Daniel's (Audio) Den

See the written version of this piece, here, for photos.

See here for my 2017 piece on ‘Invictus’ in The National Student.

First of all, apologies for my noisy tummy! I didn’t realise how loud it was until I listened back to the recording. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to re-record, so consider it part of my Substack’s shabby chic. I hope it doesn’t detract from the reading too much.

As I say in the recording, I’ll be away from now until March 21 on account of being in Spain, so you’ll be pleased to hear that my voice, words, and noisy stomach will not be invading your inbox for a few weeks.

You can read Humeniuk’s poem, along with some more by other Ukrainians, here. Click below to read the interview with him that I quoted.

As I promised in the recording, here is a small selection of articles, ordered by date, that I’ve found interesting and useful throughout the Ukraine crisis.

* ‘Why Ukraine Matters’ by Francis Fukuyama (American Purpose, Jan 24, 2022).

* ‘Putin’s Wager in Russia’s Standoff with the West’ by Michael Kofman (War on the Rocks, Jan 24, 2022).

* ‘Forget NATO: Ukraine's Problem Is Russian Imperialism’ by Matt Johnson (Haaretz, Jan 30, 2022).

* Pretty much everything by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic.

* ‘Putin’s spiritual destiny’ by Giles Fraser (UnHerd, Feb 24, 2022). A good analysis of the much-overlooked religious aspect of Putin’s ambitions and ideology. (I notice a comment below the piece lamenting that if only Putin hadn’t poisoned people in England, they’d love to support him! I assume this person is suffering from a case of right-wing Putinphilia: “He’s an anti-woke defender of masculinity and tradition and Christianity, don’t cha know?”)

* ‘Putin’s Pointless War’ by Matt Johnson (Areo Magazine, Feb 25, 2022).

* ‘A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv’ by Taras Bilous (openDemocracy, Feb 25, 2022).

* ‘Has Putin lost the plot?’ by Owen Matthews (The Spectator, Feb 26, 2022).

* ‘Vlad the Invader: Putin is looking to rebuild Russia’s empire’ by Niall Ferguson (The Spectator, Feb 26, 2022).

* ‘Why Ukraine Matters’ by Francis Fukuyama (Quillette, Feb 26, 2022).

Incidentally, I just realised as I was scheduling this post that it will be published on February, 21st—my birthday. How appropriate…

As mentioned at the beginning of the reading, the new Substack regime has undergone a slight mutation. Listen or see the About page for the details.

As for that essay by David P. Barash on “evolutionary existentialism”, the original (and, I think, richer) version can be found in the 2007 Festschrift Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. But there is a more accessible version from 2018 here.

Here it is, my first reading aloud of one of my own Substack pieces: ‘Of Burns and Dawkins: Some Interesting Connections.’ Again, apologies for my amateurishness: I am not a voice artist, nor do I have any professional sound recording/editing facilities. For all that, I think it came off tolerably well.

I was going to record a little extra at the end, but I forgot to do so. I wanted to re-share a relevant section from my Areo Magazine review of Dawkins’ 2021 essay collection Books Do Furnish a Life. I wish I’d included something along these lines in the original piece, but I said it pretty well in Areo, so appending an excerpt from my review here should suffice:

In “Worlds in Microcosm,” Dawkins discusses models: things that look like, and can help us think about, real and highly complex systems (his examples include weather simulations and arcade games as well as animal bodies and gene pools, which model the ancestral environments of a species). He also looks at the nature of our—and other animals’—brains, and how they simulate internal models of the world (what you see is not what is out there: rather, you see the model of the world your brain has created out of the information it has received from the rest of the nervous system). The uniqueness of human brains comes from the ability to project our internal simulations forward into the future:

And once natural selection had built brains capable of simulating slight departures from reality into the imagined future, a further emergent capacity automatically flowered. Now it was but another short step to the wilder reaches of imagination revealed in dreams and in art, an escape from mundane reality that has no obvious limits.

Our imaginative and scientific prowess come from something longstanding and deep inside us, a result of a process that, over billions of years, has also seeded the planet with the most extraordinary beings, that is part of our fundamental nature as human animals and that connects us to the rest of earthly life. Is that not wonderful?

In his introduction, Dawkins ponders why fiction appeals to us. Could this deep evolutionary aspect of our minds be part of the explanation? We are master simulators and expert modellers, and what is fiction if not simulation on steroids? Every writer simulates worlds of her own, projecting into the future, the past and the non-existent to probe and analyse the world around her. The same is true of other art forms, going right back to the prehistoric cave paintings created by our ancient predecessors, who depicted the beasts of their world as well as themselves. What is this if not simulation? Could such imaginative powers, fossilised in the form of cave paintings, have helped our forebears survive and reproduce, by helping them to plan hunts, for example, as well as being—if indeed they were—expressive? Could our capabilities as simulators have allowed us to externalise our models in the name of survival and reproduction, and thence to build civilisations, create art and pursue science?

The literary images that Dawkins discusses as essential elements of literary science, and which he himself crafts and uses both skilfully and prodigiously, could also be seen as models of what they are discussing. “Trick of Life”: is that not a model of the problem of biological complexity? Isn’t the idea of the extended phenotype a model or simulation? Is all imagery understandable in this vein?

Here it is, the beginning of my new Substack regime and my first Monday Reading. Enjoy!

P.S. Reading from Unweaving the Rainbow reminded me of the words of another great writer on the beauty and poetry of science: Douglas Adams. I can’t resist sharing his impromptu response when asked by Dawkins, one of his close friends, in Dawkins’ 1996 documentary film Break the Science Barrier what it was about science that “really gets your blood running”:

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened—it's just wonderful. And ... the opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

I said earlier that I was marking the tenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’s death quadruply. But then I had a whim to do some readings, so here they are, thus extending my celebration into the quintuple. Be warned: this was all done in one take, with very brief breaks, so it is hardly a pristine piece of audio.

I’ll take the opportunity to mention a couple of things. First, I have, obviously, set up the podcast/audio feature of my Substack. I don’t know exactly how this will evolve, and it’s not a podcast as such, but I might use it more frequently in future for readings, conversations, musings, and the like. Second, the aforementioned future: as I wrote a while back, I’ve been on a bit of a Substack hiatus. But I’m planning on a reboot in the new year, with a renewed sense of purpose and more of a focus. I might publish sporadically until then, and will let you know my new year plans as soon as I know them in more detail myself.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my readings. I quite like reading aloud, and I like to inflict my readings on others regardless of their (my readings’) quality. But I don’t think I’m too bad at it… Timestamps below for convenience.

1:00 Introduction (the podcast I mention, on which I appeared with Iona Italia, Ben Burgis, and Matt Johnson can be found here).

1:20 I discuss and read the introduction to Hitchens’s first essay collection, Prepared for the Worst (1988).

11:49 I discuss and read from Hitchens’s introduction to the 2008 paperback edition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir, Infidel (originally published 2007).

13:48 I read and discuss Hitchens’s introduction to the 2011 paperback edition of his memoir, Hitch-22 (first published 2010). The Areo piece by Matt Johnson that I mention can be found here.

25:37 I read and discuss Hitchens’s widow Carol Blue’s afterword to Hitchens’s posthumously released book, Mortality (2012).

38:44 I read and discuss a passage on Hitchens from Martin Amis’s 2020 book Inside Story.

40:09 I read and discuss Hitchens’s introduction to his final essay collection, Arguably (2011).

57:38 I read and discuss a passage from Hitchens on the history and nature of the b*****b (from a 2006 Vanity Fair essay, collected in Arguably).