Books in 2010

40 Books. Written in German, Spanish, English, Russian, French, Japanese, Portuguese. Authors from Germany, Spain, England, Russia, France, Algeria, Slovenia, Chile, USA, Japan, Canada, Portugal, Scotland. 3 books were written by women, 37 by men. 21 (just over 50%) were written within the last hundred years. 23 were fiction.

The List
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
Don Quixote (Part I) - Miguel de Cervantes
Joseph Andrews - Henry Fielding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction - Michael Tanner
The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Dust - Carolyn Steedman
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
The Plague - Albert Camus
The Orthodox Way - Kallistos Ware
Christian Doctrine - Shirlie Guthrie
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Fragile Absolute - Slavoj Zizek
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Endless Forms Most Beautiful - Sean Carroll
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
Drood - Dan Simmons
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
The Comedians - Graham Greene
2666 - Roberto Bolano
Israel Potter - Herman Melville
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Underground - Haruki Murakami
The Parallax View - Slavoj Zizek
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
The Last Day of a Condemned Man / Claude Gueux - Victor Hugo
Theory and Reality - Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Bonehunters - Steven Erikson
Fado Alexandrino - Antonio Lobo Antunes
Travels in the Interior of Africa - Mungo Park
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Thus Spoke Zarathustra isn't my favorite Nietzsche, but I am going to read every book Nietzsche wrote, eventually. Human, All Too Human is on my shelf right now, and I'll probably break that open in the next few weeks, once I finish a few of the non-fiction books I'm reading. Beyond Good and Evil, unlike Zarathustra, got under my skin, stayed on my mind for quite a while.

Reading Nietzsche and Zizek is what made me interested in Hegel, who I'd always written off as a kook, which maybe he is. The Fragile Absolute is advertized as a book by Zizek, a devout atheist, about why the "Christian legacy is worth fighting for." Most of the book has nothing to do with that, and it reads more like a group of essays than a book with a central thesis. Still, that aphoristic quality is part of what made the book, and Zizek in general, and Nietzsche, so fun to read. The Parallax View has more sustained arguments, but still had those great aphoristic qualities.

Sputnik Sweetheart is definitely not Murakami's best effort, and seems sillier when read around the same time as Underground, which is a stunning piece of journalism. Even so, Murakami's worst books are more interesting to me than a lot of other novels being published....Raymond Carver's Cathedral was great to read alongside Murakami, partly because Murakami read and translated Carver's books into Japanese and knows him extensively, partly because that attraction existed for a good reason. Both of the writers make great use of the ordinary, even though Murakami is mostly thought of in terms of magical realism.

Dust is a book that my friend Dan recommended to me, and I'm glad that he did. Among other things, it's a book about archives and waste, which I'm come to think a lot about since I've started archiving medical records.

Of all the books I read this year, I may have had the most visceral response to the ending of Origin of Species, which is a fine piece of art besides a fine work of science. Reading this at the same time as Endless Forms Most Beatiful (the title comes from a line in Origin of Species) was fascinating, reading one very famous evolutionary text from the 19th century and another evolutionary text, of lesser fame, from the 21st. At the same time, I was reading some of Stephen Gould's essays on Darwin and evolution. I wouldn't reccomend Darwin or Carroll to everyone, but I would reccomend Gould to anyone who has even a passing interest in science, especially evolution.

Therese Raquin and Madame Bovary are both 19th Century French novels about adultery. Madame Bovary is the more famous for many good reasons. Both end up feeling very judgmental in the end, especially given how clinical and objective both authors were attempting to be. Dickens has much more of a reputation for preachiness, but Dickens revels in the criminal and deviant scenes of Oliver Twist, they give all the weight to the novel.

2666 was a long, sometimes great, sometimes tedious novel. Since reading the novel I've been much more interested in Ciudad Juarez. The repetition of abduction, rape, and murder, over and over in the novel doesn't seem so excessive once you begin to read the news about Juarez, or the news about Mexico.

And that's all I'm going to write about that!


A few books I'm looking forward to finishing next year:

The Decameron, which I've been reading off and on for the last 4 years.
Das Kapital vol. 1 by Marx, which I've been reading since August. When I read the Communist Manifesto for the first time a few years ago, I wasn't that impressed. I read it again this year with some selections of the German Ideology, and couldn't get enough. North and South I read because I'd been meaning to for a while, and I'd been told it was good to read alongside Das Kapital.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I don't pick it up often, but everytime I do I think it was a good decision.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which I've been reading for almost a week now. I'm enjoying it a lot. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his MFA piece, was fun to read, and was enough for me to know I'd like reading something else of his.

What I'm most excited to read over the next year, and it will probably take me that long, is the new translation of Arabian Nights. Arabian Nights is usually advertised as stories for children, and so the stories are printed for children and heavily censored. The new translation is, as far as I know, the first complete translation since Richard Burton's in the 1880s. I've read a dozen or so of the stories in Burton's translation, which is great.

This will be the first year that I've not been assigned books for school, so it's unlikely CS Lewis or Jane Austen will show up in next year's list.

6 Years Ago

Was the tsunami in south east asia. For many thousands of people, boxing day will always be the day that everything drowned... 230,000+ dead.

more on marx

This last week, I finished reading Fado Alexandrino by Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes. Among other things, the novel is about (and structured around) a Marxist revolution in Portugal back in the 70s. Reading this alongside Capital vol. 1 by Marx, I've been thinking about Marxism's history, and how condemnations of Marxism always entail pointing towards its bloody revolutions, Soviet Russia, Stalin, Mao, etc.

I've never read a Marxist defense of these things, which I imagine would be about as interesting/boring as hearing Christian defenses against the history that is leveled against it: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials, slavery, church corruption, etc. I imagine the typical responses would be the same, "That's not real Marxism," "That's not real Christianity." And then there are the historians, "Well, that's not really what happened during the Crusades," or "Well, if you look at the Inquisition in the context of 16th century Spain..." The appeal to purity or history is always a losing argument, or at best a back-pedaling argument.

What's more interesting for me is to take things full force, to say, "Yes, let's suppose all this is true, that the church really did institutionalize murder, genocide, and torture..." A better question, but one I'm not satisfied with either, is "What about Marxist ideology was useful for revolutionaries, or fascist leaders, to appropriate?"

What I think is disappointing about this last question is that it still puts the ideology first, as the motivating factor behind genocide and torture and exploitation. What's more convincing to me is that the ideology is secondary to the torture, that the torture serves as a justification for the ideology rather than the ideology for the torture....

illness

Often when I'm sick, and I've been feeling sick off and on for the last few weeks, I think of Darwin and Nietzsche. Mostly because both of them were sick for significant portions of their adult lives, chronically sick. Part of my interest here is that they had very different responses to their illness. Darwin comments often in his autobiography about what his illness prevented him from doing: prevented him from going on hikes, from getting work done, from being in society (though he sees some good in this).

Nietzsche, on the other hand, writes some about illness in Ecce Homo: "In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough." The obstructions and difficulties caused by sickness here are the very vehicle for surmounting other obstructions and difficulties....

Well, I don't think that's quite right, or quite what Nietzsche is getting at, but it's a starting point.

beards

Scottish explorer Mungo Park lived as a prisoner in Western Africa for several months in 1795. Writing about his time among the Moors he said, "if any one circumstance excited among them favourable thoughts towards my own person it was my beard, which was now grown to an enormous length, and was always beheld with approbation or envy. I believe in my conscience they thought it too good a beard for a Christian."

At least I know that if I'm ever held captive by 18th c. Moors I'll be held in high esteem.

Capitalism, time and space

Over the last two months I've been reading the first volume of Marx's Capital. Today I was reading, among other things, about the compression of time and space in manufacturing, how divided tasks are brought together into a close space (the factory, for instance) and how the time between separate stages of an article are shortened so that the "establishment and maintenance of a connection between the isolated functions requires that the article be transported incessantly from one hand to the other, and from one process to another" (Ch. 14).

Talking about the division of labor Marx also mentions the specialiazation of instruments and tools and how in Birmigham, for instance, 500 different hammers were made for all sorts of different processes. I'm curious about how these two different issues, compression of time and space and specialization of instruments, play out in the archive.

What's curious to me here is the excessive nature of the archive, the lack of utility for all sorts of different records and collections. The factory compresses space and time while the archive expands it, constantly requiring more space for more entries, keeping things stored that will, probably, never be accessed or used. Of course criminal records are used be prospective employers, credit records or used by landlords and lenders, driving and medical records are accessed by insurance companies, but I suspect that these utilize the minority of records and statistics being kept and compiled all the time (especially taking into account, for instance, records of dead people). Part of what was interesting about working in a library was how much of the collection is never touched, the thousands of books and records that are never looked at and probably never will be looked at until someone finally decides to throw them away.

Which shows the reverse for the specialization of tools: that the specific and potential uses for an instrument disguise all the situations for which its totally useless. Prime examples just in the home are kitchen appliances and garage tools.

I'm also interested in time and space in reference to work and home, or the degree to which the workspace is identical with home. Isn't part of the point of factory work, or archiving and office work, that it cannpt take place at home? In other words, part of the point is an expansion of time and space. Not that no one works from home anymore, a lot of the shops in Thailand have either a back room or upper living quarters, and certainly there are sections of the underground economy that operate out of homes. But then there are other spheres of work that seem entirely impossible to conduct at home, like large varieties of scientific research and experimentation, the tools for which are expensive and rare enough that they won't be owned individually. A curious contrast to, say, Darwin who worked almost entirely at his own house, or to the early and mid 19th century in general, where amateur science was not equivalent to incompetent science...

the only reason I would resist the legalization of drugs...

...is that it would mean the gentrification of an entire industry. Other than that things seem good.

meaning

The question of meaning always comes up in talking about interpretation: what did the author mean, what is the meaning of this phrase, etc. Most of the times I've seen it brought up, except within biblical hermeneutics, the point is to talk about the impossibility of returning to an original or inherent meaning within the text. My own interests have, perhaps, gone towards what Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning comepls our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way."

My own interests, in other words, have moved towards functions, the functions of statements, beliefs, statements, stories, especially functions obscured by the apparent objectives (the meaning...) of what has been written.

Familiarity

"I love grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday" might just as well be "I hate grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday." The one makes as much, or as little, sense as the other. Who knows where the difference comes from...

cosmopolitanism

Isn't what is missing from cosmopolitanism the recognition of the other not as an external object but an internal voice? Isn't the celebration of many voices, heterglossia as we called it our studies, missing the same? And what does the inclusion of the voices of the other actually accomplish?

What I'm curious about is the internal difference and in the other, less as the difference between my self and others as between my self and myself. I worry that cosmopolitanism attempts to be too objective, literal objects bearing the distinctions of identity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, etc). Appreciation for the other in this way functions just like bigotry, by making room for what makes the other distinct. For instance, studying queer or ethnic or women's literature as such. Doesn't Slavoj Zizek address this same concern when he writes, "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness... of what goes on"?

On the other hand, apprecation for the other does examine the internal difference as hybridity, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. What's disappointing about this is that the hybridities are still posited as distinguishing marks between groups, so that what's happening isn't a disruption of the logic of the system as much as a brief alteration in taxonomy: what is pathological is revealed, finally, to be normal.

But that turn towards understanding the pathological as normal is also where I think this all begins to go right, focusing on a logic of madness. What I want to see is the normal become pathological, so that heterglossia isn't so much about the inclusion of different objects as different subjectivities within the same object.

Blah blah blah.

economy

What is interesting about economics is economy, or relationships of exchange where every gain is also a loss. What's disappointing about economics is that it doesn't deal enough with annihilation, where there's pure loss, or where the one thing exits the relationship. Aren't suicide bombers totally irrelevant to economics?

This is one of the interesting ideas in the history of science to me, that there is not pure scientific progress involving increasingly accurate representations and understandings of the natural world. Instead, scientific progress necessarily involves some sort of loss of knowledge as well. Thanks Thomas Kuhn.

Isn't the same thing true about changes in belief? That there is no pure progress of understanding, but each change is a gain as well as a loss. Isn't the idea that scientific research is pure gain just as ridiculous as the idea that change in religious belief is pure loss? Or, to put this another way, aren't scientists who ignore scientific history just as ignorant as believers who only pay attention to religious origins and have no concept of changes in belief?

history

The best thing that could happen for historians of our present is a massive catastrophe that wipes out massive chunks of the internet and digital history. Otherwise good luck.

Police Report, circa 1891

In 1891 Bolton Rogers was appointed as chief of police in Seattle. In his report for the year, he includes this peculiar note to explain why he hadn't collected nearly as many fines as his predecessor: it was "the custom prior to my advent to collect fines once a month from all gambling houses and houses of prostitution, and in that way make the Police Department what was called "self-supporting," in other words turning the department into legal blackmailers, fining law breakers for breaking the law, and at the same time taking the fine as a license to allow them to continue to break the law."

Isn't this exactly what Michel Foucault was talking about in Discipline and Punish when he wrote that "the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency" (280)?

Rogers story is an interesting one. The mayor removed him from office just a few months after he wrote that report, because they didnt get along. Rogers bounced around for a while, started a private detective agency, was reappointed as chief of police, ran some gambling dens, then died of brain fever.

Public Health, circa 1899

Today I went down to the library and read the Seattle health officer's "Annual Report of the Health Officer for the Year Ending December 31, 1899." Here are a few gems:

Unsanitary Localities: One cesspool of vast magnitude and long standing, covering the greater part of two squares on Jackson Street between Second Avenue South and Fourth Avenue South, has engaged our attention at different times, but without any improvement whatever. The region is a disgrace to the city, and time only adds to the magnitude of a nuisance which, in summer especially, is a serious menace to the health of the community."

Among the health officer's other concerns and suggestions were installing public urinals downtown to provide a "great convenience and remove a disgusting and oft-complained-of nuisance in the shape of filthy alleys"; forbidding peddlers to yell because their yelling tormented the sick; requiring scavengers to register for licenses and finding "some rational means of disposing of garbage" so that no one should have to deal with massive mounds of rubbish.

Another serious concern of his was the fact that even though there were public sewers being dug around town, no one was connecting their house to the sewers.

Which all reminds me of what I recently read in Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View: “one definition of being-human is that disposing of shit is a problem” (194). Of course it's not just about shit, although it is partly that, but aren't we learning more and more all the time about how much trouble our garbage is?

Baudelaire

I don't know anything about Baudelaire, except that he was a French poet, but I do know enough to say that his Flowers of Evil shouldn't be shelved in the gardening section at a book sale.

I know quite a bit more about Murakami, and enough to know that Sputnik Sweetheart shouldn't be shelved in the romance section at the same book sale. But hey, it worked out well for me.

Short story abut my life: Last night as my roommate and I were brushing our teeth, getting ready to go to sleep, etc, we hear some fellows outside yelling about the "fucking raccoons." We hurried to the window of our apartment and looked across the street, where three or four raccoons were crawling over the chain link fence. Appropriate response to the situation? Grabbing the raccoon pelt from my room and throwing it out the window at the yelling spectators.

crimes

Here's a list of crimes perpetrated on my friends, my acquaintances and I in Seattle over the last 4 years.

4 stolen bikes (including my own)
1 stolen car (later recovered)
1 stolen i-pod
my professor's house was burglarized/trashed
1 case of breaking and entry
1 case of identity theft
1 stolen car radio

That's all I can come up with right now, although there's more that I'm forgetting. As far as shady activity on the part of my friends, the list I can come up with is shoplifting, growing/selling/buying pot and underage drinking. Not enough material to start writing a crime novel.

From Haruki Murakami's Underground

"Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a 'narrative' in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of 'insanity'? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?"

This idea has been on my mind for sometime, although my interest isn't that the dream turns into a nightmare, but that the content of the dream and the nightmare is exactly the same. Or perhaps it is that the fantasy and the nightmare are exactly the same. But I'm also intrigued that in Murakami this shows up in such close proximity to insanity, or to a madness built upon the excesses of any system or narrative.

How to Write Your Essay

1. Begin by describing the novelty of your essay, and how it disrupts the conventional view of a text, history, identity, etc.

2. Draw out the essential core of the text, or history, or culture.

3. Do this by first introducing disparate phenomena and demonstrating how what appear to be disparate are actually part of the same pattern. Or...

4. Introduce a pattern and demonstrate that what appears to be homogenous is in fact marked by rupture.

5. Anything you treat seriously, treat as a tool to be used. Do not contextualize it.

6. Contextualize anything you do not treat seriously. Philosophers you disagree with are artifacts of naivete.

7. Make sweeping generalizations about how history led, necessarily, to the pattern or disruption that you've described.

8. Dismiss disciplines you know nothing about.

9. Use penetrating metaphors to maximize your audience's pleasure.

10. Finish like you begin, with your own novelty. You are the hero, and you're saving everyone else.

That's what I learned in college.

environmentalism, capitalism, pacifism

I've been thinking lately about the relationship between capitalism and environmentalism. In part my thinking on this started from a paper I wrote years ago on tourism in Thailand, and how a lot of the money and impetus for preserving various ecologies comes from tourist revenue. Then a few months ago I came across a historical work called Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism by Richard Grove. He talks about this issue in a variety of ways, finally saying that "modern environmentalism...emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule" (486). I suppose what's interesting to me isn't particularly the historical component, demonstrating that environmentalism emerged out of colonialism, but the ways in which environmentalism acts as an appendage or apparatus of capitalism, no matter what its history is. Whatever you say about capitalism, it's difficult to ignore that the preservation of environments (even beyond what is natural) leads to never-ending profits. Likewise, there's nothing anti-capitalist about sustainability.

I've also been curious about the connections between pacifism and capitalism, or the extent to which pacifism functions as an appendage of capitalism. Once again, it doesn't matter, in a lot of ways, what the origins of pacifism are, just how it functions and to what ends. Then again, war itself is a huge money-making machine (e.g, all those billions spent for waging war don't just disappear), so who knows?

tulip

Today I went to a Tulip Festival for the first, perhaps the last time. It's late in the season, so most of the fields had been chopped. We did find one garden and wandered through it. No one ever told me that tulip names were so bad-ass. Here's some of the gems:

Dreaming Maid
Scarlet Pimpernel
Graffiti
Oriental Splendor
Moneymaker
Dutch Master
Flaming Parrot
Queen of the Night
Temple of Beauty
Ninja
Aladdin

Way more exciting than the Calvinist tulips.

friends of the library

Here are the books I bought at the sale. $11.

McTeague - Frank Norris
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Love - Stendhal
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
Mardi - Herman Melville
Spring Torrents - Turgenev
The Long Valley - John Steinbeck
Never Let Me Go - Ishiguro
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Storm - Defoe

I'm very curious about how my standards for buying books changes. Generally, I only buy books in good condition (not too ripped, little or no underlining, not too dusty). Lately I've been more interested in older copies of books, curious about them not only to read but as artifacts. Also, my interest in books often goes in waves of publishers. Recently its been Penguin. Eight of those eleven books I bought were published by Penguin.

Also, pretty much any Stephen Gould book can be bought for $3 at a used bookstore. This will be useful to me whenever I decide I want to read more of him. Good, readable essays on natural history.

The Naive Realist Manifesto

Principle First: the principles of naive realism do not need to be explained, because they are self-evident.

children

A few thoughts.

1. Pedophilia functions as a fantasy of absolute good and evil. What I mean is that when it's discussed, its discussed as an example of something that everyone can believe is absolutely and self-evidently evil. In this sense children function as the object of fantasy for both pedophile and anti-pedophile.

2. The concentration on pedophilia and child molestation disguises the way in which children are more comprehensively exploited. This is not just in a general or ideal sense but in a very physical sense. The infant body is used to sell a variety of products, some of them having nothing to do with children. But of course in these cases what is noticed is how cute the babies are, and somehow that's separated from how the children are simultaneously being used/sold/exploited. Children similarly function as a fetish in pedophilia and advertisements.

3. There is a paradoxical discourse about sex and the body, first that the exploitation is traumatic and real because it involves sexuality, second that the exploitation is bad because it involves sexuality. More specifically, the horror is when children's bodies are the product, but there is no horror when children's bodies are used to sell the product.

4. In a more general sense I've been intrigued for a long time about how quick people are to talk about prostitution as exploitation (because it involves the body) but ignore the ways in which all jobs of any kind involve selling the self and permitting control over one's own body by the employer (if not always the customer). Another irony is how the alienation of the laborer from the product is condemned, but prostitution breaks down that alienation (then again, I'm not convinced that the product sold in prostitution is the prostitute's body.

darwin and nietzsche

Some thoughts on what has been surprising to me about reading Nietzsche and Darwin over the last 5 months.

1. Darwin isn't an environmentalist. In his travel writings, Darwin shoots and kills any strange animals that he finds, and cuts them open. In Origin of Species he talks about performing all sorts of experiments on animals, etc. He also isnt too worried about the extinction of specific species, or about the invasion of foreign plants onto domestic territories. No save the whales here. But he does set things up quite nicely for environmentalism, especially when he talks about the relationships between different life forms, or when he describes how the breakdown of coral could lead to the death of an island of people.

2. It's very difficult to disentangle both Darwin and Nietzsche from everything that has been said about them, or from how they have been used as weapons for different causes (or as targets for different attacks). Nietzsche isn't as much of an atheist as people want him to be, and he's not much of a nihilist (many of his arguments are critique's of nihilism). Darwin doesn't really talk about the origins of life in the origin of species. It's difficult to disentangle Darwin from contemporary biology and genetics.

3. I appreciate how easy both are to dip into when I'm not a specialist in science or philosophy. Darwin's arguments are complex (more complex than they are represented), but not in the way that a contemporary science journal is complex. As a casual observer, I can pick up Origin of Species and have some understanding of the arguments and details of what Darwin is writing. Likewise Nietzsche is more complicated than he is represented (either by enemies or fans), but reading bits and pieces of him gives me a lot to digest. In a more general sense, Darwin wrote in a variety of different genres (travel/memoir/autobiography/science), or somewhere between the genres.

Whatevz.

nature

Some people talk about discovering God in nature. Some people enjoy hiking and spending time out of doors, in the wilderness. I don't. In part, I just don't believe that nature exists, either nature in terms of wild life, wilderness untouched by humanity, or in the sense of nature as essence, as the real thing.

I don't find God in nature, in the diversity of plant and animal life, the fragility and complexity of an ecosystem, or even in the evolution of species. That is all very beautiful and moving, but what I find isn't God.

What I find is a system of taxonomy and invention, a system of language superimposed over the world. And I'm skeptical of the bases of taxonomy, of differentiation between species, etc. So when I go on hikes, I think of the systems of order that people believe they are discovering in the world, of the categories and qualities of a species that places it in one place or another in a taxonomy, and of the limited value of those taxonomies.

Also, how the whole idea of nature is a system of values, the basic value being the drive to catalog and systematize everything.

On the other hand, I love beaches and am all for environmentalism, prefer buying organic foods and minimizing waste, have very dear friends who care for the earth, and support them in their recreation, efforts and discoveries. Go figure.

free will

Why is free will considered to be a good thing? That is the question that has been bothering me lately, and one that I don't have an answer to. But free will is constantly talked of as if its existence is a good, and its nonexistence is an evil. God must have free will, and if we didn't have free will we would not be able to love God or others. I suppose I disagree with the assumptions that God has to have free will and that there is much choice in loving others (even the self-sacrificing sort of love that people rail on about). Regardless, I'm curious about how people talk in these ways as if it is self-evidently good. That is a much more interesting conversation than the one about whether we have free will or not.

The arguments always seem to be, to some degree, dishonest. People don't look at the evidence and decide whether or not free will exists (actually, whether or not to believe that free will exists), they value or don't value free will and move forward accordingly. Additionally, it seems dishonest from the love side, because I don't think anyone starts there. The idea that free will is a good is wrapped into a whole range of assumptions about economics and morality, and how we can treat people. Basically, we want to believe in free will because it allows us to be cruel to others, or at least to see cruelty against others and believe that we are not responsible in some way to alleviate their suffering.

Ah, but if we don't believe in free will why would we believe ourselves responsible?! That is the other problem with the conversation, which supposes that its one or the other, or that the complexity of life can somehow be dropped into nice categories (compatabilist, incompatibilist). It all starts to seem like someone started it out as a joke, and everyone who heard the joke took it seriously, and the rest of us have paid for it ever since.

I suppose the only real good that can come from the conversation is talking about the consequences of believing or not believing in free will, and the values in assuming that it is good or not good. It doesn't really matter whether we have free will or not, just whether or not we believe we do.

I'm not sure that "free-will" ever means very much, but it really doesn't mean anything when applied to God.

A few thoughts in reply to a commentor on my last post, and some connected issues.

1. Where is the impetus for thinking that God's priority is to be understood? Especially to be understood in some essential way, or as an absolute truth? The closest thing to an absolute understanding of God is touching Jesus' body. In general in the gospels Jesus speaks quite ambiguously and mysteriously, and confuses the people around him, and is quite content to do so. When he explains what his parables mean (the sower and his seeds, for instance) it really only adds another layer of ambiguity, and often he only explains things after his followers ask him to. What is important is how God's interactions with people in the bible are non-repeating and unique, and this includes Jesus' methods and interactions too. Repetition leads to essentialization, and difference ends it. God constantly reveals himself as different from his self. Perhaps the impetus for projecting a desire to be understood onto God is our drive to understand God, which is our drive to atheism, to minimize God and conceptualize him as a linguistic proposition, as an ideal.

Any use of language is giving up on absolute truth. Whenever God "speaks" it is always a limitation on God's self. Language doesn't have the capacity to hold truth, especially taking seriously what Jesus says when he identifies truth as person. Incidentally, the more I insist that God is a being and person rather than an ideal, the less it makes sense for me to have a relationship with Jesus. For some reason its very popular to talk about being humble and killing off yourself (take up that damn cross, son), and to talk about God humbling himself in the form of Jesus, but this is never extended to God humbling his own statements, or humbling truth. Probably because truth (as an ideal, and as the bible, not as a person) is worshiped more than God is ever worshiped.

1.5. To talk about the meaning, you always have to extend your argument to something outside of the text, something that isnt present, that isn't there, something that's added or subtracted. Give it a whirl: read anything at all, ask yourself what it means, and if you think you know, ask how you know and on what basis you're making your interpretation. The interpretation always extends to something outside, which means that meaning is a sort of glue from the outside that holds everything together, rather than an internal tissue.

Of course, it's ignorant to say that this means you just pick and choose, as if everyone isn't already picking and choosing. The whole process of interpretation is picking and choosing different patterns of repetition and difference to spin out some sort of ideal and some sort of argument. More significantly, there are still good interpretations and bad interpretations, the standard for which is probably more based on ability to persuade someone who has read the same text, rather than on adherence to any sort of genuine meaning in that text.

2. I've heard many different people make this sort of statement, "The bible is so amazing, every time I read it I find something new!" What that usually conveys to me isnt anything about the bible but something about the person. Usually it means that the person hasn't read very much at all, and whatever they have read they haven't reread. That sort of experience of discovery is the experience you will have reading anything, and it happens because when you return to the text you've already read it, you've heard other people talk about, and you are a different person than the last time you read it. It has nothing to do with a special or magical quality, or secret knowledge that is being revealed. But most people don't read, so why should they know that? The bible is worth reading and rereading, but so are thousands of other books.

3. Is God omniscient? When you talk about God, 'omniscience' has no meaning.

coherence + Christianity

When did coherence emerge as a value of Christianity? This question has been on my mind for some time.

Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.

Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)

If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.

I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!

I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).

So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.

reward and punishment

There is no connection between offense and punishment, or action and reward. There is no connection in value, no way to make the two equivalent in value. Steal a car and get placed in jail? Where is the connection? What is the system of values that allows these equations to take place? Likewise, rewards. Spent 10 hours lifting boxes and receive 100 dollars? Where does the connection come from?

Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).

The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?

heroism and memory

Why value heroism in ethics? Where does it come from? In part, I think Christians have simply picked up the model of the bible itself, and the form of memory that is found within the text.

For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.

Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.

To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.

I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.