A physicist, a mathematician, a philosopher walk into a novel, or three...
Bruce Duffy's "The World as I Found It"; Benjamin Labatut's "The MANIAC' and "When We Cease to Understand the World": invited to a dinner party's cabal...
Valentine’s Day ‘06, I wasn’t so caught up in the throes of passion to put down my laptop. Guessing back then more likely parenting occupied my purview, but downtime I posted this on one-click Prime A, when books mattered a bit more. I hadn’t even started my predecessor to this blog on Google. What got me thinking about this debut novel was the come-on that had me at “mind blown” by my friend who recommended I catch up with “The Maniac” before we’d meet, part of a cherished tradition where as among three other couples of long camaraderie from the days our sprats, as my wife’d’ve called ‘em, first convened to cavort under a parachute at Mommy‘n’Me at the Silverlake-Los Feliz not-really-but-adjacent Hollywood JCC. My younger spawn recently recalled that at four or so, across the street from a woebegone hot-sheets lots of rooms at the inn on Sunset and the corner of Bates Ave, he’d seen the s-t kicked out of some denizen. We love L.A. Driving past the old stompin’ grounds last month, all we saw was a vacant lot. Despite the inevitable ten-story loft with three hundred units, no parking, no environmental impact report as there’s a bus stop within half a mile exempting it from any sensible planning control, as if “affordable housing” blooms from a thousand plots. I call it open space however humbled. They zone it as yet “undeveloped.” Between the two, lies the valley and the shadow, the ominous imprint of Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” When he wrote that, these were bean fields. Studios were sprouting, and how many times did Chaplin pass by?
AKA “Bates Motel” appropriately, wittily, and with a jaded nod to Tinseltown too,
Not long after the beatdown, about three minutes walk down that fabled boulevard of broken hearts, shattered dreams, Elliot Smith offed himself, and his posthumous LP gives this Substack its title. After his suicide, on a wall near McDonald’s across from the crack donut shop Tang’s (RIP) in a less-gentrified faux-Eastside pre-millennium, albeit long a haunt for Hampshire College-bred indie rockers, red diaper grand-babies, tourists who try to pretend they’re travelers rather than gawkers, trustafarian bohos from just about anywhere not the Golden State (same as it ever was/is) there was a gaily painted wall with the design from Smith’s “Figure-8” penultimate platter. I thought it pretty fugly. But way up on a corner, in Sharpie-type bold, “you f—kin’ coward” stood out as the one elegiac, less than eulogistic, comment I found enduring.
Those with whom I gathered urged the menfolk to retreat post-prandial festivities for whisk/ey, cigars, and conversation about “MANIAC.” [Update on return home in my insmniac state: neither liquor nor smokes, but a gender-inclusive roundtable discussion ensued over dessert. I couldn't stomach hours parsing the malaprop-prone glass-ceiling boppin’ Ms. Harris' laughter, Diet Mountain Dew Yalie chuggin’ Mr. Vance's aversion to “childless cat ladies,” or blue-state shibboleths, so my clueless inquiries into the sway Ms. Swift mesmerized millions, including our early-thirty-something progeny or at least their distaff halves dominated the dessert discourse].
I brought two other works which reminded me of that new work by Dutch-Chilean Benjamin Labatut. And his previous one, which I dutifully followed up with. {Turned out one of the three giftees had tackled that too, with similar results to those I chronicle below in the last Goodreads go. Another worthy tome-lette++ of inspiration to, as a culinary challenged guest, bring. For during various social obligations in my extended stay this summer, gently used books that a host might find to his/her liking. Although I’ve been turned down graciously more than once by fellow bookworms, or those married to one, with whom the weight of their shelves looms too heavily over their habitations, inhabitants, and wedding vows. I speak from “lived experience.“
That’s why I also packed some herbal tea from La Republica del Ecuador. I had to keep the origin-myth of this blog, that’d it be about my adventures in the Andes, with a mention of said clime, although I admit I’m not heartsick to be away from four pets, barks, demands, and duties piling up at Casa Quinde, despite its bucolic rep), far more portable, if less likely to baffle or impress a visitor to one’s stacked study of fox’d pulp.
[++Alas, Second Sale E-Bay books’ “Good” didn’t match up to the battered copy they sent me of Duffy…Even though Paul Hoffman’s 1998 bio of spaced oddity Paul Erdos, “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers,” after I enjoyed an excerpt in a New Yorker of this classic case of absent-minded prof, the only book I’ve finished about math, my bane, arrived double-plus-Good, attesting to adjectives lacking precision of numbers…My own Duffy was nearly as gnarled, consigned to charity in the great purge of 2022.]
But I’m embarrassed to gift even a secondhand copy of said book As I Found It in such awful condition. To be cordial, I’ve drafted from the minors a sub, in its Czech seriousness, stoic, ironic, and compressed in a nucleus of concentrated matter, Patrik Ouředník’s 132 arch pages narrating “Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century.” Timed for 2001. Being from the Stalinist bloc, inevitably absurdist-grim. Which reminds me—natch liner notes by critic Greil Marcus—he Dylan-idolizing, Lipstick Tracing, Village Voice’d of Greenwich Village-Berkeley’ish ilk—of 1990’s CD:
Small in size, yet a formidably muscular heavy-hitter from the bench, i.e., print copies of eggheadity that I set aside for my son’s erudition, upstairs. Been borrowing back for my Angeleno downtime his-once-mine dogeared Flannery O’Connor’s stories (never liked that peacock motif on this FSG paperback); Isaac Bashevis Singer's shorts; Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House”; his not my undergrad-issue—but as timeworn plus stained and waterlogged in his even though it’s four decades newer— Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” and a handsomely cover-illustrated Jose Saramago’s QPB (remember them?) 3-fer from that 1998. Plus Caryl Churchill’s play about the downfall of Ceaucescu, “Mad Forest,” which I stumbled on by chance on Goodreads. I aver that a paternal line-up change doesn’t break any rules of fraternal hospitality. I chose this pick of the litter: given neither Son #2 nor #1 read dad’s blog/s anyhow…who’s to know?
Therefore, those three (plus helpmeets) guests-hosts were graced not with my wife’s dessert, very sorely missed, but with David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” {see embed; turns out one had bailed on it around page 300, and as it wasn’t about tennis, said friend’s youthful avocation, can’t blame my fit pal, “Man Who,” and the non-musical rendition of our past hundred years, as downbeat as Gang of Four before they went all MTV loving men in uniforms. “Damaged Goods” is kinda ok. But not catchy.
At LMU, I was a work-study student for none other than the three-personed Chicano Studies Department. But which got renamed Latino before any binary o/a or @ or “x” hit the spot; very few Angelenos of that crystal blue persuasion had matriculated it to its already nearly minority-majority undergrad who weren’t of Mexican ancestry, and the Central American chaos churning wouldn’t send thousands into Pico-Union or Westlake for a few years longer, She Who Must Not Be Named from a Nicaraguan family--i.e., my “first” you-know, or won’t ever-- who pioneered Latinizing South-Central after the Watts Riots, I mean urban uprising, moving in around Mount Carmel’s campus as, let’s say, vacancies opened up right around then; a dozen years later, sign of the times, its vacated facilities featured in the Ramones’ video for “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” before the wretched, vacant, lot was demolished for a park.
(Interruption to insert this astounding photo by a former colleague of one present who regaled us with his associate’s epiphany after a brush with either death or taxes in their inevitable dominion to abandon tedium of the sort which drugs DFW's IRS auditors and compensates moneychangers who underwrite builders of bombs for BlackRock or Los Alamos, to pivot to spend his span for high altitude pursuits, thus this at 20,000 feet high, snapped from even more of an elevated perch, no drone, looking down upon this portal to Neverland Shangri-La. The stuff of which dreams…
Synchronicity as I’d already written this piece with a lame “room at the inn” supra. You must open his site to appreciate the effect. I could only use the thumbnail.
I asked “my” Red adjunct (who the year I graduated got his tenured gig at that very tony Hampshire, but later wound up at Long Beach State), born in East L.A., jefe if he liked Go4. He shrugged. Their lyrics, ok, music, nah. He’d made his Eastside cred as a roadie-publicist-factotum for Tierra, Los Lobos in their Del Este de Los Angeles pre-”La Bomba” or opening for Public Image Ltd at Dick Lane’s Olympic Auditorium, and whomever played El Monte or Pico Rivera auditoriums. low riders revved, Brown Berets posed, Whittier Blvd. slowed way down. KRLA, Art Laboe, the plants where Fords, Firestone, “Lady Beth” Bethlehem Steel, even Firebirds, Sunbirds, and Trans-Ams in Panorama City, once paved entry into El Norte for dads of my LMU buddies. And the girls we hung out with. Sites later malls, outlets, themselves now vacating…
Why do I digress so when writing about reading? Well, as I “mature,” I increasingly gravitate away from the “outrage”-fueled press, the push-notifications, the pressures to keep up, tune in, and never drop out from the frenzy as if my civic duty lies in consuming and then scurrying after whichever headlines, memes, or soundbites (thank the Tetragrammaton I don’t click Tik-Tok, X, Instagram) send my hundreds of millions (billions if you count Turtle Island + Abya-Yala) of continental comrades into pearl-clutching tizzies, vaporous fits, onto fainting couches, and scrabbling after smelling salts. Appealing to that echt-Victorian (like medieval not necessarily dumbed-down pejoratives in my long game plan life-as-smudged-playbook) sensibility, among my league of extraordinary gentlemen—who share an interlocutory interest in hidden figures not only feminine or sinuous but hard facts, bottom lines, and cold calculation, they may mix. match, toss, trade and stash these three books between themselves. If updates after said soiree’s needed, watch this space. Otherwise, assume all’s copacetic. [Update: minor edits, major dudes’ kudos abound.]
But enough with the warm-up patter. Let’s turn to the first of this evening’s triple bill.
I select this image unwillingly, but it frames its typical reader of DFW, verily.
“At its best, an exciting novel about philosophers!” (four out of five, Amazon US)
Surprisingly perky, given pensive subject matter, and from an author who obviously loves to write. This quality seems less than apparent in many books, but Duffy, I felt, took great time and applied careful skill in making his characters emerge on the page as recognizably full-fledged people. Whether the clumsy and appealing, if fanatic and mysterious Max; Ottoline's bony limbs; Wittgenstein's trench nemesis Grundfeldt; Russell's liberated flapper DD and her dentist father from the Illinois prairies the philosopher visits in a wonderful chapter; DH Lawrence's fulminations about blood knowledge; Moore's gustatory enthusiasm when dining at Hall; or Russell's attempts to write an article for Parents' Magazine on "Are Parents Bad for Children" while trying to seduce yet another lissome lass and take care of his failing marriage, faltering children, and chaotic progressive school--this book's most engrossing.
Especially noteworthy are Duffy's depictions of trench warfare as Wittgenstein might have experienced it in WW1. I didn't expect that the relatively brief part of the philosopher's life would be so much a part of this novel. It serves, once you finish and can see the whole work completed, as the titular centerpiece and the fulcrum for so much of his subsequent reactions to the middle of the 20c. I had recently read Sebastian Barry's Booker Prize-nominated counterpart "A Long Long Way From Home," and while Duffy spends less than his whole novel on the hell endured on the Western Front, he gives a variety of vividly rendered scenes that match Barry at his best--no mean feat for Duffy's not a professional full-time writer, apparently, and this was his first novel. The depictions of war are simply and terrifyingly superb.
While I had difficulty even with the simplified explanations of Wittgenstein's thought, I confess, full comprehension of them may well be beyond any of us. W's own battles with his homosexuality, his family history of suicide, and his Christian ideals vs. his Jewish heritage make for engrossing material that eases the challenge of keeping up with W's ratiocinations. Duffy shows dramatically W's refusal to start a circle of fawning disciples or imitators of his notoriously challenging thought-experiments and investigations into what does and does not underly logic. Perhaps even Moore and Russell, as shown when they conduct the viva voce doctoral exam of W., cannot understand their candidate either. {Hey, I had similar problems but doubtless my Ph.D. supervisors didn’t attribute mine to my spry brilliance arrayed against theirs.]
The novel is not perfect; the latter chapters especially after WW2 appear rushed and the author seems winded by so much previous exertion on behalf of his complicated characters. The first section takes place around 1912; the wartime is largely early in WW1, and the latter part is around 1938 for the most part. Appended to this are detours back and forward in time that expand W's family history. It may sound cumbersome, yet it gives you enough of a context for each period to feel that you can find your way around.
Somehow over so many thousands of sentences, Duffy manages to avoid cliche, to write fresh and efficient prose, and to take the reader into a series of realms that would have seemed the least likely areas that a novelist would want to explore, let alone re-create over 500 densely printed pages. It took me most of a week's free time to read this, and it flows best when you have a few hours straight to immerse yourself in it. It's a novel that works by association, accruing patiently the rewards that pay off for the thinkers if not always their long-suffering supporting casts of lovers, relations, colleagues, and spouses.
The reason for so much reasoning gradually grows as the novel continues; you will begin to understand at least a bit how everyday life impinges upon and stimulates rarified speculation. This happens subtly, as it does in reality, and may take the space of hundreds of pages to connect, but it will cohere--for the most part, which is quite an accomplishment for a book that aspires to not only enlightenment but sophisticated entertainment. The novel does take its slow time to warm up; get beyond the first hundred pages, and know that with the middle section, part two, "The World as I Found It" will start to deepen its spell.
That’s gotta be Egon Schiele? Uncredited on the original edition. NYRB has reissued it with a preface by David Leavitt, and another enigmatic image. Less striking than this. Which aptly conveys the blasted trenchscape of its ur-myth.
NYRB issues Labatut’s “critically acclaimed” pair of fictionalized real lives, very much in the Duffian spirit. Here’s my take on MANIAC, promptly perused before partying.
The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut. Four out of five stars, Goodreads.
Disturbing, engrossing, demanding, thought-provoking as A.I. at last appears to be exercising its power after a decade or two when we all wondered why it wasn't having its growth spurt. I guess Ray Kurzweil is right in anticipation of the man-machine meld of singularity in the next fifteen years. Benjamin Labatut in a series of short chapters told by "Johnny" von Neumann and other colleagues, many sharing his Hungarian Jewish heritage, who created the world-destroying technology under which, as another recent book, also reviewed by me, Nuclear War: a scenario by Annie Jacobson, documents in unsettling true-life detail. [Spoiler alert: no happy ending.]
I've known of Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, and started it after finishing this sort-of sequel. Both compacted narratives use various voices and a series of unnerving vignettes meticulously arranged to document the human hubris which makes the brightest among us use their talents for sinister rather than benevolent ends. We've all heard the adage that if a scientist can conceive of a concept taking on tangible existence, and deployment, that said "mad genius" will seek to make the dream come true. Labutat delves into this hardwired capacity within the abilities of the supposedly smartest men and women in labs, think tanks, academia, and politics who conspire to exert the worst impulses within us for, ironically, often pure and rarified appropriation of truth embedded within our minds and instincts.
I didn't expect the last part of this book to look at how not only chess but the Asian game of Go has been championed by computer wizards set on obliterating through brute force the thousands of years of transmitted, but human-scaled, wisdom, intuition, and intelligence marshalled by adepts to use their skills in one-on-one tournaments. The cost of tearing apart the people who pit themselves against databases exponentially far more vast, inelegant, and implacable, for the sake of claiming hollow victories as calculating behemoths overwhelm human limits, is chilling. And inevitably, this will to nearly unfathomable number-crunching to obliterate our puny brains set at competition and contests which evolved thanks to fairly matched opponents won't be kept in a genie lamp or Pandora's box.
When We Cease to Understand the World. Three out of five stars, Goodreads.
I read this right after reviewing The Maniac. I think When We Cease certainly compliments its successor, similarly dramatizing the ways in which some.of the greatest minds of the past century have dismantled Newton's deterministic, mechanical universal model. Labatut sustains his narrative again in briefer sections about various scientists who strove to reconcile quantum physics with both Einstein's revolutionary theories and, in an extended section, Schrodinger's flirtations with Vedanta, madness, erotic maniacal fantasy, medical battles against TB, and, in a chapter where I expected Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp to make a cameo at a magical mountain sanitarium, fits of unhinged behavior opening the barriers which separate irrational inspiration from everyday self-control, and orderly routines. It gets tedious.
The trope of mad mathematical geniuses going bonkers by starvation, delusion, self-pity, hermetic decay, ascetic obsession, and periods of self-imposed indulgence at the cost of sanity, health, families, careers, and stability becomes familiar, especially when carried throughout two books in a row demonstrating the hubris which drives brilliant minds to breakdown as these men (interesting that women stay in the background, in supporting roles, in both works) refuse to compromise. It's an undeniably engrossing subject, but I didn't wish either novelization to be any longer. As Maniac carried a coda about brute force computing battering human players of chess and of Go, so When We appends a storyline recapitulating the bulk of the preceding content, this time set in Labutat's Chile. [Where apparently unlike Ecuador the Andes get left to the raptors, while the populace crowds the coasts for its cities.]
I'm satisfied that this pair of texts, and they benefit from being read in proximity, covers the moral lesson which its author intends. Neither despite brevity loses anything. If either fictionalized treatment focused on one character too long (here Schrodinger, there Von Neumann), that'd make the points repetitive. As it is, When We seems slightly weaker, as the extended storyline about Schrodinger threatens to wear out its allotted moralizing function. You get the point long beforehand. But, as with Laurent Binet, Michel Houllebecq, and Alan Lightman, it's encouraging that ethical quandaries via short works of imagination continue to find discerning readers.