Category: Literature

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame, has started another series around Isabel Dalhousie in Edinborough. Isabel is a the editor of the “Review of Applied Ethics” and organizer of a Sunday philosophy club (which never meets). She sees a young handsome man fall to his death and pursues the truth through meditations on Kant and everyday ethics. At the end it is Hume and his call for sympathy which McCall Smith seems to feel is the better ethics. The novel is a deliberately philosophical novel where meditations on ethical issues are interwoven with unfolding detective work. While it is one of the better philosophical novels I have read, there are moments when it lectures too much. Give McCall Smith a few more installments and he should find his stride and not feel he has to cover everything in each new novel.
What I still ask myself is why the Sunday philosophy club, after which the novel is names, never meets in the story? Will it meet in a future story? Will Isabel continue to never have the will gather the club? It strikes me that there is a hint in the missing club that gives a title to the book, but I can’t quite fix that hint.

On Saturday I went to “An extraordinary day of ideas, debate and discussion focusing on Canada and the urgent challenges facing the international community today.” The title of the event was, Navigating a New World and it was a extraordinary sequence of Random House Canada writers speaking from Irshad Manji, RomÈo Dallaire to Llyoyd Axworthy. The title for the day came from Axworthy’s new book, but what does it really mean?
Continue reading Navigating a New World

Neal Stephenson’s third and final volume to the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is out! See this Slashdot review for a good summary of the plot, strengths, and weakness – The System of the World.
What’s with the title? The System of the World is (as we are told in the novel) the title of the third book of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. More importantly it refers to the way the world is run and the transition from a Tory system based on land, aristocracy, and slavery to a Whig system based on currency, industry and mechanical power. (See my previous entries on the earlier titles Again and The Confusion.) The trilogy could be read as the fictionalization of the birth of global scientific capitalism. Stephenson tries to dramatize (in more ways than one) the ideas at this birth. This culminates in a nice, but incomplete confrontation between Newton and Leibniz (and the character Waterhouse as the simple sceptic) that is almost a philosophical dialogue worthy of Hume, but which doesn’t, unless I have missed something, really deal with their differences.
In the end I liked the book (more than Confusion) but felt let down by the Cycle. Stephenson isn’t sure if he wants to write history, accurate historical fiction, or retro-Sci-fi that is based in history. He started so many interesting threads that then wind down in dissappointing ways, partly I suppose, because they would not be true to history if he embellished them. But, what if he had had the courage of Gibson and Sterling, who, in The Difference Engine, feel free to change history following their speculation? Stephenson doesn’t dare, even when he has set up the idea of a logic mill so carefully – it just ends up packed and sent off to Russia and we are told it will be another century before it might get implemented. (Is there a sequel coming?)
So, if he doesn’t dare alter history, why doesn’t he stick closer to it? Why does he introduce these rather useless plot props like the wizards Enoch and Solomon who just show up to tweak history in some (right) direction or to represent some age that is perfectly well represented by others. (Just what do wizards add?) Why couldn’t he have rid himself of these and just written historical fiction? Or, for that matter, plain old accessible history?
I was expecting a big bang of an ending after the thousands of pages I traversed to get there, but was dissappointed. He wasn’t able to pull off a Tolkein epic climax. He didn’t dare speculate about how things could have been different and he also didn’t dare try to weave his tale into the possible as historical romance. I sense he got so caught in the research that he ended writing history but didn’t dare leave his sci-fi audience behind so he wove in some themes as bones for them. A good editor would have helped him ditch the bones, get rid of a thosand pages, and weave all the strands into his day’s ending in November 1714.
Continue reading Stephenson: The System of the World

Two books and a story. Samarkand, by Amin Maalouf is about Iran and Omar Khayy·m and his Rub·iy·t. At a deeper level is about different dreams for the islamic world from the poet to the fanatic. Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger is why I will never read another Clancy novel. Warmed over characters that are the children of previous heros are just part of the problem. The premise of a secret organization privy to all the secrets of the CIA and FBI is unbelievable. The good guys are even less believable. Clancy sets up the good gudys by having others talk us how smart they are. One big backslapping circle of characters without humility. I find it hard to believe this was a best-seller – it isn’t even good enough for airport reading. Easily the worse book I’ve read in a decade.
Alas Clancy is what people will read to orient themselves to the islamic world instead of Maalouf.
Continue reading One good and one bad book

In today’s The Globe and Mail there is a review essay about terror that included a review of In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf. I knew that name was familiar and, browsing his site, realized he had written two great novels I had forgotten, one a historical novel, Leo the African and the science-fiction novel, First Century after Beatrice. I’m embarassed that I didn’t connect those two novels. Time to read more of his work, especially on identity and terror as an antidote to the possible orientalism of Western writers like Bernard Lewis.
Continue reading Amin Maalouf: Books I forgot were good

“Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb.”
Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is a short novel about the hyper of information and getting across New York for a haircut. The hero is a billionaire currency trader driving in a wired car across town. Staff drop in and talk to him, demonstrations slow him down, and leaves his info-limo when he sees his elusive wife. All this time he is loosing his (and his wife’s) fortune on the Yen until he comes unhinged and stalks his death.
The novel read like a short story – compressed around an event and mood. While it was not well reviewed (see Cosmopolis Media Watch), I thought it better than Underworld. It is almost science/speculative fiction – about a life that is all information and lust. At the end it was better than Gibson’s Pattern Recognitions. Eric, the hero, is not even sure if there is a pattern (other than his asymetric prostrate) that he is betting so much on.
Continue reading DeLillo: Cosmopolis

To Tag or Not to Tag [May. 26, 2004] by Patrick O’Kelly is a story in O’Reilly’s XML.com site about “The New Variorum Shakespeare and XML”. Not only is it interesting that an XML site would publish a long article about Shakespeare and the TEI, but the author has taken the time to provide some of the complex history. Julia Flanders and Judith Altreuter, both of whom have been doing great work at the Women Writers Project and MLA respectively, are quoted.
There often seem to be landmark works that get digitized (over and over) to test new models. Michelangelo’s David is one of those. Every new 3D system scans David to show off the technology with a iconic statue. Likewise Shakespeare is a landmark text to transform and then compare to previous versions. The Variorum is not the only XML edition of Shakespeare, but it may set a standard for how critical editions are done. As Cliff Lynch said at COCH/COSH this weekend, in the next decades we will digitize everything of importance in the canon. We will need examples to compare what we do to, and we will need an army of humanists to do it appropriately.

Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes (St. Martins Press, 2004) is a brilliant book that reminds me of that other Texas surreal, Vernon God Little.
Kings takes place in Lamar Texas (Austin?) where Paul, a failed academic, has ended up as a temp in the TxDoGS (Texas Department of General Services) writing an never-ending RFP. The novel is part academic fiction and part science fiction as TxDoGS turns out to be haunted by homeless men downsized over the years who will do work in return for sacrificial offerings. “Are we not men?” is the call of the pale men in frayed shirts with pens in their pockets.
While computers and technology doesn’t feature prominently in the book, one read of it is that it is about the side effects of technology – the outsourcing, the downsizing of services, and the cruel neocon dystopia that wastes lives.
Continue reading Kings of Infinite Space

Resources at† Hot Text — Web Writing that Works is a project by “The Communication Cirle” (which looks like a writing and consulting company) that has some good stuff on writing for the web. I am intrigued by how they present genres as the writing equivalent to patterns. (See their section on Patterns.) Could it be that genre theory could be applied to the discussion in computer science on patterns?
Continue reading Web Writing and Patterns

BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal is a neat journal that publishes hypertext/hypermedia works. It started in 1998 and has a fair amount of content some of which works and some not.