Jonathan Dowland: Nine Inch Nails, Cornwall, June
- ninlive.com recordings for Friday
- setlist.fm page for Friday (nerdy song stats etc)
Series: | Trang #1 |
Publisher: | Mary Sisson |
Copyright: | 2011 |
Printing: | December 2013 |
ASIN: | B004I6DAQ8 |
Format: | Kindle |
Pages: | 374 |
PKGBUILD
files. After a few trials (and several errors) finally the package seems ready to me: nvenc @ AUR.
More expert Arch packagers, please leave comments or contact me with suggestions for improvements, all of that is more than welcome!
That said, now back to some video encoding (just got all the James Bond on BluRay ;-).
Enjoy
stty (change and print terminal line settings)
as a program.
Thanks to some heroes, basenc, pr, chcon and runcon have been implemented. For example, for the two last programs, Koutheir Attouchi wrote new crates to manage SELinux properly. This crate has been used for some other utilities like cp, ls or id.
Leveraging the GNU testsuite to test this implementation
Because the GNU testsuite is excellent, we now have a proper CI using it to run the tests. It is pretty long on the Github action CI (almost two hours to run it) but it is an amazing improvement to the way we work. It was a joint work from a bunch of folks (James Robson, Roy Ivy III, etc). To achieve this, we also made it easier to run the GNU testsuite locally with the Rust implementation but also to ignore some tests or adjust some error messages (see build-gnu.sh and run-gnu-test.sh).
Following a suggestion of Brian G, a colleague at Mozilla (he did the same for some Firefox major change), we are now collecting the history of fail/pass/error into a separate repository and generating a daily graph showing the evolution of regression. At this date, we have, with GNU/Coreutils 9.0:
Total | 611 tests |
Pass | 214 |
Skip | 84 |
Fail | 298 |
Error | 15 |
Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/c-option is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/silent is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/umask-x is now passing!
<br />Error: GNU test failed: tests/du/long-from-unreadable. tests/du/long-from-unreadable is passing on 'master'. Maybe you have to rebase?
[...]
<br />Warning: Changes from master: PASS +4 / FAIL +0 / ERROR -4 / SKIP +0
This is also beneficial to GNU as, by implementing some options, Michael Debertol noticed some incorrect behaviors (with sort and cat) or an uninitialized variable (with chmod).
Documentations
Every day, we are generating the user documentation and of the internal coreutils.
User documentation: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/user/ Example: ls or cp
The internal documentation can be seen on: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/ Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who accepts an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African interior, and the novella is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa. Loosely remade by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now (1979), I started this book with the distinct possibility that this superb film adaptation would, for a rare treat, be 'better than the book'. However, Conrad demolished this idea of mine within two chapters, yet also elevated the film to a new level as well. This was chiefly due to how observant Conrad was of the universals that make up human nature. Some of his insight pertains to the barbarism of the colonialists, of course, but Conrad applies his shrewd acuity to the at the smaller level as well. Some of these quotes are justly famous: Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares, for example, as well as the reference to a fastidiously turned-out colonial administrator who, with unimaginable horrors occurring mere yards from his tent, we learn he was devoted to his books, which were in applepie order . (It seems to me to be deliberately unclear whether his devotion arises from gross inhumanity, utter denial or some combination of the two.) Oh, and there's a favourite moment of mine when a character remarks that It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Tired of resting! Yes, it's difficult to now say something original about a many-layered classic such as this, especially one that has analysed from so many angles already; from a literary perspective at first, of course, but much later from a critical postcolonial perspective, such as in Chinua Achebe's noted 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa. Indeed, the history of criticism in the twentieth century of Heart of Darkness must surely parallel the social and political developments in the Western world. (On a highly related note, the much-cited non-fiction book King Leopold's Ghost is on my reading list for 2022.) I will therefore limit myself to saying that the boat physically falling apart as it journeys deeper into the Congo may be intended to represent that our idea of 'Western civilisation' ceases to function, both morally as well as physically, in this remote environment. And, whilst I'm probably not the first to notice the potential ambiguity, when Marlow lies to Kurtz's 'Intended [wife]' in the closing section in order to save her from being exposed to the truth about Kurtz (surely a metaphor about the ignorance of the West whilst also possibly incorporating some comment on gender?), the Intended replies: I knew it. For me, though, it is not beyond doubt that what the Intended 'knows' is that she knew that Marlow would lie to her: in other words, that the alleged ignorance of everyday folk in the colonial homeland is studied and deliberate. Compact and fairly easy-to-read, it is clear that Heart of Darkness rewards even the most rudimentary analysis.
Rebecca (1938) Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier creates in Rebecca a credible and suffocating atmosphere in the shape of Manderley, a grand English mansion owned by aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter. Our unnamed narrator (a young woman seemingly na ve in the ways of the world) meets Max in Monte Carlo, and she soon becomes the second Mrs. de Winter. The tale takes a turn to the 'gothic', though, when it becomes apparent that the unemotional Max, as well as potentially Manderley itself, appears to be haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the titular Rebecca. Still, Rebecca is less of a story about supernatural ghosts than one about the things that can haunt our minds. For Max, this might be something around guilt; for our narrator, the class-centered fear that she will never fit in. Besides, Rebecca doesn't need an actual ghost when you have Manderley's overbearing housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, surely one of the creepiest characters in all of fiction. Either way, the conflict of a kind between the fears of the protagonists means that they never really connect with each other. The most obvious criticism of Rebecca is that the main character is unreasonably weak and cannot quite think or function on her own. (Isn't it curious that the trait of the male 'everyman' is a kind of physical clumsiness yet the female equivalent is shorthanded by being slightly slow?) But the na vete of Rebecca's narrator makes her easier to relate to in a way, and it also makes the reader far more capable of empathising with her embarrassment. This is demonstrated best whilst she, in one of the best evocations of this particular anxiety I have yet come across, is gingerly creeping around Manderlay and trying to avoid running into the butler. A surprise of sorts comes in the latter stages of the book, and this particular twist brings us into contact with a female character who is anything but 'credulous'. This revelation might even change your idea of who the main character of this book really is too. (Speaking of amateur literary criticism, I have many fan theories about Rebecca, including that Maxim de Winter's estate manager, Frank Crawley, is actually having an affair with Max, and also that Maxim may have a lot more involvement in Mrs Danvers final act that he lets on.) An easily accessible novel (with a great-but-not-perfect 1940 adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca is a real indulgence.
A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess One of Stanley Kubrick's most prominent tricks was to use different visual languages in order to prevent the audience from immediately grasping the underlying story. In his 1975 Barry Lyndon, for instance, the intentionally sluggish pacing and elusive characters require significant digestion to fathom and appreciate, and the luminous and quasi-Renaissance splendour of the cinematography does its part to constantly distract the viewer from the film's greater meaning. This is very much the case in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as well whilst it ostensibly appears to be about a Saturnalia of violence, the 'greater meaning' of A Clockwork Orange pertains to the Christian conception of free will; admittedly, a much drier idea to bother making a film around. This is all made much clearer when reading Anthony Burgess' 1962 original novel. Alex became a 'true Christian' through the experimental rehabilitation process, and even offers to literally turn the other cheek at one point. But as Alex had no choice to do so (and can no longer choose to commit violence), he is incapable of making a free moral choice. Thus, is he really a Man? Yet whilst the book's central concern is our conception of free will in modern societies, it also appears to be a repudiation of two conservative principles. Firstly, A Clockwork Orange demolishes the idea that 'high art' leads to morally virtuous citizens. After all, if you can do a bit of the old ultra-violence whilst listening to the glorious 9th by old Ludvig van, then so much for the oft-repeated claims that culture makes you better as a person. (This, at least, I already knew from personal experience.) The other repudiation in A Clockwork Orange is in regard to the pervasive idea that the countryside is a refuge from crime and sin. By contrast, we see the gang commit their most horrific violence in rural areas, and, later, Alex is taken to the countryside by his former droogs for a savage beating. Although this doesn't seem to quite fit the novel, this was actually an important point for Burgess to include: otherwise his book could easily be read as a commentary on the corrupting influence of urban spaces, rather than of modernity itself. The language of this book cannot escape comment here. Alex narrates most of the book in a language called Nadsat, a fractured slang constructed by Burgess based on Russian and Cockney rhyming slang. (The language is strange for only a few pages, I promise. And note that 'Alex' is a very common Russian name.) Using Nadsat has the effect of making the book feel distinctly alien, but it also prevents it from prematurely aging too. Indeed, it comes as bit of a shock to realise that A Clockwork Orange was published 1962, the same year as The Beatles' released their first single, Love Me Do. I could probably say a whole lot more about this thoroughly engrossing book and its movie adaptation (eg. the meta-textual line in Kubrick's version: It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen... appears verbatim in the textual original), but I'll leave it there. The book of A Clockwork Orange is not only worth the investment in the language, but is, again, somehow better than the film.
The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald I'm actually being a little deceitful by including this book here: I cannot really say that The Great Gatsby was a 'favourite' read of the year, but its literary merit is so undeniable (and my respect for Fitzgerald's achievement is deep enough) that the experience was one of those pleasures you feel at seeing anything done well. Here you have a book so rich in symbolic meaning that you could easily confuse the experience with drinking Coke syrup undiluted. And a text that has made the difficulty and complexity of reading character a prominent theme of the novel, as well as a technical concern of the book itself. Yet at all times you have in your mind that The Great Gatsby is first and foremost a book about a man writing a book, and, therefore, about the construction of stories and myths. What is the myth being constructed in Gatsby? The usual answer today is that the book is really about the moral virtues of America. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Indeed, as James Boice wrote in 2016:
Could Wilson have killed Gatsby any other way? Could he have ran him over, or poisoned him, or attacked him with a knife? Not at all this an American story, the quintessential one, so Gatsby could have only died the quintessential American death.The quintessential American death is, of course, being killed with a gun. Whatever your own analysis, The Great Gatsby is not only magnificently written, but it is captivating to the point where references intrude many months later. For instance, when reading something about Disney's 'princess culture', I was reminded of when Daisy says of her daughter: I hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing of a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . Or the billboard with the eyes of 'Doctor T. J. Eckleburg'. Or the fact that the books in Gatsby's library have never been read (so what is 'Owl Eyes' doing there during the party?!). And the only plain room in Gatsby's great house is his bedroom... Okay, fine, I must have been deluding myself: I love this novel.
A Wizard of Earthsea (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin How did it come to be that Harry Potter is the publishing sensation of the century, yet Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is only a popular cult novel? Indeed, the comparisons and unintentional intertextuality with Harry Potter are entirely unavoidable when reading this book, and, in almost every respect, Ursula K. Le Guin's universe comes out the victor. In particular, the wizarding world that Le Guin portrays feels a lot more generous and humble than the class-ridden world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just to take one example from many, in Earthsea, magic turns out to be nurtured in a bottom-up manner within small village communities, in almost complete contrast to J. K. Rowling's concept of benevolent government departments and NGOs-like institutions, which now seems a far too New Labour for me. Indeed, imagine an entire world imbued with the kindly benevolence of Dumbledore, and you've got some of the moral palette of Earthsea. The gently moralising tone that runs through A Wizard of Earthsea may put some people off:
Vetch had been three years at the School and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.Still, these parables aimed directly at the reader are fairly rare, and, for me, remain on the right side of being mawkish or hectoring. I'm thus looking forward to reading the next two books in the series soon.
Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian follows a band of American bounty hunters who are roaming the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s. Far from being remotely swashbuckling, though, the group are collecting scalps for money and killing anyone who crosses their path. It is the most unsparing treatment of American genocide and moral depravity I have ever come across, an anti-Western that flouts every convention of the genre. Blood Meridian thus has a family resemblance to that other great anti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West: after making a number of gun-toting films that venerate the American West (ie. his Dollars Trilogy), Sergio Leone turned his cynical eye to the western. Yet my previous paragraph actually euphemises just how violent Blood Meridian is. Indeed, I would need to be a much better writer (indeed, perhaps McCarthy himself) to adequately 0utline the tone of this book. In a certain sense, it's less than you read this book in a conventional sense, but rather that you are forced to witness successive chapters of grotesque violence... all occurring for no obvious reason. It is often said that books 'subvert' a genre and, indeed, I implied as such above. But the term subvert implies a kind of Puck-like mischievousness, or brings to mind court jesters licensed to poke fun at the courtiers. By contrast, however, Blood Meridian isn't funny in the slightest. There isn't animal cruelty per se, but rather wanton negligence of another kind entirely. In fact, recalling a particular passage involving an injured horse makes me feel physically ill. McCarthy's prose is at once both baroque in its language and thrifty in its presentation. As Philip Connors wrote back in 2007, McCarthy has spent forty years writing as if he were trying to expand the Old Testament, and learning that McCarthy grew up around the Church therefore came as no real surprise. As an example of his textual frugality, I often looked for greater precision in the text, finding myself asking whether who a particular 'he' is, or to which side of a fight some two men belonged to. Yet we must always remember that there is no precision to found in a gunfight, so this infidelity is turned into a virtue. It's not that these are fair fights anyway, or even 'murder': Blood Meridian is just slaughter; pure butchery. Murder is a gross understatement for what this book is, and at many points we are grateful that McCarthy spares us precision. At others, however, we can be thankful for his exactitude. There is no ambiguity regarding the morality of the puppy-drowning Judge, for example: a Colonel Kurtz who has been given free license over the entire American south. There is, thank God, no danger of Hollywood mythologising him into a badass hero. Indeed, we must all be thankful that it is impossible to film this ultra-violent book... Indeed, the broader idea of 'adapting' anything to this world is, beyond sick. An absolutely brutal read; I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Bodies of Light (2014) Sarah Moss Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage within an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, this poignant book follows the studiously intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. You can read my full review from July.
House of Leaves (2000) Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves is a remarkably difficult book to explain. Although the plot refers to a fictional documentary about a family whose house is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, this quotidian horror premise doesn't explain the complex meta-commentary that Danielewski adds on top. For instance, the book contains a large number of pseudo-academic footnotes (many of which contain footnotes themselves), with references to scholarly papers, books, films and other articles. Most of these references are obviously fictional, but it's the kind of book where the joke is that some of them are not. The format, structure and typography of the book is highly unconventional too, with extremely unusual page layouts and styles. It's the sort of book and idea that should be a tired gimmick but somehow isn't. This is particularly so when you realise it seems specifically designed to create a fandom around it and to manufacturer its own 'cult' status, something that should be extremely tedious. But not only does this not happen, House of Leaves seems to have survived through two exhausting decades of found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are, to an admittedly lesser degree, doing much of the same thing as House of Leaves. House of Leaves might have its origins in Nabokov's Pale Fire or even Derrida's Glas, but it seems to have more in common with the claustrophobic horror of Cube (1997). And like all of these works, House of Leaves book has an extremely strange effect on the reader or viewer, something quite unlike reading a conventional book. It wasn't so much what I got out of the book itself, but how it added a glow to everything else I read, watched or saw at the time. An experience.
Milkman (2018) Anna Burns This quietly dazzling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is full of intellectual whimsy and oddball incident. Incongruously set in 1970s Belfast during The Irish Troubles, Milkman's 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister ), is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a Victorian-era novel in her hand. It's usually an error for a book that specifically mention other books, if only because inviting comparisons to great novels is grossly ill-advised. But it is a credit to Burns' writing that the references here actually add to the text and don't feel like they are a kind of literary paint by numbers. Our humble narrator has a boyfriend of sorts, but the figure who looms the largest in her life is a creepy milkman an older, married man who's deeply integrated in the paramilitary tribalism. And when gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, the milkman beings to invade her life to a suffocating degree. Yet this milkman is not even a milkman at all. Indeed, it's precisely this kind of oblique irony that runs through this daring but darkly compelling book.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) Claire North Harry August is born, lives a relatively unremarkable life and finally dies a relatively unremarkable death. Not worth writing a novel about, I suppose. But then Harry finds himself born again in the very same circumstances, and as he grows from infancy into childhood again, he starts to remember his previous lives. This loop naturally drives Harry insane at first, but after finding that suicide doesn't stop the quasi-reincarnation, he becomes somewhat acclimatised to his fate. He prospers much better at school the next time around and is ultimately able to make better decisions about his life, especially when he just happens to know how to stay out of trouble during the Second World War. Yet what caught my attention in this 'soft' sci-fi book was not necessarily the book's core idea but rather the way its connotations were so intelligently thought through. Just like in a musical theme and varations, the success of any concept-driven book is far more a product of how the implications of the key idea are played out than how clever the central idea was to begin with. Otherwise, you just have another neat Borges short story: satisfying, to be sure, but in a narrower way. From her relatively simple premise, for example, North has divined that if there was a community of people who could remember their past lives, this would actually allow messages and knowledge to be passed backwards and forwards in time. Ah, of course! Indeed, this very mechanism drives the plot: news comes back from the future that the progress of history is being interfered with, and, because of this, the end of the world is slowly coming. Through the lives that follow, Harry sets out to find out who is passing on technology before its time, and work out how to stop them. With its gently-moralising romp through the salient historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, I sometimes got a whiff of Forrest Gump. But it must be stressed that this book is far less certain of its 'right-on' liberal credentials than Robert Zemeckis' badly-aged film. And whilst we're on the topic of other media, if you liked the underlying conceit behind Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle yet didn't enjoy the 'variations' of that particular tale, then I'd definitely give The First Fifteen Lives a try. At the very least, 15 is bigger than 7. More seriously, though, The First Fifteen Lives appears to reflect anxieties about technology, particularly around modern technological accelerationism. At no point does it seriously suggest that if we could somehow possess the technology from a decade in the future then our lives would be improved in any meaningful way. Indeed, precisely the opposite is invariably implied. To me, at least, homo sapiens often seems to be merely marking time until we can blow each other up and destroying the climate whilst sleepwalking into some crisis that might precipitate a thermonuclear genocide sometimes seems to be built into our DNA. In an era of cli-fi fiction and our non-fiction newspaper headlines, to label North's insight as 'prescience' might perhaps be overstating it, but perhaps that is the point: this destructive and negative streak is universal to all periods of our violent, insecure species.
The Goldfinch (2013) Donna Tartt After Breaking Bad, the second biggest runaway success of 2014 was probably Donna Tartt's doorstop of a novel, The Goldfinch. Yet upon its release and popular reception, it got a significant number of bad reviews in the literary press with, of course, an equal number of predictable think pieces claiming this was sour grapes on the part of the cognoscenti. Ah, to be in 2014 again, when our arguments were so much more trivial. For the uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman that centres on Theo Decker, a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when a terrorist bomb goes off whilst visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother among other bystanders. Perhaps more importantly, he makes off with a painting in order to fulfil a promise to a dying old man: Carel Fabritius' 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years (and almost 800 pages), the painting becomes the only connection to his lost mother as he's flung, almost entirely rudderless, around the Western world, encountering an array of eccentric characters. Whatever the critics claimed, Tartt's near-perfect evocation of scenes, from the everyday to the unimaginable, is difficult to summarise. I wouldn't label it 'cinematic' due to her evocation of the interiority of the characters. Take, for example: Even the suggestion that my father had close friends conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality that I didn't know how to respond it's precisely this kind of relatable inner subjectivity that cannot be easily conveyed by film, likely is one of the main reasons why the 2019 film adaptation was such a damp squib. Tartt's writing is definitely not 'impressionistic' either: there are many near-perfect evocations of scenes, even ones we hope we cannot recognise from real life. In particular, some of the drug-taking scenes feel so credibly authentic that I sometimes worried about the author herself. Almost eight months on from first reading this novel, what I remember most was what a joy this was to read. I do worry that it won't stand up to a more critical re-reading (the character named Xandra even sounds like the pharmaceuticals she is taking), but I think I'll always treasure the first days I spent with this often-beautiful novel.
Beyond Black (2005) Hilary Mantel Published about five years before the hyperfamous Wolf Hall (2004), Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is a deeply disturbing book about spiritualism and the nature of Hell, somewhat incongruously set in modern-day England. Alison Harte is a middle-aged physic medium who works in the various towns of the London orbital motorway. She is accompanied by her stuffy assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, who is invisible to everyone but Alison. However, this is no gentle and musk-smelling world of the clairvoyant and mystic, for Alison is plagued by spirits from her past who infiltrate her physical world, becoming stronger and nastier every day. Alison's smiling and rotund persona thus conceals a truly desperate woman: she knows beyond doubt the terrors of the next life, yet must studiously conceal them from her credulous clients. Beyond Black would be worth reading for its dark atmosphere alone, but it offers much more than a chilling and creepy tale. Indeed, it is extraordinarily observant as well as unsettlingly funny about a particular tranche of British middle-class life. Still, the book's unnerving nature that sticks in the mind, and reading it noticeably changed my mood for days afterwards, and not necessarily for the best.
The Wall (2019) John Lanchester The Wall tells the story of a young man called Kavanagh, one of the thousands of Defenders standing guard around a solid fortress that envelopes the British Isles. A national service of sorts, it is Kavanagh's job to stop the so-called Others getting in. Lanchester is frank about what his wall provides to those who stand guard: the Defenders of the Wall are conscripted for two years on the Wall, with no exceptions, giving everyone in society a life plan and a story. But whilst The Wall is ostensibly about a physical wall, it works even better as a story about the walls in our mind. In fact, the book blends together of some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, increasing isolation, Brexit and other widening societal divisions. If you liked P. D. James' The Children of Men you'll undoubtedly recognise much of the same intellectual atmosphere, although the sterility of John Lanchester's dystopia is definitely figurative and textual rather than literal. Despite the final chapters perhaps not living up to the world-building of the opening, The Wall features a taut and engrossing narrative, and it undoubtedly warrants even the most cursory glance at its symbolism. I've yet to read something by Lanchester I haven't enjoyed (even his short essay on cheating in sports, for example) and will be definitely reading more from him in 2022.
The Only Story (2018) Julian Barnes The Only Story is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old boy who falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, a married woman with two daughters who are about Paul's age. The book begins with how Paul meets Susan in happy (albeit complicated) circumstances, but as the story unfolds, the novel becomes significantly more tragic and moving. Whilst the story begins from the first-person perspective, midway through the book it shifts into the second person, and, later, into the third as well. Both of these narrative changes suggested to me an attempt on the part of Paul the narrator (if not Barnes himself), to distance himself emotionally from the events taking place. This effect is a lot more subtle than it sounds, however: far more prominent and devastating is the underlying and deeply moving story about the relationship ends up. Throughout this touching book, Barnes uses his mastery of language and observation to avoid the saccharine and the maudlin, and ends up with a heart-wrenching and emotive narrative. Without a doubt, this is the saddest book I read this year.
(2020) Robert Kolker A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) Cat Flyn In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial. Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.
The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) Robert O. Paxton Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today. Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake. In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps... Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.
What Good are the Arts? (2005) John Carey What Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art. But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up. Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art. Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.
configure.ac
needed an update to current standards (see the updates of corels, RcppGSL, RQuantLib, and littler). The make matters more interesting we also had to address one UBSAN issue we could not reproduce locally (which, it turns out, was our fault because we had not rebuilt one package dependency under UBSAN). But Prof Ripley confirmed the issue as addressed so all is good for now.
As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
My wife is convinced that [Elizabeth] knows everything about Carney's criminal life, and is sort of giving him a pass. And I'm not sure if that's true. I have to have to figure out exactly what she knows and when she knows it and how she feels about it.I was quite taken by this, although not simply due to its effect on the story it self. As in, it immediately conjured up a charming picture of Whitehead's domestic arrangements: not only does Whitehead's wife feel free to disagree with what one of Whitehead's 'own' characters knows or believes, but that Colson has no problem whatsoever sharing that disagreement with the public at large. (It feels somehow natural that Whitehead's wife believes her counterpart knows more than she lets on, whilst Whitehead himself imbues the protagonist's wife with a kind of neo-Victorian innocence.) I'm minded to agree with Whitehead's partner myself, if only due to the passages where Elizabeth is studiously ignoring Carney's otherwise unexplained freak-outs. But all of these meta-thoughts simply underline just how emancipatory the Death of the Author can be. This product of academic literary criticism (the term was coined by Roland Barthes' 1967 essay of the same name) holds that the original author's intentions, ideas or biographical background carry no especial weight in determining how others should interpret their work. It is usually understood as meaning that a writer's own views are no more valid or 'correct' than the views held by someone else. (As an aside, I've found that most readers who encounter this concept for the first time have been reading books in this way since they were young. But the opposite is invariably true with cinephiles, who often have a bizarre obsession with researching or deciphering the 'true' interpretation of a film.) And with all that in mind, can you think of a more wry example of how freeing (and fun) nature of the Death of the Author than an author's own partner dissenting with their (Pulitzer Prize-winning) husband on the position of a lynchpin character? As it turns out, the reviews for Harlem Shuffle have been almost universally positive, and after reading it in the two days after its release, I would certainly agree it is an above-average book. But it didn't quite take hold of me in the way that The Underground Railroad or The Nickel Boys did, especially the later chapters of The Nickel Boys that were set in contemporary New York and could thus make some (admittedly fairly explicit) connections from the 1960s to the present day that kind of connection is not there in Harlem Shuffle, or at least I did not pick up on it during my reading. I can see why one might take exception to that, though. For instance, it is certainly true that the week-long Harlem Riot forms a significant part of the plot, and some events in particular are entirely contingent on the ramifications of this momentous event. But it's difficult to argue the riot's impact are truly integral to the story, so not only is this uprising against police brutality almost regarded as a background event, any contemporary allusion to the murder of George Floyd is subsequently watered down. It's nowhere near the historical rubbernecking of Forrest Gump (1994), of course, but that's not a battle you should ever be fighting. Indeed, whilst a certain smoothness of affect is to be priced into the Whitehead reading experience, my initial overall reaction to Harlem Shuffle was fairly flat, despite all the action and intrigue on the page. The book perhaps belies its origins as a work conceived during quarantine after all, the book is essentially comprised of three loosely connected novellas, almost as if the unreality and mental turbulence of lockdown prevented the author from performing the psychological 'deep work' of producing a novel-length text with his usual depth of craft. A few other elements chimed with this being a 'lockdown novel' as well, particularly the book's preoccupation with the sheer physicality of the city compared to the usual complex interplay between its architecture and its inhabitants. This felt like it had been directly absorbed into the book from the author walking around his deserted city, and thus being able to take in details for the first time:
The doorways were entrances into different cities no, different entrances into one vast, secret city. Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look.And I can't fail to mention that you can almost touch Whitehead's sublimated hunger to eat out again as well:
Stickups were chops they cook fast and hot, you re in and out. A stakeout was ribs fire down low, slow, taking your time. [ ] Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee.More seriously, however, the relatively thin personalities of minor characters then reminded me of the simulacrum of Zoom-based relationships, and the essentially unsatisfactory endings to the novellas felt reminiscent of lockdown pseudo-events that simply fizzle out without a bang. One of the stories ties up loose ends with: 'These things were usually enough to terminate a mob war, and they appeared to end the hostilities in this case as well.' They did? Well, okay, I guess. Still, it would be unfair to characterise myself as 'disappointed' with the novel, and none of this piece should be taken as really deep criticism. The book certainly was entertaining enough, and pretty funny in places as well:
Carney didn t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man s safe. [ ] The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains. Launderer, heal thyself.Yet I can't shake the feeling that every book you write is a book that you don't, and so we might need to hold out a little longer for Whitehead's 'George Floyd novel'. (Although it is for others to say how much of this sentiment is the expectations of a White Reader for The Black Author to ventriloquise the pain of 'their' community.) Some room for personal critique is surely permitted. I dearly missed the junk food energy of the dry and acerbic observations that run through Whitehead's previous work. At one point he had a good line on the model tokenisation that lurks behind 'The First Negro to...' labels, but the callbacks to this idea ceased without any payoff. Similar things happened with the not-so-subtle critiques of the American Dream:
Entrepreneur? Pepper said the last part like manure. That s just a hustler who pays taxes. [ ] One thing I ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.Ultimately, though, I think I just wanted more. I wanted a deeper exploration of how the real power in New York is not wielded by individual street hoodlums or even the cops but in the form of real estate, essentially serving as a synecdoche for Capital as a whole. (A recent take of this can be felt in Jed Rothstein's 2021 documentary, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn and it is perhaps pertinent to remember that the US President at the time this novel was written was affecting to be a real estate tycoon.). Indeed, just like the concluding scenes of J. J. Connolly's Layer Cake, although you can certainly pull off a cool heist against the Man, power ultimately resides in those who control the means of production... and a homespun furniture salesman on the corner of 125 & Morningside just ain't that. There are some nods to kind of analysis in the conclusion of the final story ('Their heist unwound as if it had never happened, and Van Wyck kept throwing up buildings.'), but, again, I would have simply liked more. And when I attempted then file this book away into the broader media landscape, given the current cultural visibility of 1960s pop culture (e.g. One Night in Miami (2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), Summer of Soul (2021), etc.), Harlem Shuffle also seemed like a missed opportunity to critically analyse our (highly-qualified) longing for the civil rights era. I can certainly understand why we might look fondly on the cultural products from a period when politics was less alienated, when society was less atomised, and when it was still possible to imagine meaningful change, but in this dimension at least, Harlem Shuffle seems to merely contribute to this nostalgic escapism.
The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:
For he who overcome should turn back his gazePerhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.) However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema. Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched. Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993). Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works. Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Next.