five top things i’ve been reading (thirty-eighth edition)
the latest in a regular 'top 5' series
Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, D.M. Armstrong
An Agent of Evil, Ernest Hemingway
SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?, Eric Berger
You Don’t Have to Live Like This, Benjamin Markovits
Space-Photo Twitter
This is the thirty-eighth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end. This week’s edition will be shorter than usual, though, because I want to start writing a long-form piece about freedom, which I’ll publish here sometime this week..
1) The past few days I’ve been gradually reading David Armstrong’s Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (2010). I’ve read parts of this book before, but not the whole thing right through. I love its short targeted chapters, its overall coherence, and its clear writing. The introductory chapter, in particular, is such a great example of rigorous complex philosophy made broadly accessible through the embrace of straightforwardness.
Here’s the question I’m addressing! Here’s what I’m arguing against! Here are some neat examples! Here we go! Nothing is more complicated than it needs to be. Everything is calm and conversational. Armstrong is writing about some of the most difficult stuff out there, and he’s doing it in a novel individual way — yet it reads as cleanly as a primer. It’s like watching Federer play tennis.
2) An Agent of Evil is a short Hemingway essay, published as part of his posthumous memoir collection A Moveable Feast (1964). Its style and substance are given away by its opening line: “The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, ‘Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it.’” There’s a massive ethical question at the heart of this piece that’s left entirely implicit. It’s only three pages, but it’s got so much.
3) I’ve written previously about how much I enjoy Eric Berger’s space writing. This recent Berger piece about the development of SpaceX is no exception. His opening description of Starbase is just the right side of poetic, and his analysis of the ups and downs of the Starship project is all you need to read if you’re planning on watching the latest launch attempt later today. Watch here to see if it goes ahead!
4) A few days ago I started reading the new Benjamin Markovits novel, The Rest of Our Lives. I like Markovits’ stuff so much that as soon as I see he has something new coming out, I order it. Sadly, I didn’t get far with this one. It just didn’t feel like his writing. It felt like a shift down-gear; it’s the kind of book you might find in a Waterstones ‘you’ll really want to read this!’ display. To be fair, I also didn’t get far with some of his earliest novels. But if anything that was because they were too try-hard in the other direction: he was trying to be too clever.
Markovits’ output over the past ten years has been excellent, however. You Don’t Have to Live Like This (2015), A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin (2018 and 2019, respectively, as the first two parts of an ongoing tetralogy), and The Sidekick (2022) are all great. I loved The Sidekick even though I know nothing about basketball and it’s very much a basketball novel.1 In fact, The Sidekick is probably the best sports novel I’ve read aside from DeLillo’s End Zone. But my favourite Markovits has to be You Don’t Have to Live Like This. It’s about graduates gentrifying Detroit. It’s about individualism, race, class, urbanism, and more. But it’s also just a really good novel by a really good writer.
I hope this latest adventure is a blip, therefore. I hope it’s not a sign that Markovits’ trajectory is following Patrick Gale’s — another talented British novelist who started out experimental, got into his stride, then tried to go mainstream at the cost of his writing. We’ll see, I guess.
5) Second only to extreme-American-weather Twitter is space-photo Twitter. Here’s a great one from today.
As is Playing Days (2010) — another really good one!