Science and Cooking

This wonderful survey of the physics of cooking was a Christmas gift (thanks nice sister!) that I've been slowly working my way through for a couple of years now.  The lento tempo, however, wasn't due to the difficulty of the text.  Sure, there's plenty of physics here, with plenty of charts and graphs, and even the odd equation.  But all of the concepts they discuss -- diffusion, pH, viscosity, protein folding and unfolding, emulsions, microbes, etc ... -- are very clearly explained and presume no prior knowledge.  They also do a great job of illustrating general principles through specific examples that you can try right in your kitchen; in fact, the book began as a Harvard class that included a lab work component.  Given the excellent overview here, it would now be a much easier endeavor to tackle Harold McGee's classic, to which the current authors are much indebted.  Maybe if I'd read that as well, I wouldn't have screwed up the complicated candy cooking stage of this Cook's Illustrated Banoffee Pie recipe!

A Trackless Path

I've listened to a few inspiring interviews with Ken McLeod on Michael Taft's Deconstructing Yourself podcast.  In one of them he mentioned this translation of and commentary on a poem written by the the 18th century Tibetan monk Jigmé Lingpa. The poem itself is a very condensed set of Dzogchen practice instructions, including descriptions of possible pitfalls and remedies.  Like most of these types of works it would be almost indecipherable without McLeod's commentary.  However, given the slipperiness and, well, I guess, emptiness of the Dzogchen approach, this commentary can only remain very light and suggestive.  Fortunately, this doesn't mean it has to be abstract.  On the contrary, McLeod writes in clear simple language about his direct experience with something that's ultimately ineffable.  As a result, there's not much point in attempting to summarize the thesis of a book like this.  The main theme is clearly rest.  Resting in awareness.  Looking and resting.  But the only way to read the text is to use it, to drop these seemingly vague instructions into a meditation and see what happens.  This is also the only method that befits McLeod's experimental conception of a path which ultimately dissolves, as the title suggests, into a wide open landscape.

Like an oak peg in hard ground

Stand firm in awareness that knows

And go deep into the mystery

 

#reread

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.