WHAT CAN WE HOPE FOR? – Richard Rorty (2022)

If I had to write an intellectual biography, I think the airing of Of Beauty and Consolation on Dutch television in 2000 would be an important marker. Wim Kayzer talked with 26 prominent intellectuals about the connection between beauty and consolation. The list is impressive: Roger Scruton, John M. Coetzee, Martha Nussbaum, Edward Witten, Freeman Dyson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Simon Shama, Stephen Jay Gould, Wole Soyinka, Jane Goodall, Tatjana Tolstaja, Karel Appel, Germaine Greer, Leon Lederman, Gyorgy Konrad, Gary Lynch, Dubravka Ugresic, George Steiner, Elizabeth Loftus, Catherine Bott, Rutger Kopland, Rudi Fuchs, Richard Duffalo, Yehudi Menuhin, Steven Weinberg and, indeed, Richard Rorty. It resulted in 40 hours of tv, and you can all watch it on VPRO’s YouTube channel.

Richard Rorty’s very moving episode is probably my favorite corner of the internet, and I still watch it again about once a year. It introduced me to what has become my favorite philosopher – the philosopher that basically killed my desire to read much more philosophy. Reading 1989’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity in a Dutch translation somewhere around 2008 was the straw that broke the camel’s back: Rorty argues, amongst other things, that philosophy is just another form of literature, and philosophers are mainly people who write books about other books, not necessarily people with a greater claim on truth or a better grasp of reality.

Rorty died in 2007. Today he is probably best know as the philosopher that warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in Achieving Our Country, published in 1998. This short passage went viral in 2016:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

There’s a summary of Rorty’s reasoning on Vox. It amounts to a history of the American left, its shift to identity and cultural issues and its consequences. Well worth reading – more so, mandatory for those with political ambitions.

When I saw the spine of this newly published book in the awesome Athenaeum bookshop in Amsterdam last summer, I decided to see if Richard Rorty could still teach me something. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics collects 19 essays that were written between 1995 and 2007 – 4 of which unpublished, and many lesser-known and hard to find pieces. It also has a 17 page introduction by editors W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil.

I want to stress the collection is accessible to readers without any prior knowledge of Rorty.

Included is “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096”, a kind of science fictional essay that first appeared as “Fraternity Reigns” in the New York Times in 1996 and was also reprinted in Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection from 1999. Rorty imagines a future American history, looking back from 2096 to “our long, hesitant, painful; recovery, over the last five decades, from the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years (2014-2044)”, a recovery that “has changed our political vocabulary, as well as our sense of the relation between the moral order and the economic order”.

I highlight this here already, because political philosophy is clearly a matter of the imagination. In the remainder of this text I shall try to summarize some of Rorty’s main points, and also compare some of his ideas to those of Kim Stanley Robinson – another intellectual & writer, one who has thought about the future too, in the hope of bettering the world.

As such, this post can be read as a companion piece to my recent analysis of Antarctica – KSR’s epistemological novel, in which Kim Stanley Robinson ties together science, ethics, utopian praxis, imagination, ideologies and stories.

This post will be quote heavy, because I simply can’t say it any better than Rorty himself.

GEHUWDE ROTSEN – Jan Lauwereyns (2021)

For now, a review in Dutch, about what translates as Married Rocks, a contemplative novel by Jan Lauwereyns, a Flemish neuroscientist & poet who lives and works in Japan.

Next post should be a review about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica.

---

---

Jan Lauwereyns (°1969) timmert al een kwarteeuw aan zijn literair oeuvre, ietwat in de marge. Hij is naast schrijver ook neurowetenschapper: hij doceerde bijvoorbeeld biologische psychologie in Nieuw-Zeeland. Sinds 2010 is hij professor aan de Universiteit van Kyushu in Japan.

In 2007 las ik met veel plezier Anophelia! De mug leeft, zijn vijfde dichtbundel, en toen ik Gehuwde rotsen van twee verschillende mensen getipt kreeg, besloot ik het boek te halen in de bib.

Er prijkt ‘roman’ op de cover, maar dat strookt toch niet helemaal met de gangbare definitie. Gehuwde rotsen is vormelijk atypisch: een tiental hoofdstukken start telkens met een foto uit het familiearchief, dan een stuk of tien gedichten en daarna een twintigtal bladzijden fragmentarisch proza – biografische & filosofische beschouwingen.

Lauwereyns’ focus ligt op de zelfmoord van zijn moeder, het mislukte huwelijk van z’n ouders en zijn eigen scheiding – liefde en de vraag of het leven wel de moeite waard is ondanks al de angst en pijn. Het boek is een geslaagde mengeling van autobiografie, poëzie en essay, en toch werkt het wel degelijk als een roman omdat het een verhaal betreft: geen netjes afgelijnde vertelling, maar we zijn als lezer wel getuige van de poging van een man om grip te krijgen op zichzelf en de zelfmoord van zijn moeder. Het is geen vrolijk boek: miserie “geeft de contouren”, is “het raamwerk van dèes, van da getokkel ier, d’iên misère en d’aender, en wa doe’d’ermé“.

Gehuwde rotsen is nog op een andere manier een mengeling: Lauwereyns is een intellectueel die veel gelezen heeft, en verwijst naar allerlei auteurs, maar tezelfdertijd is hij lichtvoetig, volks zelfs – het proza is doorspekt met Antwerps dialect, en zijn formele keuzes geven hem ook veel vrijheid, alles is soepel in dit boek, soepel en naakt en eerlijk.

Ook al permitteert Lauwereyns zich vormelijk veel, en staan er citaten in van Darwin en David Benatar en Blanchot en Spinoza, toch is Gehuwde rotsen niet pretentieus – integendeel. Het resultaat is een roman die “Ambitieus én onnozel” is, in een toonaard die je niet zo veel tegenkomt in onze letteren. 

Het boek zit vol gevoelens, en Lauwereyns probeert die in hun waarde te laten door hun veelheid en veelkantigheid te beschrijven. Het volgende fragment deed me beseffen dat mijn eigen drang naar nuances eigenlijk een soort gulzigheid is. Lauwereyns toont dat de tegenstelling tussen hoofd en hart vals is, en dat de ratio – in termen van begrip & twijfel & onzekerheid – net de weg is naar een groter hart.

veel kanten, veel aspecten, veel gevoelens en gedachten, die in hun veelheid troost bieden, uitbreiding, deling, uitgebreidheid, een groter bereik, meer zin, zoals in die titel van Hans Groenewegen, Met schrijven zin verzamelen, meer zin, een groter hart

Die gulzigheid is een verslaving, en ik denk dat ik, net als Lauwereyns zelf, ook behoor tot “iedereen die verslaafd is aan het mysterie van lichaam en ziel, het brein en het bewustzijn”.

DUNE: PART TWO – Denis Villeneuve (2024)

Let me first repeat some stuff from the intro to my Dune: Part One review.

I’ve invested quite some time writing about Frank Herbert’s books, and my reread of the Dune series in particular, resulting in a series of long posts – if you’re interested, there are links at the end of this review.

I will refrain from comparing Villeneuve to David Lynch – I’ve seen the 1984 movie multiple times, but my memories of it are sketchy to the extent I can only say two things about it: I liked it, but it probably won’t make much sense to somebody that hasn’t read the book.

I’ll simply try to describe how I experienced this new film, based on just one viewing. I have no intention of writing a lengthy analysis, nor get into the nuts and bolts of the problems of the White Savior Myth or other hot topics.

---

I’ll also won’t do a very detailed comparison of the book and Part Two, but I will zoom in on the effects of a few of Villeneuve’s choices. If you want a detailed overview of differences: there are pieces in Esquire and Screenrant, and a more general one in The Guardian. Part Two strays from the novel in much more significant ways than Part One, and while it’s overall still a fairly faithful adaptation, the differences result in a story with much less emotional impact – but more about that later.

First, I have a confession to make. A few months ago, I watched Dune: Part One again, and I stopped halfway through – it was boring. That took me by surprise, as I absolutely loved seeing it in theater when it just came out. What does that say about that movie – and more importantly: does it also say something about this sequel?

TOO LATE TO AWAKEN: STRANGE SUNDAYS IN HELL – Ballingrud, Schrauwen, Vikernes, Žižek (2023, 2024)

It seems that after the epic The Deluge – the last book I read in 2023 – I needed to cleanse my palate. Markley’s book was old school immersive & cinematic to a degree I hadn’t encountered in quite some time, and as a result it took me a while to get into a proper vibe reading other books. It is possible my enjoyment of The Strange fell victim to that – everything is context, always.

Anyhow, I ended up reading 4 very different books in the first three weeks of January – each of them fairly short and recent. After the jump, you’ll get some thoughts on these:

Nathan Ballingrud – The Strange (2023)

Olivier Schrauwen – Sunday (2018-2021)  (translated in Dutch as as Zondag in 2023)

Varg Vikernes – To Hell & Back Again: Part 1: My Black Metal Story (Norway 1991-1993) (2024)

Slavoj Žižek – Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? (2023)

THE DELUGE – Stephen Markley (2022)

Stephen Markley had high ambitions for his book: “emotionally reorient the reader around what’s happening, so we can actually feel in our hearts what the stakes of this moment actually are.”

This moment refers to the ongoing predicament of our biosphere: The Deluge is climate fiction.

As with any book, it won’t work for everyone. Especially if you don’t believe rapidly reducing our carbon emissions is necessary, or if you feel the current American political & economical system generates enough equity, The Deluge might annoy you for ideological reasons. Markley does try to be balanced – more on that below – but it’s no denying this book advocates progressive measures rather than conservative ones. It’s impossible to write books that appeal to everybody on the political spectrum, and this book won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already think society is in peril because of human emissions. But for those who do, it will put the urgency in much, much sharper focus.

So, for me, Markley did achieve his goals: the novel gave me new insights, and it affected me emotionally. I cried numerous times while reading it, and it put a knot in my stomach – tight and then even tighter.

The Deluge is set in the US, and its 880 pages chronicle 2013 to 2040. It is a big, big book of the sprawling kind, told through the eyes of seven characters – a scientist, a poor drug addict, an ecoterrorist, a Washington policy adviser, an advertising strategist, a high profile activist and her partner.

These characters all have families and friends, and it is trough their well-drawn relations Markley managed to evoke strong emotions in me, as the cast experience climate catastrophes and political upheaval primarily while they are connected to other human beings. In a sense, this book is as much about love and friendship as it is about ecological systems and politics: we fear for what’s coming, because we fear for our loved ones.

The Deluge is immersive, cinematic reading. Stephen King called it the best book he read in 2022 and “a modern classic (…) Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.” I concur. At times I felt 14 again, utterly absorbed by The Stand. Markley wrote that kind of book – with the occasional boardroom debate thrown in. It’s arguably better, as The Stand had no real-world stakes.

The novel was 13 years in the making, and so Markley had to constantly revise and change stuff he’d already written to suit new political and scientific developments. It makes it an exceptionally timely book: to really experience what Markley pulled off, you need to read this now – not in 10 years.

So what exactly does he achieve in The Deluge – aside from showing, on a basic level, what could happen the coming decades: drought, fire, flood, food scarcity, inflation, migration & death?

RALPH AZHAM – Lewis Trondheim (2010-2019)

Lewis Trondheim is no small name in the world of comics. In 2006 he won the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, a life time achievement award, and arguably the most prestigious award in the field. He has written or drawn more than a hundred titles in lots of genres, including The Fly, Kaput and Zösky, Little Nothings and his breakthrough series Dungeon, created with Joann Sfar. He’s also one of the founding members of the publishing house L’Association – famous for publishing Marjane Satrapi.

In 2004 Trondheim announced that he would more or less retire, to prevent his work becoming rote. It is during this ‘retirement’ that Ralph Azham was born: an epic fantasy series about a reluctant hero in the form of a duck. The first volume appeared in French in 2010, the twelfth and final volume in 2019. They were all first published in Spirou magazine, and bundled later by Editions Dupuis.

Joe Johnson translated the series into English, and Super Genius & Papercutz published everything in 4 parts: Black Are the Stars & The Land of the Blue Demons in 2022, and You Can’t Stop a River & The Dying Flame in 2023.

Ralph Azham is a sprawling story that keeps on doing unexpected things without feeling contrived. I’d say it is a must read for any lover of fantasy comic books. There’s action, magic, humor and adventure, and throughout the series Trondheim also introduces a bit of political ethics – but nothing too serious or heavy-handed: the focus is squarely on creative entertainment.

SCIENTISTS MAKING CONCEPTUAL MISTAKES: ‘THE ENTANGLED BRAIN’ (2022) & ‘FROM MATTER TO LIFE: INFORMATION AND CAUSALITY’ (2017)

One of my hobbies is reading academic non-fiction, mainly in the realm of biology, and it is frankly baffling how certain books are filled with conceptual mistakes that are even noticeable to non-specialists like me.

This is no small issue: the first book I present was published by the MIT Press, its author professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, and director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. The second book is a collection of essays published by Cambridge University Press, its main editor Sara Imari Walker, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, professor at Arizona State University, deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and associate director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems.

Both the MIT as Cambridge are ranked among the very top universities in the world, but it seems like their associated publishers aren’t as committed to rigorous and conceptual proofreading as they could be.

This post can be read in tandem with my critique of Michael Tomasello’s The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization From Lizards to Humans, another 2022 book by a psychologist on brains & behavior published by MIT Press.

---

THE ENTANGLED BRAIN: HOW PERCEPTION, COGNITION, AND EMOTION ARE WOVEN TOGETHER – Luiz Pessoa (2022)

The Entangled Brain is a well-written, smooth read – but that doesn’t make it a good book. There are 3 issues that stand-out, and the third issue is where the conceptual mistakes are found.

1.

The subtitle is totally misleading. This book hardly is about perception, cognition or emotion: Pessoa instead makes the case that the (distinct) brain areas that are generally considered to be responsible for perception, cognition and emotion are highly entangled, and that they cannot be “neatly disassembled into a set of independent parts”. If you are looking for specific examples of how certain emotions influence perception, or vice versa, or how perception influences cognition, etc., look elsewhere. There hardly are any such examples to be found in the book. What Pessoa provides instead is essentially a long list of nerve connections between the basal ganglia, the thalamus, the frontal lobe, the pallial amygdala, the ventral striatum, the superior collictulus, etc., etc.

By doing so, Pessoa does give a good overview of brain anatomy, and covers a bit of history of brain science too – with classical examples like Phineas Gage, Broca’s Tan Tan, and a fair amount of others. There are also introductory level chapters on brain evolution and complex systems theory.

I have to stress he convincingly demonstrates his main thesis: the brain as an highly integrated organ, a very complex system with all kinds of loops, feedback and feedforward connections. If you want to know more about the specifics of that, this book might be for you.

GLITTERATI – Oliver K. Langmead (2022)

Glitterati is a “influencer comedy of horrors billed as A Clockwork Orange meets RuPaul’s Drag Race“, according to New Scientist, who included it in their list of best speculative fiction of 2022.

Oliver Langmead also wrote Dark Star, “a sci-fi noir detective story told in verse” and Bird of Paradise, an “adult fantasy about the Biblical Adam recovering the lost pieces of the Garden of Eden”.

Novels obviously are often about ideas, but judging by my experience with Glitterati, and the blurbs of Langmead’s other stuff, he seems to be more of a pitch guy: books based on one idea only, instead of a foundational, deep wealth of ideas and characters. And sure, Glitterati is the result of a short story picked up by Titan Books as a full-length novel.

The idea is this: Simone lives on a future Earth as one of the Glitterati, the elite living lives of luxury, and slave to ever-changing whims of fashion. When he accidentally starts a new fashion, he picks a fight with Justine, another Glitterati who took credit for it. Their conflict “threatens to raze their opulent utopia to the ground”, as the back cover has it.

Glitterati‘s pitch did work: there’s that article in New Scientist, and it made the shortlist for the yet-to-be-awarded British Fantasy Award in 2023. Also Jesse from Speculiction named it as one of his best 2022 reads, and his review prompted me to buy the book.

This short novel is not fully without merit – but it was by far the least of Jesse’s last year recommendations I decided to check out: Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker was more entertaining, and Mike Meginnis’ Drowning Practice way, way better.

All three books have a satirical slant. Venomous Lumpsucker attacks late state capitalism & ecocide, Drowning Practice takes on American society as a whole, and Glitterati seems to tackle fashion, social media influencers, and, yes, class war too. Very 2022, all that.

So, what worked – and what didn’t?

WISH I WAS HERE – M. John Harrison (2023)

“How do you know what to say before you know how to say it?”

I’ve read most of Harrison’s 21st century output, and loved it all – aside from Empty Space, which I DNFed at 60%, and resulted in a fairly lengthy analysis that might interest you if you’re interested in theorizing about literature, genre, deconstruction and science fiction.

I always mean to read something of his 20th century work – his debut appeared in 1971 – but he keeps on publishing new titles. This new book is new indeed: formally inventive. Part memoir, part short fiction, part poetics – with a focus on the latter.

Wish I Was Here contains lucid thoughts about the nature of writing, our culture at large and the function of speculative fiction; but also sharp ruminations on life, growing older and memory, amongst other things. It’s a wonderfully mixed and varied reading experience that frustrated me at times, but which is always imbued with a depth that seems bottomless, steeped in the experience of a life both centered and at the edge of things.

Harrison’s prose is not always easy, but whenever I reread a part I did not get at first, it turned out that I was to blame: there’s nothing in these pages that concentration can’t handle. Moreover, in each case, it turned out that Harrison had found an elegant combination of words to tentatively express something which is hard to express to begin with. Part of Wish I Was Here is about the ineffable – the mystery of life and existence – but not the ineffable as some storified narrative, not the miracle as some event in a causal chain.

So – I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t get everything, but that doesn’t seem necessary, and I don’t mean this in the way some readers still enjoy certain poems while they don’t get them either. I think that would be the easy way out: approach parts of Wish I Was Here as prose poems. That’s not it. Harrison chiseled his latest from the tremendous amount of notes he made during his life, and it is obvious that some of these notes are private and as such incomprehensible to others – it does not make them poems, even though they are just as composed, contain metaphors too and sound A-okay when read out loud. 

All and all, when I turned the final pages, the book had floored me – even though I hadn’t been aware that there was a fight going on. Not that Harrison is a boxer, a chess player or an existential wrestler. But it is about getting grip – grip while you sit, breathe and read, grip on a bunch of words that signal something.

After the jump, some more.

MEGANETS: HOW DIGITAL FORCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL COMMANDEER OUR DAILY LIVES AND INNER REALITIES – David B. Auerbach (2023)

I’ve always been impressed by the writing on David Auerbach’s blog. His article The Bloodsport of the Hive Mind: Common Knowledge in the Age of Many-to-Many Broadcast Networks should be obligatory reading: it’s a very sharp and original analysis explaining some of what ails our current society – antivaxxers, conspiracy theories, etc. I’ve been equally impressed by his year-end lists: the sheer volume and range of books Auerbach reads is impressive.

So when I learned that this software engineer who used to work for Microsoft and Google wrote a book on the digital forces that are transforming our societies, I eagerly waited for the publication date.

For reference, let me quote a big chunck of the blurb on Amazon:

“Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.

As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.

Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.

Auerbach’s analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as:

• The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth. No one is really in control.
• The efforts at reform – to get lies and misinformation off meganets – run into a brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are trapped by the persistent, evolving, and opaque systems they have created.
• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the entire economy.
• We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or broken up that they would be better, more ethical citizens.
• Why questions such as making algorithms fair and bias-free and whether AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed.

Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.”

For a more in-depth look at the book’s content, do read the Guardian interview with Auerbach, here. Well-worth your time.

While I enjoyed reading Meganets, the book has a few problems too.

TWO BERND & HILLA BECHER BOOKS (2005 & 2022)

This time, two books from an artist couple also featured in my favorite art book list I posted back in 2017. The first is a monograph from 2007 I’ve had for ages, but never got around to actually reading. The second book was published last year, and it’s the first posthumous monograph about the Bechers to appear, published to accompany the exhibition in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an exhibition that traveled to San Fransisco, and is still on display until April 2, 2023.

Over the years, I’ve steadily collected all the thematic monographs Bernd and Hilla Becher published – my collection is pictured above. Their work resonates deeply with me, and as their work is among the most revered of 20th century photographers, I know I’m not the only one. For almost 50 years the Bechers documented mine winding towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, grain elevators, water and cooling towers, processing plants, factory halls, lime kilns, timber framed houses and entire complexes of factory buildings. They did so in much of Western Europe, and the United States as well. In a way, the things they depict are more machines than buildings, as critic Armin Zweite wrote.

Bernd also taught photography at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1976 to 1996, and Hilla was intricately involved with that too. This resulted in the so-called Becher school of photography, with prominent German artists like Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff & Thomas Struth.

Both books at hand cover similar territory: they try to provide an overview of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s life and work, framed in an historical context. Is one markedly better than the other? And, more importantly, what did I learn from these books about the Bechers and their work? Why does it resonate so deeply with me?

DROWNING PRACTICE – Mike Meginnis (2022)

An important part of reading is reading about reading, and so I bought this book because of a glowing review on Speculiction. Drowning Practice is part slipstream, part immediate future doom, part satire & part psychological study.

The novel’s premise would be ideal for a movie or tv-series. Everybody on the planet dreams the same thing in the same night: in a few months there will be a flood and everybody will drown. Most people take their dream for truth, and Mike Meginnis examines what would happen to our society when most expect imminent demise. He does that by zooming in on three broken characters: an addicted, anxious novelist, her 13-year old daughter and the girl’s father, a controlling government spy/hippie.

Meginnis started writing the book out of a frustration with existing apocalyptic stories, and I have to say he did succeed in writing something that is both compelling and completely non-generic – unlike the first episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, to name just one thing.

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST – László Krasznahorkai (2003, transl. 2022)

This blog focuses mainly on speculative fiction, and as such this short novel with a very long title is not out of place: one could approach this as a sensitive mythopoetic tale, about a grandson of a prince, living outside of space and time, wandering the grounds of a monastery in Kyoto, searching for an elusive, possibly perfect, garden.

One could also approach it as high literature of the most oppressive sort, like Marcel Theroux did in The Guardian: “It’s not beyond me to imagine that there are readers who want to surrender to the strangeness of his prose, the long, self-cancelling sentences and the obsessive descriptions. My view is that 100 years after Ulysses and The Waste Land, his writing is a belated tribute act to modernism that perpetuates its worst traits: obscurity, self-referentiality, lazy pessimism and lack of empathy with the lives of non-academic readers.”

Having an academic background myself, I guess I’m biased. I acknowledge that A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East is not for everybody – what book is? – but Theroux’s remark is terribly misguided: does he ask of Colleen Hoover if she has empathy with her academic readers? So instead of lazy shots at intellectuals, he might have just acknowledged Krasznahorkai’s 2003 title simply didn’t click with him, because, indeed, he failed to connect with the prose and the themes. There is no shame in that. Shaming its writer however, is not very empathic.

But enough with the negative vibes: I think Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról hegyek, Keletről folyó is an absolute masterpiece. 5 stars! 6 stars even! I’m not an expert on translation nor Hungarian, but it seems more than remarkable that Ottilie Mulzet managed to translate such peculiar prose from an non-Indo-European language and still conveys something of László Krasznahorkai’s flow and poetry.

This is a book to surrender too, and then be rewarded with a certain ecstasy and wonder about the terrifying miracle and baffling mystery that is all that exists. The nature of reality and the reality of nature is often pondered in literature and art, its infinite mystery even celebrated, but when push comes to shove, its profound and utter incomprehensible strangeness is generally ignored. Not so by Krasznahorkai: it seems the very heart of his writing. A 2022 interview in Rekto:Verso confirms this: “I try to express something that I cannot. The highest art can build a bridge, but only until it reaches the border of the hidden reality – you cannot move beyond that. I try to reach that border through beauty. That is not the only way, but it is my way.”

When Theroux goes on in his review, writing that this book doesn’t seem interested in “the relationships, love, toil, conflicts, needs and interactions of ordinary people” he misses the point, as the lives of people are embedded in the miracle that Krasznahorkai tries to come to grips with. To me, A Mountain to the North showcased nothing but sensitivity for what it means to be alive, even if it also expresses the sentiment that a demand such as Theroux’s – to put the human in the center – is a form of self-absorbed navel gazing.

VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER – Ned Beauman (2022)

Ned Beauman’s 5th novel doesn’t seem out of character: Ned is British, born in 1985, son to an economist and a bookpublisher/journalist, and student of philosophy in Cambridge. Venomous Lumpsucker seems entirely like the kind of book such a fella would write: witty, very contemporary and with a healthy dose of late stage capitalism free market criticism.

Single genre classifications being very last century, Venomous Lumpsucker is a near-future-satirical-clifi-thriller. While the book is not an outright triumph, Beauman makes the combination work, and I liked it quite a bit. Its 294 pages are brimming with ideas.

The book’s main problem is that it doesn’t know where its heart is – not genre-wise, mind you – but qua content: Beauman doesn’t seem sure to be sad or humorous about the demise of our current ecological constellation.

My dust jacket has it like this: “Gripping and singular, Venomous Lumpsucker is a comedy about environmental devastation that asks: do we have it in us to avert the tragedy of mass extinction? And also: do we really need to bother?“

That the fact that Beauman seems unsure himself got in my way to fully emotionally engage with the story. As such, it is more a novel of ideas & action than one of emotion.

THE EVOLUTION OF AGENCY: BEHAVIORAL ORGANIZATION FROM LIZARDS TO HUMANS – Michael Tomasello (2022)

I thought developmental and comparative psychology professor Michael Tomasello’s 2019 book Becoming Human: A Theory of Human Ontogeny was brilliant and rigorously argued. Imagine my surprise to find the first three chapters of this short work (164 pages) practically insulting because of sloppy writing and terminological vagueness.

As a result, I decided to call it a day – even though, admittedly, the remaining chapters (about the agency of apes and humans) might play more into Tomasello’s strengths as a researcher. I guess it’s my loss – 32.48 euros to be precise – but I cannot but operate using inference if I read scientific books: if your base is brittle, I’m not going to risk dwelling in a superstructure that seems solid. It’s a form a prejudice, yes, but my time is limited, and there’s way too much else to read & learn.

Even if I didn’t read it completely, I do have a few thoughts and criticisms to offer, and I hope this review will offer some food for thought.

For starters, let me quote the blurb from MIT Press, so that you know what the book is about:

Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal, Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings.

Tomasello outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending finally in the socially normative agency of ancient humans. Each new form of psychological organization represented increased complexity in the planning, decision-making, and executive control of behavior. Each also led to new types of experience of the environment and, in some cases, of the organism’s own psychological functioning, leading ultimately to humans’ experience of an objective and normative world that governs all of their thoughts and actions. Together, these proposals constitute a new theoretical framework that both broadens and deepens current approaches in evolutionary psychology.

Before I’ll discuss the book itself, it is of note that the blurb makes a curious distinction in the very first lines. Aren’t these organisms that have “feedback control systems” biological? Aren’t these systems itself biological? Didn’t these systems evolve biologically? I can’t fully put my finger on it, but I have the feeling this is the crux of the matter at hand, and the conceptual quagmire on which Tomasello builds his theory, the ontological reason for his vagueness and his at times muddled thinking. I’m sure the last sections of the book on human social normative psychology won’t suffer as much from this problem as his first chapters – if they even suffer from it at all – but if you present your book as an evolutionary account, you better start it right.

Anyhow, the remainder of this text consists of a few thoughts and examples that are in no way an attempt at a full critique or discussion of the parts of the book I did read.