What I’m reading

The Dogs of Vivo by Sven Axelrad.

This is a story about Maggie (a musician), Felix (a painter), and Art (a writer, who may or may not have received a heart transplant from a dog) – three friends in the fictional town of Vivo, which seems something like a small town in Portugal or Spain but with quintessentially South African service delivery. Art, Maggie, and Felix are in their early twenties and dream about making it big in their respective endeavours. Most of this dreaming happens in a shithole bar, named ‘The Mean Monsoon’ after the Dan Auerbach song. The inciting incident occurs when a man in a suit, who may or may not be the devil, arrives in Vivo.

I bought The Dogs of Vivo after listening to Sven’s talk at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Cool guy. He had a nice French chore coat, of which I was fairly jealous and which I can only assume is the inspiration for the similar French chore coat featured in the novel. It was also my first time at the festival and I’m glad to have gone – I also got to see Peter Frankopan and Tan Twang Eng.

But, re The Dogs of Vivo – I had fun. The narrational style is completely intrusive in a really playful way, and I appreciated that there was a good, in-world reason for this style.

American Purgatorio by John Haskell.

Jack, and his wife, Anne, go on a road trip to visit Anne’s mother. They stop at a petrol station and Jack gets out to get snacks. When he comes back out, Anne is gone. Something happened. Jack can’t remember what.

I’d never heard of this book and I got it on a whim at a secondhand bookstore. The opening is brilliant, feverish stuff. It has the kind of tension you only get in the very best thrillers, but with a level of sophistication too.

However, I’ve stopped reading American Purgatorio, at about thirty pages in – not because the writing does its job poorly but because it does its job too well. I found it too stressful to read before bed, which is when I read most of my fiction.

So, I think, I’ll come back to it another time.

Summerland by Malcolm Knox.

Every year since they can remember, two couples – Richard and Pup, Hugh and Helen – have gone on holiday together to Palm Beach. They are golden and young and rich; Hugh, especially, Hugh Bowman Junior, is rich. Richard, our narrator, is less rich. But in the wake of a tragedy, involving infidelity, Richard is hollowed out, cracked. He narrates from this future point, trying to find the ‘proximate cause’ of his ruin.

After shelving John Haskell, I started this instead, having bought it at the same time. This was another novel I’d never heard of – possibly because it is Australian and came out in 2000. But my premature assessment is that it’s utterly brilliant, a real hidden gem. I don’t think I’ve loved reading something this much in a long time.

What’s doing it for me?

Well, on the one hand, it’s generally to my taste, the Fitzgerald inspiration is made fairly clear. (The excerpt used on the back of my copy includes the detail of the characters booking their dinner arrangements under ‘Mr. Gatsby and co.,’ which, okay, is probably a bit on the nose.) But what’s really impressed me about the writing so far is the level of control – there are these hyper-confident self-interruptions, and shifting of timelines. There’s a careful dance between Richard’s dual hatred and idolisation of Hugh and their milieu. There’s a level of self-awareness about the reader’s skepticism which makes for some really funny, deliberately obnoxious stuff. The opening lines, for instance:

‘Our story is only as sad as others allow it to be, our rights to sympathy circumscribed by the class to which we belonged and the way in which our life together was to end. If our story entered its final phase with the discovery that we did not really know each other at all, that is one more reason to qualify, even to mock, our claims to sadness. Smug, rich and inert, we fall below the means test for pity.’

I’ll say more about this when I’m done reading it.

A question I’m thinking about

When is arguing actually worthwhile?

Arguing is something I used to do a lot of. I was a competitive debater for about eight years, and I carried on coaching after that, so I’ve been involved in debating, all in all, for thirteen-ish years. Especially when I first started, in high school, I thought that, in debating, I’d discovered the Secrets of the Universe and took great pleasure in telling my family and friends the five structural reasons they were wrong about Brexit or Trump or second wave feminism or whatever.

But the most lasting effect of giving hundreds of seven-minute speeches in someone’s mathematics tutorial room, is that I barely argue with anyone anymore.

Mostly, it’s because I just don’t see the point. This isn’t to say I don’t believe in the value of argument, I absolutely do. But most discussions between people which we call an ‘argument’ occur either because one person is trying to validate their own view, and they wrongly intuit that the other person will agree with them, or because one or both people are doing it for sport/rage bait. This is especially the case on social media.

So, my feeling is that productive disagreement is actually very rare. And probably more important than ever.

To this end, I found a great litmus test from Bo Seo (who’s widely regarded as the GOAT of BP debate, and is now an author and consultant and other impressive multi-hyphenate things). It comes from his book, Good Arguments and is discussed in this workshop. Before choosing to engage in an argument, he says, we must run through the following checklist:

1. Is the disagreement real? There must be an actual difference of opinion between the two sides.
2. Is this difference of opinion important enough to justify a disagreement?
3. Is the subject of disagreement specific enough that the two sides can resolve or at least ameliorate their disagreement within the time constraint of the discussion?
4. Are the two sides aligned in their reasons for engaging in a disagreement?

It’s this last one, I think, which is the most important – and which is most absent from most of the disagreements that happen on places like Threads, X, etc.

Possibly the most useful thing I’ve learnt from debating, is that in order to argue meaningfully, there is a baseline of agreement which has to happen first.

I suppose that’s obvious, in some ways, but it’s very easy to forget.

Something I’ve noticed

Honestly, the biggest thing I’ve noticed (or re-noticed) over the past two weeks is the productive value of having a second cup of coffee.

I used to slam caffeine when I was a law student, but for the past few years, I’ve only had one strong cup in the morning, nearly always a pour over, because that thing about caffeine having a 12-hour half-life (or is it quarter-life?), which I probably picked up from a Huberman podcast, really put me off. Lately, though, a second cup between 11am and 3pm has been doing it for me, and this got me thinking about nootropics.

So, last week, when I went out for lunch at this healthy vegan place called Wildsprout, I was feeling experimental and tried a drink which they describe as a ‘vegan horlicks.’ It had mesquite and maca root and that kind of thing. It honestly didn’t taste very good. But then, afterwards, when I had another flat white and got to some writing, everything went brilliantly and I churned out nearly 4000 words.

If you haven’t noticed, writers get very superstitious about that kind of thing, and the maca and so on probably didn’t do anything, it was probably just the caffeine – Google’s AI summary reckons most natural nootropics only do something after about two weeks of consistent usage, if they do anything – but I couldn’t help thinking that I’d stumbled on some divine combination of caffeine+maca etc. which provides unadulterated focus and automatic flow states.

If nothing else, this is a good example of how the correlation fallacy works (or post hoc ergo propter hoc, to give its government name).

See you in two weeks,
Blake