Reviews and Comments

It's a shootout in a mall. In space.

Actually I read the digital version of this second edition, which, along with a remarkable library of other titles in Classics, is available free from the Center for Hellenic Studies. Greg Nagy's books are (all?) there: don't miss Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter!

Anyway, Lord/Parry is one of those books I've imbibed the general idea of from references in other books (like Nagy's, or Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon). In short, oral epic composition is based on the use of "formulas" (meaning, generative templates that fit the meter). Observing and recording Yugoslavian epic singers at first hand, the authors believed they were witnessing the very same process that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey (and, Lord adds, many other European/Near Eastern epics from Gilgamesh to Beowulf). At the level of comparative poetics, what is most powerful is the argument that, through the mechanism of formula, composition and performance can be the same thing, that there is no "original" but instead the changing same of tradition which the individual singer both continues and authors anew each time.

I think this remains a very useful model of creativity to think with, and not only in the "oral epic" setting but anywhere generic creation might make use of a set of reusable templates. In fact I got to this digital text through a chain of links from a citation in discussions of (sigh) large language models, which, say people like Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, might be thought of as models of "tradition" in the specific sense described here. I guess the idea is that training the big model is like finding the mnemonic units of the internet-tradition. However, I'm pretty skeptical of that particular connection. It's clear that for Lord, the compositional act is governed by higher-level abstractions ("themes" and even "myths") as well as by the particulars of the social situation of the performers—how they acquire tradition, how they perform it, to whom.

I found the opening chapters most compelling, and it was fun to get a glimpse into those Yugoslavian epics (quotations are given in original and translation—and digitizations of the field recordings are included!). There are even pages with Bartók's transcription of the singing and accompaniment.

The later, comparative chapters, including two long ones on Homer, are kind of a letdown, at least to me. They revert to what sound to me like late-Victorian speculations about how it "must" have been for the great Homer to dictate his songs. Then there are Golden-Bough-esque assumptions about the kernel of "myth": that the "return song" is deeply about the "revived god." That just sounds silly. Still, I'm very glad I read it for the first three chapters alone.

Awake in the middle of the night and needing something emphatically not related to literature to read, I pulled this book off my shelf, which had migrated there from my parents' shelves. The author is a family friend, so the form of this book, which combines explanation-for-laypeople with memoir, is entertaining for me. Guth's infant son (infant at the time of the discoveries he recounts) is a recurrent character—but to me Larry is the impossibly accomplished older fellow faculty brat. (My dad also has a couple of cameo appearances, including one astonishing scene in which he is on the other end of the phone when Guth called up MIT to suggest they should make him a job offer. That was a different world.) This is popular science narrative in which the protagonists are actual people whose collaborations are threaded with snark and competition, and who are sometimes pulled back to earth by family responsibilities, problems with the contractors working on the house, illness, and so on.

Guth's exposition of the history of cosmology up to the invention of inflation is entertaining on the missed opportunities and persistent errors, and he is unlike most popular-physics writers I can remember in paying detailed attention to the empirical confirmation or discomfirmation of theory by astronomical measurements. Guth follows the popular science rule forbidding equations, but he includes graphs (lovingly LaTeX'd: this was 1997, and they still look good to me) with actual measurements and uncertainty bars.

As for inflation, I guess I now have a slightly less vague idea of what it is and why it's significant. A little hurried wikipedia-reading suggests it remains the best very-early-cosmological game in town. I wonder why inflation hasn't really filtered into the kids'-guides-to-the-universe I have recently been, um, co-reading.

At some point I decided it was safe to mix a little modernism into my recreational reading diet now and then, figuring that my research is now far enough from modernism that it won't normally make me start anxiously thinking about whether I need to address it professionally. On the one hand, this didn't give me agità. On the other hand, meh. Enjoyed the downtown local color, but not so much the sense of reading a second-tier Sister Carrie rendered in montage. Brief glimpse of deported reds singing the Internationale is relevant, I guess.

I went on from Asimov to this robot story (at least Wells doesn't suffer from engineer-ism). It's fine, though the TV-episode-formula quality has intensified. I already can't remember any of the human characters. There are bad ones and good ones, and Murderbot saves the good ones from the bad ones.

(I always make up the "finished reading" dates. This isn't a performance chart.)

I needed something bite-sized to read and for some reason drifted over to this, bought ten years ago. I'd never actually read it all: I've taught "Reason" and "Runaround" many times, but this time I soldiered through the whole thing, including the frame story about Susan Calvin. Those early stories are far, far better than any that came later—funnier, more surprising, unencumbered by the "Three Laws" as the main object of interest (which is a problem because they're not interesting). There's something heroic about Asimov attempting to make Susan Calvin into a character, but she's just a cardboard cut-out of the Brainy Woman.

As for the Three Laws, it's truly bizarre that they have had such staying power. I guess people really want to confound "is" and "ought": Asimov wants you to imagine robots as beings for whom moral imperatives really are natural laws. As a corollary, engineers (and "mathematicians") can take over moral authority. May all the non-existent gods help us. The novel culminates in the takeover of earthly affairs by a benevolent robotic "World Controller" who knows exactly how to make the planned economy work.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the boneheads who absorbed this stuff at third remove have given us ChatGPT. Thanks for nothing, Asimov.

Sometime last month-ish, I finished the last volume of Mann's tetralogy. Want to write at more length about it. Interesting to see that the decline of the US as the global superpower was absolutely clear to Mann by 2012, following Bush-era imperial overreach and the Great Recession (which he aptly calls "The Great Neoliberal Recession"). Now I think no one is in any doubt about that. Mann's bleak assessment of the prospects for moderating climate change--as he says, a product of ALL the sources of social power, economic, political, military, and ideological--is compelling, and, of course, the prognosis has only worsened with the last decade.

Perhaps most useful for The Times We Live In is Mann's emphasis on "politicized capitalism" ("access to the state confer[s] possession of private corporations") as the typical outcome of neoliberal reforms in Latin America, East Asia, and Russia. And now also, we can add, the USA as well. A Marxist would say, "Politicized capitalism? Is there any other kind?" but the point is not to deny the always-political nature of capitalism but to emphasize that this particular entanglement of political and economic networks, with states and parties losing their partial autonomy, is distinctive to the post-postcolonial and neoliberal era. "Policized capitalism" seems to me a more revealing label than "authoritarianism" for what we now have locally. As Mann's account of the postwar "Golden Age" emphasizes, capitalism's beneficial effects depended on caging it politically with strong labor movements and their parties. Today we have not simply an unrestrained, lawless state but the mechanisms of the state unleashed for the benefit of individual capitalists—to the detriment of capitalism itself.

Anyway sometime I'll blog my "but what about CULTURE" thoughts. Reading Mann was a really moving experience, almost comparable to what I got from reading Bourdieu, or Proust.

Like watching TV at bedtime without the sleep-disrupting effect of the screen. Perfectly amusing in its predictable way. It is a fairly pure example of the space Western---Mbot as loner cowboy rides into a frontier town and helps out some sweet kids in trouble with the local gang boss. Back in the days of Galaxy Magazine this kind of thing was an object of mockery, but it serves the purpose still. Looks like it's Fantasy-of-redemptive-violence-carried-out-by-an-antisocial-but-fundamentally-decent-oddball o'clock again.

Continuing on with Mann's history of it all. He seems to have finished vols. 3 and 4 simultaneously but divided up the resulting Monster Fun Book into two, sort of like Brendan Sanderson partitioning the last Wheel of Time, except the patriarchal authoritarians with the messianic ideology don't win in Mann's 1890–1945 story. Ha ha! I am funny!

Mann continues to be lovely to read, though in going through this volume I kept finding myself saying "ruh-roh" as some element of the fascist ascent that had an obvious parallel in our time fell into place. Mann is darkly convincing about fascism as a distinctive, and distinctively effective, modern phenomenon, which came with a compelling ideology of renewal, dealt ruthlessly and successfully with its political opponents (including the old-regime conservatives who thought they could manipulate the fascists), and used militarism effectively both in war and as an economic policy. In Mann's account, without Hitler's maniacal overreach into Russia, Germany might well have succeeded in dominating the continent. On the flipside of this is Mann's remarkable suggestion that the rapid end of the European empires and the rise of US power (as well as the stability of the Soviet regime) were in a sense contingent results of World War II.

Mann is a "grand theorist" with his "four sources of power" and his totalizing history, but in a way the best part of his account is his determination to root out contingency. He is very good on the causes of the Great Depression as a set of "overlapping causal chains" rather than a single process. Likewise on the contingencies that allowed the labor movement and Roosevelt to make the New Deal happen in the US—and limited its eventual reach. Meanwhile, if you want Swedish Social Democracy, your labor movement needs to have agrarian allies.

Jacobin's recurring "this book/film is socialist and therefore good" feature has almost never led me to something I enjoyed, but Rodari's Telephone Tales was a rare exception. Both I and certain children I know liked that book a lot, especially the more gleefully silly entries (like the story of the palazzo made of ice cream, or the one in which the stuffy town of Busto Arsizio creates a building full of things for its rowdy children to smash, and then everybody has a grand old time). So I looked for other Rodari to try and found this, also translated by Anthony Shugaar.

It's an extremely strange extended "fairy tale," where the chaos and whimsy occasionally become grotesque and threatening. The best part is the surprise ending, which is much more in the spirit of the Telephone Tales than what comes before. Shugaar's introduction says the villains stand in for the Brigate Rosse, but if that's so the implications are less clear than the liberal both-sidesism he seems to draw from it. Anyway, not as great for children---not so much because of its ideological indeterminacy (about which: who cares, really? when they're old enough, give them ST:TNG and Terry Pratchett and they'll turn out okay)---but because it's just not as fun. Forse sarebbe meglio in italiano.

Sort of ruined this for myself by watching the excellent TV adaptation first. Impossible not to see Gary Oldman every time Jackson Lamb appears, and the plot is (largely) the same. However, it's still very good. The basic idea that the "security services" are a mass of incompetents intriguing against each other by conjuring threats where none exist and then shifting blame for their own inevitable failures remains both pleasing and correct. The writing is moderately literary, but not in an offensive way.

Picked this up when the Victorian and modernist graduate reading groups made it a joint choice...sometime around 2008. Pulled it off the shelf now for obscure reasons. I don't feel like forming an intellectual position about it, except to make the obvious remark that London is clearly "one of the dark places of the earth" here.

Bought this to consider it for teaching, shelved it unread, picked it out more or less at random because the volume was easy to carry on a trip. One always likes to go back to the source, even if one doesn't actually believe in sources. There are robots. They are workers. They rebel against exploitation. They eventually reproduce humanity.

At least in this translation, it's a pretty unexciting play. It drips with misogyny towards its single female character (duplicated in the third act by a robot). Held up against, say, Lang's Metropolis (only 6 years later) it seems thin and timid, even if it does stage the utter annihilation of humanity. But even that was certainly already done to death (ha ha) by Wells. I don't know a thing about Czech literature or the Czech stage, though, so my judgments may be Anglocentric. Anyway I won't teach it in future.

Actually I read the Project Gutenberg transcription of a reprint of the first edition. This has been on my queue for a long time because of its reputation as a send-up of identity politics avant la lettre, which I thought would be fun to read, back before the backlash had brought us the likely end of civilization. In the meantime it’s become somewhat research-related, since I learned from Brooks Hefner’s book Black Pulp that Schuyler was a crucial figure in black newspaper fiction. Anyway, this novel is more of a Menckenian highbrow satire than anything else. Highly readable and very funny in parts—though, speaking of the great backlash, the spoof of presidential election politics is very, very close to home in 2025. Schuyler understood quite clearly the dynamics of the party system and the opportunities it offers to ideological entrepreneurs of any race who know how to exploit racism and class conflict.

Despite explicitly repeating the literal party line on racism being used to split the working class, the novel finally tends toward a Swift-like “Tory anarchy” more than any kind of radical challenge to the existing order. I think.