Notes for Chapters 1 and 2

Notes on After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

Chapters 3 and 4 of AV

On the up side, this gets us out of the relentless discussion of Emotivism. I am not entirely sure that I understand why Chapter 3 was written. I assume that this will be used as a target to attack later, but I think that we got all the value out of this discussion in chapter II.

The argument goes:

“We have lost the ability to talk about morality, incommensurate (Ch I).”
No this has always been the case, I am an Emotivist
“OK, the Emotivist world looks like this”
OK, so what

Is MacI trying to say that this is proof that the Emotivist society is NOT something that always was? It seems like chapter 3 is a lot of overkill to make that fairly easily granted point.

I hope that he is going to use the paradigms set up in this chapter to pick out qualities of older moralities that had it together(?) or what our new goal should be (?).

Chapter 4 was pretty good. A lot tighter / faster moving. It basically gives the specific instances in Kant, Kierkergaard, and Hume of how the Enlightenment project of answering rationally “Why should I be moral” failed. He also asserts a close similarity between the Enlightenment (which asked the same question we ask, but they did it first) and today. They asked the question that we, 300 years later, still have not addressed.

Chapter 5 promises the essential flaw that guaranteed failure, but I’m still reading it.

Based on an interview with Eagleman that I heard on To the Best of Our Knowledge, I thought I would give his book, Sum a read. The book offers in its first four chapters a layperson’s guide for understanding consciousness and provides an introduction to the neuroanatomical features of the brain. The book then portrays how the brain operates as, to borrow from Doris Kearns Goodwin, a “team of rivals” of which consciousness quite often has no control. Thereafter Eagleman makes a thoughtful presentation on how society ought punish and judge in a world where the assumption of free will, a concept at the heart of jurisprudence since antiquity, appears shaky by virtue of the previous discussion.

While the opening chapters offered little innovation compared to other pop neuroscience texts, their rudiments allowed the exciting explorations around law and culpability to be presented in the latter chapters.

Introduction

In the previous post I explained that my interpretation of House of Leaves was based on the honest, first-person perspective performed by Poe in her album “Haunted.” Her story of struggling to be heard against the voice and pursuits of her father (his Houses of Leaves) is a dominant theme in this work. In this post I’d like to describe how I became so thoroughly familiar with this recording.

In 2000 late I was in Campbell, CA on a rainy (yes, California had rain back then), winter afternoon. I had been in the Bay Area for about 4 months and still hadn’t met many people. To pass the time I would often go music shopping at the Rasputin records and grab a set of tacos from Taco Bravo. On one occasion I saw that a musician whose music I had enjoyed in 1996, and whom I had even seen perform in Houston in that same year, Poe, had released a new record, “Haunted.”

Mark Danielewski

I approached House of Leaves, the novel, looking for a story of children suffering or getting lost — literally or metaphorically. Also, I kept wondering whether the book was an fictionalization of what it was like growing up a Danielewski child. I went looking for support from Mark’s work and found it on the very first page.

The Ignored Children

HoL opens with a collage photograph with this found snippet:

Note: The collage obscures key words, these are my best estimation. The sentiment emerges regardless

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a corner in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy, only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers ….ding air, his eyes, scratching after Daisy as she …. to her death. Let both parents experience that…their narcissism find a new object to wither by. …them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

The children are named “Chad” and “Daisy.” Both are children of loving parents (they’re working to save their children) but they are parents who have missed, owing to narcissism (yet to be detailed), their children’s needs. Was it coincidence that “Mark” and “Annie” have the same letter counts as “Chad” and “Daisy?”

Thus the confusion and loss reported by Poe (the “House of Leaves” experience) is triggered, according to Mark, by narcissism. I turned the page looking to see if Mark explains what the narcissisms were.

The Narcissistic Parents

HoL (the novel) describes, in its innermost narrative valence, the story of Will Navidson and Karen Green and their children in a film called The Navidson Record. We learn that Will is a famous photographer early in novel (p. 6). We also learn that Karen is a stunning beauty, a cover model (p. 57) whose face has become a beautiful, learned mask that buries even as it distances. I tried to keep an eye out on the narcissism of the parents as the story unfurled.

Setting the Scene

In the previous posts I have presented a key by which to understand the allegory of the Navidson / Danielewski families. Peripatetic and insular, the children grow up in a world that features great need of their parents; however, their father’s ambitious pursuits swallow him and the mother’s need for his support and validation swallow her along with him, leaving the children alone. While House of Leaves, the novel, depicts that object of paternal obsession as a House with a demonic nature, houses are metaphorical objects meaning any sort of intellectual pursuit that consumes and isolates its pursuer.

The Children’s Experience

I’d like to take a moment to point out that the children’s neglect and fear is not subtle or something that a busy parent with good intentions could miss. No, I think their expressions of discomfort and need were quite clear.

Consistent care seems only to come from outside the nuclear family. Will’s brother, Tom, crafts a custom doll house for Daisy (p. 62) where she spends hours alone playing (ominously) “house.” Further, no one seems to recognize or intervene when Chad “escape[s] outside, disappearing into the summoning woods…his adventures and anger passing away unobserved.”

Even more frightening, from a Child Protective Services perspective, is that the children’s bedroom wall is “covered with drawings (p. 316).” Elsewhere we learn what their drawings look like (from a teacher):

[Chad’s drawing of his house] had no chimney, windows, or even a door. In fact it was nothing more than a black square filling ninety percent of the page. Furthermore several layers of black crayon and pencil had been applied so that not even a speck of the paper beneath could show through. In the thin margins, Chad had added the marauding creatures (p. 313)."

and:

[in the] kindergarten classroom…one [drawing] caught her eye…[t]he same…[monsters]…two thirds the size of the page, an impenetrable square, composed of several layers of black and cobalt blue crayon, with not even the slightest speck of white showing through…drawn by Daisy.

No parent could see this in their children’s bedroom and ignore that something was very, very wrong and that those kids needed out. Will is clearly not visiting children’s most-protected sanctum, the place of one of the first spatial violations, and seeing its violation [1]]. Nor is Karen.

In 2008 at SXSW I saw Alex Wright deliver a presentation entitled “The Web That Wasn’t.” Wright enumerated a series of historical approaches to a global distributed system for sharing knowledge that weren’t the World Wide Web. His list included “low tech” visions such Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Paul Otlet’s “Mundaneum” as well as higher-tech counterparts such as Douglas Englebart’s NLS, and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.

Having read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle not long before, I was interested in what techniques fact-gatherers of yore had used to organize their data in the era before the relational database or self-updating indices. In The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson clever gearworks, labels, and cabinetry make it possible to “reassemble the library” literally to find the right fact. Wright’s few remarks on Otlet’s “Mundaneum” piqued my curiosity: it seemed to be the synthesis of the Dewey Decimal system, the URL, and microfiche. It seemed to be a legacy information storage and retrieval medium that, like the card catalog, I was on the tipping point generation of; I had used the predecessor technologies and had learned, integrated, and come to prefer the successor technologies. Being a geek, of course, I harbor a nostalgia for those old displaced technologies and am awed by how they accomplished so much with such rudimentary tools.

When I came across Cataloging the World it seemed to be a welcome deepening into the world of Otlet’s technology, but also provided color on the man and his times. Particularly of note was that Otlet was a creature of that odd time before the Great War: The Belle Epoque, which marked a new spirit of Internationalism (see: the IWW, et al).

Otlet’s Technology

Otlet leaned on the work of Conrad Gessner who advocated collecting books' contents onto slips of paper (literally cut out, but in a more book-reverent age, copying would be preferable) that would be fit onto a standardize playing-card size. These cards would each bear a fact and each fact would be noted in a fashion consistent with the Universal Decimal Classification. Physical drawers would help identify and organize facts neatly. While card catalogs may seem anqiuated they provided a scalable, organized means until their successor, the relational database, came along. Notably Otlet advocated the extraction of the content of books into cards, thus winnowing away the author’s “voice” as but so much fluff (prefiguring the search engine). These cards became atomic entities which Otlet called “biblions.” Ultimately Otlet foresaw the birth of a new profession, the “documentalist” who would analyze and synthesize biblions for new querents. Otlet also supposed “client” systems that would integrate with the “home catalog” by which users could query, peruse and synthesize links across archived information.

Otlet’s Institution

Nevertheless, this technological scheme supposes a small army dedicated to order and control and a central organization for housing this body and their efforts. Here we see most clearly the Internationalist sentiment that Otlet held as a personal and spiritual requirement for his work’s success. Otlet spent much of his life seeking patrons and real estate that would house this collective: an institution he called the “Mundaneum.”

Otlet’s Weaknesses

For any information worker today it is clear as his dream’s most colossal and glaring error: control systems simply do not scale. Considering the failure of Internet directories (Yahoo!’s original charter) or the maddening task that awaits anyone who seeks to groom a Wiki, a system of order and heirarchy like Otlet’s seems woefully out of touch – or perhaps merely a relic of a time when information was merely exploding versus exponentially exploding as it seems to be doing in our era.

Conclusion

I rather enjoyed the book and am fascinated by the solution that Otlet imagined in a world that predated the relational database. I feel Otlet’s story was greatly assisted by Wright’s historical placement of him and his solution. The last few chapters covered Otlet versus other information archive designers' solutions. In many ways I feel like Wright was repurposing much of his research from his work Glut. I didnt feel like these comparisons really served Otlet’s story well and these chapters felt bolted-on. Nevertheless, for anyone who would appreciate our information architectures of today, this slim summary of Otlet’s context and dreams was a welcome introduction.

I’ve also included my notes after the break.

I recently read Nicholas Zackas’ The Principles of Object Oriented Javascript and I really recommend it. Many people I know (and students I teach) struggle with mapping the concept of object orientation onto a language that does not follow classical inheritance and lacks many of the visible signals that developers recognize as OO-ish.

The books makes forays into hidden attributes of the language but remains friendly throughout. It offers practical tools and exploratory exercises that will help JavaScript programmers learn more about this interesting and protean language.

I wrote the following precis of my take-aways:

To grow old is a strange thing: you watch agog as all you loved turns cheap and tawdry: gold to tin, elegance to chintz. The titillating becomes the pornographic, the folly becomes incalculable error, the youth become parasitic, and the open-armed city becomes a clutch of exploitative vipers.

The student of history knows that it has been ever thus. They can only smile, sadly, faithfully reporting the reality of their times and accepting it as a backdrop for the master narrative of their own life: whom they loved, the career that seemed so important, the rituals and places whose importance seemed natural and unfeigned.

In unremarkable times, death comes to the lucky and they never have to question these narratives and backdrops. But for those caught at the locus of the rupture, they feel their world change and wonder whether the most important tatters of the old life and its beauty will make it across the gap with them.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is a story of a man in such a time. A man in a future not so terribly far off from our own whose encounter of utter, wrenching true love has the challenge of happening in interesting times. Leonard Abramov: middle-aged, over-fond of rich food, moldering collections of words on pages called books finds himself trying to court, win, seduce, and become desirable to Eunice Park, a girl born part-and-parcel to the zeitgeist.

Spoiler Warning: I recommend the book highly. If you want it in all its unspoiled glory come back later.

Setting plays an incredibly important role in this book, so I’d like to note some of the more interesting aspects of the dystopia where our rupture happens.

I recently heard Parag Khanna on the A16Z Podcast and I was sufficiently interested that I bought and read “Connectography.” In this post I’ll give an review of the book qua book and also cover an outline of its big ideas.

Note:

In subsequent posts I explore some of those ideas further:

• [Connectography and Refactoring][cf]

Connectography

It’s the Hegelian in me: I love a Europe-coming-to-know-itself through history (and economics) master narrative book. I’ve found the most predictive book for the last 15 years of economic and global theory has been (Marxist) Hardt & Negri’s Empire. Empire predicts a move to a global communist panacea only after global capitalism (i.e. multinationals) guts and obviates the nation-state. Accordingly to understand capital’s progression to this end, we should listen to the most passionate global capitalists.

In the early part of the aughts I found the leading writer on the topic to be (capitalist) Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat. While Friedman always had big ideas, I found his over-emphasis on who he knows and anecdotes a bit sloppy and frankly, taxing. Like Hegel, Friedman’s work benefits from being read at a swift clip: he’s meant to be enjoyed like the Romantics: with loud thundering emotions and sweeping torrents of vision.

Khanna offers an update on Friedman’s work but with considerably more economic data. While Friedman was occasionally insufferable in mentioning where he had lunch and with whom, Khanna’s core critical ideas occasionally get lost in maps or exhaustive detailing. Given a choice, I’ll take Khanna’s approach and take the data versus the Friedman’s social itinerary, but we lose sight of many of his core pillars in the sea of details about Malaysian trade agreements.

The big ideas I extracted from 390 pages follow:

[Khanna suggests][prev] that the over-large nation-states of the 19th and 20th centuries - many of which were created by the fiat and bureaucracy of the British Empire or other colonialist machinations - be “refactored” in line with the “SOLID” software design principles. In this post I take the SOLID principles and try to transform them into the language of national identity establishment.

SOLID and Refactoring

In my [previous post about “Connectography”][prev] I noted that one of Khanna’s Big Ideas is that:

Many nation-states are held together by fiat or tradition but have no real internal attraction to one another: we should let these break apart or break them apart e.g. Iraq, Yugoslavia.

As a programmer I knew exactly what Khanna was saying. How many times did I, as a beginner in object-oriented programming, allow a class to stand unchanged because its functions had “always gone together?”

I began steering away from those negligent practices when I learned the [SOLID principles][SOLID] listed by “Uncle” Bob Martin. These five simple dicta set a new bar for how (new) code ought look. But how to go about fixing the historical messes? For that, I read Martin Fowler’s book [Refactoring][] where “refactoring” is described as:

…a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing code base. Its essence is applying a series of small behavior-preserving transformations, each of which “too small to be worth doing”. However the cumulative effect of each of these transformations is quite significant.

Source

Having learned from both of these inspirations I was able to methodically pull apart complexity and limit its creeping in. So in software, so, too, in nations.

One of the points Parag Khanna brought up in “Connectography” is that mobility is a key to keeping influential cities thriving. The pointed example he pitches (around page 122) is that of the city of Detroit (a city I love) which, at one time, was the wealthiest city in America. As the automobile industry slackened, the talent largely stayed put hoping that patriotic sentiment (“BUY AMERICAN”) or trade protectionism would restore their coffers and their civic trajectory. That, of course, did not happen. Hondas and Toyotas were bought by the boatful and the future for Detroit diminished with each bill of lading.

But is there a lesson for us that we can take from this error? Let’s take a look at the systems they had built in the early 80’s in Detroit:

• early robotics-based industrial work
• industrial development practices expertise
• labor facilitation expertise

In 2016 all of those skills are valuable expertise that are, in essence, locked in an old industry and which will share the fate of it (lest they find a way to unbundle themselves).

But what might have history looked like if the experts had realized that their host incubator was not necessary to their success earlier?

• …WHAT IF those engineers who built the assembly lines had encoded better logistics systems in software (to rival Germany’s SAP)
• …WHAT IF those engineers who built auto-assembly robotics had roboticized the port of SF, the port of Oakland (there might be dock work in SF), been influential in the upgrades to the Panama Canal, Corpus Christ’s port, the Nicaragua canal?
• …WHAT IF….that expertise had allowed the first generation of port (re-)builders to win contracts in central America in the late 90’s instead of Chinese competitors in the 2010’s?

If that were the case I could imagine many snowy Monday mornings in Detroit leading to direct flights to Managua, Corpus, or linking to a hop to Shanghai. And the reverse could be true as well: Detroit could have become the home of process optimization, industrial flow analysis and the flights (and capital, and residents) would be flowing in to offset the decline in automotive manufacturing dominance.

Based on my reading of Khanna there are two principal institutional changes that could have helped and one cultural change. Ease of mobility, ease of spot education, and the unwinding of American exceptionalism. I’ll start with the last first, after the jump.

I read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice just after Lauren and I moved back to San Francisco. It was a period of great insomnia for me. I’d sit up in the study of our short-term rental on States Street in Corona Heights and look out over the Castro Valley and the Diamond Heights neighborhoods. Winter storms would come up the Peninsula or churn about in the Bay before whipping westward across the Castro valley and on into the ocean. I joined the San Francisco Public Library and started checking out books.

On several of the nights or early mornings during our tenancy, I would sit up with a solitary lamplight on, reading. One of my favorite books in that era was the book, Tokyo Vice, which has recently been converted into a limited run series on HBO Max. Lauren and I watched the first episode (brought to the screen by auteur of night, the underworld, and neon, Michael Mann) and found it intense and compelling.

Back in 2010 though, after I posted a review on this site, I even got a comment from Mr. Adelstein himself. I stopped hosting comments on my blog years ago (too much spam to keep up with), but I kept Mr. Adelstein’s comment in a snapshot. You can read what a great storyteller he is in it:

When I first moved to the San Jose in 2000, I didn’t know a soul. Driven by ambition, hubris, curiosity and the desire to get out of the socio-political and heat environment of Texas, I went as far to the West as I could. I remember driving up from the Central Valley through the apricots, peaches, and garlic of Gilroy. The wide tree-filled manors of Monte Sereno and the brown hills of South San Jose served as pillars marking the entrance to the Valley of Heart’s Delight. It was magical and the smell of produce and the richness of Earth’s breast has never left me. I’m sure it’s all Kohl’s-anchored strip centers and Targets now.

In those days, I was eager to start working and making my splash in the tech world. There was still enough wheeze left in the coughing engine of “the New Economy” that I was hoping for one last shot at the optionaire dream of wealth and fancy. All that would be undone within 18 months, but knowing the sordid future coming due does nothing to undermine the joy of dreaming the dream. But in those early days, along in my tiny room, on Saturday night I had a ritual:

I would walk to the fast food options up the street and bring home my dinner. I’d listen to KQED’s programing of “The World,” “This American Life, “Selected Shorts,” “The BBC World Service” and then go to bed and sleep in late on Sunday. Often, in those nights, it would be me, my computer, stacks of CD’s loading Linux, or me working on programming projects. It seems small and lonely now, and it was, surely. But it was also where I started finding out who I was professionally. I can’t shun it.

To this day, I can still hear the introduction patter from program director Isaiah Sheffer: “Recorded at Symphony Space in New York.” How many dozens of times did I hear that over the years?

How funny it is, then, that I’ve now lived a few blocks away from where “Selected Shorts” was recorded all those years ago. For a couple’s night out, I got us tickets during Christmas to see a recording of “Selected Shorts” this past Wednesday.

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck…

It was a late night during the winter in San Jose in 2001. As was my custom in those days, on Saturday night I’d often be at my desk working, reading, coding, or gaming. I’d let KQED play all night long from Prairie Home Companion until BBC World Service came on at 11:00 pm.

But when I heard John Shea start with D.H. Lawrence’s “Rocking Horse Winner,” I stopped everything just to listen to his bewitching narration. I, of course, knew of the reputation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, but I didn’t know of Lawrence’s output as a short story author.

But as Shea read the final, miserable coda of the story, I thought to myself: “This is quite possible the pinnacle of the short story form.” As the last word hung in the air and the applause thundered – and host Isiah Sheffer ended the spell by drawing us into schedules and what was coming next week, I knew that I would never forget this radio broadcast. And I never have.

If you have $2.99 to give to Symphony Space, the studio where “Selected Shorts” is performed, you can own this story, too.

Alternative format, video (1976):

It’s “Malabar”

I think the best American novels that I have ever read are the following:

1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952); The Post-War Generation’s Great American Novel
2. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1996); The Boomers’ Great American Novel
3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1997); Gen X’s Great American Novel
4. James by Percival Everett (2024); The Millennials’ Great American Novel

But what makes a book especially American and why these?