Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Befuddling Book

I have not done this in a long time: I’m giving up on a book!

I am on page 412 of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a little over halfway through, and it has been the most maddeningly scattershot yet pedantic thing I’ve ever tried to read.

I surrender.

A man’s gotta know his limitations, right?

I’ve never liked math. This guy talks about math like it’s the secret language of the universe, when we all know that the love languages are the secret language of the universe. Of course I’m kidding about that last remark, but I understand most of what he’s saying about “strange loops.” I was intrigued my metatext when I was in college, (such as when a story has a “story within a story” or when the hand of the author is present, speaking directly to the reader.) I just explained in twenty-five words what Hofstadter takes chapter upon chapter of mathematical proofs, symbolic language, computer programming code and goofy “dialogues” to NOT say.


This book is just too ambitious for its own good. It’s way too easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of the overall purpose, (which, alas, I’ll never know.) It would have been fine at half the length and his stunt music theory and discussions of Bach’s music would have been better served in a separate book. Bach and theory are both usually interesting to me, however, Hofstadter somehow managed to make me hate both by removing the passion, the human-ness of Bach’s music by exploiting the more mathematical elements of a few works. While fugues and canons are fun and interesting to look at on paper and usually provide an enjoyable listening experience, (the concept of which Hofstadter seems oblivious at least in the half of the book I read), I don’t think I would label them as meta- or recursive as Hofstadter does. The truly mathematical composers like Schoenberg with his tone rows would have been much better served by this kind of analysis.

The most inadvertently humorous assertion of the book? The music of J.S. Bach would be better understood by an alien race than that of John Cage.

So I now move to re-read Kerouac’s On the Road.

posted by Mike @ 9:42 PM