Friendship

Just as author Tom Segev relates that Ben-Gurion increasingly harked back to the episodes that shaped him in his earlier life, so too are these episodes more vivid to us than later ones. This would be fine and even impressive as a literary gambit, having the reader feel about Ben-Gurion’s life the way Ben-Gurion himself did, but at least for this reader it was somewhat disappointing in that it’s the later events ⁠— founding and leading the State of Israel ⁠— that we are reading for. But again, this too may be a literary achievement, suggesting that for the subject of this biography, it was the younger man’s experiences that were important ⁠— and that by extension this is the case for all lives. But I’m not sure that’s accurate; surely the ambitious younger Ben-Gurion would have been overjoyed at the eventual achievements of his later self.

It’s a strange complaint to make, but I feel this book wasn’t long enough; each of the many episodes, particularly the later more historic ones, I felt could have withstood more detail.

I was pleased to learn of Ben-Gurion’s erratic behavior and attitude towards his family, and of his penchant for travel and mild but somewhat constant womanizing, and his growing intellectualism alongside faddishness. Segev concludes that Ben-Gurion’s philosophical disposition is basically that of Anglo-American liberal; all to the good. Almost. The implication is that this temperate poise made him the wise indispensable man, but also open him to more exciting dead-end intellectual enthusiasms.

Friendships, sex, religious relations, despair ⁠— the richness of the subject matter’s life encourages in the reader a life in politics as it’s a life in full.

Jordan Peterson has huge charisma, period, and his recent travails serve to render him even more human. His efforts to ground our current unmoored times (the chaos referred to in the title) in the fertile garden of our intellectual and spiritual heritage (the curative order) are the work of the angels.

The first of his 12 Rules for Life is Nietzschian, an evolutionary biological backgrounder for the maxim to fake it till you make it. The second is Rousseauian: we must love ourselves with amour de soi rather than amour-propre. But the whole thing ⁠— and particularly this second rule ⁠— is peppered with discussion of founts fundamental to me ⁠— Genesis, Taoism, Jung ⁠— so that the book feels like it fell out of my own mind, albeit a more disciplined, erudite, deeper version.

Either because of this over-familiarity or because the book is in fact junk food, I cannot remember anything of it as I revisit a few weeks later to write this. Is Peterson merely an Alain de Botton of the Right, a popularizer / informal codifier of what every self-respecting Westerner already knows? Either I need to pick up the book and start again, or perhaps stop reading everything else and get back to the Bible, Plato and Aristotle.

Video game maker Jordan Mechner wrote a rich diary of his life in the mid-1980s. This book covers the creation his second hit game, Prince of Persia, so we gain access of unique immediacy to the heroic tale of producing a universe-dent-making hit.

I wanted this book, which I discovered via Tyler Cowen’s most recent What I’ve been reading, as inspiration during a small lull in morale as I work on a digital product of my own.

Thirty years on there is some poignancy in that this early period of Mencher’s life was the peak: after graduating Yale, already dreamily successful, he shuttles between San Francisco and Hollywood creating video games and pushing screenplays, a digital Orson Welles (in his later game The Last Express, Mechner combines these passions, relying on cinema to produce an impressive commercial failure).

That said, perhaps it is no failure at all that one can point to the creative peak of a life ⁠— Mechner’s arguably was working within the memory constraints of the Apple II to create a foe, Shadow Man, based on the hero character. Here I’m reminded of Ken Kocienda’s not dissimilar Eureka moment when up against a constraint, that of using a dictionary to help create the iPhone keyboard.

Perhaps it would have been a better book if he had fleshed out the journal with an italicized retrospective written now, but count me a late-arrival Jordan Mechner fan. And don’t get the Kindle edition lacking the illustrations; I think I’m gonna need to buy the actual book.

Nusseibeh’s central thesis (well, secondary thesis, the primary implicit one being that the Palestinian people should all along have appointed both his Dad and then him their oh-so-reluctant leaders) I too have felt almost in my bones: that Israelis and Palestinians are natural allies. Or, more accurately, that there’s a natural affinity which will enable us to be powerful allies if and when we ever get over our admittedly fundamental conflict.

If only the Palestinians had listened to Sari Nusseibeh’s father, or to Sari, how different and better things would be. The scion of a longstanding Jerusalem family, for generations entrusted with the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, shutting to and from the playing fields of Eton, yet, in what is probably the central moment of the book, arriving back from England at Ben-Gurion Airport and experiencing Israelis for the first time, and actually liking them ⁠— certainly more than the toffs he just left ⁠— and being taken for a coffee at Abu Ghosh by his Jewish taxi driver and seeing that Arabs can exist very nicely within the State of Israel.

Nusseibeh’s central thesis ⁠— well, secondary thesis, the first implicit one being that the Palestinian people should have made him their oh-so-reluctant leader ⁠— and one that I too have felt almost in my bones, is that Israelis and Palestinians are natural allies. Or, more accurately, have a natural affinity that will enable us to be powerful allies if and when we ever get over our admittedly fundamental conflict with each other.

I felt that many years ago in Chicago where the local shop was owned and run by Palestinians ⁠— sadly they’re now merely a slip of a 25+-year-old memory and I don’t remember the guys individually. It was somehow even more of a borderline potential tear-filled choking moment going in there than if it were other Jewish Israelis, because conflict. What one sees from here cannot be seen from there.

At any rate, it did make me wonder what Jerusalem was like before its Israelification. I wonder if current Jerusalem is like what northern Jaffa is to what Jaffa must have been, a stripped-back sterilized almost-husk. Not quite, Jerusalem is very much vivacious, but there are tracts of particulary the western side of the city that I felt seemed kind of emptier than is natural.

Although the simple thesis gets repeated interminably, nonetheless it’s a nice one: that Steve Jobs’s greatness stems muchly from his constant becoming, constant learning, constant trying to overcome himself (hence the title, which can be read as descriptive).

It’s great to be in his company, which you feel you are, as one of the authors was himself repeatedly so for decades.

One thing new to me was Pixar’s role in maturing Jobs; we don’t often read about who and what shaped the shaper.

This is a delicious book to pick up in spurts ⁠— BMW punchy as Emerson is Rolls-Royce bubbly ⁠— but I couldn’t say what it’s chiefly about, where it starts, where it ends, how it fits in with Nietzsche’s other books, nor whether I’ve even read it before (I do remember particular points but perhaps they’re also mentioned in the other books). As usual this 19th-century giant sounds as if he writes… this morning.

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.