Animal Behavior

Emerson introduced one of his essays noting how sometimes you read an idea that is disturbing because it’s one you yourself that you ignored. Eric Evans’s book, now an acronym in the industry, DDD, is such on steroids; I’m sure many like me have felt the correctness of this instinct to build software according to a model of the reality where it will be used, but Evans picks and picks at it. His insistence on the power of language seemed slightly outlandish, but given the power and ubiquity of LLMs today, proves eerily prescient.

As I recall, it’s marred by diving too deep into specific examples in the final parts of the book, and I stopped reading.

Read by the mellifluous, or at least fabulously raconteur author, Alchemy serves to me as the contemporary vital yin to J. Storrs Hall’s Where is My Flying Car yang. Yes, we must overcome our engineering slump and get back on track towards the Jetsons, but at the same time, Sutherland pretty conclusively persuades, we leave a lot of psycho-physics on the table.

After all, what matters to living creatures is not facts but our perception of those facts, and we must stop neglecting this aspect of societal (and any other) improvement and progress. But because physical improvements are easier to measure than psychological ones, and psychological ones are not obvious and often counter-intuitive, we lean towards faster trains rather than other improvements around a journey that could shorten the entire journey. It’s basically a manifesto for bringing marketers and advertisers into decision-making usually reserved for accounts and lawyers.

One choice sentence:

Sometimes I have a £3.29 headache rather than a 79p one.

This is not merely fatuous; Rory backs it up with an ingenious defence of the placebo effect, pointing out that sometimes we don’t get ill until we’ve finished a big task, that we have a healing mode that focuses energies there.

I was brought to this most non-sci-fi of sci-fi novels by the Brighton Science Fiction Discussion Group. Narrated in character by its autistic protagonist, Speed of Light initially reminded me of Mr Robot. Yes, I did like it, but wasn’t sure if the thinness of the other characters is due to our narrator’s limitations or those of the author; I don’t know her other work so can’t say. A mostly unsentimental decency permeates – actually it’s an exploration of decency – which gives it an appreciable pre-cyberpunk, almost square feel.

“Speed of Dark” by Elizabeth Moon

This is the least sci-fi novel of any that we’ve read for the Sci-Fi Book Club or whatever it’s called, or any that has sci-fi written on the cover. Having a cure for autism isn’t really enough of a difference from our current world to justify the name. But whatever. I guess if it wasn’t classified as such it would seem very geeky?

I enjoyed and appreciated it, the device of the narrator being autistic. It reminded me near the beginning of Mr Robot, but is more old-fashioned in the sense that the protagonist/narrator ends up a completely good guy whereas Mr Robot is more cyperpunk in that he’s more of an anti-hero, and right now in the middle of season 2 I’m wondering if Ray is just as much a figment of Elliot’s imagination as his father and the ruthless owner of the illicit trading web site is none other than Elliot himself, and the one who gave him such a beating is, well, himself, again Fight Club style.

But that is not this novel. Here the combat is the much more civilized, stylized fencing. The choice seems so particular that once again I wonder/fear that the character fences because the author does. And we come away at the end with no sense who the other characters are, which is great in a way because our narrator has been autistic, but in the end, once he is no longer, then it wasn’t enough to suddenly break out into longer, less stacatto sentences; we should have had enough time to suddenly see Tom and Lucia, the fencing instructor couple and surrogate parents, and Marjory the love interest, in technicolor as it were.

Nonetheless, I like the unabashed Ayn Randian morality; this strong, anchored, decent impressive man has moved on up to the next step, almost a superhuman now in that he has access to the analystic obsessiveness of his pre-op life.

Perhaps these days it would be looked at from a transgender or whatever viewpoint; he has been given his true self by medical intervention.

The speed of dark idea is nice and cute and it makes me think of the Tao, and absence vs presence, the power of nothing, etc, but the speculations about it seem incomprehensible or nonsensical or meaningless to me. As someone who takes an interest in this, I didn’t get it. It is a nice conceit though. And it is a big question: is nothing actually something?

There are lovely touches, like his dream of riding light and being faster then waking up feeling happier than ever before.

The bad guys, Don and Mr Crenshaw, are kind of ridiculous, but the decency of everyone else keeps the worldview sane. Again, we don’t see them, as if the narrator is looking at his toes the whole time. So there should have been a more explosively colorful epilogue than the accomplished man sitting at his desk on a spaceship. We never see him interact with any of the old characters now that he’s normal, beyond the second visit to the rehab center by Tom. It’s like 2001 – no sentimentality, onward, upward, though this time it’s our character rather than humanity.

Mr Aldrin, the sympathetic supervisor, it’s good that the narrator doubts him but he does activate whatever network he has within the company and act subtly to make people aware of the enormity being committed. He is perhaps the most 3-dimensional character. Is that deliberate or just how it worked out for this reader?

So, did I like it? Yes? Does it shimmer as great literature, every nuance reflecting off every other to build this big metaphorific edifice? No, I don’t think so. Place is never mentioned but it does somehow feel very American, very somewhere between the northeast and the midwest or something. Not further west I don’t think. There’s something about it that just doesn’t feel British. Interesting that. Why could it not be in England?

Yes, there are hints that this is in a different world: it’s hotter, the maple trees have died, there’s an emphasis on public transport – that’s one thing American, that this is a sci-fi notion.

A suggestion for a retitling: The Book of the Author’s Flaring Nostrils. For much of the time during the first half of the book I was more than irritated with the author’s unmooring, which threatened to seriously undermine my value of his previous book, Spell of the Sensuous, which I loved. I did enjoy his honest account of his silly heightened action state coming out of the theatre after watching a James Bond movie.

For much of the time during the first half of the book I was more than irritated. Like the Star Wars prequels, the author was deflating my value of his previous book, because this overwrought prose read like a parody of it. And the idea he was pushing, that inanimate matter is as valuable as creatures. He eats freely, he states, no vegetarianism there. It seemed to me this radical refusal to set any values among things is a language delusion, the sort of thing he would presumably explore and deplore. But in the second half he comes out of that and into some animals, particularly the raven during his shamanic apprenticeship in Nepal – a great seeker, this one – and two personal discoveries left undeveloped like Emerson laments, the blurring fuge when staring without blinking and the accompanying mental flooding feeling, and what I termed ventriloquism of the soul, he combines. The former is the first step, it turns out, in reaching the other. A book that knits two of your own ideas together on a mountainside in Nepal, that is more than what I expect of a book. So although I don’t seem to love this book like the first one – it’s unseemly almost to speak of his time at home.

Jared Diamond in his not dissimilar book – both find themselves birdwatching in Asia – does a better job of that, perhaps I think because he utterly eschews purple prose; he’s a popular historian with the glory of a Pulitzer and a science prize for the same book. Abram’s purple prose is there when he’s describing sitting at his desk writing in his own home then stepping out into the snow then stepping back in because it’s cold. What he relates has been deglamorized. Though in the second half he has restored some glamor indeed, writing about something not mundane at all for his be-living-roomed reader that happened over 15 years ago as the same protagonist.

He comes off as a borderline pretentious twat as well as an amazing journeying shaman. One of his descriptions of interacting with an animal awoke some physical feeling in me briefly that I’ve missed. And he gets in his James Bond moment, and I like it: he speaks of his silly heightened action state coming out of the theatre, that for a while anyway he is living like an alert animal, like Bond. A wonderful insight I think into a necessary ingredient: danger. Says nothing about the movies themselves, but any reference to anything cultural in a David Abram book is high praise.

A book review after a google search to help find the James Bond quote as I can’t find it in the book. http://parulsehgal.com/2010/09/07/becoming-animal-an-earthly-cosmology/: straight in, Abrams is the movement hierophant. First time I’ve seen this great word in print. Yes, the shadows. That’s part of what I hated. Seems nonsensical to me. Pap.

It’s been criticized that nobody comes alive, and it’s also repetitive, and would be a better book if it were denser. but it’s great. It tells us some real truths about an important thing: how we were for the vast majority of our time. The implications of tribalism, where meeting any stranger is potentially deadly, is important. What a memoir.

The title and the author sound like James Bond I see now. Book photo of a pygmy child however does not. This is at least for now non-Bond territory. Still, see how many categories I checked when classifying what this book is about; no wonder I was excited to buy it – first book I can remember buying before it hits the shelves.

It is perhaps a bit long and repetitive and he could have gotten his real points across more quickly. If it were more dense it could be a classic. Is it one?

Again, shorter perhaps it could have been or could still be. It’s been criticized that noone comes alive. True, but places and situations do. But it’s not a novel. Does anyone come alive in Emile? Is that a classic? This is his memoir it seems. He manages to get across his view of sovereignty and religion, and his breakdown of religious reasons and traditions seems the best thing I at least have seen on it. Looking at the contents for the first time: they’re lovely. Makes a big fat book very penetrable. Earns his keep. Thanks to the table of contents, not even the index, I found with pleasure the table I sought (p367).

Gets in his dig at zionism.

So why ultimately let down? i guess the repetitiveness. But he is trying to sustain an argument. well, not really.