Nabakov's Quartet

While I'm not sure exactly how it ended up on the shelf, I imagine this collection of four short stories was in the bargain bin at the local used bookstore.  While I adored Lolita and loved Pale Fire with a burning passion, these stories struck me as rather forgettable by comparison.  Interestingly, three of the four were originally written in Russian, and these earlier works have a completely different voice from the one I have come to associate with Nabokov in English.  However, it's a much less distinctive one, that could nearly be confused with Dostoevsky (in the case of the first two stories) or Kafka (in the case of the final one).  Only The Vane Sisters, written much later and requiring no translation, speaks with the author's characteristic parodic erudition.  Though none of the stories especially struck me, they did make for a nice plane ride to Tuscon.

Galápagos

I guess you would expect Kurt Vonnegut's novel about the end of the world to be wry, funny, and above all anti-climactic.  So it's no surprise when it turns out that, from the perspective of a million years into the future, "humanity" didn't end at all.  As a species, we simply thought better of possessing these big brains that have caused us no end of trouble, and which, to top it off, have mostly not composed Beethoven's Ninth.  Just like the other Vonnegut novels I've read, this one makes you wonder how we manage to collectively sleepwalk our way through the absurdity of life without appreciating the full joy and sorrow of the cosmic satyr play staged at our expense.  Which makes me think it should be required reading in every high school, despite the fact that it appears some of us just can't take a joke.  

When confronted with the question of how the desire to improve the world fits with the notion of time presented in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut responded "you understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit."

How to Change Your Mind

Unfortunately, I can't say that Michael Pollan's attempt to capture the new psychedelic zeitgeist changed mine.  Perhaps this is simply because it is aimed at readers who, like Pollan, start off pyschedelically and philosophically naive.  I didn't need anyone to convince me that it might be interesting to alter my consciousness, nor that it can be done fairly safely with drugs, nor even that such experiences could have a profound and lasting effect on my worldview.  For the already intrepid psychonaut, the book exhibits mainly the endearing, amusing, but also kinda boring, breathlessness with which one (faintly) recalls early experiments.  So yeah dude, this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know? 

I agree completely. I sympathize with the mind-blowingness of It. All.  I understand how hard it is to convey the ineffability of the experience without ending up in vague platitudes about how all is one (too late).  I'm also frustrated by the fact that Pollan spent 400 pages chronically and neurotically doubting the reality of his own experience.  While I am, again, no stranger to this type of doubting, there's also a pretty obvious spiritual and philosophical retort for it.  All experience is real.  You may experience unreal objects, but the experience itself cannot be unreal.  Perhaps this is more tautology than theory.  Nevertheless, keeping it in mind is inoculation against the dismissive scientific rationalism that aims to separate us from our experience.  

For me, the most interesting part of the book was his history of early psychedelic research.  While it seemed neither insightful nor particularly well told, it nonetheless brought some new shit to light.  It would have made a great magazine article.  

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 ...