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Category: books

Lockdown reading : Bacon

Published March 28, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.



In an attempt to raise the level of this series, I tried to get through the latest hype in high-brow literature: The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter.

It’s an extremely thin book, just 43 pages long, hardly a novella. My Kindle said I should be able to read it in less than an hour.

Boy, did that turn out differently. I’m a week into this book, and still struggling.



Chapter 4(?) :Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, (Francis Bacon, 1979)

A few minutes into the book I realised I didn’t know the first thing about Bacon’s death, and that the book was not going to offer me that setting. Fortunately, there’s always Wikipedia:

While holidaying in Madrid in 1992, Bacon was admitted to the Handmaids of Maria, a private clinic, where he was cared for by Sister Mercedes. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a more severe respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well.

Fine, at least I now knew where “Darling mama, sister oh Dios, Mercedes” (p.7) came from, and why every chapter ended with “Intenta descansar” (try to rest).

While I’m somewhat familiar with Bacon’s paintings, I did know too little about his life to follow the clues sprinkled throughout the book. Fortunately, there’s this excellent documentary about his life: “Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence” (2017)

Okay, now I could place many of the characters visiting Bacon, either physically sitting on the chair he offers at the start of each chapter (“Take a seat why don’t you”), or merely as memories playing around in his head. It’s a bit unclear to me.

Then, there’s the structure of the book. Each of the seven chapters has as title the dimensions of a painting:

  • One: Oil on canvas, 60 x 46 1/2 in.
  • Two: Oil on canvas, 65 1/2 x 56 in.
  • Three: Oil on canvas, 65 x 56 in.
  • Four: Oil on canvas, 14 x 12 in.
  • Five: Oil on canvas, 78 x 58 in.
  • Six: Oil on canvas, 37 x 29 in.
  • Seven: Oil on canvas, 77 x 52 in.

Being the person I am, I hoped that if I could track down the corresponding Bacon paintings, I might begin to understand the corresponding chapter. Fortunately, Wikipedia provides a List of paintings by Francis Bacon.

Many of Bacon’s paintings are triptychs, and the dimensions refer to those of a single panel. So, even if I found the correct triptych I still had to figure out which of the three panels corresponds to the chapter.

And often, there are several possible candidates. The 14 x 12 in. panel-format Bacon often used for studies for larger works. So, chapter 4 might as well refer to his studies for a self portrait (see above), or to the three studies for a portrait of Henrietta Moraes:



Chapter 4(?) : Three studies for portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963)

Here are some of my best guesses:



Chapter 3(?): Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963)



Chapter 6(?): Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)



Chapter 5(?): Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981)

No doubt, I’m just on a wild goose chase here. Probably, Max Porter is merely using existing dimensions of Bacon paintings for blank canvases to smear his words on, as explained in this erudite ArtReview What Does It Mean To Write a Painting?.

Here’s the writer Max Porter himself, explaining his book.

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Lockdown reading : Centenal

Published March 21, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.



The Centenal Cycle is a trilogy written by Malka Older.

A Centenal is the basic political unit of a future micro-democracy. It is a neighbourhood consisting of 100.000 people which can vote for any government it wants, from anywhere in the world.

“Centenal-based microdemocracy naturally requires extensive use of technology. In my book, it’s provided through a massive international bureaucracy known as Information, which offers voters data about the thousands of possible governments and helps those governments manage what may be far-flung territories once they’re elected.” (Malka Older)

In this trilogy Malka Older draws from her own life: she obtained a Ph. D. from Sciences Po exploring the dynamics of multi-level governance and disaster response, and has more than a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development.

The Centenal Cycle consists of these three books:

Infomocracy (2016) (link containing excerpts).



It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

Null States (2017).



The future of democracy is about to implode.

After the last controversial global election, the global infomocracy that has ensured thirty years of world peace is fraying at the edges. As the new Supermajority government struggles to establish its legitimacy, agents of Information across the globe strive to keep the peace and maintain the flows of data that feed the new world order.

State Tectonics (2018) (link containing excerpts).



The future of democracy must evolve or die.

The last time Information held an election, a global network outage, two counts of sabotage by major world governments, and a devastating earthquake almost shook micro-democracy apart. Five years later, it’s time to vote again, and the system that has ensured global peace for 25 years is more vulnerable than ever.

Here’s a short interview with Malka Older on Sci-Fi, AI and its possible uses in the writing process.

Here’s a longer clip in which she talks about ‘Speculative Resistance’ at the Personal Democracy Forum 2018.

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Lockdown reading : Penumbra

Published March 7, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.



It’s difficult to admit, but Amazon’s blurb lured me into reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan:

“With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the 21st century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction.” (Amazon’s blurb)

I’m a fan of Murakami’s later books (such as 1Q84 or Killing Commendatore), and Stephenson’s earlier ones (such as Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon), so if someone wrote the perfect blend, I’m in. Reading Penumbra’s bookstore, I discovered that these ‘comparisons’ were borrowed from the book itself, leaving out a few other good suggestions:

One cold Tuesday morning, he strolls into the store with a cup of coffee in one hand and his mystery e-reader in the other, and I show him what I’ve added to the shelves:

“Stephenson, Murakami, the latest Gibson, The Information, House of Leaves, fresh editions of Moffat” – I point them out as I go.

(from “Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore”)

This trailer gives a good impression of what the book is about.

Why might you want to read this book?

  • If you have a weak spot for a bad ass Googler girl and her tecchy wizardry.
  • If you are interested in the possibilities and limitations of Google’s tools.
  • If you don’t know what a Hadoop job is or how to combine it with a Mechanical Turk to find a marker on a building somewhere in New-York.
  • If you never heard of the Gerritszoon font, preinstalled on every Mac.

As you see, Google features prominently in the book, so it is kind of funny to watch the author, Robin Sloan, give a talk at Google.

Some years later, Sloan wrote a (shorter) prequel Ajax Penumbra 1969, which is also a good read but does not involve fancy technology, unless you count tunnel construction among those.



Read it if you want to know how Penumbra ended up in his bookstore and how he recovered the last surviving copy of the book “Techne Tycheon”.

More information (together with reading suggestions) can be found at Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore: a reading map.

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