i have been reading

a bit superficial and silly, but Lynne Truss makes me laugh. "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" is one of my favourite grammar books, and "Talk to the Hand" was a fun, distracting book for my plane ride from Toronto to Seattle when the last hours of travelling from Israel were making me loopy. ~ier than the usual.


"So Many Books, So Little Time" gave me some good ideas about books that i should look into reading. i also like hearing about how other people connect their literature with their lives. otherwise, i did not warm to the author, Sara Nelson, very much. at all.


"Small Wonder" is a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver about different elements of her belief system for life on this planet. she has a lovely, breezy style and at the same time writes incredibly descriptively of her surroundings and natural environment. i guess that's because she's a biologist? this book has made me recommit to shooing moths outside, to leaving spiders well alone, and to consider my ecological footprint on the earth again. but mainly it's made me appreciate natural beauty like our neighbourhood is a magical wonderland in which every leaf and stone contains a universe. a universe that doesn't need to be discovered to be appreciated.

i'm heaps of fun to go on walks with.


"The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression" by Tracy Thompson has changed the way i think about life, mine and otherwise. very very recommended. i say this not because the book contains gasp-YES! insightful explanations of things (it might, for you), but because Thompson, a journalist, has really been comprehensive in her writing of this book. it covers the science of depression---chemistry, neurology, biology---spirituality, history, family, psychology, anecdotes, correlations, habits, suggestions, comfort and stories. i loved it.


this isn't the right cover, but i couldn't find a picture of "Two Lives - Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz : A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs" online, and i've already returned the book to the library. this book was lovely. and turns out i still adore paintings of flowers.




as part of my online FUNDAEC course, i learnt about a hoax that was perpetrated against an American cultural studies journal in 1996. a physicist at the New York University, Alan Sokal, felt that the liberties the academic humanities and social sciences were taking with mathematics, science, scientific methodology, the history of science and reality itself were becoming postmodern parodies of postmodernism. he felt that offering advice, a critique, or a straightforward list of the mathematical and scientific mistakes that these academics were making would be dismissed out of hand; the way Sokal phrases it is: "The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside."

so, feeling "troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities", but wondering whether he could offer commentary as a "mere physicist" (" if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy"), he devised a little test to measure "prevailing intellectual standards": "I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies---whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross---publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"

you already know the punchline: the journal, "Social Text", did publish the article in a special edition called "Science Wars". Sokal's was the only article written by a scientist, and he called it "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". (yep, you can read it.) the article contained non sequiturs, neologisms, jargon, quotations from inter-disciplinary texts, assertions without argument, and, most mind-numbingly of all, long, convoluted, meaningless sentences. apparently the editors didn't realize it was a parody. here is an excerpt (i've left the footnotes in, because some of the juiciest stuff is there):

At about the same time, in the social and psychological sciences Jacques Lacan pointed out the key role played by differential topology:

This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.57 58

As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''.59 More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism60 and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS.61 In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group62 of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.63 Furthermore, as Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten's derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial64) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.65

to read about all the different kinds of nonsense that's in there, you can sift through some of Sokal's papers on this "affair", since, of course, it became a big deal not only in academic circles (of both American and Europe) but also in the news. the American public became anxious that their tax dollars were being spent on universities and professors who were teaching their children not to believe in an external world.

all of this is background, actually. i read "Fashionable Nonsense" by Sokal and Jean Bricmont (first published in French under the title "Impostures Intellectuelles") after reading "The Sokal Hoax", put together by another cultural studies' journal, "Lingua Franca". the first one looks at specific writers in the humanities who are the main offenders when it comes to writing about science without bothering to inform themselves of the basics of what they're talking about. (an example of this kind of writing: "it now seems appropriate to reconsider the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative speeds)"). the book quotes extensively from Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze and others---all famous, familiar names to anyone who's done more than a semester of a sociology undergraduate---and points out exact transgressions of logic and outright falsities.

my compelling interest in all of this stems from a few things, i worked out. one, i feel woefully undereducated in basic math and technology. i used to feel that this didn't really matter that much, because my interests and strengths lay elsewhere. now, i feel hungry to learn about general relativity and sub-atomic particles, and to make shaun talk to me about unification theory. (or whatever it's called.) an anecdote in "Fashionable Nonsense" solidified and gave motivation to this feeling i've had:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.15

two, i have a moral and intellectual conundrum about the importance of scientific method and the valuing of alternative, especially indigenous or traditional, stories about the world. maybe reading these books has enforced my feeling that they are in competition, which is usually inherent in a discussion that includes a "variety of truths". maybe there is not a competition. but what my opinion comes down to is that each culture and people of the world is contributing, and will contribute, to human civilization.

three, i studied for three years for an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts. i was mad when i discovered that we were expected to read Heidegger's (incomprehensible) philosophising about Being without reference to his uncompromising Nazism, even after the war when everybody and their heil hitler were revoking allegiance to the regime that---it was being discovered---had perpetrated an unthinkable genocide. and when i say "without reference" i mean that not one of our lecturers or tutors mentioned his politics at any point, even when i asked.

i was confused when i bush-wacked my way through polysyllabic linguistic contortions of esoteric articulation and realized that these writers were saying they thought that divisions between high and low class (or culture) and disparities between the rich and poor needed to be broken down so that we could have a more egalitarian society.

and i was desparate when i tried to cram in knowledge and insight about society, culture, politics, literature, governance, and science from those writers who were the most obtuse, the most verbose, and the most self-involved.

not all of the papers that i studied and researched were like the ones Sokal parodies and quotes in his hoax article. and for the most part i learned from and admired my teachers. but in reading these two books i felt vindicated for the questions and feelings i had as a student at university when i decided that there was no benefit in my attempting to understand a passage like " Instead of a simple "either/or'' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither "either/or'', nor "both/and'' nor even "neither/nor'', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."

and that's why i liked these books.


thank you, kadria; Thank You. i can't get enough of the stories from the Vinyl Cafe. Stuart Mclean gets dialogue, man. he's been there. and he really makes me laugh and dissolve in a puddle of sentimental mango juice every time.


last year (around this time!) i read Nicole Krauss's "The History of Love". and aparently never got around to writing about it. well, maybe some of the comments for "Man Walks Into A Room" will suffice for a belated commentary on that one, too. i am as impressed as anyone else when a person my age---or, ahem, younger than me---writes an unusual, poetic, thoughtful, and original book, which also does well critically and commercially. Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close" fits into this category also, by the way. (uhm ... does anyone else think it's weird that i tacked on a goofy pre-work morning picture of shaun at the end of a book review? what's the intention behind that? is it conveying the message Well I May Spend The Bulk Of My Waking Hours Consumed By The Most Individualistic Hobby Since Gutenberg Designed Metal Movable Type, But I Still Make Time To Take Pictures Of My Husband Smiling, And THAT, Ls&Gs, Is How To Write A Blog. ? one can only imagine.)

anyway, so yes yes yes it's got fantastic writing in there, but at what point do my heart and moral imagination become gripped by the workings and doings of the plot and characters? where is the vertiginous sense of plummeting realization? when do i get to carry the story around in my head, the impossibility of escape because it has nailed some universal that i'd never heard expressed that way before? i'm just saying that i like a book to say something and to mean it and to get me to think about it for a long time afterwards and to hopefully change that thinking. this is especially a requirement if the book seems like it's trying to get me to feel that way about it.


i read "Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingsolver immediately after reading her "Small Wonder". this meant that i was re-reading all of her ideas about environmental sustainability and community life all over again, just coming out of the mouths and minds of fictional characters in the Virginian mountains instead of through her experiences and history. but good ideas bear repetition, i know. apart from the somewhat stiff and contrived dialogue---to my inner reading voice, anyway, which has no real knowledge of what it's like to hear people talk in the south---i have no bad things to say about this book. i especially liked learning about coyotes. they were in my dreams two nights ago, prowling wetlands, and i felt safe.



very important acknowledgement: the seattle public library, without which this blog post would never have allowed me to procrastinate on my homeworks.