Breakfast of Champions

I decided to quickly breeze through this one because I just saw Alan Rudolph's cinematic version.  Though the film was a complete commercial flop it actually had some interesting elements that reminded me of things like Fear and Loathing and Schizopolis.  I can't say it was a great movie, but it was kinda entertaining, and this is exactly how I would describe the novel as well. It's certainly not one of Vonnegut's best.  It's too scattered and indulgently meta-fictional to not feel a bit like a well know writer trying to come up with just anything to publish.  But it's also got a few great laugh-out-loud moments that only the non-author of "Wear Sunscreen" could have come up with. 

The Anomaly

Thanks for this one goes to another esteemed colleague from Tejas, Dr. Maddog, who recently suggested that I might find Hervé Le Tellier's novel interesting.  And while I'm not sure describing it as a "novel' is completely accurate (Le Tellier called it a scoubidou of short stories), I definitely enjoyed and would recommend the book.  The plot centers on the gradual revelation of the eponymous anomaly, and there's little point in discussing it without giving away the central conceit.  However, part of the pleasure of the story lies in initially knowing nothing about how it's structured, so ...

SPOILER ALERT

The anomaly is a duplicated plane together with all its passengers.  Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York lands in March, and then an identical flight literally falls out of the sky again in June.  Accordingly, the novel is broken into three parts -- the stories of the various passengers before the anomaly has been revealed to them, the comic relief provided by the deep state machinations that bring the two sets of passengers together once the anomaly is discovered, and the aftermath of this strange duplication.  The first part is an interesting stylistic exercise because each character's story is told through the lens of a particular type of genre fiction (ie. thriller, drama, sci-fi, psychological novel, etc ...).  It makes for a very fast paced and interesting way of setting up what we gradually see coming -- something about the flight they took back in March unites these otherwise unrelated and unsuspecting characters.  It's a neat trick on Le Tellier's part because introducing so many characters so quickly might otherwise have left us confused and bored rather than off-balance but intrigued.  The second part, as I say, is mostly comic relief.  Imagine Douglass Adams or Mel Brooks describing the Deep State tripping over itself in an effort to contain such an anomalous event.  The third part is naturally the most interesting bit, since it explores the classic literary theme of the double or doppelgänger.  Here, Le Tellier pursues the main metaphor that guides our interpretation of the anomaly -- it lends credence to Nick Bostrom's version of the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation.  Many folks don't think about the connection between this modern version of the double (or n-tuple) and the long tradition of thinking about twins, though, as Le Tellier makes clear, he is not one of them.  Modern simulation believers tend to treat the hypothesis as a scientific one, when in fact its main function -- reiterated from mythology down to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche -- is ethical.  And this is clearly what the third part of the novel is all about.  What exactly would you learn from meeting your double? 

What most simulation hypothesis adherents fail to understand is that a duplication of identity in time and space meant to prove that there is a glitch in the matrix can never be a physical fact.  But thinking about such a duplication has long served as a lens with which to examine our concept of identity and our notion of reality.  This has been true ever since the Buddha compared the body to a lump of foam and consciousness to a magic trick.  The prehistory of this idea that there is something illusory about reality basically encompasses all of history.  The modern simulation hypothesis is amusing because it simultaneously taps into the deep root of this intuition, at the same moment that it betrays it.  Because the simulation is based on analogy to the contemporary computer, we immediately assume that it must be run by some programmer and on some hardware. These seem to be the necessary correlates of the idea that we are nothing but software.   Inevitably, this analogy leads directly to the establishment, explicit or not, of a concept of "base" reality composed of both an ideal base 'knower' and a material base 'known'. 

But of course this concept is nonsense; the materialist philosophy this concept relies on is self-contradictory, and there's no way we could ever know if we were in base reality  By contrast, just about any experience can suggest to us that we are a sort of simulation.  The encounter with a double obviously provides an extreme example because the individual identity we all subjectively feel literally provides the model for our very concept of identity. If there can be more than one me, then I am immediately forced to rethink my innate conviction that I am a unique, atomic, self-existent entity and consider a world that is capable of producing multiple copies of my self.  This is why we reach so naturally for the simulation hypothesis in this instance.  

Notice though, what's actually happening here.  We are simply perceiving two of the 'same' thing.  But this very act implies some sort of consciousness that the things are not the same, otherwise we would not say that there are two of them.  To be exactly the same, they would have to perfectly overlap in space and time and not just in DNA and personality as Le Tellier's characters do.  In which case we would not perceive two separate things but a single one.  Perceiving two things that are 'the same' is hardly the stuff of science fiction though.  It's our most commonplace experience.  We are constantly fabricating the identity of all things when what we are given is ceaseless flux.  When we say that we see two of something it's a sort of shorthand -- we take it for granted that if we look more carefully, we'll find these things differ in some way, and that we can later go on to specify how the two distinct sets of phenomena were similar enough to treat as the same for certain purposes.  In other words, embedded within the very concept of repetition is the notion that the identity of things are constructed, that the solidity of objects is not innate but depends on context, and that our perception of reality is changeable.  These are all observations that most everyone would agree with but that we all constantly overlook in everyday experience.  The power of the anomaly lies in the way it forces these truths on us by showing us they apply even to the one thing we think cannot be constructed -- our self.  But in principle, every experience can be anomalous.  Indeed, we might think of our brain's main job as to avoid seeing every experience as anomalous so as not to be overwhelmed by it.  But take some drugs or sit very still for a long time and watch the way your perception changes.  All of our experience and all of the things in it are constructed, fabricated, and hence empty.  The only thing you need to do to observe this is watch.  So the world that is capable of producing multiple variations of me is not some post-human hyper-technoligcal simulation, but this very world, which is already in itself a sort of simulation, a "star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream".

So naturally, this brings us to the question of what we can learn from the shock of meeting our double and seeing our reality and our identity as a construction.  The answer is probably obvious -- we can, if we choose, imagine reconstructing it some other way.  The theme of duplication constantly illustrates a world of possible variation.  Whether due to chance or wisdom, we could be different.  This is often the central point in doppelgänger stories like Dostoevksy's The Double or Notes from Underground where the hero is poised on a knife edge of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement, or Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where the author's recreation of the Quixote is, "verbally identical, but ... almost infinitely richer".  And it is certainly the deeper significance of Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return.  We have lived this exact moment before, indeed innumerable times before, down to its finest details of feeling and motivation.  But what exactly is this moment that we are reliving?  And is our awareness that it is being re-lived a source of joy or the greatest weight?  The answers, according to Le Tellier, vary.  Some of us love our double as ourselves (Slimboy), and some of us need divorce proceedings (Lucie).  Some of us make a change (André) and some of us repeat the same sorrow (David).  And if we look carefully in the mirror, we'll probably find that most of us go through all of these emotions every single anomalous day. 

Built From Broken

I think someone from GMB must have recommended Scott Hogan's no-nonsense guide to keeping the body running.  Since our library had a copy I perused it very quickly and found it quite interesting.  While I haven't double-checked any of the references and investigated the quality of the studies Hogan cites, it does appear to live up to its subtitle: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.  The focus throughout is not on how to build the most muscle mass or train for any specific sport, but on what really counts as we get older -- the ability to maintain a wide range of motion in a variety of circumstances.  Hogan provides some scientific backing to an empirical conclusion I had already arrived at; this basically comes down to how well your joints and connective tissue function.  So what we really need to train is joint health.  

Coming at fitness from this slightly different angle doesn't necessarily imply a huge change in the exercises we do.  The book is filled with pretty standard looking stuff.  But knowing what the prime target is, and knowing something about the way joints differ from muscles in their response to training, can definitely change how we do many of these exercises.  The takeaway isn't earth shattering nor terribly different from the approach GMB constantly cultivates.  We want to move more often, with greater attention to the details of our exercise, through a greater range of motion (with perhaps a lighter load), and above all, more slowly (especially in the eccentric phase).  In addition to explaining why these principles are important to our joints and giving us a list of exercises, Hogan describes a 4 week workout program that includes an interesting periodization.  Though the exercises stay the same, each week is devoted to a specific goal like "connective tissue remodeling", "hypertrophy", "strength", and "endurance plus energy loading".  The changing goals correspond to changes in not only sets and reps and weights, but in how we perform the exercises.  Since I just finished the book, I can't comment on how effective this workout program is for healing painful joints and preventing injury, but it sounds plausible and I'm eager to give it a shot.

The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.