Books this year: a book diary

Wow. That was a fast way to put something prestigious-looking on my book list. One sitting, man. For real. Like an hour - maybe less. And a good book, too.

I like Rilke because he’s all misty-eyed and life affirming and  finds beauty and joy in everything, but this book taught me that he’s not me. Cool, cool. Vive la différence.

I can sum this book up in two words: poetic tantra. Tantra (as I understand it) redefines the goals of sex, opting for exquisite eternal writhing almost-climax instead of the orgasmic release that would just leave you bored and talking about the weather again in a few minutes. Rilke treats a lot of life like that. Love the questions. Don’t rush for the answers. Writhe, and celebrate your writhing. Write is all down. Be patient. Become supremely alone, and wallow in it, and record your thoughts. The purpose of life is here redefined around the creation of beauty. I have to admit that in my love of chaos I’ve often played tantric like this with my life, preferring, say, limmerence to love, and the ascent to the plateau, but seeing it written here, however beautiful and edifying, reminds me that I’d personally rather storm some castles and die soaked with blood and wine than perfect the haiku.

This book contains two big essays by Piaget. The first is a manifesto about what Piaget thinks education ought to become. It’s daring and scientifically proven. Memorization and examination should be deemphasized, and children should discover and invent everything themselves under the gentle guidance of brilliantly trained Socratic teachers. This essay has inspired me, and will probably change the way I raise my kids and teach future classes.

The second essay is about Piaget’s political thinking. Governments should wrest the control of children from knownothing parents and take responsibility to the full development of people’s personhood. I didn’t agree or learn from the politics of this essay, but it was worth reading anyways, because Piaget can’t help but digress and talk about the application active methods to the study of math and government. Some brilliant stuff.

I read this book because my grandfather heard its author on the radio and thought he had some interesting things to say. The author, George Friedman, runs a private intelligence agency which for a price, stalks, analyses, and predicts companies and governments. In this book, Friedman tries to turn his professionally honed skills towards predicting the geopolitical churnings of the 21st century. I think the results are silly.

The book is fuzzy on near-term predictions, and then precise about what’s going to happen in a century. This might be the author’s shrewd attempt at preserving his credibility within his lifetime. His predictions about the coming decade largely coincide with UN projections and New York Times op eds: China is booming while underestimating its demographic problems, Europe’s dive in birthrates will make it start begging for immigrants, and the US is in for a hard decade or two, economically. I agree, while yawning.

Then, using a small set of dubious axioms about geopolitics (i.e. nations are rational actors which always attempt to work in the interest of their populations, prowess on the world stage will always directly correlate to control of maritime trade, etc.), the author confidently extrapolates that the United States’ orbiting “battlestars” will be attacked by a Japapese-Turkish coalition in 2050.

On every page the author commits embarrasing oversights in the domains I know something about, and he probably makes other errors I don’t know enough to catch.

Also. when I read the weird way he writes, I imagine he sounds like this guy.

In college, I had this cultural anthropology professor named James MacDonald, who’s apparently the dean of something in Utah right now. The class I took from him, “Language, Thought, and Culture” or something like that, had to have a brand new syllabus in the year that I took it, because Dr. MacDonald had taken Cambodia out of the course. The prior year’s class, he said, had mutinied.

In a sentence, the book is a hip Canadian literary description of what Weaver calls The Great Stereopticon,  being the ever more powerful cultural machine that works to annihilate the meaning in our lives. The author likens these machinations to the short reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, wherein everyone in the country who could read, could speak a foreign language, or had ever been to school was executed. Both the Khmer Rouge and television have the same aims, the author says: to make impossible the memory of the past (and the sense of identity that comes with it) and the imagining of a future. But television, albeit slower, is doing better than the Khmer Rouge did. It’s nearly conquered the world.

The style of Cambodia is, by turns, breathtaking and retarded. In addition to creating a powerful work of philosophy, the author wanted to press the limits of experimental fiction, among other things by typing out an explicit subtext under a heavy black line in the middle of every page. This “subtext” ends up being just a parallel narrative on the same themes, and I think the book would been a lot easier to read if the author would have dumped all of the book’s content into one stream.

In my final analysis, I feel like Cambodia’s powerful ideas overcome its peculiarities in style (like a Philip K. Dick novel). I also feel like it’s tied up some loose ends in my own cosmology, and made me feel better about my understanding of our civilization.

I found Los De Barcelona on a $1 clearance rack during my lunch break from Whole Foods Market circa 2002 at a point in my life when I was more or less a fascist and just starting to pick up some Spanish. It is one of the more marvelous coincidences of my life that I acquired a serious interest in the book’s themes in the space of time that it took for my Spanish to become developed enough for me to read it. As it turns out, the book is a firsthand description of Spain’s glorious wartime flirtation with anarcho-syndicalism.

The book begins in Barcelona. Franco launches his military coup, and the legitimate Spanish republic basically folds (after all, they have no military to fight with). Franco’s troops come up from Morocco and occupy Spain, and they’re marching into Barcelona when the unthinkable happens. The people of Barcelona spontaneously come out of their houses, throw up barricades of trash around the city, use whatever improvised weapons they have, and take the fascists down.

It probably helped that the city had been a hotbed of anarchist and communist thought for some time. Most of the people of Barcelona were organized into communist parties or anarchist syndicates (Anarchists didn’t vote; they thought that the political process itself was wrong, and so sought to make the existing government and the  social order irrelevant through boycotts, sabotage, and their own parallel voluntary superior organization). As such, the syndicates tried to take responsibility for organizing things when the government fell, but it was often laughable. Syndicates made decrees about collectivization and the new order of property rights, but it was all a vain paper game. The people had already reorganized society and collectivized the city’s industries in good old flash mob fashion, and even the supposed organizers really had no clue what was going on. On the occasion of the death of a prominent revolutionary, the people threw a Mardi Gras sized impromptu funeral. The syndicates soon planned an official one, but nobody came. The people of Barcelona were too anarchistic for their own anarchist groups. It was like 4chan with guns.

Elsewhere in Spain, there were agrarian federations of farming villages under Esperanto speaking monarchs, communist towns, socialist places, and even surviving capitalist elements of the old republic (nervous politicians intact), all working together to defeat the Spanish army. Governments overlapped where there were governments at all. It’s a real beautiful mess, eventually verging on some kind of federalism, when the author concludes the book, starry-eyed, right before everything he knows and loves is destroyed.

Spanish, the SuperPen, etc.

So this has got to be something like the 5th book I’ve tried to read in Spanish, and the 1st I’ve finished successfully. Reading when you don’t know 10-20 crucial words on every page is impossibly slow with a normal dictionary, so I was stuck with Cat in the Hat type books until I found the SuperPen, which is an instantaneous scanning translator. After I got a SuperPen, I tried to read a Paulo Coelho book in Spanish, and I failed. Amazingly, though, I found that when reading something slightly more advanced and technical, I was able to understand vastly more, because the academic registers of Spanish and English have a lot more cognates (anarquismo, libertarianismo, etc) than the lower registers.

Now the great thing that happened is this: I learned a lot of common words and phrases, and had to scan less and less as I progressed through the book, and now I’ve found that I can pick paragraphs at random in Spanish books that had formerly defeated me and read them with ease.  So I think I’ve got something like escape velocity, to where I can now read slightly more and more complicated books, all the way to the top. Unfortunately, I’m realizing that there’s not much I want to read in Spanish. French has Sartre, Pascal, Rousseau, and Descartes. German has Kant, Marx, Goethe, and Einstein. Even minor languages like Danish have their superstars. But with all its cigars, rifles, and beautiful women, Spanish offers nothing to read.

Setting translating pen to French . . .

This is one of those really old books I got at the book barn at Hillspeak (I’ve thought recently: What would I be without that barn? Sure, nowadays any interested kid knows about Enoch and Chuang Tzu, but in the pre-internet days, how did anyone know anything? I got lucky.)

The book of Enoch is a pseudepigraphic apocalyptic mess of craziness that made it into the Ethiopic canon (and as such I actually have a huge deal more respect for it than I do for a lot of other pseudepigraphic apocalyptic messes).

The book primarily concerns itself with (1) completely ludicrous revealed accounts of celestial mechanics which cannot be saved by allegorization, (2) weird stories about Noah and fallen angels that bred supermen that had to be killed by an act of God, (3) giddy anticipation of the tortures which will someday befall deserving sinners, and (4) the Son of Man who has existed since the beginning of time, but will soon come and live among mankind and bring about the salvation of Jews and Gentiles alike.

Yeah. That last one is interesting for a centuries-before-Christ Jewish book. Knowing that some of Enoch is insane while some of it is surprisingly prescient made the book a maddening but fun thing to read, especially on a late eery night.

Vernor Vinge is the kind of science fiction writer (like Asimov or Sagan) who takes himself seriously and really gives a go at modeling the future and writing something that’s technologically and societally plausible (or even likely). I probably first encountered Vinge’s name in the context of something nonfiction that he wrote about the impending technological singularity, but when I found out that he was a singularitarian and an anarcho-capitalist, I drove to the bookstore and bought the first book of his I could find.

Rainbows End (no, there’s not a missing apostrophe, it’s a sentence) deals with the pre-artificial intelligence world of 2025, which is very much in upheaval due to the impact of augmented human intelligence. Where science fiction like Star Trek often makes the mistake of crewing 24th century spacecraft with people with 20th century morals, social structures, and haircuts, Vinge has a gift for taking things like gesture controlled text messaging and contact lens interfaces and showing how they change the nature of human interaction completely (in this case by allowing people to have discrete 1-to-1 conversations with only one of the people at the table, often in parallel to a bigger group conversation).

Most jobs in Vinge’s future have to do with search and analysis. Advertisers mine their data and look for the effects of combinations of ad campaigns. Disease control people, spy agencies, and many of the other industries mentioned in the book do roughly the same. Everyone’s job has become Levi’s job.

Children with a good handle on the right technologies play pranks with global political implications.

I was repeatedly spooked by this book, because while the world described was alien and chaotic, it also seemed strangely familiar to a person who often texts under the table, bombs polls with Reddit, and reads Palin’s hacked emails.

The book’s lasting impression on me is a lingering feeling of nervousness and worry. I interact daily with people whose cultural lag causes them to reject ideas like human evolution and global warming. How will they cope with the dissolution of hierarchy and privacy, or the advent of AI? I feel like we’re not ready, but the future doesn’t care.