Reading Journal

The Grand Design, by Hawking and Mlodinow

2011-10-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

I admittedly skimmed this book, but a few thoughts occurred to me as I did.

* Quantum mechanics is baffling as always.

* M-theory (aka, string theory) predicts that uncountable billions of universes exist and are continuously created from nothing with almost unlimited variation in the laws of physics in each. In their view, this eliminates the strong anthropic argument for God's existence.

I dislike the way they present M-theory as being true, with just a few tweaks and experiments needed to fill in the blanks. The reality is a lot messier than that, and some physicists are turning their backs on it due to its untestable claims of 10 dimensions, branes, multiverses, and so on. For example, in this specific instance, the creation of other universes can't be observed or tested.

However, let's assume for a second that M-theory is true. Then I'd ask, why are the M-theory laws this way and not some other way that would produce 0 universes?

* Philosophically, they are determinists. That means no supernatural being can change things "miraculously". The balls on the pool table will proceed on their vectors and the dead will stay dead. They admit it also implies that what we experience as free will and consciousness are ultimately illusions. They're the mechanical result of billions of deterministic chemical reactions in our brains.

Something feels funny here. They got rid of the possibility of miracles by saying that neither God nor even people can really change anything in the universe through a free choice. Does that seem right? I just decided to move my left elbow. Was the universe expecting that?

Anyway, it was an interesting skim. I read a book about M-theory last year. Maybe I'll read something else physics related after I get through some of the other things I'm reading.

Decision Points, by George W Bush

2011-05-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have liked George W as president, but either way you really should read his book Decision Points. The book reads as if you're sitting around a backyard BBQ as he recounts tales of his life, complete with behind the scenes details and every word told in his voice.

Some of those details break the caricature. For example, did you know W is a voracious reader of American history? He read 16 Lincoln biographies alone during his presidency.

He talked about all the major issues - 9/11, Iraq, WMDs, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, the financial meltdown, and so on. He put you in the moment with the information and constraints he had to weigh, and then explained why he made the decisions he did. I also like the way he pointed out the risks of the other options he had available to him.

I thought he honestly admitted his mistakes while defending some unpopular decisions that he still believes were right. For example, he brought up whether he would have approved waterboarding top al-Qaeda members if he had to do it again. The response was pure W - "Damn right." If it's true that information was part of the chain that led to Osama, it's hard to argue he had a point.

This is truly a book for all the Monday morning presidents among us. I liked it as much as I liked Ulysses S. Grant's Civil War memoirs, which I also recommend highly.

The Doors of the Sea, by David Bentley Hart

2011-01-02T21:43:00.000-08:00

The subtitle is "Where was God in the tsunami?", referring to the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 200,000 or more people a couple years ago. Taking the reaction to this horrific event as a springboard, Hart discussed how evil and destruction can be consistent with belief in a good God. It's a short book, and by no means were the arguments fully drawn out, but it did a great job of sketching the outlines and explaining the main points.

I appreciate the way he tore down various Christian viewpoints that either trivialize pain or try to make it seem like everything, including death and suffering, are somehow part of God's master plan. He explained a more authentic Christian perspective, contrasting it at times with other religions, especially Hinduism. He also spent some time on God's providence, contrasting his view with that of some modern Calvinists. In order to maximize God's sovereignty, some make God responsible for every horrible thing in the world, a view of God that's contrary to what we know of Jesus.

Sidebar - He didn't bring this up, but if you've seen "The Invention of Lying", the religion the main character invented is eerily similar to what some people really do believe. It irritates me for the same reason when people thank God for getting a good parking space. To me it doesn't allow room for a truly free universe, but instead makes God into a puppetmaster.

I love these words about the "vacuous cant" one hears when tragedy strikes.

However - fortunately, I think - we Christians are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day - to look, that is, upon the entire littoral rim of the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children - and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the ultimate meaning or purpose residing in all that misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces - whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance - that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.

Jesus's resurrection was the beginning of God's revolt against the current "god of this world" and the misery that characterizes so much of human life.

Easter utterly confounds the "rulers of this age, and in fact reverses the verdict they have pronounced upon Christ, thereby revealing that the cosmic, sacred, political, and civic powers of all who condemn Christ have become tyranny, falsehood, and injustice. Easter is an act of "rebellion" against all false necessity and all illegitimate or misused authority, all cruelty and heartless chance. It liberates us from servitude to and terror before the "elements." It emancipates us from fate. It overcomes the "world." Eater should make rebels of us all.

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara

2010-11-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

The Killer Angels is historical fiction about the battle of Gettysburg, told from the points of view of four or five different officers. I remember chapters from the perspectives of General Lee, Longstreet, and Armistead from the Confederate army, and Colonel Chamberlain from the Union army. There may have been one or two others too.

I have a brother-in-law who is a retired Army officer, and he told me that this book is basically required reading for the officer corps. Plus, I just visited Gettysburg for the first time last month. I wish I would have read it before I visited.

The book retells both the strategy and the happenstance of the battle. To me, one of the most interesting things was to learn about General Lee's many strategic blunders. I'd always heard he was a brilliant general, but the truth may be more that he was a beloved general. He sent thousands of men charging up a mile long hill to Cemetary Ridge (Pickett's Charge). The ridge was topped with a massive amount Union artillery. It was a killing field.

General Longstreet was Lee's chief aide, and although he deeply admired Lee, he knew Lee's strategy was destined to fail. The Union position was simply unassailable. He pleaded with Lee to retreat and pick a different place to fight, preferably a place where the Confederate army would have the high ground and be dug in.

In the end Lee believed the men's morale would suffer if they retreated, and that their bravery would somehow prevail. He ordered the attack and lost the battle. Of course at that point he had to retreat anyway.

Anyway, there are a lot of other really interesting and moving parts to this book. It's a fast read too. Recommended!

Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith

2010-10-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

Many people don't know about Adam Smith's other major book besides The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately my library doesn't have copy of Theory of Moral Sentiments, at least it has a compilation with some long excerpts.

I'm sure I can find it online for free since it's now in the public domain. Maybe I really do need a Kindle!

He had some interesting thoughts on why we fear death.

We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity....

That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether... from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive.

I liked his analysis of why people who are in love make such bad company sometimes. "The passion appears to everybody, but the man who feels it, entirely disporoportioned to the value of the object."

He was perceptive about what people really want when they try to get rich. In his mind, people don't really want money or even the things money can buy. Instead, they want the honor that is paid to rich people. This is shown first by people who pretend to be rich even though it ends up bankrupting them.

Vain men often give themselves airs of a fashionable profligacy, which, in their hearts, they do not approve of, and of which, perhaps, they are really not guilty. They desire to be praised for what they themselves do not think praise-worthy, and are ashamed of unfashionable virtues which they sometimes practice in secret, and for which they have secretly some degree of real veneration. There are hypocrites of wealth and greatness, as well as of religion and virtue.... Many a poor man places his glory in being thought rich, without considering that the duties which that reputation imposes upon him, must soon reduce him to beggary, and render his situation still more unlike that of those whom he admires and imitates, than it had been originally.

And again...

To attain to this envied situation, the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue; for unhapily, the road which leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in very opposite directions... It is not ease or pleasure, but always honour, of one kind or another, though frequently an honour very ill understood, that the ambitious man really pursues.

The following is one of the best analyses of ambition I've read. The reasoning is sound and the writing is memorable. It almost tells a story.

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent, and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible; and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself forever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness.

To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month, to more fatigue of body and uneasiness of mind than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to aacquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real a a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that hmble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with... that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the love of toys.

He goes on to point out that a nail clipper may give just as much real happiness as the more obvious advantages of wealth like large houses, servants and so on. The difference is that what wealth brings is obvious whereas a nail clipper is easy for other people to overlook. Therefore, if you chiefly want other people to admire you, you'll try to get rich and not just buy a new nail clipper.

Smith recommends being as lazy as possible while enjoying the simpler pleasures of life. Or as Jesus said, "Be careful of all kinds of greed. Life is more than the abundance of one's possessions."

Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor

2010-06-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

Flannery O'Connor is such a powerful writer that after reading Everything That Rises Must Converge, I was a little scared to read any more of her books. I'm glad I got up the nerve. Wise Blood is the kind of book that you'll wake up thinking about at night.

Hazel Motes' grandfather was a graceless fundamentalist preacher and during Haze's childhood, although he felt his sins deeply, Jesus was nothing but something to make him feel guilty.

[His mother] hit him across the legs with the stick but he was like part of the tree. "Jesus died to redeem you," she said.

"I never ast him," he muttered.

Haze felt himself haunted by Jesus, a Jesus he hated and feared with all his heart. If only he could avoid him... "there was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin."

When he left home for the army, he took his Bible and his mother's eyeglasses. One night, in a flash, he realized he actually didn't believe in such a thing as a soul. Without a soul there could be no sin and no need for any Jesus to redeem sin. He became an atheist. Still, although Jesus was present in a positive way exactly once in the book, in Haze's mind he seemed to lurk everywhere, even in the curses others used.

Haze became a preacher of atheism, attempting to convert people to a Church Without Christ. This led to some very ironical scenes, such as when his church split when it had only two members. The split-off Holy Church of Christ Without Christ wanted to take a more seeker friendly approach. There was also a competing "false prophet" who as it turned out, was a false false prophet. The false false prophet really did believe in Jesus and was just preaching unbelief for the money.

Haze was just as fundamentalist in his atheism as his grandfather had been in his Christianity. "Blasphemy is the way to the truth and there's no other way whether you understand it or not!" Strangely though, as much as he claimed to not believe in a soul or sin, his own sense of personal guilt grew. He lived a graceless and isolated life, a monk of nihilism, attempting to pay for sins which he didn't believe really existed. If hell exists, this story describes what it must be like.

I highly recommend this book. You won't soon forget it.

Unconditional Parenting - Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason, by Alfie Kohn

2010-02-06T20:09:00.000-08:00

Lately we've been talking about how best to teach our children to become mature adults. Frankly, a lot of the advice out there seems modeled on puppy training, whether that's positive reinforcement ("Good job coming to daddy! Here's your dog biscuit!") or punishment ("I am the alpha dog! You shall learn to fear me!"). It's all behavioralism and I believe people are more than the sum of their behaviors. I also want to raise adults who think for themselves, not dogs who come running when their masters whistle.

Alfie Kohn offered a radical alternative in this book. He disagreed with any method meant to control a child, whether that's praise, criticism, time-outs, or spanking. Instead parents should be respectful and responsive to their children, treating them as they themselves would like to be treated.

He cited several studies showing that the more children are controlled, the less internal motivation they have to adopt their parents' values. External control seems to squelch true moral growth in favor of a simple reflex to avoid punishment or gain praise. Think about the last time you improved some area of your life. Was it because someone nagged, praised, or beat you until you finally gave in? Or was it because you saw someone else living in a way that you admired, and with whom you perhaps had a close relationship? Which method is likely to produce more authentic change and growth?

I liked this paragraph about why controlling your children can be so difficult and ultimately impossible:

... in the final analysis, we really can't control our kids -- at least not in the ways that matter. It's very difficult to make a child eat this food rather than that one, or pee here rather than there, and it's simply impossible to force a child to go to sleep, or stop crying, or listen, or respect us. These are the issues that are most trying to parents precisely because it's here that we run up against the inherent limits of what one human being can compel another human being to do.

Most parents can probably relate to this:

When I say that we should make sure we're not saying no too often or unnecessarily, I don't mean that our convenience, our wants, don't count, too. They do. But they shouldn't count for so much that we're gratuitously restricting our children, prohibiting them from trying things out. When you come right down to it, the whole process of raising a kid is pretty d---ned inconvenient, particularly if you want to do it well. If you're unwilling to give up any of your free time, if you want your house to stay quiet and clean, you might consider raising tropical fish instead.

He underscored how hard it can be to communicate unconditional love when children are doing things that truly are bad.

"We accept you, but not how you act" is particularly unpersuasive if very few of the child's actions find favor with us. "What is this elusive 'me' you claim to love," the child may wonder, "when all I hear from you is disapproval?"

Look deeper than the behavior. Keep a more important goal in mind than peace and quiet.

It may sound obvious, but we sometimes seem to forget that, even when kids do rotten things, our goal should not be to make them feel bad, nor to stamp a particular behavior out of existence. Rather, what we want is to influence the way they think and feel, to help them become the kind of people who wouldn't want to act cruelly. And, of course, our other goal is to avoid injuring our relationship with them in the process.

There was some deep parenting wisdom in this book. I have a feeling I'll be pondering its implications for a long time.

Dostoevsky, Language, Faith, and Fiction by Rowan Williams

2010-01-10T15:29:00.001-08:00

I've always thought the characters in Dostoevsky's fiction seem real. One reason is that they seem to have freedom. For example, no one ever wins an argument decisively, even the characters who represent Dostoevesky's own views.

The open, ambiguous, unresolved narrative insists on this, which is why novels are never popular with ideologues and do not flourish in climates where eschatology is excessively realized. You do not find fundamentalist novelists.

Dostoevesky doesn't seem to script and control events. Instead he provides the space for his characters to decide and speak for themselves. Rowan Williams made an intriguing suggestion that this is similar to the way God gives freedom to us.

Some think that God's foreknowledge would necessarily limit our real freedom. However, Rowan thought of it differently:

But if timelessness is taken seriously, we should have to say that what happens at all points is equally and in some sense simultaneously known to a God who is fully aware of every factor that has contributed to events at each moment - including the fact that this or that act was freely chosen.

Dostoevsky's vision of the meaning of hell:

the possibility of forgiveness is always present and the righteous in heaven are always ready to receive the damned, but those in hell know that they can no longer love - though Zosima wonders whether their grief at not being able to love opens them up to an unselfish gratitude for the love of the blessed in heaven, which in itself is a sort of love. For others, there is no alleviation: " they are already willing martyrs". They are in revolt against reality itself, demanding that there should be no God; they long not to exist. They represent, in fact, the final stage in that affirmation of freedom as the purely arbitrary assertion of self...

Dostoevesky talks a lot about the implications of God's existence/non-existence.

What happens "if God does not exist" is not that a particular item is withdrawn from the sum total of actual things, nor that a crucial sanction against evildoing is taken away, so that no punishment for evil can be guaranteed. It is that we are no longer able to see violence against others as somehow blasphemous, an offense against an eternal order; no longer able to see our dealings with each other as opening on to a depth of interiority that we cannot fathom or exhaust. In a world deprived of such possibilities, it is reasonable enough to respond to a suicide by saying "it was the best solution"; there is nothing definably insane about taking one's life.

Another summary from Rowan Williams on the same issue...

The difference between the self-aware believer, the self-aware sinner and the conscious and deliberate atheist is not a disagreement over whether or not to add one item to the sum total of really existing things. It is a conflict about policies and possibilities for a human life: between someone who accepts the dependence of everything on divine gratuity and attempt to respond with some image of that gratuity, someone who accepts this dependence but fails to act appropriately in response, and someone who denies the dependence and is consequently faced with the unanswerable question of why any one policy for living is preferable to any other.

The question of God and the suffering of children:

If there were a way of saying that the suffering of children did not matter, it would be immeasurably easier to give our allegiance to the notion of a universal moral order and a just and loving God, but it is precisely the conviction of order and divine love that makes the suffering of children beyond justification or mitigation, because it is this conviction that anchors the "depth" of the child's being in a way that nothing else does. Faith, in this context, is anything but consoling. If the only possible reply to Ivan's catalogue is Alyosha's admission that he could not imagine torturing a single child for the sake of cosmic harmony, what becomes of the possibility of anything like reasoned faith?.... Alyosha is right in refusing the idea that any particular suffering can be seen as a means to someone else's purpose (even God's). But what kind of creation is it that produces personal identities that are so valuable for their own sake or in their own right that their value is totally detached from whatever fate lies in store for them?

Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright

2009-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

I loved this book. He talked about how Jesus would have been viewed as a prophet by his contemporaries. I felt like I was reading Jesus's sayings and parables for the first time and getting to know him without the veil of churchiness. The air of mystery Jesus surrounded himself with clearly came through.

Jesus persists in veiling himself in indirect references and metaphors... It is almost as though Jesus were intent on making a riddle of himself.

In Wright's view, Jesus came to announce judgment on the Temple and Jerusalem, and this is how many of the "coming of the son of man" parables and sayings are to be interpreted. Wright made a convincing argument that these passages can not be seen as referring to the end of the space-time universe itself. Instead, like the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus invested military conquest with its "earthshaking" theological meaning via metaphors like the sun and moon being darkened.

Jesus approaches Jerusalem in a quasi-royal manner.. as the crowd descends the Mount of Olives, he bursts into tears and solemnly announces judgment on the city for failing to recognize "its time of visitation". YHWH is visiting his people, and they do not realize it; they are therefore in imminent danger of judgment, which will take the form of military conquest and devastation. This is not a denial of the imminence of the kingdom. It is a warning about what that imminent kingdom will entail. The parable functions, like so many, as a devastating redefinition of the kingdom of god. Yes, the kingdom does mean the return of YHWH to Zion. Yes, this kingdom is even now about to appear. But no, this will not be a cause of celebration for nationalist Israel.

Jesus therefore staked his prophetic name on his prediction that the Temple would be destroyed within a generation. And indeed it was.

He spent the last part of the book on what Jesus thought about himself being the Messiah and even the Son of God. Wright focused (rightly I think) on Jesus's symbolic actions more than on specific proof-text snippets. Anyway, some of it was pretty speculative but it could be true.

Jesus did not, in other words, "know that he was God" in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His "knowledge" was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant, sort: like knowing one is loved. One cannot "prove" it except by living by it.

The next book in the series is The Resurrection of the Son of God, which I've already read. I believe he's releasing another book about Paul soon.

The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright

2009-11-21T13:43:00.000-08:00

This is the first book in N.T. Wright's fantastic series "Christian Origins and the Question of God." In this volume, he covered his theory of how history works ("critical realism"). He argued that the Bible should be read as stories within a larger story rather than as a collection of timeless and abstract truths. This is just the way the people work. For example, rather than talking about a theoretical definition of patriotism, the real thing modern Americans might do is tell stories about how the country came together during World War II, etc., Finally, he covered the nature of first century Judaism and gave an overview of how Jesus and the early church fit into that landscape.

The Enlightenment has challenged Chistianity's historicity, and Chistianity hasn't always responded very well. He wants Christianity to embrace the Enlightenment instead of fearing it.

Christianity has often been too unshakeably arrogant in resisting new questions, let alone new answers, in its stubborn defence of... what? Christians have often imagined that they were defending Christianity when resisting the Enlightenment's attacks; but it is equally plausible to suggest that what would-be orthodox Christianity was defending was often the pre-Enlightenment worldview, which was itself no more specifically "Christian" than any other.

I liked the way he viewed the Bible's authority.

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play, most of whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a remarkable wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to trained, sensitive and experienced actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted "authority" for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that some character was now behaving inconsistently, or that some sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This "authority" of the first four acts would not consist -- could not consist! -- in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier parts of the play over and over again."

How all this relates to the question of God:

The Stoics might be right: there is one god, since the whole world is divine, and we humans are part of it. The Epicureans, and their modern successors the Deists, might be right: there is a god, or possibly more than one, whome none of us knows very well and all of us distantly acknowledge, with ignorance and distortion. The pagans might be right: there are different "divine" forces in the world, which need to be propitiated when angry, and harnessed one's own advantage when not. The Gnostics might be right: there is a good, hidden god who will reveal himself to some of us, thereby rescuing us from this wicked world of matter and flesh, which are the creation of an evil god. Or the modern atheists or materialists might be right. There is no neutral ground here. We are at the level of worldview, and here ultimate choices are involved. The claim of first-century Judaism, and of subsequent Judaism, is that the creator of the world has revealed himself in Torah in ways which simply do not allow for the claims of Stoicism, Epicureanism, paganism, Gnosticism and the rest -- or for those of Christianity. The claim of Christianity from its earliest days, and subsequently, is that the creator of the world, the god of Abraham, has revealed himself through Jesus, and through his own spirit, in ways which disallow the various pagan claims - and also those of a Judaism that rejects Jesus. This conclusion is of course unpalatable in a world (our own) that has been dominated by neo-Epicureanism with its distant, unknowable divinities.

His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman

2009-09-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass make up Pullman's fantasy trilogy. I had mixed reactions to these books. The story pulled me along and - rare for a fantasy book - at times was emotionally moving. I especially felt the scene with Iorek at the end of The Golden Compass. On the other hand, some of the plot turns were ridiculous and forced. For example: An unknown girl burst into a particle physicist's office and minutes later, was allowed to play around with her dark matter detection device. Yeah... right.

The books' reputation as atheist propaganda is certainly well-deserved. Across 1,000 pages there was not a single sympathetic character associated with religion, including God himself. Interestingly, the only organized religion in the books was the Catholic Church. I guess it made a better straw man for his propaganda.

In Pullman's stories God was not the creator. Instead he was merely the first self-aware being, who then deceived later self-aware beings into believing that he had created them. God's agents were uniformly repressive and authoritarian; there was no room for joy, love, gentleness, humility or even modern virtues like self-expression in the ominous Kingdom of Heaven. Milton's Paradise Lost portrayed Satan as the most interesting character, which is relevant because Pullman loves Paradise Lost and wrote his novels as a sort of twist on Paradise Lost. In Pullman's trilogy, the rebels are not only the most interesting characters, but they are also the heroes of the story.

And what is the power that can overturn God and his all-powerful repressive, theocratic Church? What holds the very key to the preservation of self-awareness in the universe?

Sex. Especially teen sex, but really, any sex outside marriage will do.

Hmm.

Across 1000 pages, I can't think of many happily married couples, and I really can't remember any marriages that involved romantic affection. But all other forms of sex get plenty of favorable press. Adulterous sex produced the heroine, a nun became an atheist (and therefore a sympathetic character) after having casual sex with a stranger, and the universe was restored to balance when the two main characters awoke to their sexuality and had intercourse.

So that part was a little stupid. On the other hand, I did like the way the hero showed a determination to make his own decisions. I agree with Pullman that people can use religion and its authority figures to passively coast through their lives without ever thinking for themselves or making hard choices. When I read the gospels, that isn't the Jesus I see and I don't think an adult should act like that.

Richard III, by William Shakespeare

2009-07-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

Every Christmas my cousin Mark and I agree to read a classic by the next Christmas. This year Richard III was was we decided to go for.

Richard III is a story of an ambitious duke who was willing to kill for the throne. I found Richard to be a "fun" evil character because he's witty, plotting, and malicious. The general plot is that Richard had Henry VI killed, and then Richard's brother Edward became king. As soon as Edward died, Richard killed the other claimants to the throne and seized it himself.

First he had to kill his brother Clarence. He mused to himself after meeting up with Clarence.

Go, tread the path that thou shalt ne'er return:
Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so,
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven.

In a bizarre but funny scene, Richard met up with Anne, who was accompanying her father's corpse to his funeral. Richard had killed both her father (Henry VI) and her brother, but now he tried to woo Anne because she would legitimize his rule if he can get the throne.

Anne: Foul devil, for God's sake, hence, and trouble us not,
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Filled it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.

After about a page of Anne's curses, Richard responded, "Lady, you know no rules of charity, which renders good for bad, blessings for curses." I thought that was pretty funny.

Richard attempted to woo Anne.

Anne: And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Richard: Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne: Some dungeon.
Richard: Your bed-chamber.
Anne: Ill rest betide the chamber where thou liest!
Richard: So will it, madam, till I lie with you.
Anne: I hope so.

Queen Margaret, Henry VI's wife, cursed all the new royals as well as Richard.

Richard: Have done thy charm, thou hateful withered hag!
Queen Margaret: And leave out thee? stay, dog, for thou shalt hear me.
If heaven have any grievous plague in store
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee,
O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,
And then hurl down their indignation
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!

Queen Elizabeth mourned her husband Edward's death, one of the few deaths in the play not caused by Richard.

Why grow the branches when the root is gone?
Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?
If you will live, lament; if die, be brief.

The citizens were afraid of what would happen after Edward died.

Citizen 1: Come, come, we fear the worst; all will be will.
Citizen 3: When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?
Untimely storms makes men expect a dearth.
All may be well; but, if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve, or I expect.

King Richard had guilty dreams the night before the battle that would kill him. But in the morning he was ready to put aside his guilt and fight for his ambition again.

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to it pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

The Wealth of Nations (the rest of the book), by Adam Smith

2009-06-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

It took me over 6 months, but I finally finished!

He pointed out the follies of the "mercantile system", which was the name he gave to protectionism, and of the politicians who voted for those policies.

That it was the spirit of monopoly which originally both invented and propagated this doctrine, cannot be doubted; and they who first taught it were by no means such fool as they who believed it.

In the middle ages the laws enforced buying produce locally, directly from farmers. However, it was not very good for their overall economy and it even increased the price of food. In the middle ages, anyone who bought corn from a farmer and then resold it at a higher price could be imprisoned and set in the pillory! However, since farmers could only sell to their immediate neighbors their market was extremely limited. That meant there was no great incentive for them to improve their lands and therefore their harvest were smaller than they could have been.

He talked about the motives of colonization.

... the council of Castile determined to take possession of countries of which the inhabitants were plainly incapable of defending themselves. The pious purpose of converting them to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project. But the hope of finding treasures of gold there, was the sole motive which prompted to undertake it.

Gold mining projects were a conquistador favorite but they were pretty much a waste of effort.

But though the judgment of sober reason and experience concerning such projects [mines] h as always been extremely unfavourable, that of human avidity has commonly been quite otherwise. The same passion which has suggested to so many people the absurd idea of the philosopher's stone, has suggested to others the equally absurd one of immense rich mines of gold and silver. They did not consider that the value of those metals has, in all ages and nations, arisen chiefly from their scarcity.

The 18th century version of "easy come easy go"

Light come light go, says the proverb; and the ordinary tone of expence seems every where to be regulated, not so much according to the real ability of spending as to the supposed facility of getting money to spend.

He published the book in 1776 and he has some interesting comments on the situation with the American colonies.

They are very weak who flatter themselves that, in the state to which things have come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone. The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

He proposed that the colonies have full representation in Parliament and be a co-equal part of Great Britain. He even predicted that the capital of Great Britain would move from London to America! There's a fun "alternate history" novel in this idea somewhere.

He talked more about how mercantile legislation oppresses poor people in favor of the rich.

It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the rich and powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on fro the benefit of the poor and indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.

The mercantile system's laws flip capitalism upside down. Demand is more important than supply because supply will always follow demand. Laws that attempt to subvert that are counterproductive. Hmm, is there a demand for GM's cars anymore?

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would bbe absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

Rich people owe a lot to the government and should be more than willing to support it.

It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it.

In 18th century attornies were paid by the page!

In order to increase their payment, the attornies and clerks have contrived to multiply words beyond all necessity, to the corruption of the law language of, I believe, every court of justice in Europe.

As a college professor himself, Adam Smith had harsh words for the educational system. Even back then, teachers had no incentive to teach well!

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects of performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability.

He criticized the amount of time universities spent on metaphysics as opposed to the natural sciences.

The proper subject of experiment and observation, a subject in which a careful attention is capable of making so many useful discoveries, was almost entirely neglected. The subject in which, after a few very simple and almost obvious truths, the most careful attention can discover nothing but obscurity and uncertainty, and can consequently produce nothing but subtleties and sophisms, was greatly cultivated.

He was in favor of progressive taxation.

The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of hte rich; and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

The Federalist Papers, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay

2009-06-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

The Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (primarily) with a couple contributions from John Jay. They wrote them for the opinion section of a New York newspaper to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution. It's amazing how well thought-out each paper is when you consider that they only had 3-4 days to write each one. On the other hand, they had been at the Constitutional Convention arguing about it for a whole summer, so most of their arguments had already been worked out.

It really gave me a sense for how precarious the country was under the Articles of Confederation. The national government was so ineffective that if the Constitution had not been ratified, there was serious talk of splitting the country into 2-3 smaller regional confederations. Hamilton warned (correctly in my opinion) that these regional confederations would inevitably war with each other, provoked most likely by European powers.

This is an excellent book to read if you want to know why our government is structured the way it is. I came away respecting Hamilton, Madison, and Jay for their theoretical knowledge and the practical solutions they came up with.

Madison wanted a separation of powers and checks and balances in order to protect against tyranny. I like how he talked about "parchment barriers."

After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others. What this security ought to be is the great problem to be solved. Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of those departments in the constitution of the government, and to trust to those parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?

In a later paper, Madison developed the idea that each branch will compete for power, and that this structure will keep any one branch from dominating. In this age of vast presidential power, it's interesting that the most dangerous branch in their opinion was the legislative branch, since it was most directly connected to the people and their mandate.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxilliary precautions.

Hamilton wanted a powerful executive. In the Articles of Confederation there wasn't a national executive or judicial branch, so this seemed risky at the time. The executive branch felt like... well, like King George.

A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.

Hamilton was concerned the legislative branch would use its power over the Treasury to coerce the other branches. There are specific rules in the Constitution about how often the President and Supreme Court justices can have their salaries changed.

In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

Hamilton's conclusion:

A NATION without a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a Constitution, in time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a PRODIGY, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety.

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

2009-04-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

On the theory I know more of life now to appreciate them, I've decided to revisit all the Shakespeare plays I haven't read since high school.

I started with Macbeth for no particular reason.

One of Macbeth's enemies sees that Macbeth's grip on power is fairly weak.

Now does he feel
his secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love; now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

Macbeth realizes that having a royal title doesn't mean much without his people's love and respect.

I have liv'd long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

The famous "tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech, spoken by Macbeth when he hears of Lady Macbeth's death.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (up through "Treaties of Commerce")

2009-04-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

This year I'm slowly working my way through The Wealth of Nations. What a magnificent defence and exposition of capitalism! It is however an extremely long book, and unfortunately someone else reserved it at the library just as I was getting ready to start the "Treaties of Commerce" chapter.

So, here are my favorite passages up to that point.

Adam Smith, the original work/life balance guru:

If masters would always listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen. It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work.

He commented on why gold is valuable and speculated why it became the chief form of money.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

He warned against trade lobbyists.

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

The government, the military and so on do not add to GDP, so excessive spending there can lead to a country's ruin.

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct. The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands.... Such people, as they themselves produce nothing, are all maintained by the produce of other men's labour....

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.

The famous "invisible hand" quote:

... by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention...By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

He anticipated the kind of tyrants who would be attracted to setting up planned economies. As Credence Clearwater Revival would put it hundreds of years later, "Five year plans and New Deals, wrapped in golden chains".

The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare

2009-02-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure whether this was a tragedy or a comedy all the way to the 5th act. Great play. As I was reading this, I told Holly "Shakespeare is a really good writer." Duh. :)

King Leontes (wrongfully) suspects his wife Hermione of committing adultery with his best friend Polixenes. I love the last line about the tenth of mankind.

There have been,
Or I am much deceiv'd, cuckolds ere now;
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th'arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour. Nay, there's comfort in't
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open'd,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves.

King Leontes accuses Antigonus of not being able to restrain his outspoken wife Paulina.

Leontes: A gross hag!
And, losel, thou art worthy to be hang'd,
That wilt not stay her tongue.

Antigonus: Hang all the husbands
That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself
Hardly one subject.

Imprisoned, falsely accused, and denied her children, Hermione isn't afraid of Leontes' death sentence.

Sir, spare your threats!
The bug which you would fright me with I seek.
To me can life be no commodity:
The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went. My second joy,
And first-fruites of my body, from his presence
I am barr'd, like one infectious. My third comfort,
Starr'd most unluckily, is from my breast --
The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth --
Hal'd out to murder. Myself on every post
Proclaim'd a strumpet; with immodest hatred
The childbed privilege denied, which'longs
To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried
Here to this place, i'th'open air, before
I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive
That I should fear to die. Therefore proceed.

Paulina accuses King Leontes after Hermione's death.

But, O thou tyrant,
Do not repent these things, for they are heavier
Than all thy woes can stir. Therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees,
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren moutain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2009-02-07T07:29:00.000-08:00

Events both good and bad are becoming more extreme. No one really expects society to be much like today in 50 years, and yet we still predict the future based on theories about how things should work. The truth is that what will really shape the future is inherently unknowable - things like wars, disease, natural disasters, and new inventions.

I find this strangely hopeful compared to reading all the gloomy news. The real world is much more interesting and exciting than our theories and models. We need to pay more attention to reality.

I like how he twitted intellectuals, bankers, and Nobel prize winners. He's a very opinionated writer.

He referenced an ancient writer named Sextus Empiricus that I want to check out. He wrote a book called Against the Professors.

The author's day job is in trading and money management. His financial strategy is to keep almost all of his money in extremely safe investments like Treasuries or CDs. The remaining amount he risks in extremely risky ventures like venture capital. He avoids conventional blue chip stocks and so on because he feels like the risks are hidden there and almost all surprises will be negative.

Simon Foucher's Dissertation on the Search for Truth:

One needs to exit doubt in order to produce science -- but few people heed the importance of not exiting from it prematurely.... It is a fact that one usually exits doubt without realizing it.

The difference between an empirical outlook and a Platonic theoretical outlook:

I care about the premises more than the theories, and I want to minimize reliance on theories, stay light on my feet, and reduce my surprises. I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong. Elegance in the theories is often indicative of Platonicity and weakness -- it invites you to seek elegance for elegance's sake. A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.

Don't run after trains.

Snub you destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!

And finally...

Very few are intelligent enough to change the opinions effortlessly.

Ain't My America, by Bill Kauffman

2008-12-19T20:07:00.001-08:00

I really like Bill Kauffman's writing. For one thing, he always makes me proud to be an Iowan. In this book he contrasted Midwestern isolationism with the American Empire beloved by Republican neocons and most Democrats as well. Reading this made me despise George W. Bush's policies even more than I did before. We are propping up fake democracies for the benefit of Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, at the price of miserable levels of debt and taxation here in America.

He went through the history of America's slow expansion into an Empire.

First, the debate over occupying the Phillipines in the nineteenth century:

If neither side distinguished itself by the elevated moral standards of the twenty-first century, when all men are brothers and peace rules our planet, at least the anti-imperialists wanted to leave the Filipinos alone rather than conquer and slaughter them.

The America First isolationist movement was slandered as anti-Semitic (ie, Charles Lindbergh). Here's a wonderful quote from Lincoln Colcord, an American First leader, about his home town:

"It's not a bad place, much like many others, but the secret of our love for it lies in what I have just said -- we know it intimately. This is the lesson I get from Thoreau. Love your own pond. All are beautiful. Be contented where you are. Content! -- a lost word in our America. This restless ambition -- I cannot feel the truth of it. I cannot follow there."

Jimmy Duncan is a Tennessee Republican who argues against huge federally funded education projects. I like his reasoning and know from personal experience that small, poorly funded schools can give a good education.

"Children are better off going to a small school in an old building, as long as it is clean and safe, than to a brand-new, gigantic school where few people know who they are."

Kauffman has some biting words from "pro-family" Christians who enthusiastically support war.

... the activist Christian Right has chosen Revelations over the Sermon on the Mount as its canonical text.

Edmund Wilson thought that fighting the Civil War for the abolition of slavery has led to a theme of "wars fought for freedom".

the Civil War had enabled the United States to fill its "Treasury of Virtue," which we had drawn upon time and again in the subsequent century to support the "insufferable moral attitudes" with which we justify our wars.

Vivien Kellems was an Iowa businesswoman and folk hero who refused to withhold taxes for her employees. She felt it hid the true tax rate from workers and was an un-American imposition. She dared the government to take her to trial, but they never would.

"Many people lack an understanding of the real meaning of patriotism," explained Kellems. "They confuse love of government with love of country. The true patriot may love his country and utterly despise his government."

T. Coleman Andrews was an IRS Commissioner who became an anti-tax crusader after he left his position.

Andrews liked to quote Elbert Hubbard's description of accountants: "spare, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal, with eyes like a codfish...Happily they never reproduce and all of them finally go to Hell."

Thought there are certainly many fine military families, the military is not a family-friendly organization.

The founders understood this: in 1792, Benjamin Rush proposed that "over the portals of the Department of War" be painted the mottoes "An office for butchering the human species" and "A Widow and Orphan making office." Rush was right. We might add "The Great Cuckold Maker," since no government agency separates husbands from wives quite like the mendaciously renamed Department of Defense.

It's especially sad when mothers are sent overseas.

Behold the perversity as women reservists, young mothers of infants and small children, leave their families to go halfway 'round the world to act as cogs, expendable parts, in the machinery of empire. And hearken the silence of the courtiers and grant grubbers of establishment conservatism, whose mingled amentia and cowardice testify to the gutlessness and wicked stupidity of what passes for the Right.

The Great Crash of 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith

2008-11-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

Given all the references to the Great Depression lately, I decided to read some books about it. This is the best one I've read. JK Galbraith, the author, was a Harvard economist and he was also pretty funny.

First he explains the speculative fever of the 20s.

That much of what was repeated about the market -- then as now -- bore no relation to reality is important, but not remarkable. Between human beings there is a type of intercourse which proceeds not from knowledge, or even from lack of knowledge, but from failure to know what isn't known. This was true of much of the discourse on the market. At luncheon in downtown Scranton, the knowledgeable physician spoke of the impending split-up in the stock of Western Utility Investors and the effect on prices. Neither the doctor nor his listeners knew why there should be a split-up, why it should increase values, or even why Western Utility Investors should have any value.

It was fueled by confident optimistic statements from business leaders.

Andrew W. Mellon [Treasury Secretary] said, "There is no cause for worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue."

Mr. Mellon did not know. Neither did any of the other public figures who then, as since, made similar statements. These are not forecasts; it is not to be supposed that the men who make them are privileged to look farther in to the future then the rest. ... By affirming solemnly that prosperity will continue, it is believed, one can help insure that propserity will in fact continue. Especially among businessman the faith in the efficiency of such incantation is very great.

As the Crash started, Wall Street tried to reassure the public.

When the market fell many Wall Street citizens immediately sensed the real danger, which was that income and employment -- prosperity in general -- would be adversely affected. Preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it wouldn't happen. This they did. They explained how the stock market was merely the froth and that the real substance of economic life rested in production, employment, and spending, all of which would remain unaffected. No one knew for sure that this was so. As an instrument of economic policy, incantation does not permit of minor doubts or scruples.

The Hoover White House tried to look like it was doing something, even though it had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it. Economic summits were a great way to do that.

In recent times the no-business meeting at the White House -- attended by governors, industrialists, representatives of business, labor, and agriculture -- has become an established institution of government. Some device for simulating action, when action is impossible, is indispensable in a sound and functioning democracy.

Remember McCain's "fundamentally sound" blunder?

On the whole, those who had proclaimed during the crash that business was "fundamentally sound" were not held accountable for their words. The ritualistic nature of their expression was recognized; then as now no one supposed that such spokesmen knew whether business was sound or unsound.

This is a good lesson in general.

One of the pregnant lessons of that year [1929] will by now by plain: it is that very specific and personal misfortune awaits those who presume to believe that the future is revealed to them.

King Henry V, by Shakespeare

2008-09-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

King Henry V attacked France in order to get a dukedom that was (supposedly) rightfully his. However, the real reason behind his attack was likely to follow the advice of his father - better to unite England in a foreign war than to allow it to slip into civil war again.

After an unlikely victory at Agincourt, Henry ended up conquering France, marrying King Charles' daughter, and ruling both countries.

Henry threatens the French city Harfleur which he has under siege. He was not exactly a nice person, was he?

If we begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins, and your flowering infants
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is 't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the had
Of hot and forcing violation?....

If not; why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls:
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers, with their howls confus'd,
Do break the clouds

Henry reflects upon the unhappiness that comes with power. The pomp is all pretty useless when it really matters.

Wherin thou art less happy, being fear'd,
Than they in fearing.
What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it?

King Richard II, by Shakespeare

2008-09-12T21:12:00.001-07:00

Richard II was deposed and eventually executed by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV).

Richard finds out almost none of his nobles have remained loyal to him, and that they've all given allegiance to Bolingbroke.

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings,
How some have been depos'd , some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd, for within the hollow crown
That rounds the moral temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Richard ponders while in prison.

Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride,
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endur'd the like.

King Henry IV, Part 2, by Shakespeare

2008-08-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

Henry IV took over the crown from Richard III in a sort of coup. His son Hal (Henry V) is hanging out with the wrong crowd, spending way too much time in bars with Sir John Falstaff. Meanwhile Henry IV is fighting civil wars.

Northumberland learns his son Hotspur is dead and decides to join the rebellion. (Later his wife and daughter persuade him to skip out... again.)

A scaly gauntlet now with joints of steel
Must glove this hand, and hence, thou sickly quoif,
Thou art a guard too wanton for the head
Which princes, flesh'd with conquest, aim to hit:
Now bind my brows with iron, and approach
The ragged'st hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enrag'd Northumberland!
Let heaven kiss earth, now let not Nature's hand
Keep the wild flood confin'd, let order die,
And let this world no longer be a stage,
To feed contention in a lingering act:
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reighn in all bosoms, that, each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!

King Henry IV is too anxious to sleep.

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?

As Henry IV dies, he regrets he is passing his kingdom to his son, who he fears is dissolute and unworthy.

Henry the fifth is crown'd: up, vanity!
Down, royal state! all you sage counsellors, hence!
And to the English court assemble now,
From every region, apes of idlesness!
Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum:
Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins, the newest kind of ways?
Be happy, he will trouble you no more;
England shall double gild his treble guilt,
England shall give him office, hounour, might;
For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks,
The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog
Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent.
O my poor kindgom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

2008-07-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

Wow, what an incredible book! Highly recommended. Lily is a complex person; initially you think of her as a money-grubbing social climber but by the end you really come to admire her.

Lily Bart's mother:

Mrs. Bart was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though one were much richer than one's bankbook denoted.

Lily wasn't merely after money. She had a sensitive nature that was attuned to beauty... in some ways similar to Dorian Gray.

She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly advantages.

Selden is somewhat of a Stoic:

"Freedom? Freedom from worries?"

"From everything -- from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit -- that's what I call success."

Funny comment on the rustic wedding of an extremely wealthy couple:

It was the "simple country wedding" to which guests are conveyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their way, note-book in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents.

Lily's aunt was a fastidious person:

She "went through" the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of the penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities.

Lily's sensitive nature gave her a sense of pride:

The cruise itself charmed her as a romantic adventure. The cruise itself charmed her as a romantic adventure. She was vaguely touched by the names and scenes amid which she moved, and had listened to Ned Silverton reading Theocritus by moonlight, as the yacht rounded the Sicilian promontories, with a thrill of the nerves that confirmed her belief in her intellectual superiority.

Lily comes to a final understanding of the values she'd been raised upon.

That was the feeling which possessed her now -- the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another."

Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales

2008-06-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool book. It has great stories about wilderness survival and fatalities, and uses it to draw lessons about life.

He who is brave in daring will be killed,
He who is brave in not daring will survive.
Tao Te Ching

Nice quote about the fine balance between pessimism and realism:

Good survivors, like good wives, husbands, and CEOs, always consider the bleak side of things, too. They plan for them and have an earnest hope that they will manage. But they do not care overly much that they might not. They accept that to succumb is always a possibility and is ultimately their fate. They know safety is an illusion and being obsessed with safety is a sickness. They have a frank relationship with risk, which is the essence of life. They don't need others to take care of them. They are used to caring for themselves and facing the inherent hazards of life.

Stay within your limits.

The summit is not the only place on the mountain.... It's a matter of looking at yourself and assessing your own abilities and where you are mentally, and then realizing that it's better to turn back and get a chance to do it again than to go for it and not come back at all.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

2008-06-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

This book was not what I expected from Oscar Wilde. It was dark and disturbing, not lighthearted and witty. Dorian Gray is a rich young man who gets his portrait painted. The painter is inspired by Dorian's innocence and good looks, and he paints an almost mystically perfect portrait. As Dorian looks at the finished product, he realizes he will get old and ugly while the portrait will remain beautiful. He then makes a wish that the opposite would happen, that he would stay always youthful but that the picture would age.

It happens.

As time goes on, Dorian descends into selfishness and increasingly into moral corruption, including many oblique references to homosexuality. His only goal is to find new aesthetic experiences. He looks for pleasure, not happiness. He keeps the portrait locked in an upper room in his house. Although he himself still appears innocent and beautiful, his portrait not only ages but the painted expression takes on a lascivious leer.

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand, and grinned through moving masks.

I like this description.

...he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day they had met: "To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and it would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.

Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, by Bill Kauffman

2008-04-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Whether you agree with him or not, this is a book worth reading. Kauffman contrasts local, small town America with the patriotic nationalism of the American Empire. The American Empire pursues world power as national policy, and sees people as game pieces in a larger strategy. Kauffman wants our priorities to flip the Empire's order: be concerned first with our families and small communities, and care less and less about what happens as the scale grows larger. For example, why should the people in New London, Iowa (for example) really care about Saddam Hussein? If New Londoners do want to bomb Baghdhad, it's because their focus has been diverted from what should be most important to them - New London, Iowa.

Kauffman, though not an Iowan, spends a lot of time talking about a renaissance in Iowa culture that happened before World War II. It really made me proud to be an Iowan -- this summer I want to see some things in Iowa that I've never seen before. Anyway, apparently in the 1930s Grant Wood and others created distinctive Iowa art, Iowa poetry, and so on. World War II wiped all that out.

Even "good" wars like the Civil War and World War II get harsh treatment from Kauffman.

"His sympathies were for race -- too lofty to descend to persons," a wit once said of the righteously abolitionist senator Charles Sumner. For how else could a man not merely countenance but positively rejoice in the slaughter of his countrymen, not only rebel southerners but noble Robert Gould Shaw and Berkshires boys, too?

Influential men, men of state, their days a blur of movement, retainers at beck and call, come to see others as toadies or supplicants (with the toothsome few laid aside as bed partners). In their eyes we are all expendable. Why was anyone surprised when Ted Kennedy swam away, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to scream in her air pocket till the water rushed in? Kopechnes serve, and Kennedys are served; Vietnam was just Chappaquiddick with rice paddies. Shut up and die.

Who are these creatures, capable of decreeing... the mass execution of, say, Iraqi children or Vietnamese peasants?

That reminds of what Tolstoy said about Napoleon and the Tsar in War and Peace. Why do people obey when commanded to go kill strangers half a world away?

This was a pretty funny jab at Reagan.

The only compliment more glowing is that a president "made America believe in itself again," as Ronald of Bel Air was said to have done. Indeed, who among us will ever forget where she was at the moment she learned that Grenada had been liberated?

He quotes Nixon "Defending and promoting peace and freedom around the world is a great enterprise. Only by rededicating ourselves to that goal will we remain true to ourselves."

Kauffman's satirical comment on Nixon's words sum up the book:

True to ourselves. You might think you can be true to yourself by raising a family, planting a garden, participating in the life of a small and vital community, writing books about your people's history, building houses or farming land or simply studying with the birds, flowers, trees, God, and yourself, as Dvorak put it -- but you would be wrong. Worse, you would be small, meager, mean, niggardly. The measure of a man's greatness is his willingness to abandon his family and go abroad to murder strangers on behalf of... your guess is as good as mine. Mr. Nixon's "great enterprises," I guess.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (volume 2)

2008-04-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

This book held some surprises for me. First, I was surprised by the amount of female nudity described in it. Remember, it was published in the 1500's during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It described quite a few "frolics", "lily white paps", "lustie youths" -- well, you get the picture. A faithful screen adaptation would certainly be rated R for both sex and violence.

It proves that Elizabethan England wasn't exactly Puritan. No wonder the Puritans felt unwelcome and came here!

Second, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed all the knight vs. monster fights. He did a great job of making the monsters fearsome, and the battles seem larger than life.

So, now that I'm done, I'm going to miss the world of knights, honor, goodness, and chivalry. I feel somewhat like I did at the end of The Pickwick Papers. If only the world were really like this!

More favoriate passages from The Faerie Queene --

His name was Daunger, dreaded over-all,
Who day and night did watch and duely ward
From fearefull cowards entrance to forstall
And faint-heart-fooles, whom shew of perill hard
Could terrifie from Fortunes faire adward:
For oftentimes faint hearts, at first espiall
Of his grim face, were from approaching scard;
Unworthy they of grace, whom one deniall
Excludes from fairest hope withouten further triall.

Truth, not power, is in the end what should be admired.

...deedes ought not be scand
By th' authors manhood, nor the doers might,
But by their trueth and by the causes right.

I like this quote because he uses a water mill as a metaphor. It makes me picture an English thatched roof scene in a forest somewhere.

Like as a water-streame, whose swelling sourse
Shall drive a Mill, within strong bancks is pent,
And long restrayned of his ready course,
So soone as passage is unto him lent,
Breakes forth, and makes his way more violent;
Such was the fury of Sir Calidor

A knight was not just a warrior, but a virtuous warrior. I admire that ideal.

"For nothing is more blamefull to a knight,
That court'sie doth as well as armes professe,
However strong and fortunate in fight,
Then the reproch of pride and cruelnesse.
In vaine he seeketh others to suppresse,
Who hath not learnd him selfe first to subdew"

Sir Calidore made his Squire take an oath of honor. Wouldn't the world be a better place if young men today swore faith to a knight and truth to Ladies all?

There him he causd to kneele, and made to sweare
Faith to his knight, and truth to Ladies all,
And never to be recreant for feare
Of perill, or of ought that might befall:
So he him dubbed, and his Squire did call.

A shepherd taught Sir Calidore about contentment regardless of circumstances. The shepherd's philosophy reminds me of the Stoic Epicticus.

Interestingly, later in the story this shepherd and his wife are murdered by bandits.

"It is the mynd that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore;
For some, that hath abundance at his will,
Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store,
And other, that hath litle, askes no more,
But in that litle is both rich and wise;
For wisedome is most riches: fooles therefore
They are which fortunes doe by vowes devize,
Sith each unto himselfe his life may fortunize."

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

2008-03-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

I have to return volume 1 to the library today, so I'm going to record my favorite quotes before I finish the whole thing.

The Redcrosse Knight killed a monster after a three day battle. The knight had found water that miraculously healed him from all his injuries every night.

So downe he fell, and forth his life did breath,
That vanisht into smoke and cloudes swift;
So downe he fell, that th' earth him underneath
Did grone, as feeble so great load to lift;
So downe he fell, as an huge rocky clift,
Whole false foundacion waves have washt away,
With dreadfull poyse is from the mayneland rift,
And rolling down great Neptune doth dismay:
So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine lay.

Mammon's temptation of Sir Guyon --

"Vaine glorious Elfe," (saide he) "doest not thou weet,
That money can thy wantes at will supply?
Sheilds, steeds, and armes, and all things for the meet,
It can purvay in twinckling of an eye;
And crownes and kingdomes to thee multiply.
Do not I kings create, and throw the crowne
Sometimes to him that low in dust doth ly,
And him that raigned into his rowme thrust downe,
And whom I lust do heape with glory and renowne?"

Sir Guyon's response --

"All otherwise" (saide he) "I riches read,
And deeme them roote of all disquietnesse;
First got with guile, and then preserv'd with dread,
And after spent with pride and lavishnesse,
Leaving behind them griefe and heavinesse:
Infinite mischiefes of them doe arize,
Strife and debate, bloodshed and bitternesse,
Outrageous wrong, and hellish covetize,
That noble heart as great dishour doth despize."

Spenser's view of how reason is assaulted by the passions:

What warre so cruel, or what siege so sore,
As that which strong affections doe apply
Against the forte of reason evermore,
To bring the sowle into captivity?

More later after I finish volume 2.

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra

2007-07-14T21:33:00.001-07:00

Whew! What a long book! It's been awhile since I've read a 900 pager, and now that I have kids it took a long time to get through.

I bought Sacred Games in India. It's set in Mumbai/Bombay, and it's about a policeman, a crime lord, a guru, and a plot to destroy Bombay with an atomic bomb. It definitely gave me a feeling for what Bombay is like. I also learned a lot of Indian swear words like "gaand", "maderchod", etc. After a while I think I figured out what each meant, but I'll spare you the translation.

It's a melancholy book that conveys a bleak, hopeless outlook on life. Most characters end up dying in tragic ways, many destroyed by the natural consequences of their own ambition, idealism, or plans.

Reading the Mahabharatta gave me quite a bit of background that I needed to understand allusions he made to Arjun and Krishna. The book had a very eastern feel to it. I'm definitely ready to read a Christian book now!

"He allowed himself to think of [his mother's] death, and he shivered suddenly, but he was not sad. Every connection came freighted with loss, every attachment with the possibility of betrayal. There was no avoiding this conundrum, no escape from it, and no profit from complaining about it. Love was duty, and duty was love."

The Prince by Machiavelli

2007-07-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

This is a classic I've wanted to read for a long time but never got around to it. In today's atmosphere of political and corporate platitudes and pandering, Machiavelli is an insider strategist who spills the beans, whispering "Now let me tell you what it really takes to hold onto power."

"Therefore, a wise prince must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him."

Welfare state, anyone?

"For there is such a distance between how one lives and how one ought to live, that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done achieves his downfall rather than his preservation. A man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good."

I guess this explains why we end up mistrusting politicians and executives.

"From this one can extract another notable observation: princes must delegate distasteful tasks to others, while pleasant ones they should keep for themselves."

That works until it becomes too obvious.

"Nor should any state ever believe that it can always choose safe courses of action. On the contrary, it should recognize that they will all be risky, for we find this to be in the order of things, that whenever we try to avoid one disadvantage, we run into another."

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Anyway, he had some perceptive things to say about a leader's duty to be two-faced. A leader's public image must appear to match a people's ideals -- whatever those are -- but if that leader wants to hold onto power, he must be willing to break alliances, kill enemies, double-cross friends, etc. at a moment's notice.

Now that would be an interesting topic at a political debate! "Each candidate will now take five minutes to discuss people they've betrayed to attain power."

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

2007-02-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve my cousin Mark told me this book was really funny. So, I put it on my list of books to read in 2007.

I don't have much energy for a long review, but I will say it's a very funny book. Ignatius Reilly was the reactionary/idealist/lazy/deluded/gluttonous hero of the story. Physically, he was immensely overweight and always wore a red hunting cap. Philosophically, he looked down in disdain on the 20th century, preferring the Middle Ages. And yet on a personal level he was utterly under the control of various petty vices. At one point he organized a Moorish Worker's Revolt in a factory with a large minority population. He spent much of the story as a hot dog vendor dressed up in a pirate costume, peddling weenies in the French Quarter.

I don't want to give anything away, but if you ever read it, I almost guarantee you'll laugh out loud at the "Woof! Woof!" line.

I loved the fact that it had a happy ending too. Great book!

Reading List for 2007

2006-12-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm going to use this post to keep track of the books I want to read during 2007. Suggestions are welcome!

Must Read
1. The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar. My cousin and I are each going to read this by next Christmas, and we're going to each bring a dish from it to our Christmas Eve celebration.
2. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. My cousin said it was really funny.
3. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. I bought this 900 page epic in India, and it's been sitting on my shelf shaming me ever since.

Might Read
1. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. I started this back in high school at the end of a long Dickens kick. The kick came to an end right in the middle of this book and I quit reading it.
2. Something by Edith Wharton, maybe Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth
3. Ramayana. This is a Hindu holy book that I bought in India. I liked the Mahabharata because of its warrior mentality and code of honor. But the Ramayana has sat on my shelf next to Sacred Games heaping yet more shame upon me.
4. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. Holly is reading a book about a guy who read that book (among other things!), and it sounds interesting.

Memoirs From the House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2006-10-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

Mr. Dostoevsky wrote an account of the years he spent in a Siberian prison camp.

As a member of the upper class, he struggled a lot in prison because most of the prisoners were commoners. No matter how much he tried to be "one of the guys" he was not allowed to do so.

"Indeed, I always wanted to do everything for myself and was particularly anxioius not even to seem to put myself forward as a soft-handed and womanish creature playing the fine gentleman. In fact, to be honest, some part of my self-esteem depended on this attitude. But--and I decidedly do not understand why this always happened--I could never shake off the various servitors and hangers-on who attached themselves to me and finally got me completely in their power, so that in reality they were my masters and I was their servant; somehow it always seemed to turn out that my outward appearance showed that I was indeed too lordly to do without servants and acting the fine gentleman. I found this, of course, very vexatious."

There were also incredibly memorable descriptions of the prisoners' Christmas plays and of a prisoner who died. However, I am too lazy to type them out here.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe

2006-08-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a great book! A Man in Full is still my favorite Tom Wolfe novel, but this is a good one too. Wolfe is amazingly observant and descriptive.

At some point in one of his books I would like him to describe an admirable white-collar person. So far I haven't seen one -- they're always compromising, weak-willed ninnies until they lose their money.

"The recollection brought a smile to Fallow's lips, the sort of wry smile that says that this is a sad story and yet one has to admit it's funny. ... The Dead Mouse and Highridge tried to choke back their laughter, since after all it was a lot of unfortunate poor people they were talking about."

"The housing project had been designed during the Green Grass era of slum eradication. The idea had been to build apartment towers upon a grassy landscape where the young might gambol and the old might sit beneath shade trees, along sinuous footpaths. In fact, the gamboling youth broke off, cut down, or uprooted the shade-tree seedlings during the first month, and any old person fool enough to sit along the sinuous footpaths was in for the same treatment."

"The women came in two varieties. First, there were women in their late thirties and in their forties and older (women "of a certain age"), all of them skin and bones (starved to near perfection). To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers. This season no puffs, flounces, pleats, ruffles, bibs, bows, battings, scallops, laces, darts, or shirs on the bias were too extreme. They were the social X rays, to use the phrase that had bubbled up into Sherman's own brain. Second, there were the so-called Lemon Tarts. These were women in their twenties or early thirties, mostly blondes (the Lemon in the Tarts), who were the second, third, and fourth wives or live-in girlfriends of men over forty or fifty or sixty (or seventry), the sort of women men refer to, quite without thinking, as girls. This season the Tart was able to flaunt the natural advantages of youth by showing her legs from well above the knee and emphasizing her round bottom (something no X ray had). What was entirely missing from chez Bavardage was that manner of woman who is neither very young nor very old, who has laid in a lining of subcutaneous fat, who glows with plumpness and a rosy face that speaks, without a word, of home and hearth and hot food ready at six and stories read aloud at night and conversations while seated on the edge of the bed, just before the Sandman comes. In short, no one ever invited... Mother."

"And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line."

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens

2006-08-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

"The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end. Amen."

"Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you."

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

2006-07-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

This was a good book, though in my opinion it wasn't as funny as Love in the Ruins. It's called The Moviegoer because to the main character, a place doesn't feel real unless he's seen that same place in a movie. Then it has that special "something" normal places lack.

Good quotes:
"Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world."

"Tonight's subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:
I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual --
Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.
I believe in music. I believe in a child's smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.
This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt's house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts."

"What a sickness it is, Rory, this latter-day post-Christian sex.... But to be neither pagan nor Christian but this: oh this is a sickness, Rory. For it to be longed after and dreamed of the first twenty years of one's life, not practicied but not quite prohibited; simply longed after, longed after as a fruit not really forbidden but mock-forbidden and therefore secretly prized, prized first last and always by the cult of the naughty nice wherein everyone is nicer than Christians and naughtier than pagans."

"Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of s**t that flies -- my only talent -- smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great s**thouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall -- on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire."

I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe

2006-03-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

The thing that struck me about this book was all the characters were consumed by what others thought about them. They were unable to make decisions without reference to other people.

Charlotte -- From her valedictorian address to the end of the book, "Momma's good girl" was obsessed by others' opinion of her. Once at Dupont, she soon did what was once unthinkable after it became clear what it would take to be included. In fact, all of her choices regarding Hoyt, Adam, and Jojo were not driven by her own internal feelings but instead by how other girls would react to her choices. Therefore, she was driven to lie and put on an act. The last scene of the book had her watching Jojo play basketball, which completely bored her. The crowd started cheering for him, and she quickly put on the face of an excited sports fan and girlfriend -- "It obviously behooved Jojo Johanssen's girlfriend to join in." is the last line of the book.

Hoyt -- Hoyt was popular because he pretended not to care about being popular. The one exception was his willingness to be unpopular with the liberal intelligensia on campus. But when it came to his fraternity brothers, he made sure he remained the king of cool by watching SportCenter with them every night. He did that even though he knew his bad grades would keep him out of a good job after college. Finally, he only showed physical courage when drunk.

Adam -- For most of the story, Adam was the classic wuss, someone who lived in an almost physical fear of other people. He let himself get pushed around by the basketball team, but then he took out a secret, petty revenge. When it came to sex, he had secret fantasies about Charlotte. When it came to reality though, his love for Charlotte was insipid and tentative because he was also afraid of her.

Jojo -- Jojo was the one person who made inner directed choices, deciding to better himself academically for himself. Even in the face of Coach's wrath and mocking Socrates comments, he stood firm. An interesting thing I noticed was that as the story progressed, he cared less and less about showing off his pecs and attracting groupies.

A few of my favorite quotes occurred when Charlotte talked to her perceptive Momma. She tried to explain away her bad grades and moping, which were really caused by depression over getting rejected by Hoyt.
"I'm not upset, Momma. The only thing is..." She couldn't think up what the only thing was. She couldn't dream up a serviceable lie. It occurred to her that never before had she had to dream up lies in this house, other than little white lies. On the other hand, deep down she realized that lying was not foreign to her nature. Anyone -- or certainly she -- who has been praised so highly so regularly and for so long keeps within her the means of patching up punctures on the road. "I guess I was surprised, that's all."

Lies! Momma had always held up the Cross to lies, and they always cringed and died in that merciless, unforgiving light.
"Sorry don't change a thing, darling. Never did, never will."
Long pause. "I love you, Momma." The last and lowest resort of the sinner.

A Different Universe, by Robert Laughlin

2006-02-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

This was an interesting but ultimately disappointing book about physics. I don't expect to understand physics deeply, but the descriptions he gave were not long enough to help me even get a glimpse of what he was really talking about. He would throw out two paragraphs on some incredibly complex topic, with no diagram, and then continue on his merry way. Huh? I guess my one semester of physics in college didn't quite prepare me for that.

He did include a good quote from Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

On Paradise Drive, by David Brooks

2005-11-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

I laughed more while reading his Bobos in Paradise, but this was good too. Lots of funny social commentary.

I guess me and my family are "Crunchy Cons" (Crunchy=progressive/environmentalist/non-conformist, Cons=conservatives). "Crunchy Cons -- the pro-life vegetarian high-church Catholics who can their own preserves, care too much about zucchini, home-school their kids, and read Edmund Burke while wearing Swedish clogs."

Interesting observation about our endless quest for self-actualization... it's a lot of weight to bear. In the end it's self-defeating. "It means that the central question of life is not 'What does God command and love?' but rather 'What is my destiny and fulfillment?' It is not our duty to humbly obey God's law and submit to the universal order. It is our duty to create and explore our self, to realize our own inner light. It is up to each of us to justify our own existence."

Taking up Christ's yoke sounds like a better plan to me.

The Incredible Walk (CD)

2005-10-30T20:16:00.000-08:00

By Phanatik

Loved this Christian rap CD. Has some great rhymes and catchy beats... Phanatik delivers the goods with energy.

From "Me?"
"I'm not gonna to stand here so I can pitch me,
so you can pick me
like I got what you need
if you prick me I'll bleed
Nah, it's gotta be God."

Whose Bible Is It?

2005-10-30T20:10:00.000-08:00

By Jaroslav Pelican -- lots of recap interspersed with some interesting tidbits.

I find this observation very true:
"...our own age seems especially vulnerable to an aestheticism... that finds the ultimate mystery of transcendence, "the mystery that awes and fascinates," in the beauty of art and music, which have the magical capacity to transport us into an otherworldly realm wihtout at the same time calling us to account for our sins in the presence of the holy God and righteous Judge of all mankind."

Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy

2005-10-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

This was possibly the best book I've read all year, maybe excepting A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe. The full title is Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

It's a tale of a future United States, in which left and right have crystallized into their most strident and extreme forms. The only doctors remaining are psychiatrists, who treat liberals for nervous disorders, and proctologists, who treat conservatives for large bowel complaints. The liberals stand mainly for euthanasia, abortion, etc. The conservatives on the other hand are extremely patriotic and hold an annual pro-am golf tournament in honor of "Jesus Christ: the greatest pro of them all."

Society meanwhile has crumbled, grass growing on the interstate. Into this comes a psychiatrist, Dr. Tom More. He has invented a device which can scientifically detect the state of a person's psyche and even restore it to wholeness. Chaos ensues when a foundation grant representative (who may be the devil incarnate) gets hold of his device.

There's a great quote at the beginning of the book. There are lots of other funny and profound parts, but they're mainly in the dialogue and I don't want to type them all in.

"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good."