Richard Wu

Richard Wu has completed the 2019 Reading Challenge Richard Wu has completed their goal of reading 5 books for the 2019 Reading Challenge! 6 of 5 (120%) Create your own 2019 Reading Challenge »
Mar 09, 2019 10:47PM · 2 likes · like · view books
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys by James Fadiman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Member A suggested the possibility of "awareness kits" to go with special programs about botany and other areas of science… Member D suggested the example of a program on a rose, perhaps looking at it from the standpoints of a botanist, a biologist, ...more
Mar 09, 2019 10:40PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book liked it Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It's frankly amazing that Fernando Pessoa, the most alienated individual in the history of the human race, found life so joyous relative to whatever the aether had had in store for him that he, in less than fifty years! crawled all its twenty thousan ...more
Feb 23, 2019 11:50PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Trip by Tao Lin. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Trip by Tao Lin <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu liked that Richard Wu has completed the 2019 Reading Challenge Richard Wu has completed their goal of reading 5 books for the 2019 Reading Challenge! 6 of 5 (120%) Create your own 2019 Reading Challenge »
Feb 23, 2019 01:39PM
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I believe this is my second Pollan book, the first being, if memory serves, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I must've read while undergoing in high school what one might call a "nutritional awakening." I remember that book being positively soporific, o ...more
Feb 21, 2019 07:20PM · 5 likes · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine of Hippo	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
One may praise Augustine's genius for producing the first clear-cut instance of autobiography in Western literature and/or trace the genealogical prerequisites for his innovation so as to materialize the "divine spark" to which many attribute its (an ...more
Feb 15, 2019 09:28PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Ayelet Waldman insists you know how fast her fingernails grow in this monthlong microdosing journal cum tell-all. She's a neurotic Jewish upper-middle class mother of four and the perfect candidate to persuade you, a good obedient liberal NPR-listeni ...more
Feb 13, 2019 03:55PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Richard Wu has completed the 2019 Reading Challenge

Richard Wu has completed their goal of reading 5 books for the 2019 Reading Challenge!

6 of 5 (120%)

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Richard Wu rated a book really liked it

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys
by James Fadiman

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Member A suggested the possibility of "awareness kits" to go with special programs about botany and other areas of science… Member D suggested the example of a program on a rose, perhaps looking at it from the standpoints of a botanist, a biologist,

Member A suggested the possibility of "awareness kits" to go with special programs about botany and other areas of science… Member D suggested the example of a program on a rose, perhaps looking at it from the standpoints of a botanist, a biologist, a poet, and so on, with the suggested aim of heightening perceptual awareness.
-Ch. 12

"Awareness kit" here encapsulates exactly what, for psychedelics as a general research interest, is Fadiman's book. It begins with a guide on good tripsitting whose advice has obviously been culled from thousands of sessions over decades of practice. Next, Alan Watts imports a host of concepts to outline the general texture of psychedelic experience. A pastiche of trip reports from pioneering psychonauts follows, tailed by various encyclopedic entries on:

- Psychotherapeutic applications
- Proactive prevention of bad trips
- Exorcising misinformation from false rumors and scare tactics
- Post-therapy longitudinal survey data
- Case studies on problem solving and creativity (both for groups and individuals)
- Criminalization of psychedelics and its impact on research(ers)
- Microdosing
- Fadiman's life trajectory
- Usage intentions by education, age, gender

Etc.

Fadiman's purpose in collecting, collating, curating all this info? Picture a miracle cure for the whole gamut of mental disorders which just so doubles as a cognitive lubricant for the already healthy, and you have the sort of panacea he conceives 5-HT2A agonists to be. Mightn't you, a deeply altruistic sapient concerned for the betterment of your kind, think it worth eulogizing this unfairly banned molecular band? Knowing entrenched interests impede its liberation but not perhaps how best to unlock their perceptive doors, you fashion keys in manifold shapes, chain them, launch them into mindspace capsule-like in hopes one of them or some of them will find, in the right hands, the right locks, and lift humanity.

You might be a tad too eager; Fadiman is. Dozens of the book's chiliad hyperlinks are broken, eroding its utility and longevity. Some material, like his episode with Ram Dass in Paris, is needlessly repeated. The empirical side is marred by problems with isolation of independent variables, statistical power, and those endemic to self-reportage according to precoded language. But it's fine. What's good here is good enough to recruit new allies—good enough. ...more

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Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
by Tao Lin (Goodreads Author)

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It's frankly amazing that Fernando Pessoa, the most alienated individual in the history of the human race, found life so joyous relative to whatever the aether had had in store for him that he, in less than fifty years! crawled all its twenty thousan It's frankly amazing that Fernando Pessoa, the most alienated individual in the history of the human race, found life so joyous relative to whatever the aether had had in store for him that he, in less than fifty years! crawled all its twenty thousand leagues to be reborn as a certain Tao Lin in America somewhere. Too bad he had to ransom nearly every heteronym—that is, or was, his poiesis—as reentry fee. I guess sometimes he can still pull it off:

[McKenna's talks] employed a wandering, exploratory form, like the tunnel an ant might create by entering a cube of sand at one point and exiting at another, with the cube representing [his] knowledge on a chosen subject and the tunnel, exiting in a manner seeming inevitably abrupt, being the content of the talk.

About once per book, if Trip is any indication; as the quote above is its only metaphor of merit by many a mile—and the only reason I gave it an extra half-star, rounding the rating to three. The rest of it's a breeze-weak house of straw throughout whose cluttered volume, strewn with apophenic theories pieced from secondhand summaries of sketchy sources, sags a dreary miasma: the laconic exhalation of its sole, scatterbrained squatter. Horrific growths of adverbiage ("note-takingly"; "non sequiturly"), editorial sloth (who/whom mixups), and weeds of diction ("failable"; "littler") stink up the prose like his weed addiction. And then there's Terence McKenna, hovering in the haze like a holy ghost, all beneficence. No mention of his "Meat Locker" episode. It doesn't fit the narrative.

Which is… ?

Lin wants his world to be real; wants, specifically, his world to be the world, wants it bad. But it isn't, and cannot even so-seem, to him, as long as he has the need—evinced through dutiful documentation of momentary minutiae—to convince himself that it is. The thinking goes like this: 'If I can write with such exactitude about, say, the half-second I pressed my thumb to the Edit button on my cell phone's notes app, then surely my observations of the Big Things must be astute as those of the details.' As usual, the psychology is reversed; Lin's obsession with the apparent firmness of language belies an existential paranoia—that the liquid external may slip away before his very senses and wash his memories Lethelike with them. The psychedelics act as abreaction.

And his detachment is a coping mechanism. He seeks solidity, stability, dried flowers, flattened butterflies, phenomena pressed to the page. The more meta he goes, the realer he feels, but the less he is, and to everyone around him also. Trip's first two-thirds are told (versus shown) in first person; in an indifferent tone highly reminiscent, I find, of gamers who prefer piloting their characters—Lin's body here being his—in the third-person camera perspective. Trip's epilogue, which for some reason takes up a whole third of its length, is told in third person. An effective apotheosis of alienation in which Lin becomes akin to the viewer of a Twitch stream, watching someone else play the game of his life. He no longer has agency. He is pleased with this. ...more

Richard Wu liked that Richard Wu has completed the 2019 Reading Challenge

Richard Wu has completed their goal of reading 5 books for the 2019 Reading Challenge!

6 of 5 (120%)

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How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan (Goodreads Author)

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I believe this is my second Pollan book, the first being, if memory serves, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I must've read while undergoing in high school what one might call a "nutritional awakening." I remember that book being positively soporific, o I believe this is my second Pollan book, the first being, if memory serves, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I must've read while undergoing in high school what one might call a "nutritional awakening." I remember that book being positively soporific, of no consequence to my dietary habits, and, as I now know to expect of NYT bestsellers, forgettable. This one's better. Here's the ending:

But this I can say with certainty: the mind is vaster, and the world ever so much more alive, than I knew when I began.

That was a litmus test, by the way; how intrigued you felt on reading it will, in proportion, dictate its truth for your reading of the whole. Personally, my mind was not changed with regards to any claim made herein, nor was my world livened. Which is OK, because it delivered exactly what I'd expected: a thorough history of American psychedelic culture and its major figures, a state-of-the-scene-and-science gloss, and a few trip reports (kudos to Pollan for putting his skin in the game) which convey approximately zilch of the substances' phenomenal texture—not, mind you, because one has to ingest them to grok it, but because he lacks—insofar as what is considered "showing" in sober, journalistic prose amounts, on higher-dimensional experiential planes, to "telling"—sufficient grasp of language's formal properties. Not his fault for tailoring to the TED crowd (or being tapped—by whom? why now?—to evangelize our country's glut of so-sold "educated, skeptical critical thinkers" entheogens), though.

How to Change Your Mind is strongest when in detective mode. Pollan is meticulous. His reputation grants him access not just to leading researchers but also their subjects, who provide colorful, earnest testimony of their trips and subsequent effects. He faithfully regurgitates soundbites from neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychotherapists, weaving them in with paraphrased summaries as context demands. He chases leftover mythical debts from the 60s, as if to assign them their proper and factual weight in history's accounting. Those reading to be informed will not be disappointed.

It is weakest when editorializing. William James, one of my favorites, is cited multiple times with an understanding analogous to that of a New Age crystal cruncher abusing relativity metaphors to further cement unexamined epistemics. More damningly, several interviewees with deep subject matter expertise in, for instance, physics and metaphysics specifically (and heroically) attempt to dissuade Pollan of the thoroughgoing dogmatic materialism through which he subsumes all forms of evidence (in fact that he at all produced this gargantuan work without, after consuming multiple psychedelics, detethering from its original intentions should itself allay purports about their insanitizing aftereffects), proving once again the truth of Murray Gell-Mann's old barb contra journalists and their profession. Naturally one should beware empirical statements coming from someone who, for all his science worship, "earned a D in high school chemistry." Case in point:

Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just happen; countless people have taken psilocybin and continued to smoke. If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory meetings and the integration afterward. (Emphasis mine)

Fatally ironic—for the instance sets precedent for all claims of kin—is Pollan's confidence in a causal mechanism for which the study in question was not testing, had no control, and did not posit. On the whole, I do submit the relation is plausible—but plausible is a long way from factual, and Pollan's presentation here betrays his trigger-happiness for conclusions he has no need of formal standards to endorse (I suspect no quantity of Psilocybes—effective as they may be for PTSD, depression, death anxiety, opioid addiction and suchlike ailments—can cure him of his scientism).

On the prose level, as other reviewers have noted, a dearth of humor pervades. I forgive it this because psychedelics, by virtue of their past, are a touchy topic, and as such a serious, levelheaded sobriety may accelerate their mainstream resurrection. Less so is Pollan's overreliance on terms like "scrim," "abeyance," and "italicize," which, like a maraschino cherry, are clever once but saccharine thrice. Minor quibbles, of course; but even the smallest itch can catalyze a bad trip. Speaking of, let's segue into the one thing I have changed my mind about:

Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt…

If one considers the experience of living to be triplike ("life is but a dream"), or even if not, to write at all is in a way already to sublimate the material and/or phenomenal into the Platonic and/or metaphysical; an abstraction, and thus a reduction, but also, one may propose, a purification or distillation of essence. To eff the ineffable, then, is precisely the miracle of language and literary art, so let the poets do violence, I say, and wring beauty pro tanto; for it is no wonder small or large that theirs are the words in which the psychonaut most readily finds recourse. ...more

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The Confessions of St. Augustine
by Augustine of Hippo

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One may praise Augustine's genius for producing the first clear-cut instance of autobiography in Western literature and/or trace the genealogical prerequisites for his innovation so as to materialize the "divine spark" to which many attribute its (an One may praise Augustine's genius for producing the first clear-cut instance of autobiography in Western literature and/or trace the genealogical prerequisites for his innovation so as to materialize the "divine spark" to which many attribute its (and our ultimate) genesis, but these are in my reckoning detours on its proper reading path (those who on principle deny that such may exist are prime LASIK candidates), namely to discard modern hermeneutics and be yourself the author in his trials.

Be Augustine. See yourself a thief, a lecher, sinner from the first; be held spellbound by a binary cult, drink of its dogma even as you hone the rhetoric that will sever you from their snares—you've begun to question things—but not yet. Now a teacher, travel round and spread your seeds of knowledge—thespian fictions, modes of speech and apologia—while yet they sprout inside you knots anew and thorny tangles; learn of your dear friend's death, then grieve it, suffer deeply. Attend a sermon in your town, befriend the bishop who's to be your mentor in a minute; watch those in higher stations flaunt their all-you've-ever-wanted; burn with envy. Choose lust in lieu of life and light for just a little longer please, but then hallucinate a couple puttis whispering in singsong, "Tolle, lege" twice and chance upon a passage in epistle thus, and thus also salvation; you will know from whence Paul drew his words to Corinth: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Then too your son and mum will die while you remain alive—to do what? Interrogate time to the utmost limits of your mind? Hey…

Men however, whose days are few upon the earth, cannot by the use of their senses find in previous ages and in other nations of which they have no experience the same relations of cause and effect which they observe in times and peoples of which they have experience. (62)

Who am I kidding, y'cant just be Augustine, right? The best you'll do is empathize, but still, it's worth a try.

For you may find that you and he are not so different, that his struggles were, are yours, that his God may too be yours, that you too, can overcome your doubts and renew yourself in faith you never thought you'd have, and wonder how you ever lived before, if what you were doing could even be called that, living… And things start making sense again, or perhaps, as it were, for the first time. Did it not say that all will be revealed? There is no bottom to your gratitude. Cathedrals, frescoes, symphonies across the centuries to glorify the passions, agonies, and ecstasies—were built on the same, and this you feel to be true. Maybe you'll want to chip in. Or turn from the temporal; leave earthly delights by past's wayside in favor of fervors contemplative, cast off privilege, memories, friends and family, drives and dreams and hopes for God; you live for God and die for God, would bear the burden of Christ for God, the single thought or thing you need for company forever; begin, perhaps, to pity those who cannot see what you now see, and want to show them how (or else perform eye surgery)—but how?

Wouldn't you too, write something like this? ...more

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A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life
by Ayelet Waldman (Goodreads Author)

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Ayelet Waldman insists you know how fast her fingernails grow in this monthlong microdosing journal cum tell-all. She's a neurotic Jewish upper-middle class mother of four and the perfect candidate to persuade you, a good obedient liberal NPR-listeni Ayelet Waldman insists you know how fast her fingernails grow in this monthlong microdosing journal cum tell-all. She's a neurotic Jewish upper-middle class mother of four and the perfect candidate to persuade you, a good obedient liberal NPR-listening NYT-subscriber student council treasurer type striver, that actually methamphetamine ain't as bad as it's cooked up to be. Ah yeah—she's been a law professor and drug attorney (no shortage of war stories), too, so you know you're in safe hands when she recommends taking your first pill of Ecstasy together with the one you're sure you love.

Intrigued? Can't blame ya. She is as open about the pettiness of her marital spats and summer camp one-night stands as the consequent self-loathing vortices and the antidepressant armamentarium (trade AND chemical names) she's used to deal—all of which sucks compared to diluted ("near-homeopathic," in a nice turn of phrase) Beatlesong. Really it's a Long Island Iced Tea of parenting chronicles, chronic shoulder pain, mythbusting, therapy sessions, conspiracy theories, expert interviews and levelheaded policy suggestions. A panoramic farrago. A pleasant three-hour buzz.

Spoiler alert: Waldman feels "normal"—that is, amazing relative to her typical (hardyharrhar) depressive anxious ruminative turbulence—and even good most days on Fadiman's dosage protocol; she works better and reacts more calmly to familiar familial provocations. But is this because of the acid? My gut says no duh. It's right. However, in my professional capacity as a human individual living on this merry Earth and with regard to the responsibility carried therewith I must remark for an instance on that hallmark of social psychology known as the observer effect, which has long since of course been found incapable of replication but whose driving intuition must not be repudiated under even the most lenient of terms, for who among you has not experienced the parallel phenomenon of camera shyness? It's as real as placebo, and I must again declare that cognizance of being observed absolutely causes behavior modification in all sorts of circumstances one might (if one should have more than the minimum g quotient required of knowledge work in an advanced information ecosystem as ours, Goodreaders, is today) imagine, from bank robberies to exam cheating. So in my mind the biggest confound is Waldman's not inconsiderable psychic investment in her project's success, viz. the hundreds of research hours spent in books and traveling and the desperation for symptomatic relief that would push this outstanding law-abiding citizen of our fair nation to commit an illegal act as possession of a controlled Schedule I substance…

No, but it is a well-paced, informative read, emotional, too, at times (I am neither a woman nor mother nor Jewish nor famous but I like Waldman too would banish the smarmy helimom from the pantheon of archetypes should I have my moment of omnipotence). Only on two counts do I downgrade her effort. The first: she does not, in her afterword, at all describe her experience for the next month, or few weeks, after she is in effect forced to stop microdosing (ran out), preferring instead to end it with a heartwarming family narrative that ostensibly shows her growth as a character. The second, more grievous, is for such crimes against rhetoric as:

…I found myself flinging my children’s toys across the room or starting a social-media flame war, the occasional anti-anxiety pill. A chill pill, if you will.

…I had managed much more easily than usual to shrug off my bad mood, even if my shoulder hurts too fucking much to shrug.

...more