Men Without Women

This short story has it all -- genetic genealogy, ultra high net worth physics quant banker, stripper, cop, marriage, family, New Yorker writer. It's fiction, but based on real characters and stories. 

There is an audio version, read by the author, at the link.

Satellites by Rebecca Curtis (The New Yorker July 5, 2021) 

My husband and Tony were anxiety-ridden workaholics who’d focussed, from a young age, on earning cash. Tony wanted enough for a good life; Conor, enough to feel safe. They were fifty-six years old, though Conor looked forty-five and Tony thirty-five. They were meticulous, but owing to oversights they’d each had five kids by four women. They were two nerds from New Hampshire. ... 

His ancestors, he told me, had founded America. He’d started working at age twelve, as a farmhand, and eventually acquired a Ph.D. in quantum physics from Harvard, then served for decades as the “head quant” at a world-renowned investment bank. But he wasn’t smart enough to be skeptical when go-go dancers said, Don’t worry, I’m on the pill. ... 

After high school, Tony turned down a scholarship to the University of New Hampshire. He wanted to work. He did active duty in the Marines for eight years, then served in the Air National Guard for twenty while working as a cop. Now he collected his police pension and, for fun, drove a delivery truck. 

... 

Conor smiled. By the way, he said, had Tony ever done 23andMe or Ancestry.com? 

Tony squinted. Ancestry. Sinead bought them kits for his birthday. Why? 

Conor peered up at Jupiter, approaching Saturn for the great conjunction, and the murky dimmer stars. I studied shuttered restaurants. A few bars had created outdoor dining rooms and were busy; the 7-Eleven was dark, but the ever-glowing “Fortune Teller!” sign on the adjacent cottage was lit. 

No reason, Conor said. Had Tony, he asked, opted into his family DNA tree, to see his matches who’d already done Ancestry? Or elected to receive text alerts whenever some new supposed relative signed on? 

Tony walked swiftly. Nah, he said. He’d done Ancestry to make Sinead happy. He shrugged. She’d made their accounts, he said. She probably opted him in; he wasn’t sure. 

When we got home, Tony’s phone had twenty missed calls. 

...

Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway 1927. "Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, ..."

Rebecca Curtis interview

In “Satellites,” your story in the Fiction Issue, a woman and her husband, a retired banker, host the husband’s friend at their Jersey-shore mansion. The woman is a frustrated writer, and, to inspire her, her husband, Conor, asks the friend, Tony, a retired police officer, to tell her cop stories. How would you describe the woman’s views of these two men? 

The narrator is awed by how smart Tony and her husband are, and by how hard they work. She’s impressed that they’ve read so much and educated themselves about so many diverse topics while performing demanding and often unpleasant jobs, and by the fact that they’re two of the most generous, kind people she knows. She appreciates that they’ve maintained lifelong friendships, something that she wishes she’d done herself. She doesn’t agree with all their political ideas. Earlier in her life, she believed that, one, bankers cared about money but not about art, literature, world hunger, etc.; and, two, that anyone who supported Trumpish policies (or who voted for anyone like Trump) must be an ignorant jerk. Meeting her husband (and Tony) punctured those beliefs. 

The narrator views herself as the proverbial grasshopper: someone—possibly frivolous, vapid, and solipsistic—who wants to enjoy her life, sing, dance, make “art,” while working various hip-but-not-very-remunerative jobs to pay rent, never truly planning for winter. Tony and Conor are ants: anxious, alert to the dangers the world can pose, doing difficult (and sneered-upon) jobs diligently so they’ll be protected when scarcity comes. The narrator aspires to be more ant-like while remaining a grasshopper. 

Tony and Conor are, in some ways, obsessed with genetics and lineage—they discuss Ancestry.com and bloodlines—but their own families (they each have five children by four women) are somewhat of a disappointment, or even an afterthought, to them. Can you say a little about that tension? 

Conor and Tony suffer because—in several cases—they don’t have the ability to see their children. In the case of divorce, a time-sharing agreement may be in place, but, if the mother has principal custody and won’t permit the father’s visits, what can the father do? Possession sometimes is nine-tenths of the law. Hiring lawyers and going to court to try to force a mother who won’t honor custody agreements to do so requires copious energy, oodles of spare time, and a small fortune. Conor and Tony care deeply about their children, but they’ve lost control—in some cases, of seeing their kids, and, in others, of influencing them. They may feel powerless.

Infinity and Solipsism, Physicists and Science Fiction

The excerpt below is from Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), an experimental novel which is somewhat obscure, even to fans of Zelazny. 

Positing infinity, the rest is easy. 

The Prince Who Was A Thousand is ... a teleportationist, among other things ... the only one of his kind. He can transport himself, in no time at all, to any place that he can visualize. And he has a very vivid imagination. 

Granting that any place you can think of exists somewhere in infinity, if the Prince can think of it too, he is able to visit it. Now, a few theorists claim that the Prince’s visualizing a place and willing himself into it is actually an act of creation. No one knew about the place before, and if the Prince can find it, then perhaps what he really did was make it happen. However, positing infinity, the rest is easy.

This contains already the central idea that is expressed more fully in Nine Princes in Amber and subsequent books in that series.

While traveling (shifting) between Shadows, [the prince] can alter reality or create a new reality by choosing which elements of which Shadows to keep or add, and which to subtract.

Creatures of Light and Darkness also has obvious similarities to Lord of Light, which many regard as Zelazny's best book and even one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. Both have been among my favorites since I read them as a kid.

Infinity, probability measures, and solipsism have received serious analysis by theoretical physicists: see, e.g.,  Boltzmann brains. (Which is less improbable: the existence of the universe around you, or the existence of a single brain whose memory records encode that universe?) Perhaps this means theorists have too much time on their hands, due to lack of experimental progress in fundamental physics. 

Science fiction is popular amongst physicists, but I've always been surprised that the level of interest isn't even higher. Two examples I know well: the late Sidney Coleman and my collaborator Bob Scherrer at Vanderbilt were/are scholars and creators of the genre. See these stories by Bob, and Greg Benford's Remembing Sid: 

... Sid and some others created a fannish publishing house, Advent Publishers, in 1956. He was a teenager when he helped publish Advent’s first book, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder. ... 

[Sid] loved SF whereas Einstein deplored it. Lest SF distort pure science and give people the false illusion of scientific understanding, Einstein recommended complete abstinence from any type of science fiction. “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough,” he said.

While I've never written science fiction, occasionally my research comes close -- it has at times addressed questions of the form: 

Do the Laws of Nature as we know them allow ... 

... time travel?

... the construction of a stable wormhole? 

... the creation of a baby universe in the laboratory? 

... the creator of a baby universe to send a message to those inside? 

... genetic engineering of superhumans?

This research might be considered as the ultimate in hard SF ;-) 

Wikipedia: Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.

Note Added: Bob Scherrer writes: In my experience, about 1/3 of research physicists are SF fans, about 1/3 have absolutely no interest in SF, and the remaining 1/3 were avid readers of science fiction in middle school/early high school but then "outgrew" it.

Here is a recent story by Bob which I really enjoyed -- based on many worlds quantum mechanics :-) 

It was ranked #2 in the 2019 Analog Magazine reader poll!

Note Added 2: Kazuo Ishiguro (2017 Nobel Prize in Literature) has been evolving into an SF/fantasy writer over time. And why not? For where else can one work with genuinely new ideas? See Never Let Me Go (clones), The Buried Giant (post-Arthurian England), and his latest book Klara and the Sun.

NYTimes: ... we slowly discover (and those wishing to avoid spoilers should now skip to the start of the next paragraph), the cause of Josie’s mysterious illness is a gene-editing surgery to enhance her intellectual faculties. The procedure carries high risks as well as potential high rewards — the main one being membership in a professional superelite. Those who forgo or simply can’t afford it are essentially consigning themselves to economic serfdom.

WSJ: ... Automation has created a kind of technological apartheid state, which is reinforced by a dangerous “genetic editing” procedure that separates “lifted,” intellectually enhanced children from the abandoned masses of the “unlifted.” Josie is lifted, but the procedure is the cause of her illness, which is often terminal. Her oldest friend and love interest, Rick, is unlifted and so has few prospects despite his obvious brilliance. Her absentee father is an engineer who was outsourced by machines and has since joined a Community, one of the closed groups formed by those lacking social rank. In a conversational aside it is suggested that the Communities have self-sorted along racial lines and are heavily armed.

The Inheritors and The Grisly Folk: H.G. Wells and William Golding on Neanderthals

Some time ago I posted about The Grisly Folk by H.G. Wells, an essay on Neanderthals and their encounters with modern humans. See also The Neanderthal Problem, about the potential resurrection of early hominids via genomic technology, and the associated ethical problems. 

The Grisly Folk: ... Many and obstinate were the duels and battles these two sorts of men fought for this world in that bleak age of the windy steppes, thirty or forty thousand years ago. The two races were intolerable to each other. They both wanted the eaves and the banks by the rivers where the big flints were got. They fought over the dead mammoths that had been bogged in the marshes, and over the reindeer stags that had been killed in the rutting season. When a human tribe found signs of the grisly folk near their cave and squatting place, they had perforce to track them down and kill them; their own safety and the safety of their little ones was only to be secured by that killing. The Neandertalers thought the little children of men fair game and pleasant eating. ...

William Golding was inspired by Wells to write The Inheritors (his second book, after Lord of the Flies), which is rendered mostly (until the end, at which point the perspective is reversed) from the Neanderthal point of view. Both Wells and Golding assume that Neanderthals were not as cognitively capable as modern humans, but Golding's primitives are peaceful quasi-vegetarians, quite unlike the Grisly Folk of Wells.

The Inheritors 

Golding considered this his finest novel and it is a beautifully realised tale about the last days of the Neanderthal people and our fear of the ‘other’ and the unfamiliar. The action is revealed through the eyes of the Neanderthals whose peaceful world is threatened by the emergence of Homo sapiens. 

The struggle between the simple Neanderthals and the malevolent modern humans ends in helpless despair ... 

From the book jacket: "When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. What the people didn't, and perhaps never would, know, was that the day of their people was already over."

See this episode of the podcast Backlisted for an excellent discussion of the book. 

I am particularly interested in how Golding captures the perspective of pre-humans with limited cognitive abilities. He conveys the strangeness and incomprehensibility of modern humans as perceived by Neanderthals. In this sense, the book is a type of Science Fiction: it describes a first encounter with Aliens of superior capability.

We are approaching the day when modern humans will encounter a new and quasi-alien intelligence: it may be AI, or it may be genetically enhanced versions of ourselves.

On a scientific note, can someone provide an update to this 2013 work: "... high quality genome sequence obtained from the toe of a female Neanderthal who lived in the Altai mountains in Siberia. Interestingly, copy number variation at 16p11.2 is one of the structural variants identified in a recent deCODE study as related to IQ depression"? Here is an interesting follow up paper: Nature 2016 Aug 11; 536(7615): 205–209.

   

Audiobook:

 

James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime (documentary)

The documentary James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime is now available free to Amazon Prime subscribers.

This 54-minute documentary traces the writer James Salter's lifelong love affair with France, unforgettably expressed in his 1967 masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime. The film captures the great purity of Salter's prose and the essence of his power to evoke the erotic. Salter's own reflections on his writing and life offer rich insights for reader and writer alike.

If you enjoy it you may also like this history of The Paris Review, also free on Prime video.

See also James Salter, James Salter (1925-2015), and The Life of this World.

The excerpt below is from his 1993 interview for Paris Review's The Art of Fiction.

INTERVIEWER

When A Sport and a Pastime came out you were hailed as “celebrating the rites of erotic innovation” and yet also criticized for portraying such “vigorous ‘love’ scenes.” What did you think of all that?

SALTER

The eroticism is the heart and substance of the book. That seems obvious. I meant it to be, to use a word of Lorca’s, “lubricious” but pure, to describe things that were unspeakable in one sense, but at the same time, irresistible. Having traveled, I also was aware that voyages are, in a large sense, a search for, a journey toward love. A voyage without that is rather sterile. Perhaps this is a masculine view, but I think not entirely. The idea is of a life that combines sex and architecture—I suppose that’s what the book is, but that doesn’t explain it. It’s more or less a guide to what life might be, an ideal.

INTERVIEWER

People seem to have different opinions of what the book is about.

SALTER

I listen occasionally to people explaining the book to me. Every few years there’s an inquiry from a producer who would like to make a movie of it. I’ve turned the offers down because it seems to me ridiculous to try and film it. To my mind the book is obvious. I don’t see the ambiguity, but there again, you don’t know precisely what you are writing. Besides, how can you explain your own work? It’s vanity. To me it seems you can understand the book, if there’s been any doubt, by reading the final paragraph:

As for Anne-Marie, she lives in Troyes now, or did. She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.

That paragraph, the final sentence, is written in irony, but perhaps not read that way. If you don’t see the irony, then the book is naturally going to have a different meaning for you.

INTERVIEWER

It has been said that Dean’s desire for Anne-Marie is also a desire for the “real” France. It’s a linked passion.

SALTER

France is beautiful, but his desire is definitely for the girl herself. Of course she is an embodiment. Even when you recognize what she is, she evokes things. But she would be desirable to him even if she didn’t.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a postmodern side to the book. The narrator indicates that he’s inventing Dean and Anne-Marie out of his own inadequacies.

SALTER

That’s just camouflage.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean?

SALTER

This book would have been difficult to write in the first person—that is to say if it were Dean’s voice. It would be quite interesting written from Anne-Marie’s voice, but I wouldn’t know how to attempt that. On the other hand, if it were in the third person, the historic third, so to speak, it would be a little disturbing because of the explicitness, the sexual descriptions. The question was how to paint this, more or less. I don’t recall how it came to me, but the idea of having a third person describe it, somebody who is really not an important part of the book but merely serving as an intermediary between the book and the reader, was perhaps the thing that was going to make it possible; and consequently, I did that. I don’t know who this narrator is. You could say it’s me; well, possibly. But truly, there is no such person. He’s a device. He’s like the figure in black that moves the furniture in a play, so to speak, essential, but not part of the action.

...

INTERVIEWER

What do you think is the ultimate impulse to write?

SALTER

To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

Serotonin: Houellebecq and Gilets Jaunes

In Houellebecq on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Nietzsche (2015) I pointed out that most intellectuals and elites have been so strongly conditioned by the existing cultural hegemony that they cannot understand obvious realities about the world. In that case I referred specifically to Houellebecq's previous novel Soumission.

Events since 2015 -- Trump's election and populist movements in Europe -- have stimulated a vague (but distorted) understanding in the minds of brainwashed elites as to populist discontent, its causes and origins. The reaction of our "thought leaders" is to decry the (previously sacred) democratic process by which the masses exercise their limited influence on society.

Individuals who told me confidently before the election that Trump had no chance of winning now forget how wrong they were then. They continue to express great confidence in their understanding of world events and political/economic processes.

So few are capable of updating prior beliefs in the face of new information. So many are overconfident in their powers of rationality.

Houellebecq has shown again that he understands reality much better than his critics.

Guardian: Serotonin, the story of a lovesick agricultural engineer who writes trade reports for the French agriculture ministry and loathes the EU, has been hailed by the French media as scathing and visionary. The novel rails against politicians who “do not fight for the interests of their people but are ready to die to defend free trade”.

Written before the current gilets jaunes anti-government movement began blockading roundabouts and tollbooths across France, it features desperate farmers in Normandy who stage an armed blockade of roads amid police clashes.

... In a recent article for Harpers, Houellebecq lauded Donald Trump for his protectionist policies, calling him “one of the best American presidents I’ve ever seen”, and praised Brexit: “The British get on my nerves, but their courage cannot be denied.” Serotonin, which will be published in English in September, viciously criticises free trade.

In Houellebecq on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Nietzsche, Houellebecq discusses Tocqueville's insight concerning the manner in which democracy is likely to be subverted: by a soft tyranny that

Tocqueville (Democracy in America, chapter 6) ... covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Soma, Serotonin, soft censorship of dangerous ideas -- call it what you will.

See also Paris 2018: Global Capital and Its Discontents.

The Life of this World

From this 2011 post:

I've been a fan of the writer James Salter (see also here) since discovering his masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime. Salter evokes Americans in France as no one since Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. The title comes from the Koran: Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime ... :-)

I can't think of higher praise than to say I've read every bit of Salter's work I could get my hands on.

For true Salter fans, a new (2017; he passed in 2015) collection of previously uncollected nonfiction: Don't Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles. I especially liked the essay Younger Women, Older Men, originally published in Esquire in 1992.

From A Sport and a Pastime.

“When did you get out of Yale?”
“I didn’t,” he says. “I quit.”
“Oh.”

He describes it casually, without stooping to explain, but the authority of the act overwhelms me. If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I had only had the courage, I might have also become. ... Now, looking at him, I am convinced of all I missed. I am envious. Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.

He quit. It was too easy for him, his sister told me, and so he refused it. He had always been extraordinary in math. He had a scholarship. He knew he was exceptional. Once he took the anthropology final when he hadn’t taken the course. He wrote that at the top of the page. His paper was so brilliant the professor fell in love with him. Dean was disappointed, of course. It only proved how ridiculous everything was. ... He lived with various friends in New York and began to develop a style. ... in the end he quit altogether. Then he began educating himself.

...

She stoops with the match, inserts it, and the heater softly explodes. A blue flame rushes across the jets, then burns with a steady sound. There’s no other light in the room but this, which reflects from the floor. She stands up again. She drops the burnt match on the table and begins to arrange clothing on the grill of the heater, pajamas, spreading them out so they can be warmed. Dean helps her a bit. The silk, if it’s that, is quite cold. And there, back from the Vox opposite the Citroen garage, its glass doors now closed, they stand in the roaring dark. In a fond, almost brotherly gesture, he puts his arms around her. They hardly know one another. She accepts it without a word, without a movement, and they wait in a pure silence, the faint sweetness of gas in the air. After a while she turns the pajamas over. Her back is towards him. In a single move she pulls off her sweater and then, reaching behind herself in that elbow-awkward way, unfastens her brassiere. Slowly he turns her around.

...

From a message to a friend, who knew Salter, and asked me to articulate what I most admire about his work.

About 5 years ago I became friends with the writer Richard Ford, who offered to introduce me to his friend Salter. I was less enthusiastic to meet him than I would have been when he was younger. I did not go out of my way, and we never met.

Since he lived in Aspen, and I was often there in the summers at the Physics institute, I have sometimes imagined that we crossed paths without knowing it.

I admire, of course, his prose style. Sentence for sentence, he is the master.

But perhaps even more I admire his view of the world -- of courage, honor, daring to attempt the impossible, men and women, what is important in life.

Frank Herbert interview on the origins of Dune (1969)

The interviewer is Willis E. McNelly, a professor of English (specializing in science fiction). Herbert discusses artistic as well as conceptual decisions made in the writing and background world building for Dune. Highly recommended for any fan of the book.

See also Dune and The Butlerian Jihad and Darwin Among the Machines.

The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts carefully:

Muad'Dib, born Paul Atreides, was the son of the Duke Leto, a man whose bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. The Prophet's mother, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and carried gene-markers whose supreme importance to the breeding program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project.

The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union. Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son. This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme. But there were other far more important indications that they virtually ignored ...

"Kwisatz Haderach" is similar to the Hebrew "Kefitzat Haderech", which literally means "contracting the path"; Herbert defines Kwisatz Haderach as "the Shortening of the Way" (Dune: Appendix IV).

Another good recording of Herbert, but much later in his life.

American Psycho

Author Bret Easton Ellis, Christian Bale (Patrick Bateman), and Director Mary Herron discuss American Psycho.




This is a rare 1999 documentary about Ellis. It mixes interviews with dramatizations of scenes from his writing. The American Psycho bits are terrible, especially compared to the actual movie, which was released in 2000. Rewatching the movie today, my main reaction is that Bale is simply brilliant as Patrick Bateman: e.g., Hip to be Square (reprised by Huey Lewis himself here).




It seems likely that the title American Psycho is partly an homage to the late 1970s film American Gigolo, which had a big impact on Ellis. (I highly recommend BEE's podcast to anyone interested in film or literature.)

Rolling Stone: 'American Psycho' at 25

Before American Psycho came out, 25 years ago this month, it was already the most controversial novel of the Nineties. Its vivid depictions of gruesome murders of women, men, children and animals preceded wherever it went. The original publisher dropped it and told author Bret Easton Ellis to keep the money — but to please go away. The New York Times titled its book review "Snuff This Book!" On the opposite coast, Los Angeles Times begrudgingly wrote that "Free Speech Protects Even an 'American Psycho.'" The National Organization of Women attempted to organize boycotts. Stores refused to order it. And Ellis, who turned 27 around its release, received death threats. ...

Has the way that Patrick Bateman has become a cult character surprised you?
What if I said, no? [Pause.] I'm kidding [laughs]. Of course, it was surprising to me. American Psycho was an experimental novel. I wasn't really quite sure, nor did I care, how many copies it was going to sell. I really didn't care who connected with it.

Why is that?
I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties – a very specific time and place ...

... Beginning in the Eighties, men were prettifying themselves and in ways they weren't. And they were taking on a lot of the tropes of gay male culture and bringing it into straight male culture — in terms of grooming, looking a certain way, going to the gym, waxing, and being almost the gay porn ideals. You can track that down to the way Calvin Klein advertised underwear, a movie like American Gigolo, the re-emergence of Gentlemen's Quarterly. All of these things really informed American Psycho when I was writing it. So that seemed to me much more interesting than whether he is or is not a serial killer, because that really is a small section of the book. ...

... Patrick Bateman, who was obsessed with Donald Trump, would likely be pretty happy with his campaign.
Or would he be embarrassed? Trump today isn't the Trump of 1987. He's not the Trump of Art of the Deal. He seemed much more elitist in '87, '88. Now he seems to be giving a voice to white, angry, blue-collar voters. I think, in a way, Patrick Bateman may be disappointed by how Trump is coming off and who he's connecting with.

To the guys that I was talking to in the Eighties when I was researching American Psycho, Donald Trump was an aspirational figure. That's why the jokes are throughout the book. It wasn't like I pulled that out of my hat; that was happening. And so I just thought it was funny that "OK, well, Patrick Bateman's gonna be obsessed with Donald Trump. He's gonna want to aspire to be Donald Trump." And I don't know if he would think that today. ...

Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis on American Gigolo

https://www.podcastone.com/episode/B.E.E.---Paul-Schrader---10/17/16-1685639

Highly recommended to readers with literary or cinematic interests. Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis discuss American Gigolo. (Best brief summary of the movie and its impact is @5-12 min.) Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Schrader wrote and directed American Gigolo (1980), which had a huge cultural impact and made Richard Gere a star. (Intro soundtrack is Blondie's Call Me.)

This is an old interview with Ellis (translated from the French):

ALEX ISRAEL - We've spoken about your interest in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo. Tell me about your relationship to the film.
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was 16 when it came out and back then it seemed very shocking. It was Paramount's big spring movie of 1980 and it reverberated through our cultivation and started to change things. What Was shocking Was That there HAD never-been movie That Looked at a male beauty in the way American Gigolo DID. We'd seen women bed, Addressed, and undressed fait que fashion, we aim'd never seen a movie about Essentially male beauty. It was the first metrosexual movie. I think it has Anticipated changes in culture, That Would Be seen with more clarity later on in Calvin Klein ads and in the photographs of Herb Ritts.

ALEX ISRAEL - So it offered a new way of thinking about male sexuality's role in mass culture?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - A lot of movies-have Dealt with male sexuality. Purpose Does American Gigolo really deal with male sexuality? Richard Gere plays a prostitute in it. It's a film noir. Regardless of what Paul Schrader Was going for at the time, it: has a heavy homoerotic element. Purpose It Was not a gay film. It was Saying, look, this is Where We're headed as a culture male beauty in straight Culture is going to be Embraced in this way - not as it is in gay culture, in order --other this way. I remember seeing the movie a number of times, Knowing That It Was not a great film, That goal It was very suggestive. Now, 30 years later, it's a key THE movie.

ALEX ISRAEL - An Especially key movie for you, right?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - Completely, right down to the fact That I named Julian in Less Than Zero after Gere's character in American Gigolo. For better or worse, in 1980 I Began working on Less Than Zero. There Was not really a character Julian in the first draft of That book. When That character Began to announce Itself in subsequent drafts He Was named Julian - in homage to American Gigolo.

...

ALEX ISRAEL - What you Influenced When You Were writing Less Than Zero, other than American Gigolo?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was a Southern California kid Who wanted to write about youth culture and about the people I Knew. The language of movies and it cam from punk rock and from Joan Didion. I do not know if There Was a specific cultural influences That inspired Less Than Zero. I do not know what it Would Have been. I knew that I wanted to write a novel, and I Was That very much Influenced by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway, not that much profit by Fitzgerald.

Hemingway's cafes

WSJ: Hemingway’s Favorite Parisian Cafes, A tour of the literary Parisian cafes Hemingway’s generation made famous. For some reason they don't mention Les Deux Magots!

See also With Pascin at the Dôme:

I always wondered who Hemingway had in mind as the dark sister when he wrote the short story With Pascin at the Dôme, which appeared in the collection A Moveable Feast. According to the article Who Was With Pascin at the Dôme?, it was the model Bronia Perlmutter (on the left, below). The early 20th century precursor to Natalie Portman?

With Pascin at the Dôme: ... I went over and sat down at a table with Pascin and two models who were sisters. Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not. Pascin was a very good painter and he was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense. The two models were young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring.

'The good and the bad sisters,' Pascin said. 'I have money. What will you drink?' 'une demi-blonde,'I said to the waiter. 'Have a whisky. I have money.'
...

Can anyone identify this third wave coffee place I visited last week? Hint: it's in the east bay.

Huxley: Brave New World Revisited

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. ..."

Brave New World was written in 1932. In 1958 Huxley reconsidered his dystopian novel in a long essay.

Quantity, Quality, Morality

In the Brave New World of my fantasy eugenics and dysgenics were practiced systematically. In one set of bottles biologically superior ova, fertilized by biologi­cally superior sperm, were given the best possible pre­natal treatment and were finally decanted as Betas, Alphas and even Alpha Pluses. In another, much more numerous set of bottles, biologically inferior ova, ferti­lized by biologically inferior sperm, ... [t]he creatures finally decanted were almost subhuman; but they were capa­ble of performing unskilled work and, when properly conditioned, detensioned by free and frequent access to the opposite sex, constantly distracted by gratuitous entertainment and reinforced in their good behavior patterns by daily doses of soma, could be counted on to give no trouble to their superiors.

In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, mak­ing sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. ... And along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence. Indeed, some competent authorities are convinced that such a decline has already taken place and is continuing. "Un­der conditions that are both soft and unregulated," writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect. . . . It is the fashion in some academic circles to assure students that the alarm over differential birth­rates is unfounded; that these problems are merely economic, or merely educational, or merely religious, or merely cultural or something of the sort. This is Pollyanna optimism. Reproductive delinquency is biologi­cal and basic." And he adds that "nobody knows just how far the average IQ in this country [the U.S.A.] has declined since 1916, when Terman attempted to standardize the meaning of IQ 100."

... And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ's and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.

... And what about the congenitally insufficient organ­isms, whom our medicine and our social services now preserve so that they may propagate their kind? To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the whole­sale transmission to our descendants of the results of unfavorable mutations, and the progressive contamina­tion of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, are no less obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.

Houellebecq on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Nietzsche

I prefer good literary criticism.




But this is not it:



Beyond some trivialities, the discussants make no progress toward the question that fascinates all of them: what is Michel Houellebecq really thinking? But they cannot conceive it because their conditioning is so strong that the thoughts cannot enter their minds. (Note that, in its favor, the panel includes Soumission translator Lorin Stein.)

Much better, and shorter, this video of Houellebecq on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Nietzsche.

Tocqueville (Democracy in America, chapter 6): ... It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. ...

Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. ... I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.1

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ...

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. ...

See also Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment.

Update: Kudos to Ross Douthat of the NYTimes, who is way ahead of the NYU panelists.

James Salter, 1925-2015

"Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel."

Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.  NYTimes obituary.

From a 2011 post:

I've been a fan of the writer James Salter (see also here) since discovering his masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime. Salter evokes Americans in France as no one since Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. The title comes from the Koran: Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime ... :-)

I can't think of higher praise than to say I've read every bit of Salter's work I could get my hands on.

See also Lion in winter: James Salter.

INTERVIEWER

But why a memoir?

SALTER

To restore those years when one says, All this is mine—these cities, women, houses, days.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think is the ultimate impulse to write?

SALTER

To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

Short stories

Yesterday I listened to this interview with the fiction editor of the New Yorker:

Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, discusses the magazine's 90th anniversary and the canon of fiction it published.

She didn't mention Irwin Shaw's 1939 classic The Girls in Their Summer Dresses. According to James Salter, Shaw wrote it in a single morning.

... "I like the girls in the offices. Neat, with their eyeglasses, smart, chipper, knowing what everything is about, taking care of themselves all the time." He kept his eye on the people going slowly past outside the window. "I like the girls on Forty-fourth Street at lunchtime, the actresses, all dressed up on nothing a week, talking to the good-looking boys, wearing themselves out being young and vivacious outside Sardi's, waiting for producers to look at them. I like the salesgirls in Macy's, paying attention to you first because you're a man, leaving lady customers waiting, flirting with you over socks and books and phonograph needles. I got all this stuff accumulated in me because I've been thinking about it for ten years and now you've asked for it and here it is."

"Go ahead," Frances said.

"When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . . ." He finished his drink. "That's the story. You asked for it, remember. I can't help but look at them. I can't help but want them." ...

Irwin Shaw is largely forgotten now, despite having been a giant in his own time. He was a hero to the young Salter when the two first met in Paris. They stayed friends until the end.

Burning the Days: ... in the winter of his life ... the overarching trees were letting their leaves fall, the large world he knew was closing. Was he going to write these things down? No, he said without hesitation. "Who cares?"

He wanted immortality of course. "What else is there?" Life passes into pages if it passes into anything, and his had been written. ...

From the Paris Review:

I wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” one morning while Marian was lying in bed and reading. And I knew I had something good there, but I didn’t want her to read it, knowing that the reaction would be violent, to say the least, because it’s about a man who tells his wife that he’s going to be unfaithful to her. So I turned it facedown, and I said, “Don’t read this yet. It’s not ready.” It was the only copy I had. Then I went out and took a walk, had a drink, and came back. She was raging around the room. She said, “It’s a lucky thing you came back just now, because I was going to open the window and throw it out.” Since then she’s become reconciled to it, and I think she reads it with pleasure, too.

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings."

Ursula K. Le Guin, remarks at the National Book Awards. She acknowledged her fellow fantasy and sci-fi writers, who have for so long watched “the beautiful awards,” like the one she received, go to the “so-called realists.”

New Yorker: ... I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Beyond Human Science

A short story by Hugo and Nebula winner Ted Chiang. See also A Modern Borges? and Genius (Nautilus magazine article).

The Evolution of Human Science

It has been twenty-five years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?

No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish secondhand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.

No one denies the many benefits of metahuman science, but one of its costs to human researchers was the realization that they would likely never make an original contribution to science again. Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attention away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.

Textual hermeneutics became popular first, since there were already terabytes of metahuman publications whose translations, while cryptic, were presumably not entirely inaccurate. Deciphering these texts bears little resemblance to the task performed by traditional paleographers, but progress continues: recent experiments have validated the Humphries decipherment of decade-old publications on histocompatibility genetics.

The availability of devices based on metahuman science gave rise to artifact hermeneutics. Scientists began attempting to "reverse engineer" these artifacts, their goal being not to manufacture competing products, but simply to understand the physical principles underlying their operation. The most common technique is the crystallographic analysis of nanoware appliances, which frequently provides us with new insights into mechanosynthesis.

The newest and by far the most speculative mode of inquiry is remote sensing of metahuman research facilities. A recent target of investigation is the ExaCollider recently installed beneath the Gobi Desert, whose puzzling neutrino signature has been the subject of much controversy. (The portable neutrino detector is, of course, another metahuman artifact whose operating principles remain elusive.)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that— unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one— humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns. For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually "up-grade" their minds to a metahuman-equivalent level. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.

There is a tide

This novel reminds of recent dystopian movies and books such as Elysium, The Road, Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas. Our zeitgeist recognizes the ever accelerating gap between haves and have-nots, and these novels and films reflect that collective consciousness. The gap always existed between the rich and poor worlds, but now it exists within developed countries like the US, threatening broad swathes of the former middle class.

Leonard Lopate Show: Chang-Rae Lee talks about his new novel, On Such a Full Sea, set in a future, when a long-declining America is strictly stratified by class. Abandoned urban neighborhoods have become high-walled, self-contained labor colonies. The members of the labor class work to provide quality produce and fish to elite villages. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears.

Interestingly, the wealthy dwellers of the Charters allow the top 1 percent of children from the labor colonies to ascend in class. The main character Fan's brother was adopted by a Charter family, and she seeks him out for help. The genomic angle manifests in the disappearance of Fan's love, who is dispatched (for study?) because of a rare mutation that makes him resistant to the still-deadly "C-diseases" (cancer?).

An excerpt from the book.

... When our ancestors were first brought here—the archival vids and pix show them rolling in on fleets of shiny silver company buses—the air was to them fresh and clear, just like in the image of the roofless row house, and when they stepped out, they must have been entranced by the scant briny notes of the harbor waters, breathing them in deep. And think of how startled they might have been by the strange brand of tidiness in this place (once known as Baltimore) and other abandoned cities that settlers were sent to in other eastern and midwestern states, this preservation by dint of absence, such that after they gathered their luggage from the curb and were shuttled by carts to the houses assigned to them, our and your and Fan's forebears among them, their gasps were not of trepidation or disappointment but of gratitude and relief.

Indeed, it's difficult for us to understand how genuinely grateful they were; we glance around B-Mor now and it's impossible to imagine how our people could have felt that way (how time and safety and a filled belly rapidly evolve us!), to be presented with so depleted a cityscape and still have a heart-surge of excitement. The legendary Wen Shurbao, who would be our first and only mayor, reportedly exhorted his brethren by invoking the classic proverb: "Our generation will plant the trees. The next will enjoy the shade."

Surely there were the discontented among those originals, but which of them could deny the promise of this place? Here was an entire community, ready for revitalization. Yes, the houses were basically shells, but in fact many still had roofs and walls and sturdy stairs; yes, few had any boilers, but the majority had salvageable wiring and plumbing; yes, the floors had to be scraped and sanded and refinished, every cabinet and counter scrubbed and disinfected of the leavings of birds and vermin and insects, and yet what activity offers more immediate, honest gratification than shining up a seemingly ruined surface back to the distinctive grain of its essence?

... We should concede that unlike the experience of most immigrants, there was very little to encounter by way of an indigenous population. There were smatterings of them, to be sure, pockets of residents on the outskirts of what is now the heart of B-Mor, these descendants of nineteenth-century African slaves and twentieth-century laborers from Central America and even bands of twenty-first-century urban-nostalgics, all of whom settled the intimate grid of these blocks and thrived for a time and, for reasons that history can confidently trace and identify but never quite seem to solve, inexorably declined and finally disappeared. Our predecessors had the unique advantage of being husbanded by one of the federated companies, rather than the revolving cast of governmental bodies that overreached in their efforts or were disastrously neglectful, all of them downright clueless. The originals were brought in en masse for a strict purpose but with their work- and family-centric culture intact, such that they would not only endure and eventually profit the seed investors but also prosper in a manner that would be perpetually regenerative.

... Perhaps it was the same with our originals, though in a different circumstance. They went about their first labors, renovating the row houses in the same way, it turns out, that certain antique American communities used to do, the foreman or forewoman of each block marshaling all its residents to converge on one address and revamp, say, the bathrooms or kitchen, the museum clips just like a science class vid of hundreds of ants tugging a sourball-sized rock. You can picture it now. They'd go from one house to the next, right on down the block, this mobile, instantly adaptive assembly line, each person assigned a function, with the children passing beach pails of dust and rubble in a brigade, the elderly offering sips of cool chrysanthemum tea from canteens, even the unwell propped up in chairs close by or even inside the site, so that they might lend moral support or learn by watching. ...

Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3,

BRUTUS
Under your pardon. You must note beside,
That we have tried the utmost of our friends,
Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day.
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

Ulaanbaatar

A beautifully written short memoir from Ariel Levy in the New Yorker. I won't spoil it for you, but here's a sentence:

Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia.

Levy (right) married Amy Norquist (left) in 2007:

Nabokov on teaching

Nabokov was professor of literature at Cornell from 1948-1959. The excerpt below is from a 1964 Playboy interview, reproduced at longform.org (a site I highly recommend).

Nabokov: I gave up teaching—that’s about all in the way of change. Mind you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s—without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustic arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.

The first paragraph of Lolita, one of my favorites in all of literature:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Weak Meat Strong Eat

弱肉強食

These characters mean "Weak Meat Strong Eat" -- the weak are meat for the strong. It's a Chinese (and Japanese) saying. Sometimes it is even translated as "Survival of the fittest"!

One of the repeated themes in Cloud Atlas is: The weak are meat the strong do eat.  David Mitchell, the author, lived in Japan for many years and has a Japanese wife. I suspect he learned this phrasing from the Japanese.

My favorite sub-plot in Cloud Atlas is the Orison of Sonmi 451. Hmm... what is psychogenomics? (See also Dune.)

Cloud Atlas: ... sourced his supply of psychogenomics theses from an obscure tech institute in Baikal. The original author of my x-postgrad’s work was a production zone immigrant named Yusouf Suleiman. Xtremists were killing genomicists in Siberia at that time, and Suleiman and three of his professors were blown up by a car bomb. Baikal being Baikal, Suleiman’s research languished in obscurity for ten years until it was sold on. The agent liaised with contacts at Papa Song Corp to instream Suleiman’s ascension neuro-formula to our Soap. Yoona939 was the prime specimen; I was a modified backup. If all that sounds unlikely, Hae-Joo added, I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unxpected places.

Some video of Suleiman (identified by caption) appears in the movie in the scene in which Hae-Joo educates Sonmi about fabricants and genetic engineering. Suleiman is lecturing in front of a board covered with equations -- no snail shells in sight.