Factotum 

By Charles Bukowski

208 pages

Originally published Jan. 1, 1975

Factotum was one of three books the Mules read for our mid-July meeting at the Cigar Club. A semi-autobiographical novel about a wannabe writer and drunk, it is outside of the sorts of books our members enjoy reading, so I was surprised by the recommendation.

The Plot 

Henry Chinaski roams around from one fleabag hotel and city to another, barely understanding what is going on while attempting to support himself through mindless, poorly paid jobs. (Chinaski is Bukowski’s alter-ego. The character appears in five of his novels.)

There’s lots of drinking, smoking, and foul language, but there is virtually no forward movement among the characters. Still, I would recommend this book to anyone that hasn’t read Bukowski and to anyone that wanted to understand American prose in modern times.

What I Liked About It 

Bukowski’s prose. I’m a big fan of Hemingway. And I liked the way Bukowski takes Hem’s terseness and directness even farther… probably as far as prose can go while still retaining some poetic vibration.

What I Didn’t Like So Much 

Having to vicariously live the life of Henry Chinaski. This isn’t a fault of the story. Nor of Bukowski’s imagination. He wants the reader to live in that depressing, boring, unredeemable world in order to show him the little glints of light. But it’s viscerally uncomfortable.

About Charles Bukowski 

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) 

Charles Bukowski was born in Germany. When he was three, the family moved to the US.

As a struggling writer, he worked a wide range of jobs, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.

His writing often featured a depraved metropolitan environment, downtrodden members of American society, direct language, violence, and sexual imagery. His first book of poetry was published in 1959. He went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. (Source: Poets.org)

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity 

By Douglas Murray

288 pages

Originally published Sept. 17, 2019

I’ve heard Douglas Murray on the BBC. I’ve seen him in a few debates. And I’ve had The Madness of Crowds recommended to me by friends and colleagues. But until last week, I didn’t realize that Murray was the author. It was time to check it out. So, I ordered it on my audio app and began listening.

I’ve read (listened to) about half of it so far, and I’m feeling like it’s a well-spent investment of time. The Madness of Crowds is about, among other things, some of the extreme ideas that leftists are promoting about gender and sex. And yet, in Chapter One, I learned that Douglas Murray is a homosexual.

That has given his book an extra layer of interest for me. I want to find out how he deals with the gap between his political and social conservatism and the expectations that leftists have of him as a gay man.

It’s basically the same challenge that Black conservatives have when they talk about race or any topic that has racial associations, which is basically every topic today.

The Madness of Crowds is divided into four main sections, each a look at an identity group: Gay, Women, Race, and Trans. Murray makes a strong case that contemporary ideas about and attitudes towards each group have not been good – either for the groups themselves or for the community at large. He warns that the current practices of vitriol, cancellation, doxing (a form of cyberbullying), and other forms of and ideological persecution are fueled by identity politics. And they are growing fast. In a world gone mad with tribalism, he says, and with each tribe getting its information and inspiration from different sources, we must relearn how to accept and forgive.

Douglas Murray is smart and funny in a way that I associate with my old-fashioned view of things. His arguments are, to my mind, solid. But they are delivered, as one critic put it, with such lively, razor-sharp prose that I would want to believe them even if I didn’t.

Critical Reception 

The Madness of Crowds was a bestseller and “book of the year” for The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK, but it received varying reviews from critics.

Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph praised the book, calling Murray “a superbly perceptive guide through the age of the social justice warrior.” Katie Law in the Evening Standard said that Murray “tackled another necessary and provocative subject with wit and bravery.” Writing for the Financial Times, Eric Kaufmann said that he “performs a great service in exposing the excesses of the left-modernist faith.”

Conversely, William Davies in The Guardian was highly critical, describing the book as “the bizarre fantasies of a rightwing provocateur, blind to oppression.” And in The Times Literary Supplement, Terry Eagleton likened it to “a history of conservatism which views it almost entirely through the lens of upper-class louts smashing up Oxford restaurants.”

About Douglas Murray 

Douglas Kear Murray is a British author and political commentator. He has been a contributor to The Spectator since 2000 and has been Associate Editor at the magazine since 2012. He published his first book, a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (the lover of Oscar Wilde), at the age of 19, while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Since then, he has published three more books on politics, history, and current affairs, including the award-winning bestseller The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.

Here’s a clip of him talking about the connection between post-modern theory and woke thinking today.

In the Heart of the Sea:

The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex 

By Nathaniel Philbrick

302 pages

Originally published May 8, 2000

Storytellers have used real-life events as inspiration going back to the beginning of history. Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel about an elusive and dangerous whale, for example, was partly based on a real-life Sperm Whale: Mocha Dick. Named for the island of Mocha in Chile, where it was first spotted, it eluded whalers for decades before being killed in 1839. A first-person account of Mocha Dick’s demise was published in 1839 in The Knickerbocker (a literary magazine). Subtitled “The White Whale of the Pacific,” it was a story that Melville almost certainly read. Click here.

Another source that Melville drew upon was the tragic story of the whaleship Essex, chronicled by Nathaniel Philbrick in his book In the Heart of the Sea.

It was the book of the month for the Mules, recommended by founding members BS and CA. (The two of them are probably responsible for more book recommendations than all the other members put together. We don’t formally acknowledge that because we like to believe that the club is equitable and inclusive. But I suspect that, like every other social and political organization, the Mules is secretly run by a Deep State, of which these two are deeply ensconced.)

It was quite a good recommendation. Full of information about whales and the whaling life. But it was also a book that made you stop and think every several pages about the possibilities and limits of human courage and endurance. It is hard to read it without having to confront the fact that we are all much softer than men and women were back then.

The Story 

In 1820, the whaleship Essex is rammed and eventually sunk by what appears to be an angry Sperm Whale. As the ship sinks, the captain and crew desperately provision three small whaleboats for what will turn out to be 90 terrible days at sea.

Widely reported and discussed in the media at the time, the wreck of the Essex was, for the 19th century, as big a story as was the sinking of the Titanic a century later.

Critical Reception 

In the Heart of the Sea was on the NYT bestseller list for 40 weeks. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2000.

* “Scrupulously researched and elegantly written, In the Heart of the Sea is a masterpiece of maritime history. It would have earned Melville’s admiration.” (W. Jeffrey Bolster, New York Times)

* “One of our country’s great adventure stories.” (Wall Street Journal)

* “[Told] with verve and authenticity… a classic tale of the sea.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow 

By Yuval Noah Harari

448 pages

Originally published in 2015

The first book of Harari’s that I read was Sapiens. I loved it. It’s one of those books that gives pleasure on almost every page. And there are 448 pages. In it, Harari takes readers on a tour of the history of Homo sapiens (intelligent humans), divided into four periods:

1. The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, when imagination evolved in Homo sapiens)
2. The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture)
3. The Unification of Humankind (c. 34 CE, the gradual consolidation of political organizations towards one global empire)
4. The Scientific Revolution (c. 1543 CE, the emergence of objective science)

I next read Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which seems to be a collection of clever but somewhat random ideas he had about the state of the world that he wanted to get down on paper. That book was solid, but not great.

With Homo Deus, Harari is back to his strength. As the subtitle cleverly suggests, it is a wide-ranging commentary about all the amazing things that are happening today, with a brief history of how they came about (mostly taken from Sapiens) and a look at what they will look like in the future. And “the future,” as he reminds us, could be next month.

His central argument is that it took millions of years for apes to evolve into Homo sapiens via the tedious mechanism of evolution through natural selection, and that has changed. Natural selection is being replaced by machine learning, AI, and other forms of intelligent design that are much faster (and become geometrically faster every year). Homo sapiens’ next stage of development – the “Homo deus” of the title – will be taking on the characteristics that traditional societies attributed to gods.

With the recent developments in AI technology, this book couldn’t be a more timely read. A question it is trying to answer: What effect will it have on the world?

For example:

* What will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves?

* What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”?

* Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions, rather than just novel gadgets?

Critical Reception 

I didn’t know this when I read Sapiens, but Harari is generally thought poorly of in academic circles. In preparing this review, I read a few such critiques and they were sort of obnoxiously dismissive.

For example, from Christopher Robert Halpike on Sapiens in 2020: “One has often had to point out how surprisingly little [Harari] seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.”

And on July 22, 2022, Current Affairs published “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” an article arguing that his books were short on scientific proof: “The bestselling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with error.”

Here’s What I Think 

Academics don’t like Harari because he understands and exposes their game of branding ideas that don’t support their leftist views as unscientific and factually inaccurate. What they really mean is: “Don’t even bother to read Harari. You may find him interesting, but his books will damage you. And you and your children will stop believing in all the bullshit we’ve been paid to teach and write about.”

About Yuval Noah Harari 

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and bestselling author. (His books have sold 45 million copies in 65 languages.) Currently a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals.

Click here to watch him speaking about Homo Deus.

Your Next (First?) Cormac McCarthy Novel

Reading the mailbag responses from Friday’s issue, I was surprised that some readers had never read anything by McCarthy and asked me for suggestions.

It’s difficult to do that because of how varied his books are in terms of complexity, literary style, and plot points.

Usually, I recommend The Road to readers that have never read McCarthy because the plot is straightforward, the characters are limited, and the size of the book is relatively small. For me, The Road is to McCarthy readers what The Old Man and the Sea is to Hemingway readers.

In any case, if you haven’t read McCarthy, and want to try one of his books, I found this “cheat sheet” by Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post. Click here.

How to Improve Your Understanding of Everything 

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) 

They say the best way to learn is to teach. Because teaching something you think you understand will help you understand how much you really don’t know.

That’s been true for me – from trying to teach Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady Sonnets” when I was in graduate school, to teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu students how to gain top position with the “scissors sweep,” to teaching apprentice copywriters how to craft emotionally compelling sales letters.

The idea that it’s easy to think you know something you don’t know was a favorite topic of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who made important contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics, particle physics, quantum computing, and nanotechnology.

Notwithstanding his amazing accomplishments as a scientist, he said the thing he most enjoyed was teaching students about the art of learning while he was a lecturer at Cornell and Caltech. He believed that anyone with ordinary intelligence could learn the most complex subjects “as long as he/she was willing to study hard.”

And he developed a system for that. Learning specialists call it “the Feynman Technique.” If your curiosity dog is not too old to learn new tricks, you’ll enjoy reading about it here.

“Why should we consider the soul mortal?”

From Diaries of Note, an interesting entry by Wanda Gág, an author and artist who, in 1928, published Millions of Cats, a bestselling children’s book. Twenty years earlier, when she was 22, she wrote this entry about an ongoing discussion she was having with Adolph Dehn, a fellow art student at the Minneapolis School of Art, on the intersection of science and religion in trying to understand the mortality or immortality of the human soul. What I found enjoyable about it was not so much the reasoning (which seemed appropriate for a serious 22-year-old thinker) but the gentleness of her feelings towards both the argument and Mr. Dehn.

Click here.

“Some Monstrous Gullet Suffocating with Fury”

I came across this entry in Diaries of Note. It was written by Pierre Loti, a French naval officer, novelist, and diplomat. He wrote it in 1889 while on a diplomatic mission to Fez, Morocco. It’s the kind of journal entry I would like to be able to write every day. Alas, my life is too ordinary and my imagination is too mundane.

Click here.

The Trial 

By Franz Kafka

Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925

176 pages

May’s book selection for The Mules was The Trial by Franz Kafka. We don’t often read classics, but I’m always happy when we do. In some cases, I get to read an important book that I’ve never read. If I’ve read it already, it’s even better. Classic books are classics for a reason. You can’t possibly get all they offer in a single read.

Prior to this, I had read only one book by Kafka: Metamorphosis. (I think it was assigned in college.) But if ever The Trialcame up in conversation, I’m sure I would have pretended to have read it. Even in high school, I was well aware that reading Kafka – and these two novels in particular – was de rigueur for anyone that wanted to present himself as well read.

I’m not sure how to describe The Trial. It reminded me a bit of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In both books, the protagonist is involved in the criminal justice system. In both, there is a good deal of philosophical consideration that carries along just under the action. Both Kafka and Dostoevsky have an ability to present a dark, almost fatalistic, view of the world in an unsettling but comic way.

But The Trial also reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett’s plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, etc.) in its soporific pace, simplicity of language, and absurdist point of view. I found myself thinking, “Okay, I get it,” after the second chapter. I almost stopped reading. But, first, I decided to watch Orson Welles’s rendition of the story on film. And I’m glad I did. It was mesmerizing and sent me back into the book with the energy to finish it.

The Plot 

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K, the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. Josef is not imprisoned, however, but left “free” and told to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

The rest of the book is like a bad dream. For the protagonist, things go steadily from bad to worse.

The Themes 

We didn’t spend much if any time on the plot. The plot, in any good absurdist or existential novel, is not the point. Our conversation was all about the themes that presented themselves continually in the reading of the book and then came back to haunt the reader after putting it down.

At one level – the most basic, I think – The Trial is about the endless tyranny of bureaucracy. But it is also very much about the existential dilemma of being human in a nihilistic, post-Enlightenment, post-religious world, where finding meaning in life is impossible, unless one can find meaning in nothingness. (An idea that Sartre, among other existentialists, made a fair case for.)

A major theme of the book, which I was surprised most of the Mules didn’t recognize, was guilt – the result of man’s original sin: being born with a self-reflective consciousness and having to deal with its constant reminders of his weaknesses and failures.

Okay, I’ll stop here. I was hoping to give you a sense of how many interesting and potentially pompous topics The Trialcould lend to any philosophical conversation, as it did to ours that evening.

Here is what I need to say. The Trial is, as advertised, a great book. Not great in the sense of “I really enjoyed reading it,” but great in the sense of “If you want to experience why Kafka is considered so important by so many smart people, you have to read it.”