Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee writes a careful and thoughtful review of Cornel West’s new book. It performs the delicate feat of being at once both generous to its subject and devastating in its analysis:

Legend has it that the blues guitarist Robert Johnson acquired his haunting style by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads. West, as a “bluesman of the life of the mind,” has clearly also been to the crossroads. The devil gave him a team of publicists. I don’t think this was a good bargain on West’s part. It left him unable to recognize that self-respect is often the enemy of self-esteem.

Although his prose style is impeccable, what I like even more about McLemee’s piece is the way in which he expresses hope that West might return to fulfilling his early promise. (I suspect that this expression of hope is mainly a form of rhetorical charity, but it’s stylish nonetheless.) This led me to wondering whether it’s even achievable to foster a similar style among people who write about code.

I suspect that many of the awful writing habits of software bloggers come from the fact that they are sometimes actually trying to do things: I tried to use some software; it did something dumb (or nothing at all); I am frustrated; I am going to get splenetic, possibly on a subject where I have no idea what I’m talking about. You can’t take an issue of Social Text out of the university library and do something fun with it after hours (hell, it takes a strong stomach to have fun with critical theory inside the library), so that particular variety of resentment born of ill experience doesn’t arise.

Maybe I’ll actually write up some thoughts on Go at some point, and see if I can live up to my admittedly forlorn hopes.

Feith’s book is perfectly rectangular. Its page numbers progress in a pleasing upward sequence. Its evident shortcomings in terms of accuracy are offset by its usefulness in balancing wobbly furniture.

At its best (the Three Californias trilogy, Antarctica), Robinson’s writing is at once haunting and beautifully evocative of a sense of place.

Q. Is it true that at some point in the seventies, Goings On About Town used the listings for The Fantasticks to serialize James Joyce’s Ulysses? Jon writes: Yes. The New Yorker began serializing Ulysses in the November 3, 1968 listing for The Fantasticks, which famously ran for 17,162 performances, or nearly 42 years. That issue quoted the copyright information from the third printing of the novel (London, Egoist Press). The book’s opening words—“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed”—appeared in the Dec. 21, 1968, issue. The serialization lasted almost three years, ending in November of 1971, and encompassed the entirety of the book’s first chapter. [...] Asked about reader response to the serialization, [New Yorker editor Gardner] Botsford observed, “Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code.”

[...] We begin with a topic that has greatly excited many philosophers: along with Dennett, we think it is a complete red herring. We mention it because you may well run into it, and deduce from the awe in which it seems to be held in some quarters that it is a serious contribution to the subject – which it is not. This is the concept of a “zombie“, which is exactly like a human in every respect except that it is not conscious. Zombies are thought experiments, often used to focus attention on the (alleged) ineffable quality of consciousness that is so different from the physicochemical activities of material brains. imagine a zombie, the argument goes. It functions just like a real human being, right down to the electrical activity of its brain cells – but you know it’s not conscious, because that’s how you imagine it. Conclusion: consciousness is different from the physical activity of a material brain. There are so many things wrong with this suggestion that it is hard to know where to start. The main one is that it’s a cheat. It’s a Silly Question in disguise, one of the “but what if you saw a ghost?” variety [...] You might as well encourage people to imagine a zombike, which is exactly like a bicycle in every way except that it does not move when the pedals are pushed. Oh, mystic miracle of ineffable immateriality, the source of motion in a bicycle is not anything physical!

The quantity of books I apparently read has given the lie to that particular notion. Somewhere, I am finding time to read hundreds of pages a week. This has greatly cheered me up. On the other hand, I am faced with the sad fact that I’m reading enough sci-fi to thoroughly rot my brain. I can almost feel the amyloid plaques coagulating in real time.

At least it’s good sci-fi. I am now, thanks to The Fifth Head of Cerberus, confirmed in my belief that Gene Wolfe has no equal as a serious writer of science fiction. His books are every part the equal of Calvino and Borges for playfulness and complexity, but they have actual plots. In which events occur, characters develop, the story arcs, and what have you.

Since we don’t know when the move will occur (we first have to get permission from the City of San Francisco to demolish a house and build another, then actually build the bugger), what I think will really happen is that we will, some time in 2007, move exactly as many books as we have now.

So what am I throwing out? The victims appear to have fallen into five categories.

1. Books that now make me wonder what I was thinking when I bought them;
2. books that I bought because I was told to;
3. books evaluated as wanting;
4. books that turned up apparently from nowhere;
5. and books that are too dated to have much residual value.

Here are a few representative samples.

1. Wurman, Information Architects. A colourful, wretched tome that conflates jumpy graphic design and advertising with data visualisation. Properly done, data vis is informative, elegant, and gets out of your way so you can understand what you’re looking at. Wurman is responsible for the TED conferences, which should be indictment enough.
2. Millman and Halkias, Integrated Electronics. I dealt with my analogue electronics classes in college by avoidance. I achieved a passing grade by skipping most of my classes, ignoring my assignments, and sitting idle through most of the final exam. Perhaps my transcript was swapped with that of someone less bolshy; I can’t imagine how I could have passed on the merits of the work I did.

   Most people get over such trauma by tearing up, burning, or selling (I know, too sanguine by half) their textbooks to achieve catharsis. Me, I had the bugger shipped across the Atlantic, to moulder on a succession of California bookshelves for a decade. I have no idea whether this book is any good, having never read it.

3. Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind. A huge “look at me, I’m so clever” pop-science tour masquerading as a crusade against the notion of strong artificial intelligence. This travelled with me from Ireland when I was still in my “never throw stuff away” phase. In its favour, I will grant that I detest this book less than Gödel, Escher, Bach.
4. Petzold, Programming Windows 95. One of those doorstop programming books that contains very little actual information, sort of the mental equivalent of cheeseburger for programmers.
5. Williams, Programming the 68000. Nostalgia aside (this was the first programming book I bought, around age 15), I doubt I’ll ever run into a 68k-class CPU again at the instruction level, unless I start reprogramming washing machines.

Somehow, I lived in the Bay Area for ten years without realising that Borderlands even existed, until Shannon told me about it last month. So much for being savvy about my environs.

I describe time spent at Borderlands as dizzying because a fog of attention deficit descends over me when I go through its doors. If I’m looking at books under “A”, and I remember that I wanted to look for something under “P”, my eyes will wander over “C”, “J”, and “N” along the way, until I recall that I wanted something under “W” too. By which time I’ve forgotten about “P”, and slump back to “A”, defeated in my attempt to maintain any thread of thought under the onslaught of thousands of book spines.

On our last visit, I decided to retro-educate myself on supposed classics of SF I had never read. I picked up a $2 used copy of Sam Delany’s “Nova” and Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”.

Prior to yesterday, the only Delany I read was his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, over a decade ago. Whatever his writing skills, Delany’s capacity for sex stuck in my mind; I was surprised he managed to squeeze in any time for writing, given all the time he spent at the truck stops.

Anyway, the carnage described in his autobiography has successfully stuck in my head for over a decade, but I can’t say the same for Nova. It is so much a product of its age (the mid-1960s) that it hardly bears reading today. Between the risibly psychedelic dialogue and the preoccupation with Tarot, I found the first few chapters almost unbearable, so I’ve been unable to bring myself to pick it up again.

None of this is the case with Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. This is essentially a Vietnam War novel, only with a science fiction setting. Haldeman fought in Vietnam, but his book suffers not one iota of the dated air that afflicts Nova.

Forever War is a humanist indictment of the military that happens to take the form of a gripping space opera. Given the continuing misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book has retained its relevance (something I think Haldeman might prefer was not the case). Haldeman’s unadorned prose and solid plotting can beat up Delany’s florid extravagances any day.