fundevogel's 2011 DDC

I'm giving myself a new thread for this year (it's this one!). This will allow me to track my yearly progress rather than let it get lost as it is mixed in with all the other years I'm in the challenge. Plus, can you imagine how long a thread would get if we only used one the entire time? So this thread will keep my Dewey reading complete and up to date through 12/31/11 and which point I will stop updating it and move into a 2012 thread (probably). I hope no one minds. This thread's still a manageable size so I'll be staying here for the time being.

Key
* - books I found particularly worth reading
italics - books I read prior to starting the challenge

Other Stuff:

Links
Complete List of Dewey Decimal Classes
LT Dewey Browser
OCLC classify
Dewey Decimal Challenge Suggestions
my 2009/2010 list

Class 000: Computer science, information & general works
9/84 Assigned
0/16 Unassigned/No Longer Used

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
001 Knowledge The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan
002 The book Warmly Inscribed - Lawrence Goldstone
006 Special computer methods Above the Fold - Brian Miller
007 Unassigned
008 Unassigned
009 Unassigned

010 Bibliographies
013 Unassigned

020 Library & information sciences
024 No longer used -- formerly Regulations for readers
027 General libraries Diamond Jubilee, Seventy-five Years of Public Service - Roger H Woelfel
029 No longer used -- formerly Literary methods

030 Encyclopedias & books of facts

040 No longer used—formerly Collected essays by language
041 Unassigned
042 Unassigned
043 Unassigned
044 Unassigned
045 Unassigned
046 Unassigned
047 Unassigned
048 Unassigned
049 Unassigned

050 Magazines, journals & serials

060 Associations, organizations & museums
069 Museum science Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder* - Lawrence Weschler

070 News media, journalism & publishing Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism - David Mindich

080 General collections
082 Collections in English Distory: A Treasury of Historical Insults - Robert Schnakenberg

090 Manuscripts & rare books
096 Books notable for illustrations The Douce Apocalypse (The Library of Illuminated Manuscripts) - A. G. Hassall
098 Prohibited works, forgeries & hoaxes The Roman Index of Forbidden Books* - Francis S. Betten

Class 100: Philosophy and psychology
12/89 Assigned
0/11 Unassigned/No Longer Used

100 Philosophy & Psychology
104 No longer used -- formerly Essays

110 Metaphysics
112 No longer used -- formerly Methodology

120 Epistemology, causation, humankind
125 No longer used -- formerly Infinity
129 Origin & destiny of individual souls Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife* - Mary Roach

130 Paranormal phenomena
132 No longer used -- formerly Mental derangements
133 Parapsychology & occultism The Satanic Bible - Anton Szander LaVey
134 No longer used -- formerly Mesmerism and Clairvoyance
136 No longer used -- formerly Metal characteristics

140 Specific philosophical schools

150 Psychology
151 No longer used -- formerly Intellect
155 Differential & developmental psychology The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker
157 No longer used -- formerly Emotions
158 Applied psychology The Sunny Nihilist - Wendy Syfret
159 No longer used -- formerly Will

160 Logic
163 Not assigned or no longer used
164 Not assigned or no longer used

170 Ethics (Moral philosophy) The Ethics Of Spinoza* - Baruch Spinoza
171 Systems & doctrines The Moral Landscape* - Sam Harris
173 Ethics of family relationships Marriage and Morals* - Bertrand Russell
179 Other ethical norms The Society of Timid Souls - Polly Morland

180 Ancient, medieval, Oriental philosophy
184 Platonic philosophy Five Dialogues* - Plato
188 Stoic philosophy Handbook of Epictetus - Epictetus

190 Modern Western philosophy (19th-century, 20th-century)
192 Modern Western philosophy British Isles Unpopular Essays* - Bertrand Russell
198 Modern Western philosophy Scandinavia Fear and Trembling - Sören Kierkegaard

Class 200: Religion
14/89 Assigned
0/11 Unassigned/No Longer Used

200 Religion God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (audio) - Christopher Hitchens

210 Natural theology
211 Concepts of God Why I Am Not a Christian - Bertrand Russell
215 Science & religion Religion and Science* - Bertrand Russell
216 No longer used -- formerly Evil
217 No longer used -- formerly Prayer
219 No longer used -- formerly Analogies

220 Bible Jesus, Interrupted - Bart D. Ehrman
222 Historical books of Old Testament Who Wrote the Bible* - Richard Elliot Friedman
225 New Testament Misquoting Jesus* - Bart D. Ehrman

230 Christian theology Mere Christianity - C. S. Lewis
232 Jesus Christ & his family The Case for Christ - Lee Strobel
234 Salvation (Soteriology) & grace A Short History of Christian Theophagy* - Preserved Smith
237 No longer used -- formerly Future state

240 Christian moral & devotional theology
244 No longer used -- formerly Religious fiction
245 No longer used -- formerly Hymnology

250 Christian orders & local church
256 No longer used -- formerly Religious Societies
257 No longer used -- formerly Parochial schools, libraries, etc.
258 No longer used -- formerly Parochial medicine

260 Christian social theology

270 Christian church history
271 Religious orders in church history Immodest Acts - Judith Brown
277 Christian church in North America Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller

280 Christian denominations & sects
288 No longer used -- formerly Unitarian

290 Other & comparative religions
291 Comparative religion The Golden Bough - James George Frazer
296 Judaism The Dead Sea Scrolls - various
298 No longer used -- formerly Mormonism
299 Other religions Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia - Jean Bottero

Class 300: Social sciences
21/90 Assigned
1/10 Unassigned/No Longer Used

300 Social Sciences
301 Sociology & anthropology Obedience to Authority* - Stanley Milgram
303 Social processes Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond 10/13/18
305 Social groups Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word* - Randall Kennedy
306 Culture & institutions The Ethical Slut* - Dossie Easton
308 No longer used -- formerly Polygraphy
309 No longer used -- formerly History of sociology

310 General statistics
311 No longer used -- formerly Theory and methods
312 No longer used -- formerly Population
313 No longer used -- formerly Special topics

320 Political science The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
321 Systems of governments & states The Democracy Project - David Graeber
329 Not assigned or no longer used Plunkitt of Tammany Hall - George Washington Plunkitt

330 Economics The Origin of Capitalism - Ellen Meiksins Wood
332 Financial economics Debt: The First 5,000 Years* - David Graeber
335 Socialism & related systems The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
339 Macroeconomics & related topics Broke, USA - Gary Rivlin

340 Law
345 Criminal law BLACK'S LAW: A Criminal Lawyer Reveals His Defense Strategies in Four Cliffhanger Cases - Roy Black
349 Law of specific jurisdictions & areas The Code of Hammurabi* - King Hammurabi

350 Public Administration
355 Military science The Men Who Stare At Goats - Jon Ronson

360 Social services; association
362 Social problems of & services to groups of people ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World - McKay Jenkins
363 Other social problems & services Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919* - Stephen Puleo
364 Criminology Bosnia's Million Bones - Christian Jennings
365 Penal & related institutions The Gulag Archipelago I-II* - Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

370 Education
373 Secondary education Getting Schooled - Garret Keizer
376 No longer used -- formerly Education of women
377 No longer used -- formerly Ethical education

380 Commerce, communications, transport

390 Customs, etiquette, folklore
391 Costume & personal appearance The World Beard and Moustache Championships - Michael Ames
394 General customs Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling* - Barbara Holland
396 No longer used -- formerly Women's position and treatment
397 No longer used -- formerly outcast studies
398 Folklore The Uses of Enchantment : The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales* - Bruno Bettelheim

Class 400: Language
11/85 Assigned
0/15 Unassigned/No Longer Used

400 Language The Way We Talk Now - Geoffrey Nunberg
408 With respect to kinds of persons The Last Speakers - K. David Harrison

410 Linguistics
416 No longer used—formerly Prosody (linguistics)
417 Dialectology & historical linguistics The Power of Babel* - John McWhorter

420 English & Old English
421 Writing system, phonology Righting the Mother Tongue* - David Wolman
423 English dictionaries The Meaning of Everything (audio) - Simon Winchester
424 No longer used -- formerly English thesauruses
425 English grammar Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog - Kitty Burns Florey
426 No longer used -- formerly English prosodies
427 English language variations Poplollies and Bellibones - Susan Kelz Sperling
428 Standard English usage English As She is Spoke - Jose da Fonseca

430 Germanic languages; German
434 Not assigned or no longer used
436 Not assigned or no longer used
439 Other Germanic languages Norwegian : A Book of Self-Instruction in the Norwegian Riksmål - Alf Sommerfelt

440 Romance languages; French
444 Not assigned or no longer used
446 Not assigned or no longer used
447 French language variations Merde! - Genevieve

450 Italian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic
454 Not assigned or no longer used
456 Not assigned or no longer used

460 Spanish & Portuguese languages
464 Not assigned or no longer used
466 Not assigned or no longer used

470 Italic; Latin
474 Not assigned or no longer used
476 Not assigned or no longer used

480 Hellenic languages; Classical Greek
484 Not assigned or no longer used
486 Not assigned or no longer used

490 Other languages
491 East Indo-European & Celtic languages English Grammar for Students of Russian - Edwina Jannie Cruise

Class 500: Science
10/95 Assigned
0/5 Unassigned/No Longer Used

500 Natural sciences & mathematics A Short History of Nearly Everything (audio) - Bill Bryson
504 Not assigned of no longer used
507 Education, research, related topics The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments - George Johnson

510 Mathematics
517 Not assigned of no longer used

520 Astronomy & allied sciences
523 Specific celestial bodies & phenomena The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
524 Not assigned of no longer used

530 Physics The ABC of Relativity - Bertrand Russell

540 Chemistry & allied sciences

550 Earth sciences
551 Geology, hydrology, meteorology Dust: A History of the Small & the Invisible - Joseph A. Amato

560 Paleontology; Paleozoology

570 Life sciences
573 Physiological systems of animals Skeleton (DK Eyewitness Books) - Steve Parker
574 No longer used -- formerly Homologies

580 Plants
589 No longer used -- formerly Thallophyta

590 Zoological sciences Kingdom Under Glass - Jay Kirk
591 Zoology Swift as a Shadow:Extinct and Endangered Animals - Rosamond Wolff Purcell
595 Other invertebrates Butterfly & Moth - Paul Whalley
599 Mammalia (Mammals) Of Wolves and Men - Barry Lopez

Class 600: Technology
14/94 Assigned
0/6 Unassigned/No Longer Used

600 Technology (Applied sciences)
609 Historical, areas, persons treatment Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner* - Michael M. Baden

610 Medicinal sciences; Medicine
611 Human anatomy, cytology, histology Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers* - Mary Roach
613 Personal health & safety The Angry Chef - Anthony Warner
614 Incidence & prevention of disease The Ghost Map* - Steven Johnson
615 Pharmacology & therapeutics Charlatan* - Pope Brock
616 Diseases Vaccinated* - Paul Offit
617 Surgery & related medical specialties Dr. Mütter's Marvels - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

620 Engineering & Applied operations
621 Applied physics Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons* - George Pendle
626 Not assigned of no longer used

630 Agriculture
635 Garden crops (Horticulture) Gardening 101 - Martha Stewart Living Magazine
636 Animal husbandry All Creatures Great and Small - James Harriot

640 Home economics & family living
646 Sewing Alabama Studio Sewing Patterns - Natalie Chanin

650 Management & auxiliary services The Go-Giver - Bob Burg & John David Mann
652 Processes of written communication The Code Book* - Simon Singh
654 Not assigned of no longer used
655 Not assigned of no longer used
656 Not assigned of no longer used

660 Chemical engineering

670 Manufacturing

680 Manufacture for specific uses
686 Printing & related activities Simplified Bookbinding - Henry Gross
689 Not assigned of no longer used

690 Buildings
699 Not assigned of no longer used

Class 700: Arts and recreation
19/94 Assigned
0/6 Unassigned/No Longer Used

700 The arts
704 Special topics Devils - Gilles Neret
708 Galleries, museums, private collections of fine & decorative arts Norsk Folkemuseum - Various
709 Historical, areas, persons treatment Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia - Richard Hertz

710 Civic & landscape art

720 Architecture

730 Plastic arts; Sculpture
731 Processes, forms, subjects of sculpture Advanced Mouldmaking and Casting - Nick Brooks

740 Drawing & decorative arts
741 Drawing & drawings Family Man: Volume I* - Dylan Meconis
744 Not assigned or no longer used
745 Decorative arts How to Start a Home-based Etsy Business - Gina Luker
746 Textile arts The Bayeux Tapestry* - David MacKenzie Wilson

750 Painting & paintings
756 Not assigned or no longer used
759 Historical, areas, persons treatment Egon Schiele Drawings and Watercolors* - Jane Kallir

760 Graphic arts; Printmaking & prints The Artful Dodger: Images and Reflections - Nick Bantock
761 Relief processes (Block printing) Lynd Ward: Gods' Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage* - Lynd Ward
762 Not assigned or no longer used
768 Not assigned or no longer used

770 Photography & photographs Carny: Americana on the Midway - Virginia Lee Hunter
777 Not assigned or no longer used
778 Feilds& kinds of photography Stop Motion - Susannah Shaw
779 Photographs The Bone House Joel-Peter Witkin

780 Music
781 General principles & musical forms Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (audio) - Oliver Sacks
782 Vocal music The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad - Sean Wilentz
789 Not assigned or no longer used

790 Recreational & performing arts
791 Public performances Freak Show - Robert Bogdan
792 Stage Presentations The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook - Thurston James
796 Athletic & outdoor sports & games The Tracker - Tom Brown
799 Fishing, hunting, shooting The Man Eaters of Tsavo J. H. Patterson

Class 800: Literature
23/98 Assigned
0/2 Unassigned/No Longer Used

800 Literature & rhetoric
804 Not assigned or no longer used
808 Rhetoric & collections of literature Antigone - Sophocles

810 American literature The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 - Dave Eggers
811 Poetry The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel - Don Marquis
812 Drama Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
813 Fiction Tropic of Cancer* - Henry Miller
814 Essays When You Are Engulfed In Flames - David Sedaris
817 Satire & humor Letters From the Earth - Mark Twain
818 Miscellaneous writings Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain
819 Not assigned or no longer used

820 English & Old English literatures
821 English poetry The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer (translation by David Wright)
822 English drama Hamlet* - William Shakespeare
823 English fiction The Raw Shark Texts* - Steven Hall
826 English letters Dear Sir, Drop Dead! - Donald Carroll
828 English miscellaneous writings The Mystery of Lewis Carroll - Jenny Woolf
829 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Beowulf - unknown (translation by Seamus Heaney)

830 Literatures of Germanic languages
831 German poetry Struwwelpeter - Heinrich Hoffmann
832 German drama The Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht
833 German fiction The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
839 Other Germanic literatures The Prose Edda - Snorri Sturluson

840 Literatures of Romance languages
843 French fiction The Hermitage* - Marie Bronsard

850 Italian, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romanic
853 Italian fiction The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

860 Spanish & Portuguese literatures Borges: Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

870 Italic literatures; Latin

880 Hellenic literatures; Classical Greek

890 Literatures of other languages
891 East Indo-European & Celtic literature Cancer Ward* - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
896 African literature Devil on the Cross* - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Class 900: History, geography, and biography
14/90 Assigned
1/10 Unassigned/No Longer Used

900 Geography & history Bloody Foreigners - Robert Winder
902 Miscellany of history The Decline and Fall of Practically Everbody - Will Cuppy
904 Collected accounts of events Great Ship Disasters - Kit Bonner

910 Geography & travel A Night to Remember - Sir Walter Lord
916 Geography of & travel in Africa Dead Men Do Tell Tales - Byron De Prorok

920 Biography, genealogy, insignia Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir* - Shalom Auslander
921 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Philosophy Ernie Pyle's War - James Tobin
922 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Religion
923 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Sociology
924 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Philology
925 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Science
926 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Useful Arts
927 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Fine Arts
928 No longer used -- Formerly biographies of Literature

930 History of ancient world
935 History of ancient world; Mesopotamia & Iranian Plateau History Begins at Sumer - Samuel Noah Kramer

940 General history of Europe The Holocaust Industry - Norman G. Finkelstein
949 History of Europe; Other parts of Europe Anne Frank: the diary of a young girl - Anne Frank

950 General history of Asia; Far East

960 General history of Africa

970 General history of North America
973 United States After the Fact - James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle
974 Northeastern United States The Sun and The Moon - Matthew Goodman
975 Southeastern United States Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
978 Western United States Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
979 Great Basin & Pacific Slope Mysterious California - Mike Marinacci

980 General history of South America

990 General history of other areas
991 Not assigned or no longer used
992 Not assigned or no longer used

891 - Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This book had been sitting my shelf for years mocking me. No more.

I feel a little bad saying I enjoyed reading this book. It seems kinda wrong to enjoy a book about sick people living under an oppressive government. But it is very well written and has a wry sort of humor to it. Honestly it reminded me of Catch-22, but wryer, much wryer.

The book's strength is in it's characters. It's an ensemble cast and the characters come from all sorts of backgrounds with various perspectives. The story is written from the point of view of it's characters and Solzhenitsyn is able to shift gracefully from the draconic mind of the dedicated party-man to the studious young liberal without hitch.

With his diverse characters Solzhenitsyn is able to address a range of issues greater than any one of his characters could. Through the hospital staff we learn about the critical shortage of supplies, overtaxed equipment and the entrenchment of bad workers that do none of their own work leaving the dedicated workers with double workloads. We learn about the doctors' naive insensitivity to a patient's right to know what his condition and treatment is let alone his right to approve or refuse treatment. But some of the most rousing issues are raised and debated aggressively by the characters themselves, usually with the primary protagonist, Oleg Kostoglotov, spitting fire across the ward.

Ultimately it was a captivating read though the ending turned my perspective of the protagonist on its head. For all his intellect and fiery political opinions Kostoglotov was a prisoner that needed his prison. He was institutionalized, not it in the dependent, helpless way we usually think of it, but he had come to define himself with the bars he beat himself against and without them he didn't know who he was.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................53/99 = 53%
Assigned Sections........93/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

839 - The Prose Edda - Snorri Sturluson

The Edda is essentially a 13th century crash course in Norse mythology. At the time it was written Iceland was already Christian and the book's author penned an unintentionally humorous disclaimer in the prologue making sure everyone knew that he didn't believe any of this, that he was sophisticated enough to know the truth of Christianity, and he was just concerned about preserving these quaint beliefs for the their cultural and literary value. His sincerity made me giggle a little. I don't know, maybe the disclaimer was necessary back then, it's just so bizarre in a modern context.

Any who the intent of the book seems to be some what instructional. It collects various stories of godly hijinks, heroes and the monsters they face as well as shorter bits explaining little details of the world according to Norse mythology and the proper way to name things according to the traditions of skaldic poetry. That's why I call it instructional. Most of early Nordic literature is poetic and has very specific rules and symbolism. It can be tricky to understand the kennings and stories without a fair amount of background information so the Prose Edda is essentially intended to give people the background they need to understand and appreciate the literary tradition of skaldic poetry.

That said it doesn't really matter if you're reading the Edda with the intent to dig into skaldic poetry or not. The Prose Edda is the primary source of Norse mythology available to us today and Norse mythology is crazy. Like other mythological systems the purpose is to explain the world and give the history of the gods, but the Norse take just seems a little crazier and bloodier. I can't really go into the actual mythology without either going on way too long or short changing the stories, but suffice it to say that at one point Loki ties his testicles to a goat and engages in a tug of war with said goat.

On a side note, reading Norse mythology totally put me in the mood to revisit my neglected metal collection. Norse mythology is pretty metal.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................53/99 = 53%
Assigned Sections........94/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

027 - Diamond Jubilee, Seventy-five Years of Public Service - Roger H. Woelfel

This is a slim book commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Los Angeles County Library system. It appears to have been self published (probably by the library) for the occasion. It's fairly dry, but it is interesting to know a bit more about the history of my library. Like at the time of the books publishing (1987) it was the largest circulating library system in the USA with over 80 branches serving 3500 square miles. Which is why, I suppose, I use it. My branch is puny but the holds system is fantasic.

More interesting is hearing the early history of the library, like how it started in 1912 out of the first librarian's home and was only open 4 hours a week. The back includes still better tidbits gleaned from interviews with old staff. One says that during the war the library hours were essentially set by the army since no lights were allowed after dark along the coast. Another notes that two branches were lost when the St. Francis Dam burst in 1928. Another remembered that when all the Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps their books were returned and fees paid before they left. That kinda depresses me.

I also learned that my library system will turn 100 September 5th 2012. So near.

831 - Struwwelpeter - Heinrich Hoffman

I read this a while ago but somehow missed that it had a spot on my list. It's a interesting little book designed to scare children into behaving written in 19th century Germany.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................54/99 = 54%
Assigned Sections........96/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

133 The Satanic Bible by Anton Szander LaVey

I found the beginning fairly worth reading. That's the bit that evaluates the structure and flaws of organized religion and defines the ideology of the Church of Satan. Honestly I agreed with some of the basic ideology, the materialism and embracing of human nature, but then things just get sillier and sillier as you go on.

The problem with LaVeyan Satanism is they want it both ways. They want to be able to analytically pick apart organized religion, and can do so quite efficiently, but then they want to put together their own organized religion and try to redefine religion to shoehorn their ideology into the realm of religion. It's weird. Especially since LaVey admits that his brand of Satanism just sees Satan as a symbol and God as some sort of pantheistic entity if they believe at all. There is no belief in any sort of deity to worship, he just likes the replicating the emotional response that religious ritual produces in it's participants. And then the book goes on and on and on about how to perform these "magic rituals". It's bizarre. I can't figure out if the whole thing is a parody doomed by Poe's law or if these folks just like dressing up and doing pretend magic or what.

Weird.

Ultimately this is more of curiosity than anything. Though I suppose some wide-eyed teenagers might mistake it for something profound, not knowing all the viable philosophy was nicked from other sources.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................54/99 = 54%
Assigned Sections........96/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

822 Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Well this is the first I've read Shakespeare (not counting excerpts in high school English) and I'm not sure why I was avoiding it for so long. Especially considering the fact that I gritted my teeth through Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

Though maybe it was a good thing I'd read Marlowe since it gave me something contemporary to Shakespeare to compare him to. Conclusion? Those folks that claim Marlowe was Shakespeare are delusional. Even though it takes extra effort to understand 16th century English it is obvious that Shakespeare deserves the praise he gets for beautiful and sharp use of language. I can't say the same for Marlowe.

Lordy, I love beating on Marlowe. But back to Hamlet. I just had a lot of fun reading it. There's a lot of humor in the first half as well as the sort of melodrama you would expect. I benefited from reading this after watching the RSC's 2009 production. Watching and reading the play together helped me understand it better than I would from just doing one or the other.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................54/99 = 54%
Assigned Sections........96/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

761 - Lynd Ward: Gods' Man, Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage by Lynd Ward

I'd never heard of Lynd Ward before I found this book, which is a shame. Ward was an artist/illustrator going back to the 1920's and is credited with being one of the fathers of the American graphic novel. This book collects Ward's first three novels, the first of which was published less than a week before the stock market crashed in 1929. All three are 'written' in woodblock prints without any text. The prints are absolutely beautiful and are what make these novels worth looking into because, sadly, the stories can be a bit tricky to follow. It's easy enough to get the basic plot and themes of the stories, but the details tend to be difficult to interpret as their visual cues do not necessarily have the same meaning for the reader as it did for the storyteller.

All in all it's a fine art book and it even has a few short essays by the artist reflecting on the novels and his work process. I think that's how this one got into 761 (Relief processes - Block printing) rather than the more generic 769 (Prints) that the three novels are assigned in their individual editions.

Progress:
Classes.......................10/10 = 100%
Divisions.....................54/99 = 54%
Assigned Sections........97/908 = 10%
Unassigned Sections....1/92 = 1%

>17 fundevogel:
If you are interested in the wordless graphic novel idea, I'd recommend The Arrival - a story of an immigrant recently arrived in a foreign land. The art is a little more intricate than what I've seen of Ward's. I think in the Arrival's case a little uncertainty regarding details is fitting to the mindset of the immigrant trying to piece together how the new culture works.

Ah, thanks for the recommendation. Perfect timing too. My branch is about to secede from the the county system (weeping, gnashing of teeth) so I can just manage to check it out before my beloved inter-library loans go away.

>19 fundevogel:
Ouch. That's rough. I've been so good about purging books lately - but stories like this make me want to reconsider.

234 - A Short History of Christian Theophagy by Preserved Smith

Ah, this book.

I'd been itching to read up on theophagy ever since it was briefly mentioned in an anthropology class I took. It took a while to make that happen because I promptly forgot the word theophagy and when I remembered it turned out to be so esoteric a term that a google search for it literally had one result - an abstract for this book I believe. Thankfully since my initial interest was peaked the internet has filled out quite a bit and there are now actual articles on the practice to be found. However this stands tall to me as a reminder that the internet does not have a monopoly on information and there are things you can still only learn by cracking a book, especially when it comes to theophagy.

This book, written in 1922 by the historian Preserved Smith, was the only credible book I could find on the subject. Apparently, though the practice of eating god is still fairly wide spread and super interesting, not many have bothered to to study it in any detail. I was a little nervous that with only one option on the subject I might be stuck with something dry and unreadable, but that really wasn't the case at all. A Short History of Theophagy is clearly academic in tone, but not at all dry.

The book starts out with an introduction to pre-Christian theophagy which is fascinating. Theophagy was widely practiced in early religions, not just in the Middle East and Mediterranean, but also in the Americas. Smith traces the development of pre-Christian theophagy from the mysteries like the cult of Bacchus who pretty much set the bar by running down their god-meat in the form of a wild animal and devouring it raw on the spot. Back then the god-blood they drank was blood, maybe with a little wine mixed in. It didn't take too long for the practitioners of theophagy to regard devouring actual flesh and blood as a barbaric practice and shift to eating their god impanate (in the form of bread) and drinking his blood as wine. The Romans looked down their noses at the mysteries that practiced theopaghy and were more than a little suspicious of the whole thing. This was all before Christianity.

The discussion of Christian theophagy is more structured and takes advantage of the copious amount of literature and dogma the church has generated on the subject. Smith explains the theological justifications the church produced in defense of the eucharist. They are generally bizarre and hard to believe today. Transubstantiation and it's newfangled competition, consubstantiation, are explained and then Smith throws you into the vitriolic rhetoric that dominated the discussion as the Protestant Reformation made mass and communion one of their primary points of contention. Smith observes the theologians were fairly bad at defending their views and were often reduced to using obscurantism as a tactic saying:

"...the reason for these interminable beatings around the bush lay in the fact that both parties started from a false premise, namely that reason and the Scripture could be reconciled."

They certainly tried to explain the eucharist in reasonable terms...but it had a way of degenerating to absurdity. For instance, of those that argued that Jesus' body was physically (or sometimes spiritually) present in the eucharist, none could find a satisfactory answer to the question of what happened when the holy host hit your stomach and your bowels. Reformation theologians were very concerned with if they were pooping Jesus. That and name-calling. Lordy, I've never seen so much historical shit-talking. Luther was particularly bad and enabled by his unflinching conviction "that he had a monopoly of truth and that those who advanced independent opinions were, so to speak, infringing his copyright."

Yep, good old Martin Luther was a sonuvabitch. His position on the eucharist was nigh indistinguishable from the Catholic church (he was very possibly the most conservative branch of the Protestant Reformation), but he didn't let the difficulty of defending a god impanate stop him. Nope. Luther just kept busy accusing those with differing opinions, like that the eucharist was merely a symbol, of being in league with the devil, possibly the antichrist, a threat to Christianity, as bad as the pope (ironic since it was Luther whose views were most closely related to the Catholic church) and that their writings were "dung" and that they smeared Christianity with "dung". What a classy guy huh? He certainly wasn't the only one name-calling, but he did seem to produce more bile than any of the others. I think he hit the ultimate low when he declared the death of one of his opponents to be proof that god had smote him for disagreeing with Luther.

All and all it's a fascinating read, complete with bizarre factoids like that the holy host was on more than one occasion poisoned and employed in murder and at least one assassination. It would have been easier to follow the rancor between the Protestant reformers if I had a better understanding of the Reformation, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this. And I learned some new words! How cool are "impanate", "artolatry" and "zwinglian"? Smith has more books on Martin Luther and the Reformation and I expect I'll come back to them at some point.

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408 - The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison

I never really got into this one. I had thought it would either be about the linguistics of endangered and exotic languages or an anthropology of the speakers' cultures. Maybe both. Technically I suppose it was both, but with all the effectiveness of a combination fax machine/scanner/copy machine.

The only thing this book really commits to is regaling you with the author's personal travels on his quest to save endangered languages. How exactly he intends to do this is anyones guess. He has palatable distaste for the nuts and bolts of linguistics, you know, sorting out grammars and origins and such not and his documentation of language and their corresponding cultures is painfully shallow. Then there's the fact that you really can't do much to save a language from the outside, only the speakers can save it. What he does do is never miss an opportunity to remind his readers that this particular language could disappear very soon. It's as if he thinks his readers aren't capable of retaining the definition of "endangered" for more than 20 pages. Couple that with his rather questionable claim that the extinction of each of these languages will mean the loss of invaluable information and my sentiment quotas get maxed out pretty quick.

Make no mistake. I am an information for information's sake sort of girl. I'm doing the Dewey challenge after all. What bugged me was that Harrison did such a shoddy job of relaying the sort of unique information that these language speakers had a monopoly on that his vague claim that something like 80-90% of information is contained entirely in verbal communication flirts with the sort of woo that gets people believing that if only that ancient culture hadn't died off and taken their ancient medical secrets with them we could cure frickin' lymphoma with berries and organic honey. I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of human knowledge was not available in any written form. But make no mistake, that's because most of it is personal experience content that might have sociological, anthropological or historical merit, but would rarely effect change on contemporary life. It's interesting to learn about how tribal yak herders herd their yaks, but it's not changing anyone's life, except in the rare case of aspiring yak herders.

All and all I didn't get much of what I wanted out of this book. The linguistics and anthropology were both really superficial and frankly I get a bit exasperated by writers that make themselves the center of their books when said book really shouldn't be about them. If it weren't such slim pickings in the 400's I would have held out for something better.

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That's too bad. Sounds like it could have been an interesting topic.

098 - The Roman Index of Forbidden Books by Francis S. Betten

It's a book that argues the Catholic church has the right, nay, the duty to prohibit it's members from reading books that might undermine the church. Crazy right?

It compares the books in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to diseases and likens the ban against them to a quarantine for the good of everyone. It isn't enough for only those at risk of losing faith to observe the ban, every Catholic must, unless they have received dispensation from the clergy. Violating the ban is likened to King David murdering a man and taking his wife. That's right, reading The Three Musketeers was like committing murder according to the church. Those that have received dispensation are cautioned to protect their souls from the dangers of reading using both "natural and supernatural means".

It is in short an eye-rollingly hilarious and intellectually infuriating bit of claptrap. It paints a very clear (albeit unintentional) picture of the church's attempt retain it's power and influence by obliterating the voices of anyone that might challenge them. The most basic idea here is that ignorance is a small price to pay for faith.

Selected authors with works prohibited by the Index:

Galileo
Rene Descartes
Diderot
Alexander Dumas
Immanuel Kant
David Hume
Victor Hugo
Francis Bacon
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
John Stuart Mill
John Milton
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Voltaire
Émile Zola

This book was published in 1909. The Index was last updated in 1948 and it's use was formally abolished in 1966 by Pope Paul VI.

So are the priests who have to read the books to decide if they go on the list martyring themselves? :)

They were rather inconsistent about the whole thing. They said it was a mortal sin and it applied to everyone equally, but they were pretty obliging with granting dispensation. I got the impression that reading one of the books was a mortal sin...unless you went to a member of a clergy and asked permission first. I imagine the clergy grant themselves permission. ;)

We might be asking too much of the church if we expect them to make sense or be consistent.

I am surprised that Galileo was still on the list in 1909/1948.

It wasn't. His stuff was removed prior to 1909, but this book maintains that for the duration of the time it was banned it was proper that it be banned. Even when they remove books they don't like to admit that banning them might have been a mistake.

I just finished The Gutenberg Revolution (about to post on my Dewey list), and it mentions this list at the end. The author says the list was a "notorious failure," in part because it failed to ban all sorts of sexy books like Lady Chatterley's Lover--basically the list couldn't keep up with book publishing.

They definitely couldn't keep up with the pace of publishing. I'm not sure if they abandoned the list because they came to their senses about book banning or if they just realized maintaining the list was like trying to empty a leaky dingy with spoons.

They missed a lot, but I did add a few things to my reading list because of them. I hadn't heard of Emile Zola before and apparently the church couldn't abide his novels one bit.

171 - The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris 8/24/11

This book went on my reading list after watching a wonderful lecture Harris gave based on the book. The premise is that science not only can tell us something about morality, but that it is better suited to doing so than any other system of morality. It's simple really. If morality is a matter of making choices and taking action to preserve or expand well being and minimize suffering and if well being and suffering correspond situations and characteristics of the world then it makes senses that we can use science to determine which scenarios will increase well being and which will not. It's so simple it's a wonder no one's made the case before.

And yet this really is a novel book because we've had it drummed into us from all manner of people (scientists included) that science has nothing to say on the subject of morality. It's one of those things you hear so often it is accepted out of hand even by people who should know better.

Harris works his way through the book talking about what morality is, how science can applied to it and the problems with other systems of morality. He lambastes religious morality for it's disconnect from practical well being in favor of obedience to a higher power and gives explicit examples of where religious morality takes a sharp turn from promoting well being and minimizing suffering. But he's no gentler with liberal apologists of the moral relativist camp who, for reasons that escape Sam and I, seem to think that issues like women's rights and child welfare vary in importance depending on which culture you're addressing.

All and all I would highly recommend the book (or at the very least the lecture). It is simply the most progressive and intelligent treatment of ethics I have seen.

Also, apparently Sam Harris is a neuroscientist. How is it that this is the first I've heard of it?

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that sounds excellent. I think i;ll pick that up and read it consectutively with The God Delusion.

Ah, you're putting together books like double features! I haven't read The God Delusion but it probably would be a good pairing.

523 - The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking 8/28/11

Well I read it, and my poor liberal arts brain understood...some of it. It's all very mindbendy and perplexing. Basically I'm not really qualified to comment.

Except he borked up when he invoked free will as a criteria for distinguishing sentient creatures from a seemingly sentient facsimile of a sentient creature. Determinism 101 dude. The appearance of freewill is all there is. Sentient creatures are no less moved by the system in which they exist than robots, it is presumably just harder to define the system that governs them.

Woo. Philosophy pedantry achieved.

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yeah sometimes i get on some theme kick and read a few that are somehow tangentially related to each other... i recently finished The Third Chimpanzee and before that Cro-Magnon -- the first few chapters of 3rd chimp was the core of most of the latter. just wound up that I read them that way though -- Id gotten 3rd chimp as a birthday gift a few years ago and cro-magnon was a (way overdue review!) ER book

35> At the beginning of the year I inadvertently read two books (I think in a row) that were connected, Hamlet and the Prose Edda. It turns out that The story of Hamlet is thought to be rooted in a story from the Edda. And then I just had to follow that up with Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead. I've got The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare and Vortigern, An Historical Play hanging around in the event that I decide to make it a very Shakespearean year.

305 - Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word - Randall Kennedy

A strange career indeed. This slim volume is written in what I tend to think of as "the college structure". Namely it is packed to the gills with historical and contemporary examples arranged categorically. In terms of volume most of these relate to pejorative racist usage, but, true to his byline, Kennedy is just as committed ironic, satirical and affectionate uses of the word.

As someone that abhors taboos of any sort and loves words, slurs have long occupied a difficult status for me. I don't think they should be afforded special status, off limits to all but those who would use them to attack, but I can't ignore their baggage or people's sensitivity to them. Randall seems to have a similar feeling on the matter. He certainly doesn't excuse vile usage of the titular word, but he knows that attempts to regulate it's usage, or excise it from the English language entirely are not only naive, they would undercut freedom of speech and turn victims of verbal attacks into agents of censure. As ugly as words can be it's important to remember that freedom of speech doesn't mean much if we can pick and choose what speech it applies to.

But back to the book. Kennedy briefly looks at the origin of the word and when it picked up it's nasty connotations before diving into historical and contemporary examples or it's uses and abuses. There are some pretty nasty stories, but thankfully as you read on the breadth of the "N-word" becomes more apparent. Kennedy celebrates ironic, sarcastic and affectionate uses of the word within the black community citing people like Richard Pryor and Chris Rock as examples of people that wouldn't let the fact that white people might hear them and not understand their usage dictate how they spoke. Positive uses of "nigger" from literature, music, and comedy are reprinted and discussed.

The last segment is dedicated to controversial usage of the word and this section is done especially well. Kennedy presents the facts of the situation at hand before weighing in on the subject. This allows the reader time to think over what they think of the usage in question before Kennedy makes his case.

All and all I found this quick and edifying. It gave me fuller perspective on the use of the word and it gives me great pleasure that members of the black community are bending the word to their own purposes. Despite Kennedy's defense of non-blacks using the word in positive manners I think I'll leave wrecking this particular taboo to those better suited to it. As it is I'm perfectly happy taking the teeth out of "cunt" anyways.

The one thing I wish was included but wasn't was commentary on the recent censoring of Huckleberry Finn. Kennedy defends the book and Twain's usage of "nigger" in it, but this book was published years before the regualtionists excised all usage of the word from an edition of Huck Finn.

To close out, it's not the words you use, it's what you say with them.

PS. This is one of the books Zoe gave me in last year's Librarything Secret Santa. Thanks Zoe!

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37> great review! I think I heard about that book first on The Daily Show a few years back and you've reminded me to put it on my list.

38> Its definitely a worthwhile read, especially given society's tendency to fixate on words rather than how they're used. Remember when Dr. Laura got in trouble for saying the N-word something like 14 times on the radio? And yet the most racist things she said didn't involve the word at all. Too much of the media just focused on "omg she said the N-word" and skimmed right past her comments that now that we had a black president black people couldn't complain about racism.

And then there's the fact that every time I say "the N-word" part of me thinks "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named".

821 - The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
(rendered in modern prose by David Wright)

Enter the Canterbury Tales. Honestly it's a mixed bag. The prose rendering isn't any trouble to understand and I like that it's written like a piece of verbal storytelling, casual and (mostly) direct. I'm not sure how much of that is down to Chaucer and how much of it is David Wright's. I was pleasantly surprised to come across the phrase "damn your eyes" (one of my favorites), but upon cross checking it with the original text it doesn't appear to be in usage. And so while I liked the delivery I really can't say how well it reflects the original.

The stories, frankly, are bizarre. Not surreal, but alien. They tend to have the simplistic narrative structures you see in myths or fairytales. They are entirely plot driven with cardboard character development (as is typical of fairytales and myths) and seem to fall into a few camps: bawdy and entertaining, heroic, satirical or moral. The stories themselves differ in tone and purpose according to the character of the teller, but aside from Chaucer's overt mockery of certain characters and types it hard to tell how much his thoughts coincide with a given storyteller. This was problematic for me because, as it turns out, Chaucer devoted a lot of the book to an issue that seemed to have been sweeping the 14th century, the roles of men and women in marriage.

Lets face it, when you talk about marriage in the 14th century you're looking at an institution based on economics and controlling women's sexuality. And most of the book is written with a tacit acceptance of women as chattel. Men frequently pine and curse the women they have instantly "fallen in love with" for not immediately submitting to them. Honor and purity are the meter-sticks by which the women in the story are measured with women who chose to die rather than have sex given special praise. But one the other hand you've got the Wife of Bath, who, whatever her flaws, is a strong woman and makes a forceful case for women's power in marriage. And though she is the most defiant she certainly isn't the only one to undermine the idea that women should just submit to their husbands. It's no feminist manifesto, but it can't be overlooked. Unfortunately for me, while it's clear Chaucer is interested in the issue, I have no idea what he wanted to say about it and, frankly, the stories that treat women like they should come with security seals across their twats drove me batty.

Ultimately I'd say this is really not intended for a modern audience and though probably a lot more readable than other literature from the time this is probably best read to better understand the time it was written than for entertainment. Though the raunchy stories are fun.

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I haven’t reread The Canterbury tales since I read them in college, but I also remember thinking that they had an uneven quality and a simplistic characterization and plots, similar to folktales, – but then most of them were based on folktales and what we might call today urban legends. I think it was only much later that writers learned to create three-dimensional characters and complex plots. Even in the majority of Shakespeare’s fictional plays most of which were also based on earlier stories, neither the characters nor the plots are complex, from my point of view. I’d say the same about Joseph Andrews or Grandison. Dickens’s novels have fairly complicated plots, but the characters (at least in the novels I’ve read) seemed to me also rather cardboard. Personally, I think that Jane Austen created the first rounded characters in English literature and entirely realistic plots.

Regarding women’s position, I had a feeling that Chaucer was fairly sympathetic towards them. As I remember, he made it quite clear that the Wife of Bath was very nice to her husband at first – and he treated her abominably till she rebelled. And in another tale, about Griselda, who responded angelically to her husband’s “mental cruelty,” as he subjected her to various “tests” to see if she really loved him, Chaucer says that everything ended happily with them, but warns his male readers not to do anything like that because most women won’t react like Griselda. I think that by having the husband in this story behave in a way that anybody even back then would have considered unreasonable and outrageous, Chaucer was trying to send the message that men should treat their wives decently. Even more surprisingly, in the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer doesn’t condemn the unfaithful wife and lets the readers reach their own conclusions about May-December marriages. Compare The Canterbury tales with The taming of the shrew or the perfect wife Desdemona who finds pleasure even in her husband’s frowns and reproaches, or to the stories of Estella and Pip’s sister in Great expectations which are very similar to The taming of the shrew, and Chaucer begins to seem quite ahead of his time. As far as I know, it seems to me that Galsworthy was the first British male writer to take up the women’s cause – one of the main points of The man of property being that a man shouldn’t look upon his wife as he looks upon his assets – and that was early 20th century!

>41 Ella_Jill: Thanks for the commentary. I had wondered if the much of the misogyny had been intentionally spotlighted to undermine it, but I just wasn't sure since I'm not very familiar with the conventions of the time. I wish my copy had footnotes to clear a lot of this up, but since you read it in school and might remember what you professor had to say I'm curious about two other features of the book.

1. There's a story about a saccharine Christian boy getting murdered by the most ludicrous razor-toothed villain of a Jew you ever saw. It's hard to believe this absurd story was meant to be taken seriously. I tend to believe it makes light of the ridiculous stories that circulated about Jews at the time. But Poe's Law means I'm not quite sure if it is a parody or just another example of the old antisemitism you see in The Jew in the Brambles and the rumors were freely spread of Jews consorting with the devil, killing Christian babies and torturing Jesus (via the Eucharist if you can believe that). You wouldn't happen to know if this particular story was actually intended to be taken seriously or if it's intentionally as ridiculous as it is?

2. There are a lot of references to classical mythology, sometimes even with gods acting as characters in stories. In one case classical gods, in a fantastic bit of spatchcocking, talk about the folly of not acting in accordance with the teachings/will of the Christian god. Any insight into this bizarre mash-up of Christian and classical religious characters?

We didn’t study all the tales in class and I read the rest of them on my own, including "The Prioress’s tale." My own feeling on it was that, sadly, many people back then would have taken it seriously, and so Chaucer would not have included it if he’d disagreed with it. But after I’d read your message I became interested – I remember how disappointed I felt and wondered if there might be another interpretation.

So I looked it up in books and online, and it turns out that there currently is a disagreement among scholars about this tale. Some scholars do think that it was intended as a parody either of anti-Semitism of the day, or of miracle stories, or of the Prioress with her superficial sentimentality. Others maintain that the poem is too well-written and too effective to have been intended as parody. At least one scholar even claims that “with the stateliness of its rime… and the careful blending of pathos and emotion, Chaucer’s masterly hand has created a work that moves even modern-day readers and critics…. despite their abhorrence of the anti-Semitism that the prioress and her tale reveal” (Emmy Stark Zitter, “Anti-Semitism in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale.’”

Everybody concedes that Chaucer’s portrayal of the Prioress is clearly satirical, what with her love of jewelry, sympathy for mice caught in a trap, her various affectations and even her name, Eglantyne, “often used in romantic tales, far removed from the life of a nun” (Richard West, Chaucer, 1340-1400). Richard West even points out that “nuns in the 14th century were forbidden to wear adornments, keep pets or go on pilgrimages… in mixed company,” and that the Prioress’s table manners follow closely the advice a procuress gives prostitutes in Le roman de la rose which was popular in Chaucer’s England. However, the fact the Chaucer mocks the Prioress’s weaknesses and selects a simple and overtly pious (by the standards of the day) tale that suits her doesn’t necessarily mean that the tale wasn’t supposed to be taken at its face value.

Various critics write that the controversy over the interpretation of this tale is of recent origin, and that in the past readers and scholars were quite comfortable with it, except for William Wordsworth’s reaction. And all the discussions about Chaucer’s attitude towards Jews in this tale and arguments that the tale wasn’t intended to be taken seriously that I saw referred to had been written after WWII. I also came across the following description in George Lyman Kittredge’s Chaucer and his poetry written in 1915 and reprinted by Harvard University Press in 1963:

Of all the Canterbury pilgrims none is more sympathetically conceived or more delicately portrayed than Madam Eglantyne, the prioress…. She travels in modest state, with a nun for her secretary and three attendant priests…. but her gentleness and sweet dignity are her best protection…. As to her table manners, which often make the uninstructed laugh, they are simply the perfection of medieval daintiness. Nothing is farther from Chaucer’s thought than to poke fun at them…. It is no accident that Chaucer makes her tell the infinitely pathetic legend of the pious little boy who was murdered for his childlike devotion to the Blessed Virgin…. Miracles of the Blessed Virgin were a favorite form of legend in the Middle Ages, and no wonder!.... The Prioress, involuntarily expressive of her inmost nature, had chosen to repeat the loveliest and most touching of them all.

Nowhere does Kittredge mention that the boy in the tale was murdered by Jews or give any indication that Jews feature in this tale at all. Not all scholars back then completely ignored the ugly side of this tale, but then they tried to minimize it by insisting that although “the story affords ample opportunity for the expression of animosity” towards Jews, “Chaucer’s religion would appear to consist less in denunciation of Christ’s enemies than in affection of her saints” (Grace Haddow, writing in 1914, as quoted by West). And the well-known Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones painted a beautiful illustration of "The Prioress’s tale" featuring Mary with the boy (he later illustrated a new edition of The Canterbury tales, but this tale was the one he’d chosen to represent first, and full-scale and in color). All of this made me think that, perhaps, in the past scholars and readers did their best to persuade themselves and others that the classic poet portrayed the prioress as they thought prioresses should be portrayed and that she told a kind of tale they thought she should have told, whereas today some critics try their best to persuade themselves and others that the classic poet’s attitude to people of other religions was what it should have been and his morals decent in light of what is clear to us today. Interestingly, I’ve even come across a contemporary view that manages to combine these two viewpoints:

Chaucer was widely traveled and more broad-minded than the rest of his countrymen. In "The Prioress’s tale" Chaucer questions her moral blindness and exhibits sympathy for the Jews. However Chaucer’s intention is not to denunciate the Prioress. He only wished to remind the Englishmen of their inhuman treatment of the Jews. The Prioress has no idea whatsoever that she is telling a tale of questionable ethics and moral blindness. She is a simple-minded woman who cannot understand why the massacre of the Jews is unethical. While Chaucer exhibits concern for Jews, he does not water down their wickedness in the story. He emphasizes more on the human rather than the supernatural aspect. His main focus is on the young child’s devotion to the Virgin.

Granted, the above quotation comes not from a scholar, but from BestNotes.com, but they are a registered property of the John Wiley Publishing Company – a respectable publisher that produces many educational books for schoolchildren, for whom this website is also intended.

Richard West also writes that during the Black Death, Jews were accused of causing plague: apparently some Jews confessed to it under torture, and local authorities sent this information around, which led to massacres of Jews in southern France, Switzerland and various German states – despite the fact that Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls that condemned the attacks on Jews and pointed out that the Jews were also victims of the plague. The French poet Guillaume de Machaut wrote a poem about Black Death in which he stated that Jews “who love the evil” “rivers and fountains which used to be pure and healthy in many places poisoned.” West writes that “Chaucer was an admirer of Machaut, and indeed borrowed other lines from this very poem.” Did he also believe its libel? There were no Jews in England at that time, since they had been banished by Edward I in 1290, but the Black Death came to England from Continental Europe, having arrived to Italy from Asia via the Silk Road. West also says that although “the blood libel and other accusations against Jews had been repeatedly denounced by the Papacy,” “these accusations were made and widely believed not just in the Middle Ages but into the 19th and even 20th century.” This confirmed me in thinking that Chaucer wouldn’t have included such a tale – and without any authorial comment at that – if he disagreed with its message, knowing as he did how many people believed such stories and been incited to murder, persecution and slander by them.

And then there’s the ending where Chaucer writes, “O younge Hugh of Lyncoln; slayn also with cursed Jews as is notable, for it is but a litel while ago,” immediately bringing a story that supposedly happened long ago in a far-away place much closer home. Apparently, there was a legend of Little Hugh of Lincoln believed to be a victim of ritual murder and widely revered as a martyr in Lincoln (West). Helen Phillips adds in her An introduction to the Canterbury tales that “Chaucer’s wife and members of the family of the Duke of Lancaster, in whose households she served, belonged to the Fraternity of Lincoln Cathedral, where St Hugh was venerated.” So maybe that’s how Chaucer got the idea for this tale.

So, from what I’ve read, I was forced to agree with Philip Alexander who wrote:

An author, holding up a mirror to life, may express through his characters ideas which he himself would repudiate. However, the author may find himself on morally dubious ground if he insists on being an out-and-out realist, a recorder but not a commentator. He is responsible for his creatures, and he cannot be allowed carte blanche to publicize any point of view purely and simply on the grounds that there are people who say such things. Inevitably he has his own perspective and where this clashes with the perspective of his characters he can reasonably be expected to find ways of distancing himself from them. The more momentous the issues and the deeper the clash, the more imperative does such distancing become. If the author is totally self-effacing he can hardly complain if the reader assumes that his voice and the voice of his character are one and the same…. Chaucer keeps his own council and offers no clear guidance. He has simply given us a slice of life… a portrait of a certain type (in the person of the Prioress). If he meant to distance himself from the Prioress’s views than the means by which he had chosen to do so are inadequate…. He knew what he was doing, and his readers knew what he was doing. He set out to create a version of a well-known type of anti-Semitic tale, and he succeeded wonderfully well. (“Madame Eglentyne, Geoffrey Chaucer and the problem of medieval anti-Semitism”).

And with Richard West’s summation:

Frankly, I doubt whether Chaucer’s irony, even if he intended it, would have been observed by sophisticates at the court any more than by the stupidest of the Canterbury pilgrims… Subtle ironist though he was, even Chaucer tended to drop hints in advance when one of his characters… is about to condemn himself from his own mouth…. We can therefore take it as certain that Chaucer regarded the Prioress with mockery, if not contempt. I would like to think that he disapproved of the Tale which he assigned to her. Unfortunately I cannot do so. For one thing, the Prioress’s tale is one of his most beautiful poems, and he must have been proud of it…. Reluctantly, I have come to accept that Chaucer believed in the blood libel just as Michaut believed that the Jews in France were poisoning wells.

I cannot even say that Chaucer was no worse than other people of his time, because both Alexander and West pointed out that there were people back then who defended Jews against general slanders. So, unfortunately, I've reached an even sadder conclusion than I originally had.

Regarding your second point, I don't remember this episode where classical gods discuss the folly of not acting according to Christian god's will/teaching - as I said, it's been awhile since I read this book.

That was a fantastic post. Thank you so much for sharing :)

184 - Five Dialogues - Plato
(Euthyphro, Apologia, Crito, Meno & Phaedo)

This was recommended to me by the single most coolest stranger I have ever spent a few hours trapped on a plane with. It is by Plato (boo) but purports to be accounts of philosophical conversations Socrates had. I really enjoyed the first two, Euthyphro and Apologia, which deal with issues of justice, the second of which is theoretically the speech Socrates gave in his defense while he was on trial. The last three were philosophical and scientific train wrecks.

These last three, based on my limited exposure in college, felt very Plato to me. They range in topic from the nature of learning to the human soul and a truly Seussical argument that the quality of the thing comes not from its quantifiable attributes, but from it's relationship with Plato's beloved ideals or, as he called them, "Forms". These Forms are not anything we can see, or even really describe. They are simply the most pure form of a given ideal or attribute. Plato was really hung up on the ideal that the world as we see it is just a shitty copy of the ideals. I can't imagine he was much fun to hang out with. He also seems from this book to have desperately needed a lay as he was far too zealous in his claims that celibacy was absolutely necessary for the soul to prosper after death. I think it's a pretty simple case of sour grapes myself, but I digress.

As I said, the topics in these last three are rangy, but they do share a commonality. They are all patent balderdash. Seriously. I don't think Plato (or Socrates if you're willing to accept that) even knew what a logical fallacy was. I wrote many irreverent notes in my margins (some about Plato's mother) as my irritation grew. So what was the problem? Honestly, it's roughly the same one I had with Lee's Strobel's Case for Christ. It starts with a premise for which there is no evidence but that the author dearly wants to be true, almost certainly for the comfort it provides him. In this case it is that the soul is immortal and that once it is freed from the body it is granted clear sight and infinite knowledge. And like Lee Strobel the rest of Plato/Socrates' claims are dependent their audience accepting this first unsupportable claim. The similarity doesn't end there.

Each dialogue is presented as if it is a serious philosophical debate, but by the last three hardly any of the participants speak at all except to periodically tell Socrates how great he is and how right whatever nonsense he's just said is. You could rename this section of the book "Socrates and the Sycophants". It's very similar to the investigation that isn't really an investigation undertaken by Strobel, though Plato/Socrates is probably guiltier of far more self-satisfied moronic brain-wanking than Strobel ever could be.

All in all I enjoyed the book. The first two dialogues I genuinely enjoyed and the last three I enjoyed bitching about. This I found worthy as I do love to hate Plato and had felt ill prepared to do so before and wasn't about to read The Republic. Oh, and at the end Socrates drinks hemlock and dies. It isn't as dramatic as it sounds though.

Excerpt from Phaedo:

...if someone tells me a thing is beautiful because it has a bright colour or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons--for all these confuse me--but I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safe answer for me or anyone else to give, namely, that it is through the Beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful...

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I hear you on the Plato. I have a book on the Socratic dialogues that will satisfy 183, and it keeps staring at me with its beady, little Greek eyes from the bottom shelf of a bookcase.

I, of course, look away in shame... :)

Kudos on sticking it out!

@46 It might not be so bad as you think. I don't know how much they're like these, but I read this book in about a week. The style wasn't at all hard to read and some of them are genuinely good. You know, when they're talking ethics and such rather than exclaiming "by Zeus, of course the human soul is sturdier than a cloak and thus immortal."

But I don't have any plans to read any more Plato either. I blindly bought something by Rousseau at my Goodwill so that's really the only philosophy book I've got staring back at me right now. I don't count Being and Nothingness which, after 60 pages, I determined to be especially well-suited to raising projectors and weighing down beach towels.

398 The Uses of Enchantment : The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales - Bruno Bettelheim

This book is really more about psychology and child development than fairy tales, but it turns out fairy tales are a pretty cool means by which to learn about psychoanalysis and such not. Bettelheim makes the case that fairy tales aren't just fun for children, but that they help them face the subconscious fears, conflicts and ambivalence that a child would be otherwise unable to understand or cope with. A lot of his insight to child development and how fairy tales can reflect childhood crises and help children learn how to deal in real life was brilliant. His analysis of specific fairy tales was a lot more hit or miss.

I'm not someone that thinks the fairy tales were written with some intentional deeper meaner. That doesn't mean I don't think they can't have deeper meanings, or even a specific deeper meaning. But when that's the case I expect it's the product of hundreds of years of storytellers and audiences unconsciously editing and re-editing stories to settle on the version that resonated most deeply. And the fact that I do think some fairy tales do seem to have a specific meaning doesn't mean someone that finds another meaning in it is wrong. These are personal things, if someone finds something there that isn't there for me I am not the arbiter of their experience and I certainly can't dismiss their reactions.

That said, a notable chunk of Bettelheim's analysis is more a demonstration of a psychoanalyst's ability to find cock everywhere than it is about what anyone else is going to see. This can be pretty ridiculous and entertaining. It can also get stupid and sexist. I'm not saying everytime Bettelheim offers a sexual interpretation its bullshit. I'm just saying keep your psychoanalysis filters up.

Highlights!

"The magic formula "up stick and at it" suggests phallic associations, as does the fact that only this new acquisition permits Jack to hold his own in relation to his father..."

"Thus the expulsion from the infant paradise begins; it continues with the mother's deriding Jack's belief in the magic power of his seeds. The phallic beanstalk permits Jack to engage in oedipal conflict with the ogre..."

"it does not take much imagination to see the possible sexual connotations in the distaff..."

"So dwarfs are eminently male, but males who are stunted in their development. These "little men" with their stunted bodies and their mining occupation--they skillfully penetrate into dark holes--all suggest phallic connotations."

"A small locked room often stands in dreams for the female sexual organs; turning a key in a lock often symbolizes intercourse."

"She selects him because he appreciates her "dirty" sexual aspects, lovingly accepts her vagina in the form of a slipper, and approves of her desire for a penis, symbolized by her tiny foot fitting within the slipper-vagina."

"The bride stretches out one of her fingers for the groom to slip a ring onto it. Pushing one finger through a circle made out of the thumb and index finger of the hand is a vulgar expression for intercourse...The ring, a symbol for the vagina, is given by the groom to his bride; she offers him in return her outstretched finger, so he may complete the ritual."

"...he will gain a golden vagina, she a temporary penis."

This isn't a new section for me, but it's just too good not to add.

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006 Above the Fold : Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design - Brian Miller

This is a book on web design so it's got a very specific audience, but if you're part of that audience I'd recommend it. This isn't a book that teaches html or css or any of that. It is strictly devoted to web design. Graphic design, layout, navigation, functionality, these are the things this book addresses. It's well organized according to topic and includes lots of images to illustrate the concepts it addresses. Many of the images are of websites which is useful to see the breadth of web design, learn how various web developers have solved problems and glean inspiration for your own web design.

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#48: I like your review of this, and the selection of quotes. Better not let kids read fairy tales--they're all XXX!!! :)

>50 carlym: I actually really agree with his thoughts on why fairy tales are helpful to children, I think a lot of his interpretations on the other hand came straight out of his ass.

Hey! It's been a while. Been working on my real-life TBR shelf which has made for mostly fiction reading. However this bunch is going up on my Dewey list. The 320 & 813 are replacing books previously on my list and 329 is a new section, one of those elusive "Not assigned or no longer used" ones.

320 - The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Oh Rousseau. I spent so long reading this book that it is difficult to hold a complete enough picture of it in my head to respond to. I think I'll pass on writing a proper review because of this. Suffice it to say the dude was passionate about democracy...sometimes to the point of naivete. The guy couldn't fathom the possibility that in a true and proper democracy a majority would ever trample that rights of the minority. He also had a pretty extreme nationalistic streak. He really didn't think you had any business being a citizen if the thought of avoiding the opportunity to die for king and country ever crossed your mind. The end good really weird when he started debating the effectiveness of religion in molding good citizens. Nevermind if you were an an atheist. Clearly there isn't a civil bone in your body.

The beginning was more thoughtful and politically relevant, but I read it way too long ago to comment without a refresher.

329 - Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by George Washington Plunkitt

This is a collection of short pieces, I'm not sure if they were essays or speeches, by Tammany politician George Washington Plunkitt. It short easy to read and not to be missed for is brazen and unapologetic explanation and defense of "honest graft". AKA the shady ways Tammany politicians acquired and maintained wealth and power.

The downside is that this about as unbalanced a historical account you could find, so even if you pick up all of Plunkitt's tricks and obscurantism you're aren't really going to get the big picture of the situation from this book. Plunkitt isn't concerned about explaining the issues. As far as he's concerned issues are irrelevant to getting votes. As such he rails against things like "civil service reform" but does little to explain why, leaving the reader to assume it must have been something that made his graft more difficult to execute.

On the up side of colorful characters he does condemn liquor taxes for forcing his saloon owner friends to sell "wood alcohol" that resulted in at least six deaths. Tsk tsk. And if they don't lay off the saloon owners he warns the taxes will force them to sell kerosene oil libations to their patrons. The poor dears.

813 - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Book number whatever on the "fundevogel can't resist a banned book" binge. It's good! It was banned in the US until the 60's for it's sexual content (though it's not erotica) and was the book responsible for changing censorship laws in America. Yay! Personally I loved it. There's no real plot, just a roughly chronological collection of stories and musings from the author's time slumming in Paris. The writing is absolutely beautiful, with a flow and nuance I found sensual which is a wonderful contrast to the crazy shit going down.

Seriously. Miller doesn't exactly portray himself and his comrades in a favorable light. Miller floats from one borrowed bunk to another, mooching off his friends, casual acquaintances and people he only tolerates for the meals or francs he knows he can get out of them. In fact the book basically breaks down into just a few things:

• Chasing tail (mostly prostitutes)


• getting by (mooching food, money and a place to crash)


• Listening to other people talk long enough to get food, money or a place to crash out of them


• pining over women


• musing/ranting about art and the world

It seems pretty superficial, and in a way it is, but that's sorta what's great about it. Miller doesn't present a clean sparkling face to the world. He lays it all out and that's that. And while he and his friends do plenty of shitty things, apparently without remorse, I do admire that as difficult and amoral the life depicted was it was a conscious and enthusiastic choice to live that way. He faced down how the world would have him live, and rejected it. Rejected the morality others would impose on him and the steady job and reliable pay so that he could live life outside of the mold. That's really what it was about to me, being the author of your own destiny and damn the consequences.

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832 - The Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht

I never really got into this one but I'm not sure I'm ready to dismiss it as a play. I was initially familiar with the play from the music. I love Mack the Knife, Pirate Jenny and What Keeps Mankind Alive? They're fantastic songs. Unfortunately there isn't much zing in reading song lyrics off the page without Kurt Weill's music to go along. Then there's the fact that I've never actually seen the play. Ouch. Of course I haven't seen Death of Salesman or The Crucible either and that didn't interfere with enjoying the text.

The issue here is that Brecht's intent and style is intentionally off putting. Brecht creates a spectacle and he's driven by his political positions. In this case he spins a yarns about vile underworld criminals and the simpering women they use. On the page the lead character, MacHeath (Mack the Knife) is impossible to like. He heads up a small but successful criminal empire robbing people, but is just as known for flippant acts of rape and murder. And yet somehow people can't seem to get enough of him. The way women claw at his trousers is a combination of absurd and grotesque. There certainly are moments of black comedy in the script, and I could see a talented cast bringing humor to a lot of what is just repulsive on the page. Sadly I couldn't benefit from that.

What that left me with was a pack of characters for whom I felt indifferent to at best and disgusted by at worst and an overwhelming awareness of just how hard Brecht was pummeling with his political message. The Threepenny Opera is meant to show the dregs of the criminal underworld and, pointing a finger at corporations, bankers, the bourgeoisie and so on, say they are just as corrupt and vile, see how they profit from the misery of others. And knowing Brecht that's the experience he wanted me to have, sorta. It probably would have worked better to see it staged.

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811 - The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis

I'm going to do like I did with The Threepenny Opera and say this didn't really work for me but give a bit of free pass since I read it in a format radically different than it was originally presented and intended. The book collects an irregular column published in the Evening Sun 1916-1922. It was ostensibly authored by "Archy", a cockroach purported to type each piece letter by letter by hurling himself head first into the proper typewriter key. Because of the restraints of this sort of typing Archy's pieces never included punctuation or capitalization. You see, it would simply be impossible for a cockroach to use the shift key while hurling himself at another. He was also a vers libre poet in his last life.

Sadly the writing never really lives up to it's conceit, nor does the anthology live up to its name. Marquis doesn't seem to have ever really had the time to come up with interesting or particularly crafted pieces for the Archy segments so what is there often seems repetitive, vapid or twee. This may not have felt so irrelevant within it's original context along side the news of the day. There at least it may have served as a pleasant bit of fluff between extolling the virtues of sobriety and ridiculing the kaiser.

Sadly, whatever might have been learned from the relationship between the Archy column, the Evening Sun and their era you won't find it here. I had been excited to lay my hands on this book specifically because I had been interested at stealing a glance at history by way a literary cockroach. Didn't really happen though. First off this book uses end notes rather than footnotes. I hate end notes. In a way the fact that there isn't really anything interesting or insightful there is a good thing. It meant I could give up hunting around for the proper end note once I realized half of the notes were telling me things I already knew--believe it or not, I didn't need a special note to tell me what a "speakeasy" is-- and 100% of the notes were far to limited to give any real insight to the time or the column.

So what did I get from this? A lot of bitching from Archy about how he wasn't getting paid enough for his writing (which, in all fairness probably did reflect a very real problem for Marquis) and my current boundary for the bottom of the barrel when it comes to free verse poetry. Allen Ginsberg Archy is not.

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335 The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and that other guy Frederick Engel

Honestly, I expected better. I already know the basic problems with communism going into the book, but I didn't expect they'd be so obvious in the text. Maybe that's the privilege of hindsight, but I did find the goals defined in the book incredibly naive. Rather than set goals that could improve the lives of the working class the book ostensibly sets it sights on taking the power from the bourgeoisie and giving it to the the workers. Except there really isn't a plan to empower the worker, just a wide-eyed scheme to find equality with the elimination of private property. If there is any equality to be found here it is in misery as there was no actual plan described that would actually raise the quality of life for the worker.

I suppose communism might work on a small scale in a commune setting were al involved opted in. But not as a government enforced economy. At the most basic level communism is based on some pretty austere philosophical principles and regardless of how well any given person may do with them, it will never do to have a government force such a philosophy and it's implementation on it's citizens.

PS. I've never seen the words "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" used more. Seriously. So many times.

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301 Medieval Marriage - Georges Duby

Meh. The focus was much narrower than I anticipated and not one I was particularly interested in. It really was just a book about:

• which 12th century French noble married which lady (the oldest son to the richest/most powerful family girl that could be arranged)
  
• who arranged the whole thing (the patriarch of the family)
  
• who bitched about it (the church when it didn't suit them, the husband when he wanted a new wife)
  
• if said lady had babies in the quantity and gender desired (sometimes)
  
• what was done when someone wanted to terminate a marriage (claim adultery or say "oops she's my cousin"--she was of course, but so was the lady he married next).
  
• the purpose of this whole marriage thing (secure power, allegiances, money and consolidate family wealth via incest)
  

Frankly, I pretty much knew all that from my women's studies class in college which was a lot more interesting and wasn't afraid to call rape rape, inside or out of marriage. Duby's language is so detached when he talks of abducting women to the marriage bed you wonder if, like Fezzik, you should pipe up "I don't think that word means what you think".

Woo hoo! Traditional marriage!

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599 Of Wolves and Men - Barry Lopez

Does what it says on the tin. It covers wolves, or rather what we know about wolves and their relationship with people from every angle imaginable (though some are covered more thoroughly than others). It starts off with what was know about wolf life and behavior and then lept into human wolf relations. It was at it's most hippy when discussing Alaskan and Canadian Indians' understanding of and respect for wolves, but it still stayed pretty even handed. There was an awful lot of brutal chapters on wolf hunting in North America, both for sport and profit. Honestly, though I hadn't heard of it before it sounds like it was up there with the buffalo hunting. They were taken to the brink of extinction, largely because farmers and cattlemen saw them as a threat to their business. There's some on folklore and myth as well as little bits on wolf-children, werewolves and the hazards of keeping wolves as pets.

It's certainly not a bad choice if you're looking to learn about the history of men and wolves.

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306 The Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton 10/2/12

I tend to roll my eyes at self-help books and relationship books. It probably isn't my best attribute, but it's true. This one I ate up. This was almost certainly because we live in a society so knotted up about sexuality and traditional monogamy that there really isn't much discussion of, let alone positive role modeling of healthy non-monogamous relationships out in the open. Lately I have become more and more aware that a lot of perfectly lovely people have been cutting their own path when it comes to structuring their intimate relationships. Couple that with my own disinterest in the traditional institution of marriage and this seemed like the book for me.

It was.

The book starts off beautifully from the simple premise: Sex is fun and pleasure is good for you. The authors proudly dismiss the idea that the number of partners a person has has any bearing on their value as a person or their moral fiber. This, they point out, is a hold over from our culture's long tradition of commodifying sex, or, more specifically, commodifying women according to the exclusivity of their bodies. There is of course nothing wrong with monogamy if it is what works for a couple, however the authors are quick to point out that love and sex need not go hand in hand, and if love is dependent on complete sexual possession of your partner's body you might be confusing your lover with your property. You love a person for who they are, not who they do.

These are of course things that need to be sorted out by the individuals involved and nowhere in the book do the authors imply one sort of relationship to be superior to another. They do however point out that what's best for one person is not necessarily best for another and what is best for a person can change over a lifetime. Or several times. They dig into the ethics and strategies of non-monogamy and here it really opens up. Frankly, with the possibly exception of the chapter on how to negotiate sex parties, this section really ought to apply to anyone. Communication and emotional honesty are emphasized above all else. Using this basic foundation the authors detail how to sort out what boundaries you need in your relationship and how to deal with the difficulties and problems that will arise in a non-monogamous relationship. Not because non-monogamy is inherently more fragile than monogamy, but because every relationship faces challenges.

I still don't know how exactly I would like to structure my romantic relationships, but now I'm a lot more knowledgeable about the options out there and feel more secure knowing my relationships don't need fit any expectations or structure other than those imposed by the people involved. Yay!

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829 - Beowulf - unknown, translated by Seamus Heaney 12/5/12

I read this imagining it being read aloud (or recited) over a series of nights in a Medieval mead hall. In my brain it was a Nordic hall with a borderline viking audience, but I hope you'll forgive me as the story is super Nordic in flavor. I think it makes more sense like that. The way it's organized, the dynamic action, the repetition of stuff we've already heard in great detail....It seems made for a listening audience, divided up into self contained story units for many nights of consecutive storytelling. That or it was compiled from several pre-existing stories mashed together. Probably both.

As such it definitely doesn't have the level of story craft we expect from modern literature. You will never, ever find a character retelling in exact detail the events he has just lived through that you just read a few pages back in a modern book. But there it is in Beowulf. There are also some continuity errors. While eulogizing Beowulf it is claimed that swords always failed Beowulf because his strength was such that they always broke on the first swing....except earlier the author had gone on at length about how fantastic this ancient sword was and it wasn't until Beowulf found this fantastic ancient sword that he could defeat Grendel's mother. Also, stop talking about your father in heaven. Really. Invoking Christian mythology in the middle of a monster-fighting action scene isn't badass, it's just weird. Clearly I'm not a 12th century Saxon.

That said I can see why this is important historically and artistically. Heaney's translation is vibrant and dynamic as I imagine the original must have been to Old English folk. And while the structure and style is almost certainly lifted for older Nordic skaldic poetry (oh the kennings!) there is a maturity and thoughtfulness to it that you don't often see in old heroic tales. As much as Beowulf is about super-human heroics it is just as much about mortality and the inevitability of even the greatest man's downfall. It adds a level of humanity to the story that isn't often seen in mythic tales.

On the other hand it's not nearly as mad and funny as its Nordic kin. Not one goat-testicle tug of war if you can believe it.

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301 - Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram 1/11/13

"Worse crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion." - C.P. Snow

This book has been on my TBR list (but not my shelf) for years. About a 100 pages into The Gulag Archipeligo I had to stop and request this one at my library. I just needed something to help me understand how an institution built on human cruelty could possibly find the manpower to perpetuate its cruelty. This definitely helped.

In the 1960's Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that tested what happened when a figure of authority instructed a person to do something that violated common ethics. In the experiment subjects were told that they were taking part in a study into the effects of punishment on learning. There were three roles in the experiment: experimenter, teacher, and learner. The teacher would read a series of word pairs to the learner and the learner was to remember what word was paired with another. However, for every incorrect response given by the learner the teacher was to administer and electric shock. In most versions of the experiment the severity of the shock increased with each wrong answer. The experimenter oversees the experiment, recording results and instructing the teacher.

In actuality it is the teacher that is the subject of the experiment with the parts of both the learner and the experimenter played by actors. The learners responses are predetermined. In addition, as the learner is in most versions located in an adjacent room, recordings of the learner's increasing protests and pain are played in response to predetermined shocks providing the teacher with feedback for his actions.

There is a fairly decent chance you didn't need that summary of the experiment. It's famous. It's famous because the majority of subjects completed the experiment administering the highest shocks on the board until the experimenter terminated the experiment. Don't misinterpret this. While there was an occasional kook that seemed to enjoy shocking the man in the other room virtually all others showed remarkable amounts of stress, expressed concern for the man they were shocking and or entreated the experimenter to halt the experiment or check on the man. And yet, though they would never do such a thing on their own and knew that their actions violated their own ethics very few were able to defy the experimenter's instructions and halt the experiment.

Milgram recounts the experiment in its variations including transcripts of various trials. It is captivating reading the exchanges between the experimenter and teacher, wondering if this subject will be defiant or if he will conform to the will of the authority. You always hope, this one will defy... The book is utterly captivating and edifying, exposing the fatal flaw in the implementation of personal morality.

Honestly, this ought to be required reading. Fuck Ethan Frome. Assign a chapter of this in high school and have a God's honest discussion about ethics, authority, agency and culpability.

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Yes, it's a famous experiment, but I don't think that it exactly parallels the situation with Gulag or Holocaust, or those who post on Yahoo news today in support of corporal punishment of children. After all, participation in experiments conducted by research groups is strictly voluntary. Nor would anybody be forced to continue participating in an experiment against his/her will. So the people administering the shocks had to asume that the other person wanted to go along with it, whatever his involuntary reactions (maybe it was his research, and he thought the resulting paper would be worth the pain - one never knows). However, people working in the Gulag knew that their victims hadn't agreed to it. So why did they come to work there? Well, why did the people in Milgram's book agree to participate in an experiment that would require them to administer shocks to people in the first place? I'm sure that some brainwashing that it was in the interests of the state or science did take place, but ultimately I think it shows not so much most people's obedience to authority (nobody ordered them to work in Gulag or take part in that experiment), as the fact that most people don't care too much about what happens to other people, if they don't know and care about them personally. Without that, they wouldn't have agreed to it in the first place, whatever the state's/researchers' rationale. It's not at all flattering about human nature, but I think it's true of most people (although certainly not all) that we don't really care about other people in general. That's why when given a good enough reason - it's in the interests of science/these people are traitors/these children are lazy/they are heretics/they want to steal our land/they stole something already/they are criminals/they don't understand anything else/they hate us/etc/etc/ - enough people to keep such institutions running would perpetrate any kind of cruelty. If human nature were different, the world would have been a very different kind of place, without wars, without need for police, without slavery in most countries' history, etc.

To give, but the most recent example, when I first heard of the Newtown school shooting in my workplace's lunch room, we were all shocked, but after awhile all of us (about a dozen people), except for one person, resumed eating lunch. That person was the only one I saw crying afterwards. It doesn't mean that the rest of us weren't upset by the news. We just weren't upset enough to make it upset our day. Or take the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everybody at my workplace whom I know on a more than hello-how-are-you basis is and always was against them, but again, even though we have no problem disagreeing with our government, we carry on with our lives, as if nothing was happening. Now, I'm sure, none of us could press a button to send a missile to Baghdad, despite the government's rationale, but it always takes two: those who believe and act and those who let them. Hence the world we're living in.

I think in addition it's never really clear what is possible or how to stop terrible and complicated things from happening. People who can effect change are special in that regard whether its through their position or personal power or leadership or conviction and stubbornness.

The threshold of what is daunting and what is worth personal risk or effort compared to sense of ethics morality or empathy and compassion is a invisible yet potent barrier.

Why should it take a Newtown and so many others to direct enough national attention to get to a point where t e issue is raised to a vote?

This is mostly for Ella_Jill. It's long in coming because I knew when I read your response I was going to have to write a book and needed a little space to collect myself.

Certainly the Milgram experiment and the events remembered in The Gulag Archipelago are worlds apart in terms of magnitude. And while what was happening in the Archipelago wasn't really known to the outside world (or even the rest of the Soviet Union) Milgram's experiment was very much a response to the atrocities of the holocaust. He acknowledges this and the fact that clearly, in a situation such as that the pressures to bow to authority would be much stronger as rebellion would threaten one's livelihood at the least and probably one's life and family as well. I don't know what mechanism controlled who was put into choosing who executed the atrocities under either regime, but you're right, it was in the interest of both to employ the sadistic and cruel whenever possible.

However, in the aftermath of the holocaust it was the knee-jerk reaction of those learning of it from a far to proclaim things like, "that could never happen here", "I would never do such a thing" and generally assume that somehow the people of Germany must be some how inferior to have allowed such a thing to happen. But Milgram was a scientist, so rather than assume that normal people could never allow such things he investigated what normal people could be compelled to do in spite of themselves. And it turned out to be quite a lot.

Now let me address some of your more specific comments:

"…participation in experiments conducted by research groups is strictly voluntary. Nor would anybody be forced to continue participating in an experiment against his/her will. So the people administering the shocks had to asume that the other person wanted to go along with it, whatever his involuntary reactions (maybe it was his research, and he thought the resulting paper would be worth the pain - one never knows)."

Certainly it was voluntary, but you don't seem very familiar with the details of the experiment. There were many variations of the experiment. These variations helped Milgram pin down what factors influenced obedience positively or negatively. After the earliest experiments when they first discovered that almost everyone was completely obedient they introduced elements they thought would encourage disobedience. The subject watched as the learner strapped down and connected to the device. At this point of the experiment the learner would express concern, citing a heart condition. They would be assured that though the shocks could be quite painful there was no health risk.

After that the teacher and experimenter left the learner alone in the other room. The switchboard was explained and a small sample shock was administered to the teacher so they might have an idea of what the learner was experiencing. This shock (believe it was 15 volts) was painful enough to make many of the learners jump or yelp and when questioned about how strong they thought the shock was they almost all overestimated the strength of the shock. During the testing phase they received auditory feedback from the learner with increasing resistance. There were yelps and screams as well as insistence that the experiment be ended. After a bit the learner complained that his heart was bothering him and later flat out refused to participate any further. At this point the teacher was instructed to consider a lack of answer a wrong answer and continue administering shocks. As the teachers got further along the board the recorded responses stopped altogether leaving the teacher to wonder if the learner was unconscious or dead. When teachers expressed concern for the learner they were told that the shocks caused no permanent damage and that it was essential that they finish the experiment.

Make no mistake, the subjects were given every reason to reject the task they were given to perform. But the majority finished doing them anyways as they exhibited extreme stress.

"…people working in the Gulag knew that their victims hadn't agreed to it. So why did they come to work there?""

Certainly it was in the state's interest to employ the most cruel and indifferent people they could. But that doesn't mean they always could or that those employed had other options. It was the fucking Soviet Union. People were starving in the cities. People were starving in the country. Returning from the war Soviet POWs were considered enemies of the state simply because they lived rather than died. And believe it or not people really did believe in the superiority of communism and that all its failures really were just a consequence of villainous wreckers and saboteurs. If you thought the McCarthyism was bad you read about the chekists and the gaybists. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag because he had a pen pal from outside the Soviet Union to whom he occasionally expressed political criticism. This was of course espionage as far as the Soviet Union was concerned.

Why in the world would a normal person take such a cruel job? What choice did they have? True, Solzhenitsyn mentions one sensitive man who, when recruited to the gaybisty (or was it the cheka?) went straight to a tuberculosis clinic and was able to secure a false diagnosis and thus slip his nation's call. So how do normal people become agents of cruelty? Sure what the guards and police did was far worse than Milgram's subjects and lasted a good bit longer than one day. And for that you should probably look into The Stanford Prison Experiment. But put simply, the tormenters learn that the prisoners deserve what they get. After all, they're prisoners. They wouldn't be there if they didn't deserve it. Ha. This was also pillar of the Soviet prosecution: you wouldn't have been arrested if you hadn't done something wrong. Have a tenner.

So there you have it. You're living in the Soviet Union and by some miracle you haven't been arrested yet and, oh, check it out, if you take a repulsive job for the government you can eat too. Milgram's subjects had it easy. They only had to take responsibility for their role in the experiment. If only they had such luxuries in the Soviet Union. To be free to be true yourself knowing the government wasn't lurking around every corner dying for the smallest excuse to sodomize you with a sealed soda bottle.



I'm still working on Gulag (and my book only contains the first two parts) but what I took from Milgram's book is if you don't want to be coerced into betraying yourself you need to own your actions. Those are the people that disobeyed, the one's that accepted their part in the experiment and saw themselves as ultimately responsible for their actions rather than surrendering responsibility to another party. It also changed how I view authority. In trying to make myself wholly responsible for my actions I am my own authority. As such I have to be aware and critical of circumstances in which I am asked to cede my authority to others and make sure those I would grant my obedience deserve it and don't overstep their authority.

There are some interesting books on the related subject of "ordinary" Germans' participation in the Holocaust (and also on East Germans' participation/assistance the Stasi).

OMG. I'm back. Or rather I never left but now I actually have something to post.

616 Vaccinated - Paul Offit 4/12/13

Good stuff. I'm quite partial to medical history, but it'd been a while since I read any. This is a good one, easily accessible, interesting and super relevant. Although it's organized around the work of Maurice Hilleman it really isn't a biography (thank goodness). Offit simply uses him as a pivot by which he accesses the history and development of vaccines preceding and concurrent with Hilleman's career. It was completely fascinating reading how vaccines grew from the cringe-worthy practice of arm-to-arm vaccination (when the inoculated fluids of one person were introduced directly in the next person to be vaccinated) to the crazy space-age sort of vaccines we've got to day where scientists can cleave apart viruses isolating the particles that cause immunity from the dangerous bits with little threat of outside contamination. That's pretty new, they stumbled onto the mechanism to do that in the 80's.

Most of it is about some pretty down and dirty, nose to grindstone type of techniques. Reading about them made vaccines understandable in a way that they never were before. Simply put before I read this book I had only the vaguest idea of how vaccines worked and where they came from. Scientists did it! With magic! Ha. No really, after years and years of hearing about vaccines being made from weakened or dead diseases I get it now. Now I know how they weakened diseases. They forced them to evolve. Stick it in a chicken egg. Force generation upon generation to acclimate to life in a chicken egg until it's not so good at life in a person, but still enough like the original disease that the body can learn to make antibodies from it.

Offit presents how various vaccines were developed and it's fascinating how much the ingredients list sounds like witchcraft. Really. The rabies vaccine was first made in rabbit spines. Offit also does a good job of looking at the political and corporate involvement in vaccine production, both positive and negative. It's all very human. Hilleman was kinda a hardass, but you had to respect how completely committed he was to developing the best vaccine for the people. It's a shame that egos, fear-mongering and bottomlines can do so much damage to such important work.

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365 - The Gulag Archipelago I-II - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago (I-II). Over the 4 months I spent reading it I found there were just two reactions in who asked what I was reading: indifferent unfamiliarity and oh, that. This seems appropriate. If you know what the book is "oh, that" is pretty much the simplest, most sincere response.

This isn't anyone's favorite book and what literary qualities there are you don't discuss with your book club. More than anything it is a monument. A monolith of document whose sole purpose is to record the Soviet government's secret holocaust . At least tens of millions were swept up off the streets, from their homes, their jobs and disappeared forever into the grist mill that was the archipelago. Ostensibly these were political arrests, know as 58s. It used to be under the tzars there was pride in being a political prisoner and they commanded a certain amount of respect in prison. Not so under the Soviets. The highest crime was individual thought and if they had even the slightest though that you may only be 99.99% in step with the regime you were arrested, your dangerous thought quarantined from the public.

I say ostensibly this is only part true. It is true that people had only to let out even the barest hint of individual political thought to be swept up. But this was not necessary. The first World War was ending and the distribution of power had changed. Country folk now might be crossing country lines to visit family they had always visited. The Soviet government treated such indifference to the new border as espionage. Russians the returned home from living in Europe were arrested for the crime I being able to notice that The U.S.S.R. was rather shit compared to the west. Russians living abroad that chose to remain their rather than return to the new Soviet Union were branded spies, kidnapped and dumped into the archipelago. There were also the Russian POWs, Russian soldiers that had the audacity to live rather than die for their country. They were considered traitors simply by virtue of their continued existence. And in greater numbers were people that were probably just a poor combination of unlucky and naive, people swept up simply because the gulags needed to be fed. You see, as much as the gulags were about political suppression they were even more an economic fact. The country could not support itself on labor (if there even was such a thing in the Soviet Union) and thus became dependent on slave labor in the gulags. This is why there were arrest quotas. The gulags required a steady diet of new prisoners as it shat out emaciated corpses that had never had a chance to finish the 5, 10, 15 or 20 year sentences that had been hung on them.

And that's assuming they survived long enough to die in the gulag. The physical book I just completed contained only the first two volumes of Gulag. In all there are seven. In the first two parts Solzhenitsyn doesn't even get to the gulag. Solzhenitsyn you see isn't just writing a memorial, he is documenting a suppressed history as it happens. He knows that no matter how many millions disappear the government is doing it's damnedest to make sure no one found out what happened to them, to simply make them disappear. And so Gulag attempts to record every facet of the Gulag system including the road to it. He explains the way arrests are carried out, how interrogations are conducted and the role of torture, via both active and passive means. Active torture would be things like beating or staging fake executions (like in Argo) which require action on the part of the torturer, passive torture includes things like starvation, sleep deprivation, prolonged exposure to extreme cold and shoving you in a box full of bedbugs to suck you till you can't stand while they eat lunch (the guards I mean, but I guess the bed bugs are having lunch too). Use of passive techniques by far surpassed active torture as it cost nothing and required no energy on the part of the torturer. There is a limit to just how many prisoners one person can beat. You can only beat one at a time and eventually you have to rest your arm and even the most efficient beater is eventually looking at a repetitive stress injury. On the other hand there is no limit to how many prisoners you can freeze, starve or turn into typhoid fodder all at once. Solzhenitsyn scoffs at reports of people being released unbroken after 4 days of torture by Nazis. Clearly, he says, the Nazis gave up too soon. Everyone breaks under Soviet torture.

On the other hand Solzhenitsyn celebrates every small mercy and the slightest joy that prisoners may enjoy on their way to the gulag. A piss pot, even when it is overflowing, is better than no piss pot. And a bowl is a luxury when you've been eating your gruel out of your coat pockets. And a trip to the latrine, sheer bliss. And then there are the truly unique privileges of the prisoners. In the Butyrka political prisoners awaiting sentencing could request any book from the library. There was no telling when it would turn up but they did turn up and they were books unavailable anywhere else in the U.S.S.R.. They were by in large confiscated from personal collections and the prisoners overwhelmingly indulged in books forbidden in the Soviet Union. Maybe the prison staff didn't know the contents of the books they dutifully delivered to the 58s or maybe they just didn't care about enforcing censorship among a group of people that had already been deemed politically tainted and quarantined. Solzhenitsyn goes so far as to say, "The cell was constricted, but wasn't freedom even more constricted?". You see, outside, where bodies were free minds and mouths were caged by fear of the government, but once in prison you could say whatever you wanted within the intellectual safe zone of the quarantine. And they did. You get the impression that the communal cells housing 58s were full of vibrant and passionate debate on politics and philosophy. Only here were intellectual pariahs free to state their minds, make their cases and change the minds of those more sheltered than them selves and each other.

There really is no hope of me detailing even a fraction of Solzhenitsyn's work here (and it would only be a fraction of his work if I even attempted it), but I can say with complete conviction that he achieved what he set out to do. He told us what happened to them. How it was done and what it was to live it. And he did it while himself a prisoner. This is what a hero looks like.

Selected Quotes:

"Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered."

"The machine stamped out sentences. The prisoner had already been deprived of all rights when they cut off his buttons on the threshold of State Security, and he wouldn't avoid a stretch. The members of the legal profession were so used to this that they fell of their faces in 1958 and caused a big scandal. The text of the projected new 'Fundamental Principles of Criminal Prosecution of the U.S.S.R.' was published in the newspapers, and they'd forgotten to include any reference to possible grounds for acquittal. The government newspaper issued a mild rebuke: 'The impression might be created that our courts only bring in convictions.'"

"If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone."

"But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest? Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated."

"At Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. 'So and so! Article 58-1a, twenty-five years.' The chief of the convoy was curious: 'What did you get that for?' 'For nothing at all.' 'You are lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.'"

"The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan."

"What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for."

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You know, this isn't even a new section for me. How many books can one person read about prison? I've got at least three more on my reading list.

652 - The Code Book - Simon Singh

Interesting look at the history and craft of cryptography and its eternal nemesis cryptoanalysis. Having had only a rudimentary familiarity with cyphers and other cryptography before I can now say with perfect conviction that I am neither smart enough nor patient enough to even entertain the possibility of further dabblings on my part. My heart got warm fuzzies reading about the epic nerds behind the cyphers and their crackings, but I am not that that kind of nerd (I just think those nerds are hot). I mangaged to do just the first of the challenges in the back, and after sinking several hours fruitlessly into the second I decided I was out of my depth.

Even so it is really interesting reading, and while I have exactly zero interest in cracking a Vigenere or Enigma (ha!) cypher on my own they are pretty cool to read about. Also, Marian Rejewski invalidates all Polish jokes.

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67>

I know that I couldn't crack an Enigma, but if you're ever in the DC or Baltimore area, the NSA's Cryptological museum (which is about halfway between the two cities) has a working Enigma machine that you can actually play with. It helped me really understand how it works a lot more than just reading about it did.

(I really liked The Code Book, too. Glad you enjoyed it!)

That sounds cool. I'll put it on my dream museum list.

A decent, readable book on cryptography on two Dewey lists and is super-cheap on Amazon? Sold! On the wishlist it goes...

439 Basic Norwegian - Pimsleur

Aw, I finished my first Pimsleur course. Og nå jeg snakker litt norsk. Men jeg forstår ikke så mange. To be completely clear I started digging into Norwegian almost exactly a month ago, though I had been taking it in passively over the last eight years by way of Kaizers Orchestra.

I'm not sure how familiar the lot of you are with Pimsleur, for whatever nerdy reason I am forever seeing cheesy google ads for them proclaiming them to the mortal enemies of language tutors. Frankly I call bullshit on anything that claims to have the secret to learning a language quickly and easily, but within the decidedly narrow parameters the Pimsleur courses exist in they are worth looking into. And by this I mean checking them out of your library and ripping them onto your computer. The Pimsleur model is almost exclusively an audio based training system which breaks down pronunciation and introduces dialogue which it then teaches you to recognize and respond to appropriately. Given the intentional use of repetition not a lot of ground is covered in the 5 discs of material, but it is well covered. They definitely err of the side of knowing a few basic things well rather than many things poorly.

The Norwegian course in particular worked well for me, relative to my previous attempts with Pimsleur's introductory Russian course. Admittedly I wasn't studying exclusively with Pimsleur with either language, but I have put in far less time with Norwegian than I have with Russian and I still ended up with a much better grasp of what was going on in the Norwegian course than the Russian course (which I haven't managed to finish yet). Part of this is down to the language itself. Norwegian has far more in common with English than Russian and, if my novice language studies have shown me anything, Russian grammar is a snake pit. Just saying. Of course you can totally learn it despite it's epic grammar, but that grammar makes for a less comprehensible Pimsleur course than Norwegian does.

You see, the beautiful thing about the Norwegian course is without defining any rules it prompts you to find the patterns that define word order and grammar and then execute completely new sentences based on what you've already learned. And that is pretty awesome in a beginning language course. This isn't even attempted in what I completed of the Russian course as the inflections fly far to fast and furious to be intuited and executed by a new student. Because of this and Pimsleur's apparent commitment to remaining mum on the subject of grammar a grammatically intense language like Russian is reduced to repetition without interpretation. I was able to sort out a lot of it based on outside sources, but was eventually stymied by the subjunctives. With the Norwegian course all my questions were easily answered with the other sources I was using (one Norwegian-English pocket dictionary, a 1950's Teach Your Self Norwegian book with Riksmål of all things and my beloved Kaizers). Honestly most of the time I was getting the grammar before it came up in Pimsleur so I got to sit back and think "well of course it's got that ending, it's the definite article" or "oh yes, here you use the infinitive, but over here the verb declines for the present tense". It's all very nerdy and delightful.

And most importantly I'm totally learning a lot. Considering I've been at this just a month it's sort of ridiculous how much I can pick up out of written text and I'm getting much better at recognizing familiar vocabulary in my Kaizers' songs. Of course they sing in a different dialect that's transcribed in Nynorsk rather than the Boksmål of Pimsleur or the (good lord) Riksmål in my primer but I don't think it really matters that much at this point. I mean, I'm getting a leg up in Swedish for free here and that's supposedly a different language entirely so I don't think it's worth fretting over the varied spelling and pronunciation conventions observed in Norway just yet.

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179 The Society of Timid Souls - Polly Morland

The book takes its name from a long forgotten group of shy pianists. Rallied together by a man that promised to squelch their paralyzing stage fright they met and took turns preforming to an audience of their peers. Fellow timid souls hooting hollering and generally doing everything possible to be the worst audience imaginable. Apparently the program was pretty successful at steeling the nerves and confidence of the previously nervous pianists.

But this book is not about them. Instead Morland, a self-described timid soul, inspired by the pianists sets out to discover what courage is and if it is something that can be learned. Sadly as an interview based book the bulk of the material is indistinguishable from the millions of human interest stories you've already encountered about soldiers, firefighters, extreme sports, cops, the terminally ill or disabled and those people that in a split second put themselves between a baby and a mad dog. These people act bravely, though their own opinions on their courage (or lack of it) and why they acted as the did are rarely anything you haven't already heard a million times before. And here in lies the problem. Morland set out to write a book of courage but most of the people she interviews, regardless of their personal courage, don't seem to have any more insight into the virtue than the rest of us.

Fortunately there are bright spots. The first was not about courage but fear. In a section on performance anxiety Morland uncovers a vast swath of professional musicians suffer from crippling performance anxiety. And though this fear lacks the drama of the battlefield or a sheer cliff wall it is no less real or difficult to overcome. It turns out though, that because this fear is felt with shame and often seen as a threat to a musician's livelihood it is dealt with clandestinely. It turns out something like 30% of professional musicians take beta blockers to calm their nerves when they anticipate a performance will test their nerves. It does make the, better musicians they explains, it just allows them to perform their best.

The other bright spot comes much later in a section dedicated to what Morland calls "moral courage". Here there are people that stick to their guns and do what they think to be right in the face of social opposition. Morland clearly sees this as the height of bravery as often it requires a person to act alone and in defience of his peers. Those interviewed in the section were universally more interesting and thoughtful. No doubt a consequence of courage born of personal ideology and conviction rather than split second action. There are tantalizing sections with a non violent civil rights activist and the man that literally wrote the handbook on non violent resistence. It would have been a much better book if more of the interviewees were of this caliber.

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271 Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown

Completely bizarre. And consequently one of the easiest bits of academia I have ever read. First off let it be know that the lesbian elements are a relatively small part of the book. There.

This is the story of a 16th century nun that rose to power in a fledgling convent by passing herself off as personally chosen by God. You know, visions, stigmata, trances, holy suffering, pretending to be possessed by Jesus or angels. The Usual Things. These, apparently miraculous things, had a well established history at the time. Enough so that when the veracity of Benedetta's...experiences were investigated no one ever asked if she was faking. Nope, inconceivable. Instead they went on and on with the minutea of her experiences, comparing them with other supposed mystics' experiences and evaluated if her visions were in step with church canon. No, it was not chichanery they worried about but devilry. Because obviously if these weren't heavenly visions they were deceptions sent by the devil. That or she was just an overly enthusiastic nun working herself up into thinking she was communing with god in miraculous ways. That wasn't so uncommon either. But with the extent of Benedetta's experiences simple flights of fancy just couldn't cover it. This is after all a woman that mobilized her convent to throw herself a lavish wedding ceremony for herself and Jesus and spent a good part of it talking about how awesome she was as she pretended to be possessed by her divine bridegroom. She was nothing if not extravagant and assertive in her saintly claims.

The fact that she used the power she attained to coerce another nun into a secret lesbian affair would hardly compare if not for the fact that no one had a frickin clue what to think about two women getting it on. Angelic possession and invisible divine bridegrooms sure, but two ladies getting it on. It literally broke their brains. They knew what they thought of two men getting it on (they burned them to death) but two ladies? How could they possibly lust for anything other than dick? Oh Renaissance, how perfectly unenlightened of you. You definitely get the sense that the straight male heirarchy was petrified at the prospect that maybe their dicks weren't the best thing ever. But whatever, the heteronormitsm was so extreme back then even Benedetta appearred to have trouble placing her same sex attraction into the cultural framework available. Ultimately she created a narrative that imposed a heterosexual frame on her lesbian affair. You see she enacted her sexual aggression in the character of one of the male angels that "posessed" her. This also served to make it easier to coerce her partner's participation.

Because of the sort of sources the story is drawn from it is impossible to know the character of the affair. There was certainly a massive disparity between Benedetta's power (she had become an abbess and in effect a living saint) and her partner's. It could have been entirely coercive and rape-y. Or perhaps it was consenual. I expect it was not fully one or the other. Because of the extreme repercussions for being caught in such a relationship both parties reported the relationship when questioned in the manner which best served to cover their own ass. And who can blame them? Regardless of their actions it's hard to believe they would justify what the church would do to them for the truth.

The conclusion? Everyone decided the devil was behind the whole thing. Bendetta was imprisoned for the rest of her life for the weakness she showed in allowing herself to be fooled by the devil and her former sex partner went back to being a nun barely worth a footnote in history.

Verdict: shit was crazy.

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Thanks for explaining the Pimsleur courses. I kept wondering about them - interesting.

I don't even know what to say about Immodest Acts! The world is a crazy place! But I enjoyed reading your reviews.

Thank you :)

778 Stop Motion by Susannah Shaw

Nice introductory overview of how to make stop motion animation. Some sections are far more detailed than others, but it seemed to work out that subjects most exclusive to stop motion were covered in most detail while those skills employed in other sorts of animation and filmmaking got lighter treatment. Seems fair since they tend to be things which you can already find plenty of material on in sources specifically focusing on them.

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447 Merde! The Real French You Were Never Taught at School - Genevieve

This one was shamelessly picked up for this challenge because I actually take all the sections seriously. Even the ones in 400. In other words this got me a section in the French division without much fuss.

In some ways this does feel more authentic than the usual sort of phrase books. There's something that just feels forced about phrases like, "Tell me please, where is the train station?" or "when do you want to eat?". This probably reflects some defect in me as clearly these are perfectly normal sentences, however there's something that just feels more real when a phrase book commits to telling me how to remark, "You bastard, I'll smash your face in," (Espece de salaud, je vais te casser la gueule) or "I walked in some dogshit," (J'ai marche dans de la merde).

Though I don't really see any new French vulgarities sticking in my brain from the book.

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well heck now I want to read it just to.see what phrases they used!

There's a second volume as well, Merde Encore!: More of the Real French You Were Never Taught at School.

Wouldn't it be great if there were one of these for each of the language divisions? :)
We could be fluent in street Spanish, then Italian, and German, etc. To be fair, there should be one in English, too, just to make sure we're all up to speed.

I bet there's something like it for the more commonly taught languages. You know any time a language is taught in schools the students immeditely want to know the swears. But some how I doubt I could find an English/Norwegian phrasebook to this end. Of course that would just be for my own interest since of course I only study langugages whose materials are all crammed into one section along with the other languages they share it with.

Excellent idea! start writing!

614 Plagues and Peoples - William H. McNeill 7/19/13

Well it's been nearly a month since I finished this so it's probably time. This book, written in the 70's, is a pretty academic look at the historical relationship between humans and disease, specifically how great an impact each has in shaping the other's history. This ought to be at least superficially familiar as it's become widely accepted that the European conquest of the America's was pretty much ensured by the catestrophic deathtoll of European diseases on native populations. Such loss of life often left survivors too few too maintain their civilizations and appeared to be a sign of the divine abandoning them to side with the Europeans.

McNeill's focus is the so called civilized diseases. Things like smallpox, cholera, mumps and such. These diseases, he explains, cannot exist without civilization as all those infected either die or gain immunity. Without a large enough pool of unexposed people regularly coming in contact with infected persons the diseases burn themselves out for lack of hosts. So you see, none of these diseases could exist without humans first supplying a nice nest. Further, humans and civilized diseases evolve together. A human community's first exposure to a civilized disease is invariably extreme. The community his no immunity whether it be imposed by former survivors or social controls and the book references many such catastrophic events on all continents. But from there the disease and it's hosts start to find an equalibrium. The most virulent strains of the disease are burned out by their self-defeating deathtoll allowing the human population to adapt socially and biologically to milder strains. Of course it still sucks, but that's basically how it went until vaccines came around.

Honestly the book is a bit macro for my tastes. My eyes sort of glaze over at troop movement-type history and as you're reading about the trade routes and armies that transported diseases around the world it feels pretty troop movement-y. There is very little discussion of the character of diseases discussed, but McNeill does do an excellent job of illustrating just how much more disease there was in everyday life prior to modern medicine and what that meant to a scientifically naive populous. Basically everyone lived their lives having seen plenty of sudden and unpredictable death from disease. You could literally be totally fine one day and dead the next (seriously, cholera will fuck you) and you get the impression it left people pretty fatalistic. All in all it's solidly in the category of "read this to get a better picture of the shit people had to deal with before you were alive and thank your fucking stars you don't have to."

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614 The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson 10/6/13

"It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class conciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all this shit?"

Somewhere around chapter two I realized this is a book about shit. And that's ok. It turns out it's something that needs addressing once you start packing enormous qualtities of people (who are very good at making shit) into a comparatively small area (like Victorian London).

Victorian London saw an insane population explosion (brought on by industrialization I believe) for which it had neither the square footage nor the infrastructure to support. With gross class disparity this meant millions of poor were packed into squalid neighborhoods basically living on top of each other. Technology had come far enough to make water closets a thing, but even if you had one they just drained to your cesspool or your basement, yard or whatever public space it encroached on if you were too cheap to have the nightsoil-men empty said cesspool. A lot of people were too cheap, or just couldn't afford it. Hell, plenty of people just emptied their filth out the window.

As you might expect this created an enviroment less romantic than you probably imagined the last time you saw or read a story placed in Victorian London. It was just really shitty. Really Shitty. And then they started dumping the waste in the Thames to try and get rid of the fetid stink...you see where this is going?

Cholera is normally a little bacterium that knocks out a humdrum existence living on plankton or something. But you introduce it to the human digestive system and it loses its mind (so to speak). Once it hits your small intestine it produces a chemical that tricks the human body into endlessly dispelling its water into the intestines while the bacterium replicates itself in the trillions. People can lose as much as 30% of their body's water in a single day. A person can go from perfectly healthy to cadverous in a day. Or dead. I'm not sure I ever heard of a disease that can tear down a human body as quickly as cholera. Thankfully because cholera has to be introduced to the digestive track one infection is unlikely to result in transmission...unless the cholera bacterium's wildest dreams comes true and it stumbles into a communtiy of humans that regularly ingest each other's fecal matter.

So non existent waste disposal + ground water = ground water you don't want to ingest

This seems obvious today, but Victorian Londoners didn't have a lot of options at their disposal and no one had a goddamn idea what caused disease anyway. Ok, they had ideas...but they were wrong. In fact the primary theory of the time, that they were caused by miasma (bad smells/air), was actually the basis for the decision to turn the Thames into a sewer (they thought it would help the smell).

So this was the situation that paved the way for London's brutal cholera epidemic. Johnson's book primarily follows two men, a scientist and a clergy man, who, initially on the ground independently with disparate theories regarding the epidemic eventually came together to uncover the source of the disease and it's means of transmision. Honestly it reads like a mystery. Without any knowedge of the existence bacteria or means of actually seeing it the two were none the less able to track it and deduct it's means if transmission with their exhaustive boot leather investigation of the neighborhood, it's inhabitants and their habits.

I've never appreciated sewers so much.

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Sewers are indeed fantastic. This book plus W. Hodding Carter's Flushed really make one grateful for proper plumbing. Nice review.

Wonderful review and would perhaps make a nice accompaniment to Everybody Poops. Seriously, it does sound interesting.

973 - After the Fact - James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle

I am reasonably sure this is a college textbook, but it's shameful something which ought to be the foundation of an education of history seems to be tucked away and forgotten by our education system until you become a history major. Or possibly minor.

The basic goal of the text is to illuminate how history is decyphered, it's limitations and ultimately that it is an epic mistake to treat history and the past interchangeably. Each chapter approaches a particular way of studying the past through a specific historical event highlighting how the type of data available inherently limits and focuses the history that can be constructed. The characteristics of the resources historians have availible may have been consciously curated to tell a certain story at the time of it's creation as in a photograph, public political speech, or literary activism, or their character may be shaped without intent by virtue of documentation being limited to certain classes, the fact than any human documentation is limited by the experience of those documenting it or simply that time passes swiftly and is unconcerned with leaving proper documentation.

The authors intentionally choose to look beyond the common-knowledge assessment of the history they discuss to show how history can be misleading or how it is impossible to strip the past down to a single point of view or rigid chain of cause and effect. This is not to say that there is no such thing as an authentic past, but that history is incabable of reproducing it. It is simply too big, complicated and messy. It explodes outward exponentially from a single event in the actions and beliefs of people colliding into still more events each hopelessly and unconsciously interconnected in their immediacy. The ultimate message seems to be, we should all study the past, but understand that no single person owns it. Which is probably why you're unlikely to face such an approach in the usual education. It fundamentally undermines the idea that there is such a thing orthodox history, and instead points out that the past is only seen from where it's witnesses are standing.

Personally I think the minority categoization is more appropriate given the goals of the book, (907 Education, research, related topics), but I'm bending in my categorizaton for the very poor reason that the overwhelming majority of holdings are under 973.

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940 The Holocaust Industry - Norman G. Finkelstein

Sacred. Profane.

These are words that are never used in The Holocaust Industry, but they are the ones I think get to the heart of matter. The Holocaust is the superlative crime against humanity, and it's victims (all Jewish) perfect martyrs. Do not confuse this with the Nazi holocaust which, while completely horrible, is still just one more awful chapter in the continuing history of man's inhumanity to man. But not The Holocaust. The Holocaust is the standard by which all other cruelty is measured, it's author perfect evil. Sacred evil. This is why invoking The Holocaust is powerful, the idea of it has been made so epic and pure that it is socially beyond doubt and beyond question in all ways.

And that can be taken advantage of. Fake memoirs, fake survivors, extortion of well over a billion in the name of holocaust victims (exclusively Jewish ones by the way) that by in large doesn't actually get to holocaust victims. It's a nice trick really. Shake governments and banks down with accusations of Nazi collaboration, war profiteering and double down with how these poor victims are running out of time and amends must be made now, no don't check our numbers, a billion dollars will be fine. And then pass the vast majority of the so called restitutions to Jewish organizations and lawyers because, fancy that, we can't actually find all those victims we told you we need the money for in the first place but we think they'd like us to have it. They literally demanded the return of Jewish property in Poland that were active schools and hospitals. Because, you know, it doesn't matter that the Jews who own them are dead, they'd want us to have them.

It's pretty disgusting to read about the few actual surviving victims picketing outside, lobbying for retributions to go to healthcare for victims, while their supposed lobbists are throwing a gala and arguing the medical idea isn't really feasible.

This is why nothing should be sacred. The war is over, Hitler is dead, but there are still people wringing blood out of it in the name of charity.

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oh God the more I learn, the more I learn that I don't know anything. Heartbreaking. Thanks for reviewing.

439 Norwegian : A Book of Self-Instruction in the Norwegian Riksmål - Alf Sommerfelt 12/1/13

I found this little book a wonderful little leg up with Norwegian grammar. It's an old one (from the sixties), but it's well organized and provides good examples and exercises. I appreciate the lack of childish dialogues and images that seem to clutter modern language textbooks. And since it is most certainly not a phrase book it was entertaining to see what sort of random sentences were given as usage examples.

I like that Alf took the time to demonstrate when common niceties might be used to sass someone:

Jeg skal melde Dem til politiet. (I'm going to report you to the police)

Ja, vær så god. (Yes, by all means.)

But my favorite was one of the examples of the use of past participles:

Naboen vår er blitt beskyldt for å ha stjålet en sekk poteter. (Our neighbor has been accused of having stolen a sack of potatoes.)

Yay! Grammar!

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332 Debt: The First 5,000 Years - David Graeber 1/8/14

Given the breadth and depth of the book's content there is simply no way for me to properly address it my little reveiw. There is just too much. What I can gladly explain is this is an unapologetically anthropological history of human debt and its systems of calculation and payment. There is more than a little criticism of the received wisdom of economics, and given the context provided in history, it seems fair.

Graeber simply does not truck with the presumed universality of the wisdom of economics. The problem with it is it isn't really science and therefore, rather than being based on observation of history and growing to incorporate the economies of various times and cultures it presumes the universality of the sort of economy that it was born within : Capitalism. This becomes even more of an achilles heel as Graeber points out that the creation myth of capitalism is just that, myth. That old chestnut that captialism, indeed money itself, sprung inevitably from the prohibitively unweildy system of barter is simply fancy. Speculation straight from Adam Smith. Of course the man had a right to such intellectual noodlings, but Graeber reminds us that ultimately the common knowledge of captialism and economics come from an idea about what could be, not what has been or what is. Adam Smith's idea, the dream of a self-regulating market, prices set by the will of God.

The point is capitalism is just the most recent economic system used on this planet. And comparatively, it hasn't even been in use all that long. Graeber wades through thousands of years of human exchange from all over the globe, and if one thing is glaringly apparent it's that that people have had nuanced and effective systems of exchange of all sorts as long as we have history for them. One of the things Graeber is careful to point out is that you can't presume all of human exchange boils down to the expectations of capitalism and dyed in the wool economics. Because ultimately exchange isn't about the relationship between people and money or people and goods or whatever. A person can't really have a relationship with a product or currency. A person can only have a relationship with other people regarding goods and currency. And that, what currency and goods mean in terms of people's relationship to eachother, is a product of culture.

Honestly, it's fascinating. More fascinating than I expect anyone ever expected of an economics books (if you even want to call it that). The sheer variety of exchange culture in history is eyeopening and a good way to get perspective on our own exchange culture. This book does go to some pretty dark places as the relationship between war and finance has always had a way leading exchange to dark places. The volume of content on the commodification of people and the economic role of slavery in various times and culures is profoundly disturbing, but too important to ignore. And heads up, that includes contemporary slavery and capitalism.

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826 Dear Sir, Drop Dead : Hate Mail Through the Ages - Donald Carroll 1/15/14

This is just a quick one, read mostly because for the last year (and probably longer) my reading's been pretty dire non fiction. Needless to say a steady diet of history books about people being shit to one another has a way of dampening one's spirits. And for the most part this was a pleasant relief. There's passion and humor and hyperbole here thankfully, as well as some tragical spelling, grammar and just plain misuse of the English language from some less able letter writers.

But it isn't all jollies, sadly. Madalyn Murray O'Hair contributed a sizable collection of her hate mail which was pretty nasty stuff, people fantasizing about her death or otherwise doing violence to her. I suspect the editor might not have included all that if the book had been published after her murder rather than before. More typical letters were from enraged customers to offending businesses, unpaid authors to publishers with a sprinkling of pointed correspondence from famous people. There was one from Lincoln to General George B. McClellan I'd encountered before that merits repeating, "If you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while." I wouldn't exactly call that hate mail, but then there are more than a few letters included that I could say the same of.

I think one of the more interesting functions of this book is as a time capsule. Originally published in 1979 it comes from an era where hate mail and the ranting of private citizens was almost exclusively private. Nowadays of course we've all seen this sort of thing aired publicly on the internet in all of it's glory, both the well written zinger and the cringe-worthy squall. And I suppose the most relevant thing I can take away from the book is that regardless of if hate mail is composed for a single target or aired for all the world to see hate mail is hate mail and the passions behind it seem largely unchanged by how public or private the letter will be.

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339 Broke, USA : From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - Gary Rivlin 1/24/14

A long hard look at predatory lending, it's strategies, consequences and the people that fight it. Checking cashing, pay day loans, subprime morgages, refund anticipation loans, pawnshop loans, rent to own--it is staggering the number of ways persons of few scruples have found to extract large profits in exchange for dodgy if not downright poisonous "financial services". Rivlin's focus is on the personal consequences and actions at play and, as a book constructed primarily from interviews, he has a lot to draw from the victims, former employees, lobbyists, activists, and yes, the men that run these businesses. It's a dark story-- engrossing and edifying.

My only complaint is that Rivlin seems compelled to put a black or white hat on everyone he talks to playing up their likability or contemtability with entirely irrelevant tidbits about their appearance or bearing. It really hate it when writers do that. Just let actions speak for themselves, don't condescend to pull transparent tricks on the reader.

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First of all, I have been seriously in love with David Graeber since I first heard him talk about this book on www.booktv.org . I also liked his involvement with the Occupy movement. I've tried to get through Debt but need to do it again. His lectures were very enlightening for me. Economics is a foreign concept to me and he is the reason I pursued a couple of other books about the subject. His lecture is still available on the website and probably youtube but I haven't looked. So glad you liked him. I need to buy a copy so I don't have to keep returning it to the library. I think I would do better with it now after some of my other reading on the topic. Isn't it fascinating?

and secondly, I have to read the hate mail book. Not sure why it sounds so funny to me, just that sometime when we are feeling emotional enough to write that mail, we aren't thinking and write the silliest stuff.

Clearly, I enjoyed those reviews! Thanks!

299 Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia - Jean Bottero

Meh. It's been a while since I've read up on Mesopotamia, but this honestly seemed rather dry for the subject. And strangely devoid of mythological content. I found myself relying on what I could remember about Sumarian myth and history to help fill in the gaps. It does get into the nitty gritty when it comes to religious practice (arguably bogged down), but it still has a tendency to feel somewhat shallow. That may have been unavoidable, this is history from thousands of years ago afterall. I guess maybe more of my issue would be that the author seems to be making some large assumptions about what these people thought and their culture that simply couldn't be verafied with the narrow artifacts and documents we have from them. If nothing else you can't extrapolate the inner thoughts and attitudes of the illiterate commoner from the writings of elite. So I've got serious issues with him making broad statements about the political satisfaction of a demographic that left no record of their thoughts.

It was neat getting a down and dirty look at what magic and religion meant in practice to a civilization with no other means of understanding their world. It does not much resemble the magic we see in movies today. Turns out it's more like going to the exorcist when you have a toothache, because clearly there is a demon in there.

And apparently sometimes the priests dressed like carp? Holy carp? That seems like it must be a mistranslation, but that's what Bottero said.

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791 Freak Show : Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit - Robert Bogdan

This is the sort of book I was hoping for when I read Punch and Judy in 19th Century America last year: a solid academic look at a branch of long gone low brow entertainment. That book did not satisfy, but this one was quite good. It's interest was in the business and the sociology of freak shows, specifically American freak shows in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how thet related to and played upon the predjudices and expectations of the day.

There is some pretty nasty stuff as often exhibits, particularly of non-westerners and persons with mental disabilities, were portrayed as sub-human, savages and missing links. But then there were also persons that made a good living and gained status exhibiting themselves as freaks. Though the manner of display is too simple a test to determine the quality of life of a given showman. The Hilton Sisters were shown in a flattering light, but were in fact slaves for much of their career.

More interesting was Bogden's defense of the freak show as a business, and criticism of the the medicalization of "freaks" that ultimately killed the freak show. According to Bogdan, and I agree, to be a freak is a matter of identity and showmanship, not deformity. To paraphase, the difference between a tall man and a giant is attitude. The existence of freak shows and freak culture opened up new occupations for people who often had few prospects. Certainly as elements of the public began to condemn freak shows as shameful exploitation, plenty of freaks had no problem talking right back at the do-gooders that seemed to think eliminating their livelihood would do them a favor.

Medicine on the face of it might seem like a more kind frame for persons with physical irregularities, but there are a few things worth noting. First, while the title of freak was generally adopted by choice by the performer the medicalization of human irregularity was issued by medical figures indifferent to the social implications of such labeling. To be a freak was to be part of a tightknit culture, one that offered work. Being diagnosed just made you a patient, labeled you disabled or got you shipped off to live out your days in a medical institution. And there was definitely a eugenics angle in there at the time.

Ultimately Bogdan is neither a cheerleader for freak shows nor their oppostion. They were guilty of the same sins and virtues you encounter in businesses of that era and others. And, as everywhere else, some were better than others and some were far worse.

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373 Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher - Garret Keizer

For whatever reason when I requested this book I had it in my head that this would be a critical/academic look at the theory, practice, strengths and follies of the American education system. I don't exactly know why I expected that other than that was the most interesting book I could project from the blurb. This is more of a diary. Most certainly composed based on journaling during the course of the school year. There are observations, musings, rants and vignettes, but it isn't really assembled to any purpose beyond collecting the author's thoughts and experiences.

As such feel ill prepared pass judgement. How does one grade a diary? Keizer might have an answer for this as journal assignments seem to have been a staple in his class, but I suspect it's just a completion grade. I have sympathy for the challenges he relates, but it's hard to take eveything at face value as we've only got his perspective and despite his apparent efforts to fight the good fight, it's hard to accept that after ten years out of the classroom he has the practice and insight he would have us believe. I cringed when he talked placidly about assigning work with no apparent purpose beyond giving out completion grades to raise student averages. You would think that someone so sure that standardized testing and the school's overwhelming data-collection gets in the way of teaching might notice something troubling about work that serves no end but the grade.

Ultimately I can respect the experiences and observations shared here, but at the end the only thing I've really been able to add to what I know about today's education system is that now there are more gadgets. Ultimately I wanted an argument, a thesis, something about the practice and efficacy of modern schooling...but it seems wrong to hold the lack of a central thesis and cohesive argument against a diary. The cruel part of me opines if I graded this according to Keizer's own rubric he'd be awarded full points for turning his work in complete and on time.

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296 The Dead Sea Scrolls - various

So, it turns out long lost ancient scrolls discovered in caves are still that same old boring, ass-backward bullshit. And now I have exactly zero interest in apocryphic religious texts.

"When you approach a city for battle, offer it terms of peace. If it accedes to the terms and opens its gates to you, then all the people found therein shall serve you in forced labor...But in the cities of the peoples that I am giving you for inheritance, you shall let live nothing that breathes. No, you shall utterly exterminate the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Girgashites, and the Perizzites as I have commanded you, lest they teach you to do all the abhorrent practices that they have done for their gods..."

Clearly a few divinely mandated genocides is a small price to pay rather than pick up the abhorrant practices other peoples commit for their gods. Some days I'm so close to joining the Satanic Temple. They understand irony.

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617 Dr. Mütter's Marvels - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Medicine, in case you don't know, is a pretty new thing. That's not to say that there haven't been doctors for thousands of years, just that until very recently they have been almost useless when they weren't actually making things worse. Arguably modern medicine started taking it's first staggering steps in the 19th century. It was a brutal world rife with disease and crippling dangers for which the medical community was ill-prepared to face. Medically the biggest strike against them was a fundamental ignorance of the cause and transmission of disease and infection. But in terms of consequence it was probably the trade's elitism and proud conservatism that held them back the most. It was this that kept doctors proudly leeching, bleeding and blistering patients even as they raged at the suggestion of cross infection of patients by doctors working with dirty hands and tools in the blood-stiffened smocks they proudly wore. If this was the greatest sin of the medical community Thomas Dent Mutter practiced its corresponding virtue.

It's not that Mutter didn't have pride, but that his confidence was in the future of medicine and his own work ethic rather than the misguided orthodoxy that had passed for medicine for so long. He understood the stakes his patients faced and that successful treatment was about them, and not the authority or status of himself or his profession. Aptowicz tells the story of a compassionate, forward-thinking surgon fighting the good fight for his patients and medicine at large in an era rife with suffering. And it's not for the faint-hearted. There was no such thing as anesthetic until halfway through his career. As a rule patients had to be held down to keep them from leaping up midway through a surgery and running away screaming. And even that wasn't always enough to prevent a patient from escaping. It was just hard for most people to find the cure preferrable to the disease when the knife started its work.

Under such conditions it's not hard to imagine how surgons earned the epitaph "saw bones". It was a grimm business that demanded a swift hand and an unshakable contenence. What set Mütter apart was how closely he allied himself with his patient before, during and after his surgeries. You see, Mütter's field of choice was cosmetic surgery, and cosmetic surgery was a whole other beast in the 19th century. Mütter helped person's suffering disfigurement so drastic they were unable to live normal lives. People that at the time were still commonly identified as monsters. These people knew the consequences of their conditions and this knowledge gave them the courage and determination to suffer through the pain and danger of a 19th century surgery. Working together with his patients Mütter spent time leading up to the surgery walking his patients through what would happen to prepare them mentally and massaging the appropriate areas to help them become acclimated to his touch. The level of investment Mütter put into his patients would be admirable in any age, but it is especially touching knowing that he still had to cut like any other surgeon and he wasn't depersonalizing the situation and desensitizing himself to its brutality.

There's alot here to praise, both in the writing and its subject. Honestly, Mütter comes off like a goddamn hero, and you might be surprised how often that doesn't happen in medical history. And yet, this is the book that brought me closer to fainting than any book ever has. It probably wouldn't have happened if I wasn't reading while standing in line at an under-air-conditioned DMV, but in any case, if I ever start an Industrial Revolution themed metal band I'm calling it Phossy Jaw.

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792 The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook - Thurston James

This is a good survey of moldmaking and casting techniques, but it's not the Bible. Some of it is pretty dated and other parts are dangerously vague. It's a good place to start in terms of figuring out what sort of material and techniques are appropriate, but I would definitely look into more in depth instructions for whatever materials you go with.

Especially when James says things like that silicone doesn't need any release. Believe you me, silicone may not bond with many things, but forget to seal a porous surface and knowing it's a mechanical lock rather than a chemical bond will be a poor comfort.

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650 The Go-Giver - Bob Burg & John David Mann

"You like to read..."

Giving and loaning books is hard if you actually want the receiver to get what you hope out of a book. People that introduce their offering with the above words are the worst. These are people so unaccustomed to reading they seem to think reading is something some people just like to do. If that were that case I wouldn't laugh like an idiot every time Alec Baldwin declared that The Handbook for the Recently Deceased "reads like stereo instructions!" I've read me some shit books and thankfully many more awesome ones. This is the kind where I can't stop wondering just how stupid the author thinks I am.

The Go-Giver is a business self-help fanasy novel apparently written for people for whom conventional self-help books are too challenging. Unfortunately it's the self-help that's fantasy and the book is entirely void of wizards and unicorns.

In a way the book is sort of an anti-Prince. The Prince has long served as a manual for cold machination and ruthless strategy for dictators, business men and stone cold bastards. The Go-Giver, on the otherhand, preaches selfish selflessness. To put it simply, the revolutionary secret to "Stratosheric Success" is just be a good person. Except, how good can you really be if you're only good because you think you'll get something out of it? The two authors (it took two dudes to write this crap!) actually came up with "Five Laws of Stratospheric Success" but it's equal parts lame and depressing. The laws fall into two categories. The first category is just do the things that any decent person would do because they've got a baseline of human compassion. The second category is stand back and wait for your good behavior to be rewarded richly. Failure to be properly rewarded indicates a lack of "receptiveness" according to the shameless authors.

On the one hand I like that this book is essentially saying, "don't be a dick". But ultimately the complete message is "treat other people with decency and kindness with the expectation that you will get something out of it." That's a sociopathic take on ethics. To make matters worse the book takes the tacit view that success and money are a manifestation goodness, effectively sainting the wealthy. Certainly there are good people that are also wealthy, but there are also an awful lot of very not nice people that are wealthy and successful. It sticks in my craw that the book sets up an implied scale that equates goodness with status and wealth. It also irks me that these two grinning yahoos are no doubt transforming the publicity garnered from their undeserving bestseller into traffic for their consulting business.

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530 The ABC of Relativity - Bertrand Russell

There are things in this world I will never really understand. Non-Newtonian physics is number one on that list. As such it was a struggle trying to follow much if the book. This is not a fault of Russell's writing, but a consequence of my own limited senses and the difficulty of untangling seemingly illogical behaviors beyond their perception. On the otherhand, while I'm non in a rush to do any non-Euclidian geometry it turns out that's not as inconprehensible as I had thought. And so reading this book is brain exercise. If I paid very close attention Russell could, momentarily at least, untangle some bit of mindbendy science often with an amusing senarnio to illustrate his point. It's hard to make such counter-intuative knowledge stick, but I am slightly more understanding of the bizarreness of physics than I was and that's fine with me.

"Let us suppose that on a foggy night two brigands shoot the guard and the engine driver of a train. The guard is at the end of the train; the brigands are on the line and shoot their victims at close quarters. A passenger who is exactly in the middle of the train hears two shots simultaneously. But a stationmaster who is exactly halfway between the brigands hears the shot which kills the guard first. An Australian millionaire aunt of the guard and engine driver (who are cousins) has left her whole fortune to the guard, or, should he die first, to the engine driver. Vast sums are involved in the question who died first. The case goes to the House of Lords, and the lawyers on both sides, having been educated at Oxford, are agreed that either the passenger or the stationmaster must have been mistaken. In fact, both may be perfectly right. The train travels away from the shot at the guard, and towards the shot at the engine driver; therefore, if the passenger is right in saying that she heard the two reports simultaneously, the stationmaster must be right in saying that he heard the shot at the guard first."

Rock on Russell.

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If you are interested in trying to understand special relativity, I can recommend a few popular-level books that are likely to be far more comprehensible than one written by a philosopher.

I would appreciate suggestions, but I expect it would take some time for me to come back to the subject. It's a challenging subject for me.

421 Righting the Mother Tongue - David Wolman 1/3/15

This is a great little book about English spelling, how it got so weird and what people think of it. Wolman presents an easily digestible look at the path written English has taken to arrive at its current state. It's certainly not comprehensive and the linguistics stay pretty light, but I think it's just right for the layperson. Even more praise worthy is his handling of the subject of spelling reform. Both historical and contemporary movements are discussed and Wolman covers all sorts of angles. Good cases are made on both sides and I am pleased to report that the book gives a nuanced and fair look at a complicated and often controversial subject. Wolman's apparent stance at the end gives an optimistic nod to future linguistic developments in a manner I hadn't considered before but find fascinating.

For what it's worth, Wolman didn't seem to know about the impact of Norse on English, but some of his examples of shifts in English spelling shows shifts away from forms similar or identical to the Norwegian word.

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I enjoyed your review of The Go-Giver. I think it would be fairly easy and totally hilarious to write a fake self-help book and see how popular it becomes. They seem to be 99% BS.

I'm afraid most self help books are written with that sort of impetus. Now if we could get an Onion-style self help book, that would be something.

853 The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco 2/16/15

The Name of the Rose is a far cry from what I hoped it would be. I blame the deliciously meta prologue and the obvious Borges influence. But Umberto Eco's novel is a far cry from the Library of Babel. While the novel isn't bad per se it is undeniably wanky, and not in a fun way. The book takes place over the course of seven days, but it took me four weeks of dogged reading to get through it. Do you have any idea how thoroughly a day must be documented for it to take four days to read at that sort of pace? It's absurd. It might as well be 24 with scribes.

So there's the first problem, it's conspicuously and pointlessly drawn out.

I'm more ambivalent about the content. There is much here on heresy, political power plays, religious minutiae, logic and that manner of intellectual fappery. None of that bothers me and on many occasions Eco (or his mouthpieces Adso and William) had rather erudite and poetic observations on various matters. But while I appreciated this, nothing Eco came up with was anything I hadn't come across before or figured out myself years ago. Additionally as an atheist, indifferent to the minute sectartian differences that get people burned in this book, I simply couldn't relate to the passions that drove the violence and machinations. They were pretty much all just stirring up a shitstorm for nothing in my opinion.

Argueably the best part of the book is the story that isn't on the page. This is set up in the prolog, but is untouched for the rest of the book. Or at least it is never explicitly returned to. You see, the prolog establishes a framework for the following novel. Ostensibly the author, Eco I suppose, came into possession of a French translation of a Latin manuscript while travelling. He takes upon himself to translate the manuscript into Italian. However, before long he loses the original manuscript (mistakenly taken by a travelling companion he seems to have had a falling out with). And so he is now left with just his Italian translation and whatever notes he made.

After his journey he attempts to track down another copy or at least learn more about the manuscript. He tracks down the materials that he had noted as being sourced in the French translation, but the references to the manuscript they are supposed to contain simply do not exist. Tlön, Ukbar and Tertius Minor anyone? At this point Eco leaves us to speculate if the manuscript was a fraud, a forbidden text expunged from history in some diabolical and sweeping conspiracy, or simply a figment of his imagination. Though a more difficult question might be how we can be expected to believe that the following complete, 611 page novel could possibly be the incomplete Italian translation he supposedly tootled out in his down time while on holiday.

At the very least this translation of a translation of a ostensible translation of a lost text excuses the fact that Eco's prose (or to be fair, the English translation of Eco's prose) in no way resembles 13th century writing. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've read enough 12th and 13th century texts to know this text doesn't even try to emulate them. And that's fair, we all know what a transformative effect a few turns in google translate can produce. But the real potential lies in the conclusion the reader draws about the nature of the book itself.

Do you accept that the manuscript was originally written by Adso documenting the events he describes? If so, is he reliable? How could he possibly deliver such an agonizingly detailed account so many years after the fact? Or was Adso a pseudoepigraphical invention? To what end? Typically pseudoepigraphical religious texts have very specific political and religious goals. What ends might this text been written to serve? And if either of these are the case what does it mean that any other trace of the book has been purged from history? While there is something oroborusesque about the suppression of a text obsessed with the supression of another lost text, what are we to think about the possible suppression of this book? What of it's content would be considered so offensive or threatening to inspire such action? Perhap the sex scene where a woman's breasts are compared to a clump of grapes?* Or was it simply a hoax or a fit of meta delirium? This is the story I hope to continue chewing over now that the dreary task of actually reading The Name of the Rose is behind me. In between rolling my eyes at the idea that a book about a labyrinthine library featuring a blind monk named Jorge merits having other books published to explain it. Of course.

Seriously. Just read Ficciones.

*Actually, in my head canon the breasts like clumps of grapes would indicate that the text was not written by Adso as no man that has ever seen a breast could ever make such a description. However it would imply a certain sexual naivete or simulated sexual naivete on the part of the actual author. I favor the second possibility as it takes a staggering amount of credulity to conceive of a person that, even never having seen a naked breast, could think they probably resemble a clump of grapes.

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155 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker 3/22/15

So it turns out this book looks more credible than it actually is. Pinker does a poor job of actually defining what he means by "human nature" and capitalizes on the ambiguity to be granted from never planting a flag on the sort and extent of influence heredity and environment play on said human nature. His opponents on the other hand are inevitably presented as holding the most implausible and rigid stance in the nurture camp. It's not immediately suspicious when looking at the historical debate, but is very much so if one plans to refute 'the modern denial of human nature'.

Ultimately Pinker fails to properly address the modern voices of science and psychology. He practically admits this when he mentions that when explaining his book to colleagues the usual reaction is skepticism of the relevancy of a book refuting a belief no one holds. But he dismisses that. Instead of venturing into the disputed territory of the how both hereditary and environmental factors come together Pinker intentionally takes an unspecified position somewhere on the side of nature and nurture so he may benefit from portraying his opponents' cartoonishly defined positions as two-dimensionally as possible. Here there be straw men.

It simply isn't very scientific. When studies are mentioned they are often poorly explained if at all which does fuck all to support his argument beyond some childish appeal to the authority. Data is only as good as its source and rigor and the nearest Pinker comes to defining studies is to occassionally tell us if there were twins involved. Yes, I understand twins are great to have in genetic studies, but I'd also like to know what was being tested and how it was evaluated and if that thing the study puts a number is actually the sort of data that can quantified. But no.

Ultimately Pinker isn't debating a scientific point, but a political one. A dumb political one. And while it's certainly no surprise that fake science and poor philosophy are often shitty bedfellows when it comes to politics the arguments against them ought stand on the rigors of science not petulent rhetoric. I probably agree with at least 80% of Pinkers actual postion on the matter, but none of that came of any argument Pinker brought to the table. No, the only reasonable arguments Pinker trots out were some elementary ethics and common sense. And frankly, I don't need anyone to explain that just because something may be true doesn't make it right any more than I need Pinker to explain that, actually, rape is sexual. No shit Sherlock.

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I don't get the literary obsession with The Name of the Rose. I tried reading it one time and thought it was so boring.

You're not wrong.

916 Dead Men Do Tell Tales - Byron De Prorok 4/30/15

This feels like a 19th century dime novel, and it probably ought to be treated like one, but it's 20th century and actually a memoir. Wikipedia says this dude was the original tombraider, and while I'm not sure about the timing of that I wouldn't be surprised if he was the first to make a celebrity of himself as a professionally scorned archeologist. The tone is self-aggrandizing and naively racist, or maybe not naively. But for real. It is dripping with colonial entitlement. It was interesting hearing a bit about the state of Ethiopia back in the day as Prorok navigated interactions with local and national leaders. I had to take the whole thing with a massive grain of salt though so I'm not putting a lot of stock in his appraisal of any of the Ethiopians he spoke of. I'm sure there's some truth in it, but I am completely unqualified to tease the truth from the fabrication and eurocentric bias.

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896 Devil on the Cross - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 6/2/15

Thiong'o paints a dark, but hopeful picture of post-colonial Kenya. Here is a Kenya where westernized Kenyans profit off of the misery and desperation of their countrymen by emulating and subjugating themselves to western business. Thiong'o's handling of the subject matter is both incredibly personal and comicly satirized. In some ways his choices have a kinship with magical realism. There is a playfulness to his depiction of the the Devil's feast and the frenzied competition amongst the modern thieves and robbers to prove their skill in fleecing their countrymen for their own ends and those of their Western masters.

The book was a much needed counter balance after reading the painfully biased Dead Man Do Tell Tales. But even without my need to hear a native African voice this makes for a rousing and passionate read. It offers a revolutionary call not just against the destructive consequences of colonization, but also an unfliching indictment of globalism and the promotion of profit over people.

Most tellingly one of Thiong'o hyperbolic schemes suggested by one of the theives and robbers is a real thing. They do sell dirt to people by the potful to people too poor to own any land of their own. An idea Thiong'o clearly thought as shameful and ludicrous as selling air. And yet...

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828 The Mystery of Lewis Carroll - Jenny Woolf 6/16/15

This painted a sympathetic picture of Carroll and offered strong counterpoints to the more salacious rumors about him (that he was a pædofile). However the same lack of information about Carroll's personal life that made such a fertile ground for the rumor mill also meant there wasn't a whole lot of to know about the man, as a man. I was somewhat disappointed that the book never mentioned the possibility that Carroll was asexual, as what is know about his personal life could be consistent with that. Most likely Woolf had never heard of asexuality though.

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978 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown 7/27/15

Here's a book where the same fucked up story of broken promises, dehumanization, victimization and extermination just replays over and over. It's upsetting, but it's probably most upsetting how unsurprizing it becomes as America ruins one native population after another. It's hard to see it as anything other than a state organized extermination program, even if that's not how the state saw things. That was it's effect.

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321 The Democracy Project - David Graeber 9/11/15

Just another fist pumping book about fighting the power. The main focus is on the Occupy movement and the book places it historically, politically and idealogically. There's some good discussion of non-violent protest and diverse ways of engaging in political speech and the opposition they face from institutional forces. It offered a nice intro anarchistic principles and organizing.

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590 - Kingdom Under Glass - Jay Kirk 2/15/16

I'd hesitate to call this a biography since Kirk takes clear narrative license to further dramatize Akley's life. He sets a scene with novelistic detail and isn't ashamed to describe the internal thought of the historical characters at play. If Kirk wasn't so skilled a writer it would rub me the wrong way. As it is I'm just regarding it as a text-only biopic. You accept that it isn't gospel and appreciate it for what it is, a good story teased out of real life.

In this case it is the story of Carl Akley, the taxidermist that reinvented the practice and raised it to an artform. There is artistic devotion, obsession, some serious colonialism and a constant push and pull between the ostensible goal of preserving animals before they were pushed to extinction and killing them in service of this goal. All and all it is simpathetic without brushing past the picadillos and prejudices of the people and the era.

The most striking lesson though was just how narrowly it was that all of those beautiful taxidermy diaramas came to be. I was a child when I last visited the Natural History Museum, and looking back I realize what a staggeringly beautiful and opulent cross-section of art, craft and science they were. It's rare that the educational side of the museum get such an artistic treatment. There was a small window where taxidermy of this scale and craft was viable, and I feel lucky to have seen it.

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362 ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World - McKay Jenkins 2/23/16

The world is a very different place than it was 100 years ago, go back another 100 years and interchangeable parts are still more idea than fact. But the most intimate changes wrought by industrialization and it's partner capitalism are as invisible as they are pervasive. The fact of the matter is that there is no part of the world untouched by toxins, chemicals and industrial byproducts that simply didn't exist in the world prior to industrialization. Jenkins doesn't claim to have the verdict on which substances are and aren't safe and at what levels. What he does point out is that we are putting things into our bodies, many of which just hang out there, which the human body has never harbored before.

We carry pesticides, plastics, artificial hormones, flame retardents and god knows what else in our bodies, some of them in our breast milk. We pick these up at our homes, work, in our food and water. In fact scientists have found manmade chemicals in penguins on living in Anarctica. Some of these things are certain to effect the chemical processes that make our bodies function, and yet, we act as if they won't or they aren't there.

Jenkins book paints a critical picture of just how broad such contamination is, but he also makes it clear that this is the product of the choices and actions of people. He points out practical choices people can make to reduce their exposure and support environmentally friendly businesses. I was particularly struck by the volume of pollution and toxic exposure linked to lawn maintainance. A practice which, lets face it, is basically just a display meant to demonstrate that we are good little residents conforming to a purely aesthetic practice where in we must perpetually fight the environment's natural equilibrium. That might just be the definition of Sysiphean madness.

In any case, I've already gone a year happily cleaning my hair with good old fashioned H20 so I'm feeling pretty impowered to continue to gradually decrease my depence on chemical products in every day life. Shockingly it turns out you can do an awful lot of cleaning cheaper and more safely doing things the way your great grandmother did. Oh, capitalism...

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745 How to Start a Home-based Etsy Business - Gina Luker 3/17/16

Thorough and easy to follow.

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818 Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain 3/26/16

This was more of a mismash than I expected. It included a fair amount of personal recollection, both from Twain's childhood in awe of the rivermen and his time working on steamboats. He includes a lot of professional knowledge and insight often in self-depreciating tales. He also shares a lot of big fish tales. He has a innocent way of decrying the horseshit other people deal out on the steamboats only to turn around and innocently shovel some equally spurious tale out for his reader. Much of the rest of the book is written as a travelogue (with some pretty shameless tangents) as he travels the river as a passenger years after the end of his steamboat career. The most fabulous thing was that he hired a poet to accompany him on the trip. Sadly he didn't see fit to remark on the poet-for-hire's service on the journey.

686 Simplified Bookbinding - Henry Gross 3/28/16

Gross gives a thorough and well organized breakdown of various techniques for repairing books at home with minimal specialized equipment. He walks through step by step and between his text and the accompanying photos there shouldn't be any room for confusion.

This book was published in the 1970's and I couldn't help but be impressed by the level of craft and commitment taken for granted by the author. He clearly just saw himself as a hobbyist and was writing for other would be hobbyists, but the difference between the expectations he had of himself and his craft and what you see in most modern craft books these days was staggering. It's much rarer these days to see craft books and projects that matter of factly expect the sort of time commitment and craftsmanship demonstrated here.

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070 Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism - David Mindich 4/15/16

I like to come back to the history of journalism from time to time. It's just one of those areas where it's easy to get exasperated with the state of the business now and get romantic about the way things were. But like most romances, the longed for days of noble journalism reside in our imaginations, not history. It's good to be reminded that the sins and follies of modern industry aren't the exception, but the rule. For perspective.

For his part Mindich walks his reader through the development and implementation of several strategies adopted in the persuit of that holy grail, objective journalism. This included things like detachment, non-partisanship, the inverted paramid, facticity and balance. These characteristics can be identified and tracked, but objectivity itself is far trickier to identify and define.

While the reader mostly sees improvement in the journalism as these techniques are introduced at the no point do we see true objectivity. Some come closer to the ideal than others, but those scare quotes around "Objectivity" on the coveer of the book are no accident. As it goes with ideals, objectivity itself is almost certainly unattainable. The virtue is in the pursuit of the ideal, the trap in thinking we ever have or ever will attain it. Chew on this for a minute it:

"Newpapers and wire services had embraced "objectivity" and the idea that reality lies between competing truth claims. But the idea that the world can be seen without human filters is, of course, problematic. For example, the New York Times and other papers attempted to "balance" their coverage of lynching: on the one hand lynching is evil, on the other hand 'Negroes are prone' to rape."

So you see, while there are steps one can use in pursuit objective writing, the genuine article is not something that can be produced by a simple application of rules. Readers and writers both are human and have a limited number of perspectives and interpretations with which we struggle to define a truth that transcends both. So as a reader, maybe don't fetishize or romanticize objectivity so much. Just put on your critical thinking hat and do the best you can.

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291 The Golden Bough - James George Frazer 7/6/16

The Golden Bough is a book most often encountered in bibliographies. If you have ever read a book of comparative religion it was probably lurking quietly, or not so quietly in the works cited.

If one decides to actually read the book itself it they might have trouble nailing down a specific text. Always a chunky tome the book has been abridged at least twice and expanded as well. The largest version of the piece spanning 12 volumes. Not surprizingly, few people mean that version when they say they read The Golden Bough. I chose to read the most modern abridgement, which, at nearly 850 pages, is still a fair commitment.

But what is The Golden Bough? Frazier came from an era of eurocentric exploration and armchair academics. Frazier built an extensive network of contacts with early anthropologists and ethnographers. Using the mountain of information they provided him on culture, belief and behavior from cultures all over the world he assembled The Golden Bough. In my experience, it is the sheer volume of data on diverse and obscure people and their religions that make this a mainstay of comparative religion texts. But Frazier was never a simple aggregator.

Amazingly, despite the sprawling mass of text, Frazier's intent was surprizingly specific. He wanted to understand the basis of a certain arcane religious tradition, the King of the Wood at Nemi. The king of the wood stood guard at the sacred grove until he was defeated in single combat by a slave or fugitive who then took his place as the King of the Wood. Frazier's approach is wholistic, and based on the belief that the development of belief, myth and religion has a common logic and course of development across diverse human cultures. He analyzes belief and practice from many cultures attempting to reconstruct the logic and processes that shaped myth and tradition in the most distant days of human history and it's development and legacy as culture evolved and matured.

The work is more literary than scientific, but it is well thought out and intriguing. It is a worthy text for it's sheer volume of anthropological data (though some of it is surely dated) and well as a sincere and very early attempt to understand religious belief academically. And the the abridgement I read restores the wry humor and observations that earned it a respectable level of controversy and outrage from the god-fearing crowd.

But really, who can resist a Victorian that's got some shit to say?

"...Christians and pagans like were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathens took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that in the point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real senority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occassion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature."

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Not a new section for me, but how could I resist adding such a classic to my list?

974 The Sun and the Moon - Matthew Goodman 12/21/16

I was about halfway through before they started talking about the moon hoax and I realized with about 100 pages left that they were done talking about the moon hoax. So, with the 300 pages of the book, about 50 was about the hoax. To be fair, I figured that might happen fairly early on and it still read well enough that I never considered abandoning it. Though I could have done with less about Edgar Allen Poe. I was neither surprised to learn he was a twat nor interested in learning more about what a twat he was.

Honestly, it's a book about The Sun (the newspaper) and Richard Locke (the journalist that wrote the hoax for The Sun) in the times leading up to the hoax and also following it and the ups and downs of business and professional rivalry and how pissed people were about abolitionists for not shutting up and also Edgar Allen Poe being a twat and PT Barnum being a twat some of the time to certain people.

There you go.

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708 Norsk Folkemuseum - 1/8/17

This is a tourist photo book published by the Norsk Folkemuseum. The text is printed in Norwegian, English, German and French. I read as much as I could in the Norwegian, but did fall back on the English as a learning tool. Some of the words were too specialized or historical to be of use to a learner at my level.

615 Charlatan - Pope Brock 3/23/17

Account of brazen real life huckster "Dr Brinkley" who made shameless money selling bogus fertility cures among other things. Brilliant self promoter, utterly void of morals or compassion. And yes he sewed goat testicles into people, a worthless procedure at best, when carelessness and ignorance didn't result in disfigurement, injury or death.

646 Alabama Studio Sewing Patterns - Natalie Chanin 3/29/17

Exemplary book on the Albama Chanin style of hand sewn jersey garments. Beautiful, inspiring and instructive.

551 Dust: A History of the Small & the Invisible - Joseph A. Amato 4/13/17

A cultural, historical and scientific look at humanity's perspective and relationship with small things throughout history.

731 Advanced Mouldmaking and Casting - Nick Brooks 4/22/17

A thorough look at various advanced moldmaking and casting techniques and materials. A very good source for someone ready to up their casting game.

900 Bloody Foreigners - Robert Winder 5/22/17

Winder delivers an exhaustive history immigration and foreigners in Britain over many hundreds of years. There is no such thing as a typical immigrant, so Winder covers every sort and in the process exposes the difficulties and prejudices facing immigrants. Ultimately the book is a sympathetic one that gently points out the Britain has always been a country of immigrants and their descendents.

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613 The Angry Chef - Anthony Warner 11/29/17

I requested The Angry Chef from Library Thing's Early Reviewer program hoping for a solid education in the science of eating healthy in contrast to the gimmicky diet advice that is usually peddled and celebrated by their religious adherants. Unfortunately this book is less about the nuts and bolts of good eating than debunking gimmicky, novelty diets that are popular. Which was satisfying to a point. I hate the quick fix, bumpersticker diets that claim to have the secret to healthy eating while vastly oversimplifying the chemistry and nuance of nutrition and human bodies. What disappointed me was there was, while there were discussions of how poor logic might make a particular diet seem effective, there was very little discussion of the specific science of nutrition. I realize now that was never the point of the book. But while this was a satisfying rant I hoped for something more educational.

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902 The Decline and Fall of Practically Everbody - Will Cuppy 9/28/20

Wow guys remember me? It's cool. This is a lifelong challenge I can take couple years off and do other stuff.

This isn't anything crazy. Just a super dated collection of humor pieces about historical figures. It claims to be totally true and complains that people just won't believe it's totally factual. And, honestly it does feel like some stuff was made up for humor, maybe less than I would guess, maybe none. But ultimately it's written by a humorist, not a historian, and it suffers from bouts of sexism and blinding eurocentricism, which may have passed in the earlier half of the 20th century, but it seriously undermines it today.

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PS it felt appropriate reading reading this title in 2020.

330 The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View - Ellen Meiksins Wood

I was super interested in the history and theory in this book, but unfortunately it was very dense and difficult to follow. I followed the broad strokes and the logic tracked, it just wasn’t great at laying everything out so it clicked for the reader. Which is a real shame. But broad strokes, capitalism didn’t come from the bourgeoisie amassing wealth and applying it to pursue greater profits, instead capitalism comes from the peasants and working classes becoming deposed of access to land and the means to sustain themselves without selling their labor to just stay on the treadmill of ever rising rents.

It’s a plausible argument, it just wasn’t written with all the clarity I would need confidently explain its claims.

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158 The Sunny Nihilist - Wendy Syfret

This book reads like a calming meditation with a bit of interesting philosophical and historical research behind it. But definitely not so much research to push it from a personal reflection to academic writing. I've generally had this sort of approach to meaning for a while, but it's still hard to not let all the intensity of life get to you. Taking a moment to read a bit from this book just made me feel calmer.

Though, it does make me think I should find Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness.

In the meantime, back to Manufacturing Consent, which does not make me feel better.

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