Italo Calvino
Cosmicomics
Cosmicomics is like reading the dream of a graduate student of physics, fallen asleep at her desk among a stack of cosmological texts. Elementary particles fall in love, get jealous, argue. Superstrings complain of overcrowding on the eve of the big bang. The cosmos has a pulse, a mind, itches that need scratching. The thread that connects the stories is the attribution of human traits to non-human substances and to explore how those attributes might play out as the universe unfolds over the eons.
While this is my first time reading a book of Calvino's, I did encounter one of these stories ("A Sign in Space") once before, in an anthology of science fiction. Among the standard tales of rockets and aliens and unexplored worlds, here was this odd story about a mind that leaves a mark on the galactic disc as it coalesces, and then spends the millennia watching for the mark on the next pass around. While there's virtually no story in it -- very little plot of which to speak, just an extended monologue exploring an idea -- it stuck with me for over a decade such that I recognized it the title instantly in Cosmicomics and remembered the story almost exactly. It was so different from the other stories in the volume: science fiction in the sense of fiction about science, but so far from my stereotype of the genre. Just a simple thought experiment. What would it be like to be the first being in the universe to make a mark?
As for my own mark consumption, summertime has slowed it considerably. With so many other things to see and do in so many hours of daylight, I make less time to sit down to read. That's not a good or a bad thing, but just the reality of the gardening-and-music-festival-and-wandering time of the year. I've got a small stack of things on deck; we'll see how many I actually get through before the snow starts falling again...
Daniel Levitin
This Is Your Brain On Music
This Is Your Brain On Music is the sort of non-fiction book that doesn't really make an argument, but is more a collection of interesting observations. In this case, that doesn't make it any less of a book. Levitin has basically compiled the state of the art in cognitive studies of music from papers published in the field, and turned them into a bestselling piece of popular science writing. It's the good kind of popular science writing that explains the content of the papers without leaving out the science, and provides a complete bibliography in the appendix for further reading. And the two-sentence summaries of the published research are such that you (or at least I) want to look them up and read them. Rather than letting the research speak for itself, Levitin threads it together by abstracting away from the data to make generalizations of the sort that you can make in popular science writing, but not in an academic journal. Sometimes those generalizations seem insightful; other times they seem to over-extend. But they are nearly always provocative.
One example: Levitin observes that most of us don't mind not being expert at our hobbies. When we go out to play a game of basketball with our friends, we aren't bothered that we aren't NBA superstars. We shoot some hoops, maybe we're competitive or maybe we aren't, and we go home. But most of us are embarrassed to make music or sing in public, because we think we aren't good at it. Not being good at basketball doesn't embarrass us; singing badly does. Levitin makes the observation, which I think is astute in itself. He offers what seems on the surface to be a plausibly social explanation -- we're encultured into it. Levitin claims that particularly in pre-technological cultures, music and dance aren't something reserved for experts; they are things in which everyone participates.
It does sound plausible, but it also undermines much of what he's doing in the rest of the book, which is to show the biological and neurological basis for music creation and appreciation. If that's his line, I'd like to have seen him follow through on it. I can see a couple of openings:
You're welcome.
David Hume
Four Dissertations and Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
It seems like lately I've been having more conversations about religion than has been usual for me. I'm not sure why -- it might have to do with the company that I keep, or it might have to do with the fact that I can finally talk about it without frothing at the mouth. Whatever the reason, I've had several chances to expound upon my cosmology over the last couple of months. So, while it's been on my mind, here it is:
People like categories. We like to know who's a Christian, a Muslim, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Republican or Democrat. It lets us make quick judgments about people, based on our predispositions about what those things mean. And most of us like to fit into categories, because it's expedient. Once I call myself a Pentecostal or a Libertarian, I don't have sort out every thorny issue of doctrine or politics myself -- I can just ask my Pentecostal pastor or Ron Paul what's good. And most of us adopt our religion or politics from our family. It's rare for Baptists to have a Muslim child, and vice versa. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. But if we feel uneasy about our category later in life, we go fishing. The Information Age makes the fishing more interesting. An American Civil War soul-searcher wouldn't have much opportunity to become a Taoist; where would he find out about it? These days, we have toys like the Belief-O-Matic and the Political Compass Test to tell us our orientation. (I'm apparently a Socialist and a Universalist, if you want the handy categories.)
The problem is that the categories hide at least as much as they reveal. The standard opening questions to religious discussions is "Do You Believe in God?", and as soon as it's spoken, it's already a bad question. The Buddhist and the Baptist both say "yes", but of course they aren't talking about the same thing at all. My standard answer is "You tell me what 'god' means, and I'll tell you whether I believe in it." Because if you really need a category, I'm basically an atheist. But only basically. I find it crazy to think that there's some super-human intelligent being out in space somewhere that controls human lives but nonetheless has human characteristics like a will, desires, and rationality. I understand why people want to believe it -- it's nice to think of a divine being that's just like us, but more perfect -- but that doesn't make it an accurate picture of the world. So basically, atheist. But for most people, that category also implies some unwavering faith in human reason, human science, and naturalistic explanations of the unexplainable. And here is where I depart from the label, and nuance enters.
I don't think human rationality is a sufficient tool to explain the world. And I don't think any possible human science can understand it, either. I find that idea nearly as arrogant and crazy as the idea of a giant bearded Caucasian pulling the cosmic strings from heaven. We humans have about three pounds of goo in our heads, connected to another few ounces of sense organs. The whole enchilada took on its modern form barely a half million years ago; the universe, by contrast is somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 billion years old. So our little head full of modern neurons has existed for about .004% of the history of the universe. That ain't much. We've had anything like "science" for about 500 years of that; maybe more if we're generous to the Greeks. Do I think that our little bucket of monkey brains is capable of perceiving much of the universe, let alone explaining it with this new-fangled "science" thing? Please. It's more likely that I could explain calculus to my cat.
So I'm very willing to accept that our experience of the universe is a minute portion of what's actually going on -- .004% seems as reasonable a guess as any. I'm willing to accept that we may observe phenomena that are fundamentally unexplainable, because we're experiencing a tiny sliver of something much, much bigger. And I'm willing to accept that if we stick around long enough to give our brains a couple million more years to evolve, we'll be able to perceive and understand a whole lot more. Not merely because scientific understanding has advanced, but because our sensory and cognitive capacities will have advanced. In the mean time, we're operating with a scarcity of information and very imperfect models, and we muddle along with those as well as we're able. If somebody wants to take that vast sea of what we can't perceive and couldn't possibly understand with our little monkey brains and call it "god", I don't have a problem with that. But don't pretend for a second that you know what's in that sea, and certainly don't tell me that it looks just like us, but more perfect, and that it "loves" or "wants" or "gets jealous" or any of those other petty things that our monkey brains do. I think Wittgenstein nailed this one in the Tractatus -- "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."
So science and religion are both just imperfect models, and one is just as good as the other, right? Not so fast, cowboy. They definitely address different domains, and solve different sets of human problems. You can't run your car on prayer or transcendental meditation, and you probably can't learn to love your fellow man by drinking gasoline. I'm not personally very interested in the question of truth-seeking in either science or spirituality, because I don't think that our bucket of monkey brains can get very far in that direction. I am, however, very interested in improving the human condition and solving problems in the realms of perception to which we do have access. Scientific pursuit has done a pretty good job of that. I'm willing to say that since the days of Sir Francis Bacon, both quantity and quality of life have improved. Sure, we've also made atomic weapons and designer plagues, but on the whole, we've done pretty well. I find the case for religion quite a bit shakier. Certainly it has improved the lives of some, but it's also been a primary justification for a majority of the armed conflicts and genocides in the last three thousand years. It's hard for me to imagine a much-improved version of the world that doesn't include some form of scientific curiosity (I don't know what would take its place), but it's not so hard for me to imagine a better world without religion, in which basic human respect and decency took the place of the existing mythology. I'm constantly amazed when we pit recent scientific information against two-thousand year old mythology in our schools, and the mythology wins. It probably has something to do with community-building: the two-thousand year old myths and rituals give people something with which to bond. The genius myth of twentieth-century science fails in that regard. As long as we cling to the myth of the solitary scientific genius toling in his laboratory, of course people are going to be turned off by it. We evolved as social animals. If the genius myth and ritual of modern science can't provide for that, people will look for it elsewhere. Folks do so love those Sunday afternoon Baptist church dinners. And why shouldn't they?
As for Hume's "Dissertation on the Natural History of Religion", I was disappointed. He catalogs the religious beliefs of "less enlightened" (i.e., "not Scottish") people, and shows how preposterous they are, but why people believe in them, anyway. And then he always add something to the effect of "But of course our Christianity is nothing like that (wink, wink)" which is supposed to be a transparent veneer that shows that our Christianity is of course exactly like that. And he's not wrong, and I understand the social context in which he couldn't just come out and say that Christianity is as much bunk as every other primitive myth, but there's really no philosophical argument in it. It lacks the argumentative precision of the Treatise on Human Nature, and it's that precision that makes Hume such a joy to read. The Dissertations are a pretty lackluster effort overall, and it's no surprise that they've been barely a footnote to Hume's philosophical legacy.
Stephen King (ed.)
The Best American Short Stories 2007
When I started to read The Best American Short Stories 2007, I was afraid it was going to be an entirely grim affair. Much like The Best American Essays 2005, it seemed like it was written exclusively for the gratification of rich New Englanders. People in the Hamptons. They're rich. They're sad and lonely. Whatever are we to do, darling? There's just nothing in the story that speaks to me. You're rich. You're sad and lonely. Get over it.
Fortunately, there are a few gems in the collection. “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell is pure fancy, creative, whimsical, unlike anything I've ever read. “Wake” by Beverly Jensen is equal parts William Faulkner and Ray Bradbury, and a fun (if unimportant) read. And Alice Munro's “Dimension” is a completely fascinating take on violent crime, in which the victim finds that the murderer of her children is the only one who can really understand the gravity of her experience.
In the only-slightly-ironic forward, guest editor Stephen King laments the decline of the American short story. (I don't doubt that there are those who would argue that he has helped to hasten its decline, but I digress.) But I wonder how true it is. Has the short story really been in decline, or are the good old days never really as good as we think they were? It might be true that fewer people are buying short stories; it might even be true that printed literary magazines are on the decline. They're small runs, expensive to produce, and so bear a high cover price that most of us won't pay. But anybody with twenty dollars and an Internet connection can start their own online literary magazine, dedicated to whatever they like. Star Trek fan fiction? More than you can shake a tribble at. Snuff erotica? No problem. First person stories about being sad and lonely? Welcome to the blogosphere.
The short story is in decline? Hardly. It's just no longer the exclusive domain of rich New Englanders with MFAs. They've been writing stories for each other for decades. Now the Trekkies are doing the same. The medium morphs, and you can pine all you like for the good old days of The Cathedral, but we now live in the age of The Bazaar. Or The Bizarre, as the first-person Star Trek snuff erotica goes.
John Steinbeck
Travels With Charley
I hadn't actually planned to read this one. The truth is, I tend toward serial monogamy where my reading habits are concerned: I read one book at a time, start to finish, then put it down and move on to the next one. I've already been reading a short story anthology, and recommended Travels With Charley to a friend who had recently taken a similar cross-country road trip with her dog. As I pulled the book from my shelf to loan it out and started paging through it, I realized that it had been over a decade since I had read it, and while I remembered liking it, I didn't actually remember a single anecdote from the story. What I did remember was pretty much what was on the cover: Steinbeck. His dog. Good times.
So I figured that rather than recommending a book about which I no longer knew anything, I should maybe read it again. Too bad for its intended recipient. But good for me. I am pleased to report that it is still a pretty good (and very fast) read. Steinbeck. His dog. Good times.
Of course, I should know better than to read travel literature. Because it makes me want to go, forever and always. Not on a road trip -- staring at interstate highway is without romance for me -- but on foot, into the world, out the front door with a pack and home again two months later. I've been home barely two months, and I could go again tomorrow given the chance. It's a curse, a blessing, a lebensform. I'm no Steinbeck, but here's to the restless everywhere. Long may we roam the earth.
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature
Would it be weird to say that I enjoyed this book? It seems like one ought to find a Chomsky-Foucault debate provocative, perhaps interesting, but enjoyable? Nonetheless, there it is -- I enjoyed reading this. After my claim that I was going to read something lighter than a French novel about a WWII internment camp, I picked this. And liked it. Something is wrong with me.
I'm not sure that I find the title so apt. For one thing, the debate is fundamentally not really a debate at all. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, both thinkers wholeheartedly agree that colonial policy is a losing game. Where they disagree is really only in how to talk about it. Secondly, the book is only about human nature to a limited extent. There is some disagreement as to whether linguistic structures are innate to the human brain vs. contingent on human culture, but the conversation doesn't dwell there long. It quickly moves into more interesting territory -- the power and nature of the state. Chomsky's perspective is more easily pigeonholed: he's an anarcho-syndicalist, and believes in working toward a real liberation in which those worst off no longer serve as cannon fodder for the powerful. Chomsky is also straightforward in disconnecting his philosophy of language from his politics; for him, the two are separable, and while the former pays the bills, the latter is ultimately more important.
Foucault, as we might expect, is much more embedded. He's interested in how power structures constrain human relations and human communication, in which the state is not merely a bureaucracy but a cultural network that steers the very way that we can think about the world.
Here again, Chomsky doesn't really disagree; he just chooses to focus his work at a different layer. And while I'm sympathetic to Chomsky's politics and find it the more direct approach, I also find Foucault's approach gets more to the fundamentals of living. The problem with pitting The People vs. The State is that it places the individual or the citizenry outside the state, which is a bit dangerous. Here in the U.S., we really don't have anything like a democracy anymore. We ostensibly have a government for the people, but I don't think we can convincingly argue that we have a government by the people. Geography aside, there is no way to cut up Congress demographically to represent anything like America. It's still rich white guys, with a handful of rich white girls.
So if government by the people doesn't exist (and maybe it can't in modern America), the best we can do is to assure government for the people. But then we get the separation of governors vs. governed, state vs. populace, and Chomsky can't be happy with that. Foucault seems uncommitted to any particular government structure, and would mostly reject that State vs. Populace is the useful divide to recognize. He's more interested in revealing the dynamics of institutions -- families, churches, government, schools -- to lay bare who is controlling whom, and through what means, and toward what ends. For Foucault, we can't ever be free from power relationships, but we can unveil them and scrutinize them, as to rearrange or dismantle those we find harmful.
And so the debate is really a non-debate, but mostly an exploration of common issues from different perspectives. With a new presidency, we have the opportunity to undo the closed style of paranoid government ushered in by the Nixon era that has become the status quo. One thing the Obama campaign showed us is how to dissolve the divide between the governor and the governed -- the "we" in his "yes we can" was what won the election. Whether he can leverage that "we" to participate in the actual governance or whether it will become more cannon fodder for the powerful is up to us to decide.
Nathacha Appanah
Le Dernier Frère
Le Dernier Frère est l'histoire du petit Raj, fils d'une mère compatissante et d'un père violent. Les événements du roman passent pendant le deuxième guerre mondiale, à l'Île Maurice. Au début d'histoire, beaucoup est caché parce qu'il est raconté de la point de vue d'enfant qui ne sait rien de la guerre, rien des juifs, et rien du monde loin de son île. Son père travail à une prison, et il dit au petit Raj que c'est une place pour les criminels dangereux. Mais quand Raj visite la prison à cause de son curiosité, il découvre le jeune juif David, le même âge que lui, à l'autre côte des barbelés. L'historie raconte les relations entre les deux, et le procès par ce que Raj part de son enfance à devenir un homme.
J'ai acheté ce roman à Cassis, après j'ai fini De La Terre À La Lune, avec aucune idée d'histoire ni l'auteur. J'étais à la plage, j'avais besoin d'un livre, et celui a gagné quelques prix en France. Donc, je l'ai acheté. Malgré la qualité du roman, l'histoire de l'holocauste n'est pas si bon pour la plage, ni pour voyager. Un peu lourde pour ma situation. Néanmoins, c'est un bon livre, et la méthode de raconter m'intéressait. Mais pour mon livre prochain, peut être quelque chose plus leger...
Jules Verne
De la terre à la lune
Les temps ont changé, sans doute. De la terre à la lune, par Jules Verne, est une oeuvre du savoir-faire des américains -- leur intelligence, leur ténacité, leur puissance de faire ce qui semble impossible. Le protagoniste du roman est Barbicane, président du "Gun Club", organisation américain qui devise les canons et les fusils pour la guerre. Après la guerre entre le nord et le sud est terminée, Barbicane s'imagine une nouvelle projet -- lancer une projectile de la terre à la lune. Le roman donne une respecte profonde aux ingénieurs américains et leur machine de guerre -- rien peut arrêter l'esprit américain.
Aujourd'hui, il n'y a plus de respecte pour les machines de guerre américains, non plus pour les américains eux-mêmes. Les nouvelles en France sont pleine de la crise économique aux États-Unis, parce qu'elle touche tous le monde. Cette crise n'est pas entièrement la faute des guerres américains, mais elles on joué leur rôle -- certainement dans le prix d'huile, ce qui fait des effets sûr pour l'économie.
Peut-être avec le nouveau président Obama, les États-Unis peuvent retrouver un peu de leur respecte encore: la respecte du monde, mais aussi la respecte des eux-mêmes. J'espère que nous pouvons devenir le pays décrit par Jules Verne. Un pays intelligent, aventureux, et avec la respecte pour le monde et avec la respecte du monde.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
I spent yesterday at Mont-Saint-Michel, that architectural marvel of Normandy. It's an uncomfortable mixture of the sublime and the garish. There's no disputing that the environmental setting is dramatic, and the abbey itself is architecturally and historically astounding. But there's only one route from the terre of the wet sands to the ciel of the abbey, and that's through the gauntlet of crepe stands and tourist shops that line Mont-Saint-Michel's one narrow street. It serves to make me more interested in Mont-Saint-Michel's modern history than in its more distant past. Who sold that real estate to the crepe vendors, and when? How much does that land cost, anyway? How long could I busk there without being stopped?
More generally, looking through my photos of the trip, I see that I've visited more than my share of abbeys and cathedrals. Even an atheist can't help but be moved by these architectural marvels – which is of course exactly what they were designed to do: to lift the eyes and the mind toward heaven. Most of these cathedrals have stood for hundreds of years still fulfilling that mission long after their architects have passed on.
Of course like most man-made wonders, they were built from the blood of the peasantry. The popes and cardinals hoarded gold while nations starved, they marched their own holy armies against the principalities of man (and sometimes against each other), they swapped indulgences to the wealthy in exchange for money and labor to construct their cathedrals, they claimed to administer to the needs of the soul while torturing the bodies of their spiritual competitors under the premise of heresy. The abbeys and cathedrals stand as testament to all of that, too, so perhaps the real wonder is that the peasantry didn't tear more of them down long ago.
The Name of the Rose is about all of that and more – part historical fiction, part murder mystery, part concordance of heresies. It made for good accompaniment through the cathedrals of Brittany; I read it perhaps too quickly as to get the English language out of my hands as soon as possible.
Next stop: De la terre a la lune.
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
The decision to read Cosmos during my trip was fairly random -- it was on my shelf, I hadn't read it, and it fits in the pocket. So Sagan's oeuvre on the cosmos made its way around the terrestrial sphere with me: I read it in buses, I read it in my tent by lamp light beneath the night sky. On a remote beach on the Dingle peninsula, illuminated by the red glow of my emergency head lamp, I read Sagan's optimistic conjectures of extra-terrestrial life. He wants so badly for Them to be out there; wants so badly for Them to contact us. More importantly, he wants us not to blow ourselves up before They find us. The threat of nuclear winter looms large over his 1979 text.
For him, science isn't ever the problem; science is the answer. Sagan clings to the scientist's ideal of untainted knowledge -- the probing of the atom was faultless; nuclear weapons are the corruption. He believes that space exploration will serve a unifying role in human history, based on the only-partly-metaphoric premise that from space, you can't see national borders. He conveniently neglects the fact that the core motivation of nearly all U.S. space exploration has been jingoistic paranoia. From the first beeps of Sputnik to (at least) Reagan's orbital laser wet dream, space exploration (certainly up to 1979) was all about outshining, out competing, and out maneuvering the Russians. I don't know much about the ISS -- in theory, I think it's the sort of thing that Sagan had in mind. In practice, I'm not sure how much of a unifying force it's been -- the U.S. is certainly as nationalistic as ever; so is China, France, India, etc. Sending rockets to Alpha Centauri isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it's the thing that will make us all hold hands and sing together.
Susan Orlean (ed.)
Best American Essays 2005
I had a night off while in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago. Like a salmon returning to its spawning ground, I found myself disembarking the metro at the Pentagon, with the intention of walking past my old apartment, now ten years past. Upon exiting the station, I saw nothing familiar. The events of September 11, 2001, have transformed the facade -- what was once a sidewalk in front of an oddly-shaped office building is now a closed corridor encased in bulletproof glass. I found myself not quite able to orient myself. The building itself is of course identical on all sides. Only by spotting the the Sheraton hotel at the top of the hill was I able to tell which way to walk.
But as I did walk, things became quickly more familiar. I remembered riding my skateboard along the sidewalk home from work every day. Here was where I used to hop the curb head into traffic. Here was where I wiped out at the bottom of the hill on the way to my second week at my new job, arriving at work torn and bloody, silently passing into my office without a word from my colleagues after dabbing the congealing blood from the stinging wounds with a paper towel in the bathroom. (I flex my wrist as I pass the spot; it still cracks, echoes of the impact ten years later.) The weight of those ten years is stifling as I walk, makes it hard to breathe. Ten years gone. How many of those years was I really happy? How many was I just running away?
I arrive at what used to be my front steps, and I picture Jane, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me to come home. And I picture myself, not wanting to be home, passing her by without a word, getting a beer from the fridge, and taking it upstairs to the shower, staying under the hot water much longer than needed, until the bottle was empty, resigning myself to those few minutes alone that life had seen fit to leave me before it was time to shut off the water and return to an existence that I didn't want. Twenty-one years old, no longer able to be a kid, not yet able to be an adult. Those days set me on a wrong course for years to follow, always running away from life because I had never learned to sculpt it, fleeing my reality instead of recreating it. Washington, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Stockholm, Pennsylvania again, and finally the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I learned that contentment was something I needed to make, not find. All those years, I was running away, but never towards. Jane pulled it neatly from the lyrics of "Spider in the Snow" -- you're afraid to not let go. I guess I knew even then that she was right, but I didn't know how to not let go. The curse of the military brat: letting go was the only thing I had ever known.
The impression that I get from Best American Essays 2005 is that essayists are gay New Yorkers obsessed with food. I think that can't possibly be right. While I'm willing to believe that a gay New Yorker is more likely to write essays than a straight farmer from Kentucky, I'm less willing to believe that it makes for a very compelling book of essays. Or maybe it's just compelling to other gay New Yorkers interested in cooking. And truth be told, they probably buy more books than the farmers in Kentucky, anyway. I guess it's a closed system.
On Saturday, I leave for six weeks in Ye Olde Countrie. I expect I'll have a few essays of my own at the end of that rainbow. Watch this space for updates...
Mariama Bâ
Une si longue lettre
Quand j'étais au lycée, j'ai suivi trois courses en français. Tous mes camarades de classe étudiaient l'espagnol. Je ne suis pas certain pourquoi le français m'intéressait le plus. Peut être c'était parce que les classes étaient plus petites; peut-être j'ai pensé que les plus jolies filles serait en ces classes. J'ai fini le lycée avec une compréhension rudimentaire, et je n'ai appris aucune autre mot depuis dix ans. Quand j'ai devenue étudiant de troisième cycle, j'ai commencé étudier le français encore. Pourquoi? Je ne me souviens pas exactement, mais je pense que c'était parce que j'ai pu; aucune d'autre raison.
J'ai lu Une Si Longue Lettre dans ma troisième classe à Virginia Tech. Ce n'était pas facile pour moi. (Évidemment, mon français est encore rudimentaire, mais je l'améliore lentement.) L'histoire lui-même est l'historie d'une femme sénégalaise qui habite avec son mari et leurs enfants. Le mari se décide à prendre une deuxième marie, malgré les sentiments de la narratrice. C'est une histoire des droits des femmes africaines et une histoire des politiques coloniales.
Pour moi, l'histoire ne m'intéresse pas beaucoup. Les événements de la roman ses passent lentement, avec beaucoup des pensées de la narratrice. Le pensées sont peut-être important pour le commentaire sur la politique d'Afrique, et je suspecte que la langue est belle. Mais malheureusement, je ne suis pas compétent pour juger la langue, parce que mon compréhension des subtilités ne suffise pas. Donc, le roman est perdu à moi. Ce n'est pas la faute du roman; c'est la faute de moi, je suis sûr.
Donc, je vais retourner à France pour pratiquer mon compréhension. Je pourrais suivre un autre cours, mais je suis limitée par les accents de mes camarades de classe; lesquels ne sont pas meilleure que le mien. Je fais des projets de passer un mois en France cet automne. Je vais voyager et pratiquer. Si je suis de la chance, je peut apprendre plus en un mois en France que trois mois en classe.
Bon courage à moi...
Douglas Coupland
Life After God
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that suffering is beautiful, and a million sad poets were born. I don't buy it. Suffering is horrible. Certainly one can find beauty in any situation, and certainly beauty stands out in contrast to squalor and misery, and that sometimes makes it resonate all the more. But too many writers get confused, and think that by writing squalor and misery, they've written beauty. It just ain't so. Coupland makes the mistake in "Life After God". His characters are dejected and depressed, but there's no art in them. There doesn't seem to be any message other than the fact that everyday life is kind of pointless, which is certainly true if you live a pointless kind of life. But that doesn't make a character beautiful. On the contrary, it makes a character whiny and horrible. And that ain't art.
Perhaps ironically, probably the best story in the book is "The Wrong Sun", an essay about nuclear holocaust. It works precisely because it doesn't wallow in self-perceived personal suffering. Instead, it just presents a series of first-person narratives about people's lives when The Bomb detonates. The TV goes to static. The shopping mall collapses. Office chairs are overturned. But there's no panic or sadness in the narratives -- it's a dramatic event described blandly, instead of a bland event described melodramatically. In that sense, "The Wrong Sun" reverses the formula of the rest of the book, and for that reason it stands out.
I guess when I was a teenager, I had a taste for melodrama. I guess I figured that if I made myself suffer enough, I would just *have* to make good art out of it. And from that angle, "Life After God" might have appealed to me. Now it just seems self-indulgent. God is dead. Fine. Your neighbors aren't. Go give 'em a hand with something, and get over yourself.
Umberto Eco
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is the story of Yambo, a Milanese bookseller who loses his memory by way of a stroke. Or rather, he loses his personal memory, but retains perfectly the text of every book he's ever read. What follows is a story of personal reconstruction through texts -- a process of correlation among personal history, national history, and literary history. It's a fun approach to storytelling, and (as with most of his stories) a chance for Eco to flex his personal concordance of books and language and to imagine a character solely through an intersection of bibliographies. (It's something like David Hume's definition of personal identity, except here the sense impressions are all textual.)
But it's also a reconstruction of modern Italian history, particularly that of the second world war and the rise and fall of Italian fascism. My primary and secondary education were sorely lacking on the subject. I was taught WWII as the war against the Germans in Europe and against the Japanese in the Pacific. Italy was part of the Axis, but always as a footnote. We learned the name of Benito Mussolini, but not what he stood for. We learned the term 'fascism', but not why it appealed to the Italians. We only knew that the trains ran on time.
Eco's story is particularly poignant as it portrays Yambo's primary school education in fascist Italy -- the rampant patriotism, the grave directives to serve one's country, the drive to convert boys into proud soldiers. Like so many American children mindlessly mouthing the pledge of allegiance every morning, Yambo writes patriotic essays to please his schoolteachers, but which nonetheless constitute a portion of his sense of self. His story about his childhood service to the socialist resistance sounds almost like a justification; not just of Yambo, but of the Italian people. Not all of the Italians were fascists; the fascists were the villains, the anarchists and the socialists the heroes. In reconstructing one's personal history in light of the fascists' defeat, how could the narrative be otherwise?
Where The Mysterious Flame comes unglued is when Yambo suffers his second stroke and his personal history comes back to him in an ever-accelerating collage of images. Sadly, this is also where Eco's storytelling comes unglued. While masterful with bibliographic storytelling, Eco falls a bit short while working with image association. So the grand finale falls a bit flat; a disappointing cap to an otherwise delicious novel.
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
It should be obvious to say that Love in the Time of Cholera is a love story. I'm not sure that it is. The young Florentino is obsessed with the beautiful Fermina -- mad with desire, having laid eyes on her only once, he writes her letters, thinks of nothing but her, and waits, waits, waits, while she marries another man, moves away, gets old, becomes a widow, and is finally won over. It should be a love story. It has all the right themes, the right narrative structure, the right iconography. But as a love story, it falls flat for me.
Because there's nothing to love. We're told that Florentino is love with Fermina; we're shown the lengths and depths to which he will go to win her. But we never see why. For her part, Fermina is cold, hard, unwinnable. But also entirely unlovable, even unlikable. It makes it difficult to root for the protagonist, because I really don't want him to win. His perpetual string of casual lovers seems vastly preferable to his object of desire, even on those rare occasions when she finally does acknowledge his existence. I just can't read it as a love story. It's more like a story of pathological obsession and eventual concession, but with no real emotional investment in the plight of any of the characters. So the novel becomes to me only a linguistic exercise -- a string of well-turned phrases instead of a story, or maybe a story that serves as a frame on which to hang the well-turned phrases.
It's not that I'm a cynic about love. I may be, but I don't think so. I am a cynic about the tendency to hammer love into a particular shape. Spending time with my family over Christmas, there was much speculation about when my now-married sister would breed, much speculation about who would marry next. Why? Nobody seems to know. Because that's the next thing that you do. The protagonist gets the girl, so we call it love. Because that's the way that the story goes, even if she's entirely unlikable. It's lazy storytelling, and that much worse when we live the story. Once you've got the kids, you wait for the grandkids. Because that's the next thing that you do.
Love in the Time of Cholera has some nicely-turned phrases, and in that sense it lives more richly than most of us. But the frame is rickety, and the happy ending not actually that happy. Like far too many other stories, that makes it difficult to admire.
Plutarch
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives
Over the last few months, I've been reading a bit of Plutarch. I'm not sure why -- it was on my shelf, and I haven't touched it in about thirteen years, so I gave it a go. It was a lot more fun than I had expected, and not quite the way that I had remembered it. For example, while I had the story of Themistocles pretty well cemented in my head, my reading of it is so different now. When I was eighteen, I had read the story of Themistocles as the story of a tragic hero -- a wildly successful general who leads the Athenian navy against the Persians and saves Athens, but becomes so popular with the people that the assembly is forced to ostracize him in order to prevent him from being appointed king. And while the facts of the story do go something like that, now I read it as a story about an arrogant, showboating dickwad who uses his many talents to ingratiate himself to people in power while making the steadfast civil servants look bad. It would seem my opinion of human social nature has changed over the years, and not in favor of Themistocles.
It's been particularly fun to read the Greek Lives on the heels of Machiavelli. Athens is synonymous with Democracy, while Machiavelli is synonymous with Tyranny. The modern United States is supposed to be synonymous with "democracy building". But guess what? Modern American federalism has far more resonance with Machiavelli than with Plutarch. We've got a plutocracy (at best) in which we elect our favorite millionaire based on American-Idol-style popularity contests, and the most popular millionaires get to create legislation. We've got Kennedy family dynasties, Bush family dynasties, Clinton family dynasties, ad nauseam. Poor ol' W has to take weekend-long photo ops trimming brush on his Texas ranch -- it's hard work becoming a Man Of The People when you're the multi-millionaire son of a U.S. President! Contrast this with the story told again and again in the Greek Lives, in which too much popularity is the political kiss of death. Ostracism was a pretty good incentive to stay humble. It wasn't criminals or traitors who were ostracized (there were other penalties for those things); it was the public servant who had amassed too much power and had become a threat to egalitarianism. It was when people started murmuring things like, "Hey, this guy's pretty good! Maybe we should hand over wartime powers to him -- you know, just temporarily -- until this situation with those terrorists in Sparta gets sorted out..." that the assembly would lay the chips on the table and suggest that maybe you needed to take a little vacation in Persia for oh, ten years or so. Or you could be put to death. Your call, really.
Of course, I don't really mean to romanticize Athenian democracy. While it did strive for egalitarianism among citizens, citizens were defined as free men -- free, as in "not slaves", and men, as in "not women". I do however, mean to point out that modern American "liberal democracy" is much closer to fascism than ever before, and nothing much like Democracy as Plutarch would have understood it. And that a little ostracism goes a long way.
Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I've long described my method of living as an exercise in aesthetics. Other people find a moral or religious purpose; I've worked on creating a lived-in piece of art. What bothers me most about so many people isn't differences in opinion; it's their failure to contribute anything beautiful or interesting to the world. And maybe that really is a moral failure -- Wittgenstein thought that morality was a question of aesthetics, and I find myself inclined to agree.
If morality and aesthetics are really the same question, then Hunter S. Thompson can be nothing less than a saint, and it's the petty, predictable social conservatives who deserve our moral condemnation. The passive consumer of mass produced goods, television, shrink-wrapped religious dogma with no guts whatsoever. That is what evil really is. Fear and Loathing revels in drugs, sexual depravity, interstate crime, and a disregard for common sense so flagrant and intentional as to become a kind of sense of its own. It's not that any of those things are good -- most people who use recreational drugs aren't any more creative or interesting than most soccer moms. (They just think they are.) What makes Thompson's genius isn't the fact of the drug abuse and depravity; it's the style with which he does them, and the ability to tell a good story about it later. For Thompson, the lived-in art form itself wasn't enough (although he certainly surpassed just about everyone else -- ashes shot out of a cannon is about as gonzo as it gets). He had both the guts and the clarity to document it for the rest of us. His was a two-fold genius -- a genius of living and a genius of writing. Most of us don't manage either.
Was he immoral? I guess it depends on whom you ask. But if morality is an aesthetic -- I think a strong argument can be made that it is -- then for my money, he did all right. Certainly better than a grey-cinderblock moral realism would have us believe.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
Also from my pile of books-you-should-have-read-but-never-did, my most recent read was Machiavelli's The Prince. We use the word "Machiavellian" in the English language with such regularity that I thought it might be a good idea to give the man a chance to speak for himself. As is so often the case, the result surprised me. First off, it seems impossible to really understand Machiavelli without a pretty thorough knowledge of his contemporary Italian history, which I decisively do not have. Not the big stuff like the date of the fall of Rome, but the little stuff like which Pope courted favors from which prince in which city, and to what effect. While some of Machiavelli's examples are drawn from the classical Greek and Roman figures, the majority use his lesser-known contemporaries, which leaves quite a bit of his nuance lost on me reading today. I can infer a lot of history from his political examples, but it's supposed to work the other way around.
However, I can still grasp his principles, which are intended to transcend history. When we invoke the name of Machiavelli, we mean for it to be synonymous with treachery, deceit, and mercilessness. Machiavelli does indeed advocate those things when appropriate, but only as means to an end. That end is the maintenance of the power of the monarch and the order of the state. His point is not that a leader should be cruel, but that a leader should be capable of cruelty when the situation calls for it. A leader need not be subversive all the time (indeed, should not be subversive all the time), but must be skilled at and capable of subversion when necessary to maintain power. It makes an interesting complement to Plutarch's Lives of the Greeks, which I've been reading at the same time. Machiavelli is pretty clear that the preferable method for a monarch is to win the loyalty of the people; failing that, he must subjugate them utterly as to keep them powerless and incapable of revolt. When conquering a foreign state, the ruling family must be wiped out; without that, there are credible forces for organizing a popular uprising.
I'll admit that it is impossible for me to read The Prince without drawing some parallels to the modern American state. The Bush administration seems to have treated Iraq as a monarchy in the sense that Machiavelli would have understood it -- hang the monarch, hunt down the ruling family, and there is nobody left to lead the populace against you. The miscalculation, of course, is to treat "the populace" as a unified body, which it isn't. In hanging the monarch, you may instead create a power vacuum into which heroes from previously-subjugated castes can arise. As such potential heroes arise in Iraq, they are assassinated in short order. At some point, a more successful hero will probably arise (or be installed by more powerful military forces), and the fear of assassination will mean that he will be a well-armed and highly militant leader, which doesn't bode well for the region. (Bin Laden, anyone?) As for American domestic politics, it looks like nepotism is alive and well. We've endured 12 years of Bushes, and it looks likely that we'll endure at least 12 years of Clintons. 24 (and maybe 28) consecutive years of the presidency in the same two families? I'll confess that it worries me, no matter what their political platforms may be. It's not quite the Medici court, but we're moving in that direction with major consolidation of executive branch power, and that can't be good.
Alan Weiss
Getting Started in Consulting
Elaine Biech
The Consultant's Quick-Start Guide
For the last few months, I've been kicking around the idea of starting a consulting practice. Not necessarily with the intent of making more, but with the intent of working less (or at least working more flexibly). So I've started doing some homework. I've done consulting under a corporate umbrella for a number of years, but have never taken a stab at running my own business. What I needed was some good information on how to turn my expertise into a viable and self-sustaining independent practice.
Toward that end, I picked up two books -- The Consultant's Quick-Start Guide, and Getting Started in Consulting. Both books purport to do the same thing -- to provide the new independent consultant with the necessary tools to put a consulting business into the market and keep it there. One book was terrible, the other quite good.
At a glance, the main difference is obvious. Flipping through the Quick-Start Guide, one is met with page after page of whitespace. For instance, a page might say "List your top twelve goals in starting your practice", and then the rest of the page is whitespace for making that list. The usefulness of the list notwithstanding, the book is perilously low on actual content. I read the entire thing on a single flight from New Orleans, and didn't feel much better off when I finished than when I started. The list-making exercises are useful, but the actual content of the book could have been reduced to about fifty pages if the whitespace were cut out.
In contrast, Getting Started is extremely content-rich, well-organized, and well worth the price of admission. It reads like a how-to volume written by a consultant near the end of his career, full of practical know-how and real-life scenarios. Rather than coming across as an academic exercise in how to start consulting in theory, it reads as an earthy volume on how it works in practice, often contrary to theoretical expectation. The book spends as much time on common mistakes and what not to do as it does on how to plan and what paperwork to file. Some of the advice is a bit too earthy (e.g., how much to pay for a fax machine: if you can't figure that out on your own rather than relying on dated printed material, you're probably in trouble already). But there is plenty of excellent advice on creating proposals, pricing jobs, following up on deadbeat clients (or not), etc.
After finishing Getting Started, I have little doubt that I could start a successful consulting practice. The question now is whether I should: i.e., would the consulting offer me a better or worse quality of life than the already high level that I currently enjoy. The other question is one of timing and cash reserves. I wouldn't expect to make any money the first month, and probably shouldn't expect to make any money the first year. Which means that I'll need to figure out how much of my personal cash reserve I'm willing to tie up in a business. I'm still young enough and dependent-free enough that financial ruin wouldn't be personal ruin. At worst, it would be a non-volitional career change. And that ain't necessarily all bad.
Ian Svenonius
The Psychic Soviet
Not since TAZ has anyone seen the world as clearly as Ian Svenonius. He perfectly understands and accurately depicts the post-Soviet depression in which the Western world finds itself -- a depression in which the global corporate-state monopoly has no enemies left to fight, and so has to create them in order to keep the fetishized post-colonial economy alive. The good old boys have done too well for themselves, and now that they've killed off Mother Russia in a condensed Oedipal reversal, they're getting cagey. Cultural colonialism just hasn't been as much fun, and it's harder to rally the troops to defend a Starbucks in Baghdad. Double skinny mocha, lock and load!
So we manufacture new fetishes. Control consumer demand and you control the economy; control the economy and you control the country. Conquer Afghanistan and cinch control of the recreational narcotics industry. Stormtroopers bring Happy Meals to legless Iraqi children. The danger isn't failure; the danger is succeeding too quickly. Alexander weeps because there are no worlds left to conquer. At least when Mother was alive, we had someone to impress by blowing all this money.
While Uncle Sam tries to control the economy, the economy becomes self-aware and turns the tables on Uncle. "Feed me, Seymour!" it cries, as Uncle frantically "liberates" nation after nation and tosses them down his darling child's maw. But the larger The Economy grows, the more He needs to eat, until it gets to where no amount of spent ammunition will satisfy Him. Uncle Sam becomes His willing slave, sacrificing the quality of life of the American populace so that the beast won't wither.
The Psychic Soviet sees all of this and more. What Svenonious has given us is the mirror in which to groom our modern world. Let us smooth our lapels, straighten our neckties, and find the bravery to do what we must.
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
My first exposure to Haruki Murakami was Pinball, 1973. It was a tattered copy of the book in Japanese, with English on the facing pages, intended for Japanese students of English. (I think it has still never been printed in an English edition.) I took a liking to it almost immediately. Besides being a story about pinball obsession (a condition I share), it reminded me of Richard Brautigan (another obsession I had for a while). So I read some more. And then a bit more. Now, a few books later, I can say that I still like him, although the stories begin to blend together a bit. Part of the problem is that Murakami is such a consistent writer. Even though all of his narrators are ostensibly different characters, they all sound like the same character. I guess it's hard for any of us to sound different than ourselves, but I think that is the challenge in writing fiction. I was certainly never any good at it -- all of my narrators only ever sounded like me. A failure of imagination, I suppose. So Murakami makes up for it by being outlandishly imaginative with his plot and settings -- so imaginative, in fact, that's it's almost cheating. He gets his characters from point A to point B by non-sequiters and magic. While it's fun to read, I think I have more respect for an Umberto Eco who manages to create the appearance of magic from the cloth of mundane existence. You think you're dealing with the occult, but it turns out just to be sinister but misguided guys in robes.
Anyway, I still hold a fondness for Pinball, 1973 -- I've got a printed copy that I cribbed from somewhere on the Internet tucked in between all of the other books on my shelf. And I still like the occassional surreal twist in the road But I've probably read about as much Murakami as I need to understand his particular twist.
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
Historically, I've not had the easiest time with Faulkner. He's got a way of making the mundane sound... well, mundane. I figured that As I Lay Dying at least has a hook -- each chapter is narrated by a different character, in their own voices with their own idiosyncrasies. That seems like it ought to work well -- you get a sequence of events, told with some degree of overlap, and the different perspectives on what really happend and how it really happened sketch in the details in a more nuanced way than the standard third-person or single first-person narration would. It's a gimmick that has since served many a film writer well.
But I don't find it overly compelling in As I Lay Dying for a number of reasons. To me, the characters themselves just aren't adequately differentiated. Faulkner is telling a story of small-town pathos, but his characters come from such a small world that they have too much in common. For one, there's the imposed rural dialect. Even the most literate characters come across as using dialogue written by Hollywood for "Hee-Haw". While I'm well aware that various rural Southern dialects do exist, and while I'd agree that putting academic English into the mouths of early 20th century farmers would be inappropriate, it still makes for a wearying read, and one in which the narrative voices begin to slur together into a stew of "Cain't I?" and "'Cuz", and it deters from the very effect Faulkner sets off to create.
The other issue is that there isn't much to the story other than the narrative voice and structure. The setup is a Steinbeck-style journey of a family to bury their deceased mother at the homeplace, but there's very little of the Steinbeck-style character evolution. The characters come out of the tale pretty much the same as they went into it, and the telling is pretty much just the process of character exposition. If the characters were more engaging or more likeable, that might be enough. But they aren't, and it isn't.
I don't mean to sound like it's a terrible book -- it isn't. It's a literary accomplishment, it gives voice to the American South, etc., etc. But for me, it was more work than the story was worth. Talking to rural Southerners is one thing; having to struggle through a transliterated printed version of the dialect is another. If I want rural pathos, I'll just have a drink with my neighbors.
Immanuel Kant
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Kant is one of those philosophers whose thought has always been presented to me second-hand, but whom I had never read until recently. I guess the idea is that his prose and argument structure are too opaque to read in an undergraduate philosophy class.
That may not be completely off-base. His prose is opaque, and his reasoning complex. But reading the Groundwork has been a joy for me. Discussion about Kant usually focuses around moral realism and categorical imperatives -- both important ideas to him, to be sure. But what I found most interesting and relevant to my own thinking is the meta-ethical problem of how we do moral philosophy at all.
The standard method for most moral philosophy seems to go like this: consider the sum total of those human behaviors that we consider to be either moral or immoral. From that set of behaviors, try to infer some set of moral principles that best fits. Then test that set of principles against other situations, and see if they lead to conclusions that we intuitively know to be incorrect. If so, go back and amend the principles until the conclusion is more intuitive. Conversely, when a philosopher wants to attack some moral system, the standard approach is to show some case in which the system leads to an obvious moral absurdity -- i.e., a conclusion contrary to common moral intuition.
The problem with this method is that it necessarily assumes that our common moral intuition has validity, and we are able to recognize a moral absurdity when we see one. (This is something quite different from recognizing a logical contradiction of the sort P & ~P.) There is probably no sound reason to make that assumption, and if there were a sound reason to make that assumption, then it's not clear that the moral system does any work. If we can trust our moral intuition to differentiate between a conclusion that is morally absurd and one that isn't, then why wouldn't we similarly trust our moral intuition to arbitrate individual situations, and do away with moral theory entirely?
One common response is that we engage in a process of "reflexive equilibrium", in which our moral theories refine our moral intuitions, and our intuitions in turn refine our moral theories. As compelling as this sounds, I don't think it gets us out of the problem. While I agree that we might eventually reach an equilibrium, I don't see any reason to believe that we would converge upon the "right" one. A corrupt moral theory would corrupt our intuition, which would reflexively corrupt the moral theory. We might get an equilibrium, but a thoroughly corrupt one.
Kant, however, rejects our moral intuitions entirely. He refuses to allow empirical observation to play a role in constructing moral theory. Kant wants a moral system derived entirely from rationality, not informed by checking it against our moral intuitions as they apply to empirical situations. In that, he avoids the problem of reflexivity -- if we have a rational moral system and our moral intuitions lead us to some contrary conclusion, then our intuition is just wrong. (We can't meaningfully ask the question of whether our rationality itself is valid, because answering it presupposes a rational evaluation.)
So Kant at least achieves consistency. Of course, that leaves him entirely in the rationalist camp and therefore vulnerable to all of the critiques of Hume, et al. But at least he manages to start with an internally valid system.
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart D. Ehrman
The take-away lesson of Lost Christianities is that the Western Christianity as we know it today is just one of may possible Christianities that were in circulation in the second and third centuries. The dogmatic tendency is to tell the story as one of truth and heresy, but prior to one version of the religion gaining a dogmatic standing (in large part because of state endorsement by the Roman emperor), there was no dogma, and hence there was no heresy. There were only competing versions of a proto-religion all claiming to have the most authoritative set of scriptures and the best interpretation of those scriptures. Only once one version became the "winner" could its competitors be labeled heretics.
And these are no small matters of theology that differentiate the competitors. For example, how many gods are there? The Western dogma is of course that there is only one God, there has always been only one God, He is eternal, all-powerful, etc., and Christianity has always believed it to be so. But to say that is a-historical at best and dishonest at worst. The number of gods was a pressing question for early Christians. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the idea of a tidy three-in-one trinity would be articulated. Were Jesus and God the same thing or not? Were the Hebrew god and the Christian god the same, or were they competitors? When god says in Eden that Adam has "become as one of us", to whom is he speaking? When god says to Moses that "you shall have no other gods before me," doesn't that admit that there are other gods? When Jesus asks on the cross, "God, why have you forsaken/deserted me?" to whom was he speaking? With 1700 years of dogma behind us, these may seem like silly and/or heretical questions now, but they were far from it in the first 300 years following the death of the historical Jesus, and the scriptures that remain are the ones that supported the emergent dogma. Once the dogma formed, the now-heretical scriptures and theological tracts were removed from circulation and usually destroyed.
But one of the things that Ehrman does well is not to chastise the surviving dogma for its selectivity. He does a nice job of demonstrating why it became the surviving dogma. To take an obvious example, a Christianity that required circumcision of all adult males who wished to join the church just wasn't going to have a strong appeal to the Gentile world. Paul's success was largely because he was willing to extend the offer of salvation to non-Jews, without requiring that they adhere to Judaic law. However, a total abandonment of Judaic history wasn't really a contender, either, because of the reverence that the Roman world held for antiquity. A brand-new religion didn't have any roots, and therefore didn't have any credibility. So proto-Christianity kept the Judaic scriptures and grafted new scriptures on to it that said that converts didn't need to keep to the Judaic law. Constantine was won over by a religion that could claim roots in the ancient world while not requiring him to go under the knife or eat kosher. With Constantine's conversion and the establishment of the state-sponsored church in Rome, the Western dogma was born.
One of the things any dogma has to do in order to survive is to obliterate its own past. We see it in religion, we see it in science, and we see it in politics. We're at war with Oceania -- we've always been at war with Oceania. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- it's just a feature of dogma, and adherence to dogma is useful (and perhaps necessary) if we're to function in the world. We can't question every belief we hold every hour of the day. But questioning some of those fundamental beliefs some of the time and examining their historical formation is a tremendously beneficial exercise, even if we don't end up changing them. Lost Christianities does a wonderful job of just that.
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
Tom Robbins
Earlier this summer, I had the worst case of poison ivy that I have ever had. The worst case that I've ever seen, actually. It started innocently enough. Her Ladyship had pointed out that there were a few poison ivy plants hanging about the front garden, and that they were probably directly related to the small itchy bumps that had been appearing on our persons since the cats took to their summer homes huddled beneath the hemlock trees. Being the strapping young courtier that I am, I bravely and selflessly volunteered to extricate them. And being the prudent fountain of practical wisdom that I am, I donned a pair of rubber gloves and headed out the door to duel the herbivorous serpent.
The thing that I neglected to calculate was that poison ivy isn't a regular plant like a daisy or a dandelion. It's a vine. So as I grabbed at the first couple of green shoots, I found out that they were connected to longer shoots, which were in turn connected to longer shoots. I knew that if I were going to beat the thing, I needed to find the root. So I followed vine after vine, pulling them along with me as I went, and stuffing the tendrils into a trash bag. Before I knew it, I had filled one garbage bag and was getting started on a second. After an hour or so, I had dug up the tap root and had a trash can full of urushiol-soaked evil. I did the usual cleaning up and tossing of clothes into the laundry, and hoped for the best.
A few hours after that, the itching started. I left for a conference the next day, and by the time the plane landed in San Jose, I had one arm wrapped in a bandana. By the following morning, I had both arms wrapped in surgical sponges and bandages to contain the eruption. I was drinking extra water to avoid dehydration. This made for a really terrific conference. "Hi, can I interest you in information on software to... say, what's that leaking out of your elbow?" I'm fairly sure the hotel wasn't going to be reusing the bed clothes after I checked out.
On the flight home, I read Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. I sought not so much a book as a panacea, something to take the edge off my slow but steady conversion into the Toxic Avenger. For that, it worked pretty well. It's not a book that changed my life, but it's a book that prominently features fornication with nuns, which can't be all bad.
Oh, about the poison ivy -- I like to think that I won in the end. Since The Great Purging (and subsequent Great Weeping), there hasn't been any the rest of the summer. Nor have Her Ladyship and I had to suffer any more of those tiny itchy bumps. Of course, there are the scars on my arms with which to contend...
The Selfish Gene has been much (and often unfairly) maligned on the ground that it advocates a type of genetic determinism. The fault is surely attributable in part to Dawkins' choice of words. He often describes the organism as a "robot" programmed by its genetics. So it's at least understandable when Dawkins' critics level charges against him of providing gene-level vindication of a host of crimes like racism, fraud, sexual assault, etc. Without actually reading the book, it would be very easy to make such criticisms based on excerpts from the text. But reading the whole book makes it quite clear that Dawkins is not in fact a determinist. He would be better characterized as a "predispositionist". Dawkins surely would argue that humans are indeed organisms developed by geneplexes that exist solely as self-replicators, and that the drive for the genes to replicate potentially predisposes the organism toward a host of unsavory behaviors. But he's also quite explicit that the human animal is in a (probably) unique position of self-awareness, and thus often able to override our genetic programming, at least as far as behavioral traits are concerned. A gene "for" a violent disposition (if something so simple as that were to exist) doesn't necessitate violent action on the part of a self-aware organism. It may however make the organism less naturally inclined to to choose non-violent resolutions.
Dawkins' choice of language was no doubt intentionally sensationalistic. He was a relatively young scholar when The Selfish Gene first saw print, and the idea it proposed was relatively new. Dawkins himself says in the footnotes that some of his youthful linguistic indiscretions were due largely to his excitement over the material. I expect Wilson's Sociobiology has taken most of its beatings on similar grounds (although I'm less familiar with it).
For me , much of the joy of reading The Selfish Gene comes less from the genetics than from the examples drawn from Dawkins' experience as an animal behaviorist. One could approach the book almost solely as a behavioral freak show of the bird and insect worlds. From infant cuckoo birds pushing the rival eggs out of their surrogate nest to Thisbe irenea caterpillars drugging ants into serving as bodyguards, the biological examples are fascinating, and serve well to bolster Dawkins' argument. The book is well worth reading for these anecdotes alone.
As for me, there seems to be strong evidence to suggest that I'm genetically predisposed toward pinball, ice cream, and lousy handwriting. I'm disinclined to overcome any of these predispositions.
Something about the modern American mind seems naturally inclined toward theories of conspiracy. I'm not sure what causes that, but I would guess that it has something to do with most people finding their existence desperately mundane. Get up, go to work, watch television, go to bed. Repeat that for twenty or thirty years, and you're bound to start thinking that there must be something more, some secret information or secret way of living to which you've not been granted access. So the conspiracy theories start rolling out. I must be dull and lazy because the chemtrails are making me dull and lazy in the name of the New World Order. They killed Kennedy, they cause global warming, they keep us poor, keep us quiet, keep us helpless. Because the alternative -- that the world is generally run by slow-moving committees of bueracrats nearly as lazy and incompetent as we are -- is just too boring to accept.
The danger suggested by Foucault's Pendulum is that nature abhors a vacuum. Create a conspiracy theory, create a mythical place of power that is by nature of unknown occupancy, and before too long someone will come along and occupy it, and your conspiracy becomes real. There's a chilling amount of sense to the proposition. Call me a crook, treat me like a crook, and then tell me that you're a helpless victim to my crookery, and it's not going to be too long before I take advantage of it. It's also not going to be long before somebody else smells the money and offers to sell you a way out of the conspiracy. Protects against chemtrails, aliens, abductions, and demons, all for only $21.99! Hooray!
Naturally, I'm all for reintroducing a little magic into our otherwise mundane world. But I'm not so sure that wearing orgone power pendants to fend off the New World Order is really the way to go. There's a whole lot that most people could do to make their lives a lot more interesting, and not just in the tin-foil-helmet sort of way. But I suppose that's just the mind control talking.
Candide
Voltaire
The best of all possible worlds. It's a phrase that gets repeated over and over again in Candide. All that happens is ultimately for the best. Voltaire writes Candide in response to Leibniz, but the idea is much older. It goes back at least to Aquinas (and therefore, by extension, probably to Aristotle). The argument, in coarse terms, is as follows:
The world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds, and everything that happens in it could be no other way. We know this to be true because the world was created by a perfect God, who admits no error. (The argument for the perfection of God is of course a separate discussion; there are multiple courses by which we may arrive at the premise. See Descartes, et al.) A perfect god could not have created an imperfect world -- everything He does is perfect by definition. But what of those things which seem to us such obvious flaws? What of wars, disease, insanity, infant death, etc.? Again, there are multiple avenues by which to solve the problem. Human-created disasters (war, murder, greed-induced famine, etc.) are the result of human free will. Human free will is a necessary part of God's divine plan. In order for salvation to be perfect, humans must choose it, not have it assigned to them. The failures of war, murder, famine, etc. are human failures resulting from their perfect free will, not divine failures.
Fair enough, says the skeptic. But what of natural disasters? What of disease, insanity, and infant death? Surely these can't be failings of man, and must therefore be failings of God, who either doesn't exist or created an imperfect world. Not so fast, says Leibniz. How do you know that disease doesn't contribute toward a more perfect world? How many people have been brought closer to God as a result of disease and suffering? What better opportunity for the righteous to demonstrate Christian charity than to assist those in need, which presupposes that need must exist? Each apparent tragedy must necessarily be a blessing in disguise. After all, God is (by definition) perfect and can admit no error. Our perception of God's failure to create a perfect world is in fact a failure of perception, not a perception of failure. For the intellect of Man, while also necessarily perfect in type, is nonetheless limited in scope. Our failure to understand the holistic perfection of the Divine Plan is not the fault of the Divine Plan, it is the fault of our willingness to understand it. The finite intellect of individual humans may fail to penetrate the perfect mysteries of the divine will. End of discussion.
Candide makes no attempt to engage with the question philosophically. Voltaire instead resorts to a simpler tactic -- base mockery. The story of Candide is a story of human suffering taken to absurdity, and of Candide's steadfast effort to maintain in the face of that absurdity that he does indeed live in the best of all possible worlds. (Somewhat ironically, it calls to mind another familiar tale. Job, his family slaughtered, his land destroyed, covered in lice, dressed in sackcloth and sitting on a dungheap, finally has the nerve to ask God, "Um, what's the deal?" God's reply: "Where were you when I created the world?" Who are you to question the perfect mysteries of the divine will?) On first blush, we may be tempted to chide Voltaire for simply poking fun instead of engaging in discourse. My own reflex, captive to my meager philosophical training, is such. As I've told so many students, conviction is no substitute for lucid argumentation.
Or so says the philosophical training. But Voltaire was certainly no stranger to the philosophical argumentation. On the contrary, he was so familiar with philosophy and wrote so much about it that his writings were complied into a Philosophical Dictionary. The philosophical arguments against Leibniz's perfect world were well known. But I think Voltaire also knew something that liberals today often forget: fundamentalism isn't comprised of philosophical arguments. That's precisely what makes it fundamentalism. It is instead comprised of fundamental principles (God is perfect and the world is part of God's perfect plan), and any rational argumentation is subordinate to and consequent from those principles -- not the other way around. If the rules of logic determine the fundamental principle to be absurd, it is the logician that must be in error, not the principle. At which point the shrewd fundamentalist will argue that philosophy and rationality themselves are a form of fundamentalism, but with rules of logic instead of principles of theology as its fundamental tenets, and aren't our rules of logic just Articles of Faith? At that point we can hand our fundamentalist a copy of Russell's Principia, but by then the core of the argument has already passed us by. Once Faith has entered into the discussion, we're lost. Faith, by definition, stands in the face of reason. If it were reasonable, we wouldn't need faith.
All of which means to say that you can't argue with fundamentalism. The wit of Candide is that it takes the theological argument of one the most stringent of logicians -- one of only two Western contenders for the invention of calculus, at that -- and simply sticks out its tongue at it. It's both juvenile and amusing. It does for theology what Jonathan Swift does for politics. I find it curious that such a simple story would be so well-remembered, but it makes for an entertaining read nonetheless.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
Nothing should be easier than telling our dreams from our waking life, but in practice it's not always so simple. We live at least some of our lives not able or not willing to tell the difference between the two. This is most obvious when we're children -- our daydreams are at least as real as our trips to the dentist, and our nightmares are by no means dissipated by something so concrete as a peek under the bed. Even once we become "rational adults", the boundaries are flexible. We're told that if you die in your dreams, you'll die in real life, too. (Apparently false: I've been killed in at least one dream -- shot in the throat by a firing squad sporting candy-colored pistols. The sensation of the impact of the bullet just between the collarbones, and then of blacking out in the dream to awake in my bed, was certainly a peculiar and very tangible sensory train. For quite some time I was convinced that I actually knew what a bullet wound felt like.) Most of our dream experiences are more mundane. I'm at the grocery store. Did she ask me to buy orange juice, or did I dream that she asked me to buy orange juice? She was at the kitchen table at the time, I remember that. I search for something out of place in the scene to give me a clue -- something the wrong color, an object on the table that shouldn't be there, a familiar name assigned to an unfamiliar face or thing. I can't find anything wrong. I buy the juice.
We already have juice.
One Hundred Years of Solitude achieves a similar effect. The story starts at the turn of the last century with a man in the tropics of South America taken to see an extraordinary object kept in a box in a traveling carnival. It's square and clear like a diamond, but cold and wet to the touch. Touching it, even for a moment, draws the heat from the hand itself. Completely strange, completely unreal, and yet completely there, the humble block of ice is something at once mundane and extraordinary. In obverse contrast, a woman taken up into the heavens before the eyes of the town and a man beset by constant swarms of yellow butterflies are treated as commonplace events. It's not that the dreams and the reality are treated seamlessly; it's that the seams have been shuffled about nearly at random. The effect is a story of non-sequiters that nonetheless follow necessarily from their predecessors, and a patchwork of images and events that holds a logic and beauty entirely its own.
All of which is really just a fancy excuse to come home with yet another carton of orange juice.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
Whenever a film is based upon some book, comparisons are inevitable. If you're the sort of person who wants others to think of you as an intellectual, whenever the subject of the film is raised in conversation, you're supposed to say that the book is better. (This is particularly effective when you've actually read the book, or know someone who has.)
The intended effect is two-fold: first and foremost, it is intended to be impressed upon your audience that you are the sort of person who reads books, unlike the unwashed masses who have only a long enough attention span to sit passively through a two hour film. Secondly, and by extension, it is intended to belittle film as an inferior medium to the written word, particularly if the film has enjoyed any commercial success, and particularly if the speaker fancies himself a bookish type. If you have not in fact read the book, under no circumstances should this be admitted. You should instead direct discussion to the relative merits and detriments of the film qua film (use the word "qua" to do so), paying particular regard to the camera work, lighting, blocking and other aspects of the film in which you're hoping that the other bookish types won't be quite so conversant. And if you get cornered, nod sagely and say nothing until the conversation veers elsewhere. Better to say nothing than to be mistaken for one of the unwashed masses.
The film Bladerunner, as the bookish types will tell you, is based loosely on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "Loosely" in part because Ridley Scott had a vision, and in part because he reportedly never actually finished the book himself before making the film. I'd be lying if I said that I like the book better. It is, without question, a brilliant book. However, in no small part because it's a bit dated by now, it relies on technological gadgetry a good bit more than the film, and that makes it read more like stock science fiction than Bladerunner. While Do Androids Dream... is full of robotic sheep and flying cars, Bladerunner focuses more on sweat and dirt. Yes, the book plot is more complex. But the film environment is, to my eye, much richer and actually more immersive. It leaves less to the imagination, but the details included share the director's imagination in fascinating ways. I'm very glad that I read Do Androids Dream... It's a great book on its own merits. But it's also a great book as backstory to a great film. Bookish types and the unwashed masses alike would do well to pay attention to both.
How The Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill
History has never been my strong suit. I'm not sure what my strong suit is, but it isn't history. I have in my head a smattering of names and dates and events, but generally haven't done a very good job of treating them as anything other than an isolated smattering of names, dates, and events. Which of course isn't where the interesting bits of history exist at all. It's the connections and disconnections among all of the smatterings that bring coherence to the world as a whole.
How the Irish Saved Civilization does a nice job of helping a poor slob like me put some otherwise disconnected pieces of information into perspective. For example, I've read Saint Augustine's Confessions, and I've read a bit of Irish history about Saint Patrick and his mission in Ireland. But I haven't read anything else that explicitly discusses the two as Christian contemporaries (which they were) and puts them in the context of the dissolving Roman empire. I've read about the Irish warrior kings and I've read about (and visited) the monasteries in which the early European Christian texts were preserved. But up until Cahill, I haven't read anything that discusses how illiterate barbarians became skilled Latinists and book preservationists within the span of a generation or two. This isn't to say that there aren't other books out there to have done so; I just haven't read them.
Therein, I suppose, lies the value of secondary historical sources. The story isn't in the events; it's in the seams between events. And those living in the seams usually don't know that they're in them. Reading Augustine, it never once dawned on me that I was reading what is possibly the first spiritual autobiography in the history of humankind, authored by someone whose civilization was collapsing around him. I suppose it's possible that it never dawned on Augustine until the barbarians were at the gates of Hippo.
How the Irish Saved Civilization is not an academic history. It's isn't heavily footnoted, sources are not always obvious, and the most of the details are far from detailed. But as a means of connecting the data from other sources in interesting ways, it serves wonderfully.
American Gods
Neil Stephenson
I read most of American Gods on a recent trip to Washington, D.C. My patience for driving up and down route 81 between here and there has been utterly exhausted over the years, so I took a different route this time, via Amtrak. I picked up the train in Hinton, WV, and traveled by train through the Greenbriar River valley. The fall foliage was in full display at the time, the trip was pleasant, and I got an enormous amount of reading done. Over the course of the trip, I also completed my second foray into the world of beats-and-fiddle. While I can't claim it to be a tear-jerking work of genius, I can say in all honesty that it amuses me enormously. Which -- let's face it -- I usually prefer to genius, anyway.
When I started American Gods, I had sort of a hard time with it. As I tried to adjust myself to the story and style, it dawned on me that I'm just not that used to popular fiction anymore. I suppose I used to read a fair amount of it in high school, but over the course of my education, it seems I've wandered away from the contemporary novel. A quick perusal of my recent reading list seems to confirm the fact. So reading something with a linear beginning, middle, and end; something with a small handful of characters with transparent motivations; something with a tidy wrapped-up conclusion -- it struck me as a weird sort of story. I found myself looking for something more to it. There's this guy, and some stuff happens to him, and then some other stuff happens after that. What gives?
At some point over the course of the train ride, my brain remembered about fiction. That it's supposed to be fun. That it doesn't need to be a work of genius to be good.
I was OK after that. American Gods is fun. It isn't genius. I didn't learn anything by reading it. I'm neither smarter, nor more enlightened, nor more capable after reading it. But it kept me happily diverted on a train for several hours in between sequencing bass and fiddle loops, and in that capacity it does its job well.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
After fighting my way through the Selected Non-Fictions of Borges, I was ready for something to rest my mind a bit. Something that I could read in a night or two and that wouldn't require endless cross-referencing with other sources in order to properly appreciate. So I started cruising my shelves, which still contain a few volumes that I own and haven't yet read. Eventually my eye came to rest on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The book came to me (I think) by way of my brother when he liquidated his undergraduate book collection, and had languished on my shelf unread for quite a while. Here, no doubt, was the perfect opportunity to take care of it. It's a slim story, and one that pretty much everybody thinks they already know, despite the fact that hardly anyone to whom I've spoken has actually read the book. So I went for it.
As expected, I finished it in a couple of sittings. And as expected, the story as written wasn't quite the same as the story that exists in the popular imagination. I think that both The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein are generally assumed (particularly by those who haven't read them) to be allegories about the dangers of Man tasting the forbidden fruit of scientific knowledge. But neither of them is really that. In the case of Jekyll and Hyde, the vicious persona of Mr. Hyde is not the result of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong; on the contrary, it's the result of a scientific experiment that succeeds perfectly. Kindly Dr. Jekyll does not fall victim to the evil of Hyde -- he concocts a potion in order to free himself of the inhibitions of Jekyll so that he can become Hyde. And he takes enormous pleasure in that persona. When he wants to be evil without the pesky interference of his conscience, he calls in Hyde, so that he can indulge his base pleasures while Jekyll continues to live with an untarnished reputation. Interestingly, once he's Hyde, he never wants to change back to Jekyll, except to avoid apprehension and prosecution. It seems Stevenson has a fairly dim view of human nature...
In any case, this wasn't my favorite book ever, but it was at least a bit of brain candy before I start ramping back up to something more challenging again. But a bit more candy first. Next stop: American Gods.
Selected Nonfictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Writing about the Selected Nonfictions of Jorge Luis Borges is something like writing about the Encyclopedia Brittanica or the Oxford English Dictionary. It's a bit shorter than either, but covers an array of topics only slightly less broad. Where else can we find King Kong and the Kabbalah measured side by side? Borges comes across as an expert on all things literary, which I suppose he might have been. As I read him, a certain sense of despair always sets in. It's the despair of having once aspired to be a so-called "man of letters", and realizing that it's something I'll never really be.
It's not that it's something I couldn't ever be. If I were to devote myself single-mindedly to literature, I could likely produce a volume nearly as diverse (although not nearly as artful) by the time I were an old man. I couldn't read all of the world's great literature, but I could read quite a lot of it, and probably in a small handful of different languages. But would my time have been well spent? My personal answer would certainly be "no". Not that I think it was the wrong choice for Borges -- I can't speak for him -- but it would be the wrong choice for me. I don't particularly want to be expert in just one thing (even "one thing" as broad as the entirety of human literature); I want to know a lot about almost everything. And not just know a lot about everything, but be able to do a lot of everything. Borges writes brilliantly about the tango. But could he dance the tango brilliantly? I don't know the answer, but would be willing to guess not.
So I've chosen the life of jack-of-all-trades, a "renaissance man", or a charlatan, depending on your point of view. Which is itself not entirely satisfying, because there still isn't enough time in the measly seventy-odd years I've been alloted to do half of what I'd like to do or learn half of what I'd like to learn. So I'm stuck making the most of the time that I have, and basking when possible in the glow of other people's genius in their chosen idiom. So be it.
The Bhagavad Gita
Stephen Mitchell (trans.)
A long-standing trouble of mine with regard to Eastern religions has always been the issue of contentment. The Tao Te Ching is rife with passages about the value of being passive, the value of being content, the value of non-resistance. To be sure, these are things in which I do see great value, and most of the people who know me well would probably say that I exemplify them most days. But there is still something about the idea that doesn't sit right with me. Specifically: what comprises the very fine barrier between contentment and complacency? The dictionary is no help here: it defines "content" as "desiring no more than what one has; satisfied" and "complacent" as
"contented to a fault; self-satisfied and unconcerned". I understand the difference in the linguistic sense of the two words; what I have always struggled to understand is the particular set of empirical circumstances that make one more applicable than the other in one's life.
The relative value of contentment is something that I've recently discussed much with a friend who is a yoga instructor. She argues that a life of contentment is a harmonious life; a life without conflict. Very well, I say, but isn't it conflict and a certain amount of discomfort that inspires us to improve ourselves and our world? Doesn't the very notion of doing anything presuppose some desired end state which one does not currently possess? Wouldn't a life of perfect satisfaction also be a life of perfect inactivity? And if so, I reject satisfaction -- something that I've seen myself do for many years now. Embracing discomfort as impetus for positive change and new situations, while it may make Lao Tzu cringe, has always seemed to me to have an enormous potential for benefit.
And so I finally picked up the Bhagavad Gita, and found the beginnings of some insight into the issue. I was surprised to find Krishna at once advocating a life of perfect satisfaction, but also characterizing himself as the standard for a life of perpetual activity. The answer supplied by the Gita is activity free of intentionality, or at least activity free of expectation of a particular result. This makes at least some sense to me. One doesn't need to be dissatisfied in order to act; one could just act for the sake of action, independent of desire for results. This begs another question: then why act well? Again, perhaps for the goodness of the action itself, not necessarily the goodness of the outcome. It's sort of an anti-utilitarian approach to morality in which we don't motivate actions by their outcome nor by their intent, but by the merits of the actions themselves.
While the notion is still fuzzy in my mind and will require more reading and thinking to bring it into sharper focus, the Bhagavad Gita has at least gotten me thinking about the problem in a new light. It is entirely possible that I've been intuitively utilizing the principle for quite a while without quite being able to articulate what it was I was doing. I often find myself unable to account for my own actions in terms of intention or desire; there are a great many things that I do because it seems intuitive and/or beautiful to do them in the particular moment and space in which they occur. I've recently been described by someone as "guileless", which may or may not be quite right. There are definitely some things that I approach with an engineer's eye toward problem-solving, and definitely other things that I do entirely without craft. Learning which to apply to human relationships certainly constitutes one of the most important lessons that I have learned in my dealings with the world thus far.
Home Buying For Dummies
Eric Tyson and Ray Brown
The very fact that I have purchased and read a book called Home Buying For Dummies disturbs me. It seems that my life has a tendency to change quickly and thoroughly. Four months ago I was living out of a backpack in the hills of Ireland, and now I'm working a full-time computer software job and trying to figure out how mortgages function. I'm currently trying to grapple with the realization that I was far more comfortable with the former. There are multiple ways to interpret the fact. The most obvious and most likely is that I'm not cut out for nine-to-five life with a house and a yard and all of the trappings of an ordinary middle-class existence. But there are others. Basic, irrational fear of commitment is a strong contender. Unreasonable unwillingness to compromise is a good bet, too. Immaturity (if the label can be considered meaningful in the first place) is another likely possibility.
The fact is, I can't really point to anything quite wrong with my life as it is. As jobs go, I can hardly imagine one more suitable to my interests and lifestyle than the one that I have. Perhaps a shortage of creativity on my part, or perhaps I have a good job. And yet I'm uncomfortable with the very fact of having it. Maybe not because of what it is, but maybe because of what it represents: a conventional sort of income that could be easily applied toward a conventional sort of life.
This becomes pretty central to the whole house issue. Every time I raise the topic in the company of other people, they usually tell me I should buy a house. Why? "Because it would be a good investment." And right there is where I have to stop listening. The language of investment and return is foreign to me. It seems to presuppose that the purpose of money is to reproduce, and buying a house is a way of providing a cozy petri dish in which hundreds of thousands of little dollar bills can get busy procreating. But it's an angle with which I just can't sympathize. If I buy a house, I want it to be because it's good for me, not just because it's good for my money. This is where we cut to the heart of the matter. What is good for me, anyway? In what ways is it good, and on what time scale? That's the part that I can't quite grasp yet, because I haven't really decided what kind of life I want for myself yet. Buying a house -- whatever financial sense it may or may not make -- constitutes a full-on commitment not just to a particular dwelling place (that part I could handle), but to a particular kind of life. The kind of life in which I need to continue a forty-hour-a-week existence at least long enough not to be plunged deeply into debt for the rest of my very-grown-up life. And that part is a commitment that I'm not yet sure I'm willing to make. Commitment to a home, to a person, to a project -- those are things that make sense to me. Commitment to sitting at a keyboard for eight hours a day just doesn't.
And so I am trying very hard to take the long view right now. Not the chronological long view that Investors are supposed to take, but the standing-back-and-squinting long view to try to figure out the most beautiful possible arrangements of events, people, and forces in my life. The Impressionist long view, I guess you could call it. If all of the parts orchestrate into a beautiful whole, then they're the right parts. If not, then they need rearranging. My life as it is looks pretty amazing through the squint. Considering ways in which to make it even better is the crux of the current quandary.
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
James Joyce
As often happens, while reading "Portrait of the Artist..." a friend asked me what the book was about. And, as often happens, I didn't really know how to answer. I said something along the lines of "it's a coming of age story about art, apostasy, beauty, and finding one's voice in the world." Which of course can't be a satisfactory answer to the question, where a satisfactory answer would be something like "a super-virus is unleashed upon Las Vegas, and it's up to one man to stop it." A good book is about different things to different people -- that's part of what makes it a good book. For me, "Portrait of the Artist" is a coming of age story about art, apostasy, beauty, and finding one's voice in the world. For someone else, it might be a story about the revolution in Ireland. To someone else, it may be about Joyce embarking upon a literary experiment. There's a lot between its thin covers.
But the story of a budding apostate is probably the most resonant to me. I had a good talk with my grandfather last night. He's 85 years old, I'm 29 years old, and while he's a devoted Christian and I'm a contented backslider, we agree on nearly everything -- particularly where religion and politics are concerned. It's incredibly interesting to me. Almost nobody would dare question my grandfather's faith. He's been a church-going man all his life, prays out loud before every meal, and gives liberally to Christian causes. I of course do none of these things. And yet I can't sit down with my grandfather for five minutes before he launches into some diatribe against "the evangelicals". This means something very specific to him. To me, *he's* an evangelical. But the evangelicals that he's referring to are the neo-conservative Republican evangelicals. And that's where things get interesting. My grandfather is an old-school Roosevelt democrat, and has been his entire adult life. He and I completely share a deep distain and confusion for what passes as Christian living in the 20th-century United States. How is it that the political party of military spending, reduced social programs, and "free market" corporate economics is the party of Christ, while the party of providing aid, employment, and education to the needy are the godless liberals? When and where did Christianity get hijacked? What happened to "give away all that you have to the poor and follow me," or "that which you do unto the least of these, you do unto me", or "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven"? When did Jesus pick up a gun and give up his mission to assist the poor in favor of protecting corporate profits? And why aren't Christians other than my grandfather completely outraged at what's being done in His name?
And so we sit on the porch at night and talk about these things. I have a tremendous respect for my grandfather's faith. He's a Christian -- a *real* Christian. Not the kind of Christian that would rather cherry-pick verses from the book of Leviticus in order to promote their own culture of fear than pay attention to those pesky red-lettered words of Jesus. I know a handful -- a very small handful -- of other Christians whom I similarly respect for being willing to deal with the whole of the Bible, instead of just those parts that endorse what they already believe. And while I respect them, I don't believe that I'll ever again count myself among them. Like Stephen Daedelus in Joyce's novel, I feel like the time of questioning has passed me by, and left me with a faith far more secure than any that I found in the confines of a church. To my family, I shall forever be an Apostate, but I'm willing to live with that. In place of a sequence of stand-up-sit-down rituals, I have a genuine love for other people that I almost never saw in twelve years of "Christian" education. And that -- if I'm reading the same New Testament as the millionaires currently carpet-bombing the Middle East -- is the most Christian thing of all.
Dune
Frank Herbert
More and more often these days, I seem to be hearing about water issues. In the news, in people's research, in casual conversation about town zoning issues -- everywhere people seem to be more and more concerned about clean water. I don't know how many times I've heard commentators say that over the next ten years, wars will shift from being about land control to being about water control. I don't know enough about the economics or ecology to have a good sense of whether environmental and human conditions have changed significantly of late, or whether people are just paying more attention to that particular issue.
I finished Dune just before departing for Ireland, which was a pretty stark juxtaposition. Dune is a great story about political intrigue, but more than anything else, it did a great job of making me hyper-conscious of my own water usage. The setting of the novel is one in which water is so precious that people even reclaim their own sweat in order to stay alive. I didn't go that far, but I did find myself wincing more than usual at dripping faucets and lawn sprinklers.
And then I went to Ireland, where water conservation seems to be about the furthest thing from anyone's mind. And who could blame them? I didn't see a single day in Ireland that didn't have rain, and barely set foot on a dry piece of earth the entire time I was there. In the cities, there is somewhat greater reason to pay attention to water usage, as the transformation of waste water into drinking water does use energy resources. But in the countryside, where everything is wells and septic tanks, it hardly seemed a concern. There wasn't much worry about anyone's well running dry, as the rains topped the groundwater off every few hours. I still couldn't bring myself to let the faucet run while I was brushing my teeth, but it wouldn't have mattered too terribly much if I had. That moisture would have left the septic tank and been back in the water table in a matter of hours.
The much more interesting issue there was one of energy. From what I could gather, a large part of the energy produced in Ireland is from good ol' King Coal. But not Irish coal -- there isn't any. It's coal from Poland or the Czech Republic. As in America, the effects of coal mining aren't felt much by those who consume it, and it's those who are poorest who work in and live with the industry. The other major power source is a uniquely Irish one -- turf. I don't have a sense of what proportion of power is peat vs. coal (more research required once I have an Internet connection), but I do know that turf burning constitutes a large part of Irish power generation. Like coal, it's a non-renewable (or at least very slowly renewable) resource that does environmental damage to harvest and burn. "Turf farming" is kind of like high-speed strip mining. Certainly peat can be produced much, much faster than new coal, but still not fast enough to keep up with demand. So the Irish are looking at other alternative energies. Solar ain't gonna cut it in a place that cloudy and that far north. Instead, I read a lot in the news about wind farms. It seems like a no-brainer -- you're an island in the middle of a big, cold sea, and there's certainly no shortage of wind. And yet, there's opposition. The reason: windmills ruin the scenery. Not like those pretty carcinogenic coal-smoke sunsets. The other reason, and the one that confuses me even more, is that windmills will kill birds. Unlike, say, acid rain or mountaintop removal mining. I mean, come on, people. Is it that hard to put some goddam chicken wire around the front of a windmill? My bedroom fan already has it, right?
The Elephant Vanishes
Haruki Murakami
For the last week or so, I've been hiding out in Hillsborough, North Carolina. I've completed the move out of my old home in Blacksburg, put everything left that I own into a 10x10 storage unit, packed up the cat and hit the road. My feline partner will remain here while I move on, probably tomorrow. He's adjusting a bit more slowly than I had hoped, but adjusting nonetheless. His new roommate, whom we'll call "Bitey Cat" in order to protect his anonymity, is not particularly pleased to share his abode. Or perhaps he is pleased, and expresses his pleasure by way of pouncing and biting. My own hand has considerably more perforations than it did when I left home. In any case, they seem to be working things out through some sort of incomprehensible cat-diplomacy, and I think I'll feel OK about hitting the road again tomorrow and leaving my best mammalian friend behind. Then it will be a week north of the Mason-Dixon line, followed by a flight across the sea.
One of the prominent images in The Elephant Vanishes is repetition of non-sequiters. I guess you'd call it modern surrealist fiction, if you were the type of person to call things names. It creates a detached sort of chain of events that pretty well depicts the way I was feeling before my move. A losing of the self in a series of events. Hume wrote that the thing that we perceive as the "self" is really nothing more than a bundle of the various sensory perceptions that we've had. So it stands to reason that the more disjointed the perceptions and the greater the size of the gaps in which we forget things, the more disjointed the Self. And I think that's been my problem. I can feel things happening around me, but I don't feel like they're happening to me. They're just happening. While it does have a sort of Taoist aesthetic to it, I don't feel like there's much to tie the bundle of perceptions together. They're like so many loose sticks of memory scattered across a table.
One of my first activities when I get to the Emerald Isle will be a ten day solo backpacking trip through the Wicklow Mountains. It feels like the right start to the trip -- a way to ground myself to the land and to start finding a thread of Self with which to assemble (and add to) the bundle. Or, at the very least, a way to make greater peace with the discontinuity. Here's hoping I have the fortitude to leave the cat behind and start the trip tomorrow. Or will I just be tossing out a few more sticks, to keep the bundle leaner and easier to manage?
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave
Frederick Douglas
Never in my life have I been really and truly harmed. I've never gotten into a fight, was never abused, never even broke any bones other than a few toes here and there due to my own clumsiness. I've never had family members killed, never been imprisoned, and never done forced labor (unless mowing the lawn counts). In short, I've enjoyed a pretty trouble-free life of a sort denied to probably 90% of the world's inhabitants. I try not to take it for granted, but when you get down to it, it's impossible. The fact is that I do take it for granted. It's beneficial to read something like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and to realize that not long ago, people were being treated as property in the United States, and still are in much of the world. But on a gut level, I find that I still read it as I would read a work of fiction. There's little in in that resonates with me on a more personal level, because it's so far outside of my own experience.
Today's New York Times headline was "Blast Kills 122 at Iraqi Clinic in Attack on Security Recruits". And I find that I read it much the same way. There's just some text with a number in it. 122. The number could be a street address, the number of milligrams of vitamin C in a glass of orange juice, an ex-girlfriend's weight, anything. But it isn't. It's dead people. And yet I can't quite connect the number with my own body and the bodies of 121 people that I love.
There's a Charles Bukowski poem (I don't remember which one) in which he says of Americans, "The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up." I don't think I wish to be bombed, but there is a degree of truth in the observation.
Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software
Matthew Fuller
I don't doubt that somewhere out there, cowering in the basement of some academic building in some far-flung corner of some unfashionable university, there exists a "critical theorist" who both has really good ideas and can write with precision and clarity. And I also don't doubt that if the other critical theorists ever find out about that person, they will be immediately beaten to death with laptop computers. It's not that critical theory has nothing to say -- it sometimes does -- it's just that the means by which authors attempt to say it makes it look as if they're getting paid on the basis of maximizing some sort of word-to-idea ratio. With bonus pay for neologisms, especially if redundant. I mean, I guess there's a certain skill involved in learning to talk like Jacques Derrida, but there's also a certain skill involved in, say, removing someone's spleen with a pair of safety scissors. That doesn't mean that I want anybody to actually do such a thing, either to my spleen or the English language.
Anyway, Behind the Blip was such an experience for me. Every few pages, there was a small glimmer of insight. But I'm not even sure that the author himself could find them. It's like doing a Search-A-Word without knowing in advance what the words are, or even if the words actually exist in the English language yet. "Decanivictualization? Yeah, I made that one up. I guess it means 'dog vomit'." I'm not sure whom to hold responsible for this. I could blame the author for turning five pages worth of interesting ideas into a hundred-odd page monologue on paper. I could blame the entire history of cultural studies for making that an OK thing to do. Or I could blame myself for not having any stomach for writing that would rather sound complex than actually be complex.
So yeah, I was an English major. And yeah, I have a master's degree with a large critical theory component. And yeah, I was a teaching assistant for philosophy classes for a couple of years. And yeah, I'm glad that's behind me for now.
Making things out of wood seems more interesting by the day.
The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh
After slogging through a book of mostly hard-to-read poetry, I decided to give my brain a break and read a nice, skinny novel. Something that wouldn't make me think too hard. Something that I could read in just a few sittings. Something that would make fun of the English, Hollywood, and pet cemeteries. I've had The Loved One on my shelf for a while, and it seemed like just the right thing.
Now, I have been accused from time to time of doting overly on my cat. (As an interesting side note, in the linked photo, he has his paw draped over the very book about which I currently write.) And I suppose that, if he were to expire, I would probably rather dig a hole for him than allow neighborhood dogs to feast on his corpse. Strangely enough, I can't say the same for myself. I would much rather be devoured by badgers than pumped full of preservatives and stored in a box for the next several decades. Why is it that I would want my cat to have a more "dignified" retirement than me? I don't know. I suppose I have what are affectionately known as "issues".
Anyway, reading about the demise and embalming of Englishmen and Hollywood pets was pretty much just what I needed about now. A good read, a few good laughs, and no mental strain in this one. Now, on to more difficult things again...
The Contemporary American Poets:
American Poetry Since 1940
Mark Strand (ed.)
It's been quite a while since I've either written or read any poetry. It's another of those things that a graduate degree doesn't really encourage. I've had The Contemporary American Poets sitting on my shelf for a while, so I decided to crack it open and give it a read.
The first big surprise was how long it took to read the thing. I just can't really read most poems one time through, and get anything much out of them. I also can't read a lot of poems at one sitting, and keep the images distinct in my mind. Trying to sit down and read ten or twenty poems by five different authors at one time became an interesting exercise in surrealist free association. My brain was skating wheelbarrows across frozen ponds in the springtime and pondering the tragedy of war. In short, I've forgotten how to read poetry. I found myself lapsing into the old academic sloppiness of skimming text. While that may work fine for sociology texts, it just doesn't make any sense for poems.
I'll contend that at least part of this is because The Contemporary American Poets selected just aren't that good (or at least aren't my style). I can largely maintain that theory because there was the occasional poem or poet that really grabbed me. The fact that I paid attention to the Ginsberg stuff is really no surprise. I also really got a kick out of Gregory Corso's poem Marriage. If nothing else, the book served as good mental discipline, and a chance to read the stuff against which the "Beat" poets were reacting. Reading the biographical notes in the back, I can't help but notice that nearly every single author had a post as a literature professor at some university or other. And their stuff reads as overly-academic puffery.
The trap in editing a volume entitled "The Contemporary American Poets" is that the book came out in 1969, and there's nothing much contemporary about it by now. I do wonder what a "currently contemporary" poetry volume would look like, and whether I would like it more or less.
The Dream of Scipio
Iain Pears
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a former student of mine who grew up a missionary kid in New Guinea. It had always been good having him in the class -- the course was an Ethics class, and we spent one week of the course talking about whether we have any moral obligation to the poor. Amidst all of the well-disciplined capitalist kiddies who were pretty convinced that they somehow deserved their Gucci bags and PlayStations, he was one of the only ones willing to entertain the crazy idea that driving the rest of the world into war and starvation so that I can wear Tommy Boy jeans maybe isn't all its marketed to be. Anyway, while talking about first-world resource-burning, he compared the United States to Rome right before the collapse of the empire. "It's all bread and circuses."
Part of The Dream of Scipio takes place during the collapse of the Roman Empire at the hands of "barbarian" invaders. And part of the tale is that it's no so clear who the real barbarians were. Sure, the hordes didn't have much use for Roman art or philosophy. On the other hand, they weren't chugging wine while watching lions devour their poor. I don't know if the United States is currently on the road to barbarian invasion or not, but developments abroad certainly seem to suggest that all ain't well in the Empire. Here's hoping they at least don't burn the libraries next time around...
Sputnik Sweetheart
Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart is, in part, about love and infatuation. I've had folks try to convince me that it's impossible to love someone who doesn't love you back -- that's it's really just infatuation at that point. I'm pretty certain that's wrong. and Sputnik Sweetheart illustrates why. Part of being in love with someone just means wanting the best possible things for them, regardless of whether you get anything out of it or not. That's a lot easier to sustain when the wish is reciprocated, but I don't think it's requisite. I'm pretty sure that at points in my life, I've loved people who didn't love me. It's not always as bad as it sounds. I've also had plenty of selfish infatuations. I think those have probably been more hurtful.
In any case, Sputnik Sweetheart is a good story about the two. The narrator is in love with a friend; the friend is infatuated with somebody else. The storytelling is pure Murakami -- just surreal enough to remind you that you're reading a novel, but just realistic enough to make you care about the characters. The plot itself is of secondary importance to the prose and the character development. I think my life these days reads similarly. Now that I've quit school and am living without a full-time job and no long-term goals, the plot has pretty well fallen by the wayside. My hope is that I can take some time to get down to improving what I've always cared more about, anyway -- aesthetics. Not that I entirely want to live a Murakami novel (they tend to be rife with hearty doses of heartache,) but I am working on building something. Here's hoping it hangs together...
Tales of the Arabian Nights
Sir Richard Burton
One of the great ironies of a graduate education is that there isn't actually time to read anything. Sure, you're assigned several books per week, but unless you're some sort of literary demi-god that can digest a hundred pages an hour and still retain the information, you don't really read. You spend a lot of time with open books in front of you, "getting the gist" of the material. As for non-academic reading, forget about it. There becomes no such thing.
So I did the only sensible thing this spring, and started reading a fairly archane 900 page book. Burton's version of The Arabian Nights ain't much like Walt Disney's. There's quite a bit more fornication and subsequent castration, for one. There's also a bit more burning people alive in bags of lime, group sex with Moorish slaves, gouging out of eyes, and other things seldom committed to technicolor animation. Naturally, the stories are quite a bit more compelling, as well. My first impression (as a good American boy) is that the Islamic world must be insanely violent. And then I remember the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Bible. I mean, let's face it -- Eurpoean Christianity has been about as violent as any worldview could possibly be. Although Walt Disney doesn't bother with that too much, either.
So yeah, it took me a few months to get through this one, in between reading about the history of American chemical engineering and the background to the Piltdown hoax. The good news is that I've decided to retire from graduate education, at least for the time being. What this is supposed to mean is more time actually to read actual books. It also means months of uncertainty ahead, which I think is probably a good thing at this point in my life. Keeps me from turning into too much of an adult. And if I end up burning alive in a bag of lime cast into the Arabian sea, hopefully at least somebody will make a good story out of it.
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Somewhere along the line, somebody got the idea that genius must necessarily be mixed with malady. It's almost a prerequisite for having the "genius" label applied. If you aren't a drunk, blind, schizophrenic, or have a fondness for adolescent boys, you might as well turn your genius license over to the authorities. Call it the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Certified genius, but kind of obsessive-compulsive when it came to that goddamned road runner. The Captain Ahab of the animated world.
It's exactly that sort of worn out suffering-is-picturesque and genius-must-be-misunderstood attitude that makes high school goths dress up like bubonic plague victims and scrawl poetry in the columns of their algebra books. Invent an affliction, make yourself fairly opaque and presto! -- instant genius qualifications. Waugh plays something like the genius card in the character of Sebastian -- he's a terrific drunk, shuns his family, and carries a teddy bear with him at all times. Fails out of school, wanders Europe, etc., etc. The problem is that we aren't really given much reason to actually like him, even though I think we're supposed to. He's intended to be quixotic and charming (see Wile E. Coyote) but instead just comes across as kind of pathetic (see high school goths.)
As for me, I'm more than happy to can the whole genius myth. If this means that we're forced to label Edgar Allen Poe a pathetic human being (despite being a good writer), so be it. If it means fewer kids in black eyeliner hanging out the parking lot at 7-11, it's a price I'm willing to pay. I'd be pretty happy to be considered competent, and leave quixotic misfortune to those obsessive coyotes who get paid for that sort of thing.
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
I once read a description of Gravity's Rainbow that called it "less complicated than Ulysses." The comparison, I think, is apt. After 750 pages, it's very difficult to say what Gravity's Rainbow is about. Drugs, lust, rockets, Pavlov, paranoia, and song are all prominent. But I wouldn't say that it's about any of those things. Characters enter the story and then disappear. Plot lines start and stop abruptly. Motifs are introduced and forgotten. The whole book is one long string of non-sequiters. And it's the non-sequiters that are interesting -- not so much the story as a whole, which is virtually indiscernible.
I was actually first asked to read this book for a class when I was an undergraduate. At the time, I didn't get through it. No so much out of lack of interest, but more because of lack of time. It's not exactly a zippy read that you can just skim through. And having gone back to it, and having done some background reading this time, I am disappointed to find out that Pynchon is an actual person. The first time that I had read Gravity's Rainbow, that question was still much in dispute. Wilder theories claimed that he was actually J.D. Salinger; tamer ones suspected him of being an English professor in Southern Florida. To the disappointment of conspiracy theorists, he turns out just to be a regular guy who doesn't much like uninvited company. He turned down a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and despite the unanimous vote of the judges to give Gravity's Rainbow the Nobel Prize in literature in 1974, the decision was overturned by the Nobel advisory board, who described the novel as "obscene."
It is.
On the other hand, there could still be conspiracy at work. What better way to avoid the public eye than to build a convenient and boring alter ego? What better way to settle suspicions of conspiracy than to demonstrate publicly that there is no conspiracy? And so I prefer to disbelieve the resolution, and to maintain the fanciful. Who is Thomas Pynchon, and how much does he know? It's a question more interesting left unanswered.
Hacker Culture
Douglas Thomas
There were reasons that I abandoned the analysis of art and literature after college. Truth be told, I never much participated in them while I was in college, making me a pretty mediocre English and art major. The main problem was just that there was so much outright fabrication involved. Fabrication is perfectly fine when one is writing literature or creating art, but completely bogus when talking about it. I used to roll my eyes so often in classes that I would occasionally pull muscles. I remember one discussion in art class in which we were discussing a gallery show that we had just visited called Taxonomy and Communion. The show itself was pretty hackneyed photography, but the professor had mistakenly written down the title as Taxidermy and Communion. What followed was a lengthy discussion about the theme of taxidermy and how it related to communion through the medium of photography. When it finally came to light that the title had nothing to do with stuffing deer, and was instead about classification schemes, the professor tried to pass it off as an interesting illustration of the way that postmodernism interprets a text from the reader's perspective, and how meaning is never fixed. Nowhere was the admission that we had just gotten the title -- and the point of the exhibit-- wrong. And that was pretty much the end of my last shred of faith in critical interpretation. Somehow, the "critical" part got lost, and it was just interpretation, and damn the facts, even when they're spelled out in black and white text on the gallery wall.
Hacker Culture does a bit of that, and those portions of the book make me wrinkle my nose in disgust. In particular, there's some very silly analysis of Mentor's Hacker Manifesto, as read through the eyes of a sociologist. However, those parts aside, Hacker Culture is not a bad read. While it does a bit of masturbatory academic fabricating in parts, there's also some fairly rich and interesting history. The chapters about the representation of hackers in popular culture and the resulting demonization of hackers by the legal system is complex, insightful, and well-supported. The bits where Thomas lets the hackers speak for themselves, rather than playing the role of distanced interpretor, are quite good. Thomas manages to be not quite as adoring as Steven Levy, and not quite as critical as the popular press. When he manages to walk this line without giving in to his speculative sociologist's (in)sensibilities, Hacker Culture succeeds in being a good (and useful) book.
An Unfortunate Woman
Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan was an early obsession of mine. Not only did I love the books, but they were rare enough that finding them added a ongoing adventure to my life. I would wend my way through countless used bookstores, hoping to find a paperback that I didn't already own. (I never did find a copy of June 30, June 30...) I gave Richard Brautigan books as gifts, I received Richard Brautigan books as gifts on rare occasions. Whenever I became so depressed that nothing else seemed interesting or worthwhile, I would read them -- particularly In Watermelon Sugar, which could calm me down like virtually nothing else. And I always kept one book in reserve as insurance. Knowing that the author was dead, and there wouldn't be more, I always kept one Brautigan book on my shelf that I hadn't read, so that if things ever got really bad, I would still have that one thing to look forward to. Until this week, that one book was An Unfortunate Woman.
I read it not because I'd had a really bad week. On the contrary -- I read it because I feel like I don't need the insurance any more. There are enough other stable fulcrums in my life by now that the books don't have to bear the same weight that they used to. They have become what they actually are: just books.
Unfortunately for him, Brautigan himself lost track of any sort of fulcrum, and killed himself at home in 1984. I've always felt that, as they did for me, his books kept him alive, too, and when he ran out of books, he ran out of reasons. Following his writing chronologically is like following a timeline of declining genius. His early books introduce a truly unique writing voice, and his later works read as an imitation of that voice. An Unfortunate Woman, discovered in his personal belongings and published sixteen years after his death, is about as melancholy as a book can be. It reads like Richard Brautigan going through the motions of writing a book, but in the full knowledge that he simply doesn't have anything left to say or write. It's like a diary of giving up; a shadow of a shadow.
So while I'm thankful to Brautigan for his post-mortem balancing that he provided for me, I'm somewhat regretful that he didn't have someone do the same for him. An Unfortunate Woman will never stand out as one of his better pieces of literature, but it is a very personal and difficult chronicle of what happens when one's vitality dries up.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy
The subtitle of this book should have been a damned giveaway. It sounds something like Kirk Cameron: Dream Guy, or Def Leppard: Rock and Roll's Bad Boys. I was anticipating a nice bit of computing history, and instead got a mostly silly fan book written by an adoring groupie. (John Draper Position: Phone Phreaker Height: 6'2" Likes: Chinese Food Dislikes: Smokers.) Which means to say that this book was a bit of a joke. There is a bit of history in here, but it's smoothed over by so many layers of idol worship that none of it can be taken as any sort of literal account of the facts. At times, Hackers nonetheless succeeds in being an interesting read, but more often it's about as interesting as a Britney Spears web log. ("Britney spends four hours in makeup before every show! Can you believe that? Four hours!")
I would like to think that the early hackers were actually complex and interesting human beings, and not the autistic dweebs that Levy describes. And if they were the autistic dweebs that Levy describes, then they certainly don't strike me as heroes. The Bible even permits god to have a more complex personality than Levy ascribes to his hackers. As far as I'm concerned, a heroic hacker is one who can hack a whole lot more than computers and phone lines. I'm much more a fan of the rennaissance hack: hack bureaucracy, hack relationships, hack oil painting. Manipulating a predictable, orderly system ain't really much, when you get down to it. Manipulating (or even navigating) a disorderly system like human relationships is a hell of a lot tougher.
Hack life.
The Glass Bead Game
Herman Hesse
I would like to think that every academic struggles with questions of worth. Naturally, I would like to hope that every human being struggles with questions of worth, but that seems too ambitious. However, to restrict the wish to academics seems not unreasonable. If anyone should be a bit reflective, they should -- if for no other reason than that they have the time and the capacity to do so. My impression of the academy is nonetheless quite dim. What should be a means of service seems primarily a means of escape. Too many teachers do everything in their power to avoid teaching. They would much rather tinker with their own ideas behind their own closed doors, and only interact with the world when it comes time to present at conferences or submit yearly publications in order to maintain tenure. The whole thing strikes as too safe, too cowardly, too proud. I like the world. It's dirty, it's grubby, it breaks down. It requires not just book smarts, but actual smarts. Living in the world requires a certain knack, and it's a knack that many people never quite get. What is frustrating about the academy is that it seems proud of not having that knack, and looks down upon those who do. It's as baffling as it is irritating. What's so terrific about writing missives about what you believe the world to be like, while ignoring the contributions of those who simply navigate it instinctively?
The Glass Bead Game is, in part, a story about the failure of academics to take into account the world. In striving to place themselves above and apart from the world, the Glass Bead Game players also succeed in making themselves entirely disposable. The book follows the efforts of one of their order to reconnect the realm of the mind with the realm of the practical, as so to give the public some reason for tolerating and perpetuating the existence of the game's players. It becomes a missive on teaching, and (to a lesser extent) pedagogy. Hesse seems to suggest that when the revolution comes, the academics will be the first ones sacked. I think he's probably wrong (the bureaucrats will probably get sacked first, and then the academics), but makes a good point, and one which academics would do well to heed.
Naturally, this is all filtered through my own discontent. The Game is no doubt enjoyable while one is playing. The puzzles of philosophy are amusing diversions from the dirtiness and grubbiness of the world. Academics is a fine place to hide out from doing any real work. But none of that seems to justify it. This is why I would like to consider myself first and foremost a teacher, and only secondarily a scholar. Because scholarship, for all of its pleasures, does seem to me to be empty. I don't mind the "problem" students who aren't willing to accept academics for its own sake, who tell me in class that philosophy is bullshit. In fact, I kind of prefer those students. Philosophy is bullshit, as I don't mind telling them. But it's bullshit that sharpens your mind to be able to do other things. And those other things -- the things that exist in the world -- are often terribly important.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
I spent the entire month of February as a vegetarian. I was asked several times my reasons for doing so, and found them hard to articulate. The best explanation that I could offer is that it was an exercise in empathy. Basically, it's worked like this:
I've never been a real vegetarian. While I would prefer not to eat my cat, I'm certainly not an animal rights nut by anyone's standards. Neither am I a health food nut, a Hindu, or any more environmentally responsible than the average NPR listener. Nonetheless, I've always known people that are real vegetarians, and generally fit into one of the aforementioned categories. And, historically, I've had a great deal of fun at the expense of those people. (Why they've chosen to remain my friends is a question beyond my capacity for reason.) I have not generally been what one would call "sensitive". This mostly rested on the assumption that most people didn't really have good reasons for their beliefs, and just acted on them because it seemed like a cool thing to do.
Thus, the experiment in empathy. Last year, just to see what it felt like, I gave up being omnivorous for a month and only ate dead vegetables and non-meat animal products (I wasn't quite radical enough to go vegan.) The idea was to gauge just how much of a sacrifice this really was for people -- how much would it really cramp my lifestyle to be able to say that I was a vegetarian? The answer: it was fucking rough. It affected where I ate, with whom I ate, and how many options I had when I shopped and went out. When ordering pizza with friends, I had to be the annoying guy to say "I can't eat that. I'm a vegetarian." Restaurant menus which formerly had dozens of items available now had about three. Social patterns changed. People gave me the same sort of shit that I used to give my vegetarian friends.
And so, to remind myself that sometimes people do relinquish something significant for the sake of their ideals, I've repeated the experiment this year. It may or may not have the long-term effect of making me a more empathetic person, but it at least means that I give my vegetarian friends less shit than I used to.
In the midst of all this, I happened to read The Jungle. It wasn't a calculated coincidence; it was just the next unread book on my shelf. Sinclair's account of the packing houses of Chicago made it that much easier to stay away from meat for a month. I didn't finish the book a rabid socialist, but it puts a nice historical shine onto anti-trust laws and the FDA. The story isn't so interesting, really, although it does make me glad that I've been teaching English to immigrants for a couple of years. Looking for work in a country in which you can't speak the language is a horrible thing to have to do.
New project: Transition away from factory-produced food to support local grocers peddling organic and local food. Compare price difference and resulting change in cooking and eating habits. Start April 1.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The story of Frankenstein is, of course, heartbreaking and insightful. Everybody already knows that. The monster could have been a decent guy, given a chance. Everybody already knows that, too. Frankenstein wasn't such a decent guy, and couldn't follow through on his own ambition. Everybody also already knows that. Because everybody already knows these things, what we get at the beginning of the book is a positively revolting preface by Diane Johnson that tries to reveal to us "surprising" truths about Mary Shelley that we may not have already known.
She starts out with a bit of biographical information -- no problem there. From there, we get some exposition about Shelley's social and political environment. No big problem there, either. Then Johnson gives us a brief bibliography of Shelley's "influences", and we start to run into trouble, because (while plausible at times) it seems to be pure speculation and assumption. And finally, we get several pages of psychoanalytic drivel about Shelley's id and superego, and how Frankenstein's unwillingness to give life to his female monster demonstrates Shelley's fear of her own fertility, and a number of other brilliant inductions with all of the credibility of a Parade magazine horoscope. For instance: "The somewhat mournful union Frankenstein contemplates with Elizabeth (the name of Shelley's sister) is chastely terminated before it is consummated, suggesting, perhaps, the wish of this burdened young woman to exchange for an uncomplicated, virginal state her present condition of continuous pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal concern." WTF? If this were someone's term paper for a freshman composition course, I would fail them. Let's see -- the monster (who of course represents the id) survived on nuts and berries. Clearly "nuts" refers to crazy people, and berries are a fruit, and everyone knows that a "fruit" is a homosexual. Therefore, the monster represents the growing insanity that Shelley felt when contemplating her deeply repressed lesbianism, and the authoring of Frankenstein was a means for her to symbolically de-closet and subsequently kill her undeclared sexuality. Yeah, that sounds good. Let's roll the goddam presses.
Frankenstein is a great story. Not great writing always, but a great story. Johnson's introduction is the worst sort of pseudo-scholarship that I can imagine; it's the sort of thing that makes real human beings (justly) slander "academics" for being completely out of touch with reality. Read the book, skip the introduction (with the possible exception of the biographical history), and draw your own goddam conclusions.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn
While Kuhn's argument makes sense to me as a model of scientific change, I'm less convinced that it can (or should) be taken literally. I can't help but be a bit wary of any theory which claims that "this is what (X) looks like" (where X is some complex and mutable phenomenon to be explained.) There are no doubt cases of scientific explanations that cannot be made to fit into the Kuhnian model without considerable distortion. However, I don't believe that a model need be literal or absolute in order to be useful. Despite its necessary generalizations as a model, the paradigm theory of scientific change is decisively a useful tool for unearthing previously neglected information in the history of scientific change.
There is, however, at least one area in which I believe Kuhn could be improved by some additional articulation or amplification. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions creates the impression that when an experiment produces an aberrant result, the scientific community is presented with a puzzle, and immediately sets to work to provide a theoretical account of the aberration. This seems to me to leave out some very important and necessary steps. Any responsible scientist, before even considering any theoretical account of an aberration, is likely (and justifiably) prone to dismiss the aberration as an error -- either an experimental blunder or the result of an equipment failure. The first response to an aberrant result will typically be a verification of the proper functioning of experimental equipment. Diagnostics will be run; calibrations will be double-checked. Next, the experimental procedure itself will be verified. Were standard experimental practices followed? Was the experiment performed "by the book"? Once equipment and procedural errors have been eliminated as causes, then the experiment will be repeated. If the aberration persists, then its nature is probed. Is it systematic? Under what conditions does it manifest itself? Is it reproducible at will? Those aberrations that are both systematic and reproducible are then presented to the experimenter's scientific peers, who subject the aberration to a similar battery of experimental tests. Only after one or more third parties have verified the aberration to be systematic and reproducible is it likely to make the passage from "error" to "puzzle."
Thinking About Technology
Joseph Pitt
It is often said that in the classroom, there are no stupid questions. While this is no doubt meant to buoy the self-esteem of the inquisitive student, the statement is sadly false. There most certainly are stupid questions. In particular, there are questions which are badly formed or badly directed, such that no possible answer could be of use. This is not to say that no possible answer can be given (for there are always a host of stupid answers available for any given stupid question), just that none of the stupid answers get us any closer to understanding the topic at hand. At best, they waste time and distract us from the issues that matter, and at worst they provide barriers to learning by allowing us to think that we've arrived at "the truth of the matter." An ambitious student of philosophy could rewrite nearly all of the history of philosophical inquiry into a massive multi-volume set entitled A History of Stupid Questions. Volume one could be entitled Definitions: The Blind Persuading the Foolish. It would contain depressing accounts of philosophers engaging in Abbott-and-Costello style verbal slapstick, chasing their tails in pursuit of essential definitions for concepts that have no essential qualities.
In the preface to Thinking About Technology, Joseph Pitt creates the impression that he will engage in no such tomfoolery. He says that there is no sense (and potentially great danger) in talking about "Science" and "Technology" writ large as if they referred to discernible and definable objects; the complexity and diversity of the objects and activities contained within our notions of those two words stymie any attempt to talk about them in broad terms. Pitt advocates instead speaking of particular technologies or particular sciences. So far, so good. This pragmatic inclination is one with which I can agree, and makes an enormous amount of sense.
Sadly, Pitt ends up abandoning what seemed like a perfectly seaworthy ship when he starts asking questions like "What is/are the structure(s) of technological theories?" and "What is the nature of technological change?" He seems to take it as given that these were good questions to ask about science (an assumption which I find profoundly dubious), therefore they must also be good questions to ask about technology. The phrasing of the question seems to imply that there is "a nature" of technological change, or some common structure or set of structures of technological theories. Given the author's self-professed pragmatism, it seems that it should follow that the consideration of these questions as important should be the result of some requirement that the possible answers have (useful) pragmatic consequences. What these consequences are, we aren't told; neither can my admittedly practical mind imagine what they might be. If these questions remain unsolved (per Pitt's own example of the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"), then what will we have lost? Or what will we not have gained that would have served us toward some useful end?
And so my concern might be summarized as follows: Pitt makes a great deal of sense until he starts to sound like a philosopher. While his topic may intuitively interest those afore-mentioned tail-chasing purveyors of verbal slapstick, actual human beings (including scientists and technicians) are given little reason to care. This strikes me as both shameful and needless. There may indeed be a good pragmatic reason to consider questions like "What is the structure of technological explanation?", but nowhere are we told what that reason might be. There are nuggets of fascinating empirical information here, and brilliant case studies that illustrate specific points quite nicely. Unfortunately, they fall short of providing a sound basis for considering the philosophical thread as a whole, or shedding light upon the "big picture" questions such as those mentioned above. Were Pitt to remain true to his preface, realize that such "big picture" questions are almost always overly-simplistic (and ultimately stupid), and instead provide some other pragmatic justification for the linkage of the anecdotal elements, Thinking About Technology would be a stronger text, and one which would appeal to someone other than the Abbott-and-Costello tail-chasers within the ranks of philosophy.
Last Night's Fun
Ciaran Carson
I should preface my statements by saying that I do not consider myself an Irish musician. Yes, I have Irish ancestors. Yes, I play a number of folk instruments. Yes, I played in a band for about five years that almost exclusively performed traditional Irish music. But the fact is that I simply don't know the tunes, and never really did. I cannot hope to hold my own at a session. I'm deficient in both skill and catalog.
Nonetheless, there was quite a bit in this book with which I identified. It is clearly a book about music as written by a musician. Not the concert-trained sheet music type of musician, but the type of musician who learns their music through time spent in pubs and on porches, swapping tunes with others of the same ilk. (I once went along to a friend's voice lesson, and was asked by his instructor whether I was a musician. I mentioned that I played guitar, banjo, and mandolin; he sniffed and said, "Ah, fun instruments." This was obviously meant to be a perjorative term, which amuses me to this day.)
However, the style at times irritated me. Perhaps there is such a thing as an "Irish voice" in writing, but it too often sounds to me like distorted echoes of James Joyce, with little new to contribute. Joyce was good, but good because he was fresh and unconventional. When that voice gets bent and bludgeoned to serve the literary aspirations of throngs of imitators, it ceases to resonate. That aside, Last Night's Fun is a good read, especially for anyone who has any heart for folk music. Or fun music, if you prefer.
Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
I suppose all writers change as they get older. And I think it would be inaccurate to generalize that as being either a good or bad thing. Some gain a maturity and humility that they lacked in youth; others lose confidence, try too hard, and become caricatures or imitators of their younger selves. Others just change.
Borges' Collected Fictions provides an interesting case study in stylistic evolution. The voice throughout is unmistakably Borges, but the style and content take on different shades in the later work. Gone is the glorification of the rapscallion, gone the idolatry of recklessness. Or perhaps not gone entirely -- in its place we get dialog between the young and the old. One has the confidence of having never tasted failure; the other has the confidence of having survived it. And neither Borges quite seems to trust the other.
The stories are, of course, stunningly beautiful and wickedly clever. So beautiful and so clever, in fact, that they shame me a bit in my own writing. It is perhaps never quite just to hold ourselves against the standards of others, but I can't help but feel more than a little bit small when reading something so immense. Even in translation, Borges has a depth and power that those of us not prone to megalomania must despair to ever attain. Fortunately, we can make do with this -- an enormous volume of beauty that has already been bound and delivered for us.
A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume
It may seem like it should be easy to get college freshmen interested in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. I mean, here's a fellow who was an ornery bastard in his day, and even as a relatively young man, was taking a philosophical piss at his elders, his church, the school system, and all of the dead white guys whose books he had to read. And, brilliantly, he did so by beating them at their own game -- if he were a modern-day hip-hopper, he'd be laying down the harshest dis tracks Scotland and France had ever heard. And the shit would be tight. He'd have them beat on style and content, and would still have the good sense to put the mic down and buy everybody 40's when he was through clowning them. I mean, this mother could M.C.
But for some reason, I was largely unsuccessful in convincing my freshmen of this bare, obvious fact. All they see are the big words and "connexion" spelled with an X, and they put the book down and give up. Isn't this the same generation who watch the X-Games, play on the X-Box, and eat X-treme gorditas at Taco Bell? But throw some "X-treme necessary conneXion" into an argument against causality, and they don't know what to do. Is that whack or what?
So yeah -- Hume is an analytic ninja. He lays down logic so tight that if it were a boa constrictor, my brain would be dead by now. He sends Cartesians crying for their mommies and feels no remorse. Shit, he even plays backgammon. How cool is that?
The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics
William Provine
I'll be honest, here -- I never went to kindergarten. I'm not completely sure what one learns there, but book store titles seem to suggest that it would have been everything that I really needed to know. It seems sort of a waste to have participated in the other seventeen years of schooling when I could have gotten it over with at age five, but hindsight is always 20-20, and nobody bothered to clue me in at the time. Now I'm stuck taking classes about the history of evolutionary philosophy, and there isn't a finger-painting smock in sight.
One of the lessons that I would have presumably learned (had I not plunged headlong into first grade) is how to play well with others. If I am to take The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics at face value, I'd say that kindergarten did not yet exist at the turn of the twentieth century, or at least that the geneticists of the day made the same error as me in bypassing it. Provine tells the tale of the development of population genetics as a rock-em sock-em rumble between the Darwinians and the Mendelians, both of whom were so convinced of their correctness that they managed to avoid combining the two systems for over twenty years. The modern scholar can merely look back and say "Duh", but when it's a race to the swings on the playground of science, I'm not so sure that we're doing much better these days. (I mean, do modern genetic engineering and conservation ecology really have to be at odds so often?) A read through Provine's work suggests to me that perhaps we're all due for a little global naptime to think things over. Hell, I'll even spring for juice and cookies.
Jitterbug Perfume
Tom Robbins
For years, people have been bothering me to read a Tom Robbins book. They have insisted -- nay, demanded -- that I would really like his style. So, as with all things that people insist that I do, I didn't. I'm kind of a pain like that. Anyway, as a congratulatory gift for quitting my job, one of my former colleagues gave me a copy of Jitterbug Perfume. And so a dilemma was born. Do I read what everybody has been telling me all along to read, with the possibility that I might actually like it, thereby demonstrating the utter absurdity of my personality flaws? Or do I let the book gather dust on my shelf, thereby violating my sworn determination that I would never be one of those boring saps who keeps a bunch of books on their shelves that they have never read, and have no intention of ever reading? Caught between two hypocrisies. What's a self-righteous bastard to do?
So, I opted for the more informed of the two evils, and I read the book. With some serious predisposition that I wasn't going to like it, therefore preserving the justification of my stubbornness. And, alas, it failed. I am sorry to report that Jitterbug Perfume is, in fact, a great book. And I am equally sorry to report that I enjoyed it throroughly, and will probably read more Tom Robbins just as soon as I finish my Master's degree and can therefore re-enter the world of people who are allowed to read books without a colon somewhere in the title. (Does Robbins have any books with a colon in the title? That might help me out.) So, for all of those people who have been bugging me to read Tom Robbins all these years -- yeah, yeah. You were right. This time. But don't get any ideas. And no, I still think that Vertigo is a vastly overrated film. So there.
The Man Who Died
D.H. Lawrence
I'm not completely sure what to make of this one. It's not that I didn't understand the book -- I feel like I have a firm grasp on the story and the subtext -- it's that I'm not sure that I understand why Lawrence wrote the book. It doesn't really strike me as the type of story that would be contained within a man, just waiting to be released. And it doesn't strike me as the type of story that a man would write with the intent of startling or educating an audience. It's also not a story of particularly intentional beauty. So my wild, uneducated, and uninformed guess is that it was something of an experiment for Lawrence, an attempt to tackle something that was wandering around his head one afternoon. And I think that the book's length -- weighing in at just under 100 pages -- seems to support the theory. I've done some writing, and I've got some idea of what it's like to sit down at the keyboard with an idea, and to gently launch a story out into the water like a tiny boat, just to see where it lands. And once the boat touches the opposite bank, or gets swept away out of sight, you put out the lights, and wander upstairs to sleep, and don't think about it any more.
As it happens, The Man Who Died is beautiful, but I don't think it's because Lawrence set out with any particular goal to make it so. I think that it's just how the boat happened to drift. It seems to set out with some dim idea of exploring the beauty of being alive, the beauty of being in human flesh, and to intersect those ideas with a dim idea of what it must have felt like for the resurrected Christ to find himself once again walking the earth in human form. It briefly follows the "post-retirement" career of Christ, the healing and acceptance of his corporeal form, and his exploration of what it really means to be alive and in a human body. And then, either satisfied or frustrated with the exploration (I won't speculate which), the story rather abruptly stops. And, much as I imagine Lawrence must have done when he finished writing it, I then laid the book gently down, and went to sleep.
Artificial Life: An Overview
Christopher Langton (ed.)
I think that in most disciplines, few qualities are as consistently valuable to a rational individual as the trait of skepticism. Which is not to downplay the value of faith or idealism -- such things are the fervor that give birth to new ideas. The problem is that faith and idealism are seldom stalwart enough parents to rear those ideas from their infancy into maturity, nor are they objective enough to effectively defend those ideas from that which would threaten them. That sort of discipline requires not fervor but discipline, not faith but doubt. No idea can come into any sort of fullness until it has been tested against a sufficiently icy blast of skepticism, and emerged stronger for having done so.
The science of artificial life is still very much in its infancy. Much of the writing done on the subject suffers from the wide-eyed idealism of the youth of an idea, the sort of youth that tugs on one's sleeve and tries to persuade by strength of conviction, rather than by strength of maturity. That's not a bad thing necessarily; it's probably an inevitable thing for any science that hasn't had time to calm itself down and truly ponder the long road ahead.
Many of the essays in Artificial Life begin to make efforts at that ponderance. There is still some of the ecstasy of youth present, but it begins to be dulled, or (at the very least) to become focused. It begins to set aside some of the passion of apologetics, and to get down to the messy business of performing actual science. In short, it begins to acknowledge its own skepticism, begins to retract indefensible grandeur in exchange for small, documentable steps. And it is these tiny, defensible steps, coaxed on by the governess Skepticism, that will carry the science forward.
Virtual Light
William Gibson
When I was a bit younger, nothing pleased me more than to save up a couple of bucks, so that I could walk to the nearest gas station and blow my hard earned savings on candy and soda. Long-term investment was not a concept that interested me as a ten-year-old. (Even as a twenty-five-year-old, it holds little interest, actually.) I was more keen on gnawing down as much candy as my two dollars could afford. It tasted good, it never really filled me up, and I didn't really care.
Virtual Light works something like that. It's cheap, it's yummy, but it won't fill you up. The gist of it is this: It's the future, some good people piss some bad people off, and then spend a couple hundred pages running away from the bad people in creative ways. Along the way, they get to play with some high-tech gadgets that don't actually exist yet, and to travel through a post-corporate-apocalypse San Francisco that almost exists. And that's about it. I kind of get the feeling that the plot and characters are just incidental vehicles for Gibson to showcase the setting and the gadgets.
In summary, Virtual Light is to geeks what Monday Night Football probably is to jocks: a good enough excuse to spend an evening on the couch, but not one that's likely to leave a lasting impression on one's life. Which doesn't make it any less fun, just less important.
Maggie Cassidy
Jack Kerouac
The moral of Maggie Cassidy seems to be something along these lines: Love stinks. When you're young, you care too much, and everything seems like a big deal, even though it probably isn't. And then you get older, and you don't care enough, and nothing seems like a big deal, even though it should. And pretty much the whole time, you're wishing for something different than you have now. This, in a nutshell, is love.
Maggie Cassidy is one of those books that affected me, and not in very nice ways, and not at a very nice time. It hurt me, and that makes it a pretty powerful book. I would not call it a "good" book. I didn't finish it and think, "Gee, I'm glad I read that. Think I'll go make a sandwich now." I finished it and thought, "Ouch. I think I'll bury my head under my pillow for the rest of the day."
I will say this -- it's quite a bit different than any other Kerouac book that I've read. Different tone, different style, different characters. Which is probably why I had never heard of it, prior to picking it off of a used bookstore shelf. You won't find the usual cast of hipsters and pranksters, swinging their way through the Harlem night. Instead, you'll find a bunch of goofy kids in small-town New York, killing off what's left of their childhood before killing off what's left of their lives in bleak blue-collar jobs. Real warm, fuzzy stuff, that. And stuff that will probably scare the hell out of anybody who's ever tried to love anybody else.
Kant And The Platypus: Essays On Language And Cognition
Umberto Eco
There was a time, not all that long ago really, when I was a starry-eyed undergraduate English major, applying for graduate programs in Linguistics. I was a boy enchanted with language, mesmerized by the oscillation between signifier and signified, obsessed with Structuralism, haunted by semiotic interpretations of just about everything. However, while I was intimate with Saussure and his chums, what I didn't have was formal background or education in linguistics, and I didn't get into graduate school. Upon reading Kant and the Platypus, I heave an enormous sigh of relief at my good fortune.
It's not that Kant and the Platypus is a badly written book; it isn't (although the translator does make some egregious grammatical errors that the editor apparently didn't catch). It's just that -- now that my days of interest in formal linguistic and semiotic study are mostly under the bridge -- the subject matter strikes me as so astoundingly trivial, even banal. For example, the first 56 pages of the book constitute an essay on the infinitive verb 'to be'. Fifty-six pages. And we aren't talking about complicated issues of ontology or how we know we exist, or anything like that. It's fifty-six pages on why the verb 'to be' is the basis of all cognition and language. And while I don't disagree, and don't even find the idea disinteresting, I don't find it sufficiently complex to warrant nearly sixty pages of exposition. The remainder of the book proceeds in a similar vein -- pages of exposition detailing the complexity of seemingly intuitive ideas.
For students of cognitive philosophy and semioticians, Kant and the Platypus is probably a delightful text. For pragmatists such as myself, it prompts the most basic of all questions, "Why?", followed closely by its sidekick, "Who Cares?" The ideas presented are good ones, well thought and well articulated, and ultimately irrelevant to almost everyone outside of the aforementioned disciplines. Which, I suppose, is really more of a shortcoming in my decision to read the book, rather than in Eco's decision to write it.
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