The Signal and The Noise

The Signal and The Noise
(Nate Silver, 15:54)
Bayesian deliciousness. Sharp exposition, with a highly reliable account of how to not be numbed by numbers.

Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla : Biography of a Genius

(Marc Seifer,  22:17)

A blazing start, and an ending so painful it literally felt as if Tesla was driven to incarnate Dostoevsky's Underground Man. The biography covers a great deal of his creations, although never at a level of technicality that could deceive the reader into feeling they actually understand what his work accomplished. The most acutely embarrassing dimension of Tesla's life was his dependency upon JP Morgan, with whom he signed contracts giving 51% control over significant patents. Morgan came to the conclusion that Tesla was not a profit-engine (primarily because of his tendency to over-promise, but also because of his pretension to be able to completely overthrow Edison, in whom Morgan had substantial investment). Once that moment occurred, Tesla engaged in such futile behavior as to debase himself with the aim to guilt-trip Morgan, a man without the capacity for feeling guilt. The last third was very hard to finish, but somehow, I made it to the bitter end, when Tesla was living alone in the Hotel New Yorker, viewed by most who saw him as a mad man devoted solely to late night peregrinations and pigeon feeding. Sad in so many ways.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama: A Retrospective

(Achim Borchardt-Hume,  Nicholas Serota, Mark Godfrey, Gerhard Richter; 288pp)

Beautiful book, interesting life. Best quote: "A fresh start like that is a kind of ritual, with its own order, mixing the colours, finding the right hues, the smell, all these things foster the illusion that this is going to be a wonderful painting. And then that moment of defeat, when I see that it's just not working.  That's what's going to happen here. Tomorrow, I'll try again." (p16) Another revealing biographical detail (on p86) discussed art's "fascist longings" (Susan Sontag's term), and Richter's decision "not to treat his clouds like this, but only ever to realise paintings at a scale relating to individual viewers... shows Richter's resistance to this pull, and his commitment to working on the human scale."

Hallucinations

Hallucinations
(Oliver Sacks, 9:55)
A pleasure, although it's all but impossible for Sacks to cover new neurological ground. Instead of providing a completely new vista, Sacks writes quite personally about his own drug use, for example, in his open discussion of the dependency he developed for sleeping pills. The addiction triggered hallucinatory withdrawal reactions; although that's interesting, the acid trips that Ollie went in for while it was still legal (starting in '63) are even more fascinating. Sacks apparently tripped almost every weekend, while hanging out with people around Venice Beach.

Jpod

Jpod
(Douglas Coupland, 9 CDs)
Very funny, even though the meta-structural posturing occasionally bumps its own head. Also, the lists, which index long arcane category errors, is not well-suited to audio, since the mass on the page is presumably what Coupland was aiming for. The story focuses on a group of game design employees assigned to a cubicle pod because their last names all start with J. The book etches with great clarity the soul-sucking slow death that comes with doing "knowledge work" under bosses who have neither the knowledge nor interest to supervise with intelligence. Coupland's superb at formulating little maxims of humorous insight; my favorite: "Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise, isn't it? Most of us can't handle a structureless life." (p175) I didn't object to the fact that the narrator collides with a hateable incarnation of the actual author, although I don't know that it tickled me either.

Cheever

Cheever
(Blake Bailey, 29:44)
I picked this up once I learned that Philip Roth had chosen Bailey to be his own biographer. I've read Cheever's stories, and I wasn't the target demographic. His life, a hot mess, is quite a thing to behold. The narcissism and loneliness he exuded, combined with his repressed homosexuality and alcoholism, give the biographer much to work with. He gave love to his young children, but in a selfish way that failed to connect deeply with their true persons. His prodigious verbal gifts are well captured in an anecdote from Yaddo, where someone thought he'd heard Cheever reading aloud from a book, and turned to see that it was just the man talking.

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

(Suze Rotolo, 384 pp)

Delightful, yet elusive, this book captures the moment when Dylan was becoming Dylan. There's subtle indications of who Ms. Rotolo herself was, but she's not a great writer, although it must be admitted she was an astonishing looker as she walked in the snow for that fateful album cover.