A Blow to the Head

“If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” —Kafka

Dear Friend,

Some notes on a humble scholar whose obscure 734-page treatise earned him an NYT obituary yesterday, a look at AA as a Network State, and why so many “successful” literary women all seem to fail in the same way.

—Justin

What I’ve Been Reading

Sarah McNally’s tragic success in the book business. In this article for Vulture, Matthew Schneier tells the story of how Sarah McNally built an impressive empire. But the real story is between the lines: Yet another beautiful and intelligent woman who achieves success in Arts and Letters at the small cost of a broken family, and whose ultimate destination nearing the age of 50 appears to be the same undifferentiated soup as all the other highly successful NYC literary women her age: a never-ending rotation of exclusively female book clubs dedicated to trauma healing. Of course, the tragedy goes completely unnoticed by the author.

Knowledge of the Good might make you Good, automatically. In the Gorgias, Socrates annoys Callicles so much that he storms off in frustration. This dramatic exit—coupled with Socrates' atypically direct and extended arguments—all seem to suggest that philosophy is perhaps more powerful than politics (the opposite of what we find at the beginning of the Republic). Socrates even says that tyrants lack real power because they lack knowledge of the Good. If they truly understood the Good, they would pursue that. In other words, the crimes of any bad politician are not moral but epistemological!

Alex Karp: Tribal knowledge won’t be commoditized by AI. In a recent interview, Alex Karp calls Palantir an autopoietic system—essentially a self-generating engine of value creation—which means that it can’t be reduced to the sum of its observable “reverberations,” as with traditional financial models like Discounted Cash Flow. He says “tribal knowledge” will remain uniquely valuable in the age of AI, and that companies should focus on what they ought to do rather than mimicking others.

How a 734-page treatise on the economics of car parking gained a cult following. There was an obituary in The New York Times yesterday for Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking. Though it’s a dense and daunting book (unreadable to most), published by the uncompetitive academic press Routledge (no prestige), Shoup’s obsessive focus on an apparently banal subject has shaped policy in about 3,000 cities. His main recommendations are to ban off-street parking, employ dynamic pricing for on-street parking (to flex with demand), and improve sidewalks to incentivize walking. There is a Facebook group with more than 8,000 fans of Shoup (who they call Shoup Dogg).

Ivan Illich for the New Right? Ivan Illich condemned modern medicine as a ‘planned and engineered hell,’ writes Catherine Sulpizio in the latest issue of IM-1776. In “America’s Medical Nemesis,” she suggests that Illich’s concept of iatrogenesis should be central to the new right-wing politics of health. Illich believed that a culture’s authentic code of living, feasting, suffering, and dying is what makes a people healthy. Sulpizio wonders if the New Right is bold enough to say: “Medicare for None.”

Cixous, Kafka, and the Violence of Great Writing

In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1994), Hélène Cixous cites a letter from Kafka to remind us that writing is a violent rush to the land of the dead.

She goes on: “Whoever wants to write must be able to reach this lightning region that takes your breath away, where you instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the already-known. This ‘blow on the head’ that Kafka describes is the blow on the head of the deadman/deadwoman we are. And that is the awakening from the dead. I can't make a recipe of it, for as soon as we begin to inscribe signs, to attract attention, we destroy. So though you should hear everything I say, it should then be absorbed, pass through the blood, without your thinking about it, with your living it. All great texts begin in this manner that breaks: they break with our thought habits, with the world around us, in an extreme violence that is due to rapidity. They hurl us off to foreign countries...

Not everyone is given access to this other world where the dead and the dying live. We are not all guests of the dead, this wisest of companies. If we can't get there by dying, then let's go there by dreaming."

This other world she talks about, that’s the other life.

That’s exactly it.

Around Town

Selected discussions from the community this week.

Chris James wonders if AI-generated texts will ever be worth reading. Some members argued that AI can generate passable marketing copy but not serious texts. AI seems to require significant human collaboration and curation to be valuable for serious texts. One member suggested the heuristic that AI content should take longer to create than to read. I shared some examples of OpenAI’s Deep Research, which strike me as highly valuable if you do creative knowledge work for a living and/or you are trying to build knowledge tools on the bleeding edge.

Peyton Bowman asks how genre shapes artistic experience. Why does contemporary culture frame so much in sci-fi or fantasy? Is “literary fiction” itself just another genre, shaped by marketing conventions? The discussion includes references to Proust, Cormac McCarthy, and the tension of constraint that produces masterpieces.

Tanner Gesek argues that Alcoholics Anonymous was the original Network State. He traces how AA, founded in 1935, leveraged a question-centered approach to solve a social problem. With its decentralized structure, huge textual canon, and persistent growth, AA has been far more successful than most modern attempts to build new societies. Gesek highlights Bill Wilson’s choice to cede top-down authority in 1955, letting AA’s norms and members govern themselves.

Coming Up

Plato's Gorgias. Join us for a seminar on this foundational work about rhetoric, ethics, and power. We’ll discuss Socrates’ debates with Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, and consider the difference between rhetoric and parrhesia. Wednesday, Feb 26 from 05:30 PM to 06:45 PM CST.

The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp. Join us for a seminar on the contemporary politics of technology and Silicon Valley’s place in the world, through a close reading of Alexander Karp's new book (Karp is the co‑founder and CEO of Palantir). Saturday, Mar 22 from 10:00 AM to 11:15 AM CDT.

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Until next week,

Justin Murphy