Our Mutual Friend

Since I knew nothing of Dickens beyond A Christmas Carol, I chose my first novel in the old fashioned way -- I read the footnotes.  Specifically, I read footnote 4 of Deleuze's final essay, where he refers to a single chapter in this enormous novel (the one where Rogue Riderhood nearly dies).  The novel contains several great scenes, and this is one of them.  The full list would include the foggy night on the Thames that it opens with, our hilarious initial encounter with the Veneerings, and a couple of the climactic scenes that can't be described for fear of spoiling the surprise for the many loyal readers who will undoubtedly be inspired to plough through all 900 some odd pages of this monster once they read this review.  

Because it was really pretty entertaining.  Yes, admittedly, it is way too long for modern tastes.  Many scenes that seem designed to be read aloud for purely comic effect could be significantly shorter.  But when you consider that the novel was published in installments over the course of 20 months, these diversions make a lot more sense.  And yes, modern taste may also find the ending overly moralistic.  I don't know what it was like in 1865, but these days it strains credulity -- even in fiction -- to see every bad guy either fully reformed or perfectly punished according to his just desserts.  But the story is crafty, the characters exceedingly well drawn and relatable, and the writing shockingly experimental for so popular an author.  Though, if I ever do read another Dickens novel, I'll make sure to do it as the author intended and only cover 50 pages a month.

Radical Acceptance

Someone must have recommended Tara Brach's first book a long time ago, because it had been sitting in my to read list for quite a while.  In the meantime, I've read a couple of other books that belong in the same "IMS dharma" genre as this one.  They're all an easy-reading combination of modern takes on core Buddhist principles, lightened with a mix of personal anecdote and case stories drawn from the author's teaching experience.  While I've enjoyed them all, I found Brach's book the most affecting of the ones I've read.  

She frames the goal of practice as awakening from a "trance of unworthiness", a deep and often subconscious feeling that it is somehow simply not okay to be the way we are.  The idea that nothing is a problem, that everything is okay being the way it is, might sound like a simplistic reiteration of the vapid teachings of Dr. Pangloss.  Once we move beyond the facile misinterpretations to which this idea is prone though, we see that it's not a question of trying (futilely) to avoid acting or changing anything, but a question of becoming intimate with our experience, becoming capable of seeing all of it, excluding none of it.  In other words, the opposite of radical acceptance isn't activity but simply ignorance -- we ignore our experience.  Accordingly, Brach structures her book as a progressive investigation of the things we usually like to ignore.  Our feeling of unworthiness, our body, our desire, our fear -- these are all experiences we thirst to make disappear as quickly as possible because we see them as problems to be solved and states to be avoided.  We just want to make them stop.  If, instead of struggling to alter these feelings, we pause to embrace them, however counterintuitive this may sound, we can gradually find that these states begin to lose some of their reactive power over us.  They may even stop on their own.  Or they may not.  The goal really isn't to control of optimize our experience, but to experience it.  Thus, Brach builds towards the Dzogchen idea that all experience is part of the one thing that can't ignore -- awareness. 

P.S. I cried when her dog died.

G.W. Leibniz -- Philosophical Essays

I've had this one sitting on the shelf for quite a while.  As with so many things, my interest in Leibniz began with Deleuze.  Since I've long planned to read his whole book on Leibniz, I wanted first to familiarize myself with the original material.  This turns out to be a bit tricky in the case of Leibniz because he never prepared a single authoritative publication of his philosophical views.  Instead, his ideas are scattered throughout various essays, letters, and notes, and there are several different collections of these available in English.  In this volume, Ariew and Garber attempt to select and arrange pieces in roughly chronological order so as to provide an overall idea of Leibniz's thought and development.  Reading through more of this material put my earlier encounter with The Monadology in a new context.  Despite being written fairly late in Leibniz's life, The Monadology is not a deductive treatise comparable to Spinoza's Ethics, nor even a summary of the author's mature philosophical view.  It's closer to a series of notes to himself by which Leibniz clarifies and orders one particular thread of his thinking (albeit a very important one, and certainly the one he became best known for).  Since even Leibniz didn't manage to effectively summarize his own philosophy, I'm not expecting to do that here either.  So I'll just write down a couple of things I found interesting.

His most interesting idea was clearly the monad, with the irreducible unity of its windowless interior eternally separated from an exterior matter that is continuously divisible to infinity.  That is, for Leibniz, there are no material atoms, only spiritual ones.  But it's also interesting to understand why Leibniz felt the need to invent the monad.  The problem he faced was the passivity of pure matter, which in those days people saw as reducible to the combination of impenetrability and extension, neatly illustrated by the Cartesian model of a billiard ball world.  In this world, the only consideration appeared to be the conservation of momentum, which is a simple linear product of the purely "geometric" concepts of mass (impenetrability) and velocity (change in extension).  Leibniz could literally "prove" that this view was incomplete by constructing examples -- like a ball falling from a height to collide with another -- that showed there was something more than momentum involved in the dynamics of physical bodies, and that if you wanted to calculate what would happen, you would have to raise extension to a power.  For him, this "more" or "power" indicated the activity of the monad.  For us, it's just the conservation of energy -- the potential energy of a ball is proportional to the square of the height from which you drop it.  Naturally, this argument isn't the only reason that Leibniz believes in the monad, but he does consider it one of his stronger arguments for its existence, judging by how often he returned to the example.

Another intriguing theme that runs through his philosophy is what he calls "the labyrinth of the continuum".  The problem of the continuity of the real number line, along with the closely associated problem of the levels of infinity, really becomes urgent with the invention of the calculus.  Leibniz is adamant that our customary way of envisioning the real number line is inadequate.  It cannot be composed of an infinite set of points, which are just abstractions, but has to be thought of as the product of some sort of real process.   This process is part of what Deleuze will take up in The Fold.

Analogia

This will be the last George Dyson book I will ever read.  While Turing's Cathedral was modestly interesting, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Code, has more of the defects and fewer of the virtues that I noted nine years ago in my review of the former book.  The histories Dyson relates -- of the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, of the last stand of the Apaches, of the invention of the atomic bomb, the biography of Samuel Butler -- are certainly not without interest.  But his digressive, scattershot, yet somehow still overly detailed writing turns them all into a slog.  And then on the philosophical or conceptual side it's just a jumble of half-baked concepts stirred together with a dash of futurism.  I think Dyson imagines that he's describing the emergence of a new species of organism called the "analog computer".  Somehow this new type of computer will make no distinction between program and data in the way we associate with the Von Neumann architecture that powers the modern digital computer.  As far as I can tell this is the entire explanation for the subtitle.  Further, it seems this new monster aims to replace humans at the cutting edge of evolution, rendering us little better off than the Apaches.  Or at least, so I infer from tiny thread of connection one might see glimmering between Dyson's almost unrelated stories.  

George Dyson is interested in a lot of interesting stuff.  But he's not a clear thinker, nor is he a clear writer.  Fool me once ...

The Recognition Sutras

I heard about Cristopher Wallis' resurrection and translation of Kashmiri Shaivism way back in Michael Taft's VSM 1 class.  Wallis is not merely a translator, but also a practitioner of this non-dual Hindu tradition that was nearly lost in the 700 years between the Muslim conquest and Partition.  Accordingly, his goal is not merely to make this historic text accessible, but to actually make it come alive as a philosophy and a practice manual.  Since Wallis is also a Sanskrit scholar who has written extensively about the Tantrik tradition that the Recognition school is a part of, it seems he's almost uniquely qualified for the job.  Which is a lucky break for us, because, no matter how clear the translation, the original text would remain almost totally obscure if it weren't for his extensive, line-by-line commentary on it.  

While I haven't precisely tried any of the practices in this book, many of them appear to be closely related to various Buddhist techniques.  For example, he discusses something like a non-conceptual shikantaza, a breathing exercise that sounds very similar to Goenka's fast body scanning, and a practice akin to Shinzen's "gone" that looks for the emptiness from which various phenomena arise and cease.  Since it's difficult to learn techniques just from a book, I'm likely to stick with the versions of these I already know.  As a result, for me, the book is more valuable for its philosophical stance than as a practice manual.  Wallis progressively describes a version of monism that comes incredibly close to Spinoza.  All phenomena are seen as simply modes in the unfolding of the non-dual God/Goddess Awareness (Shiva/Shakti).  There is, however, one crucial twist that brings it closer to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's crowning contribution to the univocity of Being.  The heart of the Recognition school is the idea that you are this very awareness; you are God; you are Awareness itself, the groundless ground of Being.  From a logical perspective, this suffers from all the usual recursive difficulties.  But from a mystical perspective, it makes for an inspiring and bottomless vision of the world in a grain of scan.  

Nature's Metropolis

Upon discovering my interest in Barudel, Picketty, Fischer, Graeber, etc … more than one professional historian has suggested I read William Cronon's classic history of Chicago.  While they may have Piled it higher and Deeper, these folks were not full of shit.  The book is a fascinating, accessible, and yet rigorous history of Chicago from roughly 1840 to 1900.  During this period, the city functioned as a gateway connecting the rural "Great West", as it was then called -- basically what we would now call the northern midwest area that stretches from the great lakes to the Rockies — to the urbanized Eastern seaboard of the country.  By the end of the 19th century, Chicago's role in matching the easterly flow of commodities like meat and grain with the westerly flow of manufactured good and capital turned it into America's second largest city.  Cronon's deepest thesis is that, because the city was a crucial crossroads during this unique period of expansion, the interdependent duality of city and country that emerged here shaped many of our later attitudes about urbanization, corporatization, and mechanization.  The specific history of Chicago is part of what lent these processes the moral ambivalence they still carry in American life.

But of course there's much more to his history than this high level observation.  Cronon begins by tracing the seeming inevitability or 'naturalness' of Chicago's position back to what was actually a fortuitous combination of circumstances.  Originally promoted as a unique waterway linkage between the upper Mississippi valley and Lake Michigan (via the Illinois river and the Illinois and Michigan canal) most of city's growth was in fact due to the way it became the Eastern terminus of a rail network that gradually stretched further and further West.  That is, from the beginning, its unique 'natural' advantages were relevant more as a pretext for the construction of what Cronon terms a "second nature" — the human infrastructure that gradually came to replace the original natural landscape so thoroughly that we take it with the same inevitability.  Obviously, the notion of an 'original nature' is philosophically suspect.  But by identifying a 'second' version, Cronon just aims to mark how the rails replaced the rivers as transportation conduits, the wheat replaced the prairie grass as the dominant flora, the domesticated cow and pig replaced the bison as ruminant  herd animal, and the settlers 'naturally' replaced the Potawatomi.  

Accordingly, he devotes chapters to the intersecting ecological and economic histories that created this new nature.  We learn about the rise of the railroads that would eventually fan out from Chicago.  We learn about the changing grain trade that would give rise to the futures markets that exist to this day at the Chicago Board of Trade.  We learn about the forces behind the growth of Chicago's famous meatpacking industry and the way its less famous lumber industry eventually cut down every tree along every Lake Michigan bound stream in Wisconsin.  Each of Cronon's stories is a fascinating and well documented business history by itself, but together they really convey the way the development of this central city reconfigured the entire ecology of the hinter-landscape surrounding it, turning it into a resource 'destined' for market exploitation.

Finally, there are also two very interesting chapters on Chicago's relation to the East, and particularly to New York.  The city's growth depended not simply on its Western hinterland, but on the enormous Eastern capital invested in turning it into a transfer and processing point for commodities as they flowed towards the East.  This position halfway between Western commodities and Eastern manufacturing markets also made Chicago the perfect distribution point as finished manufactured products moved back towards the West.  The railroads, grain elevators, and giant ice-cooled meatpacking plants could not have developed without New York capital. Likewise, business model innovations like Montgomery Wards' or Sears' mail order catalogs could only have grown out of this environment.

It's truly a terrific history that I would recommend to anyone interested in the era, and mandate for anyone suffering from either of our great 21st century maladies: frontier nostalgiaitis, and eco-apocalyptic derangement syndrome.  Thanks to CV and Dr. Mei for the recommendation!

The Idiot

I found The Idiot to be a more puzzling and less engaging novel than The Brothers Karamazov.  Since so much of it is taken up with dialogue detailing the various intrigues by which each character defines themselves in relation to the titular Prince Myshkin that it can sometimes appear to border on the soap operatic.  The main action of the plot is confined to hardly more than two scenes. The rest of the book is a fairly elaborate set-up for the incredible scenes with Rogozhin.  Still, there's something moving about Dostoevsky's depiction of what seems to be a completely and genuinely good man.  Yes, he's like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know ... why everyone is so unhappy.  But isn't that exactly the question we all keep forgetting to ask ourselves?  That's the puzzle of the idiot -- his goodness seems to consist in nothing more than compassionately mirroring back to us the best aspect of our intentions.  While this may sound like (and from the Prince's perspective actually is) a philosophy of affirmation, its effect on others is mostly to make them aware of their pettiness without providing them the means to overcome it.  Why are we wrapping ourselves in knots, scheming and intriguing against one another and even against ourselves, when at bottom we all desire the same peace and joy?  Dostoevsky clearly conceives of this as a Christian question, and its certain that the Prince is a Christ figure.  Less obviously, he also seems to conceive this question as somehow related to a contrast of foreign (ie. European) reason and Russian passion.  Is our reason too hollow?  Is our passion too overwhelming or too depraved?  I think to understand Doestoevsky better on this point I would need to be more familiar with the intellectual and political climate of his day.  And one of these days, I'm going to let Joseph Frank explain it to me.