A Just Recompense

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

A few weeks ago, a Catherine Project group leader I studied with last year announced he would be leading a Reading Group on Moby Dick this summer. I was very tempted. Even though I was deep in Ancient Greece at the time, Melville certainly counted as a Big Book (my reading theme for this year) and I’ve always felt like my English degree was fraudulent because I’d never read it. Yet I’ve always found it too intimidating to read it by myself. I decided against signing up for the group for a variety of reasons, but decided to go ahead with the book, because that is the most important lesson the Catherine Project has helped me learn: I can – and may – read any book I want, both in terms of capability and permission.

I wasn’t a total Whale Novice. I don’t think anyone who pays any attention at all to anything in the Western World is, since he regularly surfaces in everything from serious literary discussion to news to pop culture. Also, ten years ago I took a mooc (of course I did) on the Digital Humanities, and have been following the professor’s bot, MobyDickAtSea, ever since, watching it spout random quotations (and some which are not so random) with random frequency every day. One of the distinct pleasures of reading the book has been, in fact, coming across those quotations I’ve become familiar with over the years: “I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law”; “Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?”; “Signs and wonders, eh?”; “I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me.” And my favorite, though I haven’t seen it recently: “But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?”

One reading is not enough to know this book; and even if it were, one post would not be enough to discuss it. So I’ll just mention some of the parts that most interested me.

Overall, I love that so many people find so many different things in it. I browsed around Youtube and various other places, and see it is considered to be about: God; Existentialism; Truth; Justice; Capitalism; Energy; Society; Fate vs Free Will; man’s need for God, for Truth, Justice, Society, etc. It’s a pretty cool book that can support all those readings. I’m thinking an eleventh-grader could come up with a rip-roaring take of a dystopian novel, if they put a little effort into it.

Given my general interest in narrative technique, I found the book to be a wonderful collection of styles, not something I would have expected from the mid-19th century (which may explain why it was a resounding flop, critically and popularly, when first published, and only achieved its superstar status after WWI with the rise of Modernism). Beware of so-called ‘abridged’ versions; they don’t include the preliminary portions “Etymology” or “Extracts,” and much of the whaling and seafaring detail is often removed. The original publication in England, in fact, omitted the Epilogue, which is like leaving the last word off a poem.

But even as a complete work, the initial material sets up a certain impatience to get on with it, yet focuses on the Whale. “Etymology” is ascribed to a “late consumptive usher at a grammar-school” while “Extracts” comes from “a sub-sub-librarian.” I would propose both come from a future Ishmael; one from someone he knew in his school days, and one from his own research. His interest in literature is obvious given he writes the book itself, includes chapters structured as plays or with stage directions, and will have written his own poetry to be tattooed on his skin (a paean to Queequeg?). the novel also draws on a great deal of literary allusions, particularly the Bible and Shakespeare. Ishmael – or whatever his name is, for it’s obvious this is a pseudonym – is obviously an educated man, not your average bottom-rank sailor.

Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

An oddity I can’t quite parse – I need to do more research on this – is that Ishmael, the presumed narrator of the entire book, sometimes records events and conversations he didn’t witness. I think of Thucydides admitting he made up speeches in his History to jibe with what he considered appropriate; Ishmael makes no such announcement, he simply goes omniscient. How does that work? In a workshop, he’d be called on it. Fortunately, they didn’t have writing workshops in the mid-19th century, so Melville just did what he felt was right. This is worthy of more study on future reads.

The opening chapter, in the lead quote, is right up there with the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. I can see why high schoolers might hate it – some of the sentences take a little time to parse – but so much of it is beautiful. And even in the middle of describing how a ship works, or the function of the line, or how a whale is turned into the precious oil, a few sentences will pop up that links such things to all of life. It’s the literary version of Grey’s Anatomy turning every quarrel with a colleague or medical catastrophe into a Life Lesson (uh oh, I just lost someone there).

The title of that first chapter, “Loomings,” sets up both an ominous tone – I doubt anyone who reads this book is a completely naïve reader – and the battle between fate and free will. Where does one end and the other end? Do we drive into Fate via the highway of Free Will? Can we swerve out of it again? Take the Sermon in chapter 9: Jonah, accepting his punishment, shows true repentance and thus earns forgiveness: “Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.” So much of our contemporary moment shows the effects of doubling down on our sins, turning them into offenses against us instead of by us. Maybe a lot of the bad side of Fate could be forestalled by a little repentance, a little acceptance of responsibility.

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
“Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

This rather Platonic description of the really-real hiding behind the apparent-real ties me into the Big Question: What is the Whale? Is it God? Then why is so much devoted to describing the two aspects of white: on the one hand, it’s purity and goodness and cleanliness, and on the other it’s terrifying and bizarre and abnormal. Do good and evil depend on one’s viewpoint? Or is this an allusion to Edmund Burke’s view of awe, which generates terror, as in “God-fearing”?

I spent some time with Fedallah’s prophecy to Ahab

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?”
“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.”
“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee: – a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see.”
“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
“And what was that saying about thyself?”
“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
“And when thou art so gone before – if that ever befall – then ere I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still? – Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom – “Hemp only can kill thee.”
“The gallows, ye mean. – I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision; – “Immortal on land and on sea!”

This trope of the misunderstood prophecy just came up for me in a work from… about 2500 years ago: Herodotus records the Oracle’s message to Croesus that he will destroy a great empire if he attacks Cyrus, and of course, he does – but it is his own great empire that he destroys. Then there’s the thing about Birnam Wood which was only 420 years ago. And the Paul Simon lyric from almost 60 years ago: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Seeing Ahab discover the true meaning of the prophecy in the final paragraphs is more tragic than satisfying.

The end of the book brings together a lot of open threads. Queequeg’s coffin, turned into a life-buoy – a cool enough metaphor in itself – bounces out of the vortex to save Ishmael, who is picked up by the Rachel, rebuffed by Ahab, searching for her children for she had none, connecting with Ishmael’s implied orphancy. Is it Queequeg’s love that saves him, or the duty to tell others his tale – for that quote from Job hovers over the epilogue: “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The book of Job repeats this three times: three different servants come to Job to tell him his flocks and family have been destroyed. And Job replies, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s acceptance. That’s belief. Faith without doubt. Is this what Ishmael asks of us?

In my wanderings, I discovered one commentator – I don’t remember which – said that only the Bible has generated more art than Moby Dick. I’m skeptical of that claim, but I came very close to buying Elizabeth A. Schultz’ review of this art in her book Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art. I may someday. I was also intrigued by artist Frank Stella’s project of creating one work of art, be it painting, sculpture, or other medium, for each chapter; an examination of this work is available in Robert K. Wallace’s book Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes, which is clearly out of my price range but does seem to be available by library loan. I’ll think about it.              

As I admitted at the outset, there is more in this book that I haven’t included here, and more that I haven’t even glimpsed. This will do for a first pass. At least I now feel entitled to my degree.

Resources:

• Find the MobyDickAtSea bot on Bluesky
• I only discovered Robin VanGilder’s blog Beige Moth, with its entries for each chapter, at the very end; my next read will pay more attention to it.
• The book Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art by Elizabeth A. Schultz is available online
• Robert K. Wallace’s book Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes  is available online.  
• One of the many video resources I took a look at is the National Association of Scholars’ meeting, The Great American Novel Series: Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, much more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; And he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel: those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. I.1

Until about a year ago, I couldn’t really keep straight the Persian War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Punic Wars when they showed up on Jeopardy. I’ve got 2/3 of them straight now – at least, to some degree, though the details of some of the battles are still pretty murky. I just don’t seem to understand war.

As I rounded the final turn of Herodotus, I started preparing for Thucydides. I’d already discovered I had an edition translated by Jeremy Mynott; I don’t remember when or why I acquired it, but there it was. However, I’d found the maps and footnotes of the Landmark Herodotus to be extremely helpful, so I added the Landmark Thucydides to my stash. I was surprised to find that it used a lightly edited version of the 1874 Richard Crawley translation, but that worked out well, since so many other sources use the same text. In places, Mynott is a bit more readable, and I appreciate that he uses the title “The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians” to avoid the sidedness of The Peloponnesian War, but he structures the text by years and seasons, as Thucydides originally did, rather than by books, as later editors have done. Although the book divisions are noted, I found this hard to follow at times. However, it was definitely a benefit to have two different texts to work with.

So what’s it all about?

Thucydides spends a fair part of the first Book of his account presenting a summary of the past thousand years or so of the Hellenic world to defend his claim that this was the biggest war in history. He then zooms in on the Pentecontaetia, the fifty years between the Persian war and this one, to come up with his view of the cause of the war: the Spartans’ fear of Athens’ growing power.

One of the most notable features of this book is its extensive use of speeches, debates, and dialogues.

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. I.22

Now, I read this, and I think, oh, so he made them up; they’re not what Pericles or Cleon or Alcibiades said, but what Thucydides believes they must have said. But scholars seem to think there’s enough evidence (with some exceptions) to accept the speeches as reasonably close to what was actually said. And who am I to argue. It’s a good thing, too, since a lot of political philosophy and international relations are built on Pericles’ Funeral Oration (my favorite part is when he tells women, “[G]reatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad.” Ok then) and the Melian Dialogue (“[T]he strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must).

I did find myself engrossed in several of the individual battles, though not about battle tactics. A very bloody civil war broke out at Corcyra; Thucydides analyzed it thusly:

Words changed their ordinary meaning and took that which was now given: Reckless audacity came to be considered courage; prudent hesitation was specious cowardice; moderation was unmanliness; frantic violence became manliness; Blood became a weaker tie than party; revenge was also held of more account than self-preservation. III.82.4
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two; society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. There was no promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. III.83.2-3

If some of these features seem terrifyingly contemporary, Thucydides would be perversely pleased, as he noted, “The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, which is have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.” III.82.3

I was a bit brokenhearted over the destruction of a couple of little towns that merely got in the way. One was Plataea, familiar from the final battle of the Persian War. Just before the official start of the Peloponnesian War, Thebes decided to attack Plataea, an Athenian ally right on the border. The Plataeans fought back, unwisely as it turned out, and after two years of siege, were slaughtered, the town burned, and the land given over to new residents. This event was meaningless in the grander scheme of things, which made it ever the more tragic to my mind.

Years later, a similarly meaningless tragedy befell the town of Mycilessus when a band of Thracians, too late to join the force bound for Syracuse, were told to ‘injure the enemy’ on their way back home. Some of that involved stealing cattle or taking other booty, but the people of Mycilessus were slaughtered. Thucydides writes it was, for the Mycilessians, “a calamity, as lamentable as any that happened in the war.” Again, I was moved more by this absurd attack than by the horrid drawn-out deaths of thousands on Sicily. I think it’s because soldiers know what the risks are; ordinary people living their lives don’t expect to be wiped out.

On the brighter side, one of my favorite battles involved little loss of life, was fought over an uninhabited island, and turned out to be a major turning point in the war: Pylos. Athens thought it would make a nice base for raiding the Peloponnese; the Spartans had a plan to stop them, but things went awry, and several hundred Spartan soldiers, including many elite Spartiates, ended up stranded on the heavily wooded island of Sphacteria (rhymes with bacteria, for an added touch of accidental humor). Things dragged on, with the  Athenians unable to round them up.

Cut back to Athens itself, where big shots Nicias and Cleon are arguing over the problem. Cleon – earlier described by Thucydides as ‘the most violent man in Athens’ III.36.6 – can’t understand why the forces don’t just go in and get them. Nicias gives a “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it yourself” kind of reply, resigning to let Cleon take over the mission. Cleon blanches at first – no, no, he didn’t mean that – but eventually gets into it, and promises he’ll capture or kill the Spartan forces within twenty days.

As it happens, the main reason the existing Athenian forces haven’t managed to take the island is the forest cover. And here Thucydides reports Cleon runs into a bit of luck: one of the Spartans on the island accidentally sets a fire that burns the brush cover, allowing him a clearer path to attack. The Spartans and Spartiates, trapped, surrender, something that shocked the Hellenic world: Spartiates don’t surrender, they come home with their shield, or on it. Except here they became hostages, assuring that the constant raids on the Attic countryside would stop for the time being. Sparta even offered a peace treaty, but Athens was feeling it now, and refused.

Turns out, they should have taken the deal, since a couple of years later:

Athens had suffered severely at Delium, and again shortly afterwards at Amphipolis, and had no longer the confidence in her strength which had made her before refused to accept the offer of peace, in the belief of ultimate victory which her success at the moment had inspired; besides, she was afraid of her allies being tempted by her reverses to rebel more generally, and repented having let go the splendid opportunity for peace which the affair of Pylos had offered. V.14

There’s a reason peripeteia – reversal of fortune – shows up in all those Greek tragedies.

Fortunately, the Spartans were also pretty discouraged, and they wanted their hostages back, so the Peace of Nicias was signed. Thucydides tells us, however, that “looked at in the light of the facts it cannot, it will be found, be rationally considered a state of peace…” And we don’t have to take his word for it; the list of battles goes on. It is true, however, that Athens and Sparta do not directly attack each other for six years.

But let’s go back to Amphipolis, since it has a direct impact on us as readers. It was just another battle: Brasidas, the military star of Sparta, took over Amphipolis by cleverly outmaneuvering his Athenian counterpart Cleos. Both of them died, which, as Thucydides puts it, ‘cleared the way for peace’ since they were both warhawks. But the interesting thing is that a back-up fleet was supposed to be at Eion, just a hop, skip, and a jump away; that fleet, however, was all the way over on Thaos, more than a day away, and couldn’t get to Amphipolis in time to save the city from Sparta.

And why is this so interesting? Because the general of that fleet was… Thucydides.

It was also my fate to be exiled from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; And being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely. I will accordingly now relate the differences that arose after the ten years’ war, the breach of the treaty, and the hostilities that followed. V.26.5

Athens’ loss was history’s gain: now Thucydides, as one of my more lighthearted sources put it, had nothing better to do, so he wrote this account of the war. He did return to Athens when the war ended.

The Sicilian Expedition occupies two of his eight books. He presents it as a misbegotten idea from the start and a disaster for Athens, not to mention the free-for-all that eventually ended the ‘peace’ and started The Peloponnesian War: Part 2: The Decelean Phase. But it was very popular at the start:

Everyone alike had fallen in love with the voyage: the older men believing that either they would overwhelm the places they had sailed against or that so great a force could at least suffer no disaster; the young men of military age yearning to see these far-off sights and spectacles, full of good hope for their safe return; and the mass of common soldiery seeing an opportunity to earn some money in the short term and to acquire a power that would be an endless source of earnings in the future. And so in the face of this extreme passion on the part of the majority, anyone who felt otherwise was afraid of seeming disloyal if he voted against and therefore held his peace. VI.24

And when things went sour, the populace of Athens was furious at the loss of life and resources, “angry with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition, just as if they had not themselves voted it…” (VIII.1). Then he says something I find amusing: “As is the way of democracy, in the panic of the moment they were ready to be as prudent as possible.” (VIII.1) Oh, that’s the way of democracy, is it? Could’ve fooled me. Of course, they didn’t have the Internet. But I still imagine the streets of Athens were buzzing with blame for years to come.

The Sicilian Expedition also begins the bizarre tale of Alcibiades – ah, Alcibiades, the man who never knew a country he couldn’t betray; who, when condemned to death in both Athens and Sparta, ran to Persia; who eventually weaseled his way back into Athens only to be thrown out again. It’s interesting that, to me, with my limited grasp of Greek politics and military practices, both the initial charge and the final charge against him seem bogus. But in between, he did plenty to deserve condemnation, such as telling Sparta exactly how to most effectively attack the Athenians. I’ve been hearing about Alcibiades for years in my readings of Plato, so it’s nice to finally get a real sense of who the guy was: prima facie evidence that even Socrates couldn’t resist a pretty face, and  that virtue cannot be taught.

Thucydides’ book ends seven years before the war does; though no one knows for sure, it’s generally accepted that he died in 400 BCE, after the end of the war, and just didn’t finish writing. Xenophon picks up where he left off; I started to read Hellenica, but no, not now. The sum total is that as Athens declined and went through several types of government – from democracy to oligarchies from The Four Hundred to the Five Thousand (Thucydides’ personal favorite),  they eventually surrendered to Sparta, who imposed the Thirty Tyrants on them; but Critias was such a monster he ended up dead and a semblance of democracy was restored, albeit without the empire. I wonder if the survivors thought it was worth it all.

I’ve mentioned sources I used to help with my reading of this book. One of those was the Yale OCW on the History of Ancient Greece, taught by Donald Kagan. He’s written several books about the war, and one specifically countering some of Thucydides’ claims. I read this – Thucydides: The Reinvention of History – as a follow-up, and found it very enlightening.

In short: Thucydides had a point of view, and it wasn’t always reflected in reality or by his contemporaries.

He felt Pericles’ approach of not engaging Spartan land troops was the best approach, that the Spartans would tire of naval harassment and would proffer peace. Alas, the overcrowding this produced in Athens no doubt made the plague worse, and ran through the treasury pretty quickly. But Pericles died – of the plague, it’s presumed – before he needed to change his approach. Thucydides blames the loss of the war on the change in strategy after his death, but Kagan argues that, since the strategy wasn’t working, a change was called for. He challenges a number of other specific characterizations, such as the ‘violent’ nature of Cleon, and the accidental overinflation of the Sicilian Expedition.

My own personal takeaway is in a similar vein: the Golden Age of Athens isn’t so golden any more. I don’t have enough military smarts to judge Pericles, but he seems like a bit of an asshole, telling farmers not to worry about their farms and homes being destroyed because it would preserve their freedom as they found any place to crash in an overcrowded, plague-ridden Athens. The Parthenon, destroyed in the Persian War, was rebuilt with funds from the Delian League members, who suddenly realized they didn’t need the expensive ‘protection’ from Persia any more but were violently prevented from achieving independence. The destruction of Melos and Scion were just over the top. That Mytilene was spared that fate by the narrowest of votes shows how close we are to savagery when threatened with loss of status, power, and riches.

This isn’t to throw the baby out with the bathwater – yes, they invented Western drama and philosophy and kickstarted science, and that’s no small thing – but only to keep in mind that all idols have feet of clay.

I have several other books coming to help with my understanding of ancient Greece, including Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, Plato’s two Alcibiades dialogues (how did I not even know these existed?), and Kagan’s Big Book on the war. Then just the other day, I discovered David Stuttard, whose new book Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, was just released – and whose Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens will be on my next book order. I’m a little obsessed with Alcibiades: why has Hollywood, or at least Netflix, not discovered him?

And when I’ve finished all that, there’s still Philip and Alexander to figure out.

It’s a road. I keep on truckin’.

The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shockwaves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014.
Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “The Night Gardener” ch VI

A long time ago – back when I didn’t understand the world at all, but assumed that was because I hadn’t seen much of it yet – I read Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh. I was at the time obsessed, as any depressed teenager would be, with Don McLean’s song “Vincent” and wanted to understand it better. When I finished the book, I read something – a review, perhaps? An author’s note? Or am I inventing a memory? – that the Maya section was entirely fictional. I was outraged. How was I supposed to know the difference between fact and fiction if they were all blended together?

I’ve read many fictionalized biographies since then, and have had a lot of fun, actually, figuring out where fact ends and fiction begins. So why am I so annoyed with Labatut’s book, which does the same thing? Maybe because I’m misunderstanding it. I should be reading it as Labatut’s views, not his reportage, or even his interpretation of the subjects’ views; it’s what he hopes, or wishes, they’d felt, because, presumably, it’s what he believes he would have felt.

In stories about scientists from chemists to quantum physicists, the theme of science as a double-edged sword is repeated. Sometimes it’s a warning that all knowledge has a bright and a dark side, that even the most beneficial effect might have unintended consequences down the road. Sometimes it’s the madness that results when the scientists themselves realize what doors they’ve opened. It’s a theme worthy of exploration as we start letting AI loose. But of course, when profits are involved, worthy themes often take a back seat.

The book opens with a mostly factual recounting of several inventions that had unintended consequences.

The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention. The modern world could not exist without “the man who pulled bread from air”, in the words of the press of the day
Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “Prussian Blue”

“Prussian Blue” reads beautifully, as it glides from cyanide suicides during the fall of the Third Reich to the process by which the substance was distilled, a process that started with the 18th century pigment that came to be known as Prussian Blue. Then we take a detour to Fritz Haber, the chemist whose Nobel Prize celebrates his invention of a process to create fertilizer and increase the food supply. A good thing, yes, though Labatut clouds it with the problem of overpopulation and the concomitant use of nitrogen in explosives.

It gets worse.

Haber was also instrumental in producing chlorine gas used in the chemical warfare of WWI, and his process was involved in manufacturing a pesticide called Zyklon A. Haber had nothing to do with Zyklon B; he’d fled Germany by that time, since his origins were Jewish.

You never know where your discoveries will take you.

“Schwarzschild’s Singularity” follows the development of the physics of black holes. Labatut sees potential for a more personal effect in a (fictional? Embroidered?) deathbed conversation between Karl Schwarzschild and mathematician Richard Courant:

According to Schwarzschild the most frightful thing about mass at its most extreme degree of concentration was not the way it altered the form of space, or the strange effects it exerted on time: the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable.
…. If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will – millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space – unleash something comparable to the singularity?
Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “Schwarzschild’s Singularity”

The text relates this to the political direction of Germany in the throes of WWI, but perhaps any era, like our own, might wonder the same thing. Does mass obsession create its own physics? But remember, this is embroidered, not factual.

“The Heart of the Heart” looks at the connection between genius and insanity via two mathematicians who may have understood a mathematical proof no one else could fathom, and found it so terrifying they both left mathematics, and one perhaps left sanity. It’s another very readable story; I’ve declined to figure out the line between fact and fiction.

“When We Cease to Understand the World” is a longer piece divided into chapters, following the development of quantum physics via Heisenberg and Schrödinger, among others. The fictionalization gets annoying here. The actual physical ailments of both men are played as background to both mental stress and genius. Heisenberg has a (presumably fictional) encounter, perhaps involving absinthe or some other hallucinogen, in which a fellow patron asks, “Tell me, professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?” This is followed by a confused walk in the rain and a vision:

Countless men and women with slanted eyes, their bodies sculpted of soot and ash, were stretching out their arms to try and touch him. They thronged about him without managing to advance, humming like a cluster of bees caught in the threads of an invisible web. Heisenberg tried to take the hand of a baby that had broken through the net and was crawling towards him, but an explosion pulverized the figures and brought him to his knees, rummaging in the dirt to try and salvage some trace, some vestige of those phantoms.
…. When Bohr returned from his holiday, Heisenberg told him there was an absolute limit of what we could know about the world.
…. And until decades later, he was incapable of confessing his vision of the dead baby at his feet, or the thousands of figures who had surrounded him in the forest, as if wishing to warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant by that flash of blind light.
Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “When We Cease to Understand the World”, “The Kingdom of Uncertainty”

I’m something of a hopeless romantic, a fan of metaphor and allusion, but this, as emotionally charged as it is,  feels over the top.

“The Night Gardener” seems to be a totally fictional piece allowing the author to freely roam among his ideas. It accomplishes all of what the prior pseudo-biographies attempted: makes us wonder if we’re over our skis in a lot of areas involving technology, and not paying enough attention to negative consequences.

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; Then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with the rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.
Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “the Night Gardener”, VI

I find myself wondering, if I was so disappointed with Lust for Life and with certain stories in this book, why have I found other fictionalized biographies so enjoyable? “Vincent and the Doctor” is one of two Doctor Who episodes I could watch over and over; is it because the painter is not the primary protagonist, or because the sum total of the visitation is naught? And why was I so taken with the Bruegel bionovel last year? Or Kehlmann’s  Measuring the World, about Gauss and Humboldt?

I’m not sure how comfortable I am with shifting boundaries between fact and fiction, and that may play a part. But since this is labeled as fiction, the approach is a fair one, even if it does stretch even my romanticism a bit.

I never did get to a point where I felt I understood the world. These days, I understand it less and less every day. But I am not a mathematician or a scientist; I don’t feel it should naturally make sense.

I’ve spent most of my life looking for connections, patterns, and meaning in science and business, and this passion extends to art, literature, and philosophy. Our ability to generate meaning from the patterns we find within and between all these disciplines is amazing.
…. I also have a personal sense of the meaning of these patterns and their context as many of my short stories … involve sensing, figuring out patterns, and finding the courage to engage with the world every day. Linked to my own battles with anxiety, I care deeply and take careful note of how real and imagined mentally ill characters navigate their worlds. What is knowledge but strings of patterns derived from data and information, and the whole point of having a pattern matching and meaning apparatus is to use it? I stand with Milton and Shelley, Keats and Nabokov — and their characters.
“Afterword” (author’s essay)

I’ve always said I love a story that teaches me something. I’ve also said I love a story that shows me I’ve learned something. Most of the stories in this book do both.

It’s a short book – 120 pages with generous white space – of sixteen short stories, some flash, none over 3000 words, and one essay. To call it a story collection would be selling it short; it’s more of a web of connections, a stream of references and allusions. A couple of my readers (hi Andrew, Jake if you’re still there) have noted I tend to relate the stories I read to my own experiences, be they part of my life or part of my prior reading. Rubin goes one step farther: he relates his stories to everything. Given his background, he has a lot to choose from: a broad array of writers, scientists, artists, and their works.

I’m tempted to divide the stories into categories: these feature characters who struggle to deal with the world (really, who doesn’t?); and these are a kind of historical fiction glimpsing into a moment in the lives of people we’ve read about; then these are horror/fantasy. I worry that fights against the webbiness of it all. And several – my favorites, in fact – blend these categories. How about if I will use categories to get started – but don’t worry when the rails come off.

“The Steiner Papers” kicks things off with references to Euclidean geometry, Brownian motion, Thomas Hardy, and a man who, for all his intellectual interests, lives in the coulda-shoulda-woulda. The final sentence punches that home: “Tomorrow, with rolled-up sleeves and a typewriter, Backman Steiner would  change everything.” I get the sense that he says that every day. I can relate; I’ve been saying “I’ll write a post about this book tomorrow” for a week now. I’ve been unusually intimidated by all the webbiness.

Rubin uses this pattern of showing pages of struggle then ending with the flaw – or the victory –  in several other stories. “The Spectator Takes a Walk” uses it, as well as the image of a struggle with an armload of too many books, to arrive at a more concrete failure, but a more positive recovery. The struggles create sympathy – for some of us, empathy – with the characters; it’s interesting that the endings for these two stories go in opposite directions.  

My favorite pieces involved historical personages undergoing their own struggles.

“Planting the Solstice Stake” shows us the moment Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to a remarkably accurate degree considering he didn’t have a smartphone or AI. Rubin throws Archimedes into the mix, as well as a delightfully era-appropriate vulgarism: “Oh, Pan’s under-balls!”

And again, the ending resonates: “That is amazing. Absolutely nothing has changed, yet everything is different.” Not only does this follow the general discourse pattern of “Steiner” and “Spectator”, but it echoes a sentiment I just read a few weeks ago in Robert Crease’s The Great Equations: “Finally, the experience of learning it transforms the way we experience the world, which fills us – naturally, if sometimes only momentarily – with wonder.”

I did mention something about a web of connections, didn’t I?

“(Mary’s) Testimony” spends a few pages detailing the relationship between Borges and his muse, between all the Great Men and the women who mused them, loved them, took care of them so they might become Great. There’s a paragraph on the five talented daughters of George Boole and Mary Everest Boole, of whom I first learned in Ian Stewart’s generously annotated edition of Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland. And again I find the money shot in the last paragraph:

I am Mary Kennedy Hart of a lineage labyrinth that catalogs other-worldly souls who map and measure — heights, widths, times, relations, transformations, conceptions, emotions… transcendence. The universe suggests that maybe there is nothing left to measure. Borges asks me if I really am his mirror and suggests I am too astoundingly beautiful for him, another Elsa, or Gabriel or Rilke’s terrifying angel. He laughs that maybe he is unattainable Fanny and I am the consumptive poet Keats. I mutter that it is just my luck to draw a copulation-questioning prude. We agree that as there is no infinity, there will be one final roll for Sisyphus accompanied by trumpets when he announces, “Enough, I am done. I have outlasted cruelty and abomination.” Enlightenment.
“(Mary’s) Testimony”

I’ll admit, though this is goosebump language, I’m not sure I understand as much as feel. I’ll keep the feeling, and hope I come to understanding down the road.

Everyone knows Aesop’s Fables, and a lot of us think we know something about Aesop. But he’s as shadowy a figure as Homer. One of the stories about him is that he offended the Pythia of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and was thus condemned and thrown off a cliff. Rubin uses this to great effect in “Aesop’s Wish”. Given the chance to have one wish granted before death, he chooses to know if his story, “The Beasts, The Birds and the Bat” survives the ages in the form he wrote it. This allows a mysterious ending that’s so amusing it’s easy to overlook that it feels just a little like cheating.

“Fall of the Sparrow to the Milky Way” blends the James family of intellectuals – Henry, William, and Alice (who, I confess, I was totally unaware of until reading this) with a clever, if familiar, self-referential science fiction save-the-world plot and a rather explicit pronouncement on the current milieu (specifically, 2022):

My untethering is an extremely long and complex story with so many self-referential systems that I think even the World’s quantum compute rails would lose track, but please allow me to proceed…. This is its attempt to balance the chaos caused by a slew of pandemics, climate disruptions, income inequality, jobs lost to automation, the spectacular recapitulation of entropy and amplification of tribal populism via social media, the devolution of human attention spans due to smart phones, the falling apart of logic and discourse, and the resultant failing ability of nation states.
“Fall of the Sparrow To The Milky Way”

Bring it on. Because things have not improved since 2022.

And by the way, there’s a thematic connection to Aesop:

[W]hen William then cheekily asked me whether Henry was still relevant in the distant future, I reignited the brotherly scuffle by answering, “Only to literature professors, the occasional ninth grade class forced to read What Maisie Knew, and a few erudite loners here and there.”
“Fall of the Sparrow To The Milky Way”

All artists hope for a place in posterity. Even if it’s only with a few erudite loners.

The final fiction in the book, “Symbols, Signs, and Saints” (how lovely to see the serial comma in all its glory; I will assume its omission in the ToC was an oversight) is perhaps the most difficult read, not only because of the stylistic requirements of writing from the point of view of a brilliant but thought-disordered protagonist, but also because it includes quotes from and allusions to Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs”, Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes”, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, plus some chess notation, Russian, and an ambiguous ending.

The elaborate article was inanimate and capable of sign-speech. The Principles of Referential Mania. It re-named me and made me purposefully inchoate filled with uncertainty and mystery. It put me beyond irritable reaching after reason. Yet it misunderstood its own references. It purposefully misrepresented the arising of my intentions and grotesquely misunderstood my actions. From the window I saw the old man gently swaying a basket like an old censer. I am poetry like Shelley’s monster or Keats the man.
“Symbols, Signs, and Saints”

The story relates Nabokov’s original, the central act being the father bringing a basket of assorted jellies to his son in the institution, to Keats’ poem of a woman hoping to dream of her future husband on the legendary day, and the man who wishes to take advantage of that.

I happen to have read the Nabokov story some time ago, after reading Lorrie Moore’s “Referential”, a riff on Nabokov, back when I was still reading TNY stories regularly. That helped me less than I would have hoped with Rubin’s story. I read and listened to the Keats poem and found a few brief commentaries on it, but again, I still felt quite lost.

Then I read “Afterword”, the final piece in the book, an extended Contributor Note bringing the collection together and focusing on the final story. That helped a great deal. Note to self: Always read the Afterword before despairing.

It turns out that linking Nabokov and Keats via the jars of jelly (and a few other details) was something of a coup for Rubin. The International Nabokov Society put his story on their website, The Nabokovian, and invited reactions in their weekly Flash Contest (links to all below). I love a book that teaches me something.

And I’m going to miss it now that it’s over. Though a book is never over; it’s always a thought away.  

Resources:

• Check out the author’s website to find out more about his work.
• The author’s website includes, among other things, a list of online published stories from this book, including links where applicable (Some of the links have died, but don’t let that discourage you from trying them all)
• “Afterword” can be found at The Smart Set
• “Symbols, Signs, and Saints” can be found at The Nabokovian, the website of the International Nabokov Society.
• The Nabokovian Flash Contest’s winning response to “Symbols, Signs, and Saints” is also posted on their website.

…[L]earning an equation, at least of the kind as fundamental as 1 + 1, is in effect a kind of journey. It is a journey that takes place in three stages. We begin naively without knowing the equation. We are led by schooling or accident or curiosity or intent to comprehend it, often accompanied by dissatisfaction and frustration. Finally, the experience of learning it transforms the way we experience the world, which fills us – naturally, if sometimes only momentarily – with wonder.
This book is about those journeys.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with math. It’s yet another of those things I look at longingly through an invisible barrier I can’t seem to get through. I’ve often found Emily Dickinson’s advice helpful: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant – Success in circuit lies.” Books like this, which don’t try to teach math but tell stories related to math and science, work for me.

The focus is on how certain equations – the ones that had great impact, that changed paradigms – were discovered and developed. This means, often, stories of people trying to figure things out via mathematics. The physics gets pretty complicated in later chapters, but the point isn’t to understand the math; it’s to understand the process by which the math emerged.

It’s similar to my read of the home construction book, The Walls Around Us, from a few weeks ago. I had no interest in doing any construction, but I found the stories about the development of materials and technologies involved in construction to be interesting. The “take what you want and leave the rest” approach works just fine here, too.

The first chapter features an equation many readers probably know, or at least used to know back in school: the Pythagorean Theorem, a2 + b2 = c2, where a and b are the legs of a right triangle, and c is the hypotenuse. Wait, don’t run away, don’t be scared – knowing what that means is not necessary to enjoying the chapter.

Crease tells us that Thomas Hobbes, the Leviathan philosopher, became fascinated with this theorem when he encountered it in a copy of Euclid’s Elements in a friend’s library.  “Hobbes began to reconstruct political philosophy in a similar way, by first establishing clear definitions of terms, and then working out the implications in an orderly fashion.” It sounds to me like it was Euclid’s methodology of consecutive proofs that is the key factor here, but apparently it was this specific equation that drew him in.

The nature of proofs is a focus of this chapter: “A proof recounts the journey by which we know an equation.” The reason this equation is so widely known, perhaps, is that there are so many proofs for it, in words, mathematical symbols, and pictures. Plato sneaks a proof, related to this equation, into his Meno dialog, and Crease discusses the implications at length.

The second chapter deals with Newton’s second law of motion, described in the equation F = ma. Don’t worry about it. The chapter is about how motion was viewed from the ancients – in terms of Aristotelian purpose – to the early modern age, when the ether became a distraction for a couple of centuries.

But I have a far more personal connection to this particular equation. Caution: pointless digression begins; skip to the Interlude if you’re not interested (and there’s no real reason you should be).

I was a good student in high school – not a star, but pretty good – so I took the full roster of Good Student classes, including Physics. Mr. Augustine was our teacher. Every day he’d wear what I later cane to think of as the IBM uniform: grey pants, a white short-sleeve shirt (this was South Florida after all), and a narrow black tie. He never made a personal remark, or told a joke. He wasn’t cold or mean; he was just serious.

In my senior year I had my first major depressive episode. I won’t go into the details, but it was obvious to everyone I had checked out. I sat like a zombie in class, wrote down random answers on tests. I got a C in Chorus. Do you know how hard it is to get a C in Chorus? Had this happened today, there would be school psychologists and parent-teacher meetings, but it was the early 70s and mental health was an embarrassment. So Mr. Augustine kept teaching Physics, and I kept writing random numbers on tests.

Until one day when he asked about the topic we’d studied two months ago: “Does anyone remember the equation?” To my shock, I did. I was so surprised, I even looked up, made actual eye contact. My zombie face must’ve given way, because Mr. Augustine looked back at me. He didn’t want to hurt me. He didn’t want to embarrass me. But he didn’t want to ignore me if I actually had come to life. So he called on me, gently, hesitantly. “F = ma,” I said. “That’s right,” he said, with a mixture of surprise and relief. It was my “The limit does not exist!” moment, more than thirty years before its time.

I must have begun to recover before then, but that was the point where I started trying again. I managed to pass the course, despite never really catching on to all the kinetic equations that come after F = ma. And it’s the one physics equation for which I feel genuine fondness.

The Interlude after Chapter 2 follows Galileo’s attempt to write himself out of trouble with the authorities by citing scripture and nature as the books both written by God, one in language, one in mathematics. Galileo tends to get romanticized out of proportion to his troubles, but it’s a nice little chapter.

Chapter 3 continues with Newton and his Law of Universal Gravitation. We take gravity for granted now, but it was contentious back in the seventeenth century, and it took some persistence to get to the heart of it. “That path was marked by raging ambition, empty posturing, obsessive secrecy, seething jealousy, and transparent lies, but the product was breathtakingly brilliant.” And you thought scientists were boring.

One of the key struggles was between Newton and Robert Hooke. Don’t you just hate it when your worst enemy gives you the key piece of a puzzle you’ve been struggling with for years?  Crease mentions “Newton’s mendacious practice In memoirs and conversations of backdating key events in his work” to push Hooke out of the picture. And here was a surprise:

Newton clearly profited from Hooke’s work, but when Newton famously said that he saw farther than others because he stood on the shoulders of giants, the statement owed its truth to its irony. Newton was alluding sarcastically to Hooke’s diminutive stature; that is, the boost from him was more like that of a footstool than a tower.

I’m almost as devastated as when I discovered Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” wasn’t the Hallmark card I’d been told it was for so many years.

Chapter 4 gives us Euler’s Identity: eiπ + 1 = 0. I have to admit, I’ve read and viewed maybe a dozen explanations of why this is such an astonishing equation, and I still don’t feel the love. It’s something to do with uniting different types of math: the natural logarithm, imaginary numbers, irrational numbers, and rational numbers. Ok, I follow that, I’m just missing the conceptual underpinning that makes it such a big deal. Crease writes about it in terms of ‘neighborhoods’ of mathematics – algebra, trigonometry, etc – and again, I follow that; but why is it so astounding that they’re related?

I did find a personal connection to this chapter (again?): it quotes Stanford professor Keith Devlin several times. I took Devlin’s “Mathematical Thinking” mooc, an introduction to proofs, back in 2014 (this was back when some people were doing creative things with moocs, not just filming lectures and having TAs add multiple-choice quizzes to them; it was back when Coursera’s motto was “Let’s teach the world” instead of “let’s sell certificates.” Me, bitter?). It introduced me to a very different way of thinking of math. And yes, he did discuss Euler’s identity, and frequently used words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘elegant’ in connection with proofs.

The fifth chapter gives us a history of entropy. This is also a concept I’m a bit hazy on. Yes, I get it, things fall apart, they don’t fall back together. Crease presents the century-long process of understanding entropy mathematically  as a five-act Shakespearian play.

But the drama itself, I claim, is Shakespearean. The cast involves powerful human beings who dedicate themselves body and soul to their work. The action unfolds as these individuals are troubled – sometimes deeply and tragically – by differences between what they find and their expectations, and try to make greater sense of the world by intervening in it. Has any drama ever had such finely drawn and unique characters, or more profoundly reshaped our understanding of ourselves and the world?

Hmmm. Ok, I like the conflict between expectations and discovery, and intervening in events sounds on target,  but I typically associate Shakespeare with things like hubris and tragic flaws. I could easily be overlooking such things in such a crowded field of which I have but limited understanding.

Chapter 6 on Maxwell’s Equations starts off with a dramatic quote from Richard Feynman:

“From a long view of the history of mankind – seen from, say, ten thousand years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.

Maybe it’ll look that way ten thousand years from now, but at the moment, it looks like the Civil War is still destroying the United States, so count me as a skeptic.

Maybe the problem is that I don’t understand electromagnetic fields very well. This chapter pretty much left me in the dust. However, it’s followed up by a fascinating Interlude that mourns the lack of attention to science and scientific discovery in most history books. Crease imports a word from Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (which I now want very much to read), anosognosia, the “lack of awareness of one’s own diseased condition.” In this case, Crease relates it to the historian’s – and more generally, the humanist’s – lack of awareness that they’re not paying enough attention to science.

What are the causes of anosognosia? I count four contributing factors. One is drama: scientific and technological change tends to lack the exciting settings of other historical turning points ….
Second is the hope among even the so-called enlightened and progressive scholars that we can reinvent ourselves and remake the world, Marxian-style, achieving liberation at a revolutionary stroke; admitting dependence on science and technology serves to dampen such hopes. Third is a fear of specialized knowledge, knowledge that one might take extra training to acquire.
Finally, and most importantly, scholars in the humanities often see themselves as having a critical function – they see themselves as asking important questions that help humanity navigate the world’s dangers. But if the fate of “the people” is as tied up with science and technology as it is with ideologies – with who is exploiting whom – this leading role is blunted, or at least shared.

This book was first published in 2008, which in historical terms wasn’t that long ago. But in sociopolitical terms, it was a very different era. Between the science denial brought out by the pandemic, the implementation of AI, and the complete abdication of responsibility for addressing climate change, science has clearly caught the attention of all sorts of disciplines within the humanities. And it only took about ten years, not ten thousand. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…

Chapter 7 looks at the ‘celebrity equation:  E = mc2. Crease begins with the dissatisfaction science felt with the conflict between Newton and Maxwell, and shows how that dissatisfaction led to an astonishing place: special relativity. He traces not only Einstein’s path, but the path of the equation as an icon, the star moment of appearing on the cover of Time.

But there’s an interesting little section that fascinates me: the scientific evaluation of the practicality of nuclear energy. It was simply too small to be of any use.

Still, the energy generated by any single nucleus – even if all of its binding energy were released – was far too minuscule for any practical purpose. For this reason, for the rest of the decade, nuclear energy seemed a distant, even ridiculous, prospect, the stuff of dreamers and fanatics. Almost to the end of the 1930s, nearly all physicists thought that the prospect of being able to release and control nuclear energy was far-fetched, even crazy. In 1921, Einstein was cornered by a young man proposing to produce a weapon based on E = mc2. “It’s foolishness is evident at first glance,” Einstein replied. In a 1933 interview, physicist Ernest Rutherford called the idea “moonshine.” Einstein compared it to shooting in the dark at scarce birds. And in 1936, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, discussing instances when collisions between particles and nuclei that are so energetic much of the nuclei explode, remarked that this would not “bring us any nearer to the much discussed problem of releasing nuclear energy for practical purposes.”

1936. The next time someone tells you renewable energy doesn’t work, or electric cars aren’t practicable, or, for that matter, makes fun of researching shrimp on treadmills or gila monster saliva, consider that in 1936 the best scientific minds in the world thought nuclear energy was just an academic thing.

The eighth chapter takes us through the development of the theory of general relativity. It also gave me the most succinct characterization of the two relativities: special relativity is about the equivalence of matter and energy; general relativity is about the curvature of space-time. I’m a little hazy about the concept of relativity spanning between the two, but it helps to at least know the broad strokes.

The most dramatic section of this chapter could be titled Waiting for the Eclipse. Photos from a total solar eclipse would visually show the bending of light as it passed through the gravity of the sun. But eclipses don’t happen every day, and clouds get in the way. It’s not written that dramatically (oh, Dr. Crease, such an opportunity) but it’s almost cinematic as one attempt after another is foiled over several years – until, finally, success.

The Interlude addresses the would-be role of the science critic. It’s not the same as a science communicator, or a science reporter, but it’s along those lines. Unfortunately, today’s science critics … well, you know.

Chapter 9 covers Schrödinger’s equation, quantum theory, and atomic orbitals as probabilities rather than little circles around a nucleus. And yes, briefly, the cat. It’s a little complicated. It’s also a little scary that there might be – there is – a whole different reality on the scale of the very, very small. The Interlude looks at the dual realities of science: how typical scientific discoveries are explained, and the human element that goes on behind the publications.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in Chapter 10 is the final equation. I’m way over my head here; I can recite that you can’t know both the position and momentum of a particle, but I don’t really understand why not, let alone the implications. Even so, there are interesting moments, including, of all things, a  violent attack of hay fever.

Even though, as a recreational read, I had to leave much of the text for another lifetime, I enjoyed my slant tour of science offered here. It’s been some time since I’ve read any science other than biology (which requires the least math of all the sciences, or at least it did until computational biology came along). I have a few other things coming up, and this is a nice way to ease into what could be more technical reading, and more effort towards understanding.  

You’re going to Paris. It’s an eight-hour flight from New York. You want something to read on the plane. You’ve been meaning to read Robert Fisk’s Pity The Nation, but you’re not sure you’ll be able to concentrate. The last four days have been wrecked.
…. The book is on a table in Barnes & Noble, part of a 3-for-2 offer. You’ve also been meaning to read Seymour Hersh’s Chain Of Command, and this too is in the 3-for-2 deal. They’ve got Gravity’s Rainbow by the notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon. Mao II by DeLillo, The Border Trilogy by McCarthy, The Catcher In The Rye by Salinger, notorious recluses to a man. They’ve got The Loser, a novel about the notorious recluse Glenn Gould by the notorious misanthrope Thomas Bernhardt. They’ve got Lotteryland by the notorious recluse misanthrope Zozanian. You feel surly and uncommunicative, you hate your fellow man, reclusiveness and misanthropy could be the hair of the dog. They’ve also got Helen DeWitt’s new book, Your Name Here.
Your friend Mike has been telling you for years to read Dewitt’s first book, The Last Samurai (which is not on the 3-for-2 table).
…. Something’s bothering you, but you can’t put your finger on it.
You pick up Your Name Here. There’s a quote on the cover.
“I give it 8 1/2!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Janet Maslin, New York Times.
You open the book. Who are these people? What’s going on? Where is it going?

Don’t worry, only a few portions of the book are in second person.

I start with it because, as the first section of the book, it does a lot of work right off the bat. It announces that this book will be a little bit different. It announces it fits in with books by such complicated luminaries as Pynchon and McCarthy. It reminds us of DeWitt’s first book, which is probably why we’re reading this one, either because we loved Samurai, as I did, or because someone else in our lives has been telling us they loved Samurai. It jumbles the real (most of the books on the 3-for-2 table, Helen DeWitt and Samurai) with the fictional (Rachel Zozanian, her book-within-this-book Lotteryland which you’ll come to know in just a few pages, the non-existent quote – which nudges an association with Fellini, as the companions on the 3-for-2 table nudge associations with those writers – from the real Janet Maslin) thus telling us to be on our toes. And it asks the questions we’ll be asking for the next 604 pages, thus letting us feel less stupid about asking these questions: Who are these people? What’s going on? Where is it going?

And there’s something else. A section of the text is printed on the front cover, with one change: “They’ve also got Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s new book, Your Name Here”. Knowing a bit about DeWitt’s passion for detail, the omission in the text is not an accident. I myself have been guilty of referring to this as DeWitt’s new book, when it is in fact DeWitt and Gridneff’s new book. 

Numerous reviews and interviews are available (links below) describing the book: the combination of emails, images, scenes, conversations, quotes, and other techniques that appear. It’s a crazy book. It takes work. You have to want it. And of course, I wanted it.

Every once in a while, there’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a hilarious second-person reader (like the pages showing a person reading a large-print version are printed in increased font sizes; and by the way, it seems there is no large-print version of the book in reality, though there is an audiobook, which must be weird since typography and image play not-insignificant roles). Sometimes the gift is one of the email discussions between DeWitt and Gridneff, the journalist with the crazy anarchic voice, a voice DeWitt (or maybe it was Rachel Zozanian?) kept in her in-box for two years “to read in moments of existential despair”. Or it’s a reference to a Saki story (haven’t thought about him in ages) and a resulting puzzle to keep a clutch of annoying children busy.

And sometimes it’s Rachel – the Helen DeWitt doppelganger – getting a brilliant idea.

What if I bring in a character like nothing anybody has ever seen before? What if I bring in a voice, that crazy anarchic voice, the voice that calls back zombies from the undead, the voice that dispels the anomie of the alienated third person orphan in schwarzweiss Kansas and hurls us Over the Rainbow into the glorious Technicolor of the first person singular? Will there be Munchkins? Will there be Flying Monkeys? What if. What if. What if. Forget the readers, forget the betazoid. What if I have no idea what happens next?

It helps, in reading this insane book, to have some knowledge of Helen DeWitt’s own experience following the publication of The Last Samurai, since Rachel Zozarian is in essence an autobiographical character, at least until the very end. I read a great deal about DeWitt after I read Samurai, so I had an advantage. Fortunately, those articles are still available online for those who would prefer to not simply walk into YNH.

The theme I saw hammered home again and again in various contexts was this: We – society, Western society,  people, whatever – have a ridiculous sense of what has value, what should be valued, what is more valuable than what.

One of the contexts is laid out on page 9 to entice the reader (and a clutch of annoying children) to learn a tiny bit of Arabic, just a few letters, that’s all:

Look, Ilya, what this shows is that Arabic is something everyone can enjoy, it’s not just for specialists, it’s something that can appeal to a character they can identify with (i.e. a manipulative, calculating, promiscuous drink and drug fiend, an engaging potential serial killer). Look, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings to provide a background for languages he invented, and by 2003 the books had sold 100 million copies. 100 million copies, Ilya! 100 million copies! What would the world be like if someone had done that for the languages of the Middle East?
He says: Yeah. Yeah. So the point of the book is to get the message across, without actually coming out and saying in so many words, You stupid fucking morons, you’re learning fucking elf languages!
I say: Exactly. Exactly. It’s about building bridges. Look, don’t worry, Ilya, everything is going to be all right. Everyone will know you’re a great writer.

If this sounds crazy and a bit manipulative, well, it is, but it’s a bridge, as she says, and she’s trying to get a book written and published. And who knows, the curious reader might just find themselves learning a tiny bit of Arabic (as I did a few years ago, inspired by Ludo of The Last Samurai learning to read Japanese at age six). Pro tip: Duolingo, while fine for picking up a little Spanish and beginning German, is not the way to go for Arabic. Or Latin, for that matter. The point is: we’re dedicated to entertainment (like Duolingo, in lieu of actual textbooks and language classes), and will educate ourselves only in service of that end.

The career of Alyosha Pechorin, Ilya Gridneff’s doppelganger (who changes his name with bewildering frequency), offers a similar view of warped values. He’s trying to report on the Iraq war, but in order to earn actual money, he chases celebrities and writes gossip pieces for the tabloids.

The very idea of a book earning the writer a living is played several times, with the repeated line, “Ha,ha, there’s always the book, ha ha.”

War and politics provides a persistent context for value display as well, beyond Alyosha’s muted reporting. Rachel in Germany:

I did not have Internet access in the home. I went to Sarotti, where Sinead O’Connor sang “Nothing Compares 2 U” on the LCD.
According to the Guardian 600 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay for four years without trial. President Bush has explained that when you are fighting for freedom and democracy you can ignore the Geneva Conventions. This is the jollity.

A day went by. I clicked on the Thunderbird icon and got three offers for penis enhancement. …. The abbreviated Serenity Prayer runs as follows: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The Holocaust: Be serene. The gulags: Be very serene. Rwanda: Remain serene. Invasion of Iraq: Remain perfectly serene. Lipstick color: Courage! Be bold! Be brave! Let’s not be silly.

If this, written in 2006, sounds terrifyingly 2026, well, progress isn’t a straight path.

Britain doesn’t get off easy, either. There’s a to-do about something called “top-off fees” which apparently is a fairly substantial additional charge on university tuition. This has a, shall we say, profound effect on Rachel in her student days.

Then there’s Lotteryland, a novel where everything is determined by the lottomonitor, a measure of your luck. It’s not so different from the real-life system where the zip code you’re born in determines to a great extent both your life span and your income, though we don’t call it luck (well, John Rawls does, but that’s him).  Lotteryland is the novel that sold well, was critically acclaimed, was translated into a dozen languages, and still doesn’t really earn Rachel a whole lot because of the deals she signed. Luck doesn’t have a chance against a fast-talking entertainment agent. And if something about the lottomonitor starts to remind you of AI, well, DeWitt knew where we were going back in 2006.

And publishing. Oh, how publishing is skewered, again and again. From the agent who keeps Rachel on hold for three hours (though she makes good use of the time, reading a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls), to deals that cut the writer out, to the preference for books that are the same books rewritten again and again so as to not challenge the reader too much, publishing is a particular target of Rachel’s (and DeWitt’s) rage.

While all this was by turns powerful, confusing, entertaining, and educational (and you know I love a book that teaches me something), by page 400 I was thinking, just how are they going to land this thing? The Rachel/Alyosha book gets published or doesn’t; that seems like a pretty weak way to go out, considering the work I put into reading this, with all its references to various aesthetes of film and literature.

And behold, just when I need it, another gift.

You are on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on. Zozanian has embarked on a book with your character, so now we have a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you seem to be the minimost perestroikist in a net of Gorbidolls. A cast of extraneous characters seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Rabbits in a Viagra trial. Rabbits in a Viagra trial designed to tackle the freak four-hour erection problem. Who are these people? What are they doing here? It’s like the finale of Blazing fucking Saddles.
…
In other words, the book is fucked.
But wait, it may not be too late.

At first I thought this was another second-person reader, but I realized it’s Gridneff. It’s followed by an email to DeWitt which leads to a terrific discussion of Chekhov’s Gun and macguffins and Hitchcock, and serious doubt on Gridneff’s part (“This is great. You’re working with a writer who turns to Wikipedia for inspiration.”) which makes my doubt seem justified. Planned, even.

But they pull it off.

Oh, there was a scary moment when it looked like it was going to turn into an international crime thriller, but I think that was just one more poke DeWitt delivered at those who screwed her back in 2000. That twist served a purpose, but the end was much better.

I remember, a quarter century ago some film critic – probably either Siskel or Ebert – said of The Sixth Sense that it was the sort of movie that you immediately wanted to watch again to see if there were hints, if you should have seen it coming. He didn’t find any. I wasn’t about to read the whole book again, but just a quick look through the few sections gave me a hint that didn’t seem like a hint on first read. That’s the best kind of hint, one hidden in plain sight. I’m sure there are more, but, no, I wasn’t going to read the whole book again. Not now. I will, someday; I have to.

It was a strenuous but glorious ride. It will be a bit less strenuous, and  I believe more glorious, the next time.

Resources:

• The first chapter, published online in 2007 on n+1, is missing some graphic elements but is still a way in.
• “A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read” – review by Robert Rubsam in The Atlantic
• “A Firm Sense of Resolve” – review by Jess Bergman in The Nation focusing on its anti-war elements (the full print article is paywalled, but the audio is available)
• “Unwriting the Great American Novel” – review by Celia Bell in The Rumpus
• “What Are You Doing After the Orgy?” – interview by Sean Hooks in The Baffler with both DeWitt and Gridneff
• “Beautiful Losing” – review by Josh Billings in LARB
• “An Interview with Helen DeWitt” – interview in The Believer
• Helen DeWitt’s website
• Ilya Gridneff’s website

Every house is a work in progress. It begins in the imaginations of the people who build it and is gradually transformed, for better or for worse, by the people who occupy it down through the years, decades, centuries. To tinker with a house is to commune with the people who have lived in it before and to leave messages for those who will live in it later. Every house is a living museum of habitation, and a monument to all the lives and aspirations that have flickered within it.
Also, of course, it eats money.

As a lifelong apartment dweller, I don’t do a whole lot of home improvement. While DIYers are the most likely audience for this book, I still found a lot of it to be fun reading, thanks to Owen’s sense of humor and storytelling style. And if I skipped over the more specific how-to details, it was still worth reading.

Take, for example, Chapter 2: The Best Paint in the World. As it happens, painting is one of the few household maintenance tasks I have engaged in, though it’s been a few decades. After a brief explanation of why cows lick freshly painted utility poles (the linseed oil in oil paint comes from flaxseed, which they smell as food), we’re taken on a quest to get the paint that lasts twenty years, the paint used in nuclear reactors. It turns out that isn’t the best paint for your house for exactly the same reason it’s so good for its intended purpose, and Owen uses that as a way to explain exactly what paint is and why expensive paint lasts longer than the cheap stuff. He focuses on external house paint, which, darn, is outside of my limited experience.

Chapter 3, Fear of Lumber, exposes the male fear of looking foolish in home improvement stores; he compares asking for a 2-by-4 (how long? What wood?) to the first attempt to buy condoms.  Chapter 4, Bones and Skin, starts with his discovery of a Roman numeral VI on a joist when exploring his attic, then goes into why it’s there and how that fits with the history of building housing frames.

What got me there was the bit about buying nails, which makes buying lumber look easy.

This system dates back to the fifteenth-century English practice of referring to nails in terms of their cost per hundred. In the 1400s, a ten-penny nail was a nail that cost ten English pennies per hundred, or one-tenth of a penny apiece. Today the designation refers only to size. The bigger the number, the bigger the nail. An eight-penny nail (about three inches long) is a good bit larger than a two-penny nail (about an inch long) and a good bit smaller than a sixteen-penny nail (about three and a half inches long). To make this system more confusing, the abbreviation for ten-penny is 10d, because d – which stands for denarius, the name of an old Roman silver coin – was the English abbreviation for penny.
Nails today are sold by the pound. The proper pronunciation of “10d” is “ten-penny,” although a 10d nail is often referred to as simply a ten or, less frequently, as a number ten. Swaggering into the hardware store and asking for a hundred twelve-dee nails is likely to attract the sort of amused attention that may make one reluctant to swagger into a hardware store ever again.

I almost want to go buy some nails just for the fun of tossing off the appropriate lingo and watching the surprise on the faces of skeptical shopkeepers that some old lady seems to know what she’s talking about.

Chapter 5 goes into drywall – don’t say Sheetrock unless you’re talking about a brand – and introduces us to the people who handle it professionally. Specifically, Billy and Spanky, the rockers (those who put up the stuff) and the tapers (who tape over the seams).

Billy and Spanky talked about tapers the way doctors talk about dentists. Tapers, meanwhile, view rockers as brawny louts with no sense of artistry…. Painters, for their part, view tapers as unschooled thugs who conspire to make paint jobs look bad.

Every profession has its hierarchy.

I’ve always been pretty dense about electricity, so I mostly skimmed over Chapter 6. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about Chapter 7, The Roof, either, until I came across the story of the contractor who couldn’t find the leak in the roof so put a bathtub under it to gather the water and let it evaporate between rains. Seems he got away with it until too much rain overflowed the tub. Truth will out.

Chapter 8 on Kitchens, Bathrooms, and Plumbing starts out with a fascinating sociological overview of fancy kitchens and bathrooms (you know who I’m thinking of). Chapter 9, Building Stuff, was a lot more how-to than I was interested in, but for those inclined to build their own cabinets, it’s probably fascinating.

The book includes extensive references and resources for each chapter, but be aware: this was published in 1991, so specifics are likely to be a bit dated.

This was one of my impulse buys: I happened to see one of my Goodreads follows mention it, and it sounded like fun. It was; it made a nice recreational read. It turns out Owen has written a lot of books on subjects as varied as golf, history and politics, ecology, and the invention of the plain-paper copier. Now that’s a renaissance man for the 21st century.

Resources:

• Visit the author’s website to find out more about his work.

Art and art history can be a bit intimidating, and I like creating an entry point that sets the tone with a sense of irreverence. At times, these typologies of color and text pinpoint revealing themes throughout artists’ careers or over time, secreting them into the viewer’s brain with the Trojan Horse of humor. Other times, the palettes present a bit of a puzzle, willing the viewer to decode the pattern they see before them. For the newly initiated art enthusiast and art history buff alike, I hope the palettes feel a bit like a friend elbowing you in the rib, winking when you get the in-joke.

Since my current read of Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here looks like it’s going to take a while, I decided to sneak in a few ‘transit reads’ – books that don’t’ require a lot of analysis, but are just fun. Recreational reads, I call them.

But this one surprised me. It turned into a read-in-front-of-the-computer read, because I wanted to know more. More about the art, the artists, the individual paintings discussed.

Let’s start with the cover: a series of color blocks, with the name of a celebrity, and a date ranging from 2017 to 2019, beneath each. I had no idea what this meant. Clothing worn on that date? That was my best guess. Turns out, it was completely wrong.

The subtitle told me this would be “An irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes.” I’m all for irreverence, particularly when it comes to art, since most Artspeak makes no sense to me. Phrases like “The line brings a sense of adventure” or “the bit of yellow adds energy” don’t jive with my experience, and I wonder how people acquire this ability to understand what looks like any old painting. But me, I’m still trying to figure out what the big deal is with the Mona Lisa. That’s why I try to read something every year about art.

After I’d spent a bit of time with this book, I had the impression that it wasn’t irreverent except in comparison to the hushed museum tones so prominent on gallery tours and Youtube analyses. Young knows her stuff. She may play around with it a bit – and we’ll get to that – but I’d say 100 of the 126 pages let me learn something. Granted, I started at a very elementary level, but still, this wasn’t anywhere near as goofy as it wants to seem.

The Introduction launches things with a palette of “the reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits, 1460-1535” inspired by a line from Diana Vreeland’s autobiography about looking for the perfect red. Each red block, some bright, some tending towards burgundy or brown, is attributed to a painting, preceded by a single example of a portrait (Raphael’s “Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, known as ‘Phaedra’”) to show how the red relates.

The first thing I learned on further examination was that the artist listed as Raffaello Sanzio was the artist (and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but that seems irreverent) I vaguely know as Rafael. Hey, I’ve already admitted I’m stupid about art.  But more than this, it opened up a world of Renaissance portraits, and got me wondering about the predominance of red caps. I never found a definitive answer, though religion and wealth seemed to play into it.

Young later riffs on paintings of Madame Pompadour with her palette, “The blush of Madame de Pompadour’s cheeks, 1746-63” which recalls her fascination with red caps but sent me looking at all the paintings of this one person.

The next section traces a contemporary history of the use of color palettes.

Few are impervious to the beauty of a color palette. What is it that makes the format just plain appealing? To decode it, I start by calculating the sum of its parts: there’s color contained in rectangles, capturing a substance that is otherwise shapeless, and providing form, like water in a glass. There tends to be an interplay between several different colors and, therefore, multiple rectangles in one palette. Then there’s the text, the labeling of the color that assigns meaning that sets the rectangle in a certain context. This language functions like metadata, creating another layer of distinction between the colors beyond how they’re visually perceived….
The color palette offers a facade of order, a way in which to make sense of the world – the satisfaction of information sorted, data visualized, color interpreted – meaning assigned to abstraction. It suggests that something has been distilled to its purest form, its truest truth.

Young mentions, and in some cases displays, some of the color palettes from various artists. Spencer Finch was a revelation to me. Some of his work is purely visual joy – several renderings of Back to Kansas, colors taken from The Wizard of Oz, in one case with timestamps from the film – and some is more profound: Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on the September Morning, an installation now in The National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Then there’s Byron Kim, who has made Synecdoche, a color palette of skin tones of various friends, family members, artists, and strangers, as well as Emmett at Twelve Months #3, various hues of his son’s eyes, hair, and skin. This is why I ended up reading in front of the computer: to see at least some representation of these works.

The piece that made the biggest impression on me is Walid Raad’s Secrets in the Open Sea:

In much of his work, Raad fabricates fictional but believable narratives (I’ve been hoodwinked by Raad before), and this piece is no exception. The exhibition copy posits that these blue photographs were found in the rubble of Beirut in 1992, and following further lab analysis, an imaginary foundation discovered black-and-white negatives embedded in the fields of blue like pentimento, a visible trace of an earlier work concealed beneath the surface. The photographs allegedly depict groups of women and men who had “drowned, died, or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.” Here, Raad follows the conventions of a color palette, qualifying a color with a black-and-white negative as its caption or form of metadata. He manages to infiltrate the color palette as a medium, one that often appears unemotional and operates on a surface level, by giving the superficial-seeming form a darker underbelly, and fighting an ominous, morbid narrative to loom underneath the lushly saturated surface.

The blending of visual art and fiction is fascinating. I’m not comfortable with presenting the fiction as fact, yet it makes a powerful statement in the current era when so many have died on their way to illusory safety.

The chapter labeled “Art History” (isn’t it all?) uses Velázquez’ Las Meninas as a jumping-off point for Young’s palette of the colors of the dresses of all his Infantas, then follows a similar path based on Franz Hals’ ruffled collars. I’m more interested in the original paintings than the color palettes – Las Meninas crops up for me  every once in a while, and I’m always happy to revisit it – but the emphasis on the multitude of such subjects is again an interesting avenue.

Young treats a number of nature’s subjects in similar vein: bird’s bills in Audubon paintings, seascapes, landscapes. I find her most interesting when she zeroes in on a particular painting as an ignition point, such as she does with “the flesh tones of Lucien Freud’s ex-wives,” triggered by Girl in Bed, a painting with a scandalous backstory worthy, as Young recounts it, of The Real Housewives of whatever.

We then encounter typology, which Young defines as “the process of classifying objects or images by general type.” She departs a bit from palettes here, into exhibitions of arrays of objects and photographs ranging from cleaning products to the elbows of truck drivers sticking out of the windows of the cabs. One of the coolest (to me, the art-naif), is Lisa Young’s Flocking:

She began collecting sheep figurines on eBay and amassed, after a long stretch, more than five hundred figurines. She then created an installation entitled Flocking ( 2009 ), arranging all of the sheep on a tabletop as a single forward-facing flock. In this role, Young plays a shepherd with a bird’s eye view. Adapting to each exhibition space, Young’s sheep flock in varying formations and populations.

I’m transfixed by the idea of the artist as shepherd of her figurine flock.

The Pop Culture section begins with a look at how color preferences evolve, using interviews with representatives of Le Crueset, Benjamin Moore Paints, and Marimekko, among others. I’ve always wondered about cars, how certain colors become ubiquitous (the iconic primary red and blue VW Beetles in the 60s, Bamboo Mist in luxury cars about twenty years ago) then disappear. In New England, black seems a perennial favorite; in Florida, it’s white.

The final pages consist of Young’s contemporary palettes, ranging from Prince’s concert outfits to Tonya Harding’s skating costumes to Dennis Rodman’s hair color.

Yes, the approach is playful, and its organization is a bit chaotic, but it provided a great way for me to explore avenues of art I hadn’t known about, and to revisit some I had. Nearly every page includes full color printing of various pieces discussed; the paper is heavy and glossy, allowing the images to reproduce beautifully.

Oh, and the cover? I never found an actual description, but given one of the final palettes in the book, it might be the color of title cards from Saturday Night Live.

Resources:

• Spencer Finch: Back to Kansas
• Spencer Finch: Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning
• Byron Kim: Synecdoche
• Lisa Young: Flocking
• Visit the author’s website to find out more about her work

What is close reading? Close reading is the practice of paying attention to a passage of text to account for at least one aspect of its meaning and to make an argument about how it works.
…. There are lots of ways to write about a novel, story, play, essay, or poem. You might describe, summarize, or paraphrase it. You might reflect upon it, evaluate it, or present the process of reading by recounting what it was like to be surprised by or be submerged in it. You might linger over particular details. You might offer larger interpretations and persuasive arguments about how to understand that piece of literature. If you do all of these – if you focus on an aspect or piece of the text and also use that to see the text as a whole, if by describing the text you tell someone else how to read it, if you say what it’s like to read the text as a way of saying what to know about it – it is a close reading.

In the Preface, the editors advise us, “How you use this book will depend on who you are and what you want to learn about close reading.” Its natural audience would probably be students looking to improve their writing about literature, and teachers who instruct students on exactly that topic. I’m neither a student nor a teacher, and am certainly not a scholar, but I’ve been reading it, plus some the materials it refers to, in fits and starts for a couple of months now. It’s been a remarkable process, inspiring and guiding me in my reading and blogging more than anything since Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices.

In the Introduction, the editors lay out the process of close reading as they define it: the construction of an argument about meaning, based on evidence within the text. Five steps are described: scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. Each of these steps is discussed at length. Close reads of Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow” and Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” provide examples of strong and weak close reads. There’s also a brief review of various schools of literary theory that have used, or influenced, close reading over the past century or so.

Each of the five following sections provides a longer explanation of one of the steps of close reading, written by professors of varying literary flavors (criticism, poetics, theory, etc.). This creates an interesting three-level structure: each chapter is written by a contributor discussing a previously published close read of a literary text. Addendum: having now listened to the second part of the podcast mentioned below, I see now this is in keeping with the conversational model of close reading that is central to the editor’s definition of the process. As Farah Bakaari says in that session of the symposium, every close reading is incomplete, as the object remains open to further readings.

Unsurprisingly, I found the chapters that dealt with works I’ve read to be the most helpful in understanding the points being made about close reading. Yet several chapters interested me for other reasons.

The first section covers scene setting. I found this step to be the most difficult step to understand, partly because it can encompass different modes. The scene setting for the example of “The Red Wheelbarrow” is vocabulary; for a close read of a novel, it’s more likely to be a summary of a scene to be close read and its relation to the rest of the book.

In the first chapter of this first section, “Near Monstrous Fidelity,” contributor Oren Izenberg discusses Erich Auerbach’s chapter “The Brown Stocking” from his book Mimesis about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, with particular attention to how he selects and sets up a scene from the novel which he then interprets based on textual evidence – and, in this case, a touch of history. The editors’ introduction to this chapter explains and defends that historicity, a practice unusual and disfavored at the time.

Izenberg discusses the selection of the particular passage:

Auerbach acknowledges the “arbitrariness” of selection. And it is true; nothing of obvious interest happens in the scene Auerbach has chosen: a mother knits a stocking for the child of a distant stranger and tries it out for size against her fidgety son. But if a reading is to have some stakes beyond mere ingenuity, you must make the case that your selection is not wholly arbitrary, but in some way representative ….
The last move to “global theorizing” depends (more than you might think) upon the first – “scene setting.”

He also points out what he calls “a mistake” in Auerbach’s paraphrase of the section concerning Mrs. Ramsey’s past practice of reading, and offers an explanation and effect, that it is “truer to the world Virginia Woolf has made than the Mrs. Ramsey Woolf describes….” I would call this cheating, but I’m not a professor or a critic and if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I have a lot to learn.

The second section covers the step of noticing; it’s the step of close reading I felt I understood best. It reminds me somewhat of a quote I came across several years ago from a NYT essay by Joyce Cary:

Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: “Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?” And smiles, as on a poor dreamer without logic or understanding, when he gets the answer: “It might have been better your way, but I couldn’t do it because it wouldn’t have belonged.”
Joyce Cary, “A Novel Is A Novel Is A Novel” from NYT, 4/30/1950

Poems are full of phrases and sentences readers trip over; they’re not mistakes, they’re there for a reason. Now I know something about what to do with them. In fact, I put this to use, in an abbreviated, clumsy way, in my recent read of Isabella Fang’s story “Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges” from Best American Short Stories. I carried it through a bit, though I never got to global theorizing. See, close reading is, as Sinykin titles a recent article about the book, for everyone.

In this Section II on Noticing, the editors preface Robert Stagg’s chapter on Eric Griffith’s printed lecture “A Rehearsal of Hamlet” as such:

Most readers and viewers probably hurry past the first few lines of Shakespeare’s play, deeming them trivial. Stagg, through Griffiths, shows the power of slowing down with the dictum, who says what when and where to whom. Suddenly, the opacity of the opening of Hamlet appears: we notice it. Students sometimes believe they must rush to identify imagery, metaphor, symbol. But linger on who says what when and where to whom first. As Stagg demonstrates, this simple instruction is surprisingly complex to enact – and rewarding.

I struggle with reading drama; I just went through this in my study of Greek tragedy, so I would not have expected this chapter to grab my attention, no matter how formidable the play. But this essay made the lack of stage directions, and the precise wording of the exchange between two sentries, part of something Griffiths calls “’depth-of-field,’ an impression that the play’s characters have lives quite their own, happening offstage as well as onstage, before and after the action of the drama.” This expands my ability to notice what others probably already see when they read drama, and might help me feel more comfortable with the process.

The chapter “What Beauty Hides” by Adrienne Brown gives some helpful advice on noticing; on reading in general, really:

Noticing transforms readers from passive consumers of a text – largely at its mercy – into active co-producers of knowledge with a text in engaged conversation with it. To notice is to meditate on the choices that comprise a work of literature.
…. One way to begin the work of noticing is to describe what is familiar about a passage as well as what might be defamiliarizing about it. If you know exactly where a scene is situated in time, space, or emotional register, you can start by noticing what precisely the text has done to make you feel so.
…. If the text refuses to locate you in time, space, or feeling, this, too, is a starting point for taking stock by pinpointing what expectations or conventions it eschews in doing so. More commonly, a work of literature will mix the familiar with the unfamiliar within a single passage, scripting the reader to reflect on their expectations and how they are either being met or undermined.

This essay goes on to examine how Toni Morrison close-reads The Words to Say It, a memoir by the French writer Marie Cardinale, and points out exactly how she sets the scene, notices, and goes from local claiming to global theorizing.

Part III focuses on local claiming,  described by the editors as “how to understand what they have noticed… how that detail is working in its immediate context of a sentence, line or stanza, moment, or paragraph.” Julie Orlemansky’s essay “The Apple of Experience” again turns to Erich Auerbach and briefly reviews the steps of close reading as it dissects the medieval play Adam and Eve, emphasizing how the process of close reading is circular:

The toggle between textual details and the larger whole, or between literary design and the greater culture for which a work is made, constitutes what is known as the “hermeneutic circle,” or the iterative process by which different scales and sites of interpretation inform one another in the process of textual understanding.

For those of us who are not scholars, that may sound intimidating, but Orlemansky goes on to break it down and show how Auerbach’s close read follows this technique. It was here, by the way, that I decided I needed to read Auerbach’s work, as a curriculum of sorts for reading other literature.

Part IV focuses on regional argumentation, which “uses the local claim as a lens through which one can see something else about the text.” I was particularly struck by Elaine Auyoung’s essay “The Drama of Comparison” which discusses Alex Woloch’s close read of Pride and Prejudice. He makes the case that characters are often presented in pairs, and this positioning creates a kind of ranking,

Although poetry is not my strength (I’m not sure what is my strength, but at this point it’s certainly not poetry), – or maybe because poetry isn’t my strength – I found Emily Ogden’s chapter, “Befriending Poems,” fascinating. She writes about Robert Penn Warren’s 1943 essay “Pure and Impure Poetry” which contains his read of the John Crowe Ransom poem “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” how it relates to the New Criticism as typified by the iconic 1938 volume Understanding Poetry, and how his read of the poem changes the irony it might otherwise represent.  As it happens the original essay is available online, so I spent some time with this; I’m still not sure I’ve got it all, but I loved the idea of befriending a poem.

The final Part V covers global theorizing, “the experience of literature telling us about the world.” In her chapter “Little Bit of Ivory,” Stephanie Insley Hershinow makes me want to read Sense and Sensibility by her presentation of a section of D. A. Miller’s book Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (or perhaps it’s Miller I want to read; oh, hell, I want to read them both). She traces Miller’s path by which a toothpick becomes a criticism of marriage and heteronormativity itself, then continues on to the Austen Style – that free indirect discourse – that allows this to occur.

There are many more essays in the book, of course, exploring literature in terms of class, race, queer theory, ethnicity, and gender. If I’ve presented a mostly mainstream sampling, it’s because that’s where I feel most able to accurately portray the materials. That is my restriction (and I’m working on it), not the book’s.

The final part of the book, Practical Materials, is a little workbook with exercises and opportunities to practice the concepts and skills the book has outlined. I’m a bit insecure about this: how do I know if I’m doing it right without a teacher, or without answers in the back of the book? I suppose I’ll just have to give it a go and see where it takes me.

The editors and some contributors also participated in a panel discussion, which is currently being released, a week at a time (it’s on week 2 right now) as a podcast. I have to admit, the first week was a bit rough for me. In fact, in combination with an extraordinary post by my blogging buddy Jake Weber on a story from Best American Short Stories – a post that set the scene, noticed, claimed locally, argued regionally, and theorized globally, to arrive at an interpretation I’d missed entirely in my reading yet was so obvious to me now that he’d pointed it out – it pretty much put me in a deep funk of inadequacy, one of those places where I wanted to delete this blog and go back to reading police procedurals and general readership medicine and science. As Kim McLarin wrote in her essay collection Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed, “Learning is hard on the ego.” Eventually, I recovered. Addendum again: I found the second session of the symposium offered some comfort here, since it is a principle that close reading is a conversation, and each close reading is incomplete, waiting for further development by another interlocutor.

Even allowing for my strong preference for reading above listening, the Q&A is clearly above my current level of understanding (though it did present the opportunity for a fun drinking game: take a shot every time someone says “hermeneutic circle”) but I can look at that as aspirational. Addendum yet again: I’ve just begun listening to the second part of the symposium, and while it still remains rather rooted in academia, that is, with those who write close readings for a living, I did find the notion of close reading as a conversation to be both understandable and positive.

My neuroses aside, I recommend this book as a kind of study guide for those of us exploring the literary world on our own, outside the walls of a classroom. It’s just a delight to come across all it reveals, even if some of us aren’t quite up to grasping every nuance.  That is what a heaven’s for, after all.

Resources:

• About the Book – PUP
• Emory Symposium, Part I: Make a  claim for one term that’s crucial for close reading
• Emory Symposium, Part II: Close Reading is a Conversation
• Emory Symposium, Part lII: Close Reading is Not a Luxury
• Interview with Editors – Publishers Weekly
• Article in The Defector: “Close Reading Is For Everyone” by Dan Sinykin, May 22, 2025
• Review in LARB: “The Problem of the Parlor” by Douglas Dowland, October 21, 2025
• Blog Post by Jake Weber on Workshop Heretic: My nomination for an additional chapter in the book.

For me, right now, I have to ask myself a question about how I should proceed. Because I started writing this thing as a joke, and I’m not sure it’s still such a joke anymore.
When I took this project up, my goal was to make something stupid that would make people angry. In greater detail, my plan was to write and self-publish a book called Heavens to Betsy and put a fake name on it.
….But while I went about writing this whole thing as a put-on, a pretend book, to be presented to the world as the work of someone who doesn’t exist, I found that in the course of writing it I expressed something real, something true. Despite my initial intentions, something in this thing I was working on mattered.

See, this is why using LLMs for writing is such a stupid idea. Whether you’re a writer with a PhD in Creative Writing and a Pushcart Prize (as Foreman is) or a pissant blogger who, forty years ago while in her 30s, finally  got through an English degree without reading Moby Dick (as I am), writing can teach you things. Writing can change the way you see things.

The event that brought on this book was real. The pug named Betsy is real. She ran into the street, in the path of a dump truck. I intervened.
I acted when I saw the need to act. I surprised myself.
And while my impulse, right after the event, and actually during it, was to laugh at myself and see how ridiculous my life was, because I was a grown man chasing a pug, and pugs look so absurd that everything around them can’t help seeming funny, too, something started gnawing at me when I rescued Betsy. Something started to hurt.
I don’t know why it hurt, or where the pain was, exactly, but I know that I felt it. Which made it impossible for me to let this be merely a stupid book that inspires regret in the people who buy it.

Writing can help you find the pain that was there all along, when it finally finds something to attach itself to.

Reading can do that, too.

I read this book – it’s a chapbook, so it’s short, 53 pages, a lot of white space, you can probably read it during your lunch hour, especially if you have one of those rare-nowadays jobs that actually gives you a whole hour – four or five times. The first time, I read it as a transit book, because it’s small and easy to stuff into a rucksack and read on the bus or in a waiting room. That was a mistake, though, because the book is already fragmented, so fragmenting it even more by reading it a few pages at a time pretty much obliterated it.

Aside: It’s weird that I’ve now read two fragmented, self-referential books in a row based on real life experiences by two underappreciated, morally grounded writers I’ve known (to varying degrees) for a long time now, books that were funny and yet had something important to say.

The second time I read it, in one sitting in my living room (a much better approach), I thought, Oh, it’s a braided essay.

Aside: When I’m scared, or confused, I get analytical. And distracted. Braids are, or can be, mathematical objects. I don’t understand anything other than that they are there, and the diagrams, like the one used above, are pretty.

We have several major segments, all mixed together, like a braid (see?):

• The Story of How I Saved Betsy’s Life, I through VIII;
• If Betsy Was A Man Dying Inside A House I through V;
• What the River Taught Me, I through III;
• Inspirational Quotations I through IV;
• “Hero” sections, variably named.

Then we have a whole bunch of minor segments, which doesn’t mean they’re not important, just that they’re less clumpable. For instance, Dump Trucks, from which the above two quotes were pulled, is one of the most important sections.

Then there’s About the Author, which in most books is a Contributor Note, that is, a place for the writer to brag about all their awards and prestigious publications. Here, it’s part of the actual book, so don’t skip it, because it’s important. It starts out trying to be a standard Contributor Note, but it just can’t do that, which is evident by about the middle of the first sentence –

Robert Long Foreman suspects he would have been better off if he had gone to law school and hadn’t ever considered writing something that wasn’t a legal brief, or whatever lawyers write when they’re not out there causing problems for everyone.
He didn’t go to law school. Instead he ended up writing this.
He has made a lot of bad decisions in his life. Bringing Heavens to Betsy into the world is one more of them, probably. He only wrote It in the first place because of a mistake he made whilst having the time of his life with generative artificial intelligence.

– but then it gives up on that third-person distancing (maybe it’s because Foreman started out scared but then got over it) and just talks to the reader like a person would, not like The Author, about how the book came to be.

He – or I, rather – didn’t do that for long. I realized after messing with it briefly that AI is bad for the human race and the water supply. And we are in the middle of a global water crisis.

Then I read it a third time. Out loud. Into a Word document. Except for the parts where I didn’t realize the dictate thing had shut off because I took too long to turn the page. And this is the read where the story started teaching me things. Or, at least, I realized it was teaching me things.

This is all an interpretation. It’s a meditation, a conversation, probably other -ations. So don’t blame Foreman because I’m a little crazy. If you want more intelligent reviews, check out the links below. Or, better yet, Read It Yourself (there’s a link for that, too), and see what you think.

Because now I think it’s all about the effects of heroism on the hero. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, maybe surprise heroism corrupts surprisingly. One day you’ve rescued a pug, and the next you’re planning a murder. The things we love can hurt us. Yeah, that’s another part of the braid.

The murder starts with Tuesdays with Morrie, which I’ve never read. Foreman (who has also never read it) explains that it’s a deeply touching inspirational story about a guy visiting someone who’s dying, and gets all this wisdom he has to share. I have a deep distrust of books like that, but that probably makes me a monster in some people’s eyes.

This leads to the first part of the If Betsy Was A Man Dying Inside A House segment.

When I picture Betsy speaking, I don’t see her doing it as an actual dog. Remember: dogs can’t talk. If one did it would be horrible, and I would want to jump off the roof of the building.
I picture Betsy as an old man with tuberculosis who is dying at home surrounded by his loving family. I visit him every Thursday, to keep him company and to take his mind off the eternity he will soon face, all alone, because even when you die with other people you die alone.
…. I wouldn’t go to see him every Thursday. I would only go when I felt up to it, which wouldn’t be all that often, because dogs aren’t supposed to take the forms of sick old men. When they do it, they should be destroyed, but I don’t know if I would have the strength to kill Betsy. I don’t always have it in me to do what must be done.

Suddenly it’s Bizarro World Betsy, and Bizarro World Bobby Bear.

You can see what’s coming, right? Even if Betsy goes all Morrie and imparts wisdom (which she does, though it’s not the wisdom we’re expecting; in fact, when I see his version of wisdom, I feel like killing him myself, or at least smacking him across the face), heroism means doing what must be done.

But who gets to decide what must be done?

It’s pretty easy to decide a dog running into the street should be restrained. But what if it’s just a pug named Betsy that’s suddenly an old man talking to you, and you think that’s an abomination so you kill him/her?

What other things are you going to decide are abominations?

So this is where other strands of the braid come in.

Like What the River Taught Me, where heroism was witnessed, though imperfectly imitated.

Like The Things we Love Can Hurt Us I thru III, which is about how the love of dump trucks gets grisly.

Like Not All Heroes Are Treated Right I and II, which starts out about Prometheus and Socrates but then goes sideways when our hero suddenly starts feeling entitled. Surprise heroism corrupts surprisingly, remember?

I think that’s what I see most in this. Things change into other things. The story changed while Foreman was writing it. The story changed Foreman, he changed the story (with a little help from his wife, as mentioned in About the Author). My impression of the story changed as I read it, and as I started writing about it (which is why I write these things, at least partly). About the Author changes POVs. Betsy the Pug changes into an old man. And – maybe here is the point – heroism changes Foreman (though I think it’s mostly imaginary, like Betsy turning into an old man). The story he tells about saving Betsy changes, like a fish story where the fish goes from being a foot long to being 600 pounds. I mean, he said the dump truck passed so it wasn’t the threat any more, other cars on the road were the threat, but there were no other cars, at least not that are mentioned. Of course it’s better that he grabbed Betsy, since it was dangerous for her to be wandering around on a road where cars could come and hit her (or swerve to avoid her and crash themselves), but was she really doomed? And when he says –

Still, I think I deserve better than I got in the end. I wish everyone would stop giving me such a hard time.
And I don’t mean they give me a hard time for my heroism. I just think I shouldn’t have to work anymore. I do not want to have to go out and have a job.

– now we have a protagonist (because I refuse to believe this is actually Foreman; the book description by the publisher calls it a ‘hybrid’ form, so I think nonfiction has changed into, not fiction exactly, but imaginary territory; see, it changes) who felt kind of heroic then hurt and now resentful. And a murderer in Bizarro World.

But it’s hard to come down too hard on this, because there’s also Playlist for Walking Dogs I and II, which is sweet in that Foreman is a dog walker for a local no-kill shelter (see why I refuse to believe he becomes as entitled as the story would have him sound? He’s a vegetarian, for pete’s sake!), and cringey in that he really, really hates certain dog songs and anyone who likes that dog song. People are complicated, y’know? He’d probably rescue a person who was singing “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window” if they were drowning, but he’d also ban them from contributing to his Playlist. That’s a fair balance, I think.

Like I said, this is all an interpretation. Another reader might see it very differently. I’d love to talk to other readers of this book and see what they think. And that’s not going to happen, because I’ve been Here To Make Friends and trying to talk to people on social media for years and years, and all anybody here wants are likes and reposts and followers, not actual discussion. One exchange, at most, and that’s it. I should probably give up, but I keep hoping. And I do have a couple of people who talk to me (though Foreman isn’t one of them, I suspect he thinks I’m a pest, but I keep reading his books – except for the Weird Pig one – so he puts up with me). I guess that will have to do.

Resources:

• You, too, can get a copy of Heavens to Betsy, from Cutbank Literary Magazine, where it was a runner-up in their annual Chapbook Contest.
• Check out the author’s website to see a more professional description of the book.
• Though he’s since abandoned Substack, a post Foreman wrote outlined his experience with AI and how it started this project – and includes the weird book cover pictures AI generated (you have to scroll down a bit, but it’s there). Natalya Balnova, a person rather than a computer program, did a much better job, where Betsy looks a bit surprised herself, on the actual published chapbook.
• If you’re curious about mathematical braids (and there’s no reason you should be, but just in case), there are several videos about them on Youtube, like this one, and this one, and there’s a more complicated article about braids as life and spacetime on Nautilus.

Tom Williams is a forty-plus year veteran of NSA and the last Zendian language analyst at the agency. Most NSA employees think Zendia is a made-up country meant to teach new analysts, but Tom is one of the few people read into the ROMANACLEF program who knows the real truth: Zendia is a real country, but one whose very existence is so sensitive, it had to be kept secret, which NSA has done by hiding it in plain sight, pretending it is a made-up country.
Tom has seen how Zendia has been a hidden influence on U.S. policy from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In all that time, he has never let on anything about Zendia to outsiders, but two events have conspired to force him to spill everything he knows. One is a plot by Zendia to destroy the world, a plot Tom discovered but now doesn’t think is real. Second is his son’s ongoing struggle with mental health issues, which Tom thinks can only be fixed by telling his son who he really is.
…. Set against the backdrop of the Trump presidential campaign of 2016, this novel tells the truth about the National Security Agency and America in the only way anyone could do it and get away with it: by making it all up.
Jake Weber, Book summary on Amazon

Jake Weber – yes, that Jake Weber, my blogging buddy for the past decade or so, who just happened to also be a translator for the NSA, though I didn’t know that for a couple of years – did such a good job summarizing his novel in the Amazon description, I’ve decided it’s better than anything I could come up with.

But that summary leaves out a few things. And those things are what make this book unique. Like Tom’s Zendian wife, who’s obsessed with John Ritter and thinks Three’s Company is real. Like his son, who despite all his literary education can’t write a publishable story. Like the workplace intrigue over a counter-intuitive coffee maker (“She had probably picked the most idiotic coffee maker she could find specifically so she could berate people for messing it up” – yes, I’ve known bosses like that). Like Tom’s childhood experiences with church, his father’s experiences in war, and the history of Zendia.

That and the way it’s told. “It’s what Vonnegut would have written if he’d been a spy,” Jake says in his description. Yes, that’s exactly it. There’s  a fragmentation, a jumping around from family to work to Zendia, and it isn’t until chapter 24 (of 27) that I finally had a grasp of the whole timeline. In fact, those final chapters reminded me of a short story, with an inciting incident and rising action and a climax and a denouement that ties everything together in a satisfying way.

I don’t listen to just anyone’s secrets. The National Security Agency isn’t going to pay me to listen in and confirm or deny what you suspect about your husband and the dry cleaner, or get dirt on the mother-in-law you hate. But I do hear more than my share of intimate knowledge. You think that just because you’re a black market arms dealer you don’t get the clap from your mistress or have to beg your father humiliatingly for a loan? Even an arms dealer has more secrets than just what he’s selling and to whom. And dollars to donuts if he had to choose, he’d rather the world find out about the secrets having to do with selling weapons than find out he’s got the clap, even though the first kind of secret could put him in jail, let alone kill teenagers in some impoverished nation.

But I see it as not about the NSA, not about plots and politics, not even about family, but about storytelling and writing, and the importance of storytelling to all those things we think are more important.

What better way to emphasize the importance of something than by removing it.

My son has to be forgiven for his inability to tell good stories and his ridiculous name. My son is half Zendian. His mother was full-blooded Zendian — was, in fact, descended from what some would call Zendian royalty. The Zendians do not tell stories. The original founders of their country were half made up of Portuguese crusaders who were more concerned about conquering than missionary work. The other half were Muslim imperialists who had tried and failed to convert Ethiopia. If their country was ever going to survive, they couldn’t afford to fight over religion. Since stories so often were linked to religion in the cultures of both founding parties, it was determined that there should be no stories told among the Zendians.
This policy brought a surprising level of harmony to early Zendia within a very short time, but there were a few drawbacks: Parents lost an important tool when trying to soothe children to sleep, and the segment of the population that might otherwise have gathered a few stray Kalebs (the ancient coin of Zendia) by means of wandering minstrelsy were forced instead to found tiny shops where they dipped fish heads into buckets of boiling oil – the world’s first fast food establishment, the Zendian shadow rep to the UN would have us believe. This is reportedly how the Zendian proverb “better a fish head than a sensual novella rife with gracious flourishes recognizing one’s own corporeality” got its origin. Zendian proverbs are incredibly difficult to parse. I have a very hard time making heads or tails of them, although I try to hide this secret from my bosses at the National Security Agency, who still think I am an expert on the subject.

Tom, also, has a lifelong distrust of fiction, and hasn’t read much. “I remember learning the word ‘fiction’ in school and keeping straight what it meant by substituting the word ‘baloney’ for ‘fiction.’ So maybe it’s nature, or nurture, that son Menekob (we’re forgiving him for the ridiculous name, remember?) can’t write a decent story.

And now Tom finds himself with a problem that he feels can only be solved by writing a novel exposing secret truth to the world. He asks his son to help him. And this is where I had a lot of fun. Menekob keeps giving him Creative Writing 101 advice that Tom thinks is nonsense. But he did ask for help.

Do you know what Menekob wanted me to include instead of that aside about the role the war played in developing weapons? Something he keeps calling “Significant Detail.” …. For example, he wanted me to say something about Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi’s appearance. I said I don’t know what he looked like. He said it didn’t matter, that this is a novel and I should try to make readers able to see, taste, smell, hear, and feel things that are in it.
…. The whole point of writing this book is for Menekob’s sake. Because I want Menekob to feel better about himself, I’ll indulge him here. Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, who led the Somali-Ottoman armies into Ethiopia, had perfectly manicured toenails. This was unusual at the time, because clippers hadn’t been invented yet. Al-Ghazi had to painstakingly grind them down with the side of a stone he kept in his pocket. He put this effort into his toenails because he thought the ends of toenails were crescent shaped like the crescent moon, which is a holy symbol in Islam. He had developed a theory, one he kept to himself, that human toenails were sacred. He was afraid another imam might think this theory was heresy, so he never told anyone why he kept his nails so perfect, and he mostly did all his work on them out of sight of others.
Like I said at the beginning, we all have secrets.

I’ve always felt the best way to get anything across, to engage interest in anything, is to tell a story. I’d read fifty pages just to hear more about Al-Ghazi’s toenails. Ok, maybe five pages, which, for me on Kindle, is quite a lot. But it’s still an amazing passage. And the later application of Chekhov’s Gun to a knife is perfect. This book is a writer’s dream – not necessarily because of the writing, but because of the centrality of Writing.

And, hey, remember that fragmentation I mentioned? Turns out, Menekob keeps shuffling the pages as he reads what Tom’s written, tells him to move sections around. This isn’t the normal editing process, but it’s what they have.

As it happens, I got to the final chapters, where the need to learn storytelling becomes a compelling interest to … well, never mind to whom, just know it does … a fascinating tidbit rolled across my Bluesky timeline. It turns out the richest man in the world is trying to hire expert storytellers (at a laughable price, confirming his view of their worth) to help Grok learn to tell stories. And this is while interest and funding for the humanities, including creative writing and literary critique, is declining in favor of vocational training. I’d laugh my ass off if it weren’t so tragic.

I can’t claim objectivity here. Every time Jake has mentioned his work on this book, I’ve hinted that I hoped he’d just send me a copy so I didn’t have to wait for him to find the right publisher. Ok, so he had to do it through Kindle. And, by the way, I hate Kindle. I have five books on Kindle now, and this is the only one I’ve read. That’s how motivated I was. It was worth it. It’s very funny, very relevant, and, in just the right places, very sweet. And it’s all about the story.

Resources:

• You, too, can own a virtual copy of this book for less than the cost of a cup of mediocre coffee, or just read the full description for free, at Amazon
• In a post on his blog Workshop Heretic, Jake writes about why he wrote this novel, and why he decided to self-publish.
• Yes, there really is, or was, a Zendia, as this novel tells us, and it’s described right there in Wikipedia. It’s totally made-up (or is it?), but was used in the 50s to practice cryptography.
• Literary critic Michael Schaub takes a look at the recent ad for someone to teach AI a thing or two about storytelling.