false 6 297 274 true 5904607 read 2 true 4800655 currently-reading 21 true 4800654 to-read 0 false 4804012 scifi 0 false 4804009 history http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77840992 to: Roscoe (Paperback) by William Kennedy
Inevitably, this classically American novel ends up on a gambling riverboat. The Hudson, the Mississippi, the best metaphor for America is always the floating opera, inhabited by earnest tricksters. And by ironically honest folks, who wish the world would operate the way it should so they wouldn't have to game it.

Among scant others, William Kennedy brings the Rustbelt back to our literary realities, which seem always to be out West or down South. No matter how many authors might have been born and raised here upstate of Manhattan in New York. Ginsberb, Carol-Oates, there've been a few who render forward our gritty past. Even Tim Russert might qualify as a real-life denizen in one of Kennedy's novels, although he would seem too improbably good.

But it's Mark Twain and his riverboats that I'm reminded of mostly. He was also from these parts, claimed by Elmira New York with as much validity as by anywhere else.

Roscoe describes the world leading up to and around the lost innocence of the Bomb. Machine politics, rum running, cock fighting, boozing and womanizing among people who seem to wish it didn't have to be that way. But it did and so they tried to forgive themselves. Twain without the twinkle.

They managed to carry on despite failed loves, lost lives and buried reputations. Nothing comes out clean in the end, where the Bomb is never so present as by its omission.

We might pay attention once again to who we were back then and so very close to home. We might wonder how easily still our votes get bought or sold, and our consciences tricked. And we might question how sure we are that we are the first ones to lead conscious lives in the shadow of imminent destruction.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77631161 to: Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang (Hardcover) by Michael Saso
Looks like another book no-one else has read. But I did study with Michael Saso way back in the day. He went over to Taiwan a Jesuit, and came back a Taoist, which as I recall disqualified him from any wild dreams of a Professorship at Yale. I think there was some trouble trusting his "objectivity". Who knows, maybe he just wasn't smart enough, although he seemed pretty darned smart to me. Or maybe just not scholarly enough, which could be taken as a high compliment, especially considering the uses and abuses made of terms like Jesuitical. In any case, there was something very real in what he did relate about the inner workings of Taoism, of the sort more aligned with folk traditions, rather than the literary sort aligned with scholarship.

I never could quite believe in fantastical Jesus either, and so it should be no surprise that I couldn't enter in to the wonders of Taoist understanding. Or maybe I have in a quiet way having nothing to do with visible magic. I know that what Professor Saso (for so he was called that year) related to me was manifestly real and true. I traveled over to Taiwan myself, to inspect the temple he wrote about, but only learned to drink there. With newspaper writers who were allowed to know but never to speak the truth. Which was a different kind of occult teaching I have never quite forgotten.

So, you should read this book too, if you can find it. It leads the way to a kind of knowing beyond scholarship which is still as true as what those newspapermen knew which wasn't allowed to be any part of the official understandings. Not magic, exactly. Just what can be gotten at when you let go of too much understanding. The world could use a little more of that right now. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77185237 to: Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (Chinese Literature in Translation) by Karl S. Y. Kao
Amazing! This is the only published book to which I myself have ever made an actual contribution - who knew Goodreads was so complete! I worked on my translations while living on my sailboat back in maybe 1983. As I recall, these stories are written as though to convince their readers of their essential truth. You know, kind of the way you tell your friends things you know they'll never believe, but which really are really true. So you exaggerate a little to make your case, and a narrative forms itself to frame your story, and to make the telling that much more seeming real.

Back when I was a student of such things, we studied these tales for their structural features, and along the way toward understanding how all truths are constructed. All narratives must become a kind of fiction, or so we thought we knew. But they were still fun to read, these tales of the supernatural and fantastic. And you had to ponder the cosmos from which they descended.

And I still do wonder now which narratives are to be believed, and by which to be simply entertained. As we story tellers make our choices about which things to foreground, and which to leave alone, is there a way in the end to tell the truth from fiction? Maybe not, although I'll always trust an earnest teller, ironically enough. Holding back my skeptical heart for so long as the story's good. And often keeping my bubble popping needles to myself. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76338137 to: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (Hardcover) by William Kamkwamba
I haven't had much time to read lately - this book was a gift, in every possible sense.

Here is the first person story of a boy who had to learn how to build his electricity generating windmill by re-inventing each principle along the way toward its construction. Of course, he couldn't have done it without books to demonstrate the possibility and to provide hints for his experimentation. He couldn't have written this book either without his partner who coaxed the author's own voice to the written page.

But for the rest of us who take our understandings as grants already fully processed, and only assume that we understand what we really take on trust, here is someone who created his understandings pretty much from scratch, despite being told that he couldn't or shouldn't. We have never proven even to ourselves what we think we understand. We might be able to pass an academic test, but we can use what we say we know to change our world?

This is a truly humbling story. What then are we waiting for? Why do we let our schools destroy genius when there are so many who are starving for their resources. Why do we persist to measure what students don't know? Why do we sift out, instead of embracing in?

What William Kamkwamba has done is to demonstrate for the rest of us where true genius must always be engendered. His started in a kind of refusal to be told what is true, whether by poverty or poor scores to prevent schooling, by famine to prevent basic living, by corrupt and ignorant government to prevent basic security, or by the collective magic every one else still lived by. Here is a person who always insisted on discovering his own limitations for himself against truly staggering odds. We'd have given up at boo.

And he truly does believe and makes the reader believe as well, that what he did for his own village can be done for all of Africa. Bring light to the night, water to the fields, sanitation to the living, strong upright sanity to where magical thinking invites corruption. But more than that, he provides his example for what we might do if we also were to ignore the certainties which represent our own powers that be. If we were to overcome our own beliefs in corrupting magic.

We also must unlearn as much as William had to unlearn before we will release our own still hidden genius. Let's not be too sure of the certainties which have been granted us.

I doubt any of us understand anything as well as William understands what he does. And what he understands is not the mechanisms which he realizes, so much as the prior impulse which got "magically" engendered in him by a loving family and community, but also and mostly by William loving himself. Forgiving himself. Being himself. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2597392 Michael's review of Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny

finally, our readings cross paths. You read like a fish swims - I have to surface for long intervals. But I read lots of Zelazny way back when I was younger than you, and thought he was about the best. Try more! ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71582372 to: The God Delusion (Hardcover) by Richard Dawkins
The Trouble with God Delusion

Richard Dawkins' book excites the ire of religionists everywhere, as it was expected to do if it couldn't convert them. But the surprising thing to me is that it seems that there are no religionists who take it as a handbook to guide their own improved fitness for survival. The world is so overwhelmed by a kind of fascination with the tangibles that there must be a pretty wide opening for someone to make a good case for the intangibles again.

But for so long as there is always new reliably real stuff to uncover, and especially for so long as there is new hope that man's power will be ever improving, the religionists haven't got a prayer. Unless they're just drunk on their power too.

The trouble with God delusion, when it places its faith on such demonstrably idiotic things as Creation "Science" or the factual truth of Jesus' life, or making the Bible into some kind of literal Word - handbook for living even - is that it so clearly is delusional.

There's nothing in Dawkins' book to be disputed - any reasonable man, and presumably this must include some religionists, has to agree with everything that Dawkins has to say. But you don't have to agree with any of his conclusions. Come on, here's a guy who wants to explain falling in love in terms of evolutionary science for crying out loud. Here I thought it was yet another stupid Western invention, and he's calling it natural!

Ultimately, his is a straw dog argument. He props up the God only a delusional (or infantile, as he makes that case too) person would have faith in. God the father. God the creator. The God who can be addressed by pronouns, like Him or still more idiotically Her, only slightly removed from the bearded skyman. This is religion perverted for human purposes, not religion as connection to something beyond knowledge which might still have survival value.

For many of us there is still "god" in falling in love, which as Dawkins makes sure to point out is at the very least as delusional as believing that Jesus is real . Sure, you can believe that it's all about the hormones, and you can even decide to just enjoy the delusion of it since it makes life so much more pleasant. There may even be inspiration in the Bible, though who could ever know since its thumpers create of its words such hateful inhumanity.

Your counterpart's gonna know if you don't quite mean it.

I find nothing, absolutely nothing, in Dawkins' book which threatens God as I mean the term: The name for what can't be named, beyond the pale, eternally, of human understanding. No, I'll go further, beyond the pale of any understanding. Mine is an aspirational God, but as real for that as someone else's delusional constructed God.

Ultimately, the irony (which is something religionists could stand to learn about) of this book is that it props up Man as God's usurper on the idiotic assumption that ultimately everything maybe can be understood. I think Dawkins is a godist from the 'wrong' direction since isn't man-the-understander ultimately god-like in the complexity of his designs? Maybe science is just religion going backwards.

Man as we know him is a patently lousy designer when compared to natural complexity. The flaw in intelligent design arguments is that intelligence doesn't even come close to being able to solve the problems "solved" by unintelligent evolution. The argument by design should be turned on its head already, since a fancy watch or a 747 is that much less complex and interesting that anything from nature. You know artifice by its deficiencies, not by its cleverness.

There aren't any problems for nature to solve in the first place. There is no intention to evolution. It's just a dialogic interplay of figure with ground in some direction which we can only know with certainty will remain forever beyond any one of us, and likely all of us collectively because, well, nothing lasts forever. And it might go in reverse just as well as forward, making it a toss up whether God is at the end or the beginning.

But a pretty certain way to ensure that the end is nearer than we'd like to think is to take over that direction, by design. Like we can fly this spaceship earth!? Human design - human technology - solves problems for human survival. That's why it's anti-nature, and for that matter, anti-evolutionary. It gives mankind "unfair" advantage, and turns us into the scourge that we have become, up against the very ground of our existence, "Mother" earth.

I'd say there's nothing wrong with God as shorthand for what we cannot and will not ever know or understand. Dawkins is utterly and absolutely correct when he complains that God in this usage can never stand in for what we can and should and must know as our consciousness expands or raises or whatever it must, naturally, do.

But it isn't very clever of us to allow our designs to destroy our ground. I shall never be inclined to favor a faith-based answer to one which can demonstrably be proven. But sometimes, as with the old religious water systems of Borneo, what looks like faith and superstition is a kind of connection with something beyond articulate understanding which however simply works as an organizing principle (they've fixed that water system now, with good ol' Western knowhow). Rather like patriotism, I'm sure, or brand loyalty. It saves thinking things through every time. It becomes a shorthand for what someone, once, somewhere actually did know.

Well, just like science whose knowers are all spread out in time and space and have to be, um, trusted, perhaps religion also can compile collective wisdom which is beyond the grasp of conscious intentional understanding. Except when it's interfered with by human power brokers, which is the problem Dawkins should have focused on. Well, actually it is the problem he was focusing on, except he kind of threw out the baby with the bathwater.

And if it seems that I have emptied the Term for god of all meaning, well that's just fine with me. That term, God, should never have been voiced in the first place. I prefer the dialogic Tao which slips from both personification and meaning. And there are ways of knowing which don't entail control as proof of knowing.

Dawkins mocks "dualists" who believe mind can be separated from body. Yet he apparently might believe that the mind is like software running on its hardware substrate. He invokes digital technologies to describe memes, which endure unlike analogic transcriptions. Well, I don't buy the software/hardware divide any more than I do the immortal soul apart from body. It's all one to me, man.

The religionists should get a clue. And Dawkins should stop creating man in straw dog god's image. There's no art to that at all. It's only virtual reality can be designed, by God or Man. Reality is a conspiracy!
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/68721715 to: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Paperback) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/196938-where-from-here Rick made a comment on Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:

I recently finished re-reading Consilience, taking the book with me for a week long retreat to a friend's private lonely island up north in Canada. I could and did punctuate my read with chill swims, or let the goofy loons punctuate it for me.

I drank the book in completely in this perfect context for it, often walking out in the dark silence to find my world overwritten by meteors with trails. I still find it a wonderful read, especially for a liberal like me. I'm not really allowed to like this retro modernistic careless of political correctness dude.

His is such an earnest statement of belief in the power of rationality; of mankind's proper questing toward ever better understandings of the perceptual reality that's "out there" apart from our subjective conceptualizations of it which must be trued by ever more precise readings. Even those in-mind conceptualizations shall be unpacked, according to Wilson, as we inevitably decode their ultimately physical underpinnings. This book brings us to the brink of what must be the next phase for life; conscious evolution.

I think, rather, not.

Our problem is to achieve an understanding of just how implicated mind is with matter, and how impossible, therefore, our conscious evolution truly is. Bootstrapping is a metaphor for how our prosthetic technological extensions get fired up. It won't work in actual living fact.

What Wilson actually misses, and what his non-sequitur post-modernist lazy-head straw dogs ironically sense, is that our true choices are only ever responses to what our environment, our context, holds in store.

(I have to agree with Wilson that post-modernists' sense of themselves (ourselves?), through their convoluted academically self-referential tangled prose, can only be taken ironically and not quite seriously)

Wilson agrees we've fouled our nest. We're not nearly ready to choose our destiny, nor extract life's figure from it's ground. Ever earnest, he pleads for common sense.

I plead for a re-reading of the record thus far. Our assumption that the divide between "humanities" and "physics" is a matter for time's resolution in favor of perfect physical understanding leaves us only with the power to destroy; metaphorically by nuclear chain reactions.

The divide has already been resolved, I'd say, in equal favor, simply, of that which can't be measured. The "felt" understandings which Wilson can't help dismissing as all Christians do; lowly and vaguely dangerous emotions, trustworthy only in Christ's true light and otherwise the playground of the devil.

Emotions, still, are what make us human, especially when combined with those prosthetic powers granted by technologies descended from science. Emotions are prior to and determinant of how and what we touch. For an engineering type, I'd say Wilson goes way farther than most of his scientific colleagues do toward admitting the critical importance of emotions. Still, as with all feminine direction, he assumes - no he presumes - that these too will be "explained" as part of physical reality "out there" even when "out there" is a process in our brain/body continuum.

The stage Wilson sets so admirably for a "Consilience" of art and science - of all knowledge - will be peopled by truer humans than we have become thus far. Evolved not consciously by manipulations of our gene pool, but rather, deliberately, by readings from the heart.

Consciousness is an epiphenomenon not of evolution (it's not "epigenetic"), but of culture, as properly defined throughout this book. We, the people, are the carriers of our written and spoken words and crafted artifacts. Our hearts cannot be decoded simply because they cannot be isolated. They don't end with our brain. They implicate all of humanity. And that's the way it is. There is no end to brain's plumbing once writing got invented. Sorry dude. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/68324805 to: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Paperback) by Bill Bryson
I took this book with me to a little island up north in Canada, which I had the luxury and privilege to occupy for an entire week (well, I had to help replace the roof, but that was good for me). Bill Bryson is in his element, much as Tom Friedman is in his, journalist to the deep thinkers; our correspondent at the fringes. I feel that I'm belittling Bryson with that comparison, since, unlike Friedman, Bryson seems to have no investment in any statuses; quo, ante, post. He resurrects his own fascination with not a subject, but an entire set of subjects, which were destroyed for him as they were for so many of us, by being diced up and normalized by the education industry. His is the anti-textbook. By it's end, the reader has gained an immeasurably enriched understanding of just what's going on with understanding as the humankind-wide effort that it really always has to be. And at that brink you realize - you, the reader - that our challenges are all about how we will or will not learn to resolve our differences, with each other and with the planet. And these are not technical challenges. Which is why we should be so grateful for such clear reporting from our fringes. Bravo! ]]>