hexaflexagons, probability, paradoxes and the tower of hanoi

I’ve been reading this book over and over for about a month because the mathematical part of my brain isn’t much used any more.  Martin Gardner, the author, wrote a column on mathematical games for Scientific American for 25 years, which provided much of the material for his Mathematical Library, of which this is the first book.

Hexaflexagons has 16 short chapters with a different mathematical puzzle or paradox in each. Some are easier to grasp than others. Some are familiar from high school, some new.  This was an enjoyable book, though hard work – I recommend reading with a pencil in hand because at some stage you’ll want to work things out for yourself. Nerdish fun.

three short stories by julian barnes

60/40

Sleeping with John Updike

The Revival

There should be more short stories online, I reckon.

thoughts on debt

UPDATE: 20 December: It seems this book is the abridged published version of  Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures, which will be repeated on radio national from 14 January 2010 at 6pm.

Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a short book about the social construct of debt: where the concept comes from, the part is plays in our culture, and how it is linked to two of the strongest human emotions: desire and fear. She explores the idea of debt from different angles and traces the concept through human mythology and behaviour.

Atwood first considers fairness, arguing that borrowing and lending could not have developed without fairness.  She traces it back to the most ancient myths, such as Ma’at and Iustitia, and forward to literature, using The Water Babies as her primary example.  She explores the history of the idea of moral balances and how humans in all cultures weigh up deeds and behaviours against each other.  She also observes that a concept of cheating and fairness has also been observed in other animals.

In Debt and Sin, Atwood tries to answer the question ‘is it morally wrong to be a debtor’. She teases out the originals of the word debt (which was once used interchangeably with ‘sin’, for example in the gospel of Matthew 6:12); but also relates ‘sin’ to its origins in ideas of sacrifice, which hark back to fairness and moral balances. Much of this exploration focuses on the Christian tradition. She then brings these ideas together to establish a basis of accounting and balance sheets, pointing out their link to memory – without memory, there is no debt. She notes that the earliest written records appear to be accounting balance sheets, and notes that debt is inconsistent with oral forms of communication.

Atwood notes that, if being a debtor is a sin, then so too must be being a creditor, as one cannot exist without the other.  She remarks on several clichés here, such as Polonius’ ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ and ‘wiping the slate clean’ – noting that both of these encapsulate the idea that a healthy equilibrium is required between debtor and creditor in a functioning society.

Moving on to a chapter called Debt as Plot, Atwood returns to the idea of debt and memory, and that a debt is essentially a narrative, caused by a string of events and actions over time.  She traces some classic plots that use debt  as a plot device overtly (Scrooge, Vanity Fair) and covertly (Dr Faustus, Madam Bovary. She uses these to talk about non-monetary debt, how it can be conflated with monetary debt (through the idea of sin), and how we choose to ‘pay’ for our sins and bargains; and notes how, especially in 19th Century literature, debt (either money or behaviour) is a governing leitmotif of Western storytelling.

The fourth chapter is called The Shadow Side, and looks at what happens when the power equilibrium between debtor and creditor is upset – loan sharks and criminal syndicates, liquidation, rebellion and revolution, and also revenge. She notes how our cultural understanding of debt and fairness can be used to stir up hatred, using examples like Idi Amin’s expulsion of ethnic Indians from Uganda, and the experience of Chinese immigrants in various Asian countries; but also how it can be used against oppressors, such as the anti-colonial uprising around the world that have centred on tax.

In the last chapter, Atwood moves away from the non-fiction essay style of the previous four, and writes a fictional piece about Scrooge and a Spirit of Earth Day Past who appears to him; and how his ‘payback’ may have been different under the debt constructs of the modern world.  I didn’t finish this chapter because I found it annoying.

The last chapter aside, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book.  It is always healthy to explore ideas that we tend to take as given, and to understand where in our culture they come from and how we are influenced by deep-seated cultural factors in making decisions.The book was published around the time of the global financial crisis, and while it doesn’t tell you why residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs are bad or good things, it helps to explain some of our reactions to the events of the past year.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, 2008

the reluctant fundamentalist

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007, Mohsin Hamid’s second book The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tale told by a young Pakistani to an unnamed, unspeaking, unknown American; about his journey from the American dream to political fundamentalism in Pakistan.

Changez is a Princeton graduate who wins a job at a prestigious management consultancy.  For a time, he lives the high life in New York, with an expenses account and a tentative romance with an upper-class American girl, Erica. Then someone flies a plane into a building.  Changez becomes an outsider in his adopted city. Erica is drawing away from him into deep depression.  America attacks Afghanistan. Changez becomes obsessed with following the news from home, and can’t find meaning in his job any more. Erica disappears.  Changez resigns, and leaves New York for his home in Lahore.

As this story unwinds, the tension slowly and imperceptibly increases as darkness falls around the cafe in which Changez and his American listener are sitting. Hamid is leading the reader somewhere, just as he leads his American listener back to his hotel, along a dark street where menacing shadows are drawing closer to the pair.  The story ends with a threat of violence which suddenly reveals what Changez has become and exactly why the American has been so interested in his story.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of the best books I’ve read this year. The story seems simple but  Mohsin Hamid builds it towards a stunning and terrifying climax that left me holding my breath for the last few pages.  It is also a clear and nuanced analysis of the tensions between Islamic countries and the West as they are experienced by ordinary people. It’s a short book at only 184 pages – Mohsin Hamid has said ‘I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through’, and I would defintely read it again.  Highly recommended.

Further reading: ‘Why do they hate us‘ – Mohsin Hamid, Washington Post

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton, 2007

house of meetings

House of meetings, by Martin Amis, is a story about fraternal and triangular love. It is written as the recollections of the narrator, who has travelled back to Russia to revisit the gulag in which he was imprisoned in the 1950s.

With him in the gulag was his brother, Lev, married to the girl they both loved, Zola.  The book uses love triangle between Lev, Zola, and the narrator to explore the love between the brothers and their attempts to re-establish their lives once released from the gulag. The title refers to a house near the gulag where wives of prisoners came for conjugal visits.

The book is in turn funny, sad, grim, and revolting.  At times the smells and violence of the gulag were enough to make me stop reading and look away.  What is interesting about House of Meetings compared to other gulag books such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is that the descriptions of life in and after the gulag are written not from the perspective of an intellectual, but that of another class of prisoner.  It describes well the relentlessness and helplessness of life under Soviet Communism, but does not offer hopes of redemption through art.

Amis manages to give his writing a Russian feel without resorting to imitation.  I thought the characters of Lev and the narrator were well developed across the course of this short book, but I found Zola a bit one-dimensional, especially considering she is so pivotal to the plot.  Having read House of Meetings I would be keen to read more of Martin Amis.

House of Meetings
Martin Amis
Vintage, 2007

the thoughtful dresser

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, is a thoughtful and readable discourse on the cultural importance of clothes and dress.  While it covers a lot of topics, from the old testament to shoes and Suzi Quattro, ultimately it is about how fashion and clothing can be used to create and express a self.

Grant draws on her own experiences, and on those of her parents, East European Jews who emigrated to Britain just prior to WWII, to explore how important clothing can be as a social marker, and as remnants of culture for immigrants (she also explores this in more depth in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs*).  Each chapter can almost stand on its own as a mini essay.  Three chapters, spaced at the beginning, middle and end of the book, document the life of Catherine Hill, a Holocaust survivor who tells the story of modifying her striped Auschwitz uniform as a defiance against a concentration camp system that defined her only by the number tattooed on her arm. Catherine Hill went on to be one of Canada’s most successful fashion buyers.

The writing is a bit uneven in this book, and some sections seem to have been less thoroughly worked and researched than others.  I felt I’d read some parts before, possibly because they were ideas that she explored in her column for The Guardian or on her blog.  But it was enjoyable and somewhat thought-provoking.  If you’re interested in clothing and fashion from more intellectual standpoint, but enjoy the frivolous side of it to, this is the perfect book for you.

*I should disclose that I won an autographed copy of  this book prior to publication through a competition on Linda Grant’s blog. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised that it was nominated for the Booker.

The Thoughtful Dresser
Linda Grant
Virago, 2009

goodbye columbus

Goodbye,Columbus (1959), is a novella with five short stories attached, and was Philip Roth‘s first book.

The novella is set in 1950′s New Jersey, and describes a romance between an idealistic and disaffected young librarian, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimpkin, the spoilt daughter of a wealthy family.  Theirs is essentially a summer romance which is ultimately not strong enough to withstand the reality of their different outlooks and backgrounds. In parallel the story also explores assimilation and class issues in the emigrant Jewish community to which they both belong; and the dynamics of families.

In some ways Goodbye Columbus is a little dated – it’s easy to forget what a big deal sex outside of marriage was in the ’50s before the advent of contraception. But it’s still a really well written story, especially for a first-time author.  It describes beautifully the fragile and tentative beginnings of falling in love with someone, and the way this love is a creation of the lovers, talked into being and made more concrete than perhaps it is.  It also describes really well how people in a relationship can talk past one another and completely fail to communicate.  Neil Klugman is more likeable than many of Roth’s later male protagonists, and the thread of misogyny that runs through his other books is mostly absent from Goodbye Columbus.

The five short stories are also concerned with Jewish-American themes, but don’t sit well with the novella, I think because it isn’t possible to develop characters to the same extent in the space of a short story.

It’s worth reading just for Goodbye Columbus, which is thoughtful and satisfying, and shows Philip Roth’s talent as a writer.

Goodbye Columbus
Philip Roth
Penguin,1960

a mixed dozen

Granta is a British literary magazine, published quarterly.  It calls itself  ‘the magazine of new writing’ on a range of topics, and has been the first to publish many later well-known writers.

Granta 103, The Rise of British Jihad, has as usual several interesting pieces of writing and several to take or leave.  The cover story, by BBC journalist Richard Watson, is well worth reading (there’s an extract here).  He investigates the series of events, failures, poor decisions and mistakes  that allowed Britain’s indigenous terrorists to grow and develop.  Going back to the first Balkan war, Watson explores how young Muslim men in Britain became inspired to take part in jihad, ultimately leading to the London tube and bus bombings in 2005.  He also probes how MI5 made a pragmatic but ultimately fatal choice to ignore terrorist organisations to use the UK as a base so long as they were focused on targets elsewhere.  Watson’s piece is neutral and balanced – he makes no calls for heads on platters, but just allows the facts to tell the story.  There is a video interview with Watson here.

nine hours north

Adam has reached the last few weeks of a long stint teaching English in Japan.  Marianne, a friend of his girlfriend Sarah, arrives to begin a similar venture.  Adam gets a ‘thing’ for Marianne, begins to draw away from Sarah, becomes confused about who he is and what he wants.

You’ve read this story before, right?  It’s an old plot.  What is different about Nine Hours North and what made it so enjoyable for me is how sparse it is and how few words are needed to tell this old story in a way that makes is fresh and sweet again.  It’s almost a series of poems, each word carefully chosen, around 150 on each page with a title:

exult

What else can I do?
I run.  I shout.
I feel the rain
as it sticks to my shirt to my chest,
feel the tug of soggy denim on my thighs,
feel my head pushed under
the warm-rain waterfall of sky.

This hand-holding water birth,
this mad running baptism -
clutch at the hand that holds you in the rain
and feel the bliss course up
from the unlikeliness of city streets.

Everything short circuited.
All wires crossed,
all boundaries open,
all barricades torn down.

We breathe only in the gaps
between our screams.

We scream only in the gaps
between our laughter.

We laugh to fill the spaces
between every single raindrop.

At first I didn’t think this was going to work. I am not fond of authors who get tricksy with structure (see also diatribes against David Foster Wallace and Cloud Atlas) because I often suspect that it disguises a lack of content.  But in Nine Hours North it works beautifully.  It creates a distinctive voice for Adam and capture the fragility and gossamer of his attraction to Marianne, a thing that hardly exists because it can’t be expressed.  The story seems to ripple outwards from a single point, like a pebble dropped in a still pool.  The number of words there are exactly the number the reader needs to tell the story to themselves.

I really recommend reading this book and it’s easily the best fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Nine Hours North
Tim Sinclair
Published by Penguin

Disclaimer: I think I’ve met Tim Sinclair at one of seagreen‘s birthday shindigs but I didn’t remember this until I’d finished the book.  Tim Sinclair is also the author of the most amusing The Dog Ate My Serial.

consider the lobster

Ten essays by David Foster Wallace, on subjects ranging from US election to talk-back radio, via the porn industry, tennis and Dostoevsky.  There should have been something here to like, but unfortunately my opinion has been coloured by Wallace’s writing tics, which annoyed the bejeezus out of me. More on that later.

There are ten essays in the book, some more interesting than others.  Big Red Son is an account of attending the Adult Industry’s biggest trade show, which if you aren’t a customer of this industry (and even if you are) might tell you a thing or twenty you didn’t know.  Authority and American Usage is a lengthy book review of Brian Garner’s American Usage, a kind of bible of American English. It also examines and unpacks the ‘usage wars’ in a way that uncovers some hidden motives of both camps.  It’s a good essay if you’re a word nerd and/or a grammar Nazi.

The View From Mrs Thompson’s is an account of watching the events of 11 September 2001 unfold, from a small mid-West American town.  It’s the best piece in the book.  How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart unpacks sports biography, and tries to work out why people keep buying the genre even though its bland, uninteresting and unexceptional. 

Up, Simba is a piece that Wallace wrote for Rolling Stone about the Republican Primaries for the 2001 Presidential election. Wallace followed John McCain as he fought George W Bush for the nomination.  This was particularly interesting to read in the context of McCain;s loss to Obama last year.  It explains some of McCain’s appeal, and it also documents some mistakes that McCain made all over again in the Presidential race.

Wallace is known for his writing style: long multi-clause sentence, extensive use of footnotes, and abbreviations that he makes up himself.  The first and the last I can cope with.  The footnotes, some of which take up more than a page, and some of which have their own footnotes and then footnotes on the footnotes to the footnotes, made me want to throw the book across the room.  See, I was raised, so to speak, in a school of writing that follows these maxims:

• if it’s important enough to be in the text, it should be in the text, not in a footnote
• if you need a footnote to explain it, it’s either not as important to the text as you thought, or you need to explain it better
• footnotes are the work of Satan, they stuff up the formatting, they crash MS Word once there are more than about five of them in a document, and no-one reads them anyway.

So for many of these essays, I skipped the footnotes because, dammit, I want to read the story.  Essays are meant to be focused, disciplined pieces of writing.  The story is what should be important, not the author’s comic asides or little pokes to make sure that you heard the last comic aside three pages back, or digressions into other topics.  However, it seems Wallace has worked out that the footnotes annoy people like me, and came up with a way to make them even more annoying:  incorporate them into the text in boxes with arrows, like this (click to enlarge):

That’s where I did throw the book across the room.

I know Wallace is renowned for being inventive and innovative.  And that’s grand. But I don’t think that the ‘inventiveness’ in this book does anything to move the genre along, or adds anything to the reader’s understanding of the material.  If neither of those are being achieved, ‘inventiveness’ is only serving to dress up the material, which is often a cunning disguise for lack of content.

If you want to read David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction, I recommend seeking out articles that have been published in the MSM, not least because they will have been edited.  You could start here.

Consider the Lobster, and other essays
David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown