Daydreaming Idly
"It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, either in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality over the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their directions, and he awakens them."
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is done with you."
- David Foster Wallace
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Showing posts tagged books
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(via marxisforbros)
I’m in that thin slice, and I don’t mind it being a thin slice.
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”We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. ‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.
Philip Pullman (via lavenderlines) (via thoughtsdetained) (via libraryland)
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Ahhh, books
weeee! want! in my home!
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”It’s sort of like a book club, but there’s only one book.
Sarah Vowell, on church (via) (via luckypaperstars) (via libraryland)
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”On the afternoon of the day when her father had refused to buy her the book, Matilda set out by herself to walk to the public library in the village. When she arrived, she introduced herself to the librarian, Mrs Phelps. She asked if she might sit a while and read a book.
Matilda by Roald Dahl (via pictorialife) (via libraryland)
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”There are five new books on my bedside table that I’m dying to read, but if past form is anything to go by, they will merely form the base of an even bigger pile, until something — I’m not sure what — happens to them and they disappear, or perhaps get ground to pulp by the weight of the newer purchases. But not this year. No way.!
Nick Hornby, resolving to finish all his nightstand reading in the new year, in the New York Times. (via crumbler)
This is my new year’s resoultion too!
(via inkyeagle)
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Strategic Intuition
via youtube.comWhere does strategy come from when faced with a novel situation? I review one author’s insightful take on creativity, strategy, and intuition.
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Books on my Desk
via viddler.comCurrently reading and thinking about these books.
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My bite-sized review of Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth.
This is a really good book to read right now, as people are starting to wake up to the fact that we are no longer at a crossroads regarding energy and the environment, but are starting to have to deal with the permanent and negative consequences of the road we have collectively chosen to travel.
McKibben first paints a picture of how the planet we live on, though we haven’t quite woken up to this fact, is no longer that planet that allowed for the flourishing of human civilization. The planet and the climate that allowed for that have gone, being replaced by the planet we now live on, which is very much changed by global warming. This has consequences for everything from hurricanes to the growth of crops to the spread of and prevalence of disease to the pine bark beetle infestation in Colorado. He goes on to explain how, just as our (previous) climate allowed for human civilization, oil and other carbon fuels allowed for the development of modernity. And oil is running out. And this too has consequences. Then he talks about how expensive the world is, just to maintain the infrastructure we already have. And he finishes with the difficulties that lie ahead in trying to save ourselves and create a new civilization that can survive in the new climate/planet we have created for ourselves.
I’ve read a number of books along these lines these past two years, so as always I hope others will pick up at least one of them and wake up to the new world we already live in but haven’t yet woken up to.
Therefore, I highly recommend this book. A great overview on these critical issues. Once you read something like this, all the news and political debate and economic descriptions you see and hear will start to seem very different to you. At least that’s my hope.
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Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
This is the best nonfiction book I read all year. It’s one of those books that is about one thing, but ends up saying something much larger about the whole world. This is primarily a science book, so those who like sex but don’t like science may not enjoy it that much. But if you like both sex and science, this is the book for you. It’s really intelligent, it points out the flaws in the standard narrative of human sexuality, has real ramifications for how the reader will go on to think about sexuality from now on, and is really, really funny. And I can’t stress that part enough. They never pass up a chance to make a joke when called for by the hilarity of the subject matter.
In summary, monogamy isn’t natural, and that’s why it’s so damn hard. Monogamy is part of our cultural evolution, and is 12,000 years new. Multi-male multi-female pairings, or promiscuity (without the moral connotations) was the rule for the entirety of our species’ biological evolution, an evolution shared with our closest relatives the chimps and the bonobos, and is therefore millions of years old. It’s hard to overcome that with religion and social mores.
Read this book. Seriously. The world will look different afterward, and you may just relax a bit and judge a bit less.
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The Keep, by Jennifer Egan
This is the third book I’ve read by this author and is easily my favorite by her. What I thought was great was that she’s working primarily in an old genre (the Gothic novel), but has written a very contemporary experimental novel, switching back and forth between the tale and the tale of the teller of the tale, and she does it all with a realistic style. Really well done, and super fun to read.
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But around the same time that our window glass got straightened out, Davis’s workouts started hitting me a different way. It happened when I listened to his words. The more shaky and worn out Davis gets from his push-ups, the more the normal words we all say every day start getting mixed up with old words he must’ve used at some earlier point in his life: goon and dildo and asswipe and your mama - words left over from a life that’s long gone. And once I noticed the old words Davis uses I started hearing them everywhere, because this place is a word pit - words get stuck in here, caught from when the clock stopped on our old lives. So now when a fight starts up I don’t walk away like I used to, I crowd in and wait for those ghost words to start coming up. I’ve heard chump and howler and groovy, I’ve heard fuzz and kike and kraut and coon and square and roughhouse and lightweight and freak show and mama’s boy and cancer stick and fairy and party hearty and flyboy and knuckle sandwich (don’t forget we’ve got lifers in here with false hips and false teeth who can tell you tales about rolling bums on the Bowery if you get them going), and I grab up these expressions, I trap them in my head and I save them. Because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense because everyone else was saying them, too. I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank.
- The Keep, by Jennifer Egan
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