Political hack turned apparatchik Jack Burden, narrates the rise and fall of “The Boss”, depression era Louisiana Governor and demagogue, Willie Stark. The roman à clef par excellence.

My Take:

“All the King’s Men” is quite simply the best dramatic exploration of the political experience in any medium. While it’s most famously known as a thinly veiled fictionalisation of the political career of real life 1930s Louisiana Governor, Huey “The Kingfish” Long, ATKM is much more than more than a curiosity of political history. In fact, its themes are so timeless and its execution so perfect that ATKM is arguably a more rewarding when read in today’s political environment than when it was released more than 50 years ago.

A Pulitzer Prize winning novel that was adapted into a Best Picture Academy Award winner, the genius of ATKM is that it is a fully realised success at both the politico-historico-philosophical level as well as the level of the individual characters. Robert Penn Warren once claimed that ATKM was “never intended to be a book about politics” and he’s right. ATKM is a book about people. People with the same emotional baggage, complex personal relationships and rich emotional palates as anyone else. But also people who happen to be living and working in a political environment and are expressing their ambitions, insecurities and passions within this context. By treating his characters as people first and political actors second, Warren is able to produce a much more realistic and insightful exploration of the political experience than someone who had set out to write “about politics”. In this sense, ATKM reminded me more of “To Kill a Mockingbird” than the more obvious political analogues (eg “Primary Colors”, “Power Without Glory” etc). Yes, it has a “big picture” message, but the core of the novel, what makes it a classic, is a lyrically written, nuanced character examination.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Warren’s perceptiveness about the political process. ATKM rings very true to my experience of professional politics. ATKM portrays politics in all of its glorious idealism, compromises, corruption and malevolence but without the cynicism or naivety that generally undermines the realism of most of the political fiction I’ve seen (whether literary, TV, or Film).  A big part of the realism of ATKM’s politics is a result of Warren insisting that all of the facets of politics, good and bad, are recognisable to varying degrees in each of the actors. Warren doesn’t offer any judgement of the actions of his characters other than to show that they have consequences that are frequently equally morally complex.

Highly recommended.

Excerpts

ATKM contains a wealth of home spun aphorisms and anecdotes from the Whatever It Takes school of political practice.

The most famous aphorism is Willie Stark’s classic invocation of ‘the ends justify the means’:

“You got to make good out of bad. That’s all there is to make it with.”

But there are many, many more.

At one point, Willie Stark describes one of his key political operatives, Tiny Duffy thus:

“The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody, somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a night’s sleep. All you got to do is keep the albumin scared out of his urine.”

In a similar vein, when Stark sends his minions out to smear a seemingly high-minded political rival, he is adamant that he will be equally susceptible to blackmail as any other political actor:

“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

In another memorable passage, Stark defends his blackmailing of his rivals with ‘dirt’ with a home spun articulation of the ends justify the means:

“Dirt’s a funny thing. Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt.”

In addition to being a compelling narrative, ATKM is also brilliantly written. It’s the kind of book that leaves you constantly dog earring pages containing extended sections of brilliant prose.

Burden on his first wife:

“As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and the human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure in the juicy, sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet minon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact, as the realisation grew that the machine-Lois belong to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk) the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly.”

Burden on his unrequited love:

“It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shows and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.”

Willie Stark’s father on his uncooperative dog:

“If he was hongry now, we could guile him. But he ain’t hongry. His teeth gone bad.”

University of Chicago Professor of Jurisprudence and polymath at large, Cass Sunstein reviews traditional models of aggregating and filtering information in the context of the impact of rapidly evolving technological change. If it was published on Twitter, I’d give it a re-tweet.

My Take:

The best summary of Cass Sunstien’s “Infotopia” comes from a review by Ethan Zuckerman:

“You can think of Info-topia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.”

If  this gets your intellectual juices are flowing, you can pick up this book for some first class discussion of the competing theoretical approaches to the aggregation and utilisation of dispersed information. If you’ve never heard of either Hayek of Habermas, you should probably pass up this fairly academic book for a more accessible take on the topic (Clay Shirky or James Surowiecki should do the trick).

Infotopia offers an engaging, if at times slightly academic, discussion of the various established models of information aggregation and filtering, their strengths and short-comings and the way these models are being influenced by the technological changes occurring under the umbrella description of Web 2.0.

Sunstein surveys the academic literature underpinning four models of information aggregation and usage:

1. The statistical averaging of independent judgements of members of a group (ie the Condorcet jury theorem);
2. Deliberation and reasoned exchange of individually held facts, ideas and opinions between members of a group (ie the Habermasian norm of the Public Sphere);
3. Allowing members of a group to buy and sell on the basis of their judgements and examining pricing within a market to aggregate diverse individual judgements (the Hayekian model); and
4. “.. enlist(ing) the Internet to obtain the information and perspectives of anyone who cares to participate.” (eg through online collaborative tools like blogs, wikis etc).

The most interesting sections of Infotopia come when Sunstein engages with this fourth model. I found this quite surprising as I thought Sunstein’s previous effort in this space (Republic.com) was overly pessimistic and relatively uninformed. But in “Infotopia”, Sunstein quite convincingly comes to the conclusion that online communities of interest are something qualitatively new for information aggregation and filtering; in Sunstein’s words “Neither Hayek nor Habermas”. Sunstein recognises that while online communities are able to utilise the ability of the Hayekian model to aggregate diverse information without reference to the formal authority of the source (and favourably cites Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s declaration that “Possibly one can understand Wikipedia without understanding Hayek… But one can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”), the lack of a price signal prevents it being a perfect analogue. Similarly, whilst online communities can perpetuate many of the short-comings of Habermasian deliberation models, particularly in the way that they can increase the ideological extremism of their members (“When like-minded people cluster, they often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods.” ), it can also avoid some of the worst instances of group think by allowing everyone to have a voice.

Both the strength and weakness of “Infotopia” is its academic grounding. Sunstein takes a much less evangelical approach to the potential of both groups, and technology, looking in detail at the circumstances that must be present before groups can outperform individuals at filtering information. In Sunstein’s words:

“A lot of the book is about how and why groups utterly fail to get the information that they need — about how and why private and public institutions (1) do not elicit the information their own members have, (2) amplify the errors of their most confused members, or (3) go to unjustified extremes.”

This cautious, caveated approach can make “Infotopia” a little dry at times, but it does give additional credence to Sunstein’s conclusions when he does definitively come to a conclusion (in particular with respect to his generally depressing conclusions regarding the shortcomings of deliberation and rational exchange in reaching good group decisions).

There’s an element of “an excellent review article stretched into a less impressive book” here, but on the whole it’s a worthwhile read.

Synopsis:

My Take: While I’m not much of a science fiction fan (relative to its real adherents), as a general principle I do try to give the seminal authors of all genres the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, if you’re the best of breed in one genre, you probably have something to offer people outside of your niche. As a result, H. P. Lovecraft has always been on my list of authors to give a try.

His work, most of which was released in the mid-1920s has been deeply influential both within the Sci-Fi community (frequent references to his work on Boing Boing is a testament to this) and a broader fraternity of artists who take a darker perspective on the progress of human civilisation (including Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jorge Luis Borges). Writing before the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror genres were even recognised (they were collectively referred to as simply weird fiction at the start of the 20^th Century) Lovecraft has subsequently become a canonical writer in all three.

So with this in mind, thanks to my trusty Kindle, copyright expiry and Project Gutenberg, I recently sat down with Lovecraft’s most famous work “The Call of the Cthulhu”.  TCOTC tells the story of a young man who stumbles across a pre-historic blood cult that worships extra-terrestrial beings who look like a cross between a squid, a dragon and a man and inhabited the earth before mankind. In the abstract, it all sounds more than a little absurd, but Lovecraft is a dab hand at the art of story-telling and “The Call of the Cthulhu” unfolds with impressive suspense through three independent, documentary style narratives. While each narrative largely stands alone, as each develops, the narrator reveals a bigger, horrifying picture to the reader.

Lovecraft’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and the influence that the great author had on his work is obvious in TCOTC. Despite its globe-wide setting, the book’s first person retrospective format gives the story a dark and claustrophobic feel. Overall, it’s first class horror. Amusingly enough, despite its fame and cultural influence Lovecraft himself was not particularly enamoured with TCOTC describing it as:

“rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”

I think Lovecraft is being a bit hard on himself here. Yes, it’s a bit absurd – but it’s well told and atmospheric – more than enough for a good ‘weird fiction’ tale.

Highlight:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Lovecraft’s protagonists are nevertheless driven to this “piecing together,” which becomes a primary plot device in many of his works.

Thankfully while my blogging has suffered, my reading time has held up well (the one saving grace of interstate commuting) and I’ve had a good run of very enjoyable books in recent weeks including “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, “Stalingrad” and “Berlin” by Antony Beevor and “The Uninvited” by Geling Yan. So I’ve got a long backlog of freshly read books ready for blogging once I get some more free time.

The most exciting and blog-worthy arrival on my bookshelf in recent times however is my brand new shiny Amazon Kindle. I am a long time ‘early adopter’ of gadgetry, or as some have less charitably characterised it, a ‘prolific buyer of toys that I don’t need’. However, I have to say that so far I am especially pleased with my kindle purchase.

As a biliophile with hundreds of hard copy books on their bookshelf and a passion for stalking second hand book stores at every opportunity, I didn’t make the jump to e-books lightly. Given the (significant) upfront cost of a Kindle, you pretty well have to swear off buying hard copy books for quite a while to justify the purchase – a difficult sacrafice for someone with my proclivities.

However, after a lot of reflection during the extended period between the announcment of the international version of the Kindle and it’s availability for purchase, there were a few factors that ultimately tipped the balance in favour of taking the plunge:

Never having to pay for literary classics again

As an earnest young reader with pretentions of literary seriousness I’ve been slowly but steadily trying to work my way through the cannon of literary classics. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m really not a library person – it feels like a fascist imposition to me to have someone tell me when I need to read a book – so every classic means another purchase. Even at second hand prices this adds up.

However, thanks to the joy of copyright expiration and the non-existent distribution costs of electronic books, there is a mindblowing number of literary classics available for free download from sites like Many Books and Project Gutenberg. Kafka, Camus, Dickens, Twain, Joyce, Austen, Bronte, Carroll, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov etc etc. There’s more than enough free content out their for the Kindle to keep you occupied for a very long time.

Savings on Amazon Shipping Costs

Yes, Kindle books retail on Amazon for around half their hard copy list prices (plus a 15% increase for Australian readers), but to my mind, the real savings a realised through not having to pay the exorbitant costs of having books shipped half way around the world to be delivered to Australia (not to mention the agonising wait!). There’s real potential for savings here.

Kindle’s Versatility

The final tipping point for my purchase was the fact that Kindle provides each user with an email account to which they can send documents for uploading onto their device. The benefit of this? Anyone (like me) who has a job that involves voluminous amounts of reading can easily email whatever documents they are working their way through to their Kindle for a portable, and more pleasurable reading experience. Instead of staring at an electronically lit rectangle for hours, or lugging around a bulldog clipped print out of the report de jour, I now transfer these documents onto my Kindle for my civilised consumption. I had heard a number of people in the US blogosphere spruiking this function for sometime before the Kindle’s release in Australia and was keen to take advantage.

The Reading Experience

What I couldn’t be sure of until I got my hands on one in real life was what the reading experience would be like. After a week’s reading I am happy to say that it is fantastic. The Kindle is light enough to be more comfortable in the hand than a paperback, but solid enough that you don’t feel like you’ll fumble it. I’ve already found myself strongly prefering it for reading in bed or on the couch where previously I needed to prop up books somewhere. The screen is very easy on the eye and if anything is a better experience than reading print on paper.

However, the most satisfying aspect of the Kindle reading experience was completely unexpected. Because the Kindle screen fits slightly less text than a paperback page, the more frequent ‘page turning’ gives you a satisfying feeling of momentum whilst reading. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen reinforces this effect and gives you a graphic appreciation for how much you’ve read in a sitting.

Gripes

As you can see, on the whole I love my Kindle. I do however have a few gripes – and they are pretty well all functions of being an international Kindle user. You really are a second class citizen as an international user of Kindle. No access to content that is widely used in the US: no blog content, a very limited library of magazine content (no Economist, no New Yorker, none of the literary reviews) and a sadly limited library of books for purchase. It’s not just Australian specific authors who aren’t available to Australian Kindle readers – but many major new release books. Hopefully this will improve with time as Amazon reaches agreements with Australian rights holders, but it’s far from ideal at present.

My Take: I’m not usually a fan of Science Fiction (and I’m NEVER a fan of fantasy. Yes that includes The Lord of the Rings – don’t even get me started). In my (admittedly limited) experience science fiction novelists too often submit to the temptation to invest too much of their imaginative skills in creating a fictional alternative world and not enough in creating depth and complexity in their characters. Similarly, to my mind, the ability to ‘make the rules’ in the fictional universe allows authors to imagine their way through some pretty improbable plot arcs. It’s a bit weak I know, but I just can’t see it as ‘real’ literature.

However, I make an exception for the Foundation series. It may be because I came upon him at a tender age, before I was overcome by my current insufferable pretentiousness, but for some reason I can forgive Isaac Asimov of the sins of science fiction writing. I can still see all of the usual shortcomings, but for some reason they don’t seem to irritate me. Go figure.

While Asimov wrote more than 500 books, and managed to get an entry into 9/10 of the Dewy Decimal System categories (striking out in the 100s; philosophy and psychology), the Foundation series are considered his best work. Will Smith and Robin Williams might have popularised Asimov’s ‘Robot Series’ in recent times, but for the Sci-Fi geeks, Foundation still reigns supreme. In fact, it was awarded the Hugo Award in Science Fiction for “Best All-Time Series”

The series tells a 500 year story arc beginning with the development of psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that could be used to predict the future at the macro-level (essentially it is like a kind of econometrics but with less grand claims). Interestingly, ‘Foundation’ has long had an appeal to economists and inspired the careers of Paul Krugman and Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.

Using psychohistory, Seldon predicts the collapse of the current Galactic Empire (groan, I know) and the descent of man into a 30,000 year long dark-age. In an effort to reduce the time spent in decline to a mere millennia, Seldon establishes two ‘Foundations’ isolated and secluded planets tasked with preserving human progress to date and re-establishing civilisation.

How can this possibly be interesting reading if Seldon could see the future and therefore eliminate any prospect of failure for the Foundations? Well firstly, psychohistory only works at the macro-scale – it can’t predict the behaviour of small, isolated groups of people, which is exactly what is left after the collapse of the empire. Secondly, the citizens of the Foundations are not themselves aware of Seldon’s macro-predictions – such knowledge would affect the accuracy of his predictions. So the success of the Foundations in re-establishing civilisation is always in the balance – you’ll just have to read all seven volumes if you want to know whether the Galactic Empire is restored.

Highlights:

The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:

1. The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
2. The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
3. The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.

My Take: I hadn’t even heard of Richard Price when a friend recommended “Lush Life” to me, but when a friend told me that he was a writer for the superb HBO series, The Wire, I grabbed a copy as soon as I could. Happily, “Lush Life” delivers exactly what any fan of The Wire would expect from one of its writers; a brilliantly observed, Dickensian panorama of inner city American life. This is not your average police procedural, linear crime novel – it’s a rich, detailed and wide-ranging portrait of Lower East Side New York amidst which a murder happens to occur.

The shining highlight of “Lush Life” is the absolutely brilliant dialogue. Reviews rave about Price’s mimetic gifts and pitch perfect language. In fact, The New York Times went so far as to open its review of “Lush Life” by claiming that:

“no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price—not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase.”

The New York Magazine gushes in its brilliant in character review that Price is the:

“Best writer of dialogue since Plato. Slang you never even heard of. Keep expecting the page to stand up and wander off somewheres, make a pass at your wife, order a bacon sandwich.”

It’s not just hyperbole – Price really is a virtuoso of verbal interaction. At one point in “Lush Life” Price writes a 75 page police interrogation scene that doesn’t lose momentum once; an amazing achievement.

Despite this, critics are divided as to whether the “Lush Life” constitutes a great book of substance and narrative or simply an impressive collection of scenes. I can see the concern – while the dialogue is brilliant, I wasn’t exactly clear what Price himself was trying to say through “Lush Life”.  Similarly, as a result of Price’s reliance on dialogue, the book is much longer (over 400 pages) than it could have been with a bit more narration. But I’m not too fussed by this. It wasn’t so long as to be painful and Price’s prose offers delights on every page to compensate for any passing lack of direction.

Highly Recommended.

Highlight:

Lugo rests his crossed arms on the open window as if it’s a backyard fence. “License and registration, please?”

“For real, what I do?”

“You always drive like that?” His voice almost gentle.

“Like what?”

“Signaling lane changes, all road-courteous and shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, nobody does that unless they’re nervous about something.”

“Well I was.”

“Nervous?”

“You was following me.”

“A cab was following you?”

“Yeah, OK, a cab.” Passing over his papers. “All serious, Officer, and no disrespect intended, maybe I can learn something here, but what did I do?”

“Primary, you have neon trim on your plates.”

“Hey, I didn’t put it there. This my sister’s whip.”

“Secondary, your windows are too dark.”

“I told her about that.”

“Tertiary, you crossed a solid yellow.”

“To get around a double-parked car.”

“Quadrary, you’re sitting by a hydrant.”

” That’s ’cause you just pulled me over.”

Lugo takes a moment to assess the level of mouth he’s getting.

As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but… if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew it, is no more.

My Take: As you may have guessed by now, I have a real peccadillo for Japanese fiction. I love the nuance and non-linearity of the story telling and the subtlety of the characterisation. I appreciate the lack of exposition and the fact that in general, readers are left to scrutinise the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the characters with less direction than in much ‘Western’ literature (sweeping generalisations I know). While  Ishiguro has lived in the UK since the age of 5 and claims not to have been influenced by Japanese literature, I do think these ‘Japanese’ characteristics are deeply infused in his work.

In particular, I think the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ strongly underpins Ishiguro’s body of work. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to explain, so I’ll quote from Wikipedia at this point:

Mono no aware ( mono no aware^?, lit. “the pathos of things”), also translated as “an empathy toward things,” or “a sensitivity of ephemera,” is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo-period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man’yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition.

This melancholy ‘awareness of the transience of things’ is a feature of all of Ishiguro’s books to varying degrees. Ishiguro employs a first person retrospective approach in each of his books that allows him to subtly, but deeply, explore the attitudes, emotions and motivations of of his protagonist. In this way, the revelation and resolution of the protagonist’s self-deceptions and mental obstacles to ‘awareness’ become the driver of the story arcs of each of his novels. As Ishiguro has said:

“As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

In this sense, little actually ‘happens’ in Ishiguro’s books outside the mind of the protagonist. In fact, often his protagonists don’t even reach full awareness by the end of his novels – leaving many carefully developed plot threads ultimately unresolved. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it.

All of these characteristics of Ishiguro’s writing are clearly present in ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ Ishiguro’s second novel. In my mind this is Ishiguro’s strongest work and it’s not hard to see why it won a Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for a Booker Prize. Given that the real joy of Ishiguro’s writing is the process of revelation, I won’t write too much about the contents of the novel, but suffice it to say, the societal upheaval of post-war Japan is fertile ground for Ishiguro’s style of contemplative reminiscence.

Highlight: Everything – just read it.