Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2014

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Stephen King, Eyes of the Dragon

Mind candy. I really liked it when I was a boy, and on re-reading it's not been visited by the Suck Fairy, but I did come away with two thoughts. (1) I'd have been very interested to see what a writer with drier view of political power would have done with the story elements (the two princes, the evil magician, the exiled nobles) — Cherryh, say, or Elizabeth Bear. (2) Speaking of which, it's striking how strongly King's fantasy books (this one, The Dark Tower) buy into the idea of rightfully inherited authority, when his horror stories are often full of healthy distrust of government officials ("the Dallas police"). I don't think he'd say that being electorally accountable, rather than chosen by accident of birth, makes those in power less trustworthy...

Charles Tilly, Why?

Tilly's brief attempt to look at reason-giving as a social act, shaped by relations between the giver and receiver of reasons, and often part of establishing, maintaining, or repairing that relationship. He distinguished between reasons why involved cause-and-effect and those which use a logic of "appropriateness" instead, and those which require specialized knowledge and those which don't. "Conventions" are common-knowledge reasons which are invoke appropriateness, not causal accounts. (Think "Sorry I'm late, traffic was murder".) "Stories" give causal explanations which only invoke common knowledge. Tilly is (explicitly) pretty Aristotlean about stories: they involve the deeds of a small number of conscious agents, with unity of time, place, and action. Codes are about matching circumstances to the right specialized formulas and formalities --- are your papers in order? is the evidence admissible? Technical accounts, finally, purport to be full cause-effect explanations drawing on specialized knowledge.

The scheme has some plausibility, and Tilly has lots of interesting examples. But of course he has no argument that these two dimensions (generalist vs. specialist, causation vs. appropriateness) are the only two big ones, that everything (e.g.) the "codes" box really does act the same way, etc. So I'd say it's worth reading to chew over, rather than being deeply illuminating.

Elliott Kay, Rich Man's War

Sequel to Poor Man's Fight, continuing the same high standard of quality mind-candy. (No Powell's link because currently only available on Amazon.)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Yet another deserved classic read only belatedly. Volume I is actually about de Tocqueville's observations on, and ideas about, democracy in America. This is interesting, mostly empirical, and full of intriguing accounts of social mechanisms. (I see why Jon Elster is so into him.) Volume II consists of his dictates about what democracy and social equality will do to customs and character in every society. This is speculative and often the only reference to America comes in the chapter titles. (I see why this would also appeal to Elster.)

I would dearly like to find a good "de Tocqueville in retrospect" volume. Some of his repeated themes are the weakness of the Federal government, the smallness of our military, the absence of serious wars, the relative equality of economic condition of the (white) population, the lack of big cities among us. So how have we managed to preserve as much democracy as we have? For that matter, how does the civil war and its outcomes even begin to make sense from his perspective?

&madash; Rhetorical observation: de Tocqueville was very fond of contrasts where democracy leads to less dispersion among people than does aristocracy, but around a higher average level. He either didn't have the vocabulary to say this concisely, or regarded using statistical terms as bad style. (I suspect the former, due to the time period.) He was also very fond of paradoxes, where he either inverted directions of causal arrows, or flipped their signs.

Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Literary fiction about Seattle, motherhood, marital collapse, aggressively eccentric architects, and Antarctica. Very funny and more than a bit touching.