Monday, December 27, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Apples, tulips, marijuana, potatoes. Sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control. Really interesting from beginning to end... Pollan's concept is slightly too poppy for my taste, particularly in that he frames the book with an existential premise - that plants are using us as much as we are them to further their species - that isn't really possible to be treated in a scholarly way and that essentially is just ignored in favor of historical - and occasionally snarky contemporary - anecdotes about the agricultural development of these few modern plants. Still, I'll very highly recommend this one.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Surprisingly good. The same electricity as before works even better when he focuses it on a realistic coming of age tale. Can't wait to see what he does next.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
Several of these are transcendent. So, I can forgive several more for being clever but boring. David Foster Wallace's voice, not the voice that emanates from his text, but his actual voice (I listened to this on CD), surprised me. Questioning, soft, slightly hypnotic. Hearing Himself read "Forever Overhead" and several others was quite moving.
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl
OK, but it falls well below Comfort me With Apples and Tender at the Bone. In this third memoir, Reichl includes her original published restaurant reviews at the ends of chapters about their conception, often with a great deal of repetition between the two. Too much padding.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
Kind of an insignificant (and certainly redundant) book in the scope of Dawkins' output, but a fun read. For the following quote, the context is that Dawkins is arguing that wasps are "easy to fool" and that then, it is entirely plausible that in certain orchids that closely resemble female wasps in shape and odor, the orchids evolved this resemblance gradually, with a corresponding gradually increasing effectiveness on the foolish wasps. This is in response to a correspondence with a former atheist/current minister who was awed by the wasp/orchid relationship to the extent that he couldn't believe that it could be effective in any state but its currently complex and perfect state, and that therefore, it must be the hand of God. Dawkins of course chides the man for being arrogant jumping to such a conclusion (that evolution is false, that there is a God) without considering that he knows nothing wasps or orchids, or attempting to think about this...
In any case, the concept of animal as automaton here is what interests me and why I'm quoting this experiment.
"The female digger wasp returns to her burrow carrying her stung and paralyzed prey. She leaves it outside the burrow while she enters, apparently to check that all is well before she reappears to drag the prey in. While she is in the burrow, the experimenter moves the prey a few inches away from where she left it. When the wasp resurfaces, she notices the loss and quickly relocates the prey. She then drags it back to the burrow entrance. Only a few seconds have passed since she inspected the inside of the burrow. We think that there is really no good reason why she should not proceed to the next stage in her routine, drag the prey inside and be done with it. But her program has been reset to an earlier stage. She dutifully leaves the prey outside the burrow again and goes inside for yet another inspection. The experimenter may repeat this charade forty times, until he gets bored. The wasp behaves like a washing machine that has been set back to an early stage in its program and doesn't "know" that it has already washed those clothes forty times without a break. The distinguished computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter has adopted a new adjective, "sphexish," to label such inflexible, mindless automatism." (66-7)
Aging:
"The Huntington's chorea gene is a particularly clear example of a lethal gene. There are lots of genes that are not in themselves lethal but nevertheless have effects that increase the probability of dying from some other cause and are called sublethal. Once again, their time of switching on may be influenced by modifier genes and therefore postponed or accelerated by natural selection. Medawar realized that the debilities of old age might represent an accumulation of lethal and sublethal genetic effects that had been pushed later and later in the life cycle and allowed to slip through the reproductive net into future generations simply because they were late-acting.
...
...everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors all of whom were at some time in their lives young but many of whom were never old. So we inherit whatever it takes to be young, but not necessarily whatever it takes to be old. We tend to inherit genes for dying a long time after we're born, but not for dying a short time after we're born." (129, 131)
In any case, the concept of animal as automaton here is what interests me and why I'm quoting this experiment.
"The female digger wasp returns to her burrow carrying her stung and paralyzed prey. She leaves it outside the burrow while she enters, apparently to check that all is well before she reappears to drag the prey in. While she is in the burrow, the experimenter moves the prey a few inches away from where she left it. When the wasp resurfaces, she notices the loss and quickly relocates the prey. She then drags it back to the burrow entrance. Only a few seconds have passed since she inspected the inside of the burrow. We think that there is really no good reason why she should not proceed to the next stage in her routine, drag the prey inside and be done with it. But her program has been reset to an earlier stage. She dutifully leaves the prey outside the burrow again and goes inside for yet another inspection. The experimenter may repeat this charade forty times, until he gets bored. The wasp behaves like a washing machine that has been set back to an early stage in its program and doesn't "know" that it has already washed those clothes forty times without a break. The distinguished computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter has adopted a new adjective, "sphexish," to label such inflexible, mindless automatism." (66-7)
Aging:
"The Huntington's chorea gene is a particularly clear example of a lethal gene. There are lots of genes that are not in themselves lethal but nevertheless have effects that increase the probability of dying from some other cause and are called sublethal. Once again, their time of switching on may be influenced by modifier genes and therefore postponed or accelerated by natural selection. Medawar realized that the debilities of old age might represent an accumulation of lethal and sublethal genetic effects that had been pushed later and later in the life cycle and allowed to slip through the reproductive net into future generations simply because they were late-acting.
...
...everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors all of whom were at some time in their lives young but many of whom were never old. So we inherit whatever it takes to be young, but not necessarily whatever it takes to be old. We tend to inherit genes for dying a long time after we're born, but not for dying a short time after we're born." (129, 131)
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
"That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single, point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True." (206-7)
Hard to quote anything from DFW's prose, it usually being mad pattering dialogue or else prolonged stretches of hilarious pretentiousness. In stonerspeak. Not to mention that it's hard to extract anything that makes any sense when the context is constantly shifting. But rays of heart break through once in awhile, which is one of the reasons I'm such a fan.
The Broom of the System was a much breezier read than Infinite Jest, though even here he pulls out all the technical stops that he develops even further in IJ (though thankfully there are no footnotes/footnotes of footnotes/footnotes of footnotes' footnotes here). Some of the themes are the same too: a big time substance abusing prodigy (LaVache Beadsman - Hal Incandenza and co.), constant misunderstanding and characters who talk over one another, an ominous technology (Stonecipheco's pineal extract baby food - the Entertainment), the giant man-made wasteland (the Great Ohio Desert - the Great Concavity). Disfigurement, sexual frustration, dreams and stories, a backdrop of minor and shadow figures who eventually intertwine.
Funnier than IJ, and lacking that book's overwhelming depth and dread.
Hard to quote anything from DFW's prose, it usually being mad pattering dialogue or else prolonged stretches of hilarious pretentiousness. In stonerspeak. Not to mention that it's hard to extract anything that makes any sense when the context is constantly shifting. But rays of heart break through once in awhile, which is one of the reasons I'm such a fan.
The Broom of the System was a much breezier read than Infinite Jest, though even here he pulls out all the technical stops that he develops even further in IJ (though thankfully there are no footnotes/footnotes of footnotes/footnotes of footnotes' footnotes here). Some of the themes are the same too: a big time substance abusing prodigy (LaVache Beadsman - Hal Incandenza and co.), constant misunderstanding and characters who talk over one another, an ominous technology (Stonecipheco's pineal extract baby food - the Entertainment), the giant man-made wasteland (the Great Ohio Desert - the Great Concavity). Disfigurement, sexual frustration, dreams and stories, a backdrop of minor and shadow figures who eventually intertwine.
Funnier than IJ, and lacking that book's overwhelming depth and dread.
Friday, January 1, 2010
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
"The horses were already moving. He took the first one that broke and rolled his loop and forefooted the colt and it hit the ground with a tremendous thump. The other horses flared and bunched and looked back wildly. Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world. They did not smell like horses. They smelled like what they were, wild animals. He held the horse's face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse's eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animal's eyes and stroking the terror out." (103-4)
"...he said that he ahd seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were." (111)
"He half wondered if he were not dead and in his despair he felt well up in him a surge of sorrow like a child beginning to cry but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath." (203)
"...it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily." (235)
"He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. ...he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead." (301)
"...he said that he ahd seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were." (111)
"He half wondered if he were not dead and in his despair he felt well up in him a surge of sorrow like a child beginning to cry but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath." (203)
"...it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily." (235)
"He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. ...he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead." (301)
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning by Christian de Duve
An overview of all of life evolution, from the basic "chemical germs of life [that] are banal products of space chemistry" (p. 48), through protein chemistry and an RNA world, to the development of archaic bacteria, eukaryotes and pluricellular organisms. Plausible explanations of each step are given by a Nobel Prize winning cytologist who argues that the formation of life, at least on the cellular level, was inevitable and probably quick to occur. Continued with a discussion of the rise of consciousness and humanness, and a look into the future of genetic engineering, evolution, life, and the meaning of it all.
de Duve, who began life as a Catholic, worked for many years at a Catholic university, and only expresses his personal feelings about religion for the first time in this book written in his late 70s, refuses to identify as an agnostic ("a comfortable way of evading the issue") or an atheist ("yet, I am unable to subscribe to the notion of an anthropomorphic God" [303]), and instead leans towards what he calls an "Ultimate Reality", the unifying hidden truths behind appearances, to which the human mind yearns and catches glimpses of through our sciences, arts, spirituality, and philosophy, and which glimpses of meaning offer incentive for a continued striving, eventually using acquired technologies to "enhance all our mental faculties simultaneously and harmoniously" (264), to attain understanding.
He argues with a pragmatism and wisdom that's refreshingly free of self-righteousness and sarcasm, and of demeaning post-modern ideologies. For example, his take on the position of Homo sapiens in the natural world:
"For ... early disciples of Darwin, imbued as they were with Victorian triumphalism, [the tree of life] rose majestically towards a summit that nobody doubted was dominated by humankind, the uncontested master of creation.
Today, the point of view has changed. It has become politically correct to put the emphasis on the canopy of the tree and the millions of terminal twigs that compose it. The human species, it is pointed out, is no more than one of those twigs, on par with plague bacilli, amoebae, orchids, scorpions, baboons... Like the others, the human twig is the outcome of some four billion years of evolution, the result of thousands of accidental mutations...
Calling on science to denigrate the human species is part of the so-called deconstructionist, post-modernist trend, which blends science, philosophy, sociology, and politics into an ideological mixture inspired by a negativistic, relativistic vision of knowledge, which goes so far as to deny the very existence of objective reality... the image proposed for the tree of life is a perversion of the scientific facts on which it is allegedly based. ...
The tree of life manifestly grows in two directions, vertically toward complexity and horizontally toward diversity. ... It is obvious that the human twig occupies [the] top, at least if the brain is adopted as the criterion of complexity... [which is] no reason for bragging. All we know of the history of life makes it likely that our eminent position is only temporary. ... Astronomers tell us that Earth should be able to sustain life for at least 1.5 billion years, possibly up to 5.0 billion years. ... There is plenty of time for a more promising vertical line to start from another twig while our own withers." (186-88).
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater:
"Nature has no moral sense. It knows only the blind law of natural selection, which it applies with utter impartiality to all living species. Our grandeur (if not too grand a word) and our responsibility lie precisely in our power to oppose nature and, if desirable, direct it.
Moral laws are not absolute; they are made by humans to regulate societies; they evolve. Today, in particular, humankind is faced with a host of ethical problems that were unthinkable only a short while ago. These problems can only be solved collectively and consensually, not by authoritarian decisions allegedly ordered by God or imposed by a deified nature.
Recognizing this fact does not invalidate the teachings of the past. It is legitimate today to consider oneself a disciple of, say, Moses, Christ, Confucius, Buddha, or Mohammed, provided this allegiance is not linked with intolerant, proselytizing, and domineering dogmatism. Ethics has its great masters, as do science, literature, art, and philosophy. To follow these masters is in no way demeaning.
Religions should not be abandoned; they should rid themselves of mythical beliefs, irrational pronouncements, obscurantist teachings, magic rituals, claims to superior legitimacy, moral blackmail, not to mention appeals to violence. Cleansed of all these trappings, but with sacredness left, they should be supported and safeguarded, to help us contemplate mystery, respect ethical precepts, celebrate festivities, share joys and sorrows, bear hardships." (p. 306-7)
de Duve, who began life as a Catholic, worked for many years at a Catholic university, and only expresses his personal feelings about religion for the first time in this book written in his late 70s, refuses to identify as an agnostic ("a comfortable way of evading the issue") or an atheist ("yet, I am unable to subscribe to the notion of an anthropomorphic God" [303]), and instead leans towards what he calls an "Ultimate Reality", the unifying hidden truths behind appearances, to which the human mind yearns and catches glimpses of through our sciences, arts, spirituality, and philosophy, and which glimpses of meaning offer incentive for a continued striving, eventually using acquired technologies to "enhance all our mental faculties simultaneously and harmoniously" (264), to attain understanding.
He argues with a pragmatism and wisdom that's refreshingly free of self-righteousness and sarcasm, and of demeaning post-modern ideologies. For example, his take on the position of Homo sapiens in the natural world:
"For ... early disciples of Darwin, imbued as they were with Victorian triumphalism, [the tree of life] rose majestically towards a summit that nobody doubted was dominated by humankind, the uncontested master of creation.
Today, the point of view has changed. It has become politically correct to put the emphasis on the canopy of the tree and the millions of terminal twigs that compose it. The human species, it is pointed out, is no more than one of those twigs, on par with plague bacilli, amoebae, orchids, scorpions, baboons... Like the others, the human twig is the outcome of some four billion years of evolution, the result of thousands of accidental mutations...
Calling on science to denigrate the human species is part of the so-called deconstructionist, post-modernist trend, which blends science, philosophy, sociology, and politics into an ideological mixture inspired by a negativistic, relativistic vision of knowledge, which goes so far as to deny the very existence of objective reality... the image proposed for the tree of life is a perversion of the scientific facts on which it is allegedly based. ...
The tree of life manifestly grows in two directions, vertically toward complexity and horizontally toward diversity. ... It is obvious that the human twig occupies [the] top, at least if the brain is adopted as the criterion of complexity... [which is] no reason for bragging. All we know of the history of life makes it likely that our eminent position is only temporary. ... Astronomers tell us that Earth should be able to sustain life for at least 1.5 billion years, possibly up to 5.0 billion years. ... There is plenty of time for a more promising vertical line to start from another twig while our own withers." (186-88).
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater:
"Nature has no moral sense. It knows only the blind law of natural selection, which it applies with utter impartiality to all living species. Our grandeur (if not too grand a word) and our responsibility lie precisely in our power to oppose nature and, if desirable, direct it.
Moral laws are not absolute; they are made by humans to regulate societies; they evolve. Today, in particular, humankind is faced with a host of ethical problems that were unthinkable only a short while ago. These problems can only be solved collectively and consensually, not by authoritarian decisions allegedly ordered by God or imposed by a deified nature.
Recognizing this fact does not invalidate the teachings of the past. It is legitimate today to consider oneself a disciple of, say, Moses, Christ, Confucius, Buddha, or Mohammed, provided this allegiance is not linked with intolerant, proselytizing, and domineering dogmatism. Ethics has its great masters, as do science, literature, art, and philosophy. To follow these masters is in no way demeaning.
Religions should not be abandoned; they should rid themselves of mythical beliefs, irrational pronouncements, obscurantist teachings, magic rituals, claims to superior legitimacy, moral blackmail, not to mention appeals to violence. Cleansed of all these trappings, but with sacredness left, they should be supported and safeguarded, to help us contemplate mystery, respect ethical precepts, celebrate festivities, share joys and sorrows, bear hardships." (p. 306-7)
The Mill on The Floss by George Eliot
George Eliot tells it the way it was and the way it is. Her characters are multifaceted and flawed, and 150 years later I still vibrate with the psychologies she explores. Her period is one the brink of the modern world, where people struggle to make sense of the new demands of a complicated, but sometimes impersonal, future, against the sometimes happy, but often tragic, ignorance of the provincial past.
The most touching part of The Mill on the Floss for me is the depiction of Maggie's and Tom's childhood at the beginning, which is effortlessness and without any cloying Victorian sentimentality.
Tom comes home for the Christmas holiday:
"...the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlour at home as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge, the happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses and the smiles of that familiar hearth where the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were "first ideas" that it was no more possible to criticize than the solidity and extension of matter. There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute -- or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things, if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid." (p. 164)
Dormant feelings awoken by sensory input that is familiar from our childhood, the endlessly poignant development of these themes in our memories and present lives, see Proust.
"...remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision." (523)
The most touching part of The Mill on the Floss for me is the depiction of Maggie's and Tom's childhood at the beginning, which is effortlessness and without any cloying Victorian sentimentality.
Tom comes home for the Christmas holiday:
"...the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlour at home as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge, the happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses and the smiles of that familiar hearth where the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were "first ideas" that it was no more possible to criticize than the solidity and extension of matter. There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute -- or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things, if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid." (p. 164)
Dormant feelings awoken by sensory input that is familiar from our childhood, the endlessly poignant development of these themes in our memories and present lives, see Proust.
"...remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision." (523)
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