What a Long, Strange Loop It's Been

Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Some years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a large book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It sold many, many copies. I have one. I am convinced that few people actually finished it, or even got far into it. It was unquestionably the product of a brilliant mind. But man, reading it was work, lots of little exercises to work through, lots of symbolic logic to learn, but worst, the goal of all that work was unclear. I like a challenging read, so I’m not proud to say I didn’t get far before I put it back on the shelf, where it reposes to this day. The fact is, I just didn’t get it, and I’ll bet not many people did.



I think I will win that bet, because no less an authority than Douglas Hofstadter himself has expressed his disappointment that not many people got it. I quote from Wikipedia: “In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition [of GEB], Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: ‘GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?’”


To remedy this, he says, he wrote I Am a Strange Loop – to make the point that apparently eluded readers of GEB. It was published in 2007. It had been sitting on my to-be-read shelf, in hardcover, since then. It is almost 450 pages long. I read it to the end.


Capsule review: Looks like he’s going to have to write another book.

Its goal is to – well, now there’s the first puzzle. Recall that he says he wants to explore “what is a self,” and there is a lot of talk about self-ness in the book. Also consciousness; also possession of a human soul; also what it is that distinguishes humans from other animals.  But there is next to no explanation of what he means by these concepts, which question (if any) he is trying to answer.  I am very tempted to say that he would say that these questions are all essentially the same thing, which launches us into a muddle right at the outset.   

Which is too bad.  I'm interested in these things, and Hofstadter is really a fine writer and a brilliant man with some interesting things to say, so this volume should have been right in my wheelhouse.   But I can tell you very succinctly why this is not a good book: Hofstadter not only doesn’t get to the point, his thesis is all but invisible. If you handed him the book and asked him to find a paragraph, or even a page or two, clearly describing (1) the question he is trying to resolve (i.e., “what is a self,” “what distinguishes humans from lower animals,” “what is the nature of consciousness” “what do we mean when we talk about having a soul” – am I close on any of those?), and (2) his resolution of it, he might be able to do it. Personally, I never stumbled across it. I can’t tell you how his belief that humans are like what he calls “strange loops” gets him much of anywhere.


Why is this? The cheap answer is “because he had a lazy editor, or maybe an intimidated one,” but the real answer is that Hofstadter just may not have a clear answer to any of these questions.  If he does, it gets lost among the analogies and metaphors and stories and personal anecdotes he loves.  Nothing wrong with those strategies.  But after (actually, before) one employs them, one must articulate the idea the technique is employed to illuminate. The book is so thick with explanatory symbol-filled vignettes that they crowd out a simple, clear statement of his belief respecting these issues (and what he believes those issues to be).


The problem is illustrated right on the cover, which is a stylized representation of “video loop.”  Much of the first part of the book is devoted to a description of images Hofstadter created by pointing a video camera at a teevee that was displaying what the video camera was receiving – that is, displaying itself over and over and over.  Moving the camera distorts the image in interesting ways. You’ve seen the effect if you stand in front of a mirror with another mirror behind you – you see yourself receding into infinity. This is a purely mechanical phenomenon that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness, but Hofstadter goes on and on and on about it, even including a number of useless color plates of his teevee images, as though it tells us something profound about ourselves as human beings. It doesn’t, and if there is a useful analogy to the way humans perceive the world and re-transmit it, I missed it.


Of potentially greater interest might have been his analysis of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) and its undermining of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” (1910-13).  His explanation – which is very lengthy and punctuated with fictional dialogues and analogical fables – isn’t bad, but would it be asking too much for a simple statement, or even a complex or subtle statement, of what these abstract mathematical theories have to do with “I-ness,” or “soul,” or “consciousness,” or “self”?


Let’s return to his central simile. A “strange loop” is a self-referential system (that’s reductive but saying any more would not illuminate this discussion). I have called this Hofstadter’s simile, but I can’t even report that with any confidence – are we “strange loops” in the way that is understood in topology, logic, and mathematical systems, or is he only saying we’re like them in some way that is meaningful to his theory? I went in search of what other people think Hofstadter is trying to say when he says argues that human beings sorta have this characteristic and that it somehow relates to their essential humanity. What I discovered is that no one else knows, either, and those who purport to know sort of skip over what the hell they – and he – think any of this has to do with a unique human nature.


There’s a lesson here.  We see it around us every day, in government, in the workplace, on Wall Street, in the academy, in science:  Brains aren’t enough.  Learnedness isn’t enough.  Opinion leaders, all kinds of leaders, have an obligation to be clear.  Heck,we all have an obligation to be clear with one another.  I don’t care how complex the subject matter is – if you’re writing a nonfiction book for a general audience, especially one that purports to solve a problem or take a position, you have a sacred duty to state your position early and clearly. If you can’t or won’t, you probably haven’t really figured it out for yourself.


With over a thousand pages of closely-printed text sitting on my bookshelf, I don’t know if Douglas Hofstadter is a strange loop. I can say that he is damned near an endless one.

So You Think You Want to Read A Novel About Vampires, Do You, Dearie?

I had always thought vampires were supposed to be evil, murderous, and scary.

Then, about 35 years ago, they became exquisitely sensitive and romantic and even beautiful in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and were portrayed by the likes of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the movies.  Now, with the Stephanie Meyer Twilight series and inevitable batch of movies, they have become even more exquisitely sensitive and romantic.   And still very beautiful, in a pasty, vacant, heroin-chic kind of way.  While I haven't read any of these books or seen the movies, I get the impression that they can even be protective of honkies, or whatever non-vampires are called, especially cute female ones. 

Well, dearie, I've got news for you.

Real novelistic vampires, and I mean vampires in real, red-meat, hard-core vampire novels, are, in fact, evil, murderous, and scary.  I know this because I have read a novel called Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia, and I novelistically believe every word of it.  Any novel that begins with a guy working late one night in his dreary desk job when his slovenly, loathed boss unexpectedly arrives and before long transforms into a slobbering, furious, hungry werewolf, immediately establishes its credibility with me.  The book's central figure, Owen Pitt, improbably defeats his boss's efforts to kill and eat him, and this act of heroic self-defense comes to the attention of an organization -- the Monster Hunters of the title -- dedicated to suppressing outbreaks of the malign supernatural when they pop up around the world.  They recruit him to join their crusade against supernatural evil, and we're off and running.

Their efforts are not limited to vampires, oh no.  They also battle zombies, several species of demons, werewolves, wraiths, and the list goes on and on.  (There are also some helpful monsters of the elvish variety.)   The battles are violent and bloody -- although some of the bodily fluids involved aren't so much blood as they are goop. 

But here's what you need to know about vampires -- they're not just out for blood and, I guess, chicks these days -- they are planning world domination which involves the end of all other nonvanpiric forms of life (although what they would then feed on remains unclear).   These are bad, bad vampires, and were it not for various organizations like the Monster Hunters, our day of reckoning would have long since arrived. 

The book is great fun.  The Monster Hunters themselves are memorable, there's some romance, the usual friction with federal monster-hunting authorities, and the Monster Hunters organization itself has some deep, dark secrets of its own.  Oh sure, there's massive slaughter, astounding violence, exotic firearms, and serial dismemberment, but the tone is breezy and comedic, owing mainly to the character of first-person narrator Pitt.

One misgiving -- although it moves along briskly, the book is too long.  The mass market paperback version I read is 732 pages and could have easily stood to have lost about 150 of them. 

But if you're looking for a thoroughgoing escapist read -- that is, a read that will tell you absolutely nothing about yourself, the human condition, or the meaning of the universe, then put on your body armor and lay in a good supply of paper towels and Formula 409 and give this one a whirl.

I'm Going to Write a Book . . .

.  .  .   about (i) my worldwide pursuit of food to delight the senses, (ii) my quest for spiritual fulfillment, and (iii) my pursuit of that one lifelong passion.

I'm going to call it "Eat - Eat - Eat ."

I'd Like You to Meet Merrill Gilfillan

An elderly man likes to paint the Missouri River.  Over and over again.

"It might sound at first like an old man's fatuous surrender.  But Henry is a gifted tonalist, neither a dabbler nor a dupe, and his decision was a masterful sharpening of focus and a concentration of energy worthy of a desert mammal.  He loves awakening each day to find the Missouri still there, dependable as a dog.  He loves its bulldozer sureness, its interchangeable gulls and random flotsam, and most of all the colors it begs from the Dakota sky.  And every evening finds him there, accordingly, painting from a fertile trance where adoration flirts with and bleeds into dotage, singing out loud to himself on the breezy shore -- 'I Remember You,' or 'The Light Shines Bright Tonight Along the Wabash.'"

Did  you like that?

*     *     *

One day some years ago I was performing one of my favorite activities.  Wandering from bookstore to bookstore -- yes, there more than two of them in those prehistoric times -- and picking up the random book I'd never heard of to see if there was anything providence had placed in my path to discover.  I can see the store in my mind's eye, but the name escapes me.  It's long gone.  On a table near the front door my scan was arrested by a short stack of slender volumes, a book of short stories by someone I'd never heard of.  Its cover was dominated by an unusual shade of blue. 

It was called Sworn Before Cranes, by Merrill Gilfillan.  I judge books by their covers all the time.   The treasures I've stumbled on make the dogs worthwhile.  A book with a title like that, and with that unearthly blue ruling over the cover landscape, deserved my patronage.  I might have glanced at the end flaps to see what it was about, but I was already on my way to the cash register.

I cannot find an image of that cover anywhere on the Internet.

It doesn't sound like much.  A collection of stories, if they can be called that, centered in the upper Midwest, many of them concerning that uneasy boundary between Native American and white, set in small towns that one is tempted to describe as "dying," except that they don't quite ever die.  They survive because men and women survive. 

The stories are almost always plotless.  They are more in the nature of fictional observations of the comings and goings -- some of them dramatic, some not -- of the people of these small towns in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska.  Some are set in the past, some are contemporary.

All wrapped in the most precise and gorgeous prose I had ever read. 

I don't find it showy or consciously-arty or look at me.   To me the lush locutions are simply the result of the artist's search for a new way to say -- that is, a new way to see.  The constructions are vigorous, not mushy or sentimental.  And they're just plain beautiful to the ears, which is a value independent of content.

Merrill Gilfillan has written numerous volumes of poetry, some wonderful books of essays (Magpie Rising and Chokecherry Places among them) but in the way of short stories -- perhaps I should say short fiction -- only Sworn Before Cranes  and Grasshopper Falls (from which the above passage was taken, "One Summer by the River").

One of the pleasures of doing this page is being able to bring attention to some of my idiosyncratic passions.   Gilfillan's stuff won't be to everyone's taste, and I hope that does not sound snobbish.  If you're looking for plot, or a family saga, or romance, or surprise endings, you won't find them in his work.  What you will find is true art, making things up to tell the truth about human beings, which is to say, about our very condition.  And you will find some of the loveliest English you will ever read.  

So rather than recommend it or issue a caution, I gave you a little slice to begin this article.  And did you like it? 

Thanks for indulging me this stroll down one of the vanishing lovely backroads of American writing.

(Sworn Before Cranes is pretty much only available on eBay and from used book sellers. Grasshopper Falls is more widely available, as are the essays and poetry.)