Pun Salad

Thomas Szasz is a lot of fun to read. This book is from 1996, and centers around—see the title—the notion of "mind". Szasz argues it is a mistake (although a common one) to use that word as a noun. It should be used solely as a verb. As in: "Mind your own businesss". "Minding" is an activity, your self-communication to make decisions and guide actions.

Szasz is especially contemptuous of determinists who equate the "mind" with one's brain, and deniers of "free will". I'm on his side here.

One advantage of reading older books: you get to read how confident predictions made decades ago turned out. For example, on pp. 77-8, Szasz quotes from a 1995 Time article, still online: "Glimpses of the Mind". Why, science is on the verge of letting us "clarify the mysteries of consciousness but also to understand and treat such devastating mind malfunctions as Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage -- research projects have multiplied dramatically."

And that's why, 30 years later, nobody suffers any more from Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage. Thanks to dramatically multiplied research projects!

Well, that was interesting.

Amazon will tell you:

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023• A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Fiction, I suppose, although it's about real people. John von Neumann, mostly. The book's author, Benjamín Labatut, tells that part, chapter by chapter, in the words of von Neuemann's family, colleagues, and friends. And also enemies. Each in his or her own style. (But mostly, not all, in long multiple-page paragraphs, which can get a little tiring.) It works out to be a biography, sort of.

I read a more conventional bio back in 2023, and one common theme between this book and that one is that genius can be accompanied by mental misery. (That bio discussed Gödel, Turing, Wolfram, George R. Price. This one throws in Paul Ehrenfest, who committed suicide after murdering his own son. Yeesh.

One "contributor" is Richard Feynman, who worked with von Newmann on the Manhattan Project. I've read quite a bit about Feynman, and (it seems to me) that Labatut rendered his part pretty well.

But as far as I could tell, each contributor was an actual person. Even Nils Aal Barricelli; as I was reading his chapter, I said, "This guy has to be made up." Nope. He's real, and he's in Wikipedia! So there.

But when von Neumann dies, the book's not over! The final hundred pages or so is relatively straight reportage about the game of Go, its human masters, and Google's effort to develop a Go-playing AI to beat the humans. (Chess is trivial in comparison.) It concentrates on the showdown between Lee Sedol, probably the greatest (human) Go player ever, and Google's "AlphaGo", which beat him badly back in 2016. Also interesting.

I read A. J. Jacobs' book The Puzzler back in 2022 and enjoyed it quite a bit. This one, not so much, but it's very readable, and has some good stories.

Mr. Jacobs' gimmick here is to live a year of his life "consitutionally". Which can mean various things, of course, especially if you are Joe Biden or Donald Trump. But Mr. Jacobs took to wearing a tricorne hat (pictured on the cover), and engaged in numerous imaginative (I assume publisher-financed) deeds of patriotic significance. He participated in a Revolutionary War reenactment, "dying" early, but in a shady spot. He proposed a Constitutional amendment to a polite Senator, which would expand the presidency to three people. (You may have noticed that didn't happen.) He visits Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Constitution was written and signed.

One of the better stories is his exploration of the Third Amendment, the one about soldiers getting quartered in a house without the owner's consent. Jacobs wants to give consent, and wangles a visit! The Army officer he billets is of Indian descent, dines on some authentic 18th-century British food (shepherd's pie) but needs to spice it up a bit with some Mexican hot sauce.

Might be the most American scenario ever.

Unreasonable searches by state agents? Apparently you can make your statement to the TSA before your next flight by buying underwear with "Read the 4th Amendment, Perverts" emblazoned with metallic ink, so it will show up on the x-ray.

Jacobs is a solid Democrat, and this (unfortunately) colors a lot of his commentary, which has a definite blue tinge. For example, the SCOTUS decision in Sackett v. EPA? Jacobs summarizes that it "pared back the power of the EPA to monitor wetlands". I'd suggest reading some analysis that more accurately describes the issue. Other issues are handled similarly: superficially and clearly D-biased.

Another concoction from Christopher Moore, mashing up real people with fictional characters (and not-really people), magic, sex, violence, and deadpan humor. And there may have been a kitchen sink in there somewhere. It centers around early 20th century Vienna, about which Moore rhapsodizes:

Vienna, a shining jewel on the Danube; birthplace of the waltz, X-rays, psychoanalysis, mathematical genetics, tiny spiced sausages in a can, and before long, Surrealism, just as soon as the trout hit the cream cake.

It begins when artist Gustav Klimt discovers an apparently drowned girl washed up on the banks of a Viennese canal. He is fascinated by her coloring, and he's a painter first. Also second, third, and … well, "normal human being" is pretty far down the list. So he trundles her off to his studio, where it develops that she's not dead! At least not any more. He names her "Judith", after the deadly Jewish widow whose story doesn't make it into standard Bibles.

That's only the beginning. We eventually learn Judith's nature and colorful history, including her troubled relationship with Adam, Frankenstein's monster. She befriends Klimt's numerous models/bedmates. She goes to therapy sessions with Freud and Jung. She thwarts people who are trying to kidnap her. She acquires a loyal croissant-loving dog, Geoff, … who is also more than he seems at first.

I don't think you'll have to worry about seeing a movie based on this book. A faithful adaptation would probably put the filmmakers into jail before the movie was finished. (A lot of those models were pretty young.)

Moore did a lot of impressive research on Klimt, his retinue, Freud, Jung, and history. There is a long Afterword with details on the actual people, and where and why he took out artistic licenses. All in all, it's a little long, because Moore is very much a "I can't leave this out" kind of writer.

I've been taking my time working through Mary Roach's books. (Fortunately, the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library book-selector seems to be a fan as well.) This one is from 2003, and it's Mary's usual travel guide into weird, gross, and (occasionally) hilarious topics that would be considered off-limits in polite dinner party conversation. In this case, as the subtitle says, it's about dead people and what can happen to their bodies (or parts).

There are a lot of possible paths and destinations: organ donation, of course; anatomy class; crash testing; wound research; testing the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin; cannibalism. And more.

One of Mary's investigations takes her to the island of Hainan to investigate reports of cannibalism. Reader, it's not a tourist spot.

Another fun fact: painter Diego Rivera was not just a fan of Marxism also cannibalism!

Mary is often irreverent, with a smart-ass remark never far away. I get the feeling that her everyday conversation can be considerably more R-rated than the prose that makes it into her books. But some things are (literally) dead serious here; one example is her description of the detective work carried out on the recovered bodies from the doomed TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Was it a bomb? A missile? A bolide? Theories abounded, but the investigators managed to debunk them, thanks to clues provided by the corpses.

It never hurts (much) to be reminded that our survivors are going to need to somehow dispose of our remains, and Mary devotes a couple final chapters discussing possible alternatives. There are a lot of them! One intriguing one was "alkaline hydrolysis", which involves a few hours in a pressure cooker, submerged in a lye solution. The process results in a pH-neutral sterile liquid that can safely go in the sewage system, and crumbled-up bones. It is, at least theoretically, more environmentally-friendly than usual cremation via flame.

As noted, this book is from 2003. Surely, things have changed since then? A little Googling shows that progress has been slow on that front. Although there have been a lot of euphemistic names proposed for the procedure: "water cremation", "aquamation", "resomation", …

But what really surprised me: it's illegal in New Hampshire! Your survivors, if they desire to go that route, will need to trundle you off to Vermont or Maine.

I will remind you that the NH motto is "Live Free or Die". Perhaps they should add "But when you die, don't think about being free to use alkaline hydrolysis."

(My guess is that Catholic opposition to the process explains its continuing illegality here. Also verboten is "human composting", another possibility Mary describes.)

I notice that after a long hiatus, Mary has a new book coming out in September: Replaceable You. If I haven't undergone alkaline hydrolysis by then, I'll be grabbing it off the library shelf.

The fifth (and, as I type, most recent) book in Stephen Spotswood's "Pentecost and Parker" series. "Pentecost" is Lillian Pentecost, famed proprietor of her late 1940s New York City detective agency. And "Parker" is Willowjean, her diligent, wisecracking investigative assistant, who narrates most of the book. (There are some excerpts from Lillian's journal.) Two out of the five back cover blurbs make reference to the similar, obvious, precedent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Godwin mysteries.

But this one moves off formula: an antagonist has been shot in the head at a shindig where he had promised to reveal a dark part of Lillian's family history to the world. Lillian arrives to confront him, and … bang, bang, he's dead, apparently shot by Lillian. Ballistics seem to point to her gun! Lillian is arrested, awaiting trial in the wretched "House of D" ladies' prison. To make it worse, one of the prison guards has it in for her.

So Willowjean is tasked with clearing her boss's name, finding the truth about what happened. It is a classically convoluted plot, with numerous possible suspects, each with possible motives. A lot of red herrings. Never fear, eventually the truth is uncovered, Lillian is cleared. This is a continuing series, after all; the outcome is never in doubt. And there's a setup for (I assume) book number six.

Trivia, not that it matters: I caught an anachronism at the start of chapter 38, where Willowjean's girlfriend, Holly, is "stubbing out her Chesterfield in the Folgers can." Ah, in 1947, that would have been a "Folger's can", with an apostrophe. The brand didn't lose its apostrophe until 1963 when acquired by Proctor & Gamble.

The mystery follows the "classic" formula in another way I've always found a tad irritating: Lillian and Willowjean figure out the true culprit, and accumulate supporting evidence, without telling the reader. Yes, this sets up for the Grand Reveal at Lillian's trial later. But this I-know-but-you-don't game kind of emphasizes the artificiality of the narration.

I also found it unfortunate that Spotswood saw fit to append a virtue-signalling "Author's Note" where he bemoans "a wave of laws passed across the country criminalizing gender and sexuality, and stripping women of their bodily autonomy." Sigh. Eye roll. Shut up and write.

Back in my youth, a book by Clifford D. Simak was an automatic buy. It helped that I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while, and they invariably featured his latest novel as a pick-of-the-month.

For some odd reason, these books languished on my shelves, mostly unread. I have no good explanation for that. Between cheap SFBC hardbacks and paperbacks, I counted 19. (And there are a bunch more I don't own.)

So: a new reading project was born. I fed these 19 titles into my book-picking system, and this one was the first up. It is from 1975, and the paperback cost me $1.25. Amazon will charge you more these days.

It is set on Earth, but an oddball one. There are Terran flora and fauna, the sun rises in the east, and so on. But there are non-humans aplenty; a goblin appears in Chapter One, soon to be followed by ogres, witches, gnomes,‥ The reader might ask: are we talking about a forgotten past, a strange future, or what? Neither, as it turns out, but I don't want to spoil a half-century-old book for you.

Anyway, the book opens with a scholar, Mark Cornwall, discovering a short manuscript hidden in a dusty tome in a candlelit university library. This is surreptitiously observed by a monk. And both Cornwall and the monk are being spied on by the "rafter goblin", Oliver. All note the importance of the hidden text. The monk informs a local bunch of cutthroats of Cornwall's find … and here's why you shouldn't trust a cutthroat: the monk gets his throat cut for his troubles.

But Oliver seeks out Cornwall to warn him that he's in mortal peril for being in posession of this manuscript. Cornwall takes the opportunity to light out on a dangerous quest to uncover the secrets described in his find. He also accumulates a ragtag crew of co-pilgrims, each with their own reason for helping out.

It's a lot of fun. Simak's prose style is unfancy, garnished with occasional dry wit. Think "Minnesota Nice" in print.

Pity the author, Marc J. Dunkelman! This book, dealing as it does with the perceived difficulty of implementing grand government-driven schemes lumped under the broad category of "progress", seems to cover very similar ground as does another book: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And Abundance seems to be getting a lot more attention.

For example, I could easily find Dunkelman's book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library; in contrast, PPL owns three copies of Abundance, and they are all checked out (as I type).

Dunkleman's thesis is pretty simple. He adapts the terminology of the early 20th century Progressive, Herbert Croly, who was famous for his advocacy of using "Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends". (Croly was also one of the leading examples/villains of Jonah Goldberg's classic title Liberal Fascism, but we won't get into that.) Dunkleman is not as hostile toward Jefferson as Croly was, though. His approach is that your standard Progressive harbors both (a) a "Hamiltonian" yen to accomplish Big Projects under the direction of wise and benvolent central planners and bureaucrats; and (b) a "Jeffersonian" impulse that central authorities have too much unchecked power to run roughshod over individuals and communities that don't have as much political pull. Currently, he believes, the Jeffersonian ideal holds sway; it's why we can't have nice things, like high-speed rail, "affordable" housing, and hydro power from Quebec down here in New England.

Dunkleman is a Progressive, and is mostly aiming his argument at other Progressives. He views one Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian oscillation as "the yin turned to yang, the ebb turned to flow, and the teeter-totter crossed its fulcrum." The idea that there might be some fundamental, and essentially insoluble, problems with Progressive central planning is not seriously considered. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is briefly mentioned along the way, but only as a sign of increasing skepticism of the Progressive project. I kept looking for other serious criticisms: mentions of public choice theory, for example, but if they were there, I missed them. To his credit, Dunkleman does seem to recognize the problem of regulatory capture, especially when he looks at passenger airline deregulation. (Which happened largely thanks to … Progressive Ted Kennedy!)

As noted, one of Dunkleman's examples is a local one: he goes into great detail on the Northern Pass project, meant to string high-voltage power lines down through northern New Hampshire, down to Concord, Deerfield, and (eventually) Massachusetts.

The book is full of tales like that; I confess I found many of them not as interesting. Dunkleman keeps hammering them into his Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian thesis, though, to a somewhat tiresome extent. That gets repetitious.

The book's subtitle promises that Dunkleman will reveal "how to bring [progress] back". This, he finally gets around to telling the reader, is kind of misleading. On page 330 of the 333-page text: "This book was written not to prescribe thee specific changes that should be made in every realm of public policy, but to argue for a shift in narrative." Sigh. Fine.

I'll keep looking for Abundance.

I put this book by Louise Hegarty on my get-at-library list thanks to a positive review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ. I was intrigued by Tom's promise of "a work of metafiction as written by the Marx Brothers." Yeah, OK. I was hoping for Groucho, and I think I got Zeppo.

It starts out as one of those old-style Agatha Christie-like mysteries: a group gathered in a rental mansion to celebrate the birthday of Benjamin and also the new year. The party-giver, Benjamin's sister Abigail, has arranged one of those "murder mystery night" contests for entertainment. But in the morning of January 1, Benjamin turns up dead! Soon enough, the gifted and egotistical consulting detective Auguste Bell appears on the scene, with his friend/assistant Sacker to investigate.

But (as promised) things get weird pretty quickly. Ms. Hegarty inserts "fair play rules", presented by T.S. Eliot, Father Knox, and S.S. Van Dine: guidelines that good mysteries should follow. (Don't have the butler do it, for example.)

You'll also notice a conspicuous lack of basic forensic detail about Benjamin's death. Sure, the door to the "murder scene" was locked. But what about…

As it turns out, that lack of detail matters quite a bit. Details keep shifting out from underneath the reader. Chapters about Bell's investigation are interspersed with descriptions of Abigail's increasingly disheveled mental state. And (slight spoiler here) what puts the meta in this fiction is that Bell seems to know that he's a character in a book.

Cute, but I found myself not caring very much. Without looking, I'm thinking the Goodreads ratings will have a bimodal loved it/hated it distribution.

The author, Julian Baggini, is (I think it's fair to say) a pop philosopher. A serious thinker combined with a considerable amount of self-promotion. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that," said the blogger.) I became aware of this book when I looked back at his WSJ review of Science and the Good, which dealt tangentially with the issue of "free will." I've been a longtime fan of that topic.

I was very impressed with Baggini's approach to "free will": he's not so much arguing for a position for or against, but outlining his earnest search for the truth behind the topic. Perhaps unique for a book of this type, Baggini goes out and interviews other philosophers and researchers. Also artists and addicts. He fairly presents their views and insights. For a relatively short book, it's a real tour de force. His writing style is clear and mostly accessible to even a philosophical dilettante like me.

Baggini urges the reader to avoid the trap of thinking of "free will" as a binary, all-or-nothing deal, where we are either (a) completely deterministic bags of molecules, perhaps with some quantum coin-flipping going on; or (b) completely in control of our actions with the ability to choose any future path at any moment.

The truth, argues Baggini, is somewhere in between, depends on our situations, values, and past histories. Which makes things a little messy, but manageable. For this (very bad) Lutheran, his deployment of Martin Luther's famous quote "Here I stand, I can do no other" was very on-target.

Baggini's exploration takes him to various free will-related topics, some surprising: artistic expression, legal responsibility, addiction, mental illness, and more.

Not that I'm in total agreement. Almost as an aside, Baggini claims "Freedom merely as absence of constraint and presence of consumer choice is a very thin value indeed". Whereas I think, given its relative rarity and fragility, it's actually a pretty good deal, and not a "very thin value" at all.

Baggini's also read Free Will, by anti-free willer Sam Harris. Interestingly, he quotes the same bit of the text that I did back in 2015, where Harris is musing about Joshua Komisarjevsky, participant in a 2007 Connecticut rape-murder. Harris makes the (to me) sloppy, albeit astounding, claim:

If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did.

Baggini lets this go largely unremarked, but I thought back then (and still do) that there's a real problem with "I" in Harris's sentence. Given Komisarjevsky's brain, genes, experience, etc.: there's no room for Harris's "I" to squeeze in.

At the end, Baggini comes close to making a fully-libertarian argument. But then backs off considerably with (to me) weak hand-waving about the justified role of the state in providing health care, education, transportation infrastructure. Ah well.

I realize that I'm coming close to complaining that Baggini didn't write the book the way I would have. So don't get me wrong: if you're interested in "free will", this is a very good book to check out.