26 – Daisy Jones and the Six
Daisy Jones and the Six is a treat of a book – fast paced, fun and interesting while also being firmly in an area of my affections – pop rock of the seventies. At its core, Daisy Jones is basically a fictionalised retelling of the story of Fleetwood Mac – a band struggling to find success until they are joined by a peculiarly transcendent new member. For Fleetwood Mac, that was Stevie Nicks (and also Lindsey Buckingham, but let’s not let facts get in the way). For The Six, it’s Daisy Jones and they work together to create an album that becomes one of the defining soundtracks of its decade. Here, the album is called Aurora. The real album was, of course, Rumours.
The book is written as a series of interviews with the surviving band members, several decades later, once the tumultuous personal feelings involved in the making of the album had a chance to cool off and for the wisdom of age to soften some of the sharp edges. The accounts vary. The motivations attached to each participant are shaded by personal experience. The whole thing comes across as a vaguely uncertain history put together by an unreliable, but earnest, narrator. And it’s great – well written, with likable but flawed characters, and a lot of heart.
But also, its main weakness is its main strength in that it feels a lot like reading the kind of Fleetwood Mac biography someone may have written after failing to get access to the original band members. In the sitcom 30 Rock, upon failing to get the life rights of Janis Joplin, NBC puts together ‘The Jackie Jormp-Jomp’ story – a Tesco Value knockoff with counterfeit lyrics to counterfeit songs. And unfortunate as the comparison is… a lot of Daisy Jones felt like that. One of the difficulties in writing metafiction about creative activities is that it’s hard to believe how great something is when the author insists on putting mediocrity in your way. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – Aaron Sorkin’s ill-fated competitor to 30 Rock – used to undermine its own premise regularly through misplaced earnestness. If you are going to insist that comedy is a great bedrock of free speech and you’re doing important work in your sketch comedy show, then the sketches need to be funny. Studio 60 failed to do that every time it delved into its own premise and it kicked the legs away from the whole thing. 30 Rock solved it by making the TV show at its core unashamedly low-brow and ridiculous. ‘There are too many farts in this fart machine’, kind of thing.
Daisy Jones is full of song lyrics that just don’t seem ‘all that’, which is a bit of a shame in a novel about how the songs are, in fact, genuinely ‘all that’. I think it would have been better to shy away from the details in favour of describing things at a distance. I could imagine Jackie Jormp-Jomp singing a lot of these songs, and I don’t think that was the intention.
That aside though, I genuinely did love the book and I think you should pick it up.
27 – Babel
This a densely interesting book, serving as much as a kind of treatise on the creativity of translation as much as it does a story. The author, R.F. Kuang, is a professional translator and it really shows in how she interleaves the philosophy of translation into the storytelling. And it’s another really good book, one that I absorbed in a couple of days despite its ponderous length.
The premise is this – in an alternate history version of our world, silver has been found to have magical properties. When inscribed with a word and a word’s translation in a different language, the lexical incompatibility can be harnessed to create wonderful effects. Because words can rarely truly be translated without some degree of loss, the silver resonates with that loss. Clever translation pairs can do everything – they can speed up cars, they can increase human cognition. Babel, the Oxford institute most associated with silver-working, is the heart of the practice and the research about the practice because silver is the fuel that drives Britain’s colonialism.
I’ve said before that books that are explicitly loaded with ‘messaging’ often make me roll my eyes, because I don’t read fiction for a half-hearted lecture from an ill-informed source. Babel does something really interesting with its message, and that’s what gets my eyes to roll back into their forward position. The book’s central premise is that as the world gets interconnected, languages converge through the simple accumulation of interchange. As people become more familiar with foreign phrases and words, the source and its translation gradually merge together – at which point, the magic associated with them fails. The French word ‘Merci’ derives from a word associated with the Latin word for ‘wages or fee’, but its meaning comes to us via the old French for ‘gift’ or ‘kindness’. Its correct derivation into English is ‘Mercy’, rather than ‘thank you’. In English, ‘thanks’ comes from a Latin word that means ‘think’, as in ‘I will think upon what you have done for me’. So a silver bar that translates ‘Thanks’ into ‘Merci’ could, for example, create a sense of positivity in people because the lost factor is ‘kindness’.
But when ‘Merci’ and ‘Thank you’ become interchangeable in the common world, that incompatibility goes missing. And as British colonialist interests extend, and silver empowers the engines of colonialism, in the end all they are doing is flattening the linguistic landscape. Britain’s own thirst for power is what is undermining its ability to attain it.
So Babel attempts to kick the can down the road by seeking out gifted speakers of exotic languages – the more exotic the better – to find new language pairs for new effects. Thus our protagonist, ripped from his home land and brought to Babel on a full scholarship purely because of his exoticism. And in this he finds himself at the heart of a community that will never accept him, in a societal context that will only ever see him as a commodity. And so he strikes out.
Babel then is both a fun dark academia story and a compelling exploration of the nature of belonging, told in a way that is effective because of how integrated it is into the story. I loved it. You should definitely read it.
28 – Word Perfect
I like Susie Dent, of UK show Countdown fame, very much. I did not however like her book all that much. Or rather, I didn’t like parts of it very much. The bits that are about the interesting linguistic roots of words we use every day were fascinating – and a nice complement to what I had read previously (Babel). However, that’s only maybe a third of the book. The rest is an introduction to words that exist but nobody uses them, and I found that kind of tedious because I don’t like the kind of person (who isn’t a linguist) who would use these words in conversation.
I’m not very complicated when it comes to the nature of language. It’s to inject ideas, with as little friction as possible, into the heads of other people. Sometimes the best way to do that is in a roundabout way, or with a little bit of misdirection. Communication is partially about rhetoric, but it’s always about accessibility, in the purest sense of the word. Your job as a communicator is to make your ideas accessible, digestible, and convincing. That’s about all that should be involved in word choice.
But there’s a certain type of person that revels in the joy of being inaccessible. When they choose intentionally obtuse words and definitions with the explicit intention of putting distance between you and what they want to see, just so they can feel the momentary joy of getting to explain themselves to you. As a person, I find it irritating. As a professional educator, I find it appalling.
I’ve often been accused of pompous writing, but I like to think what I am doing is matching the precisely right word to the specific thing I want to communicate. I’m the kind of person who will use ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ to describe two different ways of thinking about the same sort of thing even though to most people they’re synonyms. But ‘story’ means ‘the things that happen in the order they happened’, and the ‘narrative’ is how you manipulate that story and dress it up. So while I may turn my nose up at writing ‘simplified English’ I’m not intentionally trying to shut people out. I just want to use words correctly. I don’t want anyone to feel stupid if they need to look up a word – I just want them, afterwards (afterwords?), to say ‘I see why he used that one’.
But man, so much of Word Perfect is aimed at the other kind of person – the one that absolutely wants you to be baffled just so they can show off they know a word that you don’t. The kind of person I will simply tune out as they drone on. Word Perfect is the kind of book that is ideal if what you want to do is add an obligation of definition to every conversation you have. I enjoyed the bits that talked about, for example, how the words ‘sidewalk’ and ‘fall’ (as in, Autumn) are authentically British in their origin. I liked the bits that talk about origins of phrases such as ‘licked into shape’ (apparently there was once a belief that bear cubs didn’t take on the shape of bear cubs until their mother licked them into a bear cub configuration). That’s all fascinating, because it gives me insight that I can integrate into my own life.
I don’t care though that the word ‘Gigglemug’ means someone who is perpetually cheerful, or ‘firkydoodling’ means a kind of pre-foreplay. And I don’t care about them because anyone that uses words like that in front of me, unironically, is due to be put on my mental ignore list anyway. The only reason to use words like that is to make your communication opaque, and if that’s what you get off on then I refuse to be an unwilling participant in your kink. I get why Susie Dent is interested in this stuff. All she’s doing by releasing these words onto her audience though is contributing to a net increase in communicative frustration.
Book 28 of 52 completed. And honestly, I kind of wish I’d listened to an audiobook version of this because there are few sounds I would enjoy more than a posh English woman like Susie Dent saying some of the filthy words in this book.
29 – A Room of One’s Own
It’s quite bad I think that I haven’t read any Virginia Woolfe before this. It’s a symptom of the problem this year’s project is trying to address. I didn’t decide not to read any of her books. I just never got around to it. Now I have, and I really enjoyed this. It’s a short book, written in a lackadaisical and circumspect fashion, but one that really got under my skin. The central thesis is that in order for a woman to write, she needs ‘A room of her own, and 500 pounds a year’. Or in today’s money, an annual income of ~£30000. It is the absence of these factors, throughout history and adjusted for inflation, that means that men have dominated the intellectual landscape of the past by virtue of being the ones with money and denying the women in their life a place of solitary activity.
It’s not a bitter book, or a polemic. It’s astoundingly polite, in fact, and all delivered with a kind of cheerful wit that is understated while being pointed. Her central explorations of sex-based expectation and the injustice of uneven domesticity are still valid even now, although of course progress has been made. Much of what she discusses of her contemporary society has alien contours even if it’s reality was common knowledge. But it’s especially interesting when she looks at the many things men had written of women, and how few women had written of women. And from this she can extrapolate some concerning trends – specifically the way in which many men think of feminism as a personal attack. In order for a man to feel superior in his own life, it is necessary that others be inferior. And if a man cannot be superior to other men, it helps if he can be superior to all women. Or foreigners. Or people of a lower social class. Thus, the knee-jerk aggression many men exhibit when confronting ‘feminism’ – they see it as a zero-sum game where in order for women to be made equal, it must come through men being diminished.
Yeah, a lot of this book is still relevant today.
While the book is short, it does cover wide territory. It talks for example of the common perception at the time that ‘No woman could ever have the genius of Shakespeare’. That this was a peculiarly male form of accomplishment, the heights of which could not be scaled by women. And in this, Woolf agrees through a process of meticulous dissection. And it essentially comes down to ‘No, you’re right – because Judith Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s fictional but equally gifted sister) was never given a room of her own, and 500 pounds a year’. She would have been denied all the opportunities William Shakespeare took for granted, and so the absence of opportunity – rather than of talent – is why all these tenured professors and classical scholars were right. They just weren’t right for the right reasons.
It’s a very short book, as I say – more an extended essay than anything – but I will be reading more of her work as I go through this project.
30 – Are You Happy Now
This is a very average book which drowns an interesting premise in its own Gen Z whining. This is the quick pitch – there’s a new epidemic in town, and it’s apathy. Every so often, people will just stop what they’re doing, sit down, and then shut down. Any attempts to rouse them result in violent pushbacks. They won’t talk, or eat, or anything. They’ll just – not, until their hearts give out. It’s basically Bartleby the Scrivener, except Internet scale. It’s also incredibly annoying, but it was the book I had committed to on my flight to Portugal and so I read it through to the end.
Look, I get life is hard now. Harder than it was when I was young, most likely. I was lucky enough to be in the last generation that was able to get the helicopter out of Saigon. Every time I moved into a new life phase, I could feel the ladder being pulled up behind me. But the central premise of this book still rankles. The implicit hypothesis is that a whole generation is giving up because nobody has given them a reason to live – a reading that is brought to the surface later on for those that may have missed the oh-so-subtle messaging. And you know what hasn’t changed since I was young? The responsibility of everyone to carve out their own meaning in life.
In Bartleby the Scrivener, the story is made poignant by the fact that Bartleby’s refusal to do anything is in itself a quiet, self-destructive and yet intensely radical act. The System can cope with rebellion. With insurrection. With protest. What it can’t cope with is the direct negation of engagement. When Bartleby responds to every request with ‘I would prefer not to’, his passivity is in itself an act of choosing. It is transgressive because it identifies the only real path to power available in a coercive system. As Slavoj Zizek would put it, Bartleby is opting out of the ‘forms of resisting which help the system to reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it’.
There is nothing so sophisticated in the worldview of Are You Happy Now. In fact, despite the eerie similarity of the premise, I don’t get the impression that the author has even heard of Bartleby or the philosophical conversations that Zizek and others have spawned around it. The book itself makes note that the pandemic is likely a net positive for Capitalism as it removes some of the most economically inactive agents from the system. It’s the thing that bothers me in many books – where an inciting incident is replaced with passive acceptance without situating that acceptance within a broader context. Those that are afflicted by this pandemic are, by the very nature of their acceptance of its reality, simply abandoning agency. And that’s true of each of the characters within the book. None of them seem like they are there for anything more than to be the ‘reader insert’ personas that are to do nothing more than observe the unfolding of a fable. It’s the kind of book I react poorly to in most circumstances – a self-important lecture dressed up in the clothes of a novel. Worse though – it’s a lecture where the lecturer doesn’t know enough of the material to do even a passable job of constructing the thesis.
I get that ‘kids today’ is a refrain that is heard in each successive older generation as it contemplates the previous. But world-weary apathy was not invented by today’s youth, even if they seem to be the first that has embraced it as a core generational identity. Nobody gets let off the hook in life though – first and foremost our main duty is to work out how to exist in a universe that is fundamentally absurd, in the sense Camus would have argued it. Sure, I get it – nothing that Gen Z does matters. But that’s been true of every generation. Nothing any of us do matters, and the gradual rise of secularism in society has only peeled away our previous comfortable assurances to the contrary. Religion might have been enough of a societal grift to obscure it, but as Nietzsche said – ‘God is dead, and we have killed him’. ‘Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves?’
The ‘festivals of atonement’ are to find our own path through the existential dread of cosmic absurdity. The ‘sacred games’ we invent are fundamentally internal. Life does not come pre-packaged with meaning. To descend into apathy due to existential irrelevance is easy. And in the modern systems of late-stage capitalism, it’s a convenient surrender that does nothing but serve the needs of capital. The book outlines a coward’s solution to a lack of an external purpose – the spiritual equivalent of being locked in a room with a bottle of whiskey and a gun loaded with a single bullet. The absurd is born of the ‘confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the universe’, to quote Camus. Giving in to the silence is weakness. Screaming until it echoes with your own sense of purpose – that’s how you face the abyss and come away from it capable of functioning.
Yeah, I didn’t like this book much.