what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Things go Up..and Down...and round-about

 A lot of clever people have devoted a lot of intellectual effort to suggest that all novels can be reduced to 6-7 basic plots which are all variants of the rags to riches story. As usual, visuals say it all much more clearly and noone recounts it better than the sadly-missed Kurt Vonnegut who gave this hilarious short presentation (with spanish sub-titles) to demonstrate that the basic plots narrate how things go up and down.

His vertical axis measures good and bad outcomes; and the horizontal one time.

I won't give a spoiler to what is a fantastic presentation – suffice to say that Hamlet and a poor teenage orphan both figure in the plot outlines!

Regular readers know that one of the things this blog tries to do is to map recent intellectual history – that's one the reasons for the long annotated bibliographies which crop up in the posts.

So an obvious question is whether similar patterns can be identified in non-fiction books.

And a review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books alerted me to a book - namely Robert Shiller's “Narrative Economics – how stories go viral and drive economic events” (2019) - which explores how people have tried to make sense of what was happening to the economy – be it inflation, monopoly, boom and bust, inequality, automation, bubbles, or austerity.

With Vonnegut as inspiration, it didn't take me long to work out that non-fiction books also have plots and narratives. Things go up and down - and the authors spend most of their time describing why and how this has happened – with a few pages on what those in power should be doing to bring things back up again......Books about global warming will now add a comment about what the ordinary citizen should be doing....

And, of course, a note of panic has been discernible since the new millennium – just look at the titles - “The Long Descent”, “Extinction”, “The End of Progress”, “Requiem for a Species”, “Collapse”, “The Five Stages of Collapse”.

So most of the Vonnegut-type graphs slope downwards these days – only the likes of Stephen Pinker will have upward-sloping curves, with Branko Milanovic's Elephant curve being a complex outlier.

Update; I have just come across what looks a wonderful compendium of Vonnegut's writing Pity the Reader – on writing with style; Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell (2019)

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