I Read Some Descartes

 I dropped my only philosophy class in college because it was one of those huge lecture halls and the professor was not a good lecturer. He spent the lectures talking to the board and the first book in the syllabus was a book on string theory. I get what he was doing now but I wanted Plato.

 

So, I’ve been circling back around and trying to get a grounding in some of the foundations of western thought. For that I really like these thin Hackett books – accessible and not over-whelming.

 

Some interesting things that I came across here is that the two things that Descartes is most famous for, the Cogito Ergo Sum and the mind / body duality are literally in back-to-back paragraphs in the Discourse. He seems to be arguing to take everything from first principles, and it is an interesting path on one hand but on the other seems to deny all prior learning and feels a bit solipsistic. Only I can determine what is real and true. It’s whatever the opposite of standing on the shoulders of giants is.

 

The thing that strikes me is if he does that, it seems he doesn’t go far enough. There are multiple assumptions built into Cogito Ergo Sum, basically what the singular is, what thinking is, what being is, and what causation is. You really need to define all these before you stop at thinking. I could be missing something, or it could just be that the bar was way lower back then.

 

The other thing is that a huge part of the second book is trying to prove the existence of God, but it really feels to me like he basically makes an assumption about what God’s nature is like and then says it must be so. I wasn’t convinced.

Recent reads 8.6.2021

 The Relentless Moon

 

The Relentless Moon is the third in a series of alternate history books that basically look at what would happen if sometime in the 1950s a giant asteroid hit the earth and wiped out most of the eastern seaboard of America.  What the combined governments of the nation decide to do is create a space race to get to space and get on the moon and get on Mars. They do this because they have a theory that the aftereffects of the asteroid impact which first created essentially nuclear winter will turn around and become a runaway greenhouse effect. I don't know if the science behind this is true. But will take that precipitating event at face value.

 

For me of all the series it's those first 50 pages that are most interesting. For some reason I still don't really buy the idea that they would turn around a create a space race when there was no real existing technology for it. Even now with the technology we have over half a century later colonizing the moon or Mars seems like a huge effort. So, in the book they're spending huge amounts of resources on an effort that sounds like a really wouldn't save a lot of people. What's interesting is that there is within the text of the book a group of people who are fighting against this project because it is a waste of resources and they'd rather spent the effort of the governments on earth. The other part that really doesn't seem to work is that after the after impact everyone starts working together. On a country-to-country basis for me it would seem to be agree catastrophe would be something that pushes us towards conflict and not word unity, which she was especially prevalent in the face of the pandemic. I think the author may have wanted to use this as a metaphor for global warming writ large, but we've had a more concentrated global emergency that kind of throws away the foundation of her thought in the book.

 

The thing is this is the third book that I have read the series. So, what I'm thinking about the book and the series itself I think “Hey why am I attracted to this series?” because normally if I had these kinds of qualms about the basis of a story I probably wouldn't keep reading. And the more I think of it I think what really drives my interest is the characters. Kowal creates characters very well and they're interesting they have flaws. It's a very feminist book so there's still fighting against a lot of gender and racial norms that existed. The other thing is that this book focuses on a different character than the previous two books do so as a reader it took a minute to get into it since you had to get the grounding with these main characters in her life. Overall though she tells good stories and I keep reading the books so I have to say there's something good going on there even if I can't fully articulate it.

 

 

The Last Man Takes LSD

I went to Graduate School in English about 20 years ago. Somehow, I didn't have to read much Foucault. I think I read Discipline and Punish but only on my own time.  We may have read some sort of excerpts in a larger theory class. But that doesn't mean I'm not kind of familiar with the concepts of the man because the postmodern, post-structuralist thinking, that he helped engineer was everywhere at the Academy at that time. Even if you were more structural, Marxist or something that wasn't as grounded in French theory you still had to deal with that environment.

 

That basically means that I don't have the full context to completely judge this book because it is somewhat of a biography and somewhat of an intellectual biography but also a criticism of his work. So, reading this I learned a lot about Foucault and his thought and the things he was involved in. But I can't say where the authors got it right where they got it wrong how much he was involved in the creation and strengthening and dissemination of what we now call neoliberalism. What I can say is that the subtitle means more to the structure of the book than the title. There is sadly very little about LSD and it's more about the fizzling out of revolutionary potentials. I'm glad I read this book and I think I learned a lot from it.

 

Recent Reads 8.4.2021

 Red State Revolt

The Jacobin and Verso partnership published a book based on the Chicago teachers strikes a while back. And then after 2018 they published a book about the broader teachers strikes that struck the nation. This is that book.

 

I really liked what Eric Blanc does mainly because even though he gets up close to the people who really worked with the strikes he doesn't over invest in them which for me would be very easy to do as a non-journalist. But you still do get a lot of empathy for the people. What makes this strong is his comparison of the strikes in West Virginia and Arizona versus the ones in Oklahoma. It makes it like points of comparison which could be useful as a handbook for future work.

 

The thing that makes me sad reading this is thinking about all the promise that we had based on Bernie’s run in 2016 and then the teacher strikes in 2018 and then it felt like a letdown as a member of the left that we didn't get more progress especially considering the pandemic. Reading it just felt as if we had something within our grasp that slipped away a moment in time in the ebbs and flows where you hope you could strike wear the iron is hot, but you miss. And it's not missing that's sad.

 

Puppy Dog Ice Cream

 

I don't normally buy a book that would be a biography of a band. But when I was a little bit younger Japanther became my favorite band. The problem was that the time that I was becoming a big fan of them it was at the very end of their cycle. I saw them at Riot Fest and then once later and then I had tickets for a show in the spring of 2014 and then I got an email that said they weren't going to do that tour. It made me very sad, and I didn't know why it happened.

 

So, the thing was getting this book and seeing it offered - I was excited at long last to see an explanation about what happened. My hope was that I would get an entire view of the whole arc of the band. Which is pretty much what this book’s got so that's good. The problem is that as a reader and a story once most interesting is the conflict period and what we have here is Ian's side of the whole thing and we don't really get mad side. So, the subtitle is the story of Japanther, but it's only half the story. I enjoyed reading it was a quick read, but I would like the sequel if it were Matt story of Japanther.

 

I don't mean to disparage what Ian did because the book itself is very well written and I think he is introspective and insightful about his own experience. I think if you were a fan of the band, you would enjoy this book.

 

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

 

I have been reading Allison Bechdel’s work for a while. It started with Fun Home, but I also circled back and read her comics. I think especially in her books Bechdel isn't necessarily just writing about the subject matter at hand. What she's really writing about is herself and her own inner journey. Nominally it could be about her mom or her dad or her lifelong exploration of different kinds of exercise, but really, it's just a journey inward looking at the self. Overall, it's not a bad journey and there's a very good reason that she is an award-winning author and artist -- it's that she really touches the soul, or the nub, she gets to the root of the problem. I don't know. Whatever it is that she does she's very good at it. If you like graphic novels and you like memoirs you are going to like The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

 

The only quibble I have is that I read the whole thing and I don't think I found what the secret was. But I do have to admit to sometimes being an inattentive reader, so perhaps it's in there and I just missed it.