The Black Hole Wars

I listened to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole Wars on CD in the car, meaning I probably didn't get half of what I was supposed to get, but on the other hand that I might have absorbed more (consciously or unconsciously) than I normally do when reading a book of popular science. The question of what the popular reader actually gets out of a book like this, which is really trying to communicate the content of the science as well as how the science is done, interests me a lot. Something like ten years ago I listened to The Origin of Species on tape while driving, and although again there was a lot that I missed (sometimes while struggling to maintain my alertness on I-5...) the experience of listening to Darwin's arguments "in their entirety" aloud was transformative, something like what I imagine it must have been like for citizens listening to philosophers in the agora. Susskind is attempting to convey the doing of science in the same way. It's a different kind of popular science from either Brian Greene, who as I see it is working to convey the beauty of the vision as a kind of done deal, a vision as it were of how everyone will see the universe working once string theory and its cosmologies have been proven out somehow; and different again from that of Not Even Wrong, whose argument derives from being "inside the argument" but not able to convey all of the things that make the string theorists wrong except at some point in a qualitative way (convincing as one reads long, convincing because of the philosophical holes the author seems to be illuminating in the Landscape theory, the basic weakness of the possibility that it might not be possible to ever verify or disprove the theory).

Nixonland

The town I grew up in, the city of Orange, was very close to Yorba Linda, where Nixon was from before his family moved to Whittier, and I tend to think of it in retrospect as part of "Nixonland." But that would be "Nixonland" in a different sense from that used in Rick Pearlstein's fantastic book of history of the sixties and early seventies. I don't know whether the adjective to apply to this epic is "Tolstoyan" because of its scope and moral vision, or something more comic because the times inherently have an aspect of slapstick and Rabelaisian excess. Either way, the book is an epic, the best recollection of all the insanities of the era I've seen. When I started reading the book a couple of months ago, I read (or skimmed through, rather, looking at the pictures) Barry Miles' book Hippie in parallel. Nixonland was a terrific antidote to the fundamental dishonesty of looking at publicity photographs and self-presentations as history; though on the other hand, the Miles book provided pictures where they were wanting in Pearlstein's, so all in all the less substantial and more one-sided book was still helpful. But Pearlstein's book is a non-fiction novel about both the character of Richard Nixon and the character of American democracy. He allots responsibility between the hippies, the liberals, and the right-wingers in a way that seems to me fundamentally just, though because he does it through storytelling, perhaps being deliberately reminiscent of the sixties' New Journalism (certainly Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson come to mind ) I'm not sure he can claim to have done so as a historian rather than as a brilliant novelist.

On Chesil Beach

I finished reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach two nights ago, a short, beautifully constructed novel with the resonance of a Philip Larkin poem.  The plot is not intricate, but the manner of its telling is, without being unnatural.  The past seems to take its rightful place in a movement toward an outcome in the present, the "present" being almost fifty years ago (the same general time period as the setting of Mad Men), the past reaching no more than two decades beyond that.  In the past, we are given both a development of character, and information about what might have shaped it, that information never conclusively tied to the characters' fates, which play out here to their sad end. Psychobiography is possible, even encouraged, but never necessary, for an evaluation of the protagonists' moral qualities and failures.  I liked this book very much.

The Plot Against America

We bought Philip Roth's The Plot Against America right after it came out, and I started reading it then, but somehow got distracted, both by what seemed an opening that was dictated by the overall historical setup of this alternative history, and by some reviews that deflated my enthusiasm enough to cause me to put the book down fifty pages in and not pick it up again for a year. Reviews will do that, even if I don't have any idea of whether the reviewer shares my tastes, thinks like me, etc. (That's the thing about "good" rhetoric -- it's effective on a primate level even when one is attempting to resist its irrationality.)

When I finally did give the book another try, I found it enjoyable and deep, though it still carries the baggage of Roth's trying to imagine a different route through the years leading to and through World War II. But over and above all of that "political" stuff (and it is by no means "political" in the formulaic way most politically correct fiction is now -- it's not, for example, an attempt to directly parallel a fictitious Lindbergh fascist presidency to Bush's terms in office) The Plot Against America reads as a memoir, of a time and place, and of a child's understanding of what his parents are and what they are able to do in the world, for themselves and to protect him. The book is an absolutely essential counterpoint to all the other pictures Roth has given of his parents, many of them comic and seemingly unsympathetic. Here he finds the heroic in the imagined actions of his father and mother under circumstances that never happened -- but what if they had? I tried to make the case to Jenny after reading this book that much of Philip Roth's moral vision has to do not with what people actually end up doing, but what they have the potential to do -- a potential that can only be explored through the medium of fiction, and best through the expanse of something like a novel, where the full case in all its ambiguity can be made.

On the Difficulty of Starting Again

There are no rules about what one needs to add or say. In spite of that, I've been thinking of adding an entry as an obligation I've been unable to get around to for a couple of months now. And after a certain period something like a hardening occurs, and it's no longer a question of adding an entry, but of starting again, re-starting if you will. Blogging is now something I've dropped and am attempting to get back into, like exercise. Starting again has none of the redemptive overtones of starting over, and in a sense I need a little redemption to really feel myself back in the swing of it. Instead of which, I have the suspicion that I may not get around to this again regularly, and that the activity has passed into the great pool of things I do or have done very occasionally, spend a lot of time thinking about as potentiality, but never realize. I guess we'll see.