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�| At Neva, Miss Feva's impersonal suggestion, I just took this Political Spectrum Quiz. I found it more interesting and revealing than most of these quizzes, and I do generally like online personality tests. But many of the questions raise as many questions as they answer, and I frequently found that my opinions on an issue didn't fit neatly into the Strongly Disagree/Disagree/Agree/Strongly Agree format. I have never seen a spoiler warning about an online personality quiz, but here you go: some of the questions on the quiz appear below. Faith-based schools have a positive role to play in our education system. I put "disagree," though I don't really find it that simple. On questions like these, where I had some doubt about the exact degree of my agreement or disagreement, I tended to lean toward the answer that I thought would indicate the kind of politics that I would want a quiz like this to indicate that I held. (And I apologize for that sentence.) On one hand, I don't want the government (or, more properly, governments farming out their civic duties to private groups, and I find the present administration's emphasis on "faith-based" organizations particularly troubling. Plus, I think that many faith-based schools, by virtue of their faith basis, pose a great risk of putting faith and religious doctrine above all else, such as science, and giving what I would consider inferior and even dangerous "information" in the curriculum. On the other hand, many schools affiliated with religious groups have provided high-quality education, and play a valuable role in the lives of their students and communities. If my wife and I have a child someday, we would seriously consider sending our child to the nearby Catholic school, though neither of us belongs to the church. But my mind hangs up on the phrase "our education system." If we take "our education system" to mean "all the various types of school that people attend in our society," I would somewhat agree. But the phrasing "our education system" implies public education or something like it. I certainly do not think that faith-based schools have a role to play in the public educational system. I can't know how best to answer some of these questions without clearing up semantic confusion. But since the score doesn't really matter, even the semantic confusion has value because it makes me think and rethink and analyse my thoughts and opinions. Religion and morality are closely linked. Statements like this can be carefully handled using e-prime and other general semantics concepts that I lack the qualifications to speak of. On one hand many people derive their morality from one religion or another, and many of these people behave in ways that a great number of us would call "moral." But other people derive their morality from religious traditions and behave in ways that many other people would not consider moral. Only a tiny minority of Christians attack the people and institutions that provide abortions, but those that do certainly think that they are upholding the morality of their faith and therefore consider themselves "moral." Other people follow no formal religion, and may not even consider themselves "spiritual," but still hold strong feelings about morality, and consider it important to behave in moral or, to use the word they might choose, ethical, ways. In e-prime (English without "to be," for those who haven't been reading my blog lately) one cannot say "religion and morality are closely linked," so one must find an alternate phrasing. One can then more easily judge the truth of the "is-less" phrasings. If one phrases it as "Many people consider religion the basis for morality," I would consider that a valid statement. If, however, one chooses to say "One must be religious to behave ethically," I would consider that invalid and untrue, unless one stretches "religious" to the point at which includes any sort of vaguely metaphysical opinion about human values. At this point the word "religious" would have little use, and its semantic value would dissipate. If one chooses to say "people's beliefs greatly influence their morality," I would consider that valid, in a different way. From the e-prime standpoint, "is" statements often lack concrete meaning, so one cannot determine their validity. It's fine for society to be open about sex, but these days it's going too far. I marked "disagree" or even "strongly disagree," I can't even remember anymore. I approve of openness about sex, and I would not wish for myself or anyone else to live in a sexually restrictive time or place. I think that the standards of "good taste" have fallen in many ways, but I consider this the result of a failure of intelligence and triumph of sensationalistic lowest-common-denominator mass media rather than an openness about sex. Does a Britney Spears outfit or a Christina Aguilera video exhibit "openness" about sex? I think not. These mass media images (which I do not necesarily disapprove of) do not show any openness or honesty about what sex feels like, or the emotional issues around it, or the social consequences, or the underlying assumptions, or the influence that our neuroses, our upbringings, our values, and the way we treat our fellow human beings have on our sexual lives. These thoughts remind me of an NPR interview (Fresh Air?) with Amy Heckerling, who directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High. People from the ratings board or the studio (I can't remember) insisted on the trimming of one sex scene that they considered too graphic. I don't remember the details (and I must admit I haven't seen the movie) but according to Heckerling, the moral part of the scene (the emotional effect of sex) got trimmed, leaving in the quick thrill pleasure part. So in this case, the scene could be seen as less "open" but not really any moral. I will post more on this soon. (If I remember to.) |
| 10/1/03 Bernard Noel, The Castle of Communion (2nd time, first time probably 10 years ago) About 10 years ago, I read a whole bunch of stuff from Atlas Press. I recently dipped into a couple I read back then, as well as one by Peter Blegvad, whose music I used to play on KDVS and whose Book of Leviathan I recently read and loved. I don't have the gumption to write more about these at the moment. 10/22/03 Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: a Head Test As with the Atlas Press books, I recently embarked on a Robert Anton Wilson Revival. Between Coincidance and Quantum Psychology, I found QP more satisfying overall. Coincidance combines disparate journalistic pieces, cut-up fiction experiments, and ephemera. Quantum Psychology has some of the most concise, lucid, exposition of his ideas about the way we constrcut our reality. He appears to have written the whole thing in E-prime (English without any forms of "To be"), which may partially account for the lucidity of the writing and certainly meshes with the content and meaning of the book. I highly recommend it. I enjoyed Coincidance as well, but it lacked the sort of clarity and cohesion that characterize QP. The Widow's Son, the second volume in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, bounces all over the place, especially compared with The Earth Will Shake, which struck me as his most "traditional" novel. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I found his use of fictitious footnotes and quotations clever and entertaining, though it made it harder to suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the reality of the characters than when I read The Earth Will Shake. But to misquote Will Rogers, I never metafiction I didn't like. Wilson wrote The Walls came Tumbling Down as a screenplay. I don't know how well it would work as a movie, but I found it a quick, enjoyable read dramatizing some of the psychological/philosophical ideas he deals with in Coincidance and Quantum Psychology.
I have always gotten a giggle from Keith Knight, though I haven't taken him as seriously as the other cartoonists I read in Salon. (As if one should take cartoonists seriously!) But I breezed through this whole collection, and came out quite satisifed. 10/14/03 Michael Moore, Dude, Where's my Country? You've probably heard plenty about this already. I liked it. Read it.
A finely imagined and written look at young rootless cosmopolitans in San Francisco in the early days of the Reagan administration. My wife called it "my box-of-truffles" book because each chapter contains delightful vignettes, and each passage has its own surprises and treasures. These pleasures more than make up for the lack of a single narrative arc. I liked it quite a bit, but I think I preferred The Passion Dream Book. I liked this, Brown's first novel less than his other three, but still found it quite entertaining and gripping. I recommend Angels & Demons most highly, then The Da Vinci Code, then Deception Point, then this. Brown has his own formula that he does quite well, and I look forward to his future books, but he will need to work on some new narrative strategies in order to keep it fresh over time. 10/13/03 Kimberley A. Tessmer, Gluten-Free for a Healthy Life Gluten-Free for a Healthy Life has a pretty good amount of useful information about gluten-free diets and the health implications, without too many recipes. I like recipes, but many writers on gluten-free diets, wheat-intolerance, and celiac disease pad the books with lots of recipes but don't provide that much real health information. If I want recipes, I will go for a cookbook, like the Bette Hagman cookbooks. Against the Grain has more to really read than any other book I've read on the topic, and Lowell writes with attitude and humor. The book includes a section on what airlines offer gluten-free meals, etiquette (not always polite!) on dealing with people who show insensitivity to the gluten-sensitive, and good information on what really goes into food. This book also includes recipes she commissioned from top-notch chefs whom she challenged to come up with gluten-free gourmet grub. I found this so much more interesting than yet another recipe for GF meatloaf or something stupid like that. The other two pamphlets have some basic information and a few recipes, but nothing more than you could find in five minutes on the Web. Perhaps worth picking up if you're in the library and it's on the shelf, not really worth getting through Inter-Library Loan the way I did. 11/3/03 To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, edited by D. David Bourland and Paul Dennithorne Johnson An anthology of writing in and about E-Prime. I wouldn't necessarily recommend getting this book, because while it includes a lot of interesting material, many of the chapters are available on the Web or through library databases like EbscoHost. I highly recommend reading about E-Prime and experiementing with writing in it, but I don't really believe in it the way these people do. I think that people frequently abuse "be" verbs, and that sloppy diction and sloppy thinking form a vicious cycle that one can break or at least temper by questioning all uses of "to be," but I don't consider it necessary to do without it entirely. About 10 years ago, I really got into the OuLiPo, who believe in the use of various constraints on writing: the most famous is the "lipogram," in which one eliminates all words including a given letter. I believe that constraints can promote creativity, lead one to question assumptions one didn't know one had, and lead to interesting results. But I don't believe in one-size-fits-all dogmatic constraints. But read this, or better yet, read Wilson's Quantum Psychology. If you think that E-Prime would be awkward to read, or that it wouldn't allow easy expression of ideas, this book shows that one can express complex ideas clearly in it, and that the constraint itself can be nearly invisible. I look at E-Prime rather like choosing to write without "profanity" (whatever that is), or composing music in the key of D Minor, or working in oil paint. One can do great things in oil paint, and I love Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and many times a piece of writing
The best coverage of the 2000 election atrocity in Florida (and other corruptions) that money can buy. I wish Palast wrote more graceful prose, or at least wrote with the kind of gusto and energy that Michael Moore brings to his books, but the reporting should not be ignored. I thought I knew how bad the 2000 election was (note: I'm dropping out of e-prime, for reasons I will explore more fully later), but the whole butterfly ballot and vote-counting just acted as distractions to keep people from looking more deeply into the truly horrible intentional abuses of democracy and justice.
Watts wrote many clear, intelligent books about different facets of religion and philosophy. This one covers a fair amount of philosophical ground in just over 100 pages.
Simultaneously hilarious and deeply depressing. 11/7/03 Scott Adams, God's Debris: a Thought Experiment A surprisingly thought-provoking little book by the creator of Dilbert. Not really fiction or straight philosophy, this fits into the genre of modern pop-philosophical dialogues like Ishmael and The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. This book is like a long late-night conversation with a smart college friend. I really enjoyed reading it and following along with his thought experiment, but I barely remember anything about it anc can't even summarize the arguments, though I only read it a bit over a week ago. Whereas I can remember a number of Dilbert cartoons, probably in part because of the visual element. This book consists almost entirely of dialogue with little description or other characterization. I think the philosophical stuff would make more of an impression if the fictional/expository elements were more developed. I look forward to more such ruminations from Adams.
Deliciously, deliriously read by Tim Curry. What more do you need? |
| I haven't exactly burned with the ardor to blog lately, but my mom sent this and I had to pass the word on.
This struck me as some of the best in-joke satire I had seen for a long time. Then I looked around the site and realized they meant it. You know what disappoints me the most? They got the "hex" in "Hexley" but not the "Huxley" -- which would have fanned the flames of their brimstone even higher. What has happened to fundamentalists when they have to have these things pointed out to them? They see enemies everywhere but can't spot the name of a "real" enemy right in front of them. Apparently, they have no sense of humor. Not that that surprises me. |
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| For your edification, I present an article by doctor Shanti Rangwani on all the health problems caused by milk. I'm not a vegan (yet?) but I do less and less dairy, and certainly never plain milk. I melted some organic pepper jack cheese on chips last night and feel crappy today. But then again, I haven't gotten enough sleep lately either. But articles like this don't do much for the appetite. If you need more, check out notmilk.com, the site of Robert Cohen, who appears in the Rangwani article. Lots of good information, mediocre web page design, and some bad poems mocking the Got Milk? ad campaign. Cohen even wrote a deconstruction of Joshua "Pacey Witter" Jackson's ad, accusing the dairy industry of promoting statutory rape. His site has an entertaining mix of information and crankery. Other good tidbits include an expose on vegan Andie McDowell's milk mustache ad, and a piece on wife-beater Jason Kidd and other dubious role models used in the campaign. |
| So I haven't posted in a while. I found this tidbit while tracking down spurious citations in Robert Anton Wilson's Coincidance: a Head Test: The Invisible Library, described as "a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound." I like it. |
| I just saw this someplace, maybe in the new Michael Moore book. Then I saw it again online. You may have seen it already, but I just love it and want to spread it around.
I wish I had written it. |
| In case you haven't noticed, I have instituted a new book completion log, purely for recording what I finish reading and when. For several years, I have wanted a good way to keep track of what I read, and the straight blog hasn't quite done it. So that page lists every book I finish, but I will still try to comment on things worthy of comment as I go along. I now present some disordered thoughts on as-yet-uncommented-upon books from the first three weeks or so of logged reads. 9/20/03 David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web I made some notes and intend to write more about this book later, but I found this very interesting and illumninating, teaching me a few new things and giving new context to many things that I already knew or thought. 9/23/03 Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives & Refugees: a Walk In Portland, Oregon Almost four years ago, I read Palahniuk's Fight Club and I greatly enjoyed it. I loved the movie, too, and couldn't imagine a better adaptation/interpretation, but the book still had a particular tang all its own. Earlier this year, I read Lullabye, and it blew me away. It sucked me in and held me there, it convinced me to suspend disbelief, and I overlooked any flaws it might have had. When I read Laura Miller's notorious hatchet job on Diary, I thought, well, maybe his books do have the flaws she names, but the spell he casts with his imagination and storytelling ability far outweighs little glitches about Apollo or the color of wine. I looked forward to reading Diary, though I felt some curiosity about the "mistakes" Miller drew attention to. Diary disappointed me greatly. It bore all the hallmarks of the Palahniuk books I loved, except for the ones that really mattered -- the ability to cast a narrative spell, a sense of psychological insight, and a kind of jagged grace to the writing. If the bookcover said "Finally in print! Palahniuk's unpublished first novel!", I would have said, yeah, this shows, in rough, unfinished form, the sensibility which would eventually flower in Lullabye. But coming several novels into his career, this book didn't even come close to fulfilling his potential. I can see it as a pretty good rough draft, that with more work and more scrupulous editorial intervention could have become an excellent read. Maybe the publisher pressured him to finish a book a year (two this year, including Fugitives and Refugees), so he didn't have time to do it right. Maybe he has reached the stage in his career where they figure people will buy his books regardless, so why bother taking another six months or year to get it right. Maybe they know that his fans include a lot of people outside of the usual "literary book reading" audience, so they assume fans won't compare a new Palahniuk to more polished novels. Either way, I found it quite a letdown. I would almost call Fugitives and Refugees a must-read for anyone interested in Portland, because it contains so many choice tidbits that I wouldn't have known about otherwise. But it seemed like a real rush job, and half the time he just dropped a little piece of information that left me wanting more. And not "wanting more" in the sense of "I found that so fascinating that I want more" but in the sense of "He started to say something interesting and didn't get to the interesting part." For example, in the section about hauntings, he said that the Pied Cow (a dessert cafe we like to go to) has a ghost, who also haunted the business that was there before. But he stops there. What does the ghost do? Do I put myself in danger by eating dessert there? Does the ghost do something fascinating? Have customers seen the ghost, or only employees? Does the ghost seem malevolent? Playful? Mournful? Does the ghost appear inside, out in the courtyard, or both? The book would have filled an encylopedia if he had gone into every last detail of everything he mentions, but it wouldn't have taken too much more effort to throw in a few more details of the kind that would have made the book much more satisfying. I still had fun reading it, though the overall quality seemed more like something you'd see in a local magazine than a book to be bound between hard covers. Part of me doesn't want to pick on him, because he just went through the flap with Entertainment Weekly outing him and his male partner. I do sympathize. He obviously had reasons for keeping his sexuality secret, but that doesn't excuse a couple of books that fell below the standards that he set with some of his earlier work. 9/26/03 Yann Martel, Life of Pi I enjoyed this quite a bit, and I would definitely read something else by Martel, but I never caught the fire that some people apparently did. I just never said, "Damn, give this baby the Booker!" But then, prizes mean little too me. So many worthy people never receive them, and so many that I consider lesser talents get them, that I can't get too concerned. The Nobel Prize in Literature, for example: once a literary prize has overlooked Proust, Nabokov, Joyce, Borges, and Calvino, I can't bring myself to care too much. Hemingway and not Joyce? Puh-leeze. I would love to see, say, Philip Roth get the prize, but if he didn't, I wouldn't be disappointed, since he has won practically every American prize, sells plenty of books, and has a new movie adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Having said all that, the morning Coetzee was named last year I rushed to grab a couple of his off the library shelf before the rush hit. See below for some thoughts on Disgrace. 10/6/03 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace I had never read Coetzee, though I had meant to, and checked out The Life and Times of Michael K at least once in the past. His veganism and animal rights concerns intrigued me as much as his Booker-winning status and literary reputation. Rather, I found the combination of the two more interesting than either one alone. I don't have anything profound to say about this book. I greatly enjoyed it, I found his prose refined and compelling, I liked the unlikeability of protagonist David Lurie, and the way he develops richer perspectives on animals and on his own life. Someone once divided all stories into two types: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Disgrace has a bit of both archetypes. I might say that Lurie goes on a journey, and the stranger he meets is himself. In a 1964 interview with Playboy, Vladimir Nabokov said:
I read much of Disgrace with my spine. Doing so gives a particular feeling, where you don't just hear the words in your inner ear or see the images with your mind's eye, but feel the writer's thoughts in your central nervous system, so that the breath takes on a feeling like that of meditation, and (at its best) the whole body is involved in the act of reading. I have felt this feeling with a number of books and authors, but not recently enough. I would not call Disgrace a particular favorite of mine, though I now want to read more of his works. It did, however, awaken a hunger in me, the way a taste of a forgotten favorite food can make you realize you hadn't eaten it for a long time, and had missed the satisfaction without realizing what you lacked. Or something like that. 9/27/03 Edward Gorey, The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas I wouldn't put these among Gorey's best, but I will read anything by him. Especially since it takes about five minutes to read most of his books. |
| Ah, Moby. It feels good to see that celebrities can have the same blend of semi-inspiration and goofy near-banality that we non-celeb bloggers have. Find an unsuspected use for tacos. |