Oh, come on. You know the shtick by now. Ken’s reading Osho. Free love, anarchism, people can’t own each other, everything you were taught was to keep you in bondage and unhappy, etc.

Emphases of this Osho book in particular: worldwide anarchist revolution, marriage, and parenting.

I can’t stop. Please make me stop. I need to finish Momo and Accelerando.

I’ve got love. I’ve got freedom. Right on, Osho, preach it.

Then there’s aloneness. Ouch. Aloneness is meditation. Aloneness is being able to be alone. Your name was given to you. You’ve got your body on loan. Your degrees and titles and accumulated facts are furniture in the waiting room. When you identify with these things, you’re not being yourself. And if you can be alone and be happy, you know yourself. I can’t be alone and be happy. I need people to tell me who I am, and that I’m wonderful. I require that of them. Aloneness is tough. If I’m alone for a second, it’s gotta be pacing and business plans, or facebook. I cannot simply be. I’m running from myself. I need to learn aloneness.

Also, Osho believes in reincarnation, and that’s silly.

Profound freaking book, though.

All in all - not much learned, but it’s a vast comfort and affirmation of my sanity to see someone add up all the equations of life and come up with so many of the same answers as I have.  Also, I figured out that I am captivated, like a child at the feet of a giant story-telling muppet, by Hindu parables.

If stoicism can give you the rationale for a bold life without anger, this book shows you how to get there.

The author of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an anarchist, though he never talks about it explicitly. A mind-job holy shit anarchist thinker of the sexiest kind. He thinks that when civilization picked up and power and coercion and oppression got started, our culture, education, and language all got hijacked to serve the purposes of the oppressors.

“Should” and “have to” don’t exist. Anger only exists as a confusion having to do with “should.” When we get all non-interpretive and anti-platonic, the atomic structure under all human emotion is want and need. People who say things like “he’s lazy” should bite the bullet, quit appealing to universal standards, realize that there is no objective laziness (or not an objectively demonstrable one), and take responsibility for their own emotions. “I want him to do more work so I can do less, because I need more free time to be happy.”

Ok, that one was easy. Everything has to do with an emotional need. Sure. It gets worse. By the time I was done with this book, I could trace the roots of my disgust for any irritating person to an awful insecurity caused by a terrible need. I almost navel-gazed myself out of functional humanity. But it was AWESOME.

Quoting Gandhi, Chuang Tzu, Teilhard de Chardin, and other people who made me do double takes, Rosenberg paints a picture to an unchained de-brainwashed non-slave way of being where the purpose of life is play. Spiritual anarchism. I’m going to take this trek. Please come with me.

Oh, and here’s Rosenberg:

Sum is forty of the handsome neuroscientist’s two-to-three page short stories about the afterlife. They are all conflicting what-ifs. I suppose they’re all possible, in the way that it’s possible that I’m actually a hallucinating space giraffe, but Eagleman doesn’t try to by Vinge and make things so plausible it gives you chills. He tries to be Márquez or Borges and make you smile at the twists.

I was surprised though, at how narrowly within the possibility space Eagleman constrained his imagination when writing Sum. The same themes (good themes, I’m not hating) keep presenting themselves: the makers didn’t get what they wanted out of creation, or if they did it has nothing to do with us; the changing relationships between lovers; gods who are bored, or sad; the awe and wonder of naivety and being wrong, and the bittersweetness of advancement past those stages. I feel like Eagleman accidentally let me get to know him, and I know what keeps him up at night, what he pines for, and sighs about. He’s a good guy.

And I love this story:

Andrew Keen, the author, is a silicon valley insider because he had a failed business once that nobody ever heard of. Craigslist is bad because it provides the service that newspaper classifieds once provided, but for free, and this means that people lose jobs. YouTube is bad because the quality of entertainment on YouTube sucks, but even so everyone will be compelled to choose it over high-quality entertainment, and real art will die. The poor poor record labels will be killed by online music. Porn is gross. Etc, etc. There is no very cogent thesis. The internet is just bad. And we need gatekeepers. People like the author, I would assume, to tell us what to like and buy.

The author literally looks like this:

 And he writes like a person who looks like that. Excellent book.

Rаndаll Terry hаs аsked me to write а blurb to use in the promotion of his forthcoming book. Rаndаll Terry is аn interesting guy. If you were to reаd his Wikipediа аrticle, you might come to believe the mаn wаs dаngerous аnd insаne. He is. Whаt you will not leаrn from Rаndаll’s аrticle (which is аbsolutely full of of lies, аnd I need to fix) is thаt he’s аlso something of а living sаint, аnd а true believer in the best sense of the phrаse. (Once а lаdy аt аn аbortion clinic where Rаndаll’s group wаs protesting sаid “If you cаre so much, why don’t you rаise the kid аnd pаy for everything.” He got аdoption pаpers post-hаste. In this wаy he аcquired three of his children. He аlso hаs а glowing letter of encourаgement from Mother Teresа. If I hаd а letter from Mother Teresа, I would totаlly submit it аs one of my three letters of rec every time I аpplied for а job.)

Drаgon Slаyers is bаsicаlly Rаndаll’s аpologiа for his personаlity disorder. A Drаgon Slаyer is someone like Rаndаll: someone who аctuаlly enjoys being аngry. Someone thаt’s аngry thаt not enough people аre аngry. Someone who аctuаlly loves being hаted. Someone who usuаlly hаd dаddy issues like Rаndаll’s, аnd now wаnts to go down in kаmikаze flаmes, crucified upside-down (”ok, now form а gаuntlet аnd punch me in the stomаch!”), usuаlly for а good cаuse.

Thаt Rаndаll reckons honestly with the pаthologicаl origins of his weirdness mаkes this book sort of аwesome. I need to write one аbout people like me.

Drаgon Fuckers.

———

Concerned public: don’t worry, I replaced all the “a”s in this post with a Cyrillic letter that looks exactly like an “a.” Google searches for “Rаndаll Terry” won’t find this. 

So. About status. Johnstone says that basically all human interaction is about status competitions. People who try to do improv acting without knowing this aren’t convincing. Once you frame everything in terms of tacit status battles, though, your character comes alive. I lose status battles. I cede ground to devils and imbeciles because I think it’s the right thing to do. This chapter taught me a little bit about how to play the game, and I’m going to start doing it, for my survival.

So when I finished the early section titled “status”, I thought the rest of the book was going to be a waste of my time. Instead, it blew up my soul. Impro is a Taoist manual on creativity, education, and the subconscious. Education ruins us. Adults are atrophied children. Tapping into our true creative selves, abused as we are, sometimes requires the use of magic, hypnosis, trance. Johnstone’s students are taught that masks have powers, and do “mask work,” which is this bizarre kind of improv training based on Indonesian and Haitian rituals. Students become posessed. They can do things they couldn’t before. They don’t have to act characters, because they are the characters. Of course the masks are just pieces of wood, but so long as students believe in the masks, they can be unabashed, subconscious flowing, creative, free. Sometimes afterwords they remember nothing.

Amazing book. It has shown me a place that I would like to be able to get to, creatively. In other words, come over to my house and let’s paint each other’s faces and do freaky stuff.

Lihan Li sort of reminds me of Nathan. He has a trolling sense of humor. You laugh because the joke was so fucking stupid, and not because it was funny.

Lihan’s poems are like retarded YouTube comments, except that every third poem or so has something actually beautiful and profound in it.

The shifts are jarring.

Also, this book taught me to bee myself.

The Married Man Sex Life Primer, or MMSLP, looks at marriage and sex in a game theoretic, pick-up artist way, through the lens of evolutionary psychology. There are some very interesting ideas.

The author proposes that the motivations that we consciously ascribe to our sexual actions are largely false, and that we’re really mostly governed by immutable subconscious forces which we rationalize. We can’t make ourselves want someone sexually anymore than we can make ourselves hungry. The result is that if your spouse has a higher sex rank than you, her paleocortical “Body Agenda” dictates that she shouldn’t loan the uterus out to your genes for nine months, during which time she might get a chance to reproduce with someone with a higher sex rank. After a little laundering in conscious rationalization, this comes out as “I have a headache,” or “I’m tired.”

What is sex rank? It’s your doability score on a scale of one to ten. A man’s sex rank is derived via super-complicated multivariate subconscious equation, taking into account physical stature, brawn, leadership, courage and risk-taking, wealth, intelligence, social status, and a whole lot of other stuff that’s convenient when you’re a social and carnivorous species locked in a genetic arms race against snakes.  A woman’s sex rank has to do with youth and beauty.

The author proposes that if a couple’s sex ranks fall out of step with each other to the tune of two or more points on a scale of one to ten, the marriage will head towards sexlessness. Sexlessness being clinically defined as once a month or worse.

The concept of the “fitness test” was probably the most fascinating thing in the book. Female spiders will make their potential mates go through an elaborate dance to prove that their genes are worth fusing with. Female humans have their own subconsciously employed fitness test, the author says, that they use to ping a prospective mate’s social standing. It’s this:

“Hey, will you do all the chores tonight?”

“Sure!”

{next night}

“Will you do all the chores tonight while I flatulate and eat cheetoes?”

“Of course honey!” 

{next night}  

“Will you do all the chores, and wipe my ass, and feed me cheetoes? How come you never bring me flowers? You should bring them without having to be asked, just because you love me.”

“Coming right up! Hey, can we have sex?”

“I have a headache.”

A man’s submission, particularly to absurd requests, is an indicator of his low value, dog pack-wise. (And Ken became enlightened, and all of American modern marriages began to make sense.) The solution? Slap that bitch. Turn things around. Will it piss her off? Sure. Oh, she’ll hate it. And become more physically responsive, for completely unrelated reasons.

I do have some criticisms of this book. It veers off-topic because the author wants to impress you with every cute thing he’s ever said or every cool sex move he’s ever tried. It also seems to be written to save people whose sex lives are failing, and has less information for people who are winning the game and just want to win harder.

I have been inspired to try to up my sex rank, though. Hopefully, this will ultimately bring me two points above Megan, completely de-stabilize my marriage, and ensure that I never have sex again.

“A happy-ist.”

A Guide to the Good Life is a dry history of Stoicism followed by nuts-and-bolts manual on Stoic happiness. It’s not poetically or inspiringly written. It’s doctrinally neutral. It’s just about mind-hacks to make you happy. These range from simple Alchoholics Anonymous-type observations that make you say “fffffuuuuu, I mean of course it’s true, but are there actually people who don’t know that?” to shit that will probably change my life.

As a practicing happy-ist—hitherto very much a hedonist—attachment and a certain obsession with fame and approval have been real motherbitches to me, making my highs higher, and my lows desolate. I think this book may have the goods to cure me of that, if I’m brave enough to take the medicine.

The author of Starting FORTH  is famous for its sequel, Thinking FORTH. It’s sort of a Hobbit/Lord of the Rings affair, where the first one is cutesy and easy, and the second shatters people’s worlds and has become a household word.

Starting FORTH was a game-changer for me, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn programming (though if you’re not so concerned with writing fast artificial intelligences from scratch, and you actually want a job, Learn To Program is an extraordinary way to learn Ruby as a first language.) The book is illustrated with cartoons and explanations of such insulting simplicity that I would be shocked if anyone I know could read it and not get a grip on the language.

The language itself is very close to the machine level, so that you create your Khet program by swapping, duplicating, adding, and removing integers from the stack. There’s something mysterious and holy about that to me, and I think there always will be. Something about the way that an unthinking pattern of ones and zeros, magnetically recorded onto a tape, can become intelligent, and maybe even conscious, points for me to the mysteries of information theory, and the logos, and God.

This is a novel that needs to be read twice, and the second reading should probably happen almost immediately. That’s not the way I did it, of course – because who has the time to read the same book twice in a row? – and I feel like I missed a lot the first time through.

Asterios is a “paper architect” – an architect whose buildings only exist on paper. He’s also an insufferable ass, which is part of the reason his wife Hana leaves him. Most of the novel (which skips around in time quite a bit) concerns itself with Asterios sorting through the rubble of his collapsed life. By the end, he’s rebuilt something better out of the rubble – as opposed to bashing his brains in with a piece of (metaphorical) brick or something like that. It’s a “happy” novel, at least in the sense that it isn’t actively and unrelentingly bleak and hopeless.

The ending, though – and here I mean just the last few pages – came completely out of nowhere. I mean, it’s quite possible that hints of it were present from the very beginning, which is part of why this one has to be read (at least) twice. I was, though, completely unprepared for it the first time around. When I saw what was coming, I refused to believe it. When it actually happened, I stared at the page for a solid minute, dumbstruck, and may have said “What the fuck just happened?” out loud (probably I didn’t, because the kids were in the room, and, while I was neglecting them to read, I’m not so irresponsible as to say “fuck” in front of them, except when I do).

I place a lot of weight on endings. Maybe everybody does, I don’t know – but a bad ending, in my opinion, ruins the entirety work it ends, even if most of the work was excellent. LOST is a good example, in that most people hated the ending – I thought it was great – and this disapproval of the ending retroactively affects one’s perception of the series as a whole. Something like that.

I haven’t decided yet how I feel about the ending of Asterios Polyp. I very much want to like it, but I’m going to have to read the novel a few more times before I can decide whether the ending is a foul deus ex machina or something that actually fits with what comes before it. I think it fits: the novel is structured and intricately-constructed enough that it’s hard to believe that Mr. Mazzuccheli would suddenly get lazy or capricious at the end. It could happen, of course, but I think the fun is going to be figuring out how and why the ending works, not deciding if it works.

If you decide to read this novel – which I highly recommend – don’t, whatever you do, for the love of all that’s good and holy, don’t flip to the end to see what happens, or you’ll ruin the whole thing, and you might as well just not read it, and spend the time organizing your underwear drawer instead. It won’t be as much fun, but maybe you don’t deserve fun.

By the way: Snape kills Dumbledore.

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville: Slave rebellion (on a boat, motherfuckers), an nervous captain, an obtuse captain, a gunfight, a hanging. Based on a true story.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: A western so violent that the tree of dead babies around page 60 elicits not much more than a shrug. Hardened killers, unforgiving landscapes, unremitting brutality. Also: creepiest villain in a novel, ever (giant, hairless, frequently naked).

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Young teen fakes his own death, goes on the run with an escaped slave, pretends to be Tom Sawyer, fucks it up – and Tom Sawyer saves the day in an excessively elaborate and entirely unnecessary fashion.

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos: Disorienting stream-of-consciousness style, constant shifts of narratorial voice, horse-drawn milk-buggy vs. streetcar. Lots of “wait, where the fuck are we now?” moments.

Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History by Norman Mailer: Mr. Mailer tells the story of his involvement in a 1968 Vietnam War protest. Twice. Interesting experiment in form, intelligent remarks about the non-objectivity of historical writing, giant prick of an author.

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner: A giant, tangled clusterfuck of a novel: incest, murder, miscegenation, and a crazy old lady who holds a grudge for decades before burning down a fucking house.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Turn-of-the-20th-century housewife becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her life, has an affair, dabbles in painting, drowns herself in the Gulf of Mexico.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Massive, sprawling, obscene postmodern novel about WWII, V2 rockets, coprophagia, a lieutenant whose rocket is correlated with the German rockets, an immortal lightbulb, &c. Won the 1974 Pulitzer for fiction, but was denied it, probably for that scene where an old general eats a turd while fantasizing about sucking a giant black cock. Yeah.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Fun times with expatriate Americans in 1920s Europe. How can you go wrong with a protagonist named “Dick Diver”? You can’t. Also: more incest.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: Spenser did everything the Pythons did in The Quest for the Holy Grail (and then some), 400 years before they did, and entirely in a not-at-all-easy stanza that he made up himself. Blood, dismemberments, sexy virgins, dragons, monsters, and the original Robo-Cop.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer: Kid whose dad died on 9/11 finds a key in a vase in his dad’s closet, spends the novel obsessing over it, and meets his grandfather, who helps him dig up his dad. Actually a beautiful, touching novel.

Maurice by E. M. Forster: The long coming-out of a gay, not-particularly-likable Edwardian businessman, who runs off to become a lumberjack (seriously) with his working-class lover. Also, he punches an old man who propositions him on a train.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood: Gay English professor (who happens to be English) in 1960s SoCal mourns his dead lover, teaches a class on Huxley, drinks too much, sort-of propositions a student, maybe dies at the end.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. by Oscar Wilde: Story about an unprovable theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to his boy-lover, which people somehow can’t help believing because OMG IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE.

Salome by Oscar Wilde: Herod wants to bone a weirdly-androgynous Salome (incest!), who wants to bone a weirdly-feminized John the Baptist. Both of them end up dead, and a random suitor of Salome commits suicide onstage. The experience is woefully incomplete without Aubrey Beardsley’s disturbing illustrations.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf: Orlando, a young Elizabethan nobleman, lives for 400 years. He writes lots of not-very-good poetry, has an affair with a Russian princess, becomes ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, lives with some Gypsies for a while – oh, and he turns into a woman at some point. No big deal.

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault: Two young, fit, sexy Athenian soldiers hang out with Socrates, fall in love, fight the Spartans, and witness the defeat of their city at the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde: Growing up a black lesbian (proto-feminist) poet in NYC in the 1930s and 40s. Erotic moment with a mortar and pestle. Affair with a much older alcoholic white woman while in Mexico on an extended vacation. Parties and drinking and drama and sex. Oh, and Lorde was a librarian.

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan: Gay black teenager can’t handle life in his oppressively religious small southern town, hangs out with a demon and his retinue for a night, kills himself. Kind of a downer.

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst: Young, gay British aristocrat has lots of sex, befriends an old gay British aristocrat, finds out that his grandfather put a bunch of gay dudes in prison in the ’50s, which is why he has tons of money and a swanky apartment. And there’s a giant pink dildo at one point.

An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis: Re-telling of the story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes which mixes the world of the ancient Greeks with the 1970s. It works, mostly because the author doesn’t draw attention to it. Spoiler alert: the Greeks lose.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson: A largely autobiographical account of growing up as the working-class lesbian daughter of a rabid staunch Pentecostal in northern England. Apparently lesbians aren’t allowed to be missionaries in Pentecostal churches. There are a few exorcisms, but no projectile vomiting.

Snow White by Donald Barthelme: Insofar as this novella has a plot, it centers around the problems that arise when Snow White gets tired of sleeping with the seven dwarves – who are neither dwarves nor stupidly-named, but still idiots.

Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic by Alison Bechdel: Young woman comes out to her parents during her first year at college, only to be told that her dad is also gay, with a taste for younger guys (”OUR BABYSITTER?!”). Her dad gets hit by a truck and dies a few weeks later, in what may or may not have been a suicide. It’s a graphic novel, beautifully drawn and intricately structured.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner: Gay Mormons, AIDS, angelic visitations which produce orgasms, a visit to heaven. Made into an HBO special, starring, among others, Meryl Streep. ಠ_ಠ

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx: Two young cowboys – WHO ARE DEFINITELY NOT GAY, ALRIGHT? – spend a summer herding sheep and exploring their sexuality on the open range. They meet up to camp and fuck a few times a year until one of them dies.

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow by Brian Fawcett: Collection of related essays/stories about how television (and contemporary culture in general) is destroying our capacity for memory and imagination – the abilities to conceive of the past and of the future –in much the same way that the Khmer Rouge’s program of forced ruralization and execution of anybody even vaguely literate did, albeit on a slower timeline.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Young shitkicker leaves the farm, joins the army, falls in love with a rich girl, can’t marry her because he’s poor, becomes a bootlegger, gets obscenely rich, throws ridiculous parties, has an abortive affair with said girl five years later, and gets murdered as the result of convoluted and improbably circumstances. The Great American Novel, motherfuckers.

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The plot – which is laughable, in my opinion – is convoluted: Judge Temple, the founder of Templeton and owner of something like 10,000 acres, acquired about half of his land when it was confiscated from his dear friend Edward Effingham (who sided with the British during the War, serving as a Colonel) and sold at auction. This Effingham’s son, Edward Oliver Effingham, returns to the States (shortly before the novel opens) to care for his senile grandfather, Major Oliver Effingham, and to reclaim the property he believes Judge Temple wrongly acquired from the middle Effingham. Despite the obvious pseudonym he assumes – Oliver Edwards – and his “inexplicable” hostility toward the Judge, his true identity isn’t revealed until the novel is almost over – when it is also revealed that Judge Temple was really a good guy, who tried repeatedly to restore lands and fortune to his friend, until his letters began coming back unopened, and he heard that the two younger Effinghams had perished (and, conveniently, the old senile Major had long been “lost”). At that point, everyone’s happy, Edward Oliver Effingham marries the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth (the whole romance subplot is heavily influenced by Pride and Prejudice, published about a decade earlier), and the American aristocracy is stabilized and justified.

Fortunately, this part of the novel is secondary (in practice, if not by Cooper’s intent) to the primary conflict driving the novel: that between the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and the settler & bringer-of-civilization Judge Temple. This conflict plays out in numerous incidents, some of which contrast the “wasty ways” of the settlers (as in their indiscriminate slaughter of the pigeons migrating in great swarms over the settlement, many of which are left to rot on the ground where they fall) and the kill-only-enough-to-eat practices of Natty and Chingachgook; other incidents center on the conflict between the “law of the wilderness” and the “law of civilization” (as when Natty is fined for killing a deer “out of season,” deer season being something he views as an utterly arbitrary construct).

These conflicts are often complicated, however. The young Effingham, who will eventually inherit all of Temple’s lands and fortune, and thereby continue the conversion of wilderness into cultivated land, dotted with towns, is, for most of the novel, a companion of Natty and Chingachgook, and appears to espouse their ideals. Judge Temple himself is often portrayed as wishing to find a middle ground between Natty’s absolute rejection of cultivation and “civilization” and the rampant, wasteful consumption of natural resources practiced by most of the settlers and endorsed by his verbose and outspoken cousin, Richard Temple. The Judge, however, is also generally portrayed as weak-willed and ineffective as a responsible cultivator of the wilderness, alternately giving in to the “excitement” of his cousin’s activities (the trawling of the lake, for instance, which produces a harvest of as many inedible fish as edible ones) and quietly disapproving from the comfort of his manor-house. Cooper seems incapable of or unwilling to consider the middle way the Judge (usually) espouses; there is no room in the novel for a westward expansion of civilization that also preserves areas of wilderness.

Though Cooper often seems to side with Natty, the cruelly ironic final line of the novel – “He [Natty] had gone far toward the setting sun, the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” – betrays, in my opinion, a belief that the time has come for Americans to dominate and utterly transform the landscape as they move West to the Pacific – and that such domination and transformation is inevitable, if not also divinely ordained.

It’s worth reading because it’s not really about zombies — or, rather, it uses zombies to talk about one possible way a lethal and easily-spread virus might spread and disrupt global society in a spectacularly clusterfucky manner. Zombies are more fun than ebola (well, in a manner of speaking), but the principle is the same.

World War Z was published in 2006, and the zombie pandemic with which the novel deals seems to begin (in China, of course) sometime around then. The novel is composed of a series of interviews (or excerpts therefrom) conducted toward the end of the decade of “peace” which followed humanity’s decade-long struggle for survival; the interviews are arranged chronologically according to which part of WWZ they address, from the initial outbreaks, through the “Great Panic” and humanity’s return from the brink of extinction, to the decade of rebuilding after “victory” is officially declared.

Though Brooks acknowledges his debt to George Romero, the novel is far different from Romero’s films in that it posits humanity’s survival; the humans win, and the zombies are contained, though not eradicated (some spend their winters frozen and thaw out in the spring, millions and millions wander around on the oceans’ floors, and, hilariously, Iceland is still completely overrun). Humanity survives, but the cost is high: not only are there significant (catastrophic, even) ecological consequences – the extinction of the whales, for example – but the survival of some humans means the sacrifice of many more. Israel totally isolates itself for the duration; South Africa adopts the Redeker Plan, which calls for the establishment of safe zones by simultaneously establishing “live bait” zones (and guess where most people end up?); and there are plenty of smaller instances of military units abandoning civilians, or civilians abandoning each other, or resorting to theft, rape, murder, cannibalism, &c. Good times.

The fact that this is a novel about zombies will, I think, keep it from being widely read, which is a shame; it deals intelligently with the issues that arise during and after a catastrophic disruption of society, and such things happen on a local (and not-so-local) level all the time. Reading the novel (or anything else, fiction or otherwise) won’t prevent such disasters, obviously, but being forced to think about the ways our choices and behaviors can exacerbate or alleviate the suffering of those affected by such disasters is a good thing – or, at least, a thing that’s good for us.

Not only has the United States been overthrown by fundies (who are purging not only Catholics but Baptists – the novel has its darkly funny moments), but the birthrate has also plummeted, for a variety of reasons, including severe environmental degradation (nuclear and toxic wastes everywhere, pollution, etc). This leads to the establishment of “Rachel and Leah Centers” where fertile but not exactly moral (but not really really immoral) woman are indoctrinated and then assigned to high-ranking officials with infertile wives (because, really, it’s always the woman’s fault, right?) to have babies for them – like Bilhah and Zilpah did for Rachel and Leah.

The novel is narrated (”reconstructed”) by one of the handmaids, given the name “Offred” – which is both a patronymic (”Of Fred”) and a pun (”off red”), as the handmaids are dressed totally in red. Before the shit hit the fan, she was married and had a daughter; their attempt to escape to Canada (where else?) failed, and Offred ended up a handmaid, her daughter was given to someone more worthy, and her husband’s fate is unknown.

There are, as are required in dystopian novels, a secretive and potentially omnipresent police organization, an underground resistance, double agents, an escape attempt – but these are secondary elements: the novel is primarily concerned with exploring the role and psychology of a woman living under an oppressive patriarchy, and it does this quite well. The epilogue (a transcription of an academic talk titled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” and delivered in 2159) adds, well, problems of authentication – it draws the reader’s attention to the “reconstructed” nature of narratives that appear to be offering a running account of events, among other things.

Though I may not have made this novel sound interesting, it actually was; I finished it in two days because I couldn’t put it down. Certainly I would recommend reading a little of it before deciding that my taste in novels is not to be trusted.

Invisible Cities (or Le città invisibili) was published in 1972, and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba to Italian parents; the family returned to Italy shortly after his birth in 1923.

It’s an intricately structured novel, but the short version is that its made up of nine sections, each itself made up of short (1-3 pages) descriptions of cities ostensibly visited by Marco Polo during his travels through Kublai Khan’s empire. Each of the larger sections both begins and ends with a dialogue between Marco and Kublai narrated by a third-person narrator; the descriptions of the cities are (apparently) narrated by Marco Polo himself. Some of them, though, are blatantly anachronistic, and I think a few more are subtly so, though I don’t know enough to know.

The headings of the descriptions recur – “Cities and Names,” “Cities and Desire,” “Thin Cities,” “Continuous Cities,” etc – and are incrementally numbered, which is important to one of the novel’s patterns. Several major themes run through the novel: on the dual (or tripartite) nature of cities; on what distinguishes one city from another, and what doesn’t; on how a city is different for an inhabitant and a visitor; on how cities endure and change through time. The dialogues between Polo and Khan deal with, among other things, memory, desire, facing one’s mortality, and the futility of attempting to know or understand everything, or even much of anything.

It’s a beautiful book, and I wish I had room to quote about half of it – so really, you should just go read it. It’s short (about 160 pages) and the brevity of its sections and subsections makes it easy to read in bits and pieces – though I imagine reading it in one sitting is an interesting experience.

I’ll end with an excerpt, the second section titled “Continuous Cities”:

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have though I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flow beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

I liked all 3 of the plays, but my favorite was The Wild Duck. I will definitely be reading more Ibsen.

The main thrust of the book is the development of the medieval mind-model of the physical and metaphysical universe. Because this model is constantly referred to, and it is assumed everyone already knows it, it can be difficult to get on reading old texts without having at least a cursory understanding of it.

I feel I learned a lot from this. I found it interesting that the concept of plagiarism as being bad didn’t exist in medieval times, as authors constantly copied old works and changed them. One only has to look at the plethora of Arthurian stories to see this. Because there was a sort of truth to the stories, it was kind of like copying a fact rather than an original piece of intellectual property.

I’ve never really been a serious student of medieval or renaissance literature, but I would guess that the contents of this volume would probably help to catch some of the references.

What I was most impressed with is how different classical conceptions are with neo-classical ones. The economics we learn in school is much more similar to that of Alfred Marshall than it is to Adam Smith’s. Smith, and other classical thinkers, didn’t have any real conception of equilibrium prices, and instead thought of the true value of things rather than their prices. This was quite surprising to me, as I had always assumed that Smith formulated equilbrium prices.

The whole dynamical construct of free markets solving for optimal parameters is really completely neo-classical. I also still have no idea why everything thinks Keynesian economics is so great. I’d love to find something that would pursuasively argue for it. I guess I should just read Keynes.

The book pretty much goes chronologically through the foundation of the republic and the emperors, and the last fifth or so covers the rise of Christianity in the empire. Much time is spent on Rome proper, but, in Durant’s characteristically holistic style, some time is spent exploring the outer provinces as well. Treatment is giving to literature, philosophy, architecture and the arts as well.

I’ve been inspired to read Plutarch’s Lives and Lucretius next, but I won’t get to them for a little while. A lot of people are said to have really loved the Parallel Lives and On the Nature of Things is an amazingly accurate scientific treatise/poem for its time. I also still plan on going through Gibbon, but I won’t start it this year.
I was very pleased with the book, and will be starting the Age of Faith next month.

It’s written in a smooth, butterlike style. It’s really a joy to read, and the characterization is great. Highly recommended.

I always enjoy a little stoicism, but I found most of this stuff pretty dry. I think Seneca’s De Ira is a masterpiece, but they didn’t include much of it. So I guess I would say going to the originals is probably better in my opinion, though I wouldn’t really know.

It took me a long time to get around to reading the whole thing. The bulk of the book is fairly detailed projections of a variety of aspects, centrally brain scanning and life extension.

Kurzweil seems pretty confident about most of his predictions. He gives margins of error, but they aren’t very wide. In 50 years, we’ll know if he was way off or not. Basically, he believes that the growth in technology is accelerating at such a pace that we will be able to scan our brains into computers in 20 years or so and that in this way, we will essentially conquer death. Then, only a short while later, the entire universe will be permeated with information. There’s a lot of other details I’m leaving out, but these two strokes of transhumanism and singulitarianism I think are the two most important.

I myself essentially buy everything that’s said in the book. Though many of the details of how these transformations will be effected are necessarily unknown at this time, this does not imply that a belief in their occurrence is simply blind faith. This however, is the point I have the greatest trouble with. Kurzweil answers the criticism from Malthus simply by saying that when a limit is reached, new paradigms will be found. The trouble is, we sometimes don’t know what those paradigms will be, or more often, don’t really know for sure if we can bring them about or how. For example, quantum computation is theorized to be practical, but we don’t know how to do it or even if we really can. Kurzweil answers these criticisms with a faith that we’ll figure it out. And he thinks that this faith has great historical justification.

There are a lot of other writers and speakers on the subject of the singularity. I myself haven’t perused a lot of the literature, but I have enjoyed the things Ken has forwarded me and the Singularity Summit talks I’ve seen.

When the tortoise first started speaking to Brutha, he assumed he was going crazy. When the tortoise started telling him that it was actually the Great God Om, Brutha assumed he was being tempted by a demon. When his faith was strong enough for him to accept that the tortoise actually was the Great God Om, Brutha began the transformation from simple minded gardener and novice monk to the greatest prophet his faith has ever known.

Shortly after Brutha began carrying around a tortoise and speaking to it he was chosen by the head of the Omnian question, Vorbis, to accompany him to the neighboring town of Ephebe. He was chosen because even though he had never learned how to read and really hated to think, he was gifted with an eidetic memory that Vorbis thought would come in handy. They were going to Ephebe because there was a group of people there who were worshiping the Great Tortoise, because they believed the world was a flat disc riding on the backs of four giant elephants, which were in turn riding on the back of an even more giant tortoise. This seemed insulting to the Omnians, because they believed the Great God Om was the only real God, and that he would never manifest as something as lowly as a tortoise.

While in Ephebe, Brutha and Om became acquainted with three philosophers, and while talking to them Om came to the disturbing realization that even though many people worshipped him out of habit or due to fear of the Quisition, Brutha is the only person left who truly believes in him. This was a problem for Om because a god’s manifestations and powers are dependent on the number of believers they have, and if anything were to happen to Brutha, he would fade away. Fighting broke out between the Omnians and Ephebians, and Brutha memorized many scrolls from Ephebe’s extensive library before escaping in a boat. Brutha and Om wound up trekking back home through the desert with a badly injured Vorbis, and Om spent many anxious hours protecting Brutha from the various small gods floating through the desert looking for someone to believe in them. Once they came to the edge of the desert a recovered Vorbis tried to kill the tortoise, abducted Brutha, and rushed to Omnia to be declared the eighth Prophet.

Back in Omnia, Vorbis ordered Brutha to be publicly burned for heresy on the back of a brand new torture device that looks like a giant turtle. At the last possible moment, Om fell from the sky onto Vorbis’s head, killing him instantly. Upon seeing this miracle, many people began to once again truly believe in Om and he became powerful once again. He then named Brutha the eighth Prophet and allowed him to establish the new Church doctrines. Together they avoided war between Omnia and Ephebe, and Brutha lived on for another one hundred years, turning what was supposed to be the bloodiest century in Omnian history into a century of peace.

I guess what you get out of this novel depends on how you choose to look at it. Some people think it’s purely a fun read, some people think it’s a commentary on today’s religious disagreements, and some people think that whatever it was meant to be, it was horrible. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t use it as a way to frame my opinions of real world religious dynamics. Another good thing about it is that even though it is a part of the Discworld series, you don’t have to know any of the Discworld culture or backstory to enjoy it, so if you are wanting to familiarize yourself with Pratchett’s books it’s a good one to try.

That disputed author’s note serves as a springboard for the haunting story of Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the daughter of a spineless, fearful marquis and his drunken, drug addicted wife. The parents hate each other so much that they hate their own daughter because they can see each other in her. They send her to live with the slaves and she becomes enamored with their lifestyle, moving around silently (even when her mother forces her to wear a bell around her wrist), worshiping their gods along with practicing Catholicism, and lying just as easily as she tells the truth. One day when one of the servants takes her with them to the market she is bitten on the ankle by a dog. It is just a small wound, so the servant dresses it and sends the girl on her way without even thinking to tell her parents. The next day, the servant returns to the market and sees that the dog had been killed and hung up to let people know that it had rabies. Everyone then becomes consumed with the fear that Sierva Maria has the disease. From then on, things just keep getting worse for the poor girl. Even though she never shows any signs of rabies, she is subjected to so many different treatments that what was once a healed wound became a festered sore that she couldn’t even walk on. A doctor befriends her father and treats the girl, but says that there is nothing that can be done.

The local Bishop summons the girl’s father to his home and tells him that he believes the girl is possessed. After a while, the father decides to listen to the Bishop and has his daughter committed at a local convent. The nuns and the abbess immediately start attributing every bad thing that happens in the convent on Sierva Maria. She fights them, tears up her cell and her clothing, and becomes little more than a wild animal in response to their treatment. Then the Bishop sends his personal librarian to be the girl’s exorcist and from there everything begins to change. The priest makes sure the girl is treated humanely, and she begins to respond to him. Eventually, the priest and the girl fall in love. It is fascinating to watch the love story between the two characters unfold, and heart breaking to see all the obstacles that come between Sierva Maria and any form of happiness. Once again, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has crafted a unique and entertaining story that will linger in the minds of its readers for years to come.

The hero of Stardust is Tristran Thorn, from the small English village of Wall. Wall is a town that borders on the magical land of Faerie, and the gateway between Wall and Faerie is guarded at all times. Except, of course, for once every seven years when people come from all over England to be allowed to cross through the Wall and into the Faerie marketplace. Unbeknownst to him, Tristran is the result of a chance encounter between his father and a mysterious woman at one of those market places. When he was born, he was pushed through the gap in the wall with a note, and since there were only restrictions on people going into Faerie and not coming out, he was given to his father.

One day, while trying to convince the girl that he loves to marry him, Tristran notices a falling star. The girl tells him that if he brings back the star, she will marry him. Tristran goes off to retrieve the star, and is allowed to cross the wall into Faerie to find it since that is where he came from. Unfortunately, bringing home a falling star is easier said than done. Not only are there witches trying to find the star too, the rules of everything in Faerie are different and hard for Tristran to comprehend. It also doesn’t help that the star actually turns out to be a woman, and she doesn’t want to be rescued.

Gaiman has altered his style in this book in homage to the old fairy tales that were the inspiration for it, but his personality comes out in the humor and the ridiculous escapades in this book. It is a fascinating, vividly described story full of intriguing characters and whimsical turns of plot. Very entertaining, and a must read for anyone who is a Gaiman fan.

There are 2 parts of quantum mechanics, the dynamical equations of motion which are completely deterministic, and the collapse which is probabilistic. Nobody has ever provided any way of determining when this collapse occurs. The problem of doing so is called the measurement problem, and was first elucidated by the great John Von Neumann. As some of you might have suspected, things like the “consciousness causes collapse” idea are completely speculative.

You’ll often hear people, sometime very eminent ones, making statements that the world is essentially random, and that that has been proved by quantum mechanics, which will never be overturned. It is true that most people suspect that we need a theory that makes the same predictions as quantum mechanics does. This suspicion is fueled by a very precise and unfailing accuracy in all of the predictions quantum mechanics has ever been asked to make. (People will probably only start allowing themselves to consider looking for theories that make different predictions if quantum mechanics starts making erroneous predictions, and nobody expects that to happen.) However, there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that don’t involve a collapse of the wave function, and there are other complete theories that make the same predictions as quantum mechanics, notably Bohm’s theory. These theories, because they only rely on the dynamical equations of motion of quantum mechanics, are completely deterministic.

One thing that everyone needs to know is that the Many Worlds interpretation has very serious problems. Hugh Everett III’s paper did not actually specify the Many Worlds interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation being just one interpretation of Everett’s paper. It could also be read in such a way as to suggest that the collapse is a delusion that the dynamical laws can be shown mathematically to bring about in us. One of the most damning things about the Many Worlds interpretation is that the separate worlds that are actually generated depend on the basis in which one writes down the universal state vector. And quantum mechanics, like most mathematical theories, is invariant with respect to basis. For example, whether I specify a vector with polar coordinates or Cartesian ones, it’s still the same vector, even though I’m choosing to use two different point-sets to describe it. Nobody has come up with any way of finding some sort of canonical basis which we can use to tell which worlds are actually coming in to being, so to my mind Many Worlds is nonsensical (i.e. not well-defined). Some attempts to figure out how to construct a preferred basis have been made since the publication of this book (1994), but I haven’t evaluated all of them. Most of them have smackings of anthropomorphism, which strikes me as not the best direction to be going. As of 2001, the problem had still not been solved.

Another interesting thing that one can show is that any theory whatsoever that does not involve collapse will not be distinguishable by experiment from any other of the theories that don’t involve collapse. This means that if collapse is ever shown to not happen (and this is difficult but possible and also what I happen to believe), then there are widely varying metaphysical interpretations, each one of which is completely untestable even in principle.

In short, you can’t even begin to understand quantum mechanics until you’ve read this fascinating book.

There’s also a response to the Hegelian notion that one can somehow go “beyond” faith by studying philosophy. To my mind, it’s always been obvious that no satisfactory logical proof has been found for or against God, but I guess people really wanted to look for one for a long time, so they lost their objectivity somewhere in the process.

I really liked the idea of The Knight of Faith, i.e. someone who trusts that good things will come to him on the strength of the absurd. I think I live this courageously sometimes. I have ventured to consider the possibility of achieving things that it would be absurd for most people to even consider achieving. And further, I have then been successful. This is one of the reasons I count myself luckier (but also braver) than everyone else.

The first selection, Why I Write is mostly about the necessity of writing at least tangentially about politics in the age in which George Orwell is living. The Lion and the Unicorn is a discussion of what makes Britons Britons, and sort of a call to arms and to socialism. A Hanging is a short story about a dude getting hanged. Politics and the English Language is an instructive piece about not using big words all the time and how politicians try to obscure their meaning.

Overall, I found the selection quite nice, but definitely need to read more Orwell, in particular Homage to Catalonia. This is actually the first thing I’ve read of his. I know, I’m self-deprived.

Dead Souls is about a man who goes about in early nineteenth century Russia buying up dead souls, that is people’s serfs who had died but were still registered with the government and incurring taxes. Exactly why he does this is suspended until the end, but it’s very anti-climactic as I believe there was supposed to be a second part of the book, but people say it’s awful and incomplete.

What makes the book really great is the characterization. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading it. I would even dare say that it’s a bit like The Office in its caricatures. Gogol breaks the fourth wall a lot, even at one point hinting about how he wasn’t in Russia while he was writing the book.

I also suspect that much is owed to the particular translation I got, which is by B.G. Guerney. He uses a lot of words not commonly used in English anymore, and has some interesting styles of writing, but I think he did a really good job of making it flow. By the way, when he talks about them playing Whist, they’re almost certainly actually playing the extremely popular Russian card game Preferans (преферанс).

Pick it up if you want to get a taste of Old Russia without having to read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

Apparently, Taylor Helzer was a perfectly normal, devout Mormon until he went to a self help course that taught him that right and wrong don’t exist. I maintain that if he was perfectly normal, one really horrible self help course wouldn’t have been enough to take him from successful stockbroker to self proclaimed prophet and mass murderer, but to each his own I guess. This book was extremely well researched, and pays excellent attention to detail. Even the murders are recorded down to the last drop of blood.

This is a gripping story and a fascinating look into the mind of a madman and the people who followed him like sheep. The details of the crimes are not really for those who are weak at heart, but I commend the author for including the ugliness of the reality instead of glossing over it for the sake of the book. Definitely worth reading once, but not something I plan to read again in the future.

I’m sure that if someone were to put in enough effort to blog this book properly it would contain paragraph upon paragraph about finding your enlightenment, and the symbolism, yadda, yadda, yadda. Screw that. I say you should read the book for yourself, draw from it what you will, and then if you’re interested read what other people have to say about it.

As I’m sure you could guess from the title, this book takes a look at some of the more prominent religious sects and attempts to explain some of their doctrines, a little bit about their history, and their meeting/worship styles. The different groups covered are: Seventh Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Liberalism, New Thought, Christian Science, Spiritualist, and Theosophist. The information is presented in several different ways so that you can choose to go through it in whichever way suits you best, and even though there is a lot of information it isn’t overwhelming. If you have any interest in learning about these sects and what they believe in, I highly recommend this book.

If you have any interest in becoming more familiar with the history of the Catholic Church, this an excellent place to start. It is an engaging read and is quite easy to follow. Louis de Wohl has made writing about the (Catholic) Church his mission, and it clearly shows through his writing.

Obviously, if you want to learn anything about philosophy, reading a book of jokes is not the way to go. I didn’t start the book expecting to learn any mind shattering truths, therefore I wasn’t disappointed when I didn’t. I guess maybe this would work for you if you are hoping to use jokes as a way to make people think you know something about philosophy.

The good news is, the book is incredibly short so if you’re curious about it you can read it without a very big time commitment. However, if you do try it and think it’s not good, don’t blame me for recommending it.

Which is to say that they sat on my shelf for a very long time. Everytime that I went to read them, I opened to Molloy, thumbed through, saw that it was a block of text, shut it, and put it off for later.

I finally forced myself through Molloy. I almost quit about 20 pages in, but pushed through. And I am infinitely glad that I did.

Molloy is comprised of two monologues, one by Molloy, the second by a detective named Moran. Molloy’s monologue spans the first 90+ pages of the book, and Moran’s is the second half.

What’s so daunting about the book is that Beckett has done away with many of the comforts of fiction, and stripped it to a bristling block of stream-of-consciousness. Molloy’s monologue is two paragraphs, with one lasting for over 90 pages. On top of that, Molloy is insane. This is not pick-it-up fiction, but a serious investment. But with the investment comes reward.

If you want studied, scholarly analysis of what Beckett is doing here, there are many internet resources. You most likely, if you haven’t read it, care little about his altering of character voice, his desire to reduce the first person to a point of simply consciousness; nor do you care about whatever his intentions were with stating something about language, about its inability to not introduce errors and intentional obfuscations. Maybe you do, but I have little interest in writing a second-rate lit paper. And when I say “interest”, I mean “ability.”

The book is worth reading, as opposed to articles about what it wants to achieve, because Beckett has one of the most razor sharp voices for our inner drive towards complete vegetation. There are images contained in Molloy that strike me as deeply as any in fiction. Not only that, but Beckett has an eye for the darkly humorous. Beckett is dark. Really, really fucking dark. After the hammering that is Molloy’s monologue, Moran’s quickly proves to be even more bleak, with the protagonist an abusive father, himself slowly going insane. But somehow this is tolerable due to Beckett’s imbuing everything with equal parts humor and dread. It’s a chocolate/peanut butter combo that runs through the book beautifully.

Beckett owes a lot to Joyce, as has been stated by others. Both monologues are similar, in a way, to Molly’s at the end of Ulysses. I think Molloy is more of an enjoyable read than Ulysses, however. Similarly, it is no surprise to me that Paul Auster edited Beckett’s collected works, as his City of Glass, part of it’s own celebrated trilogy, owes much of its final pages to Molloy. If Auster, Joyce, Markson, or Robbe-Grillet tickle any parts of you below the belt, then you probably have already encountered Beckett, and aren’t going at it ass-backwards like I am.

If you read only one 90-page stream-of-conscious paragraph this year, make it Molloy. I would easily say that it’s the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of a book since 2666/One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As the title explains, The Drowned Book is written by Bahauddin, the father of Jelaluddin Rumi, the Islamic mystic poet of the 13th century.  The title comes from when Rumi was teaching something from his father’s writings by a fountain to his students, and Shams of Tabriz, a crazy wandering dervish that had an intimate friendship with Rumi, pushed the copy of the book into a fountain.  Rumi gets pissed, but Shams says that when he reaches in the fountain to get the book, it’ll be dry.  Of course, the book comes out dry and not ruined, and Rumi learns the lesson that he can’t be bound by his dead father’s teachings and that there are higher planes of experience.

Basically Bahauddin’s book was a private journal that he kept, with everything from mystical experiences written down, to meditations on the Quran, to wild sexual fantasies which would’ve scandalized the community, to tips on treating nausea and gardening.

I appreciate his realness as a person–he was a man who had appetites–sexual and spiritual, and his love for God wound both together.  Some of the spiritual wisdom he offers is a bit tedious to read though, but not enough to make me dislike the selections all together.

And I have to admit that I prefer the poetry of Rumi than to his father’s writings, but Bahauddin is a delight in his respective ways too.

The Mystical Baker has blogged.