.)

The other thing Tyler Cowen does very well is provide extremely economic analyses of many disparate things. This by the way is a strength born of the weakness described above. He will apply his brain in the same way to Thai food, as Jane Austen, as Coltrane, as Hayek, as marathon running. It’s laughable in one sense, well actually in nearly all senses, but it does also apply a certain relentlessness in all matters.

So, really, what we’re talking about with Cowen is that old Seeing Like a State matter of “legibility”. And why I don’t mind this is that my personal view is that we should continually avoid epistemic capitulation in the face of ambiguities and uncertainties until we can no longer do so, but should also allow that there are genuinely ambiguities and uncertainties - unknowables, crucially (touch of Gödel here perhaps) - and that the point of analysis is *over* the line where you can no longer factorise the equation, and not before it, excluding everything that doesn’t fit. V capitalist imv. (I make no particularly moral judgment there - it is capitalist, technically speaking).

A digression on the capitalist element here:

The book I’m reading at the moment – Plough, Sword and Book – Ernest Gellner – puts it very well I think, regarding the comparison of ‘rational’ societies to pre-rational societies – we might use the marker of the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance, or any other similar - I would add Capitalist to that list.

I won’t quote all the relevant section (obv I was going to quote all the relevant section), but he writes that:

A man making a purchase is simply interested in buying the best commodity at the least price. Not so in a many-stranded social context [he is setting ‘multi-strandedness’ against the ‘single aim’ possible in a rationalist society]: a man buying something from a village neighbour in a tribal community is dealing not only with the seller, but also with a kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival, potential supplier of a bride for his son, fellow juryman, ritual participant, fellow defender of the village, fellow council member.

All these multiple relations will enter into the economic operation, and restrain either party from looking only to gain and loss involved in that operation, taken in isolation. In such a many-stranded context, there can be no question of “rational” economic conduct, governed by the single-minded pursuit of maximum gain. Such behaviour would disastrously ignore all the other multiple considerations and relationships which are also involved in the deal, and which constrain it. These other considerations are numerous, open-ended, intertwined and often incommensurate, and hence do not lend themselves to any cost-benefit calculation

Well, and so are we all in this position if you assign ‘kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival’ etc to elements of our emotions, social life, intellect, experience etc.

But of course Cowen very sincerely believes capitalism is the best mode for humanity, seemingly unaware that ‘humanity’ is about how we live - inclusive of past generations and future generations - and not how generate the best (for some value of ‘best’) outcomes, which is an absolutely legitimate parallel political and economic activity.

To return to ’legibility’ after that digression on capitalism. As Scott pointed out, legibility comes with very meaningful gains and very meaningful losses - the losses are not important to the purpose of legibility, which is sort of mainly extractive. There are meaningful to us though. However, what I want to pursue here is legibility as a feasible ideology, akin to, say, mapping unknown bits of the earth or universe, such that you can place it at the centre of what you do, as Cowen does.

And in fact Cowen himself makes a very good and important point in an extremely-painful-to-listen to interview with Dwarkesh:

TC: I'm not sure what those numbers going up mean or what a GPT-7 would look like or how much smarter it could get. I think people make too many assumptions there. It could be the real advantages are integrating it into workflows by things that are not better GPTs at all.
And once you get to GPT, say 5.5, I'm not sure you can just turn up the dial on smarts and have it like integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.

DP: Why not?

TC: I don't think that's how intelligence works and this is a Hayekian point. And some of these problems, there just may be no answer. Like maybe the universe isn't that legible.”

Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth, 31 Jan 2024

So, I think he’s absolutely right here, and it is important for thinking about AI and how well aligned it is with humanism (the proper sense of humanism rather than some of the bad words you see about it sometimes). And this observation very much reminds me of a favourite quote of mine from RF Langley:

[q]Is it possible for the ontological content of the world to drain out? in *Murphy* by Beckett there is a phrase 'the quantum of wantum does not vary.' but is that true?

Perhaps another way of putting it is to ask whether it is possible for the ontological content of the world to reduce in resolution, become graphically more basic like going travelling backwards via games consoles? (not perhaps a great analogy as there is a decent argument for saying that the games we have now are less imaginative and interesting than the ones we had then, but you get the idea)/[q]

Looking at the richness of the world (in fact the house around him) in his journals, and noting how everything was retained, every friction the door had taken in being opened and closed in some way retaining the experience of its existence, and extending that to the universe, RF Langley asked the question 'but does it leak?'

And I think that question is critical. My instinctive assumption is that the universe leaks, or at least as far as it is meaningful for humans, that is what it does. And this entails a lot from the importance of a painting by Rembrandt (my definition of humanism, if that isn’t the da vince cartoon of a smile on a woman he saw in the street - it’s both ofc), to the importance or not of religion, to tyler cowen’s derangement, or whether social democracy or socialism is the better bet.

I don’t want to say Helen de Witt is addressing all of this. That would not be a good thing. But the fact that she is interested and insightful on both Kurosawa and Gerd Geigerenzer is a good thing. It is playing at the heart of the matter, and is also at the front edge of the world at the moment.

When I’m walking through the park, I think about the point in time and space I’m in - the damp archipelago at the north-west part of the continental european landmass, the most extensive moment in history at the point I’m thinking it (let’s say the 16th April, 2026), hurtling through space - and I feel a lot of art is a couple of decades at least behind that point. I don’t feel that with Helen de Witt.

Having read some of what she wrote, I feel generally a bit more sympathetic to the situation she describes. She’s very good at some stuff, she’s very bad at some other stuff, so are we all. Like most of us she probably shouldn’t make public the less good aspects of her life, but god, *that’s* nothing to get on a horse about. Of course it’s also fine to laugh at because it’s funny and a bit stupid.

good post, fizzies. i like tyler too. i'm not sure how i feel about his interviewing style though. with the right guest it can work, but sometime his rapid-fire nerd questions seem completely void of life and humanity. i like dwarkesh though

It is amazing listening to Cowen talk about literature. He reads a lot, probably more than any of us will ever read, yet I have no sense that he has any emotional understanding of literature at all. I know - who will save us from people telling us what to enjoy or how to enjoy it? It’s up to him. But I find his descriptions of his engagement with art hilarious, slightly alarming and also a bit sad.

Got a piece/podcast example of this?

oh lol, i thought this hadn't posted (internet failure while abroad) and thought 'thank christ'. will attend tomorrow.

Money and writing. It could always be worse. This is a twitter bio I just found.

"Former senior executive in a multinational oil company. Retired Entrepreneur. Just finished my first novel. Writing, not reading"