Strolls With Scrolls

O. Von Corven (19th century), The Great Library of Alexandria

Alan Jacobs: “I encourage you all to read this really thoughtful essay by Steven Poole” on Kurzweil-style human enhancement in the bionic run-up to the Singularity.

Also worth reading: “Et cetera”, Poole’s ongoing series of cleverly-stitched theme-with-variations essayistic roundups of nonfiction books , in the Review section of the Saturday edition of the Guardian (Poole also, as it happens, reviews Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom in today’s TLS).

From the review by Poole of A Brief History of Encyclopedias, by Andrew Brown:

“The winner of the prize for the most quasi-Borgesian taxonomies must be the early 16th-century French savant Textor, who provides ‘sections on men who smelt bad, various types of haircut, arguments drawn from the impossible, different kinds of excrement, descriptions of a long time and a list of various types of worms’. It makes Wikipedia seem terribly dull by comparison.”

Here he is ventriloquising the author of Screw Business as Usual, Richard Branson:

“Some people talk about Capitalism 2.0, but my vision is huger: we need Capitalism 24902. (That’s the circumference of the Earth, in miles!) Just look at my Mates condoms, which funded HIV awareness, or my Virgin Unite charitable arm. But it’s not just about me. Consider the success of microfinance, Virgin Mobile, eco-groceries, Virgin Active health clubs, green energy companies, Virgin Media, virtual-education startups, and Virgin Atlantic! My close friends Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Peter Gabriel, the Queen, and Buddha all agree with me. You can do good and profit at the same time! Get to work! (Psst: want to open a bank account?)”

From a review of The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, Volume II edited by Robert B. Silvers, founding editor (along with the late Barbara Epstein) these last 50 years of the NYRoB:

“Best line of creative writing feedback comes from Elizabeth Hardwick, whom Darryl Pinckney remembers encouraging her students by saying: ‘I’d rather shoot myself than read that again.’ I have noted that for use in a future book review.”

Poole again, reviewing Satisfaction Not Guaranteed by the social historian Peter Stearns:

“Given the enormous advances over the last few centuries in agriculture, medicine, education and so forth, this author asks, why aren’t we happier in our ‘modern condition’?

“The ‘satisfaction gap’, Stearns argues, arises from various factors not yet eliminated by modernising forces (major stressors such as war) or actually created by them: the disorienting effects of constant change; the monstrous hegemony of clock time; the cruel injunction to be happy; meaningless and oversupervised work in modern jobs; medicalised death; anxiety over ‘correct’ child-rearing; and the inability of shopping really to help. The book is dry but interestingly nuanced, encouraging us to see our flawed modernity as a ‘work in progress’. In Victorian times, Stearns relates, ‘Nervous middle-class people now learned that having sex too often, possibly more than once a week, could induce premature death or insanity.’ One hopes that at least they yawned a lot,”

that last desideratum (Why don’t you come to your senses? Thank you, Eagles, that will be quite enough) arising from the previous book assayed in Poole’s omnibus review, Curious Behavior, whose author, Robert R. Provine, notes that “sneezing and yawning … can provide ‘satisfaction’ (yawning apparently can even trigger orgasm in some people: try this at home) – which is just as well, since little else in life today does.”