Complexity vs. Simplciity

An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It
Bruce Scheiman

Capsule Review

In An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It (Alpha, 2009), Bruce Scheiman makes the claim that religion offers the best means of understanding one's place in the world regardless of whether God exists.  Specifically, in his view it offers more than a purely materialist, science-based approach ever could.  He offers many interrelated arguments to support his claims.  Unfortunately, I do not have the time to dissect Scheiman's ideas in detail, but, after the majority of his edifice eventually collapses under the barrage of questions with which any thoughtful reader would inevitably bombard it, one question remains standing that we must consider.

Scientific materialism is reductionist – it holds that complex natural phenomena can always be reduced to a collection simpler ones.  Thus, any biological process is a collection of chemical ones, and a chemical process is a combination of physical ones.  In other words, biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics.  And we all know that left to their own devices, physical processes will always move towards greater entropy, i.e. a lack of order.  So physics will always move away from greater complexity towards greater simplicity.  Yet few of us would deny that life, over the millions of years of its existence, has evolved towards greater complexity.  From RNA to DNA, from single-cell organisms to multi-cell ones, and eventually towards consciousness and intelligence.  How do we reconcile this glaring contradiction?

Scheiman says that only religion can do this.  This, though deeply appealing to a vast majority of people (he is right about that), is, of course, false.  Thomas Nagel, for one, has offered the idea of natural teleology that is compatible with a fully non-theistic view of the world.  His ideas, which, though fascinating, are a subject for another day, may yet end up being, if you will allow me, reduced to scientific materialism as we understand it today.  Still, the question of how to reconcile the physical imperative of greater simplicity with life's inexorable march towards greater complexity is something those of us who use science to guide important life decisions must examine seriously.

Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity has been well covered elsewhere, so I will not attempt a full review here.  Suffice it to say that I cannot recommend it enough.  One of the remarkable things about the book is that it would be unreadable if it weren't for Boo's perfectly dispassionate, detached, documentary style.  A drop of emotion, and the events described in the book would be overwhelming even to the most atrophied heart.  What really sent me for a loop, though, is that more than once while reading I thought that perhaps there are places and times when a government does have a legitimate role that goes beyond merely ensuring that individual rights are not infringed upon as I usually like to maintain, and that role might reasonably be – can I really be thinking this? – to enforce a one-child policy.  Would China be where it is today if they never had such a policy, or never enforced it?  Would that be a good thing?  And for whom?

Tyler Cowen

Went to hear Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist, at Politics & Prose tonight. He was speaking in connection with his new book, The Great Stagnation. Not having read the book yet, I will refrain from detailed commentary. Suffice it to say that he had a few interesting things to say, and in the end I was glad I went.

The gist of his argument in the book seems to be that broad economic growth is driven by technological innovation, and that we have run out of innovation. "Broad" to him means something that the entire population benefits from, not just a narrowly-defined group. And the innovation has to be deep and fundamental to be meaningful -- something that transforms every-day lives of a vast number of people in readily recognizable ways. According to Cowen, for the past three hundred years, such innovation has been relatively easy to come by, and we started to take it for granted and assume that things will continue in the same vein for the foreseeable future. In fact, however, such life-altering innovation has now become very difficult to achieve. We have already picked off all the low-hanging fruit, and anything more will require exponentially more effort. Thus, phenomena like the leveling-off of income growth among many others.

Two points from the talk stuck with me. One is that the Internet is not all it has cracked up to be, at least when it comes to changing people's lives in fundamental ways. The intellectual elite in places like Washington, DC (i.e., all of us) don't recognize this. To us, it has fundamentally changed our lives, and we cannot imagine life and work without the Internet any more than we can imagine it without electricity or telephone service. The same is not true for the population at large, Cowen argues. For a middle-class family of four in rural Ohio pulling in $45K/year, it's a marginal improvement at best, and a bit of a luxury. I tend to agree with him on this.

The other point was a little more chilling. One of the reasons for the slow-down in innovation that Cowen has suggested is the lure of the financial sector for the best-educated. Because so many Harvard graduates (e.g.) go into finance these days, fewer talented people go into basic research, the sciences, and education. Someone in the audience, however, asked a provocative question -- how are we different in that respect from what was going on in the late 1920s, another major boom for the financial industry? Cowen's answer was that we weren't that different. In retrospect, of course, we all know where the events of 1929-1931 led to, especially in Europe. Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to ask him to comment on that during Q&A. I asked the question once the event proper was over, but I am not sure he got my drift. He was focused on the economic legacy of 1931 in the US, not the political legacy of 1931 in Europe. He advised me to pay off my mortgage. Thanks, Tyler.

James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief

James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief is a curious book. Carse - a former head of the religious studies program at NYU - starts with a bold claim that pretty much all commonly accepted definitions and, more importantly, understanding of religion is wrong, and sets out to provide the correct one.

The big problem for him are belief systems. Pretty much anyone would agree that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that, according to Carse, is precisely what has led to millennia of violence and intolerance in the name of religion. He spends the entire first half of the book deconstructing and analyzing belief systems and how they work. This he does with clarity, elegance and much nuance. In fact, this analysis is the chief appeal of the book and to many will be the only part worth reading. Carse points out, for example, that a fundamental feature of belief systems is the need for opposition, that they derive their vitality from not only espousing a set of beliefs, but from disagreeing with a set of opposing beliefs just as vehemently. If all of a sudden everyone said to a proponent of a given system, "Sure, you're right, I agree with you," the system would implode. He also points out - and that may be obvious on a bit of reflection, but he does it well nonetheless - that belief systems are by definition closed, i.e. they accept no evidence that does not support the beliefs already held. That is precisely why science does not count. Any scientist believes a great many things at any given moment, of course, but is always open to having his mind changed by new evidence. The mental process that is essential for subscribing to a belief system he calls willful ignorance - a notion that becomes important in the second half of the book.

So if religion is not a belief system, what is it? Here, Carse is far less clear. In opposition to willful ignorance, he posits a higher ignorance. A kind of sense of wonder at the ever expanding mystery of the world around you. The key here is that by definition you will always remain ignorant of the ultimate truth, and the more you learn, the greater your ignorance becomes. This is why science doesn't count here either, although he does not say that. Any self-respecting scientist would say that we could eventually know everything about the world. It might be that we never will, but we could.

Mere higher ignorance, however, even if you could pinpoint it exactly, is not by itself religion. Carse defines religion in terms of the Latin word communitas. It takes him a while to arrive at a definition. Mostly, he defines it as being in opposition to civitas (essentially, formal authority), but eventually arrives at this: "[communitas] is a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body" (p. 83). Finally, longevity is essential - communitas has to have existed long enough to be meaningful. Carse never defines "enough" - it's a case of "I'll know it when I see it." Thus, Catholicism is a religion (as is Christianity in general), but Mormonism is not. So religion, then, is a spontaneous gathering of people that has coalesced around a sense of higher ignorance and has been around long enough. Interestingly, on the same page where he defined communitas Carse says that we cannot really know what religion is. But it's something like that. Note also that I didn't say a religion. This is essential - there aren't many religions, it's all one thing. Christianity and Judaism are mere short-hands (though Carse doesn't use the term) for something that we cannot know and cannot even really name properly.

One of the interesting things is that in an entire book about religion and belief, there is no God anywhere. He is barely mentioned, and even then in passing, while discussing belief. Perhaps more shockingly, the same is true of faith. Again, Carse drops the word once or twice in an intuitively understandable context, but does not really examine it or address its relevance to religion, if any. If pressed, I suppose he would say that it is a requirement for belief, but not for religion.

All this is interesting as far as it goes, but ultimately frustrating. Carse says a lot about what a religion isn't, a fair amount about what it is (or at least tries to), but nothing about what it does. I suppose he would say it doesn't do anything, it simply is. But that's a cop-out. We humans are a practical bunch. Higher ignorance and a sense of wonder is all well and good, but for us to bother, we've got to get something out of it, especially a couple of thousand years ago when we didn't have the luxury of sitting around reading books by retired religion professors. But as soon as we draw the usual inferences - "it helps us explain the world around us," "we have something to blame when things go wrong," etc., we are in the territory of belief and not religion.

So does religion have essentially no purpose? I suspect Carse would say yes. I wish he did - it would have made at least the book useful to some people, if not religion itself. But advocating the utility of something would put is back in the territory of belief, wouldn't it?

Jason Wilson, Boozehound

If you are going to go to school to study writing, don't do it at Drexel University. That is where Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits ostensibly teaches writing, and if the book is any indication, he is not very good at it. But I am getting ahead of myself. Boozehound is actually not a bad book. It's worth checking out by anyone who has any interest in distilled spirits and cocktails, primarily for the recipes. To his great credit, Wilson closes every chapter with a sizable selection of recipes, usually a mixture of classics and new-fangled concoctions, sometimes of his own creation. By the end of the book, all but the most obsessive amateur mixologist will be armed with a year's worth of experimental material.

As to the rest, Boozehound is largely true to food-writing form. Wilson travels around the Western hemisphere on his publisher's dime, visiting distilleries and bars, interviewing distillers and marketers and tasting a variety of spirits, some quite unusual, and marvels the whole time at his great fortune of being able to do this. Last I checked, this was called showing off.

Where Wilson really lost me, however, was the anecdotes of his supposedly misspent youth. Suburban New Jersey in the 1980s is an endless source of amusement to him, even all these years later. You would think that a college professor, ostensibly happily married with two kids, would have moved beyond this, and traveling around the world tasting exotic spirits would blow making out with a big-haired girl in a Camaro out of the water, but apparently not. Maybe it's just me. I never had the exhilarating experience of almost getting lucky with the most popular girl in the class on a high-school trip to Paris. But for my money, a well-mixed cocktail is best garnished with a twist of lemon peel, not a heap of teenage escapades.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Seblad is unique, in my experience, in that his fiction is classified as such but does not read like fiction at all. He is the flip side of someone like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood -- a piece of journalism that for all the world reads like a novel. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in particular, comes off like a combination of travelogue, memoir and, at times, textbook, but never a novel. Written in the first person, it is a meandering account of a man -- there is no doubt that it is Sebald himself -- wandering, mostly on foot, through the English countryside, occasionally meeting people, and seeing places and things that launch him on long historical asides that sometimes don't end up anywhere near where they started.

If this sounds like a curious book, it is, but ultimately, the strange style -- I'm not even sure if that is quite the word for it -- is largely irrelevant. For me, Sebald is all about the mood, and Rings is full of it. Subdued and melancholy, it never degenerates into outright brooding -- about the right balance for me these days. The thing that strikes one immediately is that large swaths of the narrator's world, at least until he meets whomever it is he set out to find, is almost completely devoid of people. The few that are present are always so remote -- fishermen on the beach observed from a tall cliff, an embracing couple on a distant hillside -- that they offer no human companionship at all. When he does finally meet his interlocutors, they are inevitably individuals, never groups, engaged in some solitary pursuit. It is a world that, while not entirely appealing, is one in which I instinctively feel comfortable. The darkness and weight do get intense at regular intervals, but even then I feel drawn in by the stark beauty of his scenes. One does not read Sebald to cheer oneself up.

The Emigrants, which I had read a while ago, uses the same approach, and I enjoyed it slightly more than Rings, perhaps because the latter book, during one or two of Sebald's historic/educational asides, does get just a touch polemical -- something I do not remember the other book doing, heavy on history though it was. And the last chapter, dedicated entirely to the history of sericulture, and from which the narrator is completely absent, feels tacked on as an afterthought. Still, on balance, The Rings of Saturn gave me many an enjoyable moment of contemplating the narrator's, and by extension my own, loneliness in the world.

Edmunds Wilson, To the Finland Station

Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station is a minor classic, and having finally read it after it had spent years on my list, I can see why. The writing is extremely engaging and frequently quite beautiful. There were times when I found the book hard to put down. Because of this, I read without taking notes, so what follows is shorter and more shallow than it might have been otherwise.

...Station is an unusual book - it is the literary and ideological history of socialist revolutionary movements in Europe. Wilson starts with the earliest thinkers who left a significant body of work to which we can trace the Radical Left - Michelet, Renan and their immediate followers. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Marx and Engels and their written output. In the final section, which is somewhat less focused on written work, Wilson discusses the rise of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

One of the really remarkable things about ...Station, though, and the main reason why it is so engaging, is a very strong emphasis on biography. In particular, Wilson renders Marx, and his relationship with Engels, with such vividness and attention to detail that we get a very vibrant and complete portrait of both men. In fact, the middle section of the book would suffice as a biography of Marx for most readers. The portrait of Marx that emerges is that of an extremely unpleasant character. He was a mad genius, utterly incapable of functioning in society, unable to manage the simplest details of daily life without help, all the while driven inexorably to write. He was opinionated to the extreme, unable to suffer the slightest disagreement, disdainful of all interlocutors, even those who were largely supportive of his aims, and obsessed with always having full control of any movement that claimed him as its ideological foundation. He was doted on throughout his life by his long-suffering wife and financed by Engels, without whose handouts he would have probably perished, unable as he was to hold a job of any sort.

As to the substance of his subjects' work, Wilson is frustrating. He is an extremely keen critic of Marx & Co.'s work, and where their arguments, or methods, or both, don't hold water, which they don't in many places, Wilson deconstructs them with impressive subtlety and finesse until there is nothing left. He is unequivocal on the fact that for all the ink they have spilled on their theories of dialectical materialism, "the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their own point of view in any very elaborate way." (p. 213).

I am particularly grateful to Wilson for not ignoring the aspect most others do: their utter disdain for some of Europe's, and the world's, peoples that they felt were incapable of executing a revolution and should therefore be eliminated so they don't stand in the way. Engels in 1851: "The Poles have never done anything in history except commit courageous quarrelsome stupidities" (p. 270). And a little later: "Engels also approved when 'energetic Yankees' took California away from the 'lazy Mexicans' because... the former were better fitted to work the country..." (ibid.).

For all that, however, Wilson, who is well known to have been sympathetic to the political Left, turns right around and expresses an almost unbridled admiration for his subjects' achievements. It is true that technically he is admiring the writing - the persuasiveness of their arguments, the effective responses to their critics, etc. - but the terms he uses are tantamount to admiring the substance of the ideas the writing contains:

These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous - in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation... etc. (p. 237)

To The Finland Station was first published in 1940, when the West, and thus Wilson, could still be forgiven for not yet having understood the full implications of Stalin's most egregious crimes of a few years earlier. By the time he reissued the book with a new introduction in 1968, the full extent of the horror was well known, and in fairness, I must acknowledge that he does make an effort to repent: "I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known..." (p. v). He also makes one of the most scathing character sketches of Lenin I have read. But he makes no effort to trace the beginnings of that tyranny to the work of Marx and his cohorts and followers that he so admired, so we are left with the deflating sense that the obviously brilliant Wilson is little more than another exponent of the fallacy that makes the continued appeal of the radical Left so frustratingly persistent: that Marxism was ruined by its implementation and at its core remains a good idea.

Stefan Zwieg, Beware of Pity

I have neither the skill nor the inclination to analyze fiction, so there isn’t much that I could say about Stefan Zwieg’s Beware of Pity that wouldn’t be trite. My friend C.S., whose copy I borrowed, claimed that it was the best novel he has ever read, though he has since disowned that claim. I did not think much of the book for most of its duration, delighting in the details more than the overall theme, which I thought was spoon-fed to the reader to a disappointing degree. The characters, too, with the possible exception of Dr. Condor, were not portrayed with particular distinction or vivid color. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when the story, as it neared its denouement, steadily gathered steam and, in the last thirty or so pages, became almost overwhelming in its power and the palpable sense of inner torture Hoffmiller experiences. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that what I thought was going to be the climax (given away by the introduction I had made the mistake of reading), was not it at all, or only a small part of it. Hoffmiller is an anti-hero that the best (worst?) in literature will need to reckon with.

For some reason, I was imagining the novel as a movie the entire time I was reading it, preferably a high-budget period melodrama, with thoroughly researched and exquisitely rendered detail. True, a film of Beware of Pity would likely be British, despite the story taking place in Austro-Hungary on the eve of WWI, but for some reason I was picturing Paul Giamatti as Condor. I could also imagine someone like Ian McEwan writing the novel today – same setting, same characters, just a little more evenly rendered without sacrificing any of the power of the ending.

Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music

Why are so many jazz biographies so bad? There are some excellent ones, of course - Peter Pettinger's How My Heart Sings comes to mind - but in any other subject area, those would be all we would have. A manuscript of anything less would not even get past the desk of a junior editor at any self-respecting publishing house. But when it comes to jazz musicians, it seems that anyone who happens to like the music, regardless of their ability to write or their having had any actual connection to the subject, can write a book and have it published. The latest example to cross my path is John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter (University of Michigan, 1998).

I suppose I should be fair. Porter is a musician, and a professor of music at Rutgers, so he knows something about playing. An enormous amount, actually. But that fails to redeem the book. Porter bills his work as a biography, and starts out with an excruciatingly detailed examination of Coltrane's family roots in North Carolina. He spends three full chapters - 34 pages - doing it, and much of those are not even about Coltrane himself but his cousins, aunts and uncles, twice or more removed. Porter's excuse seems to be the fact that it has never been done before, but so what? Maybe there is a reason it hasn't. His conclusion seems to be only that the fact that Coltrane's father died of cancer when John was very young significantly affected the formation of his personality. I grant that this is valid, but it could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, or a handful of pages at the most.

At the same time, however, the book offers virtually nothing about Coltrane's personal life and lifestyle at the height of his success. Like most musicians of his generation, he had once been a drug addict but kicked the habit. He was married twice and had several children and step-children, the maternity of at least one of whom remains uncertain. One could argue, as Porter probably would, that dirt has no place in a serious biography, but I believe it is possible to write about these aspects of a subject's life in a way that is not prurient, and it is a pity that Porter barely tries. Where he does, he further undermines himself by claiming, early on, that his is the first biography to be based on objective research and then proceeding to fill the rest of the book with phrases like "it is reasonable to suppose" or "it was likely that..." and so on.

What Porter does focus on is Coltrane's music. His compositions and improvisational style are analyzed in mind-boggling detail with copious transcriptions for illustration, some of entire solos. This will have some use to a narrow audience - musicians who want to study Coltrane's style in depth and have a sufficiently deep understanding of music theory to make something out of Porter's analysis. But again, if this is a biography, this level of technical detail is excessive. If you do want to focus on it, call the book "The Musical Style of John Coltrane" or some such and dispense with biographical information altogether. But Porter can't seem to decide what he wants the book to be, or, rather, he seems to want it to be a technical analysis masquerading as a biography.

Yet for all these complaints, there is some value in what Porter has done. Pretty much everyone agrees that Coltrane was an innovator. I am not aware of charges of outright charlatanism ever leveled against Coltrane the way they were against, say, Ornette Coleman. The disagreement lies in whether the direction in which he took jazz was a good one. What Porter's analysis shows is why Coltrane's music was so innovative. Just looking at some of the lines on the printed page you realize that they look weird. He played stuff that no one had played, or even thought of playing, before, and Porter proves it. He is not afraid to take his analyses to their logical extreme, even if he ends up concluding on occasion that a particular fragment fits no known pattern or harmonic device, not even any of the ones Coltrane himself had used previously. Does that make Coltrane's music meaningless, at least from a formal perspective? Porter doesn't say, but he provides the raw material to let us decide on our own. I suspect, fully acknowledging my severely limited knowledge of music theory, that the answer is yes.

Finally, despite the distractions, Porter does manage to give us a smidgen of insight into why some of Coltrane's music, especially from Giant Steps onwards, sounds so abrasive. Long before he had given up tonal harmony and straight-ahead swing, his solos started to sound jarring, off-putting and unsettling, and not in a good way according to this pair of ears at least. He was the first, and is still the most infamous, exponent of the "where the hell is the melody?" school of jazz. Porter's explanation is that Coltrane was hearing multiple things - melodies, chord sequences, what have you - in his head simultaneously, and was unable to organize and prioritize them in his mind, resulting in his trying to play all of them at the same time:

...it was difficult to construct a smoothly flowing melodic line that would connect all of the harmonies he was hearing with a minimum of extraneous notes. (p. 158)

Porter doesn't suggest why he couldn't, but that's probably expecting too much from anyone. Just putting this phenomenon into words is valuable - it offers us a possibility, admittedly extremely daunting, to try to hear those individual threads of Coltrane's thinking the next time we pop Giant Steps into the CD player.

So approach John Coltrane: His Life and Music with caution. Lots of caution. I emphatically do not recommend it as a biography, but for those wishing to gain technical insight into Coltrane's style, it may be worth the effort.

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist

Warning: Spoilers follow.

Finished Alberto Moravia's The Conformist a few days ago. I picked up the book many years at a local bookstore's sidewalk sale. Until then, I had not even known that Bertolucci's brilliant 1970 film with Jean-Louis Tritignan as Marcello was based on a novel. I don't have too much to say about the book, but on the whole I enjoyed it. The style, or perhaps the translation, was off-putting at first - Marcello's every thought and emotion explained, with nothing left for us to infer or deduce. But it grew on me, and somehow the writing ended up being fairly powerful despite the overly literal style. I kept referring back to my memories of the film, of course, which probably made the novel more vivid for me than it otherwise would have been, but it also reminded me how many details of the film I had forgotten. It's definitely going on the re-watch list. It's probably worth pointing out that Bertolucci stuck to the book very closely until the end, but then diverged sharply - in the book, Marcello isn't even present at the scene of Quadri's murder. And for the life of me, I could not remember the very final scene, where Marcello and his family die when their car gets strafed by an Allied plane, in the film at all. Either Bertolucci chose to omit it - I can't imagine why, though, its absence changes the overall character of the work significantly - or my memory is worse than I realize.

Anne Appelbaum, GULAG: A History

A few of us will some day read Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus of Soviet forced labor camps, Gulag Archipelago. For the rest, there is Anne Appelbaum's GULAG: A History (Doubleday, 2003). The word "Gulag" has come to be synonymous with the camp system itself, and is even frequently misused to mean an individual camp, but is in fact an abbreviation for "Central Administration of Camps," the Soviet bureaucracy that ran the system. Though the KGB, and its predecessors OGPU and NKVD, have frequently vied for control of the camps with the Interior Ministry, the KGB won, as it did in most aspects of Soviet life, and in light of the fact that the KGB's archives were the only ones that were not opened to researchers after 1991, Appelbaum's study is as comprehensive and precise as we can hope to find until that situation changes.

Those who have no meaningful knowledge of Soviet camps will find more than they will have bargained for. It's all here - the unbearable weather of Russia's Arctic regions, appalling sanitation, starvation rations, inhumane working hours, and beyond-cruel punishments for the slightest disciplinary infractions. She does not skimp on details, some of which may come as a surprise even to those who think themselves knowledgeable. Prisoners on the verge of starvation who spend the last days of their lives crawling around garbage dumps in search of scarps. Women gang-raped literally to death on the transport ships plying the waters of the Russian Far East. It goes on.

The value of Appelbaum's research and writing, though, extends far beyond these topics, as valuable as they are. She masterfully analyzes the complex social structure of the camps - the informers, the bribery, the gangs and the rivalries among prisoners. What will no doubt come as a shock to many Western readers is the revelation that the line separating the guards from the guarded could, and frequently did, blur. Prisoners became guards with regularity, often going directly from one status to the other.

In the West, more often than not Soviet camps are mentioned in the same breath as political prisoners, so I am particularly grateful to Appelbaum for the attention she pays to the professional criminals that have always, even in the darkest days of political repression, constituted the majority of the camps' population. The Soviet Union having been a society under which the most minute aspects of an individual's life were controlled by the government, many readers do not realize that the country has always, even under Stalin, had a large class of full-time criminals, complete with its own code of ethics, distinctive style of dress and, famously, a patois that at times barely sounded like mainstream Russian. As a primer on this underworld, one could do a lot worse than Appelbaum's book.

Nor does she skimp on the government's administration of the camps and the dismal failures that usually accompanied it. From its inception in 1926, GULAG was always intended to be a bulwark of Stalin's economic policy, but in fact had not had a single profitable year in all of its existence. That does not surprise us today, of course, but what might is her revelation that also throughout its existence, the system was plagued with intense conflict between the central administrators in Moscow and the local commanders at the individual camps. The local bosses, expected to fulfill completely unreasonable production norms, and occasionally, Appelbaum is careful to note, out of genuine desire to improve their prisoners' lot, constantly harped on the bureaucrats for woefully inadequate supplies, lack of support, and the general fact that the bureaucrats simply did not get it.

Appelbaum's writing style is perfect for the topic. She is direct, clear, and most importantly, completely unsentimental. This is a documentary work based on research, and the lack of fuzzy, emotional language in no way diminishes its power or makes us appreciate the plight of the tens of millions of GULAG's victims any less. And her research is impressive to say the least. Communist apologists will no doubt find fault with it, citing, among other things, her reliance on the writing of Varlam Shalamov, who, while a survivor of the camps, has only published camp-themed fiction. But that's just squeaking of a discontented few. Remove Shalamov completely, and the book will lose no more than a few pages and none of its power.

In the closing chapters, Appelbaum does offer some thoughts on why the history of the camps has not played nearly as prominent a role in Russia's social and political discourse after 1991 as many have expected. More significantly, she takes a few pages to lament the West's relative indifference to what we can reasonably view as the largest case of mass murder, if not genocide, in history. Yes, nothing Appelbaum says in conclusion is different from Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," but of countless things we, as a civilization, would never want to repeat, the GULAG is right at the top, and in English at least, it has no better chronicler than Anne Appelbaum.

Catching up

A few brief notes on recent things, for lack of a better word, that I haven't written up in a more timely manner

Céline
Finally finished Céline's Death on the Installment Plan. A slog if ever there was one. It had its moments, no doubt about it. The English boarding school, and especially its headmaster, were exquisitely chilling and powerful. Some characters, too, are priceless, or almost - in addition to the headmaster, De Pereires was downright cinematic. Every scene that involved him I could imagine on screen. On balance, however, the book got to be too much too quickly - when I've had enough, I realized I still had several hundred pages to go. Celine pushes the envelope, then pushes it some more. After a while, you just want to say, "Ok, I get the point. Let's move the story forward a little now, shall we?" But he spends a dozen more pages pushing the same envelope. Yes, when the book was first written, this was innovative, sensational, even scandalous. Perhaps this, like Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (albeit for completely different reasons) is another example of a good book that did not age well.

Dogfish Head Grau Dunkel
J. and I go to the beach at Cape Henlopen, DE once or twice every summer, and like to stop at the original Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth afterwards. They usually have one or two beers that are difficult, or in some cases impossible, to get anywhere else. This time, I tried Grau Dunkelwessenberg - a German-Belgian mongrel of a brew made with a mixture of wheat, rye and barley, some of which is smoked. Really smoked. I was not taking notes, so I can't give a formal review here. Suffice it to say that it had a serious bacon thing going on. Unique, but not necessarily delicious.

Dogfish Head Sah'tea
Another one of their exotic limited edition brews, I brought this one home in a bottle and opened it with my friend C.M. a couple of weeks later. It appears to belong to the series of reproductions of ostensibly ancient recipes that they started a few years ago with Chateau Jiahu. This one apparently takes its inspiration from an ancient Finnish proto-beer called Sahti, and Dogfish-Heads it with the addition of spiced chai tea. I did take some notes on this one, so:

Appearance: Slightly reddish caramel color. Murky. Thin head, dissipates quickly.
Nose: Nutmeg, allspice, overripe fruit.
Palate: Bananas. Bananas. A bit of tartness on the back palate, but not enough to balance things. Oh, did I mention bananas?

C.M. gave it a qualified endorsement by saying it was kind of like a hefeweizen without the bad parts. Another beer I am glad I tried but probably would not seek out again.

Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen
I really waited way too long to write this one up, and it really deserved a proper entry of its own. The Embassies of Sweden, Finland and Iceland held a week-long Nordic Jazz Festival in early June, and one of the shows featured Norwegian trumpeters Nils-Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen. They both hardly ever play in the US, so of course I had to go hear them. It was absolutely riveting. The show was long and featured two other bands, both led by young unknowns, so both NPM and Henriksen were sandwiched into the middle hour, which I thought was weird, because both musicians are masters of the long form, so to speak, and because NPM at least is a mega-star in Norway, and I was frankly surprised that he condescended to play for a half-hour in the atrium of an embassy. Henriksen went on first with his long-time collaborator Jan Bang, who worked the electronics. Henriksen would play, or sing, a phrase, which Bang sampled in real time (onto something that used floppy disks - I saw him swapping floppies throughout the performance), then altered it electronically, also in real time, to provide a background for Henriksen's subsequent phrases. It was breathtaking. NPM went on half-way through while Henriksen and Bang were still on stage and matched a long droning note of Henriksen's for a few seconds, allowing him and Bang to walk off. NPM, with two other guys accompanying, then proceeded to play a few typically NPM-esque tunes - heavy drum-n-bass beat and loopy electronics supporting an absolutely ethereal trumpet. I did not recognize the tunes, but it was sublime nevertheless. Musical experience of the year.

David Remnick

Finished David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire a few days ago. Excellent. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Remnick, now at the New Yorker magazine, was the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from the fall of 1987 until the fall of 1991, and though he did not originally bargain for it, ended up witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union first-hand.

Remnick is first and foremost a journalist, and the book is written that way - quick pacing, lots of direct quotations, personal observations - but his chief accomplishment is that he does not neglect history. On the contrary, Lenin's Tomb is an excellent primer on Soviet history. Any reader who wants not just the basics but a hefty dose of historical analysis, compellingly written, could do a lot worse than this book. Though his focus is, obviously, on the Gorbachev years, he really leaves no period untouched, especially the Stalin era. In fact, the major conclusion of the book that will still be worth something generations from now is that Gorbachev's first, and greatest, accomplishment, was that he allowed ordinary Russians to regain their history. As George Orwell, among many others, has pointed out a long time ago, any totalitarian regime could survive only as long as it had complete control of the society's historical knowledge. Once people really learned what happened and why, it was all over. So in that sense, as Remnick is keenly aware, Gorbachev was bound to lose control over the transformations he himself had started, which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Another of Remnick's achievements is the attention he pays to the reactionary elements in Soviet sociaety and the Communist Party, first and foremost of which was, of course, the KGB. Many Westerners still think of the KGB as Russia's equivalent of the CIA, but it was far more than that. It was the CIA, the FBI and something that no modern democracy has (a recent blip in Maryland notwithstanding) - honest to goodness secret police, in the sense of internal espionage - rolled into one. I am grateful to Remnick for making that abundantly clear.

Remnick's faults are few. In the introduction, he expresses hope for the continued democratization of Russia, and in that he has been proven wrong already. And though I am tempted to ask how someone with as deep an understanding of the Soviet system and Russian society as he is could do that, I will chalk it up to his inherently American sense of optimism. He does include something darkly prophetic in the book, perhaps without realizing entirely just how significant it is. In the city of Perm, the former site of a large Gulag camp, he interviews the mayor:

"There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won't be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs - the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." (p. 276)

My only other complaint, irrelevant to the general reader, is his rendering into English of certain Russian words and phrases. His Russian is obviously fluent, idiomatic even, but I've seen this elsewhere -- perhaps there is an unwritten imperative among scholars of Russia to use the closest cognate when translating certain words where a much more common and sensible English word would not only work, but actually make more sense. Thus, he translates the common salutation "Uvazhayemy" (sorry, I have no good way to quote Cyrillic at the moment) as "Respected," which is literally correct, but wouldn't you use "Esteemed" to address someone? Similarly, and more misleadingly, "rayon" becomes "region" instead of "district." It is true that sometimes the problem is intractable. He renders the extremely evocative, strong and sharp "avanteurist" as "adventurer." Not even close, but my Oxford Concise Russian Dictionary agrees, and I suppose there is no better solution short of resorting to a third language.

Theodore Dalrymple

Finished Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple a few days ago. Enjoyed it, if that’s the right word. I read quickly, without taking notes, so I can’t get into too much detail, but here are a few reactions.

Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in Birmingham, where he practices in an inner-city hospital and, part-time, in a prison. The book is a collection of essays originally published in magazines, primarily City Journal, that describe his interactions with his patients and proceed to infer from these interactions certain generalizations about these people’s lives. The subtitle of the book is “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” and while the term “underclass” is easier on an English ear than an American one, it does capture Dalrymple’s intent better than any American equivalent could. These people are poor, but only in government’s definition (specifically, England’s essentially socialist government). As measured against history and, more importantly, against current economic conditions in much of the rest of the world, these people’s level of economic comfort, in many cases provided government programs, is far above basic. They are not, in a vast majority of cases, homeless. There is no official policy of discrimination against them the way there was in, say, the Jim Crow American South (often quite the opposite, Dalrymple argues). So perhaps “underclass” is an apt term to capture the general cultural and moral decrepitude he describes.

The book is not prescriptive. It is neither a scientific report nor a policy paper. Dalrymple merely describes his experiences, sometimes citing individual cases, other times describing his observations in the community (to his great credit, he lives among those he studies). His argument is essentially this. The vast majority of the underclass finds itself in the position it is in not through any sort of misfortune, unfairness, or circumstances beyond its control. On the contrary, its predicament is a direct result of specific moral choices. It is enabled – nay, encouraged – to believe that it is acceptable, and even desirable, to make such choices by pervasive government policy that deemphasizes individual responsibility in favor of being provided for by society as a whole in the name of fairness. This policy was, for decades, promulgated by liberal intellectuals, both in academia and politics. The net result is a moral and intellectual collapse that goes far beyond the loss of “traditional values” and permeates one’s very notion of right and wrong.

Some of Dalrymple’s claims and examples do come across as faintly ridiculous. In a chapter dedicated to tattoos, he claims that in his experience, there is a universal correlation between tattoos and criminality. He seems to recognize the silliness of his suggestion – the tone of the essay seems to say, “look, I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t help it – this is what I see in front of me every day” – but a reality check would have still been useful. I personally have an acquaintance who, while tattooed, is a hard worker, a dedicated mother and a loving wife, and another who, while far less tattooed than the first, is a promising scientist and a dedicated researcher. My sample size is smaller than Dalrymple’s, I realize, but it still shows that it pays to slow down now and then when making generalizations.

On balance, however, Dalrymple’s observations are sharp, informative, and successful precisely because while he does, to a point, blames (correctly, I believe) the members of the underclass for making the choices they make, the bulk of his blame is reserved, also correctly in my opinion, for the rotten intellectual climate among the social elite that made these choices possible in the first place.

Stefan Fatsis

Finished Word Freak: Heatbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitve Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis the other day. Excellent, for the most part. Fatsis explores a world most of us are not even aware exists – professional Scrabble. And what a world it is.

Fatsis, who is ordinarily a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had always been a decent Scrabble player, but had no idea it could be played competitively, until he happened upon some players in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. He started playing more frequently and meeting more and more advanced players, observing them, interviewing them, and researching the history of the game. What made the book possible, however, was that Fatsis got completely obsessed with the game and became one of “them.” He took a leave of absence from his WSJ job and started studying and practicing in earnest and playing tournaments, eventually winning two and reaching a rating of 1733 (out of a possible 2000).

Along the way, Fatsis introduces us to the most colorful characters in competitive Srabble, some of whom he gets to know pretty intimately, and colorful they are. Their extreme eccentricity is not surprising. Any game, especially one that requires the mental pyrotechnics, memory and pattern recognition skills of Scrabble, attracts the extremely dedicated, the obsessed, and the just plain weird at its highest level. Fatsis portrays them well – charitably but fairly. He also expounds on the origins of the game, its inventor Alfred Butts, and the issues raised by Scrabble’s unique position as the only commercial, trademarked game that has a thriving international competitive scene surrounding it.

A large part of the book, however, is dedicated simply to words. Words in their infinite variety, their acceptability (or not) in the game, the various dictionaries and lists that have been used to play the game over the decades, and the differences between US and non-US Scrabble dictionaries (and the fact that the World Championship uses a combination of both). Fatsis spends many pages (too many, some might say), describing the overwhelming numbers of words and letter combinations one must memorize and be able to recognize in a mess of Scrabble tiles to play well, the methods top players use to study them, and their superhuman skills at anagramming. For me, one of the more interesting, and somewhat sad, conclusions that emerges is that being good at Scrabble has little to do with being good at English. If you have any ambition at all to become competitive, you will never have time to learn the definitions of the words you’re studying. You memorize strings of letters and learn to recognize patterns. Hundreds of thousands of them. The official dictionary used in US tournaments – the Official Word List (OWL) – contains no definitions. Many of the world’s top players have minimal command of spoken English.

If I have any complaints about the book at all, it is the fact that Fatsis recounts too many individual games in too much detail. He is obviously really into Scrabble, and is clearly fascinated by every single game. He also brings his experience as a sports writer to bear and does a convincing job of depicting a game of Scrabble the way someone might do with an exciting basketball match or a close car race. But after a while, it got a bit too much for my taste. I do play Scrabble recreationally (and very poorly – I enjoy learning the meanings, etymology and use of new words way too much to learn very many actual words), but after a while all the game descriptions started to sound the same. On balance, however, the book is thoroughly enjoyable, and with just a bit more editing, could have become a non-fiction classic.

Lewis Wolpert

Just finished Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Big disappointment. I picked it up on a whim, without knowing anything about it, so I suppose I deserved what I got. The subtitle of the book is "The Evolutionary Origins of Belief," which led me to, ahem, believe that it would be dedicated to religious beliefs specifically, and how they enhanced humans' adaptability. In other words, I assumed that the book would be about the evolutionary origins of faith. What Wolpert in fact writes about is a much more abstract and formal concept of causal belief, i.e. an idea that, when held, purports to explain to an individual, whether correctly or not, why an event happens, and thus influences the individual's actions.

I found the book dry, boring, and not really helpful in increasing my understanding of the world or human behavior. It was really a summary of what anyone with a basic knowledge of the scientific method and a general awareness of cultural differences around the world already knows. He does pay some attention to religious belief, and in a couple of places, touches upon what could be a fascinating and deeply controversial idea -- namely, that humans may be genetically predisposed towards holding religious beliefs. He does not expand on it at all, however, dismissing it with the infuriating "there is some evidence that..," but even if he did expand on it, I am sure I would not have sufficient background in genetics and biology to make a stab at understanding.

Coincidence?

The number of lines in the final version of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: 433. The title, and duration, of John Cage's most notorious composition: 4:33. Coincidence? Most likely. But if not, the joke is on Eliot, though through no fault of his own.

Waiter's Rant

Read Waiter’s Rant on a recent business trip. Nothing like two sleepless four-hour flights within a few days of each other. Written by the guy who for a long time kept the Waiter’s Rant blog. He was a waiter/manager at a prominent restaurant in New York. Though he is careful to remain anonymous, the name of the restaurant, and the name of the author for that matter, are out there. I just can’t think of them at the moment.

There are some movies that would have worked beautifully as twenty-minute shorts, but sag hopelessly as feature-length films. This book is kind of like that. It would have worked better as a magazine article. Not to say that it isn’t entertaining – it is. Anthony Bourdain’s dust jacket blurb to the effect that the book is the front of the house version of his Kitchen Confidential is more or less spot-on. You start out really sympathizing with the guy. Losing his office job at 31 and needing money, he gets a job at a completely dysfunctional Italian restaurant in the ‘burbs thanks to his brother. Fast-forward seven years, and he is the manager of one of the most respected restaurants in New York – professional, loved by most his customers, expert at dealing with the difficult ones, and being the much needed buffer between the staff, who love him, and the semi-insane owner. Pulling down very decent money, too, and writing about it all with a great deal of wit. You really want to admire that at first.

But the book isn’t just about what goes on in the restaurant (it probably wouldn’t have been published if it was) – it’s about the author himself. He takes every opportunity to lament his predicament of being a waiter, and single, at 38. Of never having made anything of himself. He is completely infatuated with one of his waitresses – the twenty-three-year-old Beth – and that infatuation oozes from every page. He paints a convincing picture of his own burnout, but his downfall at his own restaurant just about makes you lose respect for him – you realize after a while that he is becoming the selfish jerk manager of the type he deplored in the early days of his restaurant career. His staff turns on him, and his exit is far from magnanimous. I suppose there is a point here, whether he makes it intentionally or not – the business will ruin anyone. In the grand American happy-ending tradition, however, he resurfaces at the end as someone who is finally doing something with himself – he is a writer now, you see, and is waiting tables at another restaurant, part time without any management responsibilities, to make ends meet. He even gets the phone number of a cute girl. How predictable. I was still pulling for him at the end, but only half-heartedly.

I don’t want to be too negative – the bulk of the book is worthwhile. It really does give you a sense of what you don’t see when you come to a gourmet restaurant for a meal. Moral of the story – if you lose your job and need money, drive a cab.

W.G. Sebald

Finished W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the other day. Very unusual book, perhaps the most unusual I have ever read. It was apparently his first major work. I didn’t really know what to expect; I picked it up after reading his On The Natural History of Destruction – I looked Sebald up and discovered that he was supposed to be known for the dreamy, slightly surreal and deeply melancholy quality of his fiction, all appealing qualities for me. Thing is, The Emigrants is not entirely fiction. It mostly is, I suspect, but it does not read as such. I say “I suspect” because it is not at all clear where memoir crosses over into invention.

The book is a collection of four stories, all written in the first person, and in all four the narrator is basically real-life Sebald himself – a German professor who moves to England to teach languages and translation. They all start out by recounting an ordinary experience – traveling to Manchester for a semester of research, looking for an apartment – exactly the way they would, and most likely did, happen to Sebald in real life. A memoir of the quotidian, if you will. In every story, however, the narrator eventually meets, or comes to relate how he once met, the central character, and here the line quickly blurs, though since factual elements persist, or so it seems to me at least, to the end of each story, there is no real line; it dissipates subtly into invention until the reader feels like he is simply reading a story.

What’s even more unusual is that the book is illustrated, if that is the right word, with a large number of photos depcting people and places in the stories, initially giving everything an imprimatur of absolute, documentary certainty. The vast majority of these, of course, were never intended to be illustrations. Sebald merely found images that fit, or, perhaps in some cases wrote prose to fit the images. The effect is curious but powerful – rationally we realize a particular segment of the story cannot be literally true, and the photo isn’t really of the thing being written about just then, yet the image and the text on the page together draw us in more strongly than either would do on its own.

One of the four stories – the one about the narrator’s elementary school teacher – I suspect is straight reminiscence. All the details match up neatly with Sebald’s life, down to the towns he mentions. Though he uses only the first letters, they are in fact the first letters of the names of German towns where Sebald grew up. The accompanying photos of schoolchildren are almost certainly of Sebald and his classmates. The rest of the stories are far less factual. Each central character is probably based on a real person to some extent – the reclusive doctor in the first story, especially, has a palpable believability about him – but the events of their lives Sebald eventually comes to recount are the locus of his message and creativity. All four are Jews of German origin. All four had their lives upended by the Holocaust, but all survived and none experienced deportations or concentration camps, though they certainly had family members who did. Sebald’s concern here isn’t with surviving the Holocaust directly. Rather, it is with the experience of being removed from one’s origins, first physically but eventually, through the passage of time, emotionally. There is no lesson here. It may seem at times that Sebald implies a disappointment with how much personal history his characters lost over the years, yet at the same time he makes them continue to do everything they can to distance themselves from their past further still. The pain of even an indirect experience is too much for them.

There is really only one bit about the book that made me raise my eyebrows briefly. The character of one of the stories – the longest and most fantastical of the bunch, it had something of Mann’s Magic Mountain about it – is Sebald’s great-uncle, making Sebald himself, according to this story at least, part Jewish. In real life, he was not. The whole book, of course, is Sebald’s answer to the imperative that every post-war German writer deals with the Holocaust. This is his way. But does one have to pretend to be that which one is writing about? Especially in a book designed to blur the line between memory and invention? Has he gone just a tad too far? I don’t know. Suffice it to say that even if you see this as a fault, it is a small price to pay for the melancholy fascination of The Emigrants.

Nabokov

I finally read Nabokov’s Lolita a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going to write anything at all about it – what can I possibly add to everything that has already been said about that book – but my friend S.G. asked me to trade comments, so I obliged.

It was a bit of an accident that I read it when I did. It had been on my list for years, but for some reason I just couldn’t get around to it. A couple of months ago, my father asked me whether I had ever read any Nabokov. He was rediscovering his Russian books then, and was absolutely blown away by the sheer artistry of his language. He asked me how his English prose compared. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be of any help. A little later, however, on the way to New York to visit my parents as a matter of fact, I left a book on a train, and ended up with nothing to read. So I walked down to the local Borders and picked up a copy of Lolita. If not now, then when, right?

It took a few pages to gain a full (as full as I could, anyhow) appreciation for Nabokov’s writing, but relatively quickly it became obvious that his English was every bit as idiosyncratic and brilliant as his Russian, at least on my father’s report. This was not just beautiful language, this was utterly unique, multilayered prose sparkling with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns that kept me marveling at how someone could come up with something like that. Here’s a mild example. Humbert has just been talking to Lolita’s mother, whom he cannot stand, but whom he pretends to love, and he goes to the refrigerator to make some drinks:

I set out two glasses… and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its heart. (p. 102)

I couldn’t choose the most impressive of Nabokov’s linguistic devices, but if I had to, I might have to go with the pun. These are not the lame puns you and I would make (well, I would…). This is punning at stratospheric heights. My personal favorite, if indeed I could pick one, is probably Humbert’s casual statement that while traveling through rural Alabama, he and Lolita saw a museum of guns and violins. In a three-word pun, Nabokov encapsulates his entire view of the rural South.

This actually brings me to the one aspect of the novel that I feel I could say something about. It has been written that an important theme of Lolita is America seen through the eyes of a European. I would adjust that a bit by saying that it is the “inner,” for lack of a better word, America, the cultural heartland that needs not be in the heart. And the eyes need not be European. Those of an urban Northeasterner would suffice. Large chunks of the book are dedicated to two road trips around the country Humbert and Lolita take. Nabokov’s eye for the roadside tourist trap, the beyond-tacky gift shop, the small-town soda fountain, is razor-sharp. Thing is, I have seen plenty of these places personally. In Arizona, in rural Virginia, in Michigan, just about everywhere my travels have taken me over the last twenty years. The places certainly changed since the early 1950s, but not nearly as much as you might expect, and not in any ways that are germane to Nabokov’s observations. And let me tell you, the museum of guns and violins is no figment of his imagination. Not the idea of it, anyway. I do have to ding him for getting Phoenix streets wrong – Seventh and Central both run north-south and do not cross – but that’s just the nit-picker in me.

As amazing as the novel is, I did think the story sagged a bit towards the end, and turned noticeably darker (the amount of wit throughout most of the book was another shock to me) but the ending, both with respect to Lolita’s fate and Humbert’s final act, is priceless.

Another friends who recently read it said that though enjoyable, it did not carry a fundamental revelation about the human condition for him. I disagree vehemently. You cannot possess another human being, and the harder you try, the harder both you and the object of your attempted possession fall.