Archive for books
Those Who Can’t, Teach/Gatz
1. Those Who Can’t, Teach
It was funny (great lines!), entertaining, touching (wept buckets) and it restored me to my good mood. Later, however, I thought there were too many messages in the play (which resonated with the audience the night) about NIE, about scholars being teachers, teachers as role-models, about good students, bad students, about over-worked teachers. It seemed to me, a mouth piece than a story of the character’s lives.
There is a POV that I think is outmoded ie, academic success = success in life and somehow the characters seem to expect it.
The one who comes to mind most is someone who at his 25th reunion seemed stumbling along as a seventh grade teacher, so his income was one of the lowest in the study, and instead of being a famous writer he was just helping his seventh grade students write their own papers. It was true he had a nice family and enjoyed sailing, but I didn’t think anything of him. And when it came time to re-interview him at 75, he was leading the most wonderful life and it was a function of, for 75 years, having done everything right. He still was neither powerful or rich, but he lived in a lovely family compound, which he largely built himself. He was devoted to teaching his grandchildren sailing, he had a perfectly wonderful marriage and the inside of the home was beautiful, both from tasteful decoration but also the piles of laundry that reflected the harmonious living together of three generations. Read more
2. Gatz
I didn’t know it was going to be a 7 hour show experience. I might not have bought tickets if I read the sistic website carefully. I bought show tickets more than a month ago and by the time the lights darkened and Mark Barton (as Nick Carraway) began reading the starting of The Great Gatsby in a very old office, I thought, hang on, I know this book. I like the slow build up of activity. He begins reading it, doing the voices of the characters in the book. Gradually, the people in the office begins to do the things as described in the book, saying the lines. It surprises Nick but he continues. By the start of part two, the office setting has faded from my mind and I am watching Jay, Daisy, Tom, Josephine, Nick, Wilson and I completely believe them all.
I have forgotten much of the story now – I read it more than 10 years ago – and yesterday’s show brought back interesting memories. As I was watching it, I was also thinking how Gatsby reminded me of Darryl van Horne (Witches of Eastweek) and Brown (The Comedians). I remember quoting from the book angrily once, complaining about careless people, about working so hard for orgiastic futures and yet borne ceaslessly into the past. How angsty I was! I’ve outgrown the book. Nick was excessively judgemental of Daisy and Tom – they were no more careless (self-absorbed) than Wilson’s wife, Wilson, Gatsby or himself.
A Map Of Love (by Donald Justice)
May 12th, 2010 books
Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.
Bonds
April 13th, 2010 books, elsewhere
There is a passage in Couples (Updike) spoken by Ken Whitman,a scientist studying molecular events of photosynthesis, of his wife’s Foxy affair. Molecules have bonds, he lectured, observing that Piet and Foxy’s bonds were stronger than his and Foxy’s. Today, it struck me to wiki molecular bonds.
The strength of bonds varies considerably; there are “strong bonds” such as covalent or ionic bonds and “weak bonds” such as dipole-dipole interactions, the London dispersion force and hydrogen bonding.
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A covalent bond is a form of chemical bonding that is characterized by the sharing of pairs of electrons between atoms, and other covalent bonds. In short, the attraction-to-repulsion stability that forms between atoms when they share electrons is known as covalent bonding.
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An ionic bond is a type of chemical bond that involves a metal and a nonmetal ion (or polyatomic ions such as ammonium) through electrostatic attraction. In short, it is a bond formed by the attraction between two oppositely charged ions.
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Intermolecular forces are due to differences in charge density in molecules.
Poor Ken.
Sleeping with John Updike by Julian Barnes
February 2nd, 2010 books, elsewhere
Resentment, jealousy, dishonesty simmers along (for 40 years?). Nothing boils over in this story of two women on a train on the way home. Found here on guardian books.
“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
“You know, I never worry about that any more. It fills a slot.”
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
September 22nd, 2009 books
It amused me to think that Anna Wulf’s notebooks are born out of the desire not to exclude. It reminded me of a journal article I read a long time ago, written by an accountant, asserting that accounting systems are designed by men. She explains that by virtue of the shape of their reproductive systems, a man classifies by defining what belongs to his body, what is excluded from his body, whereas a woman would find a way to include everything. I wonder if a ordinary women reader might have an easier time ‘getting’ the book. The book is not an easy read for me mainly because it is too brilliant. Every other page, I was stopping to admire how brilliant it is and it can be distracting. I think an attempt to read it all in one go, would result in whatever is the book-reading equivalent of throwing up after having pigged out at a buffet. While reading the book, I toyed with the idea of reading the discussions on the online book reading project at goldennotebook.org/blog and goldennotebook.org/forum. I’m glad I didn’t do it. The blog talked about the book whether or not it is feminist, which I didn’t quite understand. She’s a single woman having some particular challenges and viewpoints doesn’t mean she’s representative of the challenges or viewpoints of women in general.
It’s not just the internal conflict I enjoy. The book draws the reader intimately into the conversations between Anna and everyone else around her – Tommy, Molly, Michael, Saul, Richard, Marion. The conversation were analytical, illuminating, hurtful but did not cleave apart their affections for each other. The frankness impressed me and I’m fascinated because all honest conversations I’ve heard inevitability result in an apology and/or awkwardness. Anna, an intelligent woman, the most analytical, most sensitive character I’ve met, thinks through every thought, every encounter and tries to compartmentalise each thought, every experience and achieves this without falling into melancholy. Anna Wulf (Lessing) considers her behaviour schizophrenic, and presents an illusion of her schizophrenia at the end of the book where she covers an entire wall with newspaper cutouts. Perhaps that I live in times when every article is tagged, clipped/quoted or linked, I think she’s too hard on herself.
While I cannot identify with the character, nor do I particularly want to be her, I am marking every other page on the book, thinking “how true” or “brilliant”. Reading Lessing is like going to Redang for the first time. Everything is beautiful – even the scary/nasty parts – because you can see how very clear everything is. Only at the end of the book that I realise the book was written in the 60s. I came to this book only because the reprint was placed prominently (cover facing out) and I was looking for a new author to follow. I have never before heard of Doris Lessing – well, other than reading on BBG Muse, while waiting for data, she had won something a prize. Knowing it was written 40 yrs ago was surreal. I could not believe she could, in the heat of the events, consider these matters so clearly. The only rational explanation is this: Lessing lived in a parallel universe where everything is terrible and nasty so she’s come to warn us about it. She has access to a time machine which has a paradox resolving device to compute the right moment to insert her presence without creating problems. Lessing having observed everything, took her knowledge of the world she came from and inserted herself in the 60s to publish this book and lived on in our world since then.
Audio books, E-books
September 5th, 2009 books
The nicest way to read a book is to have a physical book, read it, uninterrupted, from the first page to the last.
Reading lets a person linger on beautiful turns of phases. Listening is too fast. While I prefer reading, audio books can be a nice companion on long walks. I have been catching up on the podcasts on my walks and for a change, I put on two audio books in the iPod: The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett , narrated by the author) and The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (Alexander McCall Smith, narrated by Hugh Laurie ). With audio-books, I am less picky about the books since it takes lesser time to finish. That I got less enjoyment from listening (even though both Bennett and Laurie entertained well), isn’t because of the audio books I pick. I have listened to a reading of Greene’s Cheap In August, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and still feel this way.
A slightly improved alternative is the e-book. I’ve got a few Heinlein downloaded to the phone and I can now linger if I want but it doesn’t satisfy the deep magpie-like urges.
From the Uncommon Reader:
“Your employer has been giving my employer a hard time.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order.”
“Her Majesty likes reading.”
“I like having my dick sucked, I don’t make the Prime Minister do it. Any thoughts, Kevin?”
“I will speak to Her Majesty.”
“You do that, Kev, and tell her to knock it off.”
Against The Gods by Peter Bernstein
August 20th, 2009 atwork, books
Thanks, Phil for the two books!
The book began with a lot of mathematical history tracing the developments of mathematical concepts in the application to the management of chance. It was fun at first but I found the fun difficult to sustain. These math greats are often discussed on In Our Time so it wasn’t because of unfamiliarity but that brief bios and accomplishment listings become quite boring after a while.
Closer to the end of the book, I got interested again when Bernstein talked about Prospect Theory. It’s not a new theory (part of behavioral economics) but I’ve not thought about it from a risk perspective. What Prospect Theory says is that how a person chooses depends on how the choices are framed and from this, the person selects the option that gives the highest utility, which we could think about it as the least pain/regret.
This leads me to re-think about Index funds. Since indices are baseline measures to rate fund manager’s performance, perhaps to rate equity index funds as for clients with high risk appetite is not quite accurate since the risk is approximately market beta and the return for that risk is approximately market return and it might frame the fund as high pain/regret and therefore shift investments into greater proportions of bonds/money market funds that earn much lower returns.
From Our Man In Havana
Listening to this at work in between loud and long conversations, this jumped at me.
“I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the UTC and the British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment – he and I.” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh I forgot. There is something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, USA and USSR. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom.” I said I sympathised with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary System.”
“My God, you said all that?”
“Yes. It was quite a speech.”
“Did you believe it?”
“Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.”
When the plane lands and the control tower in Changi comes into view, does the heart feel heavy or light?
Where one chooses to put up one’s feet cannot be derived by drawing two columns and labeling one Pros and the other Cons. It is a feeling of inexplicable contentment, of sentimentality, of (even) relief. To some the cause of such feelings of goodwill is family – that tiny nation of two, three, four or more. For persons whose family does not generate such feelings of goodwill, perhaps friends play the part. What if neither friends nor family play the part – what then gives the heart it’s lightness? Adventure, curiosity, strangeness, newness. Or is it routine, old ways, traditions, familiar sounds?
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress b Robert A Heinlein
July 30th, 2009 books
A week ago, when my brother saw the book in my room he said, “You read Robert A. Heinlein?”
“Not yet.”
“BUUUUUUUGS!” he made his eyes large and held invisible guns in his hands.
“Eh?”
“Starship Troopers? Remember? Robert A Heinlein – he wrote it.”
“Oh my God! BUUUUUUUGS!”
Hyuk-yuk-yuk went the both of us. “Crap, is he going to do something like that in this book?”
Heinlein did do something like that. Right at the end, Man said to the computer, Mike, “Do it, Mike, throw rocks at ‘em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit ‘em hard!” YAAAAY!
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I really enjoyed the novel. It was engaging, cheerful and had a adorable supercomputer call Mike. I kept thinking about what Stephen King once said about writing, that he would let the reader have the puppy, let the reader stroke it, then kill the puppy. I was worried with every turn of the page Mike was the puppy and Heinlein would make the adorable supercomputer do something heartbreakingly cruel because it wanted a laugh. Then, I’m surprised when Mike didn’t do a thing like that. What did I miss? Mike seems to understand loneliness and loyalty. As a computer, it shouldn’t because it has only processing power and artificial intelligence to guess the next step – it doesn’t have motivation to be loyal or to be social. A computer doesn’t fear being pushed out of a pressure lock and has no need for other computers, unlike human beings.
I think Heinlein is conducting a thought experiment with this story. Let’s have a few intelligent, loving, capable people in the mix, give them a bit of trouble with the authority. What do they do? Like all intelligent folks, they begin with ideals – let’s do away with government. Then, they end up with the machine rigging the votes so they remain in power, propaganda and all other bad habits of governments. I didn’t feel cheated and let down at all because Heinlein is so readable, so friendly a writer.
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
July 28th, 2009 books
Perhaps that I am sick and hence short of patience. The book is all over the place. He keeps explaining everything in music theory or neuroscience terms without saying anything new or interesting. I stopped halfway where chapter talks about studies showing that the 10,000 hours of practice makes a person an expert. I’m not sure if he wrote it wrongly but the idea is stupid in the extreme. First, there must be pleasure in practicing music – which provides the motivation to improve. Second, to a certain extent, we take the path of least resistance – generally speaking, musicians who become professional, doing music for them is relatively easier when compared with the rest of ordinary folks. So, if there is no dopamine spike, and doing it is relatively difficult, a person could practice 10,000 hours and still won’t become an expert. This can only explain that a person can’t coast on talent alone. Scanning the rest of the chapter, I find the chap trying to talk about talent in music, saying it could be genes or social conditioning, or a bit of both. If you have nothing to say…
