My first order of books from Amazon, largely selected on the basis of recommendations from readers, has just arrived. A couple arrived a few days earlier, including Economical Writing by Deirdre McCloskey, which I have already read. Very enjoyable, though I can’t bring myself to accept her advice to abandon the “roadmap” para which ends the introduction to all my articles. Her view is that it’s meaningless until you’ve read the article, and useless once you have done so. I agree with this if you only read the article once. But I find this kind of para useful when rereading my own articles and those of others.

Anyway, thanks to all who made suggestions and a reminder that I’m always keen to get recommendations for reading on almost any topic.

This Salon review of horror flick 28 Days Later asserts that whereas

. the classic British dystopian sci-fi novels of J.G. Ballard and John Wyndham as influences, and they’re in there, all right …. [but] George A. Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy, specifically the underrated third entry “Day of the Dead,” is so closely emulated here that parts of “28 Days Later” feel like a shameless rip-off.

In fact, the plot, as described in the review, is a carbon copy of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (except with zombies instead of carnivorous walking plants). The film version of this was pretty lame as I recall, but the book was excellent.

My question is, can a film be a shameless ripoff of two completely different sources at the same time? I guess it can be if it takes the plot from one and the cinematography from another. I don’t think I’ll bother going to find out, though.

Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO by Gideon Haigh. It’s the latest Quarterly Essay and the first to cover an economic policy issue. Until now, the focus has been on the concerns of the cultural Left (environment, foreign policy, Aboriginal issues). QE encourages responses, and I’m going to submit one on managerialism in general. It’s long, so I’ve included it in the extended entry below. Comments from readers would be much appreciated.

I’m also reading Teach yourself Perl in 21 days by Laura Lemay. I’ve made numerous efforts of this kind over the years, with mixed outcomes. My most successful has been with HTML, also using Lemay’s books. I’m hoping that knowledge of Perl will enable me to improve my blog and even perhaps revive the lost comment threads of past incarnations.

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Jason Soon linked to Alan Woods’ review of Shiller’s The New Financial Order a little while ago, so I thought I’d post mine, published a couple of weeks ago in the Fin. I can’t resist bragging that Shiller said it was the best review of the book he had read. It’s much longer than my usual so I’ve put it in the extended entry below.

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The Harry Potter debate reminded my of Jonathan Franzen’s refusal to have his book The Corrections listed on Oprah’s Book Club. I thought I’d posted on this before and dug out this one from just before I left Canberra, which turned out to be mainly about coffee.

The house is all packed up except for the items we absolutely need for tonight and tomorrow – beds, a toaster and the Krups espresso machine. With a long trip ahead, a good cup of coffee will be even more vital than usual.

So I was fascinated to read this piece on a new image for “Mr. Coffee”, one of those 1970-vintage automatic coffee machines. In a nod to my favorite computer, they suggest calling it iCoffee, although there is no planned connection to the Internet.

This raises a couple of points. First, the problem is not the name but the mechanism. Given America’s status as the world’s leading consumer society, it’s startling that so few people there understand something as vital to civilisation as good coffee.

Second, as with anything about coffee in the US, the article can’t avoid mentioning Starbucks. The question I have is about the appropriate metaphor. Is Starbucks to coffee as Oprah Winfrey is to literature, a potential bridge from instant to the real thing. Or is Starbucks to coffee as Microsoft is to software, a ‘good enough’ monopolist that kills the competition and closes off the chance of anthing better?

Jason Soon links to killjoy Jenny Bristow who says

For all the original artificial hype of Potter’s literary qualities, it is self-evident that their readability, not their quality, is what made them popular with children. Yet while Enid Blyton was actively resisted by school libraries in the past, on the grounds that it might distract from the better quality stuff, Rowling’s equivalent has all but formed the basis of English exams.

Even when I was a kid I thought the librarian jihad against Enid Blyton was pretty stupid. I read heaps of her trashy Famous Five books when I was in primary school (she wasn’t banned in our library). It didn’t do me any harm or distract me from better stuff – as I recall I read the Penguin translation of the Odyssey in the same years, for example. (Jason’s account of his own reading habits suggests a similar range, from absolute trash like Agatha Christie to the classics).

But at least the librarians of my youth had the excuse that a censorious attitude was part of the culture. In fact, such were the many grounds of censorship, I was never quite clear whether the ban on Noddy was because
(a) Blyton wrote trash;
(b) The portrayal of the golliwogs was considered racist; or
(c) The relationship between Noddy and Big Ears was considered ambiguous
I thought we’d grown out of that kind of thing these days. But apparently, according to Bristow, the demise of the Blyton ban shows that ‘Our expectations of children have plummeted’. I’ll bet she reads romance novels on the sly.

The Pope’s Battalion’s: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split by Ross Fitzgerald. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I’m more sympathetic to Santamaria now than I was twenty-five years ago, which was about the end of his period as a politically influential figure. Still, reading this book reminds me how much there was to disagree with as well as to agree with in his thought and actions.

On the movie front, I’ve on a thematic kick and am looking at movies set in Brisbane or, more generally, in Queensland. So far in the last month or so, I’ve seen Swimming Upstream an autobiopic by Tony Fingleton, He Died with a Falafel in his Hand (claimed as) autobiopic by John Birmingham and Praise, a quirky but enjoyable film about an odd couple. When I lived in NQ I watched and enjoyed All Men are Liars, filmed in South Johnstone. Any further recommendations much appreciated.

I’m also thinking about trying to watch all the Oz movies with one-word titles, Praise, Proof, Innocence and Lantana come to mind from recent years, but there must be many more.

Keneth Miles (permalinks bloggered) reports that Lyndall Ryan has finally made a detailed reply to Keith Windschuttle’s attacks on her, conceding sloppy footnoting, but showing that she did indeed have evidence to back up the crucial claims on which Windschuttle based his claims of fabrication.

Also, at Surfdom, Chris Sheil reports on the Windschuttle vs Reynolds travelling circus. I gave my own take on the debate here. You can read ‘Gummo Trotksy’s take on Windschuttle’s ideas about the philosophy of science here.
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Linking to Ross Gittins’review of Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish, Ken Parish writes

The Buddha discovered this fundamental truth about happiness thousands of years ago, and not only about material possessions. All worldly striving and attachments, Buddha taught, are ultimately unsatisfactory. Happiness is transitory by nature.

But endemic human unhappiness and striving are the engines of growth and development, including in an intellectual and cultural sense. They have led us to decreasing levels of hunger, disease and malnutrition, as well as great discoveries in science and the arts.

Ken is right about this, but I don’t think this undermines Clive’s criticism of a system in which advertising and other social forces keep us permanently dissatisfied with our levels of material consumption.

Granted that striving is better than vegetative contentment, and even that there’s inherently nothing wrong with striving for more and better material possessions (I’m not sure Clive would grant this, but I will), it’s surely a problem when an entire society is premised on the assumption that everyone should be pursuing this limited and limiting goal. There may be nothing more noble in, say, striving for 10 000 unique visitors per day than in striving for a Ferrari, but at least I can feel that I’ve chosen the first goal for myself rather than having it foisted on me by the advertising industry. And some goals, for example curing diseases or saving the environment, are better than Ferraris or blog rankings.

For those of us who are “of a certain age”, it’s encouraging to read this piece presenting some evidence against the presumption that, in the words of GH Hardy, “mathematics is a young man’s game”. The gender part of this claim was debated a little while ago, in relation to the highly mathematized fields of economics and analytical philosophy. The age part of it is also interesting and is related, as Jordan Ellenberg points out to the idea that mathematical progress is a matter of huge intuitive leaps.

It’s striking that, whereas vast amounts of intellectual energy and research effort have been expended on determining whether gender differences in mathematical ability are biologically or socially determined, discussion about age differences is still at the level of casual conjecture. Since discussion is at this level, I’ll throw in the casual conjecture that age differences in research output and creativity are due at least as much to socially determined career structures, as to the biological effects of aging.