TUESDAY: While others observed the effects of Blue Ruin...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2024

We explored an award-winning text: We basically lost the whole day today on this, the latest of our alternate week Medical Mondays Plus One.

Returning to our sprawling campus, we saw that other people had been exposed to the effects of Blue America's loss in November's election. 

They'd watched the incoming president offer his latest highly peculiar remarks. For ourselves, we'd been locked away, way across town, exploring a peculiar, though widely honored, text.

Regarding incoming President Trump:

How did we ever lose to this guy? Many of us in Blue America have struggled with that question.

Those of us in Blue America can see the way the other guy's voters got conned and misled by Red America's various teams. We may have a harder time seeing the ways those of us in Blue America may have helped earn our way out.

We'll return to that topic tomorrow, adding this unpleasant question to the pre-existing mix:

Is it possible that those of us in Blue America have also been conned, along the way, by our own tribe's leadership cadres?

We'd say that yes, it's quite possible. We'll return to such matters tomorrow.

On a massively grimier note, Greg Gutfeld has returned to the air at the Fox News Channel after a lengthy paternity leave. 

The early results have been ugly. As we've noted in the past, part of the responsibility for that moral and intellectual disgrace lies directly with Our Own Blue Elites.

More on Gutfeld's return tomorrow. For today, this:

During today's Medical Monday Plus One, we perused an interesting, later addition to an honored text. We refer to the preface to this award-winning book:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

As we told you on Saturday, the monumentally puzzling book was published in 1979. Perhaps inevitably, it won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

We've presented its title in bold. Below that, we've presented a puzzling summary which appears on the honored book's cover.

The book was published in 1979. The preface to which we refer was published twenty years later. In it, the author offers a surprising complaint:

He complains about the endless array of people who haven't been able to discern what the book is about!

The preface appeared as part of a twentieth-anniversary edition of the honored book. Title included, the new preface started like this:

Preface to GEB's Twentieth-anniversary Edition 

So what is this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid—usually known by its acronym, "GEB"— really all about? 

That question has hounded me ever since I was scribbling its first drafts in pen, way back in 1973. Friends would inquire, of course, what I was so gripped by, but I was hard pressed to explain it concisely. A few years later, in 1980, when GEB found itself for a while on the bestseller list of The New York Times, the obligatory one-sentence summary printed underneath the title said the following, for several weeks running: "A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids." After I protested vehemently about this utter hogwash, they finally substituted something a little better, just barely accurate enough to keep me from howling again. 

Many people think the title tells it all: a book about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician. But the most casual look will show that these three individuals per se, august though they undeniably are, play but tiny roles in the book's content. There's no way the book is about those three people! 

Well, then, how about describing GEB as "a book that shows how math, art, and music are really all the same thing at their core"? Again, this is a million miles off—and yet I've heard it over and over again, not only from nonreaders but also from readers, even very ardent readers, of the book. 

The complaint continues from there, at substantial length. We'll produce additional text at some point in the near future. For right now, let's review:

Twenty years after the book appeared (and was widely hailed), the author was complaining about an unfortunate fact. Basically, no one has been able to explain what the book is about!

At first, the New York Times got it wrong, the author says. In fairness, the summary the author quotes—"A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids"—makes no apparent sense. 

At first, the New York Times got it wrong—but after that, so did almost everyone else. For today, we ask you to consider only this part of the rolling complaint, as voiced in paragraph 3:

Many people dimwittedly thought the book was about Gödel, Escher and Bach! Except, "There's no way the book is about those three people!" the author now complained.

Our reaction would be this:

If "many people" thought some such thing, should that have been surprising? As the author explicitly noted, the title of his book includes those three names! Indeed, that's how the book's title starts:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

That's the title of the book! Could that be where people got the idea that the book was about those three people?

Consider the perfect beauty of this strange presentation:

Twenty years after a major book was published and was massively honored, its author is complaining that no one has been able to explain what the book is about! In that, we'll admit we discern a tiny hint of pomposity on the part of the author in question. But we also find a suggestion of the inability of our academic and journalistic elites to come to terms with a wide array of highly significant manifestations—not excluding the pied piper appeal of our incoming chief executive, who sounded off again today in highly peculiar ways.

In a work upon which GEB is based, Bertrand Russell spent hundreds of pages proving that 1 + 1 = 2 (or something like that). Later, Douglas Hofstadter wrote an impenetrable but award-winning book, then complained, twenty years later, when no one was able to explain what the book was about.

(One thinks, perhaps, of Finnegans Wake. Was this a non-fiction companion?)

Along the way, certain elites alleged that they understood and revered the book. Twenty years later, a petulant author seemed to be complaining that no one has been able to discern what his book was even about.

As he continues, Hofstadter tries to square that circle. Twenty years later, he tries to explain what his book actually is about. 

In our view, he tries and he fails. Gaze on the works of our academic elites! Gaze on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

(The later Wittgenstein was all about this. For better or worse, he too had almost no ability to explain what his work was about!)

We Blues won't be saved by our high elites. As January 20 approaches, is it likely that we Blues will be able to save ourselves?