fitzroya cupressoides

While walking through Edinburgh's botanical gardens with my friends, I happened across this plant, the fitzroya cupressoides. Considering that I had just read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, I had the captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, on my brain. The right name from the right place. And I felt like I saw it at the right place (the city where Darwin went to school) at the right time ("the Darwin Year," and when I was in the middle of reading, thinking, and writing Darwin). So I took this picture to remind myself to look it up later.

Well it turns out I was right, that the fitzroya cupressoides was named after Robert Fitzroy. It ends up being an interesting plant, a giant tree that is the only species in its genus. In the late '90s, one tree was found that was over 3000 years old...

mechanics

What I've come to be wary of is any idea that can move from from place to place with losing or gaining anything. This is the trouble I have with activisms and fundamentalisms of all kinds, with protests and campaigns.

Karl Popper makes a similar point when he tries to demarcate between science and non-science, where he says that what is perceived as the strengths of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis is actually their weakness, namely their ability to absorb and explain all new data. Zizek, I think, makes a better point (though still one about weaknesses perceived as strengths) when he writes in the Parallax View, "In other words, the fact that sexuality can spill over and function as a metaphorical content of every (other) human activity is not a sign of its power but, on the contrary, a sign of its impotence, failure, inherent blockage." But, here Zizek is talking about content moving from form to form, molded into different shapes, and what I'm interested in here is the same form moving from content to content without ever bending or changing shape.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes about idealism in this way: “All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are significantly better than the other causes in the world; they do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all, it needs exactly the same foul-smelling manure that all other human undertakings require." And, actually, I would think this goes both ways: not only making use of the foul-smelling manure but at the same time creating it, constant reworking.

flak

A few days ago, a bus in New York crashed bad. So far 15 of the 31 passengers are dead, and there are some accusations that the bus driver fell asleep at the wheel. Apparently the company he worked for has been flagged for problems with fatigued drivers, which reminded me of a section from Marx's Das Kapital.

Marx writes about a railway accident that occurred when some railway workers fell asleep on the job, resulting in the deaths of hundreds. But, “Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver and foreman of a locomotive engine are not continually on the lookout. How can that be expected from a man who has been at work for 29 or 30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest?”

The workers were charged with manslaughter but, of course, there were no consequences for their employers.

finishing up

I've been finishing a lot of books lately, including a few that I've been reading since summer. Today I finished reading The Challenge of Jesus by NT Wright. Here are the 4 main things I thought were interesting:

1. Wright insists that the parables are to be read, and were delivered, as stories about the nation of Israel, rather than about individuals.

2. Truth, not as "a set of doctrines or theories but as a person and as persons indwelt by that person."

3. One of the huge dividing lines in the church, one of the real ones, is in the distribution of weight between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Most Christians I know put all the weight on the crucifixion, and read the scriptures that way. Wright argues that every early Christian theology was focused around the resurrection, and that a bodily resurrection.

4. Did Jesus know himself to be God? "It was in short the knowledge that characterizes vocation. As I have put it elsewhere: 'As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be."

retrograde

After talking about rejecting metaphysical ideas, especially theological ones like original sin and salvation, Nietzsche puts this forward: "Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind's greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind's finest accomplishments to date."

I'm not against metaphysics to the extent that Nietzsche is, but I do think there is something very important here in terms of ideas and how they are approached. What I find boring about much of philosophy, theology, and even history, is that first movement that Nietzsche talks about, where energy goes towards assent or rejection, proof or disproof. What I find more interesting is asking the question of why an idea is valuable and powerful, how it functions, and what it has done. I may not believe in substitutionary atonement, but I still find it to be fascinating for just these reasons. Not to mention, arguments centering around assent and rejection are unlikely to change anyone's minds, but arguments focused around function can be much more revealing.

Where I also get bored of philosophy and theology is the treatment of ideas as fixed forms, as stable entities, and as essences. I'm not sure that ideas ever reach a fixed state, in spite of various attempts to construct or identify stable systems of thought and how each part of the system works together. The history of an idea isn't just about how an idea passed through time, or even how it changed through time, but also how the manipulation and multiplicity of a single idea is necessary for it to function.

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.