Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it. So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again. Stuff will follow ...
I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.
The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made. ... And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument. ... I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard. ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org.
The book had some good stuff. Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language. I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle." But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further. At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.
2025/07/01
I got 500 pages into The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson. Somebody else requested it from the library so I had to return it.
Wilson really knows how to convey a mass of information clearly and eloquently. Great book.
From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict—for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. ... Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War.
Next I hope to insert a quote from a Reddit review that I saw a couple of days ago:
One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex; surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. OK, that’s by necessity. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further.
This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.
The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context; the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export of Dutch cannons, this is the book for you). Thanks to engaging writing it rarely drags though, and the drama is compelling.
There you go.
2025-07-19
I read The Three Musketeers by Aleandre Dumas.
This book (or stories based on it, including a cartoon series) had been a big part of my childhood. Also, when I got around to watching "Django Unchained" and being surprised to find out that Dumas was Black. So, when I saw a copy of it for sale at BMV I picked it up. I glanced at the back cover. "All for one! And one for all!" I remember hearing that pretty frequently as a kid.
It was funny how my last book about the Thirty Years War included events mentioned in Dumas' book. I hadn't planned that.
Anyway, I agreed pretty much with the sentiments expressed in the review I linked to. I was surprised to read how much Dumas celebrated the aristocratic ethos of violent braggarts who thought nothing of not paying for what they took if they had no money, of killing someone over an insult, fucking other men's wives, and etcetera.
I was kind of hoping that Milady DeWinter would have a reconciliation with Athos. But when she poisoned D'Artagnan's girlfriend I knew it was all over.
2025-08-03
Yesterday afternoon I finished Tom Drury's 1994 novel The End of Vandalism.
I bought some t-shirts at "National Thrift" on Lawrence Avenue East and then I went to the Goodlife Fitness gym in the same plaza and I put on one of the t-shirts (a "large") and found that the neck was unacceptably tight. So after my workout I went back to the thrift store and exchanged it for another shirt. But the new shirt was one dollar less in price so they forced me to buy something else for a dollar. They said paperback books were a dollar. So The End of Vandalism looked like the best thing for me and that's how I ended up with it.
Anyway, the novel is about some people living in a fictional, midwest rural county. The three main characters are Louise (the independent-minded beauty), Tiny, her ne'er do well husband, and Dan Norman, the laid-back county sherrif. Louise breaks up with Tiny and eventually marries Dan.
It was apparently Drury's debut novel. I thought it was okay. I think that he described lots of interesting characters and their stories. The guy at Kirkus Reviews says it needed more of a plot. But that wasn't the problem that I had with it. For me, it was how Drury would introduce a LOT of other characters without much of a description and almost everybody in the novel is a person of few words. So, you don't really remember them and then three or four new ones are introduced and then an old one returns and I was like: "Wait. Who is this again?"
I came to know Louise's mother, Mary, because she popped-up quite frequently. I eventually remembered that Albert Robeshaw was the youngest child of the Robeshaw's and that he had a touching love-affair with the Taiwanese exchange student Lu Chiang. (I always remembered who Lu Chiang was for some reason.) I remembered Dr. Pickett the ob-gyn doctor from the get-go. I guess it was because she had a commanding personality in her introductory scene.
I liked how it meandered and the reviewer does mention something pretty clever that went right over my head. The different experiences of the infant Quinn and Dan and Louise's daughter Iris.
I might as well also admit that I read Derf Backderf's Trashed.
It's a pretty good portrayal of the disgusting job of trash collection that also serves as an indictment of our wasteful, throw-away culture.
And at last Sunday's Comic Jam, I won a copy of Marc Bell's Stroppy.
It was as enjoyable as all Marc Bell's books. I'm glad that I once got to shake his hand say "Big fan! Big fan!"
In reading his comics, one almost sees Bell as less an artist crafting a narrative than as an anthropologist dutifully observing and recording the goings-on of the cultures that happen to inhabit his brain. Another influence seems to be Will Elder in terms of the incredible detail and many "eye pops" (or "chicken fat", as Elder called) that can be found in every panel of Bell's work. Bell piles joke upon joke upon joke, providing callbacks to his own comics as well as references to the wider culture (pop and otherwise). Despite the frenzied energy of each panel, Bell counteracts that mania with languid, casual interactions. Conversations between characters can go on for pages. There's a sense of the characters just hanging out as Bell observes them doing their thing.
There.
2025-08-27
I'm almost finished Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. [It's co-written with his son Daniel.]
The first is that traumas—a term he defines widely—are going unrecognized and untreated. Combined with the stress of modern life, the result is that many people retreat into addictive medication, which often causes or exacerbates physical ailments. Once, these mental strains were addressed by communal activities and personal connections, but those remedies are vanishing in the digital age. The second level is the economic organization of techno-capitalism, which creates conditions of inequality, reclusiveness, and manipulation. Taken together, these issues create a yawning gap between how people live and how their biology wants them to live. “A society that fails to value communality…is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human,” write the authors. They believe that individuals must accept their traumas in order to move past them and toward true healing. Stress, alienation, and isolation should be denormalized.
For my part, the evidence that constant stress, suppressed rage, long-term depression, are toxic for the body, to the extent that they are strong determinants for various cancers and other ailments, was very strong and very shocking. At the same time, Gabor later gives us the documented cases of women who changed their attitudes towards life in the opposite direction from the ones that had produced the disease and who were able to heal themselves. One woman became cancer free (to the disbelief of the cancer specialist who had been treating her) while others were able to live much longer and much healthier than any medical experts in the field would have thought possible.
Capitalist societies are definitely toxic. Matĕ at one point describes his disillusionment as a young Hungarian communist, with the Stalinist assault on their attempted peaceful revolution in the 1950's, followed by the disillusionment with the West's brutal assault on Vietnam, followed by the racist reality of what he had thought was the Jewish homeland of Israel. But if capitalism was toxic, then obviously feudalism was toxic. As was the patriarchal, violent Ancient World. It would only be in the communities of hunter-gatherers living in geographies of relative abundance, where there would be no competition with rival groups of humans, that provided the self-sustaining, community, egalitarian culture that he recommends.
2025-08-28
Today I finished a collection of three plays by the Ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes, presented by Penguin Classics: Aristophanes: The Wasps/The Poet and the Women/The Frogs. (Translated and introduced by David Barrett, 1964).
I'm not qualified to judge the quality of the translation. Some people at that "Good Reads" link say it's good, others say it's bad. I noticed that Barrett makes the Scythian archer (a policeman/slave in Ancient Athens) speak like an Italian speaking in English.
Most of our knowledge of Ancient Greece comes to us from the view of the more privileged male social strata. Your average Athenian didn't have the leisure to write plays or philophy. (Socrates was apparently something of an anomaly. His natural genius got him admission to elite circles.)
"The Wasps" has a struggle between an old man and his son. The son must have come into wealth on his own, without it having come from his father. Because the son runs the household and wants to get his father to enjoy the finer things in life, whereas his father enjoys the power he enjoys as a juror, who always rules against the privileged citizens who come before him. As well, his father enjoys the labourer's wage of two obols (the Athenian currency of the time) that he gets for jury duty.
The son manages to convince his father that he's not powerful, but merely a servant of demogogues who use them to tear-down the great men of the city so that they can become powerful instead.
The "wasps" in the title refers to the group of other jurymen who come to collect the father to go to the courts as part of their daily jury-duties. (In Ancient Athens, men from the various districts were obligated to be available for jury duty for a certain length of time. They were selected by a complicated process to serve on different trials in such a way as to make bribery and manipulation almost impossible. Typically, it was older, retired, less wealthy men who showed up every day to fulfill their duties. Aristophanes considers them to be an annoying swarm of wasps.)
After getting his father to renounce daily jury-duty, he tries to make him acceptable to high-class social occasions, such as a drinking party at some rich person's house. But the father's plebian nature asserts itself and he gets obnoxiously drunk and commits acts that will see him in court to face a jury of his own.
"The Poet and the Women" is a diatribe against the tragic playwright Euripides (his contemporary). In reality, Euripides was sympathetic to women, and wrote them as actual characters, rather than a chaste mothers and wives. But in giving them personalities of their own, Euripides also admitted they had their own appetites and flaws. This makes Aristophanes portray Euripides as having made himself an enemy of the women of Athens, by slandering them. In the play, the women are going to meet during a festival (when Athenian women were actually allowed to be out together by themselves without men around) and vote on how to best punish him. Euripides finds out about this and gets an older male relative to disguise himself as a woman and attempt to defend him.
This plan goes wrong of course and the male relation is captured and Euripides tries to save him in various attempts that are [apparently] parodies of his own plays.
I've read a few of Euripides' plays and I was greatly taken with "The Trojan Women." Aristophanes comes off as a bit of a doofus here. But there is some value in his portrayal of the lives of Athenian women as told by the various characters (including the women themselves) that sheds some light on the reality of their highly circumscribed existences.
"The Frogs" has Dionysius going with his slave to Hades to find a poet who can save the people of Athens from their follies. It was written and performed in 405 BC, during the darkest days towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. The war had been in the hands of the majority for much of this time and things have gradually gone from bad to worse. The Athenian majority have had several opportunities for peace but turned them down thinking a recent victory in a battle was a harbinger of victory in the war itself. The war dragged on. The taxes on the rich were increased. And the elites began to conspire against the majority. At one point they staged a coup and plotted with the Spartans and Persians against their own people. The coup was defeated when many outsider oligarchs who had supported it because they thought that they would have a seat in the reduced parliament found out they had been lied to. The democracy was restored and vengeance imposed.
Aristophanes uses his play to heap blame for Athens crisis on the stupidity of the majority. He blames the stupidity of the majority on the decline of the City's culture as represented by the plays of writers such as Euripides (who had died the year before). Euripides challenged the conventional view of religion and wrote about the complexities of human beings. The "moral relativism" and apostasy of Euripides has corrupted the common "sheeple" and has brought Athens to ruin.
Dionysius, in mainly feminine attire, dresses up as Hercules (in a lion-skin) and goes to Hercules himself for directions to Hades. (Hercules had gone into Hades and returned during one of his adventures.) The "frogs" are a Chorus singing about the issues of the play as Dionysius, his slave, and the boatman of the River Styx, Charon, cross over to Hades.
Dionysius presides over a contest between Euripides and Aeschylus as to which is the better poet who can teach the Athenian people the proper morals needed to end the wars (both foreign and civil) and bring peace. I don't know much about Aeschylus. Apparently he fought at the Battle of Marathon and died about fifty years before "The Frogs" was written. From Aristophanes, it seems that Aeschylus wrote heroic plays in a spare, ponderous tone. Just the sort of manly virtue that Aristophanes' contemporaries needed to hear from, rather than the too-clever, relativistic, feminine drivel from the low-born Euripides. (Euripides' mother supposedly sold vegetables in the marketplace of Athens.)
As with the two previous plays, there's some admittedly funny slapstick here. But also, there is Aristophanes' limitations as an essentially right-wing social critic. Dionysius chooses to take Aeschylus back from Hades. (Euripides isn't even given Aeschylus's seat at Pluto's table. This goes to Sophocles who never challenged Aeschylus for it.) The Athenians, who stupidly voted to continue fighting, need to hear from the martial virtues of the warrior Aeschylus, rather than from a man who could see both sides of an issue and who wrote about human beings in all their complexity. This contradiction was obviously lost on Aristophanes. Being an elitist conservative, he can only see that Aeschylus was a higher-born man of quality, with a warrior ethos.
The rabble of Athens have fucked everything up. The fact that it was the great Pericles who convinced Athens to go to war, and who came up with the genius plan to have everyone hide behind Athens' walls, which led to squalor, disease and death for many (including Pericles himself) isn't mentioned. Indeed, in "The Frogs" one can see all the stupid elitist delusions of superiority. Certainly, ordinary people can make stupid mistakes. Also, during times when they find themselves with power, but not knowing all the details of how things are run, they have blundered in ignorance. But its not as if, when allowed to rule without hindrance, traditional elites do not themselves make stupid mistakes and commit atrocities.
Aristophanes is still a valuable look at a certain ethos during a long-ago time.
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