Summer reading list

This is the first summer I have really done the serious reading I always intend to do over the summer. Here are the books I have either completed or am working on:

Catcher in the Rye - I read this because I have a student who is using it for his senior thesis. I found the book very compelling. I had picked it up a few years back, mainly because somebody told me that I reminded her of Holden Caulfield. I did not really see myself in the character, so I never finished the book. This time I read it rather quickly and found it very compelling and moving. The overall tone of the book is cynical, and I can see why we don't read it at our school. I do think that Holden has an innate goodness that he does not want to acknowledge. I look forward to discussing the book with my senior.

Heart of Darkness and Watchmen - I started in on Heart of Darkness, but found it hard to become engaged in the book. I am reading it for another senior thesis. Meanwhile, I picked up Watchmen at the library. I had looked through it before, and mostly looked at the art and tried to understand the use of motifs and symbols. I found the book a little threatening since I had heard how great it is. I was afraid it would be over my head. This time, I read it straight through without worrying about "getting" all the subtleties. It was quite moving and thought-provoking. It also made it easier for me to understand Heart of Darkness. The books are quite similar in theme. Watchmen makes some clear allusions to Conrad, and even cites the title of the book at one point.

The Iliad - I am listening to Stanley Lombardo reading his translation of The Iliad. This poem shows that Zeus acts the way he does because he is the most powerful of the gods and he can do what he wants. This is a theme in Heart of Darkness and Watchmen. I did not really set out to explore this idea, but that is the way things are shaping up.

The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben - This is a book about a German company with significant international ties that made it possible for Germany to threaten the world. They also produced Zyklon B. I just started this book, although I can see it has a similar theme to the previous three books.

The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time - I just reread this book in a few hours. It is a sort of mystery told from the perspective of an autistic boy. It does a great job of making you sympathize with the narrator, but also see how different his perspective is. There are some clues that would be obvious to a neurotypical person that he completely misses. There are other things that he catches that we would miss.

Zeno's Paradoxes revisited

Anybody who has been in my ancient history class knows that I love paradoxes. This year, we did not spend as much time on philosophy as I had hoped, so I hope that you had time to think about the paradoxes on your own. I want to take a minute to go back over the "Achilles and the Tortoise" paradox, because I tried to explain another way to think about what the paradox is trying to say, but I felt a little rushed and am sure that I explained it well enough for people to catch on to what I was saying.

You remember that "Achilles and the Tortoise" involves a race between Achilles, the fastest runner, and a tortoise, who is less than the fastest runner. Since Achilles is so fast, he allows the tortoise to have a head start. The tortoise runs quite a ways before Achilles starts. Achilles is fast, but it still takes him some time to catch up to the tortoise. In that amount of time, the tortoise has moved on a bit. So now Achilles needs to make up the distance that the tortoise moved while Achilles was catching up. As soon as Achilles gets to where the tortoise had been, the tortoise has had time to move on a bit more. Now Achilles can keep getting closer and closer to the tortoise, but he is never going to completely catch up.

We also talked about a more recent retelling of this paradox, "The Frog and the Fly." There is a frog who wants a fly, but he can only jump halfway to where he is going. So he jumps half, half, half, but will never get there. In the ordinary world, is there any way to move somewhere without first going halfway?

What these little stories are supposed to help you imagine is a paradox of infinite divisibility. Say you have an object, a rubber ball, perhaps. You can cut it in half and discard one half of it. Then, take that half and cut it in half. How long can you keep this up? Forever? If you can do it forever, then any object is made up of infinite bits piled up together. How big are these infinite bits? They really cannot have any imaginable mass, since it takes infinity of them to make up something as small as a rubber ball.

If you can't cut it in half forever, what's stopping you? The ancient philosophers known as the "atomists" came up with the notion of "atoma," which translates to "without cutting." This is where we get our modern word "atom" - although they do not mean exactly the same thing. The atomists proposed that there was a point at which you reach a particle so small that it cannot be cut in half. According to them, this piece has some size and you can imagine half of it - it is "geometrically divisible" - but it cannot be physically divided. The atomists believe that this solves the paradox - at some point the frog moving towards the fly will reach a point where there is no such thing as "halfway" - it can either be on one side or the other.

I am not sure the atomists have solved the puzzle, though. Since an atom has a knowable size, then it is still divisible. It seems that in order to completely erase the paradox, an atom would need to be both physically and geometrically indivisible. In other words, it has to be special enough that you can pile up a finite number of them to make a rubber ball, but they are not made up of halves. This sort of thing is either very hard - or impossible - to imagine. It seems it is still a paradox.

MacArthur Park

The other day, I was listening to an oldies radio show that plays songs that used to be hits, but that are not played very often. The song "MacArthur Park" came on about the same time my older daughter came in to the room and started crocheting. I thought that I might ask her what she thought about the song, because I can remember when it was played on the radio all the time. I think that some people perceived the song as being a bit overwrought, but I can't remember anybody suffocating in laughter over how ridiculous the song is. Meanwhile, we have been exposed to a couple of decades of Dave Barry columns in which he mocks the song as being the "worst ever." So now, of course, the song is more likely to inspire laughter - or at least a wry smile - rather than the sorrowful loneliness it was meant to evoke. So I wondered if a person from my daughter's generation were to hear the song "fresh," how would she respond.

While I was thinking of a way to ask my daughter to direct her attention to the song on the radio without tipper her off to what I was wondering, she started shaking with laughter. I asked her what was up, and she said, "Are you listening to the lyrics?" (Actually, since she is starting to talk in teenagerese, it sounded more like, "Are you listening? To the lyrics?") So my question was answered without me ever having to ask it.

This question seems to point to a deeper question. When this song came out, why didn't we laugh about it? Was the nation in some sort of delirious trance in which lyrics like these - "MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark/ All the sweet, green icing flowing down. / Someone left the cake out in the rain. / And I don't think that I can make it / because it took so long to bake it / And I'll never have that recipe again, oh no" - actually seem somewhat moving. Did it take Dave Barry to snap us out of a haze that our civilization will never fall into again? What songs are on the radio now that my daughter's children will laugh about?

Los Alamos on Fire - Again

A large wildfire is currently threatening to burn through my hometown. I have been obsessively checking news to see what is going on. The fire started in the Las Conchas area of the Jemez Mountains, which is where we used to go when the summer was getting too hot. I always considered it one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Check out these photos from another blog: http://woodswanderer.blogspot.com/2008/07/las-conchas-canyon-pretty-canyon-in.html

Delusional mensapsychosis

Here is another term we need. It refers to a person who receives a high score on an IQ test and so decides there is no longer any reason to think about anything. Any crazy notion this person has must be true because it comes from a clearly superior intellect. There is no need to argue with people who disagree, since it is obvious that they are inferior and simply do not understand.

Fideopsychosis

I have been somewhat reticent to post this, because I am afraid somebody is going to misinterpret what I say and take offense at it. If you are that person, please post here so I can have a chance to respond.

I have long thought that we need a word for the type of insanity that some people demonstrate when they talk about religion. Everybody has probably met somebody who is perfectly reasonable, only to be warned not to talk to that person about religion. If you do engage the person on religion, you find yourself lost in a maelstrom of bizarre ideas and find rational discourse impossible. I don't mean to say that all religious people are insane, only that certain people seem to lose their capacity for rational thought when discussing religious topics.

I know some people will say that these are likely people who have such a sublime understanding of ultimate truths that they cannot communicate them without seeming insane. Perhaps.

The word I propose is "fideopychosis." I will take other suggestions.

Insouciant

This isn’t a big deal, but it is something that I have been wondering about. There are two French words that we use rather frequently in English: “insouciant” and “nonchalant.” It occurred to me that these words mean roughly the same thing. So I looked them up, and sure enough “nonchalant” is given as a synonym of “insouciant.” So my question is, why do the French have two words for an attitude that English-speaking people have not come up with a single word for? I guess “carefree” is kind of close in meaning, but not exactly. Please respond with any thoughts you might have.