Manny > Recent Status Updates

Mon dieu, this book certainly doesn't waste any time getting started.

We recently watched the 2022 movie version, so I thought I would reread the original. Surely that many things couldn't have been changed?

No doubt people will say I'm sexist, ageist and nationalist. But if you're going to film a book set in a 1930s German boy's boarding school, why would you ask a young Swedish woman to direct it?! This just doesn't make sense.

Une femme de trente-cinq ans, à l'âge des grandes passions violentes, qui conserverait seulement un rien de la mièvrerie caressante de ses amours de vingt ans, qui ne comprendrait pas qu'elle doit s'exprimer autrement, embrasser autrement, qu'elle doit être une Didon et non plus une Juliette, écœurerait infailliblement neuf amants sur dix, même s'ils ne se rendent compte des raisons de leur éloignement.

Elle appelait le premier le « Capitaine Fracasse » et le second « Mouton Fidèle »; elle finit par faire de celui-ci une sorte d'esclave attaché à ses pas, dont elle usait comme d'un domestique.

Elle eût bien ri si on lui eût dit qu'elle l'aimait.

As with every time I read Maupassant, I have trouble accepting the fact that this was apparently written by a man. ChatGPT-5.5 suggests that his mother was a strong formative influence, and that "fuck the Patriarchy" might be rendered into late nineteenth century French as "À bas la tyrannie des hommes !" or "Qu’ils aillent se faire foutre, tous ces messieurs !"

Usually I avoid reading books in translation when I have any chance of being able to read them in the original, but I thought this would be an exception since Beckett translated it himself. I must admit I'm starting to wonder. The book is so extremely Irish, and rendering it into fanciful inventive French is more than a little disorienting. Though perhaps that's the point?

- Mais trahis-moi, dit Neary, et tu finiras comme finit Hippasos.

- L'Acousmatique, je présume, dit Wylie. Sa rétribution m'échappe pour l'instant.

- Noyé dans un égout, dit Neary, pour avoir divulgué l'incommensurabilité du côté avec la diagonale.

- Ainsi périsse tout babillard, dit Wylie.

Etant enfin arrivé à libérer une main, il saisit le récepteur, qu'au lieu de jeter par terre pourtant, il porta à son oreille, tant il était agité.

- Que le diable vous emporte ! dit-il.

- Il est en train de le faire, dit-elle.

Célia.

They sang, screaming, 'A ken't get, nö, zetizfektion'.

I'm amazed that the authorities let them get away with the Stones' 'Satisfaction', a song which, if it became an anthem for desire of all kinds in the west, was bound to become a rallying cry against the whole system in the east. 'Did they know what it meant?' I asked.

'We didn't know what it meant,' Klaus laughs.

He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.

'I would like to see your ID card,' he says.

'I don't have one.'

'What do you mean?' he asks.

'In Australia we don't have ID cards.'

He is speechless. He looks at me as though all his suspicions are confirmed: I come from a place so remote, so primitive that the people there have not yet been labelled and numbered.

Hand i hand går de in i hennes rum och i hennes säng med de redan skrynkliga linnelakanen. Där älskar Skord Xenia som laxen hoppar i forsen, starkt och vilt fast han har vita lockar. Och Xenia älskar Skord som tornsvalan när hon dyker i blå luft och aldrig ska behöva nudda vid marken mer i hela sitt liv. De älskar varandra som roslingen och björnmossan när de flätar sig in i varandra, utan ändamål, utan avsikt.

Jag sa åt honom att det vore säkrare att bygga detta Helvete med ord, kanske Paradiset också och jag erbjöd mig att hjälpa till. En Prolog, ett Ode, ett sagospel för röster med musik. Ord är oomkullrunkeliga. De står. Men marmorkyrkor ramlar till slut lika säkert som papptempel och lerhyddor med halmtak. Och ofta för ett ord förresten.

- Skit, sa han i stället. Allting är skit. Det som inte är skit blir det. Vet du vad jag trodde att jag hade kommit i världen för att finns hemligheter och priser dem? Jag trodde att det som bultade i mitt bröst och som flämtade i stjärnorna och prasslade i gräset var hemligheter. Gud hade lagt dem där.

Han kände hat. Utan att öppna munnen talade han till henne. Han sa något som inte var sant men som en gång skulle bli det.

De är döda, sa han. Det är slut med dem. Gräset är nertrampat och avbränt. Men det ska växa upp nytt gräs. Genom golvet ska det också växa. Det ska bända upp katedralens golvstenar. Trä ska multna och murar vittra sönder i regnet. Korset ska falla, galgarna, steglarna, hjulen. De ska multna.

- Fick du min gåva? frågade gästen plötsligt. Bosen reste sig mödosamt, föll på knä och kysste sin hand.

- Illustrissime!

Den upphöjde avfärdade hans ödmjukhet med en mjuk och nästan retsam rörelse. Och detta skulle de ofta se när de lärde känna honom: han föraktade hyllningar och ärebetygelser. Men när de uteblev kom det ett skarpt och irriterat drag kring hans mun.

"Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their heads," Musk commented. "Most humans have very limited firewalls," he elaborated elsewhere, "so are easily reprogrammed".

Musk's approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data - whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff, or illegitimate people - could simply be deleted. What DOGE sought to automate, media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was "not paperwork but democratic decision-making". Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.

Musk understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an "exploit" or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened.

After acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off nearly 80% of its staff and forced the remaining employees to work harder. Meanwhile, he pushed the platform's content to the right. If the social network was an "information weapon", why not wield it against his enemies? To fight wokeness, Musk would develop a new pathogen, propagated through a cascade of counter-memes: the anti-woke mind virus.

As Musk put it on Twitter in 2019, "I am become meme." It would be a running joke for Musk, riffing on J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous invocation of the Bhagavad Vita after witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1945: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

Musk first tweeted in 2010 but remained, at most, a casual Twitter user. Starting in 2015, this began to change. That year, he tweeted 617 times - an increase of 226% from the previous year. In 2017, he posted 1162 times, and average of three posts a day. By 2028, his annual tweet count had hit 2288. By 2024, he was posting an average of 60 times a day and sometimes 40 times an hour.

In the most extreme version of Muskism, the human is no longer the subject of history, but its discarded scaffolding. The product is not a car, or even a robot. The product is a self-regulating infrastructure in which the world - like the factory - runs on its own. No operators, no workers - just endless production, unfolding without interruption or intervention.

The first Obama term stands out as a rare moment of consensus on the need to reduce US dependence on fossil fuels imported from the Middle East. Musk did believe that burning fossil fuels was heating the planet, though that wasn't the only reason he wanted to electrify the auto industry. Another motivation was geopolitical: the "true cost of gasoline", he said in an interview, included "the auxiliary cost of wars".

Musk had set out to build a rocket. But more consequential than what he built was how he built it. Later, he would describe a lesson he learned from his close friend, the investor Antonio Gracias: "It's not the product that leads the success. It's the ability to make the product efficiently. It's about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you build the factory?

By 2025, SpaceX accounted for 95% of all orbital launches in the US, and more than half of all launches globally - a position that made the Pentagon, NASA and other government agencies deeply reliant on Musk. This was sovereignty-as-a-service, the logic of the modern internet platform scaled up to the level of the nation state.

"At school, Musk was bullied relentlessly. At home, he read constantly. When he ran out of books at the library, he devoured the entire Encyclopedia Britannica."

The authors do not mention this, but I am struck by the fact that the science-fiction author Cyril Kornbluth, who also held strong eugenic views, famously did the same thing.

Critics see immaturity or malice; fans see relatability or authenticity. Both fail to see that, in Muskism, trolling is infrastructure. Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness: can he still move markets with a post? Can he tutor the algorithm and the underlying training data to push it further rightward?

Människorna var kålhuvuden, svin, löss, sillar, stjärtpillare och lusfinnare men stjärnorna ovanför dem andades sitt ljus och ville nå dem och förvandla dem. De ville fullända dem och få dem att blomma som solar.

I was talking about this delightful book with a friend who's trying to improve their German, and as soon as we'd started looking at it I found I found I just couldn't put it down until I'd reread it from start to finish. On a scale where Alice in Wonderland scores 5, it must be at least a 4.6.