| RRR!! (recent reading roundup) 11/17/03 Russell Hoban, The Little Brute Family I picked this up because it seemed like a parody of The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown, and because we refer to our dog as a little brute. I found it a bit predictable, and the whole thing takes about a minute to read, but I found the brutes kind of cute.
This book always comes up as a recommendation when I look for gluten related books in Amazon, and I had heard good things about it, so I put in an ILL request. 11/20/03 Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: an Interpretation of Aleister Crowley
11/21/03 Robert Cohen, Milk A-Z
11/27/03 Peter Russell, From Science to God: A Physicist's Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness |
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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. |
