Non-fiction Archives -

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil

This book is a fantastically named sequel to his first, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR. The Singularity is moment at which our brains are able to meld with a computer, so we will – according to him – be able to be fantastically more intelligent. A bit like the leap from Neanderthal to today.

It’s a book absolutely bristling with ideas – I highlighted lots of it. Like, for example, do you know the odds of the sperm and egg meeting to make you was 1 in 2 million trillion? And then go back through all the people who had to meet and mate to produce your parents, to see how lucky you are to be alive. Even wilder, he talks about how many things had to go right for life to have emerged on earth at all; apparently it is the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.

He has lots of big ideas for the future – for example, for when nanotechnology will be able to print anything, because it will be able to assemble stuff at atom level. So lithium will no longer be precious; nor will diamonds. He believes the world is getting better (did you know deaths from war in prehistory were about 500/100K; now they are 4/100K, even counting nuclear weapons?), and will continue to get better quickly. He makes some good arguments, pointing out how unimaginable landing on the moon was in the early 1900s, when no one had even flown yet.

I struggled a lot with all this talk of the ‘one way march of progress.’ I see what he means, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I do. What about the fall of Rome? What about the dangers of AI? I hate to say it, but all this boundless optimism just said one thing to me, and that one thing was: boomer. I get it, your life has just been one long upward swing. Here’s fingers crossed for the rest of us.

THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki

Here is a book in which a journalist seeks out and interviews members of the court of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, immediately after he is deposed. This is not too easy, as they either dead or in hiding. He is mostly able to find the most junior servants. The guy whose job was to put the pillow under his majesty’s feet; the guy whose job was to clean up after his majesty’s dog; the guy whose job was to bow every hour on the hour, so the emperor could keep track of time passing. It’s an interesting picture of what power does to people. Some say that the interviews are a bit too on the nose, and that in fact the whole thing is a commentary on the dictatorship in Kapuscinki’s native Poland. I don’t know that it makes that much difference; one great truth in life is that one autocrat is much like another.

Particularly interesting was how Selassie lost power, in inches, to the military council named the Derg, which itself became a pretty robust dictatorship basically immediately. I have been to a museum about this in Addis, where they directly display some of what they dug up from mass graves of the period, including heart-breaking passport photos of hopeful students with enormous 70s hair who laid down their lives for a better Ethiopia. I’ve also been to Selassie’s palace, where you can see the his-n-hers bathroom set up he had (pink and blue) complete with bullet holes in the mirrors from when things got real at the end.

A sad and weird read.

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary. This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties). They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers. I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest.

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot. He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys. He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will.

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context. Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’. Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts. I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK. At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’. They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage. To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship! Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex. He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him. It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before.

THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

I’m apparently really into nautical non-fiction at the moment. THE WAGER, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, and now THE WIDE WIDE SEA. It’s the story of Captain Cook’s third and final (fatal) journey of exploration. He was all set to retire too, and no one really understands why he decided to go ‘one last voyage,’ given he was already famous and rich. How could he not see that there was virtually no way, narratively, this wasn’t going to go either tragic or disappointing?

The voyage had two goals, one to find the NorthWest Passage, and the other to return to this young man, Mai, to his home island of Tahiti. This second part was pretty interesting. Mai discovered guns at the business end – by being shot at -when the Europeans landed in Tahiti the first time. He was strongly, strongly in favour. His family had been killed by their enemies on Bora-Bora, and this guy, clearly a total baller, decided to play the long game, i.e., befriend the Europeans, get them to take him to Europe, get European guns, and come back to use them on these bastards from Bora-Bora. To understand his level of fury, let me tell you that apparently it was not uncommon for Bora-Borans to take the dead body of their enemies and “flatten the eviscerated corpse with clubs, then cut a hole through the abdomen, through which the triumphant warrior would insert his head to ‘wear’ his victim as a sort of macabre serape.”

Mai had been living in the UK for some years, mostly on country estates with the wealthy. He rarely visited towns, but when he did ‘the poverty and hunger he encountered while on brief visits to . . . upset him; he’d seen nothing like it in the land of tropical plenty that was Tahiti.” He was admired for his quick learning of English, and his freedom with the language; ice was ‘stone water,’ a wasp that stung him was a ‘solider bird.’ One day when offered snuff he politely replied ‘No thank you, the nose not hungry.’

When Cook finally drops him off, he struggles to reacclimatize of course, and the gun thing doesn’t really work out because the intra-island battles have moved on. The author, bizarrely, says a bunch of stuff about how sorry he is for Mai, who he feels is ‘doomed . . . to a jumbled, deracinated existence,’ because he has moved around so much and seen so much. Has this guy never been to London? About half the population are from elsewhere and I don’t note us all in despair at our jumbled lives.

I was interested to learn that Cook’s achievements were not just geographical but culinary. I knew scurvy was a bad disease, but did not realize that “ It was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition.” The causes of scurvy were not understood till the 1950s, but Cook dreamed up a diet for his sailors which prevented it – his first voyage was three years and they did not lose a single person to the illness, which made him famous and was a huge breakthrough for British imperialism.

Anyway, he ends up being killed by some locals on a beach in Hawaii. An interesting story.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann

I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go. I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes. The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann. Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow). He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE. You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no. As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.” However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence. My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”

I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs. Poor guy. He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe. At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull. Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc. Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring. But in any case, I had to quit. One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today. I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care.

LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused. It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII. They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic.

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war. But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on. She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS. She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about). She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!) I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in. One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’ Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her. She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes. She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days.

DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald

This book of personal essays was reviewed rapturously in the New York Times. I did not quite get it. You don’t need to have had an ‘interesting’ life to write interesting essays about that life. But this is not his problem – Fitzgerald does seem to have had an interesting life : Catholicism, bar work, porn work. And yet the essays were, for me at least, rather vanilla. It’s hard for me to imagine how you write a tame essay about your time in porn, but there you go, seems to have been done. I guess others loved this book, but it wasn’t for me.

TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park

Here are the deliriously wild real-life diaries of an English man’s solo effort to find the source of the Niger. He does not start off solo, but it goes that way pretty fast. In 1794 he is employed by some geographic association for the task, after the man who went before him “had fallen a sacrifice to the climate, or perished in some contest with the natives.”

He starts off from the Gambian coast, on foot. He meets a huge variety of people, and is an object of great interest. In many villages he spends hours taking on and off his coat for an audience who have never a white person, or a coat, before. In one village the women come in to find out from him if he is truly a man (!) and he volunteers to show ‘the youngest and prettiest one’ his penis. They find this hilarious.

I had always heard that one reason African people did not unite to fight off colonialisation is that they did not (understandably) immediately realize the threat, being too deeply involved in their own centuries-old conflicts. This book shows how that could be so, for a huge amount of it is about who is at war with who and what that means for Mungo. Also shockingly interesting is his estimate that only about one in four of the Africans he meets are free, the rest being slaves. (Apparently there were two levels, if you were a local, you had some rights, but if you were a foreigner you really had none)

Mungo gets robbed quite a bit, and eventually is actually imprisoned by some Arab nomads. He has more time than he wants to observe them, and notes that “ as (their) pastoral life does not afford full employment, the majority of the people are perfectly idle, and spend their day in trifling conversation . . .” WHERE DO I SIGN?

He also notes some pretty interesting female beauty standards: “A woman, of even moderate pretensions, must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm to support her, and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.” He saw young girls sit weeping over their food, being forced to eat until they vomited, so they could grow fat. Again, WHERE DO I SIGN.

This part is pretty bleak actually, as the translator (a 9 year old boy) calmly explains to him that his captors are debating between putting his eyes out and murdering him. Eventually he escapes with only the clothes he is wearing and his horse. He is lost and has no water. He lies down to die, first letting his horse go (as the last ‘act of humanity’ he will ever do); and then it starts to rain. He manages to meet some more people and is able to exchange buttons on his waistcoat for food. It is hair-raising. Eventually he makes his way back to the coast, never having got near the source of the Niger, but returning to a hero’s welcome all the same. On his return, impoverished journey, it is pretty sad to see how who mostly helped him are the poor. He is grateful to tears when an old slave woman gives him a handful of mush.

I expected quite a lot of old school racism, but more got this:

“Whatever difference there is between Negro and the European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature.”

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

Here is the true story of a man who camped in the woods, completely without human contact, for 27 years. I take it back: in the 1990s, apparently, a hiker said ‘hi’ to him.

This is a mind-boggling story. This guy from Maine, one year out of high school, leaves work one day and drives to Florida. Then he drives all the way back to Maine, past his childhood home, and keeps driving, deeper and deeper into the woods, until he runs of petrol. He puts the keys on the dash, and heads into the woods with nothing. And then he just doesn’t come out again.

I don’t want you to get the impression that he was there, wandering through glorious vistas and living off the land. He essentially found a small clearing, behind some rocks, that was minutes away from holiday homes, and just stayed there. All winter, he did not move. Even in summer, he only left to go steal necessities form the holiday homes. He just sat there, in this clearing, for 27 years. Once finally caught, police noticed how pale he was, and he accounted for this as follows: ‘I’m from the woods, not the fields.’ His main concern once police were in his camp seemed to be for his mushroom, that had grown from being coin-size to dinner-plate-size while he sat there. He apparently concluded he could not have a mammal pet, because he did not want to have to ever be forced to eat a pet.

This was a possibility, because every winter he got close to dying. He stole as much as he could in the summer, but it was hard to make it through the whole winter on that. He woke up every night at 2am to walk around so he didn’t freeze to death. And all the time there was a convenience store not 10 minutes away.

Probably the weirdest part of this whole story is that this guy does not seem to be crazy. In the woods he listened to the radio, and read books. After getting out of prison he went back to live with his family (who btw he did not tell that he was leaving). It just seems he did not much like human interaction, so he cut it out. He opted out.

He spent a lot of his time in the clearing apparently not fixing stuff, or reading, or whatever, but just sitting there. He cannot well describe it, but it is clear he had the experience of going out of himself. Because you don’t need a self when there is no one else to have a self for. He just listened to the wind and looked at the leaves. And then there was the pet mushroom.

I mean it does make you doubt your own choices. Somewhere the author quotes the line, attributed to Sophocles, of ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life,’ and I’ve been thinking about that.

THE WAGER by David Grann

A tale of shipwreck and cannibalism to at beat all stories of shipwreck and cannibalism. In 1742, thirty men wash up in Brazil in a makeshift open boat. They have travelled an astounding 5000kms up the coast of South America after being shipwrecked.

It is a totally astounding story. Their ship, the Wager, left the UK to go fight the Spanish. They had been desperate for sailors, so had pressganged anyone, and by anyone I include limbless invalids. They go down the coast of S America (“below the forties there is no low; below the fifties there is no god”). They are running out of food and have scurvy, so in addition to losing their teeth they are losing their minds. They shipwreck and about 140 of them make it onto a desert island, with the limbless ones drowning in their hammocks. The island has nothing much on it but seaweed, which is not so bad because at least it has Vitamin C in it so some sanity returns, but then they face the very real prospect of starving. It all goes on: manslaughter, cannibalism, and eventually mutiny. The captain has a mad plan to save them, so they go with the plan of the lowly gunner. 80 survive to get on the lifeboat, of whom 30 make it to Rio.

A few months after they arrive, 3 more make it: the captain’s mad plan did indeed fail, but then some local people agreed to walk them half way up the continent to the Spanish. On the outskirts of the city, a free Black British man who made it all this way, is kidnapped and enslaved: horrifying.

Then they make it back to Britain and there is much argument about who ate who and who mutinied when. What I found overall hilarious about this story was that a few days after the shipwreck the men were in fact found by some locals, who gave them food and tried to help. The men harassed the local women and tried to steal their boats. So the locals went away and left them to it. Can you IMAGINE? All of this was completely unnecessary. All they had to do was behave relatively normal around the locals and nobody would have had to get eaten! And still they could not do it. Colonialism was sometimes pretty intense.