Post-modernism is the rejection of the modernist program.

Modernism is the idea that progress is possible the world is order-able and that reason is reasonable.

a postmodernist thinks that reason and empiricism can be compromised by position (POV) by power, by tradition etc. The worst of them talk about multiple truths and that all data is theory-laden and such such-ness.

in mathematics Modern is Bertram Russel - Post-Modern is Godel

in cultural anthro Modern is Boaz - Post is Geertz (the dumb kind) and Rosado (the smart kind)

Godel, Escher, Bach, god help me.

God help you flag. I, on the other hand, have completely lost the ability to concentrate on a book.

Loved Umberto Eco though, Focault's Pendulum was over-bashed by critics.

Godel felt that this key "would give a person who understood it such power that you could only entrust the knowledge of this philosopher's key to people of high moral character."

http://bible.cc/matthew/17-20.htm

Holy shit you’re still doing these?

Well, TBD. There are far more books listed here than I’ve reviewed, but a lot of them I’d already read. A lot of them I’m not going to read. Generally if it got endorsed by more than one person, I was willing to give it a swing. If it sounded interesting I’d give it a swing. And if it was an audiobook, I’d give it a swing.

476 days, fucker.

Right. So rezzeJ, as part of #hubskiliterarything, sent me a copy of this book.

This is how long it takes me to read paper.

It’s available, by the way. Will totally fit into a USPS flat rate box.

No, no. You read Alibek’s Biohazard way quicker than that. It was on paper…

One, I didn’t finish it yet. Two, it was on Kindle. Three, I was stuck in an unheated shithole next to a mountain for five weeks.

But the fact remains, you’d rather read a book about biological warfare at the sunset of the Soviet Union than a New York Times bestseller.

Fuckin’ Twilight was a NYT bestseller.

Let the slagging begin. Don’t you have a quippy meme to show us?

Dude.

Look -

thenewgreen loves this book. mk loves this book. briandmyers loves this book. I did not hate this book. But if you take this book:

and this book:

and slam them together you’ll pretty much have Owen Meany. Except…

Do go on alienating your friends.

thaaaaat’s it.

Look - it’s not a bad book. It’s not a great book. It’s also not a short book and it’s also not a linear book. This allows Irving to hide a Rube Goldbergian miracle at the heart of some fundamentally saccharine observations about the ‘60s and ‘80s.

There are two narratives, one of a past that has been fled and one of a present that is scarcely inhabited. As the book drags on, these two narratives converge at a fundamentally disappointing inflection point.

”I fucking hate the message, but I love the book.” - mk

It’s possible that had I read it earlier, I might have liked it better. As it is, though, it borrows its narrative structure from Stephen King’s It (published 3 years earlier) and its sappy down-home grittiness from Best Christmas Pageant Ever (published 18 years earlier) and then makes its central character speak in all-caps italics. The fact that the access character is a pusillanimous loser helps absolutely nothing; the fundamental conceit is that Owen Meany is miraculous but this requires you to ignore the fact that every other character is a static cipher with zero development, listless motives and an utter and total lack of personal advancement.

Shawshank Redemption was a short story. I haven’t read it, but the shape and size of it is visible from the movie: there are just enough events to hang a lot of cinematography and acting on, and not too much pointless tedium to get in the way. A Prayer for Owen Meany would probably have been an interesting and engaging short story. Instead it’s 636 pages long.

”So extraordinary, so original, and so enriching…” - Stephen King, Washington Post

Right. But Stephen King loved the fuck out of The Passage too:

"Every so often a novel-reader's novel comes along: an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination. Summer is the perfect time for such books, and this year readers can enjoy the gift of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Read fifteen pages and you will find yourself captivated; read thirty and you will find yourself taken prisoner and reading late into the night. It has the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve. What else can I say? This: read this book and the ordinary world disappears.”

Probably in no small part because it’s a paint-by-numbers homage to The Stand.

I’m not going to second-guess Stephen King’s motivations. I will second-guess his judgement.

Probably a good thing you’ve run out of your friends’ recommendations to slag.

Don’t get me wrong - I’ve enjoyed every step of the way, even down to my failure to penetrate more than a quarter inch into Godel Escher Bach. I’ve known for a decade or more that my tastes are outside the mainstream - I would not have started a tag like #kleinbl00batshittery if I thought I were normal (really ought to finish that “Avengers of Tonopah” thing). The stuff I’ve had literary success with is the stuff I write for an audience other than myself… this does not mean I do not value the input of others, nor that I do not respect their choices.

But you’re still going to slag on everyone’s favorite books.

See, I didn’t say “favorite books.” I said “great books.” I love the shit out of Neuromancer but I would not recommend it to someone who didn’t want to read some gritty-ass cyberpunk. Deep Black is an intensely fascinating tome… IF you have an undying interest in the intelligence capabilities of the NRO in the mid ‘80s (big “if”). So on the one hand, I’m loath to do this schtick with the books I find interesting. But on the other hand…

Do you have any idea how disingenuous it is to ask permission to blog?

Yep. yep I do. So instead I’ll just say I’m currently slogging through this quagmire and despite the fact that I have effectively 9 uninterrupted hours a week (and I listen at 1.5x) I do not think anyone here will give a fuck what I think of this book and I do not think I will give a fuck enough to subject y’all to my opinion. So even if dozens of people are DYING to hear what I think of a book they’d otherwise never read, I’m still not going to tell you for quite some time. You’re welcome.

NEXT UP:

TBD.

the list

the collection

It was the mid '90s. I was watching the news. And some local anchor talked about how a man had attempted to board an airplane with a semiotic weapon and I just about fell out of my chair laughing, and then decided that was maybe the best band name I'd ever heard. Now, of course, it's a Tumblr, a Wordpress and a Twitter handle and near as I can tell, none of the above understands semiotics.

I'll bet that's why Dan Brown writes about Professor Langdon, the "symbologist", rather than Professor Langdon, the semioticist. If I say "symbologist" you're likely to figure it's somebody who studies symbols and their meanings, right? But if I say "semioticist" you're likely to figure it's some egghead so far up his own ass that he turns the act of opening a can of cat food into performance art. Near as I can tell, that's an occupational hazard when your field of study is literally the meaning of meaning - when there's a tautology in the title you're kinda fucked from the get-go.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I went into this book having enjoyed the movie and having no real handle on what I was getting myself into. I was expecting "literary murder mystery" - a sort of Cadfael with philosophy. And it's that, kind of the way Godel Escher Bach is about a turtle racing Achilles. I've burned through three or four histories of the renaissance, actually had heard of Waldensians and Cathars prior to reading this, and had seen the movie three times.

And it got really dry for me.

As I listened (did the audiobook), I started to get a nagging feeling that narrative was being sacrificed for capital-M Meaning. This reached a fever pitch in the last quarter of the book, wherein we solve the mystery by applying three or four layers of Meaning to casual things people said while also demonstrating how things would have been solved much sooner if three or four layers of Meaning hadn't been applied to other casual things people said.

You know that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye says "there IS no other hand!" and acts all decisive and shit? After spending the whole movie arguing with himself?

In The Name of the Rose, Tevye never says "there is no other hand." He just argues with himself and then says "Tradition!"

Lemme put it this way: if you enjoyed the movie, as I did, imagine the novel as if the movie were intercut amongst a 46-hour-long reenactment of the Nicene Council. Your enjoyment of the new movie is heavily dependent on your interest in early Christian canon and how it got to be that way.

Does that make sense?

1. Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman 2. Godel Escher Bach - Douglas Hofstadter 3. Moby Dick - Herman Mellville 4. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 5. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

It's tough to pick a Top Five, but those are books that I'll recommend without hesitation. Ok, five more:

6. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller 7. Franny and Zooey - J. D. Salinger 8. The Lord of the Rings (all 3) - J. R. R. Tolkein 9. Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan 10. The Private Life of Chairman Mao - Dr. Li Zhisui

When you start a system in an environment utterly devoid of biology, the structures and means that will appear have no reason to resemble our own.

I agree with that. However, many animals express an intelligence we can at least relate to. I expect that the same might go for non-biological AI, at least to the degree in which we operate in the same environment, but maybe not.

He saw "intelligence" as an impossible thing to judge; he argued that "imitating intelligence" was easy. I think the processes you're talking about are going to lead to "intelligence" - I'd argue that in many ways, they already have.

For sure. I don't think there's a difference between intelligence and the perfect imitation of it. It's in the eye of the beholder. It's telling that we can't even agree upon the fundamentals of our own intelligence. We just know it when we see it.

I'll add the book. I am starting an actual doc now. I'm not sure if you've read Godel, Escher, Bach, but it's fantastic. The rest of what I've read from Hofstadter are variations on themes outlined in GEB.

Short Circuit is a great choice. It also made me think of Kit from Knight Rider, but they are painful to watch. The computer in War Games was borderline AI.

For reading, I thought of a collection of essays put together by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter called "The Mind's I". Some of those dealt with interesting ideas and paradox of AI. Perhaps a chapter or two from Godel, Escher, Bach. I'm thinking of one that concerns the intelligence of an ant colony.

edit: Star Wars has the potentially interesting issue of how droids are intelligent, but treated like property. Luke is a slave owner. I also had the thought that the Turing test would be a good topic, and it even might be worth watching Watson school Ken Jennings on Jeopardy.

Of the "Great Books" I have read:

Moby Dick by Melville: I read it as a treatise on passion. One of my favorite classics. It makes for a poor adventure tale.

Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: A well-deserved Pulitzer, it has no equal. It's not just a book. It is art.

War and Peace by Tolstoy: I enjoyed it much more than Anna Karenina. Tolstoy knows the mind of his characters.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: The only other Eco I have read is Focault's Pendulum. This one was much better. A fantastic mystery novel with a setting soaked in character.

The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich (yes that Voynich): Revolution in 1840 Italy, and the minds of revolutionaries. Just a unique read that stuck with me.

In Our Time by Hemmingway: This convinced me that Hemmingway was a short story writer that also wrote novels. If you like it also read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, in whatever collection it resides.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White: A singular book of Arthurian fantasy.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: You must have read it. If you haven't you must. A courageous work.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: War as the madness it is. In Vietnam, my father once tackled a guy that threw a grenade into the officer's mess, then terrorized the camp with a shotgun. They transferred him.

Great Expectations by Dickens: I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. If you really like what Dickens is all about, Bleakhouse is all that and more.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving: I fucking hate the message, but love the book.

Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan: The subtitle says it all: "Reflections on the Romance of Science". It inspired me in my early 20's, and is probably part of why I am a scientist.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow: Not a great, but a short read that is well worth the afternoon it will take.

To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust: Also not a great, but it's about the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven, and he pulls it off.

You've got two of my top 5 in yours (Godel and War). That damn whale isn't grabbing me. I've picked it up and put it down like 10 times now.