Work that moved me in 2023
Work that moved me in 2023
Indigenous knowledge, Robert Lowell, AI, Cormac McCarthy
In 2023 my reading collapsed mainly to academic papers (for work) and verse epics and Robert Caro books (for fun). I didn’t read as much general nonfiction as usual and didn’t watch as much TV either. But in this post I talk about two extraordinary books I did read and some miscellaneous works about two of my abiding interests: AI and nuclear weapons.
Sand Talk by Tyson Yankaporta
For me, a challenging book. I have an extremely modern worldview. This is one of the best examples I’ve ever read of a totally different worldview, an approach to existence that is perpendicular to anything from the last five thousand years. As Yankaporta points out, civilisation — by which he means the urge to build and live in cities — is at most ten thousand years old and therefore less time-tested than an indigenous lifeway.
In Australia in particular, this way of life continued for six-hundred centuries without the demographic and climate turmoil of the Eurasian or African continents. And so the knowledge baked-in to the customs and rituals, the memes (what I call System 3) of Indigenous Australian culture is hard-won. Under intense selection pressure, the approach to justice, food, cooperation, violence, teaching, conservation, and death had some unfakeable robustness. (This is my way of characterising it, not Yankaporta’s language or framing. But he is also an academic and is au fait with all the intellectual trends in the social sciences and humanities.)
One provocative section says that “young cultures” always ask the same three questions:
Why are we here?
How do we live?
What happens when we die?
Yankaporta shows how his culture answered these long ago. Existential angst is inapplicable to a way of life built on being a custodial species, with an important and unambiguous role in its ecosystem, supported by a suite of rituals that both remember and enact that role.
I love Yankaporta’s humility. More nonfiction books should have the author explaining how much of a dickhead they are and disclaiming, right from the opening, any redemption story.
There’s one chapter that is a kind of guided meditation which is worth the price of the audiobook. (Authors normally do a subpar job of reading their own work, which is understandable because they’re not professional voice actors. Yunkaporta’s narration is excellent.) I turned the lights off, closed my eyes, and listened. It was in many ways more profound than anything I’ve personally experienced from any of the “young” traditions like Buddhism and Vedanta.
The book was especially poignant this year. On October 14 Australians voted down a referendum to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. There were cogent arguments against it. But, ultimately, I took it as a signal of mainstream Australia’s desire to not have to think about Indigenous people. This is certainly an upgrade from actively trying to destroy Indigenous people’s culture and steal them as children; which was itself a very slight upgrade from dispossessing and murdering them. But after decades of unsuccessful efforts to establish a treaty and continued exclusion from decision-making, the quashing of this attempt at increased self-determination via democratic channels would lead me, if I was Indigenous, to want to secede from the country.
Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
I was never a Robert Lowell fan. I didn’t give him a proper airing and sort of pigeonholed him as a “confessional” New England poet and thought him more respected than read. It’s impossible for me to connect to that period of my life now, having read this extraordinary biography. I’m not even that big on biographies. Jamison’s is a masterpiece.
Even if you’ve never heard of Robert Lowell, it’s worthwhile.
Lowell is larger than life: a Promethean intellect and true artist. He suffered from bipolar disorder and the book is also a cultural history of that strange ailment which the ancient Greeks described as a pairing of mania and melancholy. Jamison is a psychiatrist and an expert in bipolar. There are many scenes of Lowell in episodes of total and destructive insanity. At one point he has eight burly policemen cornering him and says he’ll go quietly if they consent to listening to a poem. He recites “Waking in Blue” — his own poem about living in an asylum, the very one they’re about to send him back to. But as Jamison points out, in one extraordinary chapter about courage, he also picked himself up sixteen times: the number of serious manic episodes he had as an adult. Each time he came back. Unlike several of his famous coevals, he didn’t take his own life and died of a heart attack, leaving behind decades of amazing work that I’ve been reading the latter half of this year.
Dryden said, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied” and this madness/genius trope is now unfashionable. David Foster Wallace warned against it even as he seemed tragically to confirm it. Jamison obviously doesn’t think they necessarily go together, but she returns to an earlier view of mania in particular being related to creative energy. She assembles extensive clinical and epidemiological evidence and I found it convincing. The “maniac” can be treated with love, understanding, and now lithium and their contribution to human excellence has been outsize.
This is literate, lyrical writing. Setting the River on Fire has the range of citation and the unforced erudition of an earlier age, specifically the mid-twentieth century, in which its subject was formed, and it reads like the very best of the New York Review of Books (of which Lowell was a founder). I listened to the audiobook, read beautifully by Jefferson Mays. Limpid phrases mark every page, many of them quotations from Lowell’s works of course and yet just as many are Jamison’s own writing which, incredibly, matches her subject’s freakish eloquence.
AI stuff
I read a lot about AI this year. Most of it was technical or philosophical as I tried, for my day job, to comprehend the larger meaning of this near-future technology. I also revisited or tracked down cultural representations of AI. Honestly, I didn’t find much that stood out.
An exception is Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. Imagine my shock in finding out that the literary novel of the large language model era had already been published in 1995. For me, it was slightly uncanny to read. The protagonist is my age and is dropped into a research facility among the engineers as the token humanities guy (my present gig). He wades into all the debates about language, meaning, agency, and consciousness that I’ve been exploring since the advent of ChatGPT. The book is suffused with snippets and paraphrases from the canon of literature the AI is being trained on and which I trained myself on and evidently Powers did too. So for me it was a freakishly personally relevant read, but I recommend it to anyone interested in these themes (many will have read and enjoyed Powers’ Overstory but Galatea is a more compact novel and very urbane).
Movies: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg via Kubrick) is worth revisiting. And I’d never actually seen Spike Jonze’s Her and I was impressed. It was a relief, actually, to watch something with a decent goddamned script and with a real-deal actor in the lead role. I think it was viewed as some kind of quirky satire when it came out. I guess because Jonze had done that kind of thing before. I read some contemporary reviews and the consensus from the truly idiotic film reviewers seemed to be that they personally didn’t like Phoenix’s character and therefore it was a weak movie. Whatever. See my previous lament about how bad most reviews are. I viewed it as a sincere love story in a plausible world. It’s also an experiment in how much a visual medium can rely on an actor’s reactions to something that is unfilmable, i.e. a disembodied voice (Scarlett Johansson).1
The best explainers of LLMs or deep learning or neural networks or whatever are to be found in blogs and videos and they’re easy to find. Indeed, the best use I’ve found so far for ChatGPT is as an everything-textbook, a first and second port of call on any technical topic. It’s very good at explaining anything in computer science in an interactive way and can engage at any level of expertise. One excellent trade book, though, is Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence, which neatly unifies biological and artificial learning under one umbrella.
So far I haven’t seen any cultural output from AI worth recording (but I’m not very in touch with the visual art world). The only exception is Zoe Dolan’s collaborations over the last year. Dolan has developed a personalised, eccentric version of ChatGPT. She has customised the voice and led the system down unique paths, getting it to learn within its generous context window. Her experiments have created an AI companion that is spiritual, erotic, philosophical. An example here.
Nuclear weapons stuff
I’m still obsessed with nukes and continue to plead with those more powerful than myself to treat them as the paramount threat to the world. So this year was typical in that I continued to explore fictional and nonfictional works about nuclear weapons.
Like many, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. In fact I saw it twice at the cinema and also read the screenplay (which I recommend to screenwriters).
SPOILERS (surely you know how it ends). On reflection, I think the entire Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) storyline was extraneous. If it was a miniseries, fair enough. But I’m now convinced that hiding within the 180 minute saga is a brilliant and terrifying 110 minute film whose natural climaxes are the Trinity test and then the meeting with Truman following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As a film, it was still impressive, I’m pro-Nolan. As propaganda, it probably won’t work. The two are related. The runaway chain reaction of dumb takes this film detonated is impressive. There were articles written by historians pointing out historical inaccuracies like, “So and so weren’t ever in the same room but Nolan shows them in this meeting,” etc. It’s a film, a dream. There are also sections where Groves (Matt Damon) and Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) are having a conversation and one of them starts a sentence in one location and then there’s a cut to a new location where the sentence continues. Presumably this also didn’t happen in real life. Reviewers’ grasp on reality is tenuous.
The history was actually pretty damned accurate, based on my nonexpert but well-read-in-the-area experience (the screenplay is adapted from American Prometheus).
But one can find just as much nuclear history and a few more tidbits about the personages involved in Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, The Passenger, which I also read this year. Only after I picked it up did I google him and find out he’d died a few weeks earlier. (He’s another interloper like me: he stationed himself at the Santa Fe Institute for several decades as the strange old man of letters in residence.)
The Passenger isn’t his magnum opus but is worth reading.2 The first third, in particular, has some of McCarthy’s best writing (the next two thirds sometimes feel like a pastiche of his earlier works). The main character is a physicist whose dad was in the Manhattan Project. There are extended dialogues about quantum physics and kibitzing about Heisenberg and Bohr (I love that shit). But there’s also one passage, in the fourth chapter, about Hiroshima that’s given the full McCarthy treatment. It is one of the most devastating things I’ve ever read. It seemed like McCarthy’s whole career — a career spent writing weird apocalypses in the most baroque English prose of the last hundred years — was preparation for this final attempt to write the actual apocalypse of last century and the looming Armageddon of this one.
Connoisseurs of self-reflexive wank, like me, will enjoy the mise en abyme in the first act when Amy Adams’ character is making an experimental film that involves filming someone while they’re asleep, in an uncertain attempt to see how much can be conveyed without interacting with another person or the environment — the challenge Phoenix faces throughout the film.
His magnum opus is Suttree.