Lev Davidovich Bronstein - Leon Trotsky

I have long wanted to read books by the very erudite Stephen Pinker. (Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.)

I started his book How the mind works in December 2004 but did not really get into the meat of it. (See more about that in my previous post.)

I recommend seeing this TED Talk by him in 2005, in which he previewed his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, which looked at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. He questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

Now, in another TED talk, Pinker argues that our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we are living in one of the most peaceful times of human existence. Seems the decline of violence is a fractal phenomena! Do see the talk to hear more about his interesting argument.

Update: Amit Varma has a quote for the day that goes quite well with the above post.

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

It is om The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, a book Amit strongly recommends.

Though I still have not finished Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra* ...

... I have started with two other books since I need a dose of good literary talent. And so I am reading two renowned names that I have always wanted to read but not read so far. (Actually, I think I may have cursorily perused through Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in the 90s.) And so I began Wedding Song by Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz and The Counterlife by (future Nobel laureate?) Philip Roth. Aah...such delight in reading good literature after suffering through the pulp fiction of Vikram Chandra.

Coincidentally, both had an interesting snippets about September, with the former novel, which I started last night, started with the short but powerful lines:

September. The beginning of autumn. The month of preparations and rehearsals.

And this excerpt from Roth's book, which I started this morning and already got through the first chapter (which I thoroughly enjoyed. The writing style is very different than Updike but Roth still reminds me more of Updike than Saul Bellow. It is amazing how good writing about a 39 year old dentist, his inadequacies, his affairs, and his death has gripped me and gave me more satisfaction than the cat-and-mouse games of a cop and a gangster and all the interesting side characters in Sacred Games!):

It was early in the afternoon at the end of September; from the cold touch of the breeze and the light heat of the sun and the dry unsummery whish of the trees you could easily have guessed the month with your eyes closed - perhaps have even guessed the week.

Related:

• Deciding to do the impossible - NYT
• Philip Roth: Life and Counterlife: A Review Essay - Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 3, 325-339, Oct., 1989 - available via JSTOR, which you may have free access to through your public library. At least you do through Boston Public Library.
• A review by The Book Diva
  

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* I am trudging through it only to say that at 900 pages, it is the longest book I ever read! I have somehow gotten to page 500 or so and given how little it has interested me - with every passing day, the story interests me less and less --- I wonder if I will have the patience to get to the end. Given how long it is, it meanders too much and is easy to lose focus and interest. It started with a gripping encounter between Sartaj and Gaitonde, which I had read elsewhere before as an independent short story ... but this book meanders around and has petered to a very anti-climactic boring middle. Hope there is some surprise or good ending because so far the story has been only mildly interesting in parts. And the writing quality is sub-par at best. I wonder what all the hype was about!

I had picked up Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, from the public library. However, I am reading too many other books at the current time and probably will not read this book now but managed to find an excerpt in the Foreword that I read.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

From the little I read about the book, I learned about the impact bias i.e. "people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it." Here is an interesting wiki entry on various cognitive biases.

You can read the NY Times review of the book or hear the author at TED talk about "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" (I think I linked to this before.)

Also, every released book seems to have a blog these days.

A study finds why attempts to restore a native trout haven't worked: They used the wrong fish!

A 20-year government effort to restore the population of an endangered native trout in Colorado has made little progress because biologists have been stocking some of the waterways with the wrong fish, a new study says.

This continued for 20 years? This is more incredulous than the NASA goof-up over inches versus metric units during the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter robotic probe in 1999. Ok...no... that case takes the cake given the millions (billions?) of dollars involved and the fact that it was the brainiacs at NASA in charge. (Want me to be patient with them NASA scientists... they are not rocket scientists ... oh wait...in a way, they are! :))

Thank god NASA finally decided to go metric this January for all operations on the lunar surface when it returns to the Moon. Don't want any more "big oops for mankind" scenario as they plan to send men back to the moon!

Did not realize that the 2007 Man Booker longlist was out. Seems like this year's nominations include a set of low-profile names that I have not heard of, with Ian McEwan being the most famous one* on the list. Previous year's winners are compiled here.

I know that the Booker is "awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland" but it is still interesting to note that 3 of the names in this years list, highlighted by me below, sound like of Indian/Pakistani origin.

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Tindal Street)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N.Wilson (Hutchinson)

Update: Anne Enright won for The Gathering.

Booker trivia: Beryl Bainbridge has been nominated twice in the 1970s and three times in the 1990s but has never won the Booker prize. Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, has been nominated twice and won both times. Margaret Atwood has also been nominated five times but won in 2000, while Iris Murdoch is the only 6-time nominee, with a solitary win on her 4th nomination in 1978.

* I am a big fan of McEwan....having read couple of his books - the Booker prize winning Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers - in the last year. Also started but didn't read much of Saturday and Black Dogs. Will have to check out this latest nomination - On Chesil Beach - some day... but next on my to-read list is his previously Booker-nominated, Atonement. Another very good recent author whose novels I have unfortunately not read so far is Kazuo Ishiguro (though I did see the movie, Remains of the day, based on his novel of the same name.

Like all unsustainable pyramid schemes, a scary scenario looms... and to think some people think we may live to be a 1000!

A metafilter entry reports:

Animated population pyramids project a steady increase in the median age. England and Wales. United States. Canada. China. Japan. "The number of older persons has tripled over the last 50 years; it will more than triple again over the next 50 years." [pdf] There will be a shortage of workers to support the retired and disabled. The looming crisis has been predicted for years. Proposed solutions include robots and immigration. [previously, previously]

Aah...for a little whiff of genuine life!

He talked of the old college days... ...of the days of keen and blind ambitions and large intentions. Now there was left with him, at least, a philosophic acquiescence to the existing order--only a desire to be permitted to exist, with now and then a little whiff of genuine life, such as he was breathing now. - from A Respectable Woman by Kate Chopin.

Kate Chopin was a genius to write short stories that were not only ahead of her times but also to pack such a punch with so few words. Her short stories, which I am reading a collection of, are just 3-4 pages long but she packs such a wallop that the characters and the story stays with you for hours after that.

...and it is as if death has owned this life all along.

That's from the first para of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster.

I found it via amazon.com and reproduce the first para through a screen-shot below.

Also, found this very interesting statement in a comment by someone called Lyn Bann at the amazon.com link.

The task of writing has no ultimate goal; life itself is full of hollow spaces, so why would we want to transcribe it into a work of art? ....... Reading, writing and living are all part of the same ludicrous, meaningless wandering.

Just finished reading the graphic novel, City of Glass, with the story by Paul Auster and artwork by Paul Karasik & D. Mazzucchelli.

The book has received some rave reviews - both as part of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy series but also as a graphic novel.. but I did not enjoy it much at all. However, this is mostly because of my limitations in understanding it. When I picked it up, I thought it had lot of promise but it turned out to be quite a bizarre story and a bit too surreal for me. I didn't quite follow much of what was going on* but kept reading till the end hoping things would get clearer - but it only got more confusing! I understood that it was about losing yourself in trying to chase the truth.... but some of the deeper and subtler nuances were certainly lost to me. That said, I did appreciate the artwork and enjoyed it more than the story. The panels on the back of the book was what seduced me into picking this up....and that remained the best part of the book even after I was done reading it.

I have not found a link to the back panel and do not want to scan it in myself to avoid any copyright violations... but you may be able to see it via Google Books here. The words on the back panel read...

New York was a labyrinth of endless steps,

and no matter how far he walked, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.

Each time he took a walk, he felt he was leaving himself behind.

All places became equal,

and on his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere.

This was all he ever asked of things:
to be nowhere.

Each line above was one panel in the 9-paneled back page. A couple of panels were completely dark black panels with no words. Like I said, I thought this had great promise and I picked it up thinking this is going to be a very intelligent book about angst, urban loneliness, and such... but it turned out to be a whole lot more (like an amazon.com commenter writes: "There are so many levels in this story you need an elevator"...and perhaps too intelligent for me!

--
* This comment by C. D. Murphy that I read at amazon.com just now has shed some light about the story but even so... there are probably many other nuances that didn't get to me! (Sorry.. not sure how one links to a comment at amazon.com, just the commenter)

... Campbellian march through the four phases of life......look for this as you read it: from his birth as Auster, to understanding language with Stillman, the identity crisis with the father, the mid-life crisis after meeting his namesake, the question of paths during this, the isolation of late life and finally the fading away.

Also, this essay by Bill Johnson breaks down the first few paras of the book.

This story beautifully explores the modern day terrain of what it means to live in an age where so many people appear as fragments not only to others, but to themselves. At each stage of the story, the audience is taken not only deeper to the resolution of the story's surface mystery, it's taken into an examination of the role of chance upon the formation of fragments of personality.

Wish someone would break down the whole book in more simple terms for me to enjoy! Let me know if you know of some such site or yourself have read this and understand more than I did!

Related: Britain finally embraces the graphic novel.

What a haunting song....had never heard it or about it before.

Billie Holiday sings the very moving and horrific song, Strange Fruit.



Apparently,the images conjured by the song are so horrific that Billie Holiday often performed it with her eyes closed. This piece in the Guardian traces the song's dark history.

Needed to hear this song a few times after hearing Strange Fruit -- The Blues are Brewing, also sung by Billie Holiday, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet.

When the moon's kinda dreamy
Starry eyed and dreamy
And nights are luscious and long
If you're kinda lonely
Then nothin' but the blues are brewin'
The blues are brewin'

Five poems this Sunday morning. Wish I could write poetry again... but the muse seems to have died these past few years.

-

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full of messages
....
If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

- from Village Life, a poem by Louise Gluck, in the New Yorker.

--

Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

-- from Driving Home, a nice little poem by Charles Simic, also in the New Yorker.

Just learned that earlier this month Simic was appointed as the 15th Poet Laureate of the US. (They really should make these at least a 2 year appointment. Seems like yesterday that the esteemed poet, Donald Hall, was appointed to the post.) Incidentally, Gluck was the12th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.

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But see how each busy capitalist
stares serenely through an exhibit's glass
to gaze at lotus flowers, a phoenix,
or philosophers on a mountain path.

- from a poem, In the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, by Sarah Wardle, who won the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 1999.

---

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.

- in Heart by Margaret Atwood, from her book, The Door

---

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.

If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.

If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.

If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

——

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

-- Two of the Four Poems by Vera Pavlova, also published in the New Yorker.

Do read the other two poems also - even in translation (from the Russian), this is good stuff. And this interesting interview from 2002 with Pavlova, where she says:

"Men became so female, that women had to take on the male part themselves. How did all this resolve itself? Towards the end of the century, women poets became far more radical than men. Stylistically and spiritually."

and later...

"In art the basic distinction is not between male and female, but between dead and alive."

Not a book I have read but have merely found it via a review.

House of Meetings by the widely talented British author, Martin Amis.

The book, which is about the grim days of Russia under Stalin... but I won't get into the horrors that be*. Instead, I want to merely highlight this paragraph, that I found in its entirety at this blog post..

“There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.”

* I own copies of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 and Gulag Archipelago Volume 2 but have never had the heart to read them! Some day I will stop getting books from the library and read the ones I already own - which for the most part sit in boxes in the basement!

Interesting excerpt from this 2003 article about the author, Amit Chaudhuri...(emphasis mine):

"..it is the imperfect, the flawed, that Chaudhuri celebrates as allowing not only great creativity but the possibility of a truly liberal, open society. Talking not of Lawrence, but of Indian society today, he laments the fact that nowadays there is no place for daydreamers, for those that "yearn for the irresponsible", for what he calls "the cult of failure": "When I was growing up (in Kolkata), if you were sensitive and intelligent, basically, you must be a misfit. I used to laugh at the cult of failure, but now I do believe that there has to be a place for the misfit, for the outsider. The person who lacks ambition or is an outsider is seen to mount an implicit critique of the value systems which people live by, and is therefore looked upon with great intolerance in this society."

Also later in the article...this phrase: "a heady cocktail of outrage and despair." Now I know how to describe how I feel about India sometimes. Having said that... Jai Hind... Happy Independence Day (whatever that means!)

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