Books Acquired

• David Pogue iPhone the Missing Manual (bought for Marta and her new iPod touch) (print)
• Harlan Coben The Stranger (overdrive library program)
• Michael Pollan Cooked: a natural history of transformation (kindle)
• Emmanuel Carrere Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia (kindle)
• David Herbert Donald Lincoln (kindle)

Books Read

• Terry Pratchett Pyramids (kindle)
• Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves (print)
• Harold Bloom How to Read and Why (print, library book)

As I mentioned in a previous post about what I was watching in August, moving out of our apartment and into our house took up a great deal of my time. But I did get some reading done.

I had an earlier entry about Danielewski’s book, so I will not have anything else to say about it now. But I did enjoy the other two books and would like to share some quotations I wrote down from them.

Here is a nice passage that illustrates Pratchett’s sense of humor:

The camel knew perfectly well what was happening. Three stomachs and a digestive system like an industrial distillation plant gave you a lot of time for sitting and thinking.

It’s not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It’s because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.

It’s not generally recognized that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involved ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the the same way as a human’s hand and eye coordination, a chameleon’s camouflage, and a dolphin’s renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there’s any chance biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.

The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. The are so much brighter that they soon realized that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendents not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of shops or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.

And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution, to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, and called You Bastard.

And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.

You Bastard was thinking; there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Taur equal Chi/4 cudcudcud. Let Kappa/Y be an evil smelling bugger differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin coefficients…

…Angle two-five, cud fire.

It was a magnificent volley. THe god of cud had some commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.

The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.

The landscape began to distort again. This was clearly not a place to linger.

Pratchett also had a couple of other passages I wrote down as worthy of being contemplated. First is this:

It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions to science than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along.

And, finally, there is this passage:

OK, said the Sphinx, in the uncertain tones of someone who has let the salesman in and is now regretfully contemplating a future in which they are undoubtedly going to buy life insurance.

Harold Bloom had the following to say about Borges:

Borges, a skeptical visionary, charms us even as we accept his warning: reality caves in all too easily. Our individual fantasies may not be as elaborate as [his story] Tlon Uqbar,Orbis Tertius, nor as abstract. Yet Borges has sketched a universal tendency, and fulfilled a fundamental yearning as to why we read.

Bloom goes on talking about Borges:

Borges’ [stories] insist always upon their self-conscious status as artifices…One is not going to hear the lonely voice of a submerged element in the population, but rather a voice haunted by a plethora of literary voices, forerunners. “What greater glory for a God, than to be absolved of the world?” is Borges’ great outcry, as he professes his Alexandrianism … for Borges, the world is a speculative illusion, or a labyrinth, or a mirror reflecting other mirrors.

Bloom recommended Cervantes’ Don Quixote. As I read Bloom’s essay I thought that Don Quixote is filled with humor; House of Leaves, the book I spent so much of August reading, not so much.

Reading Don Quixote is an endless pleasure. Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all novels. There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know as well as you can Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Bloom continues:

Cervantes, particularly in part II of Don Quixote arranges things so we can’t  do without him. He cuts a grip into the illusion he creates for us, because both the Don and Sancho throughout part II, comment upon the roles they have played in part I. (Cervantes, even more baroque and knowing, joins Don Quixote in complaining about enchanters, in Cervantes’ case the plagiarist-imposter who would finish his novel for him.

Thomas Mann, writing about Don Quixote, admired the uniqueness of a her who “lives off the glory of his own glorification.” Sancho, to shrewd to go that far, nevertheless say that he is “to be found also in the story and is called Sancho Panza.”