Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

oh cool, another unfinished sentence.

"i would say" what you cvnt.

no idea.

oh i also want to say that only murders in the building is v good at reviving an old school detection approach.

I still don't understand Fizzles' original claim that "the cops are crap" in BROADCHURCH, as against earlier detective fiction.

Because, again, this is a founding premise of Sherlock Holmes - it's literally all over A STUDY IN SCARLET.

Not having seen BROADCHURCH I think I imagined the central characters *were* police detectives, so I can't tell if Fizzles is saying they are bad cops, or other cops are bad cops. But either way, the "inept police" seems to be a very long-standing genre element.

I partly agree with Fizzles that hard-boiled detection involves less detection and logic than Golden Age detection.

I also think that this idea is exaggerated (a view I take, in fact, from Charles J. Rzepka's good book DETECTIVE FICTION), and there is a lot of detection in Chandler and later detective fiction.

One of the things I like about Chandler or Ross Macdonald or even Paretsky is how much detective work goes on and how they have a craft that leads them to do things like search a garden, look under a cooker, talk to neighbours, follow up documents, to an extent that the reader could not always expect.

I suspect that Fizzles' idea, which I think is partially true, would become still truer if you went further into a kind of ... *mood-based crime fiction* - say, David Peace - where rational deduction counts for much less than in Chandler.

A good clue to the fact that detection and deduction takes place in Chandler is that Chandler inserts long scenes in which Marlowe talks to a police detective about the facts of the case and they review evidence and bat theories back and forth. The action here is intellectual and deductive, not about violence and action.

"The action here is ... not about ... action" -- not a good sentence, ultimately.

so ok i didn't say the cops are crap. it's about the main character right? the cops in golden age tec fiction are *ok* but not up to the baroque crimes the main detectives solve. in broadchurch the cops are the main detectives?

i agree that marlowe is quite good at finding trouble ('trouble is my business') and has a nose for it. that is his mode of detection. and his pinkerton-adjacent detection work is fine and good. it's just a v different aesthetic - i LOVE marlowe and indeed hammett. i'm just saying that the plot movement to resolution is more vibes based.

while i was in glasgow last night got chatting to someone who did a degree in philosophy and was now about to do a degree in software development. i said that i felt it was important to see a wider perspective on software development as it relates to culture and he asked me for a reading list. this is what i sent him and i'd be interested in knowing what other people here suggest:

So, while i’m very hungover on a train heading back to London, I thought it might be a good chance to repay those cigarettes.

I wasn’t really very cogent last night, and i’m not much better now tbrr, but thinking about the relationship between software development, coding and society I might change the word ‘society’ to ‘culture’. Culture being how society communicates, self-identifies and finds meaning. The platforms with which we communicate that - whether it’s cave drawings, the printing press or twitter are important; as Marshall McLuhan said ’the medium is the message’. It allows for fruitful interrogation of the question of whether politics is downstream of culture or culture is downstream of politics - Stephen Bush writes well about this here.

Anyway, here’s some suggested reading across that space.

A Mathematical Theory of Communication – Claude Shannon (with a v useful introduction by Warren Weaver)
Shannon wasn’t the first but this is arguably one of the most important texts in recent technology history. Information theory has an incredibly wide application to modern society. it’s a major part of media compression to ensure high quality images can be conveyed over limited bitrate bandwidth for instance. i think it has a much wider application - it can be applied for instance to communication changes when we started working from home and had fewer in person meetings.

if you going to be able to see things in terms of ‘information spaces’, which I often find useful, then it’s pretty much mandatory reading.

Information Rules – Carl Shapiro and Hal R Varian
If you want to understand something, why it’s being done, understand the money/transactional flows. Published in I think 1999 (one of the discussions at the beginning is about the relative business models of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encarta cd-rom) but still one of the very best texts about what information economies and software means for business models and transactions more generally. The economics of information.

Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky
Another old one, but still full of excellent principles on software development. Full blog available here, but also available as a useful book.

The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology – LM Sacasas
Again, another collection of blog writing. Sacasas writes on the interactions between software, technology and culture. “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” He has a new blog called The Convivial Society

The Last Samurai, Sexual Codes of the Europeans, Lightning Rods, Some Trick - all by Helen DeWitt (I mean I’d recommend everything by her tbh). Helen DeWitt is imv one of the best fiction writers around at the moment. That's not in the “greatest living writer” sense that might make me say eg Pierre Michon or Gerald Murnane, but that she’s one of the very few writers genuinely interested in coding, statistics, how things get done and how that relates to art, ethics and culture.

Memetics - the units of cultural information we use to communicate and cohere around ie memes are reasonably well understood these days, though I don’t know a lot of good writing about them, so let me know if you do! Mimetics, the dynamics of how those cultural groups form is less well known, but increasingly being talked about. The founding author of Mimetics (not to be confused with Mimesis - the excellent theoretical history of literature by Eric Auerbach) is French theologian René Girard, author of several books worth reading, I think I mentioned I See Satan Fall Like Lightning last night. so-called ‘godfather of the like button’ because Peter Thiel was reading Girard the night before he put a load of investment into a nascent Facebook. His fundamental thesis is that desire is mediated rather than direct - we desire someone else’s desire, because in some way we have made them models for who we want to be (totally reasonable behaviour this btw - it’s not a bad thing), and inversely, we also look at negative models - people we don’t want to be, for defining our boundaries or distinctions. note the binary sorting and rivalry here. like/don’t like. i would argue that binary sorting is probably the most significant epistemic distinction that social media brings to our age (with v much negative consequences imo). Luke Burgis has a couple of useful introductions to memetics, which I’ve attached.

I disagree with his contra memes stance in the second document tbh, i think memes and mimetics are complementary as i say.

I mean there’s a lot more, with an increasing dilation of scope, but that’s enough for now right?

I do think it’s well worth understanding probability and risk, just generally, and to that end I’d probably mention Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L Bernstein and Superforecasting by Phil Tetlock. Ted Chiang’s v good short story The Lifecycle of Software Objects is worth reading too (from his generally good collection Exhalation).

I’m super wary of the Slate Star Codex/Tyler Cowen nexus of techno/economic libertarianism, but Tyler Cowen does have some interesting conversations on his podcast and is a smart interviewer even if he’s an a-grade cunt imv.

To sheepishly interject what I'm reading, though it's a digression from the ongoing conversation:

I finished The Metaphysical Club. It has some excellent aspects. Louis Menand has a knack for clearly and briefly summarizing the essence of the ideas of his main subjects (Oliver W. Holmes, Wm James, John Dewey, Charles Pierce) and their ramifications. He draws many important connections between these men, their formative influences and influence upon one another, and the spread of their ideas into society.

Where the book flounders a bit and becomes too diffuse is in Menand's tracing too many secondary or tertiary figures, or pursuing minor and purely biographical details that have little bearing on the main intellectual thrust of the book. Still, the strengths outweighed the weaknesses and I'm very glad I read it.

I also recently read The Singing Sands, Josephine Tey. It was a good, engaging novel, but one should be aware that the 'crime and its detection' component was almost entirely incidental to the plot, which concentrates largely on resolving the personal difficulties of Alan Grant, who also happens to be a police Inspector for Scotland Yard.

I continue to dip into Eve's Hollywood, which is becoming increasingly hard to care about, in that it depends entirely on enjoying the company of the author, and her rather proudly flippant, gossipy and self-involved personality. She can be funny, but her humor doesn't wear well with me. YMMV.

Fizzles, you wrote this:

"Broadchurch is the bullshit long end of that game where the cops are crap"

which is why I have expressed the puzzlement that you have expressed. I'm further puzzled that you are now saying you did not write it.

It seems to me simplest to seek to agree that the Golden Age / hard-boiled detection dial is a spectrum, not a dichotomy - thus 'less' rather than 'none'.

I don't understand software, thus could not comment on the trade of your software developer, much more than I could on that of a plumber or a F1 mechanic.

ok, it was an unhelpful way of expressing things: 'where the people doing the detection are crap' should be the sentence. 'cops' was doing a wide angle thing.

i don't understand your 'spectrum' sentence.

the software developer stuff was another post tbh. you understand software development is a job right tho?

So you're saying that the detectives in BROADCHURCH are bad at their jobs?

That may be true of BROADCHURCH, but it's not true of eg: THE BRIDGE (the autistically brilliant detective), nor of Marlowe or Lew Archer.

So I don't understand the claim unless you're actually saying something else eg: "they are great detectives with damaged personal lives"?

My perhaps too-elaborate or even poorly written sentence was saying: these kinds of detective fiction are somewhat different, yes, but not absolutely different; some detective fiction (Chandler) may include less precise deductive work than others (Christie), but may still involve *some* notable deductive and intellectual work. I think the distinction here is overblown.

I'm sure I understand that it's a job ... but so is plumbing or F1 mechanics! Not easy for most of us to comprehend.

it is absolutely true of the bridge she takes 5000000 episodes to work it out and she still doesn't work it out it lands on her lap despite her poor cop behaviour.

ok yes point taken on the software job. i still think it can be understood as something which has significant implications on how we live our everyday lives.

I've just noted with concern that Fizzles' post cites Stephen Bush approvingly.

I agree that lots of things have massive implications for our lives, but I don't think that most of us understand most of them.

i agree with that last post. i do also think it's worth spending a bit of time to understand things that have massive implications on our lives.

is stephen bush bad? if so why?

he proved to be bad yes

really tho

I feel that, having already said more than enough, I should leave it to others to answer that last question.

I'm glad to see that someone is already doing so.

which series of the bridge are we talking about? and what was her bad cop behaviour?

(her bad behaviour is generally bcz she is too rigidly cop iirc)

i do also think it's worth spending a bit of time to understand things that have massive implications on our lives.

Is a bit of time enough?

Good questions and observation from Mark S. She did have one unprofessional personal thing where she was a bad cop because she behaved uncharacteristically, re her own past? But she seems a great cop on the whole to me.

no but that's bad personal behaviour. nothing to do with cop behaviour. *that's the whole point* right?

more importantly there are no clues, there is no sense she is following the obvious strands. literally in the first series the culprit is the most obvious person in any policier detection. it's just lead after lead after lead gets disproved. it's like anti-cop work.

Isn't a fact about THE BRIDGE that it's always 10 hour-long episodes so it really goes from one case to another to another, across the episodes, still introducing new characters about 6 hours in, and the original clues aren't very relevant by the end? Unsure of this. But it would perhaps be a violation of 'Detection Club Etiquette' in that the reader isn't given enough at the start.

yeah i think that's right. form determines plot. i have a prejudice that all the matter available at the start is what is required to solve the end. formal classicism if you like. but that is - as i say - formal constraints, which as in poetry i think are aesthetically useful.

yes none of the series of the bridge so far do that

they're more like those occasional eps of law and order where the initial crime and the final court case involve completely difft perps

I thought the highlight of The Bridge was the performances, not the cases. Particularly Sofia Helin, she was absolutely remarkable. I seem to remember Kim Bodnia departing under something of a cloud after season 1, but I can't remember what it was.

i think that nails the point i'm trying to make which is that - i don't reallty care about the golden age v the bridge. it's not a moral thing - it's just an aesthetic thing. we devise these lanbyrinths to create enjoyment.

is stephen bush bad? if so why?

― Fizzles, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

he proved to be bad yes

― mark s, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

really tho

― Fizzles, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

This was the last time I saw him on my TL.

Surprised at the number of people suggesting this wouldn't happen - toddler repeats name that is often on the radio, more on this story as we get it. Have people on Twitter never sworn in front of a toddler? https://t.co/7rgo3qXO0w

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) August 31, 2022

that’s right tho? isn’t it?

O'Toole's tweet is clearly bullshit.

oh yeah absolutely. silly tweet. but only cos of the gloss. children absorb weird things. they’re sponges right?

No doubt but it could've been worded differently, not like a defense of it.

yeah agree. it’s a technocratic failure, which sbush is particularly vulnerable to. “it makes sense therefore” bullshit. still i think bush is a smart commentator trying make sense of things in public in a way that allows for interrogation, so i don’t get the hatred tbh.

his cultural knowledge is terrible tho.

Back to books the rest of us are reading, and not sheepish about it…

after a semester-beginning slog I am reading Michael Palmer’s ‘The Circular Gates,’ of which I was previously only aware of the titular sequence. It is pleasant tho perhaps more abstract in its images than I’d been prepared for.

I’m also reading Laura Riding’s Collected Poems for the first time, it is blowing my mind, she is tremendous.

read WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST by hanna bervoets, a very short novel about people who do content moderation for a facebook-like platform and a relationship between two of them. (there's little new about the content-moderation stuff if you've read an article or two about how awful a job it is.) the book seems fairly straightforward right up until the point where it is . . . not

Fizzles, I think it would be fair and simple to say that some people dislike Bush because of political views that he has expressed.

I'm not bothered about his cultural knowledge, but a person who has published, on one platform or another, the statements that he has is not a person that I will describe as a 'smart commentator'.

yeah i don’t see the latter point. but the first point is irrefutable. and this isn’t the thread for it so.

not really sure about “political views he’s expressed” either tbh. he seems pretty left-centre tbh. mainly his commentary is “how do we connect policy or lack of it to what people experience” which seems like an important journalistic function.

Nearing halfway through DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. Quick, punchy, actually a short novel yet things are still simmering. Strikes me that the central character isn't, at the outset, a detective at all, and that this novel is as far from Detection Club "all evidence needs to be present from the start" detection as can be. There is virtually NO evidence, 90 pages in - barely even a mystery. This would help to establish the continuum on which Chandler is, by comparison, some way across on the intellection and deduction scale.

Poster Dow's comments about race in this African American story are pertinent. I'd like to see the film (again?) one day.

xpost to ledge, i'll be interested to know what you think about the anomaly. i picked it up at random in mercer st books nyc and.... well oulipian my ass. i sort of enjoyed it a bit and then ended up hating it?

I enjoyed it. It's a yarn - a great 'what if...' of little consequence - and a series of character studies, and i think it succeeds at both of those. What did you find hateable about it? The piling up of characters at the beginning did get a bit annoying but just as I was tiring of it the next, and most enjoyable, section came along. And maybe it's a bit pleased with itself? The obvious conceit that Victor is writing the story (I spotted a mention of 'ascot' which surely wasn't accidental), the list of Hollywood stars that Adrian not quite resembles (though as someone who's been likened to Michael Keaton, Matthew Broderick, and Tim Curry - not to mention Tony Blair and most plausibly Mick Jones of The Clash - I decided to enjoy the gag). Perhaps it helped that thanks to a few long train and bus rides I read it in one day, the first book I've managed to do that with in years. Yeah it's not obviously oulipian but I think there are some hidden tricks going on. (I searched the lrb for 'anomaly' to find the review and it came up with a poem by John Ashbery who's mentioned in the book - surely a coincidence!)

i don't know how much this matches fizzles's sense of a shift but the key to the cops in chandler (and possibly hammett before him?) is less that they're incompetent and more that they're many of them corrupt and just don't care

is this ever true in golden age? the only example i can quickly think of is in chesterton's the secret garden -- and that guy couldn't be less like a chandlerian cop lol (he's more of a figure in the dreyfus wars, and therefore in fact on the correct side, which chesterton with caveats was not). early on sayers had a fool called SUGG but she evidently bored of writing unclever ppl and replaced him with the guy who became wimsey's BiL (who is highly intelligent and an excellent detective, but unlike lord W has always to play by the official rules)

the underlying thesis of the father brown stories is that the human mind cannot be unpicked by mere forensics (which can be fooled): insteads you must apply reason to how ppl actually work -- which i wd argue is proto-golden age (take the "rules of detection" as they were after holmes and fashion perversely deliberate obstacles; sayers is like a realist translation of same, except her detective therefore needs to be even less realistic) (and even more annoying)

I enjoyed Devil in a Blue Dress enough when I read it years ago to consider more Mosely. I should have!

I'm reading J.H. Prynne, Elizabeth Taylor's short fiction, and rereading Tess.